Attachment To Things

My attachment to my grandmother’s things is not really about the thing as much it is to my past. Healing my relationship with nature meant healing my relationship with myself. In truth nature and human is one and there is a need to heal emotional trauma in order to create a harmonious relationship with nature–as the native Canadians knew.

As I sorted through my stuff that I am donating, I came across my grandmother’s hand knitted spread, then there was a pillow case she embroidered and her beautiful black velvet wrap.

When I was a child my grandmother would often talk about her beautiful home and nice things that were left behind in India. She’d talk about her childhood home, her library and her life of creativity and music that were lost in India, because of the partition. My grandmother never bought into the idea that Muslims can’t live with Hindus. She heartily disliked the increasing Islamism and she found the whole idea preposterous and hypocritical.

My grandmother had an incredible presence. She was so confident that she could easily intimidate and humble a General. She could say whatever she thought to anyone and get away with it. She ruled her domain like a Queen. Highly artistic, she could create crafts that could be put in a museum. Her embroidery, knitting, cooking and gardening abilities were in a category of their own marked beyond excellence.  Yet, my grandmother had a dark side. She suffered from mental illness. I’ve wondered if her illness could be called bipolar. She had abusive and obsessive tendencies. She was obese because food was her addiction to cope with severe depression. She cried often about the loss of her childhood and being made a mother far too young.

I was a little child when my grandmother moved in with my mother. I was her friend, confidante and therapist all rolled into one — I was only 10 years old. I think my grandmother was a creative genius who had never found her true calling.

She taught me Ghalib’s poetry, philosophy, Urdu and cooking. She also taught me Mirabai’s bhajans and she triggered most of my knowledge and interest in Hinduism. My grandmother was also very spiritual in her belief system.  When I go through the dark days, when I feel as if there is nothing here for me, I talk to my grandmother. knowing that there is someone who understands my pain, who often visits me in spirit and helps me go through my life.

I couldn’t compromise ultimately–it was either be or not be, regardless of the world. I think a big reason for it was watching my grandmother’s suffering as this highly gifted person struggled with mental illness. I don’t know why things were so complicated in her world. I’m not sure why she had to live like royalty and make my aunt a virtual servant who waited on her hand and foot. Maybe the loss of her own mother at a young age triggered her problems. She was however never treated for spiritual or mental illness, she was treated for heart disease and diabetes because of obesity, but never for the root cause.

As I trained in my healing work, I’d often wonder what if my grandmother had found support? what if she had been healed? as a little girl, I was aware of her pain, I’d go make all kinds of concoctions from the garden to put on her feet and legs. My grandmother had a severe disturbance in the root chakra==this is the sense of connection to the mother and her terrible grief about the loss of her mother never left her. In my life, I saw myself repeat that pattern, even though my mother was very much there, I constantly feared for her loss and my time in Canada has been full of grief because of being apart from my mother. As I healed this karmic issue, I felt that my grandmother whose life story is part of my DNA, heaves a sigh of relief, as if she can finally let go of the suffering caused by the loss of her mother. One karmic debt can be struck off my list of chores for this lifetime:).

Despite the fact that my family is from India and that is the most spiritual place in the world where people travel from all over the world for pilgrimage, and she was exposed to the concepts of Ayurveda where the root cause is always spiritual, my grandmother was ‘modern’. She’d say that finding real spiritual healers was too difficult in modern times. Her personal experience of watching her mother die because of leeching wrongly administered after childbirth made her a firm believer in Western medicine. She respected western knowledge more than the old ways. This is the generation that first saw the benefits of vaccines and she relied on and believed in ‘medical science’.  In her world view ‘taking care of yourself’ was unheard of. Others took care of you and your doctor did the rest. Food and exercise were done for enjoyment not for health.  I don’t think my grandmother spent a single day alone. She never drove, carried stuff or worked without assistance of some sort.

As a child I saw women as caregivers but also very needy themselves. They gave time, but their needs were taken care of by the husbands, fathers and brothers. People didn’t question this arrangement. In a strange way–even though this was a privileged arrangement, and being on one’s own is difficult financially and emotionally, my heart would sink at the thought of not living my life as me. I wouldn’t voice this concern because it was unthinkable in the world I come from for a woman to live alone. She must have support and protection. There’s always a price to be paid for that support…and the price was housework and care of the family plus everything else that you are doing for your self esteem and desire for nice stuff in the modern context.

I chose my own husband, but the real responsibility and tasks of the marriage of the relationship fell to me. A husband is like a wrap around a woman’s life that had to be kept there, because otherwise she wouldn’t be safe. In that world, the true responsibility of the woman stays with the parents and the husband is often like a drone.

Never mind that the ‘protector’ was abusive. But that’s bad luck, not a social problem. I was unhappy and stuffed down my emotions with illness. When I heard that there is another way and that way would mean no more antibiotics and steroids-which really had stopped working, I took to it with total commitment. I wanted so badly to be healthy that I took to yoga, meditation, natural eating, homeopathy with a passion. If it meant living in a monastery I was ok with it. But most of all, I was willing to feel. I could cry. I felt abandonment, pain, suffering and fear but my physical diseases left me as I allowed my emotional pain to surface. Behind all this pain there was something else — it was a divine unconditional love that was still a part of my DNA. It was untarnished and my healing was like polishing a mirror that had become dirty over time.

The world that had made me sick was pretty dysfunctional, but that was normal. Normal life tends to break a lot of people’s hearts.

When I moved to Canada, I wanted to close the door on that world with its sense of ‘ethics’. I wanted to shut out the world of my childhood, adulthood and motherhood and all the rest of the things that I was taught were normal. I wanted to make my own world that doesn’t have anything from the past. Nothing. But it didn’t work. That world sat under the surface like an iceberg that poked holes in my boat.

The problem with shutting doors is that they need locks and no matter how much you hide the door, it is always there, exerting a silent and awful influence that drains me.

Shutting that door and padlocking it didn’t really work beyond a certain time, because these people aren’t in my stuff from Pakistan, they aren’t in my email or facebook, they are in my head and in my heart.

Recently, I opened the door, I cleaned, I swept, I sorted. I loved. I cried. I am letting it go. I must have come a long way, because as I cry the love surfaces to fill me with joy in the vacuum that is left behind from letting go. I am not my family. I am me.

I’d love to talk about this with the other family members. But I don’t know if they are ready to heal. Healing means being vulnerable….it is about taking the risk to feel….hurt, angry, sad and then to let that go.

Attachment to things is about attachment to pain.