Sacred Quests

People ask me why I chose to spend five weeks in southeast Poland.  It is easiest to say that I needed to do research for my third novel in the trilogy which is set during World War II.  That's true, but it's not the whole story.

As many of you know, I believe in reincarnation and that our past lives still influence our present.  I believe that we often choose to be born into the same families, although not always playing the same roles.  I believe that we store sense memories of traumatic events in our bodies that are triggered when we are ready to deal with them.  I believe that every lifetime is an opportunity to replay scenarios we need to master and to learn lessons we refused to learn in the past.

In my thirties I suddenly developed allergies to milk, mold, cats, dogs, etc.  I am not a fan of allergy testing or taking a pill to deal with the symptoms rather than the root cause, so I decided to deal with them through herbal remedies, yoga, deep muscle tissue massage, deep breathing techniques, and gestalt therapy.  It worked and today I am largely symptom free, but all that inner searching and physical prodding brought back memories. 

Not all at once but in small bits and pieces until one day I was driving through a Polish neighborhood in Chicago and I suddenly had to pull over because I was crying so hard I could not see.  It came to me, not in visions or in sounds, but in intense feelings that I had died in Auschwitz.  So where did that come from?   

Now you must understand that I was raised Roman Catholic and had never even met a Jewish person until I went to Northwestern University.  I do remember reading The Diary of Anne Frank and about the Holocaust when I was younger and crying my eyes out, but I cried when they wouldn't let Judy Garland enter the kingdom of Oz as well.  I'm an emotional person and cannot watch another person cry without joining them.  So I dismissed it.

Curious, I decided to visit a metaphysical friend and ask for more information from The Guys.  Don't ask me why we call them The Guys.  I guess it sounds more personal than The Entities, the Collective Unconscious, or the Akashic records and less pretentious than God.
 
Anyway, They/He/She/It answered my questions.  They told me that I had lived in southeast Poland with my family.  I was nine years old when my father was taken away with all the other men in the village.  My mother and my aunt, my sister in this lifetime, were taken to Auschwitz with me but then we were separated.  I had managed to smuggle in the tiniest teddy bear which I hid in the crook of my arm so they couldn't take it away.  They described me sitting on a wooden bunk bed (I have always detested bunk beds), delirious from fever.  They said that even after I died, my spirit could not leave that desolate place, staying there for two more years to help other children find the light.  My allergies were supposedly a physical memory I carried of that time, which I never wanted to forget.

Other than writing a poem about it, I just filed this memory away with other past life memories.  So why did I feel the need to reopen this old wound now?   I can't say for sure, but when I told The Guys that I was thinking of going to Poland, they asked, "Do you want to get sick?"

"Not particularly," I replied.

They told me that I would need to commit to regular meditation to strengthen my heart and solar plexus chakras, but that the trip could be very healing for me.  They also told me that I needed to stay longer than three weeks, but should be back in the States before September 11th.  I decided on five weeks after a friend told me that it was a transformational number and because the Nazis always grouped their victims in groups of five so it would be easier to count them.

I knew that it was going to be a difficult trip for me physically and emotionally and it was.  I really did not expect to enjoy the trip or to meet people with whom I felt a connection, but I did.  I did not become physically ill, but I sometimes felt exhausted and lonely. 

At the end of my sacred quest, I found my main character, Leah Marie Schoege, in Nowy Sacz, and the story continues.