Living Nativity 04/01/2011

After some postponement the reenactment of the nativity of Jesus took place in our village. This is a yearly returning event that attracts the population of our village and even people from outside. The medieval historical centre of our village is the scenery for this reenactment. My daughter A. loves to be a figurant within this historical event, the first year she was archangel Gabriel due to her blond hair and last year and this year she was a market vendor.

The first year I experienced it as if it were a fairy tale. They start at 5 pm when it’s almost dark, candles, torches and fires are everywhere in the historical centre and music is playing. In every cellar one can peek inside and see ancient crafts depicted. One can see various crafts as potters, carpenters, shepherds, bakers, medieval pubs etc. There are living animals everywhere and people in medieval costumes. Jesus, Maria and Joseph are always one of the families that just had a baby. It really is a spectacle when you see it for the first time, but every year is a copy of the previous years. The same as all the processions that take place throughout the year. It’s a handfull of fanatic Catholic ladies in their sixties who are kidnapping these events for their own benefit; ascension.

My partner P. asked me if I was coming along with him and my son J. to watch the living nativity. My first reaction inside me was a firm no, then I started arguing with myself. For what reason should I go there? I’ve seen it twice and it’s always the same. It’s not really a social event in the sense of really talking to people. Why on earth should I go? P. said: “I go and see how A. is doing.” Yes of course my daughter was there and our American friend J.&A. were also figurants this year. So I pushed myself to go there and be “social”. I brought A. some cookies and water since the figurants are standing for a few hours without anything to eat or drink. I made myself useful to take on the catering for A.

I chit chatted to a few people and saw all the things they had the other years too. I expected myself to be more irritated for going somewhere I initially wouldn’t go by myself. I saw the uselessness of the whole event. If people can mobilize each other to do these things why aren’t they able to mobilize themselves and each other for life? If someone would have told them that God doesn’t exist in the way they believe, that no one has to obey to the Catholic Church in order to go to heaven since heaven doesn’t exist anymore, that one does not become a good person if one participates in these church events, what if they understood this message? The Living Nativity wasn’t there anymore nor the processions. When you ask them they do not know why they participate. In little villages as ours boredom isn’t difficult to find if one needs stimuli from outside to be moved. These festivals are a welcome distraction from the life they live.

I only see these zombies walking or participating every single year again and getting exited over and over again. Maybe that’s what I miss, I do not experience it in the moment. I’m already viewing it through the memories of last year and the year before. Defining it as useless. I need to understand that these events are part of my world so my creation. If I reject a part of my created world than I reject a part of myself. So judging it is judging myself. What I’m rejecting here is religion and what religion has done onto life, but I accepted and allowed religion in my own created world till so far…I no longer participate within it and I will be the living example of one that doesn’t need religion to feel alive or as the purpose to live for. Religion is entangled within the polarity of good and bad, therefore it has to be neutralised in order to make place for life as all as equal.

The witch in me 27/11/2010

The persecution of witches started around the 5th century AD when Christianity occurred, the witches were accused for political, religious and sexual crimes. Their so called crimes were a threat to the Protestant and Catholic church as well as to the State. Also the bible speaks in Leviticus 20:27 about witches, it says: “A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them.”

The hunting for witches took place from the 5th century AD till the 17th century AD in Europe. Between 1500 and 1600, about 80,000 witches were accused and executed, 80% of them were women. The 17th century AD was a horrible era for women who were a bit “different” from the rest. These witches were tortured in different ways and ended up death at all times. They were stripped naked and shaved of all their body hair, then they were subjected to thumbscrews and the rack, spikes and bone-crushing “boots,” starvation and beatings. The water test was commonly used to determine if one was a witch. The accused person was thrown into the water and only the ones that were floating were stigmatised as witches and payed for the stigma with their life’s. The ones who sank were innocent, but anyways death by drawning. The witch-craze did not arise spontaneously in the peasantry. It was the ruling class that feared these people and therefore terrorized them in order to keep the masses under control. At the end of the 17th century witchcraft trials begun to diminish throughout Europe. Some countries such as Holland adopted a more tolerant attitude towards witchcraft. Voltaire said: “The witches have stopped to exist when we have stopped to burn them”. Regrettable enough the damage that was done upon humanity didn’t end with a tolerant attitude and the stopping of burning people.

What kind of people were these witches? Overall women who were healers, unlicensed doctors, anatomists of western history, bortionists, nurses, counsellors, pharmacists and midwives. Witches were the only autonomous healers, serving the peasant population as women and the poor. The witch was a triple threat to the Church: They were generally  women. They were organized within an underground of peasant women. And they were a healers whose practice was based in empirical study. For Christianity, this meant that they held out the hope of change in this world.

After these centuries women were replaced/suppressed by men. We women, already accepted and allowed ourselves to be enslaved within our menstruation cycles, but with men in power enforced by the Church and State we were no longer able to be “free” and creative humans outside our own homes. Conventional medicine took over the role of healers, male professionals outran women with their superior technology. By then male “science” was more or less automatically replaced by female superstition, which from then on was called “old wives’ tales.” The strange thing is that male professionals clung unto untested doctrines and ritualistic practices, while it were the women healers who represented a more humane, empirical approach to healing. Male science and medical education was controlled by the Medieval Church, with the support of kings, princes and secular authorities. The rights and medical care for the poor and women was automatically no longer existent.

Since the witch hunts, women have been associated with witches and this negative picture of witches which is all that has remained. This cruel exclusion of women out of society and out of healing professions became a theme within history. Women had been seen as evil and cooperating with the devil himself, therefore they were a threat to the Church and State who feared them. They believed that the more satanic powers women had and therefore the more power to help themselves, the less they were dependent on God, the Church and the State and the more they were potentially able to use their own powers against God’s order.

This part of history won’t go by unnoticed, because the evidence of what happend is still in our DNA through epigenetics. Since we humans inherited the sins of the fathers we have a lot to sort out. Stuck in history and the ones that came before us we still live within the fears made and believed by our fathers. So I asked myself, what does this practically mean in daily life to me? How much witch is there still in me? I started investigating within myself.

When I say the word witch out loud, I do not consciously feel a negative charge to this word. After researching this subject I’m really amazed how much influence this one point in history had and still has. The word witch, I associate with nature, natural cures and witchcraft as in fantasy power. When I look into history it was the beginning of fear of authority created by the Church and State, fear of free speech, keeping the sheeple under control, power struggles between man and woman and the beginning of modern medicine or shall I say quackery?

To get more clarity on the subject I muscle communicated for the feeling, normally. Than I found out that this word originated between 1590-1600, the period in which the witch hunt was at it’s worst. To understand this feeling I tested for a book and came up with the following sentences: ” that to which you resist, will stay. Where you look at, will disappear. For me this sentences had to do with my struggle with authority, or fear for authority. Although after testing it had to do with fear in general/normal. So the fear I resist, will stay. The fear I I’m able to look at, will disappear. Wow, so true. I’m astonished, the in heritage of the witch hunt which is in my DNA, results in daily life for me in resisting fear. Not wanting to face all my fears. I can only do so much and take one fear at the time, but clearly there will be fears that I don’t want to face. This information challenged me and I wanted to find at least one fear that I haven’t been willing to face yet. I muscle communicated for the emotion, quieting. Which meant not obtrusive, which led me to the word protruding. Meaning the fear of protrusive behavior of others upon me. That does make sense. After testing I found out that this fear was a direct outflow of the fear for authority which is originated in the medieval period and connected to the witch hunt. Wow again. Look how fucked we are with the sins of the fathers, it’s this big spider web or matrix with interconnections everywhere. I’m overwhelmed, but than again I wanted to know this. Now I know, I know where these fears originate from and I understand how much ripples there are in the water when I throw in a stone. I start to understand what the impact of the words responsibility and consequences are, it’s huge. It’s huge yet we have to take it on in order to birth ourselves into the physical. Happy process, Sylvia.

Than I asked myself how much witch there is in me. I tested for the word slime, meaning a worthless person according to the slang dictionary. Wow, I just found out that my cyst on my lateral thigh stands for worthlessness. So this interconnects, because also that tested out to be inherited.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to resist fear in general.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not want to face all my fears, instead of knowing that I need to forgive all my fears.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to make excuses for not taking on all my fears.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear protrusive behavior of others upon me.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to do things alone and not to ask for help when I could use it.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to believe I have to be strong and do things on my own.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear authority.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel strangled when authority is put upon me.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear the information that I found by feeling overwhelmed.

I was a junkie 22/11/2010

This morning I watched the YT video of Gabriel ZM in  which he explains what a certain band and a certain song had meant to him and how he uses it now to support himself to take him back in the here and now. His story made me look  and investigate into my own life to see what certain kinds of music had meant to me.

When I was little and even before I was born, my grandmother had a children’s choir and several choirs for adults. When I became four years old she gave me the outfit of her children’s choir. I felt proud and part of her world, we lived two hours driving from my grandparents and therefore I didn’t see the choir sing very often. Without understanding why I was always attracted towards choirs, I joined the Protestant church choir at the age of 8. When I moved out to go and study art I searched for a choir and became a member of a gospel choir. I wrote a musical and songs, no music only the lyrics, I enjoyed myself and it felt as the path to take within my life. When I moved to Amsterdam to study social work, I searched again for a choir to belong to.

I found a Baptist church which was just at that moment forming a gospel choir. Since moving out of my parents house at the age of 19 I hadn’t been in church again. The founder of the new choir invited me to a service of theirs to understand from where they were coming. So I went the next Sunday to church to meet these people. I was thrilled about the songs they sang in church, they were clapping within certain rithems and they sung in parts. In front of the church was a band playing and I was attracted and drawn into this scene. I started practising with the choir and kept attending the services at Sunday mornings. I made new friends and I felt like I belonged. I found out that they also held services at Sunday evening with only singing, I was thrilled again. At a certain point I was even baptised.

I witnessed the other adolescents  of the group that were to be baptist and they were happy and ready to serve the Lord. I on the other hand wasn’t even considering serving the Lord, I felt happy for the fact that they let me join their church community. I felt high and full of energy after singing and joining this church community. The parson of the church held an interview with me a few weeks before the baptising would take place. He asked how I was standing within the whole event, I didn’t really know what to say. I told the parson that it made me happy, that was normal he said. At the most the conversation took about 10 minutes, I had nothing to share. The day itself I was nervous, not so much about the baptising and the religious meaning of it. I was nervous about doing all the rites proper, so they wouldn’t dismiss me from the community. As if they would do such a thing. The choir ended up as a semi professional choir and every weekend we were singing somewhere else. After choir rehearsal I was always full/loaded with energy, when I came home I started browsing in advertising leaflets which I saved up for this purpose. I did this browsing with such speed it was almost inhuman, but my way to release the surplus of energy.

Quite soon I was fed up with the people in the community and their little world. We went twice a year away with the choir for a long weekend to do extra practising. After the first time I hated it, they only spoke about God, obviously. The singing was only practising parts of a song with a part of the choir to study on the polyphony. No great singing, only being locked up in an isolated location with these people. When I met my partner P. I convinced him to join us and he did. One of our choir members turned out to be a parson wannabe. Every occasion when we where performing he grabbed the moment to speak and preach. It was hard for me to stand still and to listen to him talking nonsense. I didn’t have the guts to speak up and confess to the audience that I didn’t agree with him, but that’s how I felt inside. After I had my first child we moved out of Amsterdam and I stopped attending church services and the choir. It was quite a process to disengage myself from the community and the singing. The dislike for the whole religious ambiance made it possible for me to cut loose and to never search again for a choir again.

The week after I shaved my head I had a lot of realisations and this was one of them. I never before had asked myself why I liked going to this church and the singing in the choir so much. I was addicted to energy, so much that I can easily say, I was a junkie. An energy junkie, who became cranky when I didn’t got my energy shot. Always busy with how to maintain and keep myself within this group to ensure my weekly energy shot. All that distracted me from the energy kick I dismissed as boring, stupid, unnecessary and something I didn’t want to be associated with. So these powerful religious music frequencies had an hold on me, till this love hate relation turned into hate. The hate made it possible to break loose from my addiction. Till now I’ve never addressed this hate or the energy issue so it’s time to do some rehab.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to desire to be part of my grandmothers world and therefore proud on wearing the choir outfit.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to believe that the gospel choir was my life path, instead of seeing that it was a pre programming.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to search for gospel groups to get this feeling of belonging, instead of looking inside to see myself and no longer search outside myself to get validation and conformation.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel attracted to the Baptist church scene, by falling for the energy produced by the singing.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel like I belonged within the Baptist scene and used the new friends be accepted and able to stay within the group.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel as a outsider within the Baptist scene, because I knew I was in it for something else which I than not understood.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to be dishonest within the Baptist group and only took and didn’t give.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to let the singing made me high.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to judge the Baptist members for their faith in God, while their faith delivered my energy.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to hate the Baptist scene and become cranky when I didn’t got the amount of energy I was hoping for.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not stand up and be honest about my motives for joining the group even though I didn’t know them back than, I knew their was something of.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to dislike the religious ambiance while I loved the energy, knowing now that one cannot do without the other.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to participate within the polarity of hate and love.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to be an energy junkie and not considered what was best for all.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to believe the others to be boring, stupid, unnecessary belief and someone I didn’t want to be associated with.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to be possessed by the religious music frequencies.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to hate the Baptist scene, while I hated myself for being dis honest and infiltrated a group out of self interest.