Connection to our destiny task
It is important to connect to our destiny task. That task can be elusive and difficult to see at times, but once we connect to it, meaning floods into our whole life and we understand the difficulties and successes of our work in the world.
When I look into my search for what I wanted to do and work with in the world, I realise a clear path. Clear now when I am on the brink of my 70th birthday, but very unclear for quite a while. I see how I studied law to heal an injustice and lack of balance in my country, which had been for almost 20 years in the throes of a military dictatorship where safety was precarious and truth was hidden. I could not realise my task in the political reality I lived in so I became a Primary teacher. When I look back to those first years teaching children I understand two things:
I did not have the resources then to teach young children -the most noble undertaking in teaching; I only became able to teach very young children years later, within the framework of a very therapeutic education devised by Rudolf Steiner, then I thrived as an early years teacher.
As I became a good teacher to children aged 10/11 years old my teaching was always imbued with creativity and healing.
What prompted me to write about that special connection to our destiny was a visit to Greece.
My first trip to Greece was the realisation of a childhood dream as, since I read as a child of 9 or 10 about the 10 works of Heracles, my life has been inhabited by the imagery of greek mythology.
We decided to stay in the Peloponnese, the peninsula between the Ionian Sea and the Aegean Sea forming the southern part of the mainland of Greece. A part of Greece full of the ancient sites of my imagination. At first I wanted to see everything and go everywhere. My overwhelming feelings of belonging to the ancient culture of that sunny place leaving me disoriented with longing. I did not go everywhere in the Peloponnese. I did not have the time and also I could not honour that experience by rushing it.
I visited Athens for three days and spent the other four days in the second ‘leg’ of the peninsula, visiting Mycenae, Nemea, Epidaurus, and ancient Corinth. It was in Epidaurus that I met my present, buried deep in the ruins of an ancient important healing centre, considered the cradle of medicinal arts. This place was dedicated to Asclepius the god of medicine and healing. What impressed me was the wholistic nature of healing in ancient Greece where all our lower senses were considered, Movement, Sense of life, Balance and Touch. They had a gymnasium for exercise, a restaurant offering different diets according to individual healing needs, baths and water treatments to purify the body, and sleep, induced by a priest. During sleep the god Asclepius would come to the patient, touch him and heal him. Finally they had a theatre, still there and astonishingly preserved, almost intact. Theatre would provide the healing through catharsis, and the healing sound of poetry ( Speech).
I spent a long time sitting at the amphitheatre and experiencing the powers of that ancient sacred place of healing. In that place I realised that what connects all my work in the world is healing and creativity.
I thank Asclepius for having led me there and also here to my present, where healing and salutogenesis is always present in my daily work and form the thread that goes from my attempt at being a lawyer to my work as a biography worker, counsellor and psychotherapist.