Treasure in the ruins: Lessons from Cambodia

“Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.”
— Rumi

If you are travelling to Cambodia everyone asks you the same question, “Are you going to the temples at Angkor Wat?” When we first started to work with leaders in Cambodia we soon found out that many of the Cambodians themselves had not even visited the temples of Angkor Wat. Angkor Wat is the largest religious monument in the world. It was built by King Jayavarman II in the early 12th century, and it encompasses Hindu and Buddhist traditions. While Europe was in the grips of the dark ages, Cambodia was building a temple complex that had irrigation and libraries.

The leaders we were working with in 2003 through the UNDP and the NAA had not visited the temples primarily because of the Khmer Rouge war -- actually the area was still a site of armed conflict in the late 90’s. The temples had been cut off from them—by armed guerrillas, by landmines, by lack of passable road, by sheer lack of capacity to travel.

My colleague Fran decided that as part of the leadership development program they would go, and explore their history and their history of leadership. Going to the temples would give them a means of restoring a sense of inspiration and vision about their country,  and connect them to the aspects of their history and culture that was thoughtful, beautiful and strong. Hidden in the ruins were sources of strength for the Khmer** culture. It was a powerful trip and many of the participants talked about how important it was to them to have been able to go. Over the years they have returned with their families.

To find the treasure you have to head into the ruins. In some ways in those first couple of years of working in Cambodia, the war was an unspoken presence. The full stories had not yet been told, but the trips to Angkor Wat were a way to have some of the story present. Not the story of what happened to them during the war, that is what most of us think of when we think of trauma. We think of what happened. And that is a big part of the experience of any trauma survivor. But it is not all of the experience.

Repeated trauma is always three forms of trauma: what did happen, the protections you create to survive, and what didn’t happen. It would be years before we would hear stories about what did happen, but the trip to Angkor Wat would allow for some of the conversation about what didn’t happen—and allow them to begin to expand their ideas and possibilities for themselves as individuals and as leaders.

Our temples are not as tangible or beautiful as Angkor Wat. When we experience difficult days, or meltdowns, or deep grief, or wild panic, we don’t see our experience as temple ruins. We don’t realize that instead of running away from or denying those feelings, we need to paradoxically head toward them. Visit them. Explore them. Honor them. It took a lot of courage for my Cambodian colleagues to visit those temples after so many years. And it will take courage from you as well.

Our ruins many not be easy to find, but it's worth the search. They are the parts of ourselves that have been hidden for so long. They survived for years in a war zone. They may need repair. They may need to be deforested from all that has grown over to cover them. But they hold beautiful aspects of ourselves. And they deserve our time. And they deserve our patience and they deserve our reverence.

Those difficult feelings? Ruins. Those struggles? Ruins. Your grief? Ruins. Head in. Keep struggling. Keep feelings. Walk around. Sit down and journal. Look around and be amazed at what survived. What is there after all of these years. Let yourself be amazed at what is there. It will come in flashes. In small views. It's hard to take in all at once. The treasure isn't something small, though there may be small things that you appreciate. Take it all in. Get the wider view. Then you may begin to take in the treasure..

**Note: People in the West often mistake the word Khmer to mean Khmer Rouge—but this is not the case. The word Khmer is the name of the primary ethnic group of Cambodia and is also the language of the Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge were the followers of the communist party of Cambodia, founded in 1968. It was an offshoot of the North Vietnamese People’s Army. 

To virtually visit the temples at Angkor Wat you can look at them on google street view here

To read more about our work in Cambodia and other UNDP projects you can read about them here.

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2015

A great circle.

“The Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round..... The Sky is round, and I have heard 
that the earth is round like a ball, and so are 
all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nest in circles, for 
theirs is the same religion as ours.... Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from 
childhood to childhood, and so it is in 
everything where power moves.”
— Black Elk

I am not a very tidy gardener. That’s a nice way of saying my garden is often a wild mess. To be fair, I really do love the gardens that are more on the wild side, with lot of flowers, filling up every available space, but it can get out of control. About five years ago when I had some moving guys come to help me move furniture in a week when I hadn’t gotten to mow the lawn for a while because of rain, one of the moving guys looked around the yard and said, “Is that the look you are going for?”

When I first began gardening I pored over English Garden books and I wanted to emulate those massive perennial beds. But I forgot two things. I don’t live in England, and I don’t have a gardener.

And, to make matters even messier I had woodchuck issues with my backyard vegetable garden so I moved all my vegetables into my front flower garden. So it is now is a riot of flowers, and vines and vegetables. And I travel for work. So, I manage to get it in in the spring, and maybe weeded once. And that’s it. The garden is off and running and so am I. I basically don’t touch it again until I start over again in the spring.

But not being tidy had its benefits this week. We had a huge snowstorm and all of the seedheads of my flowers and vines and shrubs which looked awful and messy before the storm were all that you could see after the storm. And while I shoveled, my garden was visited constantly by Sparrows and Junkos and Chickadees. What I called messy, they called lunch.

I can waste a lot of energy on garden shame. Worrying that I really should do something about it. I can waste a lot of time on shame period. But yesterday was such a clear of example of how that kind of judgment is so misplaced. Watching those birds yesterday made me think that worrying about how things look would have been the wrong decision by a mile for those birds.

Healing doesn’t happen in a linear form. It happens in cycles the way our year happens in seasons. The parts of the cycle of healing are as interconnected as our seasons. You heal as much as you can and you move to another part of the cycle and you leave some things behind because you are pulled to the next phase of healing, and you leave some things behind because you aren’t ready yet to work with them yet. Both are always true.

And really, it’s all there all the time. It’s just that your attention has moved from one thing to another. The things you still need to work on can be out of your attention, but so can your strengths that you used to work on those things. And then something triggers your attention and you find them again, the way the birds found the flower seeds in the middle of winter. And what about the things you can’t see right now, even if you search? They are still there. The snow has covered everything else but the tops of the flowers, but the roots and bulbs are still there. They are being nourished and fed by this season. And they will bloom in their own. 

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2015


Learning to trust what you need.

The blizzard came and brought with it lots of snow. And the end result was quiet. Even the high winds were quiet. The snow muffled everything. I live on a busy road that is usually a white noise of traffic, but not today. Today I lived in wilderness, in quiet. It was like going on a wilderness retreat, and taking your house along, so that you had actually gone somewhere new, but you were sitting on your own couch.

It was such a reminder of the healing power of quiet. Of giving your senses a break from the constant overstimulation of sound. Sitting in quiet this morning put me in the mood for taking in. For receiving rather than acting. The quiet made me want to rest, and not act (shoveling not withstanding) and I found myself enjoying the act of sitting in my house and not hearing anything at all. Maybe the heating system, or the occasional sound of something blowing on the porch, but the quiet, the silence, became, so famously sung by Simon and Garfunkel, a sound. And I found myself resting in it.

Quiet isn’t my strong suit. As my second grade teacher wrote in my final report card, “That girl sure can talk.”   And I spend my days in conversation—that is my work, and I continue the conversations in my head and there is a constant buzz and chatter of one sort of the other. It’s taken many years of practice, of learning to sit in moments of silence, in moments of quiet for me to tolerate it, let alone, as I did today, to feel it actually renew me, to feel it like some sort of nutrient that I was craving.

I once did a stint in Early Intervention with toddlers and there was a little 2 year old boy, Henry, who was brought to the early intervention toddler group in a van. I would get him out of his car seat and as I picked him up he became the heaviest child in the world. He wouldn’t move or react or anything. Instinctively I held on to him and he rested his head and he and I would sit outside of the classroom—in silence, and he would just rest there. Unmoving, still, quiet. He would rest for about 20 minutes, give or take. It reminded me of those mats that people charge their cell phones on. He would lie on me and it was as if he was borrowing some sort of energy from me. He would stay there long enough and then slowly he would start to stir—like waking up after hibernation. There was some nutrient he was craving—connection, quiet, care, stillness. He was two and had very few words so I never knew exactly. But he knew what he needed and he got it.

There are so many shoulds, and so many suggestions of the right way to do things, or be healthy, or get well. Instead, there needs to be a greater emphasis on helping people hear the quiet voice inside themselves about what they need at that moment. There isn’t one right way any more than there is one right shirt to wear every single day. Today the quiet felt nourishing to me. Certainly ten years ago it would have been too much for me and I likely would have missed it altogether by having music or sound on in the background. And even now, on a different day, I might have needed something else.

Henry was an incredible teacher for me. His ability to know what he needed and just do it.  Because it was so tangible, so physical, it was easy to see and easy to do. But because it was wordless, I learned how much you have to listen to an inner voice about it: call it intuition, or feeling, or wisdom. And remember that it might be something that not everyone needs. Henry was the only 2 year old in the group who needed that kind of holding each day. But when he got it, he was ok.  Learning to listen to this voice, even if it fell outside of the ‘norm’ helped me trust what I needed for my own healing and it helped me trust more with others when the needs were less tangible and I had to look or listen a little more to understand the need.

And you can start this process at any moment. Notice what is happening. Ask yourself what you need. Trust the answer.

 ©Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD 2015

Controlling the Uncontrollable

“Let it go...the cold never bothered me anyway..”
— Elsa, Disney Princess

The East Coast of the United States where I live is bracing for a massive storm and I am bracing along with it. I am doing all that storm-related preparation we New Englanders are so good at: batteries, flashlights, full tank of gas, new shovels, extra water. I have the candles out. I cooked food ahead of time. I have a pile of books. I am charging all of my devices. I have my snowshoes ready.

And all of the storm prep was fine if it didn’t interfere with the other plans I had this week. I had a flight on Wednesday of this week for work and was optimistic (others might say in denial) that my flight would be fine. But I had it all worked out. The storm would end late Tuesday. And voila, I’d be headed to work. Look at me…in control of storm prep….AND still able to get to work. Maybe not leaping buildings in a single bound, but still.

Only, that’s not what is happening. And today was an object lesson in wanting to, and even trying to, control the uncontrollable. It’s an amazing thing to watch if you can get a little distance and maybe a smidge of compassion. I hurdled from one hope and one attempt to strongarm a solution to another. I joked with friends that it was all of Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief in one day, ending, finally with acceptance. This wasn’t the week I had planned but this is the week I was delivered.

Some of you have already learned this lesson about control because you are wise, or just better people than I am, but clearly, despite lots of practice, I have not. At around 2 pm today I was in serious knock-down-drag-out World Wide Wrestling Smackdown dressed, of course as the Illusion of Control trying to fight The Universe and in my delusional state, I even thought I was going to win.

Who won, you wonder? The Universe. Always does. On days like this I am reminded of learning to rock climb as a Girl Scout. You started struggling up the rock face feeling like you were so dangerously high up and really, when it got scary you could just put your feet back down on solid ground. It was there all the time.

When I finally put my feet back on the ground, I could see that it wasn’t the week I had planned, but it is a week to do with what I was given. And there really is something to the experience of acceptance. Of giving up the fight. Surrendering to what is. You can actually feel your breathing change. You can think again. You can look around and see possibility where before you could only see loss. The good news is that I have a week I didn’t plan and the whole adventure of the storm to practice.

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2015