The Importance of Your Story : how to look back in order to propel forward

In the 80’s, ‘This is your life’ was an unavoidable Saturday night TV show. The big red book of someone else’s life. Recently I came across an article on the episode in which the story of Sir Nicholas Winton was told for for the very first time. The humanitarian, who afterwards came to be known as the British Schindler, had rescued 669 mostly Jewish children from Czechoslovakia before the outbreak of WW2, taking them by train across Europe to London, but in the intervening decades had barely told a soul. Lots of his rescued children from the Kindertransport, now around retirement age, were in the audience. Many of whom learnt for the first time who was responsible for saving their lives - and got to say thank-you. Most never had any idea how they came about being rescued, and they suffered the pain of losing their parents in the concentration camps.

In 1939, Winton had cancelled a trip to a Swiss holiday resort to go to Prague, having heard of a growing refugee crisis resulting from the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. He put a team together to arrange trains, food, permits, and the families in Britain who would receive the children.

Seeing images of the parents waving goodbye to their little ones leaving on a train from Czechoslovakia to London in 1939 is heartbreaking. My son is four and this really hits home. Ester Rantzen who was presenting the show was crying hard, compounded I’m sure by the fact she is Jewish, this story would have been close to her heart.

Moving? Yes, very, very. Tears, tears, and more tears. And humbling. Especially given Sir Nicholas didn’t strive for attention. Today we are bombarded by other people’s concept of their ‘success’ on social media, which is all too often purely to seek validation of the external image in the eyes of others.

The emotion stayed with me over the coming days, and I questioned why I had such a strong energetic connection with it. Of course it’s moving indeed, for everyone, however I began to question the link to this deep well of emotional within me. I’m not Jewish, I have some jewish friends. I’ve been to one Bat Mitzvah. Or should I say I’m still recovering from it. Jewish people know how to throw a party.

However what I do know is that I’m energetically empathic and have learned that joining these energetic emotional dots happens in its own natural time. The story always unfolds, as does the lesson if you learn to be present and stay with the emotion. The emotion is the link to personal meaning, and meaning is the pathway to growth and freedom.

This is something I have learned through living a meditative life - the key is to go inwards, to reach for that emotion and learn to process it. Stay with it, instead of burying it and moving on. Gentle hold it’s hand and see what, or who, it really is, and bring it out into the light. Look for the red threads in your life, the red threads in your own big red book.

As moved as I was by the Kindertransport story, and interested in how he had not sought recognition or praise for his achievement; how much society has since changed to being so self promotion focused. The article also drew my attention to two bronze sculptures created to commemorate the Kindertransport.

The first ‘Fur das kind - Displaced’ by Flor Kent, ‘commemorating the greatness of ordinary people in extraordinary times’. A memorial in Liverpool Street Station in East London. In tribute to all those who helped rescue 10,000 Jewish and other children escaping Nazi persecution through the Kindertransports. Liverpool Street Station was the main place of arrival and the meeting point for the children and their sponsors and foster families.

The second : Kindertransport – The Arrival, also in Liverpool Street Station is a large outdoor bronze memorial, part of a series in European train stations by renowned sculptor Frank Meisler. Meisler, himself a "kinder" child. Making a series of Kindertransport sculptures and honouring his own personal route to survival, was very important for him. He considered these works his most significant and meaningful pieces of art.

The memorials, amongst everything they represent and communicate, also teach us perspective; most of us I’m sure have not had to live through such circumstances in our lifetime. However we are aware of crisis, refugees, children and entire cultures clinging to survival in our modern world, today. Right now.

I took a bit more time to reach inside my soul, pausing to capture the meaning of this story from my own personal experience of life.

Liverpool street station, the main station in East London, is coincidentally - or synchronically in this case - my local train station. I consider East London my home and for very many years I passed through the station daily. It is interesting to think that walking past these sculptures was and still is very much part of my life, especially the sculpture located on the steps to the tube of two children waiting for their foster parents. Shocking now to think that I had however never stopping once to question these children, experience them or gain more understanding. Also considering I started my career as an art teacher and I love sculpture, how did this happen?

The fast lane lifestyle I lived in at the time, working for fashion magazine brands and rushing around London, burning the candle at both ends, had in fact partly disconnected me from my soul, and from my depth of creativity. It is this type of disconnection I now help people identify and heal in meditation. My meditation clients usually arrive with me at a time they are feeling the most pressure in life, yet going their fastest.

By looking back, it landed with that for years I had been too busy, too rushed, too caught up in my own head, in deadlines, meetings, emails, to stop and really look around me and capture the wider breadth of life. Like the rest of the sea of Londoners. Considering there are around 200,000 people going through Liverpool street per day, how many of these people are also entirely caught up in the distraction of their busy lives and their mind? Their phone? I have since taken my son to stop with the sculptures, and although he is still too young to get it, I hope that by continually doing so I can teach him to build his own understanding of the importance of awareness, kindness, and creativity.

Commemorating the greatness of ordinary people in extraordinary times is the red thread of this story. We are all ordinary people with capacity for greatness. We are living through extraordinary times, whether we’ve stopped to become aware of it or not. Whilst on one hand we have a mental health crisis, on the other we are making changes that reflect the visionary nature of our times, moving into a new creative era in which non-linear paths and mental wellness are coming to the fore. As a collective we are balancing and becoming conscious enough to step out of our own problems in order to do something positive to help others.

Through meditation sessions I encourage people to show down, to balance, to go inwards to capture their life; to leaf through their own big red book in order to heal emotional wounds and establish meaning. It’s a starting point to unleashing unique creative talent, joy and true happiness. To begin thinking about leaving a legacy. However if we don’t slow down or stop in the first place, switch off and learn to be mindful, we are going to miss this greatness within us. It is in the meditative mind that we connect to our inner power.

By engaging in higher consciousness practices such as meditation we energetically connect to an unlimited source of knowledge and understanding that supports us. The collective consciousness. Within this - we are one, and we are not separated by religion, ethnicity, social group, cultures. The light within us emotionally experiences and honours the light within others.