Restoring Life's Missing Pieces, livre ebook

A powerful and thought-provoking look at "reunions" of all kinds as roads to remembering and re-membering ourselves.

“Reunions with people, places, things, and ourselves happen every day around us and within us. Whether to participate or not will always be your choice.”
—from the Introduction

Explore humankind's timeless, universal and deeply spiritual desire to reunite for the sake of healing and wholeness. Whether we wander far from home or reminisce from our favorite armchair, people of all faiths or none whatsoever undertake journeys to remember, restore and re-member the missing pieces of our stories, psyches and souls:

• Do you occasionally Google a person from your past in hopes of “catching up”?
• Do you leaf through old address books to try to call someone for the first time in decades?
• When you visit gravesites or memorials, can you pinpoint what drew you there?
• Have you felt an urge to revisit your birthplace or travel to your ancestors’ homelands?
• Do you feel compelled to attend an upcoming high school, family or other reunion? If not, why not?

Delve deeply into ways that your body, mind and spirit answer the Spirit of Re-union’s calls to reconnect with people, places, things and self.

Foreword vii
Introduction 1

1. Living the Questions 11
Exercise: Looking Backward and Forward to Live the Questions 25

2. Remembering the Past; Re-membering the Self 27
Exercise: Reuniting with Painful Stories 47

3. Where Friends Fit In 49
Exercise: Reuniting with a Childhood Friend 53

4. Matters about Things That Matter 71
Exercise: Letting Go 87

5. Putting Places in Their Place 89
Exercise: Discerning the Power of Place 106

6. When Saying No Really Means "Yes!" 107

7. Relatives: Reuniting and Reconciling 127
Exercise: Journaling with Others and Self 149

8. At Day's End 151
Acknowledgments 175

Notes 177
Resources for Further Exploration 183
Credits 186