Dachau Concentration Camp…. How difficult it is just to write this name. My fingers don't want to keep writing, my mind doesn’t want to be confronted with it. And still I feel so connected to all this pain, the devastation that happened there and in similar places.
It would be easy to say that this was back then, other time, other place, really bad circumstances, wasn’t even my country at that time… Ok, and what about now? What about me? Am I free of judgement? Am I free of preconception? Am I free of violence and conflicts in my speech and actions?…
My friend Bettina and I started going to Dachau, meditating there, talking about our feelings about this incredible history, and also about the darkness today in the world and within ourselves. We turned to our own negativities and shadow sides in order to increase our awareness of them, to integrate or even to transform them. Bettina describes our first encounter in Dachau like this „Es war überwältigend, erleichternd, befreiend, inspirierend – anders als man es sich vielleicht vorstellt... „
It has become a beautiful peace project, facing the pain and wounds of the past and healing our own inner conflicts. We started off in Dachau, now we are moving along the monuments of the „death march“ along which the prisoners were forced to walk in the last days of the war in 1945.
This project is not about dwelling in this incredible pain and darkness. It’s more about realizing that the pain and the darkness is a part of us, just like the light that can heal it. Only when we see and embrace that we all have the potential for both we can become whole.
We meet up almost once a month at a monument, practicing our preferred meditation or just sharing and sitting in silence / contemplation. If anyone is interested, please contact Bettina: bhoeldrich@gmx.de