Publisher's Synopsis
The story of Dancing in the Dark: From Grief to Gratitude, Healing Intergenerational Trauma began with Naomi Fiske's realization that as the natural family around her was "celebrating life ... in the midst of the exuberance, I saw unending grief." How could this be? she wondered. She struggled to make sense of it, thus beginning the lifelong journey to honor her parents and the history of her ancestors, and to free herself from the need to carry their grief herself. This is the journey Naomi now shares as a testimony to the power of healing. In her story, she present a powerful and yet fluid model for transforming trauma in general and intergenerational trauma in particular as a means of helping to alleviate suffering. The goal is freedom, and that is the goal she leads us to--freedom not in the sense of forgetting the past that shaped us but in having the ability to choose whether we will carry the depth of pain and grief our ancestors were compelled to bear. For Naomi personally, the intergenerational trauma went back to World War II and those in her family who escaped the Holocaust, and those who didn't. But the mental and emotional scars--and the means to free ourselves of them--can come just as surely from the many other atrocities that have occurred and continue to occur around the world, leaving traumatized individuals in their wake. This is a book for all descendants of those cruelties. Trauma touches everyone. The inescapable question for Naomi was: How dare I be in radiance and joy when there was so much grief and suffering in my parents' lives and the lives of my ancestors? Her search for meaning in the midst of such anguish involved decades of study and work with such luminaries as Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Stephen Levine, Ram Das, Byron Katie, Pema Chodron, and Joe Dispenza. And now, in Dancing in the Dark, we share that answer, the lessons of Naomi's search: "We owe it to ourselves," she writes, "to celebrate life. We owe it to ourselves to honor every grieving and every tradition, and then move on. In every breath we take, we have a choice as to how we want to experience each moment."
