Innocent • Zimbabwe 2013

by Susan Vielguth

​In an individual session this past week I sat on a blanket in the park as I heard one of the participants share what the last class was like for her. She asked me if I had noticed that she had tears in her eyes during one of the exercises we did and went on to share why.

She recounted that after testing positive with HIV the only soul she told, her Mother, swore her to secrecy. She described her Mother as extremely stressed by the news and remembers continually hearing her say that she refuses to have her children die before her. Her Mother’s health started to deteriorate rapidly until she finally passed due to what my new friend described as “being stressed” by her contracting HIV.

She believed that her Mother’s death was her fault. She had been living with this belief for years.

“Your Mother’s death is your fault” - Is it true?

We started with the first question of The Work and as the inquiry unfolded I traveled with her through the internal cause and effect of believing that thought. With the thought she described her bouts of crying, the guilt, the shame, and immense despair. In her mind she saw images of how her Mother would still be alive and healthy today if she hadn’t told her & compared that picture in the mind to the reality of her Mother’s death – she saw it as proof that she was to blame. At this point in the inquiry she was holding her head in her hands with tears streaming down both cheeks.

When it was time to move to question 4 she closed her eyes and, in silence, she waited. When she was moved to speak she shared that without the thought she would be lighter, freer, taking care of herself, and embracing the joy in life.

In the turnaround to the opposite, “My Mother’s death is not my fault” she realized that she had no control over how her Mother reacted to hearing that she had HIV. She saw that her Mother was very stressed by her own thinking & assumptions. She later noted that when she eventually did tell her sister about her status that her sister didn’t become intensely stressed or pass away. And it was as if, in acknowledging this, it reaffirmed that she herself had no control over how her Mother responded and allowed her to consciously recognize that there was never any malicious intent in sharing her status. She discovered her innocence.

As her examples for the turnarounds came to a close, she looked at me with plump tears in her eyes and with a smile on her face said, 
“I feel free.”