I was deep in meditation with Dr. Joe Dispenza. He was focusing on opening our hearts by breathing into our heart center. I was suddenly connected with my father. Yes, I’ve been thinking of him lately, but in this moment, I felt like I actually connected with his story.

You see, my father grew up during the Hitler–Mussolini regime. He lived in Naples, Italy. He often told me how Mussolini lined the youth in the streets, showing Hitler—who stood beside him—the control he had over them. “Give me a child at age seven and I will give you the man.” I’m not sure who said that, but I know that the two dictators of that time believed it. My father was among those youth. I can’t even imagine what it must have felt like to witness and feel the energy of those two men at such close proximity.

Perhaps that was the day my father’s heart became stilled and stopped up in trying to forget. I believe he spent the rest of his life trying to forget those times. I know he saw atrocities and things I cannot even fathom. He saw them up close and personal. He experienced destruction, fear, death of friends, and was himself catapulted into the fray as a soldier, a medic—serving however he was demanded to serve.

Many years later—and I don’t know when—he developed the illness called heart disease. He said he inherited it from his lineage. His younger brother died young from heart disease. His father also died from it. My father lived in its clutches until the age of seventy-nine. The cost was the incredible mental and emotional pain he lived with as he battled between his love for art and music and his career as a physician.

I’m telling you this because in my meditation, I felt that mental and emotional pain that he endured. It is no wonder he became an anesthesiologist, whose job it is to carefully put the patient into a sleeping state so that, when the pain and stress of surgery are experienced, the patient does not feel it.

Could my father have chosen this profession as a metaphor for his own need to sleep his pain away? My mother told me that many times he woke in the middle of the night in terror. He often told me of apparitions he saw—ghosts, devils, and the like. At that time, we did not know that he was experiencing PTSD. No one in my circle of life talked about those things. We just lived with the pain it inflicted, thinking it was just the way that person was.

My father lived with it and at times took that need to squelch his heart out on us by trying to control our lives and give us something different than what he had. I’m not making excuses for the way he sometimes treated me or my brothers and sister—I’m simply bringing understanding to it.

So today, in my meditation, he came forth vividly for healing. I understood that as I healed my own heart and sat in forgiveness of myself and others—and of him—I was healing the trauma of the past. I suddenly understood with clarity that when we heal something within ourselves, the ancestors are healing. There is no time nor space in the quantum field—in the Eternal. Everything is right now; and as we do our own work, the healing ripples out through eternity.

I don’t know why my father had to experience the terror that was his life. I do know that despite that terror, he found solace in art and music. His creative spirit most definitely permeated the lives of those around him. He brought beauty to horror. My cousin once told me, in writing, that as the family was separated at that time and then finally found their way back to each other after it was over, my father took the lead. He began to refurbish their home. He brought in a piano—from God knows where. He mended the tattered walls with art and paint.

I believe that today, in 2025, it will be the artists, the musicians, the Creative Loving Intelligence of the Universe that pours through everything, that will finally heal the atrocities we are and have experienced. I am grateful to be an artist like my father. I thank him for that gift that he so exemplified. I am also grateful that I have chosen the path of the artist.

We are all artists because our True nature is creative. It is the Presence of the Divine within each of us that calls us to express love through the expression of our True Selves. My call to others and to myself is to heal the wounds of the heart through our own inner work. I know we will feel the ripple effect of the healing permeating those we love here—and those who have gone before.

With Love,

Rev. Dr. Rita Andriello-Feren, Author, Founding Spiritual Director CSL Kaua’i, Founder of the Red Dress Movement, Co-Host of the From Woo Woo to Wow Wow! Podcast
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