Holy Friday Descansos

Making Descansos

A descansos is a Spanish name word meaning rest or resting place. A descansos is usually erected at the site of tragic accident in which some ones life was cut short. To make markers on a page is a very good way of providing an outline for yourself if you want to write an autobiography.

To cleanse oneself Clarissa Pinkola Estés suggests making descansos. To make descansos means taking a look at your life and marking where the small deaths and the big deaths have taken place.

She encourages people to make a timeline of their life on big sheets of paper and to mark with a cross the places along the graph, starting with her infancy all the way to the present where parts and pieces of her self and her life have died. You mark the roads not taken, paths that were cut off, ambushes, betrayals and death.

Personally I encourage people to make descansos by sitting down and remembering the significant milestones, by celebrating joy and mourning losses. Just as our ancestors drew on the walls of caves and sat around the campfires telling stories of triumph and tragedy we can engage in the transformative process of using story to help us.
 
When we make descansos we undergo a transformative process and come to truly know ourselves and see the events in our life differently. When we gain fresh perspective we heal.

To read more about Descansos read pages 365-66
Estés, C.P. Women Who Run With The Wolves.