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I awoke this morning with a profound sense of arriving at a place within my heart and life that feels full of hope and tremendous flow. If you’ve read my other posts, you’ve followed some of my tumultuous journey to this point.
Here is my truth as I am experiencing it today:
I am filled with a knowingness that I am on my path and that my destiny is now arriving. It is a a space of inner peace and freedom from all that I have limited myself with. It is the healing of anything and everything beyond what I have even fathomed. It is a space of gratitude and humility and joy and service from a cup that is overflowing.
Every one of us have all the miracles we have longed for waiting for us. Our lessons prepare us for the moment in our lives when we understand how our life choices have led us to where we are and what our true, individual path and destiny is. It is a readiness to fully live because we have mastered the art of death…the art of surrendering. It is a transformation of dread into peace, love, trust and bliss. It is a place of surrendering into death while being held by goodness.
It is the moment when darkness is held differently within us: A moment when ‘night is as bright as day’.
Miracles are experienced first within our own hearts. When my miracles come to my own heart and Beingness, I know outer circumstances are in the process of completing their alignment to my true path. It is a time of deeper letting into the joy of the life I have co-created.
Our priorities as souls, whether we are consciously aware of it or not, is change from the inside out. That is why outer circumstances don’t shift until our inner circumstances do.
As Willy Shakespeare says, ‘To thine own self be true”. The path to our own personal bliss is through the valley of the shadow of death into the promise lands that hold everything our hearts have longed for in ways our minds haven’t been able to conceive.
In the spirit of laughter, mirth and amusement, I intend to belly laugh my way into my future as I butt slide down the slope of this mountain of joy.
Thanks for listening ❤
~me.
Did you ever have one of those days when you just couldn’t stop crying? When snot is running down your face and your eyes are so swollen and blood shot you look like the Pillsbury Dough Boy on crack?
Yesterday was one of those days for me. It was such a gift.
I surrendered to the waves of honesty and nose-dripping sobs that had been building within me as I stared into the unwavering and kind gaze of my stuffed bear. It felt so good to be feeling my heart again. I moved from Virginia to North Carolina a month ago and changed everything in my life yet again. Life is so good and yet, at the same time, so hard right now in all the perfect ways. I needed to cry, to release, to process. I needed to feel myself. I needed to feel my heart. I needed to remember. Thank god-ness my stuffed bear is such a good listener and I had plenty of Klenex.
It was a gift to let myself cry and feel the honest soil within my heart and soul. It was a gift to once again access the place within my heart where my own presence lives. I missed myself.
Being out of felt connection with our whole-heartedness is hell in a body. It is an experience I am quite familiar with.
I spent much of my life cut off from my heart. Feeling my truth didn’t feel safe for me for what seemed like many really good reasons. I didn’t know how to connect with myself. I didn’t know how to let myself feel. I didn’t know how to open my heart. I didn’t know how to feel alive. I didn’t know how to be present to and own my truth, feelings and power.
All of us know our truth at some deep level but we may not let ourselves consciously realize that we know. I spent a significant part of my life determining not to feel the truth within. I knew being present to my truth would set me on a path full of changes that I wasn’t sure I could handle. I was afraid if I let myself feel the layers of truth aching to be expressed that I would fragment into a thousand pieces like Humpty Dumpty. I was afraid I would not be put back together again. I often pretended I was happy at great cost to myself and my relationships, but privately I was dying inside.
There comes a point, however, on the journey into wholeness that presents itself as a cross-road of the heart. We find ourselves letting go into the very experience we have been running from. We let go into the experience we thought we couldn’t handle. We enter the great Unknown that has so frightened us and find we are somehow saved though the experience of facing and feeling into it…no matter what the outcome. Within this death experience our hearts are reborn, feeling perhaps for the first time the wholeness that the courage of integrity of heart brings.
It seems to me that in our deepest hearts we all long for the self-respect that comes from surrendering into the experience that our own unique paths calls us into. Integrity of heart has it’s own thirst-quenching consequence which, in the end, was the drink I could not, and cannot, live without.
I have learned the saving grace of being honest with myself. Honesty is my salvation, my messiah, and the fuel of my life because it connects me with the essence of who I am. When I find myself unable to feel the depth of my own truth, I often feel tiny moments of panic as I wait impatiently for the life-giving release that I know is on the way but scares me when I can’t immediately feel it. During these times of stuckness, I often seek out others who inspire me with their courage and honest lives. You know who you are. You are Those who belong to the Tribe of Snotty Faces and Swollen Eyes who have gone before me and live in the integrity of your hearts. You are true to yourselves. You are my teachers, my inspiration and my courage. Keep living your lives so I can see you I need you.
So now, knowing so well that the path to being with myself is paved through embracing and owning my vulnerability, it is a relief to be pushed by life and circumstances to the point of surrendering to the truth of my emotions. It is a relief to let go, once again and over and over, into the experience of feeling the truth contained within my heart. Somehow the preciousness of my vulnerability is the destination where I find the Aliveness that feeds my soul, my life and my path.
Crying is often the magic carpet I ride into the whole-hearted land of reunion with myself. When I need to be rescued from my prison of hard-heartedness, letting go into feeling deeply often does the trick.
After spending years feeling cut off from my own heart behind fearful walls, now when my heart goes into hibernation and reaches to free itself through having a good cry, I am grateful. Grateful to experience the feeling of my own self again. Grateful that I can’t pretend to be strong any longer. Grateful to see clearly and be seen. Grateful to let others see how fragile I feel underneath all my Capricorn togetherness.
Crying reconnects me with feeling alive in all of my vulnerability and humanness and with the equality of the whole human race. Crying dissolves the shells that knowingly and unknowingly accumulate around my heart. Feeling my feelings and expressing them is my purposeful remembering of my hard earned lessons. I am still a beginner. Embracing, owning and sharing my feelings is a fairly new muscle I am exercising. It is my way of intending to live a whole-hearted life.
Giving myself permission to feel deepens me as a human being and connects me with the joy of living in the present moment, even in painful, confusing times. After honestly experiencing the truth of my emotions, I feel a bit more humble, a bit more hopeful, a bit more alive, a bit more clear. As the tide of my connection with myself and All That Is returns, I find myself flowing forward in my life in more peaceful ways. No matter if the next steps forward are painful and hard or joyful and easy, going forward knowing my deepest truth enables me to travel with my most treasured and recently found companion..myself.
As always, always remember….Love Wins.
–
We all have a deep, profound call on our lives. Every one of us.
Until we are living our calling from the inside out, we often feel either miserable, depressed, numbed out or some combination thereof. Who can blame us? We are all stunningly magnificent Beings. When we can’t feel our own worth and magnificence, it’s just too painful for some of us.
We are meant to live fully expressed lives. In moments of stillness, we glimpse this throbbing longing that pulses to get our attention. Like the painful contractions of a woman in labor, we are drawn inward by the pain of giving birth to the lives we were born to express.
As Joseph Campbell says in his description of the The Hero’s Journey…
“You enter the forest
at the darkest point,
where there is no path.
Where there is a way or path,
it is someone else’s path.
You are not on your own path.
If you follow someone else’s way,
you are not going to realize
your potential.”
Sometimes it hurts too much to feel the truth of our unexpressed life…so we turn away from facing ourselves. I get it. The cost just feels too high.
Ultimately, we become willing, little my little, to pay each cost. For me, the journey of daring to trust my heart’s response to destiny’s call was a journey of massive healing proportions. It was a terrifying journey into openness. The destination was not a place, but rather was the experience of myself and a way of being in the world that had long eluded me and cut me off from the truth of my soul.
I write this as an offering to all those who are weary, as I too know what it is like to be weary. I write to all to those who are without hope and wanting hope, as I too know the pain of being without hope. I write to all those who want to know they are not alone on this heart path of surrendering to openness and trust, as I too have known the isolation that results from terror.
I have been journeying for several years now through a deep unknowing on my way to a new state of being. My souls GPS has been broadcasting the instructions “The summit is ahead. Keep climbing. Keep letting go of all the patterns that no longer serve you”. It has been a long, long journey up my mountain by way of descending through tunnels and valleys. I have tip-toed forward often scared to my core but desperate to be whole.
I write this today from the summit of my most recent personal journey. I realized I arrived at the summit for this particular growth phase of my life when my guidance changed from ‘Keep climbing’ to ‘Take in the view’. I can see myself sitting on my mountain top…feeling my heart’s wholeness mixed in with the poignant awareness of a bittersweet grief mixed amongst deep peace. In a way that I can’t quite find the words for, I know I will travel differently from this point forward. Yes, my heart has been broken. It has been broken open into the softness I have longed for all my life. It is worth the journey.
My inner summiting of this phase of my personal journey has coincided with an outer actual physical move to a new state. I have just moved from Virginia to my new mountain home in Asheville, NC. I am writing this from the room I am rent. My windows are open. I hear the song of a lovely bird who is letting me know I am not alone although I feel quite alone in a sacred kind of way. I hear the rushing water of the creek below my window soothing me with it’s joyful music and whispering the water-wisdom of ‘go with the flow’. My room is on the crest of a little hill so I look out at the tops of the trees which are dancing with filtered light. Fall is here. The leaves in all their colors and states of death falling to blanket the earth for safe keeping through winter. It’s time to tuck in. Cuddle up. Get warm with apple cider and fireplaces and let all that has been accomplished gestate in the magic of the dark, rich soil that knows exactly what the seeds of rebirth need.
The undeniable call to ‘keep climbing’ has subsided. It has been replaced by a deep sense of accomplishment at having arrived at the inner destination I have been journeying towards. There is a foundation of deep peace amidst all the other colors of emotions that make up my changing inner landscape at any one moment.
Externally, and from the ‘worlds’ perspective, I have less financial security, less access to the friends and family that I love, less roots in the material world, and a whole lot less ‘stuff’. I appear to be cut loose from all life and structure…yet oddly feel more anchored then I ever felt while in all those structures.
As I have followed this deep call within my own soul, over and over again I have been asked by my journey to let go in deeper and deeper ways. Whatever Destiny has asked me to let go of, eventually and with no small amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth, I have released. It has been a slow and often excruciating process. I have done the things I thought I couldn’t do, over and over. I have followed this beckoning inner call into the deepening levels of personal integrity and expansion that I was wanting to experience. This life-giving whisper was guiding me into that which I was most longing for, yet couldn’t have put to words.
As I have traveled this path, some choices have felt as if my skin was being pulled off. They have been so painful, so difficult. Oh how raw and ripped open I have felt by following the call of my soul into some elusive healing that kept summoning me forward. As I have pressed on, I have had my desperate grasping fingers pried open from a certain way of being. I have often felt torn from the attachments to what I have most loved.
Letting go of control and learning to trust meant releasing myself and all those around me to find and walk our own paths of self responsibility. Over and over and over, I have been asked to release my fearful grasp on every level. In choosing my path, I have had my death grip painfully pried open and have been asked to learn to live with an open, soft hand. I have been asked to be ruthlessly present to my darkness and my light and to learn to turn towards the poignancy of each naked moment.
I have screwed up a lot as I have journeyed. I have learned the agonizing beauty of facing the depth of my own imperfections reflected back to me in the mirrors of my life. I have experienced the costly beauty of not letting my fear of judgement, rejection, or failure stop me from following my deepest destiny into the wholeness of my own soul. How deeply is has hurt me to know those I love were hurting! Yet I had to learn to cherish myself first. It is from my fullness that I will love those in my life from this point onwards.
How brave of us all to risk learning to trust. We are all ultimately honored and empowered by compassionate self-responsibility. Respect is cultivated as we each own the leadership of our own lives and Being-ness. Each of us deserves the freedom to be in our own processes, to learn our own lessons in our own way, in our own time, without interference from others. The feeling of this soil of respect is painful in a sacred, healing way. It is in this sacred space where the mirror holds the reflection of our inner worlds with the precision and effectiveness of a scalpel.
I have been broken open by my path into my deeper destiny, over and over again. At times I have felt as if I have been smashed repeatedly against the rocks by a relentless surf as wave after wave of experience comes to shatter all the shells that have kept me out of connection with the joy and peace of my own deep Presence. I have longed to live open, soft and free in compassionate connection with myself. I have longed to open myself to the joy and connection of others, and to all of life.
I have journeyed through layer upon layer of feeling separated and unworthy. I have not understood my destiny but have understood the drips of thirst-quenching water leading me on my journey. Like being reunited with someone I have loved for all eternity, I have sensed and felt that I had to respond to this remembering if I was to truly live. Often walking blindly through darkness and fog, I’ve ‘heard’ over and over again “Just this next step. This is the Way. Walk in it”. Moment by moment, choice by choice, step by baby step, I have inched and often crawled my way through the cold, dark storage spaces of my inner landscape to reclaim and welcome me home to myself. I have learned to inhabit the beautiful living spaces within me.
Destiny asks all of us to trust It with the deepest, most fragile, nakedly vulnerable parts of ourselves on our road to wholeness. All of us have an Inner Sacred Scaredy Cat that must be patiently, compassionately and persistently opened to joy.
Even when we feel most alone, most lost, most frozen, there is a Way forward. Dare to trust your thirsty heart to the true and deep calling of your own Destiny. Love wins. Always.
Delicious Pain.
Like most addictions, Delicious Pain ‘hurts so good’ we have trouble leaving it.
Delicious Pain is our souls call into dissolving the attachments that block our authentic, empowered fulfillment. It is often a fast track to healing our core wounds if we are willing.
That’s what we call it…this friend and I who share a similar earth school experience of learning through the dysfunction of intimate partnerships. We have found ourselves inhabiting Delicious Pain on our way to Delicious Wholeness. We are on a journey. We are in school. I believe I just took my final exam. I am waiting for my grade. My friend is sitting at her desk staring her final exam which lies face down in front of her. I know many of you have already graduated and are holding space for those of us in school. Thank you. If you are like me, you might spend a long, long time staring at your exam before you are ready to take it.
This Delicious Pain experience carries the wounds we are healing. As souls, like many of you, my friend and I are healing our deep core wounds through the mirror of experiencing deep soul love and painful attachment with partners who are perfect triggers for our deepest unhealed wounds. What brilliant souls we are to face ourselves with these unhealed places in order to eventually be an inner energetic match to what we have been evolving towards, perhaps for lifetimes…conscious, wholehearted, joyful, EASY partnerships that add to our happiness as we serve the world. I must add how unattainable having this partnership has felt to both of us…until recently.
I imagine many of you can relate to this. I know you can. So many of you have shared your secret pain with me as I have shared mine with you. It is from this place of honor to us all that I share the lessons of my journey with you. We all have a secret pain or two in some area of life. Where secret pain exists, so does radical grace.
This current evolutionary season is one that is reflecting back to us all that is left unhealed and hidden within us with renewed intensity. Our lack of alignment with who were really are and what we really want is being throw in our faces like a pie being hurled at us at a carnival. Like a pie in the face, this intensity is just not possible to ignore. Whatever has been blocking us from manifesting our unique paths to fulfillment is literally ‘in our face’. Our mirrors are purposefully exponentially intense right now for our own good. This has been going on for a while now.
Experiencing more discomfort is or will eventually produce it’s desired effect of turning our faces towards Trust. We may feel more miserable for a season until we shift to turning more deeply towards the essence of the Wordless Inner Home within us in the midst of this intensity. For many of us in our place of trials, our instincts are stronger now to to turn towards and into the Restful Stillness of our own Being-ness…that space of Peace, Presence and Grace that exists between thoughts, between heartbeats, in nature, in silence, or resting in the arms, chest, or Presence of our safe places. It is in this place of Presence that we find nourishment and our co-creative power finds it’s aligned expression.
Our souls design experiences to lead us to reach in deeper and deeper ways through unhealed parts of ourselves into this connected Presence within us. We often have to get to that space by first experiencing more of what we hoped had already healed. We notice old addictions surface with a new intensity and patterns of distraction clamor to save us from the unrest of our unconscious parts being made conscious. It’s messy. We want to numb ourselves in our familiar ways yet we long to do it differently. This time something IS different. Somehow we know this healing season feels different. This time as we enter our secret places, our underworlds, we dare bravely to experiences what we have long felt imprisoned by. This time we find access to a new space of connectedness that had previously eluded us on past journeys through these same distasteful spaces.
Don’t even tell me you don’t know what I am talking about. The shit has hit the fan. The pie has hit our faces.
We are learning to trust. We are daring to open to the searing purification of the process. We are finding our Way. It’s Time. It is different this time.
The pulse of Loving Resources is truly accessible to us now so It is taking no prisoners until it has it’s way with us. The universe is making ‘tough’ love to us. Our souls are DEADLY serious about setting up our experiences to face us with the choice of opening our hearts rather then closing, softening rather then hardening. Some of us are literally or metaphorically dying in order to live. Whatever experiences we need to have to facilitate our personal transformation are being handcrafted by our souls for us. Our fulfillment is at stake. Our souls are in the “Tough-Kick-Ass-Warrior-Love” mode to create the unquestionable opportunity for us to find our way this time. We can come quietly, peaceably and easily into our bliss or… we can endure the intense suffering while All-We-Long-For waits with knowing confidence for us to collapse into It’s lap….eventually.
Here is the miraculous news in the midst of these wave of crapola. Energetic resources of a gigantic proportions are available to us now. Shifting is easier then it has ever been. Hence, like a truly benevolent parent that knows what is on the other side of the ‘spanking’, we are being faced with our deepest remaining unconscious blocks because it is, in fact, TIME to heal completely. It’s time to experience what many of us have been barely able to hope for because of our long standing ancient and current lifetime pattern blocks that we have worked and worked on. In the past, we have often felt persistent disappointment for our efforts. Our hearts have become so weary. Try again? Really?
How many times have we faced into our healing winds only to find incomplete healing? Such disappointment. Such heartache. Such despair. Such pain. Such hopelessness. Such self-loathing. Why try again? How do we find the courage? The hope? Because Completion is possible now. It’s TIME to complete our healing in ways that are easier then they have ever been. Which is why the shit has hit the fan in new and deeper ways. Access to our Wholeness is effortless now …once we risk reopening the old wounds and travel through the discomfort into the new and deeper levels of trust available to us.
Cowboy up comrades! Hop on your healing horses! It’s time to ride! This time, though it will be messy and we may travel through our hidden realms of dense pain, we will end up in Nirvana…Heaven on earth… Heart Wholeness…that inner Landscape that depends on nothing changing other than us. We will soften and lean into the healing wind, knowing we can handle what we never could before. The lap of comfort, peace and stillness is more real then ever. As soon as we lean in, we will feel it alongside the discomfort.
So, back to the healing of my core wounds as an example of what I am talking about.
If being in a previous intimate relationship with me had an application process, the boxes my suitors would check off would be as follows:
-Unavailable in a variety of forms…emotional and otherwise. Check. Matched my own unavailability to myself.
-Deeply wounded. Check. Matched my own deep wounding.
-Somewhat narcissistic. Check. Matched my co-dependence.
-Hostile or abusive in some way. Check. Matched my self-loathing and inability to cherish myself.
My crazy soul just wants to heal. Period. So, she picked perfect healing partners. Sound familiar? Here’s my souls inner dialogue….”This intimate partner applicant is perfect for me to fall in love with! How fucking perfect! Now I can access my deepest wounds through the mirror of this relationship and practically kill myself in the process. Fan-fucking-tastic. (If swearing offends you, I know a great coach who can help 🙂
My souls plan of course is to reveal the hidden places within me that are now ready to heal. She wants to heal the part of me that still ‘needs’ to attach to abusive, unavailable energy in myself by seeing it in my relationships. Once that is healed…she (my soul) says we are golden 🙂
I have lived in the essence of delicious pain so long it terrifying to be experiencing my own wholeness…crazy but true. I am, however, getting used to it exceedingly quickly! The terror of healing into wholeness is now more of an adventure that nourishes me then a triggering into the same pit of despair, anxiety, hopelessness and self-loathing that I have long occupied. This new wholeness is finally being reflected in my choices.
Halle-frickin-lu-jah. It’s about time!
Like all of us, I have come by my deep core wounds honestly. I signed up for a soul contract that was loaded with dysfunction and misalignment. As I have healed my tangled mess, I have gained an authentic place from which to speak to those who face the same healing challenges. The unconscious patterns that I have lived with have been so tangled and so massive that I felt hopeless to heal them all. The heartbreaks have been so massive for me, with my particular inner wiring, that I have been derailed by them over and over.
Like many of you, I have longed for healing all my life. I have longed to be able to honor commitments to myself, longed to treat myself with loving-kindness, longed to not keep cutting myself off from the love that exists all around me. I have longed to be a safe resting place for all those who have lost hope, longed to partner with myself in gentle-kindness, longed to be nourished enough in my own Being-ness to express my gifts generously to the world without feeling depleted. I have longed to share happiness with a soul partner and trail mate on this life journey, longed to be a match to the deep, family connections I have always longed for but seemed like a fish-out-of-water in.
So friends, don’t give up. I am feeling the shift and am seeing it all around me in those who long for wholeness. If I can feel the wave of Love and Presence and peace in the midst of the tangled mess of my life and insanity, then you can too. Life circumstances don’t have to change. We are just a soft breath away from what is already all around us waiting to seep into our cells and hearts.
Join me in this journey through the mess into Delicious Unfathomable Peace.
We are so, so, so loved.
We are loved with a Warrior’s Love that won’t rest until the hardness of all we have been through is dissolved and we are stupidly happy with complete discombobulated bliss.
So unfurl your rusty tentative wings and let the winds of effortless healing carry you Home.
Take my hand. Come fly with me. It’s time.
I can’t explain everything I ‘know’.
I don’t know how I know what I know. That seems to be the nature of ‘knowing’. It lies outside the rational mind.
I do love and appreciate my mind, but she tends to have tunnel vision. She most often leads from fear. Before I knew and understood the dance of the heart and mind, I spent most of my life leading with my mind. My mind couldn’t handle the task of guiding me alone…she often got her panties in a tightwad. She needed to hold hands with my heart for guidance. Then I noticed my heart couldn’t handle the leadership task alone either…she needed to hold hands with the Great Heart that has Infinite and Perfect Knowledge of exactly what is best for everyone. Actually, that is an understatement. My heart needed to throw both arms around the leg of the Great Heart and hold on for dear life! My mind is actually much happier and more relaxed knowing it takes it’s marching orders from my heart.
It’s really, really true. Following my intuition leads me more and more deeply over time into my exquisitely healed life. It’s like having 100% trust in the most benevolent, generous leader who has perfect understanding of what is highest and best for me and the world…WHILE planning the fulfillment of my deepest desires.
I am writing this post from my room in Maine where I am on a short adventure as a camp nurse for the summer. My intuition led me unmistakably here. My intuition is brilliant in the ways she sometimes ‘tricks’ me onto the twists and turns of my path. I have spent the last couple years in a season of deep contemplation…and now am finding myself mixing it up with some new adventure.
Sometimes our paths in life are wild, crazy ones. Sometimes they are seasons of deep solitude, contemplation, and transformation. Often they are very ordinary. As I type the word ‘ordinary’, I am hearing the soulful call of a loon on the lake outside my window reminding me of the breathtaking beauty that ordinary and of the necessity of all the different seasons of life.
My mind has no idea what will happen next in my life…but my intuition does. All the circumstances in my life seem to be changing all at once. My mind, knowing the drill, is clinging with both arms around my heart and intuition. My heart and intuition together ‘know’ that I will be taken care…no matter what the outer circumstances look like. It’s like how a child feels when she is resting in the lap of a parent she trusts. She doesn’t have to know the details because she knows and trusts that her parent knows.
I have been in this place of the ‘knowing’ in the Unknowing so often now it feels like a familiar, fun, safe, and sometimes lonely roller coaster. I have had many, many times of being on this roller coaster when I felt scared and out of control.. It is a comfort to me now to find rest in the benevolent Heart that has as it’s deepest agenda to bring healing, love and fulfillment to the whole world…including me…through whatever path that is.
We all know who we are and what we want, we just don’t always know that we know. Life’s journey is about the joy of discovering our ‘knowings’ and feeling our heart’s break open into experiences of wholeheartedness that exceed anything we could have dreamed of.
Take my hand..and the hand of the Great Heart. Comfort your minds with the safety and love that come from aligning your minds as your heart leads the dance. We will journey together… through seasons of ordinary life, wild rides, deep darkness and exquisite bliss. It’s all meant to gift us in ways we deeply long for that exceed our wildest dreams! That’s just how the Great Heart rolls!
Happy dancing. ❤
I set my Beloved free and found out my Beloved was me…
Fulfillment often comes in unexpected ways and through means we never imagined. It comes as a grace of paradox and benevolent mystery. It comes through back doors or cracked windows when we aren’t paying attention or when we least expect it. It sometimes comes in ways that generously and stealthily trick us into our own happiness. Such is my soul story.
Throughout my life, I have felt a deep and profound longing to experience oneness with Spirit, heaven on earth, union with the beloved. The heartbreak and heart healing of my life has been orchestrated by the ache of deep calling to deep, my own integrity calling me to live in alignment with who I truly am. That meant and often still means changes that break my heart as I make them, but those choices also lead me into the sweet spot of living my path and of healing.
For as long as I can remember and perhaps like many of you reading this, I have been aware of a longing to return “home” ….to a place my heart remembers but my mind has forgotten. I have longed for a home that seemed somewhere else, but in truth was within me. I have longed to enjoy the relationship with myself that I have mostly looked to others to supply for me (yes, it is appropriate now to pause to send all my relationship volunteers your support because I can be very intense).
Intimate relationships have been my fast track to growth, as they are for many people. From my current perspective I rather suck at them. Yet, they have served their purpose. Relationships open me with the precision and intensity of a divine scalpel. They provide the context for me to trigger into my unhealed patterns and take back the parts of myself wanting to return home to my heart. They are the in-my-face mirror of my own unconsciousness. They have also been a place of unsurpassed joy, belonging, acceptance, love, and healing as well.
Honestly, my path has been tough for me emotionally. So tough emotionally that there have been many times I have begged the powers that be to take me home, to release me from my earthly experience. I have often struggled greatly to care for myself from this place of low self-worth. I begged for healing but it seemed so slow. I worked and worked on myself, but the patterns seemed unyielding. I have been forced by the depth of my emotional pain and it’s unyielding nature to find a new way to relate to pain, to myself, to Spirit and to others.
Eventually and inevitably, we do the thing we thought we could never do and, in the end, it feels effortless and ordinary because we have become the person who could do it. We feel the thing we thought we could never feel, we are the person we thought we could never become, we have the experiences we thought we could never have.
In the last year, this inevitability has happened upon me. I have had the most remarkable quiet miracle show up in my experience. It snuck in, little by little over time, perhaps while I have been sleeping and in-between thoughts and breadths. Spirit answered my prayer to go home, but not by taking my earthly life from me. Spirit’s answer to my cries and work was to reunite me with myself. In the reUnion with myself, I found reUnion with Spirit.
Somehow, and in a way I don’t fully understand, I have become my own Beloved. Now, I can close my eyes, and walk the well worn path to ‘home’ that I have longed my whole lifetime to discover. The path IS there now. I DO know the trail. I finally know where it leads. This trail of tears and longing and commitment has led me home into my own unique essence in the company of Beings so beautiful that my cup gush-ith over.
Sometimes, we can only feel the trail home, rather then see it when the fog of confusion is thick and blinds our minds. In this place of ‘fog walking‘, we learn to trust the pulsing, aching response of our own hearts to some deep call that guides us as we put one foot in front of the other on our paths towards our fulfillment.
Then, on one ordinary morning, between sips of coffee and getting ready for work, between feeding the dogs and brushing our teeth, an ordinary miracle shows up in such an ordinary way, that we giggle and say…’oh there you are. I’ve been waiting for you. I knew you were coming” as our hearts flood with the rivers of gratitude that perfect understanding brings.
Happy trails trailmates.
All my love,
Mary
Before becoming a personal transformation coach, I worked as a registered nurse for 26 years. One day while working as an ER nurse, I witnessed the power of a mother’s fierce love. A hispanic couple, hysterical with panic, came running into the ER carrying their precious lifeless baby girl. The ER team quickly responded and vigorously worked on resuscitating the child for an hour and a half while the parents stood by, holding onto each other and crying helplessly. Nothing worked. We were all heartbroken. There is nothing like the agonizing grief of parents who lose a child. The team called the time of death, bringing an end to the medical team’s efforts to revive the child.
Then, the unexpected happened. The mother, who had been watching in agonizing helplessness as her baby’s life slipped away, started doing CPR on her baby with her own two hands. Something inside her powerful mother’s heart would not accept the outcome. With some unexplainable force of love, she reached into the very heart of her baby and her baby’s heart started beating. The team flew back into action.
Even though the sad reality was that the baby had experienced brain damage incompatible with life by this time, somewhere from the depths of her being, this little girl’s body and soul still responded to the call of her mother’s fierce love. The baby was put on life support as this precious family was given more time to come to terms with the loss of their baby girl.
Perhaps this precious baby girl’s soul wanted her mother to know herself as the fierce lover she was? Perhaps it took this experience for this mother to know her own loving power? Perhaps the baby was actually reviving the mother?
Fierce, loving connection is the most powerful force on earth. In moments of fierce love, we lift cars off loved one’s with strength we didn’t know we possessed. We reach into the heart’s of our children with an authority only Love possesses. We touch and are touched by the fierce love that recognizes no boundary, not even of death.
During private moments when my heart’s ancient pain overwhelms me with mysterious experiences that feel like emotional suicide, I remember the power of Fierce Love and call upon it to revive me. I call upon the Fierce Love that reaches through all density, darkness, despair and hopelessness to touch me in the secret buried place that seems to have died yet longs to live…and …my heart…starts….once again….to beat…with…Hope.
Michael and I
April 2012
He was my brother. But he was so much more. We’ve all known Love Spies…we just might not be aware that we know them. We might not notice we are one too.
Have you ever had the experience of ‘knowing’ a family member on a soul level outside their family role to you? I have had this experience with my own children and also with my brother. As I was raising my children, I had a profound knowing that we were on the same ‘team’…and somehow this level of soul relationship was far more important and real to me then the family roles we lived. It allowed me to see my children through broader more timeless eyes…and myself the same way. I had this ‘knowing’ with my brother Michael also. He was a fellow ‘Love Spy’.
A Love Spy is a soul who comes disguised as an ordinary human with a soul commitment to love. We often miss ‘seeing’ them because we have notions that interfere with our ability to recognize love in it’s ordinary human form…and often even the Love Spies themselves don’t know themselves as love….which I suspect was the case with my brother.
On Dec 23rd, my oldest brother Michael died. The story of my experience of his death echoes this soul knowing of people in our lives who we think are “just” our family members…but really they are so much more. As I have shared my experience, so many people have echoed back to me similar stories of profoundly sacred moments of knowing those they have traveled this life with on a whole different level. The death experience holds a beautiful and sacred grace of intimacy.
I knew Michael was ready to leave the planet. He told me so the last time I saw him. My mother had been diagnoses with cancer and Michael didn’t want to outlive her. That’s how he let me know he was leaving. It was April of this year and I had traveled from my home in Virginia to California to visit my west coast family. Michael has long struggled with many health issues that would have taken his life long ago had he not had such a vigorous will to live, the devoted support of my sister taking care of him, and the love of his family and friends nourishing him. I noticed in the months preceding his death that he deepened his connection with others and his spiritual side. He suddenly appeared on facebook and would interact with my postings about spiritual things in ways that surprised and delighted me….and brought us closer. Somehow we were sharing a knowing across the miles as he prepared for his final journey home. We shared this unspoken supportive connection of journeying together with a knowing, and a love, and a understanding that deepened as he was completing his time on this earth.
The last time I saw him, I remember knowing I wouldn’t see him again on this earth. My heart felt open and connected to him. I was acutely aware of wanting to support him in the way he could most deeply receive…without words, with my presence, with just a simple, uncomplicated expression of love and acceptance of him. We had our good-bye moment full of the subtlety of the unspoken truths that were shared between us. There was so much more I wanted to say with words…but I let my heart say wordlessly instead.
On the day Michael died, I was traveling to a retreat center to spend 2 days doing spiritual inner work over the holidays. As I was driving down to the center, I got the phone call that my family was about to take Michael off life support.
Just a few weeks before, I had been looking for a place to spend a few days over Christmas…and this retreat center just ‘fell into my lap’ through a synchronistic set of circumstances. What made this retreat center perfect was the river it was on. I think my soul is made of a River because I have always ‘had’ to find a river during the hardest times in my life and to do deep inner work. So, as I was ‘planning’ my retreat, little did I know that I was actually ‘planning’ where I would hold space for my brother as he passed from this life into the next…it was perfect in a way I couldn’t have planned better if I had tried.
I arrived at the retreat center knowing I wouldn’t be staying…expecting my brother’s death at any moment. After updating my host on my changed plans, I walked down to the river…this beautiful, perfectly provided refuge full of glorious large, flat rocks, gently rushing water, and winter-naked trees. As I approached my sacred river friend, I felt her take me into her heart as mother earth often does for us. She pulled me into her timeless, transcendent ‘body’.
As I lay there on a large flat rock, cradled by the strength of the rock, nourished by the life and song of the river, grounded by the trees as they held the space of heaven on earth for me…I let myself feel again for the soul of my brother. I called in my helpers in Spirit. I held connected, supportive, loving. space from my place on the river for my brother to find this release in the most peaceful, beautiful, joyful way possible. I knew he knew he was not alone. I felt the supportive and powerfully loving Presence of the Angel of Transition connecting my brother and I. I felt Michael’s joy as he let go of his body and leaned into the Light and Warmth of his own magnificent essence. I could feel his surprise and delight as he experienced himself as free from the perceptions that limited him in his body. I felt his pure joy…like the joy of a child being set free to play…. he was break dancing in Spirit! I could feel his profound understanding and knowing of himself as the Love Spy that he was on earth. I could feel all illusion fall away.
He was complete. I was complete. I knew I hadn’t lost a brother. In a way, our connection feels even closer now. Now we both know what we know. We are both Love Spies. We have always been on the same Team.
I walked back up to my car from the river, picked up my cell phone and read the text ‘Mike is gone’. No, Michael is not gone. He is more truly ‘home’ then he had ever been.
“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live” -Goethe
Good morning Princes and Princesses,
Fear is really like a scared, lost child. What does a scared lost child want? It wants a safe, loving lap.
The game is played by how we RELATE to fear. It is the rejection of fear, not fear itself, that holds you in bondage. Fear has no power to hold you in and of itself. Don’t be afraid of fear. Love fear. It comes as a guide and brings you what you need for your journey back to your heart home…back to the Inner Throne from which you have come.
You have forgotten the Kingdom you have come from. That is exactly how it is meant to be! You have forgotten that you know your own nobility. It must be this way for your to develop trust in your own goodness. You must utterly forget your own trustworthiness in order to develop within yourselves the absolute knowing of your trustworthiness. The seed of love and nobility lies and grows deep within you. When you live out of connection to this place, you cannot violate yourself or others.
How, you ask, do you find this place of love in the midst of great fear? In the midst of guilt, shame, pain and confusion? How do you follow the path ‘home’ to the throne that already exists within?
A moment before the outer choice, an inner choice occurs. The moment of choice is surrendering to the EXPERIENCE of choice. It is making the choice to be in the moment with the choice.
Let yourself feel into the message fear brings: “Don’t trust love. It hurts too much to hope. Stay shut down. I am a worm. No one will meet my needs. I can’t be happy”. These messages are exactly how we are suppose to feel when we relate to fear as our enemy. They are our guides!
Don’t fight the fear. Open to it like a faithful guide or perfect lover. In accepting and opening to the fear, fear is loved and begins to dissolve into the gift it holds for you. Yes, it feels worse while you are opening. It feels as if you are becoming the very thing you “hate’ and are pushing away. You will feel lost, confused, and even dark. But that is just an illusion to be passed through. Fear that has been fully felt and loved reveals itself as Light. Fear is just love in funny looking clothes that is looking for a safe place. Don’t be afraid of fear. Love fear. That’s all fear has ever wanted.
Loved fear is Light.
Someone wise once said “you must become like a little child to enter the Kingdom”. Let the part of you that is afraid become like a little child that is seeking that safe and loving lap. I KNOW many of you haven’t known a safe and loving lap. You’re journey into trusting love is the hardest of all.
When the part of you that is afraid trusts you to relate to it compassionately, it will return you to the Throne within your own heart. That’s what guides do.
“Divine Beloved, change me into someone who trusts love so much that I can love my fear back to love”.
And so it is.
When you’re done, grab your toys and meet me in the sandbox ! It’s time to play!
Love,
Perspective
SoulSpirations 