The Illusion of Truth is Subject to Change

Off my knees and on my feet I will not submit to my spirit but stand in my heart and soul.

One of the most influential people in my life and a dear friend and mentor Diane Cornett who was teaching an evening class at my home town’s local college 20 years ago said something in her opening dialogue that shot through me like lightning. I will never forget the moment as “my truth” ripped through every illusion I had built my life on based on my upbringing and societal conditioning.

“Nobody does anything to you that you do not allow.” This statement altered the trajectory of my life.

Wow! I sat up in my chair with my little antennas tuned into not just the words but the frequency and meaning. I felt empowered for the first time in my 32 years.

This statement was in direct opposition to what my “therapist” had just days ago beat into me with a foam swimming noodle. I know; can you envision it?

You see at the time I was at a cross roads in my life. My sister had been killed when she was 18 and I was 26. Here death was the catalyst that has propelled me into my now life. She has made me question deeper, love move fully and fear less. She is always present, always faithful. Guiding and watching over me and my family. Her death has been one of the most amazing gifts in my life. Try not to judge this statement. Please for I found meaning in what appeared on the surface to be so meaningless. Yes, I have long forgiven the young man who contributed to her death. Noticed I said “contributed”. He may have been driving the snow machine she was a passenger on but she had chosen to go for that ride. I believe the they both had a soul agreement. She to leave this life for another chapter in the hall of her Akashic records. He to gain wisdom gained from the experience.

I love how the universe will give us experiences that are polaristic to each other showing us the contrasts while providing opportunities and choices.

At the age of 32 five years after Becky’s death I found myself in a bit of a “depression”; profound life altering experiences seldom come to us when we have time to process them and move through the grief and gain wisdom from them.

I remember as a young adult not truly grieving for my grandfather until 3 years after his death. My grandfather had been my best friend when I was a child. He cultivated my sense of curiosity and creativity. He loved me unconditionally and yet after his stroke and he was hospitalized I found it heartbreaking to visit him in the care home and didn’t often. I was in my teens when he was admitted. The last time I saw him his was strapped into a tall hardback feeder chair with drool running down his chin and dried food encrusted in his beard stubble and shirt collar. The shock of seeing him like that was so overwhelming. Where had the tall, strong, loving man I had known as a child gone?

“Hi Grandpa. I love you. Do you remember me?” He often didn’t remember me or anything or anyone else at the time.

A smile lit is eyes. Like when I was a little girl sitting on his knee at Christmas pushing my finger into the center of the “Pot of Gold” chocolates to find the ones with the nuts in the middle, my favorite. My Paton leather buckle shoed feet swinging back and forth, my grandpa eating all the “squishy” ones.

“I remember you.” He said clear, his voice strong. “You’re my girl Bridie.”

Moments after the cloudiness in his eyes returned his voice became weak and the words slurred. I knew I couldn’t bear to see him decline so I choose not to visit him again. I wanted to remember him remembering me. I wanted to hold that moment in my heart forever. I wasn’t expecting to 3 years later feel so much regret and remorse for not visiting him again. For lying to my teenage self that he wouldn’t remember, so what would have been the point? I wept like a baby. So much shame. He would have never left me, forgotten about me. I had abandoned him in his moments of need out of self- preservation because I didn’t know how to deal with what he was reminding me of.

At the time of my sister’s death I was a young mom with 2 small girls, Vanessa 4 and Whitney 16 months old. We had just finished building our 2nd house. I had taken it upon myself to nurture my folks who were struggling with losing my sister. Calling my mom 5-6 times a day to see if she was “ok”, re-decorating their house, creating a new vibration. Not so that the memory of my sister would be lost or forgotten but so that there was a new sacred space for my parents to find some solace, some peace.

In 4 years we had bought my childhood home, renovated, sold our house to my parents and built 2 more in the process. Life was a bit hectic.

I was the glue that was keeping it all together. Taking care of everyone I loved. I had it all, from the outside…in I was ???…me. I never questioned this, ever. My path was laid in front of me clear as the lines in the palm of my hands. I was following my karma with intentions to enhance my dharma by trying to be the perfect child, mother, wife. And then….at 32 something greater than I sent my snow globe world fly and everything I thought was true lay sprawled out on the living room floor. With every shattered piece I bled tears, the pieces of my life so small I couldn’t put the puzzle back together. The voice in my head and my heart called “I’m here”, yet I couldn’t see clear. I felt like Horton Hear’s a Who. But where was my Cindy Lu Who? I wasn’t happy living in black and white anymore. I needed to dance in colours of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, purple and crystalline white. I needed gold dust in my pores and a twinkle in my eyes. I needed to know that the death of my little sister was greater than I. That there was something bigger, something brighter, something more connected than the space, and time, that was before and the space that is time now.

In all this my marriage was falling apart. I wasn’t the girl he had married. I had changing. It wasn’t that I didn’t love him anymore. I just wasn’t in love with him anymore. I realized that marriages moved in and out of various stages of love but this wasn’t a “stage” it was something else. How could I love him when I didn’t know how to love myself, didn’t know that I ever had. But I yearned to. To discover what I was made of, whom I was without everyone expecting and telling me what I “should” be. I was losing weight, losing sleep. I had to lose who I was in order to find myself. Having my Doctor recommend a “therapist” made me feel ashamed and embarrassed. I was the one that was strong holding everything and everyone together. This place I was in made me feel oh so broken.

I was desperate to feel “better”, feel something. My Doctor had first recommended an anti-depressant, “Prozac” the drug of the day. I resisted the prescription as she attempt to talk me into the “perfect solution” feeling I was running out of options I agreed. I didn’t know then what I know now about such things. The internet wasn’t what it is now, where answers are only a click away. The only people in the “know” where the ones that were prescribing the stuff.

After taking one pill I remember curling up in bed after the girls went to school and thinking if I just stop breathing it would all be over. I have never been suicidal. I love life. Always have. Even in my darkest moments. I have faith and always have had an un-wavering faith that life the living of it is truly an AMAZING gift, opportunity for discovering a new way of being. I just didn’t have the tools I needed at the time to get me through what was my first dark-night-of-the- soul. Yes, I said first. There have to date only been 2. The dark-night-of-the-soul is nothing to fear despite how terrifying it sounds. Although the experience is truly shattering it is profoundly a powerful force to ignite your internal flame. For your darkest moments can be where your light shines the brightest.

Knowing that these feelings where not my own but a symptom of the “Prozac” I jumped out of bed and flushed the entire contents of the bottle down the toilet. After sharing the incident with my Doctor she then felt I needed a “therapist and that I was too sensitive”. She failed to tell me that one of the main symptoms of “Prozac” is suicide, an interesting detail to leave out of the consultation. Hummm, I took this experience as a bread crumb on my path to me. My next failed western approach to “my spiritual intervention”.

Picture it. I’m at my “therapists” house. Her office is in the basement. I am 98 pound soaking wet. I’m curled into myself. Crying, I’m sharing with her how I feel I needed to leave my husband or I’d shrivel up and stop existing. Existing was the problem. I didn’t want to exist. I wanted desperately to live, to thrive. Everywhere I looked everyone one appeared to just be existing. Nobody appeared to be happy, joyful.

Nobody appeared to be thriving. I craved more.

Here I am in the basement of my “therapists” house, the basement is cold dark and gloomy, a bit of a muddled mess. I wanted to bring her space into some kind of order. Have it feel less oppressive as I expressed my fear and apprehension of leaving. I was not a quitter. I made a commitment, a vow, signed a contract “till death do us part”.

Ok, let’s look at that statement for a minute “till death do us part”. That’s a little severe don’t you think? Could it not mean “death” of the relationship? The death of the way things were of who you were at the time making such vows?

I didn’t want to be responsible for hurting him and tearing my children’s “secure” lives apart. In my mind it was easier to suppress the deep thundering of my inner voice crying for “something more” than to be responsible for destroying my “perfect” life. Their perfect lives. I didn’t want to disappoint my parents, his parents, my friends. I should have been happy. Who was I to “want” something more, to covet that which I did not possess?

I felt guilty and ashamed. I should have been stronger. I should have done more. Be more. More what…..I was sad. Sad to the depth of my spirit, I couldn’t make things better. I was failing at the only thing I was good at, “trying” to keep the peace, trying to make everyone “happy”. “Look what he’s doing to you.” My “therapist” yelled at me as she beat me into the corner with the yellow foam swimming noodle.

“Fight back! Fight back!”

This was her attempt at role playing. She was pretending to my then husband and I was to stand-up for myself. “Tell him to stop doing this to you! Get angry! Fight back!”

As she’s doing this, beating me with the damn noodle, I’m literally backed into a corner my shoulders against the wall, arms crossed over my face in a feeble attempt to protect myself. She’s yelling at me to step forward, to take control. I don’t. There is a switch within me that thunders in my being that softly says “he isn’t doing anything to me.” I was not a victim. I simply wasn’t happy. It wasn’t his fault. He is a kind and gentle man. He hadn’t changed. I had changed. He just didn’t understand what was happening and was afraid of what he couldn’t control. How could he when I didn’t understand what was happening myself. I had changed. I needed something more. I didn’t know what. I did know that he was not responsible for my happiness. That I was. Interesting at the time I thought I responsible for his, everyone’s, what a double edge sword.

I felt in that moment. With my shoulders against the wall that my “therapist” was projecting her beliefs onto my situation and that she was not serving my highest good. Yes, he wasn’t listening to me, but I hadn’t been making myself clear because I didn’t know how to articulate what I wanted. I didn’t know what I wanted. What I needed. I just knew that it wasn’t this. That we had become a frequency mis-alignment. What I did know was that no amount of foam noodle whipping was going to make me blame someone for my own unhappiness. To be a victim made me powerless and made him the abuser which we wasn’t. He was simply processing life the best he knew how with the tools he had. I was doing the same. It just so happened that the tools we were using were different and therefore had different results. Not bad or good. Simply different.

The answer I had been looking for. The mustard seed I needed to guide me out of the dark days of my soul coming to life came in the words, “nobody does anything to you that you do not allow.” My faith had been restored as a door had been opened and through it the most beautiful of lights shone. I was never going to be the same person. I felt like I had arrived home for the very first time. I belonged. I had the power to make my world, my life what I wanted it to be.

I had choices I didn’t believe I had before. I could have chosen to blame everyone else for my own happiness, grab hold of that damn yellow foam swimming noodle and fight back. Instead I raised from my knees in submission my head and eyes down cast in believing I must prostrate myself for the sake of others. I chose to rise to my feet, shoulders back, head held high, eyes and arms open wide embracing the “Oh Mighty God within and of my being.” Trusting that love would be my compass, my guiding light, that fear would not be the ruler of my destiny. I would not conquer my fears but neutralize the root cause of them. Nor would I take them off the shelves of my cellular memories hallowed walls to inspect them over and over again. Like treasures and trophies, badges of honor won in the illusion of war against my-self, recreating the various vignettes of the same old ravaged landscape of the mind, body and soul. I choose to honor them for the darkness they provided for they drew my attention to where love needed to shine.