To feel into and break through our own heartbreak

A friend just contacted me to let me know her brother is dying, it bought to mind how much people endure in life along with a great deal of sadness. Her brother found recovery many years ago but illness in the form of stomach cancer got a hold of him a couple of years ago and only after that did he being to open up and reveal to her how much he had been struggling in his younger years due to trauma, bullying and carried multi-generational pain and had remained silent about.

I thought of my own buried pain and also of my sisters after receiving her text. I’ve not had the courage to contact anyone about how she is and part of me honestly feels so much guilt over this as well as sadness that she was hard to get close to. But I also had the insight that my perspective was often that of a hurting child in many ways and the truth as I see it now is we all are evolving and we all have some form of damage.. Sadly often in wounded families siblings just turn against one another or hurt each other. We probably all long for parents and siblings who see and know us but then we get what the world gives us and that is all a part of our personal and collective evolution and growth and enduring the pain and trauma may be all about deepening into spirituality in some ways but not a lofty ‘ascending’ manner, more in a descending into the collective dark past we carry in order to infuse it with light (Uranus.) .

I thought of this idea of us descending rather than ascending after listening to a talk that was shared by Michael Sandler with the energy intuitive Lee Harris and aired on You Tube a couple of years ago. I only found my way to it on Friday and in that Lee speaks of his struggles as a young man with eating issues, weight gain and his homosexuality as well as his sensitivity.. Lee went on a spiritual search and he in time started to hear guidance in the form of higher energies speaking to him, the voices were different in nature they came not from a kind of inner self talk that so many of us hear but from another source..This made me cry on Friday as that is what i started to go through when I moved into the coast house in 2005 after Jonathan left. . Before he did I had a shamanic soul retrieval done and in the imagination and soul opening work and pain of intense abandonment that occurred then, I dreamed I was being dragged over a harsh, red stony landscape and the shaman told me he saw me clearly at age 6 being so bored and disconnected in my life.. That was about the time the shades started to come down for me and later I was told in my own meditation that from that age on a negative killing energy had come to live inside of me that wanted me dead or at least only half alive from that time. The truth is that in my family I always felt so alone and on the outside, like so many of us that go on to develop emotional neglect and addiction issues.

It helps to know you are not alone going through these things, Lee also feared he may be schizophrenic but in time he learned to trust his guides and now he helps other to connect to them.. I will leave the link to that video below because in it both men talk of the witch hunters who have come after them and tried to denigrate and shame them for what they do.. Lee’s insight on this issues is that the witch burnings, drownings and aggression against spiritual and natural healers did not really happen all that long ago in human history and and that he feels this kind of vitriolic energy in some of his ‘haters’.

I had done some reading on this issue and was trying to write a book about it from 2005 onwards.. Following the black plague this kind of vitriol was a reaction of fear to all of the death and so scapegoats were sought and so called ‘witches’ or those who saw God or Goddess in nature began to be exiled as human being’s so called ‘spirituality’ began to become more split off, lofty, elevated, masculinized and remote. You can read all about that particular shift into the heroic egoic paradigm that happened in around the 1300’s in the book Return of the Goddess by Jungian Edward Whitmont and also in some of Marion Woodman’s books such as Dancing in the Flames.

The truth is there is no ascent to lofty realms which enables us to abandon and betray or split off from emotional pain carried in the body or epigenetically or to shame and judge our fellows for going through it. There is no so called ‘spiritual bypass’ that can relieve us, not cure just from divine intervention without us being able to walk through, feel, embody and suffer it all like Christ and Buddha.. To believe so is a form of, spiritual materialism or it may be that you ascribe instead to a kind of toxic religiosity that is actually a form of narcissism.

At the moment as Lee claims in his October energy update there is a real separation going on on planet earth between those who want to run from and demonize the ‘dark’ and those of us fully willing to face, embrace, integrate and break through it to the light. Many of us walking this path of endarkening to find the light go through a protracted period of intense soul suffering and depression often known as the Dark Night of the Soul in one form or another. This process may be pathologized in the medical model that does not recognize its evolutionary necessity and that is how often the process may become aberrant or abortive for some people. Stansilav and Christina Grof gave the name ‘spiritual emergence’ to this process.

I now see what I went through at the hands of my father as necessary for the time and person I was born to (parents I mean). It was that way because IT HAD TO BE THAT WAY.. To keep being angry about it would be to miss the point and yet I ALSO NEEDED TO FEEL THOSE FEELINGS FROM MY SOUL AND BE WITH THEM UNTIL THEY BURNED ME THROUGH TO A NEW PERCEPTIVE INSIGHT.. I don’t need to be told by anyone ‘I hope you can let that go in time’ truly if you say that you don’t recognize what this path entails.. with all due respect. We do not need patronizing on this painful path out but mutual support, encouragement, validation and recognition from someone who cares. NO MAN IS AN ISLAND OR CAN HEAL IN ISOLATION… WE ARE RELATIONAL BEINGS.

Today I could not be more grateful for my sobriety.. When I got my friends text I did not know what else to do but send love and prayers and then offer her to make a lunch.. Death is just part of life, illness is part of life, growing in wisdom (if you chose to take it all in) is part of life, feeling is part of being human as is failing, stumbling, making mistakes, sometimes hurting and being hurt If you open your heart to live then you will sometimes suffer and you will often meet conditions so so far from ideal, in the end how we face, endure and deal with those situations is all that matters, as both the light and the dark, the joyful and the painful is just a part of life.. How much love can we bring to self and others in the midst of this painful process and where does our own ego try to subtly and not so subtly split us off from our fellow man or woman in the midst of it?

I know for me, my past pain can keep me from reaching back out to others.. Others do not have to be perfect or even respectful to me for me to still try to offer them love at times, but there will also be a time to walk away as others make it clear they do not mesh with or understand you or may actively try to scapegoat or shame you .. We have words for this in the fellowship ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ and who knows if they were not meant to play that part in our journey so we could become wiser or stronger or even more aware of our human falibility as well as our vulnerability?.. That is okay.. as Lee says this is a time when we are being urged to examine our beliefs and not try to demonize those who may have different beliefs to us.. we can keep an open mind as well as a heart of curiosity and enquiry into how others experience the Universe.. We might even learn something..

So there it is.. Where I am today.. I had a beautiful massage on Friday, it went for 90 minutes and the lady called Glenda came to my home.. It just all flowed and honestly I have had a lot of massage as I trained as an aromatherapist in 1995 after getting sober and working for an essential oil retailer in Sydney.. But this massage was the best.. it was like being washed with warm watery hands and she worked so deeply around my neck and shoulders and the left shoulder is where I carry so much pain due both to the two accidents that massive head trauma and all of the dental work that followed along with the breast cancer and radiotherapy treatment in 2016. I think the angels must have guided me to Glenda.. Anyway yesterday was a rocky day following it as my body integrated a lot following all the insights I had around my relationship with Dad.

Luckily yesterday I managed to get out for a long walk with Jasper and to the retail center for the first time in ages to get groceries.. It feels like I am emerging from my own dark night experience more and more..and my feeling is that so many others are too.. I am also connecting with others heart to heart and soul to soul more..

If you do not have the time to listen to all of the chat shared below towards the end Lee does a meditation on moving into our hearts. I found that lovely.. I have ordered his book this week.. I love listening to others on the same journey and l love sharing what I find for truly are we not all in this together?