What is your relationship with challenge?
When our glass is full and overflowing, it’s easy to have gratitude for life and everything around us. But what about when life’s lessons are delivered in a bitter-sweet pill? Have you ever felt like you’ve been tumbled through the washing machine, hung out to dry, and just when you start to feel like you’re whole again, you ended up splattered over the windscreen of a mac truck?
If you can relate, just know that it happens to the best of us.
It’s in our times of greatest darkness that we have the opportunity to unlock our most powerful lessons.
In 1996 I attended a profound self-mastery course with Scott Washington. In that 12 month training, Scott taught me one phrase which has stood out in my mind ever since, and which has been one of his greatest gifts to me. He said to me, “Artemis, your ability to achieve self-mastery is directly related to your ability to hang out with tension”. And by tension, he means emotional tension.
How often do we run for the safe haven of the things that give us the good vibes, and avoid the things that make us feel the most uncomfortable? We go for the sugar hit, rather than the path to self-mastery. Yet those painful and uncomfortable times are often the biggest gifts in our life, if only we pause to see the silver lining.
In our last mystery week, I shared about how we can fine-tune our mental telepathy and psychic abilities using a simple playing card exercise. No different to working out at the gym as a way of strengthening our physical muscles, this exercise provides a way to exercise our psychic muscles, aka our intuition or inner knowing.
The more we can open up to these natural abilities, the more we come to know that we are a magnificent and all-encompassing Spirit, who’s temporarily taken up residence in this temple that we call a body.
Today, I want to share with you a powerful story of love and surrender, and a connection that spans many lifetimes.
You may find it a challenging story to read…yet if you read to the very end of this story, you will understand the powerful message it contains. The beautiful woman who shared her story with me has asked to remain anonymous, however I know you will be moved by her story. Here it is:
I first met James when I was 21 and working in Darwin.
From that first moment I met him, I felt like I’d come home. It was as if I’d known him my whole life.
We were both in other relationships, so we didn’t open the door to romance. Yet our lives remained intertwined, and even though we both moved away from Darwin with work, we still landed in the same place, which was Canberra.
I was still in a relationship, and my partner and I decided to move to Scotland for a couple of years. While I was there, I began having these vivid dreams about James. I had no idea where he was by this stage, but I remember saying to my girlfriend:
I don’t understand these dreams. It’s like he’s calling out to me, and I’m not sure why.”
When I returned to Australia, I just knew in my heart that I had to find him. And after much searching, I found him in a psychiatric care unit. It turns out he’d had a difficult journey with cancer, and the stress had broken him.
When we first met in Darwin, he was incredibly articulate; yet now he was heavily medicated and couldn’t even speak a full sentence. I spent the next 3 months doing exactly what I needed to do. I let myself be with him, and talk with him.
It took time, but eventually he was able to engage in full conversations. And it was then that I told him about the dreams I’d had of him, and he said:
“In my darkest moments, I used to call out to you.”
By this stage I had separated from my partner, and for a short while James and I were together. I was dancing one night with him in the kitchen, and Spirit came to me and told me that he was going to take his own life.
The lake was a favourite place of ours. We used to go there often to talk about what had happened in his life. As you know, Nature can be so healing.
This particular day, I started work at 6am and wasn’t due home until late that night. James told me he had an appointment at 10, and he always rang me before his appointments. Sure enough he rang just before 10, but I could tell something was up. I didn’t know what it was, and he kept assuring me that everything was fine.
Ten minutes later it was still bothering me, and I rang him back. I told him he might as well tell me, but he just kept saying, “No, everything’s fine - I’m just running late for my appointment”.
It turns out he’d been saving up some of his pharmaceuticals. His cancer had returned, and he didn’t want to go on like this. So that day he went to his happy place by the lake, and he left his body through an overdose.
I wasn’t angry. I knew he was in a much happier place. But I also knew I needed to let him go. It took me 3 years after his passing before I was ready for that step.
Finally, I knew it was time.
I bought a helium balloon – you know, the kind that shoot straight up into the air when you let them go? And I went down to the lake - the same one where he’d left his body. I sat and wrote all these beautiful messages of love on the balloon – everything my heart wanted to say to him. And then I went into a meditation and told him it was time for me to let him go.
And it was at that moment that I released the balloon. I watched it as it floated straight up for about 50 metres into the air. Then something really strange happened…
It was as if someone had grabbed the string and was dragging the balloon across the sky to this area with lots of big trees. And it got caught in the trees.
I’m running over to the trees crying out, “No, no, I’m letting you go!”. And inside of me I’m thinking ,“Oh no, now look what’s happened!!!”
And then a voice said to me, ever so clearly, “Well, just let it go”. And that’s when I understood.
When we’re ready to let someone or something go, we just need to let go. It doesn’t matter what it looks like – we just need to do it.
And that’s exactly what I did.