Have you ever felt like you are a passenger in your life, and that a force far greater than your mere mortal Self is in the driver’s seat?
We call this being in “Flow”, and in these moments we consciously witness ourselves moving through the river of life, with all of its perfect synchronicities. Nothing happens by chance. We see so clearly the movement of Spirit within us, managing the divine timing so that we end up in the perfect place at the perfect time…over and over again.
Last week I shared with you the powerful way in which my own barriers to the world came cracking open in an Ice Bath experience.
For at least 6 years, I’d been living life in a “loop”. It was Ground Hog day, over and over. And like a true Gemini, I was experiencing a dual existence. In my Young Living life, I have always had deep and meaningful connections that fill my cup. Yet in the rest of my life, I was struggling in my relationship with the world.
It felt as though there was a veil between me and those around me, that kept me invisible. I’d reach out to form friendships with like-minded Souls, but it felt like an uphill battle where the seesaw was tipped against me. I’d invite people to join me for a catch up, a beach walk, a lunch, a cuppa….yet more often than not, something would “come up” from their side that prevented us from meeting.
This was happening with such regularity that it became my new norm….and the strange thing is that I simply accepted that this was the “norm”.
How wrong was I!!!
Yet life does have a way of showing us what we believe. The late Dr. Wayne Dyer wrote a book called “You’ll see it when you believe it”, which perfectly encompasses this fact. What we believe in the depths of our Being is what we’ll bear witness to in our outer world. I believed myself to be alone and so I was.
Last week, I shared that my childhood had been difficult.
Whilst I have no desire to go back and repeat my childhood experiences, I do look on them with sincere gratitude. They provided the landscape of growth that has brought me to the beautiful woman I am today.
Yet everything is a choice, isn’t it? We all choose how we respond to those difficult circumstances of our life, and we create our new Self out of those choices.
This is not the Self that God gave us – the eternal and beautiful Soul that is untouched by the human existence. The Self who roams the Earth has the beating heart of our eternal Soul, but is clothed in the Self that was moulded out of our experiences, and the choices that we made.
Look carefully on this created Self, and you will see not only your wounds at play, but also the true beauty and untouched divinity that lies within.
Ultimately in our life, we are taken on a journey to meet both of these Selves. We are taken into the darkest night of the Soul to meet the “Dweller on the edge of the threshold” (ie. the loveless creature that we have thought ourselves to be, which is based on all of our pain and our perceived lack of love). And as we face this most-feared aspect of our Self, this thing that we have kept away from the Light because we’ve been so certain of its ugliness and unworthiness, it melts before our eyes.
And what is left in its place is the pure Light that is us. And once that is fully witnessed with no duality of dappled shadows and darkened rooms, there is no going backwards.
This is the journey we are all on. It’s our journey into the Light.
So what does this have to do with Hobbits and Runes? Well, that’s part of my own story. Are you ok if I take you there, to a much younger version of myself?
As a child, I was always a little bit “odd”.
I didn’t fit into the family that I was born into, and was convinced that my parents weren’t my “real” parents. My real parents lived on a Planet far, far away, and somehow I’d become lost to them.
As much as we might mock a child’s conviction that they are born into the “wrong” family, it’s indeed the truth. Our real family is our Soul family, and our real parent is that force of Love that goes by many names, including God and Love and Nature. Somewhere deep, deep inside of us we know this to be true, and are forever searching for that love and acceptance that our inner compass tells us exists.
When I was 13, I’d just moved schools. I went from primary school to secondary school, and all of my friends from primary school ended up in a different secondary school to me. I was starting over with new friendships, but that was a rocky road.
I was almost at my full height of “6 foot 1 and a bit” (186cm) and stood a good foot above my peers. I was academically gifted, but socially awkward, and was attending a lower to middle class school where academic achievement was not valued – at least, not by my fellow students. And I loved so deeply. My friendships were love affairs that tore my heart open when they went awry.
And that’s what happened at 13. A newfound friend suddenly didn’t want to be my friend anymore, and I found myself alone and isolated. My attempts to win her back failed miserably, and instead made me the most unpopular girl in the school. Worse than that, I became the target for bullying.
The “in” group of girls were threatening to bash me up in the toilets. Rocks were thrown on my house, crank phone calls made. I was physically hurt and publicly ridiculed. No one wanted to be near me, and when I stood in line to go into a class, all of the students stood across the hallway from me because I was “contaminated”.
I know. Kids can be very cruel.
Interestingly, it was the misfits who took me in. The rebels, the “bad” crowd – they had no problem with me hanging with them, and I earned my nickname of “shorty”. But I never became one of them either. They weren’t my tribe, any more than the “in” crowd.
I did have one true friend through all of that time, and that was my cat. She shone light into my world with her love and acceptance of me. At night she would sneak into my bedroom and curl up under the sheets and keep me company. Her love was my beacon.
By day, I made the decision that I never wanted to be like the other kids. I wanted to be the absolute opposite of them. If they were black, I was white. If they were up, I was down. I polarised away from them, and spent my lunch times in the school library, reading books on different religions and spiritual philosophies. Somewhere inside, I was searching for my roots.
And when I wasn’t at school, I was reading novels.
The proverbial bookworm, I buried myself in the written word, and lived in worlds far, far away from the one where my feet were planted. I loved reading mysteries, and anything “other worldly”.
I’m incredibly grateful for this, having lived lifetimes upon lifetimes through these novels. It created a powerful platform for emotional intelligence, because I was understanding the world through the eyes of other people. My heart was being moved as I devoured each page, even though my human heart felt broken.
One of my favourite books was Tolkien's The Hobbit. When I read that, it changed my life. Hidden within the pages were sections of “Hobbit speak” which were written entirely in rune language. I became fascinated by this strange language built from symbols, and set myself the task to decipher the language of runes.
What a gift this gave to that young woman who was me. I became so proficient in writing in rune language that I found my voice there. It became my language, and I scribed pages upon pages of rune symbols. It was the outlet for my emotions, and I wrote everything I was feeling and thinking onto those pages…all mysteriously disguised so that no one else would understand them.
I have yet to find all those precious writings that I made as a young teenager, yet I hope one day I will. As the adult version of my Self, I would love to read what I wrote back then, so many decades ago. I feel very tender towards that awkward girl who struggled so much, yet also loved so much. I’d very much would like to hold her hand as the adult me, and guide her through those turbulent years.
And where were my parents during this time? They were both present and yet unpresent at the same time. Physically, they were there with me. But emotionally, they had no idea how to “meet” me, and so we remained worlds apart. They were logical and analytical, but definitely not able to hold space for the deeply emotional and highly sensitive young woman that I was.
So it’s no wonder that as an adult in my own personal healing journey, I would be taken to meet my own Dweller on the edge of the threshold – to the edges of loneliness and aloneness, to the emotions of being utterly isolated even though I’m standing in a crowd.
Yet this is the beautiful thing about our life’s journey.
When we truly look on our wounds and don’t keep them hidden, the Light can shine into their darkness, and the darkness disappears.
In my last blog, I shared about how this wound has been surfacing for me of late. It burst to the surface during my Ice Bath experience, and led to me standing up in front of a room full of my peers, and sharing from my heart about my life and how separated I was feeling.
That was my breaking point. And as the shards of my isolation shattered in that moment, so much has changed for me. From invisible, I’ve become seen….and not just by those who were present in that room.
The ripple effect of healing has been far broader than that.
It’s as though the “Stay away from me – I need to feel alone” sign that I was wearing on my crown was removed in that instance, and my whole reality is different.
The newfound friends who I’ve been trying to catch up with for months and months have reached out to me yesterday, wanting to pin down a time for us to catch up. I have returned to weekly Ecstatic Dance, after 6 months of absence…and men and women who have never spoken to me before at dance have come up to me and struck up genuine conversations. One beautiful woman bee-lined me at dance and wrapped me in an enormous hug.
For me, the most wondrous thing about all of this is that I’m not “doing” the connecting. It’s coming to my doorstep instead. What an amazing, refreshing gift that is. All the “trying” has been removed from the equation, and I’m in Flow. And I can see so clearly that what I took as the story of my life, was indeed simply a self-imposed limitation.
I couldn’t make it dissolve. I just had to be willing to walk the journey that lay ahead of me, so that healing could indeed find me.
Where is your healing journey carrying you?
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