Note: This is a continuation from my previous blog titled, “The Mojo.”
Thursday night ends, and Friday begins with anxious confusion. My body is wired with nervous energy, and my head overflows with chatter. It seems that a new player is about to return to the porch, and buzzing metaphorical mosquitoes swarm all over my mind, sucking my power, demanding that this person is going to trigger me again … demanding that all of my magical growth is now going to be sabotaged and that I may as well pack my bags.
I know, I know, I know … the chatter is insane and completely ridiculous … there is absolutely no evidence to back up any of the out-of-control fabricated projections … but wow, is it ever persistent and tempting. I hardly slept last night and am on the edge of a self-manifested panic attack this morning.
Before walking out to the ceremony on this first day of February 2013, I decide to stand in front of the mirror, locking eyes with the beautiful face staring back at me, reminding her of what she deserves.
“I deserve to be free of all this betrayal storytelling,” I declare to my reflection with loving confidence. “I deserve to be in my loving power. I deserve to be free of judgment that wants to project itself outward. I deserve to love myself, to have compassion for myself, and to trust the magical flow of my process. Everything is going to be perfect.”
And it is. Time will prove that all of this projected silliness was completely a figment of ego’s creative imagination.
Sleepy Questions
As Keith begins the usual “Glow Meditation,” I am already deep in my own eighth chakra meditation, imagining myself hugging Higher Beings in that magical temple of light. While experiencing the beautiful loving energy, I simultaneously observe as Keith takes turns working with several people. I have a question forming in my head, one causing a little bit of confusion.
“Keith,” I interrupt at an opportune moment, “as you know, I have been allowing a lot of Higher Energy and love lately. For the last several nights I have had a lot of energy flowing through me, mixing it up in my body, accompanied with mild anxious feelings … so much energy that I cannot sleep well. I do not judge any of it … in fact I am actually excited and loving the energy flows … but I was wondering if you can give me any advice on how to make it easier as far as sleep.”
“Can I turn this energy off at night or something?” I ask with curiosity.
Keith reassures me that I am in a perfect place, advising me to just trust and surrender, with no controlling or judging, letting me know that all is perfect and that there is nothing to do or change.
Quickly, my friend Tina jumps into the conversation to share her own recent journey with sleeplessness. I love observing Keith work with her as he helps her understand that she has been using her own personal energies rather than trusting Higher Energies to work through her, and that she is afraid that when she goes home she will be burdened by the expectations of others wanting her help, causing her to again shut down in exhaustion.
I relate a great deal, in my own way, remembering how I also often end up exhausting my own personal power and energies rather than connecting with a Higher Source. I giggle inside as I realize that, in spite of little sleep for much of the last week that I am actually doing very well and feeling lots of energy. I recognize that this must mean that Higher Energies are giving me the strength and energy to keep going in a situation that would normally have me dragging.
Getting The Groove On
Soon, I am back in my eighth chakra meditation – one in which I delightfully experience several more waves of magical loving energy filling my body. As if perfectly timed (and it is), someone plays a little trance dance music in a nearby home, and I use the background noise to get another meditative “groove on” with the Higher Essences of both my mother and father, as well as with other people from my past with whom I am now developing a renewed bond of healing.
In the process of this magical experience, I let go of several additional layers of betrayal energy that I have carried with a few of these people – so much so that I can now clearly see them as beautiful and innocent actors who simply played a role in my personal stage play of life. Theirs is a role that I asked them to play; a role cast by me.
New God-Drama insights
Several times during the afternoon – as has also happened in other recent ceremonies – I experience sensations of being “kicked in the gut.” It is a deep feeling of out-of-breath emptiness that is sometimes mild, and a few times agonizing and severe. Intuitions guide me to begin working with this pain as deep emotional wounds that need to be loved and hugged.
As I further focus on connecting with these painful energies, I start to understand that this physical manifestation of being “kicked in the gut” is my ace in the hole, my precious guarded treasure that I refuse to relinquish.
“This is how I felt during past betrayals,” I ponder with clarity. “I literally had my life-force kicked out of me by my mother and many others. I felt wounded, agonizingly empty inside, and struggled to breathe.”
“I do not want to let this go,” I ponder the part of me that is running the show. “This is another intense and painful physical manifestation of God-drama refusal to let go of the tantrum, to drop the souvenirs and mementos of past trauma, and to insist that I need to keep this inner damage as proof of what happened to me. If I let it go, then who am I?”
Kicked In The Gut
At one point, as a large percentage of people on the porch have disengaged from the group energy, many sleeping or distracted in some way, a woman begins to cry. Her friend leans over, wraps arms around her, and methodically pulls her out of the pain and tears.
I quietly get Keith’s attention to point out the well-intentioned “fixing” energy. A minute later, Keith speaks up and asks the person to disengage, explaining that they are actually disempowering the woman who started going where she needed to go, pulling her out of her process.
This simple interaction quickly evolves into a beautiful discussion followed by a low-key empath training. By the end of the training, everyone is wide-awake, paying attention. I love how things just flow.
In the empath training, I imagine it as is being conducted just for me. During the first phase, where we inhale and eat energy the same way we began to do as children, I feel more energy than ever before – energy that painfully clogs my forehead, high-heart, and throat regions, before it ends up in my abdomen where I store most of that painful emotional density consumed from others.
As I surrender to this process, my “kicked in the gut” pain flares up in extreme ways, becoming excruciatingly painful. I again meditatively attempt to connect with this pain, to get in touch with it … but I cannot seem to go there. I have too much resistance.
As this deep pain continues, my experience suddenly shifts when Keith asks a question late in the training.
“What happens to a magical six-year-old child who has to assassinate their magic in order to fit in and conform with society?” Keith asks the group, many of whom are empaths.
“They feel kicked in the gut!!!!!” Intuitions suddenly scream inside me.
Releasing Sadness
Immediately, I sink into repeated rounds of intense easy-bus emotional release – going quite deeply into four or five waves of sobs and dry-heaving. With each wave, I bend forward and give myself about ten seconds to feel the agony before I ask the light to fill me. As I sit up feeling almost giggly, I am quite dizzy in the Higher Energies before another deeper layer of emotion then takes me down.
After several such layers, overwhelming sadness increasingly consumes me … so much sadness that I want to surrender to it, and to spiral downward into it.
“Please,” I ask the light, remembering a few recent experiences. “If I have felt this sadness enough, please let it transmute in the light too.”
Soon, the sadness vanishes … Wow!
A Perfect Flow
“Brenda, I really like what you did in ceremony today,” Keith surprises me as I help clean up the porch.
I love how, even when Keith and I do not verbally interact in a ceremony, that he energetically understands the general flow of what I was working on, keeping tabs on my process from afar.
I quickly explain my journey with feeling “kicked in the gut” today, and Keith agrees with my assessment that this is part of my “ace-in-the-hole” ammunition that is my treasured evidence of what happened to me as a child … something I am now working on releasing.
As a young man interrupts my conversation with Keith and launches into a head-debate regarding what we are talking about, I simply smile and give Keith a quick hug, leaving the conversation … not needing to debate it with rational mind. Instead, I fill with inner giggles and peace while slowly walking home, observing the beautiful sunset that lights up the clouds above the San Pedro volcano.
Magic is in the air. I am increasingly learning to be in my power regardless of what I perceive around me. I achieved yet-another layer of emotional release followed by a new infusion of light and love. I love the perfect flow that continues to guide me forward.
And for the first time in nearly a week, I sleep soundly throughout the night.
A No-Win Scenario
After a beautiful Saturday writing “Engendering Compassion And Trust,” I am quite surprised when the inner anxiety and chatter return late on Saturday evening. It seems to begin with a movie that I watch, and further increases as I read several Facebook posts that trigger silly repressed judgment.
The inner extravaganza of fantasy storytelling again tries to tell me how I need to go on the defensive, to protect myself from a perceived threat, and that someone is going to energetically stab me in the back (details not necessary – it is all an ego fabrication with no basis in fact).
Just before bed, I interrupt all the chatter, and go into deep meditation. I bring in the storytellers and have a chat with them.
“Thank you for your genuine concern, but I don’t do stories,” I tell these inner energies. “I understand that you are trying to warn and protect me from perceived patterns of the past. But you are trying to make something real that no longer exists in our reality – that no longer even matters in the present.”
“Yes, we used to feel deeply hurt and betrayed by such scenarios, but we have healed that,” I lovingly reassure these panic-filled inner energies. “Thank you for your profound service and devotion to our well-being, but we are in a different place now.”
As I go through this inner conversation, a few deep waves of emotional release rage through me, followed quickly by transmutation by the light. I love how what once would have manifested as weeks of drama is now over in seconds.
At the end of this release, I am happy, bubbly, confidently knowing that I create everything in my reality, and that nothing can go wrong – trusting that whatever happens will be for my highest good and growth.
I go back to my eighth chakra meditation and invite one specific friend to join me there – in their Higher Essence of course. After a quick round of healing, I oddly find myself connecting with my sixteen-year-old male self, laughing, hugging, and congratulating him for his passion, for his courage and love, and for how, in the face of overwhelming and impossible odds, he did it.
“You were brilliant,” I congratulate this sixteen-year-old me. “You survived a no-win scenario and came out with love.”
As I finally rest on my pillow at 11:00 p.m., I am filled with love, trusting that I have nothing to be concerned with.
(Note: And at the time of writing about this incident, as I look back with 20-20 hindsight, it was all silly fear, trying to project past pain into the future, with nothing ever materializing. Something tells me, however, that if had I not healed these beliefs when I did, I probably would have manifested exactly what I was afraid of. (Again, there is no need to give details here).)
New Growth Opportunities
Oh, how I love to manifest growth opportunities. Sigh.
At 1:30 a.m. on Sunday morning, I wake up to the sound of loud music playing in my neighbor’s home – a tiny studio apartment separated from me by a wall that allows all sounds to flow into my space with no obstacles to block them.
“Please,” I walk over to my wall and call out in a loud voice.” I hear every sound you make over here. Please be quiet.”
A minute later, the music stops and I return to bed. I lay in bed awake for the next hour as the music quickly resumes at an even louder volume. I can only assume that my neighbors came home from a late party, and are in no mood to stop the partying.
“When I get angry about stuff like this, I give away all of my power,” I ponder with clarity. “I am not going to lose myself in those low vibrations.”
Rather than allowing any anger to surface, I bring in light, while engaging in an inner conversation to restore loving power. By now, I remember my recent vivid dream where I had invited foreigners to live in my home, giving them no boundaries, allowing them to trample my inner sacred space.
“I deserve to have my need for sleep respected by others,” I ponder with self-loving confidence. “I deserve to honor myself enough to express loving boundaries.”
As I repeat these words aloud, I experience a magical strengthening energetic sensation in my high-heart and throat regions. The energy alone tells me I am on the right growth track. It is a beautiful tingling energy running through me, but now, this magical energy is keeping me awake. I simply cannot fall asleep – first with the noise next door … and now with the energy flowing in my body.
Loving Boundaries
Soon, choosing to peacefully ignore the noise, I resort to ear plugs, but the noise is so persistent that it still vibrates my ear drums. A few minutes later, with flowing love in my heart, but a sense of self-loving empowerment also guiding me, I loudly bang my knuckles on the concrete wall to my neighbor’s apartment. Something tells me that they cannot hear my voice over the music on their side of the wall, and that the only way to get my message across is to make a noise that they will hear.
“Please,” I then call out as the music stops. “It is 2:30 in the morning. Please stop playing music.”
After ten minutes of loudly banging around in their apartment, they go silent. I ponder that I really need to have a loving conversation with them when I see them during the daytime – but the thought triggers deep fear in me.
I feel loving, energized, and powerful, but sleep still eludes me because of the energy now flowing through my body.
As I later scribble notes at 8:30 a.m. on Sunday morning, I am rested, in a very nice energy … but still quite confused as to what I should do or say next.
(Note: As the days unfold, I never find the courage to approach my neighbors. I still have fear issues of my own to heal … but the neighbors do stop all nighttime noise. I continue to focus on radiating a loving energy, simply energetically detaching myself from their daytime noise.)
Going Deep
During the Sunday afternoon public chocolate ceremony, I quickly resume what has worked for me in recent times – my new favorite eighth-chakra meditation. But today, I am unable to connect as deeply. I experience resistant pains in my forehead and abdomen, along with another round of inner anxiety.
Quickly, I am back in a metaphorical theater, asking all of these resistance energies to join me, offering love and hugs, expressing gratitude to these energies for how they have served me in the past. I do not judge what is going on inside of me, but the physical pains I now experience are heavy and sharp.
“Can you suggest anything to help work with what I am doing?” I ask Keith a while later, as he enters a break between helping others.
For some reason, I feel no need to explain to Keith where I am at in my process. I realize that the details do not matter, and that he is fully aware of my energetic state.
Keith pauses, goes deep inside for a few seconds, and then opens his eyes to speak.
“Do you want to go really deep today?” Keith asks.
“Yeah, as deep as my inner reality will allow,” I respond.
“Come over here and work with Cathy,” Keith guides me.
Cathy is the woman with a brain tumor … one whose process has impacted me deeply in recent ceremonies.
“Put your hands on both sides of her head and share energy with her,” Keith coaches me.
He then focuses on guiding Cathy to feel the energy from me, and to then find her own direct source for this same energy. Once she is at that place, Keith guides me to disengage from her head and to simply hold space with my hands at the back of her heart.
If Not For Me?
As I lovingly engage in this process, I am deeply puzzled when I realize that I continue to face stiff inner resistance that absolutely refuses to further open my magic – refusing to let go of the betrayal and anger that continues to block me somewhere deep inside.
Then more insights flow.
“It seems that I cannot yet drop this strong resistance to help myself,” I ponder, “but I feel a softening in the resistance when I consider dropping it so that I can help someone else … someone literally in a life or death situation like this beautiful woman in front of me.”
“I know you are angry, resentful, and feel deeply betrayed,” I speak to my inner resistance energies. “I know you refuse to allow me to open because of anger at God and Higher Energies … but will you consider doing it for someone else … just temporarily? You can always shut it down again later.”
As I engage in this inner journey, I am actually in a really nice connection to Higher Energies. But I am also very confused because of the level of dense inner blockage that I feel trying to stop me from further opening.
While sitting in this confusing dilemma, I get quite emotional. Eventually, realizing that my help with Cathy is no longer needed, I return to my seat to go deeper. Soon, several layers of deep betrayal emotion flow through me on the easy bus. I feel them to the core, agonizingly bending forward and forcing energy out of my throat, then bringing in light, feeling briefly free and giggly.
“These are layers of anger at what happened to me,” Intuitions whisper confidently. “It is anger at being metaphorically kicked in the gut, forced to sacrifice my magic, forced to fear expressing my magic because it only dug a hole deeper, getting me into more trouble in a very confusing world.”
An Energetic Grenade
Further intuitions whisper that this deeply relates to what happened last night with my neighbors – in my fear of speaking up, and in my fear of creating conflict.
“I was deeply afraid to speak my truth, to own my power, and to express my true self and my personal needs,” Inner voices continue flowing. “I literally sacrificed my magic in order to please my mother. I bottled up my feelings, stopped trying to express my magic, cut it all out, tried to avoid conflict and confrontation, and focused on people-pleasing so that there would be no uncomfortable fighting that would just make things worse.”
“In my life, I literally jumped on an energetic grenade, sacrificing myself, killing my magic in the name of avoiding that conflict.”
“I deserve to express my magic,” I ponder with new understanding. “I deserve to be in my power. I deserve to express my true heart.”
I repeat these empowering thoughts over and over again – a process that soon triggers more intense emotional release. I go deeper, trying to relax, connecting with more light – but as I do so, I experience intense anxious feelings – squeamys (cellular level screaming and squirming) in my arms, abdomen, and head. All of these areas swirl with overwhelming feelings of confusion.
A Deeply Rooted Dilemma
As this meditation continues, I literally feel as if I am in the middle of a profound panic attack. All of the physical symptoms are intense and pronounced.
But what is amazingly different is that I am simply observing this without attachment or identifying it as being me.
The experience is overwhelming and all-consuming, requiring that I access intense concentration to remain the detached observer. I struggle to focus, and as I do so, I am blessed with profound, deeper glimpses into my God drama.
There is deep anger inside – anger at how I sacrificed my magic to please others – anger and betrayal so strong that I refuse to further open that magic out of spite toward those who I perceive as hurting me (projected onto parents and God).
On the flip side, I rationally understand that it is not my parents or God who continue to hurt me … that instead, it is this very emotion, and my refusal to let it go, that continues to hurt me.
The dilemma is that this emotion is hiding, deeply rooted, strong, agonizing, anxious, terrified, and refusing to let go … and that no matter what I understand at the rational-mind level, this emotion does not seem to budge.
An Undeniable Message
Meanwhile, I follow the unfolding physical metaphors. Intense pains of again feeling “kicked in the gut” begin to punch me in the abdomen, while I feel sharp prickly jabs in the lower center of my forehead.
As I observe these very-real pains, interpreting their metaphorical meaning, I notice that the “kicked in the gut” sensation does something it has never done before. To my shock and surprise, the pain migrates slowly upward, stopping right in the center of that nail-in-my-heart spot at the center of my heart chakra.
In the weirdest of sensations, I experience an empty, aching, wind-knocked-out-of-me agony in the middle of my heart. This is not the feeling of a knife or an ice pick piercing me as happened last year. It literally is an aching emptiness.
The fact that this painful emptiness physically migrated from my abdomen to my heart is an undeniable confirmation that what I am experiencing is a profound energetic communication.
Meanwhile, deep panic-attack-like anxiety continues to demand my focus.
Questions Of Scamming
“I wonder if this anxiousness is part of a lifelong confusion /chaos distraction that an inner liar is using to try to keep me from going deeper.” I ponder. “Is this confusion and panic real, needing my love … or is it ego trying to deceive and distract me?”
I ponder this thought, bouncing back and forth for a long time. I absolutely know the anxiety is profoundly real … as is the feeling of inner terror. But after all the light and love that I have brought in recently, the intensity of my experience seems so unexpected, causing me to wonder if an inner part of me is trying to scam me so that I will cycle in unnecessary manifestations.
Finally, I ask Keith for guidance in this issue. He answers with a metaphor.
“Brenda,” Keith asks me, “what happens if you walk up to the side of a scary cliff and look over the edge? Of course you get intense fear and anxiety of going any further.”
“Ok,” I giggle, “I get it. You are telling me this is real and not an inner scam.”
“Yes,” Keith confirms with confidence.
Vanishing Symptoms
In the conversation that ensues, I catch Keith up to date on all of my magical insights of the day. He quickly turns this into an opportunity to teach the whole group a little about the God drama. Later, when I add a comment intended to illustrate just how intense such an emotional journey can be, a new woman throws out a fixing rational-mind comment, telling me I am silly, and should just let my anger go.
“You are right,” I smile at her, letting her have her truth. “But I am focusing on opening up my light shadow, and that is much scarier than facing the inner darkness.”
After this brief exchange, feeling no need to further explain or defend where I am at in my process, I take my meditation back inside, sitting in a beautiful energy until the end of the ceremony. I clearly understand that this woman has her own unique journey ahead of her, and that she is not in a place right now where she could really understand what I am doing. Trying to explain myself would serve no one.
Amazingly, at least for now, all of the intense physical symptoms simply vanish once I have achieved deep meditative understanding. I love how that works.
Time To Ponder
Later, I run home for a quick dinner and then return to help bag another batch of freshly ground chocolate. We are fast tonight, and I am again home at 9:00 p.m., leaving me ample time to ponder where I am in my process.
And I love what I see. As Keith had hinted earlier, I did make great progress today, going very deep. It was an intense inner journey with profound pains and insights moving though me without attachment or identification. I survived an overwhelming panic attack without giving my power away, and I dived down into several layers of anger and betrayal, easily transmuting them.
“That is more than enough,” I giggle to myself as I prepare for sleep. “I can be gentle with myself, trusting with patience that the remainder of my healing will continue to flow in perfect order and timing, exactly as my own Higher Energies have designed it.”
“Today was clearly my creation, right from the start,” I ponder. “Working with Cathy was a beautiful setup to take me deeper into my own inner resistance. I love it.”
I am soon so exhausted that I fall fast asleep.
Energy Exploration
To my surprise, for the second time in recent weeks, I wake up just two hours later, having had another vivid and profound dream. As I mediate, the details of the dream melt into beautiful threads, helping me to find a deep and beautiful heart connection to everyone on Keith’s porch, even with the person onto whom I had created so much imagined pain that had never materialized. In the middle of this meditation, my high heart magically opens to another layer, with sharp energetic tingles consuming the center of my upper chest, just below the throat.
Soon, as I go more general with the meditation, the metaphors guide me into additional deep work with my mother’s Higher Essence, initiating the release process with more surfacing parts of her energy that currently reside in me. Finally, after getting to this point of my meditation, I express my intention for the process to continue in the dream state. It is now after midnight, and I really desire another good night’s sleep.
When I awaken at 7:30 a.m. on Monday morning, I am amazed at how I feel. I cannot explain, but I know that something magically shifted in my body. There is more energy flowing in my legs and abdomen, and my forehead and other parts of my face are softer, also flowing with more energy.
By 8:00 a.m., after scribbling a few notes. I decide to be gentle with myself and just watch a movie. I giggle during the movie and the rest of the morning as I continue to feel energy movements throughout my body … some twitchy and anxious as things are shifting and releasing … some quite pleasurable and magical. It is a beautiful and playful morning of energy exploration.
Eye Gazing
Early in the Monday afternoon workgroup ceremony, Steven looks in my direction. I glance back at him, and before I know what happened, we have again locked gazes.
I initially attempt to send him energy, because I am currently quite happy with where I am at. Finally, however, he coaches me to relax, after which I sit back against the wall and decide to surrender, allow, and receive.
As I stare into Steven’s eyes, sharing and receiving profound love and light energy, I return to my process where I left off yesterday – focusing on the blocks and resistance in my God drama. I express an inner intent to explore more of the anger and betrayal that cause me to reject and fight Higher Energies. I ask that this experience today help me to release more of my walls.
As I surrender to the flow, I hit layer after layer, feeling each one as I lightly sob and dry-heave before transmuting with the light. I have no idea how long Steven and I share in this process. It must have been an hour or two, with at least ten to fifteen intense layers of emotional release during that timeframe.
Overall, it is another beautiful, deeply emotional experience, leaving me joyful and free when the process ends.
Growing Understanding
As I disengage and focus elsewhere, everything Keith says and does with others seems to bring me into deeper understanding of what happened to me as a child, helping me to further understand the continued wall of anger and betrayal regarding the “martyrdom” of my power and magic … and how that magic got me into so much trouble.
An ever-deepening clarity tells me that my mother’s psychic surgeries, and my struggles simply to be a surrendering peacemaker, were two of the primary contributors to that power outage. And also, I clearly understand that I wanted all of this to happen – that it was all part of my plan to take on these issues as part of what I wanted to work with in this lifetime.
As I continue following, more pains, emotions, and blockages come and go into my awareness, but through it all, I remain in a beautiful energy.
Riding A Wave
As Keith works with a deeply magical young woman, helping her to understand how her magic and power were martyred by her mother, she begins to talk about a deep empty hole that she feels inside.
At almost the exact same time, I again feel my own profound “kicked in the gut” pain, along with a deep permeating emptiness at the center of that pain. Based on many similar experiences in the last few ceremonies, I already know that this is metaphorical pain related to my God drama, and to how I am clinging to the remaining blocks – using those blocks as ammunition to justify holding on and refusing to let go of my power failure.
“I deserve to be in my magical theme park,” I remind myself. “I deserve to have the power turned on. I deserve to love myself in that power. Childhood was a time when power did get me in trouble, but things are very different now.”
I repeat such inner affirmations several times throughout the ceremony. I experience the feeling of martyrdom in energetic and physical ways, but I am unprepared for what happens next.
Another woman on the porch is now working on releasing her own agonizing emotional pain from a heavy hole of her own. As she goes into her release, the heartbreaking wails that come out of her throat deeply trigger my next layer of release.
I ride her wave and sink deeply into my own pain, feeling it to the core, bending forward, dry heaving, and sobbing.
“Don’t get lost in it Brenda,” I hear Keith call out from across the porch as he works with this other woman.
Even though I already had the confidence that I would not get lost, I appreciate Keith’s watching my back, reminding me of where I am at. Perhaps thirty seconds later, I come up and gasp for air as I bring in some light, almost in a giggle. That “kicked in the gut” feeling has vanished, and I feel free of something very big.
I love how much confidence I have now developed in my ability to do such intense layers of emotion so quickly, without getting lost in them for days or weeks.
Homework Riddles
Near the end, as the ceremony is close to wrapping up, I request a little guidance.
“Keith,” I ask, “I did some really deep work today, and again felt that intense kicked-in-the-gut feeling. That is gone now, but several other pains still remain. Can you suggest anything that might help me tie up this process, or should I just allow and trust that all is well?”
“I’ll work with you,” Keith responds after checking his guidance.
Keith then explains that a Higher Being, one who I deeply trust and with whom I have worked for a long time, is going to presence in front of me.
“That being is going to begin shoveling more pain back into your abdomen,” Keith explains to me.
I sit in this metaphor for a minute or two, barely feeling a slow and gradual, insignificant increase in the pain.
“I am barely feeling it,” I respond. It is hardly affecting me. I am in a very good energy and am not attached or identified with what is coming in, so it is not sticking much.”
“Allow the being to shovel more,” Keith coaches me.
“The pain is intensifying now,” I respond, “but I am still not owning it or allowing it to define me.”
“All of what you are saying is true,” Keith reassures me before continuing this unexpected journey.
Keith then explains that the Higher Being is now going to accept everything back – all the stuff that was just shoveled into me. He tells me to release it, and that in this process, something will come up that will show me what I am doing.
A few minutes later, I share a few initial feelings, but Keith dos not respond. Finally, he gives me a hint, again telling me that the pain inside is like a souvenir from childhood. He emphasizes that I am afraid that if I let it go, that I will no longer remember the lessons that I learned from it – and that by clinging to it I am ensuring that I will not forget the betrayal (anger, pain, etc…) that I intentionally put there to learn from.
Everything Keith says resonates as true, and most of it is things we have discussed before, but he continues to tell me I am not fully getting what he wants me to find. Finally, he tells me that this is my homework to do all by myself.
“You are very good at this type of homework,” Keith reassures me as he moves to work with someone else. “Just keep following.”
Afraid Of My Power
While Keith works elsewhere, I continue this meditation, allowing inner feelings to guide me. Finally, at the end, when he glances my way, I speak up.
“I am hanging onto this pain because I am afraid of my power and my light shadow,” I speak with confidence. “This pain gives me an excuse to continue processing rather than further embracing my magic and my power.”
Keith smiles and agrees, reminding me that it is his job to watch my back.
“Of course you will always have more to process,” Keith coaches me, “but THIS today is stuff you are hanging onto, not wanting to release, because you are afraid of your power and magic.”
As I ponder this brief exchange, I return to the confusion I had yesterday when I asked Keith if I might be scamming myself with all of the fear and anxiety that had come up during my process. At that point, I clearly understood that part of me is afraid to move into the Higher Energies – that doing so means losing all excuses to be small and weak. I was quite happy then to realize that the anxiety was real. Today, I also clearly see that the other side of the equation is real too – that because I am afraid to heal and to step off that cliff into my power, that it is easy to manifest a continuous stream of blocks to keep me from doing so. It is a very fine line to walk.
This IS exactly what I have been focusing on for the entire ceremony – facing fear of further opening to the light – recognizing how I cling to the pain, anger, and betrayal because I do not want to give it up.
Owning My Readiness
As I walk home, I bump into a young woman who was at the ceremony yesterday. When she asks if we can talk, she shares painful stories of struggles in a relationship. I feel deeply guided to help her, holding space for her while I gently counsel and nudge her into an understanding that all of this is her own creation, her inner pain that she designed to help her grow and heal. As we part ways, she tears up, telling me how much I helped her, and that she wishes she could record my words.
While continuing my homeward journey, I clearly realize that right now, I could indeed be working with, and counseling others on an individual basis. No, of course I am not done with my own process, and of course there is more for me to learn and heal in my own life … but I can help others with things that I have already healed.
Something inside has shifted, relative to my homework. I no longer see that role as a “future thing” – as something intimidating that I want to delay and put off. I know that I am ready and that when (and/or if) the synchronous flow of my path takes me in that direction, I will courageously follow. But right now, something tells me that my flow wants me to first connect more intimately to my light shadow, and that writing will be a more prominent part of my near future.
Exploring Personal Power
I giggle Tuesday evening, February 5, 2013, after a full day of writing – and after finally clicking the publish button on my latest blog titled, “Magical Joyful Giggles.” It has indeed been a magical and joyful first five days of February, as I seem to have manifested a nonstop and continuous journey into exploring personal power.
It is uncanny how I spent two late evenings dealing with nonstop storytelling voices in my head – voices creating and projecting fear and anxiety onto nonexistent situations – voices trying to coax me to give my power away to make-believe realities. And then, there was that early-morning-neighbor noise – an experience profoundly reinforcing how I can literally relinquish my personal power in an effort to avoid confrontation and potential conflict – whether real or imagined.
Another beautiful thread this week is that both in and out of chocolate ceremonies, I am repeatedly building confidence and skill at trusting the easy-bus version of emotional release. Over and over, I empower myself by proving that I can spend less than thirty seconds feeling an intense layer of painful repressed emotion all the way to the core, and can then allow that emotion to be transmuted by Higher Energies in a matter of seconds. This sure beats the old way, where processing a layer took much longer, at times consuming weeks or even months – at times leaving me quite powerless.
But wow, I have never had so many back to back “kicked-in-the-gut” metaphors. On Friday they flared up several times, showing me how my power – my life-force – was literally kicked out of me as a child, martyring my magic, resulting in most all of my personal power being removed or given away in one way or another.
On Sunday, I followed that same intense metaphor ever deeper into the God drama, reinforcing my understanding of how I refuse to release the very emotional blocks that hold me stuck – all because they are my childhood treasures, absurd keepsakes that I hang onto as proof of what happened, and as an excuse to remain small. And what a weird sensation it was to feel that agonizing “kicked-in-the-gut” pain magically migrate up into my heart, taking me to the edge of a very real panic attack – to the edge of terror that surfaces when I contemplate letting that stuff go and actually being the magical being that I came here to be.
And then, I was pulled right into the same metaphor on Monday – to the core of a deep aching emptiness, bringing me to yet another level of understanding about how the power to my magical theme park was turned off so very long ago.
As I ponder all of the personal power themes that have repeatedly surfaced in my inner work this week, and in other recent weeks, I cannot help but remind myself that, “I DO deserve to have unlimited, free-flowing, divine power in my magical theme park … and I DO deserve self-love and self-compassion while I joyfully play in the middle of that magical world.”
One thing is quite clear at this point in my process. No outside person or entity stands before me, blocking me from what is my birthright – from the infinite unconditional love of the Universe – from the Source energy that is, and always has been abundantly available to each and every one of us.
It is only a matter of, “When will I love myself enough to finally allow myself to have it.”
… to be continued …
Copyright © 2013 by Brenda Larsen, All Rights Reserved