It has been two and a half weeks since my last post. Several times since mid December, I have attempted to force myself to write, but my emotions have been so raw and fragile that I was unable to focus for one reason or another.
I am now three and a half weeks behind in documenting my healing journey. It has been a wild roller coaster ride of emotional inner work – one that has found me either in a chocolate ceremony, doing my own emotional processing on the side, or being so emotionally drained that all I have been able to do was crash in a heap of exhaustion. While I would have loved to communicate more during this intense period, the thought of even attempting to email a friend seemed to require more effort than I had strength.
Newborn Insights
In this journey, I go back to the very beginnings, experiencing the emotional pain of myself as a breech-positioned newborn, cut from the womb via cesarean section, and mostly isolated from my mother’s embrace during her two-week hospital recovery. Profound meditation finds me experiencing the personal hell of an alone and brokenhearted baby – the agonizing pain of a tiny child who felt abandoned and betrayed by life.
The journey then takes me to a discovery of how I have hooked the concept of receiving love as being equal to bringing in pain, heartache, and rejection by those who I believed should love me back.
New Love And Hidden Sadness
Two days later, in a series of unexpected events, Keith is guided to dedicate a large portion of a chocolate ceremony in helping me to open up a beautiful energy flow in long-shutdown energy centers in my high-heart chakra. As I feel the energy begin to burst through these dormant areas, I experience actual physical pain, like iodine splashed on open wounds. It is an experience of joyful tears and amazing peace, combined with physical shock.
Later that same day, I suddenly sink into some of the most profound buried sadness that I have ever experienced in my life – sadness that makes no sense to logical mind – sadness that seems to have been buried before age three or four. This sadness consumes me for several days. That evening, and again the next day, Keith helps me to ground myself in peaceful love, but the daunting emotions remain lurking in the shadows.
Certifiably Crazy
On another day, I find myself feeling extreme judgment toward an energetically gifted young man, fully knowing that I am projecting all over him. It is only later that I realize how he reminds me of how I might have been in a male body. It seems that I continue to harbor intense judgment and self-hatred toward my own magical-but-awkward little boy. This young man powerfully represents my hated inner child, Bobby – all grown up.
In the middle of the night, on the Thursday before Christmas, I spend ninety minutes sobbing, feeling intense self-hatred, re-experiencing the intense emotional agony of my teenage years. If my buried shame and self-hatred were underground fields of black yucky tar and oil, there would be enough to supply the petroleum needs of the entire United States for years. Were it not for my intense commitment to self-exploration, and to writing about it, I may have packed my bags and given up my quest during these dark nighttime hours of fear and trauma.
On Friday, during one point of agony, I beg Keith for guidance over my intense mood swings. His response brings little relief, as he assures me that I am actually doing great, and that I have to relive these emotions in order to move through them and release them.
“I feel as if I belong in a mental institution.” I share my crazy agony with Keith. “If I were around friends and family right now, they might just send me away to an insane asylum.”
Fearful Comparisons
Ever since the painful-but-exhilarating opening of my high-heart chakra, I have experienced fluid (metaphor for emotion) in my lungs – fluid that has me repeatedly waking up in the night with periods of intense coughing. A part of me fears that I may be on the way toward developing full-fledged bronchitis or even pneumonia. I know that my symptoms are energetic – caused by repeated intense emotional release and new energetic openings – yet the physical manifestations are beginning to scare me.
“I am at a point where I am now more afraid of NOT learning how to trust and use higher energies than I am of allowing higher energies to help me.” I finally share with Keith in desperation on the day before Christmas Eve. “Trying to do the emotional release process all by myself is literally killing me – in a physical way.”
My Way Please
Friday, Keith’s inspired behavior takes me right back into the role of being a child – a child being dominated by controlling parents. Immediately I get lost in a state of childhood confusion. It only takes me a few minutes to realize what is going on – to take back my power – but it is enough to whisk me back to a profound reawakening of anger at my parents for using rational mind and common sense to squash and destroy my inner magic and creativity. But I go home lost and confused, swimming in my need for understanding and validation – validation that no one seems to want to give me.
On Christmas Eve, after my begging for a private appointment with Keith and a dear friend, I ask them to play the role of my parents while I do things my way – in a way that I trust. Part of me has lost confidence in higher energies and Keith’s methods. I desperately wish to engage in some self-directed experiential processing and rational-mind discussion that I absolutely believe will help me. I know such discussion will help me restore some semblance of sanity.
But when I ask Keith and my friend to play the role of my parents, allowing me to direct the flow of the session, I meet stiff resistance. Keith tells me that it is ego that wants to do it my way – that it will only serve to further strengthen ego if we proceed.
An Ego Showdown
Lovingly but firmly, I resist and debate Keith’s meditative guidance for three and a half hours. I know I am right. I am angry at his (and my friend’s) refusal to do things my way – angry at feeling disempowered during a time when I desperately need validation and recognition. I know I am projecting “my parents” all over them. I know that I am literally re-experiencing a face-to-face “standoff of wills” with my parents.
As the session ends, I have lost all confidence in Keith. I stand up, tell him I appreciate his assistance, but that I see the whole session as an opportunity to take back my power – the power to trust my inner guidance over the external guidance of someone else – the power of a little child that could never stand up to his parents.
“I am going home with the profound awareness that I stood up to my parents and did not back down.” I tell Keith as I prepare to walk home. “I know I am right, and I know that you are refusing to acknowledge that fact so that I will have the opportunity to take back my power.”
“Brenda,” Keith warns me, “by doing this you are only strengthening your ego.”
As I walk home on Christmas Eve, a huge part of me demands that I just pack my bags and leave – insisting that Keith has rejected and failed me, and that it is time to move on.
Impermeable Walls
As I sit on Keith’s magical porch for a Christmas Day ceremony, I really do not even want to be there – but an inner part demands that I swallow my pride and show up anyway. For the first two-thirds of the ceremony, I simply watch as a detached observer, desperately trying to rebuild my trust – looking for any evidence to give me courage to trust Keith once again.
By the end of this ceremony, I have humbled myself, realized that I am indeed locked in a journey with ego – ego that is masquerading as my inner child – ego that was terrified of giving up control. I have found a beautiful and peaceful realization about a lifelong belief – a subconscious belief that has insisted that “taking back my power” meant putting up impermeable walls of protection – walls to protect me from authority figures that might hurt me again – walls that also kept out divine higher energies from being able to help me.
A Borrowed Metaphor
Tuesday, while assisting in a private group ceremony, I borrow a profound metaphor from another participant – a metaphor where her personal hell is a dark cave that she is trying to leave. She somehow manages to turn on her own inner light to light the way. As she walks out of the cave, all of her old teachers line the walls, taunting her.
As I imagine myself in my own cave, trying to find my way out of the lonely darkness, the first person I must pass is my mother. As I metaphorically stand in front of my mother, I try to imagine myself turning on my own inner light. Intense fear consumes me.
“I am still, to this day, terrified of shining my beautiful inner light in the presence of my mother.” I ponder with shock.
This metaphor dominates my daily processing for the next week.
Energetically Stuck
In that same ceremony, my forearms are aching with pain as I attempt to relax them. Keith reminds me of the “lightning bolts” of energy that flowed through my arms during a ceremony just over one year ago. It suddenly hits me. The clenching in my forearms is a desperate attempt to prevent energy from flowing into or out of my arms – and the throbbing pain I experience right now literally feels like lightning bolts of energy attempting to free themselves – attempting to flow past the painful blockages of my clenched muscles.
I continue to wake up coughing during the night, while during the day, my head is often congested with so much blocked and dizzying energy that I find it hard to concentrate, and impossible to write. I do find strength to do additional “cave meditations” with my mother – but deeply struggle with an inability to connect consistently with higher energies.
Time Travel
On the final Friday of December, in the midst of a very unusual chocolate ceremony, I experience a profound breakthrough in working with higher energies during a deep emotional release. I finally find a space of holding a powerful and loving presence as the conscious observer – while at the same time experiencing the deep inner emotional agony related to teenage years.
It suddenly seems so easy. I am loving and powerful, almost giggling on the outside, while holding energetic space for a deeply troubled teenage-me who struggles to let go of beliefs that have him trapped in shame, self-hatred, and in an inability to play and enjoy life. I even manage to have some fun by sending my present-day loving energy back in time, as my future self, comforting that little boy, and helping him to begin rewriting history.
A Blown Fuse
On New Year’s Day, other insights begin to gel with power. I am starting to realize that the energies that remain stuck in my lower chakras – the centers of sexuality, creativity, and power – are not energies that need to flow down and out to mother earth. They are energies that I still prevent from flowing up to my heart. I begin to realize that the “blown fuse” that prevents power from being supplied to my “magical theme park” is somewhere between the power center of my solar plexus and the love center of my magical heart.
I also begin to realize that age “eleven-and-a-half” has been repeatedly surfacing in my life metaphors as of late. Ever since my scorpion experiences last May, and again this week as I meditated with my mother in that dark cave, I have been unable to shine my light beyond that difficult age.
“That blown fuse hidden in me has to do with something early in my sixth grade year.” I ponder. “I was so overloaded with dysfunctional belief systems, shame, and self-hatred – so unable to receive love – that I simply committed energetic suicide to protect myself – blowing a fuse to a powerful heart that deeply ached with shame and guilt.”
A Disapproving Mother
Just a few days ago, during a Tuesday chocolate ceremony, my solar plexus was overflowing with emotional nausea and churning energy – so much so that I literally went into the bathroom, attempting to vomit out the stuck, stagnant energy.
Later, after Keith helped me to make peace with this inner resistance, I meditatively found myself in my inner conference room – an eleven-and-a-half year old boy, standing on the conference table, staring at a room full of resistance energy that was seated in chairs around the table. Every energy being in the room stared back at me with the face of my disapproving mother.
For the last two days, each time I have attempted to resume my writing, I have ended up going back to this meditative scene. I have meditated deeply into a series of unconscious beliefs that still dominate and influence my life – beliefs that came from my mother – beliefs that she got from her mother, and so on.
This meditative journey is ongoing and intense. Just this morning, I experienced profound sensations of having my heart painfully squashed as I again pondered beliefs around rules, obligation, and sexuality.
I am making great progress, but it seems that the beliefs of my childhood – beliefs taught to me by my mother – continue to remain as chains that tightly bind and restrict my heart from fully functioning.
An Inspired Quote
This morning, as I browsed Facebook prior to attempting some writing, I came across a beautiful quote – one that deeply applies to what I am working on. The quote comes as the posted status of a man named “Matt Kahn,” from the Facebook page “Sacred Heart Wisdom from Matt Kahn.”
The quote reads as follows:
“It’s amazing how you can travel endless amounts of miles around the world and never take a single step outside of your point of view. You can even spend an entire lifetime exploring every dimension, country, and culture and still never experience anything other than your own beliefs and assumptions. On the other hand, you can take a single step outside of any viewpoint and a brand new universe of possibility miraculously appears in view. This remains the easiest way to experience the literal meaning of time travel.”
Wow – as I work on stepping further outside of the restrictions of my own ingrained childhood beliefs, I do indeed feel new possibilities miraculously appearing. I do feel myself traveling back in time, changing my entire life from the past forward.
A Universe Of Possibility
I love this quote so much that I “LIKE” the page and post my own comment, as follows:
“It is a journey of undoing … of literally questioning my reality at every turn … of learning that almost everything I thought I knew was simply something that was taught to me by someone else who was equally asleep at the time … it is a journey of awakening, and of realizing that my mind had been chained and imprisoned by a process of subtle conditioning to which I was blind and complacent. I want to see the Universe as it really is … I want to step out of every belief, assumption, and viewpoint … I want to see the true oneness and divinity that is each of us. All of that is impossible if I believe that I already know the truth.”
These past few weeks have been intense. Several times, I have resisted strong inner urges to simply pack my bags and run away. Keith has often said that most people would rather die than face their own inner stuff. I am really beginning to understand that fear. Yet I am not about to give up.
I am on the most amazing journey of my life. I am so close to a brand new universe of possibility – so close to freeing myself from the mental and emotional bondage of beliefs that cripple me – so close to new breakthroughs in consciousness that I can almost taste them.
No Turning Back
Very soon, as time permits, I will resume detailed writing, returning in time to December 11, 2011 and sharing the full journey that I have only briefly summarized today. I may not be fully caught up again until this summer – but my writing is every bit as important to me as my journey itself.
I am not about to turn back now.
Copyright © 2012 by Brenda Larsen, All Rights Reserved