Wednesday morning, March 14, 2012, I receive a disturbing email from my son. It seems that my bank has sent him two new debit cards for my account, and he wants to know what I would like him to do with those cards. After a quick request for more information, I learn on Wednesday evening that two of my old cards have been reported by Visa as “potentially compromised” so they will be closed out on March 22. A quick Skype call to my bank confirms that even though no suspicious activity has occurred on my account, the bank refuses to keep the old cards open.
The dilemma is that secure and reliable mail delivery here in Guatemala is quite difficult and expensive. I have an important issue to resolve, and I need to do it quickly. If not, I will be unable to conveniently withdraw cash for rent and daily living expenses.
Thursday morning, after walking around and asking for advice from several friends and business owners in San Marcos, a new idea pops into my head … use Facebook. Without hesitating, I logon to Facebook and send messages to all my San Marcos friends, asking for advice on how to safely receive mail. A little while later, as I busily write away on my next blog, one Facebook response hits the jackpot. A friend from San Marcos just happens to be in Arizona, and will be returning to Guatemala next week. If I can get the cards expedited to her Uncle’s address by Monday, she can bring them back to me.
I send a quick email to my son, giving him all the information, asking him if it is possible to get the cards in the mail sometime on Friday. I get no response … nothing … nada. Yet the peace in my heart tells me that all is well. I know that if this does not work out, other options will present themselves.
A Verbal Slam
Early Friday morning, I find myself on a boat, zooming across the lake to Panajachel, making a quick trip to a local ATM to withdraw as much cash (daily limits) as possible before my old cards are cancelled. By midmorning I am back home, stowing about two-month’s rent away for safekeeping. I know that if my situation does not get resolved, I will be able to make several more such trips before the cards expire next week.
Soon, I walk over to Keith’s magical porch in preparation for an afternoon chocolate ceremony. After explaining my debit card adventure to Keith, telling him that my son has not yet responded to my email, I am totally unprepared for the shakedown I receive.
“You should call your son,” Keith gives me stern advice … advice that feels as if it is coming from a place of fearful urgency.
“I can’t do that now.” I respond calmly. “It is time for the ceremony, I don’t have his number with me right now, he is busy at work, and it is his daughter’s birthday today. I don’t even know if they are home this weekend.”
“See how you are just making excuses for what you cannot do?” Keith verbally slams me in what I perceive as a condescending and attacking tone of voice.
Projected Fears
Before continuing, I need to briefly regress to the past.
A few months ago, after a ceremony across the lake, one of the participants (I will call Judy) had asked if she could share our private lancha for a quick boat ride to Santiago, a small town just a short hop across the bay. She and a friend wanted to go to dinner and would return to their retreat center later that night. When Judy had mentioned that the boat driver told her he would not be able to pick them up later to bring them back to the retreat center, I allowed my own fears to surface.
“I don’t think you should go unless you have a way back later tonight.” I had told Judy. “If you can’t get a boat, you will be stuck all night in Santiago.”
As these words left my tongue, I was feeling my own fears … fears of what I would do if I were stranded at night with no way to return home.
A few weeks later, when asking Keith for feedback in another difficult situation (one in which I was on the edge of giving up and running away from San Marcos), Keith had reminded me of this incident on the boat. He let me know in a firm way that I had been way out of line in projecting my personal fears all over Judy … telling me that I was trying to control and manipulate her behavior because of my own insecurities … telling me that it was not my place to worry about her choices and decisions.
Stuffed Resentment
“What is the difference between what I did to Judy a few months ago and what Keith is now doing to me?” I ponder in annoyed and defensive frustration.
I feel somewhat angered by what I perceive as Keith’s hypocrisy. I feel as if he is projecting his own fears and insecurities all over me, trying to control and manipulate me into doing things his way … even though I feel completely trusting and peaceful about doing them in my own way.
But rather than make waves, I just stuff my resentment down and prepare for what I hope will be a beautiful healing chocolate ceremony.
Terrified Of Losing Control
During the glow meditation, I experience some peace in my heart … but am also intuitively aware that fear is bubbling in my abdomen. I do not know how I know this, I just do.
I am totally focused on flowing with nonattachment to my process … simply allowing the river of my flow to take me wherever I need to go … through the rapids of pain or the calm of bliss … trusting my Higher Self to guide me.
When Keith begins working with individuals, he first asks if anyone would like any personal assistance. After a few minutes of silence, I finally speak up, explaining that my heart feels mostly strong, but that I have a sensation of fear in my abdomen.
“I think it has to do with surrendering control to the flow of my river.” I express my feelings to Keith. “I think that part of me is terrified of losing control … not trusting that flow.”
After Keith validates my feelings and encourages me to keep following the inner metaphorical bread crumbs, another man on the porch interrupts with some rational-mind head advice … advice about how surrendering control can be a scam.
I simply smile, acknowledge his words, and then continue my process … remembering how Keith once reminded me that I can receive divine guidance from the words on a cardboard box. This man’s words do not resonate with me – and they are totally out of context with my own process – but I choose to allow him to have his own truth.
Shared Fear
Soon, I watch as someone (not Keith) begins to encourage and verbally push a friend who seems to be stuck in deep fear … trying to coax him into forging forward through his fears. I note that my friend seems terrified to go deeper into his own process.
I feel my friend’s fear … feeling it quite intensely … and begin to wonder if perhaps some of the fear I was feeling earlier in my own abdomen was in fact, not even mine. Intuitively I know that much of what I feel is indeed my own fear, but I also recognize that feeling my friend’s fear has facilitated me in feeling my own.
A few minutes later, I note with nonattachment that my friend stands up and leaves the porch. He is too afraid to go deeper right now … too afraid to face the inner demons that lie on the other side of those fears. A sense of peace resonates in my heart that all is well … that my friend is doing exactly what he needs to do. I trust that whenever two people share an interaction, that each is a willing participant in either creating or allowing that reality to unfold.
I love how clearly I am beginning to trust the flow, not just of my own process, but also trusting the flow of other peoples’ processes.
Unable To Hop
I begin to recognize a clear unfolding theme. As Keith works with a woman next to me, she is dealing with fear and control. Everything Keith does with her resonates deeply with me as well.
But it is the next woman’s work that begins to trigger my own deep journey. She is a powerful empath who does not yet even know what an empath is. As he works with her, Keith glances at me because he knows that I am deeply connected with her process. When my eyes meet Keith’s, I smile my acknowledgment. No words are necessary in this exchange.
The woman describes a recent dream in which she was a grasshopper who could not hop.
“As a child, you were not allowed to hop.” Keith shares wisdom with this woman.
Keith’s words take me into my own meditation. I do not know how I know it, but I am now regressed to two years old as I consider my own inability to “hop” … subconsciously remembering how my innocent toddler explorations were severely controlled and restricted because a child in their “terrible-twos” is too active and gets into too much unbridled mischief.
In fact, I spend the remainder of the ceremony deeply knowing that I am regressed to the tender age of two.
A Knowing Ground
“I was not allowed to cry,” this woman shares with Keith as she now begins to cry quite profusely in the ceremony today.
“I was not allowed to cry either,” I ponder clear emotional and physical memories. “Crying got me into trouble. I could not be a bubbly, bouncy, hopping child, and I could not cry when I was sad. Both got me into trouble.”
To my surprise, I begin to feel a deep sense of anger and rage flowing through me as Keith continues working with the woman.
“You were unable to express anger to your parents,” Keith almost simultaneously tells this woman who continues to explore deeply into her own childhood shutdown.
“I can feel her anger,” I interrupt Keith at this phase of the process. “She cannot feel it right now, but I sure can. It is nearly overwhelming me.”
In fact, the anger I feel flowing through me is so strong that I am beginning to wonder if it could be my own. But somehow I know that what I am feeling is the anger that this woman has inside, but is not allowing herself to feel. Since I am a “ground”, and since I am deeply connected to her process, her emotion is flowing through me.
When I ask for guidance, Keith confirms that I am indeed feeling her emotion and not my own.
A Punishing Dilemma
As Keith moves on to work with someone else, I sink deeper in my own process. My heart remains connected and loving while fear continues to bubble inside me. I am pondering my own status as a two-year-old alien – a young magical child not fitting into a 1957 world.
“As a two-year-old I was punished for feeling everyone else’s pain,” I ponder with clarity. “And I was punished for crying about the pain I felt … punished for being angry when I was unjustly punished … and punished for being too active, and for “hopping” too much.”
“And I cannot blame my parents,” I further ponder. “They were doing the only thing they knew how to do … honorably loving me and training me as best they could. I literally was an alien child, going through a shutdown that was a necessary part of my process.”
Whitewashed Wonderings
As Keith works with others, most people are stuck in some type of deep inner resistance. While one man is sarcastically joking, Keith points out that he has a layer of whitewash smeared over his issues, keeping them hidden.
“Go below that layer where all of this stuff is whitewashed,” Keith guides this man.
“Wow,” I ponder my own process ever deeper. “Am I still so stuck in denial that I have all of my shutdown pains hidden by a layer of whitewash? Is this why I am still unable to open my power connections? Am I still too frightened to know the truth about my own childhood?”
A Traumatized Toddler
Eventually, Keith returns to check-in with me, and we end up talking for a half hour as I share and discuss all of my deepening insights from the last two hours.
“I am a stuck two-year-old who could not hop, cry, or be angry … and I have a whitewashed cover over the pain that keeps me from moving forward.” I summarize my insights to Keith.
Keith quickly takes this opportunity to remind me of how I am regressing into childhood emotions … and he spends a few minutes educating the group on the way such regressions work, while also explaining how it is important to allow regressed emotions to flow with nonattachment … without identifying them with present-day reality.
I am blown away by how intense my own emotions have become. I feel this two-year-old toddler’s crazy fear, his overwhelming desire to cry, his anger, stuck-ness, and denial. But as I do so, I am also lovingly and peacefully holding space as the adult observer, making no attempt to judge, to fix, to make-wrong, or to heal. Instead, I simply hold a butler-tray of love for this traumatized toddler.
But I feel as if my process is stuck and going nowhere fast.
Waving Flags
Soon, another man starts to do some work, but he too is stuck. Keith gently tells this man that he is scamming himself.
“Your inner metaphors are a flag waving in the breeze, saying dig here,” Keith shares with the man who is refusing to listen.
“Brenda does this a lot,” Keith then shocks me as he continues. “She has flags waving faintly to get her attention and she often does not trust them.”
Keith’s words cause me to stop what I am doing and to pay more attention. I know that I often do not trust myself, that I frequently need validation from Keith before I will trust my own waving metaphorical flags, but I begin to wonder if there is something I might be missing right now.
I feel slightly triggered by the fact that Keith is not pushing me to see my own flags. But when I observe that Keith also does not push this man beyond what he, himself, is able to see and admit, I am lovingly reminded of the beauty of the way Keith works. Unless otherwise guided by their own Higher Energies, Keith never pushes anyone into a place to which they are not ready to travel.
Spinning Confusion
I almost giggle when another woman shows up on the porch in a deeply stuck state. I will call her Leslie. It seems that “stuck in fear and control issues” is very much the underlying theme of today. As Keith works with Leslie, he begins to guide her into a subconscious meditation. I decide to follow along in my own way.
To my shock, as I try to follow Keith’s guidance, I am overwhelmed by crazy swirls of energy in my head … a dizzying confusion that has now become quite common in my process.
“I am feeling the swirling confusion of my two-year old,” I begin to ponder with intuitive clarity. “It was at this tender age when my inner magic began to severely clash with a left-brain culture of logic, literally causing my head to spin in confusion as it is doing right now.”
Painful Puppy Metaphors
Soon, as a part of this same guided meditation, Keith encourages Leslie to use the love of her own heart to love and assist her inner child. When Leslie and another person on the porch begin to sob, I ride their wave. I am attempting to use my own powerful love to help my two-year-old inner child feel loved – not in a pushing way, but as a butler, making unconditional love and metaphorical hugs available to my precious child.
To my shock, as I begin this process, I feel deep heel-dragging resistance toward loving my own inner child. A part of me hates this crybaby rebellious child. Wow.
Simultaneously, I am reminded of a YouTube video I recently watched about a frightened puppy that just needed to be loved. Intuitively, I realize my own little inner child is that terrified dog and I am the judgmental adult that wanted to send the dysfunctional puppy to the pound.
As I ponder this scene, I break down in muffled sobs. I feel my inner child in anguish and screeching as the love is offered. And I remember my own emotional reaction in recent times when others have held me in their arms me on the porch – recalling several times when I have broken down into screeching wails as someone held me with pure love.
For anyone wanting to view the YouTube video, it can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8KwKgumceM
Riding The Wave
As Leslie’s emotions settle, so do mine. Keith guides her to bring in light, and I do the same. I am momentarily stable.
But a few minutes later, when Leslie returns to agonizing sobbing, I profoundly feel her emotion and again sink into my own two-year-old pain … right back into my own teeth-chattering muffled sobs.
When the meditation is over and the emotions settle, Keith turns to me to acknowledge verbally how I have been profoundly riding Leslie’s energetic wave.
“Wow,” is the only way I can respond. I am nearly in shock.
For the remainder of this amazing chocolate ceremony, I focus on bringing in love and light while meditating, simultaneously expressing my intent for this light and love to be made available to my inner child. Later, I also begin to visualize my mother’s higher essence as I imagine her sharing the purity of her real love for this tiny child.
A Flow Of Guidance
As the ceremony concludes, I am delighted by the opportunity to engage in a short “wow-filled” conversation with Keith regarding my experiences in the ceremony.
“You achieved a new level of trusting and following your flow today,” Keith congratulates me.
“But I really think you should have oars in your raft,” Keith suggests, referring to the fact that I always talk about floating down the river of my flow in a raft with no oars. “You need to look ahead and make minor course corrections to avoid the big rocks, etc…”
“I don’t want to have oars,” I respond. “I want to be able to trust the flow to take me to exactly the right places at the right time.”
“But you need to be able to respond to guidance,” Keith suggests why I might need oars.
“Of course I do,” I clarify, “but to me, the guidance is part of the flow. When I think of oars, I picture that as me trying to be in control. But if you are suggesting oars as a means of following guidance then I absolutely agree.”
As I walk home shortly before 6:00 p.m. on this beautiful Friday evening, I giggle at how words and differing perspectives can complicate communication.
Confronting Conflict
After a beautiful Saturday of writing and publishing a blog titled “Confronting Conflict”, I am again blown away by how my inner work and writing seem to line up so synchronously together.
Early Sunday morning, March 18, 2012, I find an email that was sent to me by my son. I am shocked when I read the words and then check the date and time when they were actually sent. It was an email clearly sent into the system on Thursday afternoon, confidently stating that “I believe that we can get the cards sent out tomorrow” (referring to my two debit cards). The email had been mysteriously lost in the system for two and a half days before finally showing up in my inbox.
As I ponder the weird synchronicity, I realize that the entire situation with my debit cards, right down to the fact that an email was strangely lost in limbo for two and a half days, has been a clear and unusual setup by the Universe.
I have been learning to work with conflict for several months now, and right in the midst of writing about it, I am synchronously given a scenario where intuitions tell me it is time to have an interesting conversation with Keith. I am still quite annoyed by the manner in which he had badgered me before the ceremony on Friday. Something tells me that Keith was knowingly following guidance when he triggered me in that conversation. I really want to explore the situation in a loving and honest way – in a way that will take me deeper.
Partying With Doubt
The Sunday afternoon chocolate ceremony starts out quite small, but we soon end up with fifteen people crowding the porch. When Keith checks in with me after the glow meditation, I fill him in with where I am at.
“I was beginning to struggle with doubts,” I share my journey, “so I invited all of my doubting energies to join me in my inner conference room, along with my inner children. I am asking all of these energies to throw dramatic temper tantrums like you had me do in a meditation a few months back. I am working on releasing these doubts through the silliness, and it seems to be working somewhat.”
“Brenda,” Keith suggests a different metaphor. “Why don’t you set it all up as you would set up a childhood party, with party favors, goodies to eat, hats, horns, toys, etc, and ask them to all play at the party?”
As I focus on this party scene for a minute or two, I experience deep inner resistance to the concept of partying. These energies absolutely do not want to party.
A Forbidding Mandate
A few minutes after Keith moves on, he turns to work with me again.
“I feel like the adult energy in me is preventing me from being able to party or play,” I share unfolding insights.
“Explore the metaphor itself rather than the concept of play,” Keith quickly suggests. “The idea is to be joyful and in your magic. These energies are not allowed to be in their divine joy.”
“Wow,” I respond. “That feels so much more in line with what happened. My parents had boundaries on my play, but I did play hard as a child. However, I was not allowed to be my genuine, divinely joyful self.”
“The deep resistance I feel right now is strongly showing me that I was forbidden to be in my joy, to be in my divine magical self,” I further clarify.
“Brenda, I’m getting a stronger word,” Keith interrupts. “I’m getting the word ‘mandate’. It was a mandate that you could not be in your divine joy and magic.”
Love Is A Leash
I continue to meditate quietly in these metaphors while Keith works with others. At one point, I am deeply resonating with the work Keith does with a woman across the porch. Suddenly, Keith turns around to work with me.
“Brenda,” Keith surprises me, “she is working on the same thing that you are.”
As I shift gears to focus on what Keith is sharing, a new series of ideas suddenly flood my process. I am again intuitively guided to memories of that frightened-puppy video – the one to which I shared a link earlier. As I review my terrified love-starved state, combined with images from the video, I sink deep into the childhood terror of being my real self.
“I have love hooked as being equivalent to a leash,” I suddenly blurt out to Keith as I imagine a scene in the video where a puppy screeches with fear as a leash is placed on her neck.
“As a tiny child I learned that love was a leash that would drag me around to do whatever my parents wanted,” I begin to share insights. “That leash controlled me, prevented me from following my heart and doing what I wanted. That leash was a prison … love felt like a prison.”
As I imagine myself at age two, I see that every person that represented love to me was clearly, with genuine intention, trying to put such a leash around my neck. At such a young age, it was impossible to separate the concept of love from the concept of being controlled by those who loved me.
To my surprise, as I hold space from the observer perspective, I begin to feel as if my inner child is crying deeply inside, screeching in agony, screaming out “No, don’t love me that way … I don’t want that type of love.”
Empath For An Energy
Soon, Keith returns to work with me. After filling him in on more details of my journey, he suggests that I, as the adult empath, connect with one of those terrified, love-starved energies.
“Ask that energy if it would like to release its pain to you,” Keith suggests.
As I follow Keith’s guidance, I suddenly begin to sob and dry heave.
“Yes, I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to feel it.” Keith reassures me. “As this emotion passes through you, you will feel portions of it.”
After perhaps ten minutes of intense emotional release, the dry heaves cease and the tears fade.
“I don’t know if I am done,” I express my shock to Keith, “or if I just shut it down … but it has stopped.”
“Trust yourself,” Keith reassures me. “If there is more, it will come back. Now, reverse that channel and bring in divine love. Make it available to that frightened, love-starved energy, whether it is accepted or not.”
Divine Joy Equals Pain
Almost immediately, I intuitively sense a stiff resistance to receiving this love. I feel a great deal of loving energy in my head and chest, but only a trickle of this flow makes it into my tight and painful abdomen.
I focus on this process for a while as Keith moves on. I bring in a nice vibrational energy of loving peace. The energy swirls delightfully in my crown area, my heart glows with peace, and an ever-so-gradual flow begins to fill my still-resistant lower chakras. The process is very slow and limited, but I clearly recognize that I am in a trust-building process. Many aspects of my inner child energies (and other love-starved energies) remain quite frightened of receiving such love – love that remains hooked as being equivalent to a leash. I trust that over time these energies will relax and allow.
When Keith begins to guide the group in an empath training, I remain deeply in my own process, but do partially participate with the group. But about halfway through, panicked inner energies cause me to stop. These parts of me remain quite terrified of further opening to my magic.
As the training continues, a new understanding suddenly unfolds in my heart.
“It was not necessarily the adults or parents in my life that would not let me play or be in my divine joy,” I begin to ponder. “Instead, I had learned that more divine love meant more magical connection … and when I was more magically connected I internalized more emotional pain from others … and when I experienced that emotional pain I cried and attempted to explain myself and/or seek validation. Eventually I was punished in some manner for my behaviors related to those pains.”
“I suppressed my divine joy in order to control the pain that always came as a result,” I ponder with clarity.
A Room Of Leashes
Later in the ceremony, Keith guides a woman deep into her subconscious. As I usually do, I choose to follow along in my own way.
After climbing down a ladder, sliding down a fireman’s pole, riding to the basement in an elevator, and finally walking down a spiral staircase, I reach what I intuitively feel as being the end of my descent into the subconscious mind.
Soon, continuing to adapt Keith’s guidance for my own individual process, I walk down a hallway and find a doorway that reads, “Love equals leash.”
As I stare at the words on this doorway, I suppress muffled tears as a few tissues begin to pile beside me. This door is extremely intimidating.
Finally, when I find the courage to open the door and step just under the doorframe, I am unable to go any further inside. The entire room is filled with leashes that dangle from all areas of the ceiling.
An Uncut Hook
Meanwhile, Keith is talking to the group about the truth energy and how it relates to the Christian/Jewish metaphor of Archangel Michael, the angelic being who represents this truth energy. Keith teaches that the number one project of Archangel Michael is empaths – people who use the sword of truth to cut people free of their inner lies and densities.
“Use Michael’s sword to cut you free of ‘love-equals-pain’,” Keith encourages the woman for whom he is primarily guiding the meditation.
As the woman begins to sob, Keith points out that cutting this “hook” of “love being equivalent to pain” can be quite intimidating – making you feel as if you will never again receive love if you cut this hook. For many, receiving love through such dysfunctional hooks is the only way they know how to be loved – and undoing such a hook means losing all hope of future love.
The woman is eventually able to cut her hook, and as she does so, she begins to laugh with joy. I am very jealous. It seems that in my own process of attempting to cut my “love-equals-leash” hook, I am still unable to even enter the room.
“You made great progress though,” Keith congratulates me after I express my insecurities about not being able to complete my journey. “What you did today is perfect. There is no need to push the process.”
Facing The Fear
As the ceremony concludes, my heart skips a beat as I express my desire to Keith to have a half hour of personal conversation before I go home. I still need to discuss my festering feelings of conflict, and fear of expressing myself. I am honored when Keith agrees to my request for some one-on-one time.
I begin by sharing my fears, expressing that what I want to say feels as if I am about to engage in intense conflict and confrontation.
“I have a lifelong pattern insisting to me that directly speaking my truth always leads to rejection and loss of friendship,” I express my nervousness to Keith while my heart thumps loudly in my chest.
Soon, I lovingly lay out the entire scenario through my perspective … sharing how I had felt bad when he told me a couple of months ago that I was out of line for projecting my fears onto Judy. I then hesitantly add how much I was annoyed and bothered when he did the exact same thing to me on Friday morning when he projected fear onto me by telling me I should call my son, and insisting that I was making excuses when I attempted to explain why I did not agree with him.
Love And Hate
“Keith,” I giggle as my sense of peaceful trust begins to return, “this morning when I received that delayed email – the one lost in limbo for two and a half days – I clearly realized that this debit-card thing was all a setup to trigger the need for this very discussion. I realized that it is time to break my pattern and to learn how to have such a frightening conversation.”
“Brenda, it doesn’t matter if what I said to you on Friday morning was staged or real,” Keith then admits that he was indeed aware of the energy when he shared his words on Friday. “What you need to do is to figure out what you want to do about this issue inside of you.”
I both hate and love how Keith always keeps me guessing, not quite admitting whether he was or was not following guidance on Friday – whether he was or was not role-playing for me – and how he always reminds me that my reaction is an inside job.
Pattern Recognition
Once the ice is broken, Keith and I engage in a delightful discussion and exploration of my lifelong pattern – the one telling me that speaking my truth always results in conflict and loss of relationship.
I love how the incident with Judy (a few months ago) gave me deep understanding of how I tend to project my fears and limitations onto others. I love even more how the delayed email caused me to profoundly experience how it feels to be on the receiving end of such projected and controlling fear from others.
But what I love most is that Keith is showing me how I can speak my truth in a loving way. In the course of our conversation, I share several real-life examples from the past ten years where I have been deeply troubled by the behavior of others, yet I stuffed and repressed my feelings until they finally reached a boiling point. I now clearly realize that the reason speaking my truth resulted in rejection is that by the time I found the courage to speak up, I was so filled with angry repressed emotion that I could not share my truth without projecting torrents of emotion as well.
Healing And Preparing
“I have changed so much over the last few years,” I share my delight with Keith, “but it is still sometimes a big stretch for me to find the courage to talk about such feelings.”
Keith reminds me that there are no rules for when to speak up and when to process the emotions in another way.
“Just follow your inner guidance,” Keith encourages me. “Sometimes you need to talk to the person. Other times you may just want to write a letter and burn it. It all depends on the situation.”
“Bring in a generic friend in front of you,” Keith soon guides me into meditation. “If you cannot speak your truth to this friend without it creating a conflict, is this person really your friend?”
“Of course not,” I easily respond a few seconds later. “I do not want to be close friends with someone who will not allow me to lovingly speak my truth. It has only been in the last ten years when I began to attract friends with whom I could be completely honest without such fear. But even with those dear friends, I still sometimes panic at the thought of sharing something that may be rejected.”
“Brenda,” Keith guides me further, “this whole process is preparing and assisting you to heal these issues so that you can have more real friends, and maybe even an intimate relationship, where you can speak your truth.”
As I stroll homeward around 6:00 p.m., I again ponder the beautiful sequence of events that have guided me to this profound lesson – events from three different time periods all flowing beautifully together, topped off by a mysterious email delay. I giggle how such synchronicities are becoming ever more frequent … and I love how I am learning to confidently speak my truth while doing so from a space of unconditional love and nonattachment.
A Tale Of Three Journeys
Three separate journeys have intertwined my process this week, each seeming quite different and separate on the surface.
The first seemed to begin with two debit cards that were being cancelled. But that journey quickly pulled in a multitude of synchronously-related situations, two of which were months old. The tantalizing event to top it off was a magically-delayed email. The culmination of this journey ended with a fear-inducing need to speak my truth and face potential conflict.
The second journey took me through profound emotional regressions to a time that I clearly recognize as being around age two. Events of that Friday afternoon chocolate ceremony helped me to deeply understand the twisted and confusing emotions of my young childhood – emotions that found me puzzled by the rules of the world around me – a world that would not allow me to hop, to cry, or to get angry – a world that literally punished me for feeling and expressing the emotions that were at the very core of my being.
The third took me deep into the understanding that I have had a lifelong journey with the feeling that love is like a leash around my neck – a leash that is meant to control me and keep me in line so that others can be happy.
Interestingly enough, these three journeys tightly overlap. The “love is a leash” journey taught me that disagreement and disobedience would be punished, and that humble compliance is the only way to be loved by others. The journey with a two-year-old regression taught me that being my true self, and expressing my true feelings, was sure to cause the leash to be tightened and pulled in extremely unpleasant ways. And the trek with conflict itself … well that makes perfect sense given my journeys with the other two.
I know it is time to let go of my “need for the leash” … but a very frightened energy inside me continues to subconsciously fear that if I release the belief that “love is a leash”, that I am also ultimately giving up all hope of ever receiving love.
While I am not quite there yet, a little sparrow flying above me tells me that the end result will be just the opposite.
Copyright © 2012 by Brenda Larsen, All Rights Reserved