Your capacity to love lives next door to your greatest pain.
Transcending pain and finding love.
Do you feel like you’ve earned a PhD in pain and suffering?
What if you could transcend your suffering by believing that everything, absolutely everything is created by you, for you to learn, heal and even love? What if pain, suffering, depression, anxiety, and struggle was all part of your design and your ego’s subjective response to your conscious and unconscious directions?
If you design struggle, you also design peace. The key is in your capacity for awareness, acceptance, self-directed emotional intelligence, discipline and trust. No simple process, right? Sending clear, believable and consistent signals to the universe with the momentum of your emotions can change your reality. You have the paintbrush or golden keyboard at the tips of your magical fingers.
In my experience you cannot wave a magic want and poof, it’s all rainbows, however, through willingness (an emotion) to view your circumstances, attitudes, beliefs and emotions with a lens of objective self-awareness, you can begin a new dialogue with yourSelf, creating space for greater abundance, joy, and peace.
Simply reading these guidelines and deciding you’re going to apply them today may not be effective. A first course of action is to revisit one of your greatest pains, points of suffering or trauma in this lifetime. In my experience transcendence happens through profound pain, suffering, a broken heart, and spirit. Get in touch with your source of great pain, because your capacity for great love lives in the same, dark, deep-seated place.
A Sunday, late 2015:
As I lay in savasana one Sunday morning at the end of a sweaty yoga class, there was nothing distinct or out of the ordinary about that class or that morning. My body, mind and emotions felt fluid, in a state of equilibrium as I relaxed for those few minutes on my mat. Suddenly, recognized that my consciousness was in a bathroom 2 years earlier. I didn’t have a body, just my energy of awareness, my Soul. I observed my broken down, demoralized self, standing at the sink, hanging on for not only steadiness but for life. And then it happened, I began having a conversation with another aspect of My Soul from that moment in time. Without words, we exchanged feelings, energy, intelligence, and love.
Saturday, May 11th, 2013; An ordinary day, early afternoon:
I distinctly remember being afraid. Really afraid.
I thought: “What the hell are you scared of? You have a nice home, a career you earned, a successful boyfriend…”
I was 32 years old and empty.
My reality: Our home looked nice from the outside; it was not a home. On the inside, lived alcoholism, addiction, depression, psychological abuse, entity possession, anger, rage, and demons. : Each day I put a suit and a smile on and pushed through the pain with sheer determination to survive and keep my head above a rising water line. By night I begged the drugs, alcohol and demons to end the misery.
At the bottom of the emptiness was despair so wretched that my will to live barely existed.
On this particular Saturday afternoon, I remember thinking for the first time, perhaps ever, that I was afraid. It may sound simple or silly, but I was in such great denial, thinking I could control and manage appearances that I was not only dishonest with myself, but I was also delusional about the reality of my fragile circumstances. This day, I was consciously aware of my pain, fear and suffering. Additionally, I was concerned for what awful things would happen if I drank any alcohol that day.
We were planning on going to a party and had hired a driver, as it was a pretty good distance and we knew driving wasn’t wise. At this point, I personally knew the consequences of drinking and driving. You would think that alone would trigger a self-awareness, or willingness to change fear, but no, the stark reality of my shameful actions wasn’t enough self-inflicted pain and suffering to wake me up to conscious fear, only self-loathing and repeated behavior.
I knew if I drank at the party that I would misbehave and do something terribly regrettable. I knew I would have no conscious control over my body, mind or actions after even one drink. The writing was on the wall. Dire consequences were inevitable.
Despite the voices of fear echoing around in my head and heart, I chose to attend the party, and I chose to drink. It’s likely the best, worst decision I’ve ever made.
Sunday, May 13th, 2013; Mother’s Day:
I woke up with my mother’s little Papillion, Sparky licking my face in my king-sized bed. I slowly turned my head and there was my mother next to me barely sleeping. Remorse, deep in my gut inevitably followed. Something awful had happened the night before, and I had no idea what it was. To wake up at 32 with your mother next to you in the bed was a pretty solid indicator of a train wreck the night before.
Something was strange that morning. I didn’t even try to figure out or replay the night before. I just felt the weight of self-awareness and it was objective, almost detached. Maybe I was a little numb, but as I observed the situation, I realized that I was not well, far from it. I saw me, helpless, ashamed and totally shattered in spirit and Self. There was neither compassion nor judgment in that moment. There was pure awareness, a sort of transcendence above or away from the humanness and into the realm of my Soul. Something beyond my human capacities was triggered into action.
Looking back, I’ve asked myself what was different about this morning as opposed to the countless other mornings when I woke up in pain, totally incumbered with regret, remorse and shame? I have no clue.
Still Sunday May 13th, 2013; An extraordinary day:
I’ve come back into my body.
After looking at my mother, eye to eye, I knew this was real, and it was time; time for change.
She said (in an I’m your mother, and you’re in trouble tone): “Get up. Brush your teeth. Then, come downstairs. We need to talk to you.”
While I felt like a 10-year-old about to be grounded, I knew I was a 32-year-old adult who deserved to be treated like a 10-year-old about to be punished.
Oddly, I wasn’t scared. I didn’t feel angry. I didn’t feel ashamed either. I didn’t feel. I just knew that this was not okay, nor I was not okay. It was simple and clear.
I dragged my weak and achy body out of bed to the bathroom. As I stood observing my disheveled self in the mirror, dark circles and smeared makeup bruising my eyes, so weak that I had a death-grip on the bathroom counter in order to hold myself up, something extraordinary happened. I felt a sensation flow through my body like a warm liquid. It was as if a switch was flipped on. Peace and calm ran through my body, blood and nervous system, head to toe, inside and out. There was a sense of hope that another way of being existed; a path more fluid, less resistant, open and true.
In that moment it happened. I willingly threw up a white flag and surrendered to all the years and lifetimes of pain, anger, fear, trauma, doubt, depression, anxiety, and struggle. Acceptance of all that ever was (good and bad) happened, like magic. An unconscious truce between my head and my heart (I say an unconscious truce because, in that moment, I’m not sure I would have named it a truce, but today, I consciously know that’s what happened). My head — the intellectual, ego me seeking to control, figure out, trouble-shoot and be brave and my heart — the infinite voice of pure love, potential, humility, and compassion.
By bridging the two, I accessed The Voice of My Soul.
That morning, in those extraordinary moments, I was not alone.
I remember unconsciously detaching and disassociating my consciousness from my physical body as I hovered around the room and carried on an indistinct dialogue with someone or some other consciousness/entity who was also in the room. This had happened before.
Sunday, April 11th, 1999; a heart-breaking morning:
The most notable time I disassociated, I was 18 and watching my father as he struggled to die in my parents’ bedroom. I watched as his body filled with fluid, and he made the motions of gasping for air, but no air flowed in or out of his lungs. The emergency medical technicians were clamoring around him, and I stood lifeless in the doorway; one foot on the bedroom carpet and the other on the hardwood floor in the hallway.
I remember the entire scene clearly. I next recall unconsciously detaching and disassociating my consciousness from my physical body (even though I was talking coherently and somberly to one of the EMTs, asking if they were going to put an intubation tube in my father). My consciousness floated outside my body to another corner of the room and had some sort of discussion with another entity or consciousness.
I later realized that these consciously, unconscious, discussions (both in my parents’ bedroom and in the bathroom) were going on between Me and Me. “Me” in the present moment (real-time) and a future version of “Me” that time-traveled to soothe my spirit and instill hope and meaning. In neither real-time occasion would I understand the out of body dialogues taking place, however, both times I distinctly remember knowing, with the greatest sense of conscious awareness that I was being counseled, comforted by my Soul.
I now know where my consciousness went in that yoga class during savasana on that Sunday morning in 2015. I went to that bathroom. Through an exchange of energy, I encouraged myself to always trust my body, listen to my mind, and bridge the gaps between my head and heart. I impressed upon myself that my purpose and meaning that was far beyond my current comprehension, however, I would make a difference in people’s lives through my intimate knowledge of pain and the ability to feel and express love. My gifts would later be expressed through my ability to turn dark, heavy emotions and traumas into light and even, love.
With my death grip on the bathroom counter that morning, my pain penetrated my will to live, and I felt more awake, alive and present than I had ever been.
May 14, 2013 is my sobriety date. The path has been anything but easy. It’s been a profound shift from living in a time loop of insanity to learning to live in the present moment with a greater sense of Self-awareness, capacity to see and experience pain and suffering as my greatest teachers and to know that all healing happens throughout multiple levels of consciousness.
On the morning of my father’s death, I was in active trauma and shock, and would not be able to understand or recognize that I was unconsciously incorporating the encouragement from my Soul for a very long time. I wasn’t ready, I had to go through more pain, sadness, anger and trauma to become willing to transcend my ego. I guess I’m just a slow learner.
I often get in touch with those places of immense pain and sadness, some of which go back to childhood. You see, when I choose to revisit that scared and traumatized 18-year-old girl, I reassure her that there is meaning in that awful moment. We “talk.” I use this word loosely, because we actually exchange information energetically or telepathically. We “talk” about the many heartaches, confusion, anger and shame that will follow this event and how it will dig a deep hole of resentment in her heart. We talk about how she will shut people out thinking she is protecting herself or her mother from more pain, while it will only cut deeper wounds. We talk about how smart she is, how capable she will be in the face of adversity and how her will to survive will work, until it won’t.
Most of all we talk about love and how her name, Amanda literally means “worthy of love.” She knows that by getting touch with her greatest sources of pain, she has realized her capacity to love.
