88. My Soul is Tender after Spain

BLOG 88—(present reflections tied to February 2001 journal entries about my healing journey and my return from presenting my novel in Spain)—I returned almost a month ago from Spain, from a book tour with my novel in Spanish, Niña Duende: Un Viaje del Espíritu, presented in four cities (Madrid, Murcia, Málaga, and Granada) and six venues. My journey to Spain was a homecoming, a return to the land that had shown me my soul. And this time I came with my novel, written while in the U.S., a kind of exile from that home.

My soul is tender now, not just because my gift as a writer and healer and as the person I am were beautifully received, but because, upon returning home to New Mexico, I now feel a truth I wrestled with almost 20 years ago, when healing from hip pain in New England.

Back then, while in pain and learning to listen to my soul’s voice, I wrote about feeling angry at being asked to “unmask” myself. I had worked with shamans from Ecuador, translating for them in events, and one had told me, ever so subtly, that maybe my whole journey of healing was about become soft again, about softening, which for me was a kind of “unmasking”.

Me as a little girl in Spain (front, left)

Twenty years ago, that meant becoming that little, vulnerable girl I had once been. “How dare you ask me to soften when I’ve worked so hard to gain the power, strength, and courage I have had to survive,” I wrote in my journal in 2001. “I feel the younger person I was didn’t have any power or value, and that all the power and value I had, I had to build from the ashes of my father’s blaze.”

It’s especially interesting reading those words of long ago, when today, a month since returning from Spain, I awoke from a dream that resonated with what I had written. I dreamed I was in high school again, and I had just come from Spain to the U.S. and felt extremely alone inside those school walls. In my dream, I felt what it had been like back then, entering into an environment that had been so harsh and foreign to me. And I woke up feeling the angst and trauma of it all, while also getting how I had coped back then by shutting down, becoming depressed, numb, and disconnected because it wasn’t safe to feel the pain of being a stranger among all these students I was meant to connect with, yet couldn’t. I got how a part of me had, as they say in the shamanic world, lost a part of my soul when I came to the U.S. and needed to survive.

As I lay in bed this morning, feeling all of this, I got so clearly that this is so much what happens to all of us. Every one of us experiences different traumas that we need to survive, and in order to do so, a part of us leaves, shuts down, disappears. We keep on going, appear normal to the outside world, but later, somewhere down the road, we pay the price, because a part of us is locked down, gone, and without this part, we are not whole. And then we hit some big wall in life—as I did with my injury and not being able to walk—and then the journey backwards, toward those moments in which we shut off and dissociate, begins. Because we must go back and retrieve those parts of us that we left somewhere else while we were busy surviving.

This morning, after my dream, I meditated, and I felt my soul’s tenderness. I really felt it. Because I got so clearly that all the places in our lives where we stop feeling, where we have to override our soul’s tenderness, our soul’s beautiful soft body that is as light and agile as the wind or a feather, need to be felt. We need to feel these moments where we weren’t really present, where we checked out, and we need to check back in, with immense compassion for our soul’s beauty and tenderness. We need to feel, and feel, and feel again, and less the fright we felt, and more that soft, vulnerable part of us that we shut down yet wants to be seen…that truly human, big-hearted part of us that we need with us so we can be our full soul-selves in our bodies. Then, and only then, can we experience true joy for living.

Ironically, when I came back from Spain this time, I met up with a woman who had been in my high school class in New Jersey, yet was now living in New Mexico. And what I discovered is that we had a lot in common and were very much on a similar spiritual path. Yet this time, unlike so many other times I had returned to the U.S. from Spain, I was able to feel that child I once had been who had gotten lost in the U.S.  I returned to New Mexico to make peace with that trauma I had experienced as a child when I had originally come to the U.S. from Spain. And now, that tenderness of my soul, that soft body, can more fully come home inside me.

I see now, that when I, or any of us, feel that sense of agitation, that disconnect in our lives, that it’s really a call to feel that tenderness that is our essence, and inside that space, to feel those parts of ourselves that were left behind and that long to return, to be seen, to be felt, to be whole within us again.

My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is a story of returning home to the earth inside and all around us. It’s now available in Spanish as Niña Duende: Un Viaje del Espiritu, that’s available on Amazon at Amazon Page or at www.michelleadam.net. It can be ordered at a local bookstore or directly from me (for those outside of the U.S.) as well. Also, watch a brief video on “duende”, “the spirit of the earth” in Spanish: https://youtu.be/FaRK7wOHcJU, and in English: YouTube Video

 

 

76. Spirit Walking, Spirit Waking

BLOG 76—(present reflections tied to August 2000 journal entries about my healing and novel writing journey)—Last Sunday I gave a talk at a healing fair where I asked people to inquire into who they really were. Who are we beyond what we do, think, or how we’ve learn to act? I invited listeners to travel through their life’s stories as if they were water that changes form over time. I wanted the audience to experience what it’s like to be with one’s life and self as a fluid, ever-changing life force, rather than a solid identity imprisoned by judgment and beliefs.

What inspired me to offer this kind of experience—to be something beyond our limited sense of self—was something I was introduced to more than twenty years ago. That was the first time I had gotten a taste of who I could be. Yet, like so many of us, I struggled for far too many years to unravel the past, the false sense of identities, fears, thoughts, emotions that made it impossible to be like water or anything fluid and life-changing.

When I lived in New England on the farm during my healing summer of 2000, I began to discover this place of limitlessness, of freedom, and flow. My dreams shifted from ones of fear and fright to teaching dreams of possibility. It seemed I often dreamed of a snake, and during one specific dream, I saw a serpent that tucked its body into the shell of a turtle. It drew itself close to me as a lover and began to nibble on my arm as if clearing the old, bit by bit. Slowly, like the turtle, and with immense attention to detail, this snake nibbled away at my past and made room for the person I truly was.

The snake helped clear the way for dreams that soon showed me the possibility of who I am, and we all are, as spirits in bodies. I began to dream much more consciously as I felt, for the first time, my spirit body walking outside of my physical body. Inside my dream, I could tell the difference between my physical and spirit body. With the latter, I was more present to sensations, to the sensory experiences rather than the mind. My mind was there to make sure my spirit was protected and monitored, and ultimately came back to my body, but as my spirit body I got out of my own way and felt the deliciousness of everything. There was no analysis, just pure experience, and I was able to shift my attention from my spirit body to my physical body whenever I needed to (or as some may say, return to my physical body).

During one dream, I traveled to my old neighborhood where I had lived as a child. Before doing so, I was asked where I was going, and I said that my body would stay in the room inside that dream, but my spirit would journey back to my childhood town. What happened next was amazing. I began walking inside the room to get momentum so I could fall back into the scene of my old neighborhood. As I gained speed, I lost balance and felt I was sliding down the floor, under the table, and back out. I witnessed that there were different patterns inside each state I was in, and that the one I was going into (my childhood town) was circular, like spirals moving to the center.

“Yet,” I wrote in my journal back then, “because I was traveling through two thick layers of reality, the effort or balance I needed was too great, and the circles broke into a checkered reality that lay behind the circular one.”

What I was shown back then during my dream was that we live in multiple realities at once and can access all of these. We can move from one reality to the next if we are centered enough, if we are able to maintain a certain equilibrium or speed. And these different realities show up like memory centers that are not in our physical reality. We travel to them through flight, through the body’s release of the ordinary.

Today, as I read again the lesson’s I learned during my time of stillness and healing, I am amazed at how timeless they are and apply to my life now. We run around so busy these days, with so many of us longing for a more peaceful and meaningful way of being on this earth. We work hard to connect with ourselves and each other, or to even know who we are inside this extremely material society.

What we sometimes forget inside all this noise, though, is that we are fluid like the rivers, oceans, rain, streams… we are ever-changing. Our spirit moves in and out of our body, travels and lives in multiple realities, and is much more powerful and life-affirming than we have been taught to understand. We are the change we long for because we are fluid, we are spirit, and we can manifest that which we long for on this earth.

My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is about embodying fully the spirit that we are. It’s available on Amazon at Amazon Page  or at www.michelleadam.net. It can be ordered at a local bookstore as well. Also, watch a brief video on “duende”, “the spirit of the earth”: YouTube Video

75. Beyond Fear

BLOG 75—(present reflections tied to August 2000 journal entries about my healing and novel writing journey)—I want to talk about fear. Yes, fear…the kind of fear that’s more than a feeling or moment. The kind that years ago, during my summer of healing in New England, gripped me, held my body like a fist I had to work so hard to open.

“I’m not feeling fear like a character in a story,” I wrote back in August of 2000 on the farm. “I am fear. It owns me and makes me dangerous to myself because I can’t separate my night dreams from my present reality.”

Prior to my New England summer of healing from physical pain, I would never have said that fear owned me. I was so busy running forward toward some promised land, some imagined future, that I had no idea of the fear and fright I carried in my body. It literally ran me, ran my life, and like so many of us, I hadn’t stopped long enough to truly listen to my body’s messages until that summer of 2000.

Then, during hours of healing work, dreams, and meditation, I discovered how paralyzed my soul, my essence, was by fear, by the simple act of being in this world. For some reason I was scared to feel, to embody my life, so I kept attempting to leave my body, running away from myself.

“I was an actor and observer in my dreams in the past,” I wrote back in 2000. “But now, in these situations (and dreams), I am awake and there is no beginning and end. There is just one long moment of life and death in my body, and I’m scared for my life.”

During that summer, I would wake up at night feeling unsafe in my own room. And the worst part of it was that the fright in my body was so strong I couldn’t tell the difference between dreams and reality. They were one of the same. And not knowing why I carried such fear made it even more difficult.

No matter how bad it got, though, I stayed with the nightmares, with my program of healing, discovering a world inside that had something dark and ominous to say. After all, I knew I had to experience the nightmares in order to move forward, to walk again, with grace, in this world.

So, bit by bit, I learned how to be here, on this earth, as I gardened, meditated, and discovered peace and quiet. I began healing so much that one night a crow came to visit me in my dreams. It rested, full-feathered and black, on a tree. In my dream, my housemate, Cassie, told me that “it (meaning the crow, which seemed to represent me) has finally recuperated from the torture and pain and now needs to be nurtured. Its wings are able to fly, but the crow needs to be watched, making sure it doesn’t hurt itself again.”

My dream was a clear sign that I was on the right path after almost four years of pain and little mobility since injuring myself in New Mexico. While I was relieved by the progress I had made, I soon had another challenge facing me. I was traveling away from my place of retreat in New England to see my family—my father, mother, sisters, aunts (who were visiting from Argentina), and my nephews—at a reunion in Upper New York State.

The last time I had been with everyone had been three years earlier. I had visited in crutches from my home in Oakland, California, and when I went I felt very little support. This time, I was worried I would attacked again for being weak and vulnerable. So, before traveling, I prayed hard, asked spirit, God, to give me the resilience I needed to not only survive my family reunion, but remain true and rooted in myself.

Committed to being real, and honoring and nurturing myself, even in a situation I feared would be cold and difficult, shifted everything during that family reunion. Rather than experience what I had during my last visit with family, I felt strong, clear, and, in some ways, supported. It wasn’t perfect, as few family reunions ever are, but I discovered that I had become a stronger person. Even one of my sisters acknowledged that it was nice to have me back—that I really seemed present in ways I had not been before.

So when I think back to all the fear I carried then, and how I had moved through it to become more fully myself, embodied and alive, I truly understand what it takes to be here on this earth. I get that sometimes we, as humans, walk around as souls afraid to be in our bodies. We don’t always know why we are afraid, or that we even are, but we don’t feel at home. We feel lost, stuck, paralyzed by life.

There is a place beyond fear, though, and that place is inside of us. Deep within. We must be with ourselves, understanding our shadow, the dark places that want to speak to us, and not run anymore. There is no place to go, no promised land, because we are the promised land we’ve run from for too long. We carry our home inside, beyond fear.

My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is about moving beyond fear and coming home. It’s available on Amazon at Amazon Page  or at www.michelleadam.net. It can be ordered at a local bookstore as well. Also, watch a brief video on “duende”, “the spirit of the earth”: YouTube Video

 

74. Be Still Inside Challenging Times

BLOG 74—(present reflections tied to August 2000 journal entries about my healing and novel writing journey)—A friend recently shared a profound dream with me: she was inside her house and animals began entering in droves, one after another. She became scared as they continued to come inside.

But then she saw a Lion—a wise, divine, and beautiful Lion drawing her away from her fear. Just ask for what you want, the Lion advised her, and she knew in that moment that she had to choose between her fear and the immense beauty and wisdom of the Lion. My friend took the Lion’s advice and her entire demeanor inside her dream changed. She faced the animals, and simply asked them, without fear or doubt, to leave. They did.

While my friend was deeply touched by the message of the dream, it seemed the energy of the Lion and its divine masculine way left its imprint on her soul. She was reminded, as we all need to be—especially in today’s challenging times—that we carry immense power and heart like the Sacred Lion, and that there is another way to be as we face personal challenges, natural disasters, climate change, and power-hungry patriarchal ways determined to kill us all with short-sighted greed.

When my friend shared her dream, I was surprised. It reminded me so much of my own dream of years ago, during the summer of 2000, when I lived in a farmhouse in New England, spending morning and nights healing, gardening, walking, meditating, and being with myself and God in nature. Just yesterday, I had begun writing about this dream, which, although devoid of a Lion, still held a similar message.

In that medicine dream of August, 2000, I was shown a future like today’s and given insight into how we, as humans, need to approach intense challenges in order to unravel the mess we’ve made.

In my dream, I was with Alberto Taxco, an Ecuadorian Shaman I had translated for only months earlier. He was offering healing to several women. As I watched him perform these healings, I noticed buildings falling down in the distance, and a fire raging through the hills of what seemed to be San Francisco. An earthquake was quickly destroying the entire city.

Within seconds, everyone began running through the streets, including Alberto Taxco and these women, with me trailing behind due to my injured hip. A helicopter soon appeared and lifted Alberto and the women into the sky as I stood there, the fire quickly approaching as buildings continued to fall.

What happened next was amazing. Rather than run, I stood still—absolutely still—and breathed the whole scene in front of me into my entire being. I seemed to surrender to it all, no longer needing to run, and instead became one with the fire. With this, the last building to fall did so only several feet away from me, followed by the fire, which suddenly stopped right before me.

Then, the scene within my dream changed to an earlier one, where I had learned about magic. I had been sitting watching a small canary-like bird and explaining to someone that if you can get the bird to surrender to you then you can carry the medicine of the bird with you. In this scene, the bird flew around me and I caught it in my hand without crushing it or holding it too long. It fluttered softly in my hands as it freely surrendered to me. I soon carried the bird’s magic because I no longer needed to chase it.

Carrying bird medicine, and knowing that I held within me the capacity to transform life, I returned to my dream of San Francisco. Those who had fled to the mountains of Ecuador with Alberto Taxco had returned. They were now in San Francisco and gorgeous stars filled the sky where the fire had earlier been.

When I pointed to the beauty that had replaced the disaster of merely minutes earlier, Alberto Taxco began to dance. He then approached me, and touched my right cheek ever so softly as a kind of ceremonial act, while, above us, two shooting stars fell from the sky onto the horizon of the earlier fire. Alberto smiled as he explained that I was the reason the shooting stars had fallen … that I had caused it.

I too smiled and woke up to write down my dream, and to remember, as I do now, telling this story, that there is power in standing still, in being the medicine that no longer runs from or fears disasters and messes of our lives, but absorbs, and holds a clear energy with what is in front of us so we can be the change agents that invite a new possibility of a star-filled night and shooting stars where once a fire may have raged…that in receiving and acknowledging with our hearts and whole beings what is in front of us, and no longer separating ourselves from the nature we are and are a part of, we can transform the chaos and unease of our lives.

Maybe in these challenging times, our place is to stand still and be of divine heart like the Lion… or be the wings of the bird, open, clear and knowing that, without doubt, we create our future, and that we, in our divine humanity, can be the future we envision.

My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is about awakening this divine knowing within. It’s available on Amazon at Amazon Page  or at www.michelleadam.net. It can be ordered at a local bookstore as well. Also, watch a brief video on “duende”, “the spirit of the earth”: YouTube Video

72. Vulnerable in a Red Dress

BLOG 72: (present reflections tied to July 2000 journal entries about my healing and novel-writing journey)—When we set out to heal something, deeply, fully, we can never—I mean, never—know what energies, what buried memories, reside in our unconscious, beneath layers upon layers of skin. Shed that skin is all we can do, and is all I could do, back at the New England farmhouse in the summer of 2000.

As I read through journals of those times, I am amazed at what I wrote and experienced. So full, so unedited, so raw and real, with a deep listening that reveals only that which I was ready to feel and hear at the time. Week after week, I went to my shamanic and energy healing sessions, and each time a new layer of skin peeled off to reveal what was next. Patience, listening, being with the earth, being still to feel the thunder that broke under layers of walls protecting my heart for so long. From moments of euphoria and awakening to fear and grief, it was all there as I healed.

I had a friend recently ask me, “When you see these difficult parts that show up, what do you do?” I answered, “nothing.” The old ways of fighting, cutting out the old, discarding it, ignoring it because it doesn’t serve our present world view or longing didn’t work for me back when I healed the worst part of my hip pain. What healed me, was being with it all—all the thunder, pain, and fear—becoming the nurturing mother that holds her child when he or she is in pain.

No judgment, just being with what is, with what resides in our psyche, our bodies that could be of this lifetime, or another, or some energy that maybe, just maybe, comes from the earth, from a collective psyche, working its pain through us. What matters is that we feel it, be with it, hold it, honor that this is what our being, at the deepest level, is trying to show us so we are no longer the fear that locks us down…so we are no longer a prisoner of the very cage we once created to protect us so long ago.

As I read through my journal, I come across an entry of a story I wrote from something I had dreamed, from a fright I held in my body. Why this fright was there, and where it originally came from, I can’t say. But it was there, strong, in my dreams. So I wrote out this fright as a story, so I could be with it and honor what my body spoke as I healed on the farm that summer of 2000. Maybe my story, and my willingness to share this, will inspire you, the reader, to be with your own dreams, experiences, or feelings with no judgment . .. just love.

Here’s a bit of my story, told through my dreams and body:

“There’s a young girl, no older than three, crowded into a corner of a room. It is dark. The only light on is the one in the kitchen, which casts a shadow over the backyard. But this room is bare of light. The girl hovers, holding herself, whispering a cry for help that she knows no one will hear, that she hopes no one will hear, but which soothes her for a moment into believing she is not alone.

“The door closes. There is a figure of a shadow walking toward her as she covers her body with her arms—all wrapped around her, hopelessly looking for a way out. The walls appear to narrow in as this man approaches. The man is the wall narrowing in. There is nowhere to hide. Make herself invisible is what she tries to do in her mind’s eye. If she works at it hard enough this man won’t see her, she convinces herself for a few moments. Yet he narrows in.

“Her body screams out, why, why me? It screams and screams, but she’s in no position to do anything about it. The screaming is a trembling, a question that moves through her, that one day will need to be answered. . .

“. . .Years later, she dances with this same man. And there she is, wearing this red dress and heals and knowing she needs to let her hair down, that she needs to give her female self a chance to show up. But it must have made her feel too vulnerable that day, with the dance and the dream. Something was trying to show its face, something she had never expected.”

My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is about freeing ourselves from the prison walls we’ve created to protect ourselves. It’s available on Amazon at Amazon Page  or at www.michelleadam.net. It can be ordered at a local bookstore as well. Also, watch a brief video on “duende”, “the spirit of the earth”: YouTube Video

70. Falling Apart in our Hands

BLOG 70: (reflections from July 2000 journal entries tied to my healing journey behind my novel)—The thunder rolled in, across the fields of high grass, along the old New England road outside my window. It arrived at where I sat, in front of my mesa, my Peruvian altar. Hail followed, and wind that soon turned into a vicious summer storm of late afternoon.

I had woken up late that day from a night of immense energy moving through me from yesterday’s energy healing session and was only able to fall asleep as the birds began to sing in early morning. When I did sleep, I sunk deep into dreams that unraveled the restlessness in my body.

In my dreams, I went up in a helicopter, and, at the same time, played with a helicopter in my hands. The little helicopter suddenly broke in my hands as the bigger one began descending, seemingly without engine. I prepared to save myself by rolling out of the helicopter as it touched the ground, before crashing. But it landed smoothly and I just walked out.

I observed the dream within the dream, realizing that there was no reason for me to fear crashing because the helicopter in my hand was not holding me—I was holding it and the helicopter holding me would land us both. I sensed that my own creation could break, but my life didn’t depend on my creation one bit as much as it did on the larger helicopter of life that is spirit, God, which guides us in our journey forward in the universe.

I felt a peace that came with knowing I could trust my own creations and choices in life to be held by the larger hand of spirit. Wasn’t life like that, inside my body, where a thunder rose from underneath my pain, to only reveal a peace thereafter?

As I sat meditating, listening to the storm, I surrendered to it. I allowed the storm to be my body releasing all that sought to hail and thunder to the surface. At one point, I even lay down and allowed my heart to release its unease, its restless, ancient, unnecessary creations through my feet. And then it happened. A silence—the eye of the storm—took over.

This soft, silence illuminated the darkness of my room lit by a few candles as light broke through the storm. Without seeing its source, I felt it filter through the clouds and trees, landing on my mesa, my heart, my room. It was as if the light were everywhere, even inside me, as an internal light took over. I sat with the stones of my mesa—yellow, red, jaguar—and inside the silence, gave my love to each one. The calm that entered my body was like none I had ever felt.

With windows closed and house empty of sound, the absolute stillness was breathtaking. It came as a surprise—a deafening stillness that had nowhere to go but be felt by my entire body. All the breathing and releasing of my pain, of the storm, had found a center of stillness. In riding the storm, I too had arrived at stillness as the light shone from within that had always been there. It just needed to be shaken up to release the anger and noise that had covered it up.

I truly understood, as in my dream, that there was peace in the center, in the place where God, where spirit resides, holding us, even as our creations fall apart in our hands.

My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is about awakening to spirit within. It’s available on Amazon at Amazon Page  or at www.michelleadam.net. It can be ordered at a local bookstore as well. Also, watch a brief video on “duende”, “the spirit of the earth”: YouTube Video

 

68. Shedding my Skin

BLOG 68: July, 2000—A month of swimming, sharing dinners, of poetry, prose, and rich dreams, had passed at Jean’s New Hampshire farmhouse.  During this time of healing, the rituals and practices remained the same. Every week, I visited Denise, my Reiki energy healer, and every morning, especially after sessions with her, I tracked my dreams in my journal. The day after each healing session, I’d feel extremely tender and weak, with my nervous system so intensely heightened that I could feel any subtle changes within me and all around me.

Those mornings I would move slowly, and always—without fail—sit on the earth, in the garden, weeding or tending to the vegetables and plants. The earth soothed me, as I let myself sink into her broad arms, and feel her rich soil sift through my hands. Then, after a day of gentle healing, I continued my walks in the woods, bowing to the trees, listening to my heart, feeling her blocks, her resistance to the beauty around, as I opened, opened, and let myself truly feel for the first time in my adult life. And each week, I walked more, further, as my heart and hips opened.

At thirty years old, I had already experienced almost four years of pain, which had brought me to this place, and I was ready for the change that awaited me. So, when nights arrived, and I visited the world of the unconscious, I invited the layers of my unfamiliar self to rise toward my skin, to show me what lay behind the tightness of my body’s pain. And with every energy healing session, I unwound more layers of pain.

The dreams were many. During one, I literally shit out a snake (seems the most direct way to say this!), and was guided to make sure it fully left my body. In the shamanic world, the snake carries a lot of symbolism, especially that of being able to shed its skin and release the past. I took my dream to be about that—about letting go. After that dream, I felt a surge of energy I had never felt before in my tailbone, and after others and intense healing sessions, I woke with tremendous energy in my pelvis, with great sexual energy moving down my legs and into my feet, and up toward my heart.

With all that was happening to me, and fun days with Jean and her family on the farm, it was ironic that one of my greatest fears was feeling empty. As I sat still, meditated, and was honest with my feelings, I realized that I had spent so many years fighting, so often struggling or battling hard to be someone, to prove myself, to protect myself from all that had hurt me, that in the end I was most afraid of being empty. I had come to identify myself as the pain, struggle, and fight I had so long lived, that I feared, as I let go of all these layers in my body, I would be left with no center, no I.

Even back then, as I wrote about this, I knew that this “I” that I had become accustomed to was my ego, was the person I had learned to be… not the one I truly was. Living on the farm and being with the earth in all her nurturing love, helped me let go of this old self, this pained way, and make room for a gentler, more giving self. As a friend had once said after undergoing a shamanic journey on behalf of my hip: this journey of pain was about learning to be my gentler self, of not needing to push forward with a scorching, yet unattended fire in the pelvis…to be this gentle love that I was, and yet had left behind, years ago, as a child in the fields of Spain. 

My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is about shedding our skin and returning to a gentler place connected to the earth. It’s available on Amazon at Amazon Page  or at www.michelleadam.net. It can be ordered at a local bookstore as well. Also, watch a brief video on “duende”, “the spirit of the earth”: YouTube Video

      

66. A Portal to Wholeness

BLOG 66: June, 2000—We’ve all traveled through portals to become whole at some point in our lives. Or so it seems, or seemed, during the summer of 2000, when I lived with Jean and her family on her New Hampshire farm, where I had committed a season to healing my hip.

When I refer to portals, I mean rites of passage, or some experience, often immensely challenging and horrific, which forces us to come face to face with our often unconscious fears. In making it through this rite of passage, we shed layers of all we are not, and make room for a new kind of freedom.

While this is what much of my life was about for five-plus years struggling to walk, one specific rite of passage occurred on a farm night in late June, after I had received one of various Reiki energy healing sessions. That night, when I had gone to bed, I couldn’t relax—let alone fall asleep—without being jolted awake by an overwhelming anxiety and fright residing in my hips and pelvis (in the area that I had originally injured while dancing years before).

When I finally fell asleep, it was to bird song and sunrise, and cars driving along the old New England road that lay several feet away from my second-story window. That’s when my nightmare began, revealing what was behind the fright I held in my pelvis.

When I sunk into deep sleep that early morning, I fell into an unsafe space. I was on guard, trying to protect myself, when a man approached me, and began to rape me from behind. I screamed and attempted to coax him away, to no avail. He continued and I screamed, until, sometime later, I was surrounded by a group of bearded men from India who,unlike the first man, were sitting there, encircling me in protection and support. They were angels of sorts.

What was unusual about this nightmare is that it didn’t feel like a dream. My entire body experienced the trauma and fright, as if it were occurring in that very room I was in. There was no distinction whatsoever between reality and dream, and my body relived a trauma I had never experienced—or, at least, not in this lifetime. Yet it was real, as real as the pain I had lived in my hips. 

It seemed the nightmare lasted for two or more days, although it was only for three to four hours. It was as if I were hallucinating or on a really bad drug trip. Toward the end of it, though, the building I was in began to collapse—its roof falling down upon me, and with it, hundreds of heavy stones, typical of medieval European monasteries. One of the bearded men surrounding me quickly rushed to my rescue, and, within seconds of a massive stone falling upon me, he pulled me out of the way toward safety.

I abruptly woke up. It must have been one o’clock by the time I sat up in bed, amazed to be alive. I would have died if it had not been for that one man who had saved my life. I was immensely grateful that I had made it to another day. To have been able to live through such a trauma in my body, and to make it to the other side, felt like I had survived one of the most challenging initiations ever. It was as if I had faced my own death and those hidden fears that had debilitated me for far too long.

To add to it, years later, when I was able to walk extensively, yet struggled with pain in my hips, an intuitive (psychic) woman recounted back to me the very nightmare I had lived. This woman, Jodie Foster (no, she was not the actress!), told me that my hip pain had been connected to a past life, and went on to describe an incident of that lifetime that, detail by detail, mirrored my dream. I had been a 17-year-old girl living in southern France, she later said, and I had been raped inside a monastery before dying.

I share this story today because that nightmare in late June of 2000 was one of several I experienced as I received energy healing, and slowly healed my hip. I had never expected energy healing to be so powerful—to open up my body’s consciousness, and help me awaken and release layers of pain that held back my life.

It was remarkable to have traveled through a portal, an initiation of sorts, in which invisible realities dictating my life and my path became visible. In doing so, my sense of what was real and possible in this world of healing and living expanded greatly so I could become a more conscious human being. I had made it through a nightmare, through a journey to other worlds inside me, so I could come home and be whole.

My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is about traveling through our nightmares to a place of renewed hope and joy. It’s available on Amazon at Amazon Page  or at www.michelleadam.net. It can be ordered at a local bookstore as well. Also, watch a brief video on “duende”, “the spirit of the earth”: YouTube 

 

50. Hand Outstretched to God: Time Carves us into Magic

BLOG 50: May 20, 1999—I was angry at my father inside my dream of almost 20 years ago. In that nighttime journey, I had discovered sculptures of Italy’s Renaissance artist Michelangelo below a pile of ice in a freezer. I was angry at my father for directing conversations toward rational conclusions that had nothing to do with the emotions present in the room. Discovering Michelangelo sculptures below frozen items in my dream seemed akin to discovering the magic, beauty, and life that lay below the frozen emotions of that time.

Back then, I carried a truth that lay smothered below a stoic, cold family dynamic where emotions were avoided at all costs. My truth was this: I loved my father so very much, and I also felt immense hurt and pain (including physical pain) in not being able to share this love with him or feel it from him, or from others in my family. We had learned to be tough and independent, and strong women (I am one of three sisters, and my mother), but we had never learned to express love and that aliveness, which, for me was who I really was and longed to be in this world. I was this sculpture at the bottom of a pile of ice, longing to be carved out into the magical being I was.

Today, the person I was, and the family I once had, has become—with time having carved magic out of stone—a Michelangelo sculpture, so alive, and life-affirming. Just last week, I was with my family—my father, my three sisters, my mother, and my father’s two sisters, Ingrid and Sisi, from Argentina—because my father has been very ill. We all came together to be with him as he lay on a hospital bed in the living room, too weak to stand or take care of himself anymore.

The days together were long, but rich, holding my father’s hands, feeding him, massaging him, and helping with the most mundane of tasks. With his two sisters, he sang songs of their childhood years in Argentina, and when it came to the Argentinean National Anthem, my father’s voice filled the room with a passion I had never heard before. For those moments, all of my father’s weakness and slurred speech left him inside a celebration of the life he had lived and shared. 

Unlike earlier times in his life, he reached out to each of us, shared his love, his gratitude, and pulled us toward him to receive and give love (there were other more challenging moments too!). And at one point, he asked my mother to lie on the narrow, hospital bed with him and they held each other. They made up for words and emotions unspoken during so many years past.

Then, my father asked us all to sit in a circle around him, as we did our best to prop him up at the side of his bed. He told us to ask him anything we needed to ask him. He would answer honestly with a clear “yes” or “no”, he said. There we were, five grown women with my father, trying to ask him questions that he felt were senseless (because we already knew the answers). What he wanted, it seemed, was to clear the air, for us to express any emotions or concerns we carried that needed to be spoken so he could go in peace knowing we were okay.

It’s as if my father wanted to melt any remaining ice covering these magical Michelangelo sculptures we had all become, and that he too had become. All the pain, all the years, all the wrestling that my father and I, and all of us had done, to become the beautiful God-creations and works of art we now were, had all been worth it. We were finally here to love and live so deeply together, present to life and death, and to each other, during this final leg of my father’s journey on earth.

*My novel Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit is about this journey of coming home to the magical creations we are. Check it out on Amazon. It’s currently at a Promotional Rate, but this ends soon: https://www.amazon.com/Child-Duende-Journey-Michelle-Adam/dp/099724710X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1474233011&sr=8-1&keywords=child+of+duende  or at www.michelleadam.net

43. There’s Another Way and It’s Now

BLOG 43: November, 1998—“Those guys there are not moving,” my father said to me in a dream I had while living in my parents’ New Jersey house, healing from immense hip pain and writing my novel. “They are just floating in space and will never get us home.”

I dreamed I was on a blanket—yes a blanket!—floating in outer space, far away from any sign of Earth. My mom was there, along with company men who seemed connected to the agri-corporation my father worked for. I asked these men how we could replenish the crops, and how much it would cost to buy the land back from them. They mentioned a price, which didn’t
sound so bad. Yet it felt like one of those deals that could trap you for a lifetime. I felt like a slave who was trying to buy her freedom (a freedom that was once mine but taken away), which would gradually get more and more expensive and impossible to have.

While I stood on a blanket in outer space, considering this deal, my father suddenly flew by on a jungle-gym-type structure, and pulled me away. Within seconds, I was flying at what seemed the speed of light, clinging onto this contraption. My father began to reassure me that everything would be alright. “Those guys there are not moving,” he said. “They are just floating in space and will never get us home.” He made it clear that they were trying to take us for a ride, and that is was possible to move much faster through space than these men could.

My father and I continued to speed through a kind of wind and stars, creating a bubble of sorts around us. My father told me we had all we needed, and that we didn’t need to buy seeds or land. Then, he showed me a sacred altar, a doorway of sorts, into who we, our family, were. We were holy people who carried a kind of power and protection that didn’t require money or the type of power we fight for on Earth. As he spoke, I understood the path home.

Back then, I logged my dream, not thinking much of it. But, years later, as I continued to write my novel, I came back to it as a revelation that magically wove into my personal and fictional story. And today, I return to this dream, and find its message applicable to our post-election climate.

In my dream, my father (who, ironically, worked for a corporation that helped farmers with their seeds become big-business enterprises that created systems of dependency) reminded me that we are more than these systems that run us—that we determine the fate and speed at which we travel through dimension and time. He had shown me how we can be trapped in a cycle of buying, of paying for that which is already ours.

When I reflect on the recent U.S. elections, I feel we are also being asked to awaken, to see that the corporate and political structures we considered “business as usual” are beginning to break down—that people are fed up, and seeking an alternative (even if that meant voting for an offensive, loose cannon like Donald Trump, or as radical a primary candidate as Bernie Sanders seemed to some).

If my dream has any relevance today, then maybe we are waking up to how blind we have been to our true freedom and power, and how we have been seeking and paying for that which has always been ours. Maybe this time of fear and uncertainty is a wake up call for us to take sacred action toward becoming the divine humans we are here to be. Maybe we are capable of traveling through space and time to discover a more divinely-guided way home.

*My recently-published novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, tells the story of freedom and power we as humans are capable of having. Check it out on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Child-Duende-Journey-Michelle-Adam/dp/099724710X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1474233011&sr=8-1&keywords=child+of+duende  or at www.michelleadam.net