The Spaces in Between: where God Lives

BLOG 96—(present reflections tied to May 2001 journal entries about my healing journey)—Where does FEAR and TIGHTNESS come from? Why is it that back in 2001, I had so much tightness in my body that I could barely move without great pain? What had paralyzed my legs and the rest of me far beyond the groin-pull injury I had begun with?

As I lay on the floor in a movement and breath workshop I took back in 2001 (an ironic situation since it pained me to move after having injured myself in dance years earlier), I asked myself this very question. I could feel the deep sadness and helplessness I felt of carrying so much pain, and of my deep desire to feel supported yet not feeling supported. My shoulders were all tight, my neck, my jaw, and every part of me wanted so much to ground me from the pain of not being supported.

I saw back then that so much of my tightness came from not only a physical state of not feeling supported but an emotional one as well. How often do we tighten because we are afraid, afraid that if we don’t hold on, if we don’t push forward and remain strong, that there will be no one there to catch us, to hold us? So, we grip tight. We fear. We contract. And the pain worsens. We carry this old belief, as I did, from my childhood, that I was all alone, that I couldn’t afford to let go of the tightness I had built up in body and soul.

Yet, ironically, in order to heal, in order to let God, or that divine energy we call God, move through us, we actually have to let go, to soften our grip, and let life in. That’s when the creative flow and restoration returns. That’s when we feel the divine within us, and it is this very energy that holds us.

Back in 2001, when I took a workshop in Continuum Movement with its founder Emily Conrad (who helped people recover from paralysis), I discovered the amazing truth of this. Emily had told us, “Our organism is not bound by its form. It functions in form but is not bound by it. When our system can reorganize itself, it can remain healthy. Being able to let go and let new forms arise always brings us to a higher form.”

Today, as I look at what I had written down during her workshop, I am amazed at the immense wisdom she shared and how it holds so true during these co-vid days. “All movement is limited by fear,” she said, while making reference to the fact that, when we speed up or are stressed, our molecules have to come together (and inversely, when we slow down, there is space between the molecules that makes room for new things to come in). “You have to trust that the universe is within you,” she added.

           How ironic is it that we, as a world, have most recently been asked to slow down, or at least more than ever before? And why? So new life can come in? So God can come in? So we can come into balance after years of being so contracted and not feeling held in our rush to dominate and survive? And what is it that is possible now?

Lately, I’ve been meditating more than ever, and tapping into that abundance of the universe that exists inside and out. I’ve been making more space between the molecules inside me so I can feel life, God, that essence and energy that exist in the spaces between the molecules, between the in and out breath, and inside the empty, still points. It’s where I want to be and stay, because if I don’t, the tightness returns, the constriction blocks my heart from feeling held, and I feel separate from God and this amazing universe. I am no longer able to walk the unique path that I am here to walk.

So, if you find yourself contracting, fearing, separating from the magic of this world during these co-vid days, take a breath, feel that space of God between the molecules, the stars, of your body and soul, and return home. You are held. We are all held by this divine force that knows exactly how to move with ease and grace in the world during this time and at all times.

My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is a story of returning home to the earth inside and all around us (Help me reach a goal of selling 100 books in the month of July!). It’s now available in Spanish as Niña Duende: Un Viaje del Espiritu. The English version can be ordered on this Amazon Page  and in Spanish at https://www.amazon.com/dp/0997247193  (or visit www.michelleadam.net). My novel will soon be published by the Spanish publisher, Corona Borealis, and the Portuguese publisher, Edições Mahatma. 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”: YouTube Video

91. The Magic of Loving What Is

BLOG 91— (present reflections tied to March 2001 journal entries about my healing journey)—The sun paints the sky in bright pink, orange, and grey-blue streaks as it sets here in New Mexico. Our Sandia mountains reflect the evening like the inside of a watermelon. And on the weekends, after a week of finding play and joy in my work, my shared home, Casa de Duende, becomes a place of retreat with late breakfast on the patio, Friday night movies, and walks above fallen leaves with my love.

Years ago, in my late twenties, when I first came here to New Mexico, I was so much more restless than today. I arrived from the East Coast eager to connect spiritually and to experience magic…to see some apparition appear from behind a burning bush, or to discover I could fly, or at least soar as spirit to places beyond the physical and material limitations that were so rigidly held on the East Coast. I was ready for anything, as long as it was grandiose and magical. What happened though, was anything but this.

In my search for magic, I became broken. The greater my hunger for magic, for something outside of me to fill the emptiness inside, the more I broke. In my journal of March of 2001, I reflected on this search for magic, and how, five years prior to that, a strong sense of longing to feel life in a big way, to feel spirit, to feel alive, to fill up from the outside in, led to my injury. In my journal of that spring, I wrote, “I spent all my time chasing magic, when really what I wanted was to open my heart and feel. My heart was the universe and I wanted to be able to tune into my heart, to all that I had felt so numb toward.”

In that March, 2001 journal entry, I concluded that “If I believe my heart has a voice and something to express, then there will be magic in my life that will only grow.”

Five years before my journal entry, in my late twenties—more than 20 years ago—I was called to New Mexico, where I landed, uncertain as to why. What I do know is that back then I longed so desperately for that magic and spiritual connection—that connection to that sense of God I had no name for back then. Today, as I look around me, I see the magic in front of me. It’s in my heart, and my ability to feel and receive the beauty around me. It’s in watching the sunset, in sharing my life with my love and partner, in many walks and moments with friends, in the laughter, play, and celebration of our lives together.

As I watch this modern world and its elites wielding for more power and money, I’m saddened by how much we’ve neglected this life, our earth, and its magic that weaves a colorful fabric into our lives. In our need to fill up with more, to pour more into the emptiness, we allow the forests to burn, temperatures to rise, floods to clean away the excess of all that we live. We neglect the poor, those who have so little and need community and care, and in doing so, bit by bit, we destroy our common home.

Maybe opening our hearts and learning to feel and receive the beauty around us, and to love each other and what we have just a bit more, could be what saves us. Maybe, instead of looking for magic and more to fill the emptiness, we wake up to ourselves, to our beating hearts longing to feel again this love that is here and now.

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 was soon be published by the Spanish publisher Corona Borealis and the Portuguese publisher, Edições Mahatma. 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”: YouTube Video

87. Love is Receiving Grace

BLOG 87—(present reflections tied to February 2001 journal entries about my healing journey)—“Love is receiving the grace of God in whatever form it shows up and not being afraid to do so,” I wrote in my journal of early 2001 as I continued to heal from an injury that had become chronic. I had been in New Hampshire back then, dog sitting for friends so I could continue to heal my hips and become whole again.

Every day that winter, no matter the weather, I walked in the park along the beach, practicing a walking meditation that helped me open to the blocks that stopped me from being free from pain. Earlier that summer, while living on a farm, receiving Reiki energy work, and studying shamanism, I had been able to go from barely walking to walking three miles a day. Now, with winter covering the land with her ice and cold, I pushed on, committed to transforming my life while also writing my soul’s healing journey in what today has become my novel, Child of Duende (Niña Duende in its Spanish translation).

As part of the shaman’s path, I had learned to journey (what is described as lucid dreaming). During one of my journeys to heal from pain, I received guidance on my relationship with my father, which I had worked on for many years. In this journey, I was a little girl, crying, with immense pain in my chest. As a child in this journey, I had wanted so much to share a space of ritual with the earth with my father. Yet, as I tried to connect with the earth, with God in this form, I felt my father denying me this (and denying himself this). The message that came to me was that he had wanted me to need him, to be there for him, and to hold his pain, and that being in ritual with the land had no value.

As I received this guidance, I saw that as an empathic and sensitive person on this earth (and not aware at the time that I was this way), I had carried a deep sense of responsibility for my father’s happiness, and anyone else’s around me. And ironically, this responsibility blocked me from being the person I needed to be—to be in ritual with the land, to receive the give of love that is here for all of us to receive when we are willing and able to be ourselves.

“My feeling of responsibility for healing my father stopped me from receiving God, from receiving spirit,” I wrote in my journal at the time. These are unusual words to hear, since we are so often taught to be responsible for so much. Yet in taking on other people’s pain—that pain which then we carry inside us—we are blocked from living our true lives. In my journey, I could feel my heart heavy with responsibility and pain that was like black tar that needed to be removed (and was removed through that process).

This morning, I awoke feeling heaviness in my heart, as I have in the past days, because lately I have been there for others who are going through immense pain and struggle, and I have felt concerned. While I wouldn’t take away the gift of being there for those I love, I also felt the need today to come back to myself today and be in relationship with God. So, I opened my door to the snow-filled mountains and fields before me. I picked up my drum, called in the directions, and sang my gratitude to the earth and to all of life. I allowed my heart to open again to the gifts that are in my life and to return to the God within me.

In my singing, I received a great lesson today. I realized a great truth: that of gratitude being the doorway to return into balance and peace. I’ll always recall how a shamanic teacher I once had had said said that when difficult things happen—accidents, injuries, clumsiness, small foils—it’s because we need to come back into balance. And for him, as a Peruvian shaman, it meant creating a Despacho, which, in the mountains of Peru, is a gift offering to spirit to give thanks to all of life that we have been given (and not concentrate on what we don’t have).

This morning, I could feel the truth in this—and not from a logical place of mind, but from within my body. Before singing, I had felt heavy and sad…akin to an emptiness that wanted to feed off of something to feel better, to fill up. Yet, when I sat still enough and then sang, I could feel that this heaviness and sadness were my disconnect from source (and carrying responsibilities that weren’t mine) and it was a whole lot of gratitude that needed to be expressed (not just in words or felt, but sang out as a gift that only humans can give in this way to spirit—to that from which all this life springs).

I felt today that in gratitude we receive and really feel the gifts, and in giving back to source our song, this heaviness inside can also transform to light. I saw that in this culture that feeds so much on life, consuming more and more to feel satiated and feed the addiction of our emptiness, we need to give back, to give back in gratitude for our lives so we can make more room inside ourselves to receive what we are blessed to have (and to let go of being responsible for that which is not ours to carry).

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”: YouTube Video

85. Love’s Responsibility

BLOG 85—(present reflections tied to February 2001 journal entries about my healing journey)—Have you ever traveled deep into your pain, only to discover it wasn’t yours?…only to discover it was love, an immense love you carried for another so fully that you were carrying their pain inside you?

Back in New England, in the winter of 2001, I embarked on a shamanic journey—a lucid dreaming into my body in search of answers—so I could clear layers of pain I had held in my body since injuring myself years earlier. My friend, Carl Hyatt, helped and guided me with this process that revealed such important teachings that ironically resurfaced again here in New Mexico. Isn’t it always like that—life as the spiral of a tree trunk that returns to the same place we’ve been, but further along in time and maturity?

In my Shamanic Journey in the winter of 2001, I chose to travel back to Spain, to the fields that raised me outside of Madrid. I was about eight back then, the same age as the girl, Duende, of my novel, Child of Duende. My intention was to connect with God and spirit as I had done as a child then.

In my journey, the little girl I had been, Michi, skipped up the road toward the field where I awaited her. She was happy, with her hair pulled back like a Native American girl. She was glad to see me. “All right, show me God!” she demanded in the same way she had asked of the fields and skies of Spain back then.

In response to her request, one hundred or more spirits popped out of all the reeds and light-colored grass of the field. The spirits were holding hands, dancing in circles, and creating ceremony in the space. Yet, Michi folded her arms in resistance, resilience, as if not convinced. She could see the spirits, but then said, “So, what’s the big deal? What’s next?”

As I got closer to her, wondering what was wrong, she took my hands and danced a kind of “Ring around the Rosie” game. She wanted to dance with me and her father (my father!). She didn’t want to be alone. She felt powerless and alone without him. She felt that being in the field had no value, that her need to connect with God had no connection with her family and father…that this part of her was not honored, seen, or validated.

In the journey, Michi wanted validation from her father. She felt this part of her that didn’t belong, that was misplaced, belonging to another family. She felt like something was wrong with her in wanting to be in this field this way, in wanting to connect with God, like there was no room for it in her life. She wanted her father to witness this ritual because her father was connected to these rituals, but denied it in her and intentionally cut her off from this part of herself. He was jealous, angry, and afraid that she wouldn’t need him and be with him if she were allowed to be connected to this ritual of the land. More than anything, he was determined to not let her connect to God, to her tribe, to the land, to her power, to her heart.

As Carl and I continued on this Shamanic Journey, something amazing happened, though. I cried a lot, felt the weight that this little girl I had once been carried. Little Michi was determined to have her father by her side, to share her heart with him, but most of all, to carry his pain for him. Her love was so strong that she was willing to die for him. She was attached to her father, to healing his pain and unhappiness because she wanted to be reminded of her capacity to love in the only relationship that seemed to matter. She felt her reason for living was to heal him, to be there for him…that she belonged to him and not herself.

Little Michi was also carrying an immense responsibility that weighed her down and scared her. She felt overwhelm from the weight of so much responsibility a soul like her felt she needed to carry. She didn’t understand why she had to do so much work. She carried a lot of dark energy that her father had not wanted to give up in order to believe in life again.

As this journey continued, I called in help from spirit. I asked Jesus to help the little girl that was me, and so he arrived and held her in his lap. He told her that she was afraid of being responsible for everything, and that “responsibility is not a heavy thing. It’s light. It’s clean (unlike the weight she was carrying). It was of the heart.”

As Jesus held little Michi, I asked White Buffalo Calf woman, a sacred Lakota woman, to clear the weight from this pain and responsibility I had carried in my heart. She sucked out the responsibility, which was nasty and black like tar, from my chest. She was like eagle and raven sucking out death. And ironically, as she did so, I felt scared, wondering who I was…what was left of me, where my spirit was when the layers of confused self, of attachment and pain I’d so gotten used to, left me.

“Don’t always feel you need to be engaged all the time,” White Buffalo Calf Woman said. “It’s okay to be empty. You need to be empty now in order to receive God. God is here.” She went on to explain that my feeling of responsibility for healing my father stopped me from receiving God, receiving Spirit. That love was receiving the grace of God in whatever form it showed up and not being afraid.”

This journey of so long ago included far more than what I’ve shared. But what’s especially remarkable is that in these past two weeks—during the time in which I had an amazing turnout and strong soulful response to my Storytelling and Flamenco work in Taos, NM (and I felt the gifts of my life’s work echoing back to me—I’ve had pain emerge from my right shoulder (my area of greatest strength). As I’ve been healing my shoulder with my healer Liz Blasingame—opening up my entire body and heart in new ways—I’ve had this immense grief and tiredness of a lifetime (or many lifetimes) come up.

As I’ve done this, Liz has helped me let go of the pain I’ve been carrying in my body that is not mine—to return it to its origin so I can open my heart and truly be free of pain, free to love. Through this process, I’ve felt my shoulder open, my heart open, and I’ve come to terms with how much I’ve really carried that is not mine. Like so many people who are empathic, I’ve come to understand that I’ve absorbed so much pain of the world, rather than feeling it and letting it go…that I’ve taken on the responsibility of the world like a bad habit that has crippled me and made it hard to connect with God, with this bright spirit within me.

During these past days of hot summer in New Mexico, I’ve found myself becoming more still than ever before. I’ve been feeling my soul’s home inside my body, letting my breath and light move through me, while letting go of the weight of the world that is not mine. I’m beginning to trust in a new way…trust myself, trust God, and trust this empty, still place inside me that is home, that is life moving through me with ease.

My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is my story that rose from my journey of healing and from the lips of the earth and my ancestors. 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

83. Reflections on Wind Horse

BLOG 83—(present reflections tied to December 2000 journal entries about my healing journey)—Tonight the wind danced to chimes on the vine-covered tree outside my house, and a horse released wild cries as its front legs kicked defiantly into the air. I walked outside to record the sounds of what I later called “wind horse.”

Tonight, after a month of absence, I also returned to the stories of my healing journal of 18 years ago. In my writing, the past becomes present, and it teaches me what I felt inside the wind, inside love, in living what almost two decades ago I experienced from pain, stillness, and returning to self, to that place of “God” that Deepak Chopra described as “eternal consciousness” that is inside us and everywhere. Tonight, I’ve decided to share a few simple quotes, moments of wisdom, which came to be back then about acceptance, love, and peace.

May your journey through spring, and her season of change carried by the wind, be one of peace, love, and acceptance as I share a few words here:

 “It is my loving that heals, and my direct connection through my heart to God—to the God within everything—that heals. No one needs to become big for me to be healed; I don’t need to be small to heal; I just need to be alive, to be fearless in my heart of my capacity to love and connect with all around me.”

“The sacred union between two beings is the deepest and truest expression of God.”

“Transformation is the acceptance of our place, our home, our great gift of life. It is the acceptance of all the parts that make this life balanced and whole.”

“We are the dance and the dancers. We are the source and the destination.”

“Peace is that place in the heart where all the pieces of ourselves are held together with love… that place in the mind where all the pieces are held together with clarity… that place in the belly where are the pieces are held together in fullness. It is a place of understanding.”

My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is my story that rose from my journey of healing and from the lips of the earth and my ancestors. 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

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

 

69. A Container for Spirit

BLOG 69: (reflections from July 2000 journal entries tied to my healing journey)—We stood around the fire under the full moon in a cleared out field of high grasses in New Hampshire. Denise, my Reiki healer and shamanic teacher, placed a stick into the fire and then cleansed the front and back of my hips with it, before blowing Peruvian Agua de Florida, a lavender, rose-water musk, on the same area. Then, a group of us called in the directions, sang, and began ceremony.

Since moving from New Jersey to the farmhouse in New Hampshire in early June, I partook in full moon fires like these. They were based on Denise’s teachings passed down to her from her teacher Alberto Villoldo who had learned from indigenous Peruvian medicine men and women. With every fire, there was a time of release, of throwing out the old, into the fire, and then renewing ourselves and our chakras (energy centers) with the spirit of the fire. This tradition of cleansing and renewal was tied to native traditions that have long believed that the full moon is a time of high energy when the veil between the seen and unseen world is thinnest (and therefore prayers are most powerful).

Partaking in his ritual in a manner I had never done earlier in life was special for me (after all, how many of us in our modern lives take time to consciously let go and cleanse ourselves of the past every month?). It helped me intensify my intentions with my healing process, and to do so in a manner supported by community and spirit. Being in ceremony, and healing with nature on the farm, also opened a space for me to be with God and my life’s call, which had followed me since I was eight years old in Spain.

As the summer rolled on, and I began to heal, I reflected on this life’s call in relationship to my healing journey. I wrote in my journal: “I feel that all of my life the spirit of things, what which is hidden and unseen for many of us, has always been more important to me than the material, than the concrete in front of me. I have felt frustrated with my longing to live on this earth in a manner I have known to be true but have not actualized. I’ve lived this battle within myself, between spirit and matter—as spirit contained within matter.”

My writing continued as I suddenly became aware of a fear that lay within me and my healing process: “I feel a fear and anger at the possibility that I could heal my hips, and yet return to this same hunger that brought me here—this hunger that feels I will be without a place and way to manifest this fire within that needs to dance and be sensual. That the north—the way of the eagle—which has felt suffocating like the tightness in my hips, will have no room for me, when all I want is to be in a culture that dances with fire, that knows and manifests magic and sensuality with ease.”

So, here I was, in New England, finally beginning to heal my hips as I had dreamed of doing for years, and I was afraid…afraid of succeeding.

But, as I read my journal now, almost twenty years later, it makes sense. After all, all of my life I had longed to live the fullness of the spirit I felt inside, yet saw no place for. All of my life, I had felt a different call of spirit, of creative passion, than that which I saw around me. So it seemed natural, there in the northeast, in New England, to suddenly struggle with the idea of healing, if, in healing, I still could not find home.

As I reflect on this today, my earlier words remind me of a comment my teacher, Martin Prechtel, made about healing. He pointed out that there is no use healing ourselves if we just throw ourselves back into the culture that injured us to begin with. So, with my hip, back then, and today, I see that I was afraid, because I had yet to find a culture, a way of being with spirit and life, which I could step into as I became whole. And, I had no understanding of how to become the culture, this container of life, which could one day hold the beauty and fullness of my spirit that I could dance into the world.

My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is about awakening this spirit within and finding 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

 

 

62. Unchartered Pilgrimage of the Heart

BLOG 62: June, 2000—I arrived with my friends Carl and Molly at the colonial farmhouse that would be my summer home—my three months with God, the earth, and my broken body and spirit. The old, dark brown house stood only inches away from the cracked, New England road that epitomized what I loved about this part of the country. And on either side of the house were open fields, high wheat grasses on one end, and a large lawn and soon-to-be-tilled garden on the other.

Jean, the owner of this summer house, appeared by the driveway to greet us. Almost 80 years old with formal blazer, short grey hair, and cigarette in hand, she reminded me of the great novelist and friend of Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein. Only thing was that Jean, a poet herself and one of the first women to establish a publishing house for women poets, carried an unusual combination of Boston formality and an unusual earthy “I don’t give a damn what anyone thinks about me” look.

My eyes were drawn to her cigarette as she led my friends and I into the old farmhouse that seemed rather dark despite two floors of rooms with ample windows. Who was this woman I would live with and help out during my summer of healing? I asked myself.

Jean Pedrick (A photo I took long ago. Beauty!) 

After all, we had never met—only spoke by phone before her son and I met in New York City to scope each other out and make sure his mother and I would be a good fit. I had never thought about there being cigarette smoke wafting up along dark walls filled with ghost-like photographs of times gone by until it reached the room I’d live in or the ancient bed made of actual horse hair I’d sleep on!

I remember looking out the window, toward the road it faced, where my friends drove away after helping me unpack the few items I had. It felt as if my parents had just dropped me off at camp (not that I had experienced this before in my life!) and I was alone in a dark house with a stranger who smoked and seemed rather aloof as Bostonians could be.

I feared I had made a mistake in trusting divine grace to bring me here, yet I eventually fell asleep to the sweet sound of cicadas surrounding the house and trees. The weeks to follow were the beginning of magic, though, of discovering what’s possible when we show up with clear prayer and intention, and leave the rest up to God. Jean, who died several years later, would become one of numerous angels offering me retreat from the chains of pain I had carried for far too long.

Since those days with Jean and her family, I’ve learned that the grace of God shows her face when we finally surrender and hand over the reins of our limited longing—and when we’re truly ready to receive the gift that awaits us. The form it comes in can be deceiving—as Jean did with cigarette in hand and serious disposition—but it comes, ready to give of itself to the unchartered pilgrimage of our soul.

About a month ago from today, after arriving back to New Mexico from Buenos Aires and our family’s honoring of my recently-deceased father’s life, I met another angel of sorts in man’s clothing. I met an Argentinean man who appeared to me without cigarette in hand :), but with an embracing heart, passion, and laughter. Together we exchanged mystical love poems; shared—with my father’s spirit, it seemed—Argentinean songs he and I both loved; held communion on a moon-filled mesa that whispered of the infinite until early morning; and danced and laughed inside the light-filled rhythm of our newly-discovered bubble.

It’s not every day that life’s holy orchestra offers a song like this one. But it did. It came quickly, weaving these otherworldly energies with mundane realities that soon introduced their challenges to this budding relationship. It forced me to ask myself how to navigate this place where the divine and physical intersect…where tension and beauty lie and give us choice on how to proceed?

This past week, during which time I wrote less, and struggled with overwhelm and poor health, I battled this reality of receiving divine grace within the limitations of this earth journey. And while I tried to contemplate, analyze, feel, reflect, and be with the tension that built knots inside my heart and that of this relationship (quite a different energy from the heart-opening magic of weeks prior), it seemed to only create more tension, more struggle.

But today, as a double rainbow spread across the sky, and stayed with me long enough to expand my heart’s awe, I felt what I needed to do. As with Jean and her cigarette, dark house, and initial formal and cold demeanor, there was more to this gift than I could see. Much more. What if, when we’ve given up trying to figure things out, and we’ve given up our limited, frightened expectations, we actually hand it over to God, to spirit—this place from which the gift originated? What if, in this case, as in the past, I give my heart much needed space and peace of mind to listen, feel, and be with what this beloved gift is here to offer—and what I am here to receive—on my unchartered pilgrimage of the soul?

My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is also about an unchartered pilgrimage of the heart. It is available on Amazon at Amazon Page  or at www.michelleadam.net. Also, watch a brief video on “duende”, “the spirit of the earth”: YouTube Video

 

 

 

       

61. Divine Order Inside the Dark

BLOG 61: May, 2000—There is Divine Order, I say, with a capital “D” and “O”. I’ve come to witness this clearly during my lifetime. Call it Nature. Call it the Law of Attraction. Call it this world-wide web of energies that makes up this matrix we call life. There are laws that govern life that are beyond that which our rational minds can fathom or express.

During my past blog, I shared a story of what I called “divine magic.” I had requested a place to live in New England where I could heal from years of hip pain, and to my surprise my wish was granted within one day of making it. I needed to move from my parent’s home in New Jersey and go into retreat mode at little to no cost, and the perfect place quickly appeared. That’s divine order…Law of Attraction…whatever you want to call it.

While this kind of magic is the type we all wish for, there’s another reality that plays out in our lives—that is also part of this divine order—which I sense few people really pay attention to. It’s what we call darkness, or unseen energies that may confuse our lives and challenge our notion of reality. It’s what, in today’s world of polarization and duality, we choose to label as the enemy or unwanted, rather than seeing its divine origin and place in our lives.

Back in the Spring of 2000, while I still lived with my parents—and before moving up to New Hampshire to my new home—I had an experience that taught me about darker energies that can hold us back in our lives if we don’t pay attention to them. I was up one night watching the movie, “The Sixth Sense,” the story of a young boy who saw ghosts who were stuck between this physical reality and that of the spirit world beyond this plane (and who carried some kind of pain or unresolved issue during this lifetime that prevented them from leaving this earth plane).

Maybe you’ve seen this movie. This boy with a sixth sense was extremely compassionate and sensitive, and because of this ghosts haunted him, asking him to help them, to release them from their hell. By the time the movie came to an end, I was crying furiously. Why? Because something in me sensed strongly that I was like this boy, that I carried with me one of these ghosts, one that clung onto me during my time of weakness and debilitation. I had been open and vulnerable to outside energies that didn’t serve me, but that needed someone to help them. The result was that I was extremely tired for a long time, and didn’t know why.

In the world of shamans and medicine men, these “lost” energies are understood in the same way a doctor understands that our heart pumps blood. So, intuitively I called up my shamanic teacher (I had never had experiences with this before), and she referred me to a shaman who could help me in New York City.

Not knowing what to expect, I went to this NY shaman and told her what I suspected. Within an hour of working with her, I could suddenly feel an actual energy—the shape of a tall, narrow, older man—leave my body, out my crown. It was the strangest, most real experience I had ever had. Until that day, I would never have believed in such a thing as ghosts clinging onto people and draining them of their energies. I too would have thought this was crazy.

I returned home, and felt I could access myself more easily, experience a sense of peace and calm I hadn’t felt in a while. I also felt compassion for this ghost that had clung onto me, because I knew that he had been helped, that his soul could travel home, so to speak.

My experience back then, and today, is that this world we call “the unseen world,” this place we close our eyes to in fear, is merely energy. It’s an energy that needs to be addressed with compassion and understanding in order for us to be healthy and whole. It is an energy that comes from divine love that has lost its way inside a Divine Order, inside of its true nature that calls it back to source, to love. I too was lost and needed to find my way back to this divine order, as was this ghost, this spirit, which clung onto me.

Today, after years of learning to clear old energies and dance with these subtler, unseen energies of life, I’ve been able to open more fully to love and this divine place that’s here for us to live. I’ve not had to run anymore from my shadow, or the shadow of the world, because I can see it for what it is: love.

Just the other night, I walked with a precious companion onto the desert mesa lit up by an almost-full, pregnant moon. We created sacred space under grandmother’s watchful gaze, blessed the divine love that sought a place to be sung into life, and we too felt it—this place of Divine Order where love returns and all of life becomes a magical, timeless dance of God, the infinite.

I realize now, though, that if it had not been for those darker energies, those places I had to look at, be with, help, that had lost their way, I would never have experienced what I did on the mesa—that divine love that is everywhere, waiting for us to sing it into life.

My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, which is about returning home to this divine love, is available on Amazon at Amazon Page  or at www.michelleadam.net. Also, watch a brief video on “duende”, “the spirit of the earth”: YouTube Video