95. Stop. Breathe. Grieve

BLOG 95—(present reflections tied to May 2001 journal entries about my healing journey)—I received a text, followed by the local news last Thursday evening: our New Mexico schools would close for three weeks.

As a teacher, I was relieved. After all, the schools, especially at this time of the year, had already become a cesspool of germs, and with the Corona Virus it was just one too many unknowns to deal with. But when I read the news of schools closing, I was hit with a much bigger emotion: GRIEF. I felt like I had tapped into a collective unconscious energy, and my own part in it.

The grief I felt was like a soft wind or water that filled in every crevice of my being that remained with me briefly. Then, like everyone else, I joined in the frenetic activities of hoarding food, medicine, and whatever else we needed to disappear into our shelters that would protect us from this germ war. And I called friends, checked the news, and kept abreast of the latest updates.

But the grief remained, and when I slowed down, I could feel it again. I felt the grief of the world, for those sick and dying, for those without the resources and friends to help them through this, for the emptiness we would feel, and for all of our lives forever altered. I sensed a kind of death, an end–for now–to all the running and running of this world. And inside this space, I  felt we would need to look at ourselves, and reflect on what this crazy modern-living paradigm has been all about.

Beyond this, I felt a deep grief for having lived a kind of isolation myself–like we are now–during the years when I was injured at the turn of the millennium. And the fear that came from not being able to walk—the fear of never being able to get up again. Of being so alone with my pain in a culture where people had forgotten what it was like to show up for one another. Back then, I was struck with a quote that Mother Teresa had given: “The most terrible poverty is loneliness and the feeling of being unloved.” I understood that sentiment so strongly. There wasn’t time for most people to check in, to see how I was, to have compassion for someone in a vulnerable place. And so, back then, 20 years ago, I stepped into my own cocoon, into my own aloneness, and reached out to God for answers that would help me walk again.

In 2001, I had written in my journal about how scared I had been to go to sleep after I received Reiki energy treatments from my shamanic teacher. Because, afterwards, I would have nightmares. The subconscious part of my body would rise up to the surface and tell its story woven into my cells from this lifetime and others. I would wake up, surprised to be alive, after nightmares that included frightening episodes of being unsafe and under attack.

The fear I held back then, which I imagine many feel now, is that the world would never be the same again. And it won’t. But, I discovered then, as I feel now, that the GRIEF, that energy below the fear, which I carried, was of having been on the treadmill of life far too long, and feeling an immense loss of soul and self from all of the going, going, going. And in this process of slowing down—whether then or now—there’s this immense grief of being with ourselves, of truly being with ourselves—with the pain, the nightmares, the stories our soul and body long to tell us, to guide us through, so we can come home again.

This grief of what we have left behind has been carried down from our ancestors. It’s a grief for the loneliness and aloneness, for the lack of human compassion and community, for having lost our way without a sense of place or true origin. It’s a GRIEF that longs to bring us home, inside the quiet, away from the noise that has distracted us too long and caused us to do such harm to ourselves and the planet. That’s the Grief that needs to cry itself back onto this precious earth, to fill her with our tears and love, so we can be home, in balance with her and this beautiful life we’ve been given. And this is the time.

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 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

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

63. Bowing in Grace

BLOG 63: June, 2000—Jean sat in her favorite chair in the kitchen by the screen of an open window.  She blew her cigarette smoke out past the tiny metal mesh, which temporarily protected her New England farmhouse from a few select mosquitoes of early summer. My new near-80-year-old poet and housemate seemed to love looking out the window, reflecting on her next poem, or maybe her many years married, and raising children, or her husband’s recent death.

As I stepped into the dimly lit kitchen, Jean looked up. She greeted me as I prepared to leave for a weekend of translating for an Ecuadorian Shaman who was visiting up north, in the White Mountain area. I had just arrived at her farmhouse several days earlier, but was now traveling two hours north to translate for an organization called Dream Change.  

When I arrived at the home where I’d work, the Ecuadorian Shaman, Alberto Taxo, sat in a corner of the room, legs crossed. He was a good-looking man with long black hair and graying beard. I greeted him, presented myself as the person who would be translating his Spanish to English. He nodded, smiled.

Later, he would tell me stories about growing up under the tutelage of his shaman father, and a lineage of healers along the Andes and Latin America. He’d tell me about his initiation at age 13, when was sent to the mountains to stay three days in a hole dug into the ground. One of those days, Taxo awoke with a snake coiled on his belly, at which point he described being fearless (since snakes can smell fear and attack). Instead he told the snake how beautiful it was and it uncoiled and slithered away. His journey as a shaman continued until his father’s death, which provoked grief and anger and two years of living in the streets and temporarily abandoning his healer’s path.

I loved listening to Taxo’s stories. After all, imagine missing out on your childhood, and, at an early age, being ask to carry forth a 500-year-old prophesy of your indigenous ancestors to prepare for an immense change for the earth and humanity, a “Pachacuti”, that would occur at this time in history. This was Taxo’s reality, combined with political work he did, demanding equal rights for Ecuador’s indigenous people.

Beyond his stories and teachings, what struck me most about Taxo was the manner in which he approached life. As I translated for him during various gatherings and healings, he displayed an immense amount of grace and presence. He seemed to bow to all of life—to the trees, to the animals, to the food he ate, to the people he passed—in a state of gratitude and listening. It was a practice I imagined he had learned early on in life—a practice that seemed a stark contrast to our modern-American “let’s move fast and get somewhere or something (and not listen much)” approach to life.

While Taxo was far from perfect (He seemed to have been seduced by modern Western culture in an unhealthy way), I returned to the farmhouse having learned a state of grace and gratitude that would help me heal my injury and heart.

From that weekend forth, I began to walk in the woods, a hundred feet at a time (or as far as I could go with my pain), and did so by bowing down to every tree, every flowering, breathing element in the forest. As I walked, I breathed the trees and their energy field into my heart, and, with every out breath, I bowed to the trees, greeting and honoring them. In doing this kind of mindfulness meditation, I soon discovered how blocked my heart was—how challenging it was for me to truly receive and feel the beauty around me. I also understood that if I continued this practice, I would feel the origins of my blocks and slowly get “out of my head” and open my heart, bit by bit, to feel.

Back then, Taxo’s example offered me my first important lesson of many that would help me walk again—from 50 feet to three miles by the end of the summer on Jean’s farm. It’s a lesson I’ve come back to, time and time again, in my life (even though I’ve gotten lost, plenty of times, in all the daily running around!).

This place of grace—this bowing down to and honoring life—still sits waiting for me, and all us, at all times. These days, I return to this place of grace in the dark of the night, when I sing an offering to the land, to my recently deceased father, and to those I love; when I bow in gratitude and love to my friend and lover; and when I sit still enough to feel this butterfly of transformative love for myself and all of life that sits fluttering in my heart. 

My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is about returning to this state of grace. 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

 

 

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