May - We All Have Wings

I placed my order for vibrant health and well-being with the Universe. It was in the form of an eight-page “Living Vision” homework assignment detailing every aspect of my glowing health that I could think of – hair, skin, vision, exercise, flexibility, digestion, everything. I turned it in Friday night of the May weekend.

Chaos ensued.

It actually all started going to hell earlier that week. During a Rolfing session, as the therapist worked on my left hip, a problem area for me for years, I noticed tears sliding down my cheeks and what felt like an old sadness surfacing. In my mind I heard the words "I can't hold it all together anymore." What did that mean? Where was this coming from? I didn't know.

Was this a pattern for me? The insight had felt old, like it had been stored in my hip for decades. Back in third grade, my sadness had given me the illusion of holding my world together. Feeling sad then was a better alternative than falling all apart and splintering into a million shards of glass. On Saturday, I further explored my issue with my hip, which had begun in seventh grade. Also in seventh grade my group of friends had one day decided to cast me out from the group and completely ignored me after lunch at school. I felt like I couldn't let them see me fall apart, that I had to hold myself together to save face. The pattern was becoming clear to me.

Still I resisted the notion that this sentiment had anything to do with my current life. My life is great, I stubbornly reminded myslef. For the last couple of months, I had been consciously incorporating intuition into my everyday life. I was eating intuitively, exercising intuitively, sometimes even driving intuitively - letting myself feel to right way to go to get to a new destination. But I realized that I had been unconsciously resisting all this intuition even as I was embracing it. I recognized that every day I make up and follow arbitrary rules and arbitrary deadlines that confine me and stress me out. Make sure you eat some protein at each meal, if you run on Monday then you have to run on Wednesday and Friday, not Tuesday or Saturday . . . I wrote in my journal that I want to just relax and allow things to be how they are and let them work themselves out. Then I got it: this is one way that I'm trying to hold it all together now. I'm trying to control the outcome of everything with my mind. I'm not letting go and following my intuition, I'm just "trying" to. And, as Yoda said, "There is no try, there is only do or not do." I was not doing. I was holding on.

Then Ron delivered an eloquent lecture about spiritual evolution. He said that by being at USM, you are demonstrating an intention to grow spiritually. And as you evolve spiritually, you will hit a barrier. With that will come the thought process that says "I can figure this out." Once you realize you can't figure it out, you come to surrender. You will still respond to your world, to your barrier, to fix the situation, but you will do it from a different place - no longer coming from the ego thinking, you will come from a place of surrender inside yourself. By being called upon to move up in spiritual evolution, your perspective changes and your interpretation changes. You give up the idea that it's you doing it when it's really spirit doing it.

Intriguing, but these were just words to me until Sunday morning. I woke up after a restless night's sleep to realize that I had a kidney stone. No problem, I thought to myself, I have lots of tools. I can take care of this. And I proceeded to do an hour of EFT on myself and I did Reiki on my back all morning in class. I talked to a classmate who is studying to be a Science of Mind minister. I applied every tool I had in my toolbox but nothing helped. The waves of pain increased in frequency and severity throughout the day. At lunch, a friend shared his experience with recently reaching a place of surrender on his journey. But before he could do that, everything had come to a head. His was a "it's gonna get worse before it betters" kind of story.

And everything did get worse for me. I felt helpless. Powerless. Small, no, tiny and vulnerable. I was ready to surrender. To anything, to anybody, as long as this pain would stop. My shell was cracking. The illusion was disintegrating. I was not in charge. I could no longer ignore the chronic, little symptoms in my body. They were coalescing into big, in-your-face problems. They demanded attention.

I made it through my crisis and got home to Chico late Monday night. I had probably passed a stone sometime that day because the pain had disappeared but around 11pm, I felt the familiar waves of pain return. This was not over. I needed to do something about this. I was at the limit of my skills, knowledge and ability and finally decided to go to a doctor. I was at the place of surrender that Ron had talked about on Saturday. I had reached my barrier. I couldn't hold it all together any longer. I was having spiritual growing pains that were played out through my physical body.

I remembered what Mary had said at the beginning of the year: USM is a place for your issues to arise to be healed for the last time. Friday night I had placed my order and everything that was standing between me and vibrant, glowing, fantastic health was surfacing to be healed. If I am the only one responsible for my experience then I can learn from everything that happens. Although this was a physical issue, it was also a spiritual opportunity. And it was a whopper. I surrendered to the journey that I am on.

As Ron had said in his lecture, my perspective shifted with my surrender. I had to take care of myself physically, but now I was doing it from a new perspective of love and understanding and creating health, rather than irritation and resentment at the intrusion into my life, and just getting by.

My surrender was just beginning, though, and there were deeper depths to reach. I spent the week after I got home just barely going through the motions of my life, not really caring about anything. I questioned everything, every assumption I had ever made. I reached a level of honesty with myself that I never would have reached before. I admitted to myself where things weren't working in my life - things that I had secretly known but wouldn't even articulate to myself. I'd hit rock bottom and the only place to go was honesty.

Today as I write this three weeks later, I see this journey as a painful metamorphosis. I had been living within an invisible shell made of the beliefs and judgments that I had created in childhood and reinforced by my daily rules and restrictions. I have to break out, but now that the shell has cracked, it is a long, slow, painful process as the broken shards poke and cut me on their way to the ground.

A friend shared a quote from Anais Nin with me that perfectly describes my past few weeks: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful that the risk to blossom."

I'm choosing to blossom. Like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, I, too, must push against my self-created shell and challenge my spiritual muscles in order to fly. I'm not flying yet, but I am on my journey.

April: Self-Judgment and Self-Forgiveness

It's Wednesday April 7 and I'm crying as I drive down Highway 32 to pick Lexi up at school. Not sobbing or anything, just silent tears sliding down my face. I have a vague sense that I did something really, really wrong but I don't know what it is and I feel like damaged goods. I can't love and accept myself, I have this terrible flaw. This is the third time this week that I've found myself feeling this way.

I flash back to my first weekend at USM: a woman was trying to share some awful thing that she had done that she wanted to forgive herself for, but she couldn't say the words out loud. Ron, one of our teachers, gently told her that there was nothing that she could not say here. He was so gentle and accepting in the way he spoke with her that I feel the tears well up inside me again. I want this kind of unconditional love and acceptance even though I'm afraid that I've done something terrible in the past.

I get my opportunity on Sunday afternoon. It's the third day of our weekend class and we arrange ourselves into groups of three to practice counseling. As I start talking, I mention this vague feeling that has been stalking me all week, as scary as it is nebulous. Gradually I sink into the feeling first, before understanding and words come to me. Emotionally, I feel deeply sad and very confused. Physically, I have a stomach ache and tension in my arms. I follow these sensations deeper and deeper until I realize where they come from: this is how I felt after I got spanked by my parents as a small child.

An image pops into my head: I am four or five years old and I'm running from the family room through the kitchen to my bedroom. I've just been spanked and I don't understand why. I don't understand how this could be happening to me. There must be something fundamentally wrong with me. There had to be - otherwise they wouldn't do that. I'm so confused. What could I have done to warrant this? These are the people who are supposed to love me and take care of me but they are hitting me and hurting me. What did I do? I feel so alone and unloved, I want to run away.

This is what had been bubbling to the surface all week. This was the terrible thing that had happened. This is why I am clearly flawed, imperfect, unloveable. I had been afraid that I would uncover something much worse. I feel a little bit relieved that something so simple could have such a big impact on my psyche. Then I realize that I may have found the root of my longstanding feelings of betrayal. I see the threads from this event to many later events in my life, to many misinterpretations that I couldn't trust people, that I would be betrayed.

My realizations naturally lead me into self-forgiveness. I forgive myself for judging myself as flawed, damaged, unloveable. My thoughts drift back to myself as a young girl and a wave of compassion and appreciation washes through me. I was so sensitive. I may have been a rough and tumble kid physically, but spiritually and emotionally I was delicate. My sensitivity always seemed like a weakness to me before, something to cover up, but now I see it as a gift and as a defining characteristic of who I am and who I have always been. My sensitivity allows me to be a gentle and caring parent to my kids, a loving wife, a compassionate friend, an intuitive and intelligent teacher. This is the gift that allows me to have psychic awareness beyond what most people can sense. This is just part of who I am. I love and appreciate myself more fully.

I forgive myself for judging myself as imperfect, bad or wrong, and for believing that it wasn't safe for me to be myself. I know now that it's okay (maybe even great!) to be me. I can relax. I can let my guard down.

I can just be myself. I'm perfect just the way I am.

March ~ Mysteries Revealed

March marked the final weekend of our winter quarter. To complete our inquiry into the psychological theories that are the foundation of Spiritual Psychology, we explored Psychosynthesis and Neurolinguistic Programming (also known as NLP). Psychosynthesis uses guided visualizations to promote insight into a current issue or obstacle or situation while NLP reframes our interpretations of past events to essentially "reprogram our computer" - our subconscious mind. Both of these processes yielded unexpected and powerful results for me. In terms of meangingful outcomes, I kind of got a two-fer this weekend at USM. I got insight into my (potential) future and insight into my past.

First, my future. On Saturday afternoon, our teachers led us through several of Psychosynthesis visualizations. One of them was was a process that was designed to strengthen intention toward a goal.

We were instructed to choose a goal (I couldn't come up with one) and then create a symbol for it (I was still trying to find a goal, forget designing a symbol!). As my mind wandered around, I suddenly saw a picture of myself in my mind's eye. I was sitting in meditation, legs crossed, eyes closed, and there was a beautiful cone of golden light pouring into the top of my head. Okay, I thought to myself, I don't know what this is but it looks like a symbol so I'll go with it.

The visualization continued and we were gently instructed to see a path leading up a hill to our symbol. So far, so good, I could do that. Then we were supposed to notice all the things along the path that were blocking it and distracting us from reaching our symbol. Well, there weren't any so I thought I'd play along and add some but they kept disappearing or turning into cheerleaders encouraging me on my journey. When I reached my symbol at the top of the hill, it told me that this was my destiny, this is why I'm here, I already have this inside of me. Nothing could have stopped me from getting here. Then my symbol did a really crazy thing: it showed me a business card.

My card said:

Cara Gubbins, PhD
Spiritual Intuitive
Readings, Healings, Classes
Humans and Animals

Whoa! Where did that come from?! Never in a million years would I have come up with this. Way cool. Later I told one of my classmates about my card and she said, "That's exactly what you do!" Huh. I didn't know that. I let this revelation rattle around inside me for a while as I considered the possibilities. I still wasn't exactly sure what my goal was or what my symbol represented precisely, but I really liked this card. I felt like my Higher Self had spoken to me, like my Spirit had plans for me that I didn't know about. Yet. I felt like I was starting to get a vague sense of something different for my future, something that I would have to allow to unfold at its own pace, but something that felt good and right and true, even with all the unknowns. I had gotten my first clue.

As our class moved into different information and activities, my mind kept wandering back to the card. But by Sunday I was able to focus on something else when we tried out exercises in NLP. Our instructions were to discuss something that was important to us right now and really right now I was fed up with myself. I was noticing that many if not all of the upsets that I had been examining at USM boiled down to the same thing: feeling betrayed. I was sick to death of it. No matter what happened, I felt betrayed. I felt like if I didn't get the parking place I wanted, I felt betrayed. This was getting ridiculous, but it was very real for me.

Somehow, I traced this feeling back to third grade when we were living in San Francisco and my parents were breaking up. I uncovered a sadness below the surface that was somehow protecting me from feeling scared about all the big changes in our lives. Feeling sad was better than feeling afraid of falling all apart and splintering like a broken pane of window glass.

As the exercise continued, I saw that the sadness was like a comforting blanket wrapped around me, protecting me but keeping me numb and immobile. Through the NLP process, I was able to acknowledge how the sadness had helped me cope at the time and to recognize that it was ocassionally still operating now. But it wasn't serving me now as an adult to keep this part of me operating like this. Using NLP, I transformed my sadness into Loving Comfort, an old part of me with a new mission. Loving Comfort could wrap me up in love and appreciation and affirmation in a really positive way without numbing or immobilizing me.

With my future vague on the horizon but possbily taking some kind of shape, at least subconsciously, I thought about my journey thus far and marveled at the human condition and how life works. I have done lots of healing work around my parents' divorce, but this insight was deeper and subtler than any other revelation I'd had. I felt likeI had cleared away the big debris, uncovering some smaller peices that I would never have seen before, like moving out furniture and seeing the pattern of dust left behind. It's there and it's real and it's affecting you but it takes some bigger changes to be able to see the pattern. I was left with a very peaceful optimistic feeling.