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.