A weekly dose of dauntlessly dealt reality from the What It Is Wednesday Blog Carnival…
Healing comes in odd ways. If there’s anything I can say I’ve devoted my life to, it’s healing myself and facilitating others to do the same. Due to whatever stellar alignment or cellular disposition, it’s what I’m most passionate about, and has been the most powerful bonding point between myself and other humans.
Years ago when I had my first internship, my supervisor told me something that stayed with me, since. He told me that assuming we get to live into elderhood, we all experience three radical life changes. Why in the world would the director of a state agency share that with peon me? That fact in itself is telling that, I, for whatever reason attract people who want to share themselves in a deeply authentic way, and who are also on paths of reclaiming self. I’ve also always recognized wisdom when I hear it, and I clutched that baby like it was gold.
I thought in his more mainstream way maybe he was referring to the three Saturn returns we all get if we’re lucky, or the stages of Maid-Mother-Crone. I knew what he was talking about, though I wasn’t old enough to have had a Saturn return, and I’d always felt like I skipped straight to Crone. I knew what he was talking about, because by the time I met him at 19, I’d already figured out that I was in serious trouble psychologically and emotionally, and as a result had already lived through one radical self change. That change was when I decided to stop seeing myself as a survivor and to begin seeing myself as a thriver.
That single, catchy pitch changed my life, at that young age. It took relentless mindfulness and willful honesty I’d never even imagined I was capable of. And it hurt. As a result of that experience, I went forward wondering what my second radical life change would be.
A lot of things that hurt over the years changed me. Many things about my life changed. With each one I’d whisper to my heart, “Was that the second one?” It never was.
Last year I went back into therapy for the first time since I was 23. I’d reached the point that my bill of soul was coming back clean and all needs pointed to developing deeper mindfulness. With that work, realizations came quickly that connected current limitations back to childhood patterning, things I would never have dreamed were related, or knew plain as day, though couldn’t reboot on my own. As I unraveled those murky synapses, I began making different choices in the present. Some of them generated upheaval literally, all of them, energetically. Along with the change I could affect myself, I asked for dramatic life change, with specificity.
In the last few hours of the most recent upheaval I realize myself as the agent of its change, and in so much can form the habit of seeing the adventure in the chaos, the passion, the learning. It is, has been, and will be chaotic for a while longer. I realize that’s the grist of change, and this time, I won’t forget its creation process. Neither will I forget what it feels like to be fully alive, nor will I forget the process that brought it.
If it’s not path, it doesn’t pass, period.
This time when I whisper that perilous question to my heart, it answers, “Yes.”
What does yours say?
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