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Healing Journey

I can only receive a message by sharing it

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You may have noticed by now that I am a student of A Course in Miracles. Yesterday, my lesson was #154: I am among the ministers of God.

That concept is not new to me, but I read something different in it yesterday that I never had before. It starts like this:

Let us today be neither arrogant nor falsely humble. …We cannot judge ourselves, nor need we do so. These are but attempts to hold decision off, and to delay commitment to our function.”

It goes on to say:

There is one major difference in the role of Heaven’s messengers, which sets them off from those the world appoints. The messages that they deliver are intended first for them. And it is only as they can accept them for themselves that they become able to bring them further, and to give them everywhere that they were meant to be.”

….The messengers of God perform their part by their acceptance of His messages as for themselves, and show they understand the messages by giving them away.”

I got the idea of ‘giving a message to prove I had received it or learned it’, but I didn’t fully understand the true meaning until I had lived it the other way around. That is, it was only after I had given an intuitive message I received to someone else, that I was then able to read it over again later, and realize that it was really for me too!

This is how it finally sunk in for me:  I’m a participant in a small group class, that was recently working on the idea of managing energy. In the groups’ discussion forum, a question was posed about “how to manage the energy to work when you’re exhausted” and how others are handling that issue, when physical or emotional exhaustion and burnout are a particularly sticky challenge for the members of this group.

One of my friends in the group, I’ll call her Lisa even though that’s not her real name,  posted this comment in the discussion thread that followed:

Lisa: I am using my class times and study times to see how my energy levels would stand up to running a practice. It may be a slow transition for me as I am being wise about it, because I don’t want to sabotage myself by jumping into something that I don’t have the staying power for over the long term, as my body has been sick for a very long time now. Though I feel so called to do this work that I am confident that I will find a way forward, just at a gentle pace that doesn’t cause everything to short circuit!

When I read her comment, I had an immediate intuitive response to it, and wanted to share the idea I’d had with her, but, in my role as a life coach who is VERY sensitive to not coaching without permission (invitation), I didn’t want to offer any unsolicited advice either. I decided to share my thought with her, knowing that I was offering it in a spirit of loving support and that she could take it or leave it, so long as I wasn’t attached to what was made of it. I wrote:

Andrea: Lisa, are you open to an intuitive hit I had while reading this comment you’d posted here? I wonder if starting your practice is the exact thing your body actually needs to NOT be sick anymore? That perhaps providing a channel for your profound gifts to flow through you and benefit others is the VERY thing you’ve been needing? Of course, starting gently as you’ve said, but healing by doing it. <3 (Heart)

The forum discussion went on, and ended up taking a number of different directions from there. But some time later, she wrote me a private message saying how helpful my comment had been for her, and that it was integral to a huge Aha! and breakthrough she’d had after reading it.

So, score one for me following inner guidance and sharing something potentially helpful with a friend when the intuition presents itself.

And, bonus points too: Score one more for sharing a message as the only way to realize that the content of the intuition is actually intended for me — I only recognize my connection to Spirit, and honor the messages that come through that connection AFTER I have shared them with somebody, somehow. Only then can I hear or know it myself.

No one can receive and understand he has received until he gives. For in the giving is his own acceptance of what he received.” ~Pg. 289, ACIM Workbook for Students

When I read back my own message that I had posted to Lisa, and heard it for myself instead, I had the new realization that perhaps I need to be giving more of MYSELF to MY own practice, sharing more of my voice, wisdom, and words with people, and the world, in order to heal what is ailing me?

  • My body isn’t as fit and healthy as I wish it were? ….Share more of my authenticity with the world.
  • I’m not making as much money as I want? ….Publish my book(s) and provide value to more people.
  • My heart is hurting from all the political strife in the country? …Tune-in to the spiritual truths I live by on my good days, and multiply them by helping to teach them to others.
  • I don’t have a reference point for Joy? …Share my intuitions with anyone I can, and feel that connection to God flowing through me.

After all, that is the only real source of Joy that I’m aware of.

From a Line of Motherless Women

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I come from a long line of women raised without mothers…

That’s not to say that we didn’t have mothers, because of course we all did, but for various reasons our mothers were unavailable to us, emotionally or physically (or both) and we effectively had to raise ourselves. And in some cases, raise them too, at the same time.

I discovered this while reflecting on my observations of a mother interacting with her son. She gave off an oddly insecure vibe, despite being apparently successful and confident externally, and used her phone, Snapchat, Facebook to tune out from the world and escape her intense parenting responsibilities. I found myself really triggered by watching it, so my EMDR therapist Kelly and I explored it.

Kelly asked me where I felt it in my body, and I replied that it was in my heart, my chest, my throat and around my chin, jaw, and mouth area, like I was spitting nails. As I felt into those bodily sensations, she asked me if it was reminiscent of the time in my life when my parents gave away my puppy at age 3, or if it was earlier than that. I felt into it, and had some sensations of remembering being a baby and feeling abandoned, quite possibly at the time when Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King we’re both assassinated, but as I felt into it more, it felt even earlier than that. I wondered if it was actually my own mother’s pain, from when she was young and her father left the family?

We explored into my mother’s feelings, aged two, three, four, around the time when her own parents were separating and divorcing again. Her father had left the family, and my sensations of her experience were of being very lost, alone, and floating in the dark. She was feeling frantic, and confused, having a sense of wanting to fix it, but not having any life skills of her own to maneuver with. Her mother, my grandmother, was distraught, despondent, and checked out, leaving my mother to parent herself, in all but the most basic ways, from that very young age.

Kelly invited me to feel into my grandmother’s energy, to see what she needed at that time. I quickly remembered that she didn’t have a mother either; her own mother died when she was quite young, and her older sisters raised her. So she never really learned how to be a mother either, because she was raised by people (her hard-working, farmer father, and her sisters) who weren’t her mother, and quite possibly never learned parenting skills themselves?

As such, Kelly asked me to feel into what her mother (my great-grandmother) might’ve been experiencing at that time, and what she needed. I had the sensation of her being so afraid when she knew that she was dying. She needed help, she needed support, and she needed to stop having children. That was hard for me to recognize, because my own grandmother was the youngest child in the family of eight or nine kids, I think, and had my great-grandmother stopped having children sooner, in service to her own health and life, my own grandmother may not have been born?

I had the sense that my great-grandmother may have come from a very small family, and had the mistaken belief that having a large family, many children, would provide a support network automatically, in and of itself. But she was wrong. Having all those children was just hard, and tiring, and took a toll on her health and life. She was trying to do what society, her husband, and her own ideas expected of her, and to the degree that I am here now to tell the tale, she succeeded. But it cost her in a shortened life.

So it’s absolutely no surprise that this pattern repeated in the way it did, with me feeling like I had no real parenting, no real mother energy from my own mother, starting as young as I can remember, and distinctly at around age 4. That’s the way it has gone in my maternal line for generations. And I, if I had had children of my own, would likely have been the same kind of parent myself, as devoted to my own career, and my own life, as I have always been. Maybe it’s no wonder I never had children?

I’m not sure what the lesson is here yet, except perhaps that learning to parent oneself, and mother oneself emotionally, at least in a way, is something that we all need to learn, even if we do have very engaged mothers?