Freedom: One day my soul woke me up

I woke up this morning to find an email, requesting me to share some of my story on the Emerging Proud website. Eeeek. Yes, I feel doubt & fear. Huge! But…I am doing this. Here goes the blog, for Emerging Proud to access.

Since a child, I held a searing hunger to know true freedom, yet never understood this fierce call. I grew up in a home of perfection, with well-meaning Christian parents, yet felt so very alone inside me – separate and different, from very young. I remember having vivid dreams of magnificent beings around me and I could see into another ‘higher’ world, somehow. I have always FELT others, I just didn’t know I was picking up the energies of those around me – or, of the collective consciousness. Everything felt overwhelmingly intense!  I had a soft heart, eager to help animals or persons in distress, particularly Africans, as I lived in the era of apartheid in South Africa. With a strict, autocratic, emotionally distant dad (back then – he too, shifted, over time) who believed in corporal punishment as discipline, it confused me each time I’d get ‘hidings’ -and this was often. I felt like I WAS love and if we ALL are AND he is, then why did love have to hurt so much? I would sob, beg and plead not to be hit; wet my pants – and something inside my heart began to crumble, not knowing why he wouldn’t listen to me. Today, I have a wider perspective and bear no grudges. I feel such an expanded love for my precious dad, my sweet mom & my family, as I know we were all playing our divine roles in my – and their – soul’s evolution. I am grateful for everything.

I became anorexic at 13. I am now 50 and overcame the anorexia (and by then, bulimia) after losing my 3rd child at 27 weeks in-vitro, at the age of 27. I was determined to! Since then, I’ve overcome a prescribed opiate addiction (in the year 2000 I dumped this overnight, two weeks after sleeping with my doctor for pethidine.) Yup. He was prescribing 5 injections a day, after our fated ‘interlude’. This act immediately cracked something inside me – so I see the perfection in it – and there began my spiritual awakening to know myself as…love. His act was an ‘act of love’, too, I now see.

What a fraught journey! 17 years later, I’ve finally overcome on/off binge-drinking, having left AA years before, to find my own soul solutions. It stopped making sense. I have tried to take my life about 15 times. I can’t remember exactly how many. I am clearly not allowed to leave earth, via this route. I have, for the most part, overcome fibromyalgia too, which began roughly 20 years ago but I did not know it was this, back then. All I know is, I have felt achingly, overwhelmingly broken & tired for most of my life and have had severe headaches 24 hours a day, every day, for over 2 decades. I have a very high pain threshold, by now. Doctors had diagnosed me as bipolar or having a personality disorder, or whatever other label they love to plonk on you. Today, I am ok with how I ebb and flow. I am free to be me.

I married a man at 21, one whom I’d met at 14, never ‘in love’ with him (but man, was he there for me emotionally) and divorced him at 40. NOTE: There will be a VOID inside a woman’s heart, where she feels her dad was ‘meant to be’, as a little girl. Mine was strict, authoritarian and distant, from me. We then AVOID the opposite traits in any man – like gentleness, warmth & softness – and are unconsciously DRAWN to those with similar traits to our father’s, even if its not what we really want. Well, I certainly had been. It took me forever to figure this out on my own. I resisted ‘gentle’, emotionally available men.

Something inside me knew my first husband and I were unhealthily co-dependent, so I left. I was a wreck. So was he, by this time. He loved me deeply and I carried immense guilt about not loving him ‘the same’. (He is also learning & growing so much, lately, as I share my own processes with him.) My journey took me, 7 years later, to Hawai’i, where I married a man who had found me on Facebook, whom I thought was my soulmate. He was – just as my first hubby was. Soul mates GROW you.  I imagined my second husband was my ‘twin flame’. Haha. What does fire do? It BURNS. Good thing, this! Just as with my first wedding, I got married with intense knots in my gut. I was in HAWAI’I, after all, I kept reminding myself! I had to numb my mind with 5 beers, sipped throughout the day, to pretend to be happy, on wedding day nr 2. I knew, inside me, that my soul called me to Hawai’i to…GROW and expand! (Just as my first marriage had) I had told this man exactly this, before flying out to him. We ended up homeless and rather than stay with him, I walked away into homelessness for the next 3 months, in Hawai’i. The mirrors were too hard to bear, financial ones included. I could SEE them but wasn’t equipped to deal with these…yet. I’d given everything I owned away, maxed my credit cards to get to Hawai’i (and guiltily buy for my daughter all she may need for the next year – she had just finished high school) and returned with nothing other than a few items of summer clothing, my journals which I’d rapidly filled up, over there – and deep shame, tumbled emotions – and nowhere to go.

I tried to take my life immediately after returning to SA from that gentle land and, right after, experienced an extreme out-of-body experience that filled my heart up with so much LOVE! I was stunned by what I had ‘seen’. Only one woman on this planet ‘got this’, at that time. I’d met her while frantically googling for more info on ‘conscious relationships’, in Hawai’i, knowing full well that hubby nr 2 and I were in trouble, with a capital T. She, too, had left a husband at 40 AND journeyed to Hawai’i thereafter. This was no accidental meeting.She would become some sort of a guide for me, confusing the crap out of me too! This was also fantastic. Confusion brings clarity. Clarity invites confusion. She loved me and then later let go of guiding – she knew I needed to find my own answers. They lay within, as she often prompted me via text message, when I was in Hawai’i, forlornly contemplating my heart, mind & soul whilst sitting under banyan trees. I felt so alone and so sad. When I told her of this paranormal experience, she said this: “Oh, thank God, you sound more sane now than I’ve heard in a while.” I thought she was madder than me. Little did I know, then….

My first husband, who has peripheral motor neuron disease (which I mistakenly believed I had created, by leaving him) kindly took me in, back in the small town I’d been raised in. “Back to my roots”. I was bereft. I did not want to be here! (more ‘perfect’ creation, by my soul) Everything I’d owned was now furnishing his and my daughter’s home – and I felt insane, as though I was in a twilight zone. I was now a ‘guest’ yet soon slipped back into old patterns of doing far too much for those around me, leaving me feeling drained and anything but a guest. I felt so guilty too and determinedly asked for nothing for myself. I lost my appetite completely, losing weight rapidly – and it is still very low. Appetite and weight. I wore borrowed clothes in the 2 winters and felt (and looked) like a hobo. I lost all interest in my looks, as well as any attachment to material things. This was a part of my next learning curve – taking my power back – and discovering what it was that I REALLY hungered for.

The next 2 years were the most traumatic of my life. I lost this ‘loving’, expansive feeling I’d been opened to, post-suicide attempt, and became even more furious! Depressed. Trying so hard to be grateful and HAPPY. Up/down doesn’t quite explain what I was experiencing. A deep anger had arisen in me, in Hawai’i, one I didn’t understand then. It felt FULL and…righteous. I made some magnificent woman friends there (only one was a man – the only man I’ve ever met who never triggered me in any way) who loved & accepted me unconditionally and some who referred to me as the ‘delicate tornado’. (I knew little of our inner feminine or masculine aspects, then. My SHADOWED aspects were acting out) I know more, now. I’ve isolated, studied & contemplated – a lot!

It would take me 2 full years before ‘spirit’ could truly get through to me, including another 2 suicide attempts. I recall, in a state hospital, wondering why so many believed they were ‘God’? I understand why, now. I also had to come to peaceful acceptance of having ‘no-thing’ to my name, being financially crippled – but I found my heart & soul. I didn’t have (never really did, before now) any money to run off to doctors, and when forced to do so by family, I became even more suicidal & deranged, on medication. I would always stop taking them, and then lie that I still was, because my family were too anxious about me being off meds. My soul is clever! She never wanted big Pharma meds in my body. I no longer feel the need to appease others anxiety. It’s not my job.

Today, I have a gentle, loving, open, honest, conscious (non-romantic or sexual) relationship with both of my husband’s and my heart continually sees the precious mirrors they reflect back to me. Hawai’i is 12 hours behind SA. Like…day & night. This didn’t escape my notice. There was a beautiful, tender message held in this, for me. Shadows and light – and I now embrace them all, within me and others, to the best of my ability. I see ME in others, as they reflect back to me the parts of myself that I had previously disowned, denied or rejected.

My relationship with family members has shifted. I no longer blame, attack or shame. I own my emotions when I feel triggers arise. I look within to see where I am not at peace with myself – and, I speak up a lot more than I used to. My ‘truth’ is mine and I don’t wobble to and fro in confusion anymore, as I express these. I have few friends. Two, to be precise, in my immediate physical field. Two woman, in this little town, who knew me 20 years ago and love me just as I am. I don’t have to be who I am not, around them. I seldom see them, being without transport, but we stay in contact all the time via texts or calls. I have found more friends on the internet – ones who ‘get me’ because they have lived what I have. My Hawai’i girls and I? We continue to love and support each other, across the miles.

I found my FREE ‘Dom’ and she sounds more like ‘FREEdOM’, today. The sound of creation has been set free, within me. (No wonder I spent so much time barefoot, outdoors, ‘OHM-ing, over and over, haha) My story has so many more intriguing aspects to it and some day, I will actually finish writing the book I know is held inside my heart, as I continue to let go, in divine trust, that all is just as it should be, in my world. I have always been guided to my next step, by my beautiful soul – even if this may have appeared to be ‘crazy’, to either myself or others.

I feel LOVE and I feel loved. By me. “One day my soul woke up.” I have nothing – and I have everything.  I found my freedom. I am love and…I am whole in my soul. All is well.

Mahalo nui loa, to ALL.