Dougies Light

Last week I visited a friend of mine in the hospital.  I used to work with him only a few years ago.  I became friends with his wife and she used to do my taxes.  I became friends with his daughter and she used to give me massages.  Doug or Dougie as I like to call him, used to help me with a physics course I was taking.  He was Mensa and not only does he have a brilliant mind, but a vital spirit.  We had begun a dining club at work we called IDC “International Dining Club” that still meets regularly with different attendees.

Dougle’s fairly recent diagnosis of Parkinson’s is not really Parkinson’s.  It’s Multiple System Atrophy, a degenerating neurological condition with no cure.   He can hardly move anything anymore, and can hardly speak.  Before I went, I was praying that I could say the right things, do the right things…  I’m so awkward in cases like this as I suspect we all are.  I grabbed my book “Fear of Physics” to take as a conversation piece.

I was happy to see Marcelle there.  She is a tall beautiful and strong woman, whose nurturance had left her a little worn looking and slightly bent over.  The two of them, still very much in love, maintained a healthy banter with kindness and humor.  The first words out of my mouth were an honest observation, “Dougie, it is so good to see the light in your eyes.”  In spite of his situation, he still had that inner light – the pure essence at the core of all of us, and he let it shine.

Ekhart Tolle describes the process of death as a separation from that which is physical but the eternal goes on.  It is a disidentification from form.  If we are identified with form upon death, our consciousness will gradually awaken in to its formless state in a real we cannot even conceive of.  He offers advice and consolation.

 

The pain that Marcelle is experiencing grieving the future of what could have been in their lives together and seeing someone she loves so deeply become further and further disabled and seemingly wither away is real, intense, and runs deep.  I feel so sad for her and Dougie and the family and all their friends.  I feel sad for me.  Although I hadn’t kept up with him on a consistent basis, I care deeply for him and his family.

We are all mortal and we all will die.  However, the opposite of death is birth according to Tolle, and I believe that as we shed our earthly personas, we connect with our inner light that is our prime mover and we identify more with the “manifestor” of ourselves.  The personality is the soul on brain and its respective chemicals and experiences.  Shed the brain and such, and we are pure innocent light awaiting, manifesting self and experiencing raw unfiltered reality.  Tied to this physical realm, we are embryos of the universe.

 

Visiting Dougie and Marcelle was difficult, beautiful, painful, and a blessing to me.  I am honored to have such wonderful people who have touched me and given me so much.  I pray for them to have peace, strength, and as much joy and happiness as is possible in this tortuous transit

Update:  I visited again with my friend Rhia last night. His condition has worsened, but his soul is still precious, sweet, and a joy.  Marcelle is still staying strong and beautiful and full of poise and grace in such a horrible period.

Where this blog got its title

This morning was another morning where I had to use a mantra that has been helpful for me from an amazing experience I had back in February.  I’m currently restructuring myself and rewiring my brain and learning to deal with emotions in a normal manner that I never completed and now plan to complete as an adult child.  I recommend John Bradshaw for those of us who haven’t yet dealt with childhood injuries and traumas.  This morning I got overwhelmed and angry and had to learn to calm myself down.  I started to feel that weird spiral that a sick brain can do when if latches on to darkness.

I spent over an hour on a drive trying to process, mature up my emotions, and rediscover the light inside of myself.  21 years on an antidepressant to mask emotions and now almost 4 years off so I’m still a fledgling.

This past difficult winter of PTSD and all its related crud had taken such a toll on my brain health that I cannot even describe the sensation, but it was physical and visceral inside my head.  I went through this without psychiatric medication.  I was very much aware of ill health in my brain and it felt dead and empty and dark.  There were additional sensations that there are no words for but it was uncomfortable and scary and I was fighting and afraid that I would never come back to a semi-sane state.  It felt like there was a dark storm in there that was nearing some type of cliff or abyss.   

I had used my phone in the winter months for various affirmations such as people can and do heal and that healing was inevitable along with other words of encouragement and reminders to myself.   I would imagine how this abscess that my cat had that was about 2 inches in diameter had healed with time and cleaning and nurturance.  Bodies heal and I had a good healing team and support from my sweetheart and friends and other people who had gone through similar experiences.  I had to hold on to that optimism that I would heal also.  The scary part was that the trauma started at such an early age that I was afraid that the very structure that needed to heal me was the very structure that was too sick to do the healing that it needed to do on itself.  This process has taken a lot of faith and patience on my part.

So last February as I had been suffering barely surviving the days to get through I had taken myself on a walk at lunchtime from work.  I had an intense “spiritual” experience that had a physical result while lying back on a cement bench looking up in to the budding trees above.  As I was thinking of life, awareness, experience, and dendritic spines, I realized that my focus on the experiences themselves as being “me” was an incorrect view of self.  The tree was not the buds nor the leaves nor the branches as much as it was energy of tree making the tree.  It was that life force pushing through the buds to prompt them to open and receive the blessing of sunlight.

Although self differentiates through experience and manifests itself through same, self is NOT the experiences.  Self is the experiencer.  Self is NOT the manifested, self is the manifestor.  There, self is divinity.

My entire neural substrates began a shift and I felt my energy moving as if from one seat to its opposite.  You know when you have that sudden shift of awareness when you experience an optical illusion of figure and ground?  Imagine that happening with not just your eyes and your awareness, but your entire brain and body.  The resulting shift moved me from anxiety to a state of intense peace and bliss.  My body actually tingled as I felt some kind of release.  I was no longer trying to find God, I was a piece of God, in Godness, in Energy, the Looker, the Energy at Source, having human experience and peeking through human form.  I had been stuck in the dance of the cosmos instead of the dance coming through me.

Afterwards, I was very calm for several weeks—without fear, without anxiety, having more compassion, having more quiet joy and internal giggles over the smallest pleasures and my experiences were in richer depths.    Time changed.  Instead of time feeling fast when I felt good or slow when I was uncomfortable; it shifted in to feeling eternal but irrelevant, and everything slowed to a delicious savory relationship with other entities in the physical domain.

So life does its thing and we get trapped in negativity and old patterns.  I had gone there this morning and remembered my mantra that has helped me so many times the past few months to find that state of peace and bliss.  The mantra is “find the light and be the light.”  It is that mantra that gives me strength to go inside myself, find that light, find ways to make myself happy, find that shift in which I become the light.  I’m not as overwhelmed now.  I think it’s time to do what needs to get done as I can, and make this day beautiful.

 

 

 

Cracked Heart

I wanted to drive down to the water at Tulalip Bay in Washington but I couldn’t get to the beach since it was the private property of the indigenous folks.  I wanted to step outside of the car and see the water, so I pulled up on to a hillside where there was a graveyard.  It was slightly reminiscent of the graveyard where my parents and brothers are buried except for this one was more green, and the Beaver Dam graveyard was quite arid with fields of wheat that rolled in the breeze.  I could remember the smell of the dusty sweet wheat being dried by the sun mixing with country pasture air with flies buzzing about.

The last winter had been tough for me because I was at a passage in my life where I had to deal with old unresolved and traumatic childhood issues.  I had been going through an unveiling of sorts where after coming in to some truths; it felt that so much of the way I had been experiencing life had been lies.  I had given many things a negative skew and then overcompensated as I could by being overly cheerful and a people pleaser.  So much of how I had moved through life seemed artificial and I was in the beginning stages of the process of reconstructing myself with all of my new discoveries.

The relationship I’d had with my parents was a bit strained.  I tried to be a good Mormon girl and it was I who started to say “I love you” to them first.  It was because I remember hearing that I should do that when I was in primary school at church.  My growing years as I tried to figure myself out had struggles as I knew I couldn’t be Mormon, I was bisexual, and I had to deal with my complicated sense of self (dissociative identity disorder).  These issues gave me struggles in my parental relationships.  My father died of cancer at my current age, and my mother died in 2000 as I was headed back to graduate school.

I was recalling a past visit to my mother’s grave.  You see, some time previously, a friend had given me a heart shaped sugilite stone in which the bluish color changes with wear and environment.  It had started to create a white glow in the center when I lost it gardening one year.  The next year after a hard winter I had been double-digging my garden and washing off the patio with high pressure; I saw a bluish glisten.  It was the stone that had been re-found.  The white center had widened and expanded throughout the stone.  The heart had returned in a different form.  When I visited my mother’s grave, I opened the earth above her body and pushed the stone in with a prayer that life brings renewal, transformation, return of different form.

Many of the graves in Tulalip also had various tokens and mementos.  I stepped from graveside to graveside in contemplation.  When I walked towards my car along the road, I stumbled on something so I glanced down.    There was a red glass heart under my shoe.  My immediate response was, “Oh I need to return this to the graveside, but whose is it?”  I could feel a common spirit in the wind as though voices from the graves were telling me that it was mine.  I accepted it.  As I looked at it closer, I could see a crack in the heart where the light was shining through.  Rumi says, "The wound is the place where the light enters you."