My next step was to visit some of those friends, many of whom I hadn't seen in two decades or more. I think I was trying to return to my roots, to a time when I was extremely happy. I wanted to try to piece together my life, to figure out what had gone wrong. "Wasn't I happy?" I wanted to ask them. "It wasn't an illusion, was it? Did I see to be happy?'
Those visits were a revelation. When we are in exquisite pain, we always think we are the only ones. At a 35th high school reunion, I discovered an entire room full of pain. "My husband was a sociopath," an old friend told me. "He went to prison for armed robbery. I had to move back in with my mother, raise my kids alone, and go back to school so I could support myself." This was not a bitter woman. She laughed in the face of adversity, and had not one iota of resentment etched on her own beautiful face. She made it seem easy. I wondered what was wrong with me, that I felt the betrayal to my bones and could not seem to move past it. It made me feel sick, like a cancer that had attached itself to my body and was slowly eating away every vital part of me.
My best friend in the 8th grade looked like she was still 19. The years had not left a trace on her face. Yet she told me that when her son was three months old, her husband announced," I've decided I don't want to have a family anymore." She re-grouped and married again years later, only to eventually discover that her second husband was an alcoholic. Steeped in sadness, she is divorcing again. In the meantime, her father decided at 59 that he was in love with a woman only one year older than his 22-year-old daughter. Devastated, her mother became an alcoholic. She went 17 years without speaking to the man who betrayed her, and only now is beginning to communicate with him again.
On and on it went. To me, it felt like the pain my friends had endured could fill the entire universe. Their bravery astounded me. It also cowed me. How could my experience compare with an amazing friend who discovered that her husband was a pedophile, while also coping with a son who was profoundly handicapped? She struggled every day with how to financially make ends meet, and how to manage alone with a son who was sometimes violent. Her troubles made mine pale. How dare I feel sorry for myself, when there were women everywhere handling problems far worse than mine? Thank God for women, who seem genetically engineered to balance the weight of the world on their slight shoulders. One day, I am convinced, women will rule the world.
Yesterday my journey led me to a Seattle "energy healer" and intuitive who had helped transform a friend's broken life so thoroughly that I just had to see if I could start attracting good things to my own life. My troubles have made me much more spiritual, and ignited a seeking spirit. My daughter's brain aneurysm was the final straw-- that's when I began to feel that God was "piling on."
Beth uses, among other tools, a powerful thousand-year-old natural healing system called Reiki. It is even being used in some forward-thinking hospitals now to treat cancer patients. Scientists have proven that all living things possess a bio-magnetic energy field created by electrical currents from our cells, so it's not as far-fetched as it seems to use energy to heal. Beth went much further with it, accessing her own inner "knowing" and intuition to offer advice while holding her hands inches above my stretched-out body. If I have this right, basically she was "reading" my universal life force and interpreting what she felt from my energy centers. Because I believe I have been suffering from post-traumatic stress from all that has happened, I decided to just go with the flow and not over-think the process. I felt open to anything that would help me relax, see things differently, and ultimately heal.
The entire session, I felt a sense of peace I had not felt in a long time. I almost felt that I was in a dream, or hypnotized, or on a different level of consciousness. Afterward, I felt happy and free from the debilitating anxiety and stress that had drained me. I felt certain that everything would be OK in the end, no matter what.
At first, Beth kept washing her hands over and over as I lay on the massage table, because she said the energy I had used to nurture and take care of everyone else over the years was showing up as toxins I needed to shed. "Yucky," she announced. She could actually feel it on her skin. Now, she said, it was time for me to take care of myself, to fully unfold into the person I was meant to be. When I told her that I was most concerned about my son, she said I needed to release the worry I had for him, and realize that he was doing very hard work on his own life journey right now, and that I was not helping him by being so fearful. "He is a very powerful light worker," she told me, and I felt warm tears of relief coursing down my cheeks, even though I had no clue what a lightworker was. She told me I had been afraid to cut the cords of fear between the two of us, because I felt it was all that bound us and without those cords, I would lose him. She said he feels so guilty for the way he has treated me at times, and that he loves me very much, but that it has become his habit to dump all his angst on me.
As she held her hands above different parts of me, Beth told me the deep betrayal I had experienced with my husband was akin to rape. I began sobbing. To me, I said, it felt closer to a murder-- like my soul had been murdered, or my innocence. But she went on to say that she was absolutely amazed the energy radiating from me told her I was not holding on to bitterness. I was not playing the role of victim, but had been able to somehow let the resentment go. She told me I was very strong, that my heart was very strong, and it was a message she gave me over and over during the session. I knew instinctively that what she was saying was true at that very moment, and I knew it was because I had emptied my heart so thoroughly of grief and refused to hold it in, and that the love of my friends and family had buoyed me. Earlier, she had shown me a "Queen of Wands" card from a special deck and told me the card represented me-- a lively, inventive person, a loyal friend and lover, an optimistic person who accepted life's ups and downs and used creative, feminine energy to find solutions. That ability, she implied, would save me.
Beth assured me I was never going to be hurt by a man again, because I was not the same person I was. She told me I had been grievously hurt by both my husband and my son partly because I didn't understand that there should be boundaries around each of us. I had opened my whole heart and let the people I loved all the way in. I had been so vulnerable, and I needed to learn to open my heart without letting people encroach on those boundaries. As she talked, my forehead began aching, and Beth said it was "the third eye" we all have that had begun pounding because I was regretful that I hadn't known what my husband was doing behind my back. But she said I could trust that he would never hurt me again. He was working hard on himself now, she said. He was actually a man of integrity who became vulnerable to evil when he started drinking so heavily, because anytime people become consumed by drug or alcohol addiction, they open themselves up to other entities, she said. In essence, he was possessed for a time by the devil, and it wasn't his true self who did those things. That sounded right to me. Beth told me there were angels all around me trying to give me messages, and that I needed to be open to those messages and trust my intuition.
But she also told me I needed to be grounded, and that worry, disappointment and fear of failure threatened to keep me from the person I was meant to be. "Imagine a cord of light running through your body and leading to the core of the earth, holding you there," she told me. I imagined it with all my might. Then she old me to imagine light pouring down from the heavens, from the center of the galaxy, filling me. I pictured it, imagining that's how the messages would arrive.
I know this all sounds so strange, but it didn't seem weird at all. It seemed exactly right. When I left, I felt full almost to bursting. Beth made me feel that I could handle anything that happened, and that God and his angels would guide me. I did resist inwardly a bit when she told me that everything had happened as it was meant to, and that my mantra should be, "Everything is perfect. Everything happened perfectly." I knew what she meant-- that events forged our family through fire, to make us strong. Maybe in the end, that will turn out to be true.
I will never be able to look at the murder of my soul and my innocence as the perfect plan. But as I continue my journey, I will try to implement a new way of thinking: that I can't continue to re-create the past in the present. I need to speak of appreciation, and be grateful for the good things in my life. I need to learn to hold on to the FEELING of what I desire for myself and my loved ones, and realize that something even greater than I can ever imagine might be on its way.
