When Hurting Is No Longer An Option

You don't have to go it alone.

Instead of walking around with an undressed wound from childhood it is possible to be healed. Not with thick scar tissue, but actually go in and cleanse and let the skin grow back. Scars are not mandatory. We can heal from the inside out.

There’s a technique used sometimes in hypnotherapy wherein the subject is taken back to an event and restructures the ending so it turns out the way he or she wants. It has its merits.
Changing the ending of a memory works to a degree. It gives us the satisfaction of being our own director in our own movie and calling all the shots.

But what it doesn’t do is change the original scene. Irrespective of how many of how many rewrites we do on the scripts of our lives, what occurred originally is the only truth. It must be dealt with. It must remain intact as the proper memory. Literal change of the past is impossible; virtual change is a form of healing. We write a different ending and alter how we are affected by it.

It is for us to learn from the events of our lives. If we don’t we are lost and must return to the pattern and relive it over and over until in this life or another we realize our cycle and break it.
When we change everyone wins. But this is not a contest, and not a duel to death. I am not against you nor are you against me. Abuse is not personal. Not really. The abuser is in as much pain as his or her target. Abusers are acting out of intense unaware self-loathing and they want you to hate them and to hate yourself too. Become one of the crowd and pain is lessened. Hate is attention the same as is love.

Our agreement with our abusers pre-dates birth and is forged out of love, not hate. It is to learn something. Do we bring it on ourselves? Not as such. We agree to a certain set of circumstances in order to learn, but we have the free will to alter that course. We can stop the pain and we must simply because letting abuse continue keeps us on the karmic wheel.

We absolutely must learn from our life experiences and lessons work both ways. They are for the abuser as much, perhaps more, than the abused. Perhaps that is the most difficult aspect to accept. It is a learning experience that we have both taken on. It does not have to continue. An abused person sometimes goes on to abuse others. The other has agreed to experience some of this, if needed. This is the key. It does not have to be needed.

We cleanse the wounds life has inflicted on our psyches by admitted they occurred, and while we are not at fault for being victims, we are complicit in the experience by dint of agreement. Should we blame ourselves? No. But we just admit it happened, face the events of life and move on from them.
Being bested by abuse perpetuates the cycle. Accept it and move on from it. Dwell on it and playing the victim will only serve to let the abuser win, and not learn anything. Find the strength inside and build from it. Do it for both of you.
It is an act of love.

My Cousin Wayne

Today (July 22) is my cousin Wayne’s 49th birthday. Or would be had he not died last August.
He was exactly four months older than me and we were close when we were kids.
Wayne stayed with us for two weeks in August 1969. He’d just turned 11, I was still 10, and we caught frogs and played with garter snakes, snuck cigarettes in the old house on the farm, and dug tunnels in a huge pile of sand behind the new house we’d moved into a few months earlier.
The frogs were used in competitive sports. We called it the “Froggie Woggie Olympics” and events included determining how long the poor amphibians could stay submerged before they would float to the surface belly up.
When one did we turned it over and rubbed its back for a moment to revive it. I’m pleased to report we never lost an athlete.
Looking back it was probably cruel, but back in the golden innocence of youth it was fun.

Wayne was smart. He got high marks in school, was a thinker, and was very level–headed. We disagreed only once. We were talking about starving African children and I said they were undernourished. He insisted the right word was malnourished. Maybe we were both right.

Wayne’s family moved a lot and we didn’t see one another much after that year.
He got into drugs as a teen and became an alcoholic. He went to AA and celebrated two weeks of sobriety by going out and getting so drunk that we was in a coma for three days.

Somewhere in his mid-forties he was diagnosed as schizophrenic. It was a blessing. He took his meds. He straightened out his life. He took a course in hotel management and got a good job as a night manager.

Shortly afterward he was diagnosed with bone cancer. He didn’t last too long and I can’t help but think that’s a blessing too. Survival meant pain.

Some would look at his life and pronounced it wasted. I don’t agree.
We have our lessons to learn during Earth life and we choose how to learn them.
We decide in pre-birth the big things in life, who we’ll be with and what we’ll do. He chose the experiences of his life for his reasons. Maybe it was for him to learn; maybe it was a lesson for someone else. He knows that answer, not me.

Wayne came to me during one of my altered state sessions at the hypnosis retreat in May. He said “I made a way for you.”

I don’t know what that means.

It was good to see him again. He hasn’t visited me in my dreams like most of my other dead relatives.

I could see him clearly. Tall, strong, dressed in a buckskin jacket and cowboy hat. There was door behind him, like a office door, and he put one hand on the doorknob, tipped his hat to me and said, “You take care now.” He opened the door and I know he went to a life in the American Old West.

I believe he did what he needed in this life and learned what he came to learn in the fashion that suited his needs the best.

Whatever else he did, or didn’t do, Wayne and I will always be together in the golden moment of youth, playing with frogs.

Spiritual Wake-Up Calls

Have you gotten your call?
Help from the Other Side takes many forms. Perhaps it’s a mental pull or an emotional nudge that draws your eye to a course list for a local college or adult education evening classes. This nudge or trigger might seem to be from a magazine article, a line of dialogue in a television show, or a person, a picture, a movie, book, a random bit of overheard conversation on a busy street, or just about anything else.

Certainly this can come from your own intuition. It’s your link to the world beyond our physical apprehension. But commonly it’s a loving and much needed push from the Other Side. These signals remind us that it’s time for a lesson.
It might be a simple reminder of the world beyond our five senses. But on occasion, it is quite literally a “wake-up call” from the spirit side.
We arranged before birth that we’d get these soul-awakening reminders. When our guides give us one, they’re keeping up their end of the bargain.

But how can somebody who’s incorporeal make a wake-up call? Their higher frequency can cause all manner of interesting things to happen to telephones, televisions, vacuum cleaners, and most anything else that’ll get our attention.

Have you ever been roused from sleep by a buzzing or ringing or the sound of a hurried, whispered conversation that you can’t quite make out? That’s a friend on the spirit side signaling you that it’s time to get on with your Pre-Birth Agreement.

Back in the early 1990s I was often jarred out of a peaceful sleep by the sound of a ringing telephone. I’d pick it up to find the ring was only in my head. The same thing happened with the intercom. Several times over about 18 months the intercom would buzz in the middle of the night. I’d answer, then realize it wasn’t the intercom at all.

Eventually, through meditation, I learned it was my guides trying to get my attention. They were literally waking me up to the possibilities beyond the physical world.

“Yes, when you are startled awake in the night because you thought you heard the phone ring, but it only rang in your head, yes, that is us,” Merope and Geon said together.
“We honor the agreement to help you awaken,” Merope continued. “These are signals you are familiar with and you understand. On the deep soul level you know why it is happening and it starts the process for you.”