A Child of God

It has occurred to me after a couple of particularly troublesome weeks, that I have not written a single post in about a year. I have been somewhat active on social media but this past year was one of change for me and my family. At the end of 2021, my husband and I decided that the most loving decision for our family moving forward was to proceed with separation and ultimately divorce. I spent a great deal of my time over the past two years feeling intense regret and shame. The regret isn’t so much from a place of feeling like we’ve made the wrong decision, because in my heart and soul I still know that we did. I did not make that decision without the guidance of the Holy Spirit, that’s for certain. The regret comes from the nuclear family that I perceived as “lost”.

What I didn’t realize until recently is that the guilt and shame that I have been feeling for having “destroyed” my family has been running my life.

I felt so overwhelmed in the first year after our separation that I basically numbed myself to get through my waking hours. After a year of not being able to keep up with the size of my property and the ever increasing list of responsibilities to maintain the household and care for my children, I made the decision to sell and downsize. This means that not only did I lose my sense of stability once again, but I made a plan which was so complicated that I was stressed for the full year in transition. I had to purge, clean and list the house. Purge and clean a separate yoga studio space, a baby barn, a pool and the 1.3 acre lot. I then had to pack what was left into a truck (thankfully covered as a retirement move). Then it all got moved to storage, offloaded and stored (with the exception of the stuff being used over the summer), relocate to some place for the summer until I could take possession of my newly built home (why wouldn’t I choose my 37 foot travel trailer?!), then get the stuff out of storage, moved into the house and unpacked.

The area that I live in does not have a great deal of newly built homes on the market (needing less maintenance being a priority) and I wanted to build my own floorpan so that I could minimize the effort that I needed to put in on a daily basis to maintain the household. That meant mainly one floor living. The plan was so complex and detailed in order to remove any unforeseen issues. So I thought. What happened though was that my plans kept falling through and I would somehow have a solution appear out of nowhere. By the time the house was finished, literally to the largest extent possible for living, I pushed to get into it as soon as I could. In September, I was feeling as though there was little point to life. Little point to getting out of bed and to keep going. I was blind to all of the miracles and gifts that had shown up to carried me forward. The dream to downsize and reduce my workload so that I could spend more time on my healing had been niggling at me for quite a few years.

Laying in bed on one particular morning, following a fight with my boyfriend, I contemplated what would happen if I just finished the bottle of sleeping pills or muscle relaxers or something. Anything to just sleep and not feel. This is not an easy thing to admit but it’s an important detail to share because this was the Quantum moment that changed everything for me. I had said I was all in on my practice before but the whole entire move I relied on my head to plan and control every detail and when they would that fail, I would pray and rely on guidance. The guidance would come and I would be “rescued” in some way but I always had this knowing that there had to be a better way. I had to stop crashing into these deep dark holes where I became more and more tempted by the permanent relief of death. In that moment, I prayed. I prayed for an answer. I prayed to know why. I SCREAMED at God, the Holy Spirit, my mom in heaven, anyone who would be listening. “If it’s true” I shouted and cried, “if it’s all true”, then “SHOW ME!! TELL ME WHY I CAN’T GO!!

The answer came in the vision of the bunkbeds at the back of the trailer. The three little people. The one who looks like me. A 15 year old teen boy, Jayden, who will never admit to looking like his mama. My twin girls. My amazingly unique and sensitively loving Emma whose gifts the world so desperately needs. My empathetic and creative mini me, Ava! Ava! As an image of her came to my mind I remembered. I remembered that little girl in me that was so scared to lose her mom. An impending feeling always lingered in me that I would lose her earlier than I should have by the way. But Ava, there was no reason her or any of them had to lose THEIR mother sooner than destined due to illness of the mind. So I thanked God for this image but I had follow up with questions, “then what do I do??”, “tell me what to do and I will do it!!”.

My answer was simple, and in my mind I heard a tiny whisper of a voice tell me to simply heal. Heal, and then help others. I mean I’ve known this but sometimes in moments like this the voice within us that already knows the truth of who we are and the answers of how to get home, the voice has just gone quiet and has been overshadowed by that fear. That of ego! There was still a part of me that believed that I could still have my cake and eat it too. I could still trust the intuition and the divine when I needed guidance but the rest of the time, I was numbing and having fun doing it. I was distracting myself with all sorts of stuff. They are the things we all use when we’re trying to forget the guilt of not following our own intuition and best interest. Special relationships, marijuana, alcohol, food, shopping, you name it! So I had to ask for forgiveness! Yes maybe from God but really from the part of myself that is one with God and all of you. The part of myself that aches with guilt and shame and suffers depression. I had to forgive myself.

And then, it hit me!! Over the head like a 10 lb brick!!

When my grandmother came to talk to me about my mom dying, she used what she knew as a guide to get me through this difficult time, as did the aunt that I lived with at the time. She used her faith. A devoted catholic (at least from what I knew and could tell), she had the tendency to go to the extreme with her encouragement to follow God’s path for us. What this did, as it has done for many others, is it instilled a fear of God in me that would last until the later part of 2023. I did not want to admit that I was following a path to enlightenment which included direct communication with God through the Holy Spirit. I did not want to. I knew I would get backlash from people (and myself) because of the conditioning and prior learning that has come with religion. But non-dualism, mysticism and ultimately the study of A Course in Miracles is not “religious”. The idea is that all paths lead to one universal truth. I realized just last night that my Grandmother was sent into my life very early on to try to get me on this path. I had interpreted some of what she said after my mother’s death as judgement for my mother’s life and an accusation that she would go to hell. The reinterpretation that fell into my heart last night was that she was trying to teach me about forgiveness. When I asked her at 12 years old, having just lost my mom, if mom was in heaven since she committed so many sins. She told me that we had the power to ask God for forgiveness of our sins. He is not a punishing God, though part of her believed him to be. So I couldn’t understand and reconcile why God would forgive us for sinning if he was so mean. And when did my mom even get the chance to even ask I wondered?

Reading through A Course in Miracles (ACIM) last night I stumbled upon my answers to these questions. “The Atonement”, (removing barriers to loves eternal presence through mind training), “gives you the power of a healed mind” and ”therefore, those who have been forgiven must devote themselves first to healing because, having received the idea of healing, they must give it to hold it”. It must be shared to be kept. What this meant to me was that if I stay aligned with this one purpose, God will fullfil his promise.

I learned of the promise that God has made to all of us in one of David Hoffmeister’s workshops from Movie Watcher’s Guide to Englightenment (MWGE.org). To find the exact passage to share with you, I had a little bit of fun and used an AI search that was created which gives you answers from David Hoffmeister on the questions that you’ve asked.

When I typed in “Which passage is known as the promise”, David AI responded with the following:

“The passage known as "The Promise" is from A Course in Miracles (ACIM) and can be found in Chapter 22, Section VI, titled "Salvation and the Holy Relationship." The specific lines are: "He will go before you, making straight your path and leading in your way. You will not fail to recognize His guidance, for it leads you nowhere that you would not go. But left without Him, you will lose your way, for you are not aware of all the obstacles which line the way and which arise in different forms at different times, to block your progress. And it is this that makes the journey seem long and cruel. Yet has the Guide Who would direct your footsteps on the sure way home, been given you. And He will speak for God and for your Self, thus making sure that hell will claim you not, and that each step you take is made in certainty and in peace."

And once again, just like that, I hit checkpoint. I decided that I was all in and I really worked to soak into the belief and faith that I meant it. I decided that my purpose will from now on, to the best of my awareness, will be aligned with that of Spirit, God and the oneness of the whole universe. I decided that it’s my purpose to serve so that others may heal. I may write children’s books, teen books, relationship books… all with the intent of communicating the word of the Holy Spirit where I’m meant to share it through A Course in Miracles.

This past fall, I attended a silent meditation retreat with Drop Anchor Yoga where I had an experience that I think needed to come before this one. Carey Carty, a dear friend and spiritual teacher of mine who is the owner and operator of Drop Anchor Yoga, always encourages us to be open and listen for the opportunities to practice forgiveness, witness the miracles and deepen our faith. Often what we think we know is best for us, and what we think needs to be healed, is not really the source of the problem.

I had gone on that retreat thinking I would just keep my mouth shut because I’d been finding myself indulging in my problems. Sometimes spirituality can be used in this way. To continue to stew and analyze. It’s takes time and practice to know when you’ve worked on enough forgiveness and just need to actually put things down and work on something else. It can be used by the ego to distract us from going even deeper.

I digress.

I ended up cracking wide open and healing parts of my relationship with my mother and my inner child that I didn’t know needed healing. That inner child was echoing the voice of ego and telling me that I couldn’t do this big move alone! I couldn’t be anything useful anymore because she was scared. She had tried and worked hard all of her life to be a good girl and she was tired, broken and abused. Yes, she is me. She was unhealed and trying to play grownup in a world her emotional stability and coping was not prepared for. I came to the realization that at seven years old, I’d stopped emotionally growing learning how to cope. I had learned how to survive in the best way I knew how. I had developed the habit of running and hiding, of pushing people away, throwing in the towel, changing jobs (or begging for a new posting), I had a habit of testing people, of sitting in my feelings of chronic emptiness which would lead me to ask “what is this all for?” and feeling as though there was no point to being alive.

I don’t want to live on the roller coaster any longer. I don’t want to be stuck in the dysfunctional survival patterns that I’ve learned to this point that have not been working.

The extraordinarily good news is that I don’t have to try to figure things out on my own any longer. With this decision, the voice will grow stronger. With practice and devotion, it will get louder and louder until I can think clearly and in alignment with the highest good and that of spirit. That of God.

In the course, Jesus tells us the following:

“I have enjoined you to behave as I behaved, but we must respond to the same Mind to do this. This Mind is the Holy Spirit, Whose Will is for God always. He teaches you how to keep me as the model for your thought, and to behave like me as a result. The power of our joint motivation is beyond belief, but not beyond accomplishment. What we can accomplish together has no limits, because the Call for God is the Call to the unlimited. Child of God, my message is for you, to hear and give away as you answer the Holy Spirit within you.”

In service and in love,

Kat, xo

References:

Spiri AI - David AI

Movie Watcher’s Guide to Enlightenment - mwge.org

Drop Anchor Yoga - dropanchoryoga.com

A Course in Miracles - acim.org