This coming Wednesday will be three years since Jill left her body. Interestingly, that year (2011) it was the day before Easter which this year is today. I didn’t choose this day to write but felt it come on and grabbed my laptop. I have been feeling my way through life for the last two and a half years since Jillie left. I say two and a half because for the first six months after she left I did everything in my power to not feel anything; drugs, alcohol, distractions, suicide thoughts (butcher knife at my chest trying not to dive on the ground and 100MPH driving with blurred sobbing eyes)…. but nothing took away my suffering. Nothing.

Suffering doesn’t begin to describe where I was at and is a one eighty from where I am now.I once heard that religion is for people who believe in heaven and hell and spirituality is for people who have been to hell. I am definitely spiritual but it wasn’t my choice and is also my greatest blessing. You see, I spent decades on the treadmill of life unfulfilled, scared, and feeling a hole in my heart. I wasn’t happy or whole and kept trying to be by any means possible but didn’t get anywhere except nowhere. Even with the amazing love that Jill and I had (and still have) I still carried all my emotional scars. I was trying to think my way through a process that required feeling. I needed to feel to heal and my fear of feeling all my sadness and pains was so great that I stayed stuck which perpetuated all my sadness and pains. I was stuck in self destructive patterns of everything and anything you can think of and probably the same ones as many of you. Numbing and running from my sadness, insecurities, and pain, getting into and out of “relationships” that not only didn’t serve my heart and spirit but proved that I wasn’t worth loving even though that’s all I wanted. To be loved, seen, and accepted for me; kind, vulnerable, loving, caring, tender, smart, beautiful…. Sound familiar? I wasn’t living wholeheartedly, I was merely existing holeheartedly.

Jill’s exiting her body broke me to my core into shards of horrific horror and isolation. Notice that I say leave her body because we don’t die. We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spirits having a human experience. By allowing myself to stay with my pains and using tools of introspection and non-attachment to my thoughts and feelings I made my way through a self healing process that transformed me to who I am now; peaceful and content. I only wish one thing for me and everyone; peace, love, friendship, and joy. I no longer have fears or worries and rarely get a noisy mind. I heard a yoga teacher refer to it as monkey mind; thoughts bouncing around like apes in the treetops; never resting and never at ease.

My friend Charlie said to me, upon walking away from Jill’s body when I said to stop trying to revive her, that Jill is now in a place of peace and love and joy and why don’t I try to match her at that frequency while I still have a body. Those words embedded in my being for later use because at that point I did not want or know how to keep living. It took a great effort of not doing anything for those words to take full affect. I say not doing because that is exactly what I needed to do, I mean not do, well you know what I mean. I decided that instead of running from my sadness and pain that I would see where it leads. I decided that all my decades of running from my feelings hadn’t gotten me anywhere so I would allow them full expression and see what happens. That meant staying with my discomfort which is a very light, cozy word that we often hear in yoga practices. “Stay with your discomfort and breathe into it and notice your thoughts and how you want to get out of the discomfort.” I wrote about this last summer and how to learn to stay with the bad sad feelings. Here is the link 

I have been guiding some people through their own spiritual/emotional transition/crisis/curiosity and tell them what I learned from my intuitive self in processing my hell. Breathe, breathe, breathe. Keep coming back to breath with whatever the feelings are and let them have their full say. Keep breathing and feeling and with the breathing and feeling there is space for healing. With allowing feeling and staying open to whatever might come next I was able to begin to see how my patterns of fear and pain and sadness and lack of self worth….. were all rooted in childhood patterns that were ingrained in me by my parents. They weren’t intentionally ingrained but instead came from my parents who had the same programmed into them by their parents and so on…. all of whom never looked at or resolved their own pains and thus passed them on. Like an emotional herpes that flares up at the slightest signs of stress. An ugly metaphor but spot on. All reactivity as an adult is the same trigger(s) as when you were a child. So in order to not feel the way you do now you need to allow yourself to feel the causes of the feelings. To feel the roots of the pains. The next time you feel the wave of sadness, pain, anxiety, trigger come up see if you can pause and take a breath and feel into what it reminds you of. What does it feel like? Does it remind you of when you were five and mom and dad fought about something, or when you were three and mom was crying and begging dad to not leave or to stop cheating, or when your were seven and you learned to toughen up and stop crying, or when you’re loved one left his/her body and abandoned you.

You can learn to see and not judge what you feel, just notice. By seeing and feeling you’ll begin to have awareness and understand that 1- that is not now, 2- just because it was that way does not mean it has to continue to be that way, 3- who you are is a beautiful heart and spirit who is doing the best you can with the tools you learned as a child, 4- if you can recognize that your button (trigger) is being pushed and take a breath (three is ideal to gain the space to pause) that you don’t have to react anymore to it, and 5- you always have a choice and if your heart is guiding you to do something that your mind is in contradiction to then follow your heart because that is in alignment with what love (spirit, source, god, universe…) knows you need to do. Your holehearted existence can be a wholehearted life if you are willing to do some emotional processing. And repeat this to yourself: Life is not what I experience but how I relate to what I experience.

Wishing you peace, love, friendship, and joy. namaste