Letting Go of My Story-Healing the Child Within

Wednesday, May 26, 2010


Our story is what we often mistakenly refer to as our life. The chapters of which are filled with our past experiences, our disappointments, our pain, our hurts, and our beliefs. The characters within that story are those who we have loved and have loved us, and those who have hurt us and we have hurt in return. These are all bound together and referred to time and again as a reference manual on how to live our life. We cling to it tightly never realizing the limitations of what it is we are doing.

It is our story and the pages of our history that define us and give us a sense of who we are. Whenever we face a new situation in life we unknowingly confront it in much the same way. We refer to the reference manual called “My Story” in order to know how to respond. We never dare to look beyond what was, in order to see what could be.

Finally we reach a point on our journey where we feel “stuck”. We have the desire to move beyond our limitations but feel helpless to do so.

For me that point was reached a few weeks ago and it filled me with despair. I knew how vital it was to let go of my story, or as Eckhart Tolle refers to it ‘find the life beneath my life situation”, and in all honesty I believed that I had. I had stopped using it as an excuse for my life being the way it was a long time ago. Or so I thought.

I started to become acutely aware of the fact that there was something driving me from within that I could not identify, nor access. My spiritual yearnings although great, were being hampered by an invisible force that I could not control. My mind was running its own program.

So, last week I withdrew from the world and journeyed within in an effort to heal my life and remove the obstacles that stood in the way of truth. And much to my surprise the first obstacle I encountered was “My Story”. It was still there!! My denial of it had not made it disappear. It merely lurked in the shadows, still running my life autonomously. And now, all I could do was face it, but in a way I had never faced it before. Telling my story as I had in the past had meant I was merely projecting it outwardly and the sympathy and pity I received merely reinforced the fact that I was in fact a victim to it. To truly face my story meant I had to “feel” it, feel every part of it that I still carried within me and controlled my life. It was quite unsettling, but with “Love’s” gentle voice guiding me every step of the way, I found the strength and the resolve to move through my pain.

Most of us never get the chance to do this. We bury the past in an effort to move on with life, and hope and pray that it will stay buried. In suppressing it, what we are in fact doing is denying our emotions, our actual feelings, and in the long run creating further problems in our lives. For some of us this behavior is a result of fear, for others it is a result of our conditioning. We are taught that to show or express our emotions is wrong. We just do not realize the harm we do to ourselves in this denial. Suppressed emotions take a lot of energy to keep in place and as a result we experience the effects of our actions in a physical way through illness, depression, anxiety, headaches, fatigue and of course, illnesses such as cancer. Denying our emotions leads to dis-ease.

I realized during the course of the week that if I truly wanted to heal my life, then I must face myself completely and give an outlet to everything that needed to be released. Only by confronting that which I had denied for so long was I able to fully understand the behaviours that I had put in place in order to “survive” my pain. In order to discover the truth of who I am, I needed to first understand who I am not. And so with each mask of falsehood that was peeled away I journeyed closer to the core of my being, my essence.

But to get there I needed to journey through the anger, the resentment, the fear and the sadness. It was a difficult journey, and the effects of it were not merely felt in my psyche but also very profoundly within my physical body where I experienced pain and sickness. All this I was carrying within me, all this toxicity which had left no room for the happiness, the peace and the joy that I so desired to enter in and take its place.

As I faced these emotions and allowed them to rise to the surface I feared that they would consume me and I would never be able to let them go. But I needn’t have worried, for ever so gently Love took me by the hand and walked me to our next stop on the journey, “forgiveness” and there it was that my healing truly began. As I forgave every person that I felt had hurt me in some way both living and dead, and in turn asked those I had hurt to forgive me, the heaviness in my heart started to lift. But the most profound and transformative act of forgiveness I had to face was to forgive myself. I hesitated for quite some time until I realized that until I released myself from the bondage of guilt, I would not be truly free. My tears were like a release valve relieving all the pressure I had carried within me for so many years. I felt so incredibly light. So free.

And suddenly, my story was gone. I could recall it if I wanted to, but it was no longer “me”. And seeing that it was no longer me, holding onto it was no longer necessary. The most beautiful discovery of this healing journey was finding the jewel that lay hidden beneath all the pain. That jewel of course was “Love”. That Love within me allowed me to see that everyone is at their own stage of their journey, and with that gift came acceptance. I no longer need “them” to change, I am now able to love them for who they are. Nothing outside of me needs to change. It is “all” within me. I have discovered my essence, my true voice, my light, my Love. And now I step forward and begin to live my “truth”.

I had the most curious dream……………

Monday 2nd November, 2009

Today I feel a bit like Alice as I nervously step through the looking glass, leaving behind what was once my reality, and embrace a whole new way of being.
When I commenced this journey eight years ago, I had no idea where it would lead me. All I knew at the time was that I could not stay where I was. I had tried all the conventional methods as well as the not so conventional, and I was still stuck in my despair and no way nearer to the exit. So instinctively I knew that if I wanted to get “better” and be able to function in this world like everyone else around me, I would have to do this myself.
So I armed myself with knowledge. I knew that my mind was running its own automated program because all the methods I tried in order to take back control, failed. Medication only made it easier to live with but did not “fix” the problem. I realized then that my starting point had to be knowledge of how the brain works, how the programs are put in place so to speak. So I commenced a psychology degree and did just that. The first step in “knowing myself”.
With this new understanding of how we process the world, I started to slowly pick my life apart. It took no effort in finding issues that needed addressing as when you make this commitment to heal, they tend to surface on their own. But what to do with all this information that was overwhelming me? Because simply noticing the problems wasn’t fixing them.
It was then that some courageous and inspiring people such as, Eckhart Tolle, Caroline Myss, and Wayne Dyer, entered my life through their teachings.
Through their knowledge and experience I learnt to really look at my life in an honest ego-less way, even to the point of giving my game plan away in situations where I realized that I was “reacting “ and not been authentic. I learnt about “patterns”, I learnt how environment and DNA impact on your ability to process the world, I learnt that all it took to reach some kind of understanding and somewhat heal a situation was to change your mind about it. I was tired of the games. I should re-word that, I was tired of the mask. I just wanted to KNOW who I was beneath all the pain because I knew that the pain was not me.
At that very moment, “A Course in Miracles” enters my life.
Thank you God!!!!!!!!
It entered my life at the exact point when I needed it to. (You can always count on Divine timing. It never lets you down!) I was stuck again. Learning all these things about myself made me not like myself very much. I was aware of the program that was running my life, but was no where nearer to overriding it. Awareness was hurting me. To be aware of what you are doing, to see that it hurts you and others and “feel” powerless to stop it is very disheartening.
It was not an easy book to read. When you have a mind like mine that does not know the meaning of “quiet”, it makes it very hard to maintain your focus and though it took me a long time, I made my way through the text and when I reached the end, I realized I had not retained much of what I had read at all. As I commenced reading the introduction to the workbook, I was not really sure whether there was any point as I felt i would have to start over in order to benefit from the teachings. With this in mind I continued reading and as I commenced paragraph 9, this is what I read,
“Remember only this: you need not believe the ideas, you need not accept them, and you need not even welcome them. Some of them you may actively resist. None of this will matter, or decrease their efficacy……Nothing more than this is required”
So in faith, I proceeded all the while despairing because I was nowhere nearer to being happy and the further into the teachings I got, the harder it became for me to be around people. It seemed that the only way I could love them was from afar. My despair mounted as I realized that the path I was on was leading me in the opposite direction to where the teachings were intended to take me.
The inner turmoil escalated yet the teachings afforded me peace in that no matter what I had to face on any given day, inevitably the teaching for the day equipped me with the capacity to not only confront it, but see the truth in it. I also started to notice changes in my thought patterns that took no effort to implement on my part. My perception started to shift.
But still I had no idea where exactly I belonged in a world populated by humans that I found it difficult to be around. I loved them. Just couldn’t be around them. I felt so ashamed and such a hypocrite .And when those feelings overwhelmed me and brought on episodes of depression, I fought hard not to lose my way। I coped by transmuting the negative energy into a positive one। I turned my negative thoughts into prayer. Instead of holding onto them, dwelling on them and convincing myself that my life was a waste of time, I handed them over and asked to be shown the truth. This is what is referred to as the “Atonement” in A Course in Miracles.

And now I wait…and trust!!!
Trust is a hard concept to grab a firm hold of, particularly in the last couple of weeks as I have watched my life seemingly fall apart. In truth it is only beginning to come together as what seemed to me to be my life falling apart, I recognize as a letting go of that which no longer serves me. It is a painful process but absolutely necessary for how can I possibly find “me”, when I have defined myself by all these things in my life that are not me?
In terms of my relationship I cannot say for certain. On some level I know that “letting go” is not what is needed here. Change is. Whether we can implement those changes whilst remaining true to ourselves will be what decides the outcome. I did not undertake this journey alone and although I become quite self-absorbed as I try to understand myself, I never lose sight of this fact.
And as I read over what I have written, a summary of my healing thus far, it serves a cathartic purpose and I feel a certain release that may at some point develop into tears. I feel the tension building as I write. To see it like this as a whole, I sense a certain closure that I do not fully understand right at this moment.
I see now that it was necessary for me to go through the pain of realizing who I was NOT, in order to uncover the truth of who I AM……………..