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Ellen’s World Category
Change is the name of the game for many of us of late. My personal process is eclectic as always, ranging from formal meditation, to the occasional Church visit, to psychic readings from friends (I seem to know quite a few psychics, interestingly).
My intuition is increasing as time goes on, as is yours, I’m sure. I’m working on tuning into it more and following the subtle guidance given to me by my internal self. I do find the key to moving through this chaotic time is to to continually ask myself, “What now, what’s the next step?…today, this year, this very moment.”
I find the occasionaly psychic reading validates what I’m already sensing and planning, and adds ideas to my projects. This week an old friend read for me, and oddly (to both of us), said I was too detached from material things!! She/they reminded me the importance of having a goal, visualizing it, and fleshing it out with as much detail as possible, even including writing a cheque to yourself (I’ve not done that before, but have heard of it).
If I give it the time and space, the answers always come. Sometimes I know I’m meant to do nothing, to simply breathe, to walk by the water, at other times creative inklings come to me, plans for the present and the future. For example, the facebook group I started a few weeks ago, Surviving & Thriving as a Caregiver, has been a joy to me; the response of the women and the interactions available on facebook are fun. In the fall an in-person support group will spin off from this group. Other plans for the fall, after months of quietness and “holding the space”, are volunteer coaching work with people with chronic and persistent mental illness, beginning Indian singing lessons and possible other volunteer projects along with my coaching work.
Everything happens at the right time; we’ve heard that over and over, but that’s a hard one to surrender to. Now after my changes of the past year and a half, in my work and my personal life (death of two people close to our family), I’m ready to move forward in different ways.
I began preparing myself for my mother’s departure a long time ago, even before she came to live in our community so that we could support her. Occasional dreams appeared in which I or we, (my partner and daughter) had to save my Mom; in those dreams she was called “Little Mommy”. Often water would be involved, perhaps she would fall off a dock and we would pull her out of the water. The dreams became even more prophetic before our last trip to India in the fall of 2009 when I dreamed that she disappeared from our bed where she was resting, leaving a pile of garments, only to reappear on a small bed in the same room as a baby, then the baby also disappeared, leaving behind red satin garments. That profound dream reminded me of the expression “dust to dust, ashes to ashes” because she was returning to a younger form of herself.
My mother left us in the early morning hours of April 13th; when she heard I was on my way her face changed, her nurse Ray said, and she went. I believe she then felt safe and comforted enough to let go. It was also clear that energetically I was there with her. Elizabeth Kubler Ross says that whoever is supposed to be there when a person dies is present in the room, even if they are not there physically, and I feel this was very much the case. (Most loved ones seem to die when their family is not in the room, from what friends and nurses at Totem Lodge have told me).
Our Celebration of Glenys’ life, held on a sunny, hot Saturday afternoon in our home, was joyful and uplifting. It was a simple gathering of friends and family, a reading of e-mails from family and colleagues in Toronto, some storytelling by myself and others who were present, followed by a toast to our Mom and a sharing of food. I believe it reflected the joyful, social person she was, for the most part. Everyone enjoyed the afternoon, and the next day I imagined Mom “looking down” (a reflection of my childhood Christian upbringing I suppose), clapping her hands and joyfully telling the family and friends with her, “They’re having a party for me”!
It’s been about two months since Mom left us, and the process goes on. Recently I had two dreams that reflect how I’m integrating her passing into who I am, and into my life. They also represent the circle of life, and the circle of mothers and daughters. When I did a vision board a few weeks ago, (pictures and words on posterboard), I hadn’t planned to, but began it with pictures of my mother and myself, and my daughter and myself, and used phrases such as “full circle” and “strength” and “open arms”.
My first dream, just a dream fragment, had a very young girl, hardly more than a baby, being thrown, more than once, to the curb of a road. For some reason she was not a three dimensional girl, she was rather flat, but in dreams unusual symbols appear. I motioned to my partner to pick up bits of her clothing, and I gently and lovingly picked her up and held her to my heart. This girl was a part of me, a wounded, or perhaps a grieving part, and I reclaimed her into myself as I dreamed. (Remember, although there are many helpful ways to interpret dreams, the final word is our own, we are the expert on our dreams).
The second dream, a bit longer, took place in a care home, but not the one my Mom lived in. The home and the staff seemed rather generic, and were unknown to me, totally unlike the Totem experience. In the dream my mother was dying, but then she turned around and improved, in fact to the point where she could speak again (she hadn’t really spoken for a long time). She was going to be sent to the hospital, but then I got the idea of “taking her home” for her last few days. The home wasn’t my current one, however, it was our family home on Lawrence Avenue in Toronto. I was helping her go home. There’s the full circle again.
During Mom’s last week, we all helped her go home, with our visits, our music, and most importantly, our love. Also, and this will no doubt sound weird to some of you, for several weeks before Mom became ill, I craved a pair of large, white, feathery wings to put on – not to worry, they were only going to be worn around the house! (You need to know that I have been enamoured of huge white wings for many years, ever since I saw the several part movie on television called “Mr. Pim” about a man in a small village in England who began to grow beautiful wings.) Anyway, as soon as Mom became terminally ill, my desire – my need? for wings disappeared. Again, I think it was a symbolic way of me helping her go home.
How the future will unfold as I find my new place in the world, I cannot predict. As I said to my brother last week after we left the lawyer’s, “It’s the end of an era”. He agreed.
A big hello to all my readers. Some of you may have noticed that I’ve been absent for quite a while. Unfortunately my site was caught up in the sophisticated North American hack that affected many web hosts, and I was hacked not once, not twice, but three fricking times!
During that time I’ve been laying low, as my mother died in mid April. The loss of a parent, especially a daughter losing her mother, is something many of you have been through, or will go through. No matter the type of relationship we had with our Mom, she’s still our Mom, and our identity as a woman is often tied closely to her.
So for me, it’s a gentle time of contemplation, of walking by the water, of enjoying and working in my lovely garden… of giving myself the time I need, not rushing through this as we rush through so many experiences in life.
One day as I walked by Gibsons harbour, on the Pacific Ocean, I met a woman, Laurel, who was one of the first women I was friendly with when we moved here to the West Coast in 1990. Although we don’t hang out together any more, we are connected, and I knew she would want to know that my mother passed away. This is what she wrote to me a few days later. I’d like to share it with you:
One of the things I enjoy about counselling and coaching is that there is no rush. For how can we tell our story, tease out and sort out our truth, if we hurry? Sessions are meant to proceed slowly, to take on a life of their own.
It would be wonderful if we could pace all of our days this way, so that we have time to breathe, to ensure that we’re coming from a place of energized calm.
It often feels like I’m not moving fast enough, that not much is happening in my life, but if I look back at what I’ve accomplished over the past 3 months, it is considerable. My coaching partner, Jan, helped me see that in our session the other evening.
Much of the work I’ve done has been internal. After descending into that deeper part of myself, and just being there a while, I began to ascend and tiny shoots of creative ideas began to emerge. Slowly, slowly, each day, more came into existence. This pleased and excited me, and gave me much food for thought.
In the midst of my healing crisis, I always felt completely confident that this would happen. That after a time of slowness, of unconscious as well as conscious contemplation and processing, I would begin to emerge and the energy being used internally, to heal, would be more available externally for out-in-the world projects.
During the last 2 months it I’ve been actively pursuing new business possibilities through networking, enjoying my daily activities, my dance and stretch classes, coffee or a glass of wine with a friend once or twice a week and the ongoing weekly visits to my mother in her care home.
I believe many, perhaps most of us push ourselves hard to accomplish a lot in a short time. We’ve been conditioned to do this, it’s a societal thing. But we don’t really get there any faster, we just become more stressed.
It takes time for things to evolve, to yield fruit, whether it be completing our education, raising our children, developing our career, or processing our spiritual and emotional concerns. For myself, it’s important to remember how far I’ve come in a short period of time; I’m the same, yet different, beginning afresh with new passion and excitement for my life.
Keep taking your own version of turtle steps, and enjoy the journey.
I invite you to send me your stories about your major changes over the past year or two. Hopefully they will become part of a book about the current consciousness raising many in our society are going through. (All e-mails written through my ‘Contact Ellen’ are completely confidential.
“You’ll get tired this very day: Use it. Surrender to the peace at the heart of fatigue, the Wordless mind awakens.” —Martha Beck, Daily Coach Tips
Something has happened to me. The transformation began in Dharamsala, India, the home of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. It was the fall of 2009, and we spent six weeks there, volunteering and making new friends, enjoying the light, spiritual atmosphere of this small town set in the foothills of the Himalayas.
It’s difficult to express in words, but simply put, my spirit was happy there. I felt that anything was possible. We lived in a monastery guesthouse, right in the midst of the Kirti Monastery, very close to the Dalai Lama’s temple; each day we were surrounded by what I liked to think of as the “monk energy” as monks of all ages went about their daily business.
We made many friends at the Hope Center where we volunteered, and tutored students in our apartment as well. When time permitted, we visited with our Tibetan doctor friends and their family down the hill at the Dalai Lama’s Men-Tsee-Khang Clinic.
My connection to McLeod Ganj was, and is, very powerful. It seems clear to me, and some others I’ve spoken to, that I’ve spent many lifetimes in this area of India.
I took the energy of this amazing place back home with me, and felt inspired to make small changes and begin new projects, both in my personal and my work life. Over the summer we attended a couple of Buddhist events at home and in Vancouver; the powerful energy of the teachings and initiations, and the Tibetan medicines I took also changed my energy system.
This fall I entered a different phase in my process, a quieter, deeper place. I began to look at my life in a different way, to realistically examine what was and was not working for me, what was making me happy.
The business I’d pinned my hopes and dreams on for the past four years was not developing in the ways we had intended, so I began to let go of my attachment to it. This was a painful process…depressing. But after a few weeks I felt more peaceful; letting go of my high expectations brought a certain level of peace and contentment.
Then, one week before Christmas, our daughter’s friend, a beautiful, talented young woman, like a younger sister to our daughter, committed suicide. Tortured for eight years by a serious bipolar condition, her latest medication transition was too much for her to cope with, and she ended her life in the waters off Slahkayulsh Rock in Vancouver, leaving everyone connected with her and her family in shock.
On January 3rd recent and ongoing events seemed to come to a head in me, and I had what I refer to as a chakra meltdown. Few people know what I mean; my psychic friend agrees that’s exactly what it was, and my chiropractor has some understanding of it. It felt like an implosion in several chakras and in the master point, (so named in Asian medicine), in my left shoulder.
It took me deep inside myself. I could function from this place, but my thinking was slow, heavy, at first. Instinctively I knew I needed to be, to do as little as possible, to conserve my energy for the healing I knew was taking place at a core level. The process felt intuitively like “active waiting”…waiting and trusting that something was germinating inside me, new aspects of myself. Some people call this “sacred waiting”, an appealing term.
After about three weeks slowly, slowly, my creative juices began to flow, and my energy began to increase, and come up, out into the world again. Like tiny shoots in the garden in spring, each day I received small creative guidance about what to do next.
I’ve emerged from this experience feeling different. Now I’m taking action again, in ways that please and enthuse me, though sometimes I move too fast and anxiety begins to rear it’s head, a healthy warning sign. Then I remind myself to slow it down, that’s only my “pushing brain” talking. I need only relax, to check within to see if I’m going with the flow, and to take a measure of whether the project I’m working on “delights me” as my friend Alma suggests. Now I hurry less; I trust that things will unfold. I’m redefining the idea of what success means to me personally.
Many Westerners are going through a process of change now, as we move into a higher level of consciousness. Some people term this a shift into the Fifth Dimension; even physicists at Harvard and Johns Hopkins are studying it. Our stories are different, yet there are commonalities in them. Some of us embrace this body-mind-spirit transition we’re going through while others may pretend it’s not happening and work towards “getting back to ‘normal” a.s.a.p.
The concept of personal growth is big in our society. Thomas Moore believes we talk about the process “lightly, as if we know what it means, and as if it’s a positive, progressive development.” We fail to realize that the soul’s development requires a “descent as well as an ascent” he says. He refers to the process as “The dark nights of the soul”.
Moore suggests that when we are in a transition such as this that we do not pretend we’re bright and carefree when we know we’re in the dark, but that we “weave the process into our life”, while at the same time pulling back some. I’ve always believed that our intuition will instruct us wisely, if we allow it space.
My recent transition was not my first surrendering, and it likely won’t be my last. It can be a scary process if we are unfamiliar with it, and we may feel quite isolated going through it…disconnected from our life, from things and people that formerly gave meaning. We may be in an unfamiliar emotional place…uncertain about the the sense of emptiness we feel, the impression of waiting for something. Having at least one person in our life who understands some of what we’re going through helps tremendously. We then feel supported. If we honor our darkness and our not knowing, slowly, slowly, after a time, out of this place will come a calmness, a hint of creativity and joy.
What does your spirit need? It may be different from what you thought. Archangel Michael says: “You are no longer moved forward along the “tracks” of career and work that once supported you. Now it is the energy and movement of your creative passion that will take you forward.”
Trust your own unique process of unfolding. Talk about your concerns with like-minded friends and family. Don’t be afraid to get input from a trusted doctor, counsellor, coach or spiritual advisor. Pulling together in unity will bring us to a new, delightful, place of joy.
What changes have you noticed in yourself and your life? I am gathering stories for a new book about changing consciousness and invite you to contact me through my website.
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