A Fork in the Road & The Wounded Dog

A Fork in the Road

I’m passing through a season on this path where life seems difficult. In the past month I have come to confront some big residual addictions (that I found hidden below the obvious ones J). It’s felt tough and I’m still in it. Lots of my other avoidances – food, alcohol, anger, running away etc – all seemed easy to give up compared to these. I am really attached to the feelings of being ‘Daddy’s little girl’ – it helps me avoid so much shame and worthlessness. It helps me avoid all the loss and longing for my Soulmate that feels so consuming I doubt my capacity to breathe if I submit to it. I really, really want to feel safe and protected – instead of feeling terrified of losing him, of being harmed, of people hating us.

In the past I’ve felt my passion to become more loving and closer to God has pulled me through so much processing. Often, even just realising my addictions, has helped me to begin to break them down. These last few weeks though, I’ve had to get brutally honest with myself. Just because I can see that this set of addictions prevent me from loving more completely and that they block my connection to my Father, doesn’t mean that I want to give them up. Facing my deepest unworthiness, my Soulmate grief and my terror feels like a task I am not up to yet.

The place I’m in feels harrowing. The roads divide before me – one path is the path to God and my dear, sweet mate. The other is a continuation of the well worn road of my life till now. It’s the road where I get to feel warm and fuzzy because people accept me and tell me “wow, you’re a great girl!” It is the road where I accommodate everyone else’s demands and desires because I don’t want to feel alone or rejected. It’s the road that keeps me in addiction to love’s substitutes – approval, reassurance, avoidance and hugs that help me deny my pain.

The former road means facing feeling alone, unsafe, unworthy and ashamed. This road, the one to God, takes a course through the dark emotions. The second takes me around them, on any number of detours, escaping the lows of shame and grief, for ‘higher’ ground. The only problem is that on the second I seem to tire so much and it never, ever, leads me to God. That road only leads me to a cul-de-sac and when I get there at the end of my long and tiring life I know I’m just going to have unpack my backpack and in it I will find the shame, unworthiness and grief I was trying to avoid all along.

On the first road I don’t have to carry a backpack. It will be painful at first but I know as I go the scenery will improve and I may even start humming a tune or two. But there is pain in starting out, and there will be pain in staying the course.

How much do I really want it?

Am I willing to step directly into the things I fear?

The second road still calls me. It tempts me; it masquerades as the easier route. The surface is smoother underfoot… but it’s that darn backpack that weighs me down.

I feel frustrated that I know the best path to take and yet I do not take it. I’m sitting dawdling. My backpack gets heavier by the minute and I have a tendency to whine about it. How uncaring is that? I want to whine about how heavy it is when it is my choice to keep lugging it about. It’s tiring all this lugging. It’s more than tiring it gets painful. Which leads me to the dog..

The Wounded Dog

I wanted to share a story with you about a dog full of barbs. It was told to me by Yeshua and comes from our brother John, who while here on earth the second time, was given this story from his spirit friends.

Imagine a dog who has been shot full of arrows with barbs on their ends. They are stuck in his skin and he yelps as he moves. He is in constant pain.

There is no way to remove the barbs without more pain. Barbs by their nature become lodged and stuck; their prongs embed in the skin at different angles. The most loving thing we can do for the dog is to ask him to lie still and allow us to remove the barbs as gently as possible. We can’t prevent the pain but if he doesn’t thrash and kick he won’t be injured further.

Now imagine yourself as this dog. The process of birth and growth from childhood has left you stuck full of barbs – not barbs from God but from our forefathers’ decisions to neglect God and love, from our own life’s choices which have placed pain within our souls. So we are now full of painful wounds, tender to touch.

God is so tender and loving and He wants so much to see us free of barbs and wounds and all of the sharp things caught in our coat. He will do everything he can to ease them out of us gently. The barb that hurt so much going in is going to sting coming out. There is no avoiding it. But if we lie still, if we surrender and allow God’s Hands to gently work, it will happen quickly and we will feel the sheer relief of it leaving us.

It is when we fight and resist that the process becomes painful, we cause more injury to ourselves and those around us when we thrash and rebel against what is most natural. In trusting and allowing we liberate our pain and in letting go it hardly hurts at all. Like the prick of a splinter exiting our palm, the quick, sharp, pinch is nothing compared to the feeling of relief as it comes out.

And this is the key lesson our spirit friends were tyring to teach us – our pain now is almost entirely due to the fight against feeling what is already within us. We are so terrified of the removal of the barbs. We believe it is the ultimate pain, not realising that it is actually relief.

So instead we fight and struggle or we try to find a comfortable way to numb the pain.(1) But this only augments our suffering. The barbs can start to fester, an infection can spread throughout our entire lives.

The greatest way to relieve our pain is the simplest – to allow and feel what is there while we let God’s Love and Grace remove our error.

“The new birth is the flowing of the holy spirit into the soul of a man and the disappearing of all that tended to keep it in a condition of sin and error. It is the love of God that passes all understanding…

Your will is the thing that determines whether you will become a child of God or not. Unless you are willing to let the Holy Spirit enter into your heart, it will not do so. Only the voluntary submission to, or acceptance, of the Holy Spirit will make the change.”(2)

Submit and allow the barbs to be removed.

At my fork in the road I so desperately want to fight. Indeed I spent some hours yesterday just fighting with God about it all. I feel angry at love. Can you believe that? I want to be angry at AJ for just loving me because it reminds me of how much I hurt, how much I missed him. It’s like, because I don’t want to feel the pain of loss I have deadened a part of my heart. Now that I have AJ in my life everyday it is harder and harder to avoid the pain of this partitioned off part of my soul.

I have screamed and sobbed at God, wanting another way out, any other way but through, any other road but the first. God, in all Her tenderness, just waited, waited for me to stop thrashing while she gently tries to remove the barbs.

It’s hard to trust Her.

She’s still waiting and I resist Her Love.

You know what it’s like when you’re having a bad day at work. You’re OK while everyone is just doing their thing. They may even be terse and bossy with you. You’re fine until that one person just reaches out and says, ‘Hey, you look beat, would you like to talk?’ The sudden kindness is the thing that tips you over the edge and you find yourself crying.

I feel like my whole life has been one long work day, with me beating up on myself for not doing well enough, and others around me demanding I give more. Now when I consider opening up to God, who just wants to hold me and says ‘I love you no matter what’, it feels like I’ll loose it, completely loose it.

So I push Her away.

I push away my Heavenly Mother who Loves me.

I push my mate away.

I resist anyone who is tender and gentle because I can’t bear the contrast between what life has been and what it can be.

There are so many barbs.

I’m praying now for the strength to surrender to myself, to God’s process. The process She designed with infinite care, the road that brings me back to Her.

I’m praying for you to, that you may also find this courage.

Sometimes we get so used to the barbs that we feel they are preferable. Or we decide we don’t mind the heavy backpack, we believe we deserve it.

Sometimes the hardest thing to surrender to is LOVE.

"Surrender dear sister, surrender" I hear my guides whisper "Take the shorter route, though it feels you will plunge directly into darkness, trust the Father, for from that point on your load will be lighter and your steps will be surer."

"Take the narrow road that leads to God."

---

[1] The Pharmaceutical industry is based almost entirely upon this principle; "How can we help you numb your pain?", rather than release its cause.

[2] Excerpt from a message received from Yeshua, channelled by James E Padgett in 1915. For further information on where to view or purchase the Padgett Messages see here, here and here.

Gratitude & Growth

For the past few months I’ve been living in the mantra:

“God’s got me in a process – whatever comes, whatever happens all I need to do is stay humble and keep feeling, and praying, and I’ll grow”

And I’ve felt myself growing and learning and changing. I prayed and cried and journalled and just been heaps more honest with myself and it has all helped.

I’ve learnt to trust God more. I’ve begun to want Him and I’ve felt the tides of grief have been worth it. I’ve felt that they’ve left me cleaner and clearer.

But on Thursday, as the dust settled behind the rental car carrying the two men who had come to make the documentary about us, I didn’t want to be in the process anymore.

I wanted to find a dark, cosy hole of denial I could crawl into and forget about how exposed I felt, how awkward and inarticulate. I felt like I had failed to express how precious this Path is to me, how much it means to me, and I didn’t want to face certain exposure and ridicule.

AJ, Yeshua, my mate and the kindest soul I ever knew, kept reminding me that I’m just a work in progress but wow I felt so inadequate and imperfect. I felt like my mantra was smug and that I wasn’t ready for any of it, I just wanted a normal life again. I got into dangerous projection and denial territory.

I’m still coming out of it and I’m dismayed at how readily I slipped back into fear. I’m so fortunate to be surrounded by many who love me and I feel upset when I let my connection with them sever because I fear the reactions of people I have never met.

The luminous lesson I revisited today was that of gratitude. I have so much to be thankful for.

I have a man who loves me so completely that I can’t even comprehend it.

I have God in my life. This is such a magnificent and humbling gift. I have starved for Him for most of my life.

I live a life that I am passionate about, that upholds ideals that I believe in. I am supported in this by so many, many of whom (many of you) I have never even met. I never believed that I would find a way and a place to live that fulfilled me and answered all of my questions. I found it and I am grateful.

I eat good, nutritious food. I am clothed. I have shelter.

Yes, I still need to process my fears, and the road ahead may have some tough emotions and situations to face but my life holds so much richness and beauty and possibility.

Some years ago I spent two years living in a refugee camp in southern Beirut, Lebanon. My brothers and sisters in that camp taught me much about dignity and suffering, about war and traffic. They extended to me deep hospitality and warmth. I feel privileged that they opened their homes and hearts to me. I felt my offerings in their community were so feeble in comparison. I still think of them often. I hope one day that I can do something to change the way their lives are lived. At present they live with scarcity of opportunity, education, clean air and nutrition.

Many of my old friends feel I have sold out on my humanitarian ideals. In fact I feel I have embraced them more strongly. It was too easy for me to avoid my disillusionment and cynicism through actions; actions that I knew were futile to make lasting changes in people’s lives. It’s hard, in times when I feel hopeless about my own progress towards God, to not be tempted to go back and make a splint for a Haji in Bourj el Barajneh, Beirut. 

Instead I remember the ones who live there. It makes me more grateful for the gifts I have been given and it spurs me on to make changes in this one soul. Changes that I hope, will ripple more positively and in much wider concentric circles than the ones I have created in the past.

Sharing All The Pieces

“It is wonderful what God can do with a broken heart, if He gets all the pieces.”

Samuel Chadwick

I love these words. My challenge is to dig deep inside to find all of those hurt and broken pieces and then be brave enough to hold them, to be with them long enough to share them with God so that healing can begin.

Wishing you (and me) the courage to share the tenderest parts of your heart with God, He so loves us,

Mary

P.S. God whispered something to me recently, right after I had been brave enough to share a part of my brokenness with Him. He told me simply (in feeling not in words)

“You are worthy of love”

The beauty of that feeling is still reverberating around my soul. It hasn't settled as a truth inside of me yet. But I wanted you to know because He’s been trying to tell you the same thing.

M xo

A Grey Week and a New Space of Vulnerability

 I’ve had a difficult couple of weeks. I have found new depths in this experience – facing difficult truths and emotions that I have avoided for a long time. I’ve felt afraid, sad, desperate and hopeless. Mostly these feelings alternated but sometimes they hit me all at once. I’m learning that part of the mastery of this path is to be with these spaces, without avoidance or a desire for them to be over before their completion. When I can soften into deep sorrow my being is glad to finally stop resisting what already lies within and to let the sharp edges of grief and loss diminish through their expression.

I haven’t posted mainly because I have been busy feeling and exploring these new (old) spaces but also because it’s harder to post when I feel fragile. It feels like a different quality to vulnerable to share when I am still in the sad space and when I know there are now people who read who are critical of me. But I remind myself that the reason I began to blog was to share my story. For the past couple of weeks I have been rediscovering parts of myself and my story that are both painful and poignant.

I have a half a dozen posts half written, about green tree frogs, a woman named Freda and finding the strength and joy in striving, but these will remain incomplete for today. I thought instead I would simply share some broad strokes and snippets from my journal and hopefully they can tell the story for me.

I’m struggling with two major sets of emotions at the moment. There are each overwhelming and intertwined. I’m grappling with the emotional acceptance of my identity. The mental and emotional pain of truly accepting that I am Mary Magdalene feels quite honestly in most moments more than I can bear. I tussle with just sitting with the reality of what I feel to be true and the implications of that for any length of time.

I’ve also been braving the experience of emotions of Soulmate loss. These were triggered sharply when I first met AJ and I felt him as Yeshua and me as Miriam. The feelings of grief were so intense and, at the time so confusing, that I suppressed them furiously. In the intervening years I have indeed been furious with AJ, blaming him for this grief and resolutely refusing to venture into truly experiencing it.

I’ve made some forays into these emotions in the past month but honestly I still struggle with this. There are parts of me that want him to pay for my pain. I want him to prove to me over and over again that he loves me so that I can avoid the crippling feeling that somehow his death was a rejection of me and something I deserved. These feelings are tangible. There is an anatomy to my pain that defies explanation unless I accept that we are indeed these ones who shared a life and great loss in another time. To submit to such emotions of course only triggers more issues about my identity. Sometimes I have the feeling that in order to stay sane I must allow these emotions that are undeniably a part of me but that in doing so I become to the vast majority of the world someone who is not sane.

2/2/2011

I resist connection with my mate, I have us on this desperate merry-go-round of repetition.

I fear so much the level of grief, the past loss of our connection. Now I feel if I connect with him he can be taken from me. I don’t want to connect. I never want to feel that bad again. If I open my heart completely I will give people the power to hurt me so much – they could take him from me.”

Today I have been wracked with the grief of loss.

Memories of the torture and death of my Soulmate.

A feeling that all of the goodness had been stripped from my life and my person.

A tragedy for myself, my unborn child, for the world

My heart hurts so much with the grief of longing and loosing, God help me to stay with this pain.

Later that day I wrote:

To love someone with all of who we are, to desire them completely and with an open heart, to share ourselves without reserve, is one of the most – if not the most – courageous things we can ever do. It is also the most worthwhile.

3/2/2011

Feeling the presence of my spirit guide very strongly during heavy processing, feeling unworthy of her love and attention, feel that I must get through all of the resistance alone.

I received a channeling in answer to my feelings.

4/2/2011

Reading a book on grief, loss of a spouse. The book triggers so much grief surrounding Yeshua’s death that I don’t want to feel (powerful, overwhelming). I want an easier way out than to feel them.

I feel angry with God – why should I have to do this?

5/2/2011

Truths:

 -        In order to connect to God, to receive the Love of God, I must have a relationship with Him based on me being who I am.

-        If I am Mary Magdalene this means I must accept this if I am gong to relate with God and receive His Love.

I feel like I can’t do this. I’m not capable, I’m not suitable for this role. I don’t want it.

God, why did you let me do this?

I’m not strong enough.

I’m sick of trying to be strong. I can’t do it anymore.

How much rejection must I face?

How much uncertainty?

How much loneliness?

How much striving for connection with my mate?

I’m sick of not getting it. I’m sick of the struggle. I’m sick of resisting feeling how hard this is.

This is hard. Its uncomfortable, it hurts. Everyday to stay connected to you God, everyday to stay connected with myself, everyday to stay connected to AJ I must face some terrifying truth about myself, who I am, my family, our life…

I know this is horrible but sometimes I find myself wishing I had other people’s trials and troubles. I love God and I love this path, in fact I want to dedicate my life to it. I just don’t want to do this as Mary Magdalene. This feels so hard and yet I cannot go on avoiding the memories inside of me. I’m exhausted from trying to.

Why does God want the parts of us that are the hardest to face?

Why do I have to face this pain?

Any other pain seems paler in comparison to dealing with this.

Where is my faith God? Where is my commitment to what is true? I want to shy away from it because it hurts me, it confuses me, it unlocks my deepest pains.

AM I WILLING TO FACE MY PAIN IN ORDER TO KNOW GOD?

Note: It’s difficult for me to attempt to have others understand the emotions about identity.

I realise in reading some of what I have written people could be forgiven for asking ‘Why on earth are you bothering if it feel so bad/ hard?’ or that somehow someone else is forcing me to consider this reality.

Believe me no-one could ‘suggest up’ or ‘implant’ the grief that I feel. The truth is that my pain and desperation comes from the knowledge that in order to grow I must face the things already inside of me. And the things inside of me say I am this other person.

The memories that I hold are from a life filled with hardship, followed by a brief, bright period filled for the first time with beauty, love and hope which sharply ceased. It ceased and we endured the time of Great Loss and my life again became one of hardship and sorrow. Facing my identity means accepting these memories and also experiencing the pain of others' rejection of what I feel.

7/2/2011

I feel I am a horribly flawed person, unable to change, unworthy of love.

I feel psychologically disturbed and in pain to consider emotionally the Truth that I am Mary Magdalene.

9/2/2011

God, please help me with these feelings. I am so stuck – I don’t want to open-heartedly desire my Soulmate. I want instead to blame him for our ostracism. I want to protect my heart from hurting.

I am resisting so much. I am hanging on by my finger nails, white knuckled and stubborn.

I ‘like’ the addiction of him making me feel good about myself and me being passive. I get to have him ‘prove’ over and over that I am important and that he loves me. I risk nothing in this exchange. I don’t have to examine my true feelings about him or about myself.

What are the feelings inside of me?

They feel confusing. I am angry but underneath that is the feeling of being rejected by him at his death and my own feeling that this must mean I am worthless.

When I am brave enough to feel those feelings under them is a longing for him, a fear of loosing him and a fear of expressing this longing (lest I be ‘rejected’ again).

My heart is hard on the surface – angry and resistive,

Underneath I am afraid.

Beneath my fear is an ocean of grief and longing

A soup of loss and desire

I fear that I may drown in

Is my being strong enough to survive the torrent of emotions that threatens to overwhelm it?

God give me faith that I may grow and thrive in such a brine – this mix of sweet and salty water.

I’ve learnt two things in the past few months. They are this:

Firstly that our emotions truly begin to change and shift in the moment we fully surrender to them. I don’t need to make sense of them. If I trust the process and long to God for Truth and Love as I go through them, my emotions guide me to a place of more understanding and freedom.

Second, I have realised that the issues and emotions we resist the longest, that feel the hardest to deal with, what we seem most blocked to, are the ones that have the most negative impact on our lives and conversely when we decide to deal with them, have the most inspiring and relieving results. Also, when we truly decide to face them, then very rapidly a whole truck-load of emotions comes bubbling up. Of course they do! We carry the most pain about these things; it makes sense that when we go looking for them our emotions will arrive easily.

I always thought I was so ‘stuck’ on the big issues – but the truth was that I just feared that I couldn’t handle the pain. When I decided, in my heart not in my head, to face the truth of what I really felt, the emotions were not elusive or difficult to access. They were and still are extremely present and intense and the challenge is allowing that experience.

 

I was thinking this morning of our lives, as if lived at sea. In the storm we cling to our (by now leaking) dingy. Each of us has a dingy, constructed with the weathered timber of our addictions and the things that make us feel safe and in control.

In our panic at the wind and rain, we wish to hold onto our dingy, believing it has brought us through thus far. We dash around plugging up the gaps, exerting ourselves, believing this is our only way to survive.

Meanwhile, the steady steam liner, that effortlessly maintains calm in the turbulent waters, has thrown us a lifeline. All we need do is dive into the powerful sea and reach out to God and we will be carried to peace and calm.

But instead, our fear keeps us believing that the leap is impossible. It tells us that the dingy is the only certainty we know.

Right now we are each of us weathering some kind of storm. Even if we’ve become so adept at plugging up holes and building sails that we believe the sun is shining, somewhere inside there is a tempest of grief unfelt. We all carry pain and I have found the effort to avoid that pain has become exhausting. All that is left is to dive in deep and trust the tides and that life ring to carry me somewhere safe and warm.

My dingy in sinking and I’m starting to trust that a new reality may be possible, certain even. 

With love and in shaky vulnerability,

Mary