3- Wake-Up Call

3- Wake-up Call

When we combine soul-searching and the desire to understand the meaning of life with creativity, we open a type of portal between our physical and non-physical self. Without realizing it, as this story demonstrates, I had done just that.  Though it would take another profound creative experience some years later to anchor this as an ongoing practice, I’d like to share the first of these ‘wake-up calls’ as I have come to see them.  I was in my late twenties, the single mother of two, and my life was once again coming undone! Thank goodness!

The first half of my life was a train wreck.  It was not until my late twenties that I began to truly find direction and purpose.  And even then, there was so much residual dysfunction overlapping my newfound revelations that it took a few years for my outer circumstances to begin to align with the internal changes I was experiencing.  As a single mom of two young children, I lived in a house that a relative was remodeling.  Because of the ongoing construction, I paid a reduced rent for a large home on the outskirts of town.  While it wasn’t perfect, it was affordable….and in the countryside, which I loved!  Construction on the house took place while I was at work and the kids were at school or daycare.  Evenings and weekends it was quiet and peaceful. 

The house was a very old, very large two-story which was built in the early 1900’s.  It had fourteen foot high ceilings, large handmade glass windows, shiplap walls and hardwood floors.  But before you get a beautiful HGTV vision in your mind, let me point out that the place had never been updated or remodeled! It was solid and strong but it was not a testimony to modern renovation.  The living room was divided by two massive pocket doors and this allowed me to use one side as a bedroom for myself while the kids slept on the second story.  My ‘bedroom’ was huge and the high ceilings and large windows gave it an added feeling of expansion.  I often left the pocket doors open at night in case the kids needed something, because it was easier to hear them call from upstairs.  I had a dresser and a full size antique iron bed in the corner and not much else in the space.  It was in this room, in this bed, that a wake-up call unlike anything I had ever experienced got my attention.

During this period of my life I was doing a lot of soul searching; exploring religion and questioning the meaning of life.  The phrase “Lead me into all truth.” was a constant as I sought to know and understand a God that religion had yet to adequately reveal and philosophy failed to interpret for me.  Therefore, introspection and spiritual contemplation were the norm for me.  This pre-occupation spilled over into the kind of things I chose to read or study, and made up many of the conversations I had with others.  Having always been an artist and a writer, each night after the kids were in bed I would sit up and paint or write until I got tired.  Creativity had always been a large part of my life.  It was a constant and fulfilling aspect of my being and I truly indulged myself.  At this time in my life I was completely unaware of the powerful portal we open when we combine creative contemplation and soul searching.  It is profound to say the least!

Each night after putting away my notebook or paint brushes I’d crawl beneath the comfy covers and snuggle in.  I loved this old house and I loved living in the country.  One night as I was drifting off to sleep I heard my name called out from a distance, ever so faintly, but clear as a bell.  I opened my eyes and lay perfectly still as I waited, listening.  When I heard nothing more I wrote it off as being tired and simply ‘hearing things’.  When this happened again the next night, I was a little more perplexed because I knew I wasn’t imagining anything, nor was I dreaming.  For the next couple of weeks, as I lay down each night, I intentionally stayed mentally alert.  Night after night, in the dark stillness, just before drifting off, one brief utterance of my first name, seemingly called out from a short distance, filled the room where I lay.   Slightly louder than the first night, it left me more and more anxious until I couldn't take it any longer.  One night in response, I sat up and yelled as loud as I could into the empty room, “What?”

As the echo of my frustration faded, the room grew silent.  I never heard the voice call my name again, but I didn't need to.  It had gotten my attention and anchored my curious journey even deeper into the mystery of life.  I made many positive changes during this time and have always considered this experience a pivotal point...a wake-up call of sorts.  Yet this was not to be my last clairaudient experience.   As I share in the story Stillness Speaks, the next one would so profoundly awaken me that religion could not contain it nor could philosophy explain it, though it stemmed from both.  I say this to emphasize that it doesn’t matter where we are on our path.  Religious, atheist or somewhere between the two, if we are seeking truth from deep within ourselves truth will find us.  This is because we are the truth we seek.  Not our personality self, but our divine, limitless, eternal self!  It will quite literally call out to us if that is what it takes to get our attention!  

I learned that the quickest way to connect with this truth is to drop everything I had ever been told about what it is or how to find it.  I learned that there is no ‘one truth’ in a world of duality and perception.  There is however my truth….waiting deep inside of me to reveal itself.  Deeper than I had ever been taught to look!   I learned that this is how it works for each of us, and this is why truth, what most call ‘God’ can’t be contained, experienced or explained communally. Unbeknownst to me at the time, creativity had operated as a sort of meditative space that expanded me; opened me up as a receiver and made me more sensitive to the frequencies which were not typically on my radar.  I wouldn’t fully understand this until years later but once I did, creativity became fundamental to my spiritual journey of realization and awakening.

Eventually I abandoned the paths others had given me to follow and introspectively tuned into my own questioning heart with sincerity and integrity.  I then simply followed the synchronistic breadcrumbs that showed up, unraveling the mess I had made of things from being outwardly directed.  Today I know I came here to explore my own book of life, not read from another’s.  I didn’t come here to do anyone else’s plan for my life.  I didn’t come here to look good, fit in, or win approval.  I came here to come undone!  To free myself from ancestral conditioning and experience myself as an infinite being.  I now understand that I am my own self-help manual.  All I have to do is un-do the things that keep me from reaping the rewards of this great design.  But thankfully I don’t have to do this all at once.  That would be impossible.  I have spent the last thirty years consciously un-doing the previous thirty years of conditioning, so this I can promise..…  it gets easier and easier, until it becomes a joy ride of unimaginable proportions revealing the true, eternal nature of our lives in palpable clarity.  

In the years since this experience I have come to realize that the calling of our name is sometimes a precursor to the nightly out-of-body excursions we all take as our physical body sleeps.  This, or a vibrating sensation, which I have also experienced, is how we sometimes disconnect from our physical ‘container’.  The expanded, multi-dimensional awareness that we truly are is not confined nor is it limited to the dense nature of our physical experiences.  Hearing my name called out in the dark of night was just the metaphysical nudge I needed to begin to explore the fullness of my being beyond the limits of all I’d been told and taught about who..…and what, I am!  

Today I realize that I am an infinite being experiencing a limited framework. This framework expands beyond its limited nature as I follow my intuitive nudges with curiosity and introspective wonder. It is this ever unfolding journey that has my full attention, and informs all that I engage.    My art, my work, and my play is born from and returns to this endeavor.  Not because I am rigidly trying to become more, learn more, experience more, but because I have realized I am more….more than I was led to believe by the conditioned outer directed world.  And it is a great joy to play in the depths of this more-ness that I am!

10- The Illusion Of Reality

10- The Illusion Of Reality

At fifty-six, my father, husband and girlfriend of twenty years were in various stages of terminal cancer.  As I walked this intimate journey with them, the gifts and insights I received were innumerable. I attribute this to a practice Phil and I had embraced for about three years.  Using a mindset of compassion and non-judgement with regard to all experiences that arise in life,  present moment awareness is heightened. Due to this we discovered a complete shift in our experience of life itself. As the primary caretaker for my rapidly declining husband and girlfriend, I was thrust into an expansion of that shift.  While the people in the world around me went on as usual, I no longer shared their experience of it. The collapsing of  timelines, and synchronistic experiences became as much a part of life as the air I breathed.  I literally watched the differences between my experience of ‘reality’ and theirs, as if it was being played before me on a stage.…because, as Shakespeare had written, indeed it was.  

Living in the continual awareness of what is truly important and what is mere distraction was life changing.  When the people I loved were nearing the end of their physical incarnations, and as one by one they passed, a kind of awareness set in as to the true nature of this thing called life.  The normal comings and goings of everyday-ness were more evident to me as I watched the world scurrying around in distraction and routine while I was enveloped in a heightened sense of present moment awareness.  A dear friend of ours, Ed Rubinstein, once wrote a book titled Waking From The Trances Of Everyday Life.  It spoke to the mindlessness of habitual ‘doing’ in ordinary day-to-day living rather than living from a state of presence while attending to those same tasks.  I found myself acutely aware of this phenomena. I was living within a kind of slowed down state of hyper-focused awareness where time was ticking forever away, while the people interacting with me didn’t even seem to notice.  Caught as they were within their own trances of everyday life, two very different realities co-existed side by side, only appearing to share commonalities.  We all drove our cars, ate our meals, slept in beds, walked the same halls or sidewalks, even discussed many of the same subjects, but our realities of what was transpiring in those moments couldn’t have been more different.  This fascinated me and I began to not only experience, but understand the concept of ‘peace amid chaos’ and the teaching “peace that passeth all understanding” more than I ever had.

Instead of living along a timeline of fear and dread as a soon-to-be mid-fifties widow facing the loss of my beloved husband, father and friend, as well as my home and income, my experience was quite different.  Instead of life pulling at me from all directions, I was free to focus on my very ill loved ones. I stood amazed at the peaceful and meticulously guided experience my husband Phil and I were both having as we lived out his last weeks at the hospital.  Spiritually centered in a thought system based in compassionate non-judgement and presence for years, together we each experienced what we considered heightened results of those efforts as his passing grew close.  An ever-flowing stream of synchronistic experiences seem to provide whatever we needed whenever we needed it, and struggle was not even a blip on our radar.  Other than the weariness of living in a hospital week after week, we were free from tending to all of life’s necessities as one by one they were either eliminated or addressed through no doing of our own.  In fact, many things that would normally need attention during the illness and after the passing of a spouse, had been eliminated the week before we even learned Phil was ill.  This is what I refer to as the collapsing of difficulties along timelines due to our practice. This, in my experience, results from an attitude of acceptance and non-attachment in regards to life experiences.  Over and over I experience the peace that unfolds as I curiously approach life without judgment or attachment to outcome, simply witnessing what it holds rather than resisting or struggling against it.  Even as I reflect on such events to share them here, I am in awe at the ease with which the road ahead of us was prepared even  before we knew it was coming.

With Phil long past retirement age, and as spontaneous as we were, it wasn’t until the lease on our condo neared renewal that we decided it was retirement time.  Having always envisioned an RV lifestyle, we decided to move in that direction. Upon hearing our plans, my daughter unexpectedly suggested that rather than paying a heightened month-to-month condo fee, we should move into her guest room for a few weeks while we hunted for our RV, so we did just that.  Within a week we sold or donated most of our possessions, put my art studio in storage, and moved out of the condo. Since Phil wasn’t going to give notice of his retirement until we found our RV, a week later, when a routine examination revealed colon cancer, we still had the full coverage from his insurance and he was still gainfully employed.  Therefore, we had almost no bills, no property that needed tending, our finances were intact for the remainder of his life because his salary continued, and I was not left with the expenses of an RV I would not be using.  Add to this that I was able to live between the hospital and my daughters guest room, which made everything very convenient.  Even the choices Phil was able to make from the hospital with regard to structuring his retirement income were informed by his terminal diagnosis.  Those choices eliminated any remaining bills I would have been left with and provided me with a small monthly income to fund my expenses while taking care of my girlfriend for the next two years.  This would not have been the insurance or retirement structure we’d have made had his diagnosis come even one week later.  As astounding as all this was, it didn’t end there.

As Phil and my father’s passing was bridged by less than a day, even the window of time I found away from Phil’s bedside in those last days, to visit my father before his passing, was filled with a blessing.  A kind of coherency rare in my dad’s last days was granted the morning I visited.  And while my visit lasted only a few hours before I was unexpectedly called back to an emergency situation with Phil, we said all that we needed before his transition.  Even after Phil’s passing, everything was so perfectly aligned that I was able to spend the time necessary to care for my girlfriend as she battled her own terminal illness. Because all of my worldly and personal responsibilities had been synchronistically resolved, it was impossible not to marvel at these amazing results I attribute to the daily practice of compassionate non-attachment which Phil and I had embraced for so long. But before I move on from sharing the collapsing of difficult timelines, I want to share perhaps the most profound result of all Phil’s experiences during this time.

As if facing the end of one’s life isn’t typically jarring enough, exiting through the painful conditions associated with colon cancer is not an easy path.  Unless, like Phil, one had spent years playing a conscious game of ‘Don’t Make It Real.”  Borrowing a phrase from the ACIM (A Course In Miracles) community, Phil and I had spent the last three years helping one another view and respond to the world as a projection of the mind, and therefore not ‘real’ in the sense that most experience it.  Seeing everything in the physical world of form as a reflection for our own benefit of awakening from thoughts of separation, we helped one another get out of the perception based conditioning of our thoughts; those automatic responses of believing the minds projection and the results such thinking produces.  For years we reminded each other, numerous times each day, to step away from the divided mind of perception and into the whole mind of compassionate non-judgement.  This practice brought us into present moment awareness like no other.  We got to the point where just the phrase “don’t make it real” could almost instantly shine a light on any situation, lifting the heaviest burden or pulling us out of intense frustration.  We laughed at ourselves often as we found one another emotionally snagged by the things in life that we were ‘making real’.  We marveled at the way this ‘not making it real’ game really seemed to lighten or shift our experiences. Our world filled with synchronistic wonder as this practice freed us from the cycle of cause and effect and collapsed difficulties along timelines.  This proved true even along the timelines we were unknowingly moving toward.

I first received the diagnosis of Phil’s cancer in the hallway just outside an exam room where he was resting from a colonoscopy. Upon sharing this news with him I took his hand and immediately asked him if he was scared.  He smiled, saying no, and that he wasn’t going to ‘make it real’.  We agreed!  We weren’t making light of the news, we simply weren’t afraid!  On the contrary, we knew that walking through such a circumstance using the practice of compassionate non-judgement would be profoundly opportunistic on our path of awakening.  And since spiritual awakening had become the center of our lives for many years, we simply continued the practices we had found, opening ourselves to the mystery unfolding before us.

The staff tending to Phil at the clinic came in and out of the room with lowered eyes and consoling words, sharing their sadness about the diagnosis. Each time one would leave the room Phil commented and repeatedly pointed out to me how the staff’s response to the situation was so conditioned that they couldn’t even see that we weren’t in fear or disbelief.  So conditioned to the beliefs they held about the news of a terminal diagnosis, they weren't able to be present to the very people they were attempting to console. It was then that Phil and I knew we would walk through what was ahead of us together, in the same kind of peace-filled awareness bubble we had played in for years.  A bubble of awareness that most of the world couldn’t see. We weren’t in denial.  That is not the nature of the ‘don’t make it real’ perspective. We had simply conditioned our minds to see beyond the programmed illusion of separation that ensnared most.  Completely aware of the physical prognosis of the diagnosis within the illusion, we were intimately connected to the reality beyond this illusion of separation which the diagnosis had also brought, and therefore completely free of fear!  As time went on and Phil’s illness progressed it was sad to watch the suffering of loved ones who only felt the ‘reality’ of impending loss.  Personally, we knew this to simply be a time of transition; a glorious time that truly should be celebrated as one steps into an expansion of themselves free from physical limitations, having completed the mission their incarnation facilitated.

Through surgery, and conditions arising from the surgery, through living at the hospital almost day and night for eight weeks, and being given various and ever shortening time frames for survival, our peace filled bubble of expanded awareness remained around us.  While I was often physically exhausted, from living at Phil’s bedside and checking in on my girlfriend when I could, Phil and I were most always in good spirits.  Alone in his room we would often talk about how amazing it was to experience ourselves actually living the awareness we had come to realize and reaping the results in this time of heightened circumstance.  It is easy to think you are growing from your spiritual perspectives when things are going smoothly.  But when the road gets rocky you get to see the degree to which your beliefs and experiences align.  We were amazed how natural it was to continue to live from our heightened awareness as Phil literally lay dying.  Phil would visit with loved ones and friends that came by, and when asked how his attitude was so upbeat, he would share his excitement about the adventure ahead of him in terms he felt they could understand. “I’ve spent my whole life wondering about the spiritual world and now I’m going to experience it first hand!” he said to one friend.  “Why be afraid?  We don’t die!” he would exclaim.  This was quintessential Phil.

Apart from high spirits Phil was also virtually pain free throughout his entire illness.  Rarely if ever on pain medication, he remained alert and truly ‘with us’ until he slipped quietly away in his sleep the night we brought him home for hospice care.  Having since watched the stark contrast of my girlfriends long and harrowing struggle with the exact same illness, and her painful lingering as she held tightly onto her body in her last days, the differences that an awakening mind like Phil’s experienced was again magnified for me. So different was his experience through his illness and transition that it is impossible to know just how much of it to contribute to his practice of compassionate non-judgement.  However, I can honestly say I have never heard of such an ease filled and almost completely drug-free presence associated with anyone passing from colon cancer.  I personally credit much of Phil’s experience with his practice of compassionate non-judgement and the difficulties that were collapsed because of it.  As for my own experiences I am certain they were aided by this practice.

A day or so after Phil transitioned, a profound thought dropped into my awareness.   It was deeper and more substantial than normal everyday thoughts that run through my mind and it caught me completely off guard.  More like a statement of fact, it carried more weight than the words themselves and was accompanied with an expansion experience beyond-the-body.  The thought was this,  ’If Phil is dead, then I can’t really be alive.’  A profound shift instantaneously arose in me and the concept of illusion that is taught in esoteric scriptures literally expanded in my awareness.  I instantly grasped a new level of understanding with regard to the physical world as a projection of the mind.  A confirmation was extended that there truly is no such thing as life (or death) as we define it.  There is only awareness…eternal awareness.  I have come to realize that this is what we are, and this is what we expand into more of upon our passing.  As we exit the limitations of our physical experience, we expand into more of that awareness, which we never truly left, but only imagined leaving in our illusion of separation. From there, if we have evolved our consciousness enough to move beyond the planes of matter, energy, space, and time we can align directly with this awareness.  For Phil and I, this evolution was practiced through compassionate non-judgement.

Because I had been wrapped in an uncommon cocoon focused on what is referred to as ‘end-of-life’ scenarios multiplied by three, I had been experiencing huge doses of this awareness for quite some time.  The comings and goings of the world around me continued to mirror stark contrasts between my reality and the hum of a distracted, unawakened reality.  Experiencing the ease of the timeline associated with Phil’s passing and how everything was divinely guided also magnified my years of practicing compassionate non-judgement, and not making things ‘real’. Giving our personal power away to those things that we grasp onto as ‘real’ limits us from our limitless, eternal nature.  Having been able to embrace the world as a mirror of the fragmented mind, even through Phil’s illness and passing, I had fostered a new level of awakening.  In truth, Phil was no more dead than I was alive….not in this physical form of illusory projection anyway.  We are both beyond those small concepts of life and death.  Knowing this allows me to approach life differently than if I buy into any ‘form’ as who I am.  The freedom in this doesn’t divorce me from the responsibilities I align with in my incarnation or remove me from tragedy.  It does however lighten this for me and moves me from one experience to the next with grace and gratitude. The opportunity this world affords me to choose love and compassion at every turn connects me deeper to my true essence. I have come to realize this as a gift beyond measure.  While I am only practiced at it and not perfect, I have come to realize that it is this attitude that moves me closer to true Self-realization.