The Gift of Spirituality

I didn’t grow up as a spiritual person. In fact, I wasn’t familiar with spiritual matters outside of the context of religion. Sure, I was dragged to church when I was little and went on Christmas and Easter. But it was more of a social gathering than anything else. I wasn’t concerned with my soul or the afterlife until my father was diagnosed with cancer (just a few years after his brother died from cancer the day before my last college final exam). That was when I found my first book about a near-death experience.

Reading about the incredible NDE calmed my nerves about an afterlife but being in my early twenties, I was more concerned with finding a career and my love life than anything else.

I still didn’t know about spirituality when, in my mid-thirties, my very first hypnotherapist asked me to connect to my higher self. Having no clue what she was talking about (because I was seeing her to help with weight loss), I had to ask what a higher self was. In the middle of her explanation, I had what I can only call “an experience”.

Suddenly I was no longer imagining this or that. It was like I’d entered a movie, but it was live. I was watching a scene while I was living it. I felt emotions ranging from power to humor to joy to compassion and unconditional love and received knowledge as the scene morphed and evolved. Afterward, I kept thinking that this must be what a psychedelic trip feels like.

Because I wasn’t interested in spirituality, I had the experience and tucked it away. I wouldn’t have a larger context for it to have real meaning for more than a decade.

I had a few more wild and crazy experiences during hypnosis sessions that were very healing – like being healed of all shame by an angel and seeing prebirth planning – and I still wasn’t interested in spirituality.

But I was interested in psychic phenomena and after meeting my first intuitive energy healer, I became very interested in energy healing. After taking my first Reiki class and becoming attuned, something changed and I was set on what I’d only later realize was my spiritual path.

Within a few weeks of my Reiki attunement, I had an experience that let me know proof positive that there’s more to life than what my five senses detect or can be measured by science (although science is catching up). Full disclosure: I love science. The awakening also activated my soul’s deepest desire and passion for healing. I had to know everything about energy healing, and I had to know it yesterday.

The beauty of energy healing is how it sees the body and mind not as separate but as an extension of or a manifestation of our soul’s energy. Modern medicine treats the physical aspect of a body and behavioral medicine treats the mind. Energy medicine is a wonderful compliment, taking things a step further.

Instead of treating someone by listening to a cluster of symptoms and addressing only a physical diagnosis (which was just the ticket when I needed my very hot gallbladder removed), energy healing looks for blockages within a person’s energy field and seeks to release them. Think of a river becoming dammed, thus creating a blockage, and then removing the dam. The dam can be chronic disease or physical pain, and it can also cause chronic anger, anxiety, or depression.

As an energy healer, I know that my physical structure is held in place by an energetic blueprint that’s somewhat malleable. When I heal things in my energy field, it can affect my body and/or my mind.

While I learned about energy healing, I learned about things like angels and ascended masters, like how they can sometimes intercede and create healing with the soul’s agreement. I learned to ask for their help when I wanted to heal something and one day received it, creating what felt like a miracle at the time.

Along the way I studied all sorts of modalities, keeping what worked and what resonated with me and letting go of what didn’t. Only months after my initial awakening (I still didn’t consider myself a spiritual seeker), deeply into energy healing classes and workshops, my parents’ health began to fail and I took point overseeing the administration of their care.

Going through a few of the toughest years of my life, when first Dad and then Mom got sick and died, being able to continue learning about and experiencing energy healing was a huge gift.

Being Daddy’s little girl, shortly after his death I tried out some of the new skills I’d learned in class about communicating with spirit. Much to my surprise, I made contact! I heard (in my mind) and felt my dad’s joy and relief about being free from his body. It was so unbelievable that I shared what happened with a few psychic women I knew who validated that I hadn’t made it up. It was real.

The miracle I referred to earlier happened after Dad died and my mother’s mental health went completely off the rails into mania. I finally realized that it was only when my mother became manic that she became a danger and could attack (usually verbally) if she felt provoked by me. Although she’d talk shit about other people when she was manic, it was only me she eviscerated with her tongue. Long story short, I was advised to look at something in meditation, and when I did, I saw that the dynamic between Mom and I had been passed down for generations in my maternal lineage.

Using the skills I had at the time, I focused deeply into my heart and asked God, Jesus, and Archangel Raphael (the angel of healing) to heal the pain. It didn’t take long for me to become very emotional and feel like something had changed. Several days later when I talked to my very manic mother, I said something I knew would push a button, waiting for her to attack. Instead, I heard nothing. There was dead silence on the phone. From that day on, she never attacked me again. Not only that, but a chronic health issue she’d had for a decade – something with no discernable physical cause – suddenly and inexplicably began to heal.

Remember how I love science? I love proof positive. With practice and experiences like this, I had proof that things like angels and ascended masters and our spirits actually exist.

One more quick story.

When I took a class in energy healing, one of the things we did was meet our healing guides and I learned that one of my guides was called John the Baptist. I’m not religious, so I don’t know him from the Bible, but I’d heard the name. Not really concerned with finding out anything about him, I just worked with him.

A few years later when I began to work with a spiritually-based hypnotherapist, she began our sessions by relaxing me and guiding me to imagine a white light above my head that was healing and intelligent. She’d also ask me to look toward the light and ask for a guide to come forward. I never knew who was going to show up, but John the Baptist arrived several times. And every time he came, he always told me the same thing: this is going to be easy peasy. He was my cheerleader. He kept the faith for me. And if I became stuck, all I had to do was turn to him and suddenly I was unstuck. When I mentioned this to my first spiritual mentor (who was very knowledgeable about the Bible), she told me that I truly knew John the Baptist and what he represents: keeping the faith. It’s an inner sense of unshakable faith. For me, it’s simply knowing I’ve got it. And even when I’m not sure how I’ll get from point A to point B, it’s knowing I will get there.

Working with spiritual beings in the realm of energy healing has helped me heal my body and my mind, changing from the inside out. Although I wouldn’t necessarily consider myself a spiritual seeker, spirituality came in through the back door, wrapped its loving arms around me, and breathed divinity into me.

Tulip Time!

The month of April is our local Tulip Festival. Every year we celebrate one of the most popular crops in our little agricultural valley: bulbs! The fields are filled with daffodils during March, and by the first week of April, the focus shifts to tulips.

Our valley here in Washington State hosts the largest family-owned tulip company in the US, and they not only grow acres and acres of flowers to sell the bulbs, but they also have several acres of greenhouses that produce flowers year-round and a formal garden that’s planted every year which boasts over a million bulbs.

Over the past several years, one of the local tulip farms that had been family-owned since its inception changed hands and has downscaled a bit. And two other small tulip farms have sprung up, providing more venues to visit.

This past week I found myself near the tulip fields and noticing it was early afternoon and mid-week, I ran over to a few of the fields which were just past peak bloom. They weren’t very crowded and I enjoyed mosying around snapping photos of Mother Nature’s majesty. Although large swaths of color are mesmerizing, I also love to find blooms that stand out, sometimes seemingly in the wrong place.

Click on a photo to see it in its entirety and to scroll through a slideshow.

Mount Baker overlooking the valley.

Art in plein air.

Why pick red or yellow when you can be both?

In a reflective mood.

Standing tall and proud.

Bloom where you’re planted.

After enjoying the first field, I took a short drive to another field with different varieties.

A peek inside!

Beautiful purple in the field.

Swaths of color.

Mount Baker overlooking another field.

I visited the formal garden in late March when the daffodils, hyacinths, crocuses and early tulips were in bloom, and I hope to make it back in the next week to see the garden in full bloom. In case I don’t make it back, here’s a photo from several years ago.

Roozengaarde formal garden.

Droplets on a Web

A month ago, I was having some much-needed quiet time perusing social media and saw a post from a lovely English organist I follow, who shared a snippet from the end of a concert she recently played in. Instead of it being one of her concerts, she was accompanying an award-winning British singer and her band. As she mentioned how lovely it was that the singer thanked the band members at the end of the concert, she was really taken that she was also singled out.

In that moment, I unconsciously connected with her gratitude and my heart suddenly burst open. Pure love poured into and through me as I was brought to tears. Not only did I receive a dousing of the divine but suddenly became aware of the chair I was sitting in.

I was filled with gratitude for the chair. But it didn’t stop there. I was filled with gratitude for all of the materials that went into the chair. I was filled with gratitude for everyone who put the chair together, for the trees that provided the wood, for Mother Earth who grew the trees, for the teachers who educated the craftsmen, for the factory where the workers put everything together, and on and on. I suddenly saw a massive web of interdependence.

Looking around the room, I felt the same gratitude for everything that went into creating everything I saw, and everyone’s efforts. The divine flowed through me.

I saw that we all play an important role in the greater whole, and how each and every role is needed. Even the craftsman who worked independently to do their job used tools that someone else made and was raised by someone and taught by someone.

Sometimes I feel alone and isolated, especially because I’m still rolling through a unique and challenging awakening process. But this mystical moment reminded me that we’re never truly alone, we’re all supported in some way, and every one of us is much needed in this physical world. We’re all interdependent with one another.

Happy Easter

My Inconvenient Truth… For Now

Just over seven years ago I experienced a somewhat rare spiritual phenomenon. My Kundalini energy cranked open and has been going gangbusters ever since. What this energy does is change a person from the inside out. The activated energy raised my vibrational frequency and suddenly made me exquisitely sensitive. Because I was so sensitive, I was aware of my inner world and feelings in a way that made it incredibly easy to recognize inner resistance like anger, frustration, fear, sadness, and more, and completely process it until it was healed. All it took was a few moments of meditative quiet and setting the intention for the resistance to bubble all the way up to my full consciousness. What was left in its place was the divine.

I saw the world through the eyes of the divine and was bubbling over with love and compassion, which is typical of spiritual awakenings in general. However, being so incredibly sensitive, I had a very hard time with noise, negativity, and people. I wished more than ever to be able to run away to a place of refuge and spend hours in silence but I couldn’t. My family needed me.

While many people experience great healing during a Kundalini awakening, so did I. But because I’d already healed so much of my life, I began to heal on a much broader and deeper level, which was very cool, and exhausting.

In the beginning, I could control when I healed things, but within months, inner healing shifts began to happen spontaneously. A conversation with someone could spark an inner shift and would leave me barely able to function for a few days. Then I’d be wiped out for a few weeks. And less than a year into the awakening, instead of finding my way out of the really tough part of things, I needed help from healers.

Since then, my life hasn’t been mine. I’ve been on a mystical healing journey that’s been incredible, but also quite debilitating. For the past several years, I’ve woken up daily to a mind that feels like I’m not all here. And far too often I’m aware of negative thoughts that aren’t mine. I know it sounds weird, but I know my truth and I know who I am, and at my core, I’m upbeat, positive, and a glass-half-full person. I naturally see silver linings and feel compassion for those who are struggling.

It feels a bit like my PC brain has been trying to run Mac software. Trying to focus my mind enough to read is still difficult to sometimes impossible. The same goes for writing – hence the large gap between many posts.

Being on an intense healing journey, my consciousness seeks out darkness so I can heal it. It’s not something I consciously decided to do – it’s just happening. Regular healing work has taken priority. And I know that this phase of my awakening – the one where I spend far too much time observing thoughts of darkness that I no longer identify with – is temporary. One day I’ll feel like myself again, my mind will be calm and peaceful again, I’ll have energy again, reading and writing will be easy again, and I can carry on with the to-do list I had to put aside years ago.

In the meanwhile, having little energy for this physical world, I do as much as I’m able, and when it comes to my passion of photography, instead of day-long outings with my backpack full of camera gear, my point-and-shoot and cell phone cameras have been my go-to’s. When I need a pick-me-up, I grab a few shots on the go.

Yesterday, I grabbed a few shots of daffodils in bloom, and today was a day of macro shots around the yard. Enjoy a few first photos of spring.

Morning Tea

I begin my mornings with a light breakfast and a cup of tea. Lately, my tea of choice has been a delicious rooibos chai. Sipping from a big mug, enjoying the spicy aroma this morning, I briefly looked up and out the kitchen window to see a sight that’s rare this time of year. Sunlight!! Not only was the sun shining, but there was a plethora of ground fog creating a magical scene. The trees were surrounded by backstays of the sun. Crepuscular rays created angel wings of sorts. Running outside in my robe and slippers, I grabbed a few photos of nature’s majesty.

Black and white.

Love

We come from and are made of the ultimate form of love: divine love. However, in order to take our vast magnificence and squeeze just a tiny thread of it into our bodies we make an agreement with our soul to forget who we are as spirit. We actually purposely choose to forget that we are love in human form.

From Google Images

Well, we don’t totally forget. Sometimes we remember we’re love when we look into another’s eye and our heart skips a beat. Or when we coo over a baby or a puppy. Or when we look out over an incredible vista as the setting sun lights up the sky and the only words to escape our lips are, “Wow!”

The tricky thing about love, once we inhabit our human forms, is confusing it with the behavior our loved ones show us when they’re just trying to raise us to be… fill in the blank. Successful. Contributing members of society. Good. If you’ve ever been a parent and lost patience with your child or teen, you’ve been there and done that. And who hasn’t had a parent who lost patience with them at some point? It’s normal!

About a decade ago when I began to tumble down the rabbit hole of spiritual awakening and energy healing, I’d hear people talk about the real you, or the true and authentic you, and I had no clue what they were talking about. How could I be anything other than who I was?

And then I had an experience with my higher self: the part of me who exists beyond my human personality with her myriad lenses of belief, and the higher self felt like pure, unconditional love and beyond. The sort of love that also felt incredibly strong, yet gentle and compassionate. She was not only strong and compassionate, she held all of the wisdom in the cosmos.

Aha! So this is love!

When I began to use hypnotherapy to get to the bottom of my challenges with weight and my relationship with food, I recovered lost memories, seeing moments in my early life when I was really scared by my mom’s verbally abusive behavior. I learned that love wasn’t safe and didn’t feel good. After seeing a scary situation, my hypnotherapist prompted me to bring a wise and loving adult figure into the scene to essentially reeducate my inner child.

Once she realized Mom’s behavior had nothing to do with her because she was acting totally age-appropriate – Mom was mentally ill and unstable – my inner child changed. She realized the difference between real love and fear-driven human behavior and became realigned with divine love.

With each and every session, I not only learned the difference between divine and human love, I was able to receive more divine love for myself. Also, instead of becoming impatient with those I loved, my capacity for patience, compassion, and love grew like the Grinch’s heart on Christmas.

If you want to be more loving, start by learning to love yourself. Give yourself and those around you the give of love by healing. Happy Valentine’s Day.

Language, Words, and Alchemy

I love words. I love to piece together just the right words to convey all sorts of imagery and feelings. Writing this blog over the years has not only been a bit of a public journal but it’s allowed me to practice different forms of written expression when the mood strikes. And I’m not above trying my hand at poetry, even when I feel quite inept.

I love a good metaphor, talking about lenses of belief as readily as the lenses on my camera. Musing about focus, filter, and light gives language to the ineffable qualities of subtle energy and spirit.

During a recent healing session, after an energetic block had been healed in my heart, I saw a stream of geometric shapes flowing into my third eye, representing the building blocks of thoughts: sacred geometry. I was shown how inspired thought comes to us in shapes and blocks, or packets, of thought.

I was told that the divine energy of Source/God/The Universe not only feels like pure, unconditional love but also contains information we can access. In fact, we access it without even realizing it. Have you ever tried to solve a problem and the answer came to you just when you were falling asleep? Or when you were zoning out?

We receive thoughts as energy that our brains translate into words and language. When I saw the energy represented as a stream of sacred geometry, I was told that because we’re surrounded by geometric patterns it’s something we can relate to.

Speaking of relating to, I sometimes find it hilarious that I expected to have a child who would grow up to love books and language as much as I do, only to be blessed with a son with learning disabilities who finds spoken and written language sometimes tedious. He was built for telepathy. But I digress.

Going through a somewhat challenging and long-lasting spiritual awakening has been incredible and amazing on so many levels. Being taught by ascended masters through direct experiences with the likes of Saint Germain in my healing sessions has been mind-blowing. It’s an education I could never get by reading books or sitting through lectures.

But this process has left me word and language challenged at times. Vocabulary falls out of my head, taking a back seat to whatever else is going on at the time. So often, what I try to convey through my fingers on the keyboard comes in fits and spurts and sometimes sounds so literal and robotic that draft after draft sits unfinished.

Reading an entire book still takes Herculean effort most of the time, although I’ve read more books in the past year than the previous five put together. Progress!

So, what have I been doing that’s been taking up so much energy and focus when I’d rather be reading? In the words of Merlin the Magician, I’ve been transmogrifying subtle energy. I’ve been transmuting inner beliefs and thought forms that no longer serve either me or the world. (After hearing transmogrify during my healing session, I had to look it up to learn that yes, it’s really a word).

Practicing a form of inner alchemy, I find subtle energy that’s become stuck, ask it to take shape and form in my mind’s eye, listen to its story of woe, helping it sift out resistance from flow, discomfort from love, and watch it change back into its divine form. Pure magic!

My Writing Table

When we moved into our house a few decades ago, I wrote at a lovely oak rolltop desk that was built for a computer. There was a cabinet for the tower and an opening in the back of the cabinet and through the desktop for wires to connect to the monitor. It was a sweet setup that lived in my office.

Since then, not only have computers evolved to the point where most of my writing is on either my laptop or a tablet, but I don’t have an office at the moment. A few years ago when my son outgrew his bed and bedroom, we moved him to a larger bedroom (my office) and I haven’t had the mojo to transform his old bedroom into what will be my sanctuary. After being a very busy child’s bedroom for almost twenty years, it needs a complete overhaul. New paint, carpeting, and window dressing. And the window trim needs to be refinished. It will happen one day.

Until then, my “office” is a cabinet and a small file drawer beside our dining area, and my writing table is a folding table in the living room that looks out a large window into the yard. I love the view. It affords me many opportunities to see all sorts of wildlife, from eagles, hawks, and a myriad of smaller birds to all manner of animals who call the area home. It’s not uncommon to see a rabbit, squirrel, deer, opossum, or coyote. And once in a while, we get a bobcat and even a black bear. There’s also the very rare cougar that I haven’t seen but my husband has. And, of course, we’re visited by neighborhood cats and an occasional dog.

I love being by the window, gazing out at the yard and trees, and on a nice day checking out cloud formations. I’m a sucker for big puffy cumulus clouds on a blue sky day, or some stratified cirrus lit up by the setting sun. I face west, treated to the occasional colorful sunset with my camera handy to capture the moment.

Over the past few days, we’ve gotten a mix of snow and freezing rain, leaving us with overcast skies and a layer of white on the ground. Because the temps dipped down into single digits last week, the wood stove has been going day and night ever since. The one challenge to having my writing table next to our big living room window on frigid days is how chilly it can get. Sure, there’s a fire roaring less than ten feet away, but I’m inches away from a window where it’s a brisk 63 degrees F. Not bad considering it’s a balmy 26 F today.

I’m wearing a turtleneck and a thin fleece today, and even with these on it can be a bit chilly. But after cracking my tailbone a few years ago, I discovered how luxurious it is to sit on a heating pad. As soon as frigid weather hits, I put a heating pad on my chair and voilà! I’m warm and comfy!

Today’s view might not be spectacular, but the sky gave us a nice show a few nights ago.

And the clear sky later that night gave a view of the crescent moon.

Here’s to writing in comfort and enjoying the view!

Looking for the Silver Lining

A few days ago a massive storm of the century hit my beloved happy place. Actually, it was the worst storm our coastal Maine cove has seen in well over a century. The combination of tremendous winds and some of the highest tides of the year proved to wipe out entire piers and lift houses, either depositing them into the ocean or pushing them back several feet.

My day began with a few photos that my younger brother sent as he surveyed the damage. Skirt boards on the face of the front deck were mostly gone, and the few that remained weren’t intact. The southern side of the deck, where a set of stairs meets a small platform before stepping up to the deck, got hit hard. There’s nothing left but a hole where stairs, posts, rails, and skirting used to be. Thankfully, the deck itself and the cottage are intact. Not so much for some of the structures beneath the deck.

What’s missing is lots of skirting, a set of stairs, railings, a small square platform that was at the top of the stairs, and some supports. The downspout is twisted.

From last summer. Green skirting boards intact. Stairs leading up to the porch and rails on the left are there.

Years ago, when my younger brother had been apprenticing with a carpenter doing home renovations, he picked up a few skills and rebuilt the front deck for Dad. At the time, when he fastened the big supporting posts onto (?into?) cement, he wondered if the construction was a little bit of overkill, but it wasn’t. They all held like champs.

My brother also let me know that the church pier in the cove was gone and a neighbor’s pier was gone. It brought me to tears. We keep a rowboat at the church dock in the summer, and after my wedding ceremony at the church, we took pictures standing on the pier under a cross. While I felt a bit sick looking at the damage when I perused social media, an acquaintance’s account shared a video he shot while riding his bike over shredded and missing asphalt. The waterside road was trashed.

I went online and found a slideshow of photos submitted to the local paper of flooding and even more damage. It was hard to digest all the devastation along the coast.

My son was baptized up on the porch of the chapel. You can see part of the pier walkway washed up here and damaged skirtboards.

The remnants of what used to be a pier. The ramp to the float gets pulled up on the pier for winter and was still there. Another bout of weather will likely wash it away.

The walkway out to this lighthouse is gone. (I took this photo last summer).

The church pier and dock last summer.

After hearing about our local pier, I suddenly remembered that it had already been scheduled to be replaced this coming summer. You see, my brother has sat on the church’s dock committee soliciting donations from the congregation for upkeep and eventual replacement. A few years ago he became aware that the pier would have to be replaced and increased the suggested donation amount to cover it. Last summer, after an inspection, he arranged for the pier to be replaced during the summer of 2025. But a storm just before Christmas took out a few of the support pilings and my brother contacted the fellow who’d be doing the work to see if he could do it in the summer of 2024 instead. Yes, he could. Phew!

Last night as I was thinking about the damage and whether it would be something we’d file an insurance claim for, it occurred to me that the church pier might have been insured. After texting my brother, I discovered that yes, the pier had been insured. Another phew! As for our place, my brother is skilled at carpentry and will most likely take care of the repairs. I’ll chip in for the supplies.

When I showed Little Man the pictures of the damage, it upset him too. But when I showed him what was left of the nearby pier, seeing that the cross survived, his comment was perfection – “Now that’s some God shit there!”

Despite the initial shock of so much devastation, I can see more and more silver linings. From the fact that my brother lives close enough to our cottage that he can keep an eye on it and take care of things, to the pier’s replacement having already been scheduled, to the extent of the damage impacting mostly the edge of the coast, sparing properties set back or raised up even ten or fifteen feet. Because our cottage sits up on a huge boulder, it was spared the damage our next-door neighbor received.

The massive waves provided some incredible photo ops for photographers, including this incredible monster crashing the shore at Portland Head Light.

The community is pretty tight and I know that people will be helping people.

And in the end, although roads, buildings, and piers in the area were damaged, I haven’t heard of any loss of life in our community. Properties and roads will be repaired and rebuilt. Life is precious.