A Shaft of Light

Just a quick update today, shortly before our school year begins next week. My teenage son, Little Man, who lives with a number of life challenges, has been doing a medication trial for crippling anxiety for the past several months. The anxiety wasn’t always crippling, but became so a few months after he turned 13. Something about puberty and middle school amped up his anxiety to the point that he completely melted down and I had to take him out of school.

After making a few different moves, including doing a year of unschooling and looking into naturopathic, holistic, and energetic healing, last year it became obvious that my son really needed help in the form of medication. One of the biggest reasons I put off looking into pharmaceuticals, was I know the power of energy healing. And I hoped we could find something else to help my son that he could use on an as needed basis, that was short acting, like taking CBD oil (that helps many people who live with anxiety).

Plus, because my own mother depended on medication to keep her mental status on a somewhat even keel (she was bipolar), I know that as people age, a medication that worked for them for years, often times eventually no longer works. And it scares me as a parent to think about my son’s mental health being dependent upon medication, and the thought of him not able to find one that works. Or his not being able to afford what works (as happens with far too many people).

That said, right here and right now, my son needs medication. And after spending the past several months trying a few different ones, it looks like the one he’s taking is just beginning to show progress. FINALLY!!

Does he still have anxiety? Yes. Does he still panic and have his brain melt when it comes to school work? I don’t know yet. We’ve taken the month of August completely off from school (to give us both a break).

But he’s beginning to show the first signs of progress in far too long. He’s doing therapy and will continue to do therapy. And over the next few months, we’ll increase his dose to find the best level for him.

The center we’ve been working with addresses more than only mental health issues in kids and adolescents: they do educational testing and connect people with tutors as well. As much as Little Man had educational testing a number of years ago, and saw a tutor, now that he’ll be on medication to control anxiety, we’ll be revisiting things like tutoring.

When I mentioned to his therapist that Little Man had already done tutoring and it ended after about five months because of anxiety, she asked if he’d been tutored alone or with other kids. Apparently, it could be helpful for Little Man to be tutored with another student. So the spotlight isn’t always on him, and so the students can help each other from time to time (which is a great confidence booster). Plus, now that his brain is being helped by a medication, it should make a big difference as well.

Light is beginning to shine back into our lives, even if it’s just a shaft. That’s all it takes. Just an opening to let it in.

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Angel Wings

This morning was a tough one, as many have been this past year. Not because there’s anything going on in my outer world causing my mornings to be tough, but because my inner world is going through a lot. A ton. Enough to kill an elephant. Good news is, by afternoon time and evenings, I’m usually feeling better. Sort of reminds me of dealing with morning sickness when I was pregnant with my son. Except with him it was all day sickness for the first few months. Gradually, I felt better in the ?mornings ?evenings? I can’t remember which; but I began to feel better on one end of the day, and by month four or five, I no longer felt queasy.

This Kundalini Awakening has turned my sleeping time into work my butt off time, and I awaken every day feeling exhausted and very out of sorts. There was, however, one day back in May when I woke up feeling almost normal, feeling good. One day. Back in May. Because it was so rare, I journaled about it.

A few days ago, another healing shift in my energy field caused some muscles in my low back to tighten up, and they’re still working on letting go of whatever activated them. Not to be left out of the fun, I awoke to find more muscles in my back, this time higher up and to one side, decided to join in. So this morning was a particularly exciting time of muscle pain and stiffness combined with my usual wonky head. Yee haw! (The pain will likely pass in the next few days. I hope. All part of the process.)

Sometimes it’s hard to find the motivation to go outside when I’m like this, but the sun called, and I was able to answer. It was such a beautiful morning with blue sky, birds aplenty, and a few wispy clouds.

Exhausted, I laid down on our trampoline, relaxing in the partial shade, listening to the birds. A beautiful cloud hung in the sky until it dissolved in the wind. I can’t decide if it’s a bird or an angel. Or perhaps a bit of both.

It was a lovely distraction from myself. Thank you Mother Nature!

Struggling A Bit

This time of year marks a time of endings and new beginnings for many students and their families. The school year recently ended for most schools, and with that, students are graduating, receiving awards and certificates, and moving on to summer vacation. My son is not. We’re continuing schooling most likely through July.

We’ve been cobbling together some semblance of an education over the past few years, while dealing with his learning disabilities and mental health challenges. Late last winter, I finally made the long dreaded decision to stop working on healing my son’s anxiety, and instead, treat it with medication. It’s proving to be a rocky road, side effects slowing us down.

With Kundalini energy fully open in my body, creating massive shifts in my consciousness, my mind, and body, I’m a shell of my usual self. It doesn’t take much, and I’m thrown into an energy shift, followed by significant brain rewiring and exhaustion. Chronic fatigue – but not an illness. It’s a side effect of my Kundalini awakening. There are days when my usual optimism pops back in for a while, buoying me up. But they are so few and far apart that most days I spend a good part of them with a raft of lies flooding my head. The thing is, when I can take a breath, I know they’re fear-based lies.

“His stomach will never tolerate the meds and they’ll never work. What if there is no medication that alleviates his anxiety? What if he has to spend the rest of his life like this – a shell of himself? What if he has to try to go out into the world with what’s really about a sixth grade (or less) education? How is he going to make it? What if he’s never able to graduate from high school and is dependent on us for the rest of our lives? What if his mind permanently cripples him?”

Every time I see a post on Facebook lately about a friend’s kid graduating from high school or middle school, or earning some well-deserved recognition, instead of being happy for them, lately all it’s done is trigger fear and jealousy. And that’s not me.

I’m envious of people who have “normal” children. Kids who thrive in school. Kids who don’t have mental challenges that take them down. Kids who don’t have dyslexia and ADHD and sensory processing issues. I’m envious of people whose kids have only one challenge, not several. And people whose kids respond well to medication.

These feelings are not my “normal” at all.

And I’m envious of people who aren’t in the throes of an intense Kundalini awakening.

My internal truth is that we can make it through any and all challenges, and everything will work out. I know my son will be fine. I don’t know what fine will look like, but he’ll be fine. And even now, he has good times. Life isn’t all a struggle.

And I know that at some point, I’ll be not only fine, but better than fine. Just not yet.

Before my mind kept being put into a shredder, I had the faith to know that I don’t have to know the “how” something was going to happen. But that by following synchronicities and breadcrumbs laid before me, we’d get there.

I’ve had too many days of losing faith, struggling to remember my truth. Too many days of being hypersensitive to everything and everyone around me. Too many days of not being able to focus and feel normal. I know it won’t always be this way, but… holy crap!

Here’s a reminder to me and anyone else who’s going through tough times. In the words of Bob Marley, “Don’t worry about a thing, cause every little thing gonna be all right.”

Happy Blog-iversary To Me!

WordPress let me know that yesterday was my eight year anniversary of starting this blog. Wow! Eight years!

I was looking back in one of my journals recently and saw why I began this blog in the first place. It was June 2, 2010, when my son was seven and just finishing first grade. After waiting a very long time to have a family, and being beyond thrilled to have him when I was 38, I never expected to have a child with invisible disabilities.

My son’s first seven years included speech therapy, occupational therapy, a special education preschool (for 3 yrs.) and entering school with support in place to help him succeed in school. By the end of first grade, I was no longer as much of the exhausted basket case I’d been for much of his life. Having a child with special needs creates its own level of chronic stress and exhaustion.

Feeling a bit better and on top of my game, I started this blog as a place to share what I’d learned about child-rearing with other new moms, a place to connect with other mothers of children with Sensory Processing Disorder, a place to share my love of photography and tell a sea story every now and then. This was where I created and found a community.

Little did I know that less than a year after beginning this blog, I’d have a very unexpected spiritual awakening, shifting my focus in life dramatically. I read and learned voraciously about this thing called Energy Healing and began to use it in our lives. There are posts as I learned about Energy Healing and I’ve shared some of the intimate details of my own healing.

As my son has grown and evolved, much of what were first labeled developmental delays are still with him. Some are only slightly noticeable, while others have taken center stage. Over the past eight years, I’ve shared bits and pieces of the journey with my son’s challenges.

And from time to time, my love of photography made its way into the blog. In fact, for ten years, I printed photographic note cards and matted 8×10’s and sold them at a handful of local holiday craft shows. With a few unexpected turns of events over the past two years, those days are now behind me. But my love of taking and sharing photos, particularly nature photos, will always be with me.

My blogging pace has slowed dramatically over the past year and then some, because of another unexpected type of spiritual awakening, this time affecting my brain. It’s actively rewiring my mind and body, and part of the process has been days when I can’t focus my thoughts long enough to get them down coherently into a blog piece.

As much as it’s been frustrating to not physically be able to write as I usually do, the changes to my mind will eventually rid me of a host of mental pain that once in a while pops up and makes its presence known (as it does for everyone). This is because of Kundalini energy having become activated in me. And it’s not done with me yet.

In the meanwhile, life goes on. And so does my blogging. Thanks to everyone who is a part of this blog’s community. It’s a joy to connect and support one another through whatever comes our way.

When Mother’s Day Is Complicated

Mother’s Day sometimes brings up a host of feelings for me. You see, my mother was mentally ill, and because she wasn’t properly treated until I was half way through high school, her moods would swing from the deep lows of debilitating depression, into the highs of mania that seriously skewed her outlook on life. I was raised by a mother who couldn’t be a stable and loving mother all the time.

Looking back, I know she did the best she could, and that’s all anyone can ask. But when your mother verbally cuts you down, attacking at the drop of a hat, it has an effect on a person. What I didn’t know until I discovered healing work, was how the dynamics of our relationship, especially during my early years, affected me as an adult.

I thought moving out and being on my own, geographically separating myself from my mother, was the answer. If I’m not around to be the target of her mania, I’ll be ok. It took years and some really effective healing work to not only see how my formative years were creating dysfunction in my adult life, but to change it, to heal it. To let go of the pain and dysfunction.

It sometimes makes me sad that my mother and I didn’t have a close and loving relationship as many other people have. But when I became a mother myself, it warmed my heart to hear Mom tell me what a good mother I am to my son. Having no one close by to teach me, I was left to follow my heart and be resourceful. So far, it’s working out pretty well.

On this Mother’s Day, with Mom gone now, I send her love and appreciation.

Spring Tulip Festival 2016

This gallery contains 3 photos.

Originally posted on Life Is A Journey… Not A Guided Tour:
Every April, the county where in live in Washington state celebrates the advent of spring with a Tulip Festival. It runs the entire month, but the flowers come up and…

Surrender

There comes a time when it’s ok to stop and surrender. And breathe.

Time To Tack

We all sail through this journey of life, holding fast to the tiller, sometimes steering with all our might, and sometimes letting the wind and current move us where they will. We head out to sea, looking for grand adventures, tacking and jibing around objects, raising and lowering the sails. Coming in to port during storms, and occasionally needing to ride them out at sea.

Sailing isn’t a world of moving from point A to point B in a straight line. And neither is life. It’s a journey including several changes in course, and course corrections as necessary. And within each voyage, there are obstacles, both seen and unseen. Rocks and shifting sands, sometimes above the water where we can see them, and sometimes below. Much of the time, we pass by or over them with grace and ease. And then there are the times we’re blown off course, or an aid to navigation has failed and we end up on the rocks.

A little over two years ago, the voyage of my son’s education ended up on the rocks. I had to make some hard decisions, and as much as I thought at the time that all would soon be well after a period of adjustment, all was not well.

Since then, we’ve been tacking back and forth, floundering a bit, and trying different sails. We’re still trying to find a better fit.

I took my son out of school because after years of pushing him to go, dealing with anxiety and misery, he’d reached his point of no return. Since then, we’ve been working with a tiny private school that guides students through their own independent and individualized education. My son is basically homeschooled, but with some specific guidelines in order to fulfill our state’s graduation requirements. We’ve created a curriculum that’s a mishmash of prepackaged courses and courses we create with the help of his teacher.

Going this route has taken a ton of pressure off both me and my son, and I thought it would mean the end of one horrific storm of misery.

What it did was shine a spotlight on one area in particular that’s become a blockade. My son’s mental health. By the end of last fall, after trying a variety of things over the previous year and then some, it became glaringly obvious that my son has very real issues with anxiety and panic attacks. In December I gave him two options to help create change, and he chose working with my very talented hypnotherapist, who is also a mental health counselor. (The other choice was medication).

That tack took my son into uncharted waters, and any time he’s thrust into uncharted waters, his nemesis, anxiety, shows up. As difficult as it was, he went to several sessions. And he was even able to have short experiences of hypnosis during a few of them. But after over three months of weekly visits, trying as hard as he could, I realized that my son’s brain needs more help. Panic attacks are no joke.

So, it’s time for another tack. One I’ve been putting off until I tried every other intervention I could. Time to try medication. Because my mother was bipolar and her mother had mental health issues that were never diagnosed, there is a family propensity for mental health challenges. I, myself have had my struggles at different times in my life, and I have a niece and a nephew who benefit from medication, so the familial connection is most assuredly there. In my case, energy healing has made all the difference.

My hope is that with the right medication, my son will have the chemical support for his brain such that he might be able to work with my hypnotherapist again, without succumbing to his nemesis, panic. She has several great tools that could help him change his life.

For now, we sail on our present course, waiting for doctors appointments. Waiting for assistance as we move through somewhat murky waters, still somewhat unsure of where this journey will end up.

Kundalini Awakening, One Year In

I’ve been trying to write this post for a while now, but my brain is being rewired so significantly that trying to focus remains illusive on many days. Struggling to hold thoughts in my mind, crafting them into word images as the thoughts disappear. I never knew how important the ability to maintain focus is when trying to write, until I lost it. Here goes nothing.

Recently, a friend asked me what Kundalini energy is, and because most of the people I know have never heard of it, here’s a post about it, having it activated in me just over a year ago.

We are all created from energy first. Our physical bodies are made because cells combine and multiply. But we don’t often think about what keeps us alive and allows the cells to live in the first place. And what tells the DNA in our cells to turn on and off? Energy. Life force energy. It primes the pump of our heart, transmits information, and withdraws from our body at the end of life.

You can connect with a facet of this life force energy through meditation, and through altered states of consciousness; and some people have spontaneous experiences of it. It feels like unconditional love and a state of oneness.

Kundalini energy is another type of energy that’s seen as a creative force (it stimulates change), and lies dormant within our bodies. Most people live their entire lives completely unaware of it because it never becomes active. However, people in some cultures such as the Hindu are fully aware of it and participate in activities like Kundalini yoga and meditative practices with the specific goal of activating their Kundalini energy.

As much as I don’t do yoga or have a practice of meditation, I can see that the healing work I’ve been doing allowed the potential for this energy to become spontaneously active in me. What Kundalini energy is doing in me is much like what I was accomplishing in my healing sessions, yet exponentially deeper. Activated Kundalini energy leads to the union of personal consciousness and cosmic and divine consciousness.

It changes our consciousness. It changes how we perceive ourselves and our entire world.

The strength of Kundalini is what allows us to expand infinitely so that we can see the whole universe within our own Self. Then, we no longer remain a limited, bound creature; we achieve total union with Universal Consciousness.

Imagine the lifelong racist who falls in love with their bi-racial grandchild and suddenly realizes that the people they’ve been persecuting are really no different from them, and they let go of a lifetime of hate. That’s a major shift in consciousness. It’s a step in the direction of knowing that even when our outer wrapper looks different, and our cultures and languages are different, deep inside, every single person on this planet ultimately has the same wants, needs, and emotions. It’s a step toward Oneness.

Kundalini energy acts on a person’s body and mind, creating exponential healing over the course of years. Usually the first few years are the most intense, with lots of change going on inside a person.

Bit by bit, unconscious beliefs and thoughts that don’t resonate with unconditional love, compassion, and unity, are bubbling up from within me and are being let go. Kundalini energy is moving this process forward, changing me from the inside out.

I’m changing from a caterpillar into a butterfly without Mother Nature’s brilliant pupa state, allowing that creature to completely step out of life by creating a cocoon where it is fully supported in its metamorphosis.

Going through such an intense metamorphosis as a human being has all sorts of physical and mental discomfort that a person just has to deal with until the cocoon of change slows.

That’s the part of a Kundalini Awakening you might not read about in your yoga and meditation magazine. They’ll write about things like the union of personal consciousness with Divine consciousness, to get you to join a Kundalini yoga class, because it sounds so amazing (and in fact, it is). But if you’re thinking about activating your Kundalini energy as a DIY project, absolutely do not ever do this in a million years without guidance and support.

I’m far enough along into the process to see that although, yes, my Kundalini energy spontaneously activated in a big way, the healing work I did over the several years prior, and everything I’d learned about myself as both physical and energy/spirit, prepared me for this experience.

Change of this sort, at this magnitude, letting go of a lifetime of human pain and disconnection, is massively challenging. The long and short of it is, the past year has been one of more discomfort than I’ve ever had to deal with so continually, and it’s not over. Fortunately, as with everything in life, the discomfort has waves of intensity, keeping life bearable enough that I’m still here, chugging along.

In the meanwhile, as all sorts of pain and anger I’ve carried around in my heart is being healed, the amount of love and acceptance that’s able to flow through is ever increasing.

It’s very synchronous that I’m finishing this up around Easter Sunday, because Kundalini energy changes a person’s consciousness, shifting us into a Christened state of consciousness, where our internal truth becomes one of unconditional love and Oneness. As much as I’m very aware that my human body has a finite life span, I also know that when my body passes away, my self-awareness won’t. I’ll still be me, yet without the struggle, hardship, and the physical, visceral pleasures that we experience in life.

Jesus’ teachings were all about helping us know that we exist beyond our physical bodies (as many native traditions have never forgotten), and that our inner truth is one of love. His teachings were all about helping us connect with this inner truth, teaching us that peace can be found deep within our own hearts. And that anyone can find it.

When you change your own heart, the way you experience the world will change.

So, my friends, I’m being rebirthed from the inside out, courtesy of Kundalini energy. The lens through which I see the world is being changed markedly. My inner truth is shifting and changing, moving step-by-step every closer to love.

When We Make Plans, God Laughs

What’s that expression? When you make plans, God laughs. Yep. We trundle along our lives doing what’s expected of us, making bold plans for what our lives will look like in five, ten, or twenty years. And some of it will come to fruition. And some won’t.

Some of our dreams will change along the way, some hopes dashed on the rocks, and some things will turn out better than even our imagination can dream.

When I was a girl, my life was going to be school – work – marriage – family of my own by the time I was 26. Then God laughed. And he laughed again and again.

Many of my plans didn’t happen. Or it they did happen, my time-table was way off.

The cool thing is, having a spiritual awakening was never on my radar. Until it happened.

Discovering a thing called Energy Healing was never on my radar until one day when it crossed my path, and having nothing to lose, decided to give it a try.

Little did I know that waking up spiritually and getting into Energy Healing would change my life in ways I couldn’t have imagined.

Having a Kundalini awakening was never on my radar either. Until it happened. And as much as it’s being a bit of trial by fire type of experience, and what my life looks like from the outside isn’t changing, I am changing. It is changing me from the inside out.

These days, when life shoots my plans down, I am more willing and able to see the grace and higher wisdom in what can come from it.