Thirteen years ago a veil was torn from my eyes. It was an un-invited spiritual awakening.
Until then, my life had been powered forward by pressurized aspirations on a timeline pre-determined by the culture I’d been born into.
Nights were sleepless, wrestling with performance anxiety.
Days found me calculating how much I needed to work to obtain whatever American culture was trying to sell me as a symbol for having “arrived.”
And although I masqueraded through these motions like a good 20-something citizen, I was never convinced that this was it.
Something in me knew this was all just a prelude to my “real life.”
I learned early that what I was really seeking hadn’t been packaged to me as an option in the developed “first-world” I inhabited.
But, I believed that going through the motions would one day present to me a mystery door, and when it did, I’d walk through it - not needing to know what was on the other side.
Because my heart could feel that the mystery was the way … regardless of what hardship I’d encounter in that un-defined journey … I knew, at minimum, I wouldn’t be masquerading through the motions anymore.
Sometimes, if we’re lucky, all of that motion comes to an unexpected halt, and life doesn’t allow us to walk a certain trajectory anymore. Some people experience this as a sickness, others as the un-coupling from a long-term relationship, and others, well, they just hit rock bottom. I got slammed with all three at once … and in the midst of that turmoil, ‘twas my mystery door.
None of my former grinding and goal-attaining could rival the cosmic energy that would burst through the cracks of my broken life when my Soul arrived into my conscious awareness.
Rumi once said something like “the wound is the place where the light enters you.” I say maybe. Maybe that can be true … if you’re lucky enough to discover how to let the light in.
If you have a mentor that enters the scene, or some guiding force leads you to the support you need just-in-time - before all that wounding you’ve incurred topples you over and you stay lost …
I’m the first to admit that I’ve had a great deal of luck. And I’m writing this because I don’t intend to keep it all for myself.
Those nights riddled with anxiety had turned my stomach inside out (that, and the fact that I was uninformed about the havoc industrial agriculture was playing on the ecosystem and my body).
At that time, I had worked as a patient care consultant and public health advocate in Chicago, and I helped staff pharmacists in high-need locations. I believed mainstream healthcare knew what was best for me. So, one colonoscopy later I wound up with torn tissue in my rectum and excruciating pain that debilitated me for weeks. I couldn’t sit. I couldn’t walk. My best days were spent wincing and moaning in the bathtub, trying to keep the pressure off. I used alcohol to numb the suffering.
Meanwhile, my boyfriend of three years was making secret plans to leave our relationship and move across the country. When he came out with it, I was in shock. We’d discussed moving together, me starting my own business on the West Coast, and us getting married. I was starting to picture myself pregnant with his child in the not-so-distant-future. But all of those aspirations died the moment he said, “I know what you want, Amanda. You want the kind of love you see in the movies. But that’s never gonna be us.”
He didn’t need to say more. My heart knew that I would have a love like that someday. So I didn’t put up much of a fight when he closed the door.
After he left, the literal pain in my ass from my medical injury played on like a melancholy cello, reminding me that this wasn’t the first time that I’d felt abandoned, reminding me that the job I was waking up to everyday was only supposed to be a temporary placeholder for my “better life” as the budding wife, mother, and entrepreneur, far from the dreary gray winters of Chicago and into the aura of the old growth trees of California. But my pain was even deeper than these dreams not realized…
It was like I was feeling all the not-belonging, left-behind, insignificant, didn’t-do-enough, un-desired, not-pretty-enough, I-don’t-fit-in feelings that I’d ever felt in my life – all at once.
My root chakra was on fire, and oh how I wanted to numb it all with live music, and late night parties, and travel. But instead, a mentor appeared … a co-worker at that “placeholder” job that actually turned out to be a necessary part of my Soul’s journey.
This mentor could have demeaned me for all of my recent drama and for my medical leave-of-absence (some of my superiors did - although I had consistently showed up for over a year, crushing goals every month and building friendships with the entire office).
Instead, this mentor saw me, the person inside the drama, having a very ordinary 20-something life crisis, just needing a reminder that I was more than my pain. Instead of being my “superior,” he chose to be my friend. And everything that happened in my life after that is because he made that choice. (Thank you, Bill!)
This mentor turned me onto some books and new ways of thinking about the mind and the body. I started meditating with the pain, and when I did, I received all this imagery, vignettes from the past, traumatic moments and emotional scars, the kind of stuff that diminishes the way you see yourself and your place in the world - that alters your identity, keeps you always searching for an external source of belonging, but in all the wrong places…
Each time I sat with the vignettes, layers of physical pain would peel away from my body. I’d open my eyes from the meditations, step outside, and find myself astounded as my sensory perception was unmistakably heightened.
The bare trees of a monochrome Chicagoan February no longer made me depressed. I’d track the branches and twigs as they sketched their way across the sky, and I’d marvel at God’s calligraphy, changing day-by-day with the seasons, reminding me that the heart has its seasons, too.
And although I was neither budding, nor in-bloom, my unseen Soul was at work inside of my mind and body, like Old Growth roots beneath a cold and wintery Earth, and it was all okay.
That’s when it appeared, my mystery door. Sleepless nights turned into deep-dream states where those old vignettes of my past trauma were washed away by premonitions of the future-
Comets falling towards me, cruising through unknown wilderness, starry skies and exotic animals, ancient magic in an un-developed world … and the enormous white-toothed smiles of family members of a different skin-color, who awaited my arrival, on a continent I’d never been…
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