Hi Everybody – Friends have suggested that I post the full “When the Soul Starts Walking” article and I’m happy to do so. Hopefully this will make it easier for a new reader to enjoy the flow, and for you who are followers to share the link if you wish to do so. Thank you for coming to Talk2Momz, and for your communications. ~ Love to you, Ida
It’s a good place to be, to comfortably acknowledge the countless things I don’t know. While I may have achieved 70 years of time in, experiencing more is a given… because I am in this top-notch school called Life, and I’m still breathing. “The more I learn, the more I learn how little I know,” is a statement attributed to Socrates. Having walked the self-realization journey for a while, I’d say, thumb’s up to Socrates.
We call it the path of consciousness, when we slowly uncover and reveal to ourselves who or what we are. I’m within the unique position of consciousness that is Ida. You are within your position, we are not the same, yet we connect, we look at the same things, and we do our best to communicate. To experience communication as a flow of truth, love, and trust… we are born with that capacity, but as we leave childhood, we take on a protective persona.
Years ago I wrote a song called “Feel Loved Again”. I didn’t know what I was talking about with this phrase, but I wrote it anyway: “Love, once it has been made, becomes an open door.” People thought I was talking about always being open to sex with old flames, or they argued about ditching past relationships, basically saying that it was just unrealistic to keep a door open – nobody does that. All I could say was, “I think there’s more to love than what we know.”
Everybody has a story, and some folks say toss your story – it’s not Life, it’s not Now, it is only memory. But actually I think stories can be uplifting and entertaining at the least, and possibly helpful as maps. I’ve been considering what more there is to complete in my own life story: is the best yet to come? The answer may become clear as we go into, walk through, and come back out of my story.
We begin life by absorbing conditioning and aligning with programming and it has to be that way. It’s a framework, holding us like a cocoon, and we don’t enter into it accidentally. I’ve spoken before about my cocoon – a farm on the South Dakota prairie, a preacher daddy, a teacher mama, five brothers and sisters, a red barn, a big cottonwood tree, a creek with minnows and turtles, all kinds of animals, cold winters and amazing summer sunsets.
How long ago was it? Born in the 1940s, I was there before electricity was installed in our house, and a phone was hung on the wall, and a refrigerator replaced the icebox. It would be another ten years before a TV was in the living room. So yes, the world has actually changed that much in one lifetime!
While my little family was pretty honest and safe, the world was not. Atomic bombs were dropped on Japan six months before I came in, Israel was established when I was very young, then the Korean war, the Bay of Pigs crisis, the murder of JFK, the Vietnam war, the murder of Dr. King, and the riots that followed, the democratic convention protests, the killings at Kent State, the occupation of Wounded Knee… all of these things and much more happened before I reached my mid-twenties.
I had been married, had given birth to two babies, and was getting divorced at the time of Wounded Knee. When the marriage ended, it was the women’s movement that was blamed: not true but what can you do. It was a revolutionary time period and something had to be blamed.
Other things that the younger readers might find surprising: there was no ‘pharma’ influence on my young life, nobody taking pills, no vaccinations, no visits to the doctor unless something broke, none of it until my late teens. We also had no GMO, no chemical fertilizers, no pasteurization of milk, no weed or insect killers until the development of DDT. I mention DDT because it was the first entry into the farm, in my recollection, of the poisons to come. I was sent out to the garden to spray DDT. It was new, and touted as something great – progress.
We’re not that far away in time from a more natural way of living, and it’s really beautiful that people are going back there, or better said, returning back around with advancements, aligned, sustainable and natural. Also today’s young parents recognize that a childhood with nature as the playground and imagination as entertainment is pretty darn nice. So we can say, within the time period of my generation, a great deal is being learned about what constitutes progress.
Let’s continue with childhood, and losing innocence. There was one moment of expanded consciousness that seemed to mark the end of trust and the beginning of a search: I was in the basement of the farmhouse, and starting to walk upstairs when I felt a very mature awareness come over me, a heart heaviness, and the thought, “This isn’t going to be an easy life.”
And so began the outer battle with injustice and hypocrisy and the inner battle to change myself. I saw my innocence as weakness. It is natural for a child to want to please people, and to be loved and not judged, and at the same time it is natural to assert who you are. Little did I know that I wasn’t going to make the innocence ‘strong’; I would only create the flip side: distrustful, critical and resentful me. Many years later I would come to cherish the little girl within who longs to be heard, but in the meantime the effort was underway to toughen up and take on the battle.
Injustice goes very deep in South Dakota. Native Americans (referred to as Indians) were mostly living on reservations, being kept out of ‘decent’ towns. I knew they had walked the land I was on, rested in the grass, gazed upon the horizon, seen the beautiful sunsets. Many a summer day I walked out into the field to my favorite spot, and I daydreamed about where the Indians had camped, where they built their fires, where their horses would be watered. So when I heard talk going around that someone had shot a ‘drunk Indian’ for trespassing, it was an awful feeling. I asked my dad, “Why do you let these people in church who say they love Jesus and they hate the Indians?” His answer was that they need God the most. Unfortunately the answer wasn’t a very satisfying one to me.
What Jesus said didn’t jibe with what church people did, and I didn’t want to give them a pass. Unknowingly, in this spirit of resisting hypocrisy I was maturing in accord with millions of my generation who would reach young adulthood in the 1960s. The inner desire to change or ‘self-improve’ was a part of my generation also: information that I would encounter in the new age movement.
At that time, Midwestern farm communities were not well connected to information. As teenagers we got a taste of something happening by tuning in to music from big city radio stations, but we were still pretty naïve, having only one TV channel. Everything the news announcer said was deemed true, everything the government did was good and necessary, every new farm chemical was progress, new drugs are for our good, baby formula is better for the baby than breast milk, and even nasty tasting margarine is better than butter.
For many of us, the feeling of inferiority is a given when leaving childhood and adapting to society. We look at other people and it appears that they have it together, and we don’t. For country and farm folks, the bigger and faster city world seems much more sophisticated and knowing. Like so many teens, I hid feelings of inferiority behind a smart attitude, competitiveness and efforts to be popular. Did I notice how I was changing? Not too often. Sometimes I noticed that I wasn’t happy, sometimes I saw myself pretending, sometimes I didn’t like people very much.
The thing to do in school was activities, so I focused on music. Then came liking boys and dating. When we heard the word Love talked about in conversation, it was God’s love. Conversation about boy-girl feelings and romance didn’t happen with parents or adults… more likely we’d get our relationship information through music. We had crushes and ‘likes’ and whispered rules about not letting a boy get to third base. In essence, sex just wasn’t discussed.
Looking back it seems I was the definition of sexually repressed. I actually did not know what happened during sex; only that women give in to it, men want it, and babies come from it. I gave in to it, found out what happened, but to enjoy or not enjoy was insignificant. My first son was a year or two old before I saw a drawing of the female reproductive system, and read that feminine sexuality is a beautiful thing; not just something you let happen because he wants to. That information came from the book “Our Bodies, Ourselves”, which was considered a women’s movement book.
Those who complain about ‘women’s lib’ having ruined women’s femininity, really don’t know the necessity that spawned it. Respect for the female body, respect for the feminine soul, the thought that you don’t have to live in an unhappy marriage in order to survive and care for your babies, the very notion that you are a full and equal person. This vital information, at its origin, was revolutionary.
Still, it would be a very long time before I would let go of resistance and embrace a man in complete trust, actually feeling the courage and strength of ‘feminine’ in relation to ‘masculine’. When it did happen, my open, soft, receptive response was surprising to me – “What is this I feel?” I had let down the wall that was my protection, and discovered an exquisite beauty not in need of protection: there was balance. The feminine and masculine energy balanced and intermingling showed me the possibilities; that relationships can be the ultimate spiritual practice.
Returning to the story, I had given birth to two little boys who were my happiness, was married to a man who made more than enough money, was living in a nice suburban home in Minneapolis… this was what my mother wished for me: an easier life than she had on the farm. So why did we divorce? Was it really the women’s movement? It was that I grew, my awareness expanded, and there was a longing within, a yearning to be.
At that time I couldn’t articulate it, so women’s movement got the blame. Today we might call it the core of longing in the human being, spoken of by Rumi. What do we long for? His answer is: the return message.
After the divorce took place I raised our boys, worked, and handled the bills. A few comparisons: they did get vaccinations but far fewer than are given to children today, they never wore seatbelts or helmets, they played with water pistols and toy weapons, I never worried about a pedophile lurking somewhere, there were no video games, we did fun things and went places, and we didn’t watch much television… which may be the reason there was so much less fear.
Nowadays that kind of living is called “free range parenting.” I’m not sure when the verb ‘parenting’ came into existence, but it was probably around the time when fearful became a way of being a ‘good mother’.
I didn’t socialize much, wasn’t looking for a husband, but I was still into music. We know music doesn’t just reflect, but actually can inform and consciously uplift a generation… or bring it down if such is the intention. Just like the music informed me, as a naïve farm girl, about the bigger world in the sixties, the music in the seventies was incredibly alive and aware, nourishing the yearning. I listened to every type of music and traveled from Minneapolis to Chicago a few times to hear the live music in the clubs.
As I look back, I could point to hundreds of songs with a living message. The music really was the fuel of the generation, and I identified closely, trying to fit the song to myself. George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” spoke directly to my spiritual longing, and the Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody” spoke to the dream of finding a soul mate.
I worked in a hospital psych unit during that time, so I read psychology books and also started reading about astral travel and going out of body. I was searching, but definitely in the dark. The out of body experiments turned out to be not such a great idea, as I started having realistic frightening dreams. Also, the housecat began to see things – reacting in fear, watching movements of something I couldn’t see.
One of the lucid dream experiences played into my next life-changing decision. I saw two females approach the house from a distance. They wore long black capes with hoods, and between them was a huge black dog on a chain. As they walked across the street toward my yard I recognized them as the “Mapes”. Very great fear arose in me as they entered my yard and tied their dog to a big elm tree. I could see their faces, and I knew they came with a warning that impressed me not as “I’m going to get you,” but more as… “Stay away or else.”
I came out of that state very shook up, saying “Mapes”. In searching for a definition for that word I’ve never found the characters in mythology, but it was clearly their name in my experience. A few days later a man from a tree removal service knocked on my door and told me that the elm tree was diseased and needed to be removed. While the truth is that he was probably just hustling up some work, I associated it with the dream. So, that experience, plus an accumulation of other stresses and my own yearnings, led me to make a change.
I asked the boys’ father if he would take over and raise them through their teenage years as I wanted to sell the house and go, and try to ‘make something’ of myself. As I look back on some of the decisions I’ve made, it seems that the longing to find out who or what you are has a steep price. My heart ached for the boys, continuously. And yet years later we would see the good in it… their father got the blessing of knowing, loving and growing with his sons.
Having already been involved in writing and recording music in Minneapolis, I reasoned that Los Angeles was the place to try and ‘make it’ as a songwriter. It was the 1970s, and I landed right in the center of the New Age, self-awareness scene. The feeling was hopeful, i.e. we can change the world. New age music was coming in, punk rock and hip-hop were experiencing their origins in downtown LA, there was reggae and jazz in the clubs, and most importantly, much of the popular music contained the message of spiritual revolution.
Side note comparison with today’s world: I smoked weed nearly every day for six years and never once worried about being arrested for it. In fact, the only ones who seemed to have any concern were the growers, who kept their locations a pretty tight secret. In the movies about that time period there are jokes about the police and paranoia, but as compared to what I see young people endure today, police worries were almost nonexistent in 1980.
Then the destructive hand moved in earnest. I actually saw the incoming of the crack cocaine epidemic. It was the new drug, a pleasant high, considered harmless, and people were trying it… until it became evident that it was a ‘hell of a thing’. I watched a young women, living a ‘normal’ life with a job and all, turn to prostitution within a month. There were so many of these girls that there was actually a name for them – strawberries. Today we know that the CIA was bringing the crack in, but we sure didn’t know it then. It was simply a new and inexpensive way of using cocaine.
The songwriting effort was bringing small success, with a few things published. I was being advised to write according to a kind of pop music recipe, which I didn’t like, so I wrote fewer songs and kept looking for some kind of spiritual knowledge that would help me. Criticism and resentment were still with me, and cynicism came along as well. I had found no answers in the spiritual books. I remember finishing a book one day and deciding there would be no more searching through the bookstore, because nobody knows.
Between 1980 and 1983 life changed again, dramatically. When Ronald Reagan was elected it actually felt like we had entered some kind of ‘end of the world’ time. Loss of hope was the emotional state of many more people than just me… something was over and we felt it. Then John Lennon was murdered, and that underlined the feeling. Sometimes being in the dark can be therapeutic as you bottom out, and it’s honest. You evaluate things.
But there was more to come before I reached the bottom. Within a few months my sister and childhood playmate left the physical and three months later it was my mother’s time to go. I had traveled back to the Midwest to take care of my mother during a planned hospitalization. While there, my sister finished her journey.
Mom and I could not attend the funeral, and she wished to be left alone on that day, so I went to a friend’s house. As I sat by the kitchen window, watching a slow rain turn the garden and even the sky into a deep grey-green, it seemed the rain was weeping with me. “How can I go on without you,” I asked, and at that moment her spirit overcame me with the most incredible bliss – more joy than one could imagine. I knew it was her communicating with me, letting me see her and feel the message. I felt her merging into that bliss, she was leaving, and I wept for joy.
Two months later my mother, now in the local hospital, made her departure. When my mother left it was different. I cried in my sleep for months until I finally saw her in a dream, with her sister. They were just walking and talking. After that I came to peace.
Going back to California, very dissatisfied with my choices, I gave some thought to this ‘music idea’. When you write music and lyrics, the desire is to say something, or create something that gives real value to the listener. What did I have to say? At that moment I didn’t see myself as having any wisdom or even any value. All I could see or feel was, “I know nothing so I’m going to shut up.”
I took all the master tapes that I had made, threw them in a garbage can, and moved to Venice Beach. It didn’t take long to find a job and a place along with all the other weirdos and lost souls. While today the Venice Beach boardwalk is a ‘destination’, having been recognized, upgraded and monetized by moneyed folks, in 1983 it was a gathering. There were new agers dressed in the garb of one or another Eastern religion, add to that the roller skaters and body builders, musicians, performers, homeless people and drug rehabbers turned artist, old folks and Hollywood actors waiting for the right role. I called it ‘the bleeding edge’.
And there I met what I would, at the time and for years to follow, consider my reason for being here. Deepak says it’s our destiny to play an infinity of roles, which seems true to me today, although at that time I had only awareness that this was my assignment, something I had asked for or been born for.
Like so many of us, my heart went out to those who were suffering and uncared for. I would soon meet up with an injustice hundreds of years old… the crux of the matter in the ‘land of freedom’. There was no way to know what would be involved: it was to be a bombardment of experiences teaching me to drop my judgments and the ego’s opinion, because things just aren’t the way my culture had taught me to see.
Among the characters in the beach community was a martial arts teacher who held daily classes on the jetty. I watched the classes, and thought to myself, “Yeah I feel like nothing, and my life is going nowhere, but since I’m here I could learn that… it would be something to do.” So I asked him about classes and saved up my $40 to get started.
The teacher was as interesting as what he taught, and I listened for clues as to what he really knew, as it seemed he knew more than what he was saying. After several months of classes, we ended up walking back to the beach at the same time. The conversation turned to spiritual matters and again I felt like… he knows more. One day he showed up at my door, and we sat and talked for many hours. It seemed as if an eternity of puzzle pieces fell into place as he said, “There isn’t any separate, personal God up in the sky… God is within us… we are within It.” Being very much into Yin/Yang and the flow of energy as a martial artist, he used this information when communicating his understanding of Divinity.
“You are not separate from God” was the message that I comprehended, and it was a life-altering message. I had long ago left the childhood notion that there was a person called God watching my every move and if I should say a curse word or disbelieve for a second he would put me in hell. But still I had found nothing in the spiritual books that would bring it home quite like this conversation did. Of course I wanted to know how God could be within the wicked, and he simply said that people are lost from knowledge of themselves.
He talked about what was going on in the world, and the changes that would come. This was 32 years ago, and much of what seemed far-fetched to me then has happened. He was a black man, born in the Bronx, grew up in the ghetto, within and participating in the black power and black nationalist movements of the sixties and seventies. Most of what he learned and experienced he learned there, although he was an avid reader of books from different cultures.
Many years later, after I had married him and raised a family and worked to be of service, I listened to someone question, at a Stuart Wilde event, why there are so few black people in the crowd, learning from this great teacher. I knew the answer: for the most part, black people are not going to follow a white teacher, especially in America with its awful history and cultural conditioning. They will follow one of their own, who speaks to their own rise.
Peoples, races, cultures and so on, have their own message and their own teachers, with all that is truthful moving in the direction of individual and collective self-realization. It makes sense that there would be not one avenue but many avenues, as the evolutionary information becomes available to many at around the same time, spreading in a language or method that can be understood.
With that said, let’s go back to when I first met my husband, and an experience that was absolutely new to me then, and hasn’t happened since. My mind was really expanding; things were starting to make sense. At one point I was resting in bed, and breathing to calm myself, when I felt a very rapid buzzing around me and through my entire body – it was as if my cells were vibrating and even the air around me was buzzing like it was full of electricity. As I lay there, I felt myself within a sarcophagus: I felt the headdress, makeup on my face, the position of my body. It was incredibly real, and came with the awareness that I had gone to sleep with the intention of waking up at this time, in this body, in order to play a part in something that was going to happen.
At that time I had harbored no fantasies about past lives and had not done any exploration with regard to myself. Any thoughts I had about past lives was to chuckle about how people like to imagine they had a past life in Egypt. So there I was, in the bed, unmoving, stunned at what I had just experienced. I couldn’t dismiss the experience as simply imagination because it was very physical and real, so I took it in as possible, that maybe people do come in with a predetermined intention, and maybe this is a very special time.
My experience of the Black experience in America: I described a bombardment of information forcing me to drop my judgments and the ego’s opinion, because things just were not the way my culture had taught me to see. So much was learned that I could write an entire book on it, but all we are doing now is a sketch of a few moments. As my life changed, I distanced myself from my family and even burned some bridges, knowing that if they were close, and I was in emotional pain, I might run back. I made it so that I couldn’t go back.
My husband was interested in starting a school in Chicago, so I quit my job and we left the beach community, heading to the Midwest. The largest black populations in Chicago are on the south side and west side: we found our way to the south side.
As I have mentioned, Venice Beach was very mixed community, and I did notice the incoming crack cocaine assault but certainly not to the degree I would have if living in Watts, for example. So I really had no experience of predominantly black communities prior to moving to Chicago’s south side where, in the impoverished areas, the population is 99.9% Black, with a few Koreans or Arabs operating the businesses, and a tiny number of white people. The only other white people I met in my time there were nuns operating a clothing and food bank, plus a very well known priest who was active then and is still going strong.
In 1984 the black rise of the 1960s and ‘70s was ending. Community organized social programs, feeding the children, respect and revolution faded away, and the reason why is not a mystery. The takedown was intentionally done by what we’ll call the ‘system’ via a CIA program known as COINTELPRO, and by crack cocaine. The music reflected the change, going from conscious and empowering to violent and degrading, and this too was by design. It became evident, or is evident… record executives control the message today whereas they did not exercise that kind of control in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
I have spoken earlier about Native Americans, and my childhood questions of, “What do you mean God loves all? If God loves them, and you love God, why do you hate them?” Now to be living within the new thought that there is no ‘in the sky Divinity’, there will be no Truth or Love to the rescue but from the truthful and loving human heart. Well, it was a deep and learning time, and I was an infant in that world.
When we drove into Chicago, and into the ghetto, it was a shock to my eyes and my feelings. There was nothing in the environment of beauty… anywhere. It seemed like even the air was grey: corner store with junk food, liquor store, storefront church in block after block of grey, with no thing of beauty, no industry, no malls, no office buildings, no jobs… some part of me was freaking out.
We stayed, and in the time to follow I would learn and learn and learn, from books, from people’s mouths, from walking down the street, from successes and disappointments, from self-observation. My cultural conditioning unraveled slowly, sometimes painfully, and that is to be expected.
I gave birth to two more precious little boys and I learned how it is to be in poverty… with babies. As with my first two sons, when a choice you’ve made for what seems like the right reasons puts your children in a position that is less than what you want for them, it brings on the self-questioning, and you live with that. It can be comforting in the moments of doubt, to remember that when our babies choose us they know Mom and Dad’s energy and the conditions they’ll be entering.
Here are a few of the hard lessons from Chicago: Why do people go on welfare? I know. What happens to cause homelessness? I know. Are there really no jobs? I know. Is there really no way out without help? I know. What’s it like to be disliked and distrusted because of race? I know. What do poor people lie about? I know. What happens when you take an advocacy position nobody likes and some people hate? I know.
I had some skills, and I could look and talk the part, so I hustled up work teaching Tai Chi to seniors, and my husband established his school. There were so many sweet and happy days: hundreds of hours in the parks and at the lakeshore watching the boys play, a martial arts school where the neighborhood kids got free classes, ethnic foods of every type, bike rides, museums, friends, and re-connections with my family. Poverty sucks: that is absolutely true, but the things that matter still are abundant.
The advocacy work that I was to do showed up. I had written to a leader that my husband respected, asking what I could do to help, and he responded. What I could do was to help in the effort to establish a globally-recognized collective identity for the descendants of America’s slaves. Even though I had seen the devastation experienced by Native Americans and now was seeing it in the Black community where I was living, I hadn’t given thought to the significance of identity or self-perception.
I read and studied, and a short while later joined the team of leaders and advocates and began traveling to the UN in Geneva to help get the point across: the forced removal of an individual’s identity, i.e. language, culture and spiritual belief, does not go away over time.
We can see the effect of this clearly in the case of Native Americans who endured a long-lasting concerted effort to destroy their language, culture, beliefs, and inherent knowledge. This was combined with genocide, systemic racism and individual punishment and degradation. Today we understand that forcing Native children away from their parents and into Christian schools, far from home, where their language and culture was beaten out of them, was a calculated, destructive, criminal act upon a People.
A new People: I participated in a 15-year long effort to bring together under one identity the millions of scattered Afrodescendants who had ended up in the western hemisphere not by choice. What happened to the concept of assimilation, one might ask. Why is this necessary? Shouldn’t they all have assimilated by now?
At its origin, the U.S. was an experiment in assimilation, bringing together various Western European cultures, and eventually Eastern European. After a few squabbles, all of the white Judeo-Christian people worked themselves in pretty well, others with brown complexions and a different religion did less well, but still they assimilated. So why not the slave descendants and Natives?
The answer has to do with the soul of a people. It’s the difference between giving up a part of what is significant to your humanity willingly, in the hope of something better, and having all of what is significant to your humanity brutally and forcibly removed and replaced with a lie akin to poison. Peoples who have been severed from identity by force, with ties to their origin cut, find themselves in a position of having to re-form themselves, almost as if from Zero. If the shared experience included, “You people are less than human,” that conditioning must be dealt with consciously and intentionally. This transformation process is as real as it can get.
We can see transformation in our own lives, and we agree that things don’t just ‘happen’, so it makes sense that the same process could take place over many thousands of years with group consciousness. We may be living within an Intention that covers a far greater time span than we can imagine. I speculate, sometimes, that in the grand scheme of things, over a time period that might be called an Age, groups of people go through specific evolutionary experiences, such as extreme restriction, in order to rise again, transformed by the experience. Great souls emerge from the fire of transformation.
Returning to the story, the travels and advocacy ended around ten years ago when my husband became ill. A new stage began, this one even more challenging. As a couple, we entered into his time period of decline. I knew I was going to have to find something to help me, as I was very much out of contact with myself. Who am I – I have no clue. This was when I came across Stuart Wilde’s book, “The Force”. I grabbed on to his work and began meditating to the theta metronome, realizing I really needed to calm down and strengthen myself.
Big question whenever you reach for something new: “Does my experience agree with it?” Maybe I should add, “In all honesty,” because we can and do lie to ourselves.
Stuart Wilde’s words would relate at a higher level: “We are not our bodies or our emotions or our minds or any of the structures and restrictions we experience around us. We are an infinite part of the God Force using the physical form to experience spiritual development through a special teaching called ‘daily life’.”
Our love had a spiritual foundation, and that made for an incredibly strong partnership as his health declined, and we lived daily life. I’ve written about his departure in another article, so won’t go into that, but I can give an example of my own spiritual development during those years.
A belief that was ingrained in me as a child was that sacrifice, for the sake of an ideal, is how to live a spiritual life. It was the childhood teachings about Jesus that put me in this mindset. Even after leaving religion, I held on to the idea of sacrifice. But there was a negative side: somewhere along the line I lost the distinction between sacrificing for an ideal, and sacrificing out of fear of displeasing people.
After many years there came a moment when I could not sacrifice myself. I had gone to my room and just collapsed onto the bed weeping, when there came into my mind’s eye a feminine figure. She showed herself to me, and she Was me: my higher self, or my future self. There was so much love emanating from her, and so much light, that I felt unworthy to even see her. She had come in my greatest hour of need, when I disobeyed the impulse to give myself away out of fear of another’s displeasure. That was a pivotal point. I was a long way from loving myself at that moment, but I had taken a first step… to refuse to harm myself.
Dealing with the grief and trauma: I had the help of my family, my husband’s friends, the people I had done activist work with, all of my sons and godsons, but I was not coming back together very well. I stayed in the house, went to the store, freaked out thinking I had to get back home, realized my husband wasn’t there, went home anyway… day after day.
After a few months I asked for help from Jeff Casper, one of Stuart’s students. Jeff’s remote healing was very much on point and his report of what he found was comforting. The second place I sought help was with Soren Dreier. I asked for a reading, and the things he saw touched me deeply as true. In response to his insight and encouragement, and his hand reaching out to help, I started writing the Talk2Momz blog. The writing turned out to be invigorating… a coming back to life. I know it sounds really new agey to say ‘finding myself’, but it’s real. Creating is definitely a means of finding.
Throughout this writing I have maintained a couple of threads, one being the longing. Longing drove me to begin this journey, and longing kept me going – as spoken of by Rumi, the core in every human being that longs for the return message. There’s more to say on that subject, but let’s go to the second thread first.
The ‘then and now’ comparisons: in comparing four years ago to now, we can see things coming to an apex. Stuart said the global shadow will come out. We’ve seen that and we continue to see it as the masks come off. He also spoke about a divide with humanity moving in significantly different directions.
When Stuart left the physical there really was a huge vacant space. He spoke often of the mirror world, which he called the Aluna. I don’t experience the Aluna often, but I do find myself there now and then. The first week after he crossed over I saw him in that world three times, talking to people and finishing up his work. In that world experience is direct; you are what you feel. What I felt from him was unconditional love. The last time I saw him he was on the other side of the bridge, looking as he had described others… very bright, quite large, and just upper body. It felt like there were quite a few of us observing, seeing him off. It was intensely reverent.
With regard to the divide that he predicted, on the one side we can see the evolution of consciousness. Peoples with different collective memories, conditioned by different religions and cultures, are approaching an awareness that will ultimately rise to Love for the One in all; so there is a coming together. We do climb up different sides of the mountain so to speak, and the process of shedding our fears and learning to trust our inner Divinity is not quick or painless, but it is happening.
At the same time large numbers of people are still vested in the system, so we seem to be separating from them, but I don’t really feel like that’s the case. In my view, the persons who defend and trust the system are still able to feel the uneasiness, and that is a great blessing for them. The longing is within them, their higher selves are with them, and when they have suffered enough of the lies, fear, hate and hell they will be drawn to new information. People open up a little at a time, as I know from my own life, and discomfort is an excellent motivator.
Controlled by fear, controlling with fear, there are some who seem to be very much committed to control and restriction. Are there any people so devolved that they won’t be able to come alive? Of course I couldn’t know, but Stuart did describe the hell worlds as very hard to escape. There is a message for those who have viciously held on, and who are still holding on to power: “Your job is done and you can leave it.” They made things so restrictive, painful and degrading that we were forced to evolve and explore, to look beyond religion and open up to the God Force. So… negative pressure has played its role, as we know.
Now we’ll go to the longing. In the beginning I mentioned writing the song, “Feel Loved Again”, and the phrase, “Love, once it has been made, becomes an open door.” How do you proceed in this world and in relationships with your heart open? I know it sounds dangerous, but if your first love is your own heart, your own Light, then it seems not only possible, but likely, that your heart will become an open door.
When it comes to judgment, we reserve the harshest condemnations for ourselves, to the degree that we might not even be able to mouth the words… I deserve… to be loved. While we might think we are berating and accusing ourselves for the sake of self-improvement, or because we want to be humble, my experience tells me it’s the ego taking a protective stance, as if we can keep the world from hurting us if we hurt ourselves first. It is, once again, the flip side of innocence.
We have all adapted to this world in our own way, and I suspect most if not all of us have been injured. To bring those injuries to light and love ourselves As We Are is to reconnect with our innocence and become a whole person. For example, to myself I have said: Ida, let your kindness and generosity be to you something you respect: you’re not a ‘sucker’ or a doormat and you never have been. Ida, let your advocacy be something you respect: you’re not failing to do the ‘ascension’ because you go to bat for people. Dear Ida, let your sacrifice be something you respect: you’re not foolishly suffering because you think you are important. You actually ARE important!
We are creating the open door as we speak to ourselves with kind words no matter what injury or aspect of ourselves we might be looking at. And it is true, that from a position of wholeness it becomes possible to authentically speak to others with kind words, no matter what state they are in, because if they are in need of love (which everyone is), we are in a position to give.
Growing from a false relationship with the external to a true relationship with the internal, and reaching back out again to relate to the world and the people in it from a heart place… isn’t this the journey we were born to take?
To the young, whose lives are so very, very different from what I experienced: no matter how painful or frightening it might be to be here, no matter how many lies there are, no matter how disappointing people might seem to you, this ‘life school’ is On Your Side. That’s one thing I can assure you is True. Everyone and every thing in front of you is a teacher meant for you, so if you can, pay attention with the intention of love.
When the soul starts walking, there’s not much we can do but follow.
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