Slices of Now

In my last post, I made a statement that in my grieving, I felt like the bottom was going to fall out. 

I have been doing energy healing for the past 2 1/2 years, and as much as I try to be present with what is and accept that there is a darkness that gives me wisdom when I sit with it, I also have a hard time sitting with it. It's a normal human reaction to retreat from danger signals, such as the feeling of falling into nothingness. When I am working in an energetic realm, there is no floor, no ceiling, no walls to contain it all. It is just my true self and the vastness of space. 

I don't know how to explain the quantum realm or any of its theories. My friend Amy and I are having a turtle race to see who can read a book we found on the matter the slowest, because it's so hard to digest. Sometimes my energy healer Christine explains things to me and I kind of-sort of get it, but then when I try to tighten my grip on the knowledge, it slips through my fingers. She often talks about "Slices of Now" when she's guiding me. The first time I worked with her, she told me that time is a human construct to create a linear structure to our world, but in reality, everything that has ever happened or will happen is taking place right now. So to reach the person I was at age 5 when I cut my thumb on a Pepsi can pull off tab, I just have to access the dimension (Slice of Now) she inhabits. 

The awesome part of this work is that I don't have to know any quantum theory or understand any of the concepts to experience the richness of it. All I have to do is close my eyes and breathe deeply, and allow whatever is present for me to come forward and be known. I can do really cool things when I access the Slice of Now I'm being called to by some part of me that needs healing. I can put energetic shells around my child self to keep her safe when she's scared, I can call forward my spirit guides to help me when she's about to be attacked, and I can sit with her and hold her when she just needs to cry and be comforted. 

This is the most healing form of therapy I have ever done. Early in my process I used to say that if what I was seeing was just the product of an overly active imagination, it was still changing my perception of things that had happened in my life, rewiring my memories. I've always had this escape route built into my process, that it's possible this is not real. I'm at the point now where I'm ready to throw this self-limiting belief away. It keeps me small, locked into a singular reality I know is not true. It's my way of feeling for the walls and the floor, and not trusting that I don't need those things.

In my session on Thursday, Christine asked me about the integration of the work we had done the previous week (that I talked about in my last post.) I told her about the grieving I did, and about how I called my friend when I felt like the bottom was going to fall out. I realized suddenly that I had missed an opportunity. Had I followed the path of the bottom falling out, I would have been brought to a place I needed to go. 

But here's another wild concept: THERE ARE NO ACCIDENTS. (This one can be particularly hard to swallow, and it is definitely not lost on me that there are people who have suffered much worse trauma than what I have been through who would find that statement offensive. I say the things I say in reference to the truth I have found in MY life. It is absolutely each individual's right to discover their own truth around this, whatever it may be.) I have found my truth in some interesting ways for sure. The title of my blog is exactly as I see my life, one with many odd twists and turns--when I look at all the stones I have stepped on to get here, it always makes me cry with gratitude for every place I have ever been. 

Thursday, I was called to who I was at 16, siting in my room seething because there was a man in my house that I did not want there but couldn't do anything to remove him. I entered that Slice of Now to sit with 16-year-old me, to offer her protection, a stronger boundary so she didn't have to be in a hyper-vigilant state. When I first connected in with her, I felt her rage and fear, but under that, something immediately clicked. She felt like the bottom was about to fall out. I breathed deeply and stayed present with her and let us sink together into the depth of the darkness. I had a flash vision of a sacred fire inside the base of a mountain, and then suddenly I was in the expanse of space and feeling that it was only a doorway to something bigger, which was another doorway to something bigger yet. I felt all of that both within me and around me. A small still voice said, "I wish to be nothingness." It was my voice, and I felt so energetically expanded that I was splayed out as individual particles. Those particles were blended with all the other particles of everything alive in the universe, and I felt a connectedness, a Oneness with everything.

I've felt this before, this feeling that when I am present with all that I am, I am not alone. The feeling has gotten stronger, the more that I tap into it. In that presence, I have no need for external validation, whether good or bad. In that presence, I know that what Rumi said was true, that I am both a drop in the ocean and the ocean in a drop. 

Here's the true magnificence I realized about the girl who felt like the bottom was going to fall out: I remember what she was thinking then as she was staring out the window watching another Arkansas sunset, feeling trapped. She was thinking that she hoped the image she'd been imagining since she was 8 years old was true, that she was going to get out of there and become the woman who was so strong she could transcend the boundaries of time to come back and tell her she was going to be okay. I think that hope she created for herself became a diamond in that Slice of Now, and I think I just mined it. That diamond is the knowledge that I can be limitless. Every stone I've stepped on in my path to get here contains another piece of that knowledge. Mind. blown.

I am in love with this work.