WARNING: Non-Music Post

My Gift 

It was the most amazing experience. The Shaman said before I got there, she had opened her circle up for my guide for this process to step forward. It was my Dad! She said this was the first time something like this has happened to her, for someone so close to show up and so strongly! My Dad said "She needs to know where this has come from." Very clearly and knowingly. Of course we did not know what "this" was, and assumed it was the pain I was experiencing from a recent break-up.

Which it was in a roundabout way. We started the journey with some energy work, basic relaxation and aura cleaning (you know, the usual). She guided me through a meditation,  touching my hand for reassurance. Then as images came up, the Shaman guided with questions and chants. She asked her guides what message they had for me, and they replied, "Just be honest." 

We first went to a forest near Santa Cruz where Mike, my ex-husband, and I used to live. Then, while crying hysterically, I explained where I was and with whom as streaming tears filled my ears. She guided me to a place to calm down, which was my room in our house in Aptos. Mike refused to be called forward as a guide; she asked him why he was hiding, he scoffed and claimed he wasn't, he “just did not like people in his space." After more conversation, Mike said I had to take his hand, said I would understand why, but I couldn't. I just couldn't, the image kept slipping. I started crying hysterically again, and said it was the guilt. I couldn't because of the guilt. She asked what I wanted to say to Mike.... I said I was sorry, I didn't know what else to do at the time, I acted selfishly and childishly.

At that point the entire session turned! This was no longer about THEM. It went into a healing process about me. She said, "This guilt came long before your husband dear." She started chanting, singing and playing a drum. "Your childlike nature is your gift, your father knew this." In her chant, she drew out a child that hovered above me, my Innocence. 

She asked my Innocence to join me back in my heart. Innocence replied, "I can't - there is no room in her heart for me. The guilt, it has hardened, and there is no room." An image of a child with a thick block around her neck, choking her, appeared.

So the Shaman chanted some more. As she chanted, she sounded so sad. She said the child Innocence was on her knees, hands together begging the heavens to stop her pain. Asked why in so much pain, the child howled because I do not know how to cope. Cope with what? The suffering. What suffering? The suffering of others, why do they hurt when they love. They pain is there for their learning my dear, so they can grow. But I love, and I do not suffer, I feel guilty that I do not. You feel guilty that you love? Yes, I love without pain; I feel joy. "Oh child, this is your gift." 

The Shaman chanted for my Innocence to return to me. As she did this I felt a great lightness come over me and my closed eyes filled with a bright pink light. Then her chanting slowed as she started to ground me. She asked her guides to join her in a prayer, a prayer that this reunion is fostered and that I am able to see signs that there has been a shift as time goes on. 

AFTER

She said I don’t have to repeat this cycle anymore. I do not have to feel guilty for feeling happiness, joy and love. I can do so with childlike abandon.  It has been healed.

I do not have to seek out partners who are suffering or broken so that the cycle of guilt is repeated. It had become a familiar, punishing habit. It has been healed.

She said now, I can truly embrace my simple happy existence and show love freely.

The trauma was my own, from not understanding my surroundings and not having the parental support to explain it to me as a child. My Dad always said I was his happy child. He must have known at some point I had lost it.