I had this post on my desktop to read when friend Luciana from Brazil send me the link to this post to read. The synchronicity was too huge to ignore so I hopped to it. What a beautiful story and what courage. I had no idea this was her story, the story of a woman I much admire. I see how her story informs her compassion and work. Never be ashamed or blame yourself for whatever pain of suffering you may be experiencing. You have no idea what pearl is hidden within.
http://www.jenniferposada.com/the-pearl-ring
This past six years has been a series of those crashes, like waves in the ocean one after the other, some larger than others. Of course I went to my inner guidance, and I talked to my beings. They told me that this was meant to be a journey I took one step at a time, without answers in advance. That I was meant to learn as I went, and search blindly but from deep within. They said this was the lifetime I could finally feel all the pain and exhaustion from every other lifetime when I had pushed forward through trauma and loss to stay on my mission, to keep the remembering alive in my heart and be one of the vessels for it on the earth. They said because I was finally safe enough and the remembering was rooted enough, I could go back and feel all the sadness and the battered weariness of a very long fight to keep a flame burning through every kind of storm.
And so I have. I have felt it all, and in that process every childhood trauma I thought I had already processed has also been more truly plumbed. The darkest corners of the underworld where the most voracious ghosts live has been my unchosen yet deeply chosen playground, my alchemist’s laboratory, and my place of magical healing dreams. I always say that the wounds of what I call in my book, The Oracle Within, “The Great Forgetting”, can only be fully healed as we now enter into “The Great Remembering”…
…But when my bottom dropped out, the one underneath all the other dropped out bottoms, I got even more vulnerable, and while some people stepped back, a few people…some I hardly knew much yet…stepped forward. They reached out a hand in the dark like the nuns did that day for me in Tibet, and told me I could call them anytime. I was humbled. I am humbled every moment of every day…I have been my whole life. It’s a gift. And then there is my love, my beautiful husband who is the light of my heart and who has stood by my side as steadfast as anybody ever could. My living angel.
You see, when the last bottom dropped out, I fell hard…but ultimately it will be what lets me soar. Through all of this suffering, like it did for Isis or Mary Magdalen, or Innana when she journeyed through the underworld, I too will know a new freedom from past pains, and I too will touch the deepest alchemies I have yet known. I know love wouldn’t make it any other way.
Alchemy doesn’t always have to happen through pain. That’s just one way. This way is like the making of a pearl. A single grain of sand gets into the oyster and irritates it, so to protect itself it makes layer after layer of coating, until a pearl is formed. Many people think suffering is a sign that one is not evolved enough spiritually, but as I have taught since long before mine became so severe, it can be all the contrary. Like it was for Isis when she wailed by the Nile and became old, and haggard, losing teeth and pulling out her hair…and everyone forgot she was a Goddess and didn’t want to even get near her…but through honoring her full feelings and pain she accessed the power to bring Osiris back to life, and restore herself. Like it was for Mary Magdalen who also suffered loss, or Innana who bravely ventured naked into the underworld to face her self-judges and shadow, to die and bring herself back to life. No, I am not ashamed of my suffering. Why would I be ashamed of my pearl?
I know it has nothing to do with luck, but I feel god-damned lucky. I feel blessed, even as I nurse my broken body and broken heart, because I know all of this has held and led me to some sacred place I needed to go, and because the tide is turning. It is going to take a while, but I know what I need to do to be treated, and I have been told and know there isn’t any reason in the world why I shouldn’t experience a total and full recovery…why the worst shouldn’t be behind me…
…For when you know, like the Goddesses of my stories, and like me, that your suffering is not a sign of something “wrong” with you, but a sign of courage and grace, brilliance and liberation, you become free. And nothing can stop you then. You break away more than ever from the lie of perfection and punishment, and find your wholeness and utter beauty here and now…the only place that it can be truly found. And then there are no more forbidden fruits in your garden, and no more dark corners to hide from within, and the luminous pulse of love and life flows through you, unfettered. And you discover that your ugliest-feeling shame, your deepest fear, has somehow become a smooth, bright, pearl.