This is a revised version of the book I attempted to resurrect from the ashes of my life, while nesting in my Adirondack shack in the spring of 2003. As I return to it, it is serving as a reminder to me - a reminder of where I once was, what I lost, and what I need to return to. I hope it also helps you find deeper depths of your own heart, because that's what this book is about. Its about embracing our own hearts and bringing more love into our starving world.

I dedicate this book to the heart of humanity and to the tears that
release our pain and open our hearts to deeper levels of Love.

Warning: This publication contains deep feelings and unedited, amateur writing. Please do not consume it with your mind. For best results read with your heart. ;-)

Embracing Feelings

  Have you ever noticed that the things, which deeply touch our hearts and help us demonstrate deeper levels of compassion/love are tragic events, sad songs, sad stories and sad movies...etc.? The stuff that reaches out and opens our hearts is not the "dance in the Sun" stuff, it's the, "hold hands in the rain" stuff. When we open our hearts to feelings of sadness it clears a pathway for deeper levels of love. And the flip side of this is also true. . .
   When we suppress our sadness - when we don't allow ourselves to feel it as it comes up, it creats a wall, which blocks the love we have in our hearts. Suppressing sadness blocks our hearts. And when our hearts are blocked, we don't operate from a place of Love and compassion, for ourselves and others, as deeply as we are capable of.
   Yet, we have a difficult time truly embracing sadness, because a healthy grieving process is often not fully supported in our world. Even when we do let our tears flow instead of completely stuffing them back down, we often release just a few of them and suppress the rest - We let ourselves cry a little and then rush to put the unpleasant experience behind us, before we've fully released the sadness that's crying to be felt/released. We rarely completely surrender and let it all out. We rarely hit the depths of it, because it's much easier to continue our habitual cycles of suppressing, especially since most of us encourage the suppression of sadness, without realizing the ill effects of it. Suppressing sadness has become such an automatic response that most of us don't even realize how much we do it.

   When I step back and look at the plight of our world, I see the suppression of sadness as an epidemic that's blocking the heart of humanity and causing multitudes of problems on literally every level of existence. The more we hide our sadness and push others to do the same, the more we spread the closing of our Hearts, which creates serious problems on ALL levels of existence. When we look deep enough we find that the suppression of sadness - the closing of our Hearts, is the root cause of ALL the problems we face, on personal, global levels and on every level in between. When we've suppressed large doses, it depresses us, makes us ill or becomes anger that yearns to strike out.

On larger scales. . .the severe suppression of sadness, causes Hearts to become so blocked that they begin filling up with deep levels of greed, warped and controling spiritual practices, uncontrolled anger, and a thirst for power over others. . .all of which are THE root cause of the destructive wars we experience, on EVERY level of existance, between family members, between religions, between cultures, and between countries.

On the smaller scales . . .suppressing our feelings of sadness causes our Hearts to block to the point where what we value most becomes money and obtaining possessions. We start losing our ability to feel compassion toward our fellow beings as well as ourselves. Depression sometimes creeps in. Our ability to feel the depths of Peace, Joy and Love diminishes. And our connection to the Highest Power, becomes more and more blocked. Is any of this sounding familiar to you? It does to me! This sounds painfully familiar! When I look at my life and out into the rest of the world, I see this so much it scares me. Humanity is losing it's heart. But it can be found again, through embracing our feelings.

 Most of us seem to suppress, and cover up sadness, far more than we realize. We stuff it down and fool ourselves into thinking we moved beyond it. We hide it from ourselves, and others. We deny it, pretend it's not there, label it as "depressing" or "negative" and think it will just disappear if we paste on a smile and carry on. But it doesn't disappear. What we don't release stays in the depths of our hearts, weighing us down and blocking our hearts until we allow it's release. What some of us call joy or love, is merely a shallow imitation of what these feelings can be when we fully embrace our sadness and unblock deeper levels of our hearts.

Suppressing Sadness Merely
Stuffs It Into Our Future

 
Crying is like giving the Heart a shower
To wash away accumulated dirt.

When I was in my early 20s I thought I was a Loving, compassionate person. I wasn't fully. But I thought I was, because I didn't know deeper levels of love than what I'd experienced up to that point. I didn't realize how blocked my heart was, until I started embracing the depths of my sadness and opening up to deeper levels of love, peace and joy.
I feel that this is the way it is with most of us. We often don't know what we're missing until we dare to open up and experience something more, something deeper, something that lies just beyond our usual comfort zones. When I've allowed the depths of my sadness, I've sometimes opened doors to an incredibly wonderful, almost magical, place within my heart.

But the first step I had to take, in order to work at refraining from suppressing my feelings of sadness, was start fully accepting their presence - stop giving them a negative label, and start looking at what I do to suppress them. Our own negative thoughts about sadness often prevent us from embracing it. The chance for deeper healing is diminished as soon as we question the feeling's right to exist.
   The consistent thing I do to suppress my feelings, (which most of us do on a regular basis), is shallow breathing. The more shallowly I breath, the more tensed up and blocked my body and heart remains. So, whenever I think of it, I start taking deeper breaths. And sometimes I can feel it opening a doorway in my heart. 
   The other tools I've used to suppress my sadness are cigarettes and over doses of food, sugar or caffeine. I was a heavy smoker up until the late 1980s. And since then I have returned to it, for short periods of time, when things got too stressful. After I stopped regular smoking I struggled with the eating addiction. And although I still go back and forth with this, I feel that I am winning the battle.
   Through the many difficulties, I've faced in my life, I strive to do my best to let my natural healing process happen - to embrace my sadness and let my tears wash away the pain. This doesn't mean that I'm sad all the time or that I don't still go through periods of suppressing. I don't do it perfectly. I just do the best I can in the conditions I'm dealt with. And this is all any of us can do, until our feelings of sadness are more accepted in our world.
   There are times when I revert back to suppressing out of fear of my heart being too open - out of fear of being too vulnerable when I'm exposed to the more chaotic parts of our world. Sometimes I suppress so much that it feels like I have to start all over again and what I had initially gained is gone. (I feel like this lately) But in my heart I know it isn't gone. I still have the memory of, and the yearning for, the place in my heart, which I need to grow back into, and this memnory will help me return to it. In the grander scheme of things each step forward goes a little further forward and each step backwards doesn't go quite so far back as the previous one. This seems to be the natural spiral of growth.

Throughout our lives we are sometimes surrounded by opportunities to embrace our sadness. Most of the time, the opportunities are relatively small. But every now and then we seem to experience some sort of loss or hurt that hits hard and deep. These are the times when it's most important to let ourselves cry out our pain.
   There have been a few times in my life when I've felt suddenly overwhelmed with, what feels like too many opportunities to feel sadness. An astrologer once told me that I had come into this lifetime with at least five lifetimes worth of work, in an effort to reach completion. I'm not sure about that. I don't see "completion" anywhere in sight! I may have already failed that part. But it sure feels like I'm undergoing many lifetimes worth of inner work! The challenges and losses I've faced in the past 20 years have been nearly unbelievable. ;-)
   There have been times when I've been hit so hard with so many tragedies and deaths and difficult situations that I went into shock and had to embrace my sadness a little bit at a time. And there have been times when I dove into my sadness so deeply that I feared not being able to get back out of it. There are times when I've felt completely stuck - surrounded by losses and deaths and tragedies that were more than I could handle, while also being targetted by the darkness of other people's hatred and jealousy. And there are times when I have spread my wings and soured, through my heart. . .into a place where Love wraped its Light around me and Angels sang me into the depths of peace. My heart often yearns to feel that Love again. 
   Most people don't have to deal with as many challenges as I have. But this doesn't mean that what I'm saying doesn't apply. Even when we hold in the small amounts of sadness, through long periods of time, it can add up to something very big and heavy.
   Sometimes I can't help but to look at the bigger picture - at the rest of this world I was dropped onto. There have actually been times when I've grieved for the masses of wounded places inside ALL our hearts, for the shallowness of the lives most of us lead and for our lack of Love and compassion.
   I've grieved for the fact that most of us don't seem to realize the depths of Love and joy that's missing from our lives. I've grieved for the avoidance of the sweet little innocent child who resides within all our hearts - the child that, too often, remains unacknowledged, unheard and unloved as we rush forward with too much focus on our monetary world.

When I was in my mid twenties, I had developed a severe blockage in my lower back. I was in constant physical pain for so long that the tensed up muscles started effecting the alignment of my spine. Eventually, two discs slipped and one ruptured, which lead to an emergency surgery, which was followed by a second surgery about a year later.
   After the surgeries the surface of my right leg and foot remained completely numb and my right foot was a little bit floppy. The doctors told me that there was no way to reverse the permanent nerve damage and thought a third surgery, to fuse several my vertebra together, could prevent further nerve damage. They listed me as being 25 percent disabled in my legs.
Well! That didn't go over well with me. There was no way I was going to settle for being disabled.
   I refused the third surgery, sought alternatives and soon realized that my back problem was not as physical as the doctors and I had originally thought.
   I learned how to do Rieki on myself, and started doing yoga on a regular basis. It was difficult for me to stick with the yoga at first. My body was very reluctant to bend. When I over did it, just a little, my back would end up in more pain and I would be set back to the point where I started from. I had to be very careful not to push too fast or stretch too far. It took a lot of patience and learning how to tune in and listen to the needs of my body. But thanks to a good yoga teacher and my determination to heal, I worked my way through the blockages in my body, on both physical and energetic levels. And I realized that our bodies carry some of our unshed tears as blocks of energy, which can be accessed through yoga.
   There were times when tears steadily flowed as I breathed into and released the tension in my lower back and hips. Sometimes it felt a bit embarrassing to suddenly burst into tears in the middle of a class. But my Yoga instructor assured me that this was what the deepest form of yoga is all about. She encouraged me to stick with it, because I was hitting some deep levels of healing. So I did.
   Most of the time, as I cried, I didn't specifically know what the tears were about. I learned to just let them flow without questioning them. My Yoga teacher often dropped a box of tissues next to me, as she noticed my release coming on. Her support through this time was the most wonderful gift I've ever gotten from a fellow human being.
   I stuck with it. Week after week I snuck into the back corner of the yoga class and embraced whatever feelings came up as I went deeper and deeper into postures. A few boxes of tissues, and a year and a half later, all the feeling was back into my leg and foot. And my body was bending in ways that I never expected it ever would again. This completely defied the opinions of the neurologists who performed the surgeries and tests. My tears helped to healed my back. The yoga postures did a lot. Yoga opened a doorway. But it was my tears that cleaned it out.

Medication vs. Grieving

 I find strength and love in my tears, 
And weakness and depression
In my avoidance of them.

I've never taken medications. I'm no authority on this subject. But I trust the intuitive messages I received during a few years of work in a mental health facility.
   When I a relative of mine decided to go on medication for depression, all of my wise inner voices loudly said, "NO don't do it! It will prevent the healing process. Do the grief work instead." But her grief was connected to the results of her own behaviors, which she was not ready to face. Sometimes we need to face our own inner demons in order to open our hearts and heal our sadness. But that process could fill another book or two.
   There are some of us who truly do seem to need medications, in order to prevent harm to ourselves or others. But, I feel sure that there are many of us who would be far better off facing our feelings instead of suppressing them even further with medication. What is often needed, instead of medications, is a retreat from suppressing activities and several good doses of deep crying.
   But it is up to each of us to decide what we feel is best for ourselves. It is imperative that we listen to our own instincts in this area. Each individual is unique. And each situation is different. This is why so much misdiagnosing happens. The medical books, which most doctors follow, do not list the endless variety of people and situations. So we must decide what is best for us. Sometimes we need to do just a small doses of medication for a short period of time. But anything more than that deserves serious consideration.
   Those who are aiming for long term medications, and don't really need to be medicated, will often have a little voice inside their hearts that is crying, "Don't do it! Please let me feel!" Too often this wise little voice is left unheard, because it is difficult to let these feelings be felt, and we are afraid of getting overwhelmed - afraid of feeling too sad. So we take sleeping pills instead of working at getting to the root of what is really preventing us from sleeping. We take anti-anxiety pills instead of reaching into what is causing our anxiety. And we take anti depressants instead of allowing ourselves to release the suppressed sadness, which is depressing us.
   Heck! Before we know it, there'll probably be a pill we'll be required to take, in order to clog our tear ducts at funerals, and they'll be handed out as we step into the parlor so that no one will have to face their feelings. . . Oops! Sorry. I'm getting a bit carried away. But really. . .

 Sadness is not depressing.
Its the suppression of it that depresses us.

 When we fully listen to our own inner voices, we can find that we know what is best for us better than any other human being can. We know what we truly need. The key is to tune in to our own wisdom and then act on it. If you are one of those people who is thinking about going on medication for depression or because you have a lot of sadness surfacing, I hope you search deep within yourself and find out whether or not you truly need to be medicated in order to function, or if you are one of the many who is just needing to take time to grieve - time to feel and release the sadness that is surfacing. Will medications make you suppress further or will they help you heal? Only you can truly know. Listen to your heart.
   As for those who are already taking meds. . .I hear that it's important to take small steps as you let go of medications or other sorts of addictions, which support the suppression of sadness. Do this slowly and find a support group, a counselor or friends who will understand what you're doing and can support you through it.

My Adirondack Shack

 In 2001, after the death of a man who had deeply touched my heart, which lead to the loss of my next home and a piece of Nova Scotia land, which I was purchasing from him; and after a fire tore through my Potter Place, NH home, (which happened a couple months later) I went into a depth of shock, which I'd not experienced prior to this. For several months, I numbly drove in circles not knowing where to go or what to do or how to pull my life back together when there were no pieces of it left to work with.
   At a gas stop in Pennsylvania, I picked up a news paper and saw an advertisement for a small hunters cabin in the Upstate New York wilderness. I went to look at it. It was a very sad, unfinished shack tucked into the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, with no electricity or public road within two miles of it. But it was something I could afford. And it was a place to call home.
   I moved in at the end of January, and physical survival became my priority as I faced new challenges, which I'd not anticipated. But these new challenges were extremely small compared to what I had just gone through. So I squared my shoulders and became determined to survive. And I write these song lyrics shortly after I moved in.

In my first couple weeks it hit 30 below zero! And it felt almost as cold inside my own heart as it was outside. The cabin was difficult to heat. There were cracks in the walls where the cold poured in. In the middle of the coldest night, it became too cold to relax and sleep, even after pulling my bed to within about three feet of the wood stove. So my guitar and I grabbed a chair, opened the stove door and huddled up to the fire, as we strummed out this song. . .

After this my grief started coming out a little at a time. This was the beginning of my hearts slow thaw. After summer arrived, I'd been about to do a fast and focus on relaxing and embracing my feelings, when I received a message that my youngest brother had just been killed in an accident.
   My family was in crisis! I was in crisis before this news came! My little brother was gone. He was only 38! Something deep inside of me froze back up. Shock took another firm hold as I packed my van and drove to New Hampshire for the funeral. Like a mantra in my head I kept repeating over and over again. . ."God help me! Give me the strength to get through this. God help me! Give me the strength to get through this. God help me! Give me the strength to get through this. . ."
   I didn't think I could handle anymore. So, I bought a pack of cigarettes and arrived at my family's home town in a bundle of jumbled nerves. Gathering with the family I'd been completely separate from, through most of my adult life, had me more uptight than the funeral did. A huge part of me longed to run in the other direction or slide into oblivion and pretend this was not happening. But I couldn't. I had to deal with it to some degree. Tears occasionally flowed, but I couldn't fully let go, until I was in the safety of my own home. I struggled to stand strong and be there for others, at the expense of myself, which was an old family roll I fell back into through this time.

But as if this were not enough, shortly after my brothers funeral my cousin suddenly died of a heart attack. After I attended my brother's funeral, sent a sympathy card to my cousin, drove for 15 hours to get my daughter back to collage before classes started, then drove, 15 more hours, back to my cabin, I was an absolute wreck. My hands literally trembled as I struggled to make a cup of herbal tea. I desperately needed someone to be there for me through this time! But there was no available person who could comfort me on the levels I needed. I sometimes sat alone, like a trembling stone, begging for The Higher Powers to help me release my pain. Sometimes I curled up in my bed and cried like a baby for hours at a time. And sometimes I drove to a nearby diner and bought a cigarette or two from the waitress.

In the weeks following my brother's and cousin's sudden deaths, I remained weakened and numb with shock. But I found strength through my faith, and my knowing that there was a higher purpose to all that was happening to me.
I wrote the following song shortly after my brother's death. But it was not just about my brother. His death threatened to dislodge the sadness of losing Jim to a sudden heart attack in the year before this. But at this point I wasn't ready to fully face Jim's death, which included the death of a dream, a home, a future - a love that never had a chance to finish blossoming. This song was really for Jim.

A couple months later, in a vision, I saw my mother's Spirit reaching down to embrace my brother, after he entered the Spirit world. I saw her holding him in her arms and bringing him into the Light. Oh, how I longed to feel her Love and comfort. I desperately longed for someone to be here for me, on that level. I needed to be held. I needed to rest in someone's arms for a while. I needed someone to reassure me that everything was going to be alright, because I really didn't know if it was going to be. There were times when I literally wrapped my arms around myself, rocked and sobbed for hours. I didn't feel alright. All I felt was the pain that kept trying to push its way up through the wall of numbness I'd built around it. And each layer I let out felt like it wasn't even coming close to reaching the bottom of it. God I hurt!
   Deep in my heart I knew that the only true comfort, in the depths that I needed, would come to me when I completely surrendered to releasing my pain and reopening my heart to God.

I lived in the cabin for a year and a half before I felt forced to sell it. Through this time, and in the following years, my life became a process of finding myself again; of finding the deeper levels of  my heart again; of bringing some purpose and Light back into my life. I am now faced with the same sort of situation again. And I deeply miss my Adirondack shack and wish that I could buy it back.

I went back and forth between smoking and crying until February 2004 when I did an 11 day fast in an Arizona desert. This is when I stopped smoking and started shifting back and forth between spreading my wings and eating. I gained 30 pounds in the next year. But over-all I was heading forward - I was healing from this chain of events, until the next chain linked into my heart - until my experiences around the Alstead flood completely knocked me off my feet in the fall of 2005.

Heart Stuff

My life has been unusually difficult, to say the least, more so than I can explain here in this one publication. And more times than not, my tears poured into the lines of my songs and poems. . .

Healing Relationship

 I fell into a three and a half year relationship, which was extremely difficult as it offered countless opportunities for growth. This relationship lead me into the depths of my heart - into the deepest love and the deepest pain I'd ever experienced in relationship. It didn't take long for the honey moon phase to end and for this man's behaviors to start raising every unhealed issue I'd had with my family of origin and X husband.
   My pain ran as deep as my love for him. It felt like it tore, not only my heart, but also cut into the core of my soul. It took years of facing and releasing my pain, before my heart felt like it started coming back together. This hit me so hard because I was also facing the pains which had been inflicted, with similar behaviors, through the previous 40 years of my life. Every excruciating jab followed roots, which grew into the most painful parts of my past. This man had a shadow side to his personality, which mimicked behaviors he knew I'd been deeply hurt by in my marriage and in my family of origin, on top of a few extras of his own. And I kept thinking it was going to get better. But it didn't.
    This relationship lead me into the toughest lessons I've ever had to learn. And I stayed there, letting my heart be pounded for too long. I did completely leave, in order to protect and take better care of myself. But this was after I'd lost something that I've not yet been able to fully retrieve - I felt like I'd lost my self respect and the respect of my children, due to the ways I reacted to this mans behaviors after letting myself be manipulated, betrayed, used and hurt for too long. I let this relationship reduce me to a state that left me feeling ashamed of my own behaviors. 
   But after leaving, I began facing, for the first time, the pain I'd held in my heart from the 14 year marriage I'd had prior to this relationship. I realized that my marriage had been far more harmful to me than I'd previously wanted to face. And I began to realize that most of the men and friends, whom I'd been drawn to, behaved in ways that were very similar to my own father's and sister's behaviors. This is what I grew up with and was accustomed to being hurt by. 
   In my heart I knew I could forgive all of it and open up to something better. But I needed to finish healing my wounds before complete forgiveness could permanently settle in. More than anything, I needed to forgive myself. I wrote most of these poems in the mid to late 1990s.

When I look into the depths of myself and others, I see that most of our issues have roots in our past - in our childhoods. Our past experiences often shape how we think and behave in our adult lives. We not only carry the past with us, we live it, breath it, reenact it, strive to heal from it or struggle to suppress it, almost every waking moment of our lives. No matter how hard we try to forget or suppress it, it's still there, having an effect on our lives, not matter how subtle it may be. . .until we face it and heal it.

Many of us bury our childhood pain so deeply that we don't even realize it's there. We numbly stumble through each day of our lives not realizing how emotionally blocked we are. This numb feeling becomes all we know - all there is. We often think we had a great childhood, or that "it wasn't all that bad", when we are just in denial - when we have suppressed not only the feelings, but also the memories of the events that caused us pain. And this doesn't only apply to severely traumatic experiences. No matter how small the events were, they have an effect on us when we've suppressed feelings associated with them.

No matter how great or small the hurts were, we carry them within us if we didn't fully cry them out. And new experiences sometimes give us opportunities to feel and release the pain we'd already suppressed.
  When we find a huge amount of sadness surfacing, due to a small event, it's almost a sure thing that our feelings have roots in the past. Some of our suppressed pain, is resurfacing along with the present pain. This is a healing thing. This is a good thing. This is supposed to happen. We should not be so quick to negatively label this as, "over-reacting" or as being "over sensitive"…etc.

  This triggering and releasing of our past pains can also happen during loving, comforting times. When we deeply open our hearts to give or receive Love, a profound healing can take place. The is the best way to heal.

I remember one of my daughters waking late at night scared and crying out for me. I went up to her bedroom, talked with her and reassured her. But she remained scared and asked if I'd stay in her bed with her until she fell back asleep. So, I remained there, holding her in my arms until she peacefully drifted off.
  After she'd fallen asleep, silent tears streamed down my face. As I comforted her I also comforted my own inner child. I felt the times, through my own childhood, when I'd felt scared and in need of being held - times when no comfort came for me - times when I laid awake crying and feeling too alone and scared. I literally felt Love filling my heart as my tears flowed. This was a wonderfully healing process for me. I felt the depths of how "giving is receiving". My daughter lay sleeping in my arms, completely unaware if my silent tears. And as I looked at her I felt so glad to be holding her in her time of need, that I stayed there for a while before I slowly snuck out of her bed.

During this time period, in the late 1980s, I had many painful childhood memories suddenly rising to the surface of my consciousness. This began shortly after a "near death" experience, which happened during a second surgery on my spine.
  I woke from surgery with the memory of having visited a place where I was wrapped in the most incredibly, comforting feeling of pure Love. Words cannot even remotely begin to describe what I felt! It was the most Loving place that can be imagined.
  This experience left me with a deep knowing that, this place I visited was my True Home, and that my time here on earth, in a human body, is only a temporary healing process, which I must pass through for my own soul's growth.
  But this changed my view of the world. After experiencing the depths of this Love, the severe lack of Love in my life here on Earth became excruciatingly obvious to me. I painfully felt the lack of Love that existed in all of us, including myself. My life suddenly seemed incredibly empty and meaningless. The whole human race suddenly appeared shallow and false.
  I struggled to hang onto some "normalcy" in my life! But my struggle was futile. My life would never be the same as it had been before this experience. And I didn't really want it to be. But, adjusting has been a difficult process.
  Within a few years, my heart opened to deeper levels than I'd ever before experienced. Many buried childhood memories and the pain associated with them, rushed to the surface of my heart and mind. My world flooded with tears and confusion.
  My pain ran so deep that I didn't know how I carried it for so long, without realizing it was there. Sometimes it felt overwhelming and I wanted to stop it's flow. But, sometimes I dove into it with a warrior's determination to heal.

As I began facing the most painful parts of my childhood, I allowed myself to feel deeply angry for the first time in my life. My father fought hard to prevent my healing process - to prevent me from looking back at my childhood. And it broke my heart when he even went so far as to start telling people that I was crazy so that they would not believe me if I were to ever remember things he wanted to remain hidden. I felt soooooo deeply hurt by the lack of love, which created the deceptions and manipulations that forced me to remain almost completely sperate from my own whole family of origin through most of my adult life. I felt angry that they were not there for me when I needed them most. I felt angry that they didn't support me or love me the way I needed them to. I felt angry that they hurt me so deeply...not only in the past, but also during this time when I had already felt devastated.

But feeling angry with them, and feeling so deeply hurt by their behaviors did not mean that I didn't love them. On the contrary. My love for them is what made my pain cut so deep. And allowing my anger was the first step I had to take, in order to start healing. As I embraced my anger I found that within it my was a very sad, wounded little girl who felt too unloved and abandoned! And her tears flowed like rivers, through her wounds.

As this pain surfaced, through the late 1980s and into the early 1990s, I sometimes regressed into feeling like a child who needed to be held and told that everything would be alright. I needed to be told that it was ok to cry and that I had a right to cry. When my deepest pains surfaced, I sometimes became that wounded little child. I felt as alone, lost, scared, and unloved, as I did throughout most of my childhood. Oh....how I cried. There were times when my tears poured out as if a flood gate an suddenly been flung open. During some of those times, I felt overwhelmed. But I learned that the only way out of it was to go straight down into the depths of it and pass all the way through it, no matter how difficult it was.
    I cried for the times when I laid in bed trembling with fear, when no comfort came. I cried for the times when I got yelled at for crying, or for being afraid of the dark. I cried for the times when I longed to be held but wasn't, and for the times when I told the truth and was not believed. I cried for the countless times when I was told I was ugly, stupid, oversensitive or mental. I cried for the bruises, black eyes and bloody noses, resulting from other people's jealousy or rage. I cried for the times when I felt severely hurt and betrayed by those whom I loved and needed love from. My pain went so incredibly deep that words can't even imagine it. Never have I cried so hard - so deep, as I did through those years.
   I struggled to embrace floods of tears. I screamed into pillows. I sobbed for hours at a time. I wrote until my fingers were sore. I cried and cried and cried as I became that wounded child who felt too deeply hurt and too painfully unloved to do anything but cry it out.

My tears eventually subsided as I began to integrate the broken pieces of my childhood. After a few years, I even began to realize that the turmoil and pain, which existed throughout my childhood could be used as a tool to help the rest of humanity.

Due to my father's desire to cover up the past, I've been kept almost completely sperate from my family of origin since I started this healing process. There are times when this has been a painfully lonely place. Yet, because my family could not understand this healing process, it's within this separateness, that I found the strength and freedom I needed, in order to heal. But I miss them. I wish I'd had their support. I wish we could have healed together. I tried, and failed, but love them still.

Deep in my heart there exists a soothing fantasy - a place where we all do the best we can to face our problems and mistakes instead of fighting to cover them up or make them worse. . .a place where my oldest sister loves me enough to not let her jealously rule; a place where my other sister doesn't let darkness of her hateful jealousy aim to harm me or manipulate the relationship between my oldest sister and I...etc.; a place where my sisters and I love each other the way sisters usually do....not perfectly, but Truly (not having this has left an aching hole in my heart); a place where my father stops manipulating his children against each other - where he stops trying to force us to avoid the past - where he grows to a point where he can face his own mistakes and feel remorse instead of crushing me in order to cover them up - where he can be the Dad I've needed him to be. . .loving enough to try to make things better instead of worse; a place where my big brother doesn't let himself be manipulated against me by my father and sisters - where my big brother is still proud of me; a place where my family can understand my need to heal, without judging me or looking down upon me for it; a place where my family loves me the way I am...with the love that can not be jealous or hurtful; a place where I found the courage to directly confront these issues BEFORE they got too far out of hand.
   Unfortunately this is not the way it is or ever was. Its just the way I wished it could be. Its just a fantasy. But reality hits me each time I run into people who have the same traits as the ones I'd been so deeply hurt by in my family of origin. So I'm still getting opportunities to heal from the pain of their lack of love. And I'm still finding the heart to understand and forgive the pain and shame that has kept us apart.

There was a time, in the early to mid 1990's, when I foolishly thought I was finished healing my past, and was ready to launch into the next step - into a "more spiritual" life style. I returned to exploring religions. I read lots of books and attended classes..etc. I started drumming circles, became a "healer", lead workshops and support groups...etc. But after a couple years I'd had to step down from my foolish pedestal, stop thinking I was beyond certain things, and return to the basic process of embracing my feelings and opening my heart to deeper levels so that I could connect more deeply to The Highest Power. It turned out that fully embracing my sadness and healing my own heart was the most spiritual thing I could do. My most powerful, spiritual experiences have been in conjunction with deep levels of embracing and releasing my suppressed sadness.

When I stopped searching for my own spirituality in other peoples spoken or written perceptions, and returned to embracing my own heart, I start finding what I was searching for.

I found that I already had the spiritual connection I needed. I was already connected to the Highest Power, as are all of us. I just needed to continue removing the suppressed feelings that blocked my heart from its depths. And each time I let go of a layer of the walls in my heart, I experienced deeper levels of my own sense of spirituality - deeper levels of Love.

This doesn't mean that we shouldn't look or search outside of ourselves. We all need other people to learn from. My time of searching gave me many valuable tools. From each path I explored, I used what felt natural to me, threw away the rest, and then added what I needed in order to create my own unique spiritual path, which included embracing feelings in a way that no other did. This is just what worked for me.

The dozens of books, the priests, the groups, the gurus, the ministers, the shamans, clairvoyants, astrologers, yoga teacher, yoga therapy and workshops…etc., had given me valuable tools to work with, and it opened doors that would have been too hard for me to open completely on my own.

When I went through a period of, what I call, "interviewing clairvoyants", the greatest gift, I received, was validation of my own intuition. My experiences with the bible validated the fact that Jesus came to teach us deeper levels of Love. The Native American type of visioning felt very natural to me. So I used it as a healing tool. I remember many occasions where, within my visions, my inner child sobbed in the arms of a grizzly bear. This was incredibly healing, since it comforted me in ways that filled a need, which had not been met in my physical world. Through entering the Spirit world, I also had the opportunity to speak to my mother and resolve the issues, which remained between us since cancer took her Home when I was eighteen years old. This was a powerfully healing experience for me.
   The Native American traditions also helped me to gain a greater appreciation for the Earth and the beings and plant life on it. I deeply related to the concepts of the earth having a spirit, because, since I was a young child, the brooks, forests, mountains and deserts have been my favorite churches. These are the places where I connect most easily to The Highest Power.

The Hindu traditions of yoga and the chakra system helped validate the energies I feel in my body, and they became a valuable instrument to access the deeper feelings, which were held within my body on an energetic level. Visualizations, deep breathing and meditating were tools I used to silence my mind and go more deeply into my heart.
   When I took a class, to learn how to do Rieki, the most valuable lesson I learned from my teacher, was when she told us that, "even if all we ever do with this healing technique, is heal our selves, we will have done enough for all of humanity." I have learned that there is a DEEP truth in this. And through my practices with spiritual healing I learned that it is best when healing starts with the heart so that deeper levels of love can be brought into the rest of the healing process.

I feel that we are all part of The Highest Power. And we can connected to that Love through the depths of our own hearts. . .and that all we need do is open our hearts enough to automatically experience it.
   And as we open our hearts and become more Loving toward our fellow human beings, the energy of that Love touches everyone we come in contact with. There doesn't even have to be an exchange of words for us to have a positive effect on the world around us. Our energy touches everyone we come in contact with. All we really have to do is heal our own hearts in order to heal our world.

I even feel that the answer to the evolution of our souls lays in the process of embracing our suppressed sadness and opening our hearts to the deepest levels of Love. . .that this will be humanity's salvation. God told me so. . .believe it or not.

Though, embracing my feelings of sadness has often been extremely uncomfortable, when I found the courage to do deeply it, it has opened doors in my heart that enabled me to experience the most wonderfully Loving times of my life. As I deeply embrace my sadness, my ability to feel Love, Peace, Joy and a spiritual connection to the Highest Power increases. My awareness of myself, my surroundings and others deepens. Spiritual feelings and experiences happen more often. And my dreams become more frequent, more precognitive, more clear and more meaningful. When I deeply embraced my sadness I was sometimes blessed with some sort of wonderfully loving spiritual experience.

Around the year 1990 I'd just gone through a devastating separation from my family of origin, while facing the return of some extremely painful, childhood memories. I'd also just separated from my husband, and then had suddenly lost the support system I'd hoped would be there for me through this time. 
   This chain of events lead me into the deepest, most excruciatingly painful release I've ever experienced. I literally cried for days! I felt incredibly hurt, abandoned, alone and scared. So much pain surfaced that it terrified me! The pain came racing to the surface, like an unstoppable locomotive. On the second day of almost steadily crying, I tried to shut it off. I tried to stop the gut wrenching flow of tears. But, I couldn't! I felt completely engulfed by it. It consumed every fiber of my being.
   When I'd reached a point where I could hardly see through my swollen eye lids and knelt on the floor gasping for breath, gripping my aching stomach and chest, I screamed and prayed for God to stop the flow. And right at that point, when I felt like I absolutely couldn't handle anymore, an incredibly Loving, presence came to hold me. I literally felt like my body was being cradled in the arms of an Angel. It felt like the Love in my Home beyond this Earth, had come down to embrace me.
   I suddenly felt comforted and safe enough to open my heart and surrender, even more deeply, to my pain. I cried and cried… until my exhausted body laid sleeping, in the arms of this Angel. When I woke, I wrote the following song as I remembered the message She gave me.

It took several days for me to recover from this release. But when I did, I felt far lighter than I ever had. And my heart felt more open and Loving than I'd ever experienced before.
   During these times when I've gone into the depths of my pain, divine help has often come to assured me that there is help - that I am not alone, not even during these times when I feel so incredibly alone here on Earth. But I would not experience these comforts if I were not willing to go into the depths of my pain.
   I took a walk in the woods directly after I'd cried and was still feeling sadness in my heart, when a little flock of birds suddenly came and danced and sang around me. (This was in 2002, shortly after my brother's death.) I literally felt a vibrating warmth enter and spread through my chest as I connected with a little Chick-a-Dee who sat on a branch, no more than two feet from my face. This was such a gift. I actually felt like that fluffy little bird poured Love into my heart, so powerfully that it brought tears to my eyes and a strong, tingling, warm feeling spreading through my whole body.
   My feeling of sadness was replaced with a deep feeling of Love and Peace. I'd never had this happen this way before. And I KNOW that I would not have had this experience if my heart had not already been open to it. Allowing myself to feel my sadness was what enabled my heart to be open to this experience of Love.
   I've had many experiences, ranging from hearing, what feels like the voice of God speaking to me, to the little bird's Love. But, I've gone through times when I searched for a magical experience and searched for divine comfort, when it seemed to not be there for me. During some of these times I was too blocked to go deep enough into my heart. When I did go deep enough, my spiritual experiences never happened in the same way twice. I had to let go of my expectations and just let it be. (I wrote the following song when I looked for another Angelic experience, while I let myself be crushed in a difficult relationship, in the mid 1990s.)

Divine help has countless faces. When I don't feel or see it, my faith has to bridge the gap. Nothing happens that is not part of some grander plan. There is meaning to everything. Even the smallest "coincidences" can be gifts or lessons from beyond. The key is to open our hearts and minds enough to recognize them.
   When we look for something specific to happen, it can prevent us from noticing something wonderful that may already be there for us. When we open our hearts to release our pain, without expectation, it also opens the doors for us to experience better things. When I met Jim, around the year 2000, I didn't feel ready for him. And it wasn't until after he died, while I delayed our unition, that I realized what a gift he would have been for me. But he came to me, in my dreams, and held me in his arms and comforted me when I needed him most. And I realized that, even though his body is gone, he left me with the gift of his love. And I cherish it still.
   Experiencing increasingly deeper levels of Love and Peace, within our hearts, is the reward of embracing feelings of sadness. I can't think of any greater reward/gift. I wrote most of the following poems in the early 1990s.