The Gift of Being Shattered

Have you ever had your world shatter?  By that I mean had the foundation of what you thought gave you safety and security totally fall apart.  Had something that rocked you to your core and left you feeling vulnerable and defenseless.

You can have big shatterings from things like divorce, betrayal and loss.  You can also experience smaller shatterings, but even those can really rock you.

My biggest shattering came in the form of my daughter who was born more than 3 months early and weighed less than 2 pounds.  Margaret Alice was born at 26 weeks gestation and had a major lung infection.  She died the next day, almost exactly 12 hours after her birth.  Add to that my own serious illness and the fact that I would never be able to safely carry another pregnancy and, well, I shattered.

The biggest thought I remember having as I began to resume my activities was, “How can everyone go on with life as normal when nothing will ever be the same again?”

Of course, life was normal for everyone else.  That’s how it works.  And it seemed incomprehensible to me at the time.

That was 15 years ago.

These years have included a great deal of clearing and releasing of my fears, self-blame, anger, jealousy and resentments.  There where some extremely difficult days in there.  Times I can only describe as dark nights of the soul.  Times when I wasn’t sure I could bear to look at the dark thoughts I was having, when I couldn’t bear to be with me.

Not all of what I cleared had to do with Margaret Alice, of course, but it’s definitely where I started out and what brought me, on my knees, to the energy technique I’m now a master in.

I would never, ever have said this in the beginning, but I’m grateful now for this whole experience, for having been shattered.  It’s brought me gifts that I could never have gotten otherwise.

It taught me that:
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• Unconditional love isn’t what I thought it was.
  I thought that unconditional love meant being able to let Margaret Alice go.  But really, I didn’t have a choice about that.  I did have to learn to truly let her go in the sense of letting it be okay that she had died.
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  What I learned was how to love myself unconditionally.  To love myself even though I had lived.  To love myself even though I couldn’t save her.  To love life, even though it didn’t include her.
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• Safety and security can only come from inside us.
  They aren’t based on what’s happening around us.  There is no job, no amount of money, no living situation that can guarantee safety.  And the more we try to hold onto safety, the more elusive it is.
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  Not even armoring ourselves emotionally will keep us safe.  In fact, it’s the exact opposite.  The more we try to defend ourselves, the more rigid we become.  And the more rigid we are, the more likely we are to be shattered.
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  The biggest thing about these defenses and this search for safety is that they separate us from the only thing that can keep us safe — the knowledge that we already are and always have been safe.
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  When we know that we’re always connected to Divine Love (whatever name we call that) and to each other and all of Life, then we know that we are safe because there simply isn’t anything else.  There isn’t such a thing as “not safe”.
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  And when I say, “know”, I don’t mean the kind of knowing that sits in the top of your head.  I mean knowing and experiencing it in every cell of your body.
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• Resistance, judgment and fear create distance.  Acceptance brings love and connection.
  My biggest lesson in all of this has been to accept whatever happens in my life.
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  I resisted accepting what happened for a long time.  I had the feeling that if I really accepted Margaret Alice’s death, I was both betraying her and giving permission to have it happen again.  I had thoughts like, How do I accept the unacceptable? and If I accept it, it means it was okay and it wasn’t! and If I accept it, it means I have to let her go, and then I’ve really lost her.  If I accept it, it means I have to go on without her, and I can’t do that.
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  I just kept at it, clearing away whatever came up.  Determined – desperate – to find my way to the heart of it all.
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  What I found as those thoughts and fears began to clear was that not accepting what happened kept me connected to the trauma of it all, not to my daughter.  It was preventing me from being connected to her, to my other loved ones, to love, peace, joy.  It kept me boxed in, small, imprisoned.
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  It kept me from living.
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  As I cleared my thoughts and fears, I felt myself expanding.  My capacity for joy expanded.  My ability to love expanded.
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• What shattered wasn’t me..
  It took me quite awhile to understand this, but what shattered wasn’t me.  It was my attachment to being safe.  To having things turn out like I thought they should.  To getting what I wanted and expected.  To having things be fair.  To having the life, family, house and so on that I’d envisioned.  To having things be right as I judged right to be.
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  What shattered were the walls around my heart, the rigidity and defenses I’d clung to, often unknowingly.
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  There’s nothing wrong with safety, fairness or any of those things.  At all.  The problem was my attachment to them, my need for them.  My fear around them.  My letting them come between me and other people.  My choosing safe and distant over connected, loving and vulnerable.
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  And I’d been doing that in most areas of my life for most of my life.

What shattering did for me was to show me with great intensity this way I’d been behaving and seeing life – and what it was costing me.  I was playing safe and small.  I was “looking good” on the outside while my inside withered.

I wasn’t truly, deeply, fully loving and expressing me, which kept me from fully, deeply, truly loving and being connected to anyone else.

What all of this led me to is me.  To truly being me.  Vulnerably, genuinely, imperfectly, perfectly me.  Me with an ever-growing capacity for joy, spaciousness, connection, energy, peace, sparkle, acceptance, love.

And now I love being able to help others get there far more quickly and easily than I did.