This is one of the perceptual changes that has had the biggest impact on how I now approach my health, my work, my spiritual growth and overall sense of wellness.
I have struggled with physical health issues, mental health issues, debilitating fears and anxieties; and although I found myself so committed to facing these challenges and problem solving how to fix them and grow from them, I have always felt so stuck in this space, so limited by my health and so desperate to find solutions. I truly saw myself as unwell, with wellness as something outside of myself that I would have to find and invite in.
Those of you who have been sharing the last couple years with me know that I have been spending my time working with A Course In Miracles (AICM) and how I like to work with ACIM is to read the lessons and then sit in meditation with the lesson and welcome any guidance that spirit might have to share to help me along on my journey. The change in perspective that I want to share today came through while I was sitting with Lesson 160 which is "I am at home. Fear is the stranger here." It is important to me to clarify that I'm not suggesting that what I am about to share with you is what this lesson means but that it was the catalyst for me in changing my mind about my relationship with wellness.
So what do I mean by wellness is my home, dis-ease is the stranger her? Similar to my writing from last week, my perspective for all of my life leading up to recently, was that everything I wanted was outside of me and I had to seek for it, find it and then figure out how to welcome it in. You could apply this to almost every perspective I held: Fear was my home, peace was the guest; Sadness was my home, joy was the guest; Illness was my home, health was the guest; Chaos was my home, stillness was the guest; and so on and so on and so on. When I sat with the ACIM lesson the following metaphor presented itself. Those of you that live on the Wet Coast (I mean the West Coast) will likely get why this metaphor was so relatable.
North Vancouver, although beautiful, is draped in clouds and rainy a large percentage of the time, and so usually around October, November we've had enough and we look to travel somewhere sunnier for a get away, and so the metaphor that showed up was of that experience when you are sitting on the runway and the rain is pouring down and the sky is dark with clouds and the plane takes off and a couple minutes later you break the cloud cover and you suddenly find yourself surrounded by infinite blue sky, and there is that moment of remembrance that the blue skies are always there but the clouds are what keep us from seeing it. The blue skies are the home and the clouds are the guest; and that as dense and dark as those clouds might get, and as long as they might stick around, the clouds are transient and the blue skies are the constant. Sometimes it is impossible to see the blue sky but it is there on the other side of the clouds.
So why was this metaphor such a powerful catalyst for change for how I approached my own sense of Wellness?
I am no longer searching for my wellness, I am uncovering it. When I believed that Illness was what I was and wellness was something I lacked, it lead me on this exhausting journey to find this illusive wellness and try to find space within myself to add it to the illness I was built on. This would be something similar to metaphorically trying to find the blue skies and then tuck the blue skies into the clouds. In my mind the clouds were always the constant and the more I held my focus on the clouds as the constant, the denser the clouds became, the more an more difficult it became to figure out where to find the blue skies, and the more I doubted I would ever find blue skies. When I changed my perspective to hold it as truth that my resting state was wellness, I could then place my attention and focus on uncovering, unfolding, and releasing the clouds and embracing, experiencing and remembering my wellness. Remembering yourself as well is very different process than trying to create yourself as unwell.
Seeing my challenges as clouds allowed me to look at them differently, as deep and dark as clouds may appear they are not solid, as impenetrable as they might appear from one vantage point as you move towards them you realize you can move right through them, and if you trust that blue skies are what await you on the other side (I now recognize this as faith) you find the strength to step through.
Faith in blue skies changed my willingness to face my own clouds. We are all experiencing our own clouds, we are surrounded by them, the fears and pains of the past that we carry forward with us. When I believed that the clouds were the truth of what I was made of, it was too scary to step into them, as I could only imagine myself stepping into an abyss of darkness that might have no end. I started going into my meditations, and going into emotions reminding myself that blue skies were the truth and this was just a cloud, and meditation after meditation these intense images, or intense sensations would arise and I would remind myself that these images were not the truth, and that just like a cloud if I looked close enough I would see that they weren't solid and that no matter how real it felt or appeared in that moment I could walk through them. Often in my meditations I imagine myself blowing them away and revealing the blue sky behind. The more time I spent trusting in the blue skies, the more I truly recognize that no matter what cloud I saw in front of myself, it was more of just the same, it was something from the past designed to keep me from seeing what was really the truth of what I was which was blue skies.
This extended to my energy work as well. If Wellness (blue skies) was my resting state and the truth of who I was then it had to be the same for others. No matter what dark clouds would show up in the session, instead of making that the truth and feeling frightened or unsure that there was a way to help, I could rest in the knowing of blue skies instead of the illusion of the cloud. There was no need to run from the cloud as we could walk through it.
A further extension of this metaphor, and it's influence on my energy sessions, was to help me to remember our connectedness in wellness/wholeness. I'll likely come back to this in further writing but for now I'll leave you with this image that came to me in this metaphor. If we are one whole self, we would be one whole cloudless blue sky. So imagine you are lying there looking up at this perfect cloudless blue sky and the clouds start to roll in. The sky gets darker, there is less blue and more grey, and before you know it what you see are only pockets of blue amongst the grey. When you look at the pockets of blue sky you don't think that the clouds have taken that blue sky and removed it from the rest of the blue sky. You don't look at those pockets of blue amongst the grey and think, oh no, there used to be one blue sky and now I'm left with dozens of tiny, separate pieces of blue sky. We can look at these seemingly separate pieces of blue sky and recognize that it is an illusion. The sky isn't in pieces even if it appears that way. How convincing illusions can be. Maybe we aren't the separate pieces we appear to be either.
There are so many more ways in which I have applied this metaphor and I will likely write more about it but the last thing that I wanted to share about it was this. We all have clouds, the content of what built these clouds is unique for everyone, how safe we feel or ready we feel to step into those clouds is unique for everyone. It is easy to look at someone else's cloud and think you know their cloud, but you are not standing on the inside looking out, you are standing on the outside looking in and that is not the same. We don't know what someone else's cloud looks like for them, we don't share their vantage point and even if we did, our own cloud alters what we can see in others.
If my home is wellness (blue skies), and dis-ease (clouds) are the stranger; then this must be the case for you as well. If I go into each experience holding in mind that blue skies are the truth for all of us, then no matter what clouds show up between us to keep us from seeing each other in our truth, I can look for the blue skies that connect us instead of the clouds that seemingly separate us.
After posting this article I realized there was one other really important thing that was on my mind about clouds. Denying you are standing in clouds is not the same as knowing there are blue skies on the other side of those clouds. If you are standing in the rain, pretending it isn't raining isn't going to help, you will get wet. If you need an umbrella in that moment to keep dry use an umbrella. The rain here of course can stand for almost any challenge and the umbrella any tangible support. If you are grieving, or facing an illness, or a difficult experience, it is not about denying what you are experiencing, it is about caring for yourself in what ever way you are able during the storm but knowing and holding on to the knowing that blue skies are what are there even when you can't see them. If you are experiencing a cloud, find yourself the right umbrella to keep you dry, please take the necessary steps to care for yourself as needed.
Much Love.
Lyanne