Finding the Blessing in the Challenge
by Meredith Young-Sowers

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On the Frontier where Science and Spirituality Meet

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When I was twenty, my father told me he was leaving my mother. He had the bad judgment to announce this fact to me as we stood at the back of the church on my wedding day. He subsequently divorced my mother, married another woman, and moved away. It all happened so quickly, and I was busy with my own new husband and career. We always think there will be time to sort things out and make amends, and sometimes there isn’t. I saw him once again when he had had so much to drink that I worried for his safety in driving. He blamed me for not accepting him, although I tried to show him how much I wanted him in my life, whether or not he had remarried or been unable to work it out with my mother. I heard from him one additional time after my son was born. Somehow he had heard he had a grandson and sent a gift. He told me in the note not to try and contact him, but at twenty-six I was certain this new correspondence meant a fresh start. My letter to him came back marked “Addressee unknown.” And that was the end of the story.

For years I didn’t think about him, and then I thought about him all the time. I had such a deep heaviness in my heart that sometimes I could hardly breathe. I needed protection and he had deserted me. I wanted to walk with him in the woods, arm in arm, and feel his strength and wisdom as I got old. I wanted my children to know him, to laugh and cry with him. I missed him so deeply. As my spiritual life grew, I was able to begin to see how I’d compensated for my loss of a father as “protector” by wanting my husband to play that role, or other friends or work colleagues. Still, I didn’t know what to do with the emptiness. Just as I’d think I had it handled, the tears would again well up in my eyes and I’d feel that deep searing pain in my heart.

Our deepest pain doesn’t go away, but it can be healed. We know intellectually the circumstances or fears that kept others from responding to us in the way we needed. It’s more difficult to see our own fears that hold past pain in front of our eyes, preventing us from a truly new beginning.

Simon told me that he had been raised in an orphanage and when he finally hit the street at eighteen, he got in with the wrong crowd. He wanted to make some easy money quickly to feel that he was important, and land at the top of the heap because he was smart. One bad debt led to an even deeper debt, and he found himself living a series of complicated lies to avoid jail or worse. This was twenty years ago and yet today he finds himself in a similar situation, never being able to shake the poverty that follows him and remaining unable to be clear and honest with himself about his needs and genuine intentions.

Every healing modality in the pages of today’s magazines recognizes the need to do something positive with the feelings that belittle us and slide us away from genuine belief in ourselves. And while we know that loving ourselves in different, more spiritually intimate ways is the path to healing, we still find it difficult to forgive ourselves and others. The many new age philosophies and techniques give us hope for a while, and then we find ourselves back in the same morass.

My experience, both personally and professionally as an intuitive healer and spiritual mentor, is that love takes many shapes in our lives to help us live authentically. Love as “Wisdom” is necessary for us to be able to apply it in new ways to finally find resolution to old blocks. Like climbing a rope, we must keep putting one hand over the other, which means finding new ways to treat our pain with loving-kindness so that we may slowly learn to live in the center of a new, more meaningful story. But we must also wrap our feet around the rope as we climb upward, in order to keep from sliding backwards. This grip with our feet represents the means we have to apply wisdom as a salve to old heartaches. I call this wisdom process finding the “blessing in the challenge.” We never think to look for the jewel in the dung heap. Instead we take the remains of old painful experiences and continue to return to them with each new violation.

I began to use internal dialoguing, spirit-to-spirit, to try to heal my pain and to help my clients. With my father, I chose a time when I was alone in the house. I lit a candle and sat down with the lights dimmed. I put his picture in the chair across from me. I let the full scale of emotions well up and spill out of my mouth. I didn’t try to curtail my anger or grief. I didn’t tell myself my feelings weren’t true or that I shouldn’t feel this way. I did feel this way, and I needed to grieve this deep loss. I let him know how angry I was, how much he had hurt me, and that his leaving the Earth without ever needing to find me to set things right had left me feeling irrevocably scarred. Then I put my hand over my heart, which gradually allowed me to move inside to a quieter and truer space. Slowly I felt calmer, and could find a small feeling of loving for myself from my true spirit self. From this new center, I asked my father to tell me what was in his heart. His real self, his spirit said, “I think you’re beautiful and I was always so proud of you — I just never said so. I thought you knew it. I saw no one — not you, your brother, or your mother over the edge of my own pain. Can you forgive me?” Like a terrible blister bursting, I sobbed, “Yes, Yes, oh Yes!”

I’d found the blessing of self-acceptance through his words, honoring me, letting me know that he had loved me after all.

I’ve been deeply touched by the way people handle pain and loss as well as unsteadiness, fear and resistance. We judge others’ actions, being unwilling to consider that our perception is what keeps us in pain, no matter the circumstances of the situation. There is no such thing as “right and wrong” in our memories. We all feel we’re right and justified in our actions and attitudes. And still the pain continues because we’ve not found the blessing that may not feel good, but “does good” by connecting us to a more loving and forgiving place in our own heart. Our soul space lets us see a part of our authentic nature that has been growing all along, even under the pain and confusion of all the years we’ve suffered.

Stan was a powerful example of old pain, but also an example of the inability and the fear that prevents us from finding the jewel in the old experience. He was an extremely successful internist who lived with his wife on a magnificent farm. His wife raised prize Golden Retrievers to show. But he was dirt miserable. He felt his marriage was a joke, he worked insane hours because he felt some satisfaction in his work, and he was afraid to find what he loved. He knew that cutting back on the work meant less money in the short term. He wanted the opulent lifestyle and he also hated his impotence in being unable to take the steps necessary to find why he couldn’t feel love and heal it. He commented one afternoon how a patient’s young wife, in appreciation for his saving her husband’s life, had kissed him on the cheek. He got very quiet and his voice almost disappeared from the other end of the phone as he continued, “I wanted so much to feel that love — I just couldn’t.” He was diagnosed with a pituitary tumor.

Our journey is to find an inner steadiness so that we can apply our new wisdom, the blessings from the challenges, to bringing love into our families, our friendships and our careers. This steadier authentic part is our Divine Presence. We usually don’t stop to reflect on this understanding — that we have something quite as grand as Divine Presence with us, in us, guiding us, as our essential self. Yet, with time and practice we begin to inquire into the nature of God, and the way our life came into being and where we go when we leave this life. We have a deep and lasting need to find The Creator in some way. Without a Creator-presence in our lives, something that we trust that holds the reigns of our life and those we love, we easily run away with our own importance.

We’re meant to ask the questions that we feel we need to understand to feel secure and in control. But life shows us that we can manage to be happy even without the control we think we need. Finally through the maze of life’s sharp turns from joy into grief, from loss into happiness, we need to find what we can believe in that is ours to manage and ours to develop. As we finally come to see that we can control the state of our happiness by our ways of looking at circumstances, we are shocked. We assume happiness comes from outside of us and that we’ll always be at the mercy of other people and the randomness of actions.

I’ve cried as I’ve sat with a person whose vibrant life slowly ebbed away and I’ve celebrated with a person’s first important step toward self-acceptance. But for all the memorable, life-shifting times with friends and clients, I’m continually reminded that the ordinary day-to-day hurts are what mount up inside. Unresolved emotional pain grows into a mountain, blocking our energy. Unresolved emotional pain isn’t just uncomfortable, it’s a serious liability as it creates serious physical trauma. Taking the time today to clean up those old sufferings does a great deal to help us find renewed energy and self acceptance. Empowerment is, after all, a spiritual choice to be happy.

To heal the traumas that bedevil you, take a quiet evening and gift yourself the ceremony of a lifetime, “Finding the Blessing in the Challenge.” You may do this experience a number of times or just one time may be enough. In either case, be prepared to find forgiveness, replenishment and renewal.

Here are some things you can do to prepare:

• Create a setting where you will be alone and not disturbed.

• Use candles, music or incense to help create the sacred feeling that you want.

• Put a picture or the belongings of the person you wish to dialogue with in front of you. It makes no difference if the person is alive or passed on. When your mind asks you, “How can you know if the person is really saying healing things to you,” tell your mind to move through this ceremony as if it were true. Through our intention we easily call the energy of others’ spirits to us. You will, in fact, be talking to the person you need to share healing with. The experience itself will convince you if you give it a chance.

• Unleash your real emotions, telling the person, whether friend or enemy, what you feel. Don’t hold back.

• Put your hand over your heart, the center of your chest, and quiet down. Find a loving space inside.

• Ask the other person’s true self, soul self, what they need to say from their heart.

• Repeat out loud what you hear or merely write it down in a notebook that you have available. You can dialogue with the other person but keep it at a heart level. Stop if you feel yourself climbing back into pain, and begin the entire experience again.

Healing is both an art and a science. It is all about loving ourselves enough that we can find beauty where we’ve seen only misery and failure in the past. Healing is the experience of our living, and not just getting out of physical or emotional pain. Healing is the process of becoming whole, with the cracks and imperfections of our lives marking our courage, endurance, originality and grace, rather than only our failure and suffering. Healing is feeling something precious in your heart that allows you to feel more love for yourself and to act with greater wisdom with those you love.

Meredith Young-Sowers is a spiritual teacher, intuitive healer and the director of The Stillpoint Institute and School of Advanced Energy Healing in New Hampshire. For more information, please visit www.wisdombowls.com and www.stillpoint.org, or call 1-800-847-4014.

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