An excerpt from my forthcoming book...

Chapter Three: Co-creating in the Vulnerable Void

‘The Vulnerability known as the Dark Night of the Soul is a Doorway to Your Highest Light’

This chapter speaks to the gifts that vulnerability hold, very often an uncomfortable state that we are reluctant to step into as in many cultures it is viewed as a weakness of character. Nothing could be further from the truth. This temporary stage of uncertainty, often referred to in spiritual quarters as 'The dark night of the Soul' is a potent precursor to change which requires courage and trust to let go of the current fourth-dimension world in order to allow our fifth-dimension world reveal itself. However, there is a pause between the old and the new, and it is often this temporary void that causes humans the most concern. This is a time for absolutely trusting in this very special process, a time of embracing our vulnerability while fare-welling the old even though not quite knowing ‘what’s next’. While our outer world appears to have halted, our inner world that is governed by your Higher Self is in fact busily co-creating our new world. The fragility and unease we feel from ‘not knowing’ is our Human Self not trusting our Higher Self as we stand on the threshold of wonderful change! The ease of this transitional period is held within our surrender, the angst is held within our resistance. Let me share with you my own experience of resistance in the hope you might choose surrender!

As humans we are mind, body and spirit and although I had been rudely awakened by grief in the year 2000, it wasn’t until 2009 that I began to nourish my spirit in a committed way, making it the most important aspect of my life. My new goal was to bring healing and balance to this trinity until my mind, body and spirit were constantly in alignment with each other and whatever I was engaged with. For when we can synchronise all three, we become greatly empowered in ways that we would find difficult to imagine. In the intervening years that I had journeyed through grief it took many lessons to connect the quality of my emotions and thoughts to what ‘showed up’ in my daily life. There is an aspect of my healing process I wish to share with you because it is one of ‘the hidden rocks’ that I spoke of in the previous chapter and you will see the irony in the sailing analogy used there.

The irony of my sailing analogy is that in 2002 in the midst of deep grief I ran away to sea … literally! Sunday sailing excursions around Lyttelton Harbour had blossomed into a full-blown love affair with the ocean and I became driven by the notion of sailing offshore. To this end I eventually gained a Boat Master’s qualification and joined the New Zealand Cruising Club which not only connected me with New Zealand cruising yachts that needed crew, but also visiting yachts from all over the globe. This very adventurous seven-years period of my life is fully covered (perhaps I should say ‘uncovered’!) in ‘Dry Your Tears’ so I simply offer an example here to highlight the danger of these hidden rocks.

With one sailing season under my belt that had taken me to Tonga, Fiji and New Caledonia, I happened to hear of a German cruiser who over a period of years had sailed single-handedly from Europe to New Zealand but was now ready to share his lifestyle with another. That ‘other’ became me for the next six years as together we sailed between New Zealand and the many South Pacific Island countries that are within relatively easy reach of each other. Little did I know this karmic relationship would prove to be pivotal in my healing journey, eventually leading me to steer my own spiritual ship into clam waters, but not until being tossed about by many a storm of my own making!

When I began my relationship with Manny I was blissfully unaware of the numerous little bundles stuffed full of my 4-D issues that I neatly stowed under the bilges and stashed away in his yacht’s small storage lockers. I also hadn’t realised that I was running away from grief and rebelling against being identified as ‘the grieving mother who had lost her son’. During those six years of cruising I called myself ‘Corky’ (borrowed from the McCorkindale side of my family) and quietly set about re-inventing myself as a free-spirited, ocean-faring adventuress. People greatly admired my courageous attitude to life which was ‘to take it by the horns and shake it’; this winning formula for approval was like a healing balm that soothed the angst of my identity crisis. But, Corky eventually became an almost impenetrable wall of my own making that was barring my way back to my heart, the part of me that was so desperate for healing. For as Corky I had defaulted to denial and resilience, fearless in the face of adversity, I couldn't bear feeling vulnerable.

By maintaining my Corky persona I was keeping my ego beautifully entertained but I was denying recognition and expression of the huge suffering in my heart. I had not wanted to be suffocated by the limiting label of ‘grieving mother’ and so had fought against this by adopting a preferred reality … except it was nothing more than a preferred illusion. I wasn’t alone in this deception; my friends and family were enthusiastic about my new Corky life as I appeared to be happy and it also let them off their uncomfortable hooks of having to deal with my grief. I say this without bitterness or judgment, its simply the way (most) humans are in the fourth dimension as a result of being so deeply entrained to fear death and grief. Thus it tends to unsettle people who want to be supportive but quite genuinely don’t know what to do or say around the bereaved. I could almost hear them sigh with relief each time the ocean beckoned.

Very often we can see more easily in others the things we are unable to recognise in ourselves. That is exactly why we live, socialise or work alongside the people who are able to reflect back to us that which we actually hold ourselves but are not yet able to see. I thank Manny from the bottom of my heart for being the brave soul who made a Soul Agreement with me and did a thorough job of shifting me through my preferred illusion. He refused to call me Corky, and diligently dismantled my ‘Corky wall’ each time he noticed a loose brick that could be pulled out. Each loose brick represented a belief, an attachment, a limitation, a conditioned response, an emotion that gave me security; in other words the Corky wall was my 4-D wall of illusion. Naturally, I wasn’t in the least bit grateful at the time of each painful extraction and the air onboard became thick with emotional dust when my ingrained bricks tried to cling to their mortar in vain! From the perspective of my Higher Self it was literally like talking to a brick wall! The patterns of our thoughts and emotions, the rigidity of our beliefs as fourth dimension humans really do resemble fortresses of resistance which is why it very often takes a shock of some kind to dismantle them. Rest assured there are much more gentle approaches than this!

Years later I read about spiritual neophytes who in ancient times faced a series of initiations in the Temples that to this day line the banks of the Nile River in Egypt. Each Sacred Temple offered different sets of lessons and while at the Luxor Temple the novice was purposefully roomed with a person who they would find extremely aggravating. This provided the scenarios that would bring limiting beliefs and emotions of the novice to the surface in order to be recognised, owned and balanced. It is said that to get along with one’s fellow man is the hardest attribute to master in the unascended state. To live on a yacht with nowhere to hide or run to was really a modern day initiation! By the time we had spent six years together, Manny had dismantled my 4-D wall so thoroughly I was an emotional wreck on the verge of mental collapse and felt even more vulnerable than when Tim had departed. But … there was a wonderful difference. Although I no longer knew who I was, I had absolute clarity about who I wasn’t! And I was wide, wide open with receptivity - emotionally, mentally and spiritually. Thus it was from this new place of clarity and openness that I was able to gradually re-assemble myself but this time with greater authenticity, something that had been camouflaged, painted over by the 4-D human conditioning.

In ‘Dry Your Tears’ I used the analogy of the Russian Babushka Doll to describe that process of gradually peeling away my 4-D egoic layers until only the tiny core was left. That tiny core represented the Spark of God that we all have inside our Heart, which is never extinguished; it only awaits our fanning of its Flame to activate our return to our former God-Like Self. Perhaps you can now understand more easily why I endorse the state of vulnerability so passionately; it is an essential pathway of surrender to our Higher Self.

The clarity I gained when my wall was dismantled and I could see beyond my third and fourth-dimension perspective was a defining moment of my spiritual evolution. It was the timeless method of using contrast as a learning principle of what we are not, to discover who we are. You will see that this method of contrast occurs over and over again throughout my journey (and yours) of ascending consciousness. In fact, the very reason that Humans have experienced the denseness and limitations of the third dimension on Earth was based on that very same principle of learning through contrast. According to author/channel of ‘The Seven Sacred Flames’, Aurelia Louise Jones, humans became embodied to become completely separated from their Creator, in order to Know their Creator in a profound way, and to also Know themselves as Creators. There was a start date and a finish date for this experience of separation, and the end date passed millions of years ago. It was never intended that humanity would remain in separation so long, no wonder our Higher Self yearns to bring us Home.

Often when writing about a topic, a new insight reveals itself in timely fashions as either a direct or indirect experience that beautifully illustrates that current piece of writing. A friend in Europe recently shared with me that she and her brother had taken their elderly mother, who has dementia, to the dentist to have a mould taken for new dentures. Given the circumstances, all went as well as it could until the dentist pressed the mould firmly down in her mouth, when she suddenly panicked and became aggressive, struggling violently against the restraining arms of her children. Her furious words were “I have told you to stop doing this to me, you must stop this! Take that out of my mouth!” Despite being a fragile woman in her eighties she summoned enormous strength to struggle free of both daughter and son and threw the dental mould across the room in a traumatised rage. They tried to reassure her that she was safe and they were there to help her, but their distressed mother was unable to hear them. When this occurred my friend instinctively knew that her mother's confused mental state had flipped back into memories of being raped and abused by her father when she had been a little girl. Her memories had been triggered by being pinned down against her will.

When my friend relayed these events she added that back at the nursing home, her mother, who normally was very difficult to understand and could barely string four words together, spoke calmly to her children with absolute clarity, in fact was channelling her Higher Self. She said that she hadn’t achieved what she had come to do and that she would soon be leaving. She urged her children to ensure they completed their work that they had some to Earth to complete. Both children had been deeply distressed to witness and feel the emotional trauma that their mother had felt when just a child but as she spoke with me I was told by my guides that her mother had received much healing because she had accessed those painful memories while held in the loving support of her children. This care and nurture had been what she had desperately needed as a child. This was the healing, the love that now transmuted the life-long held trauma that had been too painful to revisit and resolve. It was time for this wound to be healed and the mother's Soul had found a way, although this would not be apparent from a third-dimension perspective.

That evening when meditating it popped into my awareness that the unresolved childhood trauma was the underpinning cause of the mother’s dementia. The moment the trauma and her protective wall of denial was healed, her clarity returned to her, in a flash. The reason my guides prompted me to share this is because they wanted me to realise that if I had not healed my grief if I had not dismantled my Corky world of protection, I too would have eventually developed a mental condition- a preferred reality - that would continue to protect me from accessing my pain. My dear friend generously gave her permission to share her story as a potent reminder that all of our ‘illnesses’ are self-created and that it is crucial to address the underlying emotions that occurred at the time of the wound. With this insight, the temporary uncomfortable state of vulnerability becomes a small cost to pay and my gratitude to Manny goes even deeper.

‘Vulnerability is but opportunity riding the waves of inevitable change!

It can open us up to things we had previously been closed to.

Just as we welcome the swallow as the harbinger of Spring,

Let us also embrace vulnerability as the bringer of new growth’