Portals of Change- Death, Divorce and Disease
I hate change. I eat the same thing every day. I genuinely love structure, order and discipline. I’m a Capricorn sun sign ruled by Saturn, the cosmic task master. Give me an all you can eat buffet and I will have a meltdown. I sound like a ton of fun, don’t I? If you knew me back in my drinking days you might vouch for my partaking in more than my share of hedonism, but at my core, I do authentically thrive on consistency. And I’m grateful for spiritual practices that help me show up to climb the mountains I need to climb.
What I am learning is to have the emotional flexibility to embrace change. In the past seven years, I have had quite an impressive string of life altering events- divorce, death of a child, selling my marital home and moving, choosing sobriety. The minute my inner child questions why everything in my life has changed, I hear the head of my spiritual guidance team say, “well, maybe everything in your life NEEDED to change.”
Recently I have been collaborating with my dear friend and fellow practitioner on The Lori Project, Amy Rush. Amy is a death doula and psychic medium. As we compared life experiences that brought us to our work in intuitive healing, I began to visualize divorce, death, and disease as “portals of change”. I had used this image in my book- this idea that we walk through a door and we know we can’t return back. Some part of us is on schedule to transform, to awaken, to align with a life purpose. The more we resist, the more we suffer. I think we can all relate to the idea that you can’t go back to high school. The chapter is complete and there is nothing life affirming and nourishing remaining in that old place.
So, what keeps us clinging to the impermanent and fearing change? As I see it, our old identities and our old stories.
We all have identities that we form around what we do and who we think we are. These identities unconsciously define our place in the order of things and we can develop a sense of worthiness around them. I see this with my intuitive life coaching clients who are military. When they retire, there is a huge sense of loss around their identity. The same was true for me as a parent. The daily care of my children has given me meaning and purpose. Now that my role as a parent is shifting, I feel irrelevant and that sucks! When we go through a portal, there is an identity that has to adapt or deactivate and that can be painful. That type of pain releases as we grieve. But if we can’t create a new identity or if we struggle to accommodate a shift, that tells me there is an old pattern that needs to be deactivated and released. My special skill as an intuitive healer is the ability to help my clients release old patterns that keep us stuck in beliefs and behaviors that do longer serve.
When faced with the unknown and uncertainty, ask what is the identity I need to release or adapt in order respond to this change. When I stopped drinking, I released my identity as a drinker and embraced the identity of a non-drinker. That identity correlates to new behaviors, relationships, and places that further strengthen and stabilize the change.
Portals of change ask us to assess our stories. Do the stories we tell ourselves empower or keep us stuck? Victim or survivor? Sinner or person worthy of redemption? When I was divorcing, one thing that I felt sad about was that I was losing the person who knew all my stories. My sister in law pointed out the beauty in this. It was time for new stories and to be someone I had kept hidden for a long time- my authentic self.
Consider, what is your story about change itself? My story has been that I hate it- I hate it. Period. I heard an 86 year old man with 50 plus years of sobriety say that his recovery depends on changing every single day. This vibrant, joyful, man said, every day he learns something new, practices a new way of being and allows change to support his spiritual growth. “Today”, he said, “I absolutely love change.” This man changed his story around change as something to fear to something that he requires in order to stay healthy. I thought that was one of the most empowering perspectives I had ever heard and it helped shift my story that change is scary to change is a vital necessity that I require for my spiritual growth.
The other story we have about change is that it’s the end, there is nothing after it. I clung to being the mother of underage children who need me to feed them and shelter them because my mind can not conceive of what’s next. I’ve heard they still come home and they need you from time to time but facing the empty nest feels like, that’s it, it’s over. In a similar way, when a loved one dies, in the emptiness of the space they leave behind, we think that’s it, that’s all there is. Of course we need to mourn, to grieve and let go. And after that, can we get curious about what’s next? Can we ask, “what is the opportunity to learn, to be of service, to hope for something new now that I have walked through this portal?”
As I think about changes coming my way in the next few months with children graduating high school and moving to a new town, I am embracing the mantra, “I trust in the flow of life to carry and support me. God’s love and protection are lighting my path”. I’m anchoring myself in prayers of surrender and walking through the next portal.