My leap out of spirituality and back to the truth
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My leap out of spirituality and back to the truth
The impetus for me to begin to question where I was at in my life started in earnest for me in 1990, two years after the death of my father. At that time I could feel that I was in – what my internal compass told me was – a ‘mess.’ On the surface I was fun, a great girl to have at a party. I was teaching my class of children and ‘enjoying’ life in a small country town. I was a popular teacher and colleague and on the surface everything looked okay, but I felt that I was living a lie. I was deeply miserable and soothed the pain of my disconnection from myself with alcohol.
At that time I did not understand death; I was very much caught up in the unpreparedness of losing my father and the subsequent grief associated with that. I felt alone, grief stricken and stuck. I went to a friend's son who was a priest and spent an hour with him, walking out feeling lighter – he had told me that I hadn't 'let my dad go'. I had not actually ever considered the phrase ‘letting go’ and what that might mean, in any area of my life.
The light feeling that I felt upon leaving the priest’s office did not last all that long, but it stirred enough in me to know that there was more to life than death, and more to death than disappearing from earth and forever being remembered by reminders such as emotive songs, butterflies, feathers etc. It also stirred in me the knowing that there was more to me than walking around, as encumbered as I felt, by my experience of life to that point.
I was travelling home from seeing the priest and on the wireless I heard an advertisement for a seminar called 'Alpha Dynamics' – a personal development course. It was to be two hours of 'fun', learning about mind power and the strength of accessing the 'alpha' brain waves. I attended the course and then attended a weekend course shortly after. It was expensive but I felt that this was where I needed to head to find that pathway to the first steps of change that was now 'stirring' in me.
I became a great student, even convincing others to attend. I practised the memory techniques to the point that I could be given a list of 50 objects and then parrot them back in and out of order without too much difficulty. This so-called unleashing of the power of my mind led me on to walking on hot coals and reading many self-healing books by proclaimed gurus. I chanted affirmation after affirmation, spoke into a tape recorder telling myself how wonderful I was and that “deep inside me was an infinite well of love”. I listened to it every night all night so that I pretty much ‘brainwashed’ myself with words that sounded good but actually had no real meaning to them. I heard the words, but I had not noticed any substantial or deep change in how I felt about myself and how I went about my day. Whilst I never danced naked, ran around in the wild or 'ran with the wolves', I did engage in many 'techniques' that promised to offer me self-worth, self-love, and an amazing life of abundance. I 'tapped' on different points on my body saying things like “even though I'm fat, I deeply and completely love myself”. I played cassettes on repeat telling me subliminally that I would lose weight. The greatest laugh I had during all of this time was when my youngest sister bought a cassette on 'Procrastination' and when I asked her how she thought it was going she told me she hadn't as yet taken it out of the packaging!!
Despite all of this, I could not help but recognise that my search, though extensive, had taken me further from my goal of feeling truly and deeply just who I was. I knew deep inside me that there was more to me than my name and the sum of all my experiences to date.
In 1993 I met a woman who stated that she worked with energy. I wondered, 'perhaps this is it'. For the 10 years that followed I was lost in a world of banging nails into blocks of wood to 'hit the energy on the head', so to speak. I was assured that this technique, and others to follow, would rid me of the ‘energy’ causing this sense of grief and disconnection. I took drops for anger, protection, loneliness, and a myriad of other ‘ailments’ both emotional and physical under the misconception that these drops would be the magic elixir to all my internal ‘sufferings’. I cleared energy from my house by pouring a border of salt around the perimeter. I put lead pencil marks on the ends of eggs and put three olives along with the egg and a rock in a bucket of water and for good measure poured a bit of oil on top to help clear away the ‘bad energies’ that were around. As ludicrous as this sounds now as I type it, I listened to the thoughts that said that this was it and that this would eventually get me back in touch with the real me.
I tried Kinesiology, Bowen Therapy, Acupuncture, Reiki and many other modalities that many people still swear by, but they left me feeling disconnected and grieving for the 'me' that I knew was in there somewhere. This deep pull to feel a true connection with myself continued on. I listened to CDs where people 'channelled' the masters, listening fervently to the words which although they sounded 'right', came with an energy that I could truly feel was not right. During this time also I got lost in a fog of alcohol and was convinced there must be something wrong with me if I can do all this 'stuff' and receive and give all these 'treatments' and still feel the same as how I did back in 1988 when my dad passed over. Alcohol became my go to. I used it to celebrate when I felt so-called ‘amazing’, and I used it to take away the pain I felt when I realised that despite everything I had ‘done’ I still was not one step closer to feeling in touch with who I knew myself to be deep inside: in fact I was further away from being in touch with ‘me’ than ever I had been.
By 2008 I was at my lowest point ever. My mum had died a few years before. I was suicidal and lost in a world of pain from which I didn't think I was going to escape. Within me though still burned a knowing that there was more, a knowing that the alcohol had not drowned and the courses and such had not covered over. There was within me a feeling, a glimmer of light that remained undiminished. I just ‘knew’ that I was nothing like all the courses, books and gurus had told me; I was much, much more.
In 2009, a healing practitioner I was seeing provided me with a purple covered book by a man called Serge Benhayon. I could feel this strong pull towards the book, but also this very strong feeling of conflict, a voice almost daring me not to read it. I read the book in two days. I was terribly uncomfortable, but it awoke something inside me. It felt like the very thing I had been searching to find for almost two decades. The book was confronting but at the same time it felt like home. I cried, I read, I cried and squirmed and then I read some more. I could feel the truth vibrating in my body as much as the vibrating of my hands as I held the book. I could tell this was what I had known deep within for all these years. The feeling that I had felt that there was more to life than what I was currently living and that beneath all the pain I had tried to dull through alcohol was a sensitivity that could never be extinguished, and it was this sensitivity that had held me for all the previous years. The name of the book – 'The Way It Is'.
I have studied the teachings of Serge Benhayon and the Ageless Wisdom for almost 12 years now, and during this time I have come to know myself deeply. I have come to live in a different way; in a way that acknowledges my sensitivity and confirms that I am much, much more than my parents ever told me, than school ever told me, than the world ever told me.
I have come to know myself intimately. The teachings awakened in me an ancient knowing. A knowing that I already had all the answers within and that seeking outside of myself, which is what I had been doing, was not going to take me to the depths of who I truly knew myself to be. I was inspired by the simplicity with which I was able to reach this place inside me and how there were no complex formulas or behaviours or courses I had to ‘try’ in order to access this place. I could feel the depth of my ‘knowingness’, and all it took to feel this was to breathe my own breath.
As simple as that sounds, it was the Gentle Breath Meditation® as presented by Serge Benhayon that was the commencement point. Breathing my own breath rather than that of the outside world, which is tarnished by emotions and the drama of ‘situations,’ was the starting point from which I have developed a wonderfully loving, sensitive and insightful relationship with myself and who I know myself to truly be.
I have come to know that no experience or substance can ever diminish the truth of who I am. Every day I can choose to have a depth of connection with myself, and I can then walk around in that connection all day. I have become very aware that there is much in the world that would thwart that feeling, but that nothing can ever quash it. No matter how much abuse or disregard I may choose to live in, and at times I still lapse into a level of disregard, the truth of me and my ability to connect with that truth still remains. It is a constant. This is what I had spent so long searching for. I recognised that I remembered with ease that I knew this feeling. Even as a two-year-old I could feel in my body the truth and pure beauty of the Mary-Ellen Bidner for whom I had been searching. I have had to be honest about a lot. I have had to own a lot, even the fact that I was 'accomplice' to the energy that kept me from me for so long.
I am still in the process of developing a way to keep in touch with myself, every day. I have learnt that there is only love and that the rest is designed to take me away from that love. I have changed and that change has not always been comfortable, but then true change most often isn't. There are many close to me who have been confronted by this change, but those same people have been blessed by the love with which I have entered their homes, their cars, their offices … their lives.
As I open up more and more to the love flowing through me, I see with clearer eyes how all but one of the roads that brought me finally to this place were filled with roadblocks and obstacles, such as the ‘spiritual new age’, and that they were never going to hold up against the true feeling of love and tenderness that I know myself to be. The Ageless Wisdom truly is ageless. It is there for all of us, forever.
To look at my life before I reconnected to the Ageless Wisdom and now afterwards, is to see and feel that there is indeed inside us all an 'infinite well of wisdom' that is awaiting re-ignition. Although well on my way, there is so, so much more to come and to that journey and way of living, I look very much forward. The deeper I go within, the more I find the treasure that is truly me.
Filed under
Alcohol, Connection, Gentle breath, Love, Truth
