Dancing As All Things: Thriving On The Rough Road

This is a piece that I wrote in 2021. I'm sharing now as I feel it speaks to much of our current experiences, particularly those of us who rode out Hurricane Helene.

We human beings evolve through hardship. It's true! Hardship teaches us to surrender to the Higher Presence that exists within everything and quiets us so we can listen deeply to that connected part of us that has been around the block before. Surrender’s lessons are many. Most of us have heard that in the end, tough times make us stronger and teach us to think outside the box. We become a thriver, not just a survivor.

The practice of surrender was one of the hardest things for me personally to understand: that difficulty helped me evolve. In my own experience of significant adversity as a child and younger adult, it took me over 40 years of grappling to surrender, to let go and “let God.”

Surrender is not giving up. Surrender is letting go of the choke hold we have on that something in life that happened that we perceive is trying to take us down. Except, it is not trying to take us down. It is trying to teach us. Only in the deep, quiet space of inquiry and through the act of letting go is our best direction revealed. Challenge and adversity are miracles that introduce us to our next best self. Pushing away hardship and adversity is a natural reaction. No one really wants to open a wound and feel pain. But pushing it away also resists the growth that leads to freedom and joy. It ultimately delays the inevitable.

In the first lines of his brilliant poem, “The Guesthouse”, the 16th Century Persian poet, Rumi, wrote:

“This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they're a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight.”

Drawing upon my personal journey of healing is the backbone of my work as a multidisciplinary healing practitioner. Like many individuals who do similar work, I was an extremely sensitive, intuitive child. I saw energy, angels, and had dreams of flying on sky ships with my “friends.” Being raised in a small Catholic family in the 50s and 60s, it was not a good idea to speak of these things. Nor was it safe to speak of the sexual and emotional abuse that I also experienced. I had no voice because I had to bury these experiences. I was a “cutter” – a self-mutilator. It is curious that I felt detached from these actions until later, when the shame hit full force and I felt utterly out of control. In the 90s, I inadvertently picked up a book at a local bookstore. It was a self-help book about healing self-abuse and self-mutilation. This was both frightening and liberating. I started seeing a therapist who helped me excavate and own my feelings, what happened, and my reactions. OWNING it was key. In my mid-40s, I left an abusive marriage and began my lifelong study and practice of energy and healing and the deep correlation between health and our beliefs and emotions. I knew that the key to my life was owning and honoring everything.

I was led to Landmark Education, a personal development company, and attended all their courses with the intention of becoming a Facilitator. My liberation from came when I stood up in front of the entire group of 125 individuals to share my story of “brokenness.” I was terrified, body shaking, voice wavering and cracking, as I talked about the abuse, about not having a voice, about the years of cutting myself because I was numb and needed to feel, yet also because I believed I was bad and had to punish myself. I was terrified of being judged for who I was and what I had “done”. But I was met with only love. As I looked around, many individuals had tears in their eyes. One young man had his face buried in his hands and was sobbing uncontrollably. I found out later, as people came up to thank me for telling my story that many attendees shared similar experiences to my own. The young man who was sobbing shared that he had similar sexual abuse experiences to me and had never told his story. He now felt he could share with people. I felt held in a bond of deep commonality with my group. Sharing my story gave others the courage to find their own voice and finally speak of their own pain.

Our lives hold countless challenges and adversity, and some of these are extreme tests of faith and trust. Evolution just cannot happen when things are easy. Surmounting challenges helps us to embrace and OWN the “what happened” as an ally and as the springboard into nourishing healing. The deep adversity that threatens to flatten us is also the biggest gift for personal evolution.

When we have a deep dialogue of inquiry with the parts of us that we perceive to be “broken” and we can give those parts a voice, what we learn can take us deeply into healing. It is hard to open to deeper self-knowledge when we won’t consider a different perspective of an experience, particularly when that experience is horrific. Yet horror has its wisdom to share.

I recently heard an amazing way of describing the experience of hardship and adversity as “the dance of all things.” Our greatest teacher is the growth that comes from the deep, gritty cesspool of hardship. If it is not pretty, then it is probably an amazing potential for deep growth. The dance of life is the lifelong journey of weaving in and out of the darkness and the light, befriending adversity, and challenge.

Several years ago, as I prepared for a women’s retreat, it occurred to me that my life had been a Sacred Journey, and I clearly saw five specific phases, or passages, that I had moved through in my own healing. This journey became the message for the retreat: if we treat our challenges as Sacred, they become our Medicine! As I led the group through a Sacred Journey of these five phases, I saw that the WHY of our trials, accepting, moving through us, giving them a voice was indeed a Sacred Journey.

After sharing this with several women’s groups, I wrote it down. What emerged, The Five Life Passages of Transformation: The Sacred Journey through Adversity and Challenge©, is a workbook that helps individuals navigate their own journey through extreme life experiences and blend it with the deep work that must be done for its essence to become the GIFT.

Fear is an extraordinarily strong saboteur of realizing dreams and achieving purpose. It’s also an amazing teacher. Because the longer we dodge the fear of taking action, the more we see the freedom that’s on the other side that we can’t get to until we “dive in.” What is actually “good” may show up as messy, challenging, or unfathomably horrific. Whatever its form, it is always an incredible tool for personal evolution. We cocreate every second of every day, and we perceive our experiences as either for our good and happiness, or not. We must look within us. When we do not take action to change our personal course or lend our voices to alter a destructive course of our world, cocreation is STILL cocreation just by being silent and accepting what is. This is how powerful we are!

The final line of Rumi’s poem reads,

 “Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.”

This is how we move forward: Acceptance, listening deeply, excavating and embracing our “stuff,” especially that stuff that has never had a voice.

This time right now is our collective opportunity to choose what we want to create, to support, to experience, to choose the kind of world we truly want to live in. This time right now is a pivotal gift to advance to our next level of personal and collective consciousness.

“Dancing as all things” is dancing deeply and fluidly with everything Life gives us. We can thrive as we dance on the Rough Road! Welcoming adversity with deep inquiry and love is digging into the fertile soil of life itself.

DIG IN and DIG DEEP!

For more information on The Five Life Passages of Transformation: The Sacred Journey Through Adversity and Challenge© workbook, upcoming workshop series, please visit Myrrh’s website at: https://www.creativedivinestudios.com/special-events