Lately the offering of heartache as blessing has been strong in my psychic/dreaming space. Today's post comes with loving intentions that it will touch a place in you that needs to bloom open.
Five years ago, in 2005 I was pregnant. I was thrilled, terrified, excited and awed. At 13 weeks , just past my first trimester, I started bleeding and over the course of the next 24 hours, painfully labored and miscarried.
The mystery of life and death moved through me. I plummeted into a deep depression and crisis of faith. I found myself grief stricken, broken hearted, confused and angry. For the next many months, I found it challenging to get out of bed and face the day. Residing in the world of the living felt hard and heavy and I wished at times that life would just go on without me.
Thanks to the love of community and engagement in creative expression and sacred movement I was able to embrace this passage with breath. It was a dark wormhole of transformation. I cried an ocean of tears during that time and I often wondered if my true joy and trust in life would ever return.
That season:
- I humbly learned that being in "God's Grace" did not mean always having "my way".
- I discovered that my broken heart was more of a being broken open. My capacity to love, was expanded beyond measure.
- I embraced and honored the sober reality of death and the temporal nature of so many aspects of life on Earth.
- I was returned to the Source of what is Eternal.
- I was able to see, even in the depths of it, that I was being held in grace all along, and that this devastating experience was actually an offering. As beloved sister, teacher, Vanessa Stone would say, it was my perfect prescription for awakening.
For many months I grappled with fears. I was afraid to open up and trust life and love again. I was afraid of pregnancy. Would I even be able to conceive? Would I be able to carry full term? Could I handle going through this ordeal again? Would I ever get another chance?
There was a turning point where I tuned into a cellular wisdom that said that as long as I was still breathing, it was my responsibility to give my best to life. I remember weeping while listening to Second Chance, a song by Deva Premal and Miten. It pierced right through me and spoke directly to my heart... (Take a listen). My fetus had died. The dream of how that particular reality might unfold had died...but I was still alive. I realized that as long as I was still living, I belonged to life! This was my second chance. Right here, right now.
And so, I became a devotee of life. DEVOTED...to the core.
Fast forward to last week, March 31, 2010. Kenya, Talia and I attended an amazing Kirtan concert of Krishna Das and Deva Premal and Miten. We all relaxed into a sweet communion of devotional chanting. At one point, Miten started strumming that beautiful song... "And my heart whispered inside, the moon rose and the angels sighed...and they said,
Here comes your second chance, you better believe it. Open up and receive it...Take a deep breath, this is your second chance." In a flash of memory and a flood of tears, the entire experience I just shared swept through my heart, bursting it open even more. I had come full circle. My 3 year old daughter was cuddled sleeping on my lap. I had gotten my second chance at pregnancy, at motherhood, at life. In total trust, in pure love, in deep gratitude, I wept and sang my way through the rest of the concert.
Whatever the circumstances of our heartache, we all endure our darkest nights. And, with grace, we do come out the other side. Perhaps, like me, you have discovered that we are capable of accessing infinite "second chances". As Miten said last week, "every deep breath is a second chance". As long as we are alive, it is never too late to detangle knots of contraction, worry, or fear...To dislodge clogs of grudge, bitterness or hurt...To soften a hardened heart and surrender...To receive ourselves as devotees of life as we move on as love. This awesome great mystery of life, of living and dying all within eternal being, is a boundless well of blessing and opportunity.
What does your heart whisper inside? Need a second chance? Here it is...
"...And we all come and go like waves in the sea each with our own responsibility to leave this world more beautiful than we found it..."
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