“Come downstairs.”

I had just arrived at the home of my new healer—a man I did not know, but who I felt intuitively guided to work with.

Immediately, I felt emotionally challenged on all fronts. Going down into a basement with a strange man sent the unhealed child parts of me into an absolute freak out.

Suddenly, an old memory surfaced. My friend’s mother drove me to a house for a Sunday church meeting. I was 6 years old. I found it weird when we pulled up in front of a house instead of an actual church. We went in the side door and down the stairs.

I saw a circle of frumpy women. I don’t remember seeing any men at first. But then a male figure appeared wearing a mask and a cape. Most of the memories from then on are just body memories. The feeling of the beige carpet on the floor against my skin. Being touched without my permission. Feeling paralyzing fear and shame. I remember some chanting about being “a sinner” or “being delivered from sin.” There was symbolism, maybe a cross, but I can’t remember the details clearly.

I never told anyone. I never hung out with that girl or her mother again. They avoided me when I saw them in the townhouse complex where we both lived. It was like that day never happened and the memory was buried. I remember that I often saw that girl’s mother sitting in her doorway, knitting and watching people, her large girth overflowing the sides of her chair. But she never looked at me as I passed by.

(By the way, I have researched this and the people who do such things to children are aware that the masks and other things create such an intense level of fear that they overwhelm the child’s capacity to process the experience, causing the memory to become compartmentalized so the child won’t rat them out. Even pedophiles share these kinds of tricks with each other: ways to subconsciously manipulate children and get away with it.)

In my teens, one day I “accidentally” came across that house. I was on my way to a party, and suddenly there it was. It was the weirdest thing, because I recognized it and knew something had happened there, but I could not remember what. My mind was blank. I stared and stared at that house, which looked so normal, surrounded by shrubs and flowers on a suburban street, and yet I felt a sense of dread. I knew it was important, but I could not remember why. I had even forgotten who I’d gone there with.

It was only decades later, in my early 40s, when I was sitting in deep meditation, that I saw the house again. In my mind, I walked around the house, looking at the shrubs, feeling that same sense of dread. Then I saw myself in the basement on the floor, surrounded by these women, and I felt the self-loathing I’d struggled with for a good part of my life, burning inside me. Tears poured down my face, alongside deep, gasping sobs that came out of nowhere.

At first, I dismissed the memory as preposterous. Memories cannot be trusted. That’s the truth. But the body never forgets what it experiences. You can always trust your body to tell you if something happened that was against your True Self. Every time I saw it in meditation, my body filled with a mix of horrible emotions that I already recognized from my day-to-day life: anger that wasn’t related to anything identifiable in my life, and a feeling that I was so “bad” I did not deserve to exist, and that it was not safe to exist.

It’s important to point out here that this is not the only abusive experience I had during my childhood. There were plenty more that I already did know about and had clearer memories around. But this one explained my anger issues with religion, rituals and God in a way that nothing else had.

I committed some time to processing these uncomfortable feelings, then I pushed the memory aside again, assuming it was done.

Walking down into the basement of this healer, it became clear that it was not done: it all came flooding back.

To make things harder, there was incense burning. Incense for me has always been tied to spiritual rituals, which fall into that same category of things I avoid because they remind me of this experience.

But, at that point, I had paid for the session and was trusting my intuitive feeling that I would be helped by going forward with this healing, so I took some deep breaths and sat down. I have held an intention for the past year to find someone who could help me clear any leftover knots of old pain from my energy, so I can serve others at an even more powerful level than I am now. I was hopeful this would be the person.

There is a mythical belief that healers should be able to heal themselves, but they can’t, and the logic behind that is simple. We all need someone else to hold a mirror up for us, so we can see the things that hide in the shadows of our subconscious. We are incapable of seeing what we subconsciously believe it is unsafe for us to see.

We should never “search” for a healer without first asking our higher self to guide us. It will always give us what we ask for, especially when we are pure in our intentions and intend to use our healing to help others. And, of course, we must be consistent in the level of focus and intensity we put toward those intentions, visualizing them daily, sending gratitude and ACTING on the guidance we receive (lots of people skip that part!).

Just for the record, I asked for a shortcut to healing any remaining trauma. And now that I’ve experienced what that looks like, I don’t recommend you ask for that specifically, unless you understand what that will look like (all those challenging feelings will come up to be processed at the same time)!

Healing Begins By Understanding How Our Brain Works

Often when we ask for something, we don’t understand that getting what we want might not always be the best thing for us, because we may not be ready for it. Also, it requires letting go of things we really don’t want to let go of. I mean we do…but we don’t. Because the subconscious part of us thinks we need to hold onto those things for our safety and to define our identity. This is where the real fight to heal plays out—inside of ourselves. We say we want healing, but what we mean is that we want healing while also somehow holding onto everything we are and have right now. That’s impossible.

When the healer showed me that I was still holding onto this anger as a form of protection, I could feel that part of me did NOT want to let go of it, and even wanted to tell this guy to eff off! (There was another element to this though. I didn’t feel I could fully trust this guy because he was channelling doctors, which he had not informed me about before our session.) But Fortunately, I’m very aware of the different parts of myself, so I am able to begin gently helping this part to let go of this perceived form of protection.

There is always a part of us—the part governed by our amygdala (the primitive part of our brain) that would prefer to just keep all that stuff compartmentalized, so we never consciously acknowledge it. If I had $100 for every time a client announced in our first session that their childhood was great, nothing bad happened, just to discover over the next couple hours that many crappy things had happened—they had been forced to keep terrible secrets (parents cheating with other partners, for example), or had their own emotional needs completely ignored, or that there was just “that one time” when their parent took out all their anger on them, or they were forced to do things that didn’t feel safe or good for them, or they were criticized or compared to others—I’d be a wealthy woman!

Our brain puts painful experiences in boxes. These get buried in the basement of our consciousness, where they affect our lives on a daily basis, without our awareness or understanding of what’s happening.

Just to be clear, most experiences that get buried by people are not abusive. All that is required to create one of these troublesome emotional “boxes” is that your True Self was not acknowledged or valued, and that someone else used you to meet their own needs or desires without considering your needs and desires (the need to feel safe, to feel valued as your self etc.). Another possibility is that someone taught you something about life or yourself that was not true, even though they genuinely meant well.

If your life is fantastic, and you love being you, odds are that you did have a wonderful childhood (or you’ve already done a ton of clearing work). But if you experience unexplained sadness, anger or anxiety or if things are not working out the way you thought they would and you don’t understand why, there’s a good chance these buried experiences are the culprit.

A fun example is one of my clients who had a parent who unintentionally convinced her that happiness was dangerous. Otherwise that parent was wonderful and loving. So when she came to me, her big problem was that she was feeling really happy—everything was going great—and it was causing her to have panic attacks, where she was being crashed by anxiety. There was a conflict, you see. Part of her was setting off the alarm—”Danger, danger, there’s too much happiness here. We better start worrying about something bad happening”.

My client had a good laugh when I showed her what was going on and she was able to move forward with less anxiety.

Letting in the Light So Feelings Can Be Processed

This is a key part of any successful healing journey—opening up those compartments from our childhood and letting in some light. Otherwise they become dark, dense knots in our energy system, causing all kinds of weird problems for our health and even more so for our relationships with ourselves and others.

Letting light into these places does not require sitting around talking about them for months on end: a mistake many therapists make. It is about creating a safe container for feeling the feelings related to these experiences, and allowing them to be experienced, so they can flow through you like waves. Waves come and go. But when we don’t allow ourselves to acknowledge the feelings related to old experiences, and just say “Oh that was no big deal”, they get trapped and become a big deal. If we process them, they really are “no big deal”. They just pass through and we aren’t stuck with the trapped anxiety, fear and depression that comes with these emotional “knots”.

Back to Me and The Healer

After I explained to the healer what I was feeling and struggling with, we went forward with the soul reading/healing. (As I mentioned earlier, it turned out that he was actually channelling some doctors, and frankly I didn’t like that aspect of the experience. I’m still sitting with and processing that aspect of our session because I feel there may have been a lapse of integrity/transparency on his part.)

He was able to identify the main problem this experience had created for me—an intense feeling of anger and betrayal toward “God”, which also came with a flipside of fear that I would be punished for feeling this way. I already knew this, but I hadn’t been able to clear it yet.

This feeling of fear was making it tricky for me to connect deeply with the spirit world. I was totally fine when connecting with my client’s Higher/True Self and could channel great stuff from there, but occasionally, a relative who had passed on would show up with a message of healing. And sometimes I would manage to get amazing, specific validation that I could pass on to prove that it was a relative, but sometimes the fear of connecting with this person I did not know was so intense, I couldn’t fully deliver the message. This is why I don’t advertise my mediumship abilities, even though I do have them. I’m working on it, but there’s some emotional static there right now.

Being angry at and/or fearing “God”, however we define “God”, is a common problem for anyone raised in a religious environment that wasn’t truly supportive. The divide between what you thought you would get (safety, love, support) and what you did get (judgment, hypocritical behaviour, abuse) really messes with your mind. I experienced this in a more powerful way than usual, because as I child I had already decided I was going to be a nun and commit my life to helping others. I was reading the Bible at the age of 8, even though I did not understand a word of it. I was also playing unusual games with my friends, trying to “read” their minds and guess playing cards, and tinkered with Ouija boards and other things (not recommended!). I had direct experiences with ghosts in my house, and I dreamed of my grandfather’s death the night it happened—I was pulling him in my little red wagon. I was a spiritually connected kid in a world that doesn’t acknowledge real spiritual connection, and there was no one there who could help me navigate it.

The Purpose of Painful Experiences

Because of that basement experience, I never trusted the church, or in any one religion. This turned out to be an important part of my journey because it sent me off on a world-wide quest to learn the deeper truths of life and myself and my existence. Without this painful experience (and the many other painful experiences I had in my childhood), I would not have been driven to learn all those things, and to spend thousands of hours in meditation, and so I would not be able to do the life-changing work I now do.

You see, everything that happens on our journey, no matter how terrible, plays a role in us living our purpose. We are here to enjoy life, yes, but we are also here to expand and grow our consciousness, and use what we learn to help others, and that can only happen through understanding and overcoming our own challenges and struggles—which means there have to be challenges and struggles to overcome!

Our Pain Reflects Our Purpose (But we don’t need to be in pain to live it!)

Our purpose is always hidden in our deepest pain. That is where our greatest motivation lies. We don’t ever want anyone to hurt the way we did, or suffer what we saw or experienced that felt bad for us. There is nothing more motivating on Earth than freedom from pain and suffering. In fact, if you ever meet a self-actualized being, the first thing you’ll notice is that their whole life revolves around helping others become free of suffering. This is programmed into our very consciousness.

I’m grateful for my most painful experiences, because they guided me to my purpose, and they continue to motivate me to grow and expand in ways that allow me to be of even more service to others. And also because, when I do process these experiences, there is such a powerful contrast between that pain and the lightness and joy I feel when it’s gone. Nothing means anything to us in this world without contrast.

That said, I am the world’s most impatient soul. I always want to find shortcuts, so I can get to that next level of freedom faster! That’s why I provide shortcuts for others, but let me also add that I go out of my way to make sure those shortcuts are as gentle and safe as possible. Why struggle when you can get help from someone who can make your journey easier? That’s why I went to this healer. And that’s why my clients come to me.

I wish all of you many shortcuts on your journey to living with joy as your True Self in 2016. I encourage you to search out those people who can act as a true mirror for you, and help you shine light into those shadowy parts of yourself, so you uncover your purpose and live it with joy.

If you can’t afford to hire a guide/healer right now, just go to the library. Let your intuition guide you to find a book with the intention to see and heal these parts of yourself. Or use a few of my many free, detailed tools/exercises provided in this blog! (Click on “Tools for Transformation” and scan down, using your intuition to choose the one that speaks to you the most right now.)

We (all the beings of this world) need your unique light to shine. We need you to be living your true purpose, which is directly related to whatever pain you’ve experienced, so we can create the kind of world we’ve all dreamed of.

The time for shame and denial about our past experiences is over. They only happened to help us awaken.

Rise and shine as your True Self, my dear weary life traveller. It’s time.

Shawn xo