The New Reflections of Lilith White

If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.  ~ Nikola Tesla

“ Life was much more mystical and mysterious than what we had previously imagined. We were like pioneers, discovering new lands, delving into the unknown territories of what lay beyond our three dimensional boundaries, knowing that there was something more out there, something beyond what we could see with our limited human eyes”. Lilith White – The Other Side of my Reflection (go to book)

We all know that the world is made up of different types of people. We don’t all look the same, have the same dress sense and apart from us having different personalities and aspirations, we also have varying religious beliefs or spiritual outlooks. Within the myriad of variables, there are also more subtle distinctions between us. These are the less easy, to see or explain, influences that make up who we are and how we contact and operate in the world we live in.

Highly sensitive people, who display heightened empathic qualities, tend to come into the world with a deeper ‘knowing’ that there is more to life than just what’s obvious and on the surface, that there is something else going on,  beyond what the eyes can see. Most ‘empaths’ will tell you that they knew that they were different from a young age. They seemed to ‘feel’ the world on a different level and understood that there was more out there, even if they didn’t or still don’t know exactly know what that meant or means.

Nicola Tesla, understood that it was impossible to understand the universe unless the ‘energetic forces’ beyond the physical, were considered. Just think about a simple conversation you may be having…there are the words that are being exchanged then each participants inner thoughts or memories, evoked by the words being spoken then you have each person’s individual perception and then you have the ‘energy’ that the  words create….how do they make you feel? Are the words attracting positive or negative vibrations, do they bring up historical connotations of something that happened in the past or do they instil a feeling of doom or excitement about something in the future. Whilst all of this is going on, you may be forming an opinion or impression about the person speaking and all of this is creating yet more energy. This is the level of input the average person will experience either consciously or sub-consciously.

The empath will pick up other energetic influences. They may not know that the speaker had an argument with their lover the night before or that they drove to this meeting with a certain amount of road rage and when they walked into the room, this person had a negative attitude even though he was smiling. All of this is being communicated on an energetic, sub-conscious level but the empath feels it, without really knowing why they are feeling extremely out of alignment. A third party may comment afterwards, “What a nice guy” but the empath will instinctively know there is more to it than what was communicated on the surface.

Many empaths experience great resistance because they don’t actually like to see so much. I know that many times in my own life, I wished that I didn’t have the ability to see straight through people, and straight into the heart of situations. Over the years I learned to keep my inner wisdom to myself because I often had a feeling of not being heard or of being labelled as negative or judgmental. Who was I to form an opinion based purely on a ‘gut’ feeling?

Empaths who are tuned in to their intuition are natural healers and counsellors. They don’t need doctors or psychologists to tell them how to heal themselves and those around them but can get really frustrated because the majority of people around them are looking for ‘proof’ of everything…they want to see the degree or certificate that quantifies or qualifies your knowing. Many of us eventually give up, step back and recoil into an insular world where we can ‘know what we know without having to defend our position’. The greatest sadness is that we have so much to offer but more often than not, we give up trying to share our knowledge and insights because we fear that we will not be believed.

When I started writing The Other Side of my Reflection, I had absolutely no idea where it was going. My original idea was to write an inspirational book. During the time I was writing the book, my life and my outlook took a completely different turn. After my thirteen year journey, where I was given insights into the afterlife, I wondered if anybody would actually believe my story. After all, who was I to claim I knew so much? The fact that consciousness continues after death, is now being scientifically proven by doctors who are studying out of body experiences of patients who have died and been resuscitated. They have now reached the conclusion that ‘mind’ is not limited to brain activity and who we are, in our physical form, does indeed continue even after death . When I deduced this in my book, purely from my own experience, this was not a universally accepted concept.

So when we talk about energy, we are talking about how ‘everything’ operates in the universe, including the fact that we are all actually energy, making use of a physical vessel for a short time. It is said that energy can’t be created or destroyed.  It can only be transformed from one form to the other.  This suggests that our energetic form exists before birth and beyond physical death. 

I believe that in our physical form, our brain acts as a filter system to protect us from input overload and that we are only able to deal with and assimilate a certain amount of energetic thought forms at a time. Empaths do not have the same amount inbuilt filters that the majority of people have. The empath’s filtering system seems to be much more open to energetic input, which is why they are more insightful but at the same time much more vulnerable. It can be extremely overwhelming yet at the same time, an invaluable asset.

There has been a lot of focus on how the empath needs to manage their ability to pick up negative and toxic energy from others but very little about the great power the empath possesses to transmute energy. Many years ago, street lamps used to often go out while I was driving along various roads. Was my energy really affecting street lamps? I don’t have a clue but if my energy was that powerful and I actually owned it then imagine what other amazing feats I could achieve. What if moving away from that toxic person, in your life, was a way of disowning your power? What if you could be around that negative, energy vamp and effect change by transmuting it on subtle levels?

Nelson Mandela referred to this amazing quote by Marianne Williamson, in one of his speeches, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Empaths intuitively know, that they came into this earthly realm for a purpose yet their purpose, often seems to elude them. What if you were already living it and it wasn’t something out there you needed to look for and find? It’s what we do day to day, how we tune in and transform the fields of vibration around us moment by moment. Every event, in our lives, big or small, is an opportunity to be divinely on purpose and to become conscious of and connect positively to the energetic frequencies around us.

May your light always shine brightly in the now and deep into the future.

Lilith White

Is Inner Loneliness Becoming the Fastest Growing Disease on the Planet?

“The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or Leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love…” Mother Theresa.

Loneliness is a broad term for what is commonly considered to be situational; when we think of somebody who is lonely, the first thing that springs to mind is a person who lives alone with no friends and family. While this is often the case, loneliness is not always a physical state of being alone. Mother Theresa understood this and encapsulates loneliness as a state of being or having a perception of being unloved. Many people experience feelings of being utterly alone, even when they are in a crowd or living with another…they feel empty and disconnected, no matter what their situation is or where or who they are with.

Loneliness is now being recognised as a disease in itself, instead of what was previously treated as a symptom of mental illness. Long term loneliness, that adversely affects a person’s sense of well being, can lead to a state of hopelessness, pointlessness and ultimately depression. A person who feels unsupported and alone in the world, will often begin to experience stress, anxiety and panic. Imagining a future without love and support can be very overwhelming and daunting, especially as a person gets older and becomes aware of their own mortality. It is now believed that these symptoms of loneliness can lead to bad physical health; digestive problems, lack of appetite or overeating, hypertension, bad circulation, dementia and even Alzheimer’s. All of these ‘side effects’ may in turn create an even deeper fear of being alone ‘when something happens to me’, resulting in a resistance to going anywhere where there is a perception of ‘help will not be available”.

While a certain amount of solitude to replenish the soul and allow for self reflection, can be considered healthy and even extremely good for spiritual growth, too much time in mental and physical isolation can lead to a dysfunctional amount of self absorption, as social relationships become more and more deficient and dysfunctional. A person who becomes extreme about isolating themselves, often lands up suffering from social anxiety, which can be triggered by large crowds, travelling or even wide open spaces. Long term avoidance of the company of others and a lack of engaging the world at large, can precipitate phobias, including agora phobia (a fear of being out in public).

ROOT CAUSES OF A FEELING OF EMPTINESS THAT RESULT IN ISOLATION

Lack of love

Many years ago, while attending a self actualisation course, I heard that if a baby is purely fed without being touched, it will literally die. It is called, ‘failure to thrive’. The infant firstly stops growing and if the touch isolation lasts long enough, it will die.  A lack of loving touch, is very detrimental to ones mental health and well being. Demonstrative interaction can be likened to soul food. Without nurturing in some form, we begin to feel barren and empty. This can lead to eating disorders in adults such a lack of appetite or an inability to absorb and assimilate nourishment or the opposite extreme of obesity.

A person who feels unnurtured and unloved for long periods of time, will often begin to view the world and people as hostile, especially somebody who has gone through desertions in love relationships and has experienced too much abandonment. A pattern of believing that opening oneself to love because it always ends in pain and grief, can result in a type of natural self protection mechanism where the individual develops an armour coating. As they close off their hearts more and more they start losing their ability of giving and ‘accepting’ love. It is easier to push people away than to risk more loss. This then becomes a convenient avoidance of any contact that may result in any risky feelings of connection and a feeling of ‘what’s the point?’ This type of behaviour could be wrongly viewed by friends and family as selfishness or even narcissism.

Bereavement

Losing the love and caring of a loved one can also exacerbate feelings of being lonely. Even the spiritually minded who understand that death is a transition and not a finality, will experience the physical loss of somebody they hold dear. It is sometimes difficult to know how to really support somebody who has experienced the death of a parent, spouse or child. Sometimes the huge void a person experiences, without the relevant other, in their day to day lives, is too much to bear. After a certain amount of time, those closest to them expect them to move on and recover but putting on a brave face, for the sake of appearances may create an inner feeling of being inauthentic and lying to oneself. Sometimes isolation is the only way to handle these emotions because it is just too difficult to behave as if life simply goes on when you are still feeling like your world has fallen apart. There is no set time period for grief and healing.

Post Trauma After Life Threatening Situations

Any situation that brings you to the brink of death will create a certain amount of obvious or even latent trauma. In South Africa, nearly every person you meet, has been put in some sort of compromising position, whether it was a robbery at gun point, being mugged at knife point or even rape. I have been involved in a home invasion at gun point and a year later had a robbery while I was asleep with my bedroom door unlocked. I was lucky I wasn’t raped. After you have been violated to such a degree that you were rendered utterly helpless, whether you want it to or not, your world changes.

It makes you vulnerable and affects your confidence, even your self esteem. In a country where there is a high likelihood of crime, going out socially can be a challenge because every time you walk out of your front door, you are aware that ‘something disturbing could happen’. This in itself can create social anxiety and gives you the perfect excuse to begin living a more insular lifestyle.

Looking death in the eye due to health issues can also leave you feeling vulnerable and if you are living alone, may precipitate a constant awareness of your mortality. Irrational fears of sudden death that would ordinarily not have even entered your mind, suddenly become prevalent. I was in ICU for two weeks with Pancreatitis and given a 50/50 chance of survival; I would either respond to treatment or my organs would begin shutting down and I would die. Pancreatitis is very painful and I was so drugged up that I don’t remember having any fear but when I came out of the protective environment of the hospital, I was alone. My son was a huge support system and came in to help me with the basics but the rest of the time, I had to overcome the post trauma on my own. I was determined to focus on my physical recovery but didn’t really heal completely from the psychological trauma. This was two years ago and even as I write this article, I am experiencing ‘ping’ moments about why I have stress and anxiety that I never had before. A lot of the time, it is subconscious and you may have convinced yourself that you have chosen solitude because that is what you prefer, instead of looking deeper at the underlying causes.

Other Reasons for Feelings of Emptiness

Other people who are at high risk of developing the disease called loneliness are people who work alone from home, people who retire, the empty nest syndrome where children move far away from home, relocating to a new town or country, a divorce that was instigated by the other party, break ups or loss of self esteem through ageing where you begin to perceive yourself as no longer being love able.

SOME SELF SABOTAGING BEHAVIOURS AND BELIEFS LONELY PEOPLE HAVE

• Becoming so self absorbed that you are not willing to ‘allow’ other people to be there for you.
• Rejecting love because you believe that you will always be abandoned and are programmed to believe that you will get hurt.
• Forgetting to give love to the people who need you because you don’t believe that you are valuable to them.
• Displaying narcissistic tendencies where the whole world revolves around you and your pain.
• Believing that you have nothing to offer anybody so what is the point of being there for them – they don’t need you anyway.
• Berating yourself for being unlovable.
• Eating badly because you can’t be bothered to nurture and nourish yourself.
• Turning to drugs, alcohol or anonymous sex to take the edge off your social anxiety and numb yourself to the challenges of your symptoms of loneliness.

What can you do?

• Make a list of small, easily achievable things you can do to help in your recovery. It could be as small as making a phone call to a friend or preparing a wholesome meal for yourself.
• Make goals about stepping back into society. Break them into easy, manageable chunks and celebrate every little achievement.
• Push yourself to do one thing every day that you know will be good for you – something you are resisting and that is out of your comfort zone.
• Accept an invitation or invite a friend over even if you are not in the mood. Perhaps you will be pleasantly surprised.
• Do not berate yourself ever. Change all your negative thoughts to positive affirmations even if you think you are lying to yourself.
• Reach out and do something to give encouragement or help to someone else – you have more resources to help others than you believe you do.
• Own up to yourself firstly about how you really feel then be honest about it to at least one other person.
• Put on some uplifting music and dance around the house at least once a day. There is a woman, on the internet, who was very overweight. She took daily videos of herself dancing until she lost the extra pounds. Do it for fun.
• If you are abusing yourself with substances take a pro-active stance and enter yourself into a program where you will get professional help and support. All alcohol and drug programs include helping you to look at your past baggage and give you steps to finally start taking control of your life and your perceived problems.
• If you are feeling spiritually empty and disconnected, ask your higher self to guide you on to a path that resonates with you – as adults we tend to intellectualise spirituality too much. Faith and spirituality do not belong in the mental plane. What would your inner child have done? Start with that.

I am not a person who likes to prescribe or advise people. All of the above are just suggestions. If you want to heal your loneliness disease, you will find your own way. If you are too depressed to even want to heal, that’s another story and you need to seek help. There is a saying, “You can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink”…you are here on this planet so you may as well lap up some positive energy, get it together and start living your life. I read a book a while ago by Anita Moorjani who experienced a miraculous healing from cancer, called Dying to Be Me. What I loved about the book was that Anita hasn’t used her healing as a way to prescribe to others…her most profound and simple message is to ‘live your life fearlessly’. If you are lonely and struggling to even long for or want a cure then you may as well work on overcoming your fears and go for ‘something’…anything as long as it can begin replacing the emptiness you feel today. Find a way to bring some joy into your isolation and the lives of the people who surround you and if you truly have nobody to share your joy with, go out and find them.

Finally, you can’t force love and nurturing into your life from others. It begins with you. Self love is free and readily available to you. You may have been berating yourself and disliking who you are for so long that you don’t believe it is possible to love yourself. Well, find something about yourself to love. We were all born with unique gifts…not just some of us, all of us! As soon as you begin finding aspects of yourself to love, the people around you may begin mirroring your self-love by showing you the respect and love you are so longing for! And if they don’t, love yourself enough to find people that will.

Blessings on your journey back from pain to freedom.

Lilith White

Lilith White is the author of the creative non-fiction memoir, The Other Side of my Reflection (go to book)

 

 

 

 

“The rest of the afternoon passed by, in a hazy awareness of distant emotions that sat silently in some part of my body, where I had stored all the other pain. It was like a room with no view or door, no window to look out from. Somehow it absorbed the pain into its walls by osmosis and there the feelings sat like trapped little prisoners on death row, in no man’s land, experiencing neither life nor death, nor release. The room was lost floating somewhere in the cells of my body and I was lost to the room.”  The Other Side of my Reflection by Lilith White (view book here)

Sitting in my little apartment, in a strange town, having to face myself squarely, I realised I had spent too many years, treading water, to even count. Had I merely been pretending when I affirmed that all was well in my world? Had practising the law of attraction, just been another distraction from being one hundred per cent authentic with myself?  Once I had allowed myself to ‘stop’ and ‘wait’ and after I had awakened to having to forgive everything and everyone in my life, I began a process of discovering why I had never had the courage to visit my room with no view. that I had referred to in my book. I realised that, in my culture, it is ingrained in us not to give expression to our feelings.

Our society’s way of dealing with uncomfortable emotions, is to rather not deal with or tolerate them. They are very often relegated to the realm of the sub-conscious where they don’t have to be acknowledged. Once they are suppressed and buried in ‘the room with no view’ a neglected and forgotten place inside of us, they become part of what is known as our shadow self. We spend a large part of our lives keeping our innermost feelings hidden and if and when they do surface, we will do almost anything not feel them. Our solution is to disassociate from our ‘negative emotions’. We will go out and buy a book, get advice from the internet, take drugs to numb us, have anonymous sex or keep ourselves busy with all types of distractions. This little phrase ‘negative emotions’ has become very prevalent in the self help industry and with proponents of the law of attraction; if an emotion doesn’t feel good it must be negated, replaced and simply thrown into the trash.

WHAT IS EMOTION?

Emotion is the expression and release of a feeling. Feelings are our intuitive compass and our emotions are our guidance system. When a feeling arises, within us, our mind will unconsciously allocate an emotive response, according to what it considers to be good or bad. This is weighed up against how nice or unpleasant the feeling has impacted on us. If we feel good, it is expressed as a positive emotion. If it makes us feel bad, it is considered to be negative. The natural inclination is to allow the feel good ones and suppress the feel bad ones. In other words, any emotion that comes up for us as uncomfortable, embarrassing, disturbing or overwhelming is considered to be negative. We have been taught not to display these unpleasant feelings so we invariably take them under control by beating them into submission. If we are unable to overcome, hide and suppress these emotions, we consider ourselves weak, flawed or even unspiritual – there is, at the moment a lot of information about how to control our negative emotions, which in itself makes us feel guilty for having them. Not much is being said about the fact that our emotions are actually our guidance system that gives us clues as to what we need to do, or overcome in order to restore peace and balance. Ask any poet, writer or philosopher about when they had their most profound moments of genius. I doubt they will tell you, they were asking deep existential questions, whilst they were happily going about their day to day lives.  Most people only question the deeper meaning of life when they are in pain because they are too busy enjoying the ride when they are happy and content. In other words, pain is a teacher, through which we grow and expand. Life is never static. The only certainty is that there will be change. There is always a dance between joy and pain.

ARE FEELINGS AND EMOTIONS REAL?

This is a very complex question. When you have a feeling, it becomes real enough, for you to express as it an emotion, in reality. The scientific community, as well as proponents of the law of attraction, will probably tell you that it is just in your mind…something you made up or created that you can easily overcome, simply by changing your thinking response to it. Even science is now re-examining this clinical approach. Scientific studies are now being done to prove that our consciousness continues when there is no brain activity, after death. There are too many accounts of near death experiences; people crossing over into another realm, with their faculties intact, to ignore. From this information, we are able to deduce, that it is our non-physical consciousness that gives form to our reality. If this is the case, then it is plausible that our consciousness gives form to our feelings in order for us to naturally demonstrate them in the physical, as emotion.

WHERE DO UNRESOLVED EMOTIONS GO?

If feelings belong in the sub-conscious, intuitive realm and emotions are the form in which we express our feelings, what happens to them if we suppress them? There is no way that anybody can definitively answer this question. If you are able to disassociate from a so-called negative emotion, is it gone for good or does it still need an outlet? Are we merely delaying an inevitable overload by continually burying gunk that gets stored in our body, on a sub conscious or even on a physical, cellular level?

Carl Jung believed that the unpleasant emotions we have been socialised to hide from others and eventually, from ourselves, become another aspect of ourselves, called the shadow self. This is the part of ourselves that we dare not show the world or express openly for fear that we will be punished (as a child), judged or rejected. Through conditioning, we learn to abhor this aspect of ourselves and the more we suppress it, the more hidden and buried it becomes until we no longer acknowledge or see this as an integral part of who we are.

WHAT I BELIEVE

Emotions need an outlet.

When we disassociate or suppress emotions they do not dissipate and simply evaporate. They get stored in the shadow self as sub-conscious emotional pain, which clutters up our system to become an overload of emotional baggage.

When the baggage gets too heavy or big to carry around with us, the universe breaks us down, which, in our society is often ‘labelled’ a nervous breakdown or it can manifest as physical dis-ease in our body or both.

We can either suppress further by escaping into addictions or using prescribed medication as a last, desperate act or we can go through the courageous process of facing and clearing away the mountain of emotional clutter we have accumulated over a period of time, perhaps even our whole lives.

This is by no means an easy process, nor is it a quick fix. It requires a commitment to heal and perhaps even a complete ‘taking time off’ to give the process our full attention.

The three basic steps, which anybody can start working on immediately and I suggest that you use these steps with all new emotional challenges as they arise:-

Allow

Allowing is the opposite of disassociating or suppressing. It is giving yourself permission to feel the painful emotions, without judgement of whether or not they are good or bad, positive or negative, relevant or irrelevant. Don’t ever berate yourself for giving expression to your emotions. For the purpose of this process you are allowed to indulge in them, not forever, just for now so that you can acknowledge them and look at them with complete honesty to yourself.

Many years ago, I read a book entitled The Primal Scream by Arthur Janov. People entered themselves into a program to get rid of all their emotional baggage. A day or two before the process, they were booked into a hotel room. They were not allowed to distract themselves with anything like TV or phone calls or dissociate with smoking, alcohol or drugs. The idea was sensory deprivation where the only thing they had to reflect upon, was their innermost selves.

They were then ready to be isolated in a padded cell where they could curse, cry, hit the walls and invariably let out the primal scream or many primal screams if that’s what they needed. This was a safe environment to ‘allow’. I suggest that you also find a safe place with few distractions to allow your own process.

Some Suggestions

• If you are a spiritually conscious person ask for guidance from your higher self, source or whoever or whatever you believe to be a higher power.
• Think about how you feel, holding nothing back. Try to deal with one aspect, that created this emotion, at a time. Looking at all your emotional pain at once may be too overwhelming and you may miss an important process that links to something very specific that caused you pain.
• Grieve openly. If you need to have a good cry, do it.
• Beat a pillow.
• Scream in the car with the windows wound up so nobody can hear you or go to a deserted nature spot and scream.
• If somebody hurt or abused you, find the words to express how you feel about them and say it out loud (not necessarily to them directly).
• Write down everything that comes to the surface, holding nothing back.
• Write a letter to somebody telling them exactly how you feel about a situation, even if that person has passed away or you are no longer in contact with them. This letter is just for you. You don’t want to send ‘blame’ letters. You just want to express everything you feel about it to allow it to come out. At a later stage you will take responsibility for the part you played. It is seldom just about them versus us.

Release

Once you have flung open the door to your own personal room with no view, the conscious work really begins. This is where you will find outlets to clear away the old clutter from the past to make way for the new. Releasing is all about the ‘doing’. It will be different for everybody. Listen to your intuition and ask, ‘What do I need to do, to clear this once and for all?’

Some Suggestions

• Write a letter of forgiveness to somebody you want to forgive.
• Write a letter of forgiveness to yourself and forgive yourself for your part in a situation.
• Write a goodbye letter to somebody who has passed away and that you are holding on to. If you are keeping ashes because you can’t face letting them go, it is now time to do a farewell ritual and release them.
• If you have any regrets about anything that you never said or did, it is time to say what you needed to say or do what you needed to do.
• If there is anything you want to apologise for, now is the time to do it. Acknowledge that you made a mistake. Ask for forgiveness.

Letting Go.

Letting go means that these aspects of your past are over and done with. You have acknowledged them, cleared and released them. You will be mindful about re-creating events that could manifest the same patterns of emotional trauma. You do not need to re-visit these situations that caused you pain because you have set them free. If at this point you still feel you are holding on to the past then you have not fully released it or accepted that it is time to let go.

If you do not want to let go of your pain, you may want to explore further how holding on to your pain serves you. Does it keep you inside a ‘victim control drama’ or do you still need to stay with the ‘allowing’ stage for longer? Don’t judge or berate yourself if you still can’t quite manage to let go. Set the intension that you would like to let go of this pain and that you would like the other parties involved to be free as well. If you set this intension honestly, the ‘how to’ will manifest. It is not negative. It just is. Be aware that you have not yet released this aspect of your process and make sure that you don’t lock it away again, in your own personal ‘room with no view’ inside of you.

Some Suggestions

• Do a visualisation technique where you imagine pure white light coming into a point at the top of your head and flowing into every part of you. Allow it to cleanse you and then flow out of your feet to wash away. Bring in a person or even an emotion you want to let go of. If you bring in a person, surround them with white light and then cut an imaginary cord between you and let them gently drift away. If you want to let go of an emotion, write it on a piece of paper, tie it to a balloon and then release the balloon into the sky.
• Clearly state that you let the person or emotion free.
• You may want to burn some of those letters you wrote during your allowing process. This will be a symbolic gesture to the universe that you are letting go as the smoke dissipates into the ether.

Bring thoughts of gratitude into your awareness. Acknowledge that you are loved. Now allow yourself to feel a new sense of freedom from the past. Focus your awareness on this very moment as if it was the first day of the rest of your life. Go and bask in the sun or take a walk as you consciously breathe in the air or take a drive into nature with the windows wound down.

We all strive to live our best lives. There is a lovely saying, “Angels can fly because they are so light!” We must always be mindful to allow the light to shine into our lives and live in anticipation of moments of joy. Sometimes they were difficult to recognise through the murky fog of our heavy, emotional baggage. Perhaps they are right in front of us, in the simplistic and small things in the life, we often miss out on. Look out for them…the flowering plants in spring that remind us of new growth, the delicious taste of our favourite dessert that sends bliss waves through our mouths and the full spectrum of the colours of the rainbow that surround us at every turn. Let it all go, to experience a lightness of being – perhaps you too will become so light that you will fly, just like an angel.

May your light continue to shine brightly.

Lilith White.

Please note: I am not a qualified psychologist or mental health practitioner. This article does not claim to have all the answers for everybody. We are all individuals with our own journey and must do what resonates with or is good for us. Please do not hesitate to contact a professional if you need help, guidance and support.

If you are inspired by these new reflections of Lilith White you may be interested in reading my memoir –The Other Side of My Reflection by Lilith White (view here)

 

Insights On My Journey Through Break Down

By Lilith White

I love it when the universe presents me with the perfect message at exactly the right time; when the synchronicity is so profoundly in alignment that it almost gives me goose flesh or that tingly sensation around my head.

Many spiritual philosophies talk about the power of forgiveness. For me, personally, I assumed this was one area I didn’t need to pay too much attention to. I wasn’t a person who carried grudges. I seldom indulged in a ‘blame game’. In fact, I believed, I did the opposite. I had always made allowances for people; attributed their behaviour to childhood traumas, ignorance or lack of E.Q…nobody is perfect right? So to a degree, I had given people leeway, sometimes to the point that they were able to take advantage of me. I usually made a mental note of minor transgressions, sometimes got extremely shocked and hurt by larger transgressions but I was able to let it go quickly…or so I thought.

More recently, I had made a conscious decision to change this attitude – part of loving the self is knowing where to draw boundaries so I asked myself the question, ‘was the infraction big or small…how important was it to me?” I had never written somebody who was in my personal history book out of my future book. I realised that if I weighed people up against their ability to always be in integrity, there would pretty much be nobody left in my life.

There were certain people who had consistently ‘let me down’. There was a pattern of imbalanced energy. When they reached out to me, I was there for them but no effort was made when I needed a hand of friendship. I had made many allowances over many years, expecting different results and was finally ready to look the reality of these, so-called friendships, squarely in the face. This meant a total disconnect from one person and a decision for limited contact with others.

I had also been in an unrequited love situation with a man with whom I had developed a very dependable friendship with. We were in daily contact and he was a light in my life. Falling for a man, after years of abstaining from relationships, was a ‘biggie’ for me. I eventually made the decision that the best way to honour myself was to distance myself, if he was unable to reciprocate my feelings of attraction, possibly love for him. Once I had come clean with an honest sharing and after a few backwards and forwards emails, he cut me off completely like you cut off your excess fingernails and throw them in the bin. I was asking for some distance and he was chopping off my head. It hurt me more than I cared to admit.

All of these self-affirming decisions happened way over a year ago and I had supposedly moved on. To say I have been going through a tough time recently is an understatement. I had a complete meltdown.  Probably if I had gone through mainstream channels, the psychologist would have written ‘breakdown’ on her notepad, looked back up at me, with compassion in her eyes,  over her black rimmed glasses and said, “You are having a nervous breakdown’.  These two little words, nervous breakdown, would have been a simplistic way of encapsulating a more complex accumulation of unresolved loss, grief, lack of joy and more importantly the shutting down of the one thing that I knew I could rely upon through thick and thin; my unwavering faith…that constant part of myself, my spiritual aspect, that I knew could never be hurt, harmed or damaged. This knowing had always been my rock, especially since I had few real, live people in my life, I could say that about.

I didn’t consciously realise that this disconnect had banished me into a spiritual wilderness, that had left me like a tree blowing aimlessly in the breeze, without its roots to hold me solidly and firmly in the nurturing embrace of mother earth’s  soil.

I had spent too many years to even count, in isolation, exploring the path of the inner self and my spirituality. Now I wanted to experience my more tangible physical attributes like the angel who falls down to earth in the movie, The City of Angels; to experience that which we have been gifted with in a body. I wanted to fully connect with the joys of the flesh but all I had come away with, taking this path, was disillusionment. People had disappointed me, the mundanity of life bored me, creating tangible prosperity eluded me and having to fall back purely on faith, angered me. I understand, when all is said and done, that without this body, I am left with only pure consciousness but I longed for my physical reality to fulfil me and mean something too – consciousness can’t make love, hug, eat popcorn at the movies, whilst holding hands with a crush.

I guess my higher self finds this all rather humorous because it knows, unequivocally, that the universe does you a favour when it breaks you down. It strips the leaves off that tree and renders it bare, quivering naked and exposed to the elements. It cracks all those dead branches then waits for you to decide when you are going to make space for new growth by throwing off the old, useless ones and it forces you to re-acknowledge those unseen roots as the core that holds the tree together. You either put down some new roots before you fall over or you are going to get scattered all over the place and obliterated! It doesn’t feel like much of a favour when all you asked for was a safe haven and a solid human, hand to hold on to. It’s like the not guilty being given an undeserving sentence…just not fair!

At least during this break apart…down or whatever, I had the ware with all to ask, “What the F#*@ do you want me to do?” Now when you’re breaking down and being strewn all over the place, you pretty much only have time for about one question. It’s like you’re in a war zone with only one instinct, survival; that means a safe place. It’s basic. Because I had just given up my home to travel, that was literally my priority (safe place is more often an analogy…whatever anyone considers a safe place).  In my case, in this instance, my safe place was literal; a little furnished apartment for people in transit. It was the last place I thought I would find myself in but it was actually just perfect for my healing. It gave me the opportunity to ‘stop’ and ‘wait’. The I-Ching refers to ‘waiting’ as a natural stopping in between doing or going…like a dry winter waiting for rain. The time is not yet right for roots to start shooting again or for re-growth.

So I landed in my little Zen-Like room, called the Bali Suite and ‘stopped’. I didn’t think about why I needed to stop, at first. I just did. I guess I was actually just too drained to do anything else. I did scare myself with thoughts about ‘what’s next,’ at times.  This just brought up anxiety so I had to bring my mind into alignment and remind it that we were stopping. The universe didn’t break me down for me to rebel and push myself into performing. It was telling me to ‘wait’. For a change I decided not to be rebellious. I got it…’a let go, let God type thing’, I thought.

I had allowed myself to fall through, what I had referred to as the void, once before. First there is resistance…you lay guilt trips on yourself; you want a plan, yes, a goal will sort you out. If you make a decision you’ll have somewhere to go, something to do…well, if that’s what you think then you haven’t got it yet. The universe has broken you down for a purpose. You will only delay the process by doing anything you think you ‘should’ be doing. There is a lovely affirmation from a Course In Miracles, ‘Only God’s plan for my salvation will work.’ (You don’t have to use the word God if it pushes your buttons, think what word symbolises some higher power or source that works for you).

So you wait! You may still fight ‘waiting’ because we haven’t been socialised to do no-thing; it’s unproductive, but if you stop and wait it will produce something…a void. A void isn’t really thought of as something but in this reality it is a very important no-thing, something. While you are in this inner void, you do only those things that don’t dissipate your energy and only you will know what those things are – going for a walk, cleaning the house, lying on the bed, cooking a meal…whatever doesn’t create anxiety. If it doesn’t flow, naturally, leave it alone.

For me when I stop, I write. Stopping doesn’t mean you can’t do anything…it means not doing anything that feels like an effort. I once said that writing seems to come from its own private well spring inside of me. It is like an unstoppable force that arrives naturally like the ebb and flow of the ocean. It is also very important to stop any thoughts that berate, belittle or criticise yourself. Affirmations work wonderfully well to replace scary thoughts of lack.

There may be a certain amount of stopping and trying to get started before you finally allow it. Only then will you be able to let go. When you let go completely without resistance that is when you fall through the void. The universe sighs with relief. It had been holding its breath so as not to disturb the tree. Now you are ready to be open to listen to the plan for your salvation.

Insight One – Forgiveness

I woke up one morning with a slight sense of purpose – I wanted to maintain a presence on social media to get my book noticed. I had been receiving such amazing reviews from my readers but I needed to get it more out there and known. I also wanted to begin collaborating and sharing. My plan was to go on to my face book page and find some new, like minded friends. The universe had something else in mind. I was attracted to a woman and clicked on her lovely, graceful face to go to her profile. The first thing I saw was a video…the words twins caught my eye because I have twin grandsons and then I noticed the word holocaust. I clicked on it to play the video. It was a Jewish woman, Eva Moses Kor, who had arrived in the Auschwitz Concentration Camp with her family, including her twin sister, aged ten. Because they were twins their lives were spared. They were valuable subjects for experimentation and study. The Nazis were looking for ways to increase the Ayran race and twins would increase the population twofold. Jewish twins were the perfect guinea pigs because they didn’t care if they had emotions or could feel pain. She described the degradation, pain and torture they went through at the hands of a Nazi doctor, Josef Mengele. The video upset me terribly. I am particularly sensitive about this chapter in history that highlights the worst side of human nature. (Words are inadequate to describe how it makes me feel. In my book I talk about my previous lifetime connection with this, which I will not go into now. If you are interested you can click on the highlight to view my book).

What came next astounded me. She had been asked to give a talk at Boston College and was asked if it was at all plausible to find and bring a doctor who had worked at the concentration camp. She didn’t think it would be possible. Dr Mengele had died in 1979 but she did manage to find a doctor; Dr Munch, who had been responsible for signing the death certificates at the camp. He did not agree to go with her to Boston but did agree to meet with her at his home.

This initial introduction led to Eva’s family and the doctors family to travel to  Auschwitz  to sign a declaration about what he had seen and experienced during the time he was working there.

Eva wanted to find a way to thank him but every idea she had, did not satisfy her. It took several months of pondering on this before she decided to write him a letter of forgiveness. She had never formally forgiven anybody and the result felt life changing. It was suggested to her by her former English Teacher that if she could forgive him then perhaps there was some way she could forgive Mengele. She would never have believed that she would have had the capacity to let go of the trauma of her past but she was prepared to try. On the day that she formerly forgave him, she wrote down twenty of the angriest, ugliest words she could find in the dictionary to describe him. She read all of them out loud to him and then told him, “I forgive you.” It was a life altering moment. She describes it as letting in fresh air; opening yourself up for new experiences instead of cluttering up your life with the past.

To be honest, I was too emotionally distraught by what had been done to these innocent girls, to even function for the rest of the day, let alone integrate her message of the importance of forgiveness. I actually even berated myself for putting myself through trauma when I was still so vulnerable…but her uplifting message, at the end, did blow me away.

During the next few days, the idea of forgiveness came up for me again and again. How important was it to forgive? Was I holding on to baggage from my past because I had not forgiven certain people in my life? I didn’t ask these questions consciously but this was the seed that was slowly integrating and germinating in my mind.

On the Saturday morning I woke up knowing that I had to write a letter to the man who I had fallen for and who had cruelly cut me out of his life because he didn’t have the capacity to love me. I had managed to bury it, which was very different from clearing it and letting it go. I immediately wrote the letter. It was amazing how the words just flowed out of me. At the end, I wrote, ‘I forgive myself for not knowing how to deal with and express my emotions appropriately and I forgive you for the perceived cruelty you displayed in your response’. I sent the email. I did not feel any lighter. In fact I had a good, purging cry. I almost felt lonelier and more isolated than I did before the letter. I suppose I was still projecting how this would have gone down in the past…either being ignored or a clinical response.

I then reached out to a friend of mine in the UK, who I longed to have closer in my life. I told her I needed my old friends more than ever. She responded with a warm, caring message and a link her son had sent her that morning. It was a lady called, Mabel Katz, an ex accountant who had given up her career to spread the philosophy of Ho’oponopono. I opened the link and the universe suddenly let out another big sigh of relief….

Ho’oponopono is the ancient Hawaiian system of….forgiveness. Yes, you heard me right…forgiveness. My friend did not have any idea that I had written a letter of forgiveness that morning or that this had been an insight I had been working with. To be honest, there wasn’t anything I found extremely profound about her talk. It was quite simplistic …there are basically two phrases to practise, “Thank you” and “I love you”…but I do know that when the universe comes into alignment with such astounding synchronisation, you have to take note and listen. I remained open.

During the time I was watching the video I had gotten a message on my phone to say that there was a reply to my email. He had always let me know, in the past, because he knew I kept email separate from my phone. All of this had been happening at the same time on an energetic level…k-ching…the universe bringing everything into alignment.

I must admit I was afraid to read his response but was pleasantly surprised. His response was open, caring, thoughtful, wise, well taken and even complimentary, at times. He had taken his time and had chosen his words with complete mindfulness. All the tears I had shed that day, purging my pain and re-opening past wounds, had been worth it. I was completely depleted but felt that I had just gone through an immense and profound shift. I replied with one aspect that I thought called for an immediate response and told him I would give his email my full attention at a later stage. I needed to rest and integrate what had been given to me.

Later that evening, I decided to look further into Ho’ponopono. I came across a book entitled The Huna; ancient wisdom for modern times by Mathew B. James. I purchased the book on my kindle and snuggled up on my bed, now intrigued by the messages that had arrived on my doorstep during the day. I would write my email reply a couple days later with new insights about disconnecting from people and re-connecting with them at a later stage. The intension of cutting the cord was because when we look at the people in our lives we view them with all the shared history attached. In order to renew a relationship, especially one with previous challenges, it is okay to disconnect from them to re-establish a fresh start with no past. I just knew that this was to be the next step in my journey back from break down. I could already feel those little roots beginning to push their way into the earth, as the old useless branches, began to fall to the ground. Winter was over and spring was just around the corner. If this was the start of things to come, perhaps I would land up being a healthy tree, after all.

May your light always shine brightly.

Lilith White.

Easy Reference to the pointers:-

Insight One – Stopping and Waiting

• The universe breaks us down to reawaken us for new growth.
• We need to allow the process by ‘stopping’ what we think we ‘should’ do.
• There is a plan for us and we will only hear the answers when we stop and listen.
• If we give in to ‘waiting’ our true purpose will arrive.
• When we are in alignment things will flow. If we force doing something and it creates anxiety, this is a red flag to stop.
• Be aware of synchronistic events that come into your life. Be open to listen to the messages and follow the signs when they arrive.
• Hand over to a higher power by letting go, letting God/Source.

Insight One – Stopping and Waiting

• Burying past events is not the same as letting them go.
• Carrying negative energy from the past can accumulate in your system. When you are carrying too much pain, it can result in a complete break down until you are ready to face it, forgive it and let it go.
• Practising forgiveness in a literal way, will release you and the other person from bondage to negative experiences from the past. The words, ‘I forgive you’ transform intension into reality.
• Ho’ponopono, the Hawaiian art of forgiveness advises us to use the phrases, ‘Thank you; I love you’, often to release and forgive a situation before it gets stored in our system as an unresolved issue.
• Forgiveness is not necessarily a two way thing. The other person does not have to respond for you to forgive them.
• There are no unforgivable transgressions. It doesn’t mean you have to like somebody or have that person in your life. All it means is that you forgive them in order to let them go.
• The Hawaiians also practised forgiveness towards themselves so forgive yourself often and be easy on yourself. You may want to forgive yourself for the part you played, at the same time as you forgive another. Forgiveness can be part of a more profound disconnection. A disconnection can be permanent or the connection can be renewed without the baggage from the past. The Hawaiian’s practised this often with the same person to keep relationships pure and free of the past.

If you are inspired by these new reflections of Lilith White you may be interested in reading my memoir,The Other Side of My Reflection by Lilith White. https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=The+Other+Side+of+my+Reflection+by+Lilith+White

References

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LjPv-yfsWE

The Huna; ancient wisdom for modern times by Mathew B. James

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4YbZzZUkKs