Where the Light Shines In: I’m Not Afraid to Break

“Happiness is a choice.” I say to myself and anyone else who will listen.

“Believe you can have it, and you can have it.” I repeat on a regular basis.

“The most important relationship you can have is with yourself.” I remind myself and the women in my women’s circle.

“Don’t be afraid to break. The broken places are where the light shines in.” I console myself.

These are all pieces of knowledge I have carried with me, truths I have embraced for my entire life, and even more intentionally for the last year.

And there I was, on a beautifully sunny Saturday afternoon just a few days ago, facedown on my own kitchen floor, right where the light shines in, knees tucked into my stomach, arms surrounding my head, fists on the floor above my crown, sobbing, utterly, helplessly, brokenly, owning my humanity, every bit of it.

Sobbing sobbing sobbing, my body shaking, wracked with uncontrollable outbursts of agony, my eyes flooded with cascades of tears that poured down my face, into my mouth, around my cheeks and into my ears. Snot filled my nose and my head, clogging up any chance of breathing normally.

And I cried and I cried and I cried.

My husband came around the counter from where he had been standing, where we had been talking, where I had begun falling apart, and he bent down in front of me and rested his hand on my back. After more than a decade together, he knows better than to attempt anything else. Just be there.

My Prescient Little Empath

“Have you ever cried like that Mama?” Celaya’s voice from a few days before broke into my head, through my wrenching cries. Now, as I was crying so hard my chest hurt, she and her sister were playing in the back of the house, laughing hysterically at some innocent escapade. But two days earlier this question had come out of nowhere.

I had looked into the backseat at her. “Cried like what?”

“Like when you’re crying so hard your body shakes, like you just can’t stop.”

“Yes, of course I have.”

“Why?” She asks, innocently. Why would a grown up cry like that, she was wondering.

“Oh honey, sometimes I just get really sad. Sometimes I hurt myself. Sometimes I let other people hurt me. Sometimes my emotions build up and I break. That’s when I cry like that. It’s a relief, a release. It’s where the light shines in.”

Back to today, here I was. Broken.

The Dam

Carlos and I had gotten into a ridiculous fight. Stupid. We fought outside in front of the world, at the Saturday morning farmer’s market downtown, where we had walked with our girls.

Everything had been fine. We had stopped at the bookstore, visited with locals, enjoyed our children, and then meandered our way to the market.

Which type of popcorn to buy from the vendor, a wrong word, a wrong look, an unpleasant exchange turned into a raging fire.

And neither one of us would back down.

So here we were, in front of our kids, in public, fighting, both puffed up, both squaring off.

We finally walked home, the kids headed off to the back of the house, and I made lunch, and while I was standing there, my mind began to spin out of control, the way it does when I’ve finally had enough.

We’d had enough of these stupid fights over nothing that resolve nothing over the last few months, and I finally whipped myself up into an emotional frenzy that pushed open the flood gates of anger and frustration, of ineptitude, and doubt and tore down the dam.

“Your Brain Lies to You” ~Ingrid Turner

“I’m not good enough. I can’t figure this out. I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing. This is all ending. My whole life is going to change. What will I tell my kids.”

This is the typical narrative, or one similar to it, that runs through my head anytime I fall down this hard. It happens to me every couple of years. I move forward on whatever path I am on, I feel inspired most of the time in my life. I feel good about where I am at. I am strong, smart, capable, and very confident.

But there is always some piece of a puzzle I am missing, some big thing that I need done that I can’t do myself, some big question I need answered that hasn’t come yet, or, as in this case, a hurdle that needs to be leapt over that I cannot leap over alone.

My husband loves me, deeply, endlessly, heartbreakingly.

He stands by my side through all my shit, all my rock climbing, all my growth, all my falls.

But I didn’t realize how much different this latest growth period has been from any other he’s been through with me, from any other in my life, really.

I finally calmed down, picked myself up off the floor with my husband’s help, and we hugged it out.

Yes, we agreed, we want to be together, we want to work together, we want to make our marriage work.

Those are always our ultimate agreements. We always come to those conclusions. We love each other, and we want to work together.

The Medium

I had already planned to attend an “Intuitive Meeting” that afternoon, and he was off to the pool with our girls.

“Are you sure you don’t want to stay home and get some of your work done? You might feel better?” Carlos asked me.

“Yea, I’m sure. I need to go to this. For some reason I just need to go.”

I had never been to an intuitive meeting, never met a medium or anyone who actively channels from the universe.

I was entering this world in baby steps, listening to my own intuition, reading other’s thoughts and experiences with intuition and the power of the mind.

I arrived at the woman’s house who invited me, a woman I met online “by chance,” a woman I had never met in person.

The medium, Ingrid Turner, had been invited by this woman, and as soon as I walked in I knew her.

We had never met, but Ingrid was exactly what I expected, fresh, earthy, looking ten years younger than her actual age, at least.

She sat straight up in her chair, barefoot in pants and a blouse, and I felt earth and wind flow from her. She felt good. Just good. She felt like she came from where the light shines in.

Real, authentic, alive.

In the circle we were about ten women, all of us older, all of us open. I think I was the least experienced of the group.

Baby Steps

I know nothing about chakras. I know nothing about channeling the spirit world. I meditate alone in the morning in silence. I know nothing beyond that, really.

We walked down and got settled into a circle in the homeowner’s backyard. Ingrid led us through a grounding meditation and explained her process.

She would approach whoever she felt called to approach, deliver a message from the universe and then answer any questions for the universe we had. If we wanted to contact a person who had passed on she would attempt to make contact.

“But,” she explained, “channeling isn’t an exact science, and I cannot make any guarantees. I may not be able to make contact with the person you are seeking.”

As she worked around the group, moving from one woman to another, delivering messages of health and healing, channeling spirits from the great beyond, I was intrigued, engaged, and open.

Every woman she spoke to felt moved, each woman seemed to get what they were hoping for.

“Brian.” One woman said. “His name was Brian, and he was my business partner before he died.”

“Hmmm…” Ingrid said. “Was he bald? I’m seeing a bald man.”

The woman smiled. “You know, he wore a sewn in toupee that he never took off.”

To which Ingrid replied, “Yea, it didn’t work for him.”

My Turn

Finally, she looked straight at me with clear blue green eyes from across the circle. “Shanna.” Her eyes locked onto mine. “I haven’t read you yet.”

“No,” I said, smiling easily from my position, seated with my legs crossed on a log. “But I’m not surprised. You get what you expect, and I always expect to go last at gatherings and in lines.”

“You’re not last.” She said, and she walked toward me.

“You know,” she began, crouching down in front of me in the tanbark, “as soon as you walked into the room I felt a vibrational connection to you.”

“Yea,” I smiled again. “I felt the same way.”

Then Ingrid closed her eyes for a moment, cocked her head, listening. Then she opened them and smiled.

“Oh,” she said, “you match people’s energy. That’s what you do.”

Oh. I startled a bit. I do do that. I never thought of it that way. Huh.

And then she began.

“I’m feeling masculine energy.” She said.

Yea, that makes sense, I thought. I always think of my energy as tinged with masculine energy. I thought she was talking about me.

Until…

“A husband? A father?” She asked me.

It can’t be my father or my stepfather because I’m not really close to either of them and there’s no emotional connection, deep or otherwise.

“Well,” I said. “He’s my husband and the father of my children.”

“Yep.” She said. “That makes sense.”

“You’re holding something back from him.” She told me.

No the fuck I’m not, I thought to myself. But I stayed open, interested to see where this is going. And why the hell we were talking about my husband. This was about my personal journey. My growth. My new awakening, my new career path, my self love and self care.

The Light Shines In

I had thought maybe I’d ask about where to go next with my writing, what to do next with my business. Why the hell were we talking about my husband?

“Yes,” she continued. “You’re on a personal journey and you’re discovering all of these wonderful things about yourself. You’re experiencing all of this joy inside of you.” she was speaking now in a rush of words.

And as she sped up, and her words began to fall perfectly into place, as I finally began to understand where she was going, where this was going, what her next words would be, “but you’re not sharing it with him,” the tears began to fall in a free flow down my face.

This was not sobbing.

This was crying. This was a release. The sobbing earlier had created a crack inside me, and this experience with this wonderfully intuitive woman blew that crack wide open and let all the light shine in.

“You need to share it with him. All of it. He wants to come with you. He will come with you on this journey. But you have to let him in.”

She went on as the tears kept up their steady stream down the course of my face, and I just listened, taking it all in.

“When you talk to him, he gets defensive, he puffs up, he gets real big, like a blowfish. And then you do the same thing.”

Yes. That is exactly what had happened earlier in the day.

“Don’t do that.” She said. “Don’t react. Stay calm. Be patient. Talk to him. He will come with you.

“Do you understand the role of the female? It is your job to lead, to guide, to rise up. Your job is to shine bright. The male role is to support you, to back you up. And he will. You just have to shine. Just shine bright. He’ll come with you.”

Now I’m Sobbing

“That did it.” Ingrid said quietly.

And she was right. That did it. That was what had been really missing for me on my journey, but I couldn’t see it before. I had been leaving my best friend and life partner, my bright shining light, in the dark.

Carlos and I fell in love in the first place because we had shared every single space of ourselves with each other, staying up all night talking and then waking up to talk more. We found each other in the dark, and we saw each other where the light shines in.

We knew every inch of each other’s insides and outsides. We had no secrets, no mysteries, no lies, no weak spots. We knew each other through and through, for twelve years.

But as I have ventured out into this new part of my journey through life I have forgotten to share with him.

I suppose I figured since this was a path of self discovery that he didn’t need to know, or that I didn’t need to share.

And neither of us had the tools to express what was happening or the enlightenment to even realize what was happening, so instead we fought. We fought like we never had before, because where we had always been perfectly fitted together like an intricate puzzle, looping into and over, up and around each other, light filling dark and solid filling space, we had allowed separation.

It was hurting both of us to our cores.

And here was this magical woman I had never met or heard of using her supernatural crow bar to pry me open so I could heal something I didn’t even know was broken.

Sharing

The rest of the circle went well – we laughed, we shared, we said our goodbyes. The women kept checking in with me, the only one who cried in the circle. “Are you okay?” They would ask.

“Haha.” I laughed. “Yea, I’m fine.”

I was. I was better than fine. I felt great. I have a keen ability to break down entirely into fits of sorrow, work through my pain physicallly, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and then find my happy place again quite quickly.

Now all I had to do was share.

I got home that afternoon, made dinner, went for a run, put the kids to bed, grabbed a bottle of cabernet and two glasses, and met my husband on the couch.

We sipped from our glasses, and I began my story.

When I got to the part where I started to cry in the circle, the tears welled up in my husband’s eyes. And then they spilled over onto his face.

Relief

He cracked wide open too. And all the light came pouring in.

We talked and talked and talked and talked.

And drank wine.

And talked, and I shared, and we shared.

“I’m so glad I can talk to you about all of this. I’ve felt so closed off, so separate. It feels so good to talk to you about anything again.” He said, my empathetic, deeply feeling, emotional husband.

“I forgot, Carlos. I don’t know how or why. I forgot that you’re not just some guy I happen to be married to, some guy who happens to be the father of my children. I forgot that you are my partner on this journey, a part of my soul, that we are traveling through all of it together.

“I won’t forget again.” I promised him, softly, earnestly.

Believe me.

I won’t.