(Short Sacred Experience, December 19, 2024)
Just as had happened a few weeks ago (but only one week after my pervious one), I had another spiritual experience as soon as I sat down in the living room. That morning, my therapist and I had been discussing a number of experiences from my childhood. I think they came into my consciousness because of the then-upcoming holidays.
I described how, in my youth (for about ten years) my mother would manage to have a “breakdown” of sorts on Christmas and contiguous days. She would sit in her bedroom or more likely the kitchen, where she could be seen, and cry her eyes out, all the while exclaiming that it was “all Annie’s (my) fault”. Was it? Of course not! My mother conveniently confabulated crap like this anytime she decided she was not getting enough attention.
There is an entire backstory as to why I was always blamed for her so-called problems, but she always summed it up perfectly by saying to me, frequently, that she “wished I had never been born” or that she “wished she could send me away to a Swiss boarding school”.
Why Switzerland? I think she read too many novels. Why me? I was born first, less than a year after she married my father. I stole her spotlight from him, and she never forgave me for it. Suffice it to say that she regularly succeeded in ruining everyone’s holiday.
There was also a strange pattern to these episodes, that I noticed even as a child: she pulled these stunts exactly every other year. Did she think that she had fooled us, by “breaking up” the pattern of her behavior? On the contrary, she simply added another, from those frightful in-between years: One year on, another year off, etc., etc.
To return to the discussion with my therapist, I gave him a vignette of how, on one of those excruciating Christmas days, she sent me to the neighborhood convenience store to buy a can of beans or something equally uninteresting. She told me to take all three of my younger siblings with me. To the best of my recollection, we ranged in age from my 10 years to my baby sister’s 3. After we all donned our coats, hats, mittens and boots, we trampled down the street in the snow. My mother did not realize that she had actually done us a favor by letting all four of us out of the house at once, because it created a short, but splendid, time away from her and my derelict father. I say derelict, because he never lifted a finger to quash her behavior; instead, he would drink.
What happened on our little treck to the store? I decided that we should take advantage of the short amount of freedom we were blissfully granted, and sing Christmas songs. The one that we all knew was “We wish you a Merry Christmas”, so that is what we sang, full-throatedly, both coming and going to the tiny shop that was built as part of the front of the owner’s house. As you have probably surmised by now, we did not live in a well-to-do neighborhood.
Upon quick reflection, my therapist said that my behavior as the eldest child was evidence, even then, of resiliency. I still have difficulty accepting that fact, but he already knows that.
Let’s return to the original point, shall we?
As I returned to my aforementioned favorite chair after the session, I once again felt a rather “light” version of my body becoming limp, and my eyes closing. Similarly to the Visit of the previous week, at first, I heard just one word: “Acceptance”. I then saw, in my mind’s eye, the photograph that I chose for the homepage of my website—the forest pathway with the rose-colored rays of the sun gently beaming down to the forest below.
I waited.
As I focused, in my minds eye, on the sweet beams of the sun, I heard “Rise above it”.
In fact, I heard this several times. I was confused at first, because the sunbeams are focused downward, and I was told to rise above it. As I sometimes do when I cannot initially decipher the meaning of the sacred message, especially when I am still in the trance, I accepted it, with the trusting belief that I would learn the meaning.
Much to my delight, within seconds of the end of my visit from the Sacred, I received a phone call that explained it all. Although the call is too private to disclose right now, I realized that the content of the conversation would make every difference in how I enjoyed Christmas this past year.
The Universe is amazing!
Very well written
Thank you, Ken!
Hi Ann. First, I’m deeply sorry that this type of childhood, exemplified by your story, is what you lived. And kudos to you for being in therapy. The first part of my answer is that I’m unsure about what happened here. The second part is that I would theorize this as a synchronicity or, more broadly, an anomalous experience. The collective unconscious and the Self know far more than we do. It’s possible that the attitudes or emotions of the person who made this “phone call” were experienced in the broad field of the unconscious as those attitudes and emotions moved the caller toward conscious action. The result is the phone call (assuming a concrete person was on the other end of the line). There is much we don’t know. This may have been a visionary experience, but I tend to reserve that term for experiences that inform the society in which we live.
Mary, thank you so very much for commenting here on my website to the question I posed to you elsewhere about my anomalous experiences.
I am intrigued by your thought that “someone” in the collective unconscious might have been reaching out to me at the time of the experience I described in this post. I will keep that in mind, especially if/when I experience more of that type.
However, this is but one of three types that I experience, the other two being visual (that I do describe as visions) and emotionally spiritual (I just came up with that) wherein I feel enormous love. I call those experiences “visitations”.
To add to that, I have also been visited five times by my late husband since his death, that were very recognizable as he, even in his soul form. In two of the visits, he used his “human” voice, so I recognized it as being his. When his soul spent three nights with me shortly after his death, it was a visual experience but I knew it was his soul, only because I “knew”. And I can’t explain that.
In contrast, the types of general experiences that I describe as spiritual, have no recognizable characteristics, including the voice, which is gender-neutral.
Also, I have a trance-like sensation before and through the spiritual experiences, that I have come to identify as parasympatheticly “limp” sensations, similar to being in a trance. I did not have that with any of my experiences with David.
I agree with you about synchronicity and wrote about one more experience that I had with David in that vein (“A Different Kind of Experience with David “).
All of this is by way of saying that I do agree with you that there is so much that we don’t know, and that is the impetus for writing my book. I intend to “put out in the Universe” what I am experiencing, in order hopefully to contribute to our universal knowledge and understanding, and to elicit the same from our fellow residents.
Thank you for this truly engaging conversation. I appreciate you.
Ann