September 11

Thirteen years ago, something unthinkable happened in America and it struck at the core of what they believed was their safe world. Thirteen years ago, I watched very briefly the fall of the twin towers after my assistant dragged me, at work, into the news room to watch a replay of what had just happened. Thirteen years ago, I had to walk away from the news room because I felt incredibly overwhelmed by what I was witnessing, albeit with a delay. I had just moved to the UK.

Since then, i have learnt to shield myself from the bombarding of terrible news that people who watch TV on a regular basis experience day in day out. I have learnt to see that there is a very real bias towards the bad and the ugly and that this conveniently feeds the fear that is already dormant in us. I have also realised that anyone in pain would create a similar pain in me and I couldn’t carry on taking on the pain of the world. Witnessing once the twin tower collision and the death of hundreds of people had me in tears. When I reached home that night, I went on my knees and prayed. I prayed for the people who had lost loved ones. I prayed for the world. I prayed for the mistaken souls who thought that they could claim to kill in the name of God. I prayed for peace.

When I woke up the next morning, I was inspired to do this mosaic (a picture of my mosaic will be inserted here as soon as I have a chance to get to my computer). I had never been inclined to think about angels before. I was only just getting used to the idea that I had a guardian angel. I had never seen the symbol OM before. And yet, there it was. All.

As I progressed into the making of the mosaic, my soul was looking for a meaning. What was this all about? An idea started to sprout in my mind. I wondered if those extremists weren’t speaking for the outrage of the Arabic world at what was being done in Israel to the Palestinian community. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t condone violence in any form. On any side. Not even when someone else started. I wouldn’t accept it from my kids, why is it considered acceptable by adults? I am myself French from Jewish ancestry but I prefer to see myself as a citizen of the world. I will not take sides.

I knew, however, that from all big tragedies, hidden blessings come, in time. And love and behold, as the months rolled over, some friends who lived in NY reported how people started talking to each other. How people were more helpful. The tragedy had turned what was a rather dehumanised city into a neighborhood. My heart started to warm up from the big freeze it experienced when witnessing the waste of so many lives. They had not died in vain.

But on the verge of a big war on ISIS by the USA, I can’t help thinking today that one message has been missed from the tragedy of thirteen years ago: the USA doesn’t seem to understand that the Arabic world needs respect. All my friends who had Arabic roots or who were married to Muslims and who lived in the US were being targeted by humiliating checks. It was happening before. It became worse after 2001. And unfortunately, I think it’s not getting any better.

Today I pray to the angels that not only the USA and the UK not go to war. I pray that all beings are considered equal. I pray that someone sees common sense and goes got the root of the ire of the Muslims (not all of them, of course, the extremists) and see the obvious link. It is so easy to overlook anger in the “minority” (I am laughing here because Islam is the first religion of the world) when you represent a country that chips in for the white Anglo-Saxon establishment. I pray that our leaders understand how arrogant they can come across. We know that in our schools, bullying cannot be tackled by threatening bullies. Bullies are usually individuals who have suffers abuse or neglect. Why can’t adults practice what they preach before hundreds and thousands of human beings are thrown into a bloody war?

Can’t we learn the lessons of the past?

Blessings

Ange de Lumiere

The death of a pet

It’s almost like there are two categories of people: those who have pets and those who don’t. Those who do, know that a pet is a presence that is as powerful as that of a human. The love they show is deep and meaningful. When their pet die, they are devastated, as if they had lost a family member. And there is a reason: they are.

Animals have souls. They understand a lot more than people even imagine that they do. They have feelings. They understand complex situations. Just because they can’t talk doesn’t mean they are dumb or don’t understand.

I have had the privilege of being invited by animals to communicate with them. And cats have entered my life as an adult, even though I had never been a pet person before. They have changed my life for the better.

And tonight, for the first time, I have had the privilege to help a cat cross the rainbow bridge to go to Cat heaven. And I want to say how moved and honoured I am. That cat was a true angel. This happened actually only a few minutes ago and although I had never met that cat in person, we had become good friends across the ether. I am not afraid to sound completely bonkers. Yes, I have been communicating with an angel cat that lives thousands of miles away from me in a country that I have never visited and tonight, I witnessed her departure for cat heaven. It was beautiful.

Her final message was “Death is not as serious as humans make it. It is not real.”

This does not mean that the grief you experience when you let dies is not real. Some people and kids in particular, are more affected by the death of their pet than anything else in the world. And this should be honoured the same as any other grief. Time is needed. Validation of feelings is paramount. And for children, this is often the first time they have to come to terms with death and impermanence. This subject should not be avoided. Answer is as best as you can. Don’t limit your answers to your own beliefs. Keep enough space for the child to make sense of it in their own way.

As you probably guessed, I want to dedicate this post to Pompi, the angel cat. She reached out to me and trusted me enough to allow me to hear her and to convey what she had to say to her owner. I feel incredibly privileged to have been given this opportunity. I also want to thank her owner for her trust in me. And for reaching out in the last hours of her pet so that I could support them both.

If you are interested in learning how to talk to your pet but more importantly how to hear them back, I can recommend a pet whispering home study course by Sarah-Jane LeBlanc. Sarah-Jane is a wonderful teacher who works in Scotland but who also travels in the UK to run workshops through out the year. If like me, you can’t attend one of those due to your own commitments, her home study course is wonderful.

Blessings

Ange de Lumiere

Can bad boys and bad girls go to heaven?

After much consideration I dived into a book that kept on floating by me on various posts on social media called “The afterlife of Billy Fingers”. I had read a pretty horrible comment about it on someone’s wall (a comment by a third party – not my “friend”) that got me thinking but I decided to stick with my gut instinct which told me now was the right time for me to read this book.

What I loved the most about the book is the fact that the spirit that leads us through the afterlife is a bad boy: drug dealer and drug addict. Now anyone who has been on a spiritual course or conditioned by religion would immediately tell you that this is bad and that such person could not possibly be spiritual. Doing drugs is bad. Dealing drugs even worse. No way. The new age gang would tell you (and I have to hold my hand up and say that I have been influenced by it) that the drugs compromised the aura of the person and that the person would attract negative entities. How could such soul ever reach the higher realms: no way.

Well the Afterlife of Billy Fingers challenges all of these myths and that is something that always appeals to me. A fresh new outlook on things without any myths or dogmas. Dogmas always appear to me to be man made and never feel like they come from any superior being that practiced unconditional love – which by the way is what my belief of God is. Every time someone who claims to speak in the name of God deviates from that unconditional love, I smell ego and manipulation. And I run in the other direction.

The book also confirms something that I read in Lisa Williams’ book (which I enjoyed as much as Annie Kugan’s book) which is that not everyone is allowed in the presence of the ultimate creator. It’s not a merit system. It’s based on “vibration”: and a lot of priests and nuns don’t pass the test. apparently, our Billy Fingers, drug dealer and addict, did. And I believe him. To me everything is about intent. If the intent is love, then nothing is low enough to corrupt us. Similarly, however, some things considers good can drive people to righteousness and to me defeat the very purpose they pursue. Religion comes to mind but also veganism and other lifestyle or belief based decisions that can lead to extreme judgment of people who don’t live lives as “holy” or “pure” as others.

God’s law does not work that way. It is all based on love and compassion.

So yes, bad boys and bad girls do go to heaven as well as priests and nuns. But things are rarely what they appear to be. There is a point in the book where Billy Fingers attends a ceremony where he releases his identity as attached to his past lives and personalities and the being of light in charge of such ceremony sings “the bigger the lotus, the deeper the mud” as she places a flame in each of the lotuses that represents one’s life. How can you grow the most compassion if not in the most challenging circumstances.

So suddenly, our misery can become the fertile soil where our lotus flowers grow. They were never the doings of karma. They were our own choices. How beautiful is that? So we can look at all of circumstances and ask ourselves: what can I learn from this? If you get “That the human race is rotten” I think you might be missing the point.

When I finished the book, I felt I was losing a friend. In reality, I wasn’t because what I learnt from it and the enjoyment I got from it will stay with me for a long time. I very rarely read books more than once but this might just be one of those that I do.

Blessings,

Ange de Lumiere

Holiday read

I thought since I am on holidays, I would are a break from the death and dying topic and indulge in a summer read. It so happens that my other half offered me the first novel published by JK Rowlings after Harry Potter which I let gather dust on my shelves due to the fact that I read so few novels. My life is so full on, I don’t really need extra entertainment.

So I sit down in our lovely holiday cottage overlooking the St Michael’s amount bay in Cornwall, the sun creating hues of pinks and blues over the calm sea and open my holiday book, looking forward to some light entertainment. Not even two pages into the book, the main character collapses as he steps out of his car to take his wife for their wedding anniversary to the Golf restaurant. And he dies. What?

So much for a break form death and dying. And yet, I am not surprised. Death and dying might be a conversation killer if you refer to real deaths but if you talk about the latest book, you are on a winner: murder mysteries, thrillers, horror and war novels sell very well indeed. In fact, as an author, you had better kill at least one of your character or you are out. Death is entertainment. Not to mention it now pervades most kids video games, even if it’s with legal figures. But talk to them about death and mortality and you might scare the little cherubs.

Isn’t it insane? The less we are willing to talk about death as part of life, the more it gains footing in our fantasy world. It also seeps into the news which is rehearsed twenty four seven now. In the times of my grand parents, the news was a once a day event. I don’t know if the news was always about catastrophes, wars, crimes and murders but it is now and it is rehearsed ad nauseam. But try to talk to someone about your Dad who is dying and you will soon create vacuum around you.

I put my holiday read down. I am not sure what to do now. Do I really want to continue at the risk of facing more deaths? I was supposed to have a break. Oh well. It’s all spoilt now. I might as well get on with blogging.

Blessings

Ange de Lumiere

Suicide

I heard about Robin Williams’ suicide with great sadness. It’s made me think of how religion has casted out people who took their own lives by refusing to bury them. I like to see them with the eyes of love. People who commit suicide have reached a point where life does not seem bearable anymore. I know all too well what it feels like. I have been there more than once. Only, I never had the “courage” to act upon those feelings of extreme distress. It does take courage but I want to say here that it’s extremely rare for people not to reflect upon such times and not be glad that they didn’t succeed in their attempt.

To understand suicide, you have to understand that the mind is a trap. That thoughts create illusions. Only a few days ago, I felt that someone close to me didn’t love me, only to find out that this was not true. It is thus of the outmost importance to understand that most of our suffering is caused by faulty thinking. We are not our thoughts. Our thoughts come and go. However intense our feelings are today, they may change tomorrow.

Of course when alcohol and recreational drugs take over, it’s a whole different ball game. Professional help is needed. Unfortunately, this can only be sought by the person suffering from the addiction and they rarely do. What alcohol and drugs do to the aura is seriously compromise it. It creates holes which make the users vulnerable to negative energy and so they get weaker and weaker. It’s a downward spiral as the negative energy attracts more negativity and pulls them down. I would like to see these people helped by energy workers who can repair their aura and clean it to help them get a fresh start.

I can’t help thinking that people who feel like committing suicide have fallen into a black hole where they can’t feel love or anything positive. If they die of their attempt, the risk is that they will not be able to go beyond the illusions of their own thoughts and refuse to move into the light of the afterlife. They get trapped in the astral realms. This is the stuff of what people call ghosts, souls who are lost between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Angels come to reach out for them, but the souls cannot always see them or accept to cross over, especially if they are held back by worries about their loved ones.

Mediums report that all souls who commit suicide regret it once they cross over. They all see how things weren’t as bad as it seemed. They all want to comfort their loved ones about how they are now ok. They need our love, collectively, more than anyone else does. And of course the ones who loved them and who are left behind.

Perhaps people like me, who have been in those dark corners need to come out and share with the world that we have been there and that we have come back. Others need hope. Others need to know that all things come to pass even dark feelings. So hang in there. I am sending you love. I am sending you angels.

Today, I am asking the angels to build a bridge of light so that the souls that have died can cross over and also asking for a super big dose of love and angelic help for those left behind who risk tormenting themselves about what they could have done to prevent it. The truth is: there is probably nothing they could have done. And even if there was, guilt is not going to bring their loved ones back. All guilt does is destroy the lives of the people who survive: it doubled up the damage. People who truly intend to put an end to their lives rarely talk about it to anyone. Finding peAce for those who have lost a loved one to suicide is particularly difficult. Let’s hope that for them, love will win.

Blessings

Ange de Lumiere

The last stage of grief: acceptance

I am referring again to Elsiabeth Kubler-Ross’ work on the five stages of grief. The last one, acceptance, is often the most difficult for both people who are dying and people whose loved ones died of a sudden death that feels like it happened before their time or in a shocking way. How can you come to accept the unacceptable?

Where do we start? There are situations that can be put right, but death is not one of them. One belief that comes in the way of healing (and grief is a healing reprocess) is to expect life to be fair. We resist acceptance when we consider that something that happened to us is unfair. Of course, if we feel that it is unfair, then we must honour that feeling but with the knowledge that it will pass. All feelings, however intense, come to pass. We need patience. Patience with the storm of feelings that assault us. Patience with the process that sometimes feel like it’s going more backwards than forward.

Two things can help us soften the wound that the loss inflicted on us. The first one is knowing that the deceased is happy and well. This confirmation cannot happen until we have processed all our anger, denial and other strong feelings associated with the loss. We have to have come to some level of peace. Nothing good can be achieved in a storm. Once this happens, two conditions have to be met: that the person be open to the fact that we survive our deaths and that they go to a competent medium that can give them evidence of such nature that they know without a shadow of a doubt that it is them that speak from the afterlife.

Unfortunately, most religions forbid such communication, which means millions of people are deprived of the peace they could experience by having such an experience. And atheists are not much better either, as it is their own beliefs that come between themselves and that sense of peace. My aunt was one of these people. She died three years ago of lung cancer and she would not even accept someone praying for her soul. Forget about healing too. She told me through a medium after her death (yes these people do come through mediums too after they die and they are usually very grateful to have a chance to do so) and told me how wrong she was and how right I was.

But there is a second way to find that peace. The second way is to let go of our victim attitude and embrace forgiveness. How do we do that when someone or life has done us wrong? My grand mother lost her husband (well, he died) when he was forty, and she was left with three teens to look after on her own, which in the fifties was no small feast. She became embittered by what life did to her. The bitterness, of course, came from unresolved anger at life but also at him for abandoning her like this. It is very hard to actually own the anger we might feel towards a deceased loved one. Being angry at the dead is not usually socially acceptable. Being angry at our sister, best friend, neighbour, who are not as good people and who have it better than us, is a way, but we can’t hold onto to this because it comes in the way of our happiness.

We need to come to a point where we realise that holding on to that bitterness and anger is hurting us: no one else. And so we need to embrace the idea that if we let go of it, we might make way for peace and even in time happiness. We would open the door to good things coming our way. We can turn the page. Our long we take the turn the page is entirely personal to us. It cannot be rushed. But it might help to know that this is available to us in the future.

It’s not that we would forget our loved ones and what happened. How could we? That will never happen. It is more that we move on and start rebuilding our lives. Acceptance might be a word that does not adequately describe this process. The loss will always be there. But it’s good to know that our loved ones do not want us to put our lives on hold. They want us to be happy. They want us to heal. They want us to continue to live happy fulfilling lives. Nothing could make them happier actually.

So we ought to do this grief properly for our sake and for their sake. And if you will forgive me for saying, for the sake of society. We need more happy, balanced and fulfilled people.

Blessings

Ange de Lumiere

Miscarriages

I had a vague feeling that miscarriages weren’t all that we perceive them to be from a very human and limited perspective. Yet I struggled to see how this could be part of a bigger plan. Losing a baby in the womb, however small, even only eight weeks old is a devastating experience for parents. What is the point of the pregnancy happening at all?

I have heard from various sources, including the ground breaking books by Michael Newton, that the soul chooses both her parents and her life plan before incarnating. That makes a lot of sense, even though I had moments of doubts myself as I went through so much heartache with my mother and grieved over the mismatch that we were. At one point, however, I was able to switch from victim to victor and see that I had chosen her and that she taught me more by showing me what not to do then by doing the right thing. It is a far more powerful way to teach, in fact, because you live with the consequences of bad choices.

I had a feeling that souls hover their parents for some time before their bodies are conceived. In fact, I felt my younger daughter hover over me for years. I first heard her say “mama” in the quiet of the night in my London flat in 2001, ten years before she was born. In the year or two preceding her conception, I had become obsessed with her. She had already given me her name. Why wasn’t she coming then? I guess she had to wait for both me and her Dad to be ready. Her Dad took a lot longer. I can laugh about it now.

What I didn’t wasn’t aware of was that the screening for parents by souls waiting to come back can involve several potential parents. It is a complex process as both the soul’s interests and the parents’ own interests have to be considered. Elders are involved in helping with such choices. So it is perfectly possible that a pregnancy is started and that the soul changes its mind about incarnating, at any point. And there might not be another soul that choses to take such opportunity.

The soul does not tie itself to a body until the very last moment, that is to say, days or even hours before the birth. It hovers around but it is not tied in with what people call the silver cord that enables the soul to remain with the body for it’s lifetime, whatever its duration. Let’s say it’s not committed. It can change its mind at the last moment. This is when miscarriages and still birth happen. A truly heart breaking event for the mother and father but not for the soul. Sometimes it is not the soul’s choice. The soul is being shown by the Elders that the parents have other challenges to deal with or maybe that they are not ready to deal with the baby.

I once met a woman who had twelve miscarriages. And one surviving child. Her child had Asperger’s syndrome and his care took over her life. I am not sure how she would have coped with raising another child, especially since she was a single mum. You could wonder why she got pregnant in the first place. I supposed that would have been her will to do so, which might not have been for her highest good. Either way, I could see it was heart breaking for her and that she endured a huge amount of heartache. She was also angry at the unborn souls.

A client of mine who had already two beautiful children. Before her first child was born, she had been using recreational drugs. And she often said that her first baby was an angel that came to help sort out her life. That was very clear. But for some reason during her third pregnancy, she fell back into her old ways and was in a very dark place. It feels to me as though her unborn child was shown that this time around, my client needed to deal with her unresolved issues. I am not God. I cannot say for sure. And I hope that none of what I write here offends you. I am trying to show that however painful it is for us down on Earth, in heaven, such events are not as dramatic as the unborn soul can come later when the parents are ready or find another family to match them.

Our unborn children may or may not come to us when we are better prepared or when we have better co-parents. However hard it is to fathom at such times, perhaps we can entertain in our minds that there is a bigger purpose, a higher wisdom, that leads to such events happening. But if that doesn’t open our hearts to healing, we can just soothe our pain with the fact that these little unborn souls are not suffering the way we are.

Blessings

Ange de Lumiere

Practice dying now

I committed to live this year as if it was my last one and part of it is practising dying. Inspired by the book by Stephen Levine called “A year to live” he suggests practising dying by embracing illness whenever it knocks on our door.

Before I go any further, let me say that to me, illness and death are two entirely separate process: I intend to die in full health and wellness. Our society however blurs the boundaries between the two. This is probably a result of our unhealthy lifestyles. By the time we reach our fifties or sixties, we are usually plagued by ageing illnesses which foundation is usually unhealthy eating, unhealthy thinking, unhealthy management of emotions and lack of appropriate exercise (and not enough laughing). All chronic illnesses find their hold on us on the back of a compromised immune system and the immune system is compromised by the four elements above taken individually or in combination.

I don’t intend my death to be illness related nor for it to be painful. I am inspired in this by yogis and yoginis (female yogis) who, when reaching a high level of devotion and enlightenment, leave their bodies to enter the spirit world at will. Yes you read me right, they know when their time is right and when death is the next step of enlightenment: they simply jump out of their bodies and snap the silver cord. One minute they can be discussing with friends, the next they are gone. Now that is something to aspire to. Ending up senile in an old people’s home, well, doesn’t really rate as high in my world.

This being said, I thought I would give Stephen Levine a fair chance and embrace his concept of loving the illness instead of resisting it. The moment I decided to do this, my body gratefully obliged and manifested an acute tennis elbow. How kind of it to give me a chance to practice so soon after my resolution. My body is a trusted companion for growth. I say this with a hint of sarcasm but I am actually very grateful to it. One thing I don’t do well though is illness. I am such a poor “patient”.

Like most people, I resist illness. You only have to see the campaigns of charity for heart disease or cancer to see that as a society we wage a war against illness: we don’t look at it holistically. But illness is a part of us. It is created by the body. It is not something you wage a war against. This defeats the whole purpose of illness.

Illness is a language that the body speaks to bring your attention to something that needs changing in your life. It’s a wake up call. A common cold is a sign to slow down. Popping pain killers and cold suppressors like smarties may keep you functional but the price to pay is high: you haven’t listened to your body. Your body asked for rest. Not giving it what it needs compromises the immune system. and if the cycle continues, the body will create more colds, then perhaps a more chronic illness. It escalates, the same way that we tend to raise our voices if we are trying to put a message across someone and they don’t listen.

As a holistic practioner, I can look at my tennis elbow holistically and still resist the pain. I know for a fact I was cursing my elbow and the impact this inflammation had on my lifestyle. I can hardly reach out to put the kettle on. Before that, my body had manifested a virus that had me coughing for seven weeks. I had started practising being grateful for it, as I could see that it was clearing some deeply embedded feelings of sadness but it’s obvious I failed at totally embracing the process because my body created a new discomfort: a new dis-ease. I am not surprised for two reasons: I have been burying my feelings deep inside for decades and it’s hard to break the habit of fighting pain.

My recent yoga practice had helped me tremendously in this process as often, yoga asks you to breathe into the pain to release it, so this is what I am doing. I do more yoga and less pills. I still do the pills a little bit at night when the pain gets so intense that it would stop me from sleeping but the rest of the day: more breathing in and out. More appreciation that my body is working very well: it had an inbuilt mechanism that means when I abuse it, it tells me through pain. How can I see illness or dis-ease as a nuisance anymore? It’s like a best friend who refuses to tell me what I want to hear and instead tells me what I need to know. All I need to do is learn to listen.

All is well.

Blessings,

Ange de Lumiere

A road less travelled

My grieving process has been “unusual”. The inverted comas come because although there has been some mapping of the grieving process, by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, I believe we are each unique individuals and our grief is unique too. It’s messy, loopy and irrational: how can it be mapped.

And to be frank, life is like that too and we have a tendency to try to rationalise everything and as we do that, in an effort to gain control over something that quite frankly we have no control over whatsoever, we tend to kill the poetry of life. Life has its own logic, which can only be understood with the heart. The mind is useless for that.

The five stages of grief (the map) are like this: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

I never did the denial thing. In fact, I knew my Dad was dying nine months before he did. I knew he was living his last months long before the doctors gave him a death sentence. And when they did, he only had four weeks to live, in their books. This was a gift and a curse. A gift because it enabled me to get my priorities right. A curse because I was the only one to see this (everyone else was in denial except for my Dad) and I found it hard to be operating in reverse from everyone else. My mother kept on saying it wasn’t necessary for me to visit. She kept on sending me away. I kept coming back. Overall it was more of a gift than a curse. And I hope that with time, more and more people will live with their intuition turned on and this will enable them to live their lives to the full.

I did the anger ok, but instead of it happening after he died, I did it five months before. I was pushing my Dad in his newly acquired wheelchair along the local promenade and the way people looked at my Dad made me angry. I am not sure it was not all in my head: what I saw in their eyes. But I had years of experience from my lovely aunt who was wheelchair bound all her life and who often found people didn’t talk to her at all. They treated her like people treat children in the care of others. My sister told me that when she took her to the doctor, he talked to her and not my aunt. Weird.

Bargaining: didn’t do that.

Depression: didn’t do that. In fact, the mere fact someone could consider grief as depression angers me. Grief is not a mental illness. Depression is. Why are the two so often confused? Feeling sad and tearful. Being overwhelmed by negative feelings. Not knowing if one can go on. It might look a lot like depression but it’s not. Depression is a result of unresolved grief. Grief, if embraced fully, is actually a very healthy process, and wonderfully messy. When you puncture that balloon, it can fly into the room making rude noises and going mad in all directions. Kids delight in that. So should we.

Acceptance: the lack of acceptance that death is as much a part of life as anything else is what plagues our society. If we understood that every breath we take could be our last one, would we waste our life doing things we hate? Allowing people to walk all over us? And as a consequence making others miserable? Remember the five regrets of the dying? We should have those as fridge magnets or screen savers. And work towards our dreams.

Sure, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross had a good map, for people who live in denial of death and who bottle up feelings. We all do to a certain extent. But for those who refuse to conform and who live in the present moment, the map is not the territory. And that territory is so much more vibrant.

When I trained with the Penny Brohn Cancer Care, I worked with women who had breast cancer and most of them had denied themselves for decades. And so of course when faced with a potentially terminal illness, very strong emotions surfaced. Had these women learnt to self care and refrain from putting others first all the time, they might have never had the cancer in the first place. Breasts are about nurture. Could breast cancer be about lack of self care? One of them had deeply embedded bitterness about sacrificing herself. It took a long time to unravel all those unprocessed feelings.

Let’s not wait until our bodies are hurt by those unresolved feelings to do the work. Let’s own our feelings and let them bloom openly: the good, the bad and the ugly. I am not saying this will prevent us from dying: we are all going to die one day, but it will ease the process by not leaving everything for the last moment. Let’s start the healing process now and stop sugar coating everything. Let’s stop pretending everything is ok when it’s not. It’s not being negative. It’s being real. Let’s stop pretending negative feelings are bad. Let’s own our shadow. What you repress goes underground. It doesn’t disappears, it grows. If you let it out safely, it dissipates. And that’s the path to peace.

Blessings,

Ange de Lumiere

Watching superman

It happened the other day. I was watching Superman with my kids and when his Earth Dad dies, it hit me. My Dad had died too. The pain was instant. The sadness intense. I would never hug him, watch his beautiful smile or hold his hand ever again.

When is this going to end, I asked myself. It doesn’t. Grief doesn’t end. It’s just that the edges soften. I still miss my grand mother and she has been gone over thirteen years now.

When I reflected upon grief as a process, I was shown an image: a balloon. Grief is like a balloon. A big balloon. It presses on us. It invades our lives and takes a lot of space. Every time we allow our true feelings to come out though, we release a little bit of the air in it. If we suppress our feelings, though, be it with distractions, medication or keeping a stiff upper lip, the balloon remains intact, waiting to be dealt with at a later date. Every tear we shed, on the other hand, alleviates the burden.

Any grief that remains unresolved will clump itself on the next grief that comes up in our lives. So for example, if we haven’t properly grieved our mother when she died, this will catch up with us when our Dad dies.

We do it at our own pace, but we must be brave enough to face our feelings. The whole rainbow range of them: sadness, anger, resentment, regrets, doubts, guilt, despair, but also gratitude, pride, love, laughter, because these will come up too.

I recently found out that my mother is on sleeping pills, antidepressants and tranquiizers. I am not surprised. She always preferred taking pills over doing the work. And besides she believes that displays of affection are obscene. She is definitely part of the stiff upper lip club. I don’t think I have ever seen her cry. At the same time, her body is screaming. She is in intense pain: severe arthritis. To me, it looks like internalised pain: her illness is a direct result of her emotional constipation. She will never be able to see that. Most people don’t. And yet, as a holistic practitioner, I can tell you they are. What the heart cannot say, the body will. And the more you will ignore your emotions, the louder the body will speaks.

There is no need to feel guilty about being ill, but we all need to see that our bodies store our unresolved emotions. Until we open the lid and let out emotions out, health and wellness is often always a step away from us.

Blessings

Ange de Lumiere