Title: Pathworker

Gender: Female

Age: Ageless

Sun Sign: Scorpio

Chinese Sign: Wood Horse

Location: Atlantic Highlands, NJ

“There's a crack in everything, that's how the light get's in.”
Leonard Cohen I love that Leonard Cohen quote. It says it all for me.

I've been on the journey for 35+ years. I was a malcontent. After a bad LSD trip at 14, I was shipped off to a boarding school in Virginia a few days later and found myself in a state of existential angst commonly called depression saying to myself  “there must be more to life than this!?”. I considered suicide, but I had this one very troubling thought. What if you kill yourself and because you killed yourself, you go someplace worse and you can't get out of it. It would be like a big cosmic joke. Well, it was a possibility so I had to consider it.

So I didn't want to die, but it took me a while before I really wanted to live. I started looking for the answer to my question.

Krishnamurti had given me hope that your whole existence could change in the blink of an eye and I came to believe “why not me”. At 21 I had a spontaneous kundalini experience after being thrown from a horse. Talk about being rocketed into the fourth dimension!. When it happened, I understood what was happening. It was incredible. My negative energy flipped into positive and I immediately began experiencing the laws of attraction and manifesting.

And then -  alot of other stuff happened.

I wear a few different hats:

• mother of three sons (18, 20, 22) all artists and musicians
• painter (click on my photos to see some of my paintings) - God Box collage artist - knitter
  
• singer / songwriter
  
• 4th year Pathwork student http://www.pathwork.org .

My beloved partner Michael, the love of my life, died July 24th.

Michael was a wonderful creative spirit, advertising creative director, assemblage artiste, muse, hysterically funny man who made me laugh everyday, loved me in spite of myself, a warm, caring, loving, giving man, a poet and teacher. He was involved with the Foundation for Shamanic Studies for many years and traveled all over the world to better understand how various cultures practiced the Shamanic arts.

For me, watching Michael slowly dematerialize from this form was the most challenging, heart opening, image shattering and soul stirring experience.  I learned about the “wounded healer”. that there are many ways we heal and some of them have to do with getting phisically better and some do not, but healing still takes place.

I witnessed a miracle at the end of Michael's life. He had been unable to speak for over a year and in the end he was unable to even lift a hand. He could not move. The day before he died, his breathing became very intense. I didn't believe he was in physical pain, but I wasn't so sure by the looks of his breathing. Our hospice nurse assured me that this was a part of the dying process and she also agreed she didn't think he was in pain. His breathing reminded me of childbirth. He continued this breathing through the night into the next day.

Towards the end of the day his breathing began to slow down and we knew he was in the final dying stage. As he was taking his final breaths he looked right at me and began to speak. He could not make his voal chords work, but he spoke anyway. It was like watching a tv with the mute button on. I knew intuitively he was expressing his love and appreciation of my seeing him through this part of his life's journey. There was a woman with me who Michael had mentored in Shamanic healing who was helping Michael with some Shamanic rituals used when a person is crossing over. I didn't know it at the time but she could read lips (what are the chances!?!) and she confirmed for me what Michael had said.

Then Michael began telling me about what I sensed was the meaning of his journey / life / whatever you want to call it. I was always curious about why a man who was the most articulate person I had ever met would have an illness that would deprive him of speech and writing abilities. I sensed that he needed to experience his life without the things that had allowed him to control his world, his ability to communicate with words. I thought perhaps he had been too dependant on words.

I looked at him and said (like in Jeopardy - the answer is…) “You don't need words?” He made a fist, squeezed his eyes shut and threw his head and fist forward saying YES!!!, the way someone does when their favorite team scores a touchdown. He confirmed for me that I had hit the nail on the head. I was awestruck. I knew Michael was unable to make facial gestures much less make a fist and shake it. He reanimated his crippled body. According to the doctors, this wasn't possible. At the end, he was totally conscious and more powerful than I had ever seen him in his life. Before he took his final breath, he closed his eyes. Ten hours later, when the funeral home came to take him away, his body was still warm.

Though I miss Michael's physical presence very much, I just feel very blessed to have shared the journey with Michael. I now firmly believe the only thing we do take with us is the love we give and the love we receive and when I drop into the love I feel for him, I can feel his presence.

May God bless you

“Don't prolong the past. Don't invite the future. Don't fear appearances. Don't alter your innate wakefulness. And there's nothing more than that” Ram Dass