Marianne Williamson, A Return to LoveI love life. I believe that I have always loved life and have had a passion for life. As a young person, particularly during my teen years, I felt that my life was in danger…. not necessarily a physical danger but a danger of not being seen, heard or even acknowledged by the people that were most important to me…. my family. As I did not know anything else, part of me felt I had to accept the way I was being treated however my deeper self rebelled with a passion. I did not know it at the time but I had a strong spirit and a knowingness, even though consciously I was conflicted and in denial about many things. I believe that this strong spirit got me through the difficult years.
This story is about my transformational journey from the place I’ve just described to a new place… one of healing and integration. My journey began one day with the thought that I was looking at my life but wasn’t really living or experiencing it. I felt that something was missing…. a depth of feeling and presence that simply wasn’t there. The thought was that I would live out my years in this way until my retirement and old age without actually experiencing what life was really all about. There was a little voice inside that became louder and I realized I wanted more out of life.
Awareness came up around the desire to devote more of my time to healing my unhealed and unintegrated self. When I had heard about the intentional community known as the Toronto Institute of Self-Healing I was keenly interested in this different and unique aspect of therapy which was described to me as living with others in community who were doing their healing work…. and they call this experiential therapy.
This is where I met Dr. Ross Laing…. a very skilled therapist and very dedicated to his craft. I love working with Ross. What I feel is so different about Ross’s methods is that he has been able to see my deeper wounded self not known to other therapists and has been able to access those deeper parts, that in my perception, have been held in suspended animation for years as a result of previous wounding. There is more to this of course and I would like to describe this more fully in my next writing.
How has this intentional community helped me? The greatest change I have seen in myself is my ability to be more engaged and present with myself and others. This has changed the quality of my day-to-day life….. from one of being a bystander to one of being more fully involved in my life process. Heart centeredness with myself and others is another important aspect of the change. I have also learned to become a more spiritual person as a result of practising what we call The Five Tools, one of them being a meditative deep diaphragmatic breathing practice.
I want to say here that I am deeply grateful to myself and others in our community and to the members of our community house, for without them this process would not have been possible. I look forward to sharing more.
Nora-Julie
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