
Pointe L’amour Lighthouse, Labrador
It’s been just a little over a year (January 17, 2015) since I started this blog. My first post was as raw as it gets. I had just realized the extent of the wounding in my heart. It was agony to deal with it. I want to record a brief history of how I have arrived where I am today, for the record.
Back in 2012, I had originally envisioned becoming a Feminine Power coach with Katherine Woodward-Thomas and Claire Zammit. I also had, in this vision, some kind of idea that I would be teaching with horses and using equine wisdom. It was a huge vision and at that time the Feminine Power community was not offering any coaching training. I spoke to my sister about it and she encouraged me to join the Simply Woman Accredited Training with Crystal Andrus Morrissette. I was accepted into SWAT in November of 2013. (This was an excellent decision and I have had a return on my investment approximately one hundred fold already and still have not completed the certification process. Crystal and her community are absolute angels in my life.)
The thing was that in my personal life I had separated from my husband in May of 2012 and the divorce was finalized on February 14th of 2013. We had five children together and a 36 year marriage. There was a lot of baggage, to say the least. After the divorce I still had so many family possessions plus the family pets (two cats and two dogs) to deal with. I was convinced that I could move on and start over rapidly. I certainly did my best to do just that. However, I was pushing through while handicapped by this broken heart, not realizing the consequences of neglecting its messages. I did not know that I had a broken heart. It is simply not in our culture to admit to such a problem.
During the year of 2014, I had invested a lot of time and money in becoming an entrepreneur and a life coach. I felt an urgency to get out there and really help others. I enrolled as a Dream Builder Coach with Mary Morrissey in March of 2014 because her system was aligned with how I understood the art of manifestation. I found it brilliant.
Then, at the invitation of Crystal Andrus Morrisette I went to Toronto in May of 2014 to be part of a workshop taught by a business coach, whom I shall name Wanda, this is not her name. I do not want to reveal who she is because this is not about bashing her at all. It was a three day sales and money business training. She was offering an exclusive “Circle of Life” business coaching opportunity and we were all encouraged to fill out the application and see if we could be accepted. There were two options, either a one year membership, or a lifetime membership. When I filled it out I applied for the lifetime membership. The next day Wanda took me aside and told me that she saw something in me that she wanted to work with and told me that I was accepted. The thing was that she accepted me only for the one year. I overrode my qualms about the pressure of having a one year deadline to get a business off the ground, when in reality I had no business, and be successful. I accepted her offer and signed on the dotted line. I was thrilled at the time and felt that I was guaranteeing my success in this field.
I worked very hard during that year and even went through two other programs with Mary Morrissey as a Life Mastery Consultant and with Quantum Leap. This program is about changing the way you think in order to attract greater abundance and prosperity in your life. It is the law of attraction, but university style. I went to the US three times, once to the central US to participate in another of Wanda’s training’s, once to LA for the Life Mastery Training and then back to LA in late October for a women’s conference organized by Wanda. I went to this conference only because I could hear Wanda’s desperation about needing support in order for it to come together. It was a huge effort and I think she got very little financial compensation from it, from my perspective. It seems like it was a huge disappointment to her. I was broke going there and it made me so stressed out that I was not coping well at all. My behaviour was out of order. Some of the experiences I had while there were bizarre. Wanda resented having to deal with me in this state.
Parallel my personal life, I had started a relationship with a man in mid 2013 and I decided to move so that I could pursue that relationship. I rented an apartment near him, in an isolated village. It allowed me to start over. There were many good things about that decision. It was because I was trying so hard to make it work with him that I bought Wanda’s setup because her husband is of similar fabric as this man was. I can remember having made the decision to leave that relationship on the way to Toronto just before the workshop with Wanda. But, during the workshop I had an intuition that I should stay with him and that there was something valuable for me to learn. I have always listened to the voice of my intuition which is what led to me signing up with Wanda and to continue to try to make things work with this man. However, I left that relationship with him in early November of 2014, right after coming home from the women’s conference. I woke up out of the trance I was in and got out before being crushed by his oppressiveness. I moved again, this time into a little house in Williamstown, a village where I finally began to address this heart of mine.
By January of 2015 I had a breakdown. I got on the phone for a call with Wanda and a small group in the circle and told them how I was feeling. Wanda called it “hitting a wall”. She seemed to be compassionate on the call and encouraged me to write which is why I started this blog. Over the course of the next few weeks it dawned on me that she had washed her hands of me because I was excluded from further contact with the group. She had decided that I was not doing what she had planned so I was not welcome to participate in their activities. She did not like my behaviour. This was extremely difficult for me to deal with as I really needed support. In fact, I was so driven to accomplish my goal of being a life coach that I had hired, behind her back (in December of 2014), another coach who actually got me doing videos and getting something concrete out there using the Dream Builder system. When Wanda found out she became very angry and said words to the effect that she should slap me. I no longer wanted to speak to her either. I ended the coaching contract with the man who was actually getting me to produce good work, and sank into despair. I take full responsibility for everything that happened in terms of my coaching contract with Wanda. I feel it was an expensive learning experience. One of the many lessons I learned from this is that being a coach is a sacred contract and it must be carried through to the end, no matter how difficult it proves to be. That is the way I see it in terms of my own coaching business. That was a major lesson and it will serve me well.
Fortunately, I still had the Quantum Leap program and Mary Morrissey’s weekly calls to nourish and support me through that time. I also had the SWAT community and their support system. I began the work of tending to my broken heart. In doing so, I have found my life’s work, my path, and it is very rich and rewarding. As a part of my healing I used Mary’s voice to write over the frayed and disjointed programming in my nervous system. I used what she said as a healing agent to rewire and re-knit my heart to myself, to my own soul. Attachment is the first connection we have as a fetus to our mother. It is so vitally important that if a baby does not have some kind of attachment they will die, even if every physical need is taken care of.
Attachment and love are one and the same, so, if there was something off in our initial attachment with our mother then everything else in our lives is colored by that issue. For example, when I was a fetus I was floating around perfectly joyously until the stress my mother was under came through into my system. I could feel her despair as she realized what this pregnancy was doing to her perfect plan for her life. She was now going to be forced to marry someone she did not love in order to protect the family name in the name of the Catholic church. I got the idea, the false belief that I was not wanted even before I was born and had any language to express it. It became part of my most primitive survival mechanism, the amygdala being the first formed part of the brain. My brain was formed with this belief and it made me feel that I was not safe. The amygdala is like a crocodile, it cannot be reasoned with, it just feels. In order to change that programming you have to go very deep and clear out all kinds of cellular debris. I understand how attachment works with every cell in my body, with all the particles of my soul. I can sense that connection within myself and in doing so, perhaps I can help others heal themselves as well.