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The last few months have been tough for me, I have to admit. If you’ve been following my blog you’ll know that my Dad died from Alzheimer’s recently, and I found out 2 hours after the funeral that he’d changed his will and disowned me.
Whoa. I had some major processing to do about that!
It felt like a pretty big kick in the teeth, and I wasn’t sure how to deal with it. But, I’ve recovered from worse things in the past, that much is true, and I’ve gained many tools over the years. So… I tried to bring all of my psychological understanding and skills to the problem.
Some of my best skills are around reframing the meaning of things – both challenging and changing my faulty beliefs.
I know that when I hit a major stumbling block in my life, then these are usually the inner shifts that work best for me to get me out of my funk. It’s less a question of what I should DO differently, and more a question of what I should BELIEVE differently.
I knew that I needed to reframe the meaning of what had happened. As Victor Frankl points out in his famous book “Man’s Search for Meaning” we are able to change our feelings about a situation, and increase our resilience to just about anything (including surviving a concentration camp, like he did) by changing what we believe a thing MEANS.
Man’s Search for Meaning is a GREAT book by the way, if you’ve never read it.
I felt needed to change my beliefs about what my Dad had done, and what that meant, so that I could move forward in my life with a sense of forgiveness and peace.
For example, it simply wasn’t helpful for me to believe that I was somehow NOT okay, or that I was a bad daughter… and that’s why my Dad disowned me. I did consider it as a possibility, but I examined my actions in life and I felt that I’d always done my best to be good to him, even though he was not always a good parent, or a good protector, or even always kind to me.
Reframe number 1 was for me to accept that I’m okay as a person in spite of this unfortunate situation. I should not blame myself.
It also wasn’t helpful for me to believe that he was a bad person. He was flawed, for sure. But the main thing I had to keep in mind was that he had dementia, so he was not well when he decided to disown me.
So reframe number 2, was to accept that he couldn’t be held responsible for those actions either, as hurtful as they were. I should not blame him.
These reframes did help, but they still left me feeling very sad… even if no one was to blame, the situation still sucked big time.
Eventually I had to admit that the sadness was dogging me, and I was slipping into a bit of depression about it.
I felt like I needed a higher perspective, a more powerful reframe than just “no one’s to blame” in order to get past it.
I started re-reading the book A Journey of Souls by Michael Newton PhD. In it, Dr Newton describes the results of decades of regression hypnosis sessions he conducted on thousands of subjects, that allowed him to create a map of the “life between lives”.
According to A Journey of Souls, we are eternal soul beings who incarnate on this Earth plane in order to learn lessons, for the purpose of our soul evolution. In between our lives, we go back to the spirit realm to review our latest incarnation and to plan for the next one.
We choose where and when we will incarnate next, who our family will be including our parents, and we even select the most probable significant life events that we hope will allow us to test our spiritual understandings and spur on our continued growth and evolution as a spiritual being.
It’s an incredible book! Actually, there are three books in the series and they are all fascinating.
(If you are sceptical about any of this, I get it! Just reserve your judgment until you have read at least the first book in the series.)
I re-read all three books in the series. I kind of inhaled them.
Then I decided to find a “Life Between Lives” regression hypnotherapist (a special hypnosis technique developed by the author, Michael Newton PhD, which has been taught to other hypnotherapists through his institute) and have my own session.
The session was 4 hours long. It was amazing!
During my session, I remembered visiting the spirit realm after my most recent past life, where I met with my soul guide and teachers, with my Council of Elders, and with my soul group. I realised what some of my gifts are, and how I have been developing them in my incarnations here on Earth. I got a sense of my soul’s purpose.
It’s been a week since my session and I’m still digesting it all. But I finally feel that I have the higher level perspective I needed to be able to pull out of my funk.
And that perspective is:
I feel like I’ve known a lot of this stuff for a while, but during my session I had a more direct and visceral experience of the truth of it.
So… I’m still on my journey. I’m still learning. Stuff happens, and I face challenges. That’s why I came here! It’s all part of my evolution. And who knows when that will end?
I might as well relax and enjoy the process!
As always, let me know if this post has helped you in any way.
To YOUR Abundance,
Julie Ann Cairns
