A Good Book and A Flashback

Reading the book “Finding Your Way Home” by Melody Beattie was a life altering experience for me. I’ve been on a spiritual path (or what I call the long road) for many years but never really understood that my “home” and my “soul” were synonymous terms. They were always two separate ideas.

 While reading the book I had a flash back to about twelve years earlier (1990) when I was in an all day workshop of the original Healing Singing group. We had a guest speaker who did a guided meditation. During that meditation I went deep within myself into a place of absolute peace… immersed in a love that went beyond words. I was really gone for a few minutes! It was wonderful! I had meditated before, but this was different. This time my soul had a message for me. The message wasn’t in words or thoughts. I just felt something that I hadn’t ever felt before.

When the speaker indicated that we return our awareness to the room; I cried. I sobbed uncontrollably. He was concerned and asked me what was wrong.  In the manner of a sobbing child (I was thirty five at the time) I answered that I had gone “home” and I did not want to come back. The word “home” just popped out of me. 

That was the moment in my life that I understood what the word “Home” really meant. It  was no longer a location that provided shelter and safety or the family home that I grew up in, or even a place to rest my head at night.  I considered the place I lived my “temple” but this experience was light years beyond any worldly security. It was through this cherished moment at Healing Singing that my idea of home radically changed.

 Home was a safe place within me that I had avoided for most of my adult life.  It was  a tangible and real place, and for whatever reason I chose not to go there very much for half my adult life.  This time my soul did the talking and because of a number of personal tragedies I was somehow available…I finally listened. I knew without any doubt that  my home was within me.

My flash back while reading the book reminded me that the first time I “went home” was at Healing Singing! I thank God for the day that my friend dragged me to Healing Singing! (I know that some of you reading this article will be surprised to know that someone had to drag me to Healing Singing!  I would have never gone on my own. But that is another story.)

 By this time (reading the book) I had been going “home” on a regular basis and understood what Melody Beattie was talking about, but  I wasn’t really listening to my souls urging for a direction in my life.   On the outside I was doing ok. I was working, living my life… but I was I  moving my feet in the direction of my soul's urgings? The answer was that I was too frightened to do so.

Sometimes listening to inner urgings means going out on a limb. Sometimes it means doing something difficult and uncomfortable but you know inside it is right. The soul’s urgings aren’t easy to understand intellectually. There’re not thoughts.  They reside more in the heart than in the head. My head was and still is  very practical. My heart was, and I guess always will be very impractical.   

    It’s like having the urge to sing but you’re scared of doing it in front of others. So you never do it. It’s like having feelings bottled up inside and never feeling there is an appropriate place to release them.  So you walk the earth defensively on the edge or cusp of your feelings knowing that at any moment they could erupt from within. The head would rather the feelings stay bottled up inside.

My intellect's desire to control, to “sanitize” my life made it impossible for me to act on my soul's urgings. Life itself is not a clean process. It is really  messy at times.  I knew that my soul wanted me to make some changes in my life but I would have to consider giving up my security,  my profession. It was very scary.

    The life changing experience was finally choosing to listen to what my soul wanted me to do in spite of what my head said about it.  I did so. I  jumped into the void! It’s been a few years now.  I am still not sure where the road is taking me but I can exclaim; I am alive and I am listening!

 Along with these other changes I started the Healing Singing group again after a long lull. Healing Singing played such an important role in my personal progress it was important that others be given the opportunity to experience it.

 So for me the terms home, soul, and Healing Singing are inextricably connected. And so it goes. I thought that relating some of my personal experiences in the group would help in clarifying what it’s about.  It is not an easy thing to explain or to understand.  I offer the following excerpts from Melody Beattie's  book as food for thought. I think the ideas really parallel what the  Healing Singing journey entails.

 Please keep in mind that the excerpts are snippets of a three hundred page book and portray the ideas contained in several chapters. I hope there is enough continuity to make sense.   The phrase “Let the music sweep you away” becomes more meaningful.

Finding Your Way Home

People are talking a lot lately about going Home.

They’re not talking about returning to the home of their childhood days.

 It’s an idea emanating from the soul from the deeper part of us an idea that’s found its time.

 We want to discover and learn our soul’s purpose.

 We want to return to our spiritual roots.

It’s time to go home on a cellular, physical, and soul level.

 Our souls and the universe are demanding it.

There a lot of reasons we experience difficulty in remembering who our soul wants us to be.

Sometimes we go on automatic pilot, trying to act like or imitate who we think we should be.

 Sometimes unresolved guilt and shame—feelings we need to release and heal—get in the way of our accepting who our soul wants us to be. They’ll come out in extraordinary ways if they’re not cleared. We’ll become defensive and at times say the most peculiar things. What we are really doing is defending ourselves against our own attack!

Fear plays a big part, too. Some people say that unhealed fear and terror are the underlying causes for most problems we experience in this world. We step up to the plate and then choke. We’re so afraid we don’t even step up to the plate!  We sit on the sidelines crippled with fear and call our fears something else. I don’t like the game or it doesn’t interest me.

I like to know things. I like to know things in my head. I continually battle with the illusion that if I know in my head how things are going to be—what’s going to happen and when--then I’m safe. What I see in my head is usually not what I have to do. I’m still thinking in one dimension not leaving room for emotions, intuition, and the guidance of spirit.

         What I have to do first--- is jump into the void, surrender control, go through the experience, feel the emotions, and in the process discover my soul and find my spiritual path.

 It’s about courting the void—that mysterious, and sometimes frightening place of nothingness from which all creation occurs. It’s that time in our lives when what we’ve been hanging onto—clinging to for dear life—is stripped away.

It’s that place where we let go of what we know and what we think we know.

It is that place of saying and meaning I don’t know.

It means standing there with our hands empty for a while, watching everything disappear: our self-image, our definition of who we thought we should be. Be willing to stand quietly in the void. Cultivating it helps. Courting the void helps in discovering our identity from our souls point of view and for that instant in time--- return to our rightful place—home.

Excerpts from:    Finding Your Way Home   by Melody Beattie

Regards,

Rob Oliver