Psychospiritual Growth: How to make meaning of twists of fate and the surreal

When I first sat down to write this blog, I thought I would document inner space like an authority. I would tell you that there are places we go beyond our personalities and senses of individual selves, places where we meet other souls.

Psychospiritual growth is not experienced in a way that is easy to discuss. It happens in burst of images, sensations, and boundaries of the inner and outer worlds.

Who am I to write with such authority about anyone beyond me? I can only write from a space of authority within myself. So here I go.

 

The universe doesn’t ask for consent. Wenn das Schicksal dir ‘was schenkt, fällt es schwer nein zu sagen, I say. It’s a lyric from a German hip hop group named Die Fantastischen Vier. It translates to “when fate throws you a gift, it’s hard to say no.” When I was sick in the beginning of 2023, it felt like fate. I spent a few weeks wondering if I had blood clots in overly swollen legs. I woke in the middle of the night with sweats, heart palpitations, and numb arms. It was mold that was causing undue stress on my otherwise healthy heart.

During the thick of symptoms and the long and arduous process of receiving healthcare in the Crescent City, I stayed in touch with colleagues across the globe via WhatsApp, a Wi-Fi-based messaging service. A Russian woman named Marianne who lives in South Africa—a fellow psychosynthesis practitioner—checked in often. It was as if she felt a disturbance in our shared field, one cultivated over the past year during online seminars. But we’ve never met. Despite distance and culture, we are uncannily close. She told me often of times I said something exactly as she needed to hear it. At the least, we share a strong psychic connection.

During recent challenging times in New Orleans, when I woke in the middle of the night with concerns about my health, I had a message from her asking if I was alright.

And while I had, on paper, hard and fast medical problems, I also knew that energetically I was shifting out of old patterns. That was reflected in the explosion of issues I was having in my body. One toxic pattern in particular—that I was only loveable based on the care that I gave to someone—was unraveling. I was exploring the subconscious roots of the pattern; being with the strong emotions that were repressed; expressing the stories raveled up with those emotions; and then letting the whole experience go. My heart couldn’t take any more heartbreak because I loved too much, without abandon, and without accountability from the other person. This is where the toxicity of loving too much starts: I could flood a person with compassion, and say it was okay if they couldn’t love me back because they weren’t in the right headspace (due to disorder, addiction, or just straight shitty self-mental healthcare). It’s toxic when I started to rationalize the other person’s behavior (“He was just having a bad day…”) and over time, the person balked when, on a good day, I asked for something that I needed.

The metaphor of having heart problems is not lost on me—and like any turn of personal evolution, any piece of spiritual growth, I matched the metaphor to my process.

Marianne walked the journey with me. She received my wails and woes over the waves of data beamed across the Interwebs. One day, she had a tarot card pulled that had a crane and a moon on it. She felt that the message wasn’t for her, so she reached out to me. Indeed, it had been the night of the Virgo full moon (purging and cleansing, shame, self-care themes) and it was one of my worst nights physically. And, I had pieces of wallpaper with cranes on it framed above my bed.

We took it as a validation of our psychic bond, our connection across time and space.

When Marianne checks in on me, it’s often because she has a dream. She has repeatedly met me in the dream space—I am unaware of it, but she is lucid. The image that she meets is of me standing behind a door. She coaxes me through. I interpret the door as stepping to the next level, and in particular, shutting the door on the toxic pattern of loving too much without accountability. I asked her to draw the door she sees me behind. It is a beautiful orange and blue door with a gold border. I loved the image so much that I put it on my leg as a tattoo—a way of honoring the inner work I was doing to pull the roots of this behavior.

Incidentally, the tattoo was the first thing that got infected and indicated a deeper problem was going on in my body.

There was initially a lack of clarity around what was causing my ill health. At the very least, I needed antibiotics for my legs. And there was a lack of ease receiving treatment and medication. Since I had a long period of not being able to walk, I had rented a car to take my dog to the park. Incidentally, a pharmacy that was supposed to dispense me antibiotics suddenly couldn’t. The only way to get what I needed was to literally drive to another town.

“And what if I don’t have a car?” I had cheekily asked, half daft in a fever fugue and half pissed and sassy.

The pharmacy attendant shrugged.

The challenge of living in a city like New Orleans is that just good enough is the baseline. And sometimes that didn’t even happen. It’s a city so traumatized and under resourced on so many levels that there is no health there. There is only survival and when ’s gone, party till the inevitable end. I drove what should have been the twenty-minute round trip to get my medicine. Through bad road conditions, traffic, and a glaring sunset that inhibited seeing anything past the hood of the rental, the trip took 3 hours.

It was the final straw. I decided that I would leave, not knowing where I would go or how I would pack and move when I couldn’t walk and breathing was difficult. As I sat in the rental and shielded my eyes, my energetic heart swelled, and I felt intuitively that this was the right decision. I knew it would work out although I didn’t know how.

Trust and geaux. (Writing it  as “geaux” is my homage to the New Orleans’ way of putting a French influence [via spelling] on regional language.)

I left New Orleans, Louisiana en route to the Catskill Mountains in New York, which had been the home that I needed to leave after a different crisis. However, I only made it 8 hours north of the Bacchanalian city, where I write from my new home in the woods of Ohatchee, Alabama.

It was a strange series of events that led me here, starting with a systemic infection based on mold toxicity that was stressing my heart. But it was intuition that held me the entire journey, that same intuition that flooded in as I sat in the rental. Support from my global community, like from my Russian colleague, let’s me know I am not on this journey alone. I write from direct experience of the place other souls met me along the way. I’m not sure if it was inner space or outer space, but I’m doubly not sure that it matters. What I mean by this is two-fold.

There was a need to take care of myself medically and physically. And there was equally a need to take care of myself mentally, as the stress of living in the city had taken its toll after two years. Leaving New Orleans happened in the three-dimensional world. I could call that outer space.

That tripped some strings in inner space, or the multidimensional world. I’m not sure the distinction of inner space matters, save for the perceptions that we have of these intuitions from the third eye and downloads that come through the multidimensional world.

Synchronicities emerge from the lower unconscious and higher unconscious in the presence of awareness. Jung refers to a famous story of synchronicity as a beetle tapping on a window precisely at the moment a patient of his brought one into conversation.

There was a synchronicity of the deepest level on a day I was towing north toward New York.
I had resolved to buy a camper and a truck and make my way to New York, trusting and geauxing and figuring out the three-dimensional world as I went. I wasn’t much too excited about a drive day through Alabama. I hadn’t wanted to leave New Orleans on such short notice, but I did it for my wellness. I was tired. And I wanted a home.

I was lost in my thoughts, about four hours in and suddenly an alarm went off—Trailer Disconnected. I looked out my passenger-side window and saw smoke. I pulled off the highway and before I could even pull up the Geico app to call for help, a white truck pulled up in front of me on the shoulder. A man got out. I unconsciously started throwing him the meanest eye darts ever.

He lifted up his shirt and dipped—bowed—and I said, „Not now, asshole.“ I was fuming.

He approached my window and said, „Look, I can see you need help. I don’t have any guns and I have a chihuahua, too.“

I should have known—it has happened so many times. Someone lifts their shirt as a Southern code for guns (or no guns). He bowed because he was tryna be funny. He could tell I was pissed.

He offered to work on my trailer and I was too stunned to even speak. He said he couldn’t believe I didn’t flip the trailer—the tire was completely shredded. And my sway bars, unbeknownst to me, had popped off.

I had ridden past two accidents and four construction zones. I didn’t think twice about the bumpiness of the ride.

So, that. The tires on my trailer are not rated for speeds above 50mph and by the grace of this angel, I now know. Basically, they melt from the heat of friction, hence the smoke.

I was completely broken.

He asked me what I worked on, what kind of books I’m into, and I stuttered for a second. He said, „Throwing bones and weird shit? That’s the only thing that saved me.“

—As if he knew that’s my wheelhouse.

He said we should hurry up and get to Walmart—two exits down and then two lefts.

„We?“ I asked, more surprised at the naturalness of it all.

„Oh, I mean ‚yew‘,“ he replied in an Alabama drawl.

I offered to Venmo him money and with the most innocent response, he said, „What’s that?“

I asked how I could repay him. He said, „just give me a hug.“ (He got a shot of reiki energy, too.) And then he got back into his truck and drove off. Later that day, as I laid in my camper bed stranded in the Walmart parking lot, I questioned if he was real. Stories of guardian angels pepper the media. And he had been at exactly the right spot at the right time to help me.

I decided the following day to find him, and I did through the power of Facebook and the photo I took. Someone pointed out that his truck was a Chevy, and goosebumps ran down my spine. My dad used to drive a Chevy and since the incident happened close to the anniversary of his death, where his discarnate energy may be more present on the Earth plane, I wondered if my dad hadn’t sent my guardian angel after all. I believe that my dad did, and so my guardian angel was real and not real. Or, he came from the surreal.

The synchronicity blew my mind.

After I sorted out my tires the next day, I got back on the road. I was overwhelmed by peace and I heard a voice inside me say, “I am home.”

I was passing through the woods of the Talladega Forest.

I checked into a campsite in Georgia to recover my nerves and wonder what any of it meant. What meaning could I make of the supernatural events?

I spent nearly three weeks in Georgia. I was in the countryside, parked next to a creek, under crystal clear night skies. I started to be able to breathe and walk without any problem. I was haunted by the incident in Alabama, especially the voice the next day, so I followed my intuition. I decided to go back. Head to Alabama today for an afternoon of wandering, and my loves Coco and Conan accompanied me.

Really, though, I could say that I followed my heart. It was my heart that was not healthy and in the general area that I had passed through the day after the incident with my trailer, I felt alive again. Well. Whole. During that drive, inner alarm bells started going off, telling me I was home. That day, I retraced my steps from Georgia to Alabama to confirm the intuition.

In other words, Earth energy led me here. The meaning I make of it is there are ruptures in the field of shared reality, and sometimes, the only way to navigate is through intuition. Meaning doesn’t matter here. It’s fate that is driving.

I got high on the smell of pine in the Talladega Forest, and things started to swirl, and I think I was in a Stephen King novel because a train appeared and took me to the other side of the universe. And the trees talked in serious tones and said this is the cost of passage to another world: lose your mind and trust your inner sense.

So I took the gift from fate: I intuited to stay.

I rode back and the smell of jasmine and honeysuckle and cow shit and wet hay flew in one window and out the other. The katydids or cicadas or whatever shape and name the crickety insects took changed into ghost hands, shaking down bones in a cup held by people long dead and fairy Earth energy who cheered me back to my campsite. The surreal and the real mixed.

The next day, I found a tiny home community perched on the banks of the Coosa River, near the Talladega Forest. Two days later, I got a lease.

I knew I was home.

I’ve since become friends with my guardian angel who goes by Jay. Marianne checks in regularly, and recently, told me she felt that she could really connect with me on a new level. A heart level. I think the sickness brought me to a new level of health. There is a strong psychic connection with both of these people, I want to remain in right relation and authentic to the meanings that I make from such relationships. They emerged from the transpersonal to the shared reality of the third dimension. They were part of my journey led by intuition to a new home.

Reflecting on that level of surreality into reality will have me in awe for a while.

 

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Curious about seeing the world and the mind as multidimensional? What does that mean for science?

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