Since I have been in this new habit of writing out lists of appreciation, now and then I manage to come up with some somewhat shocking and unexpected things to appreciate. The most shocking of these is this:

I am grateful for all the people who have hated and abused me in my life, including and especially family, because one who has been loved and cared for in life can never feel the overwhelm of divine bliss of being loved and cared for for the very first time.

I came upon this while basking in the glory of my love. Sometimes I think and feel that no one can appreciate this love that I am in with this man. Sometimes I am beside myself with joy and appreciation and love so deep for him that I begin to cry.

It was a moment like that that I realized the vast canyon between how I have been treated all of my life, and how good this man is and how he loves me. And I stand on the safe side of that canyon looking back on the abusive side and all the people on it – far, far away – and it makes me cry.

I had been in a real funk since last week. On Friday, I had a terrible day involved in mind-bending interchanges with a client who had asked me to do an extremely thorough proofreading. My interchanges with that client had such a horrible effect on my emotional state, that it has taken me this long to pick myself back up. And how?

This morning I woke up and wrote out a list of some things I had been taking for granted recently and I felt gratitude for them. I love making these gratitude lists, because once I get started, all kinds of new things and aspects of things to feel gratitude for pop into my mind and I add them to the list.

By the end of this exercise, I was feeling as high as a kite. When you deliberately list out things you can feel grateful for, by the end of the process, if you spend enough time doing it, you feel like an ultra-special person.

After this experience today, I decided I am going to make a gratitude list every morning for the next 30 days. It is a great-feeling way to start the day and to stay optimistic and it served to pick me up out of my funk when nothing else I tried was working.

I have just returned from swinging on some playground swings near where I live. There was no competition for the swings – in fact, the playground and the streets are practically deserted – since it is pouring rain outside. And I feel great!!

I was feeling really angry at someone and I had been angry at her all week long and I couldn’t seem to shake it, even though I had done reiki on it.

So, in spite of the rain and the 13 degrees Celsius outside, I put on a raincoat and rain boots and off I went to the swings!

I swung and swung for I don’t know how long. No one was anywhere near, so I took the liberty to voice my anger at the lady I was so angry at. After a certain point, I went quiet and was staring up at the tree branches as I swung back and forth. Then I began singing “Raindrops are falling on my head…” And I was lightened, free of my anger and laughing at myself for swinging in the rain.

People seem to find it a little odd that I swing, but swinging in the rain was even weird by my own standards – and my clothes got soaked through and I got some odd looks walking home. However, I knew it would do me good and I believed it could get me out of my angry rut. And sometimes it just feels downright fun to get funny looks from grown-ups .

Swinging on swings and reveling in the rain are just two of the things I love to do that defy the list of “things grown-ups don’t do.” I don’t understand why, but once you turn a certain age, you are not “supposed” to do a lot of fun things that feel really good. “Adults don’t” swing on swings, or revel or walk out in the rain without hiding under an umbrella, they don’t stomp in puddles, they don’t stand on their heads or sit upside-down on the couch. No singing (especially not while swinging on a swing), no doing handstands against the wall, no running around and doing cartwheels in big open spaces…What a truly tragic existence adults must live – thank God I’m not one!

Do like Gene Kelly – It’s fun!

Sitting out on the deck of my mother and step-father’s house, looking out at the backyard and basking in the beauty that is autumn. Autumn was never this beautiful to me. It’s warm, 60° F. The sun is shining on me, as I sit on the hard wooden bench.

The sun warms me. It has painted the leaves with vibrant yellows and heartwarming oranges and reds. Golden carpets under our feet as we walk along the sidewalk beneath bronze and golden canopies.

For me, autumn had always signified a time of death, darkness, silence and alienation. Autumn – a magnifying glass on my misery, my loneliness and despair. My worst autumn ever was the autumn of 2005, when I wrote Finnish Autumn. Today, I can barely remember the depths of despair I was in when I wrote that, which, even as bad as it was, and as bad as my life had already been to that point, was just the precursor to the worst that was yet to come.

But today, this year, autumn is beautiful. My favorite season and a natural complement to my hair .

I am a different person. I am happy. I have peace. I feel loved; and this is the first time, ever, in my life that I can say this.

I love autumn!!!

Yesterday, [I]the very same scenario[/I] occurred with my bf. A different trigger for me, but still he called me crazy and got angry at me. Everything was the same – [I]or was it[/I]? No, because I had healed myself and no longer had pain or emotional charge on being dismissed offhand .

I am so happy about this, I can’t even tell you how wonderful it feels to be able to have the power of the solution in your heart! . I feel so good!

Last week, I had a big fight with my boyfriend. Essentially, I had a reaction to something and he completely dismissed me by calling me crazy. I was upset already from the initial thing, but he has often called me crazy when he doesn’t understand me and it often sets me off. Meanwhile, he’ll call me crazy and then I start to get angry, ballistic angry, because then he disappears and stops talking to me for days and I’m left with so much upset and anger because he won’t speak or listen to me!

Last week when this happened, it was a big blow-up and I was questioning if I could salvage this and if I even wanted to. As I always do when I have bad feelings in my relationship with him, I reikied myself. As I reikied myself, I had the insight that I become “crazy” when he treats me like that, not because he is calling me crazy, but because he is dismissing and discounting me, judging me as crazy because he doesn’t understand me and doesn’t want to. He shuts off all communication.

As I continued to reiki myself, it dawned on me that this phenomenon hardly began with him. Indeed, this is a complaint I’ve had about all of my immediate and non-immediate family members ever since I’ve had a memory. It only began with family, but I have experienced it to lesser or greater degrees across the board throughout my whole life and it’s taken a horrible toll on my self-esteem and concept of self-worth. And here I found myself with someone, who is really fundamentally very good, moral and peace-loving, thinking he is the cause and blaming him for this recurring fight and wondering if I should even continue to stay with him.

This realization gave me the focus of my next reiki session. I spent the next 3-4 days without contact with my bf and doing reiki on myself for this upsetting issue of being dismissed, all the while not being sure if he and I would be together again. That didn’t matter. What mattered was that, if I didn’t heal this issue, it would recur in every romantic relationship I would attempt.

Then…

Yesterday, the very same scenario occurred with my bf. The thing that triggered my initial reaction was different, and my reaction too was different, but he still called me crazy and got angry at me. Everything was the same - or was it? No, because I had healed myself and no longer had pain or emotional charge on being dismissed offhand .

Soooo…when he called me crazy, I said “Just because you don’t understand me, doesn’t mean I’m crazy.” He continued to be angry at me, but not like last week, and I maintained myself the whole time. He was angry, but he was at least able to communicate with me, while last week he just shut me out and disappeared. Because he was able to communicate with me, I was able to answer him, explain my behavior to him a little. His anger at me didn’t bother me to such an extent that my reaction to it was controlling me.

Throughout the whole experience, I never once felt myself separated from my love for him by my own personal issues. Because of that, there was no fight and, in the end, I was able to get him smiling again and us speaking loving words to each other again. I was able to keep the peace between us, even though he got angry and called me crazy.

I am so happy about this, I can’t even tell you how wonderful it feels to be able to have the power of the solution in your heart! . I feel so good! I think that being able to stay with your love for someone as they are being poked and prodded by their own demons, and likely even to uplift them from the effects of their demons, in a relationship feels more wonderful and more rewarding than being in a relationship with someone who appeases the complaints of all of your own demons!

The most upsetting thing I am wondering, though, is how often is being told to dump someone actually the worst advice anyone could ever give you in a relationship??

Diary entry 10

(Diary entries are intended to be read in order)

After my experience with the “mother of all healing crises,” I was afraid to do reiki for a period of several months. I went on “reiki hiatus.”

I continued to see my psychologist, but without the aid of reiki. It felt as though the monumental shift that had taken place in me as a result of the last healing session had eradicated the source of my suicidal depression, and cleared me out enough emotionally that I could begin to intend some good things for myself without the interference of subconscious self-sabotage. All the same, I knew I had a lot more work to do on myself before I should pursue or accept a new love relationship. I was still profoundly attached to my previous love, Lucifer, even though the attachment no longer had any form in outward reality. I still felt spiritually and emotionally attached and committed to him to some extent, and couldn’t fathom how I could ever move on. Therefore, I deduced that nothing good could come of a relationship I entered or was coaxed into at that point.

I felt, however, that I was free of the bulk and most severe of my depression. This, indeed, was true, however, there was more left to heal than I had known. I furthermore realized that, all of these years, I had not been making a distinction between my depression and my anxiety; I had been experiencing them together all this time, but only thinking it was depression. However, it turns out that you can have depression and even suicidal thoughts without anxiety. I’m happy to report that at least my anxiety seemed to be, perhaps, 98% gone. As for my depression – let’s just say it was no longer a permanent state or my default response – let’s say it was 90-95% gone.

Yearning for something completely different

In my desire to escape myself and my life as I had known it, I had always known that a radical change would jolt me out of my prevailing state and possibly give me direction as well. I thought that what I really needed would be to spend some months in an Indian ashram meditating, doing yoga and learning about spiritual wisdom from yogis, so that I might rise above my emotional issues with wisdom and composure, grace and beauty, instead of the fits of shouting and tears I was prone to.

Well, I could not afford such an endeavor. Unexpectedly, I managed to happen onto the next best thing, right here in New York City. I had been looking on Craig’s List for months trying to find a yoga center where I could volunteer in exchange for yoga classes. That’s how I found a Naam yoga center in Manhattan. It was practically a yogic ashram in the middle of the city.

The center I found practiced Naam yoga, which has been explained to me more accurately as Kundalini yoga with the addition of Kabbalahic theoretical teachings and beliefs.

The benefits I derived from this yoga center, which comprise another major step in my healing and development, were in some of the different meditations.

In early summer, 2009, I had taken a Naam yoga class, in which the instructor provided a certain meditation; a certain mantra to chant and a certain mudra (hand position), which he said would increase our capacity to love and to heal others merely by our presence. His words appealed so much to me, that on that very same day, I went home and began that meditation.

I did that same meditation every day for more than 40 days. I noticed changes taking place in me as I was meditating. I could feel myself vibrating, as I did when I channeled reiki, after chanting the mantra.

As I continued the meditation day by day, I noticed myself going through a process, as if the meditation itself were setting my healing in motion, just as the reiki did, or clarifying my mind, bringing me wisdom or a greater connection with wise, spiritual sources, talking to me.

Sometimes thoughts of painful things would come up during the meditation and I would start crying—sometimes so much that I couldn’t speak to chant the mantra anymore.

After doing the meditation for an extended number of days, I began to get wonderful, wise thoughts and ideas in my head while meditating. Finally, I was getting so many, that I started a “meditation journal,” where I would write down my thoughts as I had them, because otherwise they would escape me, like smoke vanishing into the air.

Unconscious Love

While I was no longer an unconscious lover of someone else, as I had been of Lucifer (Who is Lucifer?), I was being “loved” unconsciously by several young men from afar, whose advances I had made many efforts to thwart.

But what is unconscious love? Without my inquiring, this is one of the many answers that came to me in my meditations:

Conscious Love Vs. Unconscious Love

August 29th, 2009

Conscious love is self-sacrificing,
Unconscious love is self-serving.

Conscious love respects its beloved’s will,
Unconscious love imposes its own will on its beloved.

Conscious love results in freedom,
Unconscious love results in bondage.

Conscious love is constant,
Unconscious love is erratic.

Conscious love seeks only the highest good for its beloved,
Unconscious love seeks its own immediate gratification.

Thus, strive only to love consciously, or not at all.

As someone who has been both a giver and a receiver of unconscious love, yet who has also experienced the giving of conscious love, I feel qualified to observe that unconscious love is what happens when we love someone sincerely and then pass that love through the dirty filter of our psychological, emotional problems and behavioral patterns. Suddenly, our love is not pure anymore, but becomes tainted with manipulation and selfish desires and requirements which are not of love.

I call this “unconscious love” for two reasons. Firstly, it must be called “love,” even though it may more often resemble or feel like hatred. Many-a-time, for example, I had wished Lucifer, who loved me, would have just killed me to put me out of my misery instead of continuing to love me. Occasionally I would ask him, how would he be worse to me if he hated me. It was clear in his response that he was a tortured soul.

The unconscious lover will swear up and down that he loves, indeed, when I examine myself, even now, in the times I have exercised unconscious love, I know I did love the man. I loved Lucifer, but we tortured each other.

Secondly, it must be called “unconscious,” for this is the element that makes this kind of love torturous, for both the lover and the beloved. “Unconscious,” because this love is implemented and expressed through us by means of our unconscious behavior, which has been formed by all of our past pain, beginning, but not ending with, that given to us by our parents.

The cure to unconscious love is to become conscious of and then to eliminate the causes of our programmed behaviors. This almost always necessarily involves emotional release, which is what I effectively achieve by using reiki.

This realization was important for me, because my entire life has been driven by the singular desire and yearning to find a true love with a man, which will prove impossible if I continue to love unconsciously.

Further, I have had the insight that, when you stop focusing on yourself in a love relationship, or in any circumstance really, when you let go of your self-concern, only then are you free to see the truth – be it favorable or not – and only then, if need be, can you offer the love your beloved may need.

Psychotherapy – a very slow, but helpful process

In therapy and healing, explanation and understanding for your feelings and behaviors are gradually unfolded to you, and week by week, not all at once. All my young life, I was 110% certain I was a “basket case” (as my father used to say) specifically as a result of a megalomaniacal, emotionally abusive and manipulative father. It is only to my surprise that I have been finding out through my reiki and my psychotherapy, that roughly 95% of my own dysfunction in love relationships has been passed to me from maternal neglect, and not paternal psychosis.

Diary entry 9

(Diary entries are intended to be read in order)

Having pinpointed the source of this hole as being my mother, I was able to focus a reiki session on this issue with the intention of healing my heart and mind from the trauma of growing up with the hole of perpetual fear, despair and loneliness inside me, which, probably, in combination with the other inhospitable conditions of my childhood, was the greatest source of my adult suffering. Once healed, I thought, I ought to be able to function in life on a more level playing field with other people, thus, hopefully, ceasing the perpetual series of waking nightmares that I was trapped in. Thus, I set aside a reiki treatment for myself in which I focused on this “hole.”

I carried out this reiki session on myself thoroughly. It was the longest session I have ever done. The results were immediate, effective and surprising.

I had already been reiking myself with quite successful results for a month or two. I had been feeling very optimistic and “up,” feeling I had left my depression and suicidal thoughts in the past, with the one exception of waking up in the mornings before the beginning of the day with the usual sinking feeling of doom and despair, fear and futility. Despite these relatively mild morning experiences of this “hole of doom,” I felt relatively happy and optimistic during my waking hours.

The Mother of All Healing Crises

So, I reikied myself concerning this hole on a Monday morning in February, without specifying a source or a cause for the hole. By the time I went to bed, unbeknownst to me, I began to feel the effects of my reiki session. I felt a cold coming over me. During the night as I slept, I became increasingly ill. I developed a fever with full-blown flu symptoms and a horrible headache.

When I woke up in the morning, I was hopeless and depressed. I woke up realizing that, after barely surviving the devastation of Lucifer and after coming within a broken foot of killing myself, I was pursuing a new life purpose, which was not truly my heart’s desire. I realized that my heart’s desire was a dream that fate and the nature of my past would not allow, or at least I acknowledged that I had this belief. I acknowledged in that moment, as I lay in bed with my eyes still closed, my belief that the spiritual love I had dreamt and lived my whole life for could never be. Thus, I basically woke up crying, and sick.

Not only this, but I fell as deeply back into suicidal depression as I had been the preceding spring when I had planned to kill myself (see My Suicidal Foot). I stayed in my room all day crying inexplicably and feeling horribly ill. Emotionally, I had regressed to how I had been throughout my 30’s—I would burst into tears with no sign of a reason, perhaps something on TV, something that was not even visibly sad. I cried a lot that day and for the days that followed. I learned soon that this sickness was no usual cold for me, because it did not follow the pattern of a cold. It did not let go of me easily. It stayed for over a week, going away very slowly.

On the Thursday of that same week, I had an appointment with my psychologist, during which I had a complete emotional break-down. I just cried and cried. It was on that occasion that my psychologist observed that my depression was suppressed anger I harbored towards my mother. Her observation seemed to support the previous observations I had made of my own behavior in the context of love relationships and of the inner feelings that gave rise to my behavior within love relationships.

During that week, I should mention, I was also engaged in a struggle with my mother, which magnified the depth and intensity of the hole, leaving me feeling scared and alone, desperate and abandoned again. The hole was sucking me up again, sucking me up.

Due to the massive emotional breakdown I had suffered the previous year, during which I quit my long-despised job and that had led me to therapy in New York City, I was being supported financially by my mother, who, along with my step-father, preferred not to have me residing in their home, despite the cost of rent my mother was paying for me.

At the time I did this reiki session on myself, my mother had begun to express vexation and resentment at me for having to sacrifice some of the abundance of her money to support me. I felt myself falling through that really thin film that was supporting my weight as I stood upon that hole. I, with no ability, emotional or otherwise, to take care of myself, began planning my death again, or at least began planning a life on the streets, which would inevitably lead to my death.

The Blessed Light at the End of the Tunnel

After one week, my sickness had subsided and after about 2 weeks, my depression began to subside. I noticed a new emotional experience in myself—or lack thereof. I was waking up in the mornings in an emotional void—a true hole. What I had always believed to be a hole, I saw now had really been a black hole, a vacuum that was actively sucking into oblivion all things positive, for what I was experiencing these mornings was a true hole—a hole is empty, not filled with fear and despair. I was now awaking with emptiness—no fear, no despair, no doom, not even a little tinge, but there was no good feeling present in the hole either. It was a marked improvement over a hole of despair, or a black hole that sucked up positive thoughts and feelings and left me with the most horrible, devastating feelings, thoughts and fears about myself and my life. I felt the nothingness was quite ok. It left me feeling a certain kind of relief.

A few days after waking up with emotional emptiness in the place where used to dwell the greatest doom and fear of my life, in a meditation, I felt Angel Mother begin to fill in the new void in my heart with love. I felt it more and more every day.

And this is the story of how I healed what I believe to have been the greatest source of my suicidal depression. This constitutes a massive milestone in my healing process.

Diary entry 8

(Diary entries are intended to be read in order)

With my new-found healing treasure, I began reiking myself for everything I could think of, starting with my most prominent issues and sources of continued and most poignant suffering, including my ingrained behavioral patterns or deep-seated, self-destroying emotions and thoughts which had become states of existence for me since childhood. My experience in psychoanalyzing myself and my continued visits to my psychologist enabled me to understand and articulate angles of my issues which, in turn, enabled me to target certain multi-faceted, self-destroying attitudes, beliefs or past experiences in my reiki.

My Living Death

The greatest and most firmly ingrained and most devastating state I had been imbued with was a state which had grown in me from my youngest formative years, my toddler years, prospering and transforming, like a viral bacteria in its ideal reproductive environment, into increasingly invincible strains, as I became more and more laden and buried down day by day beneath the traumas and neglect that came to constitute my childhood, and then my adolescence. By the age of 20, this state had taken the outward form of ever-present suicidal depression.

Over the years, I observed that this state was limitless in its degrees of intensity and in the situations and aspects of situations in which I would feel it rearing its ugly head within me. I came to view the two extreme degrees of this state as two separate images. When I was at my best, this state felt to me as a hole deep in the core of my being, manifesting most often in mornings, as recently as this past winter, when I would wake up alone in my bed, no matter what the weather, what the country, what the city, what the situation, and, before thoughts of the day ahead would begin to fill my mind, deep in the pit of my soul, I would feel this hole; a hint of doom, despair and futility, which I could perpetually find at the very nucleus of my being. It brought worry and fear to my heart and mind. On the best days, I would get up feeling the hole and then begin my day and the hole would be covered over with daily concerns and activities. On my worst or more sensitive days, it brought me to endless cascades of tears.

At its worst, this state was my living death. By my definition, “living death” could be said to be like being slowly and painfully tortured every day to within inches of death, just close enough to death, that you may wake up the next morning, barely functional, to again be tortured to within inches of death, day, after day, after day, after day.

My living death found its expression in me regularly in my poems, but, in time, more and more it was expressed in plans of suicide, in suicidal depression, in floods of tears, set off by God-knows-what, or by nothing external at all, consumed in fear, in despair and loneliness, the intensity and depths of which you simply cannot imagine.

My living death consumed me with fear and despair each time I would love a man—fear that he would abandon me, or pull away from me. I would feel the slightest hint of discontent in his voice, or in his email, or in his behavior and feel and fear him pulling away from me, and I would feel that shakey, precarious floor I had finally almost found my footing on being pulled out from under my feet again. Again, I would be alone and insane with desperation, in tears, falling again, losing my grasp on something safe, something stable, over and over and over again.

This, fear, however, did not solely surface in love with men, but in all aspects of my life. From as far back as I can remember, I have been afraid for my safety, for my very survival, especially and above all the survival of my heart—it did not begin with men. Nothing in life had ever been stable or safe. My heart and mind were in pieces long before I was a teenager in love, but I had no idea there was something amiss.

This state, which I believe took root in me as an emotion of profound loneliness and desperate fear from a very young age, at first in absence of a mother and in absence of any source of even a small fraction of safety from the violent emotions and neglect of the family around me, found a permanent home in the core of my child-soul. It had become the roots from which I grew. I had no idea of the nature or vastness of this state, much less its power over all my life, but I became mildly aware of it in my 20’s when I was seeing a psychologist, who, according to society, is somehow supposed to fix my broken heart and mind, uproot the weeds that had been so deeply planted, which had now solidified and over-grown in my child-heart, or enable me to uproot them myself.

This state, from its cozy hiding place, wedged deeply in my subconscious, was the thing which was most profoundly sabotaging my efforts to survive, let alone succeed, in this world. Everything from finding a job, from having a loving relationship and friends to … finding a home … I can’t even begin to express on how many levels this devastating state was influencing my life and every effort I made at finding a peaceful, happy existence.

Realizing the Damage and its Extent

It took me decades to come to a sufficient understanding of the true nature of my plight and of my internal reality—that I had been formed from a tender age within a state of doom and fear and how this formation came to pass. I went through several misguided beliefs concerning this state of doom. Throughout my 20’s, when, as I mentioned, I was able to begin to perceive this state, or “hole,” I believed I had been created by God with a melancholy soul, because, even in the best situation I could imagine, I felt this melancholy, this hole, was so profound in me, that it was actually part of my eternal soul. At a later point, I believed this hole was the result of my medical condition, PKU, and the fact that, as a result of this condition, I had too much phenylalanine in my blood, which is a cause of depression and other psychological conditions (some of which I do suffer and have suffered from) and which is known to reduce serotonin in the brain, which is the chemical cause of the feeling of happiness.

Over the years, being perpetually misunderstood and looked down upon by the “emotional elite,” as I called “happy people,” I have endeavored in vain at least to be understood, since there was no compassion or help to be had from anyone, by describing this particular state in such a way that “the happy people” might be a little kinder or more understanding, at least that they might stop reacting in ways that made me feel worse about myself and about my life than I already did. This was a Sisyphean undertaking, however. Even a willing person, and few were willing, could fathom the experience of my living death, but my best attempt to date can be found in the poem If.

During the years I had to live with family, the years during which I was being formed in this state of doom, I would escape the outward hell by withdrawing into my mind, dreaming of love, of a special husband who I could love and take care of, someone who would love me, who knew me on a profound, spiritual level that no one else was capable of. I had daydreams of perhaps forming my own little family of love with him, never having to speak to anyone from my biological family ever again. My father further punished and chastised me for my escapist tendencies and most interactions with family members were of a negative nature and only served to make me even more determined to escape those people and that wretched reality once and for all.

Outsiders said I was a dreamer and that I lived in my own world. True, but their observations were useless; not one person ever endeavored to understand or to help me deal with the real world. I was on my own, as in my living death, left up to my own undeveloped and inadequate devices to survive alone in this world.

Life After the Family

Once freed of the destructive familial environment, at age 20, the axe of despair fell upon me with a vengeance. When you are in the fire, your body reacts involuntarily in such a way as to protect you from feeling the full force of the pain, but once you are out of the fire, God help you; the pain of having been in the fire floods every cell in your body and the sensations of excruciating agony sweep over and through your body like a salt-sea wave on raw, burned flesh. This applies on the physical level, and I have observed the same phenomenon on the psychological level, with the brain providing defense mechanisms to dull the impact of the psychological devastation of the immediate situation. You cannot heal while you are in the midst of the fire that is burning you. Once out of the fires of your familial hell, your body and all of your senses awaken to the reality that it was living in hellfire and now it must suffer the aftermath in an environment that will only coat you with more salt and not offer you any first aid–or such was my experience. Once I was out of my “familial hellfire,” I fell into suicidal depression within a few months, and remained there until a few months ago, 21 years, roughly.

In more recent years, however, due to observation of myself as I was suffering through relationships, and due to my own self-psychoanalytical abilities, it dawned on me that this hole/living death seemed to be directly related to my mother. By January of 2009, however, thanks to sessions with the psychologist that I had begun seeing in New York City in the summer of 2008, I had become quite familiar with the cause of this hole/living death; it was all about neglect, the lack of a mother, lack of love, lack of security, lack of being cared for as a very young child and right up until…

And this realization paved the way for my grandest reiki healing experience – the next milestone on my healing path.

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Diary entry 6

(Diary entries are intended to be read in order)

The mundane and socially acceptable solution for healing was psychotherapy, which I engaged in to appease family and to have someone to talk to about ten years of secrets and living hell. I was lucky, for the first time in my life, to find a competent and compatible psychotherapist. I began seeing her last summer and continue to see her to this day.

Other methods I tried included EFT and reiki. Things didn’t go very well with my EFT practitioner, so that business relationship only lasted about two months.

While the psychotherapy, as expected, didn’t yield any groundbreaking results in and of itself, I found my psychotherapist’s insights and therapy sessions to be a great complement to the creative aspect of my independent healing efforts (which mostly took place in my imagination in association with visualizing my goals), and also to the energy healing (reiki) which I began to do later on.

I have, however, identified three milestone developments on my healing path thus far. I see these milestones as key steps upward on my healing path, as well as blessings. Without each one of these blessings, I would not have been able to progress in my healing to this point or to continue to progress in my healing in the future.

My Angels
The first blessing on my healing path developed from my vision board. It was my angels.

From the first morning that I focused on my vision board, I experienced an alteration within me resulting from the “My Angels” goal. From that first morning, this goal came to life in my mind during my meditations and began to take on a life of its own.

For this goal, I simply used a picture of golden angels gathered around a bright, divine light, resembling the sun. The first two days that I closed my eyes and envisioned the angels and the light, as they were shown in the picture, I felt significantly uplifted and wonderful both days. After this, the “angels’ place” in the picture began to take on a life of its own. One day I had closed my eyes to envision my angels and I put myself into the picture among the angels. I wanted to be able to touch them and be closer to them. Things began to happen. I began doing things in the angels’ place, which had ceased to be a picture, but had become a place that I could go to at will when I closed my eyes. I began to think of my angel meditations as visits to my angels’ place. Each time I went to visit them, something different would happen. Sometimes I would go and the place would be bustling with angel activity. Other times I would go and it would be deserted, so I would call to the angels and usually they would come and I would speak to them, asking them to help me. Other times the angel place would be deserted and I would wander beyond the angel place and into the open spaces there and I would have different experiences.

Most or all of my initial visits centered around my angels healing me or me seeking support, comfort or healing from them for an immediate situation, such as in the following accounts I recorded in my diary:

- 15.06.08
Vision board meditation this morning: I saw myself again amidst the group of my angels. I hugged some, then I stayed, and while hugging one, I tried to detail the feeling. Then she let go and put her hand on my heart to heal it. This is the deepest I have been involved with them yet.

- 19.06.08
I got very upset and angry at Joan earlier and I still have no lodgings for tomorrow. So I closed my eyes and went, very upset, to my angels. It was odd; I practically came staggering into the angels’ place. I couldn’t even walk and angels were there, as if they had been expecting me, like hospital staff in those ER shows. Angels rushed to my side to support me and help me walk. There were angels everywhere. They put me on a golden-light sort of fluff bed; they were doing stuff. I never said a word, but I was crying a little from my upset as I sat in my chair. Angels were very busy around me. They moved me to a different place, to a bed. One angel began caressing me, around me, around my body, head to toe. Then I felt my upset calming as she caressed and I felt some peace settle in me again. Later, after all that was over, I asked the angels to resolve my lodging problem.

- 29.06.08
Visit: I went to my angels’ place, but I couldn’t see anyone there, so I went wandering, calling out to my angels that I was lonely and that I didn’t want to be alone. I came to an overpowering, shining gold and white light. I had to walk toward it. I was thinking “This light won’t lead me to my angels, so I don’t want to continue walking to it,” but the light felt so warm and I couldn’t let myself turn away from it. Then, to the left of the light, I saw a tall, slender white-light figure approaching me from a distance. I think it was a “he,” but it’s not certain. He was very calm and noble, very dignified and regal-looking. He was taller than a human and appeared more clearly to me than the angels. He spoke not a word. He led me out of the path of the light, off to the left. I was blabbering like an idiot, of course. Then I stopped and said “Can I touch you?” My intention was to feel inside him. He let me touch him in the places I reached out to touch—his sleeve, arms, and head too. And I became filled with a beautiful peace. I said to him that I wanted to be more like him, that he had a peace that radiates from wisdom and understanding, and I wished to have his wisdom, understanding and peace too. However, he lacked the feeling of warmth and love that my angels have. I was filled with great relaxation as his peace overcame me, and then he led me to my angels and disappeared along with the peace he had brought.

Each visit to my angels held a new experience for me. Eventually, and influenced by one of my therapy sessions, Angel Mother emerged from among my angels. Angel Mother, and several angel sisters, who have now fallen away, surrounded me with love and safety and promised me they would take care of me. They told me to forget earthly parents, because I am with them now. Whether imagined or real, Angel Mother would play a key role in my healing from my most profound past wounds.

Email
The next groundbreaking blessing on my path of healing occurred in October of last year, in an email that I had received from Lucifer. Bear in mind that throughout all of the preceding months, I had maintained email contact with Lucifer. Honestly, I could not fathom or imagine an ending to my situation with him in which I did not kill myself. The way things had played out between us and the way he had chosen to deal with me over the years, I could not imagine an ending in which I could let go of him, leave him and all he had done in my past. Thus, of all things that I have experienced in life, I feel like this one email was the single-most miraculous and merciful thing to ever happen.

There was nothing intrinsically spectacular about the email. After nearly five years, Lucifer had finally been possessed, by what I think could only be called a Divine mercy, to write some truthful words to me. The second I read the words, I was surprised, my heart sunk and I released him, on a superficial level dismissing almost every word he had ever written or uttered to me as insincere manipulative lies, while on a deeper level, resigning myself to the truth of not ever really knowing in this lifetime which of Lucifer’s words were true and which were designed to manipulate me. In my email response to him, I informed him that I would leave him alone now and he was free of me. And I breathed a laden sigh of relief to also finally be free of the whole situation.

This new development enabled me to get Lucifer out of my infinite present and file him in with the finite experiences from my past that I have to heal from.

If at any moment prior to that moment Lucifer would have been inspired to stop deceiving me and to be open and truthful with me, I would have been spared immeasurable and unspeakable suffering; and he, in turn, would have been spared a certain amount of suffering as well.

Not surprisingly, Lucifer maintained his own delusion when, in his response to my final email, he still reiterated that he loved me, would always love me and has never loved anyone else. I didn’t answer. I didn’t care.

With that, our communication ended.

Reiki
The third blessing that has come to me, or rather that I sought out, on my healing path is an energy healing technique called reiki. In the beginning of December, 2008, I received reiki levels 1 and 2 attunements. The experience was utterly fantastical and thrust me into a new realm of life. Reiki has not only facilitated my own healing and provided me with what I need to heal myself independently, without outside help or guidance, but it has also opened me up to a whole new world, an effective modality for helping others in their own suffering and pain and this has opened the door of one of my new life ambitions, one in which I hope my intuition can blossom and be put to full use and, hopefully, my full capacity to help others can finally be realized.

Please note that the comments are closed on all “My Diary” entries. This category is to read like a book, and each post as a chapter. Please feel free to use the contact form on the “Contact” page for any feedback.

Diary entry 5

(Diary entries are intended to be read in order)

I returned to the U.S. and to my mother’s home at the beginning of May last year (2008). Still on one crutch and relearning how to move and walk on my still-swollen and painful left foot, I arrived at Newark airport, where my mother met me. I don’t think I had ever been gladder to see her than I was at that time. In a sense, I felt as if I was just emerging from an all-engulfing and psychologically disfiguring fire, but almost physically unscathed, and all that had preceded the fire faded as I approached people from another world who led a normal life and I approached long lost familiar faces in the same little town where all of my past had transpired decades ago, in another lifetime, when I was someone else.

It was a most bizarre and odd feeling to come back into this world, a world of relatively stable and relatively satisfied people, together, living their lives, together, oblivious in their own back yards, completely unaware of the world I had been living in for the past ten years, and particularly the last two years. They were so distant from where I was living inside and completely incapable of conceiving the silence, isolation and turmoil in which I had been consumed throughout this time. These were people with families and jobs, friends and routine lives. Routine lives. “Routine? Friends? Family? Home?” I thought, “What are they?” And I was about to try to return to one of these lives, at least temporarily, after years of alienation.

My mother and step-father have quite a lovely home and my relationships with them had improved markedly over the years, so my initial recuperation was not too difficult. At their home, I reveled in the flowers of the garden and the warmth of the sun in the back yard. I relaxed in their jacuzzi in the evenings and began taking an interest in photographing interesting and beautiful things in their back yard. I wondered how a person could be depressed when in possession of such luxury and paradise. I felt there was so much to enjoy and delight in at their home. At the same time, I knew that if you are depressed today with nothing, you will be depressed tomorrow with much; if you are happy today with nothing, you will be happy tomorrow with much. “New toys” lose their shimmer and the initial happiness at receiving them and using them fades away as you inevitably return to your usual state. This is why I seek now to change my heart, not my surroundings or merely the thoughts in my head.

Outlining My Goals
My initial recuperation lasted roughly one and a half to two months. One of the very first things I did at my mother’s was to create a “vision board,” which depicted the main goals I had for my path and my new life. I printed out pictures and words that represented my goals and I pasted them to poster board and every morning I would look at the board and I would meditate on each goal on the board.

I had five goals:

1. My angels.

After all I had been through in my life, the sordid catastrophe with Lucifer being the worst, I wanted nothing to do with the human race. I had always dreamt of having someone love me, understand me and know me as I felt Lucifer did. Given the way that experience turned out, however, it was clear that I, with my judgment, posed as much of a danger to myself as others posed to me. I could never believe myself or what I felt and knew to be true in my heart ever again. I had resigned myself to living all of life alone, without a man, and I have taken a vow of chastity that is to last until I die. I told myself that there, in the place I go after this world, I will find my husband. But now I had to abandon this search for love and for my husband, which had always been the reason I lived; thus, I lost the reason for which I lived.

In my heart, I felt I had to abandon earth and humans, because I simply couldn’t live here as humans do, under the circumstances. I wanted to be surrounded by beings brimming with love and wisdom, beings whom I could look up to and harbor great respect for, who would guide me, beings the likes of which I have never even remotely experienced on this planet. I craved and needed beings that I wanted to model myself after. They don’t exist on earth, so I imagined them into my life.

I formed my own community of angels in my imagination. By this time, I had enough perspective on my past, especially through reading my old poems, that I could see that every “relationship” I had ever had with a male had only existed in my imagination, and this created a significant amount of my pain, because the man I loved was not responding to me in reality as he should have been responding to me according to what I believed about him in my mind. This time, therefore, I consciously decided to use my imagination to my benefit, for once in my life.

The angels I would imagine would be my angels, and they would be an entire community of “Lucifers.” That is, I “made” my angels in the image of Lucifer’s angelic aspect, so-to-speak. After all, it was his almost angelic, innate love and understanding of me that made it impossible for me to tear myself away from him, and last summer I still desperately needed that love and understanding. Thus, in addition to being angels, and all that entails, my angels would love me the way Lucifer did, they would understand me and know me as Lucifer did, and they would be as gentle and tender with me as Lucifer was—and they would be this way, because they were my angels. Finally, I would belong somewhere. Finally, I would be normal somewhere. My values and what I have in my heart would be normal, understood and upheld among them, and I wouldn’t need Lucifer, or any man, to achieve that.

2. Love, Truth, Wisdom, Intuition, Forgiveness, Freedom, Understanding, Compassion, Peace.

In all the years I had known Lucifer, one of two things he had always repeated to me in his very tender and loving voice was “You are an angel.” While I can understand why he may have thought that, compared to him and all those who surrounded him, I was no angel; but I wanted to be. Who would not want to be an angel? Angels dwell in inner peace, love, wisdom and joy that no man can even begin to fathom. Angels are above and removed from both experiencing and inflicting all of the emotional torture and abuse that people endure and impose on one another on earth. Not only that, but, being above and removed from these earthly afflictions, they can heal and touch people like no human can. I wanted to do that too.

I have always had a deep desire in me to be a source of love, healing and peace for suffering people, because my empathy, which causes me to experience another’s suffering as if I were the one suffering, has bestowed me with great compassion.

I realized that in order to become what I wanted to become, I had a lot of work to do on myself. So, I wanted all of the things in this list firmly inside of me, especially my weakest points: (knowledge of) truth and wisdom. I knew that if I had wisdom and knowledge of truth, my intuition, in particular, would always be rooted in truth and not in some emotionally charged agenda I was carrying. In situations I was personally involved in, the truth was always being clouded or distorted to my eyes by my active and vivid imagination, which was controlled by the agendas I had. I must forgive myself for having my agendas, however, because without believing what I deluded my heart and mind into believing, I would have killed myself. I knew, however, that if I possessed all of these virtues, I could let go of my agendas and not lose my life in the process.

3. Healing from Lucifer.

Many, or all, of the virtues in goal #2, I felt, were necessary for goal #3 (i.e. it would require nothing short of angelic qualities to forgive Lucifer). Last summer I could not fathom an earthly existence in which I had survived my experience with Lucifer. At that time, the only way I could survive was to tell myself that I was going to heal myself so that I could return to heal Lucifer from his suffering as well. That was my only motive for healing myself. Lucifer was suffering in his own life, after all, and I still loved him and I couldn’t let go of that tender love and understanding he once had for me. I still needed the depth of his understanding of me, combined with the softness of his love for all he understood of me, even though, by that time, it was all mostly a memory, or a mockery. I needed to feel known and loved, even if it was only in my imagination.

Information would emerge, later on in an email from Lucifer, that would enable me to let go of that motive for healing myself and that would enable me to let go completely of Lucifer as well. Nowadays I know Lucifer deserves any suffering he experiences, and maybe more. Furthermore, I believe that when a person dies, they are taken through a review of their life in which they experience the joy or suffering they have caused to others, and they experience this joy or suffering firsthand, as if they were the person who experienced it. When Lucifer reviews his life upon his death, he will live all of our time together as I did; he will be Lucia. He will be me in the relationship that we had. He will live a writhing emotional agony that courses through every fiber of his being, and he will live a paralyzing fear and soul-devastation caused by him and by all of the shocks he delivered over the years, then he will feel what it was like to love him for every moment that our life paths crossed. I find that to be a form of justice.

I will admit here and now, that, while I have come a long way in healing from my experience with Lucifer, I still have a ways to go.

4. Spiritual healing and therapy clinic in Algeria.

When I was in Algeria, in many ways I was living like an Algerian. I was subject to all of the frantic hysteria that characterizes many Algerians. I was subject to the corruption and lies, I was subject to a system that has no structure, save for the “might/money makes right” structure, which is a very scary structure when the might and money lie with such emotionally volatile, mentally unstable and vindictive individuals. Living in Algeria, one lie (or misunderstanding) from the mouth of another person could mean that your life is effectively over. Entirely unbeknownst to you, someone somewhere in Algeria may have started the ball rolling with a true or false word against you, and that rolling ball won’t stop until it has flattened you and turned everyone you know against you. Your life can change in a second based on an outright lie. I have first hand and second hand experience of this. This is a country where hearsay is evidence, your family and neighbors are the judge and jury and money and power are the law enforcement.

While I suffered at the hands of this system and the people in it, the experience enabled me to gain a certain amount of sympathy for Algerians, and to understand why so many Algerians were as they were—panicky or hotheaded, afraid, lying, corrupt, talking very quickly and agitatedly, with severely warped values. It is a scary system to live in, and I saw that if you don’t join them, you are likely to get eaten alive.

Considering the corruption, maybe it was nothing short of a miracle that I found any good in Algeria at all. In fact, Algerians won my heart. I was greeted with great respect, warmth and generosity everywhere I went. Even the poorest families eagerly opened their homes to me, though they had so little. People bent over backwards to help me when I asked for help, even adopting me into their families, and they did so with a free generous spirit and an open heart. People saw truly who I was. They told me what they saw in me and they spoke almost with admiration. They were interested in me, people listened to me, people liked me. Even though I was quiet, they never forgot I was there.

Thus, I saw a great potential for me to do some good in Algeria, mostly because it was the first place I had ever been where I actually felt the people were interacting with me, and interacting with me as an equal, as one of them and not as someone inferior or as some stranger or outsider they must be wary of or keep at bay. I felt I actually mattered there; I mattered to them. I was sensitive to how they spoke, which was often hurried and agitated, but I had a calming effect on them. I loved that someone like me, with my past and battered self-image and self-worth, could possibly bring something positive to people. It made me feel like I could have a value in the world and that made me feel good.

While I was in Algeria, I had a passing thought that I would leave Algeria and train myself in emotional and psychological healing methods, and return and set up a free clinic in Algeria where Algerians could go and, if nothing else, find peace from the pressures and struggles of their families and society, but, ideally, where they could get help to calm their hearts and minds in their daily lives and attain a more peaceful existence in community with one another. This passing thought, or some version of it, has now become my primary goal.

5. Money.

Money was a necessary goal to implement goal #4…and money is also a goal necessary for me to live.

These were the goals I put together on my vision board. Every morning I would wake up and meditate on each goal on the vision board, and right from the very first morning, I felt the effects .

Please note that the comments are closed on all “My Diary” entries. This category is to read like a book, and each post as a chapter. Please feel free to use the contact form on the “Contact” page for any feedback.