Melanie Morfitt from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada #Emerges Proud to tell us how “Nothing is sacred to the tornado of change whose mission it is to destroy all things not aligned with truth.” That is the transformative power of NOTES…
“For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn’t understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.”
― Cynthia Occelli
Suddenly Awake – Melanie Morfitt (written August 2018)
As I grabbed my mittens and scurried out into the cold January evening, I was unaware that my soul was totally in charge tonight. My perfect life had led me into a dark depression, and now the internal pleas for help were leading me to a workshop at my local library in Aurora, Ontario Canada.
“YOU MUST PLACE YOURSELF FIRST”, had appeared on the tearstained page I was journaling upon just days earlier. As a mother of two active preschoolers who juggled single parenting most of the time while my husband traveled, placing myself first was a foreign concept to me in 1996.
It had been several years now since I had used writing as a balm to soothe the pain of my childhood. Six long years of wearing full body casts from chin bone to tail bone 24-7 had begun when I was ten years old, and had honed my skills well as a victim of childhood idiopathic scoliosis. Years of plaster and plastic, and doctor’s appointments had left many scars on me, although most of them were invisible.
A few days ago, as I stared at those five words of wisdom demanding attention, a fresh crack appeared in my shell. I immediately walked to the front door of my perfect two storey brick suburban home, retrieved the newspaper from my mailbox, and circled an ad that felt like destiny had called. A free seminar at my local library promised it could bring relaxation and healing to the body. “Great! I could use some loosening up.”
Tonight, thirty fellow spectators are sitting spellbound during the Trager presentation as we listen and watch volunteers receive samples of this peculiar bodywork. Recipients are delighted by the small but obvious changes they experience as the middle aged gentle man with the Egyptian accent at the front of the room works on their bodies. The innate wisdom and ability of the body to heal itself isn’t a new concept to me; however, this method of reminding the body through Trager manipulation certainly is.
“Who has back pain issues?” was the presenter’s next request. As my hand shoots up, our eyes lock, and I excitedly accept my turn for healing. I position myself face down on the small wooden massage table draped with a simple white sheet, and await my relief.
After perhaps 10 or 15 minutes of demonstration I realize that I have slipped into a very welcomed, relaxed state of being. “Hey Mel…are ya still here?”, I hear my friend Tracey shout from the audience. “Yes, I’m fine” I exclaim back in reassurance. I then hear the Trager practitioner softly request, “Now before you get off the table, I’d like you to slowly pull yourself up into fetal position so I can sneak a bit of work directly on your back”. I obediently curl up into child’s pose, and feel a warm palm being applied to my spine, serendipitously directly above the scar on my back where I had been sliced open 18 years previously as a 15-year-old child.
WHAM! I am instantly gone! I am out of body suddenly experiencing the precise moment that my orthopedic surgeon is about to use his scalpel to pierce my skin to begin 4 ½ hours of surgery to my spine. It is now September 1978, not a memory, but I exist here right now in real time. “STOP!”, I attempt to scream out. But as I hover out of body about eight feet above my 15-year-old self in 1978, I helplessly realize that as pure consciousness in this moment, I have no voice. The emotional intensity of the reality brings my awareness back to the massage table in the library in 1996. I hear the calm voice of the Trager practitioner intuitively redirect me, “Just stay with it”, and once again without warning, I am whisked BACK out of body, and deposited back at the same crime scene.
I instantly realize that although I have returned to the same horror filled moment of confusion, I am simultaneous wrapped with a download of understanding and knowingness that exists beyond all thought. I feel the winds of truth fanning the embers within my cells into a full flames that rip through my internal neighborhoods of fear and ignorance. Nothing is sacred to the tornado of change whose mission it is to destroy all things not aligned with truth. As I exist here out of body in this place beyond time, I simply know things with perfect clarity. I understand my entire childhood and the choices and actions and inactions that led me to that moment of hopelessness in the operating room. I KNOW things without questions cloaking their light. I have never been a victim.
And just as quickly as this experience began, I feel myself collapse back into a body that exists in a library in a moment called January 16th 1996. Primal instincts instruct my lungs to breathe as I am suddenly aware of audible sobbing, coming from a depth of pain and overload of new wisdom that simply cannot fit back into this small human frame.
The moment is perfection, and yet it is complete destruction. I just experienced myself as pure consciousness without a body, in a place more real than the one I have just returned to.
I inhale my first breath as an awakened being, faintly detecting the acrid odor of internal maps and atheist beliefs all around me smoldering from love’s perfect strike. As I eventually get up to leave my chrysalis at the front of the room, a single thought wafts like wind beneath my wet wings, ‘EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON’, and I instantly know that I am suddenly AWAKE.
***
It was after this night of transformation that my healing and awakening journey truly began. I suddenly had no fear of death whatsoever. The reality I had experienced was MORE REAL than this one that I had returned to. My cells now knew that ‘everything happens for a reason’, which lead to a rearrangement of my perspectives from victim into student. Finding myself dropped onto the opposite shores of reality as a spiritual being instead of an atheist was confusing to the mind but has remained permanent. And what was this term I had never even heard of before now pulsing in my veins, AWAKE? The knowingness was instant and undeniable, “I am a spiritual being having a human experience, and not the other way around’.
Truly remarkable were not just the inner changes that took place, but the physical evidence of my shift. For several months lightbulbs would burn out instantly around me, and electrical devices would malfunction. Inspired writing would awaken me up at all hours of the night, and a thirst beyond all thirsts for reading material of the body mind connection and metaphysical worlds was incessant. (a small challenge in 1996 as the internet was not yet at my disposal for research.) Memories of past lives and dreams shared with my young daughter and lucid dreaming were now firsts for me as were so many other new wonders that made it so magical to finally feel truly alive and wide awake!
We are all on this journey of awakening from the unconscious dream, beginning to remember who we truly are. We are infinite intelligent energy ever expanding and experiencing more in a cosmos that uses love to create. Simple really…
Reframing Mental distress as a potential catalyst for positive change 