Reborn: Means having your Soul Rebuilt

Disclaimer:  My previous post was not meant to be a stab at Christianity or the Baptist church.  Both provided me with a foundation from which to spring into my spiritual journey and I would have been completely lost without having had these firmly beneath me in the first place.  In other words, they provided me the milk and honey I needed in the infancy of my spiritual journey so I could be ready for the meat of it.

Now on to the second discourse....

Over the course of five and a half years, I lived in Florence, OR; Ellensburg, WA; Hereford, AZ; Sierra Vista, AZ; and Crestview, FL.  Each move was costly and hurt my finances further.  While in Ellensburg, WA, I returned to college and changed my name from Frances to Cassia.

Why?

• Reason #1:  My grandmother and I were both named Frances and shared the same last name (long story short, my mother was married four times and I wanted a stable last name).  The credit reporting agencies and even the medical record centers continuously got us mixed up.  I was hurting my grandmother's finances and they kept giving me store credit for senior citizens.  Not cool to treat someone like a thief when its your mistake to begin with.
• Reason #2:  There is a Native American tradition among some tribes where when a person undergoes a rite of passage, or survives a natural event/disaster, or does something completely amazing, they would also change their name.  Why is this significant to me?  I am 1/32nd Native American.  The name of my tribe has been lost when the last of my Kentucky family members passed from this life.  Part of the tribe that was left was adopted into the Cherokee tribe, but our heritage has been mostly lost due to marriage outside the tribe.  In fact, I look more like my German heritage with my blonde hair and blue eyes, than Native American.  My grandmother is ~1/4th and she definitely has many of the characteristics from her Native American bloodline.  For me, reclaiming this tradition is reclaiming my heritage as a part of my spiritual journey - which I will go into more soon.

When I finally returned to Michigan, my focus was on my mother's health.  She was diagnosed with Hepatitis C and finally found a doctor who could treat it.  She would need weekly injections and oral medication for the next 11 months.  I came back to help her, get away from the ex-boyfriend, and start reclaiming who I am.  I learned how to administer her injections, made calls concerning her medical treatment and medications, and even represented her with her need for disability.  She couldn't see due to cataracts, so I also had to drive her to every appointment.  It was me who finally got an ophthalmologist to admit she was legally blind.  However, he wouldn't complete any paperwork in that regards because he wanted to simply perform a surgery to correct it.  She couldn't have the surgery to correct it without insurance and the ability to work to have insurance.  This was a big mess and her story to tell, so I will move on.

During this time I had a long distance relationship with another boyfriend who broke it off with me over the holidays and it threw me into a horrible depression.  I hadn't learned my lesson.  I was still changing myself too much to fit someone else.  I had surgery to remove a ganglion cyst shortly before this and still had the pain medication around, so I decided to take a bunch of them.  I came very close to overdosing one night and it was the latest ex-boyfriend's mother who talked me back from the edge of my despair.  She is still a very dear friend to me today.

Then, I reached out to a friend from junior high who lives in Grand Rapids.  We had kept in touch during my time out of state and my soul was starving!  She had become a Wiccan and was working with the Arthurian/Old Welsh tradition.  The Old Welsh tradition was based on the lore found in the Mabinogion.

And the preferred lore for the Arthurian portion was both the Mabinogion and Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory.  (To the right is a statue of Arthur found in Innsbruck, Austria and to the left is Ceridwen, an enchantress from the Mabinogion.)

While staying the night at my friend's house, I had a dream where Guinevere came to me.  She would be my guide and thus began my immersion into the world of pagan tradition.  While the group of people I was with was in my age group and very open, still I didn't feel the sense of homecoming I've been looking for.  But, I had managed to open myself to Insight, Past Lives, Intuition, Astral Projection, and enhanced my natural psychic ability (yes, I can see, hear, and feel ghosts and other energetic beings).

I was beginning to piece together who I was and who I was meant to be.  My starving soul began to find nourishment it could be sustained on.  The opening of my mind, led to the opening of my heart and I once again "fell in love".  It started with a few letters exchanged back and forth with a man who claimed to be a pagan as well and was just coming out of ...prison.  But, once again, it wasn't meant to be (whew!).  It was, yet again, another long distance relationship that my clingy nature didn't nurture but choked out of existence.  That's when my pagan friend suggested I start reading some books on co-dependency.  I definitely fit the bill.  So I read every book she suggested and started going to a local group gathering once a month.

The group work was great!  After three months, I had switched my life around and became more independent instead of co-dependent.  I started using my head over my heart.  I still sucked at relationships and continued to go through boyfriends like they were toilet paper, but, hey, I gained a new confidence in myself which was very liberating.   Right?

So, for my next post (near Valentine's Day) I will post some of my past life experiences, including the time I met my Twin Flame on the Astral Plane and found out about a very interesting past life I shared with my Twin Flame.

Until then...Happy Reading!

Internet Strike - Our Right to Freedom of Speech

Join the blackout tomorrow January 18th for 24 hours and show the Senate and House we do not want this bill supported.  Our freedom of speech is being threatened and as a writer I see this as another way to put manacles on us and limit creativity.

Click here to show your support of the strike and add your name to the electronic petition. 

Breaking Down to Build Back Up

The first thing I learned on my spiritual journey is that all my preconceptions, prejudices, and comfort zones were going to be challenged.  I grew up in an independent, fundamentalist Baptist church where I sang gospel music and hymns and was taught the Roman’s Road to lead others on the “true” path to heaven.  Even when I was 110% working in the church and following all their precepts and dogmas, I didn’t feel completely whole.  I felt like I was missing something.

Then, I started that fateful journey in March of 1998 and I realized a lot about myself.  I had days and nights of tears as I realized just how much I depended on my family and how I missed them.  I learned that I couldn’t put my trust in people I met online who I had thought were my faithful friends.  I realized the man I had an affair with wasn’t the love of my life, but I got stuck with him having no place else to go and feeling like I should always be with the first man I shared myself body and soul with.  For five and a half years, I gave him my loyalty, to realize we really weren’t meant for each other.  I had given up too much of myself to stay in that relationship and it was causing me physical, emotional, and spiritual distress.

It was a painful part of my journey where I had to be broken to be fixed.  Ever have a deviated septum?  Often the process to fix this is to break the cartilage again in order to reset the septum so it will heal in the correct place.  That was what had to happen to me.  I had to be broken in all the places that I deviated from my destined path in order to get me back on track.  Nothing could be more humbling than to be shown you don’t know everything about trust, love, and family, especially when you are 2,000 miles away from everyone and everything you grew up with and were familiar with. 

During this time of being broken, one of my favorite books to read was “The Tao of Pooh”.  Taoism helped me to categorize and filter everything going on inside of me.  This breaking down process was trying to get me back to Pu, or the “uncarved block”.  In “The Tao of Pooh”, Winnie the Pooh was portrayed as Pu as he was simple and untouched by society’s cutting tools.  This is the perfect state in Taoism.  The rest of Pooh’s friends were shown as various icons in society who are living in disillusionment.  Owl was the scholar who imagined himself the most intelligent of everyone around him even when he was completely wrong on a subject.  Rabbit was the control freak who got distressed whenever someone strayed from what he felt they should be doing.  And so on….

I like how Wikipedia puts it:  “Taoism posits that people may gain knowledge of the universe by understanding themselves.”  I started to see what I was, what I became, and how some things were just not right about me.  Once the process started, I began to see how I wasn’t what I was meant to be.  Then I actively started to seek out what was right for me, dabbling in other things and seeing how they effected my life and either moved me forward or backward.

Next post will be around the first of February and I will discuss discovering co-dependency and how paganism affected my life.

Happy Reading!

ROW 80 Round 1 2012/1998 Journey

Hello, followers.  I apologize for the lack of postings.  I'm adjusting to my new schedule with my children starting school, mandatory overtime, and other daily activities.  I have managed, recently, to figure out how to create a new page, so I can post my ROW 80 updates on a separate part of this blog.  To view my goals for this year, please click here. 

I think I would like to take this time to explain my blogging plans a bit better.  The year 2012 seems to stir strong reactions in everyone.  Some believe the end of the world approaches, while others are looking forward to a year of great leaps of faith and consciousness.  What I have decided to do on this blog for the next twelve months is to share my personal spiritual experiences in great depth with my readers and ask them to share theirs. in return  Each person's spiritual journey is unique and beautiful, even the ones who have horrible experiences, but find the light.  And each journey of personal awareness and growth is unique and beautiful as well. 

My journey began in 1998.  I was raised in a Baptist church all my life, but still felt unsatisfied and empty.  After taking a few practice jumps in my beliefs, I took an enormous jump on March 13th, 1998 (It also was a Friday).  I packed my car up with as much as I could bring, mailed a note to my family, and began my journey west across country to people I thought I knew and trusted, but never met before except in a webchat site.

My car began to leak oil very early on my journey and I didn't have much cash or credit because I gave myself no time to plan for this leap.  After all, a leap of faith is done without much planning.  Every 200 miles, I had to stop to get gas, put oil in the car (typically a quart, sometimes two), and prayed I would make it to my destination:  Florence, Oregon.  Little did I know at the time I was traveling 16 hours a day for the next three days, that when I arrived, more challenges faced me. 

When you don't live in an area and know people, your ability to get a decent job isn't going to be easy.  You'll have to take what you get and I finally landed a job as a hotel flunky.  It was a small inn with only ten rooms and I had to learn a lot of new skills.  The owner wanted hospital bed corners when making the beds.  I had to learn how to run a credit card through the old swiping machines and calling in the numbers.  Money got harder to come by and the bills got out of hand while scraping by cleaning rooms, doing laundry, taking reservations, and making coffee.

To be honest, I was very young.  I did what I had to do to survive my choice.  I learned a lot because I made a lot of mistakes and bad choices.  I missed my family, but I was too proud to admit it and felt ashamed for feeling that way after all the trouble I went through to make the leap I did.

And, that is how my life path changed.  My personal destiny and legend changed to meet the new and unusual circumstances and even my spiritual journey took off.  Sometimes it takes relocating yourself into unfamiliar area to begin opening your eyes to the world and what it has to offer.

Happy Reading!