• What the H?

    • February 29, 2024 10:07 am

    Dearest Readers,

    The other day I was speaking about self-care with a resident in the Long-Term Care home where I work and in the middle of our discussion I said, “Most of us need to have a self-care plan at the ready before we cross the line into–”

    “Hell,” he said, finishing my sentence for me.

    That’s not what I was going to say but I laughed out loud because he nailed it.

    Yesterday, I started to watch a video on YouTube about a woman who “Met God and Saw the Future”. She’d come back to life after having a Near Death Experience (NDE) with a new understanding that the afterlife is actually “Home” and life on Earth is, in fact, “Hell.”

    Then, last evening, I had a meaningful conversation with woman who lives with pretty intense mental health issues. She talked about her struggles and her suidical ideation, summing it all up by saying, “Life is hell.”

    Okay, three mentions of “hell” in as many days? I thought I’d better write about it.

    I’ve never subscribed to the idea of Hell as a place we go after we die. But this idea that Life is Hell? Certainly in my darkest hours I have felt it to be true.

    People who have NDEs often experience a state of “overwhelming, unconditional love” (as the woman in the video did) and so it makes sense that life here, with its pain and suffering and confusion, would seem like Hell in comparison.

    Yet life on Earth includes this phenomenon called Beauty and despite the hell states of war, tragedy, depression and illness, Beauty is everywhere.

    And the one generator of Beauty that we all seem to agree on?

    Nature. Nature gives us so much Beauty.

    As I was driving home the other day, a luminescent split in the darkening sky was spilling forth the brightest light imaginable from a towering wall of black clouds.

    Despite the fact that this heavenly hernia was nearly blinding me and black spots in my vision were making it difficult to see the road, I kept turning my eyes back toward it.

    It seemed an apt metaphor for how human beings seek Beauty. We want to look at it. We want it to blind us. We want to be dazzled and blown away by it and reassured that it exists, that we can see it, that it is there for us.

    And it is. Beauty is everywhere. This is an undeniable, indisputable truth.

    With three mentions of Hell and two more of “the End Times” (that’s another Letter), it’s fair to say that we are living in an extremely challenging time in history. For those who are in the trenches of war (actual and political), it’s truly Hell. For those of us feeling powerless to make a difference in these situations and in our own lives, it’s hell.

    And yet Nature continues to abide and bedazzle us all, continually striking us with this mysterious paradox: Life is Hell and Life is unfathomable Beauty.

    Somehow we go on, knowing both.

    Blessings to you on your Healing Journey,

    Celia

    I Need a Sign

    • May 16, 2023 9:00 pm
    Dearest Readers,

    Last week, a client of mine said, “I need a sign!” They were feeling stuck in a pattern and looking for a way out.

    Being a person who looks for signs and spiritual messages when things are tough, I could relate. I’m also someone who’s received signs and spiritual messages without looking and I wrote about this in the last Healing Journey Letter.

    At the very beginning of my own healing journey, it was suggested that I “look for the coincidences” as evidence that a Higher Power was at work in my life. Nearly 25 years later, I’m still taking this suggestion.

    One of my most faithful sign-bringers is Woodpecker and I’ve written several times about how this comical bird’s coincidental materialization reassures me that I Am Known.

    On a retreat I was leading last month, I shared with the group that I’d had yet another woodpecker encounter  the week before and one of the women spoke up, pointing to the window excitedly and proclaiming, “There was a woodpecker right out there this morning!”

    Since then, I have literally been bombarded by woodpeckers. (Okay, not literally.)

    For many mornings in the last few weeks, I’ve been waking up to the bird’s percussive hammering. I leave the house and hear the rat-a-tat-tat echoing in the neighbourhood. I arrive home and the rhythmic patter is again sounding somewhere in the nearby trees. On several occasions, the bird has been close enough to see, making its way around a nearby trunk or flying from one tree to another in our yard.

    A few days ago, not one but two woodpeckers were pecking at the trees right outside the kitchen window. I felt like my “sign” had become a Times Square billboard.

    I watched in awe as the pair jabbed at rotten bark and darker crevices. I marveled at the precision of their work and the singular markings on their feathers.

    My heart felt happy and my day got better.

    *

    After I wrote the above sentence yesterday, I saved the Letter and went to work.

    On the way home from work, I stopped and got gas.

    Later, after an evening walk, I noticed the fuel door was still open and the gas cap was missing. Ooops! I had forgotten to close the fuel door and I’d driven away with the cap on top of the car.

    I got in the car and drove slowly back to the gas station, looking for the gas cap on the road.

    I spotted it, pulled over, got out, picked it up.

    A man, mowing his lawn, saw me and shrugged, puzzled by my action.

    “It’s my gas cap!” I shouted above the mower.

    He couldn’t hear, turned the mower off and walked over. I repeated what I’d said.

    “That’s funny. The same thing happened to my wife this afternoon.”

    “What?!”

    “Yeah. She left the fuel door open, gas cap dangling. Some guy flashed his lights to indicate for her to stop.”

    “That just happened to your wife today?” I asked.

    “Yup.”

    Okay, seriously. What are the chances that my gas cap falls off the car in front of the house of a guy who just happens to be outside when I come by and whose wife had the exact same thing happen to her on that day?

    In a world that sometimes seems to have gone completely mad, when the cauldron of human hatred and fear seems ever closer to boiling over, I look for the coincidences to land me back in the joyful notion that We Are Known.

    From the fires of love,

    Celia

    Animal Medicine

    • February 28, 2023 2:36 pm
    Dearest Readers,

    Since publishing my memoir, I’ve been taking time to discern my next creative project. Write something new? What about all the stories that didn’t make it into the book? I have a mountain of them.

    I thought maybe I could publish the occasional piece here. The story below, about an encounter with a beaver, got cut out of the memoir because one of the editors said, “Too many animals!”

    There were a lot of animal stories. Encounters with woodpeckers and bears and deer and armadillos and beavers have always made me feel as though the Cosmos is conscious of me. When I am at my lowest, animals show up, and it always feels like I’m being reassured by a Loving Force.

    Here is the story of The Beaver:

    Have you seen the TV movie adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge? The Mayor, played by Ciarán Hinds, has made some terrible decisions, most of them while drinking. His protégé, Donald Farfrae, on the other hand, is a more saintly man, with very few troubles or fears.

    One evening, the Mayor confides in Farfrae and shares honestly with the young man about his despair. Here’s an excerpt from the book:

    “… I sank into one of those gloomy fits I sometimes suffer from … when the world seems to have the blackness of hell, and, like Job, I could curse the day that gave me birth.”

    “Ah, now, I never feel like it,” said Farfrae.

    “Then pray to God that you never may, young man.”

    When I was watching this scene in the film, I fully expected the young man to say, “Ah, yes, I understand.” But he says the opposite. This dropped my jaw.

    You mean there are actually people out there who have no idea what that kind of hopelessness feels like?

    Those of us who do understand these black, gloomy fits know well how hard it is to cope with them. Sometimes there is no remedy but to ride them out.

    On a day when I was in the kind of despair that the Mayor described, I walked to the Yukon River for relief. Nature is often one of the surest ways to lift the blackness of hell and I knew being outside would help.

    I found a bench by a bend in the river and began to pray. I remember saying the words, “Take me, God, I am willing to die.”

    SLAP!

    I opened my eyes. A beaver was in the water right in front of me.

    SPLASH!

    It dove underwater and I watched it resurface a few feet further upriver.

    Suddenly, my self-pity evaporated. The Beaver had woken me up.

    In that moment, it was as though I’d swallowed a fast-acting miracle. I became willing to live.

    —

    That’s a super-abridged version of the story but you get the idea. Reflecting on it now, I am again struck by what I call Impeccable Timing. The slap of the beaver’s tail at the instant when I “cursed the day that gave me birth.” I wasn’t alone, I was known.

    From the fires of love,

    Celia

    Keep G(r)o(w)ing

    • August 7, 2020 1:36 pm

    Dearest Readers,

    How are you doing? Really, how are you? My own emotions have been on a rollercoaster ride, mostly stabilized in the last week, but definitely up and down. When I am up, I wonder about you, how you’re feeling about the changes in your personal life and in the world, how you’re coping with it all.

    When I have these moments, when I wonder about you and if you’re okay, my own fear and anxiety decrease. Thinking of others is such a healing practice. So is caring for others. As the spiritual care worker in a long-term care facility, I am considered an ‘essential service’, and when I am with a resident, there is no thought of myself. The fearful, anxious thoughts disappear.

    Deep Presence brings relief.

    If you read the last Letter, you will remember my account of the Woodpecker, appearing at just the right moments in time to remind me that the Universe is as conscious of me as I am of It. Three days ago, I arrived back at the house after an endorphin-producing run to the rat-a-tat-tat of the Woodpecker. She was in the tree above our driveway and I stood and watched her hammer her head into the trunk at rapid-fire speed.

    Impeccable Timing brings relief.

    The above photograph of the snowdrops is evidence of a miracle, really, since the entire front garden of our house was dug up last fall to fix a leaky basement. All of the soil was removed, creating a 6-or-7-foot trench around the wall of the house. The dirt that had been removed was then dumped back in the trench to re-fill it. The result was a big, uneven pile of mud. Now, after a long winter, those snowdrops you see in the photo pushed up through the disturbed ground in the exact same spot as they always do, year-after-year. How?

    Life Finds a Way.

    In times of crisis, in times of despair, in times of great fear and crippling anxiety, I look to these experiences of Deep Presence, Impeccable Timing and the Unstoppable Life-Force Energy to keep me going and to keep me growing.

    And I think of you, and hope that you are accessing your own inner resources and outer practices to keep going and growing, one moment at a time.

    From the Fires of Love,

    Celia

    We Are Known

    • March 25, 2020 9:57 am


     Dearest Readers,

    I would like to wish you all a very Happy New Year. Can you believe it’s been twenty years since Y2K? Astonishing.

    Maybe I’m slow but it only occurred to me very recently that 2020 is a play on ’20/20′.

    ’20/20 vision’ and ‘hindsight is 20/20’ bring to mind a more clear way of seeing. How could we move into this new decade with a new kind of clarity? Perhaps by seeing ourselves not simply as individuals but as component parts of a Cosmic Oneness. Whether you are religious and believe that we are all Children of God or spiritual and believe that we are All One or secular/scientific and understand that we all share the same DNA, the fact remains: we are all intimately connected. We are not separate from one another.

    This fact was brought home to me again and again when I attended an amazing conference in San Jose, CA called Science and Non-Duality (SAND) this past October 2019. The organizers of the conference are a dynamic couple who had a desire to share with others their mutual love of science and mysticism and set about creating a conference where folks could come together to celebrate the mysteries and wonders of both.

    The pairing of science, with its fact-based approach, and spirituality, with its wisdom-based knowing, excites me almost like nothing else. When I was very little, I used to fall asleep by pressing my fists into my eyes so that I could view the kaleidoscope of colours that the pressure produced. When I did this, I somehow felt not only that I was seeing God but that God was living inside of me. In other words, my very first experience of God looked something like this:

    A number of the guest speakers at the SAND conference were scientists who spend their research time asking the question ‘Is the Universe conscious?’ In other words, does that kaleidoscope of colours have a consciousness? Does it know itself? Does it know me? Does it know, period?

    For me, the answer to these questions is a roof-top shouting ‘YES’. For how can the Mechanism Behind Consciousness not have consciousness itself? (The ancient yogis believe that ‘God’ is Consciousness itself.)


    Science cannot yet explain consciousness (why we have it, where it comes from, what it even is) and so it remains the greatest mystery. Religion and spirituality fill in the answers. We get to decide for ourselves.

    Einstein supposedly said something like, “Either everything is a miracle or nothing is a miracle.” To that end, either everything has consciousness or nothing does. Either the Universe is conscious (of itself, of me and you and all that is) or it’s not.

    Living life as though the Universe is as conscious of me as I am of It makes life pretty interesting. It also addresses existential loneliness or the feeling that I am alone and unloved.

    On an evening walk some years ago, I was stopped short by a large scattering of wood chips on the sidewalk. I looked up to see what had caused the mess and saw perfect, round holes in the tree, as if a large drill-bit had punched in and out of the bark. The very next day, when I passed the same tree I saw a woodpecker hammering its head in and out of the tree at rapid speed. I actually laughed out loud. No wonder an animation artist had invented Woody the Woodpecker, a comical, ridiculous bird!

    I don’t know how long I watched that woodpecker. It had me completely mesmerized. I was transported by the power it had in its little head to bore holes in trees, by its determination to feed itself, by the absolute phenomenon of its being. By simply by observing the humble woodpecker, I had been awakened to something far greater than my own self-centered thoughts.

    The amazing thing is, Woodpecker has continued to show up in my life, seemingly just when I need it. On more than one occasion, when I’ve been in a funk, the bird appears. Just this past July, when I was feeling despair at the state of the world, criticizing myself for being imperfect, tired of life in general, Woodpecker stopped me as I walked through a ravine to get to my destination. I first heard the rat-a-tat-tat of the beak-against-trunk and then saw it, high in a branch of an old maple. “I’m here,” it said. 

    I wrote the above paragraph about five days ago. Two days ago, I was walking on the grey streets of the town where I live, feeling extremely melancholy. My mood had dipped, as it does, and I was heading to the shores of Lake Ontario for a boost. I caught a flash of a bird flying by and looked to the tree where I saw it land. Woodpecker. “I’m here,” it said.

    Call these encounters coincidence. Call them nothing at all. Or call them a form of conscious contact from a Conscious Universe. When I choose the latter way of seeing I am bolstered by the notion that every conceivable thing is fused with Knowing. That means that I am Known. And You are Known. And We are Known. Kind of radical, know?

    May this Knowing be the foundation of our 20/20 vision.

    From the fires of love,

    Celia

    Joy to the World

    • May 31, 2010 9:27 am

    Dearest Readers,

    Today, May 31st, is a special day in my life. Exactly eleven years ago today I began to walk the Healing Path. I made a decision that day to let go of My Way (sorry, Frank Sinatra) and instead follow the Higher Way. It’s been an absolutely amazing adventure.

    If you will indulge me, I will share with you some things for which I am grateful today. It seems the most appropriate way to give thanks for all I have been given over the years and in very recent days, too.

    • To the six brave souls who attended Cultivate Your Courage in Whitehorse on the 29th. Thank you for coming and for sharing your fears and your willingness to walk through them with me.
    • To the two women who first helped me find a way to stop using drugs and alcohol and to all those who have supported me in staying stopped. Eleven years!
    • To the Mama Duck and her wee little ducklin’s I saw over the weekend, first crossing the road on Saturday and then swimming in the river on Sunday. You were so attentive to them, so protective, looking behind you every few seconds, checking on them, making sure they were okay. You reminded me that the essence of our Nature is Love.
    • To the teachers, mentors, sponsors, coaches, counsellors, spiritual directors, family and friends who have supported and encouraged me to continue growing into my fullest potential by becoming whole and free of shame.
    • To the cat I live with who wakes me each morning with his mournful cries, making me crazy/angry and thereby teaching me compassion. By asking me for love you have grown it out of me. You, little monkey-cat, are the reason I started this blog. You get the credit.
    • To the Loving Power of Higher Guidance, which continues to reveal Itself to me each day as a Force that has my back, works for my Highest Good, shows me how to live the life I am supposed to be living and provides me with all that I need in every single moment of each day that I am Alive.
    • To you, present and future Readers, for being there and for supporting and appreciating this work. You inspire me to inspire you.

    My heart is really full of Love today. Thanks, everyone.

    Inspiring Message of the Day: What do I have to be grateful for? Today I will take the time to write a list no matter how I might be feeling. When I look at what I have instead of what I do not I find freedom from want.