soul recognition
When Spirit Comes To Say Goodbye
Many people assume that their loved ones will say goodbye to them before they leave this earth plane. I beg to differ. In my experience this is not always the case. I know this without a doubt from personal experience.
In 2010, for example, my favorite sister became very ill. She was taken to the emergency room with kidney and liver failure in early August. She was admitted on a Monday, and by the Wednesday around dinner time, I received a phone call from her husband telling me that she had passed away.
Seconds after receiving this awful news, as I turned to my left, I saw her sitting next to me. Her apparition was looking at me, as if to say, “Are you okay? How are you taking this?”
Indeed, she appeared to be more concerned for me than herself. After all, where she was going now, she wasn’t going to have any more health problems or human suffering. Once her spirit saw that I had regained my composure, she left my side and continued her spiritual journey to Heaven.
My dearest sister had merely come to say goodbye, until we meet again. Rather than despair about her passing, I was suddenly relieved her soul was heading to God’s Holy Kingdom. There is after all no finer a place in the entire Universe!
In the summer of 2012, my other sister informed me that she was having difficulty breathing and was seeking medical advice about it. Sadly, at the same time, my mother was also having medical issues. Soon after, my phone rang very early one morning. My heart raced as I ran to answer the call, fearing that my mom had taken ill.
Instead, a man’s voice was saying, “Where is your mother? I need to speak to her urgently!”
Grandma’s Love Was The Best
I remember what Grandma was wearing when she passed away. I also recall exactly what she said and everything else that happened that day, right down to the violets I picked in the backyard to place in her hand. She was wearing an oversized Winnie the Pooh T-shirt that could have been a night dress, I’m not sure. She had her red robe on and black slippers lined with greyish fluff.
She was told she was being taken to the nursing home, but it was actually hospice she would be going to. She could no longer walk and had fallen, and no one was able to pick her up. Not even myself. I wish I could, but I just was not able to.
I sensed she wasn’t to going be with us very much, and I was very upset about it. But constantly having to give her blood transfusions and her being in so much pain, it was the right decision at the time. I have made peace with that now.
Settling her into the hospice, Grandma was adamant the bed be taken out, as it was unbearably uncomfortable. She kept saying, “I just want to go home and die. This is no way to live. I’m ready to go.” She also told me, if I ever needed her after she had gone, all I would have to do is call her name, and she would be there for me. Grandma kept her promise to me. To this day I still feel her around me all the time, especially when I think of her and call her name.
I think the worst thing I ever experienced in my entire life was walking into that hospice room after she had passed and seeing her shell of a body. She was no longer there, obviously, but she was still around. I felt she was somewhere in the room looking at us and saying her goodbyes.
Pain had made her very bitter towards the end of her life. She wasn’t herself anymore because she was on so many different strong medications and invasive treatments. I sensed that she longed to be with her departed husband and her dear mother who passed when she was just a young girl. Her mom was also a psychic and apparently really good with things like Numerology and dreaming lucky numbers. I loved hearing all those stories.
Rediscovering The Untouched Soul
Our soul is always a clean slate when we are born. Knowing this and living accordingly is true spirituality. However, the virgin territory of our soul is often more or less blemished or darkened due to many traumas and challenges throughout our lifetime.
Along our life path, we often lose much of the spiritual innocence we had as children. Instead, we begin to dwell in shadows of darkness in various forms: indifference to the destiny of others, confinement in our own; laziness, vanity, greed, envy, violence, hatred.
None of us can deny having at times dark thoughts or toxic emotions, malicious habits or selfish behaviors. However, no matter how widespread and ingrained the darkness may become in us, it is also certain that something immaculate always persists in some corner of our inner being. Even if it is tiny, there is an eternal point of light within where our higher self always remains pure and original. The sacred we carry within cannot be defiled.
As much as life may have made us callous or cynical, we always have this sacred stronghold inside. Herein lies the hope of those who practice spirituality: to reach that virgin point and rediscover in it one’s original nature.
This original nature, pure and innocent, we have sometimes forgotten to such an extent that we need someone or something to remind us to look inside ourselves to rediscover who we truly are.
We sometimes need someone to explain that we suffer because we have stopped believing in purity, beauty and what is good. We need someone to remind us that our deepest identity is virginal and fruitful, empty and full, both things, however contradictory this may seem.
Seeing Yourself As You Truly Are
The art of ‘being seen’ begins within. It is not in the eyes, or heart, of an external beholder. It is the grace of being able to see oneself through the Divine Eyes of our Creator.
Every soul is unique. No two are the same. Each soul emanates from the Supreme Loving Source to offer its unique beauty and pleasure to God in an incomparable, individual way. When we look at ourselves through this lens, the true beauty, light, and power of the spiritual spark of our being shines upon our inner vision.
Relationships offer mirrors too. But what they show vary according to the quality of the reflecting surface. And what we see in them depends upon how well we know, see, and stand in the truth of our own higher self.
For example, if I look at myself in a broken mirror, do I see a crack in my face? I might…if I am not sure of who I am. However, if I know myself to be whole, I can readily recognize that the crack is in the mirror, and not in my face.
Similarly, there are relationships in life that reflect broken images back to us. That does not mean that we are broken, nor that the other person or people involved are broken either. We all have wounds and scars and other gaping holes yet to be healed, or not.
Whatever the case may be, it is the relationship itself that offers up the reflective element. It is the dynamic of exchange that shows itself as either clean, clear, balanced, cracked, smeared, skewed, and so on.
Knowing oneself in truth and wholeness is thus extremely valuable. If we do not possess such certainty of self, we may accept a broken or distorted impression projected by an ill-functioning relationship to be a reflection upon ourselves.