Embrace Your Stumblings
Sometimes I am abashed at how fervently my clients and fans feel I have it all together.
The testimonials on my webpage attest to my wisdom, compassion, and authenticity.
They marvel at how good I am at coming up with a new way to look at the world.
They shake their heads with wonder at how my answers to their questions solve so many of the difficulties in which they find themselves.
They are convinced I am an Enlightened Being and so much more together than they are, or ever will be.
Oh, puh-LEEZE.
I look back on my sixty-some years and I sometimes marvel that I am here at all.
I had two rocky marriages that were to the absolutely wrong men, and didn’t get it together until my third.
I treated myself abominably when it came to relationships with anybody in my life, allowing myself to be used and abused.
I was irresponsible with money.
I was a rebel because I believed it was the only way to make my mark in the world.
I stayed in the fantasy world of Renaissance re-enacting because I thought I was worthless in the everyday one.
I have had stumblings, complete collapses, and dives off cliffs. I have over and over again not looked where I was going on my Lifepath, and fallen into the same mudpits, pulling myself out and washing off yet again.
And at sixty-something, I am still here, and the better for it.
One of the great points in YOUR SOUL’S PLAN, Robert Schwartz’s breathtaking book on pre-birth planning, is that we have crossroads in our life plan: we can go one way or the other in answer to a crisis, and which way we turn determines our path toward what we have asked to learn.
I am in that book not only as a channel but as “Doris,” one of the subjects Rob works with. And readers get to see that, during a major crisis at 16, I made choices that would make my life hell for almost three decades.
And yet, if I had not gone through the divorces, the abuse, the self-recriminations, I would not be the teacher and healer I am today. I would not understand my clients from a heart-deep level.
It’s called the “wounded healer syndrome,” and while it isn’t something one enjoys going through, there is no denying that there are gifts on the other side.
When you look at your life and see places where you have made mistakes — either tiny or massive — don’t castigate yourself. Don’t see it as proof that you are “less than” you ought to be.
It’s like Life’s Driving Test: you may fail it on some occasions, but you’ve learned, and you will pass it the next time around.
Take a moment today to look back at your stumblings objectively but compassionately.
See what you have learned from your mistakes, and how they inform your life now.
When you acknowledge how you’ve grown…when you understand how positive changes came from those stumblings which you can pass on to others… you will accept that they were truly gifts. They just weren’t wrapped the way you expected.
