As a little girl growing up all I wanted was stability and predictability. My life’s plan was to go to school, learn to read and write, solve math problems and have a general knowledge of history, geography, science, religion, etc. The next step was to choose a career, go to college, get out of college, get a job, get married, have children and then finally retire-a happy, predictable and stable life. Somehow my life didn’t play out by this book. Another story took over, one filled with sudden changes and moves, a walk into the unknown. Because of it, I often felt a misfit and failure throughout.
I felt that my life was guided and driven by an invisible force nudging me and moving me away from the “norm.” My family labeled me a rebel, an angry young woman without direction who didn’t take her life seriously and just wasted it away. The family pressure to comply and to be just like everyone else was great and often resorting to shaming and guilt tripping tactics and manipulations in an effort to bring me back to the safety of the “herd.” It never worked and it propelled me to get as far as possible from all of them and their suffocating influence. I ended up moving to the United States over forty years ago, the nation that Spirit showed me to be the bastion for freedom. I made this country my new home away from home.
Looking in retrospect at my many wanderings and changes, the one driving force behind them has been a tremendous fear of losing freedom. In fact, ever since I can remember freedom has been at the very heart of my being. Losing freedom translated into different forms in my daily life and as far as my family’s viewpoint I was a person who couldn’t commit to anything or anyone, someone who kept running away from life. They failed to recognize the fact that I always took responsibility for any agreement I made with life and relationships. I stayed until I cleaned up any messes I made. I left jobs, relationships and marriages when they became a stifling prison cell that didn’t allow me for any further growth as a spiritual being. Naturally, nobody in my family, with the exception of my son, was able to understand my take on life.
Life is indeed a school of hard knocks and I certainly had plenty of them throughout. Along the way, I have learned to hone in and refined my sense of discrimination when it comes to following the inner nudges. I now can better differentiate when they are motivated by a fear reaction or are actually inspired by the divine. I have had my share of both experiences. This, in retrospect, has given me the ability to recognize the difference and act accordingly.
Fear is the root of all evil and it has deep roots into our emotions and beliefs. One thing I have come to realize is that no matter what the motivation is behind a choice of action, the Holy Spirit is always present and ready to teach us and show us truth if we open our consciousness and heart enough to allow it. No experience is ever a waste if in the end we grow from it into a wiser, stronger and more loving being.
Back in 2008 I was living in New Mexico. I owned a nice home with five acres of land. I thought for sure this would be my last move, the place to lay down my hat so to speak. That year I had an inner experience with the Holy Spirit nudging me to sell the house and move to South America. The Holy Spirit said it would be a very good opportunity for growth if I decided to take it. So I did. To make a long story short, after several travels through Argentina and Brazil I ended up back in Venezuela, my native country, a place I never wanted to return to.
Back then I had read enough to know what was coming for humanity. The Holy Spirit had given me plenty of visions and knowledge of the bleak future we would face as a whole which had made me very frightened. I knew that the USA was going to be the target for the dark forces because of the country’s strong roots to preserve freedom. Fear had taken a hold on my mind and emotions which made me unable to have a clear communication with the Holy Spirit. I was in survival mode and I had made the choice to stay in Venezuela and remain alive at all cost. The original reason for the Holy Spirit asking me to return to my native country was an opportunity for me to make peace with it and with my family. That was achieved in a year. After that I refused to listen to the Holy Spirit nudging me to return to the USA. Because of my horrific mental projections of chaos and destruction in the USA, I turned off my inner communication with the divine and listened to my fear and my need to survive instead. I stayed in Venezuela for seven years and it nearly cost my life. That is how long it took for me to let go of my terror and my projections of doom and gloom and finally surrender to the will of God.
The Venezuelan experience has made me stronger in so many ways, stronger in Spirit, stronger in Faith, stronger in love. Realizing how easy it is to fall prey of projections of doom and gloom, whether I create them or they are pushed by the media, the collective or our friends and family, I have more compassion for those who are under the grip of terror and are doing everything they can to survive and stay alive.
In a sense, I am making peace with mortality, a given for all of us and something we try to ignore and escape with all we have. In the end, it isn’t death that scares us it is the fear of it, the fear of the unknown. The only way I know to surmount it is to open the heart to divine love, the endless fountain that sustains all of life and all of creation. Returning to our Creator, to the source of all life and the infinite love in IT, how can that be scary? The answer is in each person’s heart, not in the mind, not in the emotions and certainly not in the fear.
Blessings to all
The Road Home 