Six Page Excerpt from Calling Back Your power, Chapter 11
Diamonds in the Rough
I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration; I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.
– Haim Ginott
We are the writers of our life scripts and each day we make the choice to either lift ourselves through productive thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes or to bury ourselves under the shadow of our old programming and limited thinking.
Like a diamond in the rough we are each called to awaken to our power. It takes a great pressure to turn coal into a diamond. And, even then, the rough diamond looks dull and lifeless when it is first removed from the black carbon. Only a skilled lapidary can transform the shapeless stone into a radiant gem—unearthing the brilliance at the core of its being.
So it is with us. Life’s pressures give us the opportunity to transform ourselves from coal to diamonds, to heal ourselves of the residue of negative emotions and energy, and to shape our lives through our daily choices so that we too can shine in the full light of our divine selves.
Chronic Pain and Blocked Energy
When we met, the man I’ll call Rob had just moved to North Carolina from another state. He wanted to get a fresh start after a recent bankruptcy and he was in the midst of an impending divorce.
Before he came here, Rob had secured a full-time position in the area but it didn’t work out. He had hoped to find more full-time work. He hadn’t. His wife, also without a job, had moved back in with her parents. Throughout their thirty-year marriage, finances were always a concern and over the final ten years, intimacy and healthy communication were lacking.
Rob had had four back surgeries in eleven years. And, he had spent the prior three years suffering from chronic lower back pain. The pain and its consequences interfered with his ability to work and contributed to feelings of unworthiness, anger, resentment, and fear about the future. During recent phone conversations his wife had tearfully pleaded with him to reconsider his plans. He felt guilt over moving forward with the divorce.
Months before our sessions, Rob had considered suicide.
During our sessions, Rob recognized his habit of wanting instant results. He admitted that he felt frustrated by anything that did not live up to his expectations of perfection and complete success. He told me that he was open to the lessons of the universe but, trained as a scientist, he was also skeptical of my mystical approach.
Rob acknowledged that in spite of being an overachiever, he had a negative self-concept. He believed it was rooted in having never felt his father’s approval and that it had been made worse when other children teased him for being the fat boy in the neighborhood. Throughout his adult years he carried his false belief of I’m not good enough and fed it with unfulfilling relationships, lack of intimacy in his marriage, fear of rejection, and a constant drive to improve and do better.
After a few sessions, Rob caught himself reinforcing his negative programming, keeping past challenges and false beliefs energetically alive through the stories he told himself. He now saw how these limiting beliefs affected his ability to receive the full benefit of our energy sessions: after a healing session his pain went away, but when he fell back into his old, negative thinking, his pain inevitably returned.
When Rob came to me for healing, he had severe, chronic back pain. During our sessions he learned about the mind, body, and spirit connection and how when we fail to deal with our emotions they take root inside of us, blocking our energy flow, and often leading to pain and disease.
Despite narcotic analgesics and ice packs, Rob told me that the slightest movement caused him to scream and fight back his tears. After working together for a while, Rob came to see his pain as feedback—something he could listen to and shift with a healthier perspective.
The lower back is located in the second chakra, one of seven non-physical energy centers within the body. Other areas in the second chakra that can be affected by negative beliefs are the sexual organs, large intestine, pelvis, appendix, bladder, and hip area. The lower back is affected by long-standing emotions that deal with a lack of finances or financial support, or by an obvious or underlying worry regarding money. Even those who enjoy financial success but regularly worry about their money—wondering if their investments will last or whether others are trying to take advantage of their wealth—create health issues in the lower back or the second chakra.
In Anatomy of the Spirit, Carolyn Myss lists the mental and emotional issues associated with imbalances in each of the chakras. For the second chakra she includes: blame and guilt, money and sex, power and control, creativity, and ethics and honor in relationships.
Rob’s family had stressed over money for years. He had felt powerless in a marriage which was devoid of an intimate sexual relationship. He blamed his wife for their problems and carried guilt for moving on from their marriage. Considering his bottled-up emotions, I wasn’t surprised when he told me about the multiple back surgeries. The root cause, the emotional blocks, had never been addressed.
Rob and I just happened to meet at a social event shortly before his back pain began screaming at him. He called me when it got worse. Our life coaching sessions helped him understand how the themes of childhood and past life beliefs remain with us—he began to recognize his feelings of unworthiness and not enough money for what they were. He reframed his pain as an indication of the need to address his false beliefs. Rob took back his power and chose to look at the root cause of his pain.
Rob’s in-person and distance healings included rebalancing his energy field with energy healing and sound healing—sound frequencies created by my voice, crystal bowls, and tuning forks—which provided immediate relief. But, he learned that neither I nor Spirit could do his emotional work for him.
Rob kept raising his awareness and started finding some relief through meditation and affirmations, along with Epsom salt baths. He was trying but still needed to own what he was learning before he would be able to shift his beliefs enough to remain energetically balanced and pain free on his own. His feelings of low self-worth, the anger he kept just below the surface and expressed at the least bit of frustration, and the guilt he felt in moving on from the marriage threw his energy field out of balance again and again.
Rob wrote the following about his experience. “It sounds so easy to just release the negative energy of unworthiness, fear, resentment and anger and allow the positive energy of love, abundance and peace to flow in. I am certainly not choosing pain over peace. For me, I do feel like a diamond in the rough, though it has not been easy to shift my old programming.
“On my way to letting my Light shine, Suzette is helping me to recognize that it’s the accumulation of negative thoughts that build into an avalanche of despair. I am making a conscious choice to redirect those thoughts toward acceptance and surrender to my Higher Power. When I am alone and become present in the moment, meditative and receptive to the love and abundance of the Universe, I allow in and accept the higher vibrations. The pain and feelings of unworthiness magically disappear. Even though it fills me with awe and gratitude in the moment, I am not yet effective at sustaining the higher vibration. I slip back on the roller coaster that redelivers me to my feedback—emotional and physical pain.
“Over the last several days, I couldn’t move without feeling waves of burning electricity down my left leg in spite of the narcotic analgesic. I was allowing myself a big pity party and couldn’t focus on the empowering suggestions Suzette shares. I hadn’t talked with her for several weeks and I was expected to make a five-hour airplane trip the next morning. I considered a 911 call that night.
“Then Suzette phoned to check in with me. I said, “What a coincidence.” She said, “Not.” She reminded me to take my power back and to tap into the teachings from previous sessions. She helped me release the anxiety surrounding my ‘need’ to make that flight the next day and the challenges of the ensuing several days of the trip. She helped me surrender and trust that Spirit would guide this trip, if I was to go at all, and for the highest good of all. She reminded me to get out of my own way and to receive the abundant healing energy that is always available, as long as I don’t block it with my persistent fear-based emotions. I became more centered. I gave my pain and my trip over to Spirit. I had to. I could no longer manage it on my own.
“Suzette agreed to do a half-hour distance healing later that evening. I set an intention that if it was for my highest good to make the trip in the morning, my pain would be relieved when I woke up.
“The next morning, I was not only able to make the flight, but I no longer required narcotic analgesics. My back improved each day in spite of my drive of over 800 miles in a rental car before my return flight to Raleigh.
“Suzette helps me lighten my need to totally heal these emotional blocks yesterday. I am seeing financial issues, anger and unworthiness as themes my soul wanted me to heal. I am working with the power of the mind and am relaxing the need to be so perfect or to carry the burden of my wife’s emotional pain. I am focusing on the possibilities instead of what is.
“What is? I am out of a job. I don’t like it but I can see how my life needed this to get my attention in a dramatic way, I had ignored looking within all these years. I did not see four back surgeries as a hint. I did not see a lifetime of financial stress and feelings of I’m not enough as a hint. And now, my body, once again, got my attention and I’m ready to see it for the message it brings. I’m ready to recognize and release the root blocks. The saying, ‘When the student is ready, the teacher appears’ is valid here. I’m ready for my bliss. I’m learning that I deserve it.”
Rob learned the hard way. But you don’t have to wait for the Universe to create pain and drama to get your attention. Perhaps it’s time to feel and address the fear-based thoughts and false beliefs that have held you hostage to your mind. Perhaps it’s time to grab an imaginary Kleenex and wipe clean the lenses through which you, like many others, have interpreted your life—lenses blurred by negative experiences, erroneous beliefs, hurts, and even events stemming from other lifetimes.