6 ½ 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
This quote is one of my favorites. Ginott says it so powerfully. You are the writer of your life’s script—each day you make a choice to give your power to productive thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes or to destructive ones.
Let the phrase “diamonds in the rough” remind you of your power just waiting to be recognized. Great pressure turns coal into diamonds. Yet the rough diamond looks dull and lifeless when first removed from the black carbon. A skillful lapidary transforms the shapeless stone into a beautiful gem—the brilliance inherently present within the rough diamond.
As with the great pressure that turns coal into diamonds, life challenges and health issues allow you the opportunity to grow, polish yourself and shine as the full brilliance that you innately are.
The following story about a client, I’ll call him Rob, is a great example of how challenges offer us growth opportunities. When I met Rob, he had just moved here from another state to get a fresh start after a recent bankruptcy and impending divorce. He had accepted a full-time position but it didn’t work out. He hoped to find more full-time work. He hadn’t. His wife, also without a job, moved back in with her parents. Throughout their 30-year marriage, finances were always a concern and over the last ten years, intimacy and healthy communication were lacking. Rob was scheduled that week to fly back to his home state to meet with his wife to further discuss their impending divorce.
Rob had four back surgeries in eleven years and, most of the time over the last three years he dealt with chronic lower back pain. His pain and the subsequent scenarios around it interfered with his ability to work and contributed to feelings of unworthiness, anger, resentment and fear over his future. Through recent phone conversations his wife tearfully pleaded with him to reconsider his plans. He felt guilt over moving forward with the divorce.
Months before our sessions, he had considered suicide.
He admitted he has a habit of wanting instant results. He became frustrated with anything less than his expectations of perfection and complete success. He was open to the lessons of the Universe but, trained as a scientist, he shared his skepticism toward the mystical. In spite of being an overachiever, Rob acknowledged that he had a negative self-concept, rooted in never feeling his father’s approval. Also, as a child he was teased about being the fat kid in the neighborhood. Throughout his adult years, his false belief of “I’m not good enough” was fed by years of 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, his “stories” that kept past challenges and false beliefs energetically alive. He has experienced how these limiting beliefs affect his ability to receive the full benefit of our energy sessions. After a healing session his pain completely diminishes but then, when he thinks according to his old negative beliefs, the pain returns.
He came to me for healing when his chronic back pain became severe. During our sessions he learned about the mind, body and spirit connection and how undealt-with emotions cause energy blocks which lead to pain and disease. He now understood that his body was giving him feedback via the pain that, despite narcotic analgesics and lying on an ice pack, had him screaming and fighting back tears with his slightest move.
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 dealing with a lack of finances or financial support, or by an obvious or underlying worry regarding money. Even those who enjoy financial success but worry about their financial future or that their money won’t last, or that people will take advantage of their wealth or worry about money in some fashion will create health issues in the lower back or second chakra. Carolyn Myss shares in Anatomy of the Spirit that other mental and emotional issues that create second chakra imbalances deal with 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 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 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 past life beliefs are continued in this lifetime—his were unworthiness and “not enough money.” He began to see his pain as an indication of the need to address those false beliefs. He chose to look at the root cause of the 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. The healings provided immediate relief. And, he learned that neither I nor Spirit could do his emotional work for him. He was raising his awareness and finding relief through meditation, affirmations and Epsom salt baths. He was sincerely trying but still needed to own the teachings to shift his beliefs enough to remain energetically balanced. 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. Thus, the relief from the healings was short term.
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; what a coincidence. She says, “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 this lifetime. 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 life time 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 let go of the fear-based thoughts and false beliefs that have held you hostage in 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 from other lifetimes.
If so, then intend to dissolve the grip that your fears and beliefs have on you. By creating lighter and happier feelings, your ability to more easily handle and deflect stress and chaos will strengthen. Also, your body will respond with more energy and improved health because you have opened to a greater flow of life force energy. Often symptoms of disease and illness will go away because you are clearing their root cause—those undealt-with emotions.