Prompt: When have you felt most connected to your spiritual side?

The Pure Bliss of My Darkest Moments

How surrender opens me to the universe

I have been teaching spirituality in one form or another for almost twenty years. Within that world, there is an underlying idea that if we just do “this” kriya, meditation, practice, or diet, then we will have a “seventh-chakra” awakening and truly feel the divine.

I always sit quietly during these conversations and then eventually have to admit that many of my most mind-blowing experiences began because I was just so sad that I gave up.

The Day the Lumps Left

In 1999, I had lumps growing in my breasts. My mom had just died of breast cancer along with most of the other women in my family. Not wanting to take the medical route, an incredible teacher/guru appeared in my life in the form of a mentor as we transitioned our farm to organic… but he had many other gifts of healing that turned out to be exactly the medicine to dive into this inheritance that was killing all the women in my family.

As you can imagine, it was a journey of many dark nights of the soul. Almost every week, I would find myself digging deep into a new belief system that I had previously believed was solid and true. Every week, I would have to face another aspect of myself that wasn’t actually in line with my soul’s truth. And overall, I had to learn how to turn off my brain so that I could hear the guidance of my heart. I had to learn to surrender to be a part of the whole.

The lumps shifted and changed over time until there was only one in one breast and it had started moving its way out through the skin just below my nipple. By the end, I was in agony. The lump was protruding about an inch beyond the surface of my breast and there were electrical shocks flowing through my system. I had sent my children to my dad’s by this time (they were 2 and 4-years-old) because I needed to be able to stay inside and stay facing my demons.

One morning, I was lying in the tub not thinking about anything in particular. As I tried to stand up, which was no small thing because my body was in so much pain, I felt something release from my breast.

Suddenly, all the pain was gone and my being was floating somewhere. All I felt was warmth, and love, and joy. The words “by the grace of God” kept repeating over and over in my mind (which was strange because these are not words that I would normally say or even think). I stood there floating in the most effortless nirvana — for three hours… not that I actually felt time passing… I only figured that out later.

In the physical world, my breast had opened. Pus, blood, water, flesh, and all kinds of things were coursing out of my body. Over the course of the three hours, my bathtub filled to about an inch deep, while I floated in this blissful space.

(My breast healed completely from the inside out. Today, you would never know that anything had ever happened. The entire story of this journey is in my book What If You Could Skip the Cancer?).

Sitting on the Porch

A few years later, I was having the worst day. We were farmers, so our days were very long. On this day, I was exhausted, frustrated with my husband, and my kids just happened to want to pick at each other in the way that little kids do sometimes.

As I stood in my living room, my kids arguing about absolutely nothing, I snapped. I was finished. I hadn’t been cut out for this farm life (I had been a Toronto-born computer programmer/mathematician). Marriage was hard. Raising kids was hard. Basically, I was just exhausted and there didn’t seem to be any end in sight.

So, I walked outside onto our wrap-around porch, sat down, and said to God, “I give up. I’m finished”.

There was a maple tree on the laneway whose low hanging branch caught my eye. As my eyes started to fixate on it, the most beautiful “shower of light” flowed down over top of me. It was like this cool breeze was flowing down in a kind of cylinder bathing me with the most wonderful peace, light, and quiet.

While kind of floating over the front yard, I knew everything in the world. I could hear every human talking. It was effortless. My mind wasn’t limited to only focusing on one thing at a time. I could experience every single thing in the universe all at once… and it was so blissful.

I have no idea how long I floated in this blissful state. There were moments when I could hear my children fighting in the house… and that was okay. There were moments when I became aware of the grass on the front lawn. It was all fine. But mostly, I just floated there, completely neutral, happy, and loved.

And then, I heard the outside door open and close and I had the sense that my husband was coming out. In the physical world, he walked up to where I was sitting, sat down on the porch chair behind me with a beer and said, “Hey, whatcha doin’?”.

I tried to bring myself back into my mind to respond. But it was hard. I tried to speak, but I had no voice. Eventually, I realized that I had to fully come back in if I was going to talk to him.

This was actually a hard choice.

As I eventually “re-entered” my body, tears started flowing down my face. It was like I was wrestling to fit back in and some part of me didn’t want to go.

The words that came out to my husband were, “I’m somewhere else right now and I don’t know how to walk between these worlds.”

Luckily, my husband was a good guy who had gone through my entire healing crisis/awakening a few years prior and was therefore used to strange things happening.

He just looked at me and said, “Right on” and we just sat in silence until the kids or the cows called us on.

Surrender in Intimacy

Now, surrender is still the key for me. But I can just choose it without needing a crisis.

Some time after these experiences, I discovered tantra and soon found a world based on a kind of “surrender” to our greatest selves/God/the Universe and how this integrates our divine and our physical lives.

This brought all of my spiritual experiences deeper within myself. It changed my presence with my children, how I talked to people, and definitely how I made intimate love.

This truly is my favourite place to experience the divine. There is something about the focus and the ease of letting the rest of the world go. The moment a lover walks into the room, something releases inside of me instantly and I am in full surrender to whatever and wherever we are going to go.

But regardless of whether there is a man in the room or not, feeling close to my spiritual self is always about letting go. It is the freedom to write this article wondering where it will go. It is being open to whatever happens in this day and wondering with optimism where my path is taking me.

It is knowing that in full surrender, I am held and all I have to do is relax and enjoy the ride.

Thank you 𝘋𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘢 𝘊. for this wonderful opportunity to bring these memories together into something I can ponder today.