Tahra’s Story——————Journey to A Guided Soul

c h a p t e r  i——————The Search Begins
Who am I? The best way for me to answer this is to explain where I have been. Perhaps like you, I was seeking answers. I felt trapped, at times, and I wasn’t sure how to build the life I wanted. Some days I felt good but many days I felt stuck. I had my fair share of hardships including the death of my Mom after Alzheimer’s gripped her (I was fifteen when she began to get sick), but for the most part, things were okay. Emotionally I felt like I was trying to keep everything afloat because I didn’t remember choosing my life and it was hard to be grateful. It seemed like I was repeating the same day over and over again. My life, more or less, felt like it was happening to me.

c h a p t e r  ii——————awakening through wisdom
To get myself out of this funk, I read books written by Marianne Williamson, Dr. Wayne Dyer, and Deepak Chopra; I started to understand the significance of quantum physics, hugged Amma The Hugging Saint, watched 'I Am', 'The Shift' and 'What the Bleep Do We Know' about 5000 times. My mind began to expand. At the same time, intuitively I knew that if I started to value and respect my body in more intentional ways things might also shift. I exercised with purpose and I eliminated foods that were clearly making me sick. (I cut gluten out of my diet entirely and eventually also cut back on cow dairy.) Lingering, unexplained health issues (including fainting and seizures) started to become a distant memory.

c h a p t e r  iii——————the spiritual shift
Thanks to new insights from the books and movies I had watched, I started to reframe my life in a spiritual context. I was moving in the right direction and waking up to a new way of being. I was more loving and forgiving and as a result, the outside started to reflect the changes I was making within myself; things began to line up and it appeared as if I finally had my shit together.

c h a p t e r  iv——————facing inner fears
What I didn’t know though, was that at that point in my evolution I was still operating with a limited sense of self. I had no real connection to my Soul and it wasn’t even a consideration that I might be a guided soul. The way I saw it, there was me, the woman who lived in Brooklyn and she was someone I, on a surface level, started to feel proud of. She had a great job, wonderful friends and family, a great apartment, a boyfriend, and she was starting to delve into spiritual ideas. In many ways, I felt like I understood what I was supposed to be doing but at that point I didn’t know that beneath the 'put together' facade I was really operating with only half of my engines; the other half were frozen in fear. I was afraid to admit that on a subconscious level I still felt insecure, incompetent, and unattractive. I had very little connection to my own feelings and had no idea beneath everything I still felt unqualified, unworthy, and lost. What felt like worst of all, during this time, I didn’t know how to implement the 'self-help' books and documentaries I had devoured. I was only scratching the surface on what it meant to feel love because I still didn’t have a clue how to love.

c h a p t e r  v——————life's tests
Ironically (although common) thanks to all of the new information I had uploaded, my friends’ and family’s problems and their fear-based thinking stood out like neon signs. I was diagnosing everyone (with a less than loving inner dialogue) instead of spending time looking at myself square in the mirror. I’d intellectually mastered the concepts of Love vs. Fear, All Is One, and Law of Attraction, but it had yet to make sense to my heart. Then something crazy happened to really test me… Life. Within a few days, a close member of my family was sentenced to five years in prison, my assistant (a.k.a my right hand) quit without warning after he had just returned from a two-week vacation, and I broke up with the first boyfriend I’d had in a while. I was shattered and simply 'loving' everything seemed like an incomplete tool for what I was facing. However, instead of tapping into myself, I turned away from the deep senses of sadness, loss, and betrayal that were bubbling under my surface. I powered through, and I reasoned that the 'spiritual thing to do' was to spin gold into the chaos around me. If I let the dark feelings surface, I’d be an ungrateful victim, right? My neck and back started to twist me into an off-balance mess. I ignored the screams of my body begging me to address what I was really feeling.

c h a p t e r  v i——————the cry for help
I learned that life isn’t about learning what to do in order to navigate the Universe, rather it is about learning that your very state of being and how you observe creates your Universe. I grew so tense and withdrawn that a co-worker sat me down to tell me she couldn’t 'take my energy anymore.' This confrontation was devastating. I knew better; all I wanted was to be a happy, loving person but I couldn’t help myself. I sat and wept with her. 'I don’t want to be this person,' I told her. Things seemed to be looking up, so why did it still feel like my walls were caving in? Why couldn’t I handle everything? What I have come to learn is that we can’t intellectualize ourselves out of fear-based thinking. When we have real fear, and we don’t take time to face it head-on, it will always trump our good intentions. My cry for help didn’t happen right away, though. It took me another year or so of painful ups and downs before I finally threw my hands up. I was ready to both take responsibility and let go. I believe that as soon as we admit to the Universe (or God/Goddess) that we are the captains of our own Souls, that Divine force offers us a GPS. A gentle voice says, thank you for recognizing you’ve been driving this ship, are you ready for me to work with you so you can get out of the mud now? Once I said yes, an onslaught of wonderful healers and Gurus entered my life.

c h a p t e r  v i i——————the healing journey
I want to tell you that my healing happened overnight, but that’s not the case. Healing is a spiral and as we go around we experience deeper and deeper truths. We continue to change and evolve as everything around us continues to change and evolve. We expand into a greater version of ourselves every time we are stretched and asked to keep doing the work. As Ram Dass says 'A feeling of aversion or attachment towards something is your clue that there’s work to be done.' There isn’t a neat ‘before and after’ picture of my healed self because I now have the capacity to hold more than that limited perception. The notion that we can heal and stay in a state of bliss is inherently a dual perspective. In suggesting that, we are saying there is an opposite, or a right place to be and a wrong place to be. It’s really not one or the other, truly waking up is seeing that healing can be about opening and closing, it’s both and everything. There is nothing to get or figure out; instead, I just continue to commit over and over to staying present to the perfect nature of what is – right now.

c h a p t e r  v i i i——————embracing the cycle
The vine of a passionfruit tree sprouts an impossibly beautiful flower, and when the flower dies a juicy, sweet fruit emerges. When the fruit ripens it falls from the tree and the cycle begins again. How tragic would it be if the process stopped after the vine bloomed a flower? We need these little deaths in order to reemerge more passionate with each incarnation, in this lifetime …and in our Soul’s lifetime. Once you are awakened to the awareness of your own divinity, it is not something you can turn off but you can most definitely find yourself struggling again and again as you continue to expand each time around. What helps us through the process is the knowing that we can harness the power of Source energy to co-create a life we want to live."

c h a p t e r   i x——————the power of guidance
My healing started when I took responsibility and asked for help. In addition to other teachers and guides, I worked with a ThetaHealing spiritual healer who helped me identify a handful of fears that were blocking me. If something triggered me, instead of ignoring it or pushing the feelings away, I learned how to examine the fear behind the feeling and empathetically witness myself feeling deeply. I think it’s important to work with someone to help in the process; like the eye trying to see itself, it’s impossible for us to see ourselves clearly, and a conscious, awake guide can be extremely beneficial. I started connecting the dots of my life, and continue to be a student of my body and life, like a detective working on the most exciting and important mystery ever.

c h a p t e r   x——————universal co-creation
I have come to understand that life isn’t about learning what to do in order to navigate the Universe, rather it is about learning that your very state of being and how you generate awareness creates your Universe. If you observe with appreciation, you will witness some radical shifts. As one of my mentor’s Joseph Aldo said, which has been confirmed in plant medicine spaces, 'You are the Universe.'  Or as I like to say, U are the Universe in reverse. ;) Your reality is reflected in the depth of love you practice holding for every aspect of yourself and the complex world around you. When you witness the unfolding enchantment of yourself and life with loving eyes, you will be guided to realize yourself as all that you aspire to be. 

The impossible will be possible, once you are ready to believe.