Staring at a blank page on my computer, I glance down to check today’s date and suddenly become aware of the time warp that has become my life. What happened to the summer? Isn’t it still June? How did 3 months pass by without me taking a vacation? Is time moving more quickly and no one has informed me of the time change?
Back from a month of traveling up and down the east coast for various speaking engagements, it almost feels as if parts of me have not yet arrived home and a deep longing settles into my bones. I long for the words to describe a deep transformation that has been unfolding. I long for a way to describe how deeply I have been touched by death, the journey of the soul, the mysteries and miracles of faith, and a tangible, vibratory presence of love that is permeating my entire being.
Yet, how does one describe an experience with the Divine, in particular when it feels as the experience is beyond words? The sensation of being in communion with the Universe, a feeling of Oneness and a sense of unity with all things in creation has emerged as an awareness absent of the words that could possibly express my experiences of late; in particular as it relates to the phenomenon of the soul making it’s transition from the body and mind into the field of the unknown.
As I reflect on my life over the last 10 years and in particular the last year, I am humbled by the sadness, loss and the incredible beauty in becoming intimate with the phenomenon of death. Having said my final “physical” goodbyes to seven friends and family members since last October, I reflect on my role as a healer and as a support to both the dying and the living. “Healer to the dying” is a worthy paradox begging to speak its own truth onto the pages of my tattered, well traveled journal.
In a world that often sees death and illness as painful and certainly dreaded, I have been gifted with the opportunity to pray, reflect, bring comfort and spiritual healing as we have been present to several friends and relatives as they prepared to travel home to our great Creator. Physical death was part of their healing and each experience has impacted in me in ways that are still finding their ways into my awareness. Other losses came as a shock and did not lend themselves to the same level of honoring, yet even in those losses there has been much beauty.
Death, it seems, comes in all forms; sometimes an actual physical death and other times, as a death of an aspect of ourselves so that we may be reborn into a higher truth of who we are and thus open to an expanded sense of our existence and purpose. Depending on one’s belief regarding “life after death,” the experience of the human loss of life brings with it a full range of emotions, questions and fears. For me, death has become an incredible, indescribable next step in the evolution of our soul’s eternal journey into truth, wisdom and the essence of love and the connection we share as children born of the same Source.
My first real experience with the loss of a loved one was at the age of 17 when my father, Magan Kumar Pathik, made his transition quite suddenly after an allergic reaction to a dye used during a fairly common medical test. For years I struggled with the desire to reconnect with him. Clouded by varying views and pictures of what that would look like and how it would feel, connecting with my father’s presence felt out of reach, at least in the ways that I so yearned to experience him. I yearned to see his face, feel his healing touch, taste his cooking, or listen to the soothing Indian accent that seemed to tickle ancient memories of my lineage and the mystery of who I was becoming in the world. I also struggled with a lot that was unhealed and unspoken in our relationship and often felt robbed of the chance to speak my peace and put the past behind me.
A decade after his death, at the age of 27, and facing my own mortality, I was gifted with a life altering experience of speaking to my father while standing underneath a brilliant beam of sunlight in the middle of a quiet wooded retreat center. As a person who senses more from a place of “knowing” than “seeing,” I recall the moment that I realized I was speaking to him out loud. In spite of not hearing his voice or seeing his face, I felt a deep presence and found myself engaging in a two way dialogue.
The gratitude I experienced for all of who he was – the depth of his humor and intelligence and the intensity of his pain—was felt throughout every cell of my body and every aspect of my consciousness.
For a few moments I was One with my father, with God, with the sun and with the woods that surrounded me.
Old hurts and resentments were washed away and what began as my first real conversation with him since his death, I went beyond the freeing nature of forgiveness and was catapulted into a space of immense and humbling gratitude.
In a moment—a Divine Instant—I was healed of the stories that had held me captive in a body that had been wrought with pain and disability for over 15 years. All that remained was an overwhelming love and intense appreciation for all he had sacrificed as a teacher and guide on the path of my evolution. In that moment of complete and absolute forgiveness, the pain and fatigue that had burdened almost every aspect of my life completely left my body.
Of course it took my mind about 10 minutes to recognize that my body was free of all pain and immobility. The fatigue was gone. The heaviness was gone. The resentments and past hurts were gone. All that remained was an incredible feeling of comfort and aliveness.
I had been healed.
I was free.
My heart, mind and body was vibrating in a way I had never consciously experienced before.
I remember the moment of the realization as if were yesterday. Back in the circle in the main gathering room, my sudden awareness exploded out of my mouth as if it were a volcano erupting without notice.
“Oh my God, I feel no pain!” I exclaimed.
My guess is that of the 45 or so people there, very few were truly aware of the significance, let alone the miracle that I had just experienced. Just weeks before, my doctor laid out a dreadful picture of me waiting for an impending death; one laden with drugs, increasing disability, and a big push to leave my job and go on disability so I could, as he put it, “Spend as much time as I had with my children and get the pain under control as I prepared for an imminent departure from their lives.”
As much as one might imagine such a conversation as scary, let alone the worst possible scenario to be faced with, in truth, it was the moment of my liberation.
I had a choice.
I chose life over death and freedom and comfort over pain.
Unsure what that would look like and how I would heal, none of the details mattered. I just simply decided.
I was going to live and heal and I just knew, without a doubt that it would happen—if I allowed it.
In that decision, I also packed up my two babies, my photo albums and a season's worth of our clothes and said goodbye to a miserable marriage of five years. Over the course of the next two years I lost the majority of my possessions, my home, and any sense of financial security I had created through steadily working since the age of 12.
I was a single mother of two small children living out of two guest rooms in my parent’s home in an unfamiliar town. I financed my $20,000+ divorce and custody battle on credit cards. I shopped for our clothing at the Good Will store and paid over $700 a month for daycare so I could drive 4 hours roundtrip to an off-hours job at a jail in Maryland.
By all accounts my life looked pretty miserable, at least in the eyes of society at large. On the surface, I had lost everything. Yet, humbly, I knew I had been gifted with a miracle. Most of my friends at the time would not have cared, let alone understood the immense transformation that I was experiencing on both the physical and spiritual planes.
Sundays at church became my main source of energy and I knew I was being prepared for something incredibly important.
I grew in my relationship with myself and my source. As painful as those two years were, the inconveniences of depositions, custody hearings and the ridiculousness of the child support system became insignificant in the shadow of being healed physically.
The same day of my radical healing at that retreat in the woods, I met my future parents-in-law, Jeannie and George Law. Jeannie and I made such a connection that she invited me to join a women’s prayer circle and for the next year or so, every Tuesday morning, I would meet up with her. As part of our weekly gatherings, we shared prayer requests.
For a solid year, Jeannie’s prayer remained the same. Her entire focus was praying for her son, Brent Law, whose life had spiraled out of control as a result of severe alcohol abuse brought on by his own struggle with pain and spiritual separation.
On January 11, 1998, a year to the day that I left my first husband, and began praying for Jeannie’s son Brent, whom I had never met, Brent decided to take his last drink. By the next day, he had been brought back to life three times by paramedics, the withdrawal shocking his system into full cardiac arrest. He still recalls feeling a presence that literally shook him back into his body every time he began to lose consciousness, enabling him to call 911 as he lay dying on the floor.
I now know that Brent and I, in our seemingly separate and unrelated experiences, had been divinely educated in our awakenings to a relationship with a power and presence beyond measure and comprehension. We had both experienced miracles and healings in preparation for our destined meeting.
We had each faced our mortality and in a moment of choice, will and determination, we both decided to live. In the moment of such a spectacular choice, it is amazing what becomes important and what falls away. The everyday dramas and stories of daily life become irrelevant. Money, possessions, even a home to call your own becomes superfluous when faced with the possibility of not waking up to the world again.
All that matters is the emerging relationship with Truth, God and the few people who truly love and cherish your presence in their lives.
Just four months after Brent’s liberation, he moved to Annapolis to begin a new life. Reclaiming his spiritual upbringing in Unity churches, a few days after his arrival, he accompanied his parents and sister to a Friday night event at our church. The moment I saw him, I felt a pull I had not ever experienced and his parents and sister, who had already known for a year that we were meant to meet, introduced us.
My resistance to a deeper truth –a soul level recognition of this incredible spirit and the most beautiful man I had ever seen—began to crumble without my conscious permission. In hindsight, I now realize that I did not have a choice. Our meeting and the timing of it had been prearranged and predestined, our souls anxiously awaiting a reunion with one another. It was as if I was being reacquainted with a part of myself that had been asleep and was waiting to be aroused when the rest of my soul arrived.
Two days after our first introduction, we connected again. I was unraveling from all of my self protective binding and it was powerfully uncomfortable. I could barely breathe, nor could I avoid the fact that I was falling in love with this complete stranger; a man for whom I had prayed for a year.
I began writing again. Brent serenaded me with a beat up guitar, his only real possession. His voice was like an angel and his face was oddly familiar. I remember both the ecstasy and panic I felt when we first kissed. I knew to the core of my being that I would live the rest of my life with this man and all of the self protective barriers that would have kept me single (I had decided to never marry again) just melted away.
I can only imagine my mother’s horror when three months later we moved in together, with three of our five children crammed into a small house a few blocks between the two homes we had both sought salvation and healing in. Married 16 months after our first “physical” meeting, we just recently celebrated our eight year wedding anniversary and have enjoyed a glorious time as co-creators, lovers and best friends.
Interestingly enough, we released The Power of Our Way and www.thepowerofmywaymovie.com on January 11, 2006, exactly 9 years from date of me leaving my first marriage and 8 years after Brent quit drinking. It was a year later that we realized the significance of the anniversary and we laughed at the fact that we had both missed this obvious wink from the Great Mystery.
Together, we have found the essence of God/Spirit/the Universe, love, co-creation and healing and I suppose, in some way, it is what we offer together through our music and work in the Power of Our Way Community.
Last week, as I crawled into the hospital bed with my Grandmother, Mary Whistler, and began singing her the lullabies she had passed on to me through my Mother’s nightly bedtime rituals, I was overcome with emotion. As my mom entered the room, I grabbed her hand and she joined my daughters and me in a bittersweet serenade. As mom struggled through her tears, she began singing my grandmother’s favorite song, “In the Garden,” and we sang it over and over again, each time our voices regaining strength and in that moment; joining as one voice.
My grandmother, who had been unconscious for a while, opened her eyes, giggled and began singing along with us – four generations of beautiful, strong women celebrating a moment of heaven together. My daughters, stepfather and husband smiled and cried as they held a magical space for what I can only describe as one of the most intensely beautiful, spirit-filled moments of my life. Then, just as suddenly as she had regained consciousness and joined us in song, she slipped back into a deep and restful sleep, soon to make her journey home.
Later that evening, as I stepped into my office, my eye caught a phrase pasted on one of the treasure maps that adorn the walls of my sacred space of creation and service. It said “Ask Mary.” I had not really noticed it before and suddenly it almost seemed to vibrate off the poster board. “Mother Mary, Grandma Mary?” I quietly thought as I felt an incredible pulse of energy run through my bones. My body became incredibly heavy and as I walked into the living room I commented to Brent that it seemed as if gravity had increased a hundred times. It was so intense that the room began to spin and I collapsed on the couch, semi-conscious and completely unable to move for a few minutes. As he helped me into bed, I said, “Grandma’s going tonight, I feel her leaving.”
A few hours later, my mother awoke to a deep silence in my grandmother’s room. At 1:30 a.m., exactly three months to the hour that her daughter Nancy made her transition, my grandmother took her final breath. She joins her daughter, my father, her husband and all of the friends and family who have blessed us with their time here on earth. Dancing in the Garden I know they are also celebrating the death of pain and the human formed illusions of separation, lack and limitation. They are celebrating mine and Brent’s decisions to live and heal and are blessing our co-commitment to be of service to a greater purpose and expression in the world.
And, I feel them all.
My grandmother is laughing, giddy with the grace of complete freedom. My father is smiling and sitting with my grandfathers talking about philosophy, peace and feeling very proud of what they instilled in their children so they could pass along the beauty of faith to their lineage. I see Mahatma Gandhi and his wife who lovingly delivered and named my father. I see Mother Teresa, who took care of my older brother until his little body let go of his struggle to live. I feel Nancy, Albert, Junior, Duane, Warren, Mo and Stan saying thank you. I feel them in me, around me, through me and for a moment, I am there too, in the garden singing with my family, the angels and God…as One.
“I come to the garden alone
While the dew is still on the roses
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear
The Son of God discloses
And He walks with me
And He talks with me
And He tells me I am His own
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known
He speaks and the sound of His voice
Is so sweet the birds hush their singing
And the melody that He gave to me
Within my heart is ringing
And He walks with me
And He talks with me
And He tells me I am His own
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known
I'd stay in the garden with Him
'Tho the night around me be falling
But He bids me go; through the voice of woe
His voice to me is calling
And He walks with me
And He talks with me
And He tells me I am His own
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known”
(Words from "In the Garden" by Charles Austin Miles, 1913)
Copyright 2007, Anita Pathik Law, founder of www.powerofourway.com
(see Kimberly Marooney, Charlene and myself enjoying ourselves on Saturday evening...
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