If you saw The Last Jedi, you remember that dark open pool that Rey felt called to. For the first 30 years of my life, I lived inside an abyss like that. Surrounded by nothing but darkness and negativity, I had tried and failed to please everyone. Parents to partners, I cluelessly gave myself away. I walked through life like a hooded cobra surrounded by layers of frustration, anxiety, disappointment, and pity around all the lack of things I didn’t know I needed. Negative energy circled me like a vulture over carrion. To say the least, my outlook was grim, and I didn’t have any clue that I had control of anything. I was plagued by the constant thought, “My life is careening out of control, and I have no idea how to stop it!”
When you have a thought again and again, eventually you believe it. And what you believe, you become.
And I had become a walking pile of garbage. Worse, a victim! Wait. WHAT? I was tough, smart, determined, tenacious even. How in the world had I become a sad and sickening victim? My own emotional, mental, and spiritual garbage was crushing me like the trash compactor from the first Star Wars movie, and no one around me could offer any assistance. I studied self-help books, followed exercises, journaled, wrote characters who acted out things I couldn’t, consulted a therapist, and none of that assuaged my feelings or mended my spirit.
Enter Awakenings, a new shop in the area I was living, and the first of this kind I’d ever seen. A mystical place full of crystals, incense, tarot decks, books on astral projection and past life regression. Oh, the oddities. I imagined only the most knowledgeable and interesting people frequented places like this. A den of temptation filled with things I wanted touch even though I didn’t have a clue what any of these forbidden things were used for. I wanted to, so I learned. Book by book, deck by deck, class by class I immersed myself into the sanctuary of strangeness that felt so satisfying that I completely disengaged from my misery. What a delightful diversion. I’d found my happy place, and by extension, an inner sanctum.
I used to think I had wandered into Awakenings by chance, then I came to believe I was guided there – shoved actually – like a steer through a shoot. And Thank You, whomever managed that! I mean, a psychic had told me that I wasn’t listening to my guides. But how in the world did one do that? This I was interested in learning. These were the tools I needed to help myself out of the quagmire of crap I’d been unknowingly steeped in my whole life. It took time. Years. Perhaps the right therapist might have helped faster, but I’d been soured by a bad experience. Seeing results on my own gave me hope. Only I was able to fix what was wrong, which was everything. Job, marriage, attitude, perspective, you name it. Everything had to change. In time, it did. Once a crack opened in my old belief system, everything started to shift, seemingly not by choice. Like a house of cards tumbling down I was cheated on, laid off, told off, cut off, abandoned, even my apartment burned down to the ground, literally lost everything I owned. Felt horrible at the time, but looking back, it was exactly what I needed – had asked for – in a far more extreme way. I was desperate for a shift, and I got what I asked for, one domino after another.
I’ve always leaned toward the nonconventional, so these tools resonated with me, and Thank God! Saved me in more ways than one. Tarot alone helped me understand me in a way that no one else could. I went on to learn meditation, dowsing, numerology, hypnotherapy, and astrology and continue to learn other modalities.
I went from thinking that life happened to me to the understanding that the Universe mirrors back to me what I put out into it. Energy is as energy does. The tools gave me a new perspective, helping me show up for myself and create a new and improved life. Out with what wasn’t working and in with what did. The Meta sanctuary grew into my career, fitting as comfortably as food fit Julia Child.
The Meta life is not for everyone, but if you search, you can find light in the darkness. And for some of us who don’t resonate with the conventional, it can be everything we’ve been searching for.