Another Layer of Healing

I tossed and turned through the night. My mind kept reviewing the book chapters I’d finally finished and submitted to my editor after long months of hard work.

I dreamed all night of those chapters and the story of my childhood included in them.

Upon awakening in the morning, I felt anger.

How strange to wake up angry! This was a new experience for me. What was I angry about?

I lay in bed and touched into the feeling. I felt the anger bubbling up.

As I breathed into it, an image surfaced. I saw myself as a child, alone in the hospital, and no one telling me what was happening to me. In the forty-six years since that experience, I’d never felt anger about it before. My mind wanted to analyze the anger, but I decided to just feel it.

I felt the anger and breathed in and out. Then, underneath the anger, I found fear. A thread of terror ran through my body as if I were 11 years old again. Tears swelled in my eyes. I felt the same fear I’d felt then: am I going to live?

I continued breathing in and out. I felt again the stark loneliness, the void, the emptiness, of being so young and fragile and alone.

Then just as it did when I was 11, a warmth entered. I felt comfort that was not of this world. My body softened. I felt okay and a sense of peace was with me. I remembered how this presence, this peace of God, had come into me as a child and how it comforted me.

Now again, on one December morning of my 57th year, I was feeling this presence. My tears turned into tears of gratitude.

I knew again I wasn’t alone.

Prayers of thankfulness came through me. I’m grateful to be alive. The feeling I’d deeply felt as a child I now felt again as I lay in bed, breathing.

When you have moments of unrest, of anger, of fear, can you breathe into the feelings? Emotions are not permanent. If you let yourself feel them, they will move and dissipate. And each time you do, you heal a little more.

Underneath the feelings is where we heal and become grounded and more fully alive.