All her young life she wished for peace on earth – the insight that rocked my world.
It was this healing session with young Jess that gave me the extraordinary insight that not all our thoughts are our own. That we can pick up on other people’s thoughts so naturally that we think they are our own thoughts. That this is not just the gift of psychics or other specially sensitive people, it is just another one of the ways that we all uniquely experience the connectedness of all beings.
We were doing a horse clinic, learning how to work with our horses with an amazing mental connection, when 17 year old Jess came and asked if she could speak to me privately. Jess was a shy and timid girl, a black haired, dark eyed, tall, classic Italian beauty, who walked slightly hunched over as if protecting herself – a gentle soul, with an incredible gentle vulnerability about her.
She was pale and wringing her hands, extremely distressed about sexual abuse that had occurred when she was only six years old that had been preying on her mind all night with nightmares and flashbacks. It was an abuse that had torn her father’s family apart in a particularly horrible way, with part of the family not wanting to believe that this man was capable of what he did.
The Universe must have been looking after us, because the entire clinic that time was her friends and family, so I could deal with this differently in private. She lay in the healing room, while I’m pouring reiki healing into her, her face stressed with a confession that she had been unable to tell anybody about because it was so horrifying to her.
For years now, when she looked at a small child she often had thoughts of hurting them and her arm was waving about in a chopping motion as she described the way she talked to herself. “This is awful. How could you even think of such a thing. That’s not the sort of person you are. There’s no way you could hurt anybody, let alone a little kid” And her hands were going chop, chop in the air trying to cut off these ugly thoughts.
I don’t remember what led up to this moment in this healing session for me because up to then I had only been working with horses like that, but I look up to the heavens and say thank you to the wonderful being who was guiding me. I got her to go back and remember the last time she was thinking like that and roll those distressing thoughts away from her like a wave, so that she could still feel them, but they were no longer overwhelming.
Then I asked her “Are those your thoughts…?
With a dawning sense of wonder she said “No, they’re not”.
From that point on it wasn’t rocket science for me, but then I asked “Whose thoughts are they?”
There are no prizes for guessing that the thoughts were actually those of her abuser. As Jess realized that the struggle to not hurt any more little children was actually HIS struggle and that that torment was HIS torment, her heart opened up to this man who had hurt her so badly and unconditional love poured from her heart to him.
The awesomeness of that moment for me too was truly amazing. Not only was I privileged to feel unconditional love pouring out in such extraordinary circumstances, I got an insight into a truth so huge and so vast that it has the potential to change the world.
I understood that in that moment, this man had an opportunity for redemption that had not existed before. He may never see that girl again and if her family have their way that certainly won’t ever happen, but at that moment, he would have felt that amazing unconditional love pour from that young woman to him. I doubt we’ll ever know, but I wonder if all his defensiveness dropped away and if he too, understood what had brought HIM to that moment and what changes that enabled him to make in his life?
Jess walked into that room that morning a frightened, timid little girl and she walked out a proud, tall and amazing woman.
And I got just the first glimpse as to how sexual abuse can sometimes run in families and how the abused can become the abuser and how we, you and me, can change that – and how Jess has changed that for the world.
So here’s a toast to young Jess, whose courage to confess something so frightening and terrible, started me off realizing that not all thoughts that come into our heads are our thoughts. That other people’s thoughts can come in so strongly that we actually think that these thoughts are ours. That if our thoughts are not consistent with “who we are”, then they may well not be our thoughts at all.
And that this amazing and very natural connectedness to other beings that we ALL experience in our unique way, enables us to understand others in such a way that when enough people know about it and act on it, will bring peace on earth – a dream that young Jess has been dreaming since she was a small child…
Back to Practical Happiness and the email about Shame.
Can you see, that Jess had felt ashamed of those thoughts and feelings for a very long time and how much distress that had been causing her? Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the thoughts Jess had been experiencing is the only way to experience this connection to others though. Your way of feeling your connection to others with the five ways of feeling are unique. Instead of the thought, you could be feeling that physically, or emotionally, or with your energy or with your heart. Your circumstances and the understanding you get will be unique too.
And the right answer always, always, always feels good.
What if that amount of compassion is beyond us at the moment?
I so totally understand too, that unconditional love for someone who has done something so terrible could be beyond us. The Universe guided me into a way of dealing with that issue one time, that might help you too.
I remember a circumstance of being so bloody angry with someone’s actions that I couldn’t forgive them and yet I knew that the bottled up and repeated anger was only doing ME harm. I was worried about it, because there was absolutely no point in the forgiveness not being genuine – that would be just burying the problem, with all the issues that causes.
Then I got a flash of insight and I WISHED that I could forgive him – I could do THAT genuinely. 🙂
And I moved straight through that change place easily and something I had been wanting for a long time happened really easily and smoothly. Ask me on a Live Event one day and I’ll tell you the story – it’s a classic example of how to manifest what you want and the kind of things that get in the way.
Jess’s manifesting
The other VERY interesting part of that story is that even though she was only seventeen, Jess had literally been dreaming and musing and wanting peace on earth for as long as she could remember and THIS insight and the way that we teach people to understand how they experience their connectedness to each other, has the potential to bring us peace on earth.
Think about it. Think of every conflict everywhere in the world. How would that conflict change if the people involved could see / feel / hear / understand what the other person was experiencing? What the other person was feeling? And why?
How might this bring peace and understanding to your little corner of the earth?