Keeping the Faith – Reflections on My Hocking Hills Adventure

As we continue going through the transformation we are all in the midst of, it can sometimes feel like we aren’t making any progress at all.  We find ourselves struggling to stay positive and slipping back into old habits that don’t enrich us or feed our souls.  Our plans seem to go sideways and we begin to wonder if we are off our path.  This makes it tough to keep having faith.

I went through a bout of this recently with my Hocking Hills retreat weekend. I was excited to share one of my favorite places with a group of 10 lovely women and had high hopes for a weekend filled with fun.  The Universe, though, had other plans.

The trip started out with the women I was driving with showing up as fire trucks came swooping in to try to put out a house fire next door.  The neighbor had left a pot on and gone somewhere and smoke had been billowing out from under her garage door.  We drove off to the sound of sirens wailing.  Perhaps I should have taken that as a sign!

The next challenge happened at Ash Cave where we were meeting the rest of our group for the first hike of the weekend.  We got out of the car, only to discover that the keys had been locked inside! With no cell service in the area, this led to a group heading off to find somewhere they could get a call through, delaying our plans by a couple of hours.  In the midst of that, one of the participants discovered that her husband had been in a car accident. Thankfully, he was okay, but she was understandably concerned and frustrated that communication was so challenging without cell reception.

That night, I decided to sleep outside on the back porch.  Normally, I can’t get enough of being outside, so this would have been fun.  On this occasion, I ended up hardly sleeping at all and spending a lot of time wondering if the raccoons that were running around over my head on the upstairs porch were going to come down and discover me.  Needless to say, I was very tired when morning finally came.

The next challenge, which was really the tipping point for me, occurred with stairs.  One of the women fell down the stairs (and was thankfully okay) about the time that I had my own stair catastrophe.  I was on my way downstairs with my heavy bag full of spiritual tools and realized it was silly to carry them down there as I would just have to bring them back up later.  I turned to ask one of the women who was on her way up to take it back up with her.  She took the bag from me, lost her balance, and bumped a picture on the wall.  With a call of warning to me to watch out, I turned and looked up, only to get hit right in the left eye.  All I could think of was that I was going to be blind as it felt like the heavy picture had hit directly on my physical eye.  Thankfully, after doing a series of Bodytalk Fast Aid several times, I discovered I could still see and only had a black eye.  The shock and pain of this, though, opened the floodgates for me and all the repressed emotions from the last month of shifts and changes came welling up and pouring out.

Thankfully, two of the women who were with me were people I’ve known a long time and both are gifted intuitive healers in their own right.  They were both wonderful!  They helped me figure out what was happening from a spiritual point of view and provided a lot of much-needed comfort and love. After that, a group of us were guided to do an energy clearing with one of the participants which offered a beautiful healing for us all.  That changed the course of the weekend – bringing great healing and transformation for everyone, though not in the format I had expected.

So what did I learn from all of this?  Here are a few insights that hopefully will help you through your own challenges…

1. We don’t have to do this alone.  Many of us have spent most of our life feeling that it was our job to help and support others.  We are much more comfortable being the givers instead of the receivers.  This experience brought me the gift of seeing I don’t have to go through these changes alone.  I had felt responsible for providing all the support on the weekend and had it brought home to me again that my job isn’t to have it all together.  My job is to be real and to let God work through me.   My own struggles offered a way for the others to step into empowerment with their own gifts. They gained confidence in what they have to offer and I received the blessing of their wisdom and kindness.

2. Being honest, even when it makes you feel vulnerable, is healing and empowering.  I’ve spent a lot of my life as someone who is highly sensitive trying to protect my vulnerability.  This experience (and some others along the way) reminded me that being vulnerable and sharing from the heart is actual one of my greatest strengths.  By being willing to be honest about what I was going through and in asking for help, I received what I needed and also allowed others to get what they needed by being able to share their own wisdom and love.  Others felt safe to share their struggles and we found a lot of common themes in what we were experiencing which brought us all comfort and support.

3. Staying in your North Node is vital.  I have talked about Jan Spiller’s book, Astrology of the Soul with pretty much everyone I have worked with over the years.  This book offers a blueprint for your spiritual path and the traits that you are developing in this lifetime.  It provides valuable information to help you see your challenges and what you are trying to learn.  My North Node is Aries and my job is to lead and act by following my own inspirations and needs.  My astrological sun sign is Capricorn whose keynote is “to teach” so these two focuses require me to follow what I’m inspired to learn and to teach what I discover.  With this experience, I was slipping into my old patterns and focusing on what I thought others needed to learn.  The Universe quickly corrected me by bringing me back to my path of self-discovery and self-love and in doing this allowed everyone to learn what they needed to.

4.  We are Divinely Guided. I have had so many magical experiences in my life and so much evidence has been provided about how well and truly loved I am by the Spiritual Guides who walk with me.  They are truly phenomenal!  Even in the midst of the challenges I faced, I felt protected, loved and cared for.  The weekend didn’t go as I had planned, but it did provide me exactly what I needed to move into my joy and step fully into my true self.  My Team brought me support in the form of wonderful friends, synchronistic events, and a weekend that was designed to give me time with small groups of people instead of the larger group focus I had planned.  It truly was a magical weekend in so many ways and continues to bring me blessings as I process all that occurred.

5.  Everything thing always works out for me in ways I enjoy.  I’ve been saying this statement a lot lately and even though I didn’t “enjoy” some of what happened over the weekend, I do see that I enjoyed the results and how much better I felt after the experience.  Even my eye injury healed quickly.  I also realized that the more I stay centered in this belief – continuing to affirm that I am a magical being, living in a magical Universe, and everything always works out for me in ways I enjoy, the more that becomes my truth.

Finally, I would like to say a big thank you to the amazing women I had the gift of spending the weekend with.  I am so grateful for all of you and for your willingness to choose to go through transformation at such a deep and profound level with each other.  I love you all!

Sending much love and hugs to everyone else too!

Nancy

PS. If you need some intuitive insight and practical coaching to help you through these transformational times, I am happy to help!  You can learn more about working with me here:  How to Get Started