Jumping (26 page)

“I don't think so. Why is it one of your favorite lives? It ended in tragedy, when we were still young.”

“We accomplished many goals in that life. We didn't see ourselves as helpless. We believed we could take care of ourselves. We had fun doing it. We discovered we had strengths and we relied on them. We didn't turn our lives over to anyone else. We did our best, and we were happy.”

“But it was suicide. Isn't that wrong?”

“We had gone as far as we could go in that life on our terms, and we knew it. We weren't leaving in defeat and despair. We were making a stand, refusing to bow to someone else's plans for us. That was our intent,” she says calmly, “and that was our choice.”

I look at Philip. He looks at me. “How do you feel about it?” he asks.

I shouldn't be surprised to see I have suicide in a past life. And this death seems much better than beheadings and battles.

“I feel okay about it. And I'm kind of in awe of the courage those two had.” I look at Nika. “That's why you felt like a sister to me when I first saw you.” Looking at her, I think of my own sisters, trying to imagine them doing half these things.

“A sister, but closer. I'm so glad I'm here to see you,” I tell her.

“And I you,” Nika says, smiling. “You know, you still have the courage we had then. You've just jumped again!” And she laughs, causing me to laugh, too.

“This advances us?” I ask, interested to know, wanting that for me and for her. “To have jumped?”

“You'll have a better balance of the spiritual and the physical in life now. You've allowed the infusion of spirit into this vehicle,” Nika says, tapping my chest, “for earthly expression, which is what it's all about. You'll find it easier to stay on your purpose.”

“How does it help you?”

“A change in your vibration changes mine, by association, because our energies are so connected. It helps everyone in your cohort. Jumping raises your vibration because you've cleared fear in order to do it. Any time we get rid of some of our fear, our vibration is raised because it's no longer as constrained as it was.”

“Well! Maybe that's why I feel so wonderful here.”

“Everyone feels better here!” Nika says.

“We need to go,” Philip says. “There's a man in town for you to meet.”

Another woman comes through the small crowd around Philip and me, and I begin to wonder if my whole cohort is women. She has grey hair pulled back in a double bun on the back of her head. She's dressed in a mid-calf length skirt, with blouse belted over it. She wears soft moccasin boots.

She's Navajo, I think, because I've seen women like this when I've visited my sister Kelly in New Mexico. I feel an immense love for this woman, just as I do for Nika.

“I was your husband in our last life together,” the woman says, taking my hands in hers. “I'm someone else's granny in this life that we share. But I'm there for you, too.”

My mind is reeling. This woman is in my life now!

“We live within each other—that's what a cohort is. You can see that now?” the woman asks. “We had a deep kind of experience together—a life and death one. In that existence we successfully piloted a group project to a kind of cosmic completion. That's rare. Things like that get planned often but seldom completed. So many things have to come together—people have to hold firm in their resolve to maintain authenticity of self and purpose. When we succeed, it's like every holiday and celebration rolled into one, like finding your lost parents, or reaching the top of a mountain you never expected to be able to climb. The success is felt by your whole cohort, and beyond. It's an extreme exercise in service, so it produces an extreme euphoria. You and I worked hard to do that. Do you remember?”

I stop to think, and the memory starts to surface. We didn't intervene in something—someone died. I remember. It's a small story, really, so I would never have realized the size of its effect. We were children, not more than eight or nine. We let our friend drown. We could have saved him, but we didn't. Somehow, we knew we weren't supposed to. He had to die in order for his family to learn compassion. He was supposed to be here for only a short while, and he knew this. If we intervened, all of the plans everyone had for this life would be put to waste, and some of those plans were important for the country and the world. So we let him drown and then we took his body home to his parents, after getting it onto our sled. Back then, I only knew I was confused and paralyzed by fear the whole time.

“It's the
not
intervening,” the woman says. “It's almost impossible for us when we're on Earth, especially in life-and-death situations. We tend to follow rote behaviors for any given situation, but especially those. In truth, all situations are different and require our intuition. But usually we can't see that when we're on Earth. When it's life or death, we think we're supposed to intervene on the side of life. But that time, seeing death approaching for the first time in our young lives, we still listened to our own intuitive knowing and watched him die. We cried, but we held on to each other and stood firm, supported by every ounce of energy our cohort could send our way. And then we still had to witness his parents' grief, knowing that on some level they did blame us, even though they said they didn't. It was quite traumatic for everyone concerned, and it followed us for the rest of those lives. But there was a way we did have peace on it, and we helped each other maintain that.”

“What are we to each other in this present life?” I have to ask.

“That's still to unfold,” the woman says, “though
not
intervening is still a theme for me, as are lost children.” She looks down for a moment. “I just wanted to plant this awareness for you, for you to know I'm there for you, whether or not we ever meet.”

We hug, and I feel this woman's power and again feel the sensation of being one. “Go and finish your journeying,” the woman says, smiling. “We're proud of you. You're clearing the path for so many others.”

I blow her a kiss as I move up the beach again with Philip. I think about how different my journey is from Duncan Robert's. He met one group of people and stayed in one place, listening to stories that told him of his larger identity. He was transformed by hearing what he had done in other lives and learning what he could do in this life. Maybe I'm learning the same things in a different way. Philip is quiet while I ruminate.

Two people are walking next to me, on my left, and suddenly I'm aware they are my mother and father from my current life. I am face-to-face with my abuser, a man I have always feared. As we walk, I feel my father's courage, and it's an incredible realization to me. I resist, but the information comes to me (as it does in the Void) with its heightened energy, and I can't avoid the knowledge of what made the abuse possible. Because I'm in the Void, this knowledge neither outrages nor sickens me.
My
name is on the things that led to the abuse, too.

First thing I know?

Only someone as close to you as your cohort would engage in this kind of advancement with you. I've had a buried idea that I was experiencing abuse in retribution—because I had engaged in it in another life. Engaged in it maybe with the entity who is now my father. We took on something incredibly difficult, together. We were partners in it. Now I realize that just wasn't the case. The three of us—my mother, too—agreed to take this on out of love, to help each other through a complicated skein of generational relationships that had gone from bad to worse.

This is the second thing I know: we can carry wounds of the spirit from lifetime to lifetime. Times when we were made to feel less than or others were, times we tried to right a wrong and failed. Times we failed in some way—failed ourselves or others. We want to keep trying until we've righted it, so we carry it along.

In our cohort, we had occupied various roles over various lives—first helping to create grudges and resentments that had become deeply embedded, and then trying to work to alleviate them. We created this situation as a group and we had to resolve it as a group. These grudges and resentments had constrained all of us, dooming us to life after life in which we strove to ease them, heal them. It was slow, laborious work. Progress was incremental, and it kept us from other pursuits.

So, my father proposed the most courageous resolution—it called for something beyond everything we had been trying. He wanted to settle it once and for all. It required something transcendent, that we wouldn't be able to deny had changed us profoundly. Incest.

He proposed this scenario to give everyone a chance for a purge of the negative energy that constrained us all. It was a drastic proposal, extremely difficult for everyone involved and could only be carried off by those with impeccable motivation and dedication. His courage and love had inspired me to offer my partnership in the scenario.

The third thing I know is that lives are for trying things, taking risks, for the right reasons, under the right conditions, so progress can be made. Because I did, my mother did. My mother and I had had many other lives together. We all trusted each other to stay true to purpose, in order to achieve the larger healing.

We stand face-to-face now. No one takes anyone's hands.

I realize how long I've been carrying buried hatred, fear, and confusion about my father. I see the harm that does to my current life—this is the stuff of illness, how it starts, where it starts, how it gains hold. It takes up residence in a corner of an essential organ in your body and eats away at it—the unresolved anxiety of it always with you, like a piece of leather rubbing at your skin until it reaches bone. It can do this because you have weakened your own spirit enough by this negativity to create a permanent home for it. I know I have worked hard on Earth to be able to manage my understanding of the abuse and make a kind of peace with it. I realize now only my father can heal me or help me heal myself at the level of spirit. But it's for me to do, to allow, not him.

I have to love him, and my mother, the way I love Philip.

This would have seemed impossible, unthinkable before. I can do it now because I know this is how the healing of the whole cohort happens—they find their way to love, out of the place of grudges and resentment and pain. If I permit the healing, they can all heal and move forward. We all play a very real part.

Healing is an action, a choice, a stepping out of the old and into a new way of seeing the situation. What has made me hold onto the old? To prefer it over healing? Well, you have to be ready or letting go to heal can feel like further victimization, creating more resentment. It's such a worn-out platitude to say “you have to be ready” to let go. But it had been so hard to get hold of an awareness and even limited understanding of the abuse, that letting go of it seemed wrong at first. My understanding of it had seemed so hard won that I thought letting go of it meant I would lose that part of myself again, would lose all that understanding, and go back to being that unprotected child.

If you're ready, it feels like becoming whole, reclaiming every piece of yourself ever given up to damage. And I find I'm ready because I've looked at it, as completely as I could. I went back and looked at it as the adult I am, putting it on the playing field of adults. So it has become integrated into who I am, a permanent part of myself.

Being here, in the Void, has allowed me to then move it into the realm of the spiritual, where such acts usually originate, for the deepest understanding of it—of why anyone would do it, how they could, and what they would achieve through the doing of it. I didn't know it at the time, but engaging in therapy, entering the world of counseling, as I had done in self-defense for a number of years, was a spiritual act that put me on the path to a spiritual understanding. These things are not separate. Each works to make you whole, through an understanding of yourself. Each works to give you yourself back.

I look at them both as they stand facing me, my mother and my father. Almost immediately I know I can do this. Not only am I ready; I am able. In fact, none of this would have happened if everyone here hadn't known I was ready. They knew it before I did. I shake my head in awe at it all. We are all equals now. We have come full circle and can thank each other for the partnership. We have been able to accomplish our healing. I had been the only piece holding it back.

Now we hold hands, looking into each other's faces. I feel that we are finished. We have done what we needed to do. We will part now, with much love and respect for each other, and we will probably not have any more lives together. They will move on to other challenges, able to do that because of the help we have provided each other. I hold their hands tightly now, feeling the largeness of the moment, thanking them. My father says, “It's a wonderful thing we have done. Harder to do than most things, but with a greater reward, too. I thank you, always.” Tears come to my eyes. “I thank you,” I say, having difficulty speaking.

My mother says, “You always were my favorite!” And we both laugh. “You kept me going through it, Babe. It was so hard for all of us. I am so glad not to have to do that again.”

“Me, too,” I say and I kiss their hands in gratitude. We part, my parents walking off to the east, away from the water. I stand there crying, feeling the warmth of their hands lingering on mine.

Philip takes my hand and asks me how I'm doing. I give him a reflective smile. “Never better.” I wipe the tears on my sleeve. “I guess I'm healing from the inside out.” He puts his arm around me. “Some lives run deeper than others.” I lean into him, and we continue up the beach. Though emotionally depleted, I feel capable of anything. Which is a good thing, since I know we're not done yet.

We go up the beach to the town we see in the distance, with high adobe-like walls, huge windowless expanses of them beneath a blue, blue cloudless sky. I know there has just been the call to morning prayer and some part of someone within these walls is present to me, someone who has opened to prayer. I suddenly realize he might be thinking of me as God! I mean Mohammad, peace be upon him, because this man is Muslim. We're going to visit him.