"This little heart of mine. I'm gonna let it shine."

It was the mid-80's. Nearly three decades before New Thought consciousness terms such as "manifest" would become standard vernacular. But that's what my therapist in essence said was happening in the string of compliments that I had on some level sought for affirmation. It must be happening again for, I've received a string in the last couple of weeks, and these I'm kinda giddy about. Bear with me….

"You were always wild at heart," said my best friend.

A dear, older woman at the gym gushing about my curly hair: "Oh, you just look at it and think–'she looks fun!'"

"Something's going on with you," said my friend Gregory, looking at my face curiously. "You are really shifting! You're glowing."

And then, my friend Ken: "You have a marshmallow heart. And, I'm probably one of the few people who know that."

Perhaps I've attracted these affirmations to myself as an assurance that the changes within are showing without…

I do think there's something to the Gemini thing. I've got two sides to my personality and if you see me in a work setting, you may not know that there is a part of me that's not all business, not all task-driven and actually likes to have fun. She's the gal on the dance floor that's got rhythm and goes to town, causing all the folks that know the all-business side to reach up and scratch their noggins, perplexed.

And what Ken meant about the marshmallow heart…there are those who know that I am gooey on the inside. If you read this blog maybe you think that's how I am. And you're right. But if you know me in person you might be more likely to say something like: "Her bark is worse than her bite."…Those are the people who know there is something soft behind the tough exterior.

You see, the recent events in my life have broken open my heart. And, it needed to be broken open. Around it there was a hardened shell. The past is the past. Rocks are hard and water is wet. At 51 going on 52, I now realize that I suffered from emotional abuse by parents that loved me and meant well. Blah-blah-blah. Yeah, I know. But, listen, I'm not blaming them. No victim card show-and-tell here. Twenty years of therapy hasn't gotten me to the point I am now. Sure it helped. I'm grateful for all the work I've done. But it took this latest wake-up call for me to see patterns that I didn't even know were buried deep, perpetuating a pattern of bricks built around my heart.

Only a few people got close and I kept many at arms length. I've lived years in critical mode because I was heavily criticized. Criticism was both of my parents' weapon of protection and I adopted what I was taught. It was an ugly defense mechanism.

What I'm attempting to do, who I'm attempting to become, is requiring a HUGE paradigm shift of me. I am practicing daily seeing the god in people I pass on the street. To treat each person with the kindness deserving of the Christ within. Yes, I can be warm and fuzzy, but it's been selective. It's been to people that I thought to be safe. That wouldn't hurt me. Or that I could take out of a catagorical cage and befriend. My family was BIG on categorizing people. I learned that well, too. Categories alienate. They fail to unite people into the truth that we are. All. One. All the while I wasn't really conscious of all of these categories and tapes deeply enmeshed into my DNA and buried in the subterranean vault of my spirit.

I'm changing. It's a process. I need to buy some time. Sometimes I flip the switch off and go dark…until my heart is jabbed back into wakefulness. And in all of this change, this expansion of the heart, I'm getting lighter. I'm lightening up because I am doing deep, deep work that's sloughing decades of debris away from my heart. And what is emerging is that glow that Gregory saw. And, that broken heart? It's becoming: Luminescent.

And the thing is, I'm not special. Well, I am. But no more than You. We are all special. We all have these hearts that have been broken. Some of us have been repaired. Some of us are in a state of repair and then some are piled up in a heap in disrepair. Still, all these precious hearts are no less special wherever they are on the continuum of their heart beat journey. This old world is cruel. But that cruelty–as we may judge it–and yes, sometimes it really is that–it is our teacher.

I am greatFULL for the teachers. They are teaching me to come home to who I am, and who you are and who we all are. Beings. Being with hearts. Of Light. 

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Part of who I must return to is my long-denied visual artist self. Being an artist was taboo in my family and with my parents help, I slammed the door and then I double bolted it. After years of dabbling in various media, I am honing in on collage. The heart, above, was cropped from a collage I did a few years ago in a class with collage artist and teacher, Cindy Wunsch. In the full painting, the heart is actually attached to a basket, as the heart is a hellium (or, "heal-e-um," as I've titled the piece) balloon. Well, that's make it a hot air balloon, actually….In EMDR and visualization work the last eight years, I have been working with images of balloons in various stages of ascension. Now to make the time to put to canvas those multiple images of hearts that are gifted my imagination in this healing work of my own beating heart….