Freedom Tuesday

Today is December 2, 2008. Today is Freedom Tuesday. Today is the day that I have declared, by signature to an application for bankruptcy, that there has been a rupture in my financial accounts. Today is the day that I acknowledge, by the vibration of my signature, that I am done with carrying the burden of life-depleting and deadening financial debt that I have wrestled with for more than 6 years… ‘do the right thing screaming into my ears’ at one with its synesthesia to the on-going, tension, terror and nausea in my stomach… all relative to the establishment of a business in the United States that knew insolvency as inherently core to its frameworks, even before it was open for operation, as the energetic cornerstone to its masonry of untruths.

Today, after 4 months of research, due diligence and consultation, I took up my self-respect and kept my appointment with a trustee to claim my financial freedom. Freedom Tuesday! I am done with the application of the fire-extinguisher of constant and never-yielding debt to my life force. I AM my own fire, alive and in flame, as the living essence of myself. Instead of putting out fires - something that has been my proclivity, occupation and pre-occupation for the last 6 years (indeed, for my entire life it seems) - I now claim my godForce, first… and finally. I claim my life and my living first. If not me, then who?

So, I present, in the words to follow and for public consumption, what I shared, recently, with 15 other separate and cherished life-Forces in collective – all of them women and all of them dedicated to their own personal evolutions – as fundamental to how they move through their worlds. These women know that what presents is never about what it’s about… ever. Writing this article, then reading it aloud, as the vibration that I am in my world, to the women with whom I have shared this information, has been critical to me being decloaked and declared that I am choosing me and my life, over all else, first. I AM not the debt nor am I (the beast of) burden I have applied to myself within a culturally conditioned belief that I am to blame. I simply AM.

I know that what I have written, below, has already changed lives; as I have already indicated, it is never about what it is about. I consider it my honour to share this with you, as its reader. I invite you to take your time and to allow yourself to own your experience of the reading and whatever moves inside you. Breathe long and deep. In that wave, you’ll find your salvation and reclaim the very genius of who you are.

I am 62 years old. I am realizing that I have lived an extraordinary life and it has been a life of searching for my own fulfillment, even though, I did not know what that really was until recently. After a remarkable run for as long as I can remember of looking outside of myself for my own salvation, I now know who I am; I am not what I have been told I was. And, at this point in my life (it’s been a long time coming), the thing that I most feared for my own security is the thing that I now choose to declare in the embrace of what is patently possible. Here is my declaration to myself: I am financially bankrupt. In physical space and time, the numbers tell the truth of a life of insolvency. My financial accounts are the final frontier and the visible indicator of the depth of my fear, denied, relative to my internal sense of safety and security. And I can no longer and will no longer deny the shame I carry in the belief that I am ‘not enough’ X, whatever X happens to be in the moment. So great has been my fear of feeling shame, I have become the master of avoid, defend and deny the truth of my self-knowing, my wisdom, my self-trust and my self-belief.

It is just a matter of days before I legally declare bankruptcy and apply my signature to whatever government documents require signing. My signature that I will gladly place on the documents will make public that I am finally done with the historical habituation of ‘trying’ to fill myself up with what has ‘gone missing’, if I had even known what that was; it was all an illusion. My signature will draw my line in the sand between what was and what I now know to be true: I AM all that I require and want; I AM first; my life is first; my life is meaningful; my life IS; I AM.

The greatest gratitude that I now have is that I have actually found myself out and own that I have lived a bankrupt life. No more the imposter! That reclamation is the portal to my Self as my own sustenance. My signature to those bankruptcy forms is the vibration of me, decloaked and declared, that my personal credit is awakened, uncommon, singular, and unique. It is a rare and different place for me to stand. I do not think that external creditors can or will stand to hear such a declaration; it hooks into a business model whose underpinning is fear and greed. Aggregate interest rates demand compliance to externals and prostitution of self.

No more. No way. I will no longer play the game of satisfying an external so that I can have the right to BE who I already AM. No more dancing to the music of the Pied Piper into the default of my own history. I’ve got my own pipe, my own music and my own choreography; my dance is my art in my every breath.

The Oxford Dictionary defines bankruptcy as insolvency, liquidation, failure, ruin, financial ruin, receivership. The words ‘Insolvency’ and ‘receivership’ are the terms that I personally grok. As a metaphor, for me, ‘insolvency’ has meant me not knowing and owning that I am inherently my own solution - as if there is something that ‘needs’ solving, which, in truth, there is not. Because I believed that I had to pay for ‘solutions’ – all of them external and mired in technique – that lived outside of me, I bound myself to a life ‘in receivership’ which was not my own. Interest compounding in every waking moment of the accelerating avarice of ‘not enough’; not enough connection to self, self-identity, freedom of expression, self-trust, personal power, flow, and internal safety… all expressed through the addiction to external consumption. Think about it. FOMO shows up as ‘maybe one more course, one more drink, one more muffin, one more hand-out, one more cigarette, one more, one more, one more’… including the self-perpetuating disappointment that re-installs itself again and again though the tenuous yet finger-pinching grasp of ‘once this is gone, there is no more’. And then, there is the self-perpetuating addiction to the fear, the terror, and the outrage that is the emotional muscle in support of fault and blame, the wrong, the bad, and the ugly – the baton that we we think that others will beat us up with. Why would they bother? And yet they do,‘cause to admit otherwise would demand that they face forward into their own fear, terror and outrage… and embrace their own undeniable grief…. And, on and on it goes. Not easy.

I live in a holographic universe. I look outside of me and I know that the awakening (yes, the awakening) that is being experienced in the financial sector of the current global experience is rapid and sure. And, while I know that it is all unfolding as it should, I also know that, for me, it cannot happen fast enough. The genius in overwhelm is that final surrender to the ease of no struggle, the giving up to Self, is phenomenally breath-taking. And… what it means, for me, is that everything that I observe outside of me, I have projected into view. I can make it not about me; and, yet, joyfully or not, it IS all about me. The moment that I own that in the fullness of my physical, emotional, mental and spiritual experience of myself, I claim my resurrection and my salvation. Nothing broken and nothing to fix.

My declaration of bankruptcy has shown up in my finances to grab my attention. For others, it may demonstrate itself as a tumour in the body to make itself known. Others may find themselves ‘stuck’ in a conflicted relationship, the abuses of which demand an unwillingness for further tolerance.  Each one of these scenarios demands action… or not. No action, perceived or otherwise, is still action. The action always comes when life is recognized, no matter what the consequences are, as preferable to death. It does not matter what presents, what the story is. The process is always the same. I am either moving toward ME as godForce or moving away from ME as godForce. My intention is my law. The illusion of bankruptcy - however it shows up in my health and my wealth - self-realizes whenever I forget that I AM the godForce in my life and continue to live from the platform of my history - i.e. from the story I choose to tell about myself in order to feel OK about BEING who I am. When I move away from ME as godForce, when I forget who I AM, I also forget that my solvency lies in my own self-trust.

62 years of internal conflict projected through an external reach; outside in: I knew, without words, the essence of I AM Ancient Space that Awakens the Sacred, carrying within its magical vibration, the truth of me as Simple Aloha and simply unshakeable. However, I learned very early to not trust that, to not trust my own I AM  - my own core essence - as safe and secure. I talked about the glass half-full, yet lived the glass half-empty. I modelled that self-withholding and self-denial so powerfully that others learned well how to engage with me in the absence of clearly expressed boundaries. Unconsciously, it was like repeating a near drowning by baptism at the font of sheer terror and rage. I have denied it for all of my life – until now.

Truth is, in the allegiances we keep to sustain our family systems, we’ll do anything to not address, never mind own all the sacred elephants in our shared rooms. Nobody wants to feel wrong, no-one wants to feel shunned. Secrets are a big thing in families. Secrets become the lies that maim and kill us. I can tell you that the members of my family of origin, in all of their individual expressions were not happy campers in their own skins; they each lived out their own rage and terror within the suppressed fires of their own unconscious willingness to know not that. Put up, shut up, don’t rock the boat, so that peace might prevail.

Ultimately, my parents’ had personal bankruptcies, too. They were not about money per sé, although I believe that they were very much propelled by the need for money to feel secure. Those experiences showed up as cancers in their individual capacities to act for themselves. Their deaths were not easy. My sisters are having their own personal bankruptcies show up in relationship and long-term medical issues. Mine has shown up, the final result of adhering to expected ‘best’ practices when my internal authority - my ‘gut’ - knew it was not ‘right’ for me. Still, I did not listen, so afraid was I of losing face.

At the root of it all, I believe, has been bankruptcy of the spirit, a disconnect of feeling, an avoidance of the body, a fear of feeling publicly invalidated and shamed. What essential truth have I not allowed myself to fully own, in order to save face? It has been the repeating pattern of my life.

As I review my experience of living with my parents and my two sisters, the main theme that plays out for me is ‘dying to be right’. We can let go and live OR we can hang on and die. In either case, we always get to be right. Letting go demands a capacity and a willingness to shift identity from whom you have come to believe you are to whom you imagine you are becoming. Not just once, but again and again and again.   

So, I have declared personal bankruptcy in my experience of my family of origin.

I am also considering all the other areas of my life that are bankrupt because I prostituted what I thought I really wanted and/or did not want for what I believed would keep me safe… safe meaning that security resides in ‘fitting in’, ‘doing the right thing’, being ‘nice’, etc.

My experience of bankruptcy - considered through 7 logical levels of thinking.

When I run bankruptcy and insolvency through logical levels of thinking, this is how it plays out for me:

Environment: There was, for me, no real safety at home. The conflicts were hidden, yet palpable. There was a united front that was a lie. As I am writing, my letters, as I type, are getting all jumbled up and I cannot seem to correct them without making more mistakes. My home was bankrupt of compassion for the genius that I am. Pretty hard to feel any sense of safety, when what I heard was continued judgements around intellect and speed. Like I am doing right now, correcting my letters, I was constantly correcting my place, my story, my life. It flowed into everywhere, including school. I was hit twice by cars and once by a street-car by the age of 5. I experienced no safety at home or at school. It spread into the places that I worked. And there was never space to be me. Just a huge hole in the bedroom wall where I rocked and rocked away my ‘troubles’, ultimately re-installing them, again and again.. Bankruptcy was the rupture of my environments.

Behaviour: Sexual abuse at an early age, still mixing my letters, and re-correcting as I express what I have to say. My fingers running together, colliding into each other and into my keyboard. I feel sick to my stomach and I feel the tension in my body, the burn in my mouth, the tension in my occipital base and my shoulders. The TMJ has been making itself known, now, for days; the right pinna is sore to the touch and the whole inside of my right ear is responding to what is coming out onto the page. Again, correcting the letters. Dangerous to express and yet I remember that I am no longer a child; I am 62. Spankings with a paddle stick that was designed and labelled as a ‘fun’ thing. No fun for me and I still resent the humour as a lascivious attempt to make the ‘ownership’ OK – as if to mitigate the ‘guilt’ of discipline that was expected as ‘right’ and ‘responsible’. Oh, I think about how I made that ‘nice’. It was safer not to talk. I am vibrating inside as I write this. I am so angry at the insolvency of it all. No respect for the sanctity of my life. I may have been the only one who understood the concept of reverence. And I was the only one who understood the power of words. Amazing how innocuously liquid yet offensively slippery words become as they dribble out both sides of the fraudulent mouth. If that is not bankruptcy, then I do not know what is. Difficult labour and Caesarian Sections. Babies being delivered before they were ready to come on their own. No voice. No dance. And, with my second offspring, not even permission to initiate his own delivery. I knew something about surgery; I knew nothing about delivery. I was scared. Afraid of being over-extended and not being able to deliver, to perform at the end my exhaustion. That is how it has always been. Over-extended to beyond exhaustion. Then, I would wear the struggle like a badge of honour. Over-extended. Over-draft.

Capability: Something I had; at least I knew at a young age how to leave home. I have always been good at contemplating exit strategies – just could not always get them to work – to my advantage. That was the story of my life.  I was invited, by my mother, to leave with a suitcase at a very young age, then allowed back into the house. Some lousy strategy to get me to behave. Left me feeling unsure about anything. Left me feeling uneasy and unsure that anything that I could plan would ever be right. Being myself was dangerous, yet there were no strategies that were full-proof for the realization of success, whatever that would be. A big tummy that ‘needed’ filling. There was never ‘enough’ comfort. The bankruptcy of incapacitating myself in the uncertainty of ever doing the ‘right’ thing and the fear of doing the ‘wrong’ thing. Getting burned no matter what.

Beliefs, values and attitudes: I heard the sarcasm behind the verbal diatribe of ‘slow’, ‘speed queen, ‘Lady MacBeth (out, out damned spot)’, simple, not smart enough, ‘Polly Anna’ (I was always able to find something good and beautiful in the ugly, yet was ridiculed as being naive for that capacity to value). Belief in an external god was dangerous, at home. No belief in an external god was dangerous at school. I could not win. I had to take risks in other ways to ‘make the grade’, to be accepted, then I would look smart. I kept reaching outside of myself and over-extending. I am aware, now, that over-extending was a modelled value and a modelled behaviour. It seems to have shown up in so many areas of my life. I would get myself into ‘trouble’ and then bail myself out only to repeat the pattern. Chronic and repeated over-extension made the insolvency of struggle. Chronic and repeated struggle fostered over-extension and insolvency. It was a never-ending, closed loop. Work harder, struggle more, then run out of air.

Choice: I found it better to shut up and put up than to risk the fear of exposure. I required struggle and extension to make a sound, to be heard. I learned to keep the lid on the pressure cooker, but to be very careful so that the sound of my steam was not heard when I released the pressure that was building up inside of ‘yes, that’ and ‘no, not that’. I endured lots of sore throats, catarrh, post-nasal drip, ear infections (especially on the right side) and TMJ (especially on the right side). A deftly handled spear can cut sound. I had that pretty much under my control. That control was yet another form of struggle that was symptomatic of my entrenched terror. I was afraid to speak my truth and afraid to speak a fraud. It was easy to start believing that one was the other. It was safer to stay quiet. It was the brilliant liquidation of my own vibration by over-extending my capacity for silence fuelled by fear and rage.

Identity: My visions and my dreams did not count. I would never be able to have what I dreamed of. Day dreaming was my exit strategy at school, and I was ridiculed for it. I was identified as the one who did not pay attention. I was paying attention – only to what I wanted to pay attention to, not to what I was expected to pay attention to. So much of what I was expected to pay attention to was sheer monotony. Still is. Sometimes I simply vacate my awareness to what holds infinitely more appeal to me, yet I feel the duality of ‘patient irritation’ (how can irritation be patient) when my attention is interrupted by mundane, practical matters. I just want to be left alone, much of the time. I learned well from my mother… only I do not retreat into the bowels of the ether to the depth that I expect she did. I just hated who she was when she would snap out of her reverie. I was usually on the mean end of that return. It is not that I cannot go there; I just do not want to hurt the way that I felt hurt… more like maligned, more like scathed. God, if I could not trust my vision(s), my dreams, my potential, then I would be bankrupt of my own sight. 40 years of glasses and 10 years post laser surgery. Until NLP and the laser surgery, my visual acuity was pretty much earthed. It was not OK to dream and I could not see. Yet, God help me, if I could not ‘see’ the solution at hand – and I often couldn’t. My own solutions were far too simple (that was considered slow and dumb) and not of this world. I suffered intense and chronic, frontal headaches as a teen-ager. I bankrupted my potential by denying my dreams to what others wanted instead. No more.

It is getting easier to write as I stay at higher levels of thinking. My fingers are way less inclined to collide with each other. I do not feel like I am in such pressure, in such a race in this place. It is easier.

Connection: I was unable to embrace the safety of my own genius which would have been key to knowing and to remembering who I am and my connection to myself and to others. I have never been able to see or understand what others see in me or experience with me. It is only in the last 17 months that I have been test driving that connection and actually decloaking by degrees, more and more and more. In vibration with the speed and the urgency of engaging my own world as I now know it, my personal decloaking is accelerating.  I would not have been able to speak to a declaration of bankruptcy even one year ago. I can now and I own that connection; it is, simply, that, at higher levels of thinking, I know that I am never bankrupt and that insolvency is pure illusion. I know that, as the I AM that is Ancient Space that Awakens the Sacred, I am the one to speak to personal bankruptcy and insolvency at all logical levels. The declaration of my personal bankruptcy is the declaration of the reclamation of my personal freedom in physical space and time. The paradox to this is that, when I stay connected to who I am, I always know my freedom. Ancient Space that Awakens the Sacred can know nothing less than that. What a base line for personal emancipation!

I find it interesting that I have been at my computer most of the day and there has been a dearth of email today compared to what usually lands in my inbox. It has occurred to me that I was intended to write about bankruptcy, insolvency and receivership without interruption. My writing about personal bankruptcy will find fruition when I apply my signature to the necessary documents in the week of December 1. The very act of putting my signature onto the documents will signify the close to a life chapter of searching for personal solvency outside of me that I could not recognize, identify and own inside of me. As I have been writing away, two ‘no’s’ to the November Decloaking invitations that I extended to certain women have shown up in my inbox, following on the heels of one last evening. There are still some women whom I am waiting to hear from. In any event, I will have a group – as few as 4 including myself and, perhaps, 6 or 7. It will be what it will be. As I wept, I was reminded that, as Ancient Space that Awakens the Sacred, I am the one who will assist women and others to awaken from the insolvency of a bankrupt life where compromise, compliance and prostitution are all equivalents for each other. I have spent my day writing about bankruptcy relative to my experience of my life… and I know that there is still more to be revealed to me in what I shall further discover about myself. I just know that, in this time of advent, something new is emerging for me and in me.

As I have said before, change the content and the process remains the same. It doesn’t matter whether it is a cancerous tumour, a contagious disease, an empty relationship, a financial bankruptcy; there is always so much genius in the information presented. Changing the context for how we are choosing to move through our worlds is what counts. It is essential to take full ownership of our lives. I am so thankful that I am now associated with women who are awake and want to stay awake – and who are creating space, movement and flow for themselves.

The last 3 months since I visited the lawyer about bankruptcy represent, for me, the reflective time that I have taken to learn and to sit in the middle of all that is comfortable, yet uncomfortable about bankruptcy and my impending declaration of it and signature to it in physical space and time. Sometimes, my intellect starts badgering me about ‘why not now’… and then I remember that this upcoming session of Decloaking, for me, is my intensive test drive for what is to come. Once I have signed the documents, that declaration will be, without question, in the public domain. It means that I will be buck naked about it; I will have nothing more to hide. And I am allowing myself to know that it will be so welcomed in awakening the full potential of the collective sacred. I will be in the inside of it, able to extend and to reach out with infinity, knowing the sacred truth of the reality that I am creating, in order to easily dispel the illusion of, ‘No way, not that’. Until I am on the inside of that, I cannot know what it is like to be on the other side of where I stand now. My signature will be my line in the sand. Pretty amazing, I think.

You will be conversing and writing at Whispers from Within and, in full support of that, I will be signing the bankruptcy papers that represent the final ‘laying down’ of  history and past burdens – and that also represent my claim to my undeniable ownership of my rightful emancipation – my birthright and my rite of passage.

Amama. So be it.

Sheila Winter Wallace
Written over the days of November 21 & 22, 2008