My grandkids call me the ‘storyteller’, and yes I have a life packed with experiences, and as I run through this menu of possibilities, what seems most relevant is how I found my life purpose. It has been a bumpy road that has taken me through discovery, repression, suppression, a literal knock-on-the head wakeup, a deep slide into disintegration, stability, another ‘shocking’ experience into awakening, and finally the years of healing, study, exploration and breaking through the cocoon to a new way of being and an unending process of discovery.
I thought that might get your attention!
I am a PK and an MK – a preacher’s kid, missionary kid and a third culture kid. This was an exciting beginning, sometimes dangerous, often fearful and packed with the underpinnings of service, responsibility, obligation, duty, guilt and shame. What a package!
My parents spent 21 years as missionaries in Japan, Okinawa and Penang, Malaysia. We arrived in Japan a few years after the war to a rubble filled and desperately impoverished country. Food was scarce, forget normal amenities like regular electricity, heat or appliances. After two years of intense language study we were on our own in Okinawa, first building a traditional house followed by a church. My Dad was not only creative and persistent, but an absolute miracle-worker in accumulating enough building materials to begin our missionary service, and eventually to design and build the island’s first private hospital.
1950s Okinawa was devastated. A tiny little coral atoll in beautiful seas, the war had wiped all vegetation off the island except grasses and a few root crops. It was a matriarchal society, with communities run by the ‘Yuta’, shamanas, who used superstition, ancestor worship, ritual, ceremony and threats from the deities to keep people tied to tradition.
Now imagine me, a red-headed, freckle faced little child, the only white face in a tiny remote village of grass shacks. I was the entertainment, the object of derision, bullying and terrorizing. Not only was my external presentation different, I had a very active internal life that also made me different. From my earliest memories I was clairvoyant, intuitive, clairsentient, psychic. I could see and feel energies, I could anticipate events. I would often focus my intention to remotely move or knock objects over. While the Okinawan people embraced and normalized such abilities, I gradually realized that in the context of a strict religious missionary structure, these ‘gifts’ were not celebrated or encouraged, but rather were attributed to the devil and sinful pursuits and there would be terrible consequences to owning them.
So here came the repression, then suppression. Beginning at age 3, I created a very vivid dreamtime and one by one over many months I took each of those gifts and hid them away in a very deep well. I created a beautiful golden city for each of these gifts to reside in, but when I was complete I sealed off this well and left it behind, knowing that at some future point there would be a price to pay for denying the gifts that truly represented me.
Fast forward now through 4 years of boarding high school in Singapore, then my move to the United States for college (majoring in office administration and minoring in psychology), getting married, living in Austria for one year then moving to San Francisco.
The knock on the head: In the 1970s I was office manager for an urban and environmental planning firm. We were on our annual white water rafting trip in Northern California. The day was scorching, the water was high, rough and very fast. The rapids were Class III and IV – dangerous and thrilling. Six persons plus a guide filled our raft and unlike other years, our guide seemed to be a risk taker and possibly a bit drug addled. He fell out a couple times leaving us on our own. At one point he chose a very narrow channel through enormous borders with deep depressions in the water and the waves slammed us against a tall rock formation, collapsing our raft in half. As I was on the high side, I was thrown through the air and tumbled over boulders, then popped up under the raft as we we flew downriver.
I was unconscious and drowning. In the moment I flew through the air, time went into slow motion and I very clearly heard a voice asking me to make a choice: either I would not survive the crash or I could choose a life in which I reclaimed my true nature and allowed my gifts to emerge. While my choice is obvious, the pathway was not. My first lesson would be trusting myself. I ejected out from under the raft and my lifejacket caught on some bushes. When I regained consciousness I was alone as all the other rafts and swimmers had been swept downstream. Severely concussed and dazed, I had to untangle myself and ride the rapids for two miles before catching up to the rest of the rafts on a small beach pullout. An ER physician on our trip assessed me and asked me to lay in the bottom of the raft for the remainder of the trip.
The disintegration: I notice how difficult it is to write this even all these years later. Yes I was severely concussed and black and blue from head to toe, but my job was in a very demanding phase and after a few days of rest I went back to work. I was used to being confident, sharp, competent, type A perfectionist. My boys were ages 1 and 3. My life was all carefully managed. But now my body would tremble randomly, I would lose my balance. My memory failed; I would try to figure out how to add two numbers together and couldn’t do it. Then came the panic attacks. A new experience for me – I thought I was having heart attacks. I became severely claustrophobic. I was diagnosed with TSS (traumatic shock syndrome) which I’d never heard of. I went into therapy, the doctor put me in a psych hospital. I felt like he was punishing me for something. I had no idea why I was there. I was put on suicide watch. I hit bottom so hard there was nowhere else to go.
And here was another life lesson – when you have hit absolute rock bottom, going up is the only choice. I fired my therapist, hired a new one who immediately got me out of the psych ward which was filled with the craziest people, and he saved my life. NOW this deeply buried well of gifts showed up, cover off and completely overwhelmed me. This was even more terrifying. I used to blurt out information to complete strangers, shocking both them and me. I would walk into the office and tell people what they had been dreaming the night before. As fast as these gifts presented, I tried to stuff them back down with a little success because I did not know how to manage them.
Over time and with a great therapist, things calmed down, my mind healed, my body strengthened and my gifts moderated.
The shocking experience: Fast forward a few years to a vacation on the island of Vieques near Puerto Rico and a magical midnight swim in a bioluminescent bay, floating in a lake with as many sparkling parts as the night sky above. Fish leaving trails of silvery light, absolute stillness, feeling the expansiveness of the world around me. I got up at 4am the next morning to catch a small plane for the mainland flight home and became deathly ill. Shaking, breathless, a huge perfectly symmetrical sphere of red on my chest, copiously sweating. When we landed at the Puerto Rico airport my husband called the paramedics. I thought I was having a heart attack, again! Paramedics ran all their tests on a gurney in full view of all in the waiting room but I didn’t care, and everything came out negative. How was that even possible?
The awakening: Again doctors and tests and finally one Asian doctor diagnosed me with synesthesia. I found out later that the bioluminescence in Vieques is the most concentrated bay in the world. The electrical currents generated in the bay had completely overloaded my nervous system with stimulus, and my body went into overactivity without the information being properly organized. Now I had an understanding of what had happened and something like the saying goes, when he’s most needed the teacher shows up.
I had night visitations by a monk who I later discovered was the Tibetan teacher Kuthumi. Night after night he showed me stacks of books, encouraged me to study and shortly after I discovered Astara, which has collected a library of teachings from the ancient schools of mystery. This opened me to an entire world of energy and light. I also discovered the ancient Indian system of Pranic Healing and a wonderful teacher, Hector Ramos, who taught me about my gifts and how to safely embrace and manage them. For years we worked together offering free teaching and healings through a center in Berkeley. All this time I was pursuing my career in architectural and engineering firm management, then co-owning a leadership training institute with my husband. But gradually I knew I was meant to open a practice where my gifts could be of benefit to others.
I entered a year-long full immersion program in San Francisco to get my Master Bodyworker certificate, and then my Holistic Health Counselor certificate. These were cutting edge programs. Teachers like Bruce Lipton and Byron Katie explored their wisdom and tools with us long before they became public personas. We played in the realm of quantum energy, vibrational and multi-dimensional healing. I studied with Jim Self/Mastering Alchemy for 8 years which not only is about self mastery, but owning our connection to the cosmos and the gifts and service responsibilities we have as lightworkers. In the last few years I’ve become more connected to channeling the wisdom of our higher self and the guides available to us.
The story might have a logical pause here, and it brings me to present time, but there is one more little side trip I had to take.
In 2011 I was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer. Yes, even those of us in the healing arts get to experience the challenges of living in a physical body. And remember I said that I always knew there would be a price to pay for the suppression/repression of my childhood years? Maybe I was prescient, and maybe I created this intention for myself, but as soon as I was diagnosed I knew that this was the result of the little bits still stored in my body that I had identified as a ‘price to pay’ for denying my gifts all those years ago.
If you are curious, I did keep a journal on CaringBridge of the healing process, which I won’t repeat here, but I had surgery and almost a year of intense chemotherapy which required several adjustments in order for me to actually survive the treatment. And 12 years later I am cancer-free. I learned two lessons from this: denying my gifts and therefore my purpose cost me dearly. It took a physical toll and a mental/emotional toll. The second thing is, I was able to create a sphere of high-vibrational space and hold that throughout my treatment so that even during the worst physical days I still remained optimistic, positive and it proved to be a great training ground for being self-responsible for the energies that are embedded in ‘happy’, ‘confident’, ‘wellbeing’, ‘content’ etc.
That is a light that I hold every day, and I do my best to radiate out into the world. I hope this provides some inspiration, encouragement and motivation to be your best, embrace your gifts, and hold the light of wellbeing as you navigate this complex but utterly magical journey called life.
Linda