by Lyndy Summerhaze, Crabbes Creek, Australia

With the wonderful help from practitioners at Universal Medicine, I have been able to surrender to a deeper, more beautiful and real me, to feel the exquisite purity of my essence – and feeling this has enabled me to realise how superficial I have been.

This is what I have seen: I have a superficial way of expressing and communicating which glides and slides over all the richness, rawness, and beauty of life. I have been content with fragments of truth and used these fragments to create a mosaic or picture of life that is not true; a picture that, in its misinterpretation of life, has reduced it to something unreal and without true vibrant livingness. Forgetting to look within myself and feel the love, truth and glory ever pulsing within, a love ever ready to nurture every cell of my body and emanate forth, I instead cast my gaze onto the outer world and proceeded to search for some form of ‘good’ or ‘purity’ out there. In this process I created a false world – a world which was not without its amazing moments, but these moments were short-lived and unsustainable.

This is how I made a false mosaic with fragmented truth in my relationship with my mother. I adored her – she was lovely, funny, lively, always there for me, never abusive, a beautiful pianist – everyone loved her. For me she personified all that was good and pure. Then when I was 23, she died of breast cancer. Recently a Universal Medicine practitioner astutely asked me if I had accepted my mother’s death. I was stopped in my tracks by this question – well, I had accepted the death of my first daughter, and I had accepted the death of my father, but with this question about my mother there were tears gathering in my eyes. No, there was something amiss!

I recounted how my mother had been given 6 months to live and how she and my father were going to spend that time on a holiday together. The doctor then suggested removing Mum’s ovaries to slow down the spreading of the cancer. Although this is a recognised treatment in certain cases of breast cancer, and I appreciated the medical care that had been given thus far, somewhere deep inside I just had this feeling that this next step would not work for Mum, that it would not slow the spread of cancer in her case. I even said to my parents that this would be the end of Mum, but my mother chose to go ahead with the operation. She was dead in a couple of weeks.

Then there was the funeral. I didn’t go to it – a decision that has always puzzled me. How could I have opted to not go to my own mother’s funeral? I now know I couldn’t go because I had not accepted the circumstances of her death. Then things started to unravel to me – what I hadn’t been prepared to see about her life – all the not so lovely things that were threatening to spoil the perfect picture I held of my loving mother. I remembered how she expressed to me her bewilderment about her predicament and how her life could have come to this. She was shattered when she realised her youth and musical career were disappearing due to her illness, and she was left wondering who she was. There was a sense that she had lost control over her own destiny.

I was devastated that she found herself in this position. I realised that the deepest aspect of the grief I felt was not so much about her impending death, but how she felt powerless within her situation. I felt grief not only about my mother, but about how life is lived in the world. I kept my own reaction of devastation buried, unable to face it.  But now, in the safe and loving space held by this practitioner, I could open up and feel the devastation I had suppressed.

I realised that there were parts of my mother that I did not want to see. I could see that she could not feel that her own love and our love were enough. It was confronting for me to see how she dealt with her illness because she had not shown me her imperfections before. I had only seen her as a mother whose warmth was always there for me, but not as a woman who had gone through her own trials and tribulations in life.

My ideal ‘mosaic’ of her, created with fragments of truth, was shattered. I saw that I had enjoined a false mentality that prescribed that we blindly ignore the weaknesses of others and see only the ‘good’ – this was thought to be what ‘love’ is, but it was a distorted version of true love. I had made a tumour in the body of God. True love sees, discerns, understands, accepts, and is entirely without judgment. This was a painful but good shattering. I just had to feel it, feel it, feel it. Ouch!

The false world I had created was just a fragment of the truth (as I write this the kookaburras have just burst out laughing and I am reminded of the precious joy of life). I chose to use that precious life energy available to me to create a false world where I saw only the acceptable, nice and good – I cut myself off from the fullness of true expression. I subverted the true pure stream of life and love that naturally flowed through me and instead wove a cocoon of illusion. This cocoon, I realised, sheltered me from feeling the facts of life as they are here on earth; it protected me from feeling the unacceptable horrors of the world, and even more poignantly, from the hurts that I myself was carrying around within me. But it also cut me off from the depth of richness that we all naturally are. Because I did not want to see and feel all that was there to be seen and felt I cut myself off from the whole, and so from experiencing relationship in full with others.

The week before the above revelation, I was driving home one day when I became aware of the presence of a beautiful, radiant, loving woman enveloping me. I could feel her dignity and wisdom. This woman has many times been present with me in my life, and because Mum had died when I was 23, I had always attributed this presence to her – I always thought, “oh, my beautiful mother is with me”. But as I drove, bathing in this gorgeous presence, I suddenly and deeply knew this woman to be me – the essence of me. I had always been casting the woman within me onto the outside world – this amazing being couldn’t possibly be myself! How loving was the Soul to confirm the truth of who I am before I stumble across (yet again!) another self-created illusion. In its wisdom the Soul gave me the whole picture, creating a platform of loving acceptance for me to see what is there to be seen.

I am learning about truth – and that truth, love, and observation are one and the same thing. From here I can see what there is to be seen and feel what there is to be felt. I have realised that I have been content to be superficial in how I perceive and interact with who and what is in front of me, content with not seeing and feeling everything – to the very depths.

There is a still and loving place within the innermost heart of every man, woman and child, from whence the truth of all can be felt, seen and known in full. There is no judgment issuing from this place, only love and observation – for true love and observation are one.