My
Reluctant Autobiography
As
recently as when I wrote Light Beyond the Darkness, I was
a person who wanted to share my knowledge, but not my life.
I didn't even consider that my first book, How I Healed My Cancer Holistically (1976) was autobiographical. I had overcome cancer through my own research without surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy. I wanted to share that with other people so they could do the same. I wrote about myself in relation to cancer more as an isolated incident - it was as if I was writing about someone else.
My son, Richard, committed suicide in 1982. In 1983, I met Anthroposphy and learned that I could help him by reading anthroposophical texts to him. This I did for seven years, and it changed my life here on Earth and his life in the spiritual worlds.
I wrote Light Beyond the Darkness to help others who had loved ones who committed suicide and to help the suicides themselves. But, I tried to hide myself in that book; I endeavored to describe my son's life as if he had grown up in a vacuum. This proved impossible, of course, but I told as little as I could about myself.
To be honest, I was ashamed of my life. I had been an alcoholic. I felt like a failure as a mother. My problems with relationships were lifelong and painful. When I left my marriage of 27 years, no matter what I did, I seemed incapable of establishing a permanent home or place in the world for myself. What did a life like this have to offer anyone? What did it have to offer me? I didn't even want to think about it, much less write or talk about it.
I started getting inklings that my life might have some value when a young man who helped me with Light Beyond the Darkness saw my experiences of reading to my son from an esoteric viewpoint. That helped me move from a personal to a suprapersonal view of my relationship with my son.
Next, a very wise Anthroposophist and my spiritual teacher was deeply touched by my son's story and encouraged me to write about it. He also said to me, "Now, don't you feel guilty. The spiritual world takes us through the most incredible darkness before we come to the light."
In 1996, the year Light Beyond was published, I met a clairvoyant Anthroposophist whose works I had been studying. He had read Light Beyond the Darkness and liked it. He told me privately, "What you have to give the world is alcoholism, cancer, and suicide." "Oh, no," I said, "I would much rather teach Knowledge of the Higher Worlds."
But, I knew he was right. I began a booklet, "Finding a Greater Good in the Greatest Evils: Alcoholism, Cancer, and Suicide." In the course of researching this book, I had to confront the totality of my own life. In so doing, I recognized that my life mirrored the trials society at large is going through: child abuse, stunted emotional development, barriers in relating to others, alcoholism, cancer, suicide. My belief now, at age 76, is that the more personal something is, the more universal it is; and that my life has been a path through the world's darkness and into the Light.
In researching my life, I confronted for the first time the fact that I had been emotionally abused as a child. My mother was a very disturbed woman. She had been horribly abused during her childhood by both parents and this spilled over into crazy behavior at stressful times in her life. For instance, she pretended to be dead on two different occasions, once when I was two or three years old, which I don't remember, and once when I was eleven years old. I found her lying on the floor near a gas stove. I ran over to her crying, "Mom, Mom."
She sat up laughing and said, "I just wanted to know if you love me." I became hysterical.
On the other hand, my mom taught me to pray and to think about Christ as if he were present. She referred to him as "The Good Lord," and mentioned him often. So parallel with my depressed, negative feelings about myself, my fear and distrust of people, and my floating anger at the world, when I was sixteen I started my spiritual search and have been pursuing it since.
In 1964, I had a spiritual experience I didn't fully understand, but which sustained me during my darkest years, 1964-1969, when I entered an alcoholism recovery program. I couldn't understand how I could have such an experience and still slide further into the abyss.
In this program, I found my first tools to apply to life's situations. The twelve steps are spiritual steps indeed, and are a great gift to the consciousness soul age.
Then, I had to face cancer. In that experience I learned that I had no identity as a person. My true self had been beaten down by child abuse, submerged by alcohol and was slowly emerging through working the twelve steps. However, cancer needed quicker, more drastic changes. I had to change my lifestyle, quicken the process of healing emotional traumas, use my mind to visualize healing and to change my thoughts to positive ones. My spirit was strengthened by taking hold of my healing.
Even my son's suicide turned out to the the greatest blessing in my life. Through it I was led to Anthroposophy, and through reading anthroposophical works to him, I was able to help him move from a place of dark despair to a place filled with light where he could see everything. Then, to my amazement, after seven years of reading, I feel that he was able to return to Earth in a new incarnation enriched by hearing over 2,000 anthroposophical lectures. My son's life and my relationship to him is a mystery still unrevealed.
Slowly my experiences have come together to form a coherent picture. My life has been a discovery of the greatest good, found by going through the greatest evils. The task of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch is to confront evil. Rudolf Steiner says, "By a strange paradox, mankind is led to a renewed experience of the Mystery of Golgotha in the fifth epoch through the forces of evil. Through the experience of evil, it will be possible for the Christ to appear again, just as he appeared in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch through the experience of death."
In my next book, I will fully share how I found a greater good.
These are the thoughts that I am using now to help shape my perception as I look out into the world:
In Christ we die to find life.
In Christ we confront evil so we can choose the good in freedom, which leads us to His Love.
