Article Highlights:
- Remembering the dark in me
- Filling it with light
- What is integration, really?
- The No B.S. Spiritual Book Club – upcoming interview with Sandie Sedgebeer
Topic: “Face to Face with… Mahulili Leilana” Time: Aug 5, 2020, 10:00 AM Pacific Time (US and Canada). https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81060176099; Meeting ID: 810 6017 6099; Passcode: 603828
Dear Lenedra,
Before I get to my update about my sabbatical experience, let me mention that among things happening spontaneously for me right now are a few speaking and interviewing opportunities. I’m enjoying trying out my public voice again, though I confess to also being quite nervous about it. And I’m certainly finding myself quite a different person in that capacity than I was many years ago.
This next week (next Wednesday, August 5th) I am sharing the stories behind my 10 Best Spiritual Books live on Zoom with Sandie Sedgbeer, founder of the No BS Spiritual Book Club. We’d love for you to join us, when you will have the opportunity to ask your questions. To receive the private access details complete the SAVE MY SPACE form at the bottom of the No BS Spiritual Book Club’s video library page here: https://www.sedgbeer.com/face-to-face-with-video-series/ and you will receive details before the event. AND YOU’LL FIND FURTHER LINK AND INFO AND CALL IN NUMBERS BELOW, AT THE END OF THE ARTICLE.
Sandie Sedgebeer is an amazing woman and a fabulous interviewer; I was so happy to have this invite! It’s 60-90 minutes, including time for your questions to me. It would be lovely to have you there, if it works in your life. I have another interview coming up on the 10th of August that I’ll share with you next week, it’s Deep Dialogue, with the extraordinary Stewart Pearce.
In a perfectly timed moment for me, my photographer friend, Robert Frutos, sent this picture he took of a recent rainbow. As you read my update, refer back to it and you’ll see how it speaks to my update. You cast a shadow anytime you view a rainbow because the sun must be behind you for a rainbow to come into your view.
As you’ll also see, there was great wisdom in the guidance that nudged me toward sabbatical. It’s been very important for me and I hope the writings from the past that I’ve shared have fed you in important ways. I so appreciate and strongly feel you still here, reading, thinking, and enjoying. It’s an unusual but wonderful kind of indirect support for me that feels tangible and real.
I know it sounds funny to take a sabbatical from writing to write, lol, but I wanted to dive deep into my book writing and that was part of the wisdom of writing less here. This will continue, with your patience and support for a few more weeks as I make my book writing even more intent and focused. It’s coming along so very well and the words that come often move me deeply… as I think they will those of you who feel drawn to it when it’s finished.
Other parts of the sabbatical have been so unplanned, not at all easy but so earth-shaking and important that I am still marveling, experiencing, taking it in and can only speak briefly of it just yet. It involves what is “dark” in us, in me – things so embedded in the shadow that even our best efforts have not exposed them fully to us.
In my mid-30’s I spontaneously remembered abuse that had occurred when I was fairly young. It was only vaguely remembered and I worked with a counselor to understand and heal. It was obvious there was more, still cloaked by protective parts of myself. Over the years, I remained open to retrieving more memory, feeling that it’s always good to recover the truth of one’s life, even the hardest parts. Nothing more came forward, though. Until now.
I’m willing to share more with you, but I feel just a little more time would be good. As well, it’s something I’d rather speak, so my voice and demeanor can convey some very important aspects of how and what has occurred and what has been gained and learned. Because the gains and the learning have been truly extraordinary – gifts that leave me in wonder still.
However, Until I say more to you, perhaps in a video, let me just briefly share a few things that were part of the loving wisdom guiding me through a tender and painful period of realization. I will share six rich and life-changing things that are part of how I moved into and through it.
- First, I was cautioned again and again by those who walk with me from the unseen worlds, to be cautious of creating a story, especially a cultural story, about what this is, what it meant/means, and how it did or will affect me going forward. They cautioned that adopting the cultural story would rob me of the experience of my own life, causing it to become more like a book or movie of the experience instead of, more accurately, the simple truth of my life experience. I hope you see the important difference they were pointing to in this, it was ground-breaking as I allowed it to guide me into remembering my early life.
- Second was the guidance to simply remember and experience it as it comes. In a simple way. Not with words and self-reportage, not with the mind explaining and commiserating with learned culturally-driven information. “Simply let the memories come with the feelings and body responses you had at the time. All that is necessary is to allow. Just allow it to come as it came, opening further to allowing. Sometimes closing, sometimes crying, sometimes hurting, but returning always to allowing and opening.” This, they said would give me the greatest gift of Self-Return. In fact this was more profound than I can say right now.
- We all know that integration of the splintered or lost self is important in such cases. I assumed that at some point I might do a ceremony for this but when I sat quietly to contemplate it, I received a much fuller and beautiful understanding about what integration really is. Briefly put, it is akin to acceptance. To accept that one’s life is in fact one’s life, not some imagined “should or shouldn’t have been” that keeps one separated from one’s own life experience. I could and will say more about integration at another time – there is a depth of wisdom here – but this is enough for you to follow into your own life.
- I had pain and many tears off and on, and in that gained a feeling of vulnerability. This remains with me and in allowing that, the reward of vulnerability is a new sense of true safety, for real safety is connected to acceptance and wisdom about the truth of human vulnerability.
- I recovered innocence, which my guides assured me had not been lost or taken from me,
- nor had I lost my childhood. “Those are cultural stories”, they said. The truth was that I had my childhood, it was what it was, not what it should have been or what I “deserved to have had.” And innocence, they said, could never be taken from one. It is innate in our being, always there for us. We can separate ourselves from it, in self-protection, trauma, shock, but it cannot be taken from us. Whenever we wish, whenever we are ready, it is there for us to discover and explore.
These six things are profound and powerful, aren’t they? They involve the dark, the shadow and how it resides and works, in us fostering movement and growth. And as the shadow is allowed to reveal what is cloaked, light has come pouring in. Pouring into the space now vacated. And so I have had such an enlighting – a wonderful expansion of light – combined with such important times of strengthening, gaining self-understanding.
These 6 things, and more, are unplanned but rich rewards of my sabbatical, so important to me. Thus, I ask you not to hold me in consternation, worry, concern. Send blessings as always, but be glad for me – there are few things more powerful than purely gained experience and knowledge of self.
Know I am well enough within this, and that the abilities and grace I have earned, in a good life approaching wisdom, give me the life-skills to experience this and gain greater wholeness and wellbeing.
I’m sending you love, and more love,
Ma HuLiLi
Sandra Sedgbeer is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Face to Face with… Mahulili Leilana
Time: Aug 5, 2020 10:00 AM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81060176099
Meeting ID: 810 6017 6099
Passcode: 603828
One tap mobile:
+13126266799,,81060176099#,,,,,,0#,,603828# US (Chicago)
+19294362866,,81060176099#,,,,,,0#,,603828# US (New York)
Dial by your location:
+1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago)
+1 929 436 2866 US (New York)
+1 301 715 8592 US (Germantown)
+1 346 248 7799 US (Houston)
+1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose)
+1 253 215 8782 US (Tacoma)
Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kg8KUzZY1
When I was in my thirties, going through a divorce, seeing a counselor to spare my friends, I heard myself say, “I think I was abused as a child.” She responded, “I do, too.” A roller coaster of a ride in really knowing myself began, and I’m so grateful for it. As you say, “One’s life is in fact one’s life.” I heard you today on Sandie Sedgbeer’s and was enlightened again with your talking about your recovery of your vulnerability, so that you could live by it. Thank you so much for sharing what you know.