Harmonizing the Discord
Songs that helped me understand
From the second year on I would hear songs in my head that were either precursors to shifts in my healing journey or during a particular healing shift. The path wasn’t always straight as past lives, trauma, memories, and feelings collided. Sometimes there were side trips, falls down the hill, rocky ravines that required I scrabble hard, and incredibly difficult climbs up the mountain to spiritual awareness.
Tony, one of my Spirit Guides, was very interesting. Blond, pretty, dressed in baggy shirts and pants, he wore headphones and a stocking cap. He operated a turn table, playing music for me when I had trouble adjusting. He often helped me get through times of difficulty by playing songs with lyrics that described what was going on, or that helped lighten my mood and provide understanding – an ohhhh, I get it moment.
“Cold November Rain” played for weeks in my head as I moved through that initial dissolution phase with a grief so devastating I didn’t know if I could make it forward.
I learned something valuable from this period of time and wrote a blog about grief.
Grief can be devastating whether it’s from death, a move, or a difficult change in circumstance. Grief can also come with the death of parts of myself. I have grieved from multiple losses within, from violations, hurts, and traumas from my childhood that no child should ever endure.
I have experienced deaths – the death of an ideal, the death of who I perceive myself to be, the death of how I perceive someone or something else, or the death of my own expectations. Whenever I experience any kind of death, my grief can take the form of tiny, almost unnoticeable amounts to the grief that literally brings my to my knees and feels as if I will never find the edges of it.
I have experienced many instances of grief.
When I have tried to release grief, to release the connection to what was, I often experienced fear and more emptiness; an emptiness that seemed would not be fillable in any way by anything; an emptiness within me and around me – a space.
With healing the emptiness fills in, until little by little it becomes smaller and smaller, reducing from the vastness of the universe to an ocean, to a crater, to a jagged pit, to a hole within my center, to a smaller hole within my heart. Until one day I notice that the jagged edges of that hole in my heart are slowly smoothing and the hole feels softer somehow, as if I can no longer become lost within it, but simply sit quietly with it; a sorrowful moment, a moment that is bitter, a moment that is pain, and the moment of a quiet laugh of remembered joy of forgotten memories that aren’t tinged with fear, anger, or bitterness.
There is this axiom that time heals all wounds, but I have found that not to be true. I have found that wounds heal when I am ready and not before. I have learned that there is not a magic cure, nor one specific thing that helps me to release grief. I have learned that life simply is and when I allow myself to be and when I am ready to do so, then tiny moments, words, pictures, laughter, and myriad other things begin to fill in that vast universe of grief and emptiness until I am simply holding space in my heart for the joyful memories of what once was.
I invite myself to sit with my grief, to cry it out, to release it, and to let go the bits and pieces of the pain as I am ready to do so, but I also remember that the present moment is here, waiting for me.
I have experienced the realization that I am okay and that things are going to be okay – maybe not perfect, and that, too, is alright. I reach out to my husband, to my counselor, and to my close friends and allow them to help me because those kind, caring moments serve to light the other dark moments and help see me through them.
Other Songs Along the Way
Funnily enough, when I had passed through the rage and grief state, that stage of dissolution, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” popped up, but only the first few lines.
A few month’s later “Night Fever” by the BeeGees began playing one evening when the Morrigan visited and the witch energies had come calling.
The Timmy Trumpet and Savage songs “Freaks” and “Deja-Vu,” Ice Cube’s “Check Yo Self,” Outkast “ATliens,” and DMX “X Gon’ Give It to Ya” also played a part as did many, many other songs.
Perhaps one of the hardest songs was “Knock, Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.” With it I finally reached the core of my issue: I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want to be in this body. I didn’t want to live this life. I didn’t want anymore pain. I didn’t want to live.
“Stand me up at the gates of hell, but I won’t back down” helped me to tap into my inner Gandalf as I battled that inner demon of self annihilation, which I envisioned as that moment that Gandalph stood on the bridge, confronting the demon, shouting, “Thou shall not pass.”