This slideshow requires JavaScript.
A night out in Boston, digital photography, www.carolineallen.com
This is the sixth in a series on Re-Visioning Your Career to do more spiritually significant work in the world.
When you’re on a spiritual path, psychics, counselors and spiritual healers will often tell you to Deepen your Connection to Spirit.
Connection to spirit is important if you want a more spiritual career. The challenges you’ll face will be new in every way, and you won’t know how to handle them without help from greater forces. Spiritual work in the world is also so full of its own rules, and you’ll need the help of spirit guides to even begin to understand what you’re trying to do to help clients heal. Also, our perspective is more profound when we look at our clients or life through a spiritual lens, rather than simply a practical lens or even a psychotherapeutic one.
The problem is nobody seems to tell you HOW to do these things. How do you deepen your connection to spirit?
I’ll use my own path as an example, but please note each person’s journey to a stronger connection to spirit is a personal one.
I was raised Catholic. Twelve years of Catholic schools in mid-Missouri, taught by nuns, brothers and priests. Sister Thomas Aquinas in severe habit and cat eye glasses used to beat us with a ruler for the tiniest infarction. We attended mass three times a week. God was a white guy with a beard and boy could He get pissed off. Jesus was his fragile son. The only women of significance were Mary, Jesus ever suffering mother, and Mary Magdalene, the prostitute who followed him. (I did like the stained glass and incense of the church, though. I liked the ritual of it.)
In our living room, we had a huge picture of Jesus with a crown of thorns, blood dripping down his face. It was one of those pictures that gives the illusions of the eyes closing when you move to the other side of the room, a gruesome ALIVE bloody picture of what God represented. It was hung right next to the 12 point buck deer head and right above the plaid sofa. Once, I pointed to the picture and asked my young nephew as a sort of dark joke: “Why does Jesus have blood running down his face?” He answered in little boy whisper: “Because he loves me.”
So, as I grew up and got away from the church, it was quite the journey to find my own spiritual self. I began my adult life as a journalist in Tokyo, and there discovered and studied Buddhism. I was deeply moved by the gentleness of the Buddhist approach, loved how it quieted my mind, but still it was all about MEN. Where were the women? Why were God’s favorites always men? Why was God always a man?
I moved to Europe as a journalist. I discovered every time I entered a church, I’d have a severe panic attack. I’d stand at the back pews, bent over gasping for breath. I’d feel so dizzy, I’d have to stumble out and sit on a bench until it subsided. I was surrounded by some of the most beautiful cathedrals in the world and I couldn’t enjoy them. I knew it was time for some serious spiritual healing.
For many people, spiritual healing begins with a sort of spiritual breakdown. Everything goes to shit all at once. I lost the international jet-setting journalism career I loved, the husband I adored, a London home that deeply fed my alternative, quirky, old world Carrie self. I plunged into a depression as thick, black and damaging as a massive oil spill.
Finally, my London therapist strongly suggested I move back to the States, to be closer to the earth, to do the healing I needed around the paradigm that had wounded me. I ended up in Seattle. I despised it with every European bone in my body. I let a lot of people know how much I despised it. You can imagine how popular I was. I’d been abroad for nearly a decade and didn’t understand Seattle, didn’t WANT to understand it.
So, the spiritual healing began. Oh so slowly, oh so painfully. I screamed bloody murder at the gods. I didn’t know that what was happening was a blessing. I saw it as a curse. All my life I’ve had to deal with everyone and everything being sick and mad and crazy, and now I have to go through this!! Tearing of hair, rending of garments.
The universe was trying to help me, but I was often too enraged to notice. At a psychic fair, I accidentally ran into the woman who would become my spiritual coach for about a decade, Judith Laxer. Judith runs Gaia’s Temple, a regular temple service for the public that celebrates the divine feminine. I was finally beginning to find my own feminine, feminista connection to spirit. The gods started looking a lot more like me. I was just beginning to truly see the divine in myself.
I took hundreds if not thousands of long hikes in the woods. Once, on a hike in the Alpine Lake Wilderness area, I was so exhausted I sat down on the path and found I’d leaned over and fallen asleep in the dirt. I awoke to hikers picking their way over me. I could have slept for a full decade. I was bone tired, centuries-long tired. I was exhausted beyond all reason.
Why go through this spiritual healing if it’s so damned difficult? I sat on a rock in a park at one point, ready to give it all up. My body dripped with the old paradigm — God was a brutal man, the world was such a sick and brutal place. Why deal with it? What’s the fucking point? A voice bellowed from the heavens: What you are going through is very important, profoundly important, the most important thing you will ever go through in your entire life. Take it seriously.
That was a turning point. I decided to let myself be fucked up and depressed and sick and allow the process. I took up a deck of tarot and started studying the symbols. I studied shamanism.
I finally realized why I’d come to Seattle. One can be openly metaphysical there. It’s still difficult to do that in the old world. Also, I needed a break and I really needed the glorious rich dripping nature of the Pacific Northwest.
As a journalist, I’d channeled the trauma of the planet, war, rape, murder, war, war, hatred, war. I knew even as a child I wanted to be part of the solution of a better planet, and not part of the problem. I thought telling the truth as a journalist was part of the solution, but it was just regurgitating the trauma, repackaging it in pretty bows and ribbons and sharing it with lots of others, retraumatizing lots of other people.
So, the final aspect of deepening my connection with spirit was my realization that I needed to Re-vision my Career. It took years to figure out how that might translate into making a living. I became a spiritual healer with the tarot, but what I really wanted was to be an artist. (That’s such a lie. I resisted the artistic path — I’d grown up with alcholic rageful abusive artists and wanted nothing to do with being an artist — so thus began ANOTHER long process of healing.)
Today, I’m an artist, fiction writer and healer. It’s been a very long journey, very very looooooooooooong. It’s a humble life, with none of the bells and whistles of my earlier days, but I am content.
I wake up and stare at my laptop, at how much bloody work I have to do on my second novel Air. I go down the back stairs to my studio on the ground floor of my apartment building and study a half finished canvas. I know, in those moments, that the journey isn’t over, that the re-visioning has really just begun, that when you’re on a spiritual path, it never ever really ends.
June is the last month for readings at the old rate of $100. Contact me for a reading at carolineallen@aol.com, www.creativetarot.com
Carrie…the truth shall set us free and I AM so grateful that you have told it here…I can now only learn from a teacher who is willing to show themselves…who is teaching from authentic knowing…thank you Carrie….blessings from INgrid in Toronto