An experience with altered consciousness provides a wellness coach with the strength to leave an abusive relationship, and an opportunity to learn to “love self, first”
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BY RHONDA SHERYL LIPSTEIN — As an author, I realize that we all could write a book, since life itself is a series of experiences that expand our consciousness.
The only difference between one who “walks the talk” and one who does not even talk at all is whether we choose to be aware of this fact — of our expressed experience of being.
During my life I’ve had several experiences of expanded or altered consciousness, beginning when I was a child, continuing as an adult with the birth of my son — and later, when extricating myself from an abusive relationship.
One of my first experiences happened when I was about ten years old and sitting at the kitchen table in my family’s home. Dad was at work, Mom was busy with the pots and pans, and my brother, sister and I were sitting and eating dinner together. There was nothing unusual about the evening, the dinner, or the overall experience until suddenly I was there, with my family and yet . . . not.
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I went from eating my dinner, an active participant in our routine family dynamics, to sinking back behind a veil of an unseen, invisible, yet very present and dense energy field.
Everything outside of the field — which was my family and the environment around me — was moving very quickly, as though on a fast forward video, yet the speech of my family was set on the “slow motion” position. I couldn’t really make out what they were saying, and yet I could.
In addition to the imbalance in my sensory input — seeing everything moving really quickly, hearing everything really slowly — I felt as though I had been transported out of their dimensional reality. I found myself in my own perceptually-veiled, slow-moving movie, present yet detached and objective.
At the same time I was aware of my physical body, which seemed to be running like a race horse. My heart was beating a mile a minute, my breathing was fast and loud, and my eyes seemed to be flickering back and forth as if tracking a high-velocity ping-pong ball match.
Talk about duality!
It was as awesome as it was terrifying. I’m not sure how long my experience lasted. However, I do know that I was very afraid that I would stay stuck where I was, which, though right where I had been only moments earlier, seemed a separate reality.
After the initial seduction offered by this adventure, I think I scared myself right out of it. Yet to this day, it remains one of the most profound moments of my life. It was the first time (though most certainly not the last) I consciously experienced life from an altered state of consciousness.
Lessons learned from birthing
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My birthing experience (my son Zion is pictured at left) was as awesome as it was terrifying, like the initial pangs of labor that come as soon as you realize your water (the amniotic sac holding your unborn baby within your womb) has broken. Once I entered into labor, it was not too very long before the pain became overwhelming, and I was within the clutches of “transition.” This is the last stage right before the baby is ready to be born.
In less than eight hours I went from being a woman, carrying another developing human being within her own physical body, to being the mother of a completely separate, unique, fantabulously wonderful and beautiful individual.
What a life-altering, consciousness raising experience to have one’s life drastically, wholly and completely change forever in the matter of a few short hours. And may I add, forever in the best sense of the word. I was blessed with the greatest universal gift, ever — my son — Zion. You are most warmly welcome to peruse the journey I have been gifted with my son, in addition to some fantabulous parenting guidance by following this link.
Finding the strength to move on
Scary and exhilarating as my initial peak experience into conscious awareness was, it was brief. Sometimes, it takes more experiencing of something before we are ready to embrace the gift of a peak experience.
After more than a decade, flip-flopping in and out of an abusive relationship, I found myself sitting in a bath tub one night. I realized what being the “best I in me” really meant. As a psychology graduate, and seasoned scholar in the esoteric arts and sciences of mind and consciousness, I was fully aware of the “abused wife syndrome.”
Still, it took more than a decade for me, enduring countless transitory labor pains, before I was ready to let go of the guilt and fear of not being the best I in me. All those years I endured that which I did, I did so under the notion that if I was “all that I believed myself to be” I would be able to “rise above” the abuse, stay true to self and triumph — a heightened being of enlightenment, while providing the lifeline to another soul, desperately drowning in a darkness of his own creation.
What I did not realize was that by staying in the abusive relationship, I was not rising above or providing a lifeline, but was being dragged under, drowned, and thus losing my own lifeline. I was not being true to self, for I was saying that “this” learning, growing, and expanding of my conscious awareness within an abusive relationship and environment was what I deserved — and moreover, that an other’s state of mental health and physical well-being was more important than my own.
It was not until I was sitting in the bath tub, after yet another explosive event, that I found myself cradling my own face. I was offering myself comfort! And surrendering to it in complete wholeness of my being, knowing I deserved to be loved by me, that no one else is more worthy and deserving of my love than me, first and foremost.
What I learned? Love self, first.
Talk about an excruciatingly painful emotional experience . . . it was like the physical agony I experienced during my “labor transition,” leading to the unbelievable exhalation of birth. The relief and release from tortuous pain, like rising from the depths of the ocean to inhale your first gasp of breath, is an emotional orgasmic ecstasy like no other!
Shared lessons
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As a holistic wisdom and wellness life coach, one of the greatest lessons I journey on with my angel partners (i.e. clients) is the realization that we choose how to perceive, receive and respond to each and every situation within our lives.
The question is whether we choose to do so in awareness. When we choose to pay attention to, and within our lives, a simple “flick of the mind switch” — we empower ourselves with the ability to make choices that are truly for our benefit, by consciously loving self first.
To begin upon our journey we need to ask, “What would love do now?” What we discover is that when we love self first, we are loving all, and doing that which is best for all. Thus acting for self, is in truth, an act for the benefit of all.
As we so do, we find ourselves living in the conscious awareness that we are, in truth, experiencing “peak spiritual touchstones” every moment of every day, in every event of our lives. We are truly alive.
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Roni Sheryl Lipstein is an “artist of love”, and a wisdom and wellness life coach, as well as an ontological literary artist and philosopher from Toronto, Canada.
She is a founding partner of Sanctuaire Soul’s Sanctuary. Visit her at Soul’s Talking Brain and Fulfilled Destiny.