Is It Me?

Many moons ago, I headed into the mountains for a retreat with a woman whose work has mentored my own since her first book found me when I was living in Dubai. The Creation of Health still sits in my library. It was a portal into new understanding when I needed it most. I’d met Caroline Myss during a medical intuition seminar some years earlier in Chicago where there were 160 of us in attendance. This mountain retreat promised to be an intimate group of no more than fifty women in Whistler and I was very excited to have the opportunity to attend the “Essential Guide for Healers.”

On day three of lectures with Caroline, I experienced a seismic shift in my consciousness. She was teaching that the third energy centre of the human body, or third chakra, is about processing emotional and mental issues having to do with responsibility. And that the Law of Magnetic Attraction, which is the mystical law corresponding to this part of the body, is the law that is activated by the myths we are living.

In the context of understanding power and responsibility, she demonstrated her teaching by asking, “What do I have the power to attract in life?”

I understood the teaching. Through Caroline’s tutelage over the years, I knew the energetic logic of how attraction works. If the first mystical law of life is the Law of Gravity then weight anchors us, and it does. If the second Law of Action and Reaction, which is located in our gut, gives us the power to act in a split second, then we can follow a hunch, or save our own life, by being directed into spontaneous action. Knowing these first two laws, and moving up the power system of the human body, it made energetic sense that the third centre of power would be the place where we begin to come alive with a sense of self.

“With your third chakra, you’re beginning to become a little conscious of yourself, and conscious of what you’re attracting,“ she said. “So, for example, you’ve had thirty-five relationships and they’ve all gone down the tubes, and you finally say, is it me?”

The room burst into laughter. But I wasn’t laughing.

“Am I attracting something? Is it me?” she continued in a playful manner.

“The first time you ever say, is it me? Is it something I’m doing? Is it something I said? Is it me?”

She scanned the room to see if anyone would respond.

“Well, there’s a real good chance everyone’s gonna say … um .. yes!”

More laughter.

“Is it me? The first time you wake up and say, what am I doing right? Or wrong? Is it me? Am I attracting something? Is the first day you wake up to the Law of Attraction.”

Now Caroline kicked into her wicked theatrics. She was comedic, and laser-sharp. But I was still not laughing. In fact, I was feeling increasingly uncomfortable. My pulse was racing. My body felt hot. And I noticed I was actually a bit annoyed.

“I mean … What am I doing? Is it my cologne? My clothes? My hair? What am I doing?!” she continued theatrically.

She paused for effect and looked around the room.

“There must have been a moment when you asked that question. You must have! Someone in here must have asked that question, is it me?”

The tension in the room finally compelled me to speak.

“Has anyone?” she repeated the question.

“I wrote a book about it,” I said from the back of the room while looking in her direction. She followed my voice to find me.

“You wrote a book about it? Is it me?” she was both surprised and delighted, thinking I’d written a book titled, Is It Me?

“No,” I clarified. “It’s called Three Marriages: lies I’ve lived by.”

Now the room was lifted on Caroline’s outrageous witchy cackle, and the laughter notched up. She shimmied her hips, clasped her hands, then opened her arms to the entire room and said in staccato, “Oh …my…God…you…must…speak…to…us… at…some…point…that’s…fan…tasss…tic!”

Then she repeated my words for everyone to hear.

“You wrote a book called three marriages and lies I’ve lived by.”

I nodded my head in agreement.

“I brought you a copy,” I told her.

“I want it!” she said in a suddenly serious tone. And she rallied the group with her arms waving to say, “We are honoured to have an author in this group. Well done! Oh, brilliant!”

And spontaneous clapping erupted.

Just like that, my soul was acknowledged. When we let others see what is gifted in us to give, clarity of purpose calls us forward. I had been outed as author.

“Oh my God! Oh my God! We’re privileged to have you here,” she exclaimed.

Then she opened her arms to the whole of me in the back of the room and said, “Oh my God! I have the Law of Magnetic Attraction sitting in my group!”

Then with a theatrical wave of her hand over her face she said, “This is too much. You see what I mean about you? I mean, it’s just too much!”

The laughter settled down. And there was a new silence in the room that was more a presence than an absence of something.

Our souls were like two tectonic plates rubbing up against each other. For years, it had been a slow and steady movement toward growth. While in the privacy of my own life, I’d been studying and excavating and discovering my inner world. All of it led to that moment, in that room, with those women.  In a quake of progress, a sudden release of pressure set a part of me free.

As Caroline fell back into teaching, she became even more animated on a stage she’d created to demonstrate what happens when a woman is on the hunt for a man (or, she adds, another woman if that’s your style).

Now I felt free to laugh, too. The tension in me was gone. What a raucous group we were! But more was going on than appeared on the surface. This was not mere entertainment. Caroline Myss was nailing all of us with truth, and the hilarity of seeing the inner workings of a woman on the hunt for a man was deeply unsettling.

The skit Caroline performed about courtship, marriage and what happens when myths stop working the way we expect them to operate, was actually prophesy of the highest order — not a foretelling or forecasting, but rather a direct description of the divine order of things. I was getting a clear map of the journey I’d need to travel over the next few years. (And once I’d lived through that experience, it became my second book, Married to Love: from fantasy to freedom.)

We can never see what we aren’t ready to see but life will put us in the right rooms with the right people to bring us guidance along the way. For we never walk alone. And whatever we learn is worthy of sharing.

Or as Caroline says: “From the broken heart comes a heart that can recognize and identify with the pain of others. A wound such as that must not be wasted or buried in self-pity, but brought into the light and examined, reflected upon, and used as a lens through which the lives of others are better understood.”

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Many women have been responding to the idea that the men in their lives have been “wounded boys” as shared in my blog The Wounded Boy at The Good Men Project. I’d love to hear about your experience! I invite you to download this Story Form, use it to tell me about your experience, and email it back to me at [email protected]. Let us unite in the truth of our lives and rise!

Let us unite in the truth of our lives and rise!

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This post is republished on Medium.

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