“The shift has begun!” declared a voice.

I awoke with a start, thinking there was someone in my apartment, it was so loud, and it sounded so real.  My heart began beating quickly with that thought.  I cautiously got up and began to look around with a rather large flashlight in hand, which wasn’t even turned on.  To my relief, no one was there.  Everything was quiet and in order.  I saw my cat looking at me like I was crazy.  Was I?   I lay back in bed taking deep slow breaths to try to calm myself.  My mind was racing.  Where did this voice come from, to whom did it belong, and what did it mean?  Totally mystified, I realized this voice must have come out of a dream I was having, and I began the task of trying to remember it to discern the meaning of this statement.  Without a clue, I decided to meditate.

The vision in my meditation revealed gears, in an old fashion clock, shifting.  This vision came with a depth of knowledge and understanding.  For me, this message was,  “Surrender and allow this shift to happen because it is time to align with those who can connect through the heart and to flow with those who understand.”   On a grand scale, this message was also for everyone. We all have to experience this shift in one way or another.  In other words, we can shift to find a true home for us without kicking and screaming, or we can experience a bigger lesson that will eventually get us there.

On a timeline, this dream and meditation happened about five months after my divorce.

Psychologists say it takes at least two years to grieve the death of anything.  The stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.  They can come in any order and cycle through as many times as it takes.  I definitely experienced all of them from the time my now ex-husband demanded the divorce and for the next two years, after my divorce, until acceptance was solidly grounded in my life.

Two years later, I write the story of my personal journey through my own Armageddon, hoping to inspire those who are or have been experiencing a sudden drastic change of events, much like my own.  This is my process of healing.  All accounts are from how I thought and felt after the divorce and from where it originated in my childhood.   As I have explained in other articles, all patterns start from the ages of zero to six.  I always remind myself that everything we experience has a purpose.  These experiences point us in the direction of a path leading us to freedom and joy.

In the dictionary, one of the meanings of Armageddon is, “the last place where the battle of good and evil will be fought.”  I totally related to this.   On an intuitive level, I knew this shift was necessary as there was no heart-to-heart connection.  I was, and still am, certain that my ex-husband does not have the capability to connect to anyone through the heart, as old trauma remains deeply hidden within the recesses of his consciousness.  This understanding allowed me to have some compassion for him.  Also, as you recall from the prior article, we met through the motivation of survival, an age-old mass conscious belief for the institution of marriage, which I no longer accept as true.  However, none of these perceptions stopped my ego from moving through all the steps of grief.  After all, I was devastated, hurt and angry from being fired.  This part of me wanted revenge!   Within me, good and evil were fighting to gain dominance.  That said, my personal Armageddon had begun!

My divorce definitely came with an aftermath of destruction, and in its wake, chaos definitely ensued.  I felt like a zombie, the part of the zombie that just walks around without cognition completely living from the brain stem.  My children were like the zombies that attack everyone and everything in their path, feasting on the flesh of those unaffected by this change.  They were at war with each other, my parents, me and certainly with their dad along with those who supported him.

Remember the last article?  The wound of abandonment was at play during the marriage and continued to be at play after the divorce.  I was totally sensitive to this wound and swore I would never be abandoned again.  My battle cry was, “death to those who try”, or at the very least, I would leave them first.  Memories of the show Seinfeld appeared in my head.  Yes, I would be like George Castanza and execute the preemptive strike!

Because I felt abandoned by my ex-husband as well as betrayed, I began to fantasize his demise.  I wanted him to suffer.  Yes, I admit I was in victim mode.  I felt justified by the sudden change of events and utter pandemonium occurring at the time.  I was dealing with my own grief as well as the grief my children were experiencing, meanwhile my ex was off having a good time with his girlfriend.  My parents were also thrown into the turmoil, as we invaded their house with nowhere else to go.  I often played peacemaker between my parents and my out of control children. Looking back, I realized my parents should have been canonized as saints for putting up with all of it.  This truly was Armageddon!

However, in my book, good always prevails.  Five months later I came to my senses. It’s amazing how the unconditional love of the soul allows one to experience both negative thoughts and emotions, from the obliteration of a previous life, without judgment.  My soul maintained loving support while gently nudging me to keep moving though to the other side.  The voice I heard that night, woke me up to a new way of perceiving my life, and I began letting go.  I realized that suffering occurs in life because we hold onto events that were meant to enlighten us, move us in the opposite direction, expand our being, and land us on the road we were destined to be on in the first place.  It wasn’t until I sat down to write my last article that realization began to occur.  With that said, I knew I had to heal first before any relationship could be possible.  From that decision, I began to stay aware of my thoughts, feelings and actions.  Determined to find peace and understanding, I sat myself down under the proverbial Bodhi tree, and began my inner journey.  I knew I had to heal from these wounds, move within to connect to my essence and find self-love.

Rebirth commences on the heels of Armageddon.  As time went on I began to feel free.  Free?  That’s an interesting thought.  One day a realization occurred when my son and I were at the grocery store.  As we approached the counter, I noticed I was feeling uneasy.  At the time of payment, I began to rummage through my purse to retrieve my credit card.  It took a little longer than expected as my purse felt like Mary Poppins’ bag with endless items being pulled out.  My son, feeling impatient, demanded that I hurry because people were waiting.  My uneasiness transformed into feelings of frustration then anger.  I turned sharply around to face him and angrily told him to never say that again.  I was totally triggered.  It wasn’t until then that I realized, the apprehension I was experiencing, came from my marriage. Multiple memories surfaced of my ex-husband saying the exact same words my son had said at the checkout counter.  Was this a form of emotional abuse?  Don’t get me wrong; my ex was never purposely abusive.  I do feel he unconsciously reacted negatively to certain situations.  I believe his own patterns of early abuse and being controlled by his father emerged at certain times with an intense energy.  I know how powerful the energy of an angry individual can be.  I responded to that energy with visions of nuns dragging me out of the classroom by my ear or my chin.  Not wanting to re-experience that abuse, I often complied, all the while holding in my emotions and putting up with the lack of respect aimed at me.  I grew up as the obedient child while my siblings tended to push the boundaries often getting themselves into trouble.  Until then I never realized how uncomfortably compliant I was from the fear of punishment that might end in abandonment.  This was the result of an emerging pattern concealed within, from the ages of zero to six.  I either witnessed or experienced this same behavior in those around me, which was later compounded by the nuns at catholic school.  Understanding what just took place, I apologized to my son and explained my trigger to him.  

I am not complaining about my ex-husband.  He is who he is.  He was unconsciously living his life from the old patterns he learned as a child.  I am sure his parents must have responded in much the same way when they thought he was “dilly dallying. “  

I know enough through research, that we live unconsciously.  We react from automation rather than discernment.  It takes conscious observation of our thoughts and actions to be able to choose an action that feels right.  We always attract others to us that exhibit certain qualities to help us learn, grow and expand our consciousness.  It took the ending of a 16-year marriage for me to see this pattern so that I could transform it.

After the divorce, my ego was solely focused on my ex-husband, accusing him of being unfaithful and inauthentic, but because I wanted to heal, I began looking inward, asking myself why I attracted him to me.  I received a glimpse of the answer while at one of the weekends in Santa Fe learning a healing modality called SourcePoint Therapy.  In one of the sessions we were practicing, I saw a pattern that was handed down to me from my maternal grandmother to my mother to me and into my daughter.  It was symbolized by the umbilical cord that connected each of us.  At my daughter’s birth, my impatient OB GYN pulled out the placenta causing me to slowly bleed out.  I could feel me leave my body, as my blood pressure got dangerously low.  I looked around for my husband who was admiring our newborn and ignoring me despite the chaos, in the room, from the doctors and nurses trying to keep me alive.  This deeply hidden memory came as a shock, as I had ignored its implications.  He never loved me!  For me, a loving and connected husband would have been by my side out of fear of losing me.  That realization stung. However, blaming others keeps us as a victim, not a creator.  This memory emerged for me to see many beliefs that were at play.  I believe the umbilical cord symbolized the abandonment wound handed down from my maternal grandmother, who was abandoned at birth by her parents and raised in an orphanage, to my mother, who was emotionally abandoned by my grandmother, to me.  All the beliefs of abandonment came with it; I am on my own, I am invisible, I am unlovable and I am not important.  To clarify, my parents were always there for my siblings and me, and I was there for my daughter.  So why do these beliefs continue to play out?  Looking back to the critical ages between zero and six, I remembered and learned of several incidents that happened.

As I grew up, I always allowed my sister to get all the attention from my parents and relatives so that I wouldn’t upset her.  I discovered that my sister was not a happy camper that I was born, because I moved in on her territory.  Once, she even pulled me off the bed when I was an infant allowing me to tumble to the ground.  We were never very close, and I often stayed quiet and in the background.  This memory sounded a lot like what happened to me during my daughter’s birth.  In both incidences, I was not important.

Another significant event was when I was a baby.  If you remember my previous article, children, even babies, experience life through pure emotion.  They cannot reason as adults can, they simply feel.  My mom admitted to me that as a baby I would be awake during the night and sleep during the day.  So at night I wanted to be held and fed, thus disturbing my parents’ sleep.  The doctor told her to let me fuss or scream until I fell asleep.  Since I slept in the same room as my sister, my parents put me in another room where I couldn’t disturb her.  I screamed at the top of my lungs for hours and for many nights in a row until my night and day went back to normal.  I believe this was the introduction to an abandonment wound.  How, you ask? The explanation lies in the understanding of quantum physics and the research, done by noetic scientists, on how thought and emotion creates a field of energy that is sent out beyond the brain and heart interacting with other beings.  In other words, thought is an energy form that can be transferred from one person to the next through emotion.  Because my maternal grandmother was left at an orphanage, her fears of being abandoned again by my mother and her siblings created a dialogue of abandonment in my mother’s belief system.  This understanding gave me insight to my emotional wound.  My mother’s thought of abandoning me were most likely present at that time.  No one really abandoned me, but at the time of being placed in another room away from my parents and my sister, my mother might have had deep feelings of guilt for leaving me there, which I would have felt.

Abandonment also conjures up images of living out on the street with no money, warmth or food.  It comes from the mass conscious belief of the fight to stay alive, survival.  I realize that for me survival means scarcity.  This is one of my biggest obstacles.  It plays into both the abandonment and betrayal wounds as I unconsciously think I cannot survive on my own.  To explain, my parents lived through the great depression.  I grew up being afraid of living on the streets, not being able to eat and eventually having to face an uncertain death.  Money was tightly controlled in my family.  I learned early on that marriage was a necessary construct in order to survive.  Most girls were told to find the ideal man that had a good job and was successful.  The understanding was that the man goes out to make a living, and the woman stays home to care for the home and children.  In this economy, this old belief about marriage is no longer relevant, as both people in the marriage have to work to pay for their family’s life.  As I began to gravitate to what was right for me in the form of an inner urging, I no longer felt comfortable in the job I was doing at that time.  I came to the realization that the previous job was just a stepping-stone to what I am doing now.  I had to trust that it was the right path and start all over again growing a business.  However, my ex was not in favor, although he outwardly did agree to support my decision.  Instead, I felt the growing sensation that he was angry about it.  I felt him manipulating me to get a job that paid a wage.  He even manipulated me into bankruptcy with the promise for us to stay together.  The truth soon became evident.  While I was struggling to keep the marriage alive, he was already out.  He never planned on reconciliation, and on an intuitive level, I already knew this to be true.  Finally, I gave up my hold and surrendered to what was inevitable, abandonment.

One of the biggest red flags in my marriage was not being listened to or understood. I would often passionately talk to my ex, about the mysteries of life and the soul, about energy and quantum mechanics, and about our ability to manifest anything in our lives.  He claimed he was interested, but as I spoke, he would look as if he was listening but his eyes told a different story.  He was either thinking of his to-do list or making a judgment on what I was saying.  Whatever the case, he was not really listening and certainly not interested.  My ex had rules to follow, so I suppose he was just doing his duty as a husband by sitting there.  I always walked away feeling unimportant, invisible and unworthy.  To make matters worse, he always accused the kids and I of never appreciating him for all he did.  He said it was this lack of appreciation that made him ask for a divorce.

In the two years following the divorce, those stinging words, although untrue, were never forgotten.  It wasn’t until recently that I understood why they stayed stubbornly imprinted in my brain.  I had just finished an online course with one of my teachers, Deborah King.  Throughout the course, I often typed in questions, which were never answered.  They even had a live online question and answer blog that I participated in.  I again typed in my questions, which were still never answered.  I began feeling like I was not good enough or maybe even feeling like I was a bad person and wasn’t worthy enough to get the answers I needed.  Even worse, I began thinking that Deborah King was deliberately ignoring me because after all if you don’t have something good to say then don’t say anything at all.  Yet something didn’t feel right.  This wasn’t jiving as truth.  I wasn’t seeing something. So I began to reason:  

 I know that we manifest everything in our life unconsciously or consciously.  We are all whole, perfect and complete.  There is no such thing as good, bad, right or wrong, and we are all one.  It is our perceptions that create our reality.  

So why was I feeling this way?  Why did I manifest this?  All of a sudden an “AH-HAH” moment occurred and I understood.  My ex’s words flowed back to the forefront of my mind.  My soul was showing me how both of us were looking outside the self for approval instead of having self-approval.  Past memories began flooding in of similar situations that mirrored this very thought.  I needed to believe in myself.  I was not listening to me.  I was not honoring me.  I wasn’t viewing myself as being worthy.  I didn’t need approval from anyone but me.

I recount these parts of my story to illustrate what we all do.  We not only hold onto dead relationships of all kinds but also to jobs we are unhappy in.  We stop growing out of the need to survive.  Scientists know that the universe is always expanding, and therefore we must expand as well.  When we become stagnant, our soul gives us a nudge.  When we don’t listen, it pushes us.  Finally after several ignored pushes, our soul pulls us off the bed sending us tumbling to the ground.  It is our wake up call to move on.  My ex and I never saw eye-to-eye and there was never a heart-to-heart connection.  We were both stuck in the survival point of view.  The moment I moved past that belief, the marriage was over.

Our current issues stem from past occurrences, and illustrate for us why we do the things that we do.  We can use them as tools to direct our life in a more pleasing direction.  In my case, I now choose not to abandon myself, stop living from survival, and follow a path that feels right for me no matter what.

My ex demanding that I hurry while we were at the checkout counter taught me many things about myself.  Compliance was a lesson of standing my ground and having boundaries.  It was also a way to learn authenticity by being the real me and to speak my truth without fear of being abandoned.  In the case of my daughter’s birth, I understand now that he was only showing me my own lack of self-love. Seeing that this was a red flag, I could have ended the relationship earlier instead of burying the memory, and tolerating everything that followed.  This is a lesson to always stay present and listen to my intuitions.  In the case of my ex never listening to me, this taught me to value and believe in myself.

The universe is benevolent and loving. It allows us to experience all lessons in order to move forward instead of choosing to hold on for dear life, keeping us stagnant.  Fear holds us back.  Know that there is always another side to all perceptions.  All of these memories illustrate how stubborn the ego or subconscious mind is to release its grip on us.  It takes conscious awareness to see the patterns that run our lives. For me, abandonment was a war I was going to win instead of an experience to free myself.  Trust and faith are the keys to freedom because all experiences happen for our highest good.  Being human is to experience all emotions both good and bad, but there is a difference between experiencing and brooding.  It takes ninety seconds for the chemical reaction of an emotion to move through the body.  We can move into reason and understanding after we pause to feel the emotionally affected area, until the reaction subsides.  Surrendering to our emotions is the only way old belief patterns can surface. Once we recognize our own hidden beliefs, we can make conscious choices creating new patterns.

To conclude, I am finally at peace with the end of my seventeen-year relationship.  I am truly grateful for this experience because what I learned was so invaluable.  Now, I can move on with my life in a totally different way, creating new experiences.  I am keenly aware of how I am being affected and how my subconscious mind would want me to react. Having awareness, helps me to make positive and authentic choices.  It takes practice to change old patterns, but as long as we stay present and aware, we can eventually create new ones that allow us to shift to a new heart connected home.  In the end, my ex ultimately taught me the biggest lesson of all; good and evil don’t really exist.  I was never the bad guy nor was he.  On a soul level we were simply helping each other grow.  Armageddon is definitely a fight within us as we are our own worst enemy.  However, out of its ashes we can choose to rise to a new and freer self. 

Dedication
I am truly grateful to Littleton Yoga Center, to all my friends and teachers at this beautiful yoga center, to Shawna Jamison, to Patricia Campbell Bennet, and especially to Aliza Sodos, who have supported me at the onset of the divorce, through it and continues their support even now. I  couldn't have done it without all of you.  Also a great big thanks to my Parents,  Jim and Ruby Antonio.  I Love you guys!  A special comment to my kids, Luke and Stavia:  "I love both of you. Our journey continues to new and awesome places." 

We are not alone!

Written by Roni Antonio 2016
Certified Life Coach and Energy Healer
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED