I have been living a life short of a fairy tale until that fateful day last year. A job, a wonderful husband, a delightful daughter, a big house complete with a garden, a whole room dedicated just for my clothes and shoes….I was a princess!! The only thing missing was a dog and a couple of adopted children and we would have rivaled Angie and Brad on that magazine cover.

The lone factor that cast a shadow on this, otherwise, idyllic picture was that I didn’t feel like I was in a fairy tale. I felt more like the frog than the princess. Friends wanted to trade lives with me while I wanted to trade with them.

To have everything but to feel like you have nothing is a dreadful. I was awash with feelings of guilt for being ungracious of all the blessings I have, but at the same time, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that I was looking for something. And there is nothing worse than looking for something without an inkling of what it is you’re looking for. To demand answers but not have the questions. I was, so to speak, utterly, inexplicably, absolutely lost.

Only after a certain period of reflection did I realize that it was my own spirit shouting release. It was crying out to me from the depths of my being. For my spirit was empty. My soul was parched dry. I was looking for meaning. For purpose. Something bigger than the mundane life that I was living. I was not just lost. I was gone.

Being reborn to a purposeful life sounded grand. It sounded noble. But there was a catch. The problem with rebirth is that you have to die first. And, the bigger problem is that you don’t really die. Just figuratively.

Let me explain. Awakening comes with a price – pain. And I’m not talking about the “ouch-I-scratched-my-knee” kind of pain. I’m talking BIG pain. HUGE. It brings about feelings of desolation, desperation, solitude, hurt, anger, fear and doubt. So much pain that at times death would seem merciful.

But you don’t.

This is because your Higher Self is relentless in its pursuit. It forces you to stand up, take stock and assume. It commands you not to buckle down. And in a world of paradox, the only way you can do that is by going through the pain.

Pain is not just a given in the road to awakening. It is a necessity. Only by accepting this pain and embracing it, can we forge on and emerge in triumph.

We see the chronicles of humanity replete with this image. Various bible stories, legends and lores contain this rite of passage. God had to flood the Earth in order for new life to bloom. The Indian prince, Siddartha Gautama, had to turn his back on his life of utter perfection in order to attain spiritual enlightenment and become the Buddha. It is also everywhere around us in nature. A caterpillar has to spin itself into a cocoon, surrounding itself in darkness, before metamorphosing into an exquisite butterfly.

As excruciating as it is, embracing the pain is our only vehicle to go into the light. So rather than closing our fists and resisting, let us open our hearts and welcome. For in that solitary moment of darkness and hollow emptiness, your awakening begins.

Who is Malou?

I am a 35-year-old woman, originally from the Philippines now living in Geneva, Switzerland for more than a decade. I had no plans to make Switzerland home but I got swept off my feet and decided to leave my family behind for love. That was 12 years ago. My life has now gone full circle from being “swept off my feet” to being “knocked off my feet”. I have been separated for six months. There is a wonderful soon-to-be 8-year-old daughter to remind me that there WERE good moments. To pinpoint more or less my GPS coordinates with regard to where-am-I-right-now-professionally, I guess you can say that I am an HR professional-slash-blogger-slash-aspiring book author-woman on her own. For more about Malou check out her blog at MCairus.

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Last week I went for the second time this summer to a spiritual retreat in Lily Dale, New York.  Lily Dale is a rather unique spot.     It’s a tiny little village in western New York, near Buffalo, with small gingerbread Victorian and clapboard cottages all crowded together, most with luxuriant gardens.

Lily Dale is known as the “town that talks to the spirits” as it was called by Christine Wicker who wrote a book about it a few years ago.  It’s the home of the Spiritualist Church, a uniquely American spiritual movement that started in the 1800s.  The core belief of Spiritualism is that the dead are among and we can talk to them.   Seances, spirit photography, ectoplasm and other ghostly manifestations  became the rage all over the country at the time  and were a huge phenomena  on into the 1920s when the movement was discredited because phony mediums were ripping people off.

Despite the frauds and their controversial beliefs, spiritualists aren’t crackpots.    From the beginning they were admirably devoted to civil rights and individual freedom, supporters of women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery.   Non-denominational, with no fixed beliefs other than in life after death, they accept members from all religions, and are egalitarian, running the town as a cooperative.  Their two churches have no ministers. Lily Dale is set on the original one hundred acres bought by the Spiritualist Assembly back in the 1800s, so you can walk up and down all the streets in about an hour.

Lily Dale looks miniaturized, as though it’s inhabited by little people, though actually most of the residents are on the large side.   Mediums love to eat.   Vegetarianism hasn’t arrived at Lily Dale yet and neither has Pilates.     In order to buy a house in Lily Dale you have to be a member of the Spiritualist Church, and most houses have signs advertising readings.    There are twice daily “message services” at the “inspiration stump” in Leolyn Woods, a old growth forest with a pet cemetery and fairy houses built by children, where mediums give messages to people from their deceased relatives.   I went to a couple but found them pretty hokey.   Most of the messages were of the “you’re doing great, keep following the life path you’ve chosen” variety;  nothing juicy like, “yes, your wife is having an affair with your brother in law.”   None of the mediums ever called on me to give me a message, probably because they didn’t want to be bothered by my mother who would probably have said, “you can’t possibly believe in this stuff.”

I stayed at the Maplewood, a hotel that’s remained the same since the 1800’s.  You feel like you’ve gone back in time at the Maplewood.  It’s definitely not the Days Inn. The keys are metal, not plastic cards, the reservations are on a huge sheet of paper not on a computer, and there are no TVs or phones in the rooms.   The Maplewood has a huge front porch with rocking chairs all in a row, facing Cassadaga Lake.  On my first morning I walked outside in my bathrobe as soon as I woke up so my doggie, Shadow, could pee, and saw that all the rockers were occupied by Tibetan Buddhist monks in maroon robes.  They’d recently arrived from Dharmsala in India to make a Mandala, which unfortunately I had missed.    The other porch rockers were occupied by a variety of regular folks, from a big guy who looked like a trucker, to an elderly couple from New Jersey, to a systems analyst who was planning to analyze the mysterious photos taken by an Australian woman who had snapped pictures from the porch at night of dots of light in the trees that she blew up into ghostly images, some of which looked like floating orbs and others exactly like fairies.     Maybe it was because Lily Dale was in the middle of nowhere, but the pretentious holier than thou spiritual types I’d run into at other retreats were nowhere to be found. The visitors and residents alike seem perfectly normal, although they believe in ghosts, fairies and spirits.   I suspended my usual cynical disbelief to embrace Lily Dale since it immediately had a soothing effect on me.

I really loved being able to leave the privacy of my room to sit in the front parlor or on the porch with whoever happened to be hanging around.   After dinner I’d hang around with a variety of interesting folks.    As soon as I got home from Lily Dale I felt very depressed and isolated.  I realized how lonely I am at home, where I live alone, with no one to talk to on a regular basis.   I would love to live in a place like Lily Dale, where I could have my own space, but know that there would be friendly people around when I wanted to socialize, right outside my door.   I guess that’s what retirement communities offer, but without the charm and quirkiness of Lily Dale.    Divorce throws you into a life on your own, often a very lonely life if you’re older and your kids are gone—and you don’t have a job and work at home like I do.   There has to be a new way to live but I haven’t discovered it yet.  I’m going to start looking.   I’ll let you know what I find.

Erica Manfred

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When was I first separated and divorced, one of the hardest things for me to deal with was the time my boys spent with their father. During those every-other-weekend visits, I found it very painful that my family was out doing things without me. I was left feeling empty and with nothing to do to take my mind off the situation.

Instead of taking the opportunity to do for myself, every other weekend I threw a pity party and wallowed in my aloneness. Which was down right self-defeating because during the week when I was parenting alone I would wish for a few moments to myself. And, there I sat every other weekend squandering the very thing I often longed for.

It took me a couple of months to realize that I had the power to use those long, quiet Saturdays alone in any way I wanted. I’d spent so many years devoting all my time to my family that I’d forgotten what it was like to have time to myself.

When I finally figured out that I could take those silent Saturdays and do what I wanted with them, I began to revel in my alone time.

If you are new to the process and suffering Quiet Saturday Syndrome, here are a few ideas to help you survive — and hopefully enjoy — those alone days.

1. Pamper yourself with a manicure and pedicure. What a luxury it is to go out every other Saturday morning and have your hands and feet pampered. It’s inexpensive and a great way to fill time and connect with others – much better than sitting at home with your spirits in the gutter.

2. Hit the local bookstore. This was one of my favorites — I could sit and read, surrounded by other warm bodies, and drink my Mocha Frappuccino. It was heaven!

3. Get out and meet people. I had a group at my church that went on retreats quite often. I starting joining them, and before I knew it, I had become a regular member of the group. Not only was I getting out of the house and experiencing new things, I was also taking care of myself spiritually. I was becoming a new person.

We all have the power to fill our lives with happiness, friends, and fun. Instead of sitting around missing your children, why not become your own best friend? Become someone who knows how to lift her own spirits and take advantage of all that life has to offer, no matter what’s going on in life.

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But you know what I’ve never understood? How it is measured. Do all balancing components, i.e. work vs. play, have to happen every day? Can they divide the week in half? Or can a full month of work be balanced with one day of play?

I look at my married girlfriends who don’t have kids. And I think WOW – now THEY have balance. They work passionately at their jobs. They devote most of their spare time to their partners. And they always have that ‘extra time’ to exercise, attend special events, and steal away on exotic trips once or twice a year.

My married girlfriends WITH kids seem to struggle with it more. Doesn’t matter if they’re in the workforce or stay at home with kids. Schedules are constantly chased, husband/wife time is harder to carve out, individual ‘me-time’ is usually last on the priority list (especially for the moms). The ‘balance scale’ seems to teeter totter all over the place, oftentimes to the point where the mom gets overwhelmed and jumps off for awhile. But inevitably she gets back on, and the teetering continues with bouts of homeostasis.

And then there’s me: someone who doesn’t know how to differentiate work from play. Reason being, I love being at home full-time with my kids AND building my new career as an author.

Still, according to the ‘rules’, I’m off-balance. I can’t remember the last time I read a novel or watched TV. I don’t make near enough time to go to the gym (though I do run laps in the field across the street). Meditation I do for maybe five minutes/day. I only sleep about six hours per night. I don’t spend enough time with my girlfriends. And as for a dating life, well… as my best friend pointed out last weekend, it’s non-existent. The GOOD thing however, and my best friend would agree with me on this, is that I now have a friend with benefits to take care of the sex part. J.

I see why we need to have a concept like balance around. It IS a healthy reminder to check in and measure our overall happiness quotient. But we have to be careful not to feel guilty or judge ourselves harshly when it’s off kilter. After all, life is a constant ebb and flow, surprises happen, and sometimes life hits us in the head.

So instead of measuring my sense of balance against some scale that other people created, I think I’m going to simplify it: Regardless of how much I’ve worked, played, dated, had sex, seen friends etc on any given day, I’ll measure balance by how often I’ve felt my smile. And in that respect, I think I’m ‘almost’ there.

Delaine

www.iamdivorcednotdead.com

The key to solving this problem? Me becoming more at ease. But, you may ask, how do you become more at ease when it seems everywhere you turn there is another problem to deal with?

The answer for me is letting go of the need to control. Anyone else out there a control freak? Anyone else have a hard time feeling balanced when faced with disharmony?

If so, listen up. I’m going to tell you what works for me. You gotta “let go” and you’ve got to learn to trust others to help you solve those problems that continually pop up.

For example…my youngest has a health issue that concerns me deeply. He is now living with his father while we do battle over the custody issue. His father doesn’t share information with me about my son’s health. He refuses to sign medical release forms so that I can discuss my son with his doctors.

On top of that, my son is angry with me…can you say Parental Alienation? He is refusing to communicate with me so; I’m getting no information from him.

Having such information about your child withheld can drive a parent batty. Which I might add, is exactly what my ex is wishing would happen. The last thing my ex wants me feeling is harmony and balance in my life!

My ex’s actions naturally cause me to want to push back. To do whatever I have to do to make sure my son is getting the medical attention he needs and I am getting the information I desire.

Pushing back only causes more disharmony and less balance and no matter how hard I push, my ex isn’t about to move. Trying to have a civil relationship with him is like pushing a boulder up a mountain. It just isn’t going to happen…regardless of how good it would be for our son.

So, for the sake of “chi” I have to let go of the need to take care of my son and start taking care of myself. Because the day will come when I once again have parental authority in my son’s life. When he once again loves his mom and wants to come home and when that day happens, I want him coming home to a healthy mom, not an emotionally frazzled mom.

Oh, and having a kick-ass attorney helps also. Couple that with “letting go” and life becomes so much easier to deal with.

Cathy