Even though I wrote a book about it twenty years ago, it has taken me a lifetime to finally write the words:

My brother killed my mother, and I have forgiven them both.

At the time of my mother’s death, I was 30. Her death was the catalyst of an intense emotional, mental, and spiritual inner quest to discover how this could have happened in our family.

It was through deeper understanding that I was finally able to forgive my brother, mother, and myself.

After my mother’s passing, I began to have significant dreams and prophetic insights. My mother communicated with me in dreams for about six months. In my dreams, she kept asking to speak with my brother and I would tell her that he wasn’t there.

Then while sleeping on the rooftop where I lived, I heard her voice calling my name in real time — and it was not a dream.

The following night, she woke me and was present in my room as she gave me a message to deliver to my brother:

Could he find it in his heart to forgive her?

I visited my brother in the halfway house close to his 21st birthday and we went for an outdoor picnic at a lake where swans were swimming.

I asked him if Mom ever came to him in dreams and he nodded. I shared that she’d come to me as well, requesting that I ask him if he could forgive her, owning her part of pushing him too far, and asking for his forgiveness.

I held him as he sobbed in my arms. As his sobbing subsided, several swans soared into the sky above us.

My Journey of Understanding

Breathwork and creative expression have been the foundations of my healing journey.

In the early 80s, after moving to Arizona to be closer to Dad, I discovered the power of conscious, connected breathing. When I signed up for a series of rebirth sessions, my first session, I experienced the space/time prior to being born into this lifetime.

My inner body awareness expanded with conscious connected breathing. This gave me the courage to channel my grief in creative ways through expressive art and gestalt therapy. I experienced being multidimensional during a holotropic breathwork weekend with Christine & Stan Groff and, when I joined several African friends for dancing & drumming in a Yoga Studio after my first talk by Krishnamurti in the Live Oak Grove, Ojai, California. The last time I heard him speak live there, tears welled up and after everyone left the grove, I cried, knowing this was his last talk here. I requested on the inner plane for him to let me know when he passed. I returned home in an expanded state of awareness (no thoughts) that lasted for two weeks.

This was the beginning of me unwinding deeper inner shadow work and realizing that I had the inner freedom and strength to choose to stay in the consciousness of being a victim of my life circumstances, or to know and trust I could transform and transmute past experiences consciously, emotionally, and spiritually.

After my son was born, I found the courage to launch my own private practice. Pure Energy Integration includes body sense awareness and trauma release integration via breathwork, creative expression, and circulation, cultivation of life force energy.

Then I began to write. I knew intuitively it was my next step to heal and integrate what happened. I began writing when I turned fifty, the same age as my mother when she died; my only son was seventeen and living with me, the same age as my brother when it happened. I found a writing class and began this endeavor diligently. Elana Golden was instrumental in supporting me to go deeper and to find empathy for myself and my family members. To be able to read aloud without breaking into uncontrollable tears, be heard, and hear other women read their stories became emotionally freeing and empowering.

I wrote also in the voices of my mother and brother. This helped me to gain more insight into our family dynamics and enrich the narrative. As I began to forgive my mother for childhood wounds I believed could never be forgiven, she came to me as a muse and told me her childhood story. I loved to slow down, to feel, to give words to my challenging and painful world with beauty and tenderness.

Len Sherman a literary agent, read my manuscript, Forgiveness Beyond Time and offered to represent me with several big publishers in NY.

In 2006 I moved to Portland, Maine, and continued to participate in writers’ retreats with Leslie Marmon Silko at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico. I pitched my book to NYC agents and joined the Maine Writers Publishers Alliance in an attempt to publish my memoir. I immersed myself in meeting more experienced writers, one of them being Elizabeth Gilbert.

My brother was not supportive of my attempts to publish. Advised by an attorney with the International Women’s Writing Guild, I chose not to pursue publishing further.

The summer I turned sixty, in 2011, I discovered two life-changing vehicles of wisdom transmission. I’d been struggling to understand and utilize Human Design when Cindy Silva, from whom I was taking the course, encouraged me to look into the Gene Keys. When I printed out my Hologenetic Profile and viewed it for the first time, I felt a profound energetic confirmation of my spiritual development and evolution. In the language of the Gene Keys, the highest essence of my Life’s Work turned out to be Forgiveness, the deeper significance of which I had been seeking for the past 30 years.

The second energetic work was with Kazzy Holbrook. It was termed “cosmic pulsing,” which introduced me to Dr. Jacqueline Hobbs, known now as Oracle Girl. Both Jacqueline Hobbs and Richard Rudd, the founder of the Gene Keys, were born in the UK. I am eternally grateful for their empowering message that we, as humans, have a natural ability to transmute density of shadows (unconscious aspects) into purity and how to multi-dimensionally engage in creative dreaming.

In addition to my private healing practice, professionally I have served as an educator in public schools, a counselor on Hopi and Navajo reservations, a child and family therapist with the Phoenix Indian Center, Jewish Family Services, and the New Foundation; I have also served for ten years as a mentor for Prescott College’s education on Hopi & Navajo Indian Res. and psychology students in Phoenix, Arizona.

Since moving to Port Townsend, WA I continue to write memoirs and develop as a poet. I’ve had chapters published in two friends’ self-published books, and my first printed poem was published in 2019 in the Northwest Olympic Authors Anthology. I also self-published a book of poetry in 2022, Bubbling Springs in Troubling Times.

Footnote:

seven-foot-tall interdimensional beings that the different tribal people know ⁸ My friend Benjamin Barney, who lives up near the Lukachukai Mountains—he’s an amazing Diné man. He told me about two Navajo women, two sisters, who had been out herding sheep up in the Lukachukai Mountains, and this seven-foot-tall Yeibichei, which is like a star being, came out of the trees and told them that only those human beings who follow the old ways will survive. excerpt from L. M. Silko’s interview with NYT