A week before I was straitjacketed in the psych ward, a trauma flashback triggered a multidimensional breakthrough.1

Teaching math in a Junior High in North Omaha, I was one of a majority of white teachers in a predominantly Black student population. The administrators, athletic and music instructors were Black. When Jimmy Carter was President, I was part of a multicultural team implementing projects such as Saturday School (John Hopkins peer teaching) via a University of Nebraska program invested in more Black students graduating and becoming teachers.

The lush landscape along the Missouri River had several beautiful golf courses lined with swaying weeping willows where the majority of this culturally segregated neighborhood played golf.

Early one summer morning, I stopped by one of the golf courses — managed by my lover — intending to visit him. On my way across the grounds, I saw a dark and fit man whose familiar face made my heart freeze.

The man broke into a big smile and said “Hello, good to see you again.”

My stomach flipped, I felt nauseous and almost threw up. A memory I had successfully suppressed nearly a year ago came flooding back into my awareness.

This man and I had met at a golf tournament I’d attended to watch my golfer boyfriend compete with “the bloods” (what he called his Black golfing buddies). Prior to that tournament, I’d never been to this particular golf course before, so I’d felt out of my comfort zone.

When I’d locked my car in the parking area of the course, I’d seen a man leaning against his black sleek Cadillac. The deep grooves carved into both sides of his dark black cheeks like scars had intrigued me. Irresistibly drawn to meet him, I’d felt magnetized to nod, smile and walk over to have a closer look at his face’s enraged expression with his long arms crossed tight across his body.

When he had spoken, I naively felt safe. His voice sounded effeminate, his gestures gay in the way he moved his hands and wrists. He had invited me to have a salad with him at a restaurant nearby, and I followed his car as he drove. Halfway to the restaurant, he’d stopped and walked to my window to say he had salad fixings at his place. I’d hesitated, looked into his eyes and said okay.

We had chatted in the kitchen while he cut up lettuce, tomatoes and carrots. He said he was an attorney who’d moved from Washington, D.C. Something about the way he’d stood too close to me when he had handed me the tea warned me I needed to leave. Holding my breath, I’d silently walked into the living room.

Picking up my purse, I’d moved halfway out the screen door when the grip of his huge hand on my upper arm had petrified my body. Terror had gripped me inside. I’d sensed he was capable of swift violence, and was convinced it would be more dangerous for me to resist him. I’d feared he could have beaten me up or killed me if I didn’t go along with his every request.

He’d pushed me down onto my back in the middle of his living room.

“Remove your pants,” and then: “Squeeze my nipples,” were the only words I had heard as commands.

I’d frozen inside. I don’t recall if I said NO or STOP out loud.

His penis had stayed soft as he’d moved down to my venus mons and began licking me until I orgasmed. I’d pulled up my pants, stood and went to the bathroom where I splashed my face with cold water before leaving in silence.

When I’d gotten home, I called my teaching friend Barb who taught art at the same school. She’d worked a rape line one summer so I told her what happened to me. Even though he hadn’t forced himself inside of me, I felt raped by his tongue; mortified and filled with shame that I could have had a pleasure response under the circumstances.

I ‘d taken a long bubble bath and decided to pretend it never happened because during that time, I didn’t know how to cope any other way.

My wise crone Self wishes you knew then, my precious young self, that it wasn’t your fault. Blaming yourself is part of the shame you carry inside. Believing that you could have gotten away when you didn’t know that you had a childhood trauma memory triggered when you froze. There’s more inner work for you to do before you can fully understand the depth of the imprint from an earlier episode. And, another timeline where your life was in jeopardy.

Earlier that summer, a friend had told me her neighbor had been raped by someone she met at the laundromat in her neighborhood. They had gone on a dinner date and she’d invited him back to her place for coffee. When he’d pressed himself upon her, she’d told him to leave. He’d forced her onto her bed, pushed a pillow over her face and raped her. She had immediately called the police and they acted like it was her fault, saying she’d invited him into her place, and she’d been dressed provocatively.

This had stuck in my mind, and I’d felt the need to stay silent since he was an attorney and I’d had an orgasm I could not deny in court. At all costs, I’d chosen to avoid public humiliation as a local teacher.

Seeing the power rapist broke through your denial of what happened. You were drawn to his pain and rage revealed in his face. You were naively curious and acted out of compassion to connect with him as a peer, not a persecutor. The attorney’s shadow acted out to attempt to release his fragmented pain and rage he was immersed in. The shadows of dishonor and oppression bled into your vulnerable feminine presence that couldn’t access her inner light, her no, her voice at that time.

After this chance meeting, my trauma was re-triggered and the rest of the week became a marathon of daily drinking and toking to stay high and forget.

I won some money at the horse track, met an attractive man and planned to meet him on Friday before I met my girlfriends at a new dinner bar featuring scat jazz dancing and singing.

He never showed up, but while I was waiting for him, two men with long dark hair came up to my table at the bar while I was waiting for him and asked to sit with me. They said they worked at the horse track, though they both looked like they didn’t work anywhere.

I felt uncomfortable and said I had another place to go. They followed me out to my car, convertible top down, and offered a joint to share. We passed it around twice and they pressured me to come to a party with them. Luckily, I drove away to meet my friends.

The scat dinner club music bar was hopping. I found my friends and ordered a kamikaze, and then another. After my fifth shot, I did not feel drunk at all. The scat sounds combined with the live music, and I could feel and taste the music making love to me. I considered the joint I smoked earlier might have been some kind of whacky weed.

As I was getting ready to leave, an English teacher at my school invited me to an after-hours party nearby. A lot of people were there. I smelled marijuana coming out of a side room and entered. People were beginning to pass a joint and I joined the circle. A young black man ever so slightly brushed my breast when he passed me the joint. I became ballistic with rage, stomped out of the room to leave for my car.

Just as I rushed through the front door, I saw out of the corner of my eye Red Dog, a man I had dated a couple of times. He followed me out to my car and sat in the front seat with me. With slurred speech, I told him what happened. He sat with me in my car silently in the early morning stillness. I felt restless and began a singsong play with his name. Red Dog, Dog Red, Red, dog, Dumb Dog, Dumb Red dog and then he punched me in my left eye hard. This act startled me sober and I was ready to go when he asked me if I was okay. Somehow, I don’t recall how I drove home.

Once in the safety of my bed, I closed my eyes and saw pitch black with Cyrillic neon colors squiggling and writhing through my inner vision. The kaleidoscope of flickering lights sizzled through me like pathways a drug or substance may take in one’s bio-electrical current of the brain.

All numbness from the altering substances dissipated, and I laid still and silent in my bed becoming agitated. Fearful that I wouldn’t wake up if I fell asleep kept me sleepless till morning.

Richard Rudd writes of an iridescent rainbow, an emanation that awakens, vivifies, and catalyzes breakthroughs on the inner planes, as an epiphany and your fear of death rose to the surface of your awareness. Fear is safe.

I called Murphy and she came right over. She wasn’t the only person I called. In the middle of the night, I called Danny, Elise, Dad, Uncle Bob, granny and my mother, probably telling them more than they needed to know. In the bright of the day, I couldn’t believe I’d told everyone in my family that I had been power raped by a Black man.

I wish you could have called me, your Self that night. I am here now to say it was not your fault. You were simply an easy target, and as you found out later, a woman in your apartment complex experienced a similar situation with this same wounded aggressor.

Murphy came over to my apartment and asked, “How did you get that black eye?”

I had no idea I had one.

She took me to the grocery after looking in my refrigerator. “You need to eat something!”

When we walked into the produce section, the rows of tomatoes, red cabbage and green onions were vibrating with love. The plums, apples and tangerines were radiating aliveness I could tangibly see. Stepped closer, I cradled the fruit in my arms. When I commented how full of love the fruits felt, she suggested I consider going into a detox or treatment center. I refused, saying I’d never felt like this before.

After my friend dropped me off, I put on some reggae music, The Story’s Been Told. I knew in my soul if I could dance from the beginning to the end of this song, I could somehow free or liberate this inner abandoned wildness in my body. I knew in my heart it was possible to dance my multidimensional potent presence free.

It’s up to you what you focus on, your woundedness or you choose to see the wound for what it truly is— an entangled, wound up unaware energy, tension and suffering, lost in the denied shadows. Your emerging light and ever present purity is like a magnet for what is crying out to be heard, loved and seen. In the light of awareness and connection to your source energy, you can and do transmute what’s not resonate with life and love.

In the midst of the frenetic energy of this week of not sleeping, my lover’s common-law wife found out about our affair. Enraged, she kept calling and hanging up on me 5 or 6 times a day.

Just as I received my third hang up call for the day, my lover knocked on the door to tell me she knew about us. We sat down to talk about it and while toking, another knock came on the door. It was his concubine (as he referred to her) of the past seven years.

We started talking and she interrupted, “Do you know this man is an alcoholic?”

He responded, “Hon, please. Come now, hon.”

My potent lover’s lanky stature shrunk, his inner confidence crumbled before my eyes. Hairs rose up on my arms, my heart seized and my instincts told me this woman was probably going to pull my hair, shove me around, perhaps beat me up. I rushed to my bathroom and locked the door. Not certain if she would resort to knocking the thin door down, I bolted into my bedroom and jumped out the screen window.

I sat by the swimming pool; cooled my feet until I was certain she was gone. Alan had told me after we first met about 18 months ago that they were more roommates than lovers. He had claimed the flame had died between them after the first year, and that he wasn’t attracted to her since she put on so much weight.

This was my first and only affair. I believed him.

I called mom two more times that day and in the morning, she drove up to my place in Nebraska to pick me up and bring me back down to her home in Missouri.

In an attempt to explain to her what I was experiencing, I showed her a postcard I found when I was in Europe of an ancient nun in her 100s. The nun had multiple lines creasing her face in this monochrome portrait by Rembrandt.

“This is me, Mom.”

She shook her head, incredulous.

“In another life,” I confirmed.

She looked bewildered.

Her lack of response caused me to censor something else I was sensing in my widened field of awareness. I could feel an integral part of this scenario was playing out on another timeline or plane. I was still aware of being here with my mother in her apartment, but in the other realm, I was a captive wise woman or powerful goddess, and a Black King and a White King were fighting over me.

I sense you are attempting to describe your experience of having more than one stream of awareness or timeline appearing to be happening at the same time. This is what you were attempting to share with your Mother. You somehow knew that you had lived another life or could resonate with that similar life as a nun. Rembrandt captured her essence in the painting on a postcard. The timeline with the two Kings of different races were archetypes, illustrating the ongoing oppression of the innate power of Divine Feminine frequency, and how the partriarchy felt fear concerning this level of power not being suppressed via ownership, persecution or marriage.

Mother tried to lull me to sleep by laying down with me, her arm embracing me. I was curled up in her arm close to her face and when she woke me up snoring, I saw whiskers on her upper lip. Repulsed by how masculine she seemed, I recoiled into the bathroom and locked the door.

At that point, Mother called her best friend to come over. I became convinced they were in a lesbian relationship and that they were trying to get me to be involved with them. I sat on the floor of her bathroom with my hand on the locked doorknob.

When they went into the living room to talk, I bolted for the bedroom window and started to pull the screen off so I could escape. It took both of them to pull me back into the room.

Mother suggested we go to the hospital in the morning for some tests to make certain everything is all right with my brain. I agreed, wondering if a substance laced in that first joint I smoked with the two men from the horse track was the trigger to all of this.

As your higher Self, I assure you that how this all played out was the perfect play of consciousness for you. It was a huge gift that you haven’t been able to unwrap for many decades and now is the time for you to continue to allow your voice to be expressed through writing and your willingness now to open; making the sounds that will free your being to express and expand into the increasing frequency of light transmissions occurring right now in and through your entire body and field surrounding your physical body.

In this sound frequency, there is no time. You are rewriting the past by claiming your power back from when you couldn’t voice your NO or demonstrate nor express more fully your divine feminine essence power. Your awareness constricted to just the physical dimension of your being. And, due to the conditioning and suppression of the uncontrollable feminine, your invincibility was clouded by emotional and mental constraints in your energy field and you forgot your multidimensional connection with Source energy.

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This post is #2 in a 3-part piece:

Part #1:

When a Transpersonal Crisis Becomes a Spiritual Emergence

Grace Rose Whitehorse

·

December 6, 2024

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Part #3:

Rising to Higher Ground with my Voice, Presence and Power

Grace Rose Whitehorse

·

December 14, 2024

Read full story