Every morning in Hawaii I do my favorite part of the day: From the wooden rocking chair on the front porch, while sipping coffee, I watch the parrots eat. Sometimes this ritual is a blessed reprieve from sleepless nights; when the nights last too long for too long, this ritual restores me back to myself.

This morning, I am thinking about Connection to my Source Self, my Divine Self. In these nights that last too long, Conditioning around feeling abandoned and alone can kick in. A reality in my childhood, and then experiences with health providers who couldn’t or did not have any answers to my physical pain have reinforced this conditioning. The adults were unreliable; the adults failed me. Intermittently it shows up in angst, despair or feelings of helplessness, aloneness. It is often subconscious, in that it is a subtle and barely-there feeling that often seems to arise without any effort. It is Conditioning with a capital “C”  – and it is triggered by longer periods where I am suffering with symptoms that defy resolution. I guess you could say it’s a core wound but I see it as simply a learned pattern born of life experience.

The difficulty with Conditioning is– any form of it- it creates disconnection from Truth.

Our ability to be in our Divine Self, Truth and Inner Knowing, gets, well… screwed with.

In a nutshell, when I AM in my I AM NOT, I am in a form of Conditioning. I AM not in my “I AM“- which is that felt experience of smoothness, ease and peace I call my Divine True Self. I AM is the experience I have of myself that is limitless, wise, knowing, intuitive and abundant. I AM NOT is in every perception that takes me away from this self-experience.

I find it more difficult to experience the smooth, supple relationship I typically have with my Intuitive Self. Everything from making decisions (knowing when and what to do), to feeling into energy of situations and people– which I consult my Intuition around, is disturbed, and my Knowing feels very unreliable.

In other words, in my greatest moment of need…Spirit/Source Connection may not show up.

And… we’re back to the unreliable humans not showing up.

When I feel this alone, I *know I’m in this particular Conditioning…

This morning, though, I realized this affected how I was perceiving my relationship to my Source Connection. And I could clearly see that it didn’t have to be this way. That’s the cool thing about recognizing a story. When you suddenly become aware of how you pieced a story together, you can also see how to break it apart, and reshape it into something Truer.

Yes, my experiences with unreliable humans became a story. It is strong Conditioning. Yet, today, in my dark night periods, when I am experiencing pain or lack a solution for an ailment …Does this mean Spirit is doing the same?

No. Just because we become disconnected by Conditioning, experiences that have shaped stories, it doesn’t mean we ARE disconnected. Because right underneath all of this, I felt the Truth: I AM right here. I AM always right here. I always discover the answers, eventually, even if it takes time. My Inner Connection always leads me there. I do soothe myself. I don’t leave or abandon me.

This is the process of coming back to Truth. It is a slow unraveling, sometimes too slow (!), of recognizing that our biggest obstacles rest within our perceptions, and their healing correction. Recently, I posted the image of a spiral on my social media pages. It is a metaphor for how healing works. Every time we are triggered into healing on the same dang issue, it is actually NEVER the same. We may think we are traveling the same circle, or cycle, but we are actually traveling a spiral. Each circle takes us more deeply into center, into wholeness.

This isn’t my first rodeo with this particular “wound” or Conditioning. However, this time I did some big energy clearing around it (my husband even remarked, later that night, how “bright” I looked. Energy changes everything- even how you look!).

…Back to my morning coffee and feeding the birds ritual. This same morning, I walked outside to feed the birds, and looked up in the banyan tree for the parrots. A group of them visits us (fun fact: a group of parrots are called a pandemonium- and boy, to watch them eating and squawking at one another you would see exactly how much pandemonium occurs!). Anyhow, I always say “hello!” and “good morning!” in my best parrot voice, because I love connecting with them, watching them observe me -their little necks doing that cool 360-degree swivel, angling down to wonder at this strange creature saying strange words. Today, though I craned my neck; I didn’t see them.

I paused for a beat. They were here. I could feel them …even though I couldn’t see them.

This thought occurred to me just then: Just because I don’t think I’m Connected to Spirit – when I am distracted by pain, conditioning, thinking, emotion or energy- does this mean Spirit’s not here? No. Spirit is underneath all of it. To feel this Truth as my reality, I need to come back to myself; release what’s blocking me- experiences, turned into a story. Otherwise, what’s the point of being in a human body, and determinedly traveling that spiral of healing? Yes, the unreliability and abandonment I experienced during moments of need was real. This doesn’t change the fact that Spirit was then, and is always right here. Life has taught me: I can always KNOW this as True.

…Then, the parrots swooped down in great numbers, noisily arriving to claim their morning peanuts and seeds. As I watched them eat, I felt myself returning, too. Sinking into my rocking chair, I felt the lightness of being that I recognize as being Connected. I sank into “ME”.

p.s.- If you like the way I work with myself, here, you might enjoy using the transformative Intuitive Energy Divination Deck -to support your inner work! It supported me through the above process; a four card draw got me to the root of what was troubling me.