Doorways of Illumination

 

I am saturated with grief this morning. And it’s all because of the hawk. 

I can hear it even now, half a mile away, flying and calling, flying and calling. It has been doing this since yesterday afternoon and started up again at six o’clock this morning. Usually it calls to the other two hawks of its family, and they answer back, but no hawks have been responding.

The sound is piercingly loud and I can’t ignore it. There is desperation and hopelessness in those shrieks, and it is broadcasting a terrible bereavement over the whole neighborhood.

I hear it still, farther away. Five or six shrieks and then a pause. Over and over.

*****

Pragmatists raise their eyebrows and say, So what? It’s just a wild bird, for goodness sake. Stop anthropomorphizing animals.

I’m not pragmatic. I send out a prayer to the angels and the devas and the fairies, God and St. Francis and Gaia, asking to please help this hawk. I send out love and strength to the hawk that cries and to its small family. For months they’ve been nesting in the palm tree across the street, and I would watch as they wheeled and called to each other, the parents sometimes streaking ahead with the fledgling following, but always catching up.

And now it seems there is only one. He or she probably has no idea what happened to the others.

I desperately want to do something to help this animal in distress, and there isn’t anything whatsoever that I can do.

*****

I have to go about my day. I can’t sit here, stupefied with this peculiar cross-species grief, going through a box of Kleenex. There is the visit to the dentist as well as the day’s chores to do. These things can’t be neglected just because it seems there is an abandoned hawk in the neighborhood. 

I can try to tell myself that indeed, it’s just nature. Something happened to the other two hawks. The one that’s left will either die also, or will stop searching for its family and continue on. Or possibly, this is a natural progression: the family breaks up, the fledgling is left on its own, uttering “come home” cries to the parents until it figures out that it’s on its own.

Those notions might help the pragmatist, but they aren’t helping me. 

*****

Because this is the deepest grief I have experienced since a beloved previous cat died in 2008, I have to consider that something else is going on.

Or do I? Perhaps nothing in particular is going on. Perhaps this is just what happens when the heart becomes more accessible. The neighborhood hawk has lost its family, and it feels as if I’ve lost a family, myself.

During the second Emotion Code session I had with practitioner Barbara, we took down my Heart-Wall. (1) Barbara had told me what I might expect afterward. “You’ll probably notice that you’re walking around with a smirk for a day or two. That’s how it affected me.” 

That was several weeks ago, and I haven’t noticed any particular aftereffects. We have also released a number of very dense trapped emotions from me as well as from me plus my ancestral lines, and I have experienced many temporary upheavals from those releases. 

But today…This feels as if a bottomless well of unexpected sorrow has opened at my feet, and I have fallen in.

With the passage of some time, the sorrow smoothes out slightly. I can’t hear the hawk right now; it is flying out of the range of my hearing, or perhaps has paused to rest in the top of a redwood in the park.

Grief leaves exhaustion in its wake. Exhaustion, I remind myself, is a cracked door through which illumination may sneak. I’ve seen it in others. Perhaps it may be so for me, as well.

*****

At the dentist’s, talk turned to places to visit in Santa Barbara.

“The Rose Garden,” said the tech. “My kids play frisbee on the lawn, and three days a week, people from the Bird Refuge bring owls and falcons, on tresses, while their cages are being cleaned.”

“That sounds wonderful,” I remarked, thinking of my forlorn hawk.

“Yeah, they even had a hawk they rescued from somewhere…”

I stopped listening as the penny dropped. Raptor rescue organization. I can call and ask if there’s anything they, or I, can do for an apparently abandoned hawk in distress.

As always, I’m amazed (but not surprised) at how Spirit finds ways to tell me what I need to know.

*****

The grief has slithered away through whatever channels spent emotions use when exiting the body. This was an emotion I believe I did not trap. This should not cause residue and clogging, reaching damaging tentacles toward my future selves.

Grief came, I saw, it went. Freed of its Heart-Wall, my heart apparently can experience and quickly recover from such emotions now, leaving a path wide open for the emotions and states of beings I’d rather entertain: love, hope, compassion, joy. Peace, most of all and always, peace.

May we all be freed from the barriers to such joyous experiences.

 

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(1) See The Emotion Code, Dr. Bradley Nelson. Also see Dr. Nelson’s twenty-minute video about the Heart-Wall (https://tinyurl.com/ympw43u4).

From “How Important Is the Heart-Wall?” on Dr. Nelson’s blog (8/20/08) (https://drbradleynelson.com/how-important-is-the-heart-wall/):

“I have been pondering today about the meaning and significance of The Emotion Code to the world, and especially that of the Heart-Wall. I think it is difficult for us to truly comprehend. To be succinct, here is what we are telling the world:

1. The human heart is a second brain that is far more powerful than the brain in our heads.
2. The heart-brain is the seat of our creativity and the source of our love and our ability to feel.
3. Negative Emotional energies (Trapped Emotions) can become lodged around the heart.
4. The subconscious mind often takes those energies and forms an energy-wall around the heart [to protect it from hurt].
5. This ‘Heart-Wall’ blocks from us giving and receiving love, and from reaching our full potentials.
6. Removing the Heart-Wall from people causes significant changes to occur for them, including the disappearance of depression, physical problems, emotional difficulties, and more.
7. Removing the Heart-Wall often results in people falling in love for the first time, or falling more deeply in love with the person they are with, and often results in a deep sense of peace and an enhanced ability to feel positive emotions such as joy and happiness.
8. Anyone can learn to release ‘Heart-Walls’ by reading The Emotion Code.
9. According to “Anne Horne’s Near-Death Experience [https://tinyurl.com/s2n3t9f8],” clearing the Heart-Wall will someday assume a cosmic significance, as a threshold of enough open hearts will suddenly allow divine light from above to penetrate and permeate this world, changing it forever. I do believe that if we are to achieve a higher level of civilization, we must of necessity begin to live from our hearts. It is the way, and I believe is what all the great teachers have been telling us for all these years. No way around it.

I have been told more than once that the discovery of the ‘Heart-Wall’ may be the biggest discovery in the history of energetic medicine. Perhaps this is so.”