I'm Ascending, Now What?: Awaken Your Authentic Self, Own Your Power, Embody Your Truth

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CONSCIOUSNESS: WHO, ME?

I opened my eyes, startled and blinded by the fluorescent hospital lights, and immediately felt shocked to see my hands restrained to the edges of the hospital bed by thick handcuff-shaped, plastic clasps. How did I even get here? I started to piece together what memory I had access to. I had started the night with friends, pre-gaming for a new acquaintance’s birthday party at a new club in Chelsea just around the corner from Union Square. I had been living in New York City for a few months by then, just barely finding my footing. We had a special table reserved and everything felt very VIP—it was going to be a great night, I had a feeling. I drank too much champagne before we even got there, and one of my last memories was using my new camera to snap pictures of our table and all the beautiful people surrounding it, eventually standing on one of the tables with a bottle in my hand, drinking straight out of it like I was the queen of the club.

I loved the feeling of being in my own music video with my own soundtrack—everything was happening for me and I was in Heaven. The anxiety I normally felt spinning around in my mind was silenced by the profuse amounts of alcohol I was downing and the attention I was attracting. Even if people were worried about me for appearing to black out and fall over, it was still attention, and I liked it. In fact, I lived for it. When I woke up restrained in the hospital, instead of feeling concerned about the state of my body or overall health, my first thoughts circulated around where my new camera, my jacket, and my purse were.

I had a tendency of losing my stuff back then, and probably within the first six months of moving to New York from Southern California—for the first time without a boyfriend to babysit me—I had already lost my wallet with IDs and all my cards three times. I screamed to get the doctors’ attention to let me go—I had to get home to get ready for work. I had a restaurant gig later that day that I couldn’t miss or else it would be the second time I was fired from a restaurant after working there for only a few weeks. I vaguely remember fighting with the doctor to let me go, and it felt like I snuck out somehow without any of my things except my jacket, which luckily had not my camera in it but a totally new, even better camera. So the night wasn’t a wash after all.

This is how disassociated I was at the time: when I look back and remember what I was prioritizing or able to garner from reality—the fact that I was so focused on external material items, how I looked instead of how I felt and what next thing I needed to do—it shows me how disconnected I was from my inner being. I had no awareness or consciousness of my emotional state other than it felt so bad I couldn’t wait to drink more to turn it all off.

It was 3:00 A.M. and I had found myself more hungover than I’d been in a long while despite having experiences like this a few times a week at least. I got to the diner on the corner and somehow ordered some water and an egg sandwich. I must have dined and dashed because I definitely didn’t have my wallet. That’s why the hospital was so easy to check out of—and since they didn’t have my ID I must not have been charged for the ambulance ride from the club to the hospital. I was a Jane Doe for all they knew.

Great, I’m the hook, I thought to myself. Another win from a somewhat awkward evening. I wondered what my friends thought of the whole thing. I did, however, need to get back to that club at soon as possible and see if I could find my wallet and anything else I had left behind. I would go later that evening and the shame of what had happened would start to creep in as the doorman recognized me and checked in to see if I was okay. Of course I’m okay, I thought. I’m fine, couldn’t he see me now? Just give me my stuff so I can get out of here and pretend like nothing ever happened. It would be too painful to process or feel the gravity of what had actually transpired.

I didn’t have the capacity to even consider that as an option. It wouldn’t be until years later in early recovery from drinking and drugs that I would start to let these repressed feelings flow, which meant that I cried for what felt like a year straight. I had so much pent-up sadness and grief and unthinkable amounts of traumatic memory from so blatantly disregarding my health and well-being. For years from about age fourteen at the beginning of high school, I was so unhappy and anxious I sometimes wondered what it might be like to simply leave. Occasionally I would black out and walk into traffic hoping a car would just hit me—get it over with already. I was too much of a coward to take my own life straight up, but I’d be fine if someone else could do that job for me. A part of me admittedly liked gambling with god and the universe.

I felt so abandoned and disconnected. If you really exist, god, are you going to let me die? Is there actually anything supporting me? Am I even here for a reason? These were definitely some of the unconscious currents powering my life at that time. It was a heavy existence indeed, on top of the pressure of looking good and trying to sell myself on the story I was creating: I followed my dream of living in New York City and I was making it work, having fun with my friends, going out to flashy clubs every night, and living the dream. Look at me. Inside I was dying and on the verge of complete collapse. Not enough drugs or alcohol in the world could shut off the unparalleled anxiety and self-hatred I was living with in every moment. I could never do anything right and the voice in my head was only ever reminding me of how I would never be enough no matter what I did. Plus I had to figure it all out alone.

It took many more experiences of rock bottoms like that night in the hospital—more than I might ever be able to even recall, honestly—to finally realize: I need help, I can’t do this anymore. The shame became too immense and I had given up trying to make it all work. All my effort was never working no matter how hard I tried to convince myself. I didn’t know where else to go until I realized that my parents and numerous therapists over the years (each one I’d stopped seeing the moment they mentioned I might want to reconsider my relationship with alcohol) had recommended I try Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) for support. Finally, I was desperate and willing to try anything, even that.

My first meeting, I cried the entire time, so much so that the scarf I was wearing had to be thrown away because of the snot and tears it was soaked with by the end of the hour-long meeting. As hard as it was to try to relate to people outside of a bar or night club, I tried to let myself be carried. I thought my first sponsor was hitting on me and asking me out on a date when she invited me to start reading the big book of the 12 steps. I just went with it, despite my misgivings and doubts. I even continued doing side hustles a few weeks into sobriety as my emotions started coming back online. I would experience paralyzing fear about financial scarcity and be driven to do a Craigslist hustle for a few hundred bucks. Then I would feel so much shame about it and paranoia that I would see the person I had hustled with or that they would tell others about me and what I had done—that I’d be found out.

Eventually I had to make an agreement with my sponsor that I wouldn’t go on Craigslist for at least ninety days, since it was seeming a lot like a placeholder for my relationship to alcohol and drugs: this pattern of seeking quick fixes, attention, and money from strangers on the internet. I had replaced one distraction and means of checking out with another. I learned years later that all of these behaviors were part of the same pattern I had innocently developed from trauma—these were the ways I had learned to try to take care of myself, to soothe myself, to provide support. I did the best I could do with what I had at the time, and knowing my history, it all makes sense, and more so as the journey continues on. I am grateful to have lived to tell the stories now so that perhaps others might not have to go as deep into the darkness as I did to catalyze awakening.

TUNING INTO A NEW INNER CHANNEL

I can almost remember the precise moment in which I realized for the first time that the inner dialogue that had been running in my mind for seemingly my entire life wasn’t the only voice I could access. It was a shocking, almost terrifying revelation to receive at that point. For my entire life—perhaps a quarter of a century—I was unconsciously driven in every way by this intense, even rather abusive voice that I had never even been aware of. All along it was setting my entire inner soundtrack and overarching guiding plan for my life. Weird. What was I supposed to do with this information? It felt like a ton of bricks that I didn’t even know existed had been walled up around me for my entire life and were finally starting to fall down. It hit hard and hurt. I suppose the world you thought you knew falling apart can feel like that.

It’s moments like these that catalyze us into new realities and the practices therein that become our foundations, our lifeboats, our saving graces. We could always choose to give up and let something else happen (i.e., dying, dissolving, disappearing? Are these even real choices?), but we haven’t come all this way to just give up completely. So more often than not these sometimes reality-shattering moments that seem like total catastrophes at the time actually help shape us in the deepest sense—they can skyrocket us into entirely new ways of being, sometimes overnight. That’s precisely what’s happening now, on a global scale—like one we’ve never seen before. More and more people are waking up—wondering why they’re here, what this whole life situation is really about, and how we might be able to find more meaning and purpose in this reality we’ve agreed to play in.

I only recently learned that not everyone has an inner monologue (or different voices or channels) that they are aware of playing in their inner experience. But I do sense more have this awareness than not; at least for now that seems to be the case. The times we live in now feel like a critical juncture in which we are becoming more aware of ourselves as the operators or perhaps receivers of a much grander spectrum of expression than we had ever previously considered. This is the essence of ascension and consciousness awakening in simplicity: our unique experiences into sensing and seeing our conceptions of reality and all its inner workings and our own true natures. As we deepen in our unique multisensory experience of reality, we sense more into why we are here and what we are truly capable of experiencing and creating.

The power of an idea whose time has come is really the power of Spirit at work. When enough of us, along with one or two at visionary consciousness, begin to contemplate these in-Spirit ideas, they can’t be stopped.

—Wayne W. Dyer

As a child I was highly intuitive, very emotional, empathic, and loved to play with my dolls, creating imaginary worlds containing grand civilizations and alternate realities with their own intricate social orders. I was always fascinated with how people were. Not just what they did or how they operated in life but literally how they existed—how they be’d if there was such a term. I probably wasn’t consciously thinking these thoughts about what it was like to be human, but looking back I can see that this quest to discover what being was led my curiosity for much of my life, and this led me down many rabbit holes. One of those is definitely leading to being right here, right now, with you.

I distinctly remember when I was around age nine and my family moved to the middle of San Francisco—I mean, right smack dab in the city center. We had moved from the relatively suburban quietness and homogeneity of a small Massachusetts coastal town to the hustle and bustle of the Lower Haight, with more diversity, chaos, noise, and potential per square foot than I had ever before experienced. I started to feel painfully anxious and insecure. I would be short of breath in public, I would turn red whenever asked to speak in class or when I felt another person was seeing me too up close and personal. I’d stay up for hours and hours each night obsessively circling the clothes and supplies in catalogs I required my parents to buy for me so I could adorn myself in ways that finally would make it feel more comfortable to be in my body. The way I understood how to be in the world depended on a great deal of external validation, plus reliance on my appearance and acknowledgment from others to get love and to feel worthy and ultimately to affirm my entire existence. All of the pressure to look and be a certain way spiraled into a life-long struggle with body dysmorphia—the inability to see true reality, especially when it came to my appearance, which I was mostly sourcing understanding about through the eyes of others.

My embarrassment, dysmorphia, and painful insecurity were often quite paralyzing. In elementary school, it didn’t help that even though I was at the top of my class—the first to win spelling bees and geography quizzes, with a great capacity to memorize, digest, and transmit complex information—I had brown stains on my front teeth from a condition known as fluorosis. Despite my innate intelligence and accolades, I always had this underlying feeling that something was wrong with me born out of a physical manifestation of something that was never my fault to begin with. I’ve grown to understand that this kind of underlying experience early on in life—the emotions and lessons therein, not so much maybe the specifics—is actually quite common. Can you relate?

As far as I can recall, here is where my initial confusion and perhaps even amnesia about who I am and why I am here first took root. Quite early on I learned justification of my physical existence was wholly dependent upon my appearance, which required external validation, approval and acknowledgment from others, hence my obsession with my body and presentation. I learned at some level that if you loved me, liked me, approved of me—and of course I could feel you feeling this because my empathic sensitivity was highly attuned—then perhaps I could feel good about myself, finally.

So the moment in which I suddenly realized I had a choice as to what inner voice channel I was tuning into was rather exciting, maybe even a little liberating. At first it was also quite sad to realize how angry, self-critical, and judgmental I was of myself all that time, like I was speaking to myself as though I were my own worst enemy, in a tone that I would never wish upon my actual worst enemy. I wonder how many of us are living in internal experiences just like this.

For many it can be a jolt when you are caught by the surprise of hearing another voice within you that you have never witnessed before. It can feel like your sense of self is being shattered before your eyes. It can feel ungrounding and dissociating, absolutely. Sometimes this process unfolds quickly, and sometimes it happens slowly. There is no one way to live your life, there is only your way. Do you notice if you have other channels or voices you can choose to listen to? Or have you never even considered this being a possibility and the fact that I am mentioning it to you now sounds a tad bit scary, if you’re being