An excerpt from "When Things Fall Apart"
gwen@lovingself.net | 802-879-2706
by Suzanne Falter-Barns
"... One of the really vexing things about being human is that every so often it all goes to hell. I'm not talking about a bad day, or even a bad week, but something far more shattering - a devastating illness, the death of a spouse or the failure of a dream project. How can a well meaning Creator foist such impossible stuff on us? Isn't life tough enough with its full menu of fears and doubts? What possible reason could there be for wading through divorce, bankruptcy or illness?"
"I do not believe crises occur because we are meant to suffer. On the contrary, they happen in order to pry us loose from our comfort zone and push us forward to the next level of growth and accomplishment in our lives. And so, in a very real sense, catastrophes can be catalysts to creativity. They force us to lose our older, limited selves and give birth to larger, more expansive ones with a greater capacity to love and, hence, to create."
"Of course, changes like these don't just magically happen. We must be willing to do the hard work of rebirth and actively turn our crisis into something beneficial. Gwen Evans, a speaker and spiritual facilitator based in Burlington, Vermont, who has worked with people with a variety of disabilities, asserts that it is a matter of choice."
'Some people I work with are in incredible pain all the time and still are able to have a positive attitude and work with the pain, or they have a relationship with it that helps to transform it.'
"Work with the pain? That sounds just slightly more appealing than having a leg cut off. Yet Evans should know. As a child she had severe vision problems, and her mother died of cancer when she was five. In the middle of Evan's senior year of college, she lost her sight completely. ('That last year was a killer,' she notes wryly.) Still, she maintains that such loss and disability merely steer you more closely toward your divine purpose in life. In one four-week course she teaches, participants learn a meditation that allows them to see the adversity in their life as a visual image. Then, as the course progresses, they begin to communicate with this image, learning what it has to teach them."
'In the last class they embrace the adversity, in whatever form it takes,' Evans explains. 'As they do, it's transformed into something useful ...'
