| Chapter 3 | A Quest To Take Up More Space

"Healing does not mean closing an old wound. 

No, you cannot close to heal. Healing means expansion.

Healing means taking up more space. Healing means 

opening." -J. Bird

For so long I felt like I had done what I needed to do to live a healthy and happy life.  It's always been easy to feel gratitude in my heart for my beautifully abundant life.  I felt if I ever unlocked what was going on internally and gave myself the space to honestly feel the anxiety and depression from within, it would somehow negate that deep gratitude that fills my chest when I count all my blessings. I'm learning only now that, "Healing does not mean closing an old wound. No you cannot close to heal. Healing means expansion. Healing means taking up more space.  Healing means opening."  And in that opening up to heal it does not negate gratitude it only enhances it.

When my husband and I first married we hit the ground running. At only 21 years of age, I got pregnant right away.  A choice I made out of the understanding I was marrying someone almost 11 years older than me. He was ready to start a family so I felt I was ready too. We got busy in more ways than one and started a family that would turn 2 into 6. 

We're raising 4 of the most beautiful boys.  Their kind and soulful hearts make them into the beautiful humans they are today.  They have been teachers to me in so many ways and have provided me a strong purpose.  In life, if we can find a strong purpose whatever that might be, it can propel us and give us the strength we need to do the hard things that in turn assist us in keeping or reaching a healthy mind, body and spirit. It's the love I have for my boys that inspired this unearthing.  I have to be healthy in order to provide my children a safe and healthy environment to grow up in. 

While pregnant with my first baby I started an Interior Design Business while remodeling our first home.  The remodel was a little dilapidated ski condo at the mouth of the most beautiful canyon in the Salt Lake Valley.  We somehow found a way to make it cozy and cute on a very tight budget.  We did all the work ourselves with just a few minor mishaps.  My husband Steve lightly electrocuted himself once and stuck a foot through our kitchen ceiling while welding pipes in the master bathroom above.  He even took a saw to our bathroom wall one day and installed a window all by himself. In one afternoon we now had a little window with natural light streaming through what used to be a dark cave of a bathroom.  We both discovered then that we were really hard workers and made a pretty excellent team!

Over the years we built 2 more homes and started several businesses.  My husband and I didn't have the time to think about anything other than keeping our crazy train running.   Looking back on it, that life pace both kept me safe from myself and also hindered me in a way from emotional growth and healing.  I was growing in other ways.  I was learning how to be a wife, mother and business owner.  

Let's face it, no one has a "perfect" childhood with "perfect" parents and circumstances.  No one has had a perfect life and gets through it unscathed. As I get older I am realizing we all go to battle at least once in our lives... and most of us have been on the front lines in more than one war.  If this is true, we all are walking around with wounds that we have either found a way to heal or we are keeping hidden, covered and scabbed over. 

It's only now that I've screeched our crazy train to a halt that I have the space, and with it the expansion to observe what is going on internally. Keeping an old wound closed that beneath the scab is swollen and infected isn't healthy for any of us.  It's time to open up and give ourselves the space to heal. 

I feel somewhat strong enough now to heal the festering and infection from my past.  I'm finally in a place in life to do this heavy emotional lifting.  I'm sure there will be a scar left at the end of this. We never really rid ourselves of our pasts and our stories.  It's our pasts that shape us into the people we are in the present.  I have always chosen to believe that we are at our happiest when we are being and living presently.  I thought by acknowledging my past and the pain in my past that I was choosing to reside there. So I always resisted ever dealing with it.  What I am starting to discover is when we have the courage to take the space to heal old wounds, and get honest with ourselves, it's the healing that actually allows us to live and be present.  

We are the authors of our stories and no one gets the power to write your story but you. What words do we get to carefully place on our pages that allow old wounds to open so they can heal?  What parts of our stories that when healed will teach us? Bless us?  And finally allow us to really live in the present rather than running like crazy from our pasts? My story and your story has the capacity to change us into stronger better people if we give our wounds the space, openness and expansion to heal themselves.  It doesn't require writing a book, or a blog either.  It just requires a whole lot of honesty with the hardest person to be honest with, yourself.

This is my quest to take up more space:

I don't exactly remember how my world fell apart.  It's more a feeling than a memory. 

My oldest sister moved out as soon as she turned 18.  She didn't seem extremely connected to any of us including my parents.  She moved to California after graduating high school where I think she attended some community college and a LDS singles ward. A "single's ward" is  the name for church meetings held specifically for young LDS singles.   

I was 11 when my sister brought her boyfriend she met at church home to meet our family.  She had been living in California and out of our house for at least a year.  I remember her boyfriend seemed pretty intense and serious but extremely intelligent.  He immediately began having late night discussions with my parents.  I assumed at first they were just getting to know him.  But, that feeling changed.  I remember hearing their voices from my bed at night and knowing somehow a very deep, serious and life changing discussion was happening several nights in a row.  Although I was not part of these first discussions I felt the shift in my home.  Things got serious quickly.  I knew something big was happening, I just didn't know what it was.