At the same time, I had been reading Seth's The Nature of Personal Reality, and I was thinking about all those concepts. I went back and forth in the blame department, struggling with the idea of not being a victim and that I had chosen this chaos and in fact I had somehow created it myself. I began to understand, on an intellectual level at least, that being a victim and being a perpetrator are two sides of the same coin: the coin of lack of self-empowerment. That the victim and perpetrator are somehow magnetizing each other, vibrating in the same way.

I went through a lot of pain (to put it mildly). I gradually accepted the concept that my former husband was not to blame, that we had each created these scenarios in our lives for a reason, but it became twisted in my mind. My ex-husband was not the perpetrator, I was. I was not his victim, I was my own victim. I heaped all the blame on myself. "I don't understand," I mentally railed. "Why do I create these things for myself? Why do I create the very things that I don't want, that scare the hell out of me?"

It is said that "time heals all wounds," but if an individual doesn't come to grips with the fears that created the wounds in the first place, time just buries them and waits for the next opportunity to reopen them or recreate them. Not that I didn't consciously work on myself. I did. I followed certain impulses that led me to listen to certain channeled entities and I got involved in A Course in Miracles for a while. I learned to forgive myself and to love myself, to the best of my understanding at the time. I began to intellectually understand that I was God/Goddess/All That Is, which was a huge leap of the imagination, even though deep down I knew it was true.

Then, in 1987, I met a beautiful man named Randy. We were head over heels in love. Everything was wonderful, for a while. But within a year the friction began and the same things came up! Now I was really vibrating in fear: afraid he'd meet someone else, afraid I'd lose my house. We kept doing this dance: first I'd distance myself and then he'd get clingy, then he'd distance himself and I'd get clingy. And we were always at each other about not being able to share things with each other. He wants to travel around the world in a sailboat or go camping. I like to read and write and paint, and channel and listen to channeled entities. And I only take boats to get across the water to another piece of land. It's just transportation to me. We live in the woods on three acres of beautiful second growth cedar and fir trees and if I wanted to go camping I could just pitch a tent in our "back yard." So we tried all sorts of compromise. I went camping with him a couple of times and even went out on his boat once (and fell and broke a rib during a storm).

This went on for about 10 years. Again I was struggling with the same concepts. "I'm not a victim. Why did I create this again? I thought I dealt with this. I thought I was done with it." Well, evidently not. He met someone else and for a time I lost my house. My worst fears played out and my world fell apart again. I didn't realize that by focusing on my fears and resisting them at the same time, I was choosing the way the relationship played out.

I'd been reading Seth books and Bashar and others for years and understood the victim/perpetrator thing on an intellectual level, but inside I was afraid to touch it. I was afraid to go to the heart level and really understand what was going on because I was afraid that I'd end up in more pain than I was already in. And my fears kept playing out before my eyes. I kept pushing against it and it kept manifesting. I knew I was creating the whole scenario, my partner having an affair with someone else, and he was meanwhile creating his own scenario and playing out his own fears. It's like we were playing these roles for each other.

One of the concepts I have come to understand is the idea that all pain is caused by resistance. I knew this experientially through childbirth. I just didn't see how it related to emotional pain. Those who have gone through this and taken childbirth classes have learned that when the contraction comes, the thing not to do is to tense up. Tensing up causes more pain. The thing to do is to stay relaxed, to breathe deeply and go with the flow. Randy and I were like two people that each had one end of a rope that had a big knot in the middle. In order to untangle the knot, we had to first let go of the rope. But instead of letting go, we each pulled in opposite directions. Guess what happened to the knot? It got tighter and tighter and it got harder (more painful) to untangle the knot when we finally did let go. We were not allowing each other to be who we were.

Now, I could have chosen a much less painful way to figure all this out, but I didn't. Bashar says that sometimes we create these dramatic scenarios in order to show ourselves something quickly, in one lifetime. Like an incredibly painful disease, or losing a child. Sometimes we create these things that if we had done it a little bit at a time or in a less dramatic way, it wouldn't have the same impact, and it might take several lifetimes for us to "get it," because the impact wouldn't be enough for us to sit up and take notice or we wouldn't want badly enough to figure out why these things are happening to us. So, the thing that finally did it for me is this:

My partner and I had split up and I bought out his half of the house and he was (still is) living in a trailer on the other side of my property. We'd been split up for about a year and a half, but I still saw him every couple of days or at least once a week, and it was like the relationship never ended and the pain wouldn't go away. He wanted to continue to have the relationship with me, but I just couldn't relax my relationship belief structures enough to accept anything other than society's idea of marriage. I couldn't accept that we could continue the relationship without living together and being everything for each other. The funny thing was, even though I kept insisting that this was what I wanted, I was getting used to living by myself, having all my own things around me and not having to answer to anyone else and really liking it! And since he wasn't going away it certainly looked as though I was going to have to come to terms with it. I found out he'd been dating someone else. I asked him point blank if he'd had sex with this other person and he said yes, and I went through all this pain again. Which felt really insane, because we were split up. But it hurt anyway!

I've been kind of a recluse, living in the woods, although I take a ferry into the city to work, and I didn't really have anyone to share my deepest feelings and spiritual stuff with. So I did a wonderful thing for myself. I subscribed to the Conscious Creation Email List. I love the people on this list and I realized that I was just reuniting with a part of my Family. I was attracted by the fact that many of these people had read the Seth material and were applying these principles to their lives and sharing it. The next thing I did for myself was to get involved in a small Wiccan coven, a group of four women. I really enjoyed the rituals we would do and I agreed with some of the concepts. But mainly, I wanted to become involved with some people I could relate to, someone to have exciting conversations with about spirituality and healing. And, most important, I was finally allowing myself to do exactly what I wanted to do.

It was in this group that I met Wendy, a wonderful woman who vibrated in excitement over being the God/Goddess/All That Is that we are, and who had been exploring channeled entity material on the web. She had also read Seth's, The Nature of Personal Reality a few years ago. We shared all of our deepest feelings about who we are and just, well, everything! We're like two peas in a pod. We came to the conclusion that we had gotten involved in this coven just so we could meet each other.

Shortly after I met her, I'd been reading a thread on the CC list about polyamory and honesty. A few people on the list were discussing the idea of having more than one relationship at a time and one person even went so far as to say that it was alright and very fulfilling as long as all parties were honest about it. And in fact, she was living this for real. Well, this really got me thinking. In fact, I was in turmoil inside because I was brought up to believe that a person should have this one primary relationship that fulfills all the needs of each individual in the relationship. At the same time, I thought of myself as a very open-minded, New Age kind of person and I thought the concept of polyamory was great, for other people, but that it would never work for me. I needed one person. And then it dawned on me: "Wait a minute. I'm exploring polyamory right now, with Wendy!" My friend and I aren't having sex or anything like that, but we love each other sooo much! She's recently moved to Reno, but we communicate via email nearly every day. We share all our deepest feelings. I even have "imaginary" conversations with her sometimes. We are lovers!

So that night, after reading the last post on this thread, and having seen Randy earlier, I was in bed, going through more pain, still thinking how my life wasn't working, and I got this incredible pain in my heart. It was like there was a fist around it, squeezing really hard! And I started to get scared and I thought, "Now I've done it! I've gone and given myself a heart attack! But I'm not done yet, Spirit!" But then I saw this magenta light around my heart and I heard in my head a really loud voice that said, "THAT'S NOT YOUR HEART! THAT'S YOUR SOUL!" Oh, ok, I get it. I gave in. I stopped resisting. I just let go and dove right into the pain. I said, "Ok, God I AM, I allow the pain. I allow that I created all this and I did it for my reason and it's alright. I allow, I allow, I allow." Then it was gone. I mean, really gone, and hasn't come back.

The next morning when I woke up it dawned on me that the new relationship with Wendy was fulfilling a part for me that I'd been trying to get out of my relationship with Randy. I went out to the trailer to talk to him. I told him that I realized that I was expecting him to be everything for me, that I'd realized that that was impossible, that no one can be everything for anyone. And he said that, yeah, he was expecting me to be everything for him, too. Now we're back together, but he still lives out in the trailer and is planning on building his house on a piece of property he bought, and I live by myself in my house. Sometimes we don't see each other for a week, sometimes 3 or 4 times a week, but we each are allowing each other to live our lives the way we want. The funny thing is, it's very romantic! We love each other very much. The part of me that needs to express my spiritual ideals and be in joy with someone on a similar path is being satisfied by the people on the CC list and Wendy. Randy and I are having a very unconventional relationship, but it works, because we're no longer expecting each other to be everything. And I'm no longer afraid that if he has other friends, that he loves me any less.

I didn't really understand on a deep level how I was creating these scenarios until I allowed myself to stop resisting the new reality I was creating. I made myself walk right through the pain. I stopped clutching myself in fear. I had already, synchronistically, allowed myself to meet someone else who could fulfill part of what I felt was missing in my main relationship. What I had been resisting was a whole new idea about relationships that I myself was creating. By "trying" to accept the new idea and keeping the old, rigid belief structure about my own relationship at the same time, I was creating a lot of pain. I wasn't allowing myself to step into my own new creation. My fear of releasing the belief in loss kept me from experiencing the joy of the transformed relationship.

Following is a quote from Bashar. He's speaking to someone who is having difficulty in a relationship. The couple keeps splitting up and getting back together, splitting up and getting back together, and now they're about to split up again:

"What we are more specifically saying is that you should be on and about creating the relationship that you need to be with, that you need to express yourself as. And if for some reason that means you cannot physically be with that person, then that's what it means. But it really will not matter to either of you. Because if you're being your true self you're going to attract whatever people need to be in a relationship with you and they will feel like the right people and you won't really care who it is. Because it will feel correct.

"However, again paradoxically, when you each allow yourselves to be the real people you need to be then there really is no reason why you can't continue to interact with each other throughout your life in some way, shape or form, because you're being honest with each other about who it is each of you needs to be. And therefore there's no fear. There's no threat. There's no arguing. There's no conflict between you. Because you can still love each other for who you are. You can love the relationship for whatever form it takes. And you can communicate with each other because you know that you are helping each other really be who you need to be, even if that means helping you be with someone else, if that's who you need to be with in a specific way. That's unconditional love...."

I thought I got past thinking that I was a victim years ago, and I did, mostly. Except I was in a big way my own victim. I kept creating painful scenarios with my fears, all the while knowing I was creating them. I was my own perpetrator, and I seemed to be stuck there, but only because I kept resisting and was afraid to walk through the pain to see what was really there. I came to the conclusion that all my fears were for "naught." All I needed to do was redefine my concept of loss, of the idea that I could actually lose someone, in a positive way. I needed to transform the belief into an empowering one. I know I'm not creating that stuff anymore because when I walked through it, it stopped hurting. If it comes up again, I'll know it's just the last death throes of a tired fear, and I'll walk through it again. I'm finally getting that I'm powerful enough to have anything I desire without having to hurt anyone else or myself to get it. 

©1999, Shahma. Printed in the April-May 1999 Issue of the Conscious Creation Journal.  (Feel free to duplicate this article for personal use - please include this copyright notice.) http://www.consciouscreation.com/

• MEPECFPF (Multidimensional Energy Personality Essence Currently Focused in Physical Form)
• Reiki Master Teacher
• Lightworker/Counselor
• Writer/Artist/Creator
• Bringer/Bearer of Love, Light and Joy
• Adventurer/Lover

Cosmic Status-Quo Disrupter