Integrating The New

For the past two weeks, I’ve been away with my son. We’ve been having adventures on the rocky coast of Maine, boating on the waters around the island where we stayed, and driving to visit lighthouses and more. We were busy.

One of the things about this place is that it’s part of a summer colony of seasonal cottages that were built around the turn of the nineteenth century. And about eight of them are  owned by a family (not mine) who are related to each other, either directly or by marriage, and have been for between 75 and 100 years. These are small houses right on the waterfront, that have no insulation, and have a seasonal water supply. They were built as a place to escape to during a few summer months, and are nestled together in a cove, just a stone’s throw from each other.

After having rented one of the cottages a number of times, my grandparents managed to buy it back in the 1940’s, and my father spent vacations there, socializing with families in neighboring cottages.  As my father married and had our family, we grew up vacationing at the cottage for a month every summer. My father’s contemporaries had families and we all grew up socializing together at our cottages. They were summers of boating, fishing, cocktails and dinner parties.

Now, my parent’s generation is passing away one by one, and it’s my generation’s turn to steward our cottages and bring our children there for vacations.

There is something special about going to a place whose purpose is to enjoy being around and on the ocean, and to socialize. Going there summer after summer left an indelible mark on everyone. Several of the children who grew up on boats there are still involved in boating. And many of my generation became teachers so they could have summers free to spend in Maine. A handful of people who summered on the island now call it or the state of Maine home.

In fact, for seven summer seasons after I graduated from college, I called our cottage home, as I worked on small boats in a local harbor, and then went back to college to get the training I needed to work on ships. Summering there fostered my love of being on the ocean, and steered me into a career as a merchant ship’s officer. A big piece of my heart is always there.

I am the third generation of my family to enjoy this magical place, and as such, when I visit, I always run into people who have known me my entire life.  We catch up on what we’re doing work wise, how the kids are and what grade they’re in now. Much of the socializing has always been done with a drink in hand, and kept at a fairly light level.

We mourn the passing of the eldest generation, one by one, and the infrequent new ownership of a cottage is big news. It’s a place where change is grudgingly accepted.

Because of healing work and the major shifts I’ve been experiencing, I am changing inside. A lot. It’s never so glaringly obvious as when I visit a place that is so frozen in time, and people who basically haven’t changed at all. Sure they’ve gotten older, and have been through some life challenges, but they are not consciously working on changing themselves the way I have. Most of them are pretty happy with the status quo and grit their teeth and do whatever they have to do to make it through the cancer or the death, and then return to “normal.”

One of the biggest things to hit me the past two weeks is that as much as I was enjoying reconnecting with people, there is an awful lot about my life that they know nothing about. And quite honestly, there’s a lot about their lives that I know nothing about.

Spending just a month there during the summers when I was growing up, people didn’t see the dynamic between me and my mother, the one where she verbally assaulted me when she was manic. They were never privy to the dirty little secret of my being molested and impregnated, and giving up my daughter for adoption. It was easy to hide these shameful things. And quite honestly, I feel no need to share about the molestation with 99% of them, as I’ve healed it so much, and they couldn’t even begin to reach my level of understanding about that whole situation.

And if I share anything about my mother’s and my relationship, they don’t want to hear about her dark side. They didn’t see it. They’d rather hear about Mary Poppins than Darth Vader. I do have a few girlfriends who I’ve shared things with, but just a few, and not everything. This time, it’s not because I feel bound to keep a dirty, shameful secret, but because most of the people I know there just wouldn’t get it. They don’t know about pre-birth planning, life contracts, and the energetics of relationships. They don’t know that we set up certain relationships before we come into life, to have experiences so we can grow. They don’t have the understanding that I have. Or I didn’t share because most people I know didn’t grow up with a mentally ill mother who did them harm. They can’t relate.

As much as the people around the cottage have known me my whole life, they never really knew me, and they for sure don’t know me now. They see my work history, that I’m married, and have a son. They see what I do, but rarely see who I am.

Part of integrating me into myself is observing how I relate to others; noticing what’s different. I noticed plenty.

The fun (and a little bit weird) thing was letting a few conversations get a little bit deeper than the usual, “how are the kids and where are they in school now” type of stuff. It was interesting to watch people, as I shared a bit more, be given unwritten permission to be able to get a bit more real and share more of themselves. Once in a while, I’ll find someone who isn’t comfortable being authentic, and they quickly revert to, “how’s fishing and what’s the weather supposed to be?”

I try not to judge, but instead to recognize where a person is, and what they are comfortable sharing with me and the world in general. I’m discovering that many people are not comfortable with getting too open.

I also have to consider the generation of whom I’m chatting with, how they were raised, and what do they consider proper conversational topics. Are they a peer close to my own age, or are they half a generation or a full generation older than me? I got to catch up with people in their 80’s on down to their mid 40’s.

This whole integration thing has been a bit of a mystery to me, and I didn’t completely understand what it looked like. I’ve understood in my brain that it means to assimilate and incorporate energetic changes (into my body and energetic field). But what I hadn’t grasped and fully appreciated until recently, is that our entire physical reality comes from an energetic template that we hold and in fact, we are.

I have learned how to shift and modify the energetic template(s) that my body and life comes from, but integrating the shift means seeing it show up as something recognizable to me. I am able to notice something different.  It shows up as physical changes in my body such as disease being healed. It shows up in my emotions as triggers to old stuck feelings of anger, fear, and frustration, being suddenly gone.

When energetic shifts are integrated, you notice that you are different. And this is particularly easy to see if you’ve been gone from an area or from a group of people, and you reconnect. The changes in me are now glaringly obvious, in a very good way.

Allowing myself to just be, to align with who I am at this moment, without judging myself, is a critical part of the integration process. Right now, I’m learning a lesson in my own sovereignty; me being me.