I have something to share with you… I had a wee bit of a melt down last week and to be brutally honest it wasn’t pretty !

Sometimes you don’t realise how tightly wound you are until the fibres holding you together begin to fray and then everything seems to fall apart at the seams… or so it seemed !

Before I explain the meltdown, let me give you a bit of background info first…

Since envisioning our Spirited-Travellers World Tour late last year, the energy, excitement and greater vision of our tour has been growing and it has been an incredibly heart-warming and delightfully creative experience to build and bring this Tour to LIFE.

It has been a vision of mine for many many years now to take the Sacred Ancient Teachings further out into the world and now time and space seemed to be finally converging to make this tour a reality.

So then you may ask, why the meltdown ?

Well the title of this article sort of sums it all up. The greater the LIGHT the bigger the SHADOW.

During the week just passed it suddenly hit me the enormity of my vision, the incredibly bright LIGHT of which is building day by day and the actual physical work to be done to bring this vision into physical form.

The vision of this tour is so magnificent, so divinely beautiful and so profoundly luminous within my Heart that it has ignited a ‘shadow effect’ within me and has lead me through a profound week of soul-searching, self-discovery and deepest compassion and healing of self.

My ego/personality went into free-fall this week with the realisation that it is not possible to organise and pull this Tour together by myself… with limited resources and a zilch starting budget.

However it wasn’t this realization that pushed me off the edge, it was the very slow response of our Universal Life Tools Community (to committing to EVENT HOSTING, SPONSORSHIP / FRIENDSHIP) that was the final straw to unraveling my bundle !.

I have had hundreds and hundreds of people from all over the world in the last year request that I visit their city and facilitate an event. Then in the last few months I have had over 200 people request to be put on the interest list to be an EVENT HOST.   Thus in reality, a slow initial response to HOSTING or SPONSORSHIP really shouldn’t have affected me at all, after all there is a lot of info to read through, our tour doesn’t start until next year and I have only sent out ONE email thus far with all the details… and as a wise person once said ‘patience is a virtue’.

So why then was I struggling to deal with this situation ?

I was struggling with that terribly dark night of the ‘what if’s’.

• What if we don’t get enough SPONSORS/FRIENDS to make our FREE events around the world possible ?
• What if all 200 people who wanted to HOST an EVENT ALL decide that they are no longer interested ?
• What if after drawing down financially against our home to make this trip possible we end up losing our home or worse still go bankrupt ?
• And the what if’s continued on and on and on…

It had never EVER occurred to me that there maybe a challenge in getting support for our Tour… yet here I was spiraling downward in tears, feeling helpless, feeling like I had failed and wondering why this BIG BEAUTIFUL BRIGHT VISION was bringing up emotions/feelings/responses within me totally out of the blue and that hurt so much.

Yes it was the shadow of the LIGHT of this vision within me that was rearing it’s head and crying out to be seen, calling to be acknowledge and offering itself an opportunity to help me blossom into the full LIGHT of the vision of our Spirited-Travellers Tour.

As Debbie Ford says in her book ‘The Shadow Effect’

I believe that the shadow is one of the greatest gifts available to us. Carl Jung called it a “sparring partner”; it is the opponent within us that exposes our flaws and sharpens our skills. It is the teacher, the trainer, and the guide that supports us in uncovering our true magnificence. The shadow is not a problem to be solved or an enemy to be conquered but a fertile field to be cultivated. When we dig our hands into its rich soil, we will discover the potent seeds of the people we most desire to be.

I just LOVE those words by Debbie, as they so eloquently express the magical beautiful of embracing our shadow in order to transcend our perceived duality and emerge into wholeness of unity.

After a week of deep personal introspection and working with Sacred Ancient Wisdom… I discovered that the shadow in myself wasn’t really about the scary financial viability of this tour and possibility of bankruptcy… as these were just symptoms of a much greater cause.

The REAL root cause of my personal melt down was a much bigger shadow born out of the vast LIGHT of this tour, the REAL fear coming out of my ego/personality was ‘Am I Good Enough’.

There I have done it, I have shared with you my personal shadow from the deepest recess of my psyche.

I love the following words by Marianne Williamson to help understand the complex nature of our shadow…

We’re often afraid of looking at our shadow because we want to avoid the shame or embarrassment that comes along with admitting mistakes. We feel that if we take a deep look at ourselves, we’ll be too exposed. But the thing we should actually fear is not looking at it, for our denial of the shadow is exactly what fuels it.

And then I also love the words by Deepak Chopra on our shadow…

You only have to gaze around you at the natural world to see the proof that beauty, form, order, and growth have survived for billions of years. In dealing with your shadow, you are aligning yourself with the same infinite power. The shadow isn’t a fearsome opponent but a worthy one. Powerful as it is, the power of wholeness is infinitely greater, and by a miracle of creation, it is within your grasp.

So in embracing the wisdom of these spiritual teachers I have been giving LOVE to my shadow, having compassion and understanding of my shadow and choosing to not allow my shadow to limit me, but to surrender to the synchronisity and potential this shadow can catalyse.

A deep weekend of healing thus ensued….

After my melt down week and deepest darkest introspection of self, Shaun & I were fortunate to spend a fabulous weekend with Deepak Chopra at his ‘Journey to Enlightenment’ Retreat, here on the Sunshine Coast, Australia.

I couldn’t think of a better place to truly embrace my shadow, love it for its potential and awaken to where my shadow would now take me in embracing the full luminous LIGHT of our Spirited-Travellers Tour.

It was then after the Retreat, I walked back to our car, sat in the passenger seat and I opened my book that Deepak had signed earlier in the day. Suddenly a lady bug flew out of my hair and into my hand. I then lowered my hand onto the book and I sat there mesmerised, as the lady bug contentedly sat in my left hand and Deepaks signature page was on my right. It was a good five minutes that I sat there just BEING with the lady bug until finally I opened the car door and released the lady bug back to nature.

On my return home I looked up the animal spirit meaning of Lady Bug and this is what I found:

When lady bug spirit medicine enters you life it is a time of Spiritual Enlightenment, Death & Rebirth, a time for deepest Meditation (just did that all weekend with Deepak) and the granting or physical manifestation of your deepest most sacred desires.

As Louise Hay would say ‘Life Loves Me’, and my shadow was certainly showing me just that !

As a post script to this story…

My partner Shaun gave me the book (as pictured with Deepak’s signature above) within a few weeks after we first met in 1997. It has held so much meaning for me in my heart over the years and is still giving in so many ways ♥

Also, on the last day of my Retreat with Deepak, I was feeling so grateful for all that I had received from the weekend, as a small token of my appreciation I gifted Deepak a copy of my book ‘Shealla-Dreaming‘.

A gift from my heart in the grace of LOVE.

Here is a photo of my gift giving… an image I will treasure as a symbol of giving and receiving cycle of the universe ♥