Easter time so perfectly mirrors our own transition from death to resurrection, to rebirth and renewal, and grants us an opportunity to create ourselves anew.

We are in an intense time of transformation and it appears we are being pushed now into something bigger and better, so it appears there will be a continuing theme for a deeper review of Self bringing us back to reflect and revisit our past.

Easter time is not just a one day event so whether we celebrate Easter as a festival or not, it is a perfect time for women as well as men to feel into any old wounding around religion or religious orders and the wound of separation, particularly if we have an aversion to the “God” word or hold a belief that we have been betrayed by “God”. (Father).

This has been a deep wound for many women and men too, and the wound of separation and its root belief both personally and collectively so desperately wants to be transformed.

The recent challenging energies have given us an opportunity to take time out and go within to open us up to more of our soul’s truth, for until this deep wounding of separation from Love has been acknowledged and grieved for, our efforts to change only bring us temporary relief.

So Love’s healing message this month is this:

What really troubles your Heart?

How vulnerable are you willing to be?

Everything arising from our past wants to be seen, heard, acknowledged….and released. Whether we are a man or woman, everyone has within themselves an angry aspect of the betrayed Divine Feminine and her sadness and unexpressed grief are calling out to be acknowledged and heard.

This post was ready for Easter. I ALWAYS trust in Divine Order and Divine timing, so when I am prompted to hold back, I know the universe has other plans…

If anyone has heard the message by Prince Harry, and of a two part series which starts tonight in the UK on mental health, whilst I am not a high ranking public figure I know firsthand  the damage of what suppressed emotions and  grief can do to our health.

It is why I continue to strive to bring awareness to the importance of healing our core wounds and the importance of acknowledging our suppressed emotions and unexpressed grief through these blogs, and provide opportunities for others through the work of the Sacred Heart Circles and sacred work in the Temple of the Black Rose.

Before getting into the deeper work of what this post is about, it is no longer enough for us to talk about or read about raising consciousness, or promote healing and transformation; we must engage wholeheartedly in healing ourselves – and it is an ongoing process for all of us.

The Black Rose has much to share and reveal in this posting. Although it appears long, a reminder that it is not meant to be read in one go, take time to digest and integrate its profound truths. Be open and willing to surrender and receive the frequency that is being gifted, and if it does not resonate or perhaps you are not ready to receive the depth of this work at this time, just let it go.

This post offers an invitation into valuable, deeper insights and opportunities for breakthroughs and transformation around the wounds of betrayal, separation, shame, unworthiness – and the benefits and pitfalls of healing circles.

However, it is not offered as medical advice and should not be considered medical advice. Nothing contained in this blog is intended to be used for medical diagnosis or treatment, and is not intended to replace a one-on-one relationship with a qualified health care professional. Always seek the advice of a physician or other qualified health care professional regarding any mental or physical health condition or treatment.

Suppressed feelings and emotions and “getting on with it” for fifty years and believing I had dealt with “all that stuff”, eventually it took its toll and came at the expense of my physical health.

The effects of emotional suppression or avoidance of emotion is a coping strategy that many people engage in, it’s the way the body protects itself during trauma, but if not released can lead to damaging effects of the mind and body, unhealthy relationship patterns, stress, reactive behaviour, high anxiety and depression.

Even my professional life skills included counselling, suicide prevention, modalities which focused on distorted, limiting beliefs of the mind, and multi dimensional healing systems to raise consciousness, were not able to access the core of the wound – for me at least.

When I was growing up and for most of my adult life I was not able, or did not have the opportunity or support to talk about my emotions and feelings, so they were suppressed. I acknowledged this when I wrote the blog on the Importance of Healing Core Wounds.

The reason I continue to share the wisdom gained through my own healing journey to wholeness, is I know from personal experience the imperative importance of looking after the mind and the body and the damage that unexpressed emotions and limited thinking can do.

However, I am not my illness….

What prevented me from accessing my suppressed emotions and unexpressed grief was:

I was frightened to be vulnerable and show my vulnerability

So like most people, I wore a mask to hide my pain. Core wounds are not our “problem” – our fear of vulnerability is. I often refer to rheumatoid arthritis as my “friend”, for it enabled me to get in touch with the disabled inner child within me. Although having been given the gift of navigating the uncharted waters and healing abilities of the subconscious mind, Divine grace showed me the core beliefs that kept a core wound in place.

Just because I feel things more deeply, am very intuitive, empathic and sensitive, understanding and accepting of my own situation and that of others, I am also so acutely aware of the stigma and judgement surrounding mental or physical illness, and how we can turn away from others either because we do not have the skills or understanding, or because they mirror our own shadow stuff.

With the recent Venus retrograde divinely set up to take us on a radical journey of self Love, I know many souls who have found the recent energies very challenging indeed. Any external event or situation that we are being triggered by is to bring up and out the emotions, distorted thinking, habits and behaviours that have been stuck, unprocessed or suppressed within us.

It has been an extremely emotional time for many of us as we have been blind sided by the cold winds of reality forcing us to face our core wounds and vulnerabilities, and we must liberate ourselves from our distorted patterns and stories that keep us stuck and hold us back.

Some may think all this stuff is a waste of time and doesn’t apply to them. I too held that belief once….

We must be willing to go deeply into our hurt and pain and then transform it with the Divine Grace of Love. Through becoming vulnerable and radically honest with my self, the healing of my own Heart wounds, the understanding, the truth, the Wisdom Teachings, and knowledge then came through.

The Cross before the Crown

Our deepest pain has become triggered as the planetary retrogrades have been exposing all of our deepest fears and vulnerabilities, particularly for some around being unworthy or un-loveable.  When these wounds are triggered, it is time to revisit our core wounds of betrayal, abandonment, shame and abuse that are buried deep within our psyche from our childhood and past lives.

The Christ and Magdalene story is our story and they opened for all of us the path to Divine Love. Accepting our dark side is the key to self acceptance and healing of any kind, yet it’s not about seeking healing, or searching for what we believe is missing in our lives.

What we really seek is Divine Grace to be seen and heard

We are all the carriers of a genetic lineage, and the resurrection within all of us is about turning matter into Light through our vulnerability. It is the gateway to the highest form of Alchemy and transformation. Yet fear of it can be the biggest stumbling block to moving forward.

Our very first experiences with feminine and masculine energy are with the relationship we have with our parents. It is also their relationship with one another and between us that installs programs into our subconscious about relationships and how we perceive ourselves.

If we were ignored, neglected, abused, judged or criticised, our little inner child learns from these experiences where they get filed into our subconscious mind and then gets played out again and again in adult life.

We are all being called to be accountable. Truth is about being radically honest with ourselves and feeling our feelings. Allowing ourselves to be vulnerable helps us to identify some of our own unconscious, sabotaging patterns, and habits and wounds that may be playing out in our lives and preventing us from connecting at an authentic level with ourselves and others.

Anyone of us who has been attempting to hide from the lessons of the soul, or has been refusing to step up to the plate to confront our issues and do the inner work to heal ourselves, we are now going to be exposed. We have to be willing to stop running from our “stuff” and other people, for now, there is nowhere to hide.

Wounds of the Father

Betrayal is a double edged sword where we are both betrayer and the betrayed. The challenging energies over the next few months will give us ample opportunity to go within and release this wound.

We also betray ourselves when we neglect or abandon ourselves, or allow others to treat us like a doormat, for our betrayal is driven by fear that we are unacceptable, unworthy and un-loveable as we are…I know. I have been in those places too.

Many of us have been persecuted in past lives for our healing work and betrayed and burned by religious groups as heretics, victims of witch hunts, or convicted by the church for political purposes. The event is not the issue – it is the emotionally charged energy attached to it.

Men have had past lives as women too and what many of us do not realise is that often our unhealed mental, emotional trauma, dysfunctional behaviour, feelings of unworthiness and betrayal, finger pointing to partners or others and judging that they are the problem in our lives, we are often unconscious that these things have their roots in unhealed wounds from our childhood and past lives.

The thing about betrayal of any kind is it cuts deep. Yet it can also resurrect us by awakening us to the Light within. When we can dance with the shadow we become resurrected. We not only find our Light, we find the freedom to be who we really are and cease projecting our unhealed wounds and experiences onto others.

Betrayal of any kind is a loss and society in general has problems understanding the concepts of loss and grief that go hand in hand with it. Unprocessed grief can often cause underlying anxiety and we may want to avoid the experience of grief because our emotions can be very intense, so we adapt avoidance behaviours including avoiding a situation or even writing someone out of our lives.

Wounds of the Feminine

Fear of being vulnerable is what stops us from getting close to someone or forming deeper friendships and why we are missing out on Love. The truth is how can we have deep meaningful relationships and friendships if we do not allow others to get too close? Most of what we think Love is, is conditional.

On a separate note, for those who live in the UK, starting on the 30th April is a four part drama series on The Red Tent. Based on Anita Diamant’s best selling novel she gives a voice to Dinah and relates to the heritage of what is to be female. Whether believer or not, we can never see the Bible in the same way again. And if women would heal their wound around sisterhood they would realise we can learn so much from one another in circles rather than being in shame, conflict and competition.

If we really want Love to be real and authentic we have to remove the masks and let our walls down to be seen, otherwise, it just becomes nothing more than superficial.

I spent most of my life with a distorted belief that all I did was give, give and give, while others were just take, take and take and did not value what was given. I was there to support others, but in my times of need, there was no-one there to support me. How could they let me down after all I had done for them! I was honest, trustworthy and supportive, so why couldn’t they be that with me?

The truth is with this mindset, I wasn’t being honest, trustworthy and supportive because I was carrying wounds around conditional Love and unmet needs. Having been brought up with conditional Love I had become a perfectionist and unconsciously, I had lived my life pleasing others unconsciously believing I would get the Love, support and approval I did not get in childhood in return.

So unconsciously I attracted to myself people who were not able to Love, support and approve of me because they were carrying the unhealed wound of conditional Love too – a subconscious program set up in childhood and reinforced by the Collective Consciousness.

We all like to think we give Love unconditionally, but do we? Conditional Love is the biggest barrier in all our relationships because it is fed by shame, guilt, judgement and unworthiness.

Flaws start to appear in our relationships and friendships because when the other person does not give us what we need emotionally (because we have not been honest enough to express what we want) we end up blaming the “other” in all manner of ways and project our unhealed wound of conditional Love onto them.

This unconscious pull will attract to us those who cannot meet our emotional need. So…

We look for Love, emotional support and connection in the wrong places and with the wrong people

We seek our needs, whether spoken or unspoken, conscious or unconscious, from those who are not capable of meeting our needs because we have not learnt to be open, vulnerable and compassionate with ourselves first.

The truth is, this insidious pattern gets set up in childhood when our primary needs were not met. It sure set me up for much frustration and many disappointments in life when my own “expectations” did not match reality. As a defenceless child, the betrayal of our trust sets up a pattern for us in adulthood.

Whether man or woman, the relationship we have/had with our own mothers or whoever provided our “mothering” or care-taking is the first relationship in our development that inevitably impacts and conditions much of our life.

We can all assume that any difficulties we had back then that we have out grown them or dealt with them. We must be mindful not to be too hasty, for life has a way of biting us when we least expect it.

When we can carry victim mentality around giving, we have not truly learnt the lessons of over giving and can end up later in life looking for Love in all the wrong places, and end up receiving the Love we think we deserve.So we attract the type of people who are the reflection of how we are feeling about ourselves because we don’t believe we deserve better.

We may have been in an abusive relationship so we hide things from family or friends. We may put our partner’s or others needs first because of co-dependency issues. The truth is….

At the root of unworthiness is all our fear and shame

Truth will always show us how well we know ourselves by how open and transparent we are willing to be with ourselves and others. In order for connection to happen and to feel connected to others we have to allow ourselves to be seen.

I kept domestic violence hidden from my mum and dad and people that knew me for eight years. I was frightened to tell my dad  so I protected the perpetrator by keeping my secret hidden because I was frightened and ashamed to tell the truth because of the consequences.

The hard truth is:

No one will treat us better than we treat ourselves

Nobody did anything to me. Nobody betrayed me. I did it to myself. What I was being prepared for through the Divine Presence of Love, Grace and acceptance, was the death of my ego and my egoic stories and the healing of my core wounds.

I had to find the courage to let my guard down and be vulnerable. I had been put into a place where I gave up and there was no where to go except surrender – then the healing journey began.

I had to learn self love and compassion for myself when my life as I knew it fell apart, and it meant I had to allow the hurt little girl inside of me be seen and heard so I could acknowledge and grieve for every loss that I had ever experienced. And the very thing that had prevented me from being vulnerable and feeling connected was:

SHAME

That shame covered a fear of surrendering my power because all my life I had been overly controlled by the male figures in my life, and from their abuse of power I became very secretive, a perfectionist and a control freak. So my “power” or what I thought of as power was forcibly taken away from me along with a lot of other things to heal the wound.

Pluto retrograde is bringing our deepest and darkest fears to the surface, yet it is also a planet of deep transformation highlighting where our fear of letting go makes it difficult to transform our lives. Pluto can have karmic undercurrents too of power and control issues and past life experiences of abuse of power or being overly controlled.

By avoiding opening ourselves to be vulnerable we cut ourselves off from all the wonderful feelings in our universe.

We separate ourselves from Love

As human beings we are also good at consciously keeping secrets and keeping things hidden out of a sense of shame. We are good at concealing our thoughts and feelings too believing we are protecting ourselves. Shame is when we feel we have done something and yet we are not really sure what we have done wrong.

We can feel shame or even humiliation when someone talks to us or looks at us, or when they show disapproval. And shame always, always, always involves fear – and shame is often set up in childhood to obtain obedience to “authority”. As adults we need to learn to accept that others feelings and behaviour have nothing to do with us, and learn to feel our own authentic feelings rather than cover them with anger or shame.

Shame creates many fears and underlying anxieties, as does our unexpressed grief which can lead to sabotaging behaviour. Our sense of well-being comes from the conscious experience of belonging, and in our effort to defend ourselves we end up separating ourselves from each other and the very people that could help us. We have separated ourselves from the Earth in our attempts to dominate it. In living in our heads we have separated our Heart from our body.

Shame creates barriers to giving and receiving Love. When we are afraid to be vulnerable, we start to hide. We then start blaming others for the disconnection we feel.

Now here’s the Truth….we use blame as a tool to deal with our feelings of unworthiness and powerlessness. Because we won’t or don’t know how to heal our wounds of unworthiness and powerlessness, we project it onto others in the form of BLAME.

Most of humanity whether they would admit to it or not is suffering from an invisible wound of UNWORTHINESS. And the result?

We feel disconnected, alienated, separate, isolated and alone

So we close ourselves off and shut ourselves in the cupboard believing that if we truly allowed ourselves to be seen then others would reject us if they really knew who we were. We numb our feelings of unworthiness by bad habits, throwing ourselves into work to keep ourselves busy, over eating or drinking too much.

We get trapped in a cycle of thoughts and behaviours that makes us feel even more isolated. What we are not aware of is we developed this mindset of unworthiness because….

In the past we have been rejected, abandoned, and mistreated

So in an unconscious attempt to heal this wound of unworthiness we search for someone who we believe will make us whole. When we do not fully love ourselves, we attract the very people into our lives that are not capable of fully loving us or themselves, because we in turn are not fully capable of loving them in return. (even though we think we are).

Each is carrying the wound of unworthiness and conditional Love so the relationship ends to start the cycle all over again with someone else. When we are critical and judgemental of ourselves, we are critical and judgemental of others.

Our mothers are our role model and care giver. The truth is, like many of us, I had a mother who was unable to support me emotionally not only in my own informative years but through my adult life as well – there is no blame here. She gave the best of her Love she was capable of giving.

When I was forced to face my own core wounds, I had to reveal and acknowledge the deep emotional scars and feel the deep grief and loss for a mother who was unable to support me. She did not have the skills because she was probably not taught them by her mother either.

Standing at the Well

The Way of the Heart is the way of surrender. Our behaviours are the voices of our deepest injuries that will seek to get our attention in any way they know how, yet they also give us clues to look beneath them.

Our past is clouded in distorted beliefs, false truths, emotions and habits that when we look at them through the eyes of the Heart, we see that although our past cannot exist in reality now, those buried emotions still need to be addressed.

There are deep discoveries and profound healing and transformation to be found in the Well. Yes, it takes courage to enter. Yes, it can be uncomfortable. Yet the rewards, the knowledge, the wisdom and the consciousness that comes from it are immeasurable.

Radical Truth, honest enquiry and the ability to feel vulnerable are the order of the day. So will we stand at the Well as a bystander with a closed Heart looking at its murky water and recoil in fear of feeling vulnerable and being exposed, or will we find the courage to dive deep and drink of it’s elixir, knowing we will survive and return a changed person with knowledge, wisdom and a Heart wide open to see life in a new way.

As a diver of the sacred, holy waters of the Well I know….and from my own journey what I have learned is this:

It’s not the pain that hurts us and wears us down, it is the resistance to feeling it all that does

My own journey to the Well and the hardest truth of all to swallow, let alone admit to, was the realisation that it was abuse and neglect of myself that tore my life down. It was betrayal, rejection of Self and shame that inflicted the deepest wound.

I have seen those who have thrown themselves into work so they do not have to look at themselves and face their feelings. I have seen others who have become bitter and twisted, hardened to life itself and resentful, closed off to self and others because of a self limiting, distorted mindset and wounded Heart.

I have seen others running, escaping and avoiding, reacting and disengaging from someone because of the way they look, or the way they have looked at them – not realising or even aware that because their own buttons have been pressed, it is their own fear of feeling vulnerable that makes them run, escape, avoid and disengage. These are also acts of self betrayal.

I know….for I was once in all of those places too

And we all need to be mindful of these patterns of behaviour if we find ourselves withdrawing from activities, a situation, a group, a friendship or relationship of any kind

When we start to look at our wounding, it can trigger other things within us and it saddens me and breaks my Heart when I see the insidious poison of disengagement and self sabotaging behaviour in others when things get tough or the tough gets going.

Yes, it is scary to let go. Yet the real heart break comes from lack of self awareness and refusing to recognise our own self worth by either staying in abusive situations or from a critical, self punishing, distorted mindset of limiting beliefs and reactive behaviour. We cannot create a new paradigm or a new life for ourselves until we confront head on all our own perpetrator victim mentality.

There is so much talk about connecting with others or finding our tribe yet the truth is we cannot connect with others in a loving, honest, authentic way until we are willing to risk being vulnerable and connect in a loving, honest, authentic way with ourselves.

If we really want to transform our core wounds and heal our wounded inner child, we must also learn to see where we are not happy, where we feel restricted in life, where we are not fulfilled. We must become conscious of our limiting habits and feel the feelings. We have to connect with our anger, frustration, grief, panic, guilt, our fears and judgements and feel the experience of all of that.

And that means we have to get in touch with all the anger, the resentment and the injustices we may have felt towards our mother, father, siblings, husband, wife, lovers, friends, “God”, authority figures and others, for in doing so…

It will lead us to our feelings of abandonment, betrayal, unworthiness, separation and the unfairness of it all

On a higher level all is in Divine order. It is our true Self that plays this healing game with us.

If we continue to believe on an unconscious level that our self worth is dependent on the validation and recognition from others or from what we give, then we are not only setting ourselves up for a lot of anger, frustration and emotional pain, we reinforce the distorted beliefs of unworthiness, not being good enough and the sabotaging behaviour of betrayal to self will continue to keep us separated from love and our highest potential.

The Power of Vulnerability

Life can often grace us with challenges, but we do not have to sort through emotional issues and core wounds on our own.

A problem arises when our fear of feeling vulnerable kicks in and we are not even aware of it. So we run, escape, hide, and our own sabotaging behaviour prevents us from receiving the assistance or guidance that could empower us to rise us above it.

We can only do our healing work at the level of consciousness we are at. Healing the Heart is not always easy work, and sometimes we need someone else who has been through the journey or has the skills to show us our stuff of distorted thinking and sabotaging behaviour and the deeper causes of our fears and unexpressed grief.

So I return again and again and again to gift to you the reader as I share humbly and freely through the wisdom and insights gained from my own healing work with personal struggles and life experiences, so that others may learn from them too.

It is my passion to give the real truth of healing, by offering the Sacred Heart Circles as a safe space to be seen and heard and the sacred work of the Black Rose.

These groups are not about psychotherapy or counselling, neither are they about creating co-dependency…

It is Warrior work of the Highest Order

A group facilitator is not to fix anyone as nothing is broken and nothing needs fixing, but to co-create a safe space for participants to allow new aspects of themselves to unfurl.

The Sacred Heart Circles and Temple of the Black Rose offered by Light Messenger and co-created with Source have not only been created to provide support for us to identify, heal and transform our Hearts wounding, it’s to further realise our potential and be our Galactic nature.

The deep, sacred work in the Temple of the Black Rose helps us identify our pain and discomfort from the core wounds that we carry and which interferes with our personal growth. This sacred space provides an alchemical vessel of Love to learn and understand more about ourselves, to empower ourselves and  receive the blessings of Divine Grace.

The sharing of one’s journey is a great teacher for it acknowledges the pain, tears, Love and laughter we experience in a group setting, which can bring us closer together and help us to learn from one another’s experiences.

There is a Sacred Heart Circle too, currently being transformed and integrated for those that attend the Temple to continue the inner work and bring forth their personal challenges, challenging limiting beliefs, to talk about what has been kept hidden, to feel and speak about the pain of the present and past, about the things they have felt ashamed or afraid of, and to be present in a safe space to express their emotions.

The advantage of healing groups is that they give people an opportunity to be authentic, to be seen and heard, and listened to. These groups also give people a chance to look at things differently and ways to grow. All of what is offered through these groups is a Divine invitation to promote understanding, to connect with our divinity and continue the process of healing and transformation to bring us back to wholeness, and remember who we really are.

If we are granted the privilege of being part of a sacred circle we must be willing to participate whole heartedly and allow ourselves to be completely honest and vulnerable. We are all valuable, and we are valuable to everyone in a group setting whether we believe that or not.

I have facilitated healing groups and circles for over ten years and whilst there are pitfalls to groups, one thing that makes them fail is because participants are not willing to be honest.

We must not allow the difficulties that may arise to trigger our own rigid cycle of self sabotaging behaviour, blame, judgement and withdrawal – for it is in this cycle that we stop trying and can lose sight of our own and each others value and worth.

Whilst there are many benefits to group work that can take us out of our isolation, a group setting can also trigger our wounds around power and powerlessness.

We may think there is no deeper wound than abandonment, separation by a parent or another, a betrayal, or a rejection. No one abandoned, betrayed, rejected, abused, violated or kept me separated – yet it took an illness to show me the suppressed emotions, limited thinking, distorted beliefs, self sabotaging patterns and where I did those things to myself.

It is easy to say “let go”, yet we cannot truly let go of the past and move forward until we have seen, heard and acknowledged the wound and the core belief that keeps it in place. We heal by remembering…bringing back into wholeness all the lost parts and the things we have kept hidden from ourselves.

Love comes when we stop our manipulative behaviour and dare to be vulnerable

All of our emotions, feelings, limiting beliefs and sabotaging behaviour are our biggest obstacles that not only prevent us from seeing the beauty of who we are, they get in the way of fulfilling our greatest potential.

Trusting this post has supported you in further transforming your Heart, and to further realise your potential and your galactic nature.

If you have resonated with this work or know of someone who could benefit from it, please consider posting a comment or even share the link. We never know what goes on behind the masks people wear – at the very least it may prompt someone to come out of hiding and reach out and ask for support or professional help if needed.

In Love, Grace and Service,

Linda