One message from my spiritual teacher eighteen years ago was that if I felt pain in the center of my chest it was my heart opening. If the pain was too much, I could tell it to stop. On a rare occasion when it has happened, I have yet to do that.
This past year the pain returned, and it took a moment to realize that it was spiritual and not my body’s heart. This was the first time that an inner vision was present. What I saw was incomprehensible. A weighty necklace of large, dark gray stones piled several high was loosely circling the front of my neck. A man with a pickaxe appeared. I recognized him as a close friend. He began swinging the pickaxe, and as each arc landed a stone broke until no stones remained—leaving only a hollow bowl the color of wet, desert sand with minerals that gave it a golden tone.
The image reappeared daily. It was comforting to have an empty space replacing what I’d decided were past life remnants of fears too strong and deep for me to release.
Then one morning the bowl was different … softly curved petals looked up at me as the bowl filled with pink roses.
My realization is, “When we cannot do for ourselves what must be done, another will appear to help us make our passage through a transformation.”