Typically, when a person sees flashing red lights racing down the street while an ambulance’s sirens blare, adrenaline courses through the veins and an “Oh NO!” response blares through the body. We humans are programmed to contract into a ball of resistance at the sight of a person on a stretcher or the sound of someone yelling, “Call 911!” Which is why I can understand why my husband claims that the day I floated up (affectionately named by my ten-year-old God-daughter) was the worst day of his life. Perhaps it was because I did not see the flashing lights, the paramedics, the stretcher, the oxygen mask nor the gasping of the crowd…that I am able to reflect upon this particular event not as one of the scariest, but as one of the most glorious moments of my life.
Earlier that fateful day my husband and I were packing up our home in Los Angeles, preparing to move in three days to Santa Fe, New Mexico. As I wrapped my cherished belongings in newspaper in slow motion, my grieving process began. Can you imagine moving from the Hollywood Hills, just a few houses up the road from the Sunset Strip, the House of Blues, and where the paparazzi staked out Paris Hilton during her house arrest…to a yurt in the middle of the high desert, surrounded by red rocks and pinon trees? Quite a shock to the system, don’t you agree?
It is beautiful in Santa Fe…don’t get me wrong. But, let’s face it….it’s not Hollywood. I am a native LA girl and somehow always inferred that the beauty of nature was something to enjoy as a vacation, a novelty, a departure from “normal” life…not something to wake up to everyday. Won’t all that clean air kill a person?
The thought of actually moving from the hustle-bustle of city life to the peace-and-serenity of a 40-acre ranch made me feel like I was dying. I sobbed an ocean or two as my heart felt it was being ripped out of me, piece-by-piece, dream-by-dream.
In addition to grieving the loss of what had been my hometown for the past 40 years (the only 40 years I’ve known in this incarnation), I was seriously going to miss Sunday dinners with my big, fat, Irish family as well as candle-lit Goddess Gatherings with my best friends. I know people that live outside the City of Angels don’t think it possible for true-blue friendships to exist within boundaries of Tinsel Town. Well, let me tell you…I’m proof positive that they are wrong. You can say all you want about LA, but if you say it to my face, you are cruisin’ for a bruisin’. I am as territorial about Los Angeles as Carrie Bradshaw is about New York.
So, here we are, three days before moving day, and in the midst of all the packing tape and cardboard boxes I had to rip myself away to have a dentist drill on my molars---which translates to no food all day and a face full of Novocain. By the time we joined our friends for a farewell dinner at our favorite Indian restaurant, my blood sugar was at an all time low and I was ravenous. The dinner and the company was delicious, and I savored every decadent bite of the conversation, and the garlic naan, saag paneer, matteer panneer, curried rice, and chicken tikka…not to mention a couple pots of hot, sweetened chai tea.
As our plates were emptying and the button on my pants was threatening to pop…the room began to spin. The bright colors of the orange and yellow sequined tapestry became bright and splotchy, and the spicy scent of curry became particularly potent. The words and the laughter felt as if it was in surround sound and in slow motion.
Am I having an anxiety attack? Am I dying? fainting? losing my mind??? I closed my eyes as I leaned (actually dropped) into my husband’s shoulder. A parade of activity overwhelmed my brain, more than I could track…the floodgates were open, and I couldn’t keep up…I began losing consciousness…sinking beneath the flurry of mental activity …a thousand butterflies were flapping their wings inside my chest and in my brain…all I could do was surrender as I began to slip away. As I squeezed through a cosmic birth canal …I clung to a life raft in a hurricane with the mantra “GOD, GOD, GOD, GOD, GOD, GOD, GOD…”
Everything went suddenly black, a velvet curtain veiling a kaleidoscope of color…and I felt an inner “snap”…as I took off like a pebble from a slingshot and then began floating up… aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
On the other side of the birth canal I felt suddenly light, free, blissful, expansive…I liberated…like I had just become the entire sky. What a contrast from just moments before feeling the confines of an ego prison inside an earth-bound body.
I continued soaring through inner space like a bird, weightless, timeless, enormous…I didn’t feel love…I WAS love…ALL of the love of this universe. I felt like all separation began to dissolve…like the way an ocean wave topples over a sand castle…all had faded into oneness. As I felt like I was rising from glory to greater glory…I realized that there was no end to love…no ceiling…no walls…and just when I thought it couldn’t possibly feel any better, there was more…eternities more…like thick honey sweetening pouring itself through my awareness in an never-ending expanse of bliss.
Then I began moving, dancing through veils, as I received the message that this is the way life could be lived…moving gracefully from one experience to the next…not clinging ferociously to one experience, staking claim to it, and building an entire ego-universe around it. But, what if I could live with a lightness of being, a trusting nature that would allow me to be in this world…be in each experience, but not of it…any of it.
As if watching a Technicolor movie, I could see that all the suffering I had been experiencing earlier that day was ridiculous from the point of view of the sky. In fact, I could see that all suffering was based on attachment to form—period. Suffering was clearly a choice based on a distorted, erroneous point of view…like looking at a cracked funhouse mirror and planning your whole life around the reflection you see. Distorted.
I scanned through all the types of suffering that I could imagine humans going through, from Auschwitz, to the death of a love, to gridlock traffic on the 405, and I saw that every experience of struggling, be it physical, emotional, or psychological, was a choice all based on some attachment to a form that was slipping away. I saw that it was possible to live a life free of any and all suffering or struggling (as Victor Frankel describes in “Man’s Quest for Meaning.”) if I could remain identified with the large picture of reality, my true identity as one with God…like the sky…instead of the little teacup I normally identified with. If I could be primarily identified with the infinity of the sky, then it could be possible to live life as a great adventure, savoring every delicious moment, relationship, sunset, kiss, accomplishment…and releasing it when it was time to go, while moving freely, joyously, guiltlessly toward the new adventure that was next on the horizon.
From the sky perspective I felt a tremendous relief, a graduation from that silly game of struggle and anxiety of keeping all the aspects of my life in balance…trying to balance a full cup of tea from spilling… I was off the hook…I was done… ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…what a relief…for now…
I suddenly became aware of the turmoil that was taking place in the restaurant around me. I could hear worried voices urging me to come back…to open my eyes. The top half of my body was wet (I later found out that 4 glasses of ice water were thrown at my face in an attempt to wake me up) and slumped into my husband’s lap. I couldn’t open my eyes, yet I was aware of an urge to reassure everyone that I wasn’t dead…so I began to speak…in a dis-embodied voice.
“I’m not in my body now, but I’m ok. Don’t worry about me. I am really ok.”
I opened my eyes and could see my husband looking hopelessly afraid.
“…Look at me…I am ok. No matter what happens, don’t be sad for me…I am so happy and better than I’ve ever been. PLEASE DON’T WORRRY!”
I could then see a team of paramedics bustling around me.
“Hey you guys…stop all the fuss…I’m really alright. I’m sure there are other places you need to be right now…I’m ok.”
Nobody seemed reassured by my words.
My friend, in her infinite wisdom, said, “Kelly, you’ve got to get back into your body. Nobody will stop worrying until you come back in. Maybe if we were in a different place it would be ok, but we are in a restaurant in Santa Monica…your lips are blue and your face is ice cold. You’ve really got to come back in your body!”
It was co-dependence more than anything that guilted me into coming back…to squeeze the sky into the ridiculously tiny teacup that was my body. It took will of iron and steel to turn about face on all that light and squeeze the largess of the universe into this speck called Kelly. (Wow, I really get it, I am NOT my body. How cool is this?) but I couldn’t continue to play in infinity when my loved ones were suffering…it didn’t feel fair…so I huffed and puffed and maneuvered myself back into my flesh bag.
I thought about all the people I’d seen in hospitals that were drooling, looking despondent, and how sorry I’d felt for them. No more. From now on, I will remember that just because a person is checked out of their human body does not mean that they are not checked IN to an entirely different reality…perhaps a reality that is infinitely more peaceful and beautiful than this three-dimensional world that we think is so important.
Just as they were loading me into the ambulance I sprang up, much to everyone’s surprise and announced in my voice, “I’m fine, just had a low-blood sugar drop…no need to occupy a perfectly good ambulance.”
The paramedic checked my pulse again and concurred, my blood pressure had, in fact, begun rising back from a near flat line to normal.
A few weeks after we moved to New Mexico (without any kicking and screaming from me, thank you) I ran into Dannion Brinkley. He’s the New York Times Bestselling author of “Saved by the Light,” he has died three times, come back to tell the tale, and is known affectionately as Dr. Death. I asked his opinion about what happened to me and he answered in his inimitable way.
“Your guides must have needed to show you something. They are opportunistic little buggers…they found a window of opportunity and they nabbed you. It wasn’t your time to go, so they let you come back. If you were smart, you’d take in the message you received, share about it and integrate it into your life. It is a gift when they do that…it can change your life.”
I think about the day I “floated up” when I start feeling signs of attachment…that I know if I don’t nip it in the bud it will turn to suffering…and I always have a choice in the matter.
I am enjoying the adventure of being here in Santa Fe, and I have not died of too much clean air. I can’t say the transition has been entirely without struggle… but, overall, there has been a marked improvement in my ability to glow with the flow. With my new reference point that I can bring myself back to when I get snarled in attachments I am reminded to float up (while still in the body) and be in this world but not of it. And every time I see an ambulance or hear a siren, instead of contracting, I smile…for I know some human who thinks they are the size of a teacup is about to realize they are really the sky.
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