Links at a Glance
Practices That Helped Me Progress
Accepting ‘What Is, As Is’ Work!
It was New Year's Day 2003, and I was on top of the world. My beloved husband Daniel and I were deeply in love, living on top of a mountain sitting on 15 acres overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The business we had worked joyfully and tirelessly on for the past four years was about to bear fruit. We had an infomercial ready for production, and were about to close on over a million dollars from several investors for our infomercial and media buys.
As we sat in our hot tub looking at our glorious surroundings, we felt deep gratitude for our abundant blessings. We had worked diligently year after year to get to this point. Now we were on the verge of bringing in millions of dollars and upgrading the health and lives of countless people through our wonderful product.
Meeting Daniel seven years earlier had been a life-changing experience. It was like having my life switch from “black and white” to “Technicolor” when I met him. We were soul mates on every level. We catalyzed each other’s creative juices, and in fact our life was one big creative adventure. We launched a business importing and distributing rebound exercise shoes, and operated a kiosk selling “Jumpers” in two top malls for three years. We wrote and produced a commercial that ran on our local Channel 7, and we wrote a Trim and Tone Program to go along with our exercise shoes. Daniel wrote and produced all the music for the rebound exercise CD we included in the package.
I was living a wonderfully joyful, productive life. Daniel's skill in the kitchen afforded us gourmet meals out on the pool deck everyday. All of our senses were heightened to the abundance of life. As Essene ministers, we had a table of sprouts to grab all day long and ate from our prolific gardens. We conducted Sunday services for the community that was building nicely. We were living in paradise, and we were deeply grateful. Each morning we would walk outside a half hour before dawn, listening to the birds greeting the day with their myriad songs, and we would give thanks to our bountiful Source. "We live in Mother Earth’s Paradise. Thank you, God!" Looking over the canyon to the Pacific Ocean beyond to Monterey, feeling so grateful and at one with it all, our hearts overflowed with joy and love for Life, and for each other.
A Premonition
We had a few setbacks toward the end of 2002, including a tree falling in a storm and crushing our parked car. But we looked forward to the New Year, and particularly a meeting I was to have with potential investors in Florida the third week in January. The evening before I was to leave, however, I had an unexplained bout of terror. An ominous feeling came over me, screaming at me to not go. Daniel, of course, thought this was ridiculous. These were the funds that would finally launch our business. But my feelings persisted. I begged and pleaded with Daniel not to make me go. “You have to go, and that’s it,” he insisted. Since I couldn’t really explain my feelings or come up with any reasonable rationale, Daniel became impatient and went into CEO mode. He literally pushed me on the Airport bus, while I was carrying on because I felt so strongly about staying.
I arrived at the home of long-time friends Wendy and Bruce Fleisher in West Palm Beach later that afternoon. We went out to dinner with about a dozen people, some of Bruce’s fellow PGA touring professionals and their families. One of the pro golfers, an Australian, had recently lost his son in an auto accident. As a former grief counselor, I felt perfectly natural sitting next to him and counseling him about his loss. At about 9:00 p.m., I returned to Bruce and Wendy’s home and almost immediately began feeling sick to my stomach. For the rest of the evening, and in fact all night long, I had severe bouts of nausea and diarrhea. I was convinced I had food poisoning. However, I was the only one in our party to get sick even though we’d all shared the same food.
I decided to call Daniel -- it was around 11:30 p.m. California time -- hoping he’d have some idea for a “food poisoning” remedy. There was no answer. I wasn’t that surprised since he was an early-to-bed and early-to-rise kind of guy. Nonetheless, I tried calling every half hour throughout my sleepless night, and still no answer. I was beginning to get concerned, and then panicky. Something was wrong.
In between visits to the porcelain shrine, I picked up a book on the guest room nightstand. It was about a mysterious death that occurred at a Carmel, California lodge. By some spooky coincidence, this was the very lodge where Daniel and I stayed regularly to get away to the beach for a weekend. In retrospect, it seemed that this “coincidence” and the counseling I did for Bruce’s colleague were in some way preparing me for what I could never really prepare for.
At 10 a.m. my cell phone rang, and I noticed it was our office number. Kathy, our office manager, called to tell me Daniel was not moving. He was sitting stiffly on the side of the bed, sheet white, with his hands clenched on his chest. He was only 51, dead suddenly of a heart attack. Everything swirled around me. My mind would not accept it. In that one moment, I lost everything.
Thank God I was at the home of Wendy, my best friend since childhood. She and Bruce had their staff make emergency travel arrangements, Bruce pressed some cash into my hand -- “You’re going to need this” -- and still in shock, I boarded the plane back home.
On top of the massive grief of losing my beloved I found myself homeless, without a car, bankrupt, penniless, and forced to sell all of my possessions to raise enough money to get cross country to move into my daughter's small student apartment in Austin.
We were right between insurance companies and had everything tied up in the corporation. With a contract to run a commercial at $50,000/week and all of my investors fleeing, there was no way I could maintain the business. I was the public relations person. Daniel was the marketing and business genius with lots of years under his belt and the entire business inside his head.
With his huge presence removed from my life forever, everything turned gray. His longtime friends used to say that Daniel was “bigger than life,” and it sure seemed that way to me. His radiance was so bright it was literally golden. Despite all I learned as a psychologist, personal growth seminar leader, and grief counselor, the loss was so devastating that I could hardly imagine going on.
I tried. I numbly moved my stuff, and then went through not one, but two bankruptcies -- business and personal. I had to face our start-up investors who had trusted us. I told them that I intended to move the business forward and repay them eventually. Some became angry and impatient, others sighed in resignation, knowing the odds of that happening were slim. I was in grief and in shock, and one of the things I found most shocking was how little patience people had for grief. Not two months after Daniel's passing, as I completed the paperwork for the second bankruptcy, my attorney said cheerfully, "Well, now that that's done, you can get on with your life."
Life? What life?
In spite of everything I knew as a psychotherapist, life coach and grief counselor, I still found myself looking back in sadness more than I was able to look forward in hope. What hope I had, I placed in the business that Daniel and I had so diligently developed. Each new opportunity, each new investor would be "the one," but every opportunity seemed to evaporate in front of my eyes.
Over the next eleven months, five more family members would die, including my wonderful father who was my mentor and confidant. I couldn't seem to find my place anywhere. I moved from friend to friend seven times and the only thing good I can say about this period is that I learned non-attachment. "Choiceless choice" was the name I gave to this condition where everything -- every thing -- that gave meaning to my life was ripped away. And yet, there were moments during this time when I felt surges of inexplicable joy and gratitude for having nothing and having no idea where the next meal or lodging was coming from.
But for the most part I was still grieving for a life that could never again be. My life had gone from the Book of Love to the Book of Job, and I didn't know how much more tribulation I could tolerate. At times, I felt life was just too hard and I was too weary to go on. Fifteen months after Daniel's passing, I was still devastated and filled with regret. Against my better judgment, I had gone much farther out on a limb financially with Daniel than I ever would have on my own. Several times, I had mentioned life insurance and Daniel scoffed. “I’m going to be around for a long, long time,” he insisted. “And you’ll be taken care of financially.”
Well, whom could I blame? On top of the grief, I felt like a failure. Everything was gray, I felt numb, and I wanted nothing more than to be “beamed up.”
Practices That Helped Me Progress
The
constants in my life through all of this were meditation and deep
gratitude. As my dad had taught me in the last weeks of his
life,
I felt tremendous gratitude for who I had become through
life
experiences, for it was these experiences -- all of them --
that
smoothed my rough edges and polished me so that the diamond
could
shine through. I was grateful for the 20 years traveling on
the
PGA tour with my first husband, and meeting wonderful people
over
the world. I was grateful for my vibrant health, strength,
and my
energetic enthusiasm, for all the past beautiful homes on
land
with abundant gardens providing my sustenance, for my loving
and
highly-functional family, for my many fantastically conscious and
loving friends, for my beautiful daughter, who I birthed at home
surrounded by my family and friends. And for so very much
more!
I would go on what I called “rampages of appreciation,” sometimes for hours, loudly praising my life and blessing my blessings. The more I did this, the more I felt wealthy and blessed, despite the fact I had no home, no career, no income. I figured if there’s no reason to be grateful, might as well be grateful for no reason! Interestingly, the one thing I had feared over the years -- irrationally, considering past circumstances -- was being homeless with no material possessions. Thoughts are very powerful, so here I was just in that very situation! Yet I felt freer and more joyful then ever, my heart overflowing with gratitude and appreciation: "Thank you. God! I love my life, I am so blessed." I experienced unimaginable waves of ecstasy in the midst of having nothing, and having no prospects of getting anything. Seemingly grounds for institutionalization (or at least medication), given the outward appearance of my life situation!
As I continued to look for and find the positives in my life, miracles began and continued to occur. Once I realized that I could never have my old life back and accepted "what is, as is," I felt a visceral shift. Now, I was "home-free," not homeless. I took advantage of traveling around the country from friend to friend, and marveled at the loving network I had created. I started conversations with strangers who seemed sad or troubled, reframing their stories with them. I had been a highly effective therapist in my "previous life" but now I had learned these lessons from the inside out.
I spoke to people spontaneously in grocery stores and bank lines, in parks and on the street. I was tenacious. I would not move on until I saw the light in their eyes and smiles on their lips. Just hearing what I had been through and seeing how joyful I looked was enough to encourage and empower anyone.
Accepting ”What Is As Is” Works!
As soon as I surrendered to the reality of my life and was willing to help others with my formula for turning major life changes into joy, life opened up to me. Old friends contacted me and sent me money, as a thank-you for something I helped them with decades ago that had changed their lives for the better. In the midst of all of this something eerily mysterious and totally miraculous happened. I received a cryptic phone call from my sister-in-law, Daniel's sister, saying she had a surprise for me.
When I returned her phone call, she told me that the night before what would have been Daniel's 53rd birthday, he'd come to her in a dream and told her to take all their money and play the lotto. Her husband had been unemployed for months, they'd been on the verge of losing their home, and all she had was $50. Her husband thought she had gone insane, “your dead brother told you to do what?", she played her last $50 -- and won! A week later, she had deposited $$$ in my bank account. Shortly after that, a friend offered me her Kauai home to enjoy for the summer, while they were away. As I became more open and joy-filled, more opportunities presented themselves.
During meditation one morning, a voice said, "Lynn, it is time to live your mission bigger, to upgrade the quality of many, many peoples' lives, and light the path for them by using your own life experiences. That's what they've been for!" I wondered why I had to go through loosing my younger brothers a few months apart when they were in their 30's. Adding to that monumental loss, were the past three years of major life changes.
The Birth of Lifelines™
A short time later, while staying with a friend out west, I was awakened in the middle of the night to meditate. A very strong message came through, so strong that I stopped to write it in my notebook: "It's time to write a book and create a workshop to help more people heal. At a time when many people are experiencing financial difficulties and transitions of all kinds, this is the way you are to apply your knowledge, training and experience."
I met Bonnie and Lifelines to Laughlines™ was created. We offer this program in hopes that you will be able to transform yourself to be exactly the way you
want to be and to facilitate the upgrading of your life in all areas.
Listen to my inner voice/intuition. If I had listened to that nagging feeling that told me not to go to Florida and leave Daniel behind, I may not have been able to intervene in his death, however I would have been with him at that time.
Deal with fears and reframe them. Harboring the deep fear of homelessness, monetary devastation and premature death of family members leaving me alone on the planet, I believe, is what magnetized them to me. If I had dealt with and released them from my consciousness, perhaps they would not have occurred.
Trust in the perfection of Life. I feel so blessed to have the life I now have. All of my gifts, talents and skills are being used. I have my own place for the first time ever, and I am meeting wonderful people. There is a peace I have not ever experienced. I am exactly where I need to be.
Every experience is for my highest good. Like a seed that needs a forest fire to crack open so the potential of the tree within can be revealed, every one of the experiences in my life were necessary to reveal the wonderful parts of me I had not previously expressed.
Blessings,
Lynn
If
you would like to learn more about Bonnie and Lynn, the Lifelines
Program™ or the Lifelines Community™, you will find
the following
links helpful: