From 2007-2012, I attended a Spiritual Awareness Community. They had new age teachers of all kinds speak, from pet psychics to Reiki masters. I went most Sundays. Oddly enough, their closing prayer was a Christian protection prayer my grandmother taught me when I was four:
The light of God surrounds us, the love of God enfolds us, the power of God protects us, the presence of God watches over us,
wherever we are, God is, and all is well.
I had prayed it in times of danger, my whole life. Most new age people would say they love Jesus, and claim to know his spirit well. The phrase “Christ consciousness” is common. But, they don’t believe he is a savior, and they don’t believe in the Bible. That was me.
It wasn’t always that way. I had gone to Sunday school as a kid until age six. Despite the God of my childhood, in my 20s I dowsed for spirit guides, became certified in Angelic Kofutu healing, had readings and healings with mediums and energy-workers and gave my crystals full moon baths. Maybe Sunday school was the reason, on the inside, I would ask God to protect me from anything evil during some of these activities.
During initiation, when the Kofutu master was praying over me daily from a distance, I was visited at night by a sensation I’d never felt before, except maybe on drugs. But I was completely sober. A tingling sensation started at my toes and worked it’s way up to the top of my head. I was afraid, and without knowing what I was doing or why, I tested the spirits. I said the little protection prayer and told anything that wasn’t good to go. The presence stayed, caressing my face and heating up my hands so vividly I looked at them to see if there was any difference. I felt euphoria for what felt like hours, but was probably 10-20 minutes. I took this at the time to mean that Kofutu was alright with Jesus. But I was wrong.
During the same time in my life, I regularly experienced a recurring dream. In the dream, I would wake (but still asleep) choking, and see a ghostly figure in my room. Though it never touched me, and I couldn’t make out details of the nebulous shape, it was clear the entity was sucking my voice dry, and taking all my air so I couldn’t breath or move. In the dream, I tried to say the protection prayer, but I could not get enough air. I gasped, and choked, often waking gasping for air in real life. I often couldn’t move, my body completely paralyzed. It was around that time I started experiencing panic attacks, along with the episodes of nightmares and sleep paralysis.
Around the same time, I stayed in a hundred-year-old cabin in Post, Oregon. To my dismay, the lights started flickering on and off, nightly. Then, I had the nightmare three nights in a row, towards the end of my residence. After that, I refused to sleep in the cabin alone, either driving all the way home, many twisty canyon miles, persuading a friend to stay with me, or once, sleeping in my car. The last night I slept in the cabin, I bribed my giant dog Moo into my twin bed with crackers. When the residency was over, I mentioned the lights flickering to the owners of the ranch. They told me there had been a murder there, when a man asked for his girlfriend's hand in marriage, and her father did not approve. The father was killed by shotgun in the living room. I’ve had other experiences in different houses throughout my life, including my parent’s house. No matter how much sage I burned in these places, or how many prayers I said, the spooky feeling never went away.
In 2017, I was in labor with my first daughter, and I became frightened. It has taken me years to prick through the frozen shell of trauma, coupled with the strongest endorphins I’ve ever felt, to remember this part of her birth clearly. I sensed a change in the room, though the midwives didn’t say it; if I did not push her out soon, they’d call an ambulance. I’d be transported with her in my pelvis, and furthermore, there was meconium in the birth waters, a potential danger sign for baby.
I asked my husband to pray The Lord’s Prayer. We said it over and over, and at one point I started to feel the very same tingly, warm, light sensation that I had felt in the middle of the night years ago. The only reason I reached for The Lord's Prayer, was because I’d been in 12-step for over a year, and my home group ended each meeting with it. The prayer was like a worn, nubby blanket to a frightened child. I clutched that prayer, and my stuffed koala bear from my own childhood. Suddenly, after we’d prayed for awhile, I felt the same benevolent presence I’d felt once before, but this time it was crystal clear, like I was being embraced. I heard a voice in my mind; you will never be alone, no matter what happens, you are safe with Me. Even stranger, the voice said this: Even if you die, with Me, you will remain unharmed.
I asked my husband to tell me he believed in God. Quietly, in my ear, after 18 hours of labor, my husband whispered that God was real. He did so reluctantly; he was an agnostic. I saw that it pained him to lie, and I urged him to tell me. Tell me you believe in God. Each time he complied, I felt reassured by the presence.
At one point, I heard the voice saying, now you know pain like I know pain. It was not a sense of being punished by the pain. It was a feeling that God, and only God, could empathize with the pain of birth. He loves us all so much, to suffer the pain of creation, and then let us all be free, I thought in between contractions.
My midwife looked me deep in the eyes and said, show me how much you want to be done. And I did. My daughter “A” came into the sunset filled room right in time. She breathed within 60 seconds, as soon as they roughed her up a bit, and I miraculously stopped hemorrhaging right before the midwife was about stuff a catheter in my urethra. Apparently, that’s how they would see if releasing fluids would bring my now very-high blood pressure down. I was enormously relieved when she packed up the instrument, making the midwives giggle at my sheer terror of the Foley catheter, after all I had endured.
Afterwards, the midwives said repeatedly, anyone else would’ve been a hospital transfer. They commented on my strong body, my mental determination. That was a marathon, they said. But I knew, it was not my strength, it was the presence. I told no one but my husband and the senior midwife at my birth about the strange spiritual experience I had. I chalked it up to myself as the hormones being enormously powerful. When I told the midwife she was surprised, oh really? I didn’t catch any of that, she said in an offhand way that was reassuring at the time. Time, space, and words become very psychedelic during unmedicated labor, I told myself. The truth was, God came to A’s birth, and I tried to forget about it.
Not even two years later, the call to have a second child was sharp as a knife. When I miscarried, again, the doctor gave me the miserable diagnosis of Adenomyosis. Endometriosis grows into the muscular wall of the uterus, infamous for causing labor-like pains. No wonder the first stage of labor felt so familiar, I thought to myself. From my first cycle at the age of twelve, getting my period was accompanied by what felt like a swift kick in the base of my spine, and terrible cramps. I couldn’t miss a dose of extra strength Midol, or I’d be inconsolable. My mom said welcome to womanhood, the pain runs in the family. Apparently, so does miscarriage.
The doctor gave me birth control pills, said the best chance of conceiving would be to let the hormones shrink the misplaced endometrial tissue. The plan was to utilize birth control for three months, then immediately try to conceive when I stopped taking them. During this time, the severe pain, along with other mysterious symptoms I was seeing other doctors about, had wrecked me emotionally. My daughter didn’t sleep well, the whole first year of her life. Many nights, I rocked her until 4 or 5 in the morning, as she grimaced from colic. I am now certain it was from me having undiagnosed celiac, and ingesting my breast milk while I consumed gluten. Poor baby.
Despite the sleepless nights, I wanted another baby so badly, I wept at the thought of even waiting three months. This was compounded by doctors telling me some women had a hard time keeping a pregnancy with Adenymyosis. I built a New Orleans-style altar, with a statue of the Virgin Mary, my Gynecologist’s business card, and all the feathers and glitter we had laying around. I prayed for Coco daily, and in three months, it worked just like the doctor said it would. I started talking and praying to God during that pregnancy. But I still wasn’t a true believer. My fertility altar was inspired by a real-life trip to New Orleans, just before we started trying. Strangely, when I was in the city of the occult, I wanted no readings. For the first time, I sensed they were not from God.
With C, I wasn’t just sick with Hyperemesis for the first and third trimester, I was miserable. After a brief and wonderful respite during the second trimester, (where I merely vomited twice a day), I was swollen from preeclampsia and bedridden from vomiting. I was in pain, and fighting to keep myself nourished and hydrated from constantly retching up stomach bile. By the time I went for my induction, in the high-risk room at the hospital (nearest to the OR), I was begging for the pregnancy to be over.
To Be Continued: When I Got Saved Part 2
