Permission to Shine: In 60 Thoughts

Permission to Shine

In 60 Thoughts

Bernadette Petrie

Published in 2019 by Seaweed Press

Copyright © Bernadette Petrie 2019

Bernadette Petrie has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

ISBN Paperback: 978-1-9161168-0-1

Ebook: 978-1-9161168-1-8

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

A CIP catalogue copy of this book can be

found in the British Library.

Edited by Kim Williams

Cover design by So It Begins

Cover photograph by Amanda Farnese Heath

Published with the help of Indie Authors World

Dedication

Mammas and Papas said it best, so like them this book is dedicated to the ones I love– those little ones who cracked me open, Jessica and Flynn, and their now bigger selves, who keep it real and inspire me to be the best version of me I can be.

Foreword

This book’s purpose is to encourage you to give yourself permission to be fully yourself by loving and accepting all parts of you. I feel we all have access to the Source of life, which resides inside us – and our life force is everything. But we have to accept who we fully are, to experience it.

Throughout this book I refer to God, Source, the Universe, Divinity, Consciousness, Grace and sometimes Nature. Frequently I will use the words Love and Energy. So it’s worth spending a moment to explain, as best I can, what I mean by these terms.

Essentially to me they all mean the same thing.

I grew up in a religious environment and always believed in something bigger. But that ‘God’ or what I was conditioned to believe God was, appeared to me in 2010 very differently. I had the ‘God thing’ all wrong it seems. I am very aware that when I say the word ‘God’ because of different experiences or thoughts, we are not necessarily thinking about the same thing, because now God means something very different to me.

I don’t desire any religious labels, or any labels for that matter. Religion is a concept created by humans, not by God. At the origin of all religions the truth probably does reside, but in this book I am referring to the overriding Source of all of us.

I use the words God and Source in the context of what I have come to experience as energy, a Glorious Onward Direction. The Source of all life, which means Nature, Love, Divinity, Energy, The Universe and Consciousness are used with the same intention. Can any one word truly contain this essence?

Following my experience in 2010 I discovered new words that felt to me to be better descriptions of what I had formerly thought of as God, words like Source, Divinity, Energy, Grace, Love and Consciousness. The God word and our misunderstanding of it, is however the source of our suffering. I use it to get you questioning everything, because to me, it is literally ‘everything’.

I also refer to God sometimes as a ‘she’ because I experienced guidance in a female voice and I’m female. As Neale Donald Walsh says in ‘Conversations with God’; God speaks to us in our own voice.

I would love this book to help you to become more curious about what your life force is and if any of these words are a trigger I encourage you to dive a bit deeper and question your own thoughts about this.

Every life force has a Source, let me help you give yourself permission to let yours guide you onwards.

A miracle of gravity

As you weave the letters of your life,

don’t forget the toil and strife.

Don’t forget the loss and pain,

and let’s remember all the shame.

But please remember, to look behind,

and see the light that shines and shines.

As you weave your web of life,

a miracle of gravity,

The light, that glimmers glistens and glows,

in the dark in the midst of chaos knows,

of a story brave and bold and free,

so weave this life for you and me.

Weave and weave it BIG and BOLD,

this life of yours must be told.

Introduction

This life of mine began in 1969 in Northern Ireland. A time in Northern Irish history that would become known as ‘The Troubles’. Where an almost invisible to the outside eye religious divide, as seen in many other parts of the world too, would try to destroy the very essence of the love that runs deep within all the people there. Born into a Catholic family in a largely Protestant housing development, in a largely Protestant town and county, I would become the middle child of a large much loved family and I was from the age of 10 very much in all things Bernadette in the middle.

In the middle of my family, in the middle of religious understanding, in the middle of both, Catholic and Protestant friends, and later, I always felt very much in the middle of two very different perspectives everywhere I went.

Now I can see that all this was meant to be – I chose it all and I did so for a bigger purpose. I chose this experience to play my part in shining a light on the millions of unquestioned thoughts that drive our behaviour and the thousands of limiting beliefs that cause us to let ‘fear’ not ‘faith’ guide us onwards. My personal experience of depression, which I now consider the ‘human condition’, helped me to finally wake up because without ‘an emotional education’ we really have been ill-prepared to step into the darkness of our own psyche and discover our light Source.

We need to look at all of these things so we can free ourselves from thinking: We are not enough, we are not wholly loveable, we are not powerful.

Most importantly we have to extinguish the lie that runs throughout humanity. The lie that would stop me from sharing all of these things with you. The lie that we are afraid of our dark, when the truth is we are actually afraid of our light. Once we get a glimpse and start to believe something better about ourselves, the journey of loving and cherishing ourselves fully can truly begin.

On 20th July 2010 at the age of 41 I was admitted to the Glasgow Priory. It was day five of a roller-coaster journey that had frightened people close to me and their fear had terrified the heck out of me. I was mentally and physically exhausted. Why? Because this intensive five-day awakening process meant my whole life finally made sense, every single detail and I felt wholly accountable.

I needed desperately to sleep and I was so relieved to be going somewhere, where I envisioned peaceful angels taking care of me. Beings, that were, not afraid to look into my eyes, who would simply lovingly hush my chatter by giving a knowing smile to reassure me. I needed to let go of being ‘in control’ and felt sure this, was where this would finally happen.

My late evening arrival proved inconvenient for the staff, as it was shift change-over time. A doctor I would never see again hurriedly performed blood pressure and heart rate checks. She asked my husband to leave the room for a few moments and as he did I felt myself starting to let go. This proved short-lived as he was understandably keen to be with me and decided to return. I remember pulling myself together, trying to remain strong so as not to upset him. He’d had a roller-coaster ride too and I felt sure he, too, could do with a host of angels. It was only when I was finally alone that the reality hit me. I was in a psychiatric hospital thought to be mentally unstable and a danger to myself. Yet even though I knew I was on the edge of something major and it scared me, I knew it wasn’t the case. I had been a danger to myself. I had been my own worst enemy for far too long. Now I knew I couldn’t turn back. The chain of events from the previous summer, were no coincidence. I was also sure that the fact I was back in Glasgow, only a few moments from where I had lived in my twenties, wasn’t a coincidence either. We really do come full circle to rediscover ourselves.

I unpacked my clothes and a few personal items, which my husband had so thoughtfully packed. I had a shower, putting on new white PJs that a dear friend had sent me and I climbed into bed. I remember looking at my favourite picture of my husband and the kids, taken one mother’s day and becoming upset. I got out of bed and turned it over, telling myself that in order to be able to love and take care of them fully, I needed to really take care of myself and trust that this was all happening for a reason.

I turned out the light and closed my eyes trying to sleep, uncertain of what the morning would bring. It was then, the chest pains that had been coming and going in the previous days returned, stronger than ever before. I was totally confused. Who was I worried about now? The kids were safe, so was my husband. I had surrendered my business commitments, I had no more secrets and yet the chest pain continued.

I said these words out loud. God I’m done you’ll have to take it from here I wasn’t sure what or who God was but because I had nothing left in me, I fully let go.

Suddenly the chest pains were replaced by an incredible feeling of warmth and my entire body became a ball of light. I felt the presence of two more balls of light in the room with me. To this day, I don’t know where it began and ended. But what I felt sure was that, in this act of total surrender I was returning home. This experience was life changing for me. It’s like there was Bernie before the Priory and Bernie after.

In that weightless experience I was beautifully reminded that Source is in and around us always. It’s only our thinking that makes us feel it’s not. I could have stayed in that ball of loving light forever because in that moment of surrender, I rejoiced in the returning home to the truth that God had been inside of me all along. There really is no place like home.

But Source had other plans. A voice from deep inside me, a female voice, strong and certain, spoke only for a few seconds; Call out for help, call out for help now.

As I did, I found myself crashing to the floor unable to move. Two nurses who had by now rushed to my room tried to get me to stand up, but I was like a dead weight. The male nurse said; Get up, get up, you’ve got to get up. You’re going to frighten the other patients. Just about able to speak I said; I can’t get up and I don’t care about the other patients.

By calling out for help and crashing to the floor I had been given a fresh chance to start living honestly all over again, but this time, with the memory of who we truly are, once again intact. In that moment it felt like that floor had been waiting for me my whole life.

The message I received was - It’s here in our everyday lives where we have to continue the courageous work. We have to be willing to step into our light and continue to let it shine. We have to be courageous and let ourselves shine, and we can only do that by loving and cherishing, and bringing home all parts of ourselves. We need to allow Source to guide us every step of the way. Those ‘parts of us’ are parts that are stuck in the middle of our old story. We have to save them so they can return home to the present moment with us.

As I sat on the bed supported by the nurses my whole body started to shake and all I wanted was water. I discovered later, this is quite typical after a spiritual awakening, which is effectively an intense energetic healing. I drank glass after glass with the nurses’ help. I remember one of them scolding me; You’ve got to think of your family, you can’t be doing this to yourself. I was dumbfounded, but of course they had no idea of what had just happened, I had been totally alone. Even if I could have explained it I doubt they would have believed me. I’m not sure I would have if I had been in their shoes.

I remembered thinking; Oh no you don’t understand, I’m so lucky I have remembered it’s all going to be okay now. I felt so, so happy even if I had been zapped of all physical strength. I fell asleep only waking to ask for more water throughout the night. I would continue to sleep on and off almost solidly, for the next four days.

On my third or fourth day of my stay in the Priory, I remember glancing in the mirror as I walked to the bathroom stooped like an old lady. My body was clearly in need of physical recovery, because my mind had been cracked open yet my heart was full of love. I knew that truth and faith, not just fear, were my new companions.

It would be six weeks before I returned home. During this time I realised that certain parts of me, my inner child parts especially, were not up to speed with this new perspective. And so began the long slow journey of living with my eyes open to this truth, although certain parts were still in fear. For the last nine years I’ve let life lead me and when the need arose I’ve been diving deep to rediscover the parts of me still hiding in the dark, and in doing so I have helped others do the same.

Section one

Sometimes

Sometimes I’m my own worst enemy

I’m the one who lets me down

I’m the one who steals my passion

And scolds me when I frown.

I’m the one who trips me up,

steals my joy and taints my love.

I’m the one who when my back

is turned is giving me a shove.

It suddenly feels cluttered,

my hearts no longer full

With spaces of my mind jam-packed

creativity is nil.

It’s because my thoughts are cluttered

That it’s not easy to find

the creativity that’s inside me

It’s as if – suddenly I’m blind.

Then comes pause…

I take a deep breath

And lean inside

And let my inner wisdom rear,

and like a spring cleaning Ninja

watch my mental cobwebs disappear.

Embrace and know all the parts of you

that you would rather hide away

Let them come out, but teach them how to play.

They just need some guidance from beginning to end

Which is why you must always be,

your own best friend.

1

Slow down sweetheart there is no need to rush

One day my son hopped into the car beside me and said; Mum, I can’t wait until I’m taller than you. He was about half an inch away. When I started to write this book, nine months later, he had overtaken me by a good couple of inches. But as I sat in the car that morning, his words made me smile. Yet I also felt for him, remembering, all too well, the angst of teenage growing years. In his race to manhood, his height is ever present – the rush to leave childhood spurring him on. A few weeks before, he had asked if he could go to Amsterdam for the day with his friends (he was 14) and I heard myself saying to him; Slow down sweetheart there is no need to rush.

I am very aware that the full expression of who he is to be, will involve significant changes, not just physical, over the next few years. And there are stages and steps he will need to take, which will enable him to expand his world and do all the things he seems desperate to do right now. Whilst the physical changes seem more obvious at his age and stage, the full expression of who I am to be in the future also involve me growing, stretching and continuing beyond my comfort zone too.

The message is the same; "Slow down sweetheart there