“Dancing Through Darkness, Stories of Healing & Light” by Kristina Coll, Erma Cooke, Deborah Evans, Tamara Faust, Kris Hansen, Julie Powers

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Coll…

This book is dedicated to all the women who have faced the dark. A true testament to dancing through the darkness and emerging anew. The Phoenix rising from the ashes with messages for all of us, from all of us. Messages of vulnerability, personal truths, experiences, interpretations, and healing. Stories of embracing and embodying the intuitive knowing and the light that is within all of us. This book was born in a deep place of darkness and meant to be shared through each author’s dance through darkness itself.

Cooke…

One day I found out that a friend had lied to me about something that was really important to both of us.  To this day, I don’t remember what she lied about. The lie was the catalyst for my next “come to Jesus” conversation with God. I was angry with her for lying to me, and I was angry with myself for trusting her and being hurt by her. I let her inside my walls, and she hurt me. True to my nature, that night I was yelling at God about it. I was hurt, and I was taking it out on my relationship with God. Also true to my nature, when I finished yelling and being angry, I waited. What I heard was…

God: “You are one to be hurt by people lying to you. You lie every day of your life!”

            Me – clueless: “Um, excuse me. What do I lie about every day?”

Evans… 

In my house in the late 1970s there seemed to be a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. My mother didn’t ask, and I didn’t tell. By my fourteenth year, and a move from the poor indentured-servant, immigrant part of town to cookie-cutter house suburbia, silence was the golden rule in my family. My life seemed to fare much better when I just kept my thoughts and feelings to myself. Many times, I accepted my “inadequacy and idiocy” as the problem, so any issue would just boil over and be done. Anything for peace. “Yes, I did it,” I always agreed even if I hadn’t. I knew right away that “it” was all my fault.

Faust…

Trauma bonds and relationships may need to end, fears may need to be faced, inner thoughts may need to be transformed to reflect healthy self-love and consideration. Toxicity in all forms requires detoxifying actions, which may be hard. There are no shortcuts. We must do the work to move through it. “Personal truth” is what you really believe about who you are. It’s not how you present yourself at work. Not how you present yourself as a parent. Not how you present yourself out in public. We all have one. Our personal truth is so important because we generate the results in this life that we believe we deserve. It determines how we treat ourselves, how we express ourselves, how we manage relationships, how we parent, how we handle money, how we operate in the world. It’s the lens we see everything from.

Hansen…

After that day, everything was different. It was as if, from that moment on, I had woken up to discover just how shut down and detached I was. That was when the mama bear woke me up. That embarrassing moment of truth brought my world crashing down and left me standing in the rubble of a life I had survived for the past eighteen months. I was finally awake. I was now aware of, (and filled with extreme shame about), how bottling up emotions and cutting myself off from my own humanity produced this pressure.

Powers…

How can I, as a mother, not lose myself in grief when my own flesh and blood made an unnatural leap in the normal life timeline and left the earth before her parents? Didn’t she read the rule book? Parents are supposed to go first! That’s just the way it’s supposed to be. Emma Christine Powers broke the rules. She tore me open. She ripped me apart. She changed me. Then she put me back together by helping me see the bigger picture and urges me – without using any words – to look outside the boxes and limiting constructs and, most importantly, to look deep inside. To see past the black and white and to have an open mind and heart for all the grey areas. To allow myself to be the person I am meant to be, not what I believe others expect, and to connect the dots that I can’t even see. She does most of this teaching after her death, and she doesn’t give up when I’m resistant.