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When I'm stressed, time speeds up and so do I.  I talk faster and my words run together.  I rush around trying to do more than one thing at a time.  In a hurry, I forget important things and make mistakes that take away more precious time, increasing my stress.  My heart beats faster.  I breathe faster.  I move faster and more violently.  I anger more quickly.  I react without thinking.  Stress hormones overwhelm my body, damaging each organ and system, and my body tries to communicate with me though pain, nausea, headaches, exhaustion, cravings.  If I stay in a state of stress too long, my poor body burns out and I get sick.

In the beginning of my healing journey, I read a lot of books that encouraged me to change what I thought, to change my words and thoughts from negative to positive.  Instead of thinking, "I'm so stressed out," I tried to think, "I am at peace."

I have survived a lot in my life. Abuse, rape, neglect, homelessness, poverty, and depression top the list.

In fact, I've spent most of the last three decades surviving: getting past one overwhelming problem after another. If it's not worrying about how I'm going to pay the rent or where I'm going to live, it's a relationship done gone super-drama, a health crisis, or “someone needs my help and I'm going to help them even though I need help myself.”

While reading Dianne Sylvan's latest novel this past March, I had a flash of insight that knocked me out of her Shadow World and into the timeless, space-less realm of what Ellen Dugan calls “just knowing.” The scene in the book was of a young Witch drawing down the moon – pulling the Goddess into herself. I told my empty bedroom, “She's not pulling the Goddess into her. She's awakening the spark of divinity within herself!” Cool! I thought. Then I went back into the reading.

When I first came home to the Pagan path eleven years ago, I felt very uncomfortable with the Goddess and God concepts. The Wiccan Lady and Lord felt extremely foreign and abstract to me. I was raised Buddhist, and as a teen had gone through a period of absolutely despising religion altogether, especially the Judeo-Christian religions, whom I held accountable for committing torture, rape, murder, and genocide in the name of their Lord.