Gail Muzio

Three points to ponder:

1. Realize releasing impacts every area of our lives;   physically, mentally, psychologically and spiritually.
2. Releasing clutter isn’t only about things.
3. How to release IN love, not only with love.

1) Starting with the body first. Imagine how it would be to only take in our breathe and not let it go or how we would feel if we ate and never eliminated its waste.

Gregg Braden at a Science and Spirituality Conference I attended addressed letting go of our old story about who we have been taught to think we are as it keeps us locked in separation, competition, struggle, conflict and scarcity; it programs us to be victims and powerless. He reminded us that we are the only form of life that can choose to awaken, solve our problems, choose our relationships, heal our bodies and create our own sense of worth.

I maintain that our old story about ourselves is locked into old time religion that teaches guilt, blame and shame. Guilt being feelings associated with our behavior; shame being feeling inadequate, a sense of worthlessness, both precipitate self-rejection and blame.

Here are some of the distinctions between old time religion, OTR and new thought spirituality of the 21^st century, NTS.

OTR

• Scares with fear
• Controls with guilt, blame shame
• Need for rites, ceremonies to be connected to God and to be saved
• Punishment
• Discourages questioning
• Don’t think for yourself, we will tell you what to think
• Denial

NTS

• Fear and love can’t co-exist
• We are immersed in God and can never be separate; rites and ceremonies remind us of this
• Consequences
• Encourages questions and discussion
• Teaches how to think and and how the mind works Tell the truth

The following are some distinctions between Religion and Spirituality.

Religion

• Outward focus / what we DO
• Challenges us to a standard of BEHVIOUR
• Primarily addresses the realm of duality / positionality
• Can be sectarian / divides people into conflicting groups
• Comprised of concrete dogma
• Is man made

Spirituality

• Inward directed – is who we ARE
• Challenges us to a standard of BEING
• Addresses non-duality – oneness
• Unites, its central ideas hold the group

together with love, kindness, forgiveness, gratitude, acceptance, being non-judgemental and peaceful

• Comprised of direct realization of what is real
• Is not man made

Differences may and usually do exist among religions, but not among truly spiritual teachings. Spirituality can exist without religion, but healthy religion can not exist without spirituality.

I think what all of the above is pointing to is to relinquish all ways we treat ourselves lovelessly, unlovingly, whether in body, mind or spirit.

I recall a friend telling me in her Roman Catholic upbringing, when as a child, she was taught to kneel in church and thump her chest repeating: “I am not worthy, I am not worthly”.

2) Releasing clutter isn’t only about things

An energy drain happens whenever we think of it, (clutter), pass by it, whether a drawer, closet or the trunk of the car etc.

In watching a television program on hoarding for a few minutes, I was reminded that ultimately it indicates a high self-preservation urge with fear associated with dying underneath.

When my husband and I downsized from a large suburban home to a much smaller urban condo it surprised us when it took so many trips to the thrift stores, recycle shop and the number of suitcases filled with clothes that we donated to Our Place, an organization which helps the homeless. I think a good exercise would be to imagine you are moving across the country and you would be paying all the expenses. What would you release? It probably would be stuff you do not love or use.

Releasing clutter isn’t only about physical things, it includes the clutter of negative emotions. Many times people when asked how they are feeling without realizing it they answer with what they are thinking instead. That kind of sentence usually starts with “I’m feeling that” or” I’m feeling like”. Most of our emotions stem from four main feelings: mad, glad, sad or afraid.

When feeling angry or mad I like to suggest to go deeper. If done, then hurt is uncovered; but deeper still is fear. Telling the truth about feeling afraid to someone who is a committed listener is very healing. The person speaking is then validated.

No real healing happens unless there is forgiveness. Forgiveness is for you not the person you are forgiving. Not forgiving holds you as hostage and it is difficult if not impossible to go on with your life in a joyful way.

To release the clutter of resentment, to forgive others; to release regret, forgive yourself. Let go of criticizing; what we criticize we keep in our lives. The universe usually brings it back to us to educate us, if we are willing .

Other words for releasing and letting go are eliminating, renouncing and purifying. I like the words Radical Pastectomy, releasing the past which also includes doing our family of origin work. Important questions are: am I complete with my mother & father. Complete, not as in finished, but as in having those relationships restored to wholeness if there seemed to be anything in the past that distanced us.

I participated in numerous intensive workshops that gave me the opportunity to “complete” with my mother and father.  My father died of alcoholism and cancer at the age of 59 when I was 19. My undemonstrative mother died of cancer at the age of 46 when I was 16. She never told me that she loved me, even after I asked her to tell me so, she pushed me away. My father made me knell as punishment whenever I was a bad girl. He would say “Knell & think about how bad you were”.

A Radical Pastectomy includes anything we have been nursing, rehearsing, caressing, resisting, & refusing to release. Just think that if we released all of the above, we would have no more drama in our lives. If you think you can’t, you are addicted to it – the drama. and giving your power away.

Some people have difficulty releasing the clutter of past relationships, whether a split up, divorce or death.

I agree with author Barbara De Angelis when she wrote about the stages of recovering from a relationship. If we don’t heal from a past relationship we carry it to the next one.

So many people jump right into a new relationship without fully releasing and doing their recovery work.

Barbara suggests:

Separation / parting – takes 2weeks – 2 months

Adjusting / adapting – takes 2-6 months

Healing takes 6 months – 1 year

Recovery  / breakthrough takes 1-2 years.

Whether physical, mental, emotional, psychological or spiritual, know when we release that there is a superior alternative being prepared for us  – making room in your life for newness to flow in.

3) Let go in love; even if something is lost the other who found that thing needed it more than you. I say IN love rather than WITH love. WITH love would be feeling the emotion of love. IN love is realizing we are immersed in the power of love all the time whether we are aware of it or not. We are love at the core. I repeat, relinquish any and all ways we are treating ourselves unlovingly.

Two powerful exercises are to list anything you are currently tolerating and list any current petty annoyances: people, situations, circumstances, things and relationships.

Let go of who and what we think we are and remove any emotional attachment to it. Replace it with who, what we really are. Soul – choose soul, your new life awaits.

I love the following writing by Rev. Safire Rose:

“She let go. Without a thought or a word, she let go.She let go of the fear.  She let go of the judgments.  She let go of the confluence of opinions swarming around her head.  She let go of the committee of indecision within her.  She let go of all the ‘right’ reasons. Wholly and completely, without hesitation or worry, she just let go.

She didn’t ask anyone for advice. She didn’t read a book on how to let go.  She didn’t search the scriptures. She just let go.  She let go of all of the memories that held her back.  She let go of all of the anxiety that kept her from moving forward.  She let go of the planning and all of the calculations about how to do it just right.

She didn’t promise to let go. She didn’t journal about it. She didn’t write the projected date in her Day-Timer. She made no public announcement and put no ad in the paper. She didn’t check the weather report or read her daily horoscope. She just let go.

She didn’t analyze whether she should let go. She didn’t call her friends to discuss the matter. She didn’t do a five-step Spiritual Mind Treatment. She didn’t call the prayer line. She didn’t utter one word. She just let go.

No one was around when it happened. There was no applause or congratulations. No one thanked her or praised her. No one noticed a thing. Like a leaf falling from a tree, she just let go.

There was no effort. There was no struggle. It wasn’t good and it wasn’t bad. It was what it was, and it is just that.

In the space of letting go, she let it all be. A small smile came over her face. A light breeze blew through her. And the sun and the moon shone forevermore.

She let go. Without a thought or a word, she let go”.

I don’t share about this very often, but I’ve actually had three near-death experiences, two when I was quite young. One, as a result of sticking my finger into a socket. I won’t say electrocuted, but the shock made me unconscious. I was about two or three years old. A few years later when I was about six, I was at Winnipeg Beach – I was born and raised in Winnipeg and we used to go to Winnipeg Beach for the summer. I was on a big rubber tube, I went kind of far out even though I didn’t know how to swim and the tube burst! My mother who was eight months pregnant at the time pulled me out of the water. Somebody resuscitated me on the beach. I don’t remember much more about those two incidences.

The incident I want to share happened in 1977; it’s one that I do remember as it made a profound impact in my life. Several things that I’d like to address; first my near-death experience and second, my recollection of two out of body experiences while I was either on the operating table or in the intensive care unit.

My late husband Norman Schultz and I had gone out to New Sarepta, about 40km outside of Edmonton to visit his mother. We had just moved to our new dream home in Westridge Edmonton. We were used to taking a particular route home to another area of the city where we used to live in Dickensfield. We were having a conversation on the ride home when we both realized we missed our turnoff. We were going to Dickensfield instead of where now lived in Westridge. We had to find the next turnaround and double back.

It was about midnight and as we were coming through a green light, we were the third car in a row at the intersection, when a ¾ ton truck came racing through on his red light at 60 miles an hour into my door. We were very thankful as at the time we were driving a new Lincoln, which had a steel post between the front passenger & back doors. If the steel post hadn’t been there, we both would have been killed instantly.

I want to back up a little bit. Just a couple weeks before that, I was doing some gardening. Norman had a very traumatic stroke the year before, that the doctors thought he should have died from or at best wouldn’t recover from, which he did. I was in the garden and feeling so thankful that I had the privilege of being with him through his recovery, because he fully recovered in just three months, miraculously. I was also thinking about the International New Thought Alliance conference we had attended that year where we heard some incredible speakers. What I noticed was that many of them had near-death experiences in the past.

Prior to that I was working in my meditation with the statement, ‘I am becoming more unconsciously aware of my oneness with the Infinite.’ That was a key phrase for myself coming into and out of meditation. I am becoming more unconsciously aware of my oneness with the Infinite.

In the garden I had this flashing thought: ‘people that have near-death experiences really get this new thought philosophy Two or three weeks later…. The collision. I don’t remember it or being taken out of the car. The impact was so tremendous. When you have a brand new car the little spare tire in the trunk is bolted down. All those bolts were severed and the spare tire was rolling a half a block away. Norman, uninjured except for shock, was picking up carrots off the ground because Grandma Schultz had given us vegetables to take home.

I was rushed to emergency but I don’t remember that ride. However, for a number of years, I would get a bit shaken whenever I heard an ambulance siren. They worked on me for eight hours in surgery. After the surgeon came down and told Norman that they didn’t think that I would live the night, that all they could do was pack me with sponges. Because of the impact, my liver had broken almost in half and they had to resuscitate me two times on the operating table. Because of the loss of blood, they transfused me, totally and completely, two times over. They told Norman I would probably die within a few hours.

Two days later it was apology time. They had to take me back to the operating room because obviously I was alive and they needed to take out those sponges. They did warn him that possibly, a great probability was that when they took out the sponges, if the bleeding started again, there would be nothing they could do.

I don’t remember anything, any of that. What I do remember is moving through space at a very swift speed through blackness. I don’t recall having a body but I remember moving through that blackness, approaching a silver light. That’s the best way I can describe it, describing it was silver doesn’t do it. It was a very, very bright light that as I was speeding toward it, it became bigger and bigger and bigger. As I was almost going to be enveloped into the light, I remember the thought, ‘I want to live. I want to go back’. I didn’t think of my children, my husband, what I was doing, what I wanted to do. There was just that thought, there was that conscious choice.

I was in intensive care for 21 days. Norman at one time, said that he counted 18 tubes coming out of every orifice, (and some that they made), out of my body. When he brought my children to come visit me, my middle son Michael said, “Mom, I was almost hoping I didn’t go to see you because your face was like a balloon. You didn’t look like you.”

Just a few months before, we had decided that we were going to go to Hawaii with some very dear friends of ours, we had actually booked the flights and the reservation. My girlfriend, Frauwke lied to the nursing staff saying she was my sister so she could come and see me because in intensive care they only allow immediate family. I don’t remember her visiting, but she said she could tell that I recognized her as I grabbed her hand and made a motion holding up three fingers and I moving my hand over my chest, as though a plane was taking off. She got that I was telling her that in three months, we are going to Hawaii.

I remember when they moved me to a semi-private room after the three weeks in intensive care. One day I was sitting up in bed and looking through a door and I thought, “who is that person over there? They look awful.” Then I realized I was looking at myself in the mirror because it was our bathroom door and as I moved, the person moved …it was me. When other friends came to visit that day, I put a pillow over my face and said, “Don’t look at me, I look so awful.”

I discharged myself from the hospital very quickly as I had a not very nice room mate that I didn’t want to put up with any longer. The healing began. Our chiropractor at the time, a wonderful man, made a hospital visit to me, he drew all the drapes to adjust me plus he came and visited me several times at home. He was also into kinesiology and muscle testing for supplements. He put me on a huge regime of supplements. I think I was taking 40 tablets a day.

Of course Norman had let people know what had happened so there were many people praying for us and visualizing my complete recovery.. When I came home, the majority of my healing was visualizing and seeing myself doing all the things I could do before the automobile collision. I do not call it an accident. We had to turn around and take a wrong turn to be at that corner at that precise time for that driver to hit us. Instead I call it “my divine appointment”.

Three months later, I was 100% recovered, jogging down the beach of Hawaii. I thank God for New Thought in my life. I know that the healing power is within me. I thank God that I had attended so many classes that I had the sense that the healing power was within me. I remember once when they were putting in the tracheotomy tube for breathing, I started to regain consciousness on the operating table because I could hear them. I lifted my hand because I just wanted to touch my body but someone clamped my hand down.

I said the healing power resides in us; it is that we are immersed in God so therefore it resides within us. It is not like some people have it and some people don’t. God, the infinite presence and power, the ultimate reality is everywhere present therefore we are immersed in it, we are expressions of it, therefore the healing power resides in us.

When I came home I started to read a book and I thought, “oh my God, my mind isn’t working right” because I couldn’t understand any of what I was reading. Then I picked up a Joel Goldsmith book. Joel Goldsmith was quite a mystic. He has made his transition now, but he wrote totally from the fourth dimension, oneness, that there is no separation in consciousness. In the course of the three months healing at home, I read 21 of his books that’s all I could read.

I want to also share a little about the out of body experiences that I remember, at the time I didn’t know that is what they were called. I had what I thought was a dream while I was in intensive care where I was mostly unconscious and in a coma. I had a dream about Dr. Roder. Norman and I used to go to a lot of his intensive weekend classes. For several years. He used to fly out from Texas and Toronto and teach 23 hours of instruction at a time of Concept Therapy and Energy and Man. The “dream” was that he was in my hospital room, sitting kind of like slumped over while he meditated. He was wearing shorts and he was talking to me in his mind about me healing. A couple months later when I was recovered, I went to one of his classes and I said, “You know Harry, I had a real strange dream. I dreamed that you were in my hospital room.” He said, “Gail every day in my office at a particular time, (he is also a chiropractor) I would sit down in the corner in my mediation chair and I would meditate on you and I would speak to you.” I asked “What were you wearing?” He said, “I always wear shorts in my chiropractic office.” So was he there, or was I there?

The other incident was about a friend in Red Deer who is a poet and an artist. When they moved me from intensive care into the regular hospital room, a dozen roses came from her, each a different colour, along with it was a poem called, ‘A dozen roses that I send to you, each a different colour’ a beautiful poem. She came to visit me after I came home. I said, “Elsie, I had a strange dream when I was in intensive care. I dreamed I was in your studio, in the lower level.” They have a beautiful home overlooking Red Deer on a hill. I said, “but your room was all rearranged. You had a settee beside your big picture window overlooking the city and your easel, where you do your writing and painting, was moved beside the door. In this dream it was dark and you had kind of a gooseneck lamp over your easel, you weren’t painting, you were writing and the carpet in your room was blue.

She said, “That’s very interesting. The night that Norman called and said what had happened, I went down to my studio where we had placed a settee beside the picture window. We just installed new blue carpet and that’s exactly where the easel was beside the door. I was writing that poem to you that night.”

I remembered being there and thinking, “Elsie, if you’d just look over here you’d see that I am here” and in reflection I thought, ‘well, I transported myself to Red Deer, couldn’t I transport myself across the room?’ – that was kind of funny to me but I thought it was a dream until I told her about it and she responded.

What did all this teach me, what did I learn for sure? Many things. First of all, in the moving toward the light, there was absolutely no fear, none. It was peaceful and blissful even those words don’t describe it, it’s indescribable. I don’t have any sense of fear around my transition, whether its sooner or later.

In my first topic at the Centre for Self Awareness when we opened in Victoria I made the statement: ‘matter obeys the intent of consciousness.’ Remember I was declaring ‘I am becoming more consciously aware of my oneness with the Infinite.’ Nothing to that point in time in my lifetime brought me closer in conscious realization that I am one with God and God is one with me. I no longer say “with” I say “in”.

All this really made me see how powerful our thoughts are, even if they are just fleeting thoughts but it’s also the feeling. I was in the garden with such gratefulness and remembering the conference and remembering the people sharing that they had near-death experiences, also, being so thankful that I had been privileged to be Norman’s partner through his healing. There was the thought I had that when people have near-death experiences really get this New Thought philosophy.

The power of prayer, I cannot begin to share how many people were holding us in prayer, in affirmative prayer, not fearful prayer or supplication. They were holding me and seeing me and speaking as though I was whole, complete, perfect, spiritual, divine and fully healed, fully recovered. I also learned how absolutely magnificent my body is, our bodies are.

I remember the first time a home, Norman helped me in our large shower stall. He was holding me up because I had lost so much weight. As I was washing my body I was crying at the magnificence of my body and the healing power within it, how it had served me, and how thankful I was that I had not ever abused my body in any way.

I have read that Buckminster Fuller said that 99% of who we are is invisible, untouchable, we are primarily, spiritual beings. But, he continued, the remaining 1%, the body in which we live, is a miracle. Yet so often we take our bodies for granted.

I spoke to someone who said they were having a difficult year but had a breakthrough even though a year of challenge, it was a year of growth. Barbara Marks Hubbard has said that our crisis is our birth. I call it “a blessing in disguise”, my “divine appointment”. It was a rebirth into a new world for me because when I came home from the hospital and I was recovering, I said to Norman that I think the fall is my favourite time of year because it is so beautiful in Edmonton then plus we started the Center for Self Awareness in Edmonton in September and we started the Victoria Center for Self Awareness in September. I also said to Norman, “I don’t want to sell real estate anymore (we owned our own real estate company, just the two of us, not known for its size but for its people, him and I). I loved selling real estate and I was very good at it. I said, “I want to do what it takes to complete my training, so we can start a New Thought center in Edmonton.” So that people wouldn’t have to travel as far as I had to travel for courses, pay the kind of money that I had to pay and be away from the family for an extended period of time with the travel for the courses that I had to. So it was my divine appointment, it was a blessing in disguise. It empowered me to be a New Thought Minister for 27years

The other thing that it taught me is to have an intention to live. Do you have an intention to live no matter what anyone else is saying? ‘She’s not going to make it through the night. There’s little hope.’ Do you have an intention to live and do you have an intention to live to the highest and best that you are capable of right now in your own unfoldment of consciousness. Every experience you have had has brought you to right now, right now, right now and it’s made you who you are.

When I think of life now, I think of it as an acronym. Life or Love, Individualized, Fully Expressed and Experienced. That’s my story. I thank God that I didn’t die that night and it was my choice. Please don’t go in your mind, if you have had someone close to you in your life make their transition and you think, “Do you mean to say they didn’t’ want to stay with me?” They don’t even think about you at that point. All that they are doing is they are being immersed in that light. The realms of light from where we came from, our spirit, soul. We don’t have a soul, we are a soul, there’s a big difference.

We came from realms of light to be here on planet Earth, to experience what we need to experience for our next, our own individual unfoldment of consciousness. Each one of us has the free will and choice to go when it’s time for us to go, or to stay. What a blessing we have. We truly, truly have a blessing. I really acknowledged my husband Norman, for the gift that he had been in my life and for him always holding that I was going to walk out of that hospital whole.

I asked him, “What did you do in the eight hours I was being operated on?” He said, “I went to every nursing station and I told them that my wife was being operated on now, and she is going to walk out of here.” They were offering him valium and shots because they knew he was in shock, but he was living and speaking New Thought principles! Iam glad he did.