Olivia's Awakening

Yesterday I met my beautiful neighbor Olivia for the first time. Olivia is a radiant forty-five year old jeweler with long black hair and gentle eyes from Bogota, Colombia. We decided to go on a socially distanced walk to the park to get to know each other. I thought we might just have a polite conversation about how in the heck we both ended up in Texas, but our conversation quickly went from how we met our partners, to what we like to eat for breakfast, to... spiritual awakening. She told me a story that I would like to share.

When Olivia was twenty one, she went to an office party in Bogota after work and remembers having three glasses of wine. Suddenly she felt as if someone was hitting her head with a hammer and she fell to the ground. Her coworkers observed that Olivia was slurring her speech and concluded it was the alcohol that made her pass out and they should help her get home. What she was actually experiencing was a massive hemorrhagic stroke. At home, her mother saw her face and became alarmed. Her eyes, cheeks, and mouth were twisted and drooping. She took her daughter to the hospital where she learned that Olivia was now paralyzed and would not soon be returning home. “For the next year I was in the bed in the hospital. I couldn’t walk, I couldn't talk. I just cried every day. I had a little daughter at that time and I couldn't take care of her. It was terrible."

There was a doctor who took special interest in Olivia. He would “visit me every day to try to make me laugh.” The next year she was moved to a rehab center, and then her insurance ran out and she was placed in a home for indigent patients. “I was so tiny then,” she said. “Only bones. Everybody gave up on me, especially me." The medicine she was given made her skin itch and she would scratch her face until it bled. When she saw her reflection in the mirror after many months she could not recognize her own face, it was twisted and covered in scars.

One day the kind doctor returned and said, “Olivia, we need to check your heart.” An angiography was ordered. “They put a tube down my throat and took pictures... and what they found… oh my goodness… there was a big hole in my heart! And pieces had gone into my bloodstream and to my brain. That's why I had a stroke. They said they would have to do open-heart surgery and take skin from my leg and patch my heart with it.”

On the day of surgery, the surgeon explained that Olivia’s heart would be removed from her body, reconstructed, and put back in. But on the operating table things didn't go as planned. When her heart was removed from her body the bleeding quickly became unmanageable and her heart stopped beating for three minutes..five minutes... six minutes... and could not be revived. The doctors couldn't stop the bleeding in her chest, and eventually the surgical team concluded the situation was hopeless and began cleaning up their tools. At this point the surgeon "got a feeling that he must try something different." He worked on her again, and her heart began to quiver and sprang back to life. He told her later that he had never seen anything like this before and asked her many questions about what she experienced. "You died for a long time," he said. "You are a miracle."

From Olivia's perspective, she had moved from a dark, dense, murky world into the brightest white light she had ever seen. She was enveloped in love. "It was the most beautiful experience. I wanted to stay there- but gradually the bright white light became dimmer and gray," until she found herself back in her body.

She explained that when her physical heart was opened, she was opened spiritually. She came to know her true identity, her worth, the fact that she was a deathless being made of consciousness. After her recovery she started to live in such a way that would honor her heart, physically and energetically. She learned to walk and talk again, committed to rigorous daily exercise (which she still does) and vowed to live a life of love, joy, and gratitude. "I like to feel alive every day!" she said with childlike glee. "Everything is so beautiful. It makes me sad that people can't see how amazing it is to be alive."

She says she feels the presence of spirits, both loving and not so loving- that come and go in her daily life. "The love is real, the darkness is real. This is the realm of polarity."

Olivia can see what people who are dying see; when hospice patients are often described as "hallucinating things" in the final stages of death. "It makes me so mad when they say this! These people are not hallucinating." When her father passed, she held his hand and witnessed his entire "life review" along with him. "It was so beautiful. Everything that happened in his life we could see- from the time he was a baby all the way up until that moment - very quickly like a movie. It was so amazing. He did some bad things, but he was a good man. Everything we do in this life matters."

I asked Olivia if there was anything she would like me to share from her story. "I wish people could just enjoy all the treasures we have. And know that we are here to love and to create, not to destroy."

On this Thanksgiving day as I continue to study Vedic birth charts and look at both happy and difficult passages in people's lives, I keep thinking: "How can we ever say that something we experience is "good" or "bad"? We can't. We can say it was devastating, painful, frightening, or joyous, soothing, liberating... but we can't say it was good or bad in the big picture of life. If a person can be paralyzed, have their heart removed on an operating table and be clinically dead for 5+ minutes and this experience causes them to understand their true nature and live their lives with gratitude and a mission of kindness, then was it "unfortunate"? Sometimes we can't know for years how our challenges will transform us. Ultimately all suffering is nudging us to let go of attachments- both in the world and our attachments to ideas about who we are- and to find out what is left after we let go.