Compelling Experiences in  my life

How did I get here?

I grew perennially low on money and sometimes downright poor. It wasn’t always like that for my parents. My father started out as a professional baseball player (and he made it the Majors as a pitcher for the Washington Senators and Chicago White Soxs in a time when players were not paid like they are today) but by the time I was 8-10 years old we were really into the poor thing.

We never made it to homeless but it seemed we were just one step away too often. And it mostly stayed that way for my parents until I was in my 30s and helped them get their first home.

When I was younger, I watched my mother and father see their dreams slip away from them as they struggled to just stay afloat. As I experienced their struggle, I also experienced their energy and mood slip away from them.

The experience of growing up poor made a lasting impression on me. It defined my work in the world for me and was the perfect preparation to help me develop a strong compassion for helping people realize their dreams in the world and helping people get in touch with feeling good as the path toward self realization.

Of course, I took on much of this ancestral linage  – most significantly the tendency to see my mood slip into depression. I am a very high energy person and it was not that I was always depressed. Rather depression and anxiety seemed to lurk around the corner and make unexpected visits now and again- sometimes being more disruptive than other times.  These unhappy moods took a good deal of my life energy and focus until at age 48 I made the choice to stop being ruled by poor moods and energy and learn how to get truly in touch with who I am authentically and naturally.

Since then I have not looked back. I took up my life work and connected with the wisdom around and within me. I found out that bad moods don’t have to rule your life. I reconnected with myself, learned about the natural rhythms of moods and energy and learned that you can manage your moods and energy – even if you weren’t born with a natural good mood set point or even if through your life experiences you have somehow gotten ‘stuck” in bad moods and low energy.

Because my childhood experiences predisposed me and my brain for depression and anxiety, I pay close attention to the everyday management of my moods and energy. But since that choice at age 48 I have not been at the mercy of unmanaged moods and energy.

My hope for you is that you also will learn how to create good mood and energy wellness for yourself – that you will never be at the mercy of unmanaged poor moods and energy. I learned that you can claim feeling good for yourself – you can turn feeling unhappy, depressed and anxious into feeling happy, calm, peaceful and joyous. You don’t have to wait for the good times to show up - you can cultivate and grow good mood and energy.

When you let your dreams and desires guide you through life the better your moods and energy will be – and the better your moods and energy are the more your dreams and desires show up in the world.

Where Have I been?

Even as a kid I was intrigued by the meaning of life. I remember living in two worlds – the imaginary and the physical. Retrospectively, I think I was aware of experiencing multiple realities simultaneously - the multi-dimensional experience that is the natural state of the human being but that we are taught to ignore.

When I was in elementary school I wanted to be a teacher. Later, in high school, I wanted to be a writer. That did not seem to meet with much approval though, and I stumbled into psychology. I loved psychology. It was sort of like being a writer – getting down to the core and connecting with someone about the meaning of life - but oh so much more professional.

(In high school I also met my husband – and that is a 40 year ongoing journey of understanding the strange, rewarding and enriching nature of relationships.)

In college I fell even more in love with psychology –  I just devoured the whole idea. And in college I linked up my desire to be a teacher with psychology and discovered child psychology and early childhood development. I was in heaven. I threw myself into learning all that I could and went on to the University of Chicago to get my Master’s and study more about children. It had become my life.

By the time I finished my Master’s degree, I was pregnant with my first child. I knew I was on the verge of a serious burn out, and politely turned down an offer to get my Ph.D and went with my husband (of 5 years – we married young) to Minnesota to have our baby while he got his MFA.

The End of Illlusions and the Beginning of New Paths

I grew hearty in Minnesota. There is a lot of snow there and we did not have a car. Undaunted by this, I got my pregnant self and then myself and my baby daughter around on a bicycle and some public transportation. During that time I fulfilled my dream of being a teacher when I took on the job as Head Teacher for a community preschool program.

When I was pregnant, I was so sure that I knew everything there was to know about children. After all, I had been studying children non-stop for five years. This whole parenting thing would be a snap.

Oh, the end of illusion came swiftly and unexpectedly.

First, it was time to junk my fantasies about hospitals and natural childbirth. I was very prepared but so naïve about how hospitals really worked. We managed to “squeeze by” without the forceps delivery.

That experience set me on a path that determined the Childbearing Year part of my life - for the next 20 years.

And then there was my daughter – apparently she had not read the same books about children that I had. I look back on it fondly – now - but I can still feel the utter surprise and confusion as my entire life dissolved around this baby.

I am guessing that part of my daughter’s task in this world was to point me in the direction of my life’s trajectory. When she was 9 months old she had her first chronic ear infection. I hadn’t ever been sick much myself, so I didn’t have a lot of experience with antibiotics. I dutifully administered the antibiotics the doctors told me were necessary for my beautiful little girl. And for the next nine months I did that again and again until the doctors proclaimed that surgery and tubes to drain her ears were the only hope.

There are certain turning points in life that set you up for your life’s work -  and here I had reached one again. Sitting there in the crowded University of Minnesota hospital with sick children all around and confronting the same issue over and over again, it dawned upon me that something was amiss with the system. There had to be a better way.

That was it for me – life had put me on a path to finding a better way to take care of health and wellness. (And I never had to use antibiotics again for any of my children. And even as they enter their 30s, except for my first daughter, they have never had to have antibiotics.)

I Find That’s There Is More Out There

Five children later, I was happily in the midst of raising my family, homeschooling my children and having a grand time working with women during their Childbearing Year – teaching childbirth classes, working with breastfeeding women as a lactation consultant and delivering babies as a homebirth midwife. Plus, it was during this wonderful time in my life that I started my herbal company and embarked upon the whole heal everything with herbs journey.

As happens in most people’s lives, my spirit got a bit restless. I went looking for deeper existential expansion. This took me on a fifteen year journey with metaphysical experiences. I explored women’s spritituality, nature centered and traditional practices of healing and claimed my medicine names.

My most intense soulward experience was in a twelve year apprenticeship to a Cherokee mystic. In Native American culture a mystic is the spiritual authority of her culture.

Joan Borysenko in her book, The Ways of the Mystic, describes a mystic as one who “… sees beyond the illusion of separateness into the intricate web of life in which all things are expressions of a single Whole.” She quotes Albert Einstein as having once remarked that “the illusion that we are separate is an optical delusion of consciousness.”

The central core of all mystical traditions is: We are One. One must know that no existing thing has an independent existence. One must know that all things are interdependent. (Percepts of the Gurus, Tibetan Buddhist Text).

Some day I may write a book about that profound, crazy and whirlwind experience – because it’s quite a story. But one thing I’ll say now that it did for me was to open my eyes to the fluid nature of reality. I became very clear that healing is not a linear process – and has little to do with getting fixed up with a pill or whatever. Never again could I be satisfied with “Let’s see what herbal tonic is going to cure you”.

And the multi-dimensional nature of healing had claimed me.

There I am-  a snapshot version of the life experiences that compelled me to  this work and various viewpoints of how I operate in the world.

As you can see, I am a healer and educator of various persuasions.  I have now partnered with thousands (literally) of people to help them become healthier and happier.

Maybe we will choose to partner together, too.

Contents © 2008 by Mary Ann Copson and Evenstar. All rights reserved.