What moments in your life have resulted in the most personal change?

I feel like being really gross but I won’t go there.

I give a similar response to many questions, but it has been the past year or so for me and due to what would most commonly be described as a spiritual awakening.

It is a shift that has caused me to identify less with my personality or even personhood and more with my being as “pure” consciousness. It is a simple, but profound shift in attention from what exists only through attention and belief to what has always been even without the diminutive me being aware of it.

It came after a prolonged (as in years) period of disillusionment, fear, anxiety and stress, in my case over the state of the world and over suffering both personal and global. I understand now, though that this is part of the process. When we are comfortable and satisfied with life, there’s no need for transcendence. Our world has to crash first, and our desire to be alive has to crash—well, this isn’t universally true, I’m sure, but it is common. It is at this point that one is ready to hear a message that points in the opposite direction of the movie screen we think is life and towards the projector that is sending the light.

It is, I think, a continuum of awakening or change in awareness that is marked by a couple of milestone markers, which are better explained in a different context. Really all that’s needed is the first hint of awareness that there’s more to life than meets the eye. From there it’s simply a matter of earnestness on one’s part to observe the condition of the Self to identify and drop the many false beliefs about ourselves that we have always taken to be real.

There was the time I went to spread a load of chicken manure without checking the wind direction beforehand.

Actually, I’ll add one bit. There must be a shift to dislodge the mind from its position as master. (As in terrible master/wonderful servant.) The mind will resist this until it capitulates and can really play some odd games with you in the process including making you feel sick, tired, or by creating other discomforts.

Ok – now my gross out answer doesn’t fit, I’ll answer seriously. I will say the times that affected me most were the years after my brother’s death when I was a kid and more recently, when my husband left. I had to do a total re-evaluation of what I thought was safe and true in my life and find my core strength within. It is taking time…..I have lost much and gained much in the past three years.

2010. I was attempting to sell my house so I could move into a neighborhood that had the support in school my son needed. That was 2 stressful situations tied into one. All this while I had to stay focused at work and get all the technical details in place to buy my business on Dec 31. Dec 19th rolls around and after 77 showings we did not have a buyer. My Mortgage broker informs me that thanks to changes in lending regs, after I buy the business in 2 weeks, I would not be able to buy a home for 2 years in order to establish a history of salary income. Yikes! So I told my wife it looked like we would not be able to move after all. Now she hated me and my business. The next day we get an iron clad offer now I had to find a house. The next day I find out I have Hypertension and the insurance co that was to provide my key man insurance for the company buyout pulls the policy due to my HB. Now the old owner hates me and the deal gets delayed. YAY because I now have the chance I need to close on the house.

Long story short I was going through the wringer of life like I never had before. Here I was about to sign my life away at the bottom on the worst recession in modern history and I was scared shitless. Would I be able to be a good boss, keep the business going, keep paying the employees a good salary, and I was driving home to my new home the day before I was to close on the business I was hit by a rush of energy and I had to pull over as it all just hit me that after all I had been through, something else came up and pushed me harder and harder with more and more challenges and I just then realized it was God pushing me to do more, fix more problems until it was clear to me that I could indeed do it…that I finally had the confidence in myself to take on these challenges. That was a life changing moment for me that trumps anything else in my life.

Coming out of the closet.

Getting sober.

Being diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

The harder times: the deaths of my parents and other family members and close friends, particularly. Though I can’t say with any truthfulness that I’ve had “hard times” in my life – it’s been a good life for the most part (so far, so good, anyway) – some times are harder than others:

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

… Tennyson, “Ulysses”

All of them.

it’s been a cumulative effect

I tend towards lengthy stints of stability and then, major upheaval. haha
Divorce rocked my boat and made for great inner and outer changes some years ago, then a decade of growth, bliss, stability and contentment.
Now, this past 13 months or so I’ve been thrown overboard again in hostile waters. Vacillating between dog paddling for my life and then, just lying back and letting the current carry me.

I’m a creature of extremes it seems, but then again, such is the nature of life, periods of stability and periods of transition. MY last transition was happy one, this one very unhappy.

Getting shot at by somebody who would love to kill you. It changes everything.

The tragic ones.