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I’m not sure I could be more thrilled!  I can almost play this on my keyboard, my very first song!  I’m Gonna Build a Mountain!  For me, nearing my 60^th birthday on the 31^st of this month, this is a REALLY BIG THRILL!  I am DOING IT!  I am learning to read music and play piano!

This has NOT been easy.  I am learning lots about myself, combined with what I am learning in my book writing.  When I found my 8 ½ year old self high on that Alaskan winter mountain with my Borderline mother in reprieve from her illness, I found a gem for my own crown.  That little girl, sad as she was, crushed as I was in so many ways, had a heart so pure it could shine back in fullness the pristine beauty of that wilderness.  And it is to my heart then, my pure, pure soul that I now look for my teacher who can love me enough to learn to play this instrument.

Once I understood the other full moon lit night that “I am not a self with a soul, I am a soul with a self” I got my most important priority straight.  My self, who had just barely begun to form itself by 8 ½ — less so than a normal child’s self would have formed by age two – did manage to grow itself as I have lived through my adulthood.  But that self is too well connected with the horrible verbal abuse I grew up under to help me learn something this new, this complex and this brain challenging.

My SOUL-heart, on the other hand, that heart I have had all of my life and that shone so brightly when I found myself on that mountain at age 8 ½, is full of natural love.  It is not harsh.  It is not condemning.  It is not judgmental.  It knows how to reward me with smiles.  It knows how to complement and encourage me through a difficult learning experience.  Yet as this love begins to flow like a dam has finally been unblocked, the learning itself is beginning to bring me true joy.

My self, who tried so hard to please a mother that could not be pleased – though I didn’t know it – was bewildered with rejection on a continual basis.  Except during those marvelous two months I wrote about in my previous post.  Now I see that I was, in effect, on a runway of my own, taxiing down it throughout my childhood so I could take off flying when I became an adult.

Only that just barely happened.  Somewhere along my way, and I will know more when and how this happened inside of myself as I move forward in the book writing, I found myself on a different runway taxiing of in a different direction.  It’s pretty hard to live through a literal HELL of a childhood and come into adulthood not having lost one’s way.

I could call what I am experiencing now healing, or change, or transformation – but it really is SHIFTING!  I am shifting my conscious center of my SELF from my wounded self that struggled so hard to come into existence at all over to my SOUL who is full of wisdom, love and pure kindness.  This SOUL-self of mine now can have true conversations with my other confused and struggling self – and together you can bet WE are going to learn to make music on piano keys!

I can feel both hemispheres of my brain, left and right, now cooperating with one another toward a shared common goal-for-good instead of my self working and battling my way toward a goal that – ironically – cannot be won without letting off the pressure that my learned self so well incorporated into me.  My LEARNING self now says, “Play your way through this, Linda.  With joy, play your way through this!  You can do it!  You will do it!”

I want these piano keys to be an extension of my entire self.  I am learning (and yes I have been blessed with the perfect piano teacher) exactly correctly as best I can the techniques that I can build and build and build on.  I know ‘the music’ is in me.  It has been in me all along.  My mother, though she didn’t even know it and could not stop herself, almost beat the music out of me, but because BOTH of me, my SOUL-heart self and my learned-self actually have a helluva beat shared together, there is nothing in me that will stop me now!

I am back on my own runway now — and if it took living all the way to this upcoming 60th birthday for me to find my own runway again, so be it.  I am grateful.  I value this learning now probably more than I ever could have as my my soul-heart-self puts itself/me back together again, had I been raised in a normal fashion.  I would have taken this miracle for granted.  Perhaps I am gaining what people my age are SUPPOSED to have — wisdom!

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