by Lisa Cybaniak
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You’ve caught yourself speaking negatively to yourself, right? I mean, I think we all do it, for whatever reason. It’s just that not all of us say NOTHING but negative things to ourselves.
There are people out there who will say something negative, such as, “I can’t do that”, or “I’m not good enough to do that” to themselves when they are being pushed out of their comfort zone. I think that’s normal.
The difference between successful people and the rest, is that successful people add “yet” to the end of those sentences. When they realise they don’t have the skill or knowledge to do something well, they get motivated. Those people understand that they can always gain the knowledge they need, and in time, develop a new skill.
And that’s exactly what they set off to do.
I’m that person… now. But it wasn’t until my grandma’s spirit went on a bus ride with me, that I made this shift.
Memories of my Grandma
You see, when I was about 19 years old, my grandmother on my mother’s side, passed away. We had been close all my life. I remember spending what seemed like my entire summer at her apartment when I was a child. Playing dress up, putting on her high heels and fake pearls, and hobbling up and down the hallways of her apartment building pretending like I was going to work.
I’d come back into her apartment and head straight for “my office”, aka her bedroom, where I’d dial random numbers into the phone and pretend like I was scheduling meetings and taking notes.
I remember her taking me on bus rides to the farmer’s market and such where I felt like such a big girl. All my journey’s with my mum and abuser were in a car. But with my grandma, I got to go exploring on the bus. For some reason, that was a really big deal to me.
My First Encounter with Spirit
When she passed away, I was in another city, off at college. I remember waking in the middle of the night, for no reason, sitting straight up in bed and feeling “funny”. Something was different. It wasn’t necessarily wrong, just different.
I thought I had had a strange dream that I couldn’t quite remember, so I let myself drift back off to sleep. But it wasn’t long before my phone rang. It was my mum calling with the news. That exact moment I sat up in bed in the middle of the night was the same moment that my grandma died with my mother, her daughter, by her side.
As it is with any death in the family, especially of someone you deeply love and respect, losing our matriarch was devastating. One of the ways I coped was to talk to her. Well, I suppose I was really talking at her, since she obviously wasn’t there to be part of the conversation.
Nonetheless, it made me feel like I was still connected to her, and that’s what I needed.
Just an Ordinary Day
One day, as I was travelling to work on the bus with my headphones on (yes “on”, not in… in those days, we didn’t have ear buds!), listening to my CD player Walkman (yep, remember those ones that you had to somehow hold perfectly flat so it didn’t skip?), when I allowed my mind to wander, probably for the millionth time that day.
My mind went to where it always went back then – into self-degrading mode. I can’t remember now what it was that triggered it, but I do remember that it sent me into a spiral of reminding myself how stupid, ugly, useless and worthless I was. If it was something good that had happened, then I was reminding myself of how I didn’t deserve good things. And, if it was something bad that had happened, I was reminding myself of exactly why I deserved it.
It happened then.
A Bus Ride with Grandma’s Spirit
Sitting there in my seat on the bus, with an empty seat beside me, staring out the window thinking of how much I wanted my pain to end, my grandma yelled at me. Well, her spirit that is. Clear as day, I heard her spirit say “NO!”
Immediately I felt a warmth wrap around me, comforting and consoling me. Without a single word, my grandma’s spirit revealed my life to me, and the control I had over it.
It wasn’t an out of body experience. Rather, it was more like a download of pertinent information, only I don’t remember what it was. Almost as if my unconscious mind received the transmission and my conscious mind is only aware that it happened.
It’s exactly like waking from a dream that you still have the emotion over, only you can’t for the life of you remember a single detail of the dream itself.
And it was magical.
Life Before my Encounter with Spirit
Until that moment, I truly believed I wasn’t good enough and couldn’t do anything right.
Ten years of being told as much while being abused will do that to a person. The mantra my abuser used – telling me I was stupid, ugly, worthless and useless – had become my truth. I believed it at my core.
And that meant that I was walking around experiencing the world through the eyes of someone who believed I wasn’t enough. I saw evidence for this all around me because that’s what I was looking for.
It’s funny how our brains work in that way. We begin to believe something terrible about ourselves and instead of searching high and low for evidence to the contrary, we forcibly interpret every single thing that happens around us as supporting evidence.
This is because it fits the narrative going on in our minds. We already believe these things about ourselves, and nobody likes to be proven wrong, right?
Think about that for a moment. What is it you believe about yourself, your abilities, the world around you and your place in it? In a way, it doesn’t matter how the beliefs formed, just that they did.
Now that they’re here, how are they impacting you?
For me, that belief that I was worthless affected the way I interacted in all my relationships, the type of relationships I attracted, the drama I needed to create, and even the type of jobs I would put myself forth.
So let’s look at the drama I created.
Oh, the Drama
I honestly thought that because the actions of one person had caused all my trauma, ultimately causing me to feel worthless, I thought it was up to someone else to prove it all wrong.
Desperate to find this person who would change my life, and at the same time believing that I didn’t have any worth, created a serious problem within me. Without me realising it, I was repeating the pattern of choosing boyfriends who weren’t emotionally available, for example.
They weren’t capable of falling in love, for whatever reason, and I would fall head over heels, like clockwork. It was like I thought if I could get them to love me, then I must really be worthy – special even.
So, here I was setting myself up for failure over and over again, all because I was desperate to get someone else to show me my value, when I didn’t believe I really had any.
My Perception
I’m not saying all the people in my life in those days were wrong for me. I actually had some amazing friends in my coven that I am still so incredibly grateful for today, even after we’ve drifted apart over time.
It’s just that at that time in my life, I convinced myself that those friends were only hanging around me because they liked being around a common friend of ours, and I was just the tag-along. So not true, but that’s what I’d tell myself so that the great relationships that threatened to expose the lies in my head, were muted.
And since I was on heightened alert for any sign that I wasn’t good enough, I’d create arguments with people, just to give them the opportunity to show me what they really thought of me. I suppose I figured the sooner they were honest about not liking me, the less hurt I’d be.
Boyfriends definitely got the brunt of this. I would set them up, really. If they brought me flowers, I couldn’t accept that they were thinking of me and did something nice for me, so I’d start an argument. After all, they must have done something that required my forgiveness, right?
See what I mean? Drama.
How Grandma’s Spirit Changed my Life
After taking that bus ride with my grandma’s spirit, I couldn’t do it anymore. That negative mantra would NOT come out to talk to me again. In fact, I started giggling each time I tried to tell myself how stupid, ugly, useless and worthless I was. It wasn’t true. I could see it so clearly now.
I’m not saying I changed overnight, because I actually had a long road ahead of me, healing, learning and growing. But I had the motivation now. I already believed in spirit before this encounter, I mean after my life was saved by a psychic and all, how could I not?
I started to understand what it would be like to be my friend, or my boyfriend. How impossible it was. And I began to get a glimpse of the power I had in the choices I was making in my life.
The need to find someone else to love me and prove my worth suddenly seemed ridiculous. Not because I’d never find anyone to love me, but because I understood now that I wouldn’t allow myself to feel love.
No, I needed to stop looking externally for the validation and love I sought and find it within. Only thing was, I didn’t quite know how to do it.
But never fear, my grandma was here!
“Coincidences”
I started finding myself wandering around bookstores. I’d “randomly” pick up books that had nothing to do with surviving abuse, and I’d just know I needed to read it. Sure enough, there would be some life-changing ah-ha moment I’d have while reading it, which would spur me on to go back to the bookstore to seek out the next one.
I was devouring information, healing and growing at a remarkable rate. I began to see the so-called coincidences happening all around me, leading me along my path in life. And I was slowly starting to shift my perspective.
All thanks to my grandma’s spirit taking that bus ride with me. And I should mention here that ever since that bus ride, from time to time, when I least expect it, I feel my grandma with me. Usually accompanied with the scent of vanilla. Interesting, I know. Especially since I don’t have a memory of how vanilla is linked with her. But, nonetheless, every time I randomly smell vanilla, I feel her warm spirit hug.
For the next leg of my healing and spiritual journey, I needed a Reiki Master and a chair to levitate with… but that’s in our next spiritual series solo episode!
In the meantime, I want to know if you’ve ever had an encounter with a spirit?
Press play on the episode above to get all the details!
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Voice over credit: Shari Vandermolen. Shari is offering a free download of one of her songs to the fans of the Life Like You Mean It podcast! Just visit www.GiftFromShari.com and tell her where to send it. Shari’s debut album is available for streaming on all the major platforms including Spotify and iTunes.
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