Welcome to Healing From Within with your host Sheryl Glick Reiki Master Teacher and author of the newest book in a trilogy A New Life Awaits Spirit Guided Insights to Support Global Awakening which shares stories and messages from Spirit that show us our challenges are not economic political or societal just a spiritual disconnect from our true being or soul wisdom. Sheryl is delighted to welcome Sandra Shaw author of Evelio’s Garden a self described naturalist who has spent the last twenty nine years in Costa Rica sharing a remembrance that captures one woman’s connection to nature and becoming aware of how important it is to take care of your own dreams and needs as well as our environment.

As listeners of ``Healing From Within” are well aware, my guests and I share intimate stories and insights helping us to awaken more fully to the true nature of our duality and begin to explore energy and our soul essence so we may live more fully in the physical world of nature man and Spirit.

In today’s episode of Healing From Within author Sandra Shaw will share her friendship with Evelio in Costa Rica who helped her create an organic garden. In the difficult year battling unpredictable weather, wild animals and toxic chemicals their friendship grew and Evelio taught Sandra about the sustainability of rural Costa Rica in decades past. Their relationship and many other relationships led Sandra to open up to her difficult past and combine hers with Evelio’s stories creating profound personal change for both of them.

When Sandra is asked to think back to her childhood and remember a person place or event that might have signaled to her or to others around her what interests lifestyle or work she would pursue as an adult for often the story of one’s life is seen early on Sandra writes, “I remember the sound and smell of a northern October a sneaky gust of air bearing the chill scent of winter to-come, skittering dry leaves across the road, swirling around my legs and rattling my paper bag, as I plodded along on Halloween nights to the clutch of houses a mile down the road. I had an inkling of that same wind last night. Was my little sister Alison in tow on those Halloween nights? Surely, although I wouldn’t have taken her hand. It says a lot about the time and place – 1958, rural Pennsylvania – that our parents allowed two little girls to walk a mile and back on a dark, deserted country road for Halloween treats. We had no fear. But our parents weren’t paying much attention to us anyway, because they were in a crisis – the biggest one yet – which was to bring major changes for all of us for decades to come.

Meals were taken in heavy quiet at the kitchen table, the family silenced by our father’s tight-lipped rage. Being the elder sister, I assumed that he was angry at me. It didn’t help that in the late afternoons I would find Mom leaning against the back of the sofa, reading, feet propped on the coffee table, with a beer-mug full of gin and tonic at her side. We didn’t learn until we were in our twenties what the nature of that distant marital crisis was – our mother’s infidelity unmasked – although throughout our teens, my sister and I each harbored our unspoken suspicions. It is a judgmental age; so easy to blame, so difficult to see into the hurting heart of another, especially a parent. Alison and I carried this sense of betrayal – and in my case, the fear that I was doomed to be like our mother – into later life, when, in our separate ways, we could finally see that her love for us was greater than our grief.

Alcoholics are emotional abusers – they can’t help it, it’s all they know. They pull you into their vortex and make you feel responsible for everything that’s wrong, especially their illness. So you try rescue after rescue, which inevitably fails, and the failures mount up so high that it’s impossible to feel good about yourself, about anything. To rescue my own sinking soul, I had to break away.