Elise Cummiskey

I am a 63 year old woman who did not die the day my car spun around on a road in Colorado. The truck coming the other way missed me. I did not die when my gut had ninety-five percent Ecoli in it rather than the beneficial flora needed to digest my food. I did not leave the planet after my second husband died. The trajectory of my life was not finished...I had more to do.

When I look back it is not what I studied or with who, but the trajectory that kept dragging me from place to place. That was the education that brought me to every person who pointed the way.

My first marriage ended in divorce. Mostly because I insisted on being right, important, and morally superior. That mind-set did not make for a Harmonious relationship. I insisted on divorce. I insisted on blaming my former husband for everything. I found out how much of that was only made up in my mind.

With those instructions running and ruling my mind, I was blind to any other idea of how it could be. I had stubbornly "decided" what that marriage was all about. There was no other way it could be but what I had decided.

My second husband was an honorable and lovely man. He saw something in me I could not see. He loved me in spite of the things I insisted on. We had a love story courstship and marriage. It ended earlier this year. Gerry died suddenly from a massive brain bleed due to a fall. Gerry opened the door and escorted me through into a life where "together" was so much more real than the alone fantasy I had been running all my life.

I had believed that we would die on the same day, the same moment. Gerry never bought that. He would warn me he was on blood thinners. I desperately needed a bridge from my belief to living a full and meaningful life. I got through it with the help of friends who understood where the emotions where coming from and did not indulge in self-pity. I got through it by giving people a hand to see into the places they could not see, so they could recognize and change those thoughts in their head that did not line up with reality.

As I progressed I began to put pieces together so I could see a whole, I could see how the pieces worked. This way of seeing what I had assembled took away the pain. I did not have to feel sorry for myself. I could look at my life differently.

I could never have worked my way through all of this alone. I would have only told myself the same old story. I had to have folks who would show me what I was doing, where I was destructive, or stupid, or flakey. That check with reality had to come from outside of myself. I could not see it because I was thinking and hearing and seeing from inside those instructions in my head.

Using the floatation tank and taking classes spanned the chasm. I learned that what I was doing in the present was based on something a small child thought was real. What the child believed about herself and the world was faulty simply because she was to little to understand. That could be recognized and changed by rewriting the belief the child thought was real. I can and I do think about things differently then I had. This eminently practical protocol I have learned produces change. It is some work and takes a bit of time...it has been by far faster and more effective than anything else I know of or have tried.

My life took some specific twists and turns. Everyone's life does. Anyone will have an easier time, if they look at what they believe to be true and gauge if their ideas line up with reality. Once that is done what hurts can be recognized and changed. It only takes learning how to write a better belief about the world and replace the root cause of what is hurting with something that can countermand it.

"In the province of the mind, whatever one believes to be true, is true or becoming true, within certain limits, to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transceneded. In the mind, there are no limitations."
~John C. Lilly

Email Elise or call 908-879-2997