The Growing Soul: My Transformational Journey From Adversity to the Divine Within

By Maria Angela Russo

Have you ever asked yourself such questions as "Who am I?" "Why am I here?" or "Why do people have to suffer?" Maria Russo spent decades asking herself these kinds of questions in her search to "know God" and find her purpose in this lifetime. In her search for Truth, she discovered that we are all essenti

• Language: English
• Publisher: Empowered Whole Being Press
• Release date: Jun 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781634528948

Maria Angela Russo

Currently residing in Denver, Colorado, Maria Russo is a social worker who specializes in childhood trauma, which is often the root cause for addiction. She received her undergraduate degree in Psychology at the University of Memphis and her Masters Degree in Social Work at Tennessee University.

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CHAPTERS

INTRODUCTION

THE FIRST TEN YEARS

EXPLORING BOUNDARIES

THE NOTION OF EVIL

NO ONE TO TURN TO

SWEET SIXTEEN

THE ROAD BACK

KISS ME

DEATH AND BIRTH

THE DREAM

PUTTING MYSELF FIRST

MY MOTHER

THE GOLDEN ROPE

TWENTY YEARS OF MARRIAGE

WHAT DO I BELIEVE?

A DEEPER AWAKENING

IT’S OKAY TO BE HAPPY

INTEGRATING THE FRAGMENTED PIECES

AN END TO SECRECY

RESOURCES

INTRODUCTION

When that which is god – or that which is that which man wants to call God – is being understood by man, man has to translate it into the format he understands. But this Energy, this Source that man is giving the label of God, cannot be quantified in anything that man understands. And as man attempts to do it, the distortions are enormous.

~ Abraham ~

If you are someone who finds this book in your hands, I would like to say first and foremost Thank you for reading and allowing me to share my journey with you. My highest aspiration in writing this book is the hope that you will be inspired to take a fresh look at your own life, recognizing your darkest moments as your greatest gifts, embracing the Truth of who you are, and knowing there is nothing but goodness and beauty inside of you. You are about to embark on quite a ride.

I have always known that our real life is on the other side, meaning we are essentially spiritual beings who come here to have a human experience for a specific reason. The essence of our true selves is Divine energy and as that energy, we are magnificent Beings of Light. There is only goodness and beauty inside each and every one of us.

Some of us come here to play, or express a certain talent. Others come to work out deep issues. Some come to research particular themes like finding their own voice or mental illness, while others come to release what no longer serves their souls. We all come as both teachers and students.

I imagine it works like this:

Before we incarnate, we work with our soul group and our spirit guides to plan the areas we wish to explore. It is only through experience that we can learn and grow. Words don’t teach, only experience does. In order to have the experiences necessary for exploration, we need contrast. Since there is only Goodness on the other side, we have no opportunity to make choices and mistakes that teach us. Earth gives us all the openings we will ever need.

When planning our lives from a higher consciousness before we’re born, we settle on a particular theme of exploration that will bring us the expansion and self-realization we seek in this lifetime. We also choose a setting and a family, both of which will serve our plan well, and we make contracts with other souls in our group who will incarnate with us to play certain roles in our life.

Because we are born in forgetfulness with a free will, many of us struggle more than we need to until we discover our ability to align with the Guidance System we are born with, letting it lead the way.

Our Spirit Guides, angels, and other masters of the universe stay connected to us closely while we are here on Earth and help us with our plan. Once we set an intention, I imagine our guides making all the arrangements for us to be in the right place at the right time, meeting the right people, bringing everything to us to fulfill that intention. In addition to making all the synchronistic arrangements, like dropping crumbs on a trail, I imagine they whisper in our ears to help us stay on track, which comes through as intuition or inspiration.

When I first started thinking about writing a book, I thought its theme was about the effects of having sexual boundaries crossed in childhood, the kind of damage it can do, and what it took for me to rise above the trauma. But the focus of this book is not about those darkest moments, chosen from a higher place of consciousness before I was born. Those are just the tools that bring forth the lessons and clarity of the gifts I’ve received as I’ve healed my wounds. At the end of each chapter, I have included Insights from a Higher Consciousness to point out how I perceive the Universe is guiding me.

Working on this project, I discovered this book is about coming into this world to explore a piece of ourselves that can help us to grow closer to all that is Sacred, recognizing our own divinity in the process.

It is about relearning everything we have been taught by the world we are born into and uncovering our own Truth by communicating from our Higher Self.

It is about finding out that we are the human side of God.

It’s about discovering that life is about God exploring God.

It means learning how to detach from the story of who we have thought we are up until now and shifting our energy to our Higher Self in our search for Truth. Once we drop our storyline and detach from the circumstances of our life, taking only the lessons and insights those circumstances leave us with, then we can shift our energy into the quantum field. Only then can we know who we really are, able to speak from that higher place of consciousness.

But before we can drop the story, we have to be fully integrated.

We shut off the parts of ourselves that are hurt or offended so that we can go on with our lives. That’s how we survive until we can attend to the wounds we are left with. But more often it is easier to just ignore those pieces and hope they will go away on their own.

Typically our wounds begin in childhood and since each of us were once children, according to Carl Jung, we all have this innate Divine Child Archetype within that serves as a regenerative force, leading us toward wholeness. It is the part of us that can strengthen our connection to the past, helping us recall childhood experiences and emotions.

I have found that the Child within is the part of me that offered protection from overwhelming emotions I wasn’t ready to face. She created a make-believe world that was safe enough to live in and held my secrets until I developed enough maturity and individuation to face the past. Only then could I heal from those wounds and then integrate that part of myself into the stronger self I had been developing, making it possible to move forward in reaching my full potential.

Often if we don’t pay attention for too long a time, the fragmented part of us will act out as if to say, Hey, you have been ignoring me for so long. I can’t take it anymore.

That part of us needs to be acknowledged and understood. It needs to be validated. The problem is that when we don’t pay attention, then much of our life energy is used to fight to keep our trauma buried.

Sometimes the trauma is too painful and people are not able to ‘just go there’. But if they seek professional help, there are many techniques to clear the layers in order to get to a place where our wounds can be addressed head on. Our life purpose is to explore through our painful experiences and integrate them into the healthier parts of ourselves so we can shift to who we really came here to be.

My life has come full circle. By the time I was six, I knew my main purpose for being here was to know and be close to God. I wanted that so bad that I envied my six-year-old cousin for dying and going Home to be with God, not having to live through the tribulations of a life that I was already finding difficult.

But that wasn’t my path. I came here to live and to explore the many ways to define God. I came to experience Heaven on Earth and discover my own Truth, finding that everything I sought was already within me, including God.

THE FIRST TEN YEARS

At the center of your being you have the answer.

You know who you are and you know what you want.

~ Lao-tzu ~

When I was very young, I longed for death. Not in a morbid or depressing way. It was more like a feeling of homesickness for something glorious I couldn’t really remember, but was anxious to return to.

By the time I was six I knew exactly how I wanted to spend my life, honoring a God I knew for sure loved me.

I wanted to prove my love in return.

As a small child I had visions of living a life of devotion in a convent as soon as I was old enough. I believed that the whole purpose of being here was to experience a human life before returning to our Divine, spiritual source energy. We come to Earth to learn and to grow into more of the Spiritual Beings that we already are, only to return to our real life on the other side of the veil.

I was born to devout Catholic parents who came from large families of first-generation Italians. My mother was a strong, determined woman who was introduced to suffering when she was a child herself. At the age of six as a first grader¸ she’d been playing with matches and her dress caught on fire. Her severe burns required years of treatment, which left half her body gravely scarred. By the time she was able to return to school, she was so far behind the other children that she became labeled slow. She dropped out in the sixth grade to work in a factory. Family stories reveal she always wore dark heavy clothing to hide her disfigured body. Even in the heat of the summer, she donned a long winter coat to make herself as invisible as she could.

Like my mom, my dad had also struggled in school, not fitting in due to a foreboding shyness and epileptic seizures. He dropped out of high school in his second year and went to work as a carpenter. My parents met and fell in love while in their early 20’s. My mother believed there was only one man in the world for every woman so when she met my dad she believed that God had selected him just for her. When they told their families their plans to marry, my father’s own parents pleaded with my mother to reconsider her decision.

When my mother refused to listen, my dad’s mom tried harder. But, Connie, you will never have a normal life with Joe, she told her. He is a sick man. It wasn’t just her son’s epilepsy that worried her. His seizures had been controlled for years with medication, which worked most of the time. But my father had also been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and although medications quieted his delusions at the time, my grandmother knew how the progression of this disease could tear a life apart.

The thought of giving up her one true love just because of an illness was unfathomable to my mother. Besides, my father’s six-foot stature and soft penetrating eyes defied the slightest hint of a mental illness. When my grandparents couldn’t convince my mother to change her mind, they turned the upstairs of their home into an apartment to keep them close by.

My parents were married in 1939 on Labor Day weekend. They decided to go to Chicago for their honeymoon. Ever since my mother had heard stories of how her own father had run away from home in Buffalo to Chicago at the age of 15, she wanted to experience the city for herself. But just a couple days after the wedding, their honeymoon was cut short when my father had to be hospitalized. The doctors called it a psychotic break, likely caused by a combination of the stress of the marriage and the fact that the day before their wedding, Germany invaded Poland and two days later, Great Britain declared war on Germany. These events awakened the pathology of my father’s delusional mind. It was the first sign of his belief that he had an immense influence on decisions made by governments around the world.

But soon my father was stabilized on new medication so they were able to return home. It wasn’t long before he was well enough to go back to his steady job as a cabinetmaker. My mother took pride in keeping a home for him and they began a life together not much different than any other young couple of the day.

My family lived on the west side of Buffalo in a stable and secure Catholic Italian neighborhood where it appeared that everyone had the same values, customs, and outlook on life. On Fifteenth Street there were rows of modest houses separated by the width of a driveway, though most of the families did not have cars. Five of us were born within a few months of each other in 1943, living in a sequence of houses in the middle of the block. By the time we were 3 years old, we each had a new baby brother or sister. The following year, we started kindergarten together at School No. 38, just around the corner one block up on Vermont Street.

The year I turned five, my father had to be hospitalized again, his delusion triggered this time by a single event halfway around the world. It was 1948 and Gandhi had been assassinated that January. For days my dad was preoccupied with the newspaper articles. At dinner one night, my mom saw how agitated and distracted he was.

My mom tried to reason with him. Joe, this wasn’t your fault she told him. You had nothing to do with this. My dad was so sure that his thoughts were responsible for the acts played out by others. It was unbearable for him to imagine that he caused harm to anyone in this way. But he seemed to respond to my mother’s pleading and finished dinner feeling calmed.

My mom relaxed some the next day when my dad got ready for work and seemed much more himself. She carefully wrapped two bologna sandwiches and placed them in his black metal lunch box along with a thermos of coffee, a package of cookies and an apple. I’m about out of smokes, he said as my mother grabbed a fresh pack of Camels from the carton on top of the icebox. She kissed him goodbye and wished him a good day as he took off to catch the bus on the corner of Connecticut Street.

But that evening, he was late getting home from work. This was unusual and she started to pace. An hour passed before my mother decided to go downstairs and talk to my grandmother. As she started down the back stairway she heard her mother-in-law say Please hurry before she hung up the phone.

Don’t be alarmed, Connie, my grandmother said. Joe is home but he is outside across the street. Confused, my mother went to the front window. It was dark by now but she could see there was some sort of commotion out front. Then she spotted my dad hiding behind a tree shouting something to the small crowd that was gathering. He thinks they are after him, Connie, my grandmother said. The ambulance is on the way.

My dad was taken to Columbus Hospital in restraints. As worried as my mother was, she was relieved that he was safe and in good hands, so he could be stabilized and return to the normalcy of the life they had created.

But this proved to be a deeper, stronger break. He wasn’t responding to new meds the way he had nine years before. After about a week, he was transferred from the psych ward at Columbus Hospital to a convalescent home on the west side of town that had been serving the mentally disabled for more than 30 years.

Nothing the doctors tried this time helped. My dad did not respond to the increase in medications, his epileptic seizures were more frequent, and his overall condition worsened over the next three weeks.

So she could spend her days visiting with my dad, my mother sent my sister and me to live temporarily with my dad’s youngest brother and his family, who lived in a nearby neighborhood. My sister and I already spent a lot of time with our cousins as we were all close in age. Not knowing how long it would be before my dad came home and not wanting me to miss school, my mom transferred me to the local school in their neighborhood, while my sister stayed with my aunt during the day.

Mid-way through the third week, the psychiatrist who was taking care of my father asked my mom to meet him in his office the next day.

That morning, my mom prepared for the appointment by dressing carefully and took an early bus the few blocks to the home. I imagined that meeting happening something like this: knocking on the doctor’s door at precisely 9a.m., the psychiatrist invited her into his office.

In my imagination their conversation would have transpired along these lines: Connie, I am afraid your husband has reached a point where he needs to be institutionalized, he likely said without preamble. I have made arrangements for him to go to the State Mental Hospital on Forest Avenue.

I envisioned my mother taking the pen he handed her in disbelief, knowing she had no choice but to sign the commitment papers.

In 1948, commitment to a mental hospital was a life sentence because once a person was pronounced insane, the prevailing belief was that there was no cure and they should be removed from society.

On that last Sunday before my dad was to be transported to the asylum, I was allowed a rare visit. My aunt and uncle took me and the other children to the convalescent home after the noon Mass. My mother was already there.

I can still see the large double doors that opened into an over-sized parlor with a winding staircase that led to the patients’ bedrooms on the second floor. Children weren’t allowed in the rooms upstairs and I wondered when my dad would come down to the sitting room. But I never got to see my dad that day. My mom explained that he just wasn’t feeling well enough to see us.

When my aunt and uncle were ready to leave late that afternoon, my mom asked me if I wanted to stay with her. I didn’t know what to say because I wanted to leave, but I also wanted to see my father. Noticing my blank stare, my uncle took my hand and said, Come on, honey. Let’s go home and have some dinner.

That evening was laden with an uncomfortable silence. After a meal of Campbell’s vegetable soup and soft-boiled eggs, my uncle went into the living room to sit in his recliner and read the newspaper. He turned the small RCA radio on next to his chair to listen to Amos and Andy. I decided to get up and go into the living room to sit where no one could see me, out of the view of the dining room table where my aunt sat with my sister and cousins. I climbed onto the sofa across the room from where my uncle hid behind his paper. Scared and alone, it felt safe to finally let the tears flow. I was careful to only make sounds when the laughter on the radio was loud enough to drown out my crying. When the laughter would stop, so would I.

Lowering his newspaper, my uncle looked up and asked me what was wrong. When I said nothing he went back to reading. Confident that I could continue to go unnoticed, I waited for another burst of laughter from the radio audience before letting out another loud cry. We repeated this routine a couple more times. Are you sure there isn’t anything wrong? he asked me and each time I assured him there wasn’t. I was relieved when my aunt came in pretending to not notice anything out of the ordinary and announced it was time to go upstairs to bed.

A week later, I returned home and went back to my own school. For the longest time, it seemed all my mother could do was sit on a chair at the top of the front stairs of our apartment and sob, as if her tears would bring my dad bounding up to greet her and make everything okay again.

As much as my mother’s world had changed, nothing in mine really had. I missed my dad, but my life revolved around my friends, who were more like siblings, and around the many hours we spent together. When we weren’t in either church or school, we created elaborate ways of playing Store or School. Hopscotch was popular, as was bouncing a ball against the side of the house in a game of 7-Up, but it was the Saturday afternoons that I lived for each week. We would walk the block over to Connecticut Street, each of us with a quarter in hand, to go to the Circle Theatre. In addition to the main feature that was shown, there were serials of cowboy episodes and cartoons.

My grandmother took over much of my care and my mother focused only on my dad. Her interests shifted from being the wife and mother to some half-life of not quite a widow. My mom supported us with welfare checks, family handouts and the extra money she could earn by cleaning other peoples’ houses. When she wasn’t working, she was at the hospital to see my father, never missing visiting hours on Wednesdays and Sunday afternoons. The role she had once taken seriously as my mother shifted to devotion to my father, although she continued to be a strict disciplinarian, maintaining rigid standards.

Not affectionate by nature, my mother showed her love by making sure I had a strong Catholic foundation, enrolled me in dance classes when I was four and took me and my sister to the zoo and Delaware Park to swim in the summer whenever she could.

My early childhood memories of my mother are a mixture of being nurtured when I was sick with homemade eggnogs or honey and lemon to soothe a sore throat at times, to being told I was bad if I got angry or said something she didn’t agree with. My mother did not see me as an individual person with ideas of my own. Rather, she looked at me as an extension of herself. She believed there was only one way to view the world and that it was her duty to make sure I thought and felt the way she did. Instead of rebelling against this kind of control as my sister did, I continually tried to figure out what she expected of me so she would love me.

Somehow my mother mixed up love and fear, believing fear was the ultimate way to get a child to do the right thing. She believed that if you let a child know you loved them, they wouldn’t fear you so they would have no reason to behave. She always reminded me of that. Mommy doesn’t love bad girls, she'd say, making it clear that the only thing I ever needed to worry about was being good. If you are happy, you must be doing something wrong, she would tell me. When you die and go to Heaven, then you can be happy, but you will never get to Heaven if you are not good.

My grandmother made me feel as though she would love me no matter what I did or said. I never had to worry about losing her love. She would spend time with me polishing my nails or working jigsaw puzzles together. She taught me how to play Canasta. She was one of the first people to get a TV set when they first came out in the late ‘40s. Every afternoon at 5 o’clock, she would call up the back stairs to ask my mom if I could come down to watch Howdy Dowdy with her. Even though the show came on during dinner hour, my mother never refused. Eventually, she just moved our dinner hour to a later time. My grandmother particularly liked all the cowboy shows that were on in those early years like The Lone Ranger and Roy Rogers. During the week we all gathered around the TV in the evening to watch the variety shows like Milton Berle, and Red Skelton.

My grandmother and I also shared a love for God. She had a special devotion to the Blessed Mother, maintaining a perpetual altar in her bedroom in Mother Mary’s honor. Scented candles and various small statues of angels and Jesus as a young boy joined images of Our Blessed Mother, all of which sat on hand-crocheted doilies. Since May and October were set-aside especially for Mary, my grandmother always had fresh flowers on her altar during these months. My mother may have been strict about me following the rules of our religion, but my grandmother nourished my spirit.

I was 2 years old when my grandfather died. He and my grandmother had been married for 47 years. He, like my grandmother, was a loving and devoted parent to their 10 children, several of whom were college-educated teachers. In fact, my grandfather loved all children, working as a truant officer to encourage young people to get the best possible start in life.

My spirit was also nurtured by the nuns at the Good Shepherd Convent. My mother’s youngest sister Tina had entered that convent on Best Street when she was 16 years old. For as long as I can remember, we visited her every Sunday before my father was hospitalized. After that, we only went on special occasions, but it was one of my favorite things to do. I loved the big visiting room with the huge floor-to-ceiling windows and the life-size crucifix between them. Besides having a close affection for my Aunt Tina, we were there often enough for me to make friends with some of the other Sisters. Sister Mary Paul in particular took a special liking to me and whenever she could, she would come to take me out on the grounds for a walk or to play on the swings while my family visited together.

My aunt made a fuss over me whenever I was there, wanting to know details about my days. One Sunday she handed me a package wrapped with plain tissue paper. What is it? I asked, not knowing what to expect.

Just open it, she said sitting on the edge of her chair,