Surviving Me: And Loving the Grace That Follows

By Leatha Lockhart

What if, as a young married woman, you discovered the outrageous truth that vital life skills of survival and interaction that you should have learned as a child were so chaotically distorted and convoluted that you had no grasp how to trust or love anyone or anything! Imagine feeling so exposed that you would do anything to stay hidden.

Follow this true-life journey through dangerous waters of gut-wrenching falsehoods, close-call survivals, and my long, slow climb to truth, integrity, and vulnerability. Divine consciousness led me home.

The voice of this book peels away the flesh to get to the marrow of the emotional work it takes to be free, no matter what!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Mar 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504352208

Leatha Lockhart

Leatha Lockhart lives in north Idaho with Len, her life partner of fifteen years. They share nine acres with two German shorthair dogs, four cats, hundreds of birds, and dozens of deer. They often boat on nearby lakes and love spending four seasons in the north. Axiom is buried near his barn and willow tree.

Book preview

Surviving

Me

And Loving The Grace that follows

LEATHA LOCKHART

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Copyright © 2016 Leatha Lockhart.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Balboa Press

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Bloomington, IN 47403

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Photography by Coral DeWilliam Studer

ISBN: 978-1-5043-5219-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-5218-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-5220-8 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date: 3/14/2016

CONTENTS

Chapter One: Beginnings

Chapter Two: Light Work Healing Workshops

Chapter Three: The Humble Years: Learning To Surrender

Chapter Four: The Uncomfortable Process Of Liberation

Chapter Five: Axiom

Chapter Six: Vulnerability

Chapter Seven: Keeping It Simple

Chapter Eight: Trying To Blend In

Chapter Nine: The Healing Years

Chapter Ten: Love

Chapter Eleven: Don’t Always Believe What You Think!

Chapter Twelve: Recovery

Chapter Thirteen: Coral & Axiom

Chapter Fourteen: Pain

Chapter Fifteen: Surprises

Chapter Sixteen: Freedom

Chapter Seventeen: No Matter What!

Dedicated to Axiom, My Beloved and Divine Consciousness, which led me to share this story and continues to guide me

CHAPTER ONE

BEGINNINGS

This is a true story, dedicated to truth and clarity. I am eternally grateful to have survived and be able to share it.

My journey began in a family of three children, one older boy and two younger girls. I am the middle girl. Our parents worked hard in the 1950’s and 1960’s, trying to provide us with a normal childhood in Southern California, with two exceptions – we had horses and our family disease was alcohol.

My folks learned early on of my love for horses. When I was 7 years old, Dad brought home a lovely, very tall, buckskin horse. She had been used around the race track and she ran very fast. We named her Buck. I was in heaven. She was too big for me to ride alone, but my father would lift me high into the saddle and I sat behind him as we road down the trail. Soon after our first horse arrived, two more joined the herd. In the city, horses didn’t usually have much room to be ridden but we found places here and there, not too far from where our horses were boarded. My first horse was a black Welsh pony, and of course, I named him Flicka.

My dad, older brother and I were usually the riders. After a year or two of feeding the horses on the way to and from school, we sold the horses, since I had become about the only person riding. We found another horse for me, a beautiful brown and white paint horse, named, of course, Flicka. This time she was already named before she came to our family.

My father was a residential and commercial builder in Southern California but my folks wanted to remove my brother and sister and I from the ever-more present drug culture growing larger in the cities. In 1966, we moved to northern Idaho to live on a large ranch, raising horses, dairy cattle, beef cattle, chickens, thousands of pigs, goats, sheep, and pretty much anything else that lived on a ranch, including rattlesnakes. We worked very hard but it truly was ideal for young teens. My horse on the ranch was a spirited Appaloosa named Smokey. It was love at first sight for me.

My spiritual path wasn’t conscious for me yet, but our family alcohol disease had taught us early how to dodge and weave our way through every day, or attempt to.

I didn’t know alcohol could be a disease then but I could tell our entire family was infected with the addiction, distortion and darkness that causes destruction of families, dreams and tender young hearts.

Our family was, at minimum, the fourth generation on my father’s side of alcohol addiction, but this disease wasn’t openly spoken about in those days. At least not in our family or anyone we knew. We thought we were growing up like everyone else, but this turned out not to be the case. In our family, alcohol was a daily mixed bag of insanity, emotional and physical violence, from 5am to late in the evening. My father always drank at home, rather than in bars. As children, we tried to lay low, do our homework and stay away from the upsets as much as possible. Dinner-time could be especially dangerous, and thousands of times, entire weekends became horror stories. If we went camping or boating, the adults would party plenty and we were spared the private agony until we were back at home and the work-week began. I remember lying in bed at night, praying hard to God for my parents to stop fighting and for crying and the screaming to end.

By my mid-teens, we had moved to the Spokane, Washington area and our family addiction to alcohol began to turn my way. Beer-keg parties after school on Friday evenings, stealing booze from my folks’ bottles and of course, sneaking cigarettes to smoke with my girlfriends while we drank and knew we were in the cool kid’s gang.

My own alcohol addiction began to blossom, unbeknownst to my folks, or me. Amazingly, even though I had lived each day with the emotionally destructive and crippling, twisted, devastating results that occurred with my father’s drinking, I thought I had escaped the traps and the scars. I had no idea how deeply I had emotionally disconnected from life, other people or myself. My horses knew but I did not. What I didn’t see when I looked in the mirror at 17 years old was a deeply sad, angry, manipulating and lost young girl. I wish I had known God more as a much younger child. The soothing comfort of prayer, other than trying to stop the fighting, would have helped to ease the years of torture I felt with the upside-down, inside-out perceptions and distortions of a raging, violent, alcoholic environment. My mother had been raised in very strict religious surroundings as a child and my father’s family indulged in enormous quantities of alcohol. Our family veered away from religious paths but grace was included at holiday meals. We attended church occasionally when I was younger, and in Idaho at times, but our family did not practice a religious philosophy; especially one that included an alcoholic environment. It was quietly understood that our family matters or beliefs were not shared or discussed with anyone. It was not stated but the family secret was kept hidden from those outside general family members or very close