Field Notes on Letting Go: A Memoir of Truth-Seeking, Healing, and Personal Freedom

By Janet Howard

When Janet Howard's 25-year marriage fell apart, her life came crumbling down. As she sat in the rubble, she realized that the only way to move forward was to confront a painful past and learn to let go. Leaving her 33-year career, Janet headed to Hawaii to put an end to what was and find the beginning of what's next.

Embarking on a vision quest, she immersed herself in the natural world and received a message of trust and divine guidance. She started to see nature as a safe place to learn valuable lessons for navigating life and healing. Janet offers hope and insights through inspirational essays and heart-centered stories to help others feel less alone with life's challenges and instead embrace difficult life experiences as initiations, offering wisdom and hidden gifts. On her spiritual journey, Janet realized that, creating real change in the world, - environmentally, socially, politically, spiritually, - starts with ourselves. Heal ourselves, heal each other, and heal the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9798218119706

Book preview

THE STORY STARTS WITH FEAR

I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. But things were not as they appeared. I was raised in an unsafe household. I was terrorized. It’s only recently that I admit that to myself. In a family where perception and reality were at separate ends of the spectrum, it was hard for me as a little girl to know what was real. That is not the story. That is the backdrop to the story.

The story starts with fear. Fear as a resting place. It is a story of healing—and hidden gifts.

Before I get started, let us light a candle and create our sacred space together, a place to hold ourselves safe with whatever is going on in our lives today. Breathe in and breathe out. Good morning, spirit team, spirit council, north, south, east, west, upper, lower, and middle worlds. Thank you for guiding me. Thank you for teaching me. Thank you for loving me unconditionally. Thank you for protecting me from negative interference. Ong namo guru dev namo. Ong namo guru dev namo. Ong namo guru dev namo. I bow to the teacher within. I bow to divine wisdom. I bow to the teachers in my life.

This is how I start each morning—a flame in the darkness and an intention for the day.

STARTING OVER

It was 2015 and I was unpacking books, placing them on a shelf. Newly single, after the end of my 25-year marriage, I was settling into a renovated fixer-upper located on a quiet dead-end street in Amherst, a college town in western Massachusetts. My husband left and I had landed in the sanctuary of my new home, starting over. My daughter Frances was a freshman in high school and my son Grafton lived in a tiny house at his dad’s. As I was putting books on the shelf, I came upon a journal from our days in Brooklyn, New York, where my husband and I lived from 1988 to 2004. I casually leafed through it, stumbling upon a dream I had documented that I had no recollection of. It was a dream from when I was pregnant with my son Grafton. The dream entry was dated 1:45 p.m. on September 10, 1993—22 years earlier. The journal was full of entries both about recovering from our first baby’s death—Joe Moody Brown—and chronicling my fear, love, and everything else through our subsequent pregnancy with Grafton. I described the man in my dream as a messenger or a medicine man.

We were outside. He was seated at a table under a tree. He was of Indigenous heritage. He spoke to me without introducing himself or explaining why we were there together. I interrupted and asked what was going on. He said something that I could not hear. I put my hand to my ear. I am sorry, I am hard of hearing. I cannot hear you.

He said, That’s not true. (Which I heard.)

I just said I was hard of hearing because I didn’t want you to feel bad.

You aren’t meant to be married in this lifetime. I started leaving him—floating away. He said, You’ll see. He said it like a gentle song. You’ll see.

Then there was an intense vibration, and I was sucked out of my body. I was flying through the atmosphere—up in the stars. I had no fear. I was void of fear. It was beautiful flying through the universe—completely free and peaceful. I blinked my eyes. It was crystal clear as we flew over a small town, blanketed in snow with a church steeple.

I was sucked back into my physical body, standing on the earth with my arms stretched up. I shouted up to him—up in the sky, I love my husband. I want to grow old with him! But no words came out of my mouth.

I woke up and told my husband about the dream. He said it was not nice of the man to say that to me. And I forgot all about it. I loved him, and I was pregnant with our baby. I never read that entry again until I was separated and had moved into my new home, 22 years later. Why did I have the dream? What made me open the journal and leaf through the pages that day?

Occasionally, the dream drifted back to me for contemplation. I lived in that small town with the blanket of snow. I was a different person than when I had that dream. I was on a healing journey—healing from the inside out. I thought to myself, Maybe the messenger and I will meet again—or maybe he guides me every day.

Finding the journal as I unpacked my things felt oddly comforting. Things were rolling out as intended. The dream messenger told me I wasn’t meant to be married and I received it a second time as I unpacked my things. I thought, Maybe it’ll be okay.

So that is where we start this story—with fear and a readiness to dig into it.

DIVINELY GUIDED

I was born in 1963 in Manhasset, New York, raised in an upper middle-class family. We met the criteria as pillars of the community. But the book cover was a facade—the perfect family was the cover photo and the complexity lay within the pages.

BRAIN DRAIN

Envision the strainer basket in a kitchen sink; visualize it at the end of preparing a meal. Imagine the debris - little pieces of herbs, onions and carrot tops caught in the strainer. Think of the pieces like memories of an experience and the strainer as the brain that holds them. My brain did not strain my traumatic memories. When I was traumatized as a young child, my brain protected me by dumping experiences, without holding onto anything. Trauma that shaped me lay murky in the depths of my unconscious. Not only did I not share my experiences with anyone else, but I did not share them with myself. I didn’t let myself or anyone know, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. I call it the brain drain.

While I couldn’t recall many events of my childhood, my brain had me forget for a reason and should be thanked for its protection. My brain saved me. There were signs that something was amiss: nightmares, night terrors, irritability, startle response, stomachaches, living in a dream world, using food for comfort at an early age, body image issues, and worry and confusion over what was real. It took my adult years to look at them, acknowledge them, and figure it out.

I screamed at night for years. I walked in my sleep and had nightmares. Once my parents found me walking out the door and down the driveway, and another time, I was found climbing out the window. I have woken up with my head where my feet should have been in my sleeping bag, confused and scared. On one occasion I threw the lamp next to my bed. In my dreams, I was chased, attacked and killed. A common dream was not only being held down but simultaneously tickled in my gut. As a child, my scream would wake me up from my sleep. The sound would echo away, and I’d be left in my own confusion, tears streaming down my face. On one occasion, I woke up in the arms of my friend’s mother, as she gently stroked my head and I cried. I woke up confused, not knowing what was happening. It felt nice to have her comfort me so lovingly. I still feel the memory.

One summer, during college, I lived with two friends. One morning, they told me I talked in my sleep, saying and describing things that made me turn gray with shock and repulsion. I was a virgin. I was innocent. My nighttime voice scared me. Who was that? Why would I say terrible, scary things about myself? I didn’t know but changed the subject, brushing past it, and my friends let me. To this very day, I haven’t thought about it very much—it was that upsetting to me.

Once after knee surgery, the nurses were giggling about what I had said to them as I came out of anesthesia, before I was clear-headed. It made me nervous and uncomfortable. I didn’t giggle with them. I wondered what I had revealed. I worried about what I had said when I wasn’t in control of my voice.

As an adult, my screams woke up my husband with a startle on a regular basis. He comforted me and made me feel safe. While I fell right back to sleep, my husband, heart pounding, felt everything and had trouble relaxing after the intensity of the experience. The terror embodied in the dream would permeate my energy field and then my brain would step in, like my protector, and make sure the terror couldn’t have access to me. It was like a guard dog, protecting me from unmanageable, mind-losing fear. I tried to hold on to the moment because I wanted to remember—I wanted to understand—but it always slipped away. The memory tried to sneak in, and the guard dog would wake up and chase it off. I have recorded my dreams on and off ever since I was a girl. I knew there was valuable information there. My greatest fear was losing my mind. When I briefly connected with the terror in the nightmare, before the dog chased it off, I felt like I was.

The brain drain impacted my life. My childhood report cards wrote of a student living in a dream world—and I did. I can see my little self in class, staring out the window, alone in my daydream. It made recalling the specifics of events difficult. I avoided conversations around politics and other fact-based details. I was embarrassed that I couldn’t keep track of wars, dates, and the names of prominent people. I was not good at arguments or debate because I couldn’t properly relay a course of events. And if questioned or stumped on a date or a detail, I had to admit defeat because I would get confused. In our culture, this speaks to being less intelligent, less in-the-know, less connected. It was a false belief that I took on, that I was not very bright.

If I was nervous or triggered or had something important to convey, my brain might drain, and I barely knew my name, barely knew which way was up. I felt confused. I now know to breathe, and it will pass and often the words that I was looking for come back—they just had to step away for a moment. In therapy, when we got close to something, it would happen. My therapist would witness it. I had no more words or knowledge of what I was about to say, and my jaw would get a deep, powerful pain and I would cry. I would pause, allow myself to feel the physical pain in my jaw and experience the moment with the release of tears and anguish, even if I could not put my finger on what specifically they were about. She had created a safe place for that. Feeling the emotion was healing, even if there were no words to put with it.

While my brain had been a good watchdog, I tried not to listen to it too much because sometimes it worked overtime. It felt like my brain used to make up stories to keep me hopeful so I could keep pushing through. I don’t really have evidence of it except that I noticed it as an adult and imagine the skill was honed at a young age. If I put my head down and muscled through it, without taking in much detail, I’d get to the other side and something wonderful would be there.

As I focused on my healing, my brain started allowing me to remember my past, at a pace I could manage. In dreams, I started connecting with animals and nature. They were established as safe and within their safety, experiences could be revisited, or healing provided. Healing can’t be rushed. It moves at the pace it needs to move at. This fact took me some time to accept because I wanted to put it behind me. It took me a long time to accept that it would be a lifetime of healing. I was fortunate to have an internal protector—a guard dog—especially because I didn’t have one in my life.

The gift from an early age was the ability to follow my gut, to follow my instinct. My inner knowing guided me. I knew what I should do. I knew what I was not interested in. The gut was the decision-maker. It took me time to know this, but fortunately I followed my gut ever since I was a child, and it served me very well. I look back at my life with gratitude. I can see clearly now. I was divinely guided all along. There were hidden gifts that would slowly be unwrapped throughout my life.

SOUL-NOURISHING CAREER

At an early age, I learned that if I wanted to understand something, I had to figure it out for myself. I only trusted things that I saw with my own eyes and touched with my own hands. Growing up, I didn’t listen to my parents’ knowledge, guidance, or stories. What was presented to me as a family unit was not true – so how could I believe anything I was told?

It was 1986 and my boyfriend (and future husband) and I moved to New York City. He was a photographer. I was an English major and had not given a lot of thought to my career. I had no interest in living in a way that lacked integrity and didn’t want to waste time pretending or under false pretense. I had a couple of false job attempts before I found the place for me, where I didn’t feel I was wasting time—where my gut was happy.

***

I looked at the clock again. It was not moving. It seemed stuck. Time was not progressing. This was no way to live, wishing time would pass. I needed a new job. Working in public relations was not for me. What should I do? The environment popped into my head. Bumping into a clock that would not move helped me make a change and nudge me in the right direction.

No connections. No guidance. No internet or cell phones, for that matter. There was the voice in my head and an ad in The New York Times. I took a job with the Council on the Environment of New York City. They had a contract with the New York City Department of Sanitation to put paper recycling programs in businesses and I was responsible for hospitals. This was the right direction for me. Just a pile of manila folders and me and cold calls to get the hospitals involved. I was trained to walk the office spaces, calculate the amount of paper generated, set up the bins and the training, and coordinate pickup with one of the paper recycling vendors. I was comfortable with the position and I liked it a lot.

I had been there for about a year when I was approached by a consulting group from Louisiana and Texas that had been hired to develop a medical waste plan for the city. Staten Island’s Fresh Kills landfill was closing. Our role was to understand health care waste. What did it consist of and how could it best be managed? I was part of a group that hand-sorted thousands of pounds of medical waste in all five boroughs. Each day I was picked up at the crack of dawn from my apartment in Brooklyn and off we would go, with other crew members, to sort random samples of health care waste.

Around the same time, medical waste started washing up on beaches and there was concern over the potential to transmit HIV through health care waste. With Fresh Kills landfill closing and hospital incinerators shut down due to community opposition, there was a high focus on health care waste and its export to other states. Hospitals tended to over red bag the waste, or in other words, treat noninfectious waste as if it were infectious due to fear of disease transmission. It was an expensive proposition, increasing costs by hundreds of thousands of dollars per year by treating pizza boxes, diapers, and greetings cards in a manner that was five times more expensive. Sorting the waste demonstrated that there were wasteful practices that could be improved with better setup of receptacles, signage, and increased training throughout the health care facilities.

A year later, the project was complete, and I was laid off. And because I was naive, I did not see it coming. I felt like the life rug was pulled out from under me and cried worried tears. What should I do now? I remember crying in my bedroom, two weeks before Christmas, unemployed. I dried my tears when an idea popped into my head. The recommendations garnered from the project saved hospitals a lot of money. I pulled out my electric typewriter (yup!) and wrote a pitch letter to every major medical center in New York City I could think of, proposing that I could help them reduce waste haulage fees through improved waste management.

I only heard back from one of the targets, Beth Israel Medical Center, which is now part of Mount Sinai. In February 1991, I was hired as the first medical waste manager and reported to Tony, the vice president of facilities who used to smoke in his office, with his cigarette clenched in his teeth and a secretary who typed his memos for him. Old school. I adored Tony and he had my back in a tough environment of downsizing and mergers. We did reduce waste fees—by over $600,000