When people ask me how I first moved to Italy twenty years ago, I throw out, “Ohhhh… his name was Giovanni.”

They get a complete picture in their head and give me a knowing laugh.

What I don’t say in the breeziness of cocktail parties, is how that one choice to follow love to the other side of the globe created such upheaval in my life.

Most stress experts tell you that if you change any one major area in your life, you’ll feel stress. That includes your…

• Job.
• Economic status.
• Social status.
• Major relationship.
• Geographical location.
• Change of culture.

I’d changed them all… with a change in language to boot.  I hadn’t really known stress until I moved to Italy.

 

To set the stage of what Italian stress looked like…

 

I was in a foreign land where the people around me made unintelligible sounds. I knew they meant something, I just didn’t know what. My gregarious nature had no outlet. I spent most of my time sitting on the sidelines nodding with great enthusiasm at who knows what? It was exhausting.

I’d left behind a professional acting career that I adored. Being a professional actress in my new home town was like being a high-end hair stylist living in a land of people who shaved their heads. There was no work in sight. And no extra cash to soothe the stress with that great American drug: Shopping.

My new life in Italy also called into question everything I’d held as a constant truth in my daily world. My moral code. My abilities. My bravura.

Laws seemed contradictory and flexible depending upon the circumstances. The things I’d learned you “don’t do”… they not only did, they did it openly!

It didn’t help not knowing the rules of the culture I’d moved into. More often than not, my only external feedback was rolling-tongue gibberish or someone stopping me dead in my tracks.

It made me feel like a star basketball player lost on a soccer field, with no clue to what the game was all about. I’d pick up the metaphorical ball ready to show off my dribbling skills… and the referee would blow the whistle.

“What??” I’d exclaim.

“You don’t do that here,” they’d explain.

Then, they’d kick the ball and I’d say, “Wait! You can’t do that. It’s against the moral rules of the game.”

“What are you talking about?” They’d laugh, and shake their heads. “It’s what you do.”

Needless to say, it wore me down, whistle by whistle. I never felt like a loser. But doggonit, I wanted a win of some sort. Any sort.

Plus, I missed my like-minded friends and tribe of my Unity church back in the US.

Suddenly, here I was living in a Catholic country where I didn’t even understand what the priest was saying during holy mass. I just knew it was borderline aerobic. They got up and down a lot during their service, and beat their chests chanting something in unison. It took two pairs of ruined pantyhose from all the kneeling, standing, and sitting—plus one blinding headache from trying to keep up with the language—to decide Catholicism wasn’t for me.

In short… everything I’d used to form my sense of self up until then was no longer in play.

Sure, the Italian scenery was pretty, the food was fantastic and the people were super likeable, but it wasn’t enough to ease the stress. Not when you’re trying to push against the whole Universe.

But, like I said, stress and illumination can go hand in hand if we let it.

In my case, my Divine Soul did a great job of leading me to a major revelation, which catapulted me out of stress and straight into deeper illumination.

 

The story of resurrection and illumination happened in a Catholic church of all places.

 

I went inside the church that day to escape from the sticky smoldering 100° heat of that Italian summer day. Nobody had air conditioning back then. My home was like a sauna. It was the hottest summer on record. With nowhere else to go, I sunk down on the bench of a third row pew of the empty church. The coolness of the darkened interior seeped into my pores and soothed my soul.

My conditioning wanted me to be busy. To DO something. But I didn’t want to face the heat outside. Or fall asleep inside the church and start snoring with saliva running out of the corner of my open mouth.

With nothing else to do, I contemplated the Catholic cross sitting on the altar in front of me. I tried to value the beauty of the workmanship of the broken body of Jesus hanging from its wings. It hurt to look. An image so graphic, so lifelike, was foreign to my Protestant upbringing. The churches I’d known had all been very proud of having “taken Jesus off the cross” and put him in their hearts. Of course, how well they do that is a matter of individual courage of letting go of ego-centric power games. Some are better at it than others.

Although I’ve had many wonderful teachers in my life, Jesus was my first love and strongest influence because he taught me the basics. He taught me the alchemy of transformation using Unconditional Love. With his personal guidance, I moved from an ego-based world-view towards a heart-based state of Unconditional Love. After my car accident where I first saw the physical world in its Divine Light form as an adult, he answered a lot of my questions afterwards. He was explicit in his insistence that I change my spiritual language away from my traditional teachings. It was my time to get outside the box of Christianity and speak of the alchemy inherent in ALL religions. A Catholic priest told me the same thing years later. “You can touch people, Glenn, that I never will.” Go figure. Those are other stories for other days.

Back to church and the juicy illumination part of this story.

Between seeing Jesus hanging up there on the altar and my turbulent emotional state, it gave me some serious food for thought. My mind flashed onto a book that had gotten sold by mistake in my moving garage sale. Published in the 1920’s by the Italian government, it was a collection of government records from the time of Jesus.

My eyes became transfixed on the cross as different things I’d read came to mind. In their reports to Rome, the government officials were matter-of-fact—even a little bored—about this man called Jesus. It was clear that controlling the crowds and filling out reports was nothing more than another piece of grunt work they did to make a living. One low ranking fellow even said (roughly translating), “In my estimation, he’s no big deal. We’ll keep an eye out to see if the rabble-rousers grow in number.”

“What was it like that day?” I wondered. “How much has the story changed in the retelling of it?”

That was enough to ignite my imagination and time travel to witness the event first hand.

In my mind’s eye, I imagined that low level government worker standing to one side of the crowd, arms crossed in indifference. Dark eyes over a long nose checked out a pretty girl and he stood up straighter. She flicked curly brown hair over one shoulder and looked at him through lowered eyelashes as she passed by. I smiled at the timelessness of human interaction.

 

Then something strange happened. The very air shifted into a kind of other-worldliness.

 

It all became so real. Sounds of voices rose in my ears. My nose wrinkled against the smells of sweat and fear in the air. Perverse excitement from the people around me created a tinny taste on my tongue. From the midst of that jostling crowd, I looked up at Jesus with blood dripping down off his limp dying body.

“Has he said the famous words, yet?” I wondered with the detached curiosity of a pure onlooker. “Father, forgive them, for they know not know what they are doing.” (*1)

“Oh my God!” My hands flew to my face as a sudden horrific realization flushed through me. “What have we done?”

The vibrations of shock were enough to pull me out of the vision and back into my own time. Once again, I was looking at a piece religious art on the church’s altar.

That’s when it hit me. My current emotional pain was nothing compared to the pain his body must’ve held in the moment of his crucifixion.

I burst into tears and sobbed like a baby, the sound echoing off the stain glassed windows around me. I cried for him. For me. His mother. The people who knew him. And all the people since then who’ve done such horrible things in his name.

When my tears of release subsided, another revelation hit me when spontaneous words popped out of my mouth.

“Forgive me,” I whispered in self-forgiveness. “I know not what I’ve been doing.”

He openly demonstrated the value of not judging when he said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not know what they are doing.”  (*1)

Sure, I’d heard that quote spouted with great piety by people my whole life. To the point that my ears had shut down to it. I’d always thought he was showing us how to forgive others.

This time, though, his often quoted words transformed into personal recognition.

The minute I said it, I realized how the bulk of my stress had come from self-judgement projected out to the new world I was living in. I hadn’t realized until right then what I’d been doing to myself.

That realization created an alchemical reaction in my being. Divine Light filled me on all levels. It washed through me in wave after wave of pure Unconditional Love.

 

Stress and illumination started to become one.

 

When that expansion of Love completed its cycle, the overriding sense was relief. My burden was being lifted. I rested in that space of deep peace for a while.

The trance state of that other-time vision was one thing. Now, I was coming out of the trance state of my everyday life, the one that my stress had created. I noticed the deep smell of incense in the church for the first time. The oak rich aroma of old wood polished with loving care over the years tickled my nose. A bird chirped outside.

Then the second revelation hit me. This time, through a question.

What was the point of him dying on the cross—and then resurrecting himself three days later—if it wasn’t to show us that we could do the same in our lives? After all, he’d flat out said, “The things I can do, you can do and greater.”(*2)

Other popular phrases floated in my mind.

“It’s not me who does the work, but the Father within me,” (*3)

“I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you.” (*4).

I already understood how there was no separation. The famous car accident took care of that. But something stirred inside of me, calling me to connect the dots. Make new connections. Find new meanings.

My Divine Soul  guided me to a pivotal decision: Put everything in my life on the cross. EVERYTHING I’d been resisting and even what I didn’t recognize yet. Don’t hang on to anything. Let it ALL go. Yes, even Giovanni.

“Okay,” I thought. “I will.”

The guidance that came next was clear.

• Give it to God/the Father/Divine Spirit/Divine Light/Father-Mother-God/Divine Light Vibrations/it doesn’t matter what you call it… just give it up.
• Let it die.
• And, in three days, it WILL resurrect into something new. For your highest good and the highest good of all. That’s a promise.

So I did. In my imagination, my whole life was like a cloak made up of all my hopes and dreams, expectations and delusions, all its old hurts and current loves. I draped it on the cross like you would a coat on a standing coat hanger.

To some, that might have been a very odd connecting of the dots. To others, it might make perfect sense. It doesn’t matter in either case.

What does matter to me—and could matter to you—is that it worked.

Because something shifted inside of me, the circumstances that were causing me such distress began to shift within three days. And that’s when I understood on more profound levels than ever. Crossing over from living in my ego-intellect to moving deeper into the Divine Heart space was the key to it all. It’s from there you can truly hear the voice of your innermost Divine Soul Knowing. We’re infinite beings so there’s no limit to how deep you can go in living your Light.

After that, I went on to form an Improvisational Theater Company and Cultural Association that focused on personal and Inner Growth. In it’s heyday, it serviced fifteen schools… four different groups in two different towns… and attracted people of all ages and professional backgrounds. I’ve since let it go so I could swim in deeper waters of life.

At the time, though, it was a great lesson of learning how to move lightly—and express myself fully—in a dense world where I felt like a stranger in a strange land.