24 Lifetimes of Torture

As I sat at the table of the Council in the Oracle today, something extraordinary happened. For the first time, I felt as though I could truly see them. They have always seen me, I have known that, but today something shifted within me. It was not that they had changed. It was I who had changed. A veil had quietly lifted, allowing me to perceive what had always been present.

The Council began speaking of my recent journey through the authorities: the exhausting battle to receive my Old Age Pension, followed by my return home from the United Kingdom, where I was unexpectedly detained while trying to re-enter Canada. On the surface, these were simply difficult experiences. Yet beneath them, they awakened something far more ancient. They triggered my nervous system, my emotional body, and every corner of my brain into remembering a place of imprisonment.  A place of suffocation, limitation, and powerlessness.

It was a place where there was no room to speak, no possibility of being heard, no hope of being understood. My entire being was screaming, yet no sound could escape. I realized I was not simply responding to present circumstances. I was remembering something much older.

During the session, I was shown what the Council called twenty-four lifetimes. Whether one believes in lifetimes or sees them as symbols of the soul's journey is not important. What mattered was the truth they revealed. In each of these lives, I experienced some form of suffering that ended with my voice unheard, my value unseen, and my humanity forgotten. Again and again, I left this human plane carrying the same imprint, that I could be discarded like a soiled napkin, as though my only purpose had been to endure torture.

As difficult as that realization was, another truth emerged alongside it. The torture itself had shaped something within me. It continually drove me toward the very center of suffering, where I searched for one more breath, one more glimpse of life, one more reason to remain present. Somewhere within every impossible moment, I discovered resilience. I found life waiting quietly beneath despair.

What surprised me most was recognizing how familiar suffering felt. It was not that I wanted it or welcomed it, but I understood it. I knew how to exist inside it. It had become a landscape my soul had walked so many times that, in an odd and heartbreaking way, there was even a sense of safety there. Familiarity can disguise itself as comfort, even when it is born of pain.

Then my thoughts returned to Scotland.

My journey through Scotland and England was far more than a holiday. It became a pilgrimage into the landscape of my own DNA. Standing upon ancient land, walking where my ancestors once walked, I could almost hear the whispers carried by the wind. They spoke not only of history but of endurance, courage, and freedom. I felt connected to a lineage that existed long before the Iron Age, before kingdoms rose and fell, before history was written. It was as though the land itself was reminding me of something my soul had forgotten.

We are not born to live imprisoned by fear.

We are born to breathe freedom.

That realization opened another door of understanding. I saw that we can never truly know the light until we have stood in the darkness. Darkness has its own purpose. It reveals what light is. Yet within darkness there is often no space to be seen. There is no place to be received, no invitation to be heard. We come to understand the gift of light because we have known its absence.

As I sat with all of this, I realized I had a choice.

Today, I choose tenderness.

Not because life has suddenly become easy, but because tenderness feels like the first gentle step toward freedom. I choose to be tender with myself, tender with those around me, and tender with the unfolding of life itself. I am beginning to understand that space and time are sacred partners. Together they create the vessel into which everything is born. The question is not whether that vessel will be filled, but with what.

Today, I choose to fill it with tenderness.

For many years I believed love was the answer. I still do, yet the word love no longer feels large enough to contain what I am discovering. It has become wrapped in expectation, romance, possession, and countless human interpretations. It has been shaped by stories that often leave us longing rather than free.

The word that is finding me now is space.

Space asks nothing.

Space simply allows.

Within space there is room for breath, for healing, for mystery, for grief, for joy, and for becoming. Within space there is no greed, no hunger, no anger, no lust. Space does not need to possess because it already contains everything.

Perhaps space is the purest expression of love I have ever encountered.

Perhaps love is not something we seek or hold onto. Perhaps it is the spaciousness that allows everything to exist exactly as it is, while quietly inviting it to become more.

As I continue walking this path, I feel something softening within me. Not because all my questions have been answered, but because I no longer need them to be.

I am learning that I am not separate from nature.

I am not separate from space.

I am space.

And in that spaciousness, for the first time, I feel the possibility of coming home to myself. Free!

By Maggie Calder

July 25, 2026