Aluna Raphael is a spiritual intuitive, a healer — and a survivor of severe childhood abuse. Her story brings hope to all who still live in the shadows of memory and fear. Of the insights she has achieved that have given her the grace to create a beautiful life and family, she says:

We are not our story. We are not what happened to us. And I honestly don't think you can fully heal trauma until you get that.

Diane: Aluna, what happened to you as a child?

Aluna Raphael: I was born into a family that was basically unable to perceive Light. There was physical, sexual, and emotional abuse in every possible way, and I didn't have just one abuser, I had many, many abusers. In fact, I don't really think there was anyone in my family of origin who was not abusive in some way. The conditions of my childhood were pretty awful.

When I was really young, I still remembered my connection to God. But when I was eight years old, my life was so painful — I was literally suicidal — that I begged God to get me out of here. What happened then was that somehow the vulnerable part of myself stepped out and another part stepped in. This new part was able to be numb, to shut down. And so I survived.

Diane: What was your life like after that?

Aluna: When you grow up in a screwed up reality, that's your expectation of what the world is. You just keep magnetizing abuse around you. That's what I did.

By the time I was thirteen, I was a junky living in the streets. I had run away from home and was doing whatever had to be done to get money — dealing drugs, prostitution, "making" doctors. . . I did just about everything that possibly could be done from the darker realms of life. I stayed pretty immersed in that lifestyle for what seemed a long time.

Then when I was fifteen I entered into a relationship. The man was ten years older than I and was an alcoholic. But somehow he got off alcohol and I got off hard drugs. We got married and moved to the West Coast.

But we were both basically crazy. We ended up doing drugs again. I finally left him.

Then when I was twenty years old I decided I had to kick my cocaine habit. I went to my grandmother's house on a lake, in a very secluded area, and there I connected with nature and just stopped myself from using.

At about the same time, I met a man who had experienced an abusive childhood similar to mine. . .

You know, it is really hard to listen to someone who hasn't been locked inside the closet, as I was — they can't know the pain and fear unless they've been there. So until this time I hadn't been able to really let anyone in.

But this very special person came into my life, and he placed in my hand the book Illusions by Richard Bach. And it was the spiritual perspective I found in that book that brought me back to myself.

Until I read Illusions, I'd had a really hard time thinking that God was someone I wanted in my life. A lot of what had been done to me as a child had the flavor of "Christianity" — it was done "in God's name." But Illusions gave me a more loving glimpse of the force that lies beyond the physical.

Diane: Did therapy help resolve some of your issues, as well?

Aluna: I've been though lots of therapy. Some of it took on abusive connotations, and none of it had any true spiritual basis — although I did have one therapist who actually told me that all my experiences as a child had been brought about by karmic consequences from past lives. I tried to strangle that one with a telephone cord. At that stage of my evolution, I was so into blame — there was no way I could hear something like that. When your life's events have been really horrific and traumatic, it takes a huge shift in consciousness to be able to hear that there is some purpose behind it all.

Anyway, my spiritual process began as a result of receiving the book Illusions from my friend. But it didn't anchor very firmly in my life until I was in my mid twenties, when I received Shaktipat from Gurumayi.[1] That event awakened an energy within me that was not like anything I had known before. It absolutely changed the quality of everything in my experience. But it also brought forward everything that needed to be cleared. All the toxicity in my life began rising to the surface. I was in utter chaos for the next four or five years.

But there was also commitment. My single prayer at that time was, "Please, God, do not let me forget the feeling of being absolutely One with all life." And so, as I moved through all the different challenges that came along, I kept coming back to that as the balance point. I recognized that place of Oneness in myself as home.

At a much more evolved state in my understanding, I did really get that I had chosen to come into this lifetime. But unlike that therapist I mentioned, I would not say it was wholly a result of "karmic consequences." Although the choice was in some ways connected to past lives, it was a choice. My intent was to come into this world in absolute darkness so that in one lifetime I could move the whole way from that into Ascension.

You see, even one person moving from absolute darkness to Ascension in a single lifetime anchors that possibility into the consciousness of humanity. My horrific childhood wasn't about being "punished" for something I'd done in the past. It was about doing something really important in this lifetime, something valuable.

Diane: You mentioned abuses in therapy. What are you speaking of specifically?

Aluna: It took on different faces. When I was a teenager I was blatantly molested by a therapist. But most of the abuse was the suggestion that I was "broken," and what they were doing was about "fixing" me.

For example, when I was eight years old, I was "committed" — put into a closed-door mental facility — for eight months. And while I was there, no one ever addressed the fact that I was being physically and sexually abused at home. No one ever suggested that my home situation might have something to do with the fact that I was "losing it." I was basically told: You've got some broken things in your mind and we're going to fix them.

Diane: That's pretty heavy for an eight-year-old.

Aluna: Yes! It was really devastating. And I was locked up with a lot of crazy kids. So there were many situations of abuse that occurred in that setting, as well.

Later, when I was twelve years old, my stepfather molested me. I told my mother what had happened, and two weeks later I found myself again locked up in a mental hospital. And the condition of my release was that I be able to get along with my stepfather!

Their entire goal was to keep the family unit together! They went so far as to tell my mother that it was her fault my stepfather was molesting me. They told her that she had planted those ideas because she herself had been molested as a kid.

Now, I'm not saying that the dynamics of my mother's life didn't unfold that way. Clearly, my mom chose a man based on her own history, yada yada yada.

But to just blatantly come out and say, It's your fault, and you've got to get along with him. That was pretty screwed up.

Diane: And that ideology is still supported in much of the psychological community today, is it not?

Aluna: It is, indeed.

Diane: Let's talk about the therapist you tried to choke with the phone chord. What she told you, that it was your karma to be treated as you were, is what is still being said today in the New Age and spiritual community: We create our reality and everything that happens to us. Do you believe that?

Aluna: Absolutely. But that's different from the concept of "karmic punishment." I think some of us could walk into the very first lifetime of experience, with no karmic debts, and still choose to be in a family that can't "see" us or recognize the Light Being that we are. We don't need karma to explain that, because there is some quantum level of learning that takes place in a situation like that if we're present for it. I truly believe that.

But I also believe that we function on two levels. You can hear Drunvalo in a workshop say to you that on February 18, 2013, everything will shift. And then you can hear him talk about what we need to do over the next fifty years. Because he's both living in the ordinary perspective of 3D reality and also seeing things from a higher perspective.

On one level, from a "higher" point of view, my meditations indicate to me that what I did in a previous life was to commit suicide. So far I haven't really gone into that too much, because there's been so much in this lifetime that I needed to be concerned with. But slowly I've been willing to go back and look. Because making a decision to take one's own life does definitely set up a whole paradigm for subsequent lifetimes. We are going to find ourselves faced with resolving foundational issues that we can't run away from.

But on the everyday level — the one we need to be aware of as a society — children are absolutely innocent and are not to blame for the things that happen to them. You hear it so often, where a kid has this horrible life and someone says, "Oh well, they chose it." I don't see how we can say that to a child. In compassion, we can't hold a child responsible for the abuse. Rather, we need to ask ourselves why this abused child has shown up in our reality.

Maybe abused children are here to teach us to open our hearts and to protect them. If we are saying only, "they chose this," then we are not learning our own lessons of choice. If I witness something that pulls at my heart, perhaps it is because the persons involved have made the sacrifice to come in so that I can witness that. Perhaps they are there in order to open my heart at that moment, so that I can be present for what my guidance offers me to do.

Diane: When you go back and look at your family and their behavior, albeit abusive, do you recognize it as a distortion of love?

Aluna: Yes. Absolutely.

I had a profound healing experience take place once. I had been working with Star People, who were helping me during one phase of my learning, and I went into meditation one day and remembered a memory I had previously repressed. It was a memory of my father's molesting me.

What happened in my meditation was that I merged into my father's body and experienced what he was experiencing when he was molesting me. And that's how I knew that it really was out of love. It was really screwed-up, of course — but it was the only way he knew to express love.

Then I went even further, back into my father's own childhood, and witnessed through his eyes some of the many abuses that had taken place for him. The abuse to him had not been sexual, but there were things that had caused him to totally shut down his capacity to express love. And that really did bring me to an understanding.

I can tell you, if I hadn't been through that experiential process, I don't think I could have "gotten" the love that is behind sexual abuse. I certainly couldn't have known it from my reading. I don't think I could have come to that conclusion in therapy. It had to be experientially anchored into me.

Diane: I do know the process you're speaking of. You can go back and get the innocence within the abusive act. But that doesn't mean that what they do is conscionable.

Aluna: Right. And I'm not advocating anything like unconditional acceptance of these behaviors. But I do think it is absolutely essential in the course of our healing to reach a place of unconditional love, regardless of what anyone has ever done to us. We have to stop seeing other people as the "roles" that they are playing in our lives, and begin to see them as the higher beings that they really are. Then we become aware of them as "actors" who simply played these parts in our lives.

Here's an example of what I mean: Robin Williams is currently playing an absolutely villainous role. Do I love him as an actor any less because he's chosen this role? I think if we look from a higher perspective of the reality we're in, even though it is very real in our ordinary awareness, from a higher perspective we are these great method actors who have fully assumed our roles. But the role is not who we are. We are not our story. We are not what happened to us. And I honestly don't think you can fully heal trauma until you get that.

Diane: So when did you reintegrate the part that left at such an early age?

Aluna: That happened in an Earth/Sky workshop with Drunvalo in 1999. I had just come from spending three days with Gangaji,[2] and then I went to Earth/Sky, and that's when I "walked back in" and integrated my whole beingness from when I had separated at the age of eight.

My guides actually brought this woman to me who gave me an understanding of how the beings I was directly connected with in this lifetime were the ones who actually loved me the most in the Spirit realm! She made me aware of how we all "sat down" when I was planning this lifetime, and they had asked me in Spirit, "Okay, what are you working on?" And out of their great sense of love for me, they came in to play the parts of the villains.

What a sacrifice they made to do that for me in this lifetime! I really got that.

Now, again on the everyday level, this understanding doesn't mean that I will let my Mom be around my kids if she can't talk to them respectfully. But it does mean that I can honor whatever her life path is in 3D reality, and know that out of compassion she chose to play her role to help me evolve.

Diane: Are you in contact with your parents?

Aluna: My father died, but I'm in contact with my mother and with my father's mother. I'm also in contact with my sister, whose experiences were similar to mine. I don't really have much of a relationship with any of the others because. . . you know, there are boundaries. But I do have a fairly functional relationship with my mother, although we are three thousand miles apart.

Diane: You spoke earlier about a part of yourself "separating" from the rest. Did your dissociation show up as Multiple Personality Disorder?

Aluna: No. What that separation meant for me was that this very psychic, very alive child part of me just left. She was the part that could pick up on everything and could fully perceive her connection with God. But she was so overwrought with pain, she just couldn't function any more.

Diane: I'm thinking about your sister and other survivors of abuse. Many of them don't recover. What would you say about that?

Aluna: I've been trying to figure out what allows someone to be willing to go back in — because you really do have to do that, go back in, feel it, and let it go. And it's frightening.

But it's like you're hiding in the closet. You're so scared of all the monsters outside, and yet there are these really powerful angels sitting right there next to you who will help you walk out and acknowledge the pain and know that you don't have to "be" those experiences any more.

You know the movie What Dreams May Come? The female character in that movie was in this totally desolate place, shut down completely so that no one and nothing could get in. It took Absolute Love to reach her. It really does take Absolute Love to reach someone like that.

Diane: Don't you have to be on the path of consciousness as well?

Aluna: I think ultimately we all are on the path of consciousness. But we're hypnotized. We're in this desolate hypnotic state. The conditioning in our culture supports that.

My sister, for example, does what I call "retail therapy." She thinks the new car and the new house will help. And meanwhile she works at a job she hates for a man who mistreats everyone, and she believes that this is what she must do to survive.

If, like my sister, we believe that we have to tolerate unjust authority in order to survive in the world, we will create that reality around ourselves. But it doesn't have to be that way.

And as in the movie What Dreams May Come, the person who was lost finally recognized she was loved. I think that is the key. We must learn to recognize that we are loved absolutely and totally, exactly as we are.

But there is definitely a timing to this thing. I don't think we can underestimate that. Enlightenment can happen at any age. Someone can be eighty years old and still be totally traumatized, isolated, reclusive — and suddenly they can wake up and get it.

Diane: If a Soul is choosing to learn through these types of experiences, is it necessary to work with a healer? What kind of healing work do you recommend?

Aluna: Yes, I think that it really is necessary to work with other people. Eventually, you get to a place where you can do a lot of the healing on your own, but being supported is a quintessential part of the healing process.

What kind of healing? They say, "When the student is ready, the teacher appears." I think we magnetize into our lives the people and situations that are right and safe, and the healers that can truly assist us. We don't have to be attached to a particular healer or healing modality.

There have been hundreds of healers who have helped me. Even now, people come to me or I'm drawn into company with someone who has a piece that can help me move to another level.

Realize that you really are the one healing yourself, but that you are going to bring people to you, not only to help with different modalities and clear the distortions, but as mirrors.

Diane: Do you have any advice for survivors on just getting along from day to day?

Aluna: Always breath into your belly, and feel what you feel, not what your personality tells you. Because your personality can be in resistance about what you like and don't like.

Really connect and feel if something is right and safe. If it doesn't feel right and safe, no matter how good it looks, don't do it!

Healers are evolving just as you are, and they can only give you what they have. So you might go to different healers to get different pieces of the puzzle — just as Drunvalo was guided to go to several individual teachers.

Diane: Is there some kind of approach that you feel is not useful?

Aluna: I do have a bias about utilizing one healer for a long period of time. This comes from observing my mother in relationship with her therapist — and I say "relationship" because she has been going to this man weekly for at least fourteen years! He has her on Prozac and sleeping pills, with tranquilizers for the most difficult days.

My mom goes to AA, and says that she's meeting life on life's terms. But she's really distanced from the reality by the daily drugs prescribed by her therapist. It seems obvious to me that someone who is heavily drugged is not going to be able to really be present enough to heal. I can also see that the drugs are having a profound effect on her aura field.

A relationship with a therapist can be a substitute for healing. So I have this bias that says, if you've been going to someone for a really long time and you're not done yet, then that's not the healer you need to be with.

Other than that, I think it's important to follow your intuition and go with what you're drawn to.

Diane: You mentioned "timing" earlier. Could you talk a little bit more about that?

Aluna: Each one of us is engaged in an infinite spiral of evolution. Wherever we exist on that spiral right now is exactly where we need to be. And healing is an essential thread to our movement along this spiral. But true movement involves a difficult period when we are neither one thing nor the other, and we have to be ready to submit to this process.

We can understand this evolutionary process by looking at the science of cymatics (see Cymatics and the New Age of Miracles in the March 2001 Spirit of Ma'at). What cymatics has demonstrated is that when we move from one frequency, or coherent pattern, into a higher frequency — where a more complex coherent pattern emerges — we have to dissolve where we are and move through apparent choas before we can redefine ourselves at this higher level.

Just as a caterpillar dissolves in the cocoon before it can become a butterfly, we must break down the components that are holding us where we are in order to redefine ourselves at a higher stage.

During this process, this intermittent chaos, we need support. And we need to trust that God will guide us to the other side.

Diane: What would you say to someone reading this interview who has been abused and victimized?

Aluna: I'd say, "You're lovable exactly how you are. And just because someone couldn't see that doesn't mean it's not true."

When no one around us as children could see that we were powerful, beautiful souls alive on the planet, we eventually couldn't see it ourselves. We thought we were unworthy and unlovable. And that's simply not true. When you realize that you are worthy and loved, you hold the keys to the Father's Kingdom. Everything you need is within arms' reach. Whatever stuckness is present in your life right now is your opportunity to see what most needs to be healed if you could just be willing to heal it. All it takes is the willingness to heal. If we're willing, then everything we need will be provided.

When I was twenty years old, a friend told me, "Everything you ever were taught from the day you were born was wrong. So decide what you want to believe in, and that will recreate your world."

This friend had also been really abused. We had shown each other our scars. We had talked for hours about the kinds of things that had been done to us. He was someone who had survived as I had survived. And so when he told me I was free to recreate my world, I actually heard that. It was really powerful.

Diane: Wow. So there is Light at the end of the tunnel.

Aluna: Yes, indeed there is!

Diane: Thanks so much for sharing your story with us.

Aluna Raphael is a counselor offering intuitive guidance and vibrational healing. She may be contacted by email at AlunaRaphael@hotmail.com.

1. Gurumayi Chidvilasananda is a Siddha Guru who walked the path of yoga under the guidance of her Guru, Swami Muktananda. Gurumayi received the power and authority of the Siddha Yoga lineage from Swami Muktananda before the latter passed away in 1982. Wherever she goes, whatever she says, Gurumayi conveys the Siddhas' message that the experience of Divine Consciousness is attainable in this human body. She constantly points us back inside ourselves, where this state is both possible and accessible. See siddhayoga.org.



2. Gangaji, a teacher and author, speaks with thousands of spiritual seekers around the world, responding to the deepest spiritual questions of our time. While she does not offer a particular philosophy or practice, she extends to us the extraordinary invitation of her own teacher, Sri H. W. L. Poonjaji, and his teacher, Sri Ramana Maharshi, to end immediately all outward searching and discover directly within our own hearts the fathomless truth of who we are. (See gangaji.org. See also You Are Already Freein the May 2002 issue of the Spirit of Ma'at.)