by SS, Perth, Western Australia
It could be said by some that my marriage of eight years ended after I connected with Universal Medicine. However, there was so much more going on within my marriage before Universal Medicine that it would be very unfair and totally untrue to suggest that Universal Medicine was the reason my marriage ended. My ex-husband would blame my involvement with Universal Medicine.
So what was the cause of our marriage breaking down?
I married a man who I loved and spent eight years with. We had a great life, a lovely house in an ideal suburb, lots of friends, we traveled, and had successful jobs and a child together. Now, as with all relationships it was not always easy, and we had our struggles and issues. We had times when we were unhappy and times when we faced challenges.
The issues and struggles within our relationship seemed to come in cycles – the same things coming up for us to argue about, fight over, yell at each other, sleep in separate rooms, one of us threatening to leave, sometimes one of us driving off. I can’t remember what the actual arguments were over, but I do remember feeling completely disconnected from my husband during these times, very sad, at times angry – and at a complete loss as to why/how we were fighting in the first place. It was like something had surfaced from nowhere and things did not make sense at times.
As for me, I desperately wanted to be in a loving relationship, to work things through, to feel connected and to be happy. I was committed to my marriage and my husband, and absolutely dedicated to making our marriage work. There would be times when I would question my life and I would have a sense that there was more to it, that something was missing. I had a life changing event happen to me at the age of 34 which led to me questioning lots of things about myself and my life. I was still committed to my marriage but the priority was now me, my relationship with myself… and I couldn’t help but look at life differently.
My daughter was three when I suffered from pneumococcal pneumonia, which affects the lungs and presents like the flu. On the fourth day of having what I had been told by a doctor as being the flu, my husband took me to a hospital emergency. I was admitted immediately, induced into a coma and my husband was told that if he had left me home that day I would have died. Later in the day the head of intensive care told my husband that it would be unlikely that I would live through the night. This was to be our biggest challenge!
I did survive the night; my family flew in from interstate prepared for there to be a funeral. I spent the next two weeks in a coma – doctors had done all that they could and if I was to survive this it would be up to me. Needless to say that for all those involved, especially for my husband and family, this was an extremely challenging time.
When I woke up it was not a joyful reunion with my husband as maybe you would first think it to be, or with my daughter and family members. It was certainly not as you see in the movies! I had been very, very sick. I had three organs that had failed, I was suffering from blood septicemia and I was intubated so that I could breathe. My particular coma was not about lying around and resting each day, but one where I was actually fighting for my life. The example given was that each day I was running a marathon to stay alive. Doctors had tried to keep me alive, and hence my system had been absolutely overloaded with an assortment of drugs. When I woke up I still had a tube down my throat to assist me to breathe; I felt like I was in a dream and felt completely disconnected, dazed and very confused. I had people talking at me, telling me what had happened, and it all felt completely foreign. I lay there silent and unmoving. My family and friends were overjoyed at what was definitely deemed a miracle… even the hospital staff couldn’t believe that I had woken up. I was the talk of the hospital as there had been very little hope of me recovering.
So we have a picture of an overjoyed husband who has the love of his life back. We have the wife, myself, confused, disorientated, unable to speak or move. To my husband his horrific two weeks were over and for me, well, my journey was just beginning. While awake and still intubated I had many thoughts of wanting to die… and questioned why I had woken up at all. I had wasted away while in the coma and had lost all muscle tone and definition. I was so weak that I had to learn to do everything again – to sit up, to walk, to brush my hair, clean my teeth – literally everything had to be built up again as I developed my strength back.
And so my physical recovery began.
However, it felt like my husband and I were worlds apart. In fact we had a fight a couple of days after I woke up and he left the hospital. We were both under extreme stress but under completely different circumstances. He was trying to keep everything together and normal – his job, looking after our daughter, visiting the hospital every day etc. I was coming to terms with my physical recovery and trying to make sense of what had happened.
So I continued to recover, moving from physical recovery to wanting to understand more of the what, how and why had all of this happened? Our marriage continued and there was an attempt to get back what we had before this life-changing event happened to our family. But could we ever go back?
So our cycle of issues continued and became more and more regular. The more we desperately tried to hold together what we once had, the stronger the force seemed to be to tear it all apart.
During this time, approximately three months after leaving the hospital, I came across Universal Medicine and had an esoteric healing session with Serge Benhayon. He was the first person that said things to me that made sense of all that had happened re. being very sick. So I got involved with Universal Medicine and did some of the healing courses. My husband, in his own time, also did a course with Universal Medicine and had a healing session with Serge Benhayon.
My husband spoke with a friend of ours about his doubt and uncertainty re. all things Universal Medicine. He expressed his fears about our relationship and that he might not be worthy of my love, and that I might leave him one day. Four months later my husband left the marriage – this was 18 months after my near death experience, and about six months after I started to participate in courses with Universal Medicine.
So did Universal Medicine end our marriage? Absolutely not!
Universal Medicine helped me make sense of what I had started to feel after my near-death experience. That I actually had a connection with myself and it was one that was tangible, that could be felt and that was worth listening to. It was important to have a relationship with myself first and foremost. This is what my husband felt; that I was loving myself more and this brought up his own insecurities about how he felt about himself. So he gave me an ultimatum about me having to choose between him and Universal Medicine. However, he was asking me to choose him over myself, and I could not do this anymore. I had to choose to continue to investigate, understand, develop and nurture what I had been missing and desperately searching for, for a long time – a relationship with myself, my connection to my essence and my inner-most. If this meant that my husband had to leave because I wanted to start loving myself more, then I could not stop him.
Universal Medicine was an easy target to blame. Blamed because my husband felt rejected by me, and thus felt he had been deeply hurt. But the truth is very simple – our marriage ended because I chose to be more of myself. To me, and many of my family and friends, I was still the same person. To my husband, as I became more of me and stopped to consider loving myself more, I was different… and he chose to no longer be with me.
The Truth about Universal Medicine 
Rejection always comes from the self first, a rejection of our innate essence and the love within, well before we feel rejected by others. If your husband walked away because you were more loving with yourself it perhaps exposes that there was an arrangement, not an intention to build love together as a true relationship, which of course takes two to commit to. SS it’s great that you could use the life threatening illness and your re-connection to yourself to begin loving yourself again. It’s inspiring because you held true to what you knew was love for yourself under very difficult circumstances. Your love for yourself is actually something that supports everyone.
We can easily blame others for our ignorance, the tell tale signs are always there, when things are amiss in any relationship. Everything in life is about blaming others, yet how often do we truly look within and be absolutely honest and say, I’m part of this mess? A sad state of affairs around the world.
If we really sit down and consider, most relationships breakdown because we have lost the art of communicating. Open and honest communication begins from an early age. Instead, everything is pent up and then we explode from time to time.
Self love or self care is not selfish, there is no dependence on others. Any person could bring this to our attention,
It’s so easy to blame and very common, but as uncomfortable as it is we do need to see our part in everything in life because that is the only way to truly empower ourselves and bring about loving changes. As the old saying goes “It takes two to tango”.
The feeling of being Loving to our-selves is sometimes too much for others and they need their own timing to come to the same space. By not judging them and letting them choose there own path is simple and a practical way of living.
Beautiful wisdom Greg, thanks for sharing.
It is so simple, do not preach or teach, simply reflect as others will feel the Love.
And the feel of love is unmistakeable, no words are needed.
Truth does not blame, it only asks us to step out from hiding behind irresponsibility, but we play this game of blame, needing to hit back at what is actually asking us to be more as if that would make us less.
Near to death experiences confront our way of moving. Going back to it is not an option no matter what.
This is an article about choices, all throughout it there are choices made, and these are written about with respect and understanding.
‘….And so my physical recovery began’. Which in many ways is just the tip of the iceberg in the healing process for it addresses so many more aspects to our lives than just our physical body.
There always can be different perspectives to each story, but if we speak the truth of what happened the perspective is only one.
How could it be blamed externally something that has been initially broken within the relationship? Either we want to address or simply understand what has happened in the relationship, it’s only in the persons involved in it, that the answer can be found.
Hi SS, thanks for sharing your intimate story with us all. It sounds like quite a big journey for everyone involved, including your husband. As for the reason of why marriages break up we cannot really blame anyone, that would be a bit irresponsible. The reason has to be found in the relationship between the two involved.
There are stop moments in our lives that make us reassess everything and for the person who has not had that stop moment it is difficult to understand. We can blame everyone and everything but essentially we have a choice to be in a relationship every moment of every day and nothing holds either party there. Having a relationship with ourselves first means we are more aware of what we bring to the relationship and are less needy or irresponsible with our behaviour.
Agree Lucy, somewhere in the majority of our lives, we have a stop moment given to us. It does not necessarily have to be an admission into hospital either. It’s what we do with this offering that is the key. We are not nurtured in this manner, instead we see this as something being wrong, when it is simply communicating to look at us more from within.
Universal Medicine cannot be the true reason why any relationships ends. It is simply impossible. Yet, it is possible to attribute this to UM even if there is no truth to it at all. It is easier to do this than to assume responsibility for what goes on in the relationship.
When we have pictures of how things should be they obscure the truth of what is needed in each moment. At the end of the day we need to live what is true for ourselves and learn from what this offers.
I used to think the opposite of blaming others was blaming myself and feeling guilty. I realise now that there is no love in either of them. Blaming freezes us in time.
True, there is no love in blaming, nor any responsibility.
That’s an intense period you went through, and definitely nothing short of a miracle. It’s interesting how quick we are to blame something else for why we feel rejected or hurt. The moment things don’t go the way we plan, we seek reasons outside of what might actually be going on for us personally. We’re not conditioned to take responsibility for our choices and our behaviours, despite it actually being a natural quality we are born with.
My marriage ended and the only thing to blame was more self love I was choosing, not much you can do about that….
If we ‘love’ someone more than we love ourselves is that truly love? From my experience it is not. For when a person loves themselves they don’t need to fill another up. It pulls them to love themselves as well so that they do not need love from another. From Universal Medicine I have learnt that love cannot be given, it comes from within and another can remind us of whats inside.
Unless we love ourselves first, we are unable to truly love another.
It is so easy to blame another party for the demise of our relationships, because it takes the heat off looking at our part in its failing, or the fact that the union was no longer able to grow together and complement one another in harmony.
Blame is so common in our society, but does it really achieve anything other than to keep us locked in a victim mentality, with no healing or responsibility being taken.
Great blog SS, when a marriage or partnership ends it is far easier to blame something outside of ourselves, rather than admitting to ourselves and others the part we ourselves played. I loved how you reclaimed yourself, and if that brought up an issue for your then husband, he had a choice to step up too, as relationships are always asking us to evolve to something greater, or we can choose to stay in the comfort we are in.
It is so interesting and actually sad that we have people who would prefer us to be part of who we are than the whole of who we are. I genuinely don’t think it is on purpose, it is, as you say, because they don’t want to be rejected and if two people got together as two halves of a whole then as one comes back to their divine whole, the other is more aware of their half status. We are just never told to be our whole selves from the day we are born to the day we pass over and that is the greatest shame of them all because it fosters marriages of halves.
“I had to choose to continue to investigate, understand, develop and nurture what I had been missing and desperately searching for, for a long time – a relationship with myself, my connection to my essence and my inner-most.”
I can completely relate to this sentence, for once I felt the absolute confirmation that Universal Medicine brought to my already developing feelings that there was more to life, I too made the choice to love me. In time I left my marriage, but not because I didn’t love my husband, I left because I began to love myself.
This is powerful to read, mostly because of your perspective on the whole situation – there is no blame, just the simple experience of you rediscovering who you are and understanding that whatever has followed from that is ok, it is ok for things to not be perfect and for people to choose their own path, perhaps a path that takes them away from you but that is ok too because you have learnt the value of love.
There is without doubt, a very powerful shift when we make the choice to love ourselves. When I truly understood this and connected to the love within rather than seeking it without, every relationship I had changed because beforehand they had been based on my need to find love. Suddenly, I had realised that love is abundantly available to me, and everyone, within. The seeking stopped and hence the neediness in relationships. It seems that we can mistake this ‘new’ self-reliance’ as distance or lack of feeling…but the opposite is the case. It is a more true connection to what we feel inside and my experience is that this is a wonderful way to live and to build relationships from – built of what we already are and bring to each other, rather than a false need to seek it from them.
It is interesting what happens when our relationship with ourselves grows stronger – it challenges our previous paradigm and how we have set things up and encourages us to be more of ourselves. Everyone is going to feel that shift – our partner, our kids, our work colleagues, our friends. It is quite literally life changing. However, when we do that it challenges the comfortable norm we have allowed before, whether that is the way we eat, drink, move, sleep, and of course interact. It exposes not only where we have allowed less, but equally the same for those around us as we begin to make better choices, and that is challenging.
It has been my experience that the stronger my relationship grows with myself the more it exposes the arrangements and compromises I have made with my relationships with myself and with others. Committing to working through these arrangements is a very healing thing to do.
There would be many who could relate to what you are sharing here SS. The most important thing is that we do need to love and honour ourselves first before any other.
The greatest love affair to have is with ‘self’ first, and then all our relationships become more loving and true.
Its a strange thing the end of a marriage. Is it a failure to have the marriage end? Or is it perhaps a blessing for both people to accept that something is not working and be grown up enough to step out of a ‘good looking’ arrangement, be real about what is going on, and free both parties to grow again?
Yes, I have noticed there is a very powerful potential to grow from a marriage breakdown and that if we are honest enough, to recognise when the good looking facade but stagnant relationship is not working. The sense in the body is like feeling you can breath again.
That, by it’s description is a horrific illness. I can understand in a way and while it’s not a reason for things, so often when people are in two different places with things it takes a lot to bring them back together. I could only imagine what it would have been like for the family and friends of a person they love, watching as they are dying. With everyone saying it’s happening it would be almost like you are starting to go that way as well and for them to come out of that would almost be shocking and extremely confusing. Not that I am making an excuse for what happened but I can understand it. I remember going through extreme things and while it took it’s toll on me it was also extremely difficult for those around me, it was almost anything that happened to me didn’t only happened to me and everyone had there own process with it.
Blaming is an easy and low-cost action that serves the person who goes for it. We all know how convincing can we be when blaming another one for our malaise. This, of course, does not mean that our account of things is true.
A near death experience certainly helped you to come to understand and sort out your choices and a way forward from there..
Thank you SS for am amazing story, what a journey you have had, nearly dying but coming back through it all to claim your own love, and tender care for yourself, which your husband was unable to accept and feel his own love. This is the missing ingredient in the lives of all of humanity, and for which we all long for.
Loving ourselves first and foremost is a foundation from which we can then share this love with others, ‘That I actually had a connection with myself and it was one that was tangible, that could be felt and that was worth listening to. It was important to have a relationship with myself first and foremost.’
Wow SS, what you’ve shared was incredible. Your journey is one of healing, allowing you space to question life and to reconnect to who you are. When we start making loving choices there can be many things in life that we realise will no longer serves us and the natural process is often to let them go. When we embrace love it supports us to clear what is not love, making space for love to expand.
This is massive, huge, I love the great detail and consideration you have throughout this article, it would have been tough for all that were involved and I imagine it a sensitive subject to write on yet you have been extremely honest done very well all considered. It’s so interesting how anyone could blame a relationship breaking down on a health and wellbeing business. I liken any blame of this kind to this example….’if your husband was cheating on you and you find out about it and you break up but you blame the woman he was sleeping with’… does that not seem a little misguided? Wouldn’t you be better off asking yourself and your husband how you got to a place in your relationship where anyone wanted to cheat and lie and why he was looking for intimacy elsewhere? People want to blame but ironically it means that they continue to attract more things in their lives that are giving the same message and that is to take responsibility, I know that I am guilty of playing the blame game but deep down inside, we all know its wrong.
People always want to blame but that deflects away from their own personal responsibility.. because therein lies a pretty big ouch that we avoid at all costs – that we are also to blame for the situation.
It is interesting to observe the responses and reactions when we begin to make changes in our lives to what we feel is true for ourselves after perhaps many years of putting others first. It can bring a lot up for another in their reaction to the love for self and unfortunately they can feel so hurt that they turn against us. Having this understanding supports us to remain with ourselves and be love in those moments of conflict and confrontation knowing that true love can never be lived unless self love is lived first. Thank you SS for sharing your awareness and insights on truth.
How can anyone possibly blame something or someone else for their marriage ending? Surely it is the responsibility of the two people who got married to either chose to commit to making the marriage truly loving, or to end it, we so are so fond of absolving our responsibility currently, but if we chose to enter into a relationship and it doesn’t work out surely we can only look at the two of us.
I agree Meg, this also applies to relationships where infidelity occurs where couples often blame each other or the other person involved for breaking up their marriage which fosters a lot of hurt. But when we are willing to take responsibility for where we are in life, it totally changes our perspective and it becomes clear that any blame never heals or resolves anything. It always comes back to taking responsibility for our choices, actions and behaviours, and to look deep within for what we know is true.
When we have a ‘life-changing’ experience we are offered the choice to make more loving changes in the way we live. For a true relationship to grow we have to honour each other for our choices and grow together.
Thank you for sharing your extraordinary story. Having such a huge life event occur really re-sets your priorities. I am sure you are not the first or last person to realise there is more to life or that they want to be growing and be more loving with themselves, only to find that their partner resists or is uncomfortable with these changes. As Serge Benhayon once described, we go into relationships with an unspoken contract. If one person changes, then the other believes they have broken the contract. However, this is not love.
So true. I must say though, how often did I hear “you are not the person I first dated” as I grew up through my younger years – we cannot remain stagnant, that is so damaging all round. To love someone is to constantly deepen the relationship, it is the greatest gift we can offer each other.
From my experience of a relationship ending, I noticed that when one steps away from the silent agreement both parties agreed to on starting the relationship, the other can start to react. Some relationships have made an agreement that neither party will live who they truly are, and when one breaks this agreement and starts to live the love they are, they realise that it’s not the relationship that they wish to be in anymore, they see that the agreement is not loving and never was.
You can never blame just one factor as causing the demise of a relationship as there is always a multitude of contributing factors that all fuse together.
Interesting to read your sharing SS. It seems that we all want to blame something outside of ourselves rather than taking responsibility for what happens in our relationship. The truth being that as we change and our partner doesn’t then this is often the end result.
I feel when someone delivers an ultimatum such as that another must choose between themselves or an activity that the person finds self-supportive it really exposes where that person is at – to me it shows a dependency and a condition placed on the relationship. Love is not something that binds us, it’s something that holds us without condition creating a space that does not impose on another’s right to grow and explore life.
Very much enjoyed reading your life-story SS and the truth of it.
This is a compelling read. Thank you for sharing your experience SS.
When I read this and with current experiences I realise how strong hurts can be in controlling how people choose to react to situations and how it totally clouds seeing others for who they truly are.
Sometimes people around us just aren’t ready, which is perfectly okay. Whats beautiful is that the love I have for people who are different to me is just as strong as for the ones who are similar to me. This love is there because one, my love for myself has deepened, and two, I understand people on a much deeper level now.
Resisting the truth and remaining in comfort doesn’t really solve anything, it just keeps us stuck in the illusion and delays our return back to love.
Blame is a very effective tool we can use when we want to avoid Truth.
Marriage and divorce brings up a lot. Ultimately marriage is a union and a constellation where we can either choose to evolve together and deepen our love or we can choose to essentially stay in the same place and continue on as we are. In my experience if we are not dealing with what is coming up and deepening our love individually and together then things will come up and if we choose to continue not dealing with them then something more drastic needs to happen. We cannot rely on our partner for anything as ultimately we have to be the love we are 1st and foremost. Then we can come together and what we get is out of this universe. Otherwise if we are not both being the love that we are then we have to ask ourselves would I actually want to be with the other person? And if the answer is no then why continue something that is not working? It is not about cutting anyone off but rather not holding ourselves back for another either.
What a beautiful story. Some may not find it beautiful as your husband leaves you. But all I see is the beauty of someone reconnecting with themself and that connection being so strong that the world around them had to change to make way for this connection. It’s not an easy thing to do – to allow the world around you, that can be so comfortable, to change.