The more advanced among you might be severely tested. Remember that you asked to be tested and that there is a reason. Will you descend into a place of fear when faced with disaster, or will you remember that by aligning with your higher soul, you will access unlimited resources of courage, strength, and resilience? Will you throw your arms up in despair, once again as the victim, betraying your past experience of this beautiful journey to lay blame at God’s door? Or will you know from a place of centeredness deep within your integrated heart that this event — however distressing, sad, or hard for you to bear — has a greater purpose?

Will your faith, though dimmed by the darkness that will befall you in the immediate aftermath, still burn, even if it requires that when you are finally able to take breath again, you fan the dying embers? Will you remember that all that happens does so in the name of love?

When darker thoughts pursue you and you swallow the words that want to spill from your burning lips — “Why? Why me? Why now, after all the good I have done?” — please know this is not punishment. Here is the why: It happened to you because you agreed. You are now in an ascended space, able to experience life from a higher plane. It happened to you because you are now able to perceive everything from a place of love. It happened now because time is drawing near, and many who are still unable to awaken are at risk of becoming casualties of this ascension. It is a fact that powerful human emotion responds more deeply to the morbid and the sad, to loss and to pain, through its empathic connection to others with emotional bodies than it does to a positive or joyous event.