Debora Wayne answers the question:

What is the nicest thing a non-family member has ever done for you?

I love this question and it’s very easy to answer. The immediate person comes to mind, and she was appropriately named Angela, Angie. And Angie had these intense electric blue eyes. And when I met her, she had this feeling about her where I just felt completely safe to be able to tell her anything and everything that I had not shared with anyone else before. And this woman who had never met me before, didn’t know me from Adam, there was nothing she was going to gain by what she did. She literally spent hundreds of hours sitting with me and deeply listening to me.

She opened her home, she welcomed me in, it was... I have to take you back, because this was a time of my life where I was having a massive spiritual awakening and didn’t know it. And it looked like from the outside looking in that everything in my life was falling apart. Everything that I had been taught to do and to become and to work for, everything was falling apart: my house, my husband, my career, my health. Boom. Gone. Trashed. And I didn’t know what to do, and I was extraordinarily ashamed as well. AIt was not normal for me to be a quitter and to not be able to figure it out and get back up on the horse, but I had reached this point in my life where I was out of ideas, I was out of willpower, and I couldn’t live like I was living anymore.

And I met this woman who understood, and she listened to me day in and day out, whining and blaming. I was so lost in the blame game, I thought it was everybody else’s fault – and if he would do that and if she would change and if this would happen, I’d be fine, I’d be happy, but because of all these externals, I was miserable and it was their fault. And I wasn’t shy about saying it. Well, in this most incredible loving, gentle way, she would listen and she would sort of cock her head and smile and twinkle, and then she’d say, "You know, honey..." And she had this thick Southern accent, which I can’t imitate. And she would say, "You know, honey, you may want to think about it in a different way." And instead of telling me what to do, she would share from her own experience what she had been through.

And if anyone knew pain, it was this woman. She grew up in an alcoholic family, she was abused as a youngster, she married an alcoholic, she had four daughters. The drama, the addiction, the chaos that was going on in her family, first of all, she had no... I don’t even know where she got the wherewithal to welcome me in because she had her hands full. And in spite of all that she had been through and was going through, she remained very, very unconditionally loving and demonstrated that through her actions to me day in and day out for years, literally years. That first year in particular was critical for me because I didn’t know where I was headed. I really was headed down the trail to death.

At that time in my life, I was living on drugs, I was drinking myself to sleep every night, I was binge eating pints of ice cream, and I was completely addicted to sugar. I would black out sometimes just from sugar. And you would never have known that because I still looked so good. Everyone would say, "You look so good." And I was performing and highly functioning, and so no one had a clue, but I was bankrupt inside and I had never told anyone.

And Angie came into my life and helped me awaken to what was really going on, and that I had a spiritual malady, not an ex-husband malady. And she helped me to really get a whole new perspective on myself, life, what I was doing here, what the purpose of life was. She taught me to pray and meditate, which I did not. I knew how to meditate, but I had stopped. And prayer, forget it, I didn’t believe in that nonsense and wasn’t going to do it. But she just helped me change everything — in the way I saw everything, and eventually the way I lived — and helped me get back on the right track for me and find myself in the process. It was wild times.
 

Debora Wayne is the founder and CEO of The International Chronic Pain Institute. She is a world-renowned energy healer whose leading-edge non-drug method, known as HighSpeed Healing™, has (remotely) helped tens of thousands in over 160 countries to rapidly release chronic pain, depression, anxiety, trauma, battles with weight, binge-eating, chronic fatigue, insomnia, and other “mysterious” chronic conditions.

A highly sought-after speaker and author of Why Do I Still Hurt?, Debora has earned degrees and certifications in psychology, hypnotherapy, and chemical dependency counseling. She has 35+ years practicing and teaching meditation, is a nationally recognized glass artist, a former professional modern dancer, a certified yoga instructor, and leads the only practitioner training worldwide in her HighSpeed Healing proprietary method.