The Sexual Predators Among Us
 
CREATING INNER PEACE
 
By Kathleen Hoy Foley
 
 
By now it is obvious that sexual predators are completely integrated into every level, every corner of society.  Despite the naysayers that work tirelessly to diminish the shockwaves each time yet another alarming incident of sexual crimes is exposed, the truth that sexual predators walk freely among us––freely among our children––wherever people congregate is irrefutable.  Denying the occurrence of sexual assault, justifying the episode, or diminishing its impact, especially when it touches your own life, produces a powerful, corrosive force that aligns your thought processes––unites who you are––with the charged energy of destruction and disharmony.
 
Denial erects a raging wall of theatrical flames to banish the truth from sight.  Denial of a dark truth creates a formidable obstacle that prevents victims as well as predators from any hope of obtaining wholeness.  Given time, denial and justification hunker down into the tranquilizing world of fantasy with its emotional narcotics and harmonic lullabies.  But the denial fantasy cannot be sustained.  The charged energy of destruction is too powerful and will ultimately destroy the relief denial fantasy pretends to provide. 
 
Everyone, including sexual predators, possesses the capacity to love and has creative genius within them.  When we connect with the light of our souls, we are connecting with the universal, underlying flow of harmony.  Even when that connection is only temporary.  So it is that an actor can genuinely connect with their soul and present this soul light to the world.  And a singer can tap into their inner radiance and pour love into our hearts, eliciting feelings of tenderness and intense connection to that which is larger than us.  And so it is that a beloved can truly love with integrity and yet inflict injury with what lies hidden and unresolved in the menacing recesses of pain.
 
What if a sexual predator is someone who has brought genuine light into your life through music or the ability to express the soul’s truth through performance?  What if these transformative expressions resonating from deep within the artist’s soul lifted your soul, even momentarily, from sorrow?  What if the sexual predator is someone you deeply love?  Someone who deeply loves you back? 
 
Without the protection of denial and justification, and the diminishment of the impact of abhorrent behavior of a beloved, how can you possibly find peace and harmony ever again?  Is true healing even conceivable in the face of such shocking deceit and traumatic devastation?
 
Healing is a restoration of harmony to the body, mind, and spirit.  All healing, all repair comes from within.  Healing requires truth.  Without truth there is no healing.  Truth requires clarity.  Clarity illuminates.  It begins the process of comprehension.  Without light, understanding is impossible.  Truth and clarity elevate and empower.  Inner peace then becomes not only achievable, it becomes inevitable.   
 
You initiate the energy of inner healing and peace by surrendering to the understanding that the person you know is not the person that the victim knows.  The person that the victim knows is a sexual offender who has exposed the victim to sinister secrets, corrupt desires, and frightening, bodily nakedness.  The sexual offender––the person that you do not know––has tormented the victim with raw, heaving acts of sexual depravity, violent incidents, and abusive behaviors you simply cannot imagine being perpetrated by the person you love.  But only when you surrender to truth you do not want to confront can you begin your walk up the mountain path to awareness and clarity: the only path to inner healing.  Walking this path, you will also illuminate the way and provide encouragement for others, including the sexual offender.
 
But what about forgiveness?  Where does that fit it?
 
It doesn’t.  Forgiveness does not heal.  Forgiveness creates the illusion of healing.  And all illusions––including the illusion of forgiveness––are obstructions that block the light of truth so essential to our personal and spiritual development.  Forgiveness is an emotional response––a consequence of the cultural and religious imposition of guilt on the blameless––that attempts to bypass hidden truths, evade natural repercussions, and avoid necessary repair work.  Forgiveness fuels the energy of inner chaos through the visceral, exhausting battle of struggling to sustain it in the face of repugnance and profound pain. 
 
You do not hold the power to forgive a sexual predator.  Forgiveness is personal.  It requires deep self-care and self-honor, and is a result of individual, internal evolution.  Forgiveness only has significance and magnitude––and genuine transformative power––when it finds its own way out of the disabling trauma of darkness.  That complicated journey out of the dark occurs only when the desire for light and its healing properties are present.
 
All sickness–body, mind, spirit––is a materialization of an energetic disturbance, a result of some type of trauma inflicted on our living energy system–the structure that keeps us in physical form.  Sexual predators are created by the overpowering energy of personal damage and unresolved emotional pain.  They are completely and totally responsible for their abusive behavior and the permanent damage they create.  They must not be enabled or excused…but they are not disposable.  And they are responsible for all repair whatever form it takes.     
 
If a sexual predator is lurking in your midst, you have decisions to make regarding truth and clarity, and necessary boundaries.  You need to strengthen yourself physically, emotionally and spiritually.  You need to practice self-care and safeguard your wellbeing.  This is vital for your protection and the protection of the vulnerable around you. 
 
By aligning yourself with the forces of harmony, you are tapping into the potent, light-filled energy within you and around you.  It is there always.  You possess the power to create your own inner peace.
 
Namaste 
* * *
 
“I have nothing for you,” I said calmly to my step-father who appeared to me during meditation decades after his death. 
 
During his physical life, John J. Allen was a brutal, spirit-crushing child abuser.  To the outside world, though, he was charming, sociable, well-loved.  That is the man Phil knew.  That was the grandfather to our daughters.  But that nice guy was a stranger to me.
 
I studied this frail, in-spirit old man sitting before me slumped in a wheelchair, a threadbare shawl drooping from his shoulders.  He bore the leaden energy of unseen burdens.  I drew closer to him, curious but indifferent.  I leaned down, kissed him on the forehead and whispered, “You have to go now.”  And I turned around and walked peacefully away.     
 

INTUITION
 
Protecting Yourself.  Protecting Your Children.
 
By Kathleen Hoy Foley
 
 
Intuition is the one defense–sometimes the only defense–consistently available to us.  Intuition offers protection against cunning perpetrators who employ camouflage and deception to gain the trust of vulnerable, powerless, and unsuspecting prey for the specific purpose of carrying out acts of sexual violence, most times with impunity.  These skilled predators flourish by exploiting their social status and profiting from the atmosphere of complicit silence, unearned trust and respect, and their own awareness of the blanket approval they enjoy.  
 
From priest to babysitter and all in between, these sexual predators slide easily into normal life with their offerings of personal attention and emotional support while enjoying broad, unwarranted privileges that go unchallenged by those too naïve, too distracted, or simply unwilling to notice. 
 
Skilled predators are exceptionally difficult to identify and impossible to expose.  Why?  Because exposure falls on closed eyes and deaf ears.  Because blind faith and deep-rooted guilt overrides any suspicion.  So it is that despite flashing red-alerts, pedophiles and other sexual abusers succeed by hiding in plain sight while the intelligent, sacred power of intuition is ignored, ridiculed, and finally obliterated, assigned to the trash heap of hysterical emotions; condemned as psychic nonsense; and judged as woo-woo.  And victims and potential prey are rendered powerless.
 
Only we are not powerless.  We just believe we are.
 
Of the eight Catholic churches I belonged to during my time as a Catholic, seven of them harbored pedophile priests.  Saint Ann’s Catholic Church in Browns Mills, New Jersey gave refuge to Father Frank Iazetta, a barrel of a man with a big mouth and a domineering swagger, and a nasty habit of belittling women from the pulpit.  The instant I met him alarm bells I never knew I possessed blared like a cacophony of screeching bluejays alerting to an approaching cat.  
 
But it was the era of Marriage Encounter where the superficial, exhilarating emotions of la-la land love ran high and the overarching spiritual message called for dissolving boundaries between us all–since we are all one–and proclaiming unconditional love by gluing clever, sanctimonious catchphrases onto colorful banners.  I was besieged by the heady emotions of devotion to the Church, convinced of the unquestionable authority of the finally enlightened clergy.  Passionately and recklessly I nose-dived into my newly discovered religious evangelism and plunged both joyfully and solemnly into my mission of obedience and dispersing la-la land love to one and all. 
 
Submission–that was the missing piece: submission to God the Father.  To Jesus the Son.  To the Holy Spirit.  Submission to the laws of the Catholic Church.  Submission to the authority of the priests.  Paramount was dissolving my boundaries and resistances.  Saying YES to whatever was asked of me, despite my misgivings, despite my screeching intuition.  Obedience.  That was my path to forgiveness for whatever sins I was guilty of, the way to earn my place in heaven.  Obedience equaled love.  And I wanted lots and lots of love. 
 
So bowing to the law of religious obedience, I managed to override my shrieking intuition about Fr. Frank Iazetta.  That is until he openly began recruiting young boys for overnight camping trips.  Suddenly I became unhinged, a caged animal frantically bouncing off live wire, pointing and screaming at the air, begging my friends not to let their boys go with him.  They laughed at me.
 
You know where this is going.  Merely days ago, Fr. Frank Iazetta appeared on the list of pedophile priests made public by the Catholic diocese of Trenton, New Jersey.  Multiple, credible accusations of sexual assault it read.  I was heart-slamming-in-my-chest sickened.  But not surprised.  Forty some years later and my intuition–my visceral instincts–were validated. 
 
The woo-woo myths surrounding intuition have successfully invaded our culture managing to dismantle and demonize this holistic connection to our inner and outer worlds, and instilling us with fear of this natural, instinctive process.  Intuition is not a mystery.  It is not an exclusive, psychic gift granted to a select few.  Intuition is an inborn, perceptive sense–a practical instinct–responsible for our protection and evolution. 
 
All things radiate energy.  People radiate energy.  Energy is information.  Intuition is a beacon seeking information, seeking truth.  It is an inherent, personal sense organically connected to the powerful energy of the universal intelligence–the vital force of life–that flows within and around everything that exists.  Intuition is in attunement with the harmony of truth.  It is a personal private detective–it gathers intelligence. 
 
Intuition is a responsive sensitivity to our environment, to the vibrational energy that exists around us.  It collects information like radar for the purpose of expanding our knowledge and offering clarity.  Intuition guides.  It empowers.  But we are not taught these things.
 
We are taught to fear our inner guidance.  We are taught to mistrust ourselves in favor of following directions from somewhere outside of our intrinsic knowing.  We are taught that intuition is an impulse, dangerous to our wellbeing.  We are taught to doubt ourselves and entrust our decisions to others.  We are warned not to judge, though we judge ourselves harshly, thereby constricting our potential, and allowing our physical, mental and spiritual health to be poisoned by fear.
 
The power of intuition is obtainable to anyone prepared to do the inner work necessary to cultivate it.  Its light exists within everyone and is readily available to all those willing to make the effort to develop the skills of conscious seeing, hearing and listening.  Intuition is our clear window into ourselves and into the world around us.   
 
A sexual predator can sense prey from across the room.  With expanded intuitive awareness, you will be able to sense a predator from across that same room.  It may turn out that your intuition offered you and your children the protection that you did not know you needed.  And you will have listened because you are no longer gullible.  You know that the Father Franks of the world exist.  And your children will benefit from your wisdom.
 
 
Namaste
​

Pedophile Priest
 
FR. JOE PUNDERSON
 
By Kathleen Hoy Foley
 
 
In less than 60 seconds I could conjure up a list of men, including priests, whose predilection for sexually assaulting children and other vulnerable members of society would not surprise me.  They would be the testosterone-fueled meatheads; men who feed on their power and authority and rule through fear; and men conditioned into cruelty and arrogance by prejudice and propaganda.  Fr. Joe would have never made the list.  Not ever.
 
I only knew him briefly back in the 1980s.  I was drawn to him by his kindness; his openness.  Phil and I were participating in a charity bike ride, Anchor House, to be exact, and we were headed to our destination on a tour bus.  It was a long day’s journey to our starting point.  Fr. Joe sat in the seat behind us.  He was somewhere in his thirties, as we were, and was soft spoken and friendly.  He chatted about his dreams of one day being called up to go to the Vatican.  I remember the three of us laughing a lot.  Especially about the enormous, dirty, big-flush toilet I encountered at a seedy rest stop.
 
The first day of the bike ride my bottom was suffering and Fr. Joe offered me his sheepskin seat cover.  What a gentleman!  Though I didn’t use it for too long.  We hadn’t gone twenty miles along that country road before I hit a ditch and fell off my bike and was injured.  He helped me up.  How considerate.
 
When Phil first informed me that Fr. Joe Punderson was among the Catholic priests in the Trenton, New Jersey diocese confirmed as pedophiles, I felt as if I was floating in the middle of a calm lake.  Blissfully detached from reality.  Unwilling to allow the echoing terror of cornered children into my consciousness, so powerful was my attachment to the sweet Fr. Joe I’d met and spent time with all those years ago. 
 
I didn’t want to let go of my fantasy and replace it with horror.  I didn’t want Fr. Joe to be a pedophile.  I didn’t want Fr. Joe to have succumbed to his perverted sexual compulsions; to have abused his absolute, church-given authority; and to have created perfect opportunities for himself to rape children. 
 
I didn’t want to inconvenience myself with the truth.  I didn’t want to disturb my nice memories of him.  I wanted to continue floating detached and undisturbed on my make-believe lake remembering Fr. Joe as a soft-spoken, kindhearted soul, a rescuer of injured women.  But I am not a coward.  And if I ignored the vile facts in favor of fostering my feel-good fantasy, then I am complicit in his brutality.  If I deliberately close my eyes to what is too painful to look at, if I turn away from his victims, then I reject profound love. 
 
Fear breeds complicity with abuse.  Fear of losing.  Fear of knowing.  Fear of being forever lost.  Fear of being disloyal.  Fear of speaking.  On and on.  It is only, only through confronting difficult truths and making inconvenient, tough decisions based on those truths that the profound reparative and restorative powers of deep love and connection to divine love becomes available to us.
 
The path of profound love is intense and inward.  It is oftentimes difficult and oftentimes painful.  It requires us to grow far beyond our vision.  It calls for us to evolve further than our imagination or desire can currently take us.  It challenges us to become fully empowered.  Profound love insists that we stay attached to truth.  When we tap into the universal power of love we begin to see, we begin to understand and we develop the courage to take the difficult actions that support our highest good and the universal highest good.
 
Profound love does not pretend or masquerade, or offer petty, superficial assurances of wholesale forgiveness.  Profound love radiates light into the darkest corners, and offers deep knowledge and wisdom, and requires courageous action.  It is the path to our inner light; it connects us to our soul; and connects our soul to the universal light, to universal love. 
 
This is true for Fr. Joe Punderson’s victims.  This is true for Fr. Joe.  This is true for all of us.
 
Namaste
​

 In-Vision Communiqué
  
Spirit energies communicate in their own interpretative language which is received through the senses, read by intuition, and illuminated by the heart.  It is the receiver who determines the personal message.  Please be mindful that intuition is meant to lead the intellect, as intellect is a disruptive force to intuition.
 
Communiqué from advanced spirit energy 
 seeking to deepen and advance our conscious understanding and soul development
  
THE IMPORTANCE OF WHAT YOU LEAVE BEHIND
 
Vision:  A tall white marble pillar, a monument rising high toward the sky.  A radiant white glow of expanding, luminous light.  A fiercely exploding (erupting) volcano.  An image of a person with a style too cool for words–must’ve been the aviator sunglasses.

 Then the words: what you leave behind is important.  What you leave behind is reserved forever in time.  What you leave behind is received in time and forever held in time.  It is your slot, like a reservation at a restaurant.

 “What you leave behind is reserved for all time.”  This is a law of nature.  It is never broken.
 Archaeology is how “the future” answers questions from the past.  These inquiries from “the future” are true for all, not just public figures.  You are a public figure in your family/group/circle, etc. They are interested in you.  “The future” will be interested in you.  What you leave behind is important for you.
 
Awareness and Repair are the operative words, the operative concepts.  Repair–never guilt.  Repair deep wounds.
 
Your time is your reservation, reserved only for you.
                                                                         ~~~
 
In my experience advanced spirit energies always connect with kindness and wisdom.  At times offering tidbits of truths that meander around the heart like a soft wisp of vapor and the muted intuitive call to listen closely.  Other times, with a shock of charged energy that shouts for attention.
 
Consistent also are the themes of expanded awareness (consciousness) which refers to our soul’s evolution into its highest expression of itself, and the uncovering of our true selves and discovery of our soul’s deepest desire/purpose for existing right now on this plane.  And repair which refers to profound recovery from deep emotional and spiritual wounds.  Without repair, we remain trapped in fostered lies and enforced indoctrinations.
 
Also unwavering is the certainty of personal evolution by developing an expanded understanding of ourselves and our purpose, which in turn, radiates light outward to others. 
 
Our radiant light–so necessary for outward illumination–is easily smothered by any punishment we impose on ourselves: guilt, self-chastisement, self-harm, etc.  Punishment terminates our growth and ensures continued pain.  Emotional pain will ferociously consume a life and all the beauty surrounding it…khf
 
Awareness and Repair.  What you leave behind is important for you…ase     
    
Namaste
ArtLight Initiative ; Sharing light one piece of original artwork at a time ​