Over the last month, I have been fully stepping into working as a professional intuitive. The evolution has been interesting as I’ve learned to meld this work into harmonious interaction with my NLP and coaching skills. Throughout the course of this synthesis, everything within me coalesced into a deep understanding of who I and and what I am here to do.

With this congruency I’ve walked forward and have received more than I could have asked for in every respect.

I have a highly conscious friend who is fond of saying that the people you interact with will teach what they need from you…this absolutely true!

In working with people, one of the things that has consistently come up is the desire to have an in-person relationship with their Spirit Guides. However, they have no idea where to begin.

This is what prompted me to create a free Spirit Guide Meditation. I wanted to offer some support to the people who order readings and so I’m happy to announce and launch the recording, here…on the blog.

This meditation is designed to clean your chakra system, achieve a place of connection and openness with your guides as well as travel with the information they share and fully integrate it from the highest spiritual levels into the environmental levels of your physical experience.

With deep love and appreciation, I offer this to my readers, clients and to anyone seeking assistance with connecting to their guides

Be sure to drop me a line to let me know how it is going!

Love and light,

PK

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Awoken from a Dream

Last week my husband and kids got a stomach virus all at the same time. I was the only one who was well and I spent several days and nights rushing from person to person doing anything I could to make them comfortable. As they were recovering, I energetically as well as physically cleaned house before becoming ill myself.

I awoke the morning after they were all on the mend to a shift in my body, so I tuned into my own energy throughout the day allowing my physical form to instruct me on how to care for it. I was so grateful for its wisdom, I felt like I had access to the ultimate healer/physician and so I paid close attention to its every need. I sent my body a lot of love and moved through it all with great ease. I was mostly just depleted of energy and I had nearly recovered within the span of a day.

The next evening I was awoken by our daughter who was standing next to the bed stroking my right arm. As I came to full conscious awareness I found that I had been holding my Archangel Michael Pendant while I slept in my left hand. Knowing that this had some sort of significance, I helped my daughter get back to sleep and mentally stored this piece of information for the waking hours ahead.

An Unexpected Reading

That morning, I was concerned about leaving for my NLP Master Practitioner training in San Francisco. Our son had been on again off again sick with the various parts of the virus. Instead of getting it all at once as his father and sister had, he was getting it in stages that were a few days apart. While I was recovered, my energy was still balancing and I felt like I needed to be very gentle with myself.

My friend Raj (who also attends the training) always picks me up from the airport so I phoned him to tell him how I was feeling. During the course of the conversation he gave me a quick reading. As he prepared I grounded and opened myself to source energy. Immediately an image of appeared. I was walking toward a triangular shaped mountain with a jagged snow line. On my left side was the Archangel Michael and on my right the Archangel Raphael. It felt like being brought forth toward Source, like an initiation of light.

The Pendant Meditation

During the weekend the subject of my Archangel Michael Pendant came up often. People who are energetically sensitive are drawn toward it…as if it is communicating something to them on a spiritual level. These attractions and conversations generate the sense of a deep soul level relationship as we recognize the significance of meeting someone who is on our spiritual path of growth.

Considering all of this, it is not surprising that a group of us began to hold it, seeing what we sensed as we did. Raj held it and said that he could hear it speaking but he couldn’t understand what it was saying; he urged me to connect with the pendant and find out. So while we were on our way to a fellow practitioner’s house to watch a viewing of the Princess Bride, he led me through an exercise to find out.

I went into a very deep trance despite being in a Mustang that literally excels at noticing every bump in the road and here is what I found:

The pendant showed me a radio dial and tuning into a clear channel. Raj asked what the pendant is telling me to do and the words, BE YOUR TRUTH came. So then he asked, “How do you be your truth?” I was given the answer, by walking the path of light and love.

Then he queried, “And how do you walk the path of light and love?” At this point I was shown the path directly out in front of me…an intense sense of desire, will and passion emanating from my solar plexus began to form an energetic attraction to the path and I simply replied…I must want to…but there was so much more than these words to that simple realization.

This did not mean mind wanting alone…this meant full body…wanting…the kind of wanting that moves you without your conscious awareness that you have moved.

Compassion and Jesus

The next morning I entered a meditation in which I wanted to get clear about my truth and what the path of love and light means for me. So I went to the place where I usually convene with my higher self, spirit guides and angels. I sat watching the sunrise over the ocean view from an ancient stone wall when I noticed Jesus approaching, flanked by Archangel’s Michael and Raphael.

I moved forward to greet him when he said quite abruptly, yet full of love and compassion that my heart was too small. He reached into my chest, pulled my heart out to where we could both see it, stretched it to an enormous proportion and then returned it to my chest cavity.

I sank to the ground with its weight as I watched him wave and begin to walk away. “Allow yourself to receive love,” he said, “It is always available.” At the sound of his words the new heart in my chest opened like a sponge and beautiful golden light began to flow into it from every direction. Jesus continued, “Love is in the air you breathe, the sunlight that falls on your skin, the animals, plants, trees and in the very gaps of space that create life itself. It’s in silence and it’s in sound. It’s in the people around you…and it’s in you.”

But what about the path of light and my truth? I thought toward his retreating form. “I’ll leave that to Sylvia (my higher self) to explain,” he said. O.k. yes, I thought, but please leave Michael here with me…and in a flash the Archangel was by my side. I gazed out toward Jesus in the distance noticing Michael still walking beside him…looking up into the Archangel’s face I smiled at just how habitual the programmed limitations of the mind are.

The Meaning of the Path

Sylvia spoke from the stone wall where she had been standing. Focus on your heart, she said. Place your full attention on it’s center, be there with it…and notice it deeply.

I did as she said and found myself in a darkened room. All around me were the silhouettes of pregnant bodies, inside the large abdomens were beautiful children of light. I rushed around to each tummy full of child, placed my head against them and spoke loving words of excited encouragement. I was filled with anticipation and couldn’t wait to welcome these radiant souls into the world.

Soon, I began leading the forms to a birthing room. There I helped and witnessed each child be born. I was the first person to hold them and see their beauty and perfection. As I held them and wrapped them up in love…I began to hear their song of light.

I listened for awhile, humming the tune to the infants, noticing their nuances of excitement in response. Then I handed them off to their parents…who would assist them in entering their world. At various stages of development they return for a visit. I again, noticed their beauty and perfection, together we sang the song…and from this place of love I tell them how they’ve grown. They ask me questions and I listen to them deeply…from the level of my soul, providing directional assistance while knowing fully…the curiosity, wonder, excitement, love and pure potentiality that accompanies them on their journey.

Back to Class

Later on that day, I am assisted by the Archangel Raphael in helping a classmate who is a budding empathic healer gain control of her energy after she unintentionally healed another attendee in tears over the difficulty involved in the previous day’s processes.

We hug each other as she comes fully back into herself and her own Source infused balanced energy.

The same love that I felt while holding the babies in my meditation bursts forth from my heart chakra. With Raphael’s gentle and glowing form in my mind, I smile…allow the love to flow and think…ain’t life grand?

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This is the continuation of an article I wrote on Valentine’s Day called Manifesting the Love of Your Life, in which I outlined the process of creating your love list and invited you to take my beliefs about love questionnaire to help you determine what energies are operating in your love life.

Armed with your list of what you want in a romantic partner and the belief systems you have about love that have been playing in the background you can now determine how close of a vibrational match you are to getting what you want.

Most people find incongruities at this point…and end up facing the fact that many of their thought patterns (while living in the same space) are in direct conflict with one another. With their energy so divided…it’s easy to see why they’ve been getting the results they have been.

Bringing it all to a clear space, is what I’d like to talk about next.

Adopting the Attitude of Heart-Centered Living

What most of us really want is relationships in which we feel safe to be ourselves, in which we can let down our walls and in which we don’t have to hide or guard our vulnerabilities.

This viewpoint can actually constrict our ability to love ourselves and others due to the amount of attention and energy we spend toward trying to be safe.

In heart-centered living, we don’t have to try to be safe because we let the feelings of life move through our hearts, seeing both pleasure and pain as part of the human experience. This viewpoint moves us into closer connection with ourselves and others as we are no longer occupied with rejecting, avoiding or otherwise resisting our life’s situations.

The most common ways people tend to get it wrong are:

(A) Not knowing how to safely experience pain and
(B) trying to find someplace outside of themselves in which to be safe.

You Are the Only One Who Can Break Your Heart

Relationships are often filled with these two motivators, fear of being hurt and the search for a safe haven. So will this person break your heart or will they be the safety you’re searching for?

The answer is neither. Your partners actions can not break your heart. Only you can do that. Pain is resistance to whatever we are experiencing. It is how we interact with, interpret and give meaning to the events in our lives that causes us to suffer as a result of pain.

Pain in and of itself is a good thing, it is a warning system that is there to give you information about your environment.

Emotional pain happens when we create a restriction of the flow into and out of our heart system by not fully acknowledging, feeling and accepting our emotions. When our emotions are not fully expressed, the energy of the heart becomes blocked and contracted creating a sense of isolation and aloneness.

You break your own heart by rejecting life and this in turn disconnects you from your inner being…so when you find yourself immersed in judgment, rejection, pain, grief and other emotions that make you want to contract, bring kindness to yourself and comfort the part of you having the feeling. Don’t abandon yourself…be there for you by accepting and being present with your feelings.

The Spiritual Levels of Sexual Partnership

Sexual union and marriage on a spiritual level can be visually understood by observing the yin-yang symbol which represents opposites that are mutually rooted within the same system, transforming into one another while always holding the balance that creates the whole.

A marriage, or intimate relationship represents the process of two becoming one. Sex is the closest we get physically to this spiritual experience.

When you enter a relationship, your commitment is not to the other person as much as it is to the process of becoming whole…this is where we often become confused. We’re not loosing ourselves, giving up or otherwise being unfairly treated as our egos would have us believe by being in a relationship…instead we are surrendering our lives over to our authentic selves and sacrificing our egos so that our separateness becomes one, spiritually.

This is about riding the line of our connectedness…or our bliss. The goal is to stay centered in that connected space. When we keep our beingness and consciousness on that line we create rapture…and through the doors of rapture resides the timeless space that is the gateway to both life and death. In essence, sexual union represents this timeless, whole state of rapture…the death of separateness and a re-birth into a state of wholeness, which on the physical plane is the energy of creation itself.

As you can imagine, the ego has no vested interest in going down this path which is why you need to be the one calling the shots…

So how do you want to show up in a relationship? Which version of your current reality will get you closer to being whole? Is it the story of love’s past, of your broken hearts, of your bad luck or is it something else?

Putting it Together

Creating something else requires us to view our role in a love relationship from a more empowering perspective.

Much of this is accomplished by aligning ourselves with the higher level spiritual truth behind the desire to be in relationship with a partner…the opportunity to consciously experience our spiritual wholeness on the physical plane.

So now that you know what the real goal is, are clear about what qualities you want in a partner and the beliefs you held around love that have been interfering with creating the kind of relationship you want, it’s time to tap into your personal power and determine how you want to show up, so that you can get different results.

Choosing How You Show Up in a Relationship

The following exercise is useful for determining possibilities and filtering through them for the most empowering results.

Enter a meditative state, close your eyes, relax, breathe deeply and see yourself surrounded by protective white light.

Travel in your mind through time and space, to a place where you can see stretched out far behind you, a path that represents your life so far.

Out in front of you is the myriad amount of possibilities that could unfold. Stretch your hand out before you, and set your mind toward how life would look if you were living it as your most loving self.

The possibilities respond to your thoughts and begin to reorganize, reaching up to touch your hand and as they do, you see a movie of what life is like in each of them.

Try on as many as you like, get curious about them and study their differences until you find one that fits you. You’ll know by the energy and love you feel in your body as you experience it.

Once you’ve found it, examine the actions you take from this possibility as well as the thoughts and beliefs you hold as this most loving person. Notice what is happening in your life as a result.

When you are satisfied, make a commitment to yourself to allow your consciousness to reside in this possible reality, by building a bridge between it and your present circumstances.

Create a vision board that represents what you saw and felt as your most loving self…allowing it to flow into manifestation through the power of your conscious choice and intent.

Remember, you are one who is in control of and designing how you show up in life and in love

As always, feel free to share your thoughts and experiences!

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As a coach, I spend a lot of time working with the value systems of my clients. In fact, it is one of the areas that I will first search for incongruencies that leak and dilute their personal power and prevent them from showing up fully in their lives.

Many clients have ideas about what they want in life and can’t figure out why they are not creating it.

What a client creates can be looked at as a reflection of the connection or lack of connection that they are currently experiencing with their values system. Within the dance of this system is a call to deeply and truly connect with and honor themselves.

For this reason, we have to get honest with ourselves about what is really important to us, and honor it, in order to get what we want in life. When we get clear about ourselves internally, we are ready to shift our external experience.

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What Do You Value?

In order to find out what my clients value I have them do an exercise with index cards. I ask them to think about what is really really, important to them, and why it’s important. I then have them write these things on the front of the cards.

On the back of the cards I have them list all of the ways that they support these things with their time, money and energy.

Because much of what we do is unconscious, most people will find that there are areas in life that are really important to them that are not supported by their actions. I like to think of this in terms of voting.

Determining How You Vote

Because time and money equal energy, writing down how you support your values is a really clear way to see what level of alignment you currently have with the forces that drive you in life and where to make shifts that can bring you closer.

For example let’s say that you live in an artsy town and you just love the fact that you are surrounded by creative people because one of your values is to experience unique and beautiful things because this helps you be present to life.

If every time you buy something for your home, you find yourself in Ikea instead of the beautiful little artisan shops in your town, then you probably aren’t voting very consciously toward this value

At this point you can examine the energy behind the thoughts and impulses that led you to put your time and money into Ikea.

The Nature of the Thoughts Surrounding the Activity

In the above scenario we could imagine a thought of going to look for a few items for one’s living room, which then triggers an unconscious reaction which results with the idea of Ikea popping into your head and off you go without further examination. What happened to the value? Why did it never come into play?

Values take conscious awareness to implement and align with. In the above example, I used a value that is often brow-beaten by our unconscious alignment with our societies thought pattern of getting the best possible deal.

When I examine my own thought processes of getting a great deal, I notice a huge undertone of lack. Personally, that’s not the energy I want to put out in the world. This kind of unconscious motivation puts an invisible wall up between me and what I want to experience.

Using Body Wisdom to Determine What’s Most Important to Experience

For many people values are vague concepts floating around in their heads in a way that is disconnected from their experience. Often times they are not yet living their values because they haven’t learned to bring them into their bodies and therefore into their physical experience.

When you place your values inside of your body, you can access them environmentally, in this way you can feel where you are voting with your time and energy and whether or not you are honoring yourself with your actions.

When I place the energy of getting a good deal in my body as my primary motivation, I feel a bit sick in my stomach. When I place the energy of choosing to work with companies with an eye out for the whole as well as themselves, I feel a deep sense of rooted power.

My body will tell me which is the correct action for me. Now to clarify, I’m not saying to completely ignore price, I am only saying to examine the order in which you structure what is important, in other words, to determine which should come first.

Aligning Your Business with Your Values

When I first became aware of some of the unconscious processes that ran automatically in the background when I would search for products and services for my business, I was literally startled by what I found. I instantly made the decision to restructure my business to honor my values and I thought perhaps you might like to join me.

Here is what is on my list to do:

1. Find a hosting company that runs on solar energy
2. Use a credit card processor that gives 10% of their proceeds back to the environment
3. Produce business products, recordings and books on post consumer recycled paper and pop bottles
4. Use a financial institution who works with small companies that want to positively impact the world

Putting it in Action

When the main thrust of my energy enters the world from within my values, it makes a huge difference in how I honor myself and others.

If you would like to experiment similarly, and are searching for an easy way to find conscious businesses with which to partner, I suggest looking in the Co-Op America’s National Green Pages for the services you need.

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A few years ago I read the Architecture of all Abundance by Lenedra Carroll. Although this book had a profound impact on me at the time, one line, however, would prove to be somewhat life altering even beyond the scope of an already amazing story.

I was working on a recording project when it was recalled and I kid you not, it was like one of those skies parting moments, when everything changes and angels speak. It hit me like a ton of bricks crashing down on my head, leaving me in dumbfounded confusion, as I sat face to face with my own unconscious resistance to the word artist…

Remember that you are an artist.

The Resistance

Why would I have a problem with this word? I wondered. I’ve always loved artists…and in fact, spent a lot of time working with them. I questioned what this was really all about as I followed the trail further back through time.

A part of me began to speak through my memories. My youngest of watching and being attracted to singers and performers on television as a child, then there was the strong link to music when I was a teenager and how I used it as an extension of my own voice, onto actually working within the music industry as an adult in which I witnessed others use it as an extension of their souls.

I started to notice my pattern with both the written and recorded form of the arts. I could see how deeply connected I was to these artistic expressions and how I admired those who had the skills and talents to create in this way. At the same time I was able to look at my own past attempts at expressing myself in these mediums. The reason why I failed to bring this aspect of myself into the world was perfectly clear…I had never considered myself an artist.

I could acknowledge it in others but not within myself…without this form of inner permission I was seriously impeding my ability to create…not only in an art way…but in any way at all.

Learning to Embrace My Inner Artist

The revelation came as I began to prepare my audio project for iTunes. There in the artist box was my name. I sat in my chair with the quote from Lenedra’s book flowing inside my mind and in one great ah-ha moment…I felt, I knew…that this was true.

Breathing into it deeply, I allowed the word artist to move with my breath into the depths of my being, permeating my every cell with it’s higher level meaning and creating within it, a wonderful vehicle for the movement of my soul.

The Art of Life

So why was it so important for me to be able to call myself an artist?

An artist is able to surrender completely to the energy of creation which is always flowing between a state of contraction and release.

An artist aligns themselves with that flow, channels it and uses it to create new solutions, reroute their current path and overcome limitations.

This ability to become fluid in perspective, identity and context aligns them with a deep universal truth.

The keys to freedom, and the way to unlocking our own prison doors lies in matching our nature to Nature.

Our egoic tendencies trigger resistance as we attempt to keep ourselves separate from the totality…our true selves recognize that we ARE the totality…and that all we really ever need to do is tap into that and flow.

These qualities are something that each and everyone of us is here to express. Your artistic or creative side is an important part of yourself to integrate regardless of who you are or what you do as it will often determine how you show up for life.

Questions to Ask Yourself

How close are you to being able to acknowledge your own inner artist?

If you’ve not yet done so, what stops you?

If you found some kind of fear, ask yourself what holding onto that is getting for you?

And as always, feel free to share your results and experiences

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Andrea Hess, of Empowered Soul drew my attention to project that is the work of one of her clients called, “The Future of Medicine” and asked if I would be interested in highlighting it on this blog.

The movie explores various forms of alternative healing modalities which are based on the idea that the body is capable of healing itself. One of my favorite books on this subject if you’re in for further exploration, is the Biology of Belief, by Bruce Lipton.

The Body Can Heal Itself

The idea that the body can heal itself, makes perfect sense. Our bodies heal themselves all of the time so what causes the conditions of illness? What allows for this healing mechanism to be interrupted?

In my experience we become sick due to imbalances between our physical, emotional & spiritual bodies. When all of these things are in alignment we operate perfectly, and truth be told, we are operating perfectly even when they are not.

An NLP Perspective

NLP is based on a principle that change happens fast, not slow and that lasting change occurs below the levels of the environment because there is an aspect of ourselves in operation that is outside of our conscious awareness. This applies across the board to things like physical symptoms and illness, emotion difficulties, reactions or any behavior that we don’t want to be doing.

For example, one of the most powerful healings I received from NLP solved a physical problem that first surfaced when I was fourteen years old, eczema. In class, we were experimenting with a process called 6-Step Reframe. I decided to see if it would work on my eczema as I was tired of having cracked and bleeding hands.

Once in the process I got the chance to speak to the part of myself that was causing the reaction, get to it’s positive purpose for doing so and have it come on board for finding alternative ways to express itself to me.

Traditional medicine couldn’t really do much. They advised gloves and steroid creams which worked only temporarily if at all. This is not surprising since prescribing creams and such is attacking the problem on the environmental level without ever actually getting at the cause. Since using the NLP process, I no longer have eczema.

The Mind/Body/Spirit Connection

Speaking to the body requires us to use a language most of us are unfamiliar with and this is where alternative healing modalities can help. These methods allow us to communicate with these parts, guide us to tap into them and help us to understand their needs and having them in turn, understand ours.

Because modern humans spend a lot of time living mostly in our heads, we have no idea, just how powerful we really are. Once we re-connect the mind with body and spirit, we have our full system up and running and available to us.

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A Rose By Any Other Name

I’ve written this article for those who would like to bring a little more love in their lives. If you are at a place where you want to find someone of like mind and heart to spend a little bit of time with, this article is for you.

Love and the Law of Attraction

Before I met my husband I had a list of criteria I wanted in a romantic partner. I wasn’t even interested in dating someone that didn’t meet these requirements. When dating a new person I always had what I was looking for in mind, and if I didn’t see enough matches early on I moved on to someone else. Although I never realized it, I was using the law of attraction to find what I wanted.

I had dated enough to have a list of areas that I was really clear on…and I was a complete and total match for getting it partially because I would accept nothing less and partially because my beliefs were congruent with what I wanted.

The Love List

To begin getting clear on what you want in a romantic partner, compile a list of attributes that are a “must have” for you, in that special someone. Write down everything that comes to mind and then go into detail as to why specifically it matters, what your person having that will get for you and what makes it a must have. When you’ve finished your list, the next step is to find out if you are a vibrational match for what you want.

The Vibration Revelation

Many of us think we know how we feel about love, what we want and how to get it, however I am guessing that most of know less than we think. A love relationship is an old subject even for the very young among us as it is one of the very first relationships that we experience.

As a child growing up we form ideas about love, what it means, what it will get for us and how to get it by watching the interaction of those around us…the conclusions we come to become deeply embedded within us, operating below the level of our conscious thought.

Are you curious about the beliefs you have lurking under the surface within your deeper mind? Are you wondering what is driving your patterns, attracting you to the same type of man/woman and influencing the kinds of relationships you bring into your life?

If so, answering the following questions will reveal how you really think about love and provide a window into how congruent your thoughts are in this most important area of life.

Comparing the outcomes of these questions with the attributes you’re looking for in a partner with give you a good idea if you are a vibrational match for what it is that you want.

So what if you’re not a match for what you want? I’ll cover that in part two of Manifesting the Love of Your Life.

Uncovering How You Think About Love

Fill in the Blank

People in love are _________

Love makes people_________

I’d have love if_____________

My dad thought love was__________

My mom always thought love would__________

In my family love caused_______________

Love equals_______________

If I had love I’d_____________

If I could have love it would___________

Love is not___________

I’m afraid if I had love I would____________

Love is________________

Love causes______________

In order to be loved I need to______________

When I’m in love I usually_______________

If I could love freely I’d_____________

People think love__________________

When someone is single it tells me that_________________

People are single because________________

People become loved by_______________

Single people are____________________

Married people are__________________

When I was a kid I knew which kid’s parents were married and which were divorced. I was the kid of __________ parents and this had the following affects on my thoughts about relationships_________________.

This article was featured in:

Total Mind and Body Fitness Carnival
The Second Edition of the Carnival of Improving Life

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The power of…

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In this article I’d like to explore a very powerful technique for stimulating motion when we find ourselves stuck within our patterns and some of the most common patterns I encounter as a spiritual explorer and coach. I think by the end of the article you will agree that a little re-framing…really can make a world of difference .

Three Easy Ways to Get Stuck:

Having All the Answers. It’s easy in the personal development world to fall into the trap of thinking you have to have all of the answers. I am constantly reminding myself that I am a learner and that learning and exploring is what I am here to do. Acquiring experience is simply a consequence of this fact.

We can get used to knowing so much that we begin to expect that this will always be the case and can get quite flustered when we find ourselves in a situation in which we feel a little lost. It’s the expectation we have of ourselves and the meaning that we attach to it, that puts us in this unresourceful state.

If I feel like I should already know everything, than I’m likely not to seek new experiences or learnings and those situations are likely to cause me a great deal of discomfort.

To give myself a new way of being with or experiencing learning I might re-frame my expectation with the words, I’m not lost I’m exploring or a true master is an eternal student.

Putting too Much Emphasis on the End Result. When you make plans to achieve goals, are you only concerned with the end result? Is every step you take to get there simply a means toward that end? Are you concerned with the quality of what you do or with what you think doing it will get for you?

If everything I do is simply to get me to someplace else than I’m not actually living my current life but instead I’ve empowered a future one that is linked with a very specific chain of events as my key to happiness…and what happens to me if that outcome never comes about. What if I did a really good job, my absolute best and it doesn’t happen? Do I somehow feel I fell short and failed? What is failure and success and how would I want to ideally define it?

Something that my Spirit has really been adamant about lately is teaching me where to place my energy in life. In the view of Spirit the outcome doesn’t matter at all because the only thing that exists is the present. If you are focused ahead you are not in the place where you actually have any power which is right now.

The place from which you make your decisions and function in the present is where you have the most control over any outcome. Often when you get this right, the outer world just lines up behind it…but even if it doesn’t, you will not be affected in the same way because your emphasis was on the form of your approach and the state from which you took action, not in the action itself. This is the place where you can fully control your own success.

Re-frame: The “how” is more important that the “what”.

Rules for Victories. Do you have a lot of rules in your life? Do you have a lot of desires? Are you the kind of person that really gets a lot of what you want but will only be happy if you get what you want exactly how you wanted it? Are your rules getting in the way of the joy you experience in life?

When we surround ourselves with complex rules we ensure that we will never have a reason to celebrate. In fact, one could say that we design the joy right out of our existence by putting so much of our energy on our systems of rules and regulations that we don’t have any left for the happiness that we think these rules will buy us. By allowing ourselves some flexibility, we can awaken with gratitude to the abundance available to us within the life that we are already living.

Re-frame: I get what I want in new and surprising ways.

Re-Framing Life Experiences

I’m not lost…I’m exploring, is a classic re-frame of something that most of us would consider an uncomfortable if not unpleasant experience.

Some time ago many people referred to me as impatient because of my strong desire to immediately experience anything I was excited about. I took that to heart and began to view myself through the lens of this word as well, until one day a friend heard me describe myself in this way and said, “You’re not impatient…you’re just enthusiastic and excited.”

The minute I heard it I knew it was true. I was really enthusiastic and my energy would come through so strongly that I literally bounced and hummed with it. From that time on I never again called myself impatient and now no one else does either.

Truth is, once I started labeling myself differently, I developed very quickly a new way of being with my own excitement that was much more fulfilling.

We can easily program in the beliefs and habits of our fathers, mothers, peers, etc. and carry the voices of their world views around with us for all of our lives if we choose…or we can question those voices and take up the challenge to provide ourselves and others with a more compelling vocabulary through which to view and interpret the world around us.

What kind of world would it be if all that we judged as being wrong in ourselves and others was offered back to us with positive re-frame?

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As many of you know, last December I participated in the Spread the Love, NOW! writing project by blogging about compassion. My post, Cultivating Compassion Through ‘I Am That’ Thinking was selected by the judges as one of six winners to receive the prize of The Now Watch.

I was absolutely thrilled as after writing my article I had an epiphany of sorts about some of my earlier experiences with being a writer which I detailed in my article,
The Parable of the Watch.

The lesson of my article surrounded the way that we use our gifts and talents in life as opposed to what their true function may be for us.

Or expressed in another way, how our minds can get a hold of a gift or talent that we have and allow for only one kind of reality in which that gift can manifest…pigeon-holing us to create a very specific outer circumstance in order to have an inner experience that was ours for the taking all along.

I thought that would be the end of my writings about it, however, it turns out that the watch had an on-going purpose…one that beautifully illustrates the power of detachment and how that too…can lead to compassion.

On The Way

A week or so ago, Adam Rothenhaus, founder of the Now Watch wrote me to let me know that my prize was on the way.

I have to admit, I was very excited and wondered what my experience with the watch would be…as I was expecting with the word NOW printed across the front, it would act as a reminder to stay present and out of what Eckhart Tolle refers to as psychological time or our tendency to endlessly wander to the past or future and avoid living in the now altogether.

Last Friday, I came home from taking my son Sebastian to his gymnastics class and my husband looked at me and said, “There’s some bad news”.

Missing Mail

Our neighbor had called Jason to say that her son Scott had found a pile of discarded mail on his bike path near the front of their yard. Among the pile of discarded envelopes was the empty package of a Now Watch.

My husband embraced me after sharing the news, he knew that the watch was a symbolic confirmation of spirit for me and that hearing this might perhaps make me sad and it did. I experienced the swell of emotion and caught myself about to say a resounding “No!” to this circumstance and resist…but then I stopped.

Instead I just felt it, allowing my thoughts to go nowhere but to my breathing. As I breathed with no inner dialog I pulled back from the situation and viewed it from the larger perspective of the entire story that was unfolding…laughter and joy started to bubble up from inside of me at just how funny it all was.

I told Jason that perhaps the people who had stolen our mail needed the reminder of presence a bit more than I did and that this was the perfect opportunity to practice empowerment via detachment.

The Power of Detachment

Detachment is useful because it keeps us from wrapping our identities up in objects, people, circumstances or any number of things we may encounter in life that can be a source of unhappiness if we mistakenly associate these things, actions, abilities or situations with an extension of who we are.

Detachment allows us to feel just how large and connected we really are within our challenges, attachment on the other hand makes us feel small and alone.

It allows us a separation from our ideas about ourselves and the rightness or wrongness of our life circumstances and experiences by connecting us with the core of who and what we really are in the present moment…outside of judgment.

Using Detachment

I used a few methods to help me detach from the circumstances of the above story.

Breathe. The first thing I did was breathe deeply. It sounds like a simple thing but it is enormously helpful when you want to keep thoughts from hijacking your mind and running off with it. By breathing deeply and on count, it took my focus into my body and out of my head. Making it easier for me to experience the situation outside of judgment and giving me time to choose how I wanted it go.

Observe. The second thing I did was take an observer position. I climbed outside of myself and viewed the situation as if I was a bystander watching the event unfold. From this perspective I could see myself within the larger system around me and it brought the event to a manageable size.

Ever notice how when you’re right in the middle of something it looks so big that it seems like there is nothing else there but this problem confronting you? Becoming an observer is one of the fastest methods I know of for creating space around a challenge.

Trust. The third thing I did was consciously embrace the situation by trusting that everything had gone just as it should have.

I started thinking of the watch as having adventures and I got curious as to how it may bring a note of presence to it’s current company.

I began to wonder at the forces at work providing opportunities to all sides to grow…and I saw all of this as an extension of my own consciousness creating circumstances that would allow me to travel even further down that growth path.

Greater Good

I’ve been reading Little House on the Prairie to my kids at night (Laura Ingalls Wilder and I go way back but that is a story for another time ). At the end of the book when they have to leave the new house they built due to the government changing their minds about letting the settlers stay on the land, Laura says she finally understood what her Pa meant when he said, “There is no great loss without some small gain.”

As they had lost their home, their cow (no more milk or butter) and most of their belongings aside of what would fit in the wagon but they had gained not having to save certain foods any longer to start their garden and so they had a feast of sorts despite the circumstances…finding that the small things had the power to lift them out of the greater ones.

I found this perspective interesting today as I opened the package from the police department returning not one but two empty packages, both of personal development products.

I thought about the intuition that led the person who took the mail to come to our neighborhood and happen by our mailbox on the very day these products arrived. Surely, their guides were leading them in any way they could toward us…and the spiritual tools that were in our mailbox.

Does Detachment Mean You Do Nothing?

Detachment does not require that you do nothing. Detachment ensures that your actions will arise from the needs of the situation instead of from insecurity, anger or fear.

We feel very centered and at peace with all that has occurred and from this energy arose the action of replacing our mailbox with the locking kind over the weekend.

We did it happily and simply because it was what needed to be done .

You may wonder if we would have replaced our box anyway. Yes, we would have but without detachment we would have been angry and in a place of resistance, demanding that the situation somehow change so that we could maintain our false sense of control.

The outward effects of the two different approaches may look the same but the energy created makes a world of difference regarding your inner experience and the kind of situations you want to attract into your world.

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Dream Attractions

Some of my most transformational experiences have been heralded by Spirit Animals and dreams. My first Spirit Animal was the wolf. When I was fifteen I dreamed of them constantly and then could not stop my mind from wandering back to my dreams. Like the tongue that endlessly explores the empty cavity of a lost tooth…every time my focus slipped and I became lost in thought, I was back with the wolves.

I was practically getting beat over the head with the message and finally one day while in the grocery store with my mother I found the next step. There on the wall where people post items for sale was an index card advertising Wolf-Hybrid pups for sale.

My mom said that they were too expensive so I pleaded with her to let me call and ask if the man would accept payments. She said he wouldn’t but consented to the call and guess what, he did. I took home a wolf-pup and about a week later my mom made me return it, afraid that it’s play would be too much for her toy Pomeranians. When we returned the pup to the breeder, he asked my mom out on a date and two weeks later they were married.

This was the beginning of a new life and an amazing adventure…

Messages in Dreams

Dreams still provide me with extremely strong guidance and I am aware that I travel astrally while I sleep to people who need my assistance. Upon awakening I know I’ve been with them, even though I don’t usually remember the content surrounding our night time activities.

With dreams, I find to uncover their meanings you have to understand the language of the unconscious mind. Those who are psychically inclined are usually very good at this because the same systems are in use in both places. Basically you will rely much more on how you feel and the images and events are strung together to communicate something very specific to your experience.

No dream book can help you in this respect because much of it is determined by how well you know yourself…this will define the meaning of what the images represent to you. The more emotionally honest you can be, the better you will be able to interpret the feeling systems that were engaged and the lessons or guidance that is being revealed.

Dreams always call our attention to areas of our lives that could use introspection, action, healing or some other form of growth. Sometimes they are a window into an upcoming experience, sometimes into our fears and insecurities, sometimes into our greatest hopes and life purposes but always they hold information that can be very transformational when used for growth.

Developing Muscle in the Land of the Unconscious

Several things are helpful for growing your skills with the unconscious mind.

Hold Information Loosely. If you take the endeavor too seriously you are likely to get in your own way. What I mean by this is that you want a meaning so badly that you miss it altogether. Developing a light touch helps enormously, allowing yourself to play with it, to be wrong, to learn, to make your best guess and then see what happens will get you further along with this.

Keep a Dream & Trance Journal. Keeping a journal of your dream and trance work is really helpful. First off, it helps you to remember the details of what you heard, saw, felt, smelled, tasted, etc. Notice also how it looked, was it grainy, clear, bright, big, were you overly large or small. Keep track of the details and of your initial impressions, gut feelings, what was most compelling about it and why you feel that way…i.e. what it reminds you of.

Keep a Daily Journal. Your daily journal is where you are likely to notice the dream work and waking world overlap. In writing a daily journal you will take your observing dream self into your waking world and through the writing about your experiences you are likely to notice situations that felt similar to things you experienced in dreams and trance, laying the ground work in your thinking for correlation and reference.

Elicit Symbolic Response. This is a really fun practice that will sharpen your skills significantly. It is a way of speaking to your unconscious and drawing out from it a symbolic representation of a concept. Start with some experience to which you would like a symbolic reference. Begin breathing deeply and find a really fun memory or high moment, allowing it to play out in your mind to the end.

Take a few more deep breaths and ask yourself for a symbol of what this experience means to you…some kind of metaphor and just wait for it to come up. You may hear a word, see a sign, get a fragrance or a taste or any combination of these modes. Write down what you got and play with recalling the symbol and see how it brings up all the feelings that were contained within your experience.

This is a great way to start building a two-way communication system with this most mysterious aspect of your own psyche! And it gets really fun when you figure out how to consciously harness the power of your unconscious mind and with it, begin to co-create your living experience

Of course…a good coach helps with this as well!

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