Choosing to Deepen Commitment with Self

Last month I looked at Sabotage, this month I want to explore Choices and how we can “choose” to accept and love ourselves. What does deepening your commitment to Self mean to you?

Consciously choosing to love and accept ourselves for who we are is much more challenging than choosing from a place of fear and sabotage. We are full of old patterns and belief systems that are unconscious and judged by society. If we choose to deepen our commitment to Self, we are acknowledging that our Soul’s growth is crucial to our lives. We recognize that we ARE important and worthy of our own love, therefore deserving of others’ love too.

Choosing Us, means we choose love over fear. It means taking some time to get out of our heads and move into our hearts, literally. Fear permeates our society and our unconscious reactions. Examining our reactions helps us establish our patterns and how we unconsciously react versus consciously responding. Choosing love, means being more present and conscious of our actions. Being conscious of our actions means asking our self whether we are trying to be a better person because we want others to like us or because we are in service and are acting out of a place of unconditional love. These are two very different places. One comes from a place of fear and inauthenticity (so we aren’t disliked or judged), while the other is without expectation and from an altruistic place (being authentic and with integrity). We all want to be a “good” person (honorable, honest), yet it is in the expectation of why we do something, that we can establish whether we are truly responding from love or reacting from fear.

When it comes to “deepening our commitment to Self”, we are often coming from a place of fear, worrying if others will like us and accept us as who we are! We are afraid we will be judged as selfish. We sabotage our growth from this place of fear. Coming from a place of love means being committed to honouring our body, our diet, meditating and exercising. It means saying yes when you want to say yes, and no when you want to say NO! It means being conscious of every choice we make or don’t make and why we react to situations and people. It is balancing out our energy so that we are receiving as much as we are giving. And it means giving to ourselves as well as others.

Choosing love, comes from our Heart and the gentle guidance of our Soul. It is expansive and empowering. It opens us to gratitude and unconditional acceptance of who we are.

See more at: http://www.intuitivesoul.com/choosing-to-deepen-commitment-with-self

Magic and Grace

Every December, I write about the Magic of the Season. It is the Magic of love, compassion, and generosity. I know it is around all year, but I believe we all connect with it more strongly at this time. It has the power to open our hearts. And this year, I have become enchanted with the concept of “Grace”. Grace takes the Magic of the season and offers a gentle acceptance about life within our hearts.

It all began while watching the movie “The Tree of Life” where the mother speaks of Grace versus Nature. “The nuns taught us there are two ways through life, the way of Nature and the way of Grace. You have to choose which one to follow. Grace doesn’t try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. And others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy, when all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things…” [nature as defined in Bible book 3, chapter 54]

There is magic in these words that has stayed with me… pondering how to live a life of Grace. To know that beyond the fear that we can get stuck in, there is Divine Consciousness; Grace that breathes through our lives. That speaks of gentle acceptance of everything that happens, because it isn’t personal. That speaks of guiding us to respond with unconditional love and acceptance instead of fear. That speaks of seeing “Love smiling through all things”.

However, we must move beyond our minds, our fears and pain, to a place that exists within all of us. This magic and grace is the same piece of Divinity that is Source. It is our Home. It is what makes us all one. However, we have to nurture this Magic, or else its magnificence fades. We dull magic when ever we are disappointed like through our fears, pain and attempts to control our lives. It dulls every time we give our fears more power than the “magic” within us and our lives.

Magic and grace exist, we just have to hold it within our hearts. And make a conscious choice to seek this. This time of year magic is strongest, touch upon it… remember it… rejoice that we have a touch of the Great Mystery within each of us. Let that magic overflow in all you do. Let your heart remember what it always knew. Find your own way to let Magic and Grace nurture and foster your Divine Essence. And let that Essence flow out into your life.

See more at: http://www.intuitivesoul.com/magic-and-grace

Change & New Beginnings: Love or Fear

As we come to the end of the “Winter that wasn’t”… and approach spring, it always makes me think of New Beginnings and Changes. We all seem to want them and are inspired to imagine creating them; however, if we are on the road to authenticity and desire to come from a place of the Heart and love versus a place of the Head (ego/mind), are these desires for new beginnings and/or change, coming from a place of love or fear?

For the past couple of years, I have been inviting you to come from a more authentic place. One of the Heart and Love, versus coming from our heads, where fear is prevalent. Being more authentic suggests not reacting out of fear, but questioning why you are making these decisions. It suggests that we become conscious of who we really are? Instead of just making decisions to please others or from a place that our childhood self perceived was “safe”.

Approach change in the same authentic, heart centered way. We often want changes in our career, relationships, health or finances, and sometimes all of these areas. What is your reason for wanting a new beginning or change in your life? People often want a new job, because they don’t like the one they have. Yet when we explore why they don’t like it, it often has to do with conflicts at work. Conflicts in relationships. Their boss is giving them a hard time, there is petty gossip that they are the subject of, or someone has betrayed them. This is the same in relationships, health etc.

What I have learned over and over again is that Love is about giving, not getting. It is about how much we can give love, not controlling our circumstances. Fear seems to be about what I can “get”. The Secret has taught us that we can create anything we desire, but I have found that essentially we are trying to control our creations and desiring out of fear instead of a place of love.

If we are here to expand our awareness and grow spiritually towards love, then we need to learn to respond from our hearts, not our ego/minds. To truly desire change from a place of love, we have to give love. We have to come from a place of unconditional giving. Change from love would come from being in service to others, and having no expectations of what we would “get” as a result of our giving.

Why do you want change or a new beginning in your life? How could you approach this from a place of love versus fear?

See more at: http://www.intuitivesoul.com/change-new-beginnings-love-or-fear

Pain a Divine Purpose

I’ve come to have a new appreciation of pain in the past few months. Chronic Pain is debilitating, but I never understood how it can infiltrate every area of your life. Physical pain impacts your mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. When we are stuck in our emotional pain/trauma it can impact every area as well.

Which makes me contemplate pain in a deeper way, and why we never seem to heal our deepest wounds. I’ve been dealing with abandonment on every level my entire adult life. Each layer going deeper and deeper. Like pain, I wonder if instead of trying to “fix” it, are we just supposed to love and accept it? Take responsibility for it and then surrender it to our inner Divine?

I certainly know I didn’t “attract” this pain (I believe, like many other spiritual truths, we have misunderstood the Law of Attraction. We attract from our “resonance” to people and events, but the Law of Attraction is only one law in this Universe), and in the midst of my suffering, I do feel powerless, separate and victimized (aka abandoned), which only adds to my mental, emotional, physical and spiritual dis”ease”. However, I can see that I am responsible for everything and everyone in my life that creates the stress that makes me feel abandoned, powerless and stuck in my painful story.

So I wonder if not everything and everyone in our life is our Divine Purpose. Here to gently guide and honor our journey; to love and accept us for exactly who we are. Not to change or fix, but to let us see what our choices are, so, we may make new choices from a different perspective. To remind us that life surrounds us with opportunities to surrender our ego/mind attempts to control our life and invites our higher Inner Divine to support and nurture us from that higher perspective that we will never be able to see from this three dimensional perspective.

I believe everything is our Divine Purpose, especially our pain. We are not here to “do” things differently, we are here to BE! The only thing we need to become aware of is our perspectives, based from our unconscious and conscious beliefs. We need to respond instead of react. To surrender our ego’s desire to be “right” and justified, and move into a place of love and acceptance to all. May we see our pain, in whatever form in materializes, as an opportunity to create a deeper connection to our Inner Divine Wisdom. To love and accept our pain as the message of possibilities that exist to bring us back to Self and balanced in mind, body and spirit.

See more at: http://www.intuitivesoul.com/pain-a-divine-purpose

When the Law of Attraction Doesn’t Work

The biggest part of my journey has been to understand my own growth and spiritual evolution. Like many of us, I have been hearing about the Law of Attraction (LOA) for almost 20 years, through sources like Abraham Hicks, then the movie The Secret. This has been an empowering and exciting part of this journey. However, we all seem to be going through extraordinary challenges, and I question whether the LOA is always in the forefront of what we are creating.

My current understanding of life has changed. I feel that we need to be more authentic than always being “happy” and thinking only positive thoughts; that our unconscious is already full of emotions that we can’t deal with at this time; that what we really need is to be in the Now moment and focusing on opening our hearts and accepting and loving who we are versus trying to control our dreams through our fears.

What is worse is many people feel like failures when the LOA isn’t working for them. Another way we are betrayed, unworthy and/or abandoned by God. However, I have come to realize that there are some main reasons why the LOA doesn’t work the way we were taught in The Secret.

1. There are more laws then the LOA that are at play in the Universe. Our planet has the Law of Projection, where we see where we need to grow mirrored in others around us. But we see these people, or mirrors, as separate from ourselves and therefore can’t take 100% responsibility for our growth and what is in our lives. How can we attract when we aren’t aware what we are projecting?

2. We are using our will over the Will of God. We are always trying to control our future, through our expectations and attachments to what occurs in our future. We want to be in the driver’s seat, and the LOA is the perfect vehicle to allow us this control. We aren’t aligning with our Soul and inner Divine essence so that we co-create what our soul desires or needs, which we may not be aware of.

3. We have underlying and unhealed unconscious programming that governs our life. Most of our programming came into effect within our first 7 years. And we also agreed to our family’s lineage lessons and our Soul’s lessons from past lives. These unconscious programs come into effect when we try to change our old, stuck patterns.

There is confusion around what being responsible for our lives really means. LOA uses responsibility to mean that we are attracting what we don’t want through our conscious thoughts and our negative thinking. I believe instead that if something is in our lives that affects us, we are responsible for our reactions, responses, acceptance, healing and growth. Everything in our lives is here for a reason. It would be most beneficial if we could establish the reasons and motivations for what we “don’t want” in our lives, and from there make different choices.

See more at: http://www.intuitivesoul.com/when-the-law-of-attraction-doesnt-work
 

Holiday Relationships

We are coming into the Holiday season, one that has so much promise and is full of expectations, good and bad. Some may even feel the excitement of possibilities that they haven’t felt in so long. One thing I hear most often that continues to be expressed around the Holidays is about our dysfunctional relationships.

The holidays are a difficult time of year for many people. If you are single, the hopes of finding true love and magic at this time, hold allure, although, it may also hold a great deal of sadness and lost hope. If you are in a new relationship then there are the expectations of a relationship going to the next level. Or if you are in an existing relationship it is about maintaining or rediscovering the spark. Also there are the family get-together’s that create so much stress, as we try to meet our own ego’s expectations of having the “perfect” Holiday Dinner. All scenarios can create a stressful holiday season!

There is no easy solution, but we can find a way to get out of our heads and into the one place that we belong during the holidays, our Heart! The Magic of the Holiday season is that there is an energy of “giving”. We all have had the disappointment of not getting what we wanted. This is because of our expectations and our ego wanting something that we anticipated from someone else. Yet we all know the magic of discovering the perfect gift for someone else. However, this may have led to disappointment if it was not received with the joy that we put into it.

The holiday season is about Giving, not getting. If we could change our perspectives around this and only focus on how we can serve others; friends, partners, and our families, we wouldn’t be so stressed and we could embrace the Magic of the Holiday Season. When we are in our heads we are trying to control and manipulate those around us as well as ourselves, so that we will be liked or accepted.

The problem is that we are going about this from a mental and ego’s viewpoint. When we try and control or manipulate a situation, it is because we are holding a past memory that has a belief or fear within it. When we hold our beliefs and fears from the place of a core wound, we react instead of respond. The Holidays are filled with memories, beliefs, and fears that reflect our core wounds. Our mission, if we choose to accept it, is to stop focusing on what we want, and shift it over to what we can give to others! Think of all the beautiful gifts that you have to offer the people in your life and your community.

The gift of theHolidays is that the Magic of this time is strong, and we have an opportunity to connect into this beautiful vibration of giving more easily. My invitation to you is get out of your head and your ego’s “wantings” and shift your focus towards what you can give to others. When you do this with your heart it means that you don’t expect anything in return. Imagine that this Holiday season you have the time, energy and/or money (if necessary) that others don’t, and that you just want to give because you don’t need anything in return. Your heart is full and exuberant. You are expressing your Soul’s essence and snuggling safely within your heart’s space.

Happy Holidays!

-See more at: http://www.intuitivesoul.com/holiday-relationships

Do you know the Power of Your Heart?

We have all heard sayings such as Home is where the Heart is and Follow your Heart. One of my favorite quotes is: “Our Heart carries the wings of our dreams and the desire to realize them” by Fernando Soave.

The heart has the power to deliver our dreams and has been the focus of my energy for several years. I have grown to understand and appreciate this power. Training and research has proven that my intuitive guidance on the power of the heart is as impressive as I had believed. I am participating in a Tele-summit RealitiesofCreation.com that begins September 8^th. We will publish a book (of which my chapter is all about the Power of the Heart) and we will be going on a cruise in April, 2015. For my part of the book, I have two purposes; one is to show all the research that has been done to help you understand the power of the heart; and how using this research to keep your heart clear and coherent you may have access to as much of the Heart Field as possible. Secondly, it is to offer you ways to access the power of the heart to create the dreams you desire in your life and align to your Soul’s Purpose!

‎The human Heart is now documented as the strongest generator of both electric and magnetic fields in the body. This is important, because we’ve always been taught that the brain is where all of the action is. Multiple Brain Integration Techniques from mBraining.com (research done through Grant Soosla) teaches that we have 3 brains (proven to date), our mind has 100 billion neurons, the gut brain has 500 million neurons (the same size as the brains of cats and dogs) and the heart has only 30,000-120,000 neurons. While the brain also has an electromagnetic field, it is relatively weak compared to the Heart. The Heart is about 100,000 times stronger electrically and up to 5,000 times stronger magnetically than the brain. This is important, because the physical world is made of these two fields: the electric and magnetic fields of Energy. Physics demonstrates that a change in our electromagnetic field produces atomic level transformation: as we change our energy, we change our state of matter and BEing, and moreover, everyone we encounter. We literally change that atom and its elements within our body and this world. The human Heart is designed to do this from an emotional state.

Heartmath.com teaches that our heart emits an electromagnetic field that changes in accordance to our emotions. The magnetic field can be measured several feet from the body. Positive emotions create physiological benefits in your body. You can boost your immune system by conjuring positive emotions. Negative emotions create a nervous system chaos where positive emotions do the opposite. The heart has a system of neurons that have both short and long term memory, and their signals sent to the brain can affect our emotional experience. Our heart sends more information to the brain than vice versa. Our positive emotions help the brain in creativity and innovative problem solving. Positive emotions increase the brain’s ability to make good decisions.

What does this mean? The implications are huge!

Research has shown that the heart sends powerful signals to the brain and rest of the body. Once understood and accessed, these heart signals give you more ability to self-regulate your emotions and nervous system and to make changes you thought you couldn’t make before. Throughout history, people have talked about the core values of the heart, which include love, care, appreciation, respect, compassion, kindness, forgiveness and non-judgment. These values and attitudes, which we call core heart feelings, generate the heart signals that bring more coherence to the body’s systems. When your initial effort is “from the heart,” it brings your mind and emotions into cooperative alignment, and this gives you more intuitive clarity to clear disturbances, and more strength and energy to achieve your goals. That’s why coaches say, “play from the heart” or “sing from the heart” or “put your heart into it.” Putting your heart into whatever you do gives more power, enjoyment and better results.

What interferes with our Heart’s inner power is stress. One of the largest positive impacts on stress is through our breath. If breath controls the heart, and heart produces our most powerful field generator, then breath becomes one of our most potent catalysts for changing our energy field.

In martial art, yoga, bodywork, counseling and coaching, we use a tool called entrainment (Heartmath calls Coherence): a technique for synchronizing and controlling cardiac rhythm by an external stimulus, in most cases, our own breath. As we breathe, so too does the entrained individual or group. As we change our breath, and entrain others to do so, we change the heart rhythm – the most powerful force in the human body.

See more at: http://www.intuitivesoul.com/do-you-know-the-power-of-your-heart

Can you tell the difference between fear and your gut intuition?

With Halloween just finished, I have been contemplating fear and intuition. We know that science has proven the existence of a neural network or brain associated with our gut. Gut intuition is about perseverance. Our gut will warn us when it needs to protect us. Our heart brain is all about love and compassion and our head brain can be quite creative. So our intuition here is often clear, because it has to do with love and acceptance or showing us some creative solutions to problems. However, when you get that feeling in your gut, how do you tell the difference between fear and intuition?

I have an example of just this, when I made an appointment last week for my muscle activation guru Josh Young. I set up an appointment earlier in the week and wasn’t thinking about the date when I made it. I also had a healing done prior that created a great deal of need to relax and re-energize for a few days. What day did I make the appointment for, you ask? Mercury has been retrograde since Oct 3^rd and we were in between 2 eclipses. Just as we were scheduled for our solar eclipse on Oct 23^rd and mercury was about to go direct on the 25^th, I booked an appointment for, yep you guessed it the 23^rd! Mercury is always worst right before and during when it goes retrograde and when it goes direct, throw in the solar eclipse and… BOOM!

The day of the 22^nd I considered cancelling my appointment because I wasn’t feeling very energetic. I wasn’t sure if it was my physical condition, my intuition or just apathy that was having me reconsider. When the day arrived, I still felt quite awful and my intuition was nudging me to cancel. However, I decided that my health was a priority and I was going ahead. Also, my phone only had 28% battery charge, even though this should last me half a day; I ignored my intuition again when I kept getting I should charge it before I left.

I took the subway there, as it was a pretty good route, but I planned to take advantage of my newly acquired membership with a car share program (car2go), for the way home. I knew after the treatment, I would just want to get home as quickly as I could to relax and rejuvenate, so I reserved the car in my area. After my appointment the car wasn’t where it was supposed to be. I spent 10-15 minutes trying to locate it, I found one in a different spot 5 levels lower but I couldn’t activate it (it was out of service). I called the company and spent a 15-20 minutes talking with them while trying to locate the car. As soon as I was back at the entrance, my intuition did tell me where it was; there was a lot across the street that although wasn’t a Green P parking lot, had a green sign and a green P in the sign. I got cut off from the company while exploring where the car was, as we were going further and further underground. I did finally locate it, but I had to call back to have the car put in service, as I had been the 4^th person to try and locate it. This would have been an ideal time to walk away and choose a new course of action, however I was invested in moving forward and I just wanted to get home.

At this point, my phone no longer had a battery charge and I got in the car, only to have my intuition tell me once again there was something wrong. I continued, ignoring my intuition for the 3^rd time that day. I quickly discovered that the radio wasn’t working (usually not a problem, except you need the radio to use the inboard call center). Within a few minutes my intuition was going on high alert, because the car just wasn’t feeling “right”. After about 10-12 minutes of driving, I unfortunately discovered why, I had a flat tire. So, now I’m stranded, in an area that is not close to anything, my phone isn’t working and neither is the inboard phone! So, I had to get out of the car, find a convenience store and plead to use their phone. Of course I get a newbie and he leaves me on the phone for over 25 minutes and I got kicked out of the store, completely stranded. I was too angry to think and ended walking home which took me 2 hours. All the great work of my treatment felt a waste as I was exhausted and in a lot of pain by the time I got home.

OK, now for the moral of the story! We have all had these kinds of crazy days that seem to just snowball no matter how much we try to salvage the developing situation. It is important to take the time to understand what was motivating our choices when these situations arise. However, it is just as important to let yourself off the hook! Judging yourself for the choices you make in life, especially when things go horribly wrong, won’t help. Learning to strengthen your ability to trust and honor your internal guidance systems can drastically improve the quality of your day to day life.

When I reflect on my crazy day I can see that I was trying to control this situation and not honoring my gut! I wasn’t centered while I was searching for a way to get home therefore ignoring my intuition because I was too attached to my original plan.

When we are in good form and something is off it is relatively easy to shift our day. However, when we aren’t feeling great and are in need of some TLC and our day takes a turn for the worse, this is when it is most important to make sure we have lots of tools at our disposal to turn things around. We need to come up with our own rituals for understanding and honoring our intuition, which can even include creating the space to just let things be until whatever is going on passes.

Learning to trust my intuition and remembering that my gut is a fierce warrior that deserves to be heard regardless of what it is saying is now important. I believe from now on I will connect in with my three brains for guidance when I am getting contradictory information. Taking the time to reflect on what was happening internally has given me the insight I need to completely shift my day next time things go wrong. What about you? What do you do when confronted with a crazy day?

See more at: http://www.intuitivesoul.com/can-you-tell-the-difference-between-fear-and-your-gut-intuition