I’m sitting down at my computer with my breakfast of apples, nuts and seeds, at 11:30 in the morning on a Thursday and reflecting on what I wanted to write about today.  My life is no longer traditional.  I am so grateful that I can eat breakfast at 11am and do what I love to do with my life.  Write, sing and help others to discover what I am discovering.  That we are powerful beyond measure!

After what seems a lifetime of struggle I am finally finding success in my life!  It is not the kind of success that comes with a lot of money, expensive houses and cars.  I don’t have any of that right now.  Material wealth has never been my goal or my definition of success.  To me success is to be “self ruled!”  It is to make it through the obstacle course of life and with each obstacle find more of your true self.  In the end, when all is said and done that is all we have!  It is our true self we take with us.  It is what is ancient and eternal.  Everything else is just an illusion. 

I turned 48 this year and noticing signs of aging creeping up on me.  Like most women I would love to stop the clock but I must surrender to the process.  I must surrender that last piece of attachment to the physical.  “I am not my body!” 

Youth and beauty is worshipped in our culture and I learned at a very early age if I wasn’t pretty I wasn’t valued.  As a chubby kid with braces and glasses I was the target for everyone’s repressed self hatred.  I was the one they threw stones at!  I hated being so loathed and rejected!  I didn’t understand.  Why was I such an ugly duckling?  If only I could be beautiful people would love me, right?

So my quest became beauty!  I starved myself to an enviable thinness; I lost the glasses and the braces and grew to be five foot eight inches tall.  I was, in my day, fashion model material.  I was accepted by an agency in the City and learned how to make up and adorn myself to fit with societies ideal.  But something was missing.  Where was the happiness that seemed to be the promise of beauty?  Instead I suffered endless bad relationships, a life threatening eating disorder, extreme lack of self worth and struggle to succeed in anything I did.  Read the rest of this entry »

In my work with narcissism and abuse I see many cases of those who have no empathy for the experience of their children, parents, partners, wives, husbands and lovers.  There is nothing more painful for those highly senstive people who are so easily dumped on by one who is supposed to care for them. 

But what I have found is it is normally the highly sensitive empaths who find themselves getting involved with the energy vampires, the narcissists and those who take extreme advantage of these sensitive souls. 

Ironically we are talking about two opposite ends of the same spectrum.  An empath can sense and feel the energy of others.  If you are an empath and don’t know you are one, you may find yourself taking on a whole lot of other people’s stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with you. 

An empath is very compassionate because he or she actually feels what the other is feeling or not feeling.  What I mean by this is many very closed off narcissistic types are so out of touch with their feelings that they aren’t aware what is going on in their emotional landscape.  They tend to project their supressed emotions onto those closest to them and this tends to lead the empath into believing these toxic emotions are actually his or hers.  How confusing is that?  Very!

When empaths recognize their highly sensitive nature they can begin learning how to separate what is theirs from what is not.  This makes for much healthier relationships and much less emotional insanity. 

For more information on Empathy listen to my interview with Dr. Michael Smith from www.empathconnection.com on Tuesday August 4th at 7pm Pacific time. 

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/dispelling-the-myths

Don’t worry if you have missed this interview you can go there anyway and listen to the recorded version.

When we receive the wake-up call which has a mission to take us deeper into an experience where we are connected to God and to our true selves we often experience a death.  The death of our old self; the way we used to be; the way things were must be sacrificed in order to experience what is known as a rebirth.

I like to think of a butterfly in the chrysalis, or cocoon who must give up the experience of being a caterpillar in exchange for the experience of being a butterfly.  We would imagine the experience of being a butterfly to be so much more powerful because we are flying up in the sky, above it all, looking down on creation where we once used to crawl.

But in order for that caterpillar to undergo the transformation he must spend a time in the dark web of the cocoon.  This is a time where all outer activity comes to a halt and there is now only the inner process of transformation.  The caterpillar will never crawl again.  He will never know life in the same way again.  He must leave behind what was in order to have what is becoming. Read the rest of this entry »

Today I finally got a big piece of the puzzle that I have been trying to put together for some time.  I realize that the biggest challenge to stepping fully into our authentic selves is dispelling the forces of darkness in our lives.  Darkness truly is a force and it works through people.  The more unconscious one is the more they are channels for the dark energies.  Of course we often go between consciousness and unconsciousness.  We can all have moments of unconsciousness.  We can have moments where we take some action that is out of integrity or out of character for who we are striving to be.  These are times where we can recognize just how easy it is to allow the forces of darkness to take root.

If I could live by one rule; one spiritual law in my life it would be the Golden Rule; “Treat Others As You Want To Be Treated!”  If I find myself treating someone with less respect, less love, less compassion or less kindness than I would want in a particular situation than I am not fully living my truth.  The other side of the coin is “Expect Others to Treat You as You Would Treat Them!”  This means that we also pay attention to how we are being treated by others.

As we begin to rise up in our lives, have true success, and become more visible we can easily become targets for those who feel jealous, threatened or intimidated by us.  When one embodies these feelings he or she can lash out in attack in attempt to control us, to interfere with our success, and bring us down.  I know for myself I have had lots of lessons in dealing with these forces of darkness.  The more I dare to peak my head out, to use my voice and speak my truth the more I find myself in confronted by someone else s efforts to devalue, diminish or control me in some way. Read the rest of this entry »

True love can only be found within ourselves.  If we have not taken the journey into the darkness where we meet our own soul, we can never truly know another.  It is when all distractions are pushed aside and there is nothing left but the experience of our own existance that we descend into the dark realm of the unconscious or psyche.

It is our desire for unity and oneness that causes us to merge with another and form a bond of love that becomes our relationship.  We are under the illusion that love is something we can only find outside of ourselves.  The problem is that when we seek love on the outside we give our power to an outside entity to complete us and make us whole.  We romanticize our potential mates and project onto them our “ideal.” I can’t help think of the popular phrase in the movie “Jerry McQuire”  where Tom Cruise’s character says “You complete me!”  It is so romantic because it appeals to our belief that a romantic partner has the power to make us whole.  But this is a farce.  We give someone outside of ourselves the power to make us whole we also give him or her the power to cut us in half. Read the rest of this entry »