Emotional Hostage

I haven't written for over a month. The holidays got to me, obligations, deadlines, responsibility. Vacation also got to me, in a cold and snowy way that only my home of Utah can provide. I spent time with my family. I detached from reality for a while. I remembered how much I love red wine with holiday fare and I found my passion for skiing waiting for me once more at the top of a cold mountain peak.

And for a number of reasons I won't get into here, I became extremely stressed out. I recognized some of the signs of cortisol overload in my system, but wasn't able to do much about them. My period of stress lasted too long, to the point where everything seemed hard. Nothing seemed fun, joyous, or worthwhile -- everything felt like an obligation. Hiking felt like an obligation. Breakfast -- obligation. I thought to myself, "Why would I write about this? I'm not doing a very good job at being an Intuitive Healer right now. I'm doing it all wrong. What could I possibly have to share with others right now."

I've noticed a tendency for me to get very caught up in doing something all the way. Being a purist, you might say. For example, I feel guilty calling myself a yogi if I'm not practicing everyday, or a runner if I'm not running X miles a week. I feel guilty calling myself a healer if I get a little out of whack every now and then. After speaking to a good friend, I realized that I don't really need to be a yogi, or a runner, or a healer. I can just be me, and I can practice yoga, or go running, or offer healing. This is the place I am practicing from now.

But last month, I got off track. Things got difficult. My relationships suffered. My part-time job suffered. The compassionate space I usually hold for others shrunk and I felt very caught up in the dramas inside my body and mind. For the first time in a while, I actually felt despair. And I thought, "Seriously? Despair? I don't have enough bad things in my life to feel despair!" I also had no context for working through it, since it's an emotion that our culture fears, holding it at arms length, turning it into a clinical diagnosis, and throwing anti-depressants at it.

On a field trip in college, we went to the Berkeley Pit. The Pit is an old copper mine in Butte, Montana. It is more than a mile wide and feels like a mile deep. Birds flock to the water-filled bottom on their migrational flight, only to be killed instantly by the acidic conditions of the water. The mine created the biggest Superfund site in the entire US, largely due to the trailings that polluted the Clark Fork River downstream. When I stood on the side of the pit, I felt the despair of the earth and her creatures and was stunned to shock.

Sometimes, I feel like there is a hole inside of me where despair resides. Lots of little things build until the whole tower falls and becomes despair -- the challenge living my values, maintaining my relationships, working on projects that feel like a waste of time so I can pay the bills while I try to make my dreams fill my bank account. Cultural despair, the fights of freedom and equality for all above bigotry and intolerance. Environmental despair, as I watch the health of the planet deteriorate along with the health of human bodies and cry out in frustration as we fail to see the connection.

We live in a time when cultural, environmental, racial and social despair is real. Yet we don't allow ourselves to feel it because it's so painful and there are such wonderful distractions -- social media, reality TV, happy hour, legalized marijuana, porn, exercise, gossip, movies and CNN.

Some days, I can watch this pit of despair as any other energy that I would watch and manage. I notice how it's influenced, how it grows, what makes it bigger, what lessens its impact, and how I can channel this despair and transform it toward positive emotion and action. Other days, I feel raw. I feel like I can see every inequity, every shadow side, every hard line and each piece of trash on the highway. On days like those, it is easy to think that I AM despair, or that the despair is me.

Emotions are real. The create chemical changes in our bodies and we feel different with different emotions. The stronger the emotion, the more it screams for our attention until we may start to feel like our emotion is our reality, that we ARE the emotion. But we're not. We are not our emotions, any more than we are our bodies. They belong to us, like the clothes that we wear, but they are not us.

We are spirits, energetic beings, in human bodies having human experiences. When we can remember this, really remember it, then we can start the process of detaching just enough from our emotions so that we can begin the process of emotional alchemy -- transforming darker emotions like fear, despair and grief into things like hope, faith and joy. But first we must remember that our true nature is spirit so that we can detach just enough to see that the emotion belongs to us but isn't who we are.

We are love, light, pure consciousness combined with pure potential for action and creativity. We are the creative force in the Universe and also the watcher of the creation. We live in human bodies -- just like any place we live, we are bound in some way by the structure around us. If we live in an apartment, for example, we have limited space to create gardens or grow food. If we live in the country, we might have miles between our nearest neighbor. Similarly, living as spirits in human bodies has it's limitations. We must experience time linearly, whereas our spirits do not. We experience physical and emotional pain, drama, betrayal and violence. We are confined to the ideas of the mind that tell us that we're separate, alone, too much of one thing and not enough of the other. Sometimes it can feel that our bodies or minds are out to get us, that they are pushing us around.

Luckily, we have the ability not only to experience life inside a body and mind but also to observe it. We have the ability to detach from the pain for just a moment and to recognize that we aren't the pain, it's just an experience that we're having. This can help us detach from the story that our mind tells us about our pain and form a new context and story about our experience as a human.

If we can learn to detach, watch and tell a new story, we can start to thread together a tapestry for our lives that weaves together a stronger framework for understanding our lives. We may not finish the tapestry, but we can weave beautiful patterns of truth as we go.

How Families Affect our Energy -- and a few tips for staying sane this holiday season

Every Sunday, my boyfriend and I do our weekly grocery shopping at the local co-op. Today was no exception, except that it seemed like all of Seattle agreed to meet at the co-op at the same time. Cans of pumpkin were hoarded into cards, along with cranberries, organic turkeys, potatoes, yams, pecan and pumpkin pies and lots and lots of wine.

Obviously, people are preparing for Thanksgiving. And my guess was that the more wine in the cart, the more they're spending it with their family.

Don't get me wrong -- I love my family with every ounce of my heart. I call both my parents and my sister weekly to talk about the trials, tribulations, successes and joys of each week. I feel blessed that my family is an integral part of my life and one of the only regrets I have about living in Seattle is the large distance between us.

My family also creates some of my most difficult spiritual and energetic challenges, and it is the energy that is most difficult for my clients to work through as well.

Raise your hand (come one, humor me) if you've experienced something like this: the holidays come around and you get really excited to see your family. You can't wait for mutual show and tell, the family traditions and rituals, and spending time together. For the first couple of days, everything feels amazing and you're so happy you made it. Then, after a little while, a melancholy sort of feeling sets in -- you start to feel a little down, perhaps frustrated, and maybe you start to question some of the choices you've made that aren't the same as your family's. For me, the overall feeling I get is of feeling stuck and confused for no reason that I can pinpoint.

Sound familiar? (If not, you're more rare than a unicorn underneath a rainbow of miracles. Good job, you).

When I read clients who have just spent a lot of time with their families, I often notice that their energy field is clogged with family energy. This is energy that says, "These are our family norms/belief systems/standard operating procedures. You've deviated from this program. Here is a reminder to get you back on track." Clients feel stuck because this energy is laying on top of their own innate energy and acting like a control.

You can think of it like a computer virus. You've got all of your energetic programs running smoothly, exactly the way you want them. You're creating your own way in the world, setting your energy high and manifesting your dreams, then all the sudden your software starts to act a little weird. Everything slows down and before you know it, you're not controlling your computer anymore -- the virus is.

Our energetic field is responsible for our whole reality. It is an intricate and elaborate system created from our belief systems, karmic patterns, past time information, present time thought patterns, emotions and creativity. We can compare our energetic field to a computer system -- a healthy energetic field is running completely on its own energy in order to create its reality, just like a healthy computer system is running only on the programs we chose for our operating system. An unhealthy energy system is one running on pre-programmed ideas or lies hidden as truths, just like an unhealthy computer system is stuck or inefficient because of crap software that we don't really use, viruses, spy ware and malware.

So, back to how family energy can act as a virus.  In order for a virus to be effective, the person planting the virus must intricately understand the system, and the system must have a weakness in order for the virus to be successful. When we are born, we knew very little about how to survive in the world. We looked to our parents to supply us with information about how the world works. In essence, we actively allowed our families to program our energetic system for us. We had to -- our survival depended on it! But it doesn't any more. Part of becoming an adult is separating from ideas and beliefs that we don't resonate with, which often means a continual separation from the energy that was pre-programmed into us and a move to reprogram our energy system with our own ideas and values.

This is how energy healings work. When I work with a client, I'm basically helping them wipe their energetic hard drive of anything that's contributing toward ill health, feeling stuck, or otherwise not serving them so that they can replace those energies with their own creativity, beliefs and personal power. When we stand in our own energy, we feel better, more ourselves. Our self esteem increases and we are able to have more certainty about our life path.

It's relatively easy to clean the energy body of foreign energy, especially of co-workers, friends, acquaintances and even romantic partners. These energies are more like extra programs that you download from the internet -- they may benefit you in the short term, but eventually they can start to cause problems. When they do, you can just uninstall. But family energy works more like a virus because that's the energy you started your life with. Family energy understands your system completely because it created your first belief systems, emotional patterns, thought patterns, and the basic, underlying story you have about your life. That story creates energetic pictures about who we are at a base level. Family energy recognizes these pictures and says, "Haha! You're still mine! You have my blueprint! You've deviated a bit, but it doesn't mean you don't recognize me! Match me, match me!"

I am in no way saying that our beloved families are consciously malicious (at least, mine aren't -- you can decide that for yourself). The impact of family energy is unconscious on the part of the family members -- it's more like their love, hope, worry and fear are more easily channelled into our sensitive systems. Family energy just works differently in our bodies than the energy of others. As one of my psychic colleagues said the other day, "You can learn and grow as a psychic, and move more and more energy and become less and less reactive to people and situations around you. But when family is involved, all bets are off."

So what can we do about it? Before I go into a family situation, I take extra time to get grounded, set my energy, hold my vibration and take extra self-pampering tools with me. I check in with myself throughout the visit to notice if I'm still holding my vibration. I set up extra energy readings and healings with my colleagues.  And I always try to employ the two best tools of all -- neutrality, and lots and lots of amusement. This holiday season, I suggest you read through my old posts that include these tools and try them for yourself.

If all else fails, at least you've got the wine  :)

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Tool #4: The First Essential Step to Healing: Havingness

As we start to move into the holiday season, we often start to think of all the things we're asked to give. Give thanks, give presents, give time, give energy, give give give give give. Don't get me wrong, giving is great! When done in the right attitude, it helps us cultivate gratitude, which helps us find more contentment and ultimately, joy.

The work I do is mainly with highly sensitive people. Those of us who are sensitive know how to give -- it's part of our nature. Being sensitive often means that you're very aware of the emotions of others and often feel uncomfortable around negative energy. Because the sensitive body is so affected by the energy of others, sensitive individuals often avoid conflict in order to shield themselves from energy onslaught. Often times, this creates a sensitive person who has learned to give or accommodate under almost any circumstances.

But one thing that these clients often lack is the ability to receive and to own something simply in order to have it for themselves. Instead, everything they allow themselves to receive is because it will somehow benefit someone other then themselves. They feel a tremendous amount of guilt when it comes to having something that is just their own, a secret jewel just for them, just because. In healing, we have to be able to HAVE and receive healing in order for us to heal.

Sounds simple, right?

For so many of us, we practice giving on a daily basis -- that is, giving to others. What we don't do is practice giving love, affection, or attention to ourselves. One of the primary reasons I see clients struggle with healing is a failure to allow themselves to have it. This often manifests as an underlying belief in their deservedness to have or to receive.

What if we were all allowed to have everything we wanted, as long as the desire was manifested in our hearts and fed by Source energy? Guess what, we do! Our deepest desires and fears are reflected to us in our reality. The spirit knows it can have whatever it needs to learn and grow, plus the things it wants to keep the body comfortable while achieving growth. But so often, our bodies and minds have been programmed into believing that we have to be deserving of something in order for us to have it.

The spirit world doesn't work that way. It is human to say that something is right or wrong, good or bad, or that someone is deserving or undeserving. The spirit world doesn't see good or bad, right or wrong, it just sees what is. I'm sure we can all think of someone who is a total schmuck who has everything they want. That person may have a sketchy moral character, but they also have high havingness.

Havingness = our ability to have.

Think about how much you really let yourself have. I know that in my life, I have high havingness in learning experiences, good cars, keeping good friends and living in beautiful places, to name a few. Where I'm constantly working on my havingness is in my ability to receive and believe praise and in my finances.

Our level of havingness affects our health and healing, too. If you've been struggling with your health, take a moment to check in with yourself and notice how much you're able to let yourself have healing. Be honest with yourself. I check in using a psychic tool and visualize a gauge out in front of me, but you can also simply ask yourself how much you let yourself have your healing and trust the first answer you get. Maybe it says, "40%." Ouch, but you can work with that and raise it up.

In a reading, I can help you look at your havingness and help you discover what is keeping you from having your health and healing. From my experience from working with clients, I find that it often comes from a feeling of not being deserving, not being good enough, not knowing who you would be as a healthy person and being afraid to find out, being afraid of losing the attention that being ill attracts, and believing that you are a victim of your own body.

You are none of those things. You are an infinitely creative spirit in a body that you created.

Our body puts out signals to alert us that something is wrong. In order to fix it, we first need to tune in and try to figure out what our body needs from us. Next, we need to seek a treatment that resonates with us. We also need to identify and release the energy, belief systems or programs that made us ill in the first place. But in order to all of that, we must first believe that we can have our health and healing. We must first believe that we truly own our bodies.

How do we create havingness? Raising our havingness is a practice that involves understanding that we are inherently deserving of having the life and health that we desire and that when our health is off, it is our choice whether to stay a victim or take action. Taking action means more than going through the motions of healing -- it means digging deep and noticing whether there are beliefs you have about yourself that need to change and then making a commitment to changing those no matter how uncomfortable or ego-compromising it is.

When I notice my havingness is low for a particular area in my life, there are two ways I deal with it. First, I ask myself why my havingness might be low. Usually, I notice it's because it deals with an area of my life that I'm not completely comfortable in, have been hurt in, or haven't wanted to look at. Next, I ask myself, "What's my first step to raising havingness?" Usually, my body asks me to release an old belief I have. As I work on releasing it, I replace it with a positive, concrete affirmation. For example, if I have low havingness about finances and my spirit tells me it's because my belief says that making money isn't spiritual, I might use the affirmation, "When I prosper in my divinely-inspired mission, the world prospers with me."

There is a psychic tool for increasing havingness that's a bit more simple if you have a regular meditation practice. After grounding and calling back your energy, you can imagine a bubble out in front of you. In the bubble, as a gauge to appear with your level of havingness. Notice the number. Now ground your gauge to the center of the planet and allow the grounding chord to release from the gauge any energy that's not allowing you to have what you want/need. See the energy move to the center of the planet. You may be able to identify it, but you don't have to. Watch your gauge, it may have moved upward. If not, take your psychic finger and move it up to 100%.

Sounds easy, right? It is!

Well, it is unless you're not ready to release the reasons keeping you from having your healing.

Havingness is also about ownership. It's about coming to the realization that this body was giving to YOU and YOU alone. The only thing that holds you prisoner in your own body is you. Once you realize that you create your prison or oasis you can take ownership of your creation and begin to create your own healing path -- no matter how many times you've been hurt by others, used by others, given to others, your healing path can be no one's but yours. Own it!

Spiritual Tool #3: Filling up with YOU!

How many times have you come home from a day and said, "I feel so drained!"? If you're like me, it happens regularly, especially when around lots of people, when helping lots of clients throughout the day, or when intense or stressful situations present themselves. This post is about helping you call your energy back, which makes you feel more grounded, yourself, and literally gives you more physical energy!

In my post about grounding, I talked about how our energy bodies can be like little sponges, picking up energy from other people -- people we talk to, care for, or interact with. That entry talked about the importance of clearing or grounding those outside energies away after each day.  But just as we pick up other people's energy, we often give our energy to other people, events, or projects. Sometimes we leave our energy there, in the past, where it really does us no good. In order to keep our energy levels high, we need to fill back up with us!

The only moment that we have to work with is the present. When our energy is in the past, or the future, or with mom, or with your latest craft project, or planning dinner, we don't have as much energy available to work with in the present moment. I'm sure we've all experienced it before -- we are excited about a new project, or we have a family member or situation we're worried about, and so our energy is focused there while we try to move throughout our day and complete our day-to-day tasks. We find ourselves becoming sloppy, unable to concentrate, and feel completely wiped out by the end of the day.

It doesn't do us any good to keep our energy anywhere but right inside our body and aura. It's been said that worry is a misuse of imagination. I say energy directed anywhere except the present moment is a cheat to ourselves and the lives we're creating.

So many of us in the healing field struggle with this. We worry about our clients, or we continuously try to problem-solve other's situations while we're going through the motions of present day activities. Even those outside the healing field can relate -- we've all experienced a loved one who is going through a tough time, and often we feel emotionally connected or responsible for their well-being.  Often, we keep our thoughts or prayers with them and forget about the quality and importance of our own attention in the present moment.

Guess what -- that doesn't serve either party.

If my energy is with one of my sick clients, not only is it not with me, but it's also clogging up their space and keeping them from being able to find their most authentic self and their own healing solution. It is always best to keep our energy with us so that we can use the power of the present moment to direct all of our energy to the focal point at hand.

Our attention is the most powerful tool we own. If we can gather up all of our energy and direct our attention at just one thing, the rest of the world falls away. We've all experienced this -- maybe in a yoga class where you observed your thoughts rather than listening to them, or when you become so focused on a project that you lost track of time and created your best work. As a healer, I know I can help my client best by focusing on them and only them in a session, or when I'm doing extra research to help them -- not by focusing on them while I'm blogging, making dinner, or listening to my partner.

So how do we practice calling our energy back to us and keeping it there? (Because, remember, it's ALL a practice).

It's simple. Sit in your meditation space and ground yourself. Use the grounding meditation listed here. Start by clearing away all those energies that you might of picked up during the day -- your client, that stranger on the bus who gave you the eyes, that cute barista who drew a heart in your cappuccino, -- all of it! Once you feel clear, start to imagine all the places you might have left your energy that day. I usually start with my dream space, which is generally very active. Then, I call my energy back from clients, from my mom, from anyone I might be healing inadvertently, from my boss, from that person on the bus I gave the eyes to, from my enjoyment of my (decaf) cappuccino, and from any other situation or project that keeps stealing my attention.

Imagine that energy collecting into a big ball of golden energy above your head that is as big as you are. Let that golden ball of light fill all the way up with your energy in present time. When it's full, pull it down around you and let it fill up your whole body and aura with your energy. Do this several times until you feel full of the live that is YOU. You can't have too much!

Often with this exercise, I get asked if calling energy back will hurt or affect the people, projects or situations where your energy was left. Calling your energy back will not hurt someone you've been helping -- like I said before, your energy of worry or healing, while fabulous in the present moment, can create confusion for that person once you've moved on physically. Your heartfelt intention of help or healing, when used in the power of the present moment, is beneficial. Once you move on, if your energy doesn't move with you, it can create the same energy of confusion and clogging that we clear out of our own spaces.  Similarly, your projects can't keep moving forward if you're working on something else, so it's more effective to always have your energy in the present moment. The same goes for situations or interpersonal relationships -- focus on the task at hand while it's at hand and communication will be smoother (that doesn't mean you can't procesas and reflect later, just make sure that's you're intention at the time).

Have you ever heard someone say, "I'm running on a quarter tank today?" This is often how full our bodies are of our own energy, but it doesn't have to be. Fill up with the golden light of your energy several times per day and keep your energy gauge at full all the time.

You always deserve to be full of YOU. This isn't about ego, it's about spiritual energy. In the spiritual world, you can't get enough of yourself, so fill up! When you are full of yourself and clear from other energies, that is your quiet, soft space where you can hear the clear voice of your soul. This is where you'll make your best decisions, heal yourself, and start to have an effect on others because you're brave enough to fill up and be your own creature. Here's to being YOU!

Why should you listen to me anyway?

For a lot of my clients, their journey with me starts with a story about pain. Chronic pain, aching pain, lightning pain, hot pain, nerve pain, turned-me-into-a-different-person pain. Pain that has created two very distinct phases of their life -- before pain and after pain. Or, their story tells of discomfort, of health issues that are uncomfortable and embarrassing, or of issues that sound "weird" or don't make sense to the medical world.

Sometimes, people come to me because they're seeking clarity or grounding. They find themselves in a rut, feeling scattered and unable to call enough energy together to make change. They feel like they're in a cycle they can't get out of.

And to all of you out there who haven't yet decided to schedule a session with me, I wanted to tell you more about who I am and why I can help to address these issues and all of the day-to-day things that may bring you in for an Intuitive Coaching session.

I've been there.

I've had pain. I've had the chronic pain, the pain that wakes you up in the night, that doesn't cease in any position, that keeps you from doing everything you love until you don't know if you have the capacity to love anymore. I've had the kind that makes you bitchy, makes you snap at waiters and loved ones and makes you feel like a jerk who should have stayed at home. I've had the kind of pain that defined me and became the backdrop for how I knew myself.

I've also been the one with embarrassing, hard to identify health issues that had every doctor starting their prognosis with, "Well, I've never seen anyone with this reaction before...."

For me, pain manifested as a chronic back injury that blew up in my face one day while rock climbing. It wasn't the rock climbing that did it, mind you (although that twisting, manteling move wasn't exactly spine-friendly), it was the 20 years of overuse, of shutting my pain up with Ibuprofen and muscle relaxers, of never seeing pain as a sign but rather an annoyance to my goals. My body had given me plenty of signals throughout the years, signals to slow down, take a day off and mellow out, but I didn't listen. Then one day, BAM! My body didn't give me a choice that time.

So when people come to me with pain, I tend to imagine that they're telling me this story of pain and believing that I may not know how they feel. Trust me, I've been there. And I'm here to tell you that I got out of my pain and you can, too.

At first, I was desperate to get relief. I still saw my pain as an annoyance, like a brush fire that just needs to be stomped out as quickly as possible. So I threw myself to mainstream medicine -- sports medicine doctors, pain relievers, mainstream physical therapy, all the best recommendations I could find. And I failed. Not more than a week after my official care ended, I was re-injured.

I'd received the best care that my medical doctors could give me, so why had it failed?

My treatment failed because I wasn't listening to my inner voice.

Instead of listening to my inner voice, I was listening to the smaller voices inside of fear, telling me to get to a doctor, a real doctor! Telling me to listen and follow their advice because they always know better than you, they're the healers! And those smaller voices told me to question my intuition about my back because intuition isn't medical and can't help you heal.

I had run out of options. So instead of looking outside of myself and my knowledge base, I decided to look inward. When I did, I realized my body was looking for a very deep kind of healing, healing of the connection between body and spirit. This initial realization scared me, because the little voices in me weren't sure I was capable of this kind of healing. But my True Voice, my Inner Voice, was sure. The more I learned to listen to my inner voice, the more it lead me to healers and specialists who were aligned with my true healing path.

Next, I could tell you the story of how I met an amazing group of women who combine yoga with physical therapy to attain fantastic results. And I could tell you how I was one of the most difficult cases they'd ever seen, and how much work and frustration the healing process was. And it was. I found these healers through listening to my inner voice and sticking to what I believed healing could be. Just as important as finding this team of healers was the internal transformation and healing that took place through continuing to listen to my intuition and my inner voice.

One of my first realizations came in a yoga class that I was teaching. I'd said it over and over to my students, "You have to find the balance between ease and effort." I realized then that my whole life I had practiced effort and loathed to practice ease. Effort to attain good grades, effort in relationships, in friendships, in accommodating others. I always worked and created from a place of effort. Effort was everywhere, there was no ease!

It's not that effort is bad -- just like yoga says, we need both ease and effort. But when I took a closer look at the motivations behind all my effort, I realized that they were all fear based -- run an extra three miles so you don't get fat, do the extra credit even though you have a perfect score so that the teacher will like you, do everything for your partner because that's what good girlfriends do (even if he doesn't reciprocate), eat a perfect diet because it's "healthy" even though it's not fun.

I also realized, through intuitive insight, that this concept of favoring effort over ease had been programmed into me. I realized that somewhere in my development, I began to associate accomplishment with love. So I worked with a lot of effort in order to achieve love and affection. I also applied that same principle to myself -- only if I accomplished great things during the day was I worthy of my own love.

Ouch.

Low back injuries are often a sign of "lack of support or stability." If I couldn't love myself unless I accomplished, no wonder my body felt a lack of support.

I had to learn to be on my own team. I had to learn to balance effort with ease and to replace the old programming that associated accomplishment with love to something that served me better -- like the promise to myself to always support myself and my decisions when following my inner voice. To always gently guide myself back to my path if I have fallen off, and to not berate myself for any mistakes. To choose, instead, to learn from my mistakes and make the next decision in accordance with my higher voice.

Sometimes, our inner voice asks us to do things that are scary. It might ask us to quit that job that keeps us stressed all night, or to leave a partner that makes us feel undervalued, or to separate from friends who aren't in alignment with our highest goals for love and friendship. These changes and seem big and scary. What I have learned is that the inner voice is persistant and patient. It will continue to ask you to change, to move on, to grow. I've also found that when you do listen, and you take the big leap, it can feel scary and uncomfortable for a while, but the inner voice is tapped into the Ultimate Wisdom of the universe and always has a way to catch your fall, even if you can't yet see where you're landing.

I don't have back pain anymore. I experience some discomfort during certain activities, and I use meditation and physical activities to keep my body healthy. I'm still on a healing journey -- and although it can be uncomfortable at times, I don't think I'd have it any other way. This is how I learn to listen to my inner voice and it is through this path that I am able to connect to my clients.

I can continually use my inner voice to guide me to health and healing, and so can you.

Doing verses Being

How do you feel when there are no mirrors? When there is no portion of your mind judging or criticizing that reflection of you? How do you feel when you move out of the space of doing the ten thousand things we think we need to do and simply allow yourself to be in the world?

Today I took solace in the woods near my house. I woke early, as temperatures are rising quickly in the pacific northwest, and I wanted the cool quiet of morning. The park that I walked to is fairly small but heavily wooded with cedars, maples and shade-growing berries. I took my first lap around the park at a walk-run-skip-walk, training my body back into endurance slowly, in a fun way. The second lap, I walked quietly, watching and listening.

I felt so beautiful to be part of that forest.

For the first time in days, that part of my mind -- the one that I try so hard to quiet, so hard to turn off -- the one that criticizes me, tells me I'm gaining weight, that I need a hair cut, that I need new clothes or new something, simply shut up. The part of me that tells me that I'm not doing it right and need to do more finally just turned off and all the sudden I wasn't doing anything wrong anymore because I wasn't doing, I was being.

I recently read an article interviewing Eckhart Tolle, in which he discusses the idea of masculine and feminine energies. He says that masculine energy relates more with doing and feminine energy relates more to being.  He really says it best:

"The world is out of balance because it is focused primarily on the doing, and there is a loss of the awareness of being. This is when stress and negativity arise: when people try to get things done and they no longer are centered within that aware space of being. You cannot feel your being anymore; you cannot feel the consciousness behind all the doing. So many women these days have internalized the imbalance and are also out of touch with being more focused on doing." **

He suggests we find a balance between the ability to do and the ability to be. Just like the embracing yin yang symbol, there is a piece of the other within each: within the dark yang is a white dot, and within the white yin is a black dot. This is the ability to have stillness at the center of doing, and a dynamic quality of doing while being still (so that we don't fall asleep!).

I have been feeling out of balance lately because I've been focusing on doing too much without leaving time to cultivate just being. And I've noticed how I've felt guilty for wanting time to just be, because our culture still doesn't value it as much as doing. But I was reminded today of just how important time to be is -- it is what brings me back to my center and reminds of who I am as a spirit in a body, and just how beautiful the human process is.

**Full article here: http://spiritualityhealth.com/articles/eckhart-tolle-easier-path