The Beautiful Answer

A New Leaf

I’m feeling really different these days. I don’t know, fresher somehow, lighter and with some sort of renewed purpose. I’m not ordinarily someone who sits around wondering why she’s here. I’m pretty directed that way, and endlessly curious. So I could pretty much go on learning for the remainder of my days. 

But when I get in touch with my emotions, and the sensations I feel in my body and in the energy around me, it’s as if the universe is pushing me forward somehow, asking me to take a broader role in the world. Part of me knows what to do, what is being asked. Part of me doesn’t. So on most days I’m content to take one more step toward whatever. 

But then I started thinking about trees, and how they lose their leaves once a year. Sure, the process is visible in fall, when the leaves are turning color and hitting the ground, but it must begin in summer. Just when the leaves are losing their very greenest color, and the air is getting hotter, the tree is agreeing to change. It’s setting forth a contract to do what it always does — move into the inevitable slowing down of autumn. 

I feel like those leaves, making an agreement to move through the intense changes of spring and summer, so that things can slow down a bit in fall. I love that time of year, anyway. There’s something deeply reverent and still about it. And this fall, there’s something in me that says I’ll be in a far better and more enjoyable place, even though there’s absolutely nothing wrong with right now. 

Not My First Rodeo

Tomorrow’s a big day, so gotta make this short. It’s been a strange day, filled with roller coaster emotions and realizations. Growth can be like that. 

There was one moment when I thought I had had enough of the way things had been, but was sick of changing all the time, reacting to this and that, always adjusting around the ways of the world. Weird thought, for me at least. 

Then I saw the world turning in my mind’s eye, the stars chasing each other around the globe and the earth turning its way to greet me. Not that it was revolving around me; that would be stupid. But it was trying to meet me halfway it seemed, to allow my highest development as a soul. And after I had that vision I felt so filled with something like responsibility, that I thought to waste this chance would be, well, disrespectful. 

So though this isn’t my first rodeo, not by a long shot, it’s one that’s now been sanctioned by the Dalai Lama and the earth itself, which feels like I’ve got some heavyweights in my corner. Now, hopefully to live up to their wisdom with my actions. 

The Space Between

Today’s been a bit of a breakthrough for me. One some days, I “get” other people’s stuff - their emotions and fears, their concerns and worries. I usually know it’s not applicable to my own life when I do a quick check through my body and emotions — there’s usually some separation there — and I know I’m picking up something out there in the universe. 

Today I started picking up some weird energy — a little sadness, coming in tiny waves, and then a thought chasing that through my mind, to not get ahead and leave everyone behind. To not outshine the pack. That’s strange, I thought. Not apart of my waking reality. Not really. 

I sat in meditation for a bit, just allowing the thoughts and sensations to arise in my mind and body. That felt a little better. I did some work, took a break and ate lunch. The feelings dissipated some. I did some more work and then checked in with the feelings again. Then, as chance would have it, I read an article about a guy who studied these seemingly “difficult” emotions that arise in our lives. Most of the time, we’re trained to ignore them at best, and push them away at worst. 

He found that if his test subjects just brought kind awareness to the issues, whether they were physical or emotion in nature, and just abided there, staying with them without judgement, that the pain went away over time. That’s right. Whether it’s physical pain or emotional trauma of some kind, just staying with the feelings without judging whether you or it is good or bad, you can make your own pain go away. 

Fascinating, as Spock would say. That proves what I’ve been wondering about for along time. That healing lies in the space between, hanging out and waiting for us to invite it in. Not easy, to be sure. But worth it? You bet. 

Anticipation

I read about this experiment today, in which a scientist tried to create the most viscous material ever. It was 1927 and the scientist was Thomas Parnell, a physics professor at the University of Queensland in Australia. He poured hot pitch into a glass funnel and then let it cool while his class of students waited for the results. In about eight years, yes eight years, the first drop fell. After nine more years, another drop finally separated itself from the others and made its way downward to join the first. 

That kind puts patience into perspective. 

Since 1927, a total of eight drops have fallen. What is the purpose of this, you ask? Why would someone purposely torture himself and his students by doing this? 

I like to think it’s uncertainty. We don’t know when the next drop will fall. Maybe also unpredictability. Think about it. In the wide open flow of time that makes up our lives, do we really ever know what’s going to happen? No. And if we did, we would never willingly choose to go through half the shit that comprises our human reality. It’s too painful, too messy and devoid of fun. 

If we’re being honest here, pretty much nothing is really in our control. And maybe it shouldn’t be. Maybe the beauty is in the surprise, the up and down of our emotions, the high of our highs and the low of our lows. Maybe it’s the anticipation that the very next moment of our lives could spin us in a completely new direction, an amazing and true direction, and that this in itself is pretty damn special indeed. 

Participation Isn’t Optional

It’s been quite a day — one for reflection and growth, and another for sheer annoyance. Someone I’ve been reading for more than a year and a half placed an order for a reading only to completely flip out a few hours later, calling me several names, getting belligerent and issuing threats. She was obviously in a lot of emotional pain about something in her life, but no amount of my apologies or money refunding would convince her that I was anything but someone who lived to take advantage of other people and make their lives miserable. Why it took her a year and a half and around 15 readings to figure that out, I have no idea. 

I’ve been doing this long enough to know that it’s not personal. Of course it’s not. And I’ve been doing it long enough to know that no one’s perfect. Not even me. :)  It was the entitlement that was so stunning about it, the idea that she thought I owed her something because her life hadn’t turned out the way she wanted it to.  That was really jaw dropping. As if I somehow predicted a hard and fast truth and if it didn’t happen, or not in the timeframe she had deemed appropriate, somehow I was responsible. As if energy doesn’t change form time to time, and she didn’t have to participate in the creation of her own reality. 

Let me break it down for you. Participation isn’t optional. It’s mandatory. Attendance is taken every day and, if you’re not there, it’ll go down in your permanent record. The real one, where no one really cares if you’re there, but it still has the power to make you happy or sad, fulfilled or empty, all the time, every day, for the rest of your life. 

Believe that. 

If you don’t participate sure, you might be able to cast off whatever you don’t feel like dealing with onto someone else. Picking a fight here, or creating some drama there. Maybe you’re so used to the drama that when you don’t have it in your life, you create it just to feel alive. Maybe you can find an enabler who lets you foist off your drama onto him or her long enough that your discomfort relents temporarily, and the relationship gets used up in five days, weeks or months, only to send you back to the drawing board, hungry for someplace else to place your uncomfortable feelings. 

Me? I’m done with it, and anyone else who comes into my reality this way. I have a huge soft spot for the struggling, the people who recognize their imperfections and work on them, just trying to be a little better, a little healthier each day. I am far from perfect, so I don’t expect it in others. Part of me doesn’t even believe it’s possible, so who cares? I am as much a healer as a psychic, and if you’re not up for it, that’s fine with me. 

So I sat in meditation for a bit, looking for ways to reframe what was essentially unreframable (that’s totally  not a word). Teasing the strands apart, I saw what she had brought to it, what I refused to take on, and how it had inflamed the situation between us. I saw that I had few other options, really, and so I chose not to take it any further. I don’t need to be right; I need be heard, and to at least be granted the opportunity to make my point. If it’s not received, I can’t help that. I can only release with peace, refusing to bring any more suffering, and wish her well. 

This is What Releasing Looks Like

As an intutive person, I sometimes find myself overwhelmed with strange moods. Luckily, I’ve been doing this long enough that I can tell where my moods end and someone else’s energy patterns begin.  I know I’m picking up someone else’s sadness, anger, or fear when I can’t connect it to anything going on in my own life, and then the process begins of trying to figure out who it belongs to, and why I’m the one who’s picking up on it. 

Today has been a weird day for several reasons, but around mid-day, I found myself pretty overwhelmed with a bit of fear and a lot of sadness. It felt like someone I knew was dead, or that I’d left all I ‘d ever known behind — almost like a stranger in a strange land, or a new immigrant that doesn’t yet speak the language. 

I’ve also done this long enough to know that you have to respect the feelings themselves. So I let them move through me, crying a little, then asked my guides what they meant. After all, I may never even meet the person who they belonged to, or know why I was the one they affected. They said, “Dear one, you are a lightning rod for fear, trouble and anxiety because you have shared these feelings yourself in the past. You know what it feels like to be alone, to be afraid, and to be tired or being tired. You can help people move out of these patterns and this is part of the reason we sent you to incarnation this time around. Now think about the feelings you experienced and tell us this: Why do you think they were sent to you?” 

Honestly, I had no idea, so I asked them to go on. 

“We send them to teach you what it feels like to find your way to the place you’re meant to be. This sometimes means, for everyone out there, that pulling away from what is known in order to create a new reality feels like a ship leaving a dock. There are memories that hang in the balance and they tie us to the past and the people we have known. They tie to to the future, too, and everything we have yet to achieve. This is what releasing feels like, and we are glad you had the wherewithal to see that. We show you this as a way for everyone to feel their way to where they are meant to be, almost like holding onto a rope in the fog. You and the others will find it. We are sure, and send lighthouses and guidelines to help you mark your way.” 

I love it when they do the reframing for me. :)  Lesson learned, guys. Lesson learned. 

Fragile

As if it’s not enough that we’re bags of bone and blood barely separated from the world by a thin layer of epidermis, our creator of choice also gave us emotions, which we use to color our experiences. We revel in these emotions, sometimes giving in to them or allowing them to make our decisions for us, other times running from them, drinking them into submission, or failing to understand them in the slightest. 

I’m an emotional being. I get it. 

I’m also intuitive, very intuitive, and realize that sometimes, I’m tracking energy even in my sleep. I’ll wake up thinking I’m in another country, or smell things that couldn’t possibly be in my bedroom. But I’ve learned that few of us can do the work we’re here to do, no matter what that entails, if we live only in the realm of our emotions. I had some tough clients last week — a few addicts, a potential suicide, a few in pain for one reason or another. No one every said this work was easy. But I still consider myself lucky to work with them, because transformation, or even wielding the tools of transformation, is a gift. 

We’re all fragile. We have these small bodies, compared with many other things in our environments. We are sensory and fragile emotionally. And no matter what the scientific community would have us believe, emotions do not make us weak. They are part of our living spectrum, sent to keep us empathetic to others beings around us. 

So to reframe this feeling of intense fragility that all humans share, I sat in meditation today. I saw the tiny tendrils of light and information that connect all of us, spreading out as far as I could see in a grid, a web, a matrix.  I saw that it could be formed into a snare, to trap unsuspecting prey, or into a net, to bring in enough sustenance for everyone on the planet.

The matrix of light that bind us all? It has a million uses, I found. And when I came out of the meditation, I thought it might take an entire lifetime to figure them all out. 

Unbelievable

A few month ago, reframing was a new concept to me. I’d heard about it a lot, and thought it was some sort of mind programing, where you pretended that your dark or negative thoughts didn’t exist and instead pasted a happy face over them. By now, I’ve figured out that that was pretty ignorant.  

Now, almost a third of the way through this blogging project of posting daily for 365 days while reframing my life experiences, I find myself a bit more open, pretty effortlessly. In other words, I don’t have to try and pretend my thoughts don’t exist. I just try to find a way in the moment to see them in another way. If that’s not possible, I don’t force it.  No biggie. It’s about perspective. Even investigating a potential alternative reality to the one I’m obsessing on can be quite liberating. 

I find myself a lot more relaxed, and I rarely get overly upset by the little things. Sure, I have emotions. I’m human, after all. But again, I don’t have to think about what the “right” response might be, or punish myself for not having the “right” reactions to given situations. Most of the time, they come pretty naturally, as long as I keep a certain level of awareness in the moment. And I’ve pretty much done away with the notion of “right” anyway. 

When I talk to people about the blog, or whenever people email me asking questions, they want to know if you have to believe in certain things to practice with reframing. Nope. It’s not about beliefs, but being open and fluid as much as possible. It has to do with recognizing your feelings when they come up, and being committed to sitting with and honoring them even as you’re seeking another way to see them. 

Mostly, reframing is kind of like throwing off beliefs, and rules, and unconscious ways of being. So when someone does something that pisses me off, or confuses me, or makes me want to move to an unpopulated country with little more than a backpack for company, I think unbelievable, and the other part of me tells me that’s half right.