I was just listening to another parent’s story of an out-of-control, unrecognizable teenager.

It seems as if one day our kids are grinning lovingly at us, and the next they are sullen, slamming-the-door sorts of beasts. They don’t do what you ask them to, and they want to do things you don’t want them to do.

You yourself go from the wizard who could kiss the boo-boo better to an idiot, or worse.

Yeah, things get crazy in the teen years.

It’s not just hormones. If you can remember (heh), our teen years were when we began to find our independence, and learned to stand on our own two feet. We became more mobile, learned to drive and could go places without guardians, woohoo. Older, we could stay out later. We even longed to experiment with increasingly powerful situations and substances to find out who we were.

Adolescence and the process of independence from parents is a crucial part of our development as humans, one that I believe very few adults have completed well. I swear 90% of healing sessions I do work on issues of self-power not resolved by the end of adolescence. How can we help our kids not need healers for these issues?

What Makes the Difference?

I am writing about this all because we’ve got a high school senior and a high school junior. When they were little, I used to joke with my husband, “Oh they’re cute now, but one day they will be slamming doors at us, screaming, ‘I hate you I hate you I hate you!’”

It seemed amusing at the time.

Then again, so far we are up to about five or six slammed doors. I think I’ve heard “I hate you” only twice. But yes, check their birth certificates, they are teens.

Odd?

As my heart was breaking listening to this other parent’s story of her struggles, I wondered what was different about our house.

I thought about a friend who has very strict reins on her kid’s computer habits and, now that I mention it, almost every other activity, too. She told me why — “I don’t want him to do what I did at that age.” I’ve also heard, “I know what she can do at this age.”

Let me know if I’m missing something, but this is what occurred to me:

-> My friend doesn’t trust her kid to follow her marching orders, so she tries to overcontrol at a time when the kid is seeking independence and self-control.

-> At our house, we set up tasks and required behaviors that the kid will have to do as an adult anyway, training them to be adults.

What’s the core issue here? Trust.

1. Trust the Kid

I think trust has probably been the biggest factor in our ending up with non-monster teens.

I trust my kids to always be making the best decision they can make (which as this age, might not always be the wisest, I remind myself.) And then I make it my job to step in where they aren’t learning from consequences and show them easier options.

So when a kid doesn’t come home on time or do their chore, I trust them. I have spacey creative kids, and they probably got involved in what they were doing. I trust that they knew what they should have done. Then we have a Long Boring Talk in the near future about keeping your word, etc.

I used to NOT trust that they knew this, and things got ugly, fast.

But when I let go and did start trusting that they knew better, the issue shifted. It gave them more independence and respect they could feel. The issue became a behavioral thing then, down to mere choices or breaking old habits, not a question of whether they were smart enough or good enough or responsible enough.

Whew.

How much do you trust your teenager? Is there something you can trust them about or with? If there was something, what would it be?

2. Trust the Universe

I choose to trust the Universe too. Trust is a choice, after all. You can begin to trust right now with a simple choice. I deeply trust the Universe, even when I do not understand.

So when a teen is late coming home at night, I don’t run through every scenario that could have gone wrong. (Ok, once in a while I do catch myself doing this, and then I stop.)

I refuse to give negative fantasies, aka worry, any energy. I refuse to make those options any more likely.

Yes, I might ask the Universe to keep an eye on the kid. I might text said kid. Or I might go to bed without doing anything, following up with a Long Boring Talk about what it was like for them to be at that decision point and how they weighed their decisions, and how it felt to be at home waiting for them.

Each time a kid departs my supervisory radius, I trust that everything will work out for the best. This did not come easily at first. It is a spiritual practice.

What are you trying to control with your teen?  Can you truly control that?  How might letting go be a healthier choice?
Can you make a choice to let go of something stressful, right now? 

3. Be Trustable

When I first started parenting, my #1 rule, which I have only broken 3 times (sigh, long story), was to never ever lie to my kids. As a kid I was empathic and it was extremely confusing to experience adults lying to me. When I became a parent I realized how easy it is to throw a white lie at a kid, without even realizing it. (The kid won’t know, right? Wrong, lol.)

Honesty is always the best policy in our house, as in life. This is especially true in important relationships, which are based on trust, and which every parent models for their kid (whether they intend to or not, live with the kid or not).

In this house, admitting to having lied does not get you yelled at, but gets celebrated and may even get your punishment cancelled. Yay for telling the truth.

So we model telling the truth and being trustable. And no, it’s not always easy, and we don’t have a perfect track record by any means, but the results for our efforts have been priceless.

Our kids trust us to not blab confidences, even to other family members. Our kids trust us to be on their side, to support them, to help them figure out who they are, to always root for them, or to help them when they are confused or upset. That track record has carried into the teen years, though I notice they are more reluctant to outright ask for advice as teens, which I have to admit I miss.

Finally, I also believe being trustable includes not criticizing your kid. It seems to me that too much criticism, especially unasked for, makes one untrustable. Randomly criticizing is like randomly punishing, which drives animals mad in experiments.

You can help your kids improve, if they want you to help. I have to seriously stretch myself to allow my teens (or tweens or grade-schoolers) to express THEIR style in THEIR way.

Our job as parents is to help them see and learn to live up to their potential (not to be our dollies or puppets, tho). It’s easy to criticize when I get frustrated (then I apologize), and I’m working hard on this one. But it’s good for both of us.

Be trustable. Not criticizing yourself — or others — is another brilliant spiritual practice.

How are you trustable for your kids? How do they know this? Are you ever unpredictable or arbitrary? Or do you stick to what you say? 

4. Trust in Your Romantic Relationship

One of the big reasons I married my husband was trust. At the time I felt he was the only person on the planet I could 100% trust (well, also he’s super cute and funny).

Since trust is such a great element in friendship, my husband and I have sustained a fabulous friendship over, um, about 33 years now, yikes. Overall, we’ve enjoyed buckets of trust in our relationship, and it runneth over into the family, too.

I couldn’t live any other way, because I chose not to. Trust was a huge requirement for me for a life partnership.

How about you? Is trust a requirement for you? 

5. Trust Yourself

Finally, I trust myself. Hey, I’m not perfect, but I am doing my best.

Ya, the spanking experiment didn’t work and was shelved after only a couple months. Yelling, well that has not been so good, but I trust them to forgive me…in the long run.

Face it, we all have made parenting mistakes.

I choose to trust it will all work out in the end. I choose to trust that my kids’ wonderfulness and the power of his or her higher, divine self will trump my faulty parenting by miles and miles.

And personally, I choose to trust that God loves me no matter what stupid thing I say or do today. He’ll be waiting for me in the end, when we can all have a good laugh then.

So I trust myself. I choose to accept my innate trustworthiness.

Do you trust yourself? Where have you been naturally trustworthy? What is one thing you can do to allow yourself to trust you? (If you are still stuck, ask someone who trusts you WHY they do.)

An Exercise in Trust

So what do you think of the trust thing? Is it relevant? Try this. Think back to your childhood. Did you feel trusted as a kid? What did that feel like to NOT be trusted? Journal a page about that without stopping (you can burn or shred it when you are done).

Not being trusted rotted, as I recall. When it happened, I felt demeaned, not respected, and babied. And as a teen, I haaaaaated that.

Oh look, emotions! That there is raw gunpowder for the rebellious teen years, isn’t it?

The trouble with out-of-control teens is that the more they go crazy, the less and less you feel you can trust them. What if you just drew the line one day and said, “You know what honey, I’m going to trust you to make the best decision about your activities this weekend. Let me know if you want any input or help.” (And then you have to really let it go.)

What might happen? (After they pick themselves up off the floor, lol.) Want to find out?

Personally, I believe anyone who is a Child of God is trustworthy. (That would be everyone.)

If that is true, the key question becomes how can I live up to my inherent Trustworthiness, and bless others by sharing it?

I trust you will come up with something.

(c) 2013 Daria Boissonnas All Rights Reserved. Please contact us for reprint permissions.

About 14 years ago, I enthusiastically started what may be an unusual spiritual practice, one that seems very simple yet has challenged me and fascinated me ever since. This practice also has brought tremendous relief and inner peace as it has helped me see the world as a nonduality or unified whole — a friendly place.

I stopped believing in causality.

Yep.

This is such an odd practice, it may be hard to imagine at first. It took quite a bit of effort to slide into at first, to catch myself thinking in terms of “what caused this” and “who is to blame?” But let’s take a look at this practice and its benefits.

What Does No-Causality Look Like?

How about a nice concrete example to ponder –

Suppose you fall and scrape your knee by tripping on a heaved sidewalk tile. Without causality, you did not fall because of the heaved sidewalk tile. Nor because you happened to be thinking about a recent painful fight you had with your best friend which distracted you so that you didn’t notice the heaved section. There is no because. All three things are one, like different facets on a cut diamond. They are all the same diamond, seen from different angles at different (sequential, as we experience them) points in time.

Consider the scraped knee, a place in the body that bends and flexes and supports forward movement. Now it is hurting.

Consider the fight with a friend, their inflexibility about something that triggered your inflexibility about their inflexibility and the angry words you tossed back and forth. Perhaps you are afraid the fight will end your friendship, which has been a great support to your changing directions in life.

Consider the sidewalk, which helps us move forward in a straight line, to go where we want to go more easily than treading on grass and stones. It is heaved, its even pace broken, as broken as you feel with this new rift in your friendship. You and your friend took different positions on the issue, like the two squares of sidewalk that no longer meet eye to eye. (See the common threads?)

Not believing in causality means that what we would usually separate as cause and effect are one. Both what we call the cause and the effect are expressions of some latent pool or system of energy and consciousness. In the stream of time as we experience it, we happen to see one (which we call cause) before the next (we call that effect). But, like telephone poles along the road, they are all actually there the whole time, we just experience them sequentially.

This is an easy world of 100% responsibility, and it makes for a very pleasant place to live. Of course people in this world care about the “consequences” of their actions, or, shall we say, the far-reaching aspects of the energy and consciousness that their actions were a small part of. They know they are connected to everything, a part of everything, belong to everything.

This world is a place of deep peace, a blameless stillness and ease which allows one to focus on positive reactions.

The Effects of No Cause and Effect

OK, that subhead was a pun. There is no effect of not believing in causality. The shift transcends the mindset of blame and you simply experience the world without this filter, as it is.

For me, over the years, what I have experienced while not believing in causality is that I tend look at the world increasingly as a metaphorical representation of energy and consciousness that we happen to perceive largely through our physical and mental perceptions. What happens becomes less important than what it means and what it tells me about my resistance and hangups and how I am not experiencing the world as a safe and loving place. It has also helped me become a crackerjack interpreter of dreams, daydreams, persistent mental images, hangups and more (so my clients enthusiastically say).

I believe this shift in consciousness has empowered my healing, in a sense by allowing me to step aside more easily to let more healing flow through me. And I simply love looking at the world in this way.

It was not an instant shift, but took place over many years of catching myself in old thinking habits of blame and causality, and then applying my new philosophy of no-causality to see the situation from that viewpoint. Eventually, my habits shifted and the world became a beautiful, harmonious place of oneness.

May it become so for you, too.

© 2013 Daria Boissonnas  All Rights Reserved

Last weekend someone asked to come see me for some healing. They said, “How about Monday?”

I gulped.

Between clients and especially on weekends, the massage therapy table in my office can become like a kitchen counter — a magnet for stuff that’s “between locations.” This time, I knew, it was particularly full. The boxes and papers from my new computer were all over the table. I’m also planning to remove the large desk in my office and have started to build temporary piles while I sort through everything. (You know how things get messy before they get better?) Also also, I knew my dining room table (visible across from my office) happened to be piled high with art projects and kid stuff, and the living room was strewn with games (7, I counted later), and I never managed to dust in January and and and…

I shrank into myself as I felt how messy my house was — waaay too messy to have someone in my home office so soon! So I started to say, “No, how about Thursday?” to give myself a few days to tidy up. Maybe an hour a day or so…

But as the words formed on my tongue, the Universe went…

“Ahem.”

And I heard it. I was putting my ego and perfectionism before their healing. My somewhat messy house was more important than their getting healing right away on Monday? No.

Taking a deep breath, I said, “OK, great.” If I had to throw stuff in boxes and stash them in a closet for a few hours, I would open my doors Monday morning.

Turns out, I spent an hour tidying up the massage therapy table that morning and easily cleaned it off properly. I left the games in the living room; we do have four kids after all. I didn’t dust (and I didn’t apologize for not dusting, drawing their attention to it like I used to, lol). And after the appointment I even showed the client some of the kids’ art that was piled in the dining room.

All that cringing was not about my house, it was about me and my insecurities. About the “rule” that echoes from my childhood that you are not worthy in the eyes of God unless your house is spotless. (Cancel, clear!)

Thank goodness I have all I need in every moment. Thank goodness I have an office and spectacular healing skills to offer to someone in pain. Thank goodness I live by the principle “healing first.”

© 2013 Daria Boissonnas

Continuing from last week, we are exploring an often misquoted saying from the Gospel of Thomas, which erroneously is quoted like this:

INACCURATE:
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”  (emphasis mine)

In the last article, we considered what the first part of the official translations mean, as a writer, artist or healer, and came up with three intentions for Awakening.

Now let’s look at the second part of the quote.

Part 2: The Thing about the Thing that Kills You

Consider the same five official translations for the second half of the quote (emphases mine):

Thomas O. Lambdin:
(70) “…That which you do not have within you will kill you if you do not have it within you.”

Stephen Patterson and Marvin Meyer:
70. “…If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you [will] kill you.”

Stephen J. Patterson and James M. Robinson:
(70) …(2) “If you do not have it within you, (then) that which you do not have within you [will] kill you.”

Pico Iyer:
70.) …What you do not have within will kill you.

Coptic Ecumenical Project:
70. …If you do not have that within yourselves, this which you do not have within you will kill you.

In this part, the misquote almost restates the official translations of the first part: suppressing your gifts will kill you.

But in the official translations, it doesn’t seem to matter what you do any more. This part says you either have it, or you don’t. And not having it will somehow end your existence. Not having… something… has dire consequences.

What does this mean?

Know Your Gift, Divine Purpose, or Calling

One of the things I love about spiritual teachings and truths is that they can be interpreted in many ways or on many levels, and, if the teaching is deep enough, each of these interpretation provides valid insights. There is no “wrong” interpretation. (Just don’t mangle the teaching to say something else, lol.) So if you have other interpretations, please comment them below.

One way we could understand the correct second half of the phrase is like this: if you are pretending to be something other than what you are (that is, if you do not have within you what you are putting on the outside of you), it will kill you.

Well, ain’t that the truth. We have probably all done that at some point in our lives, moreso in our youth. Note to self: be genuine. Or, as I tell the kids, truth gets you much farther in life than lies.

What else does this teaching mean? To me, it’s all about seeing your own divinity, your own divine creative gifts, your own natural Inner Healer.

I bet you can think of a few incredibly gifted people who cannot see their own gifts. They don’t seem to appreciate how deep their abilities go or how much the rest of us, not having these gifts, treasure their abilities and their help. What I have observed in my clients over the years is that when you are truly living your gifts, it’s easy and fun. Effortless and enjoyable. The divine gift you bring to the world is so easy for you, in fact, that it can be hard to appreciate… or even notice at first.

Now let me ask you this: if a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to notice it, has it really fallen?

That is, if you have a divine gift inside you but you never see it, is it still there? Isn’t your gift, in a sense, absent from your being? If you do not look, do you really “have” it?

This teaching says to me that if you do not know what you have within you, for example if you do not explore your inner divinity, life purpose, calling, or Inner Healer, that omission will kill you. (You can interpret “kill” any way you like, from make you miserable to end your life.) If you never find out who you are, whether you get up the guts to express it or not, it you will simply cease to be.

Cease to be you.

This, in turn, reminds me of some of the oldest spiritual advice in the world, inscribed in the temple at Delphi: Know Thyself.

Know Thyself

When we get sucked into our angst, drama, and depression as writers, creatives, healers, and intuitives, we get pulled away from seeing that which we have within. We get sucked into a downward spiral of ego and insufficiency and crushed intentions. That is not the road to happiness, a meaningful life, and the joy of helping others.

Happiness comes from exploring, awakening, and expressing what you already have within. We know from the first half of the teaching that, whatever it looks like, what you are inside is GOOOOOOD. Take your time. Enjoy the chase. Enjoy the expression of your true self.

In a sense, fully investigated, this teaching of Jesus turned out to be even better advice for artists, writers and healers than I assumed.

What do YOU have within?

Over and over again in the spiritual journey, we encounter dark nights of the soul–periods when we get discouraged and bleak, despite our circumstances. This depression rarely makes sense: just last week you may have been totally upbeat about a certain project, with the world at your feet. Today, it seems hopeless. Even in the depths of a DNotS, you may be able to logically count many things to be grateful for and promising aspects of your life and project. But for some reason… the forecast feels bleak, really bleak.

In our dark nights of the soul, we shed what was holding us back. We let go of old limitations. The dark night of the soul is often the breakdown before the breakthrough. Though a difficult and uncomfortable experience, the process can be a good sign of letting go, with forward movement on its way.

But we must keep moving through our DNotS. Somewhere, hidden within each one is a kind of “pull tab” or “escape lever.” It’s the thing we have been hanging on to, which is disintegrating. When we fully let go of it, cut the strings, we emerge more quickly back into the light again. Happily, we often let go of these things in our sleep, or unconsciously. We have to keep showing up–you must get help if you need it, call your best friends, keep learning, meditating, exercising and all those things you do when things feel brighter.

Over the years, I’ve become familiar with the pattern of the dark night of the soul and have gotten better at recognizing them and sliding through them faster.  :)  But sometimes we (and I too!) can get stuck bumping up against something that does not move. This kind of stuckness, if it becomes chronic, eventually can disconnect us from our power core. We feel burned out. Worst of all, the process seems unending, a very long holding pattern.

Well, last year I finished my book and crashed into a wall of burnout like this. My hair started falling out, I could hardly function at work (and rudely inconvenienced a lot of people in the process–I’m so sorry!) At home, I easily hit my emotional tolerance level for kid noise and was wiped out by their unending (though wonderful) questions. Parenting was nearly impossible. It was so odd.  I could feel I was bumping up against something HUGE. Something old. Some issue that did NOT want to budge, and, unfortunately, did not want to release the book.

As a spiritual citizen and healer who helps others, I believe it’s my responsibility to move beyond my own blockages. Every healing shift I experience helps me help my clients more effectively. In fact I believe all healers owe it to their clients to take their own recommended medicine and get regular healing from other healers with diverse backgrounds, skills and techniques.

So I took a break from blogging for this particularly process of healing. I am grateful to all my readers for the sweet and supportive messages and love I have receieved. Yes, i’m back. I’m in the office, providing healing and healer-to-healer consulting.  I missed you. I missed blogging, and I’m glad to be back.

Have I entirely excavated what was holding me back? Mmmm… maybe not entirely, but I see the shape of it, and I”ve lopped off BIG chunks of it. Meanwhile, I continue to attend a local healing and intention circle, and I continue to heal.

Sometimes we need a silent retreat — we have to stop talking (blogging), so we can listen better to our hearts. I am happy to be back, and I look forward to sharing more healing wisdom with you.  

Until then, my friend, many blessings on your journey,

I’m going on a pilgrimage, and have agreed to give up something of great value to me.

Right now, it’s all swirling in my head.

This is spring, a time of rebirth, newness, and growth. Perfect timing.

A pilgrimage is a journey to a place of great value. I am going within, on a great 12-month scavenger hunt to collect all the parts of me I have left by the wayside, and rebuild my life (and business) as an author and creativity coach. I’ve done this sort of thing before, all along my intensive healing journey of the last 15 years, but never so focused on a single topic or goal.

My sacrifice reminds me of the season of Lent that just ended, a season of soul-searching and giving up what is valuable to prepare for rediscovery and celebration. Indulgences can be distractions on our journeys. I prefer to move forward quickly, so I am willing to let go, if it will help.

A beneficial, bona fide spiritual teacher can suggest brilliant spiritual exercises that stretch you in a good way. When my carefully chosen teacher suggested this action, I could feel my energy shift from routine into Possibility. So I agreed.

But as the time nears, I am finding myself in deep resistance. I love this thing. I don’t want to give it up. I don’t want to leave it and especially everyone associated with it, even just for a few months. There are many strong business, career, and financial reasons I should not let it go, either. It makes me sad.

Most stories start with a conflict. This is mine.

The pilgrimage starts Thursday.

The thing is my blog.

Stay tuned.

© 2012 Daria Boissonnas

Yesterday I had the most wonderful time at a writer’s group. I was productive, ate great quiche, met other writers, and enjoyed being with other people who spend all day writing or thinking about writing.

Best of all, after working, we took turns reading some of what we’d written: two memoirs, a poem, a YA novel, and my nonfiction. And then we all commented on each other’s work.

This is where my warm fuzzies went a little cold.

How do you feel about criticism? Even criticism you have asked for?

One particular point they made stung for a while. It made me realize, first, how out of practice I am at taking constructive criticism. They pointed out a distracting detail in the story that starts my last chapter. At first, I couldn’t even understand what they were saying, and flashed back to the early stages of my book’s reading committee — 10 brave people who volunteered to read my book by email, chapter by chapter. When I saw the committee’s edits, I thought I’d sent files around for 10 different books, none of them the one I wrote. What were they talking about?

Criticism Insight #1: It’s all about them.

People read their own stuff into your stuff. When they criticize you, it has everything to do with them. The trick is, if you are writing for a broad audience, you do have to write flexibly enough to handle all their stuff, too. So while it’s good to remember that they are talking about their side of the fence, not yours, it’s also important to listen to what they have to say.

Criticism Insight #2: We tend to notice criticism over praise.

When I got home and reread my notes, their constructive ideas finally made sense. I made the edit. Then I remembered they also gave me great compliments: “I like how the book talks about healing in such a positive light.” “I like to hear your enthusiasm.” “That is a great story!”

I received that.

Criticism Insight #3: Even when you’re brilliant, people can complain about something.

Then I started thinking… If I brought a page of Faulkner, Hemingway, Twain, or Joyce to a writer’s group, read it and asked for critiques, I would get them! One of the readings we heard was so good, all I could find was one word that confused me. But I did find something. In fact, I feel bad that I did not emphasize how brilliant it was.

If you ask for critique, you get critique, even on masterful writing. Art is not set in stone. There are no right answers. Everyone would do it a little differently. Writers are notorious for changing (and changing and changing) their own work. Of course you can critique the masters — people earn PhDs doing so, but those writers are still masters for a reason.

Criticism insight #4: With practice, you can get a lot out of constructive criticism.

You asked for it, you got it. And you asked because you wanted to make your art better. Let go, listen, and have fun with it. See what others have to say. (Nobody said you had to take their criticisms, after all. One particular member of my committee clearly didn’t understand the kind of book I was writing, so most of their comments were inappropriate, and I moved on.) Constructive criticism is a resource for better art, for you, and for healing yourself, too, when you look at what catches you or ignites strong emotions.

All told, I cannot wait to back to the next writer’s brunch! What are you doing to take your art and healing to the next level?

© 2012 Daria Boissonnas

Yesterday I found myself consulting with a wonderful doctor. (Due to ironic school regulations, I had to drag a kid out of his sick bed to have someone else say, “Yep, he has a virus and should be resting.”)

Here’s what struck me. Each time I said something positive (and true) like, “My kids rarely get sick,” she said, “Knock wood.” (And yes, she reached out and knocked on something.)

Remember that? From childhood? What a throwback for me. I’m sure I froze the first time she said it, trying to grok it.

What relic of an old time and a mindset the world is quickly outgrowing: the idea that spit happens and there’s nothing you can do about it. That thinking positively risks invoking the wrath of whatever else had been planned. That you have no right to take your own destiny into your hands. That it is dangerous to think positively and enjoy a good life.

It struck me as so strange that I think we should all pat ourselves on the back! We’ve come a long way, baby! We are no longer afraid to dream our dreams and then do something about them, to change the course of our lives. We are increasingly accepting that positive change (and healing) can be easy, and that much more is possible than we have assumed in the past. Yeah!

Yes, we can change the world for the better. Let’s honor how we used to think, honor our shift, and then keep moving forward. Knocking on wood is no longer necessary. We knocked, and that door opened.

© 2012 Daria Boissonnas

~ Daria’s Wednesday Wisdom column ~

How do you begin your day? For most of my life, I jumped right into a task as soon as I walked in my office. I felt like I was getting more done that way! When that task was done, I zipped on to the next one. Then I took lots of little (or not so little) breaks because I was working so hard. (Well, it made sense at the time, lol!)

In dealing with my increasingly busy days now, however, I am reminded of a joke. It says that Ghandi meditated for one hour at the start of every day, without exception. Discussing a particularly demanding day that was coming up, he told his assistant that he would have to meditate for two hours to start that day.

When the joke is told properly (sorry), you expect Ghandi to skip his meditation to better jump into his busy day. The absolute last thing you would expect is to spend even MORE time meditating!

Yet meditation has been proven in studies to calm us, relax us, and improve our thinking and effectiveness. It also can benefit your physical health. If you can get more done in less time because of it, then you certainly have time for meditation.

Start today with just 5… no, how about streeeeeetching into 6, 8 or 10 minutes a day! All you have to do is sit comfortably and feel your body or watch your breath. As sounds, thoughts, and life’s craziness rise around you, notice it, name it (thinking about my meeting, noisy kids, big worry, ankle still hurts, truck in street…) and let it go. Breathe it out if you like.

Just for a few, blissful minutes. Close your door. Take the phone off the hook and enjoy having NO responsibilities for a few minutes. When does THAT ever get to happen?

The Secret about Meditating

Beginners are often relieved to hear that there is no way to answer, “What should meditation feel like when I get it?” It feels like you, sitting quietly, naming the craziness of life and over and over, returning to the calm center that IS inside you. The masters never get to a magical point where they “have it.” You probably aren’t doing it wrong. Meditation is a practice, like playing soccer or lifting weights. You just keep getting better and better at it.

The more you practice, the faster you return to calm after interruption. The more you meditate, the faster you can return to calm when you are not meditating, for instance when the baby is crying, your boss is phoning, the pasta is boiling over, and the doorbell rings.

How can you commit to living an easier life, right now, by starting your day with a few minutes of meditation? Put it in your calendar. Do this at home before you go to work, on the train or bus in the morning, or first thing when you get into your home office.

Try it out for just 10 days and let me know how it goes, and whether you have any questions. (Hint: Which days are more productive for you, the ones that start with meditation, or the days you forget or “don’t have time”? Yeah, me too.)

(c) 2012 Daria Boissonnas

My yoga teacher, Sofia Diaz, recently described the difference between intensity and pain in our daily practice. She said intensity was like a low hum in the body, stretching us to our limits and asking us to let go into something greater than ourselves. Pain is sharp and sudden and an obvious indication we should stop what we are doing. Many of us mistake intensity for pain. We pull back when we should drop further in.

A heart ache is an opportunity to ride intensity, to drop in, to open still further. Our hearts ache when the radiance and potency of the heart meet something other than unbounded love. Our hearts ache because the intensity of our love is met with something we perceive as other than that love. It is in the moment that the heart’s fierce gift meets obstruction that our greatest thresholds can be crossed.

How many of us give up on love because it’s embarrassing or raw or too revealing? How many of us pull back from an another’s eyes afraid to stay too long or afraid what another will think or how we ourselves will react? How many of us make our love ‘nice’ instead or letting it flow like the wild and powerful river it is?

We welcome the sign of Pisces today at 10:18 pm pacific time. This is the final sign of the zodiac. It is a sign of culmination and synthesis. It wraps up the zodiacal year and asks us to leave behind what we do not wish to carry into the next cycle. In many ways, it is a month of surrender — a surrender into a greater love.

Let us remember that the heart can ache as it witnesses exquisite beauty. It can ache as it registers a remarkable act of love or compassion. It can ache because it wants to learn to love ever more. And the month of Pisces is a month to learn to love bigger, deeper, wider, with less boundary, with less reserve. It’s a month to stand open and willing to be touched. It’s a month to choose intimacy rather than escape. And remember– intimacy can be felt as you order your coffee in the morning or as you thank someone for packing your groceries. It’s a choice about how you connect moment to moment.

This month, take the phrase “the eyes are a window to the soul” as a real and tangible truth — and meet the gaze of many. Look deeper. Love more. Let go of all (at least some?) of the emotional baggage or accounts you’ve been carrying. Put them down. Walk lighter. Uplift those you meet. Redeem what you can. Stand in a rain of grace and invite others in.

Heidi Rose Robbins grew up learning the zodiac with her alphabet. As a practicing astrologer for over 15 years, Heidi takes a practical, sensitive, and inspiring approach to astrology. It is Heidi’s passion and commitment to speak to the depth of who we are and to help us grow into the next outrageous blossoming of our true selves. Her thriving worldwide practice includes transformative retreats for women twice a year in Ojai, California. GIA is pleased to offer Heidi as a regular guest columnist.

***************************

A Poem for Pisces

Love Is Not Fragile, by Samantha Reynolds (bentlily.com)

Who taught you
to be sparing
with your love
as though your heart was a bank
as though love could dry up
nonsense
it is as if the ocean complained
it was too
wet
love is not fragile
it is as common as breath
it is play money
it is a race
to give more
go first
say it with impunity
you think you will ache
with vulnerability
but the strangest thing will happen
you will nearly drown
with peace.

What is power? How would you define it?

Recently I read this definition: “Though power most often refers to the ability to influence people (Guerrero, DeVito & Hecht, 1999, p. 314), power is also related to dominance and status (Guerrero, DeVito & Hecht, 1999, p. 315)…”

Hunh? I spend all day focusing on empowering my clients and myself, but I’ve always thought of power as the ability to create healing changes, the kind of power that flows through you. Are we ultimately working towards the ability to influence, dominate, and have status?

Hmm… Well, sure. I like this definition because you can apply it perfectly to most valuable type of power you can develop, an ability most correlated with success — self-power. Power from within means you can influence yourself to write your novel, exercise, meditate every day, practice your art regularly, or get to sleep at a healthy time, even when all you feel like doing is sitting in front of a late movie with a bowl of ice cream.

Right, that power. The power that builds easy self-discipline. The power that takes you out of old, limiting habits and stretches for new habits, and keeps stretching, right through the discomfort stage.

This power is the ability to influence yourself to do what you know is good for you in the long run, when your head is full of reasons why not. It is the ability to dominate your “but-but-but” thoughts. And it is the status that says you honor your health, wealth, and happiness first. Good things come from this kind of power.

Then, when you use this power to take care of you (to put that proverbial oxygen mask over your own face), you will have more power to take care of others. You will empower your Inner Healer.

© 2012 Daria Boissonnas

How do you define power? What kind of power are you developing? Let us know in the comments below!

On Friday I attended a writer’s retreat and I am still floating. Because I am a writer. It’s my life purpose, the way I fulfill my divine contract. When I returned, I was quite surprised to find the pain from a recent horrible relationship blowup had all but disappeared. This was a situation where for two weeks I was so preoccupied that I kept forgetting things and taking wrong turns while driving.

It reminded me how powerfully healing it is to do what you were born to do, to step into your divine purpose, even just for a few hours.

Many artists, healers, and creatives spend a great deal of time and money fixing their problems. While this process has merit, we also can get WAY too distracted by it! I have seen great healers obsessed with pathology instead of asking how to move beyond it. I have seen them with their backs to the future, toiling over clearing their past, like Sisyphus rolling the rock to the top of the hill only to have it roll down again, or worse, like Prometheus getting his liver eaten out every morning.

You can spend a lifetime clearing the ants from an anthill by stepping on them as they emerge. Or YOU can help yourself step beyond the anthill.

Your choice.

When you are in your purpose, time disappears, your heart sings, and you create so much nurturing and healing energy that you can help clear a LOT of those problems you thought you had. Imagine what it would be like to make your living expressing your creativity! Let the fantasy roll. Think up your next project.

Healing comes from connections that nurture, and the most powerful kinds include connecting to your divine purpose, your natural gifts, your creativity, and who you really are when you are in that groove.

Over and over, my highly gifted creative clients are unhappy and stuck because they are not devoting enough time to doing their creative thing. (The second most common absence is not getting out in nature enough–another source of powerful healing!) It’s time to give yourself permission to be happy and to heal.

Stop peeling the onion. Put it down and be done with it. Go do your creative thang.

When I write, my cup runneth over. So may it be for you.

© 2012 Daria Boissonnas

Is there some area of your life where you know you need to make a change, but you just… haven’t… done it yet?

Maybe you’ve been intending to lose that extra 10 pounds, start a newsletter for your business, finish your book, or do that scrapbook.

I bet you give yourself grief for not taking those steps. (You do, don’t you?) You might feel bad, criticize yourself (even in front of others), punish yourself subtly, or worse.

Stop it.

Right now.

Your intentions to change are actually great news, even without the action step! Congratulations, you!

Here is why. When we make change, we generally move through three phases. Wanting to change while not taking action is the second step. And any progress beyond the first phase should be applauded!

The three phases of change look like this:

Beginning Phase: Nothing is wrong with me. I don’t need to change. What are you staring at?

Middle Phase: Uh oh, I noticed something I would like to change in my life. Ugh. Wow. How long has this been here? Why didn’t someone tell me? Oh, you did? Ack, just how pervasive is it? Oh, wow. Let me soak this in and get used to the idea. Let me look at it from all angles. I really want to change this, but I’m not sure what I want instead.

Final Phase: I am ready to do something about this issue. In fact I am doing something! I am really excited to start a program this afternoon. I already have done the first three exercises in the workbook. I looked at a lot of options, and I do believe this is the one for me. I am committed to this change, and have created a reward system for myself. I am doing this for me, and will enjoy the outcome.

Tips for Surviving the Middle Phase of Change

Yes, it’s GREAT to want to change, even if you are not yet ready to do so. Here are five ways to make it easier to survive–and graduate from this phase.

1. Celebrate. If you know you want to make a change, but you aren’t doing anything, you are in the middle phase. It’s OK, in fact, it’s great! Congratulations! You made it out of being stuck! Pat yourself on the back. Celebrate your moving forward! And let go of all that guilt. Just because you had the idea does not mean you are ready to live it… yet.

2. Get Clarity. Discover exactly what you DO want to change. Often, it’s not what you think at first, when you first move into the Middle Phase. This phase is about clarification. You see what you want to fix or eliminate, but what do you want to replace it with?

Sometimes, your original goal (eg. lose 20 pounds) is just a hint at what you really want, and your real goal (love myself enough to find a romantic partner) is something different. Dig deep. Go on retreats, consult with proven intuitives, ponder and dig around until you identify the real dream at the core of your desire to change. Keep moving forward.

3. Look At Your Options. Look around for solutions, but don’t buy anything yet. Especially don’t buy something just because it came along–it might have come along as a form of resistance, not a godsend solution. Take a good look at its merits and costs. Try programs out first–almost everyone gives away a free recording or exercise or something to try. Are you ready to stick to a schedule and do the work?

4. Give Yourself Time. Right now, you are analyzing the situation–and it’s never as cut-and-dried as it seems. You need some time. Allow yourself to have it.

If you get antsy, set a date to decide what you will do about your desire to change. If you don’t have the information or if you are not fully connected to creating a solution, set another date and some things to do or learn before that date.

5. Get Help If You Get Stuck. Yes, it is possible to get stuck in the Middle Phase, stuck in your resistance and fears and doubts, not moving forward when you want to. Get help, bounce your fears off others, and while you are exploring your resistance, be kind to yourself.

We do not punish second graders for not knowing high school math. Second grade is a phase, a stepping stone. Enjoy it. What right do you have to be mean to any of God’s children, yourself included?

When you let go of the guilt, self-criticism, angst, and self-sabotage you are raining down upon yourself, you open up a lot of energy to constructive uses, including healing. You can progress more quickly through the Middle Phase of Change and reach your end goal. Then you can celebrate once again!

© 2012 Daria Boissonnas

Have you ever thought of change this way before? Share your thoughts with us in the comment section below!

It is the worst feeling in the world when you unintentionally cause someone else pain. You wish you could rewind, unsay, and erase, erase, erase.

It is like lightning striking your relationship, too. It hurts both sides.

I’m at a loss to understand or amend what happened between me and a very important person in my life. This morning, my emotions are crippling my ability to think straight, so I’m doing what any writer might do to pull myself out of it. WRITING.

Sadly, the situation keeps making me think of a dramatic story I read in one of those emailed-to-everyone-and-their-brother chain emails. With the email long gone, I’ll retell it here (and please let me know if it comes from a book with copyrights, thx).

Once upon a time, there was a boy and his dad, some arrows and a fence. The boy opens the story by picking on another kid with his friends, as kids do. He badly hurts someone’s feelings without, like most kids, fully understanding what he has done.

So the father asks the boy to shoot a few arrows into the fence, and the kid does. The father explains that the arrows are like the insults he lobbed at the other kid. The arrows damaged the fence, and those comments hurt the kid, too.

Light bulb starts to go on in the son’s head. He wants to run apologize to the other kid right away.

But first the father asks him to pull the arrows out of the fence. They leave gaping holes and splintered wood. “Can you fix the fence?” asks the dad. Horrified, the kid realizes no. Even if you fill the holes with putty, they are still there. The fence is permanently damaged.

Lesson: When you hurt someone, you have created a wound that, even though you smooth it over later, is still there in some form. Permanent damage. Therefore, do everything you can to never hurt someone on purpose. Bite your tongue. Go for a walk. Let the vitriol cool off. Get some healing. Make the better choice, and love your neighbor.

But what about healing?

It will never, ever get better? Omg, what a depressing story! But so is my personal situation, in its recent rawness. It feels irreversible. I feel like our relationship will never be the same because this horrible, awful misunderstanding happened. There will be holes in the fence. We will always remember this.

Wait.

Sure, the dad’s demonstration helped the kid better understand THAT he hurt someone. But is it really true? Do hearts and humans, like wooden fences, never heal?

Is this an outdated, incorrect story? Is this one of the common cultural myths we are learning to heal beyond?

Do you think it is possible, with forgiveness and genuine healing (not repairing), to fill those holes and restore the relationship? Do you think the dad is teaching his kid the wrong principle, which, in reverse is this: when you get hurt you will never be able to repair yourself?

I myself believe that this story is old thinking. After 15 years as a healer, I know it is.

I know that genuinely healing a harmful relationship event (not fixing, not undoing) can transform the relationship by taking it to a new place of understanding, deepened love, and appreciation. It’s not quite “learning the lesson” in the event — it is transcending it to a place where it does not matter any more.

It’s easier to understand this by thinking of little things that are easy to forgive and forget, like a toddler wobbling and spilling your coffee on your lap. Unintentional, easy to let go of (maybe after you change and mop up). So can the BIG rifts in life be, with healing, true healing. To begin, you just have to ask how you can get to that bright and healed place.

Thanks for the reminder. Thanks for helping me pull out of my old attitude.

I am feeling better already.

© 2012 Daria Boissonnas

The holidays are in full swing and the thrill of the brand new year is upon us. Here are a few tasks for this week or next to get you in a great position for next year, clear and ready for your best year yet.

Out with the Old

1. File Your Finished Work. Congratulations! Yahoo, you published author, you! Now put those files where you can find them, right now, before they clutter up 2012. Do this in your office with paper files, and on your computer. Create a “2011 Sold Work” folder, and drop your project folders in there. This folder can be filed within your active writing folder, so you will always know where to find previous work.

2. Cull Your Unfinished Writing. Which ones will you let go of? Which projects have you already moved way beyond, with no reason to finish? I love this process! Invariably I find a poem I started or an article idea that I threw into a file and forgot about. You can hang onto the viable ones, and set them up to be finished next year. (See part II of this article for “In with the New”.)

As a writer, I rarely delete writing (you never know), so tuck away the projects you will not pursue  in either your deep-six folder or your future projects (but not right now) folder.

Then mentally and emotionally, let go of them. Create a ceremony if you like. For example, you may want to print an article you are killing, or the outline for a book that’s going bye-bey (double sided, 4 sheets to a page) and symbolically burn them in your fireplace, returning their energy to the Pool of All Possibility.

3. Tidy Up Your Accounting. Make sure you were paid for these projects, resending overdue invoices and giving their recipients a call. Put your invoices and receipts in order for accounting. When my business was small with few expenses, I taped receipts onto paper in a three-ring binder with 12 monthly tabs. Yellow paper held was cash receipts. The bank statements held bank receipts. Blue paper was for travel trips, etc.

Ready for 2012

When you are done with these steps, all your desktops should look beautifully clean. Enjoy getting ready for 2012. Here’s to you and a fabulous one-two. *toast*  ;)

Do you have any other year-end steps you take to prepare for a new year? Share them with us in the comments, below!

With energies shifting, more and more of us are becoming aware of our intuitive abilities. How about you? Do you know what form your intuition takes? Do you know how to recognize it and what to do with it?

Intuition comes in many guises. Intuition is simply a way of receiving information via the parts of your consciousness that are other than your physical body or rational, thinking mind.

Intuition is perfectly normal. We are all born with a vast spectrum of consciousness, a rainbow of flavors, which can receive information. So there are many ways you receive information, in addition to your five standard senses and your thinking mind.

Your job, my dear spiritual traveler, is to learn to be unafraid of your intuition, as you would be perfectly OK with sight or sound or other inputs you are used to. Your spiritual responsibility is to learn to recognize and decipher this additional information, and then figure out how to live a good life with it, and even use it to help people.

Intuition is a great source of objective information and guidance. When information comes in through these channels, it does not flow through the fallible human mind. It stays in its purest form, from God’s mouth to your ear, you might say. As we process or think about this intuitive info, or rationalize it, or interpret it, however, we begin to dirty the waters. A skillful intuitive does as little interpretation as possible.

To access your inner wisdom, you must first familiarize yourself with the way the extra info comes in. Learn to recognize it, and especially discern it from random thoughts — because your thinking mind can be mistaken. (Actually, the mind is quite famous for being mistaken, and for making up false stories of all kinds.)

I’m sorry to say that your intuition did not come with an owners manual. In this article series, we will take a good look at the several different kinds of intuition.

Types of Intuition – 1. Claircognizance

Most flavors of intuition begin with the prefix “clair-”, which comes to us from French, meaning “clear”. You can slap “clair” on the front end of any kind of word describing how you receive your information.  Er, that is, any word describing the way it feels like you receive your information. Er, that is, describing the most similar “normal” way of receiving information.

Oh, let’s just jump in, shall we?

1. Claircognizance — clear knowing. You just know. You know who is calling, and it turns out to be them. You know your lover will be home late, and they are. You know something bad will happen this morning, and you’re in a fender-bender. It is not belief or thoughts. You. Know.

Claircognizance may be the most common form of intuition today. I suspect it is more widespread than any survey can uncover… because you can have this form of intuition and not even know it! Ask yourself this: how many times a week do you experience or refer to what you may call: a funny feeling, impression, gut feeling, hunch, inkling, forboding, instinct, premonition or even a plain old thought! If you are not good at recognizing your intuition, claircognizance will totally feel like thoughts.

One close friend who is very claircognizant honestly believed he was a good guesser. He could find things in 20 minutes that other experts could not find for days, but he thought nothing of it. He didn’t know that everyone is born with perfectly normal levels of consciousness, beyond the thinking mind, that can gather information.

Now you know this.

For a few years, he didn’t believe me about being claircognizant. Now, he admits it. Better yet, he’s learning to differentiate this cleaner information from his chaotic monkey-minded thoughts.

When we don’t recognize the value of our intuition, we don’t benefit from it as well as we can. If he had admitted how valuable, incisive, and consistently accurate his gift was, he could have made a very highly paid living focusing on finding things that other experts could not. A great living based on one of his Divine Gifts!

Are You Claircognizant?

So think about it over the next few days… when you get a hunch, what does it feel like? Does it come with words or pictures? A feeling of calmness and peace? Or is it a random (but recognizable) blip of information in a river of thoughts?

Another clue to our intuition often comes from childhood. We tend to train ourselves to ignore our intuitive gifts as we grow up, but we can often see them in hindsight. Can you think of hunches you had regularly as a kid? Did you have a good people sense? Feel like animals talked to you or you to them? Good sense for how the grownups were feeling? Imaginary friends? Talked to fairies or your dead grandmother?

When I was little, I always had a “feeling” about trips. I knew exactly how I would feel emotionally during them, and I was 100% correct. In my early 20s, starting a Sunday night trip home, I felt like I was driving to my death. Spooked, I crashed with a friend and drove home at 4am. Even in the morning light, I almost wiped out on black ice in the mountains. We will never know for sure what would have happened, but I’m glad I listened to my gut and drove the next day.

Another gift I’ve had for as long as I can remember is being able to either predict coin tosses or know when the answer was blocked and I had no idea. 100% right when extensively tested by a disbelieving boyfriend once upon a time, LOL.

See if you can now begin to separate out your claircognizance from your other sensory inputs and mind activity. If you get a hunch about something, see if you can verify the extra information. Keep a notebook handy and see how you do. You may surprise yourself. You may completely validate what you’ve suspected for years, more like!

You are intuitive. How can you use your gifts to live a blissful life that benefits others?

Next time:  clairaudience.

Still Confused?

If you are looking for support in walking your spiritual path, consider a membership in GIA, where you learn to manage and confidently use your intuition and Divine Gifts, ultimately to make a great living fulfilling your Divine Purpose. Check out our benefits here: GIAwaken.com/benefits.

If you have another form of intuition, please comment below.

Have you gotten stuck writing a book, workshop, information product, or finishing a big creative project? Struggling to finish? Feeling guilty? Missing deadlines? Worried you aren’t ever going to finish? Can’t find the time?

I know what it’s like.  For three years I worked on writing a book, then this year, I started and finished a book in about 5 months. Let me help you by sharing the three biggest spiritual insights and actions that got me through the rough patches and helped me finish quickly and easily.

If your big creative project is part of your Divine Purpose, we want to help you finish it!

Join us in December for this amazing FREE class.

FREE CALL: “Top 3 Spiritual (& Energy) Secrets to

Getting Unstuck, (Re-)Starting, and Brilliantly Finishing

Your Big Creative Project:

A Free Class for Creatives, Dreamers, Intuitives and Healers”

With Daria Boissonnas, Founder & CEO, Global Institute for Awakening

Completing a book or BIG creative project is a spiritual journey, and it begins in this call! Learn the three secrets that can make the difference between continuing to struggle (or be stuck) and allowing your book to practically finish itself. We will begin to implement on the call, and you will have even more steps to take when you hang up.

Date: Tuesday, 13 December 2011

Time: 2pm Eastern / 11am Pacific US time

…

Register FREE and Get the Audio Recording Too

Register here and you will get all the dial-in info:  http://giawaken.com/register-free-call

Yes, an audio recording will be available after the call, so sign up even if you cannot make the live call. You will be emailed the link for the free recording shortly after the call.

I look forward to connecting with you on the call!

~ Daria’s Wednesday Wisdom column ~

A client called reporting that her blood sugar levels, which had been stable and manageable, were starting to spike and change unexpectedly. “Should I come in for more healing work?” she asked.

Usually I leave that answer up to her higher wisdom. So I asked her body’s energy and higher wisdom that question.

“No,” it said. “Something in her environment has changed and she just has to change it back.”

Sounds easy enough! What was it?

…Something in the kitchen. Something having to do with sounds.

What new sounds did she have in her kitchen?

Well, as it turns out, a few weeks earlier she had started listening to right-wing radio shows in the kitchen in the morning.

“Are you enjoying it? Do you agree with what they are saying?”

No, not at all, was her answer. But it was entertaining for sure!

When we are stressed, we often think of higher blood pressure. But in this case, it was higher blood sugar. The energy of this stressful situation was disrupting her blood sugar energy, allowing it to become erratic. She thought she was entertaining herself, but instead she was stressing herself in a way that could harm her health and well-being.

She agreed to stop listening to the new talk shows, and later told me her blood sugar levels had become more stable.

You Are Your Environment

Your environment is not separate from your energy, your mindset, or your health. It is not merely a reflection of the state of your health, but completely connected to it. Your environment is continuous with (one with) the state of your physical, mental, emotional, and other energies and layers of your being.

Happily, due to this connection, you can change your environment and change your health.

Yes, really. But only if you change it in a healing way.

My upcoming book, Gift of the Healer, (due out in Decemberish) describes in detail the difference between healing change and general change, but here is one key to changing your environment in a way that positively affects your personal energy:

Permanently change how you do things. Change your method.

Cleaning up is one thing. Body cleanses and tidying up the house are lovely and important.  But I am talking about stepping beyond a cleanup. To change your energy, you must do more than just fix the clutter in a way that allows it to accrue again. You must change your process so the clutter does not appear any more.

For instance, right here and now, think of a small area in your life where things tend to accumulate. Now walk through these simple questions.

1. Find the process you are missing.

In addition to putting away or recycling that pile of papers, batteries, or broken toys, ask yourself these questions:

Is it OK for this to accumulate here? If so, put a basket, tray, or inbox there (or somewhere more appropriate. Let that be the official place for that stuff! Skip to step 2.

If it is not OK, ask: why is this here? What allowed it to languish? You may say: I need to pay this bill, I don’t know where else to put this thing, I have to file these, I have to make a phone call about this…)

What process is missing? What did NOT happen that allowed this? If there was a process in place that would avoid creating this clutter, what would that process be? You might say, “I don’t have a holding place for my “to do” papers or unpaid bills. Perhaps you used to forget about it when it was in the drawer, so you also need a reminder, either on your phone calendar, or a marker on your desk when you have unpaid bills in the desk. (You can store the marker in the empty bills folder when it is empty.)

2. Create a new process.

Write out the new “rule” for that area. For instance, “When I come home, I will decide within 24 hours where new things live.” Or perhaps, “Unpaid bills go in the red folder in the front of the desk drawer and every month on the 15th and 30th I will pay them.”

Commit to your new process. Get buy-in from roommates/family/etc. Commit to yourself, to healing this broken process that is draining and cluttering up your energy. Adjust your attitude and assumptions that are creating this problem. Yes, your home can be beautifully clean!  Yes, you are so worth it!

Put it in action. Implement what you have come up with. Mark your calendar for that bill paying, or write a sticky note to yourself to remember to do laundry every morning until you remember. It’s OK to forget once in a while when a process is new, but If the process does not work at all, review the steps that got you there. Is there a better process? Does your partner or friend have another idea?

Healing Heals

Healing other people and animals heals you.  Similarly, healing your environment also heals you. It is the healing that makes the difference, not what you are healing.

When you know exactly what turns positive change into healing, you can heal yourself and others all day long, in all that you do. Stick around here to learn more about that!

Please share the process you changed in the comments below. I LOVE to hear from you!

To receive announcements about the book’s launch and how you can get a sneak peek at it, sign up for our free kit, at the top of this page.

~ Daria’s Wednesday Wisdom column ~

How can helping others hold you back? More easily and subtly than you think.

When clients come to see me, they are stuck, stuck, stuck. They can feel a healing gift bubbling inside them, but they cannot figure out what it is or how to fully let it out. One of the most common reasons they are stuck, which I just saw again this week, is that these spectacular healers are being held back by the dark side of helping others. This issue stops healing from flowing through you and all you do. It is important to recognize it and root it out.

What does it look like? The dark side of serving, healing and helping others comes in many, many forms. For this client, it was about satisfaction. (“Ah can’t get no…”) It was about making sure everyone around her was satisfied.  Family, friends, teachers, bosses — everyone.

But wait, you say, that sounds nice! It feels great to help each other out. True. And we healers have a natural tendency to nurture, comfort, and support others. We love it!!

Yet it does not help the world when you hold yourself back, when you focus ONLY on what others need, or you burn yourself out pleasing others. This client got stuck and “forgot” about her own needs. She forgot to figure out who she was and what kind of healing she could share with the world. (A hand analysis helped there, too.)

In childhood, we imprint our energy body with inner “rules” or beliefs. The trouble is, not all of these rules are accurate. They were created in the mind of a child. They may have worked when you were 7, or in that one event, but these inner rules can cause big trouble, stuckness, and unhappiness later in life.

You might have a rule that you must help others first, for example, even to the exclusion of caring for yourself. You feel lousy (guilty) when you don’t put others first, but you can burn out when you do. Sound familiar?

We unconsciously follow these inner rules for the rest of our lives (or until we reexamine and rewrite them). I often find that healers, who love love love to help others, almost always carry some kind of set of rules that say it is selfish to support and nurture ourselves and it is proper and even holy to help others.

Yes, it is a sacred duty to help others, but the Golden Rule says “treat your neighbor as yourself”… and that implies that you treat yourself gently and well, FIRST.

Hard though it is to think this way sometimes, the most important person in the world to you is… you. Think of it this way: you have been entrusted by God with the care of a powerful, wonderful human being and healer, a beautiful lightworker who happens to have your name and look exactly like you — oh, it is you!

When you care for yourself, and when YOU feel pleased and satisfied, chances are you will be walking your spiritual path, sharing your healing gifts, fulfilling your life’s purpose, and changing the world for the better. It is from this place of inner satisfaction – NOT from the place of being stuck and tired, but from the place of spiritual fulfillment and an easier happier life — you can help a lot more people to heal.

Take Two Action Steps TODAY to Serve Others Better

How are you nuruturing and supporting you? How are you pleasing you? Right now, take two steps to allow your healing gifts to flow more effectively through you.

1. Identify one area of dissatisfaction in your life. Choose an easy one for fun and a hard one for a nice challenge. Are you sick of that pile of clutter on the kitchen counter? Tired of a friend’s behavior, your own behavior, or a responsibility you don’t like? What eats at you, nags, and wears you down, sometimes with out words — can you identify it?

Write down five ways you could change that today. Then choose one of them and work on resolving it today. If you need an extra day or two, take it, but finish resolving it. Congratulations!!

2. Identify a dream or wish you would enjoy fulfilling. How would you like to help the world? What would you like to improve about your life that would allow you to become more satisfied? Write down (you guessed it) five ways you could move closer to achieving that goal. Decide to do it. Finish the first step today and calendar the rest.

Review your Seven Steps to Awakening (available free with our kit, above) for the complete set of 7 steps to changing any situation in your life. Comment and let me know what was holding you back and how it goes!

A book!

It’s a book!

In March of this year, at the Wellife Mind Body Spirit Expo in Madison Wisconsin, I spoke about “How to Tell if You Are A Healer”. It is one of the most common questions I get, especially at our expo booth — Am I a healer? How can I tell if I am a healer? A psychic told me I’m a healer — what do you think? Etc.

At the start of my talk, I asked the audience how many of them were healers.

In response, one man raised his hand with an “enh” sigh.

Enh? Most “enh” responses come from people who have learned a healing technique but not practiced it much since class. Then again, I also get “enh” from brilliant professional healers who can’t recognize their gifts at all or who are insecure about the little bit of healing they are doing. (This is why I have founded the Global Institute for Awakening to support healers in finding their inner power, gifts and brilliance!)

But 50 minutes later, at the end of my speech when I asked the question again, every single person in the audience raised their hands! The two ladies who apologized ahead of time that they had to leave partway through were still sitting there excitedly, hands raised.

Everyone on the planet is a healer. And WOW do we need you now! That speech, which came to me in a flash, has become the perfect outline for my new book, tentatively called Gift of the Healer.  If you have ever wondered whether you were a healer, what makes you a healer, or how to awaken your natural healing gifts to transform the world around you, this is the book for you.

I even give away the #1 secret that masterful healers know that allows them to create miracles and permanent positive transformation.  This book is chock full of valuable insights and tips for all healers, transformational coaches and mentors, artists, writers, agents of change, innovators, visionaries and conscious leaders.

Right now, the book is teetering on the edge of done. We are just waiting for the last comments from the editor.

Stay tuned for more bulletins, and look for it to be published late this year! I cannot wait to share these insights with you and help YOU connect more fully with your Inner Healer.

Many blessings on your healing journey,

.

.