Mastering life — and therefore mastering healing and problem-solving so you can live a great life you love — is all about understanding attachment and detachment.  It’s about letting GO appropriately.

Imagine you are a complex electronic device with a zillion cords coming out of you.  Your entire spiritual journey is about deciding what to plug into, and what to detach from.  And when. 

That’s the bottom line.  This activity actually defines who you are and what you can do in the world.  It definitely affects how yummy it is to live your daily life!

Your life’s journey is about deciding what is appropriate to be connected to, and what is harmful to connect to.  For example:

• What beliefs you should plug into
• What moment in time you enjoy attaching to (“now” is highly recommended by sages)
• What friends and colleagues to surround yourself with
• What issues you should let go of, repair or strengthen.

To do that well, it helps to learn how to easily sense or judge what connections will move you forward on your spiritual journey, and which ones are holding you back and even causing you pain. 

This month, our members are focusing on exercising that exact spiritual “muscle”!

Our member training right now is to focus your spiritual or self-improvement practice on recognizing harmful attachments and letting them GO.

Since we humans easily numb out to our pain, letting go is a crucial skill to have in your spiritual toolbox! 

The more easily, perceptively and sooner you can let go, the easier your life’s journey — not to mention you can save great emotional and financial expense as well as time along your way!

What Is Attachment?

Attachment is a natural energetic process all living beings do in order to exchange information.  In 12 years of energy healing, I’ve seen that conscious, living beings create energy bridges to communicate.  (And let me tell you, a heck of a lot more information goes across energetic connections than verbal or visual ones!) 

After you connect to another form of consciousness, whether a person or idea or system, then repeated communication builds a stronger connection.  Over time, energetic connections are built on many levels.  They become so complex they can be difficult to break.

Yet, after the communication is over, for instance after a relationship ends, these connections naturally fade.  They may be painful at first.  We have to adjust to them not being there.  We must change our habits of thinking and being to create new energy bridges that function similarly.  It’s hard.  But this fading process is natural and one of the reasons for the adage, “Time heals all wounds.”  

Sometimes, however, for reasons we may or may not be aware of, we hang on to a connection or energy bridge inappropriately.  The time has passed, the other person has moved on, or the belief is no longer appropriate. 

When we hang on to something beyond its expiration date… it starts to stink.  (Hadja noticed?)

In order to artificially halt the natural fading of this energy connection, you have to feed it energy, sometimes LOTS of daily energy.  You might use negative emotions to charge up that connection and keep it alive!  Ouch.

When we hold an attachment inappropriately, several things can happen, none of which are health- and happiness-inducing in my opinion.  Practicing letting go can help you eliminate this sort of thing from your life:

• Negative drama
• Fatigue
• Environmental clutter
• Physical clutter (energy of illness, toxins, parasites, cysts…)
• Emotional clutter
• Mental clutter
• Spiritual clutter (do you know exactly what you are here to do?)
• Repeating lessons and not learning
• Expense of time and money as you run in circles
• Not fully supporting yourself
• Poor finances

Let’s Let Go, Together

That’s why an important part of spiritual traditions involve exercises or practices to break the older, outdated attachments while creating and strengthening positive, life-enhancing attachments.

Please join us this month — join us as a member and save $50 through the end of August — and work on mastering this valuable skill.  Practicing letting go will contribute to the amount of grace and ease you can experience via your health, happiness and daily life.  Our program makes it easy, and we don’t tell you what to believe.  Let’s practice cutting those old attachments together!  You can do this.

“How poor are they that have not patience! 
What wound did ever heal but by degrees?” 
— William Shakespeare

If you are alive, then Awakening is a natural human process you are going through right now.   Whether you are aware of it or not, your Awakening affects the state of your health, relationships, finances, business/career success, emotional state, and your ability to live a great life.

It’s the nature of Life itself to grow and that includes you.  In your childhood, your physical body grows, but throughout your life, you also grow emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually.  You grow in knowledge and wisdom.  You grow in your ability to truly, deeply love yourself and others.  You grow in your ability to serve others and give back.  You grow in being able to be happy and at peace with your life.  This natural progression is your Awakening. 

In fact, if you want to reach your greatest Potential to be happy, live a meaningful life, make a difference, and leave the planet a better place than when you arrived, then you want to make steady, quick progress in your Awakening!

As you explore the world and advance through your Awakening, you discover what you love and what you hate, what you are good at and what you refuse to do.  Awakening is also a journey into yourself to discover your unique gifts for the world and then get them out there successfully.  It’s your spiritual journey to have trust and faith so you can let go of past events and other illusory limitations to live a life brimming with wellness, wealth and wisdom.  

Awakening is how you create your dream life.  Who wouldn’t want that?

Yet, when you resist this natural process of your Awakening, you suffer.  Blocked Awakening is largely unrecognized as the main source of humanity’s greatest challenges, problems, senseless destruction, and pain.  

What’s exciting is this:  that means working with the process of Awakening to unblock it and advance it is often missed as a source of effective solutions.  Sometimes downright miraculous solutions.

The more you allow yourself to awaken, the more wealth, wellness and wisdom not only flow into your life, but flow through your life to benefit others.  That means yes, you can change the world by changing yourself.  You can heal the world by healing yourself. 

And you can do anything you want to do better and easier by Awakening.

This is why we are so excited to help our members and fans understand and advance along their personal paths of Awakening.  We don’t tell them what to believe, but we give them the map to their journey, the wisdom and tools to move through trouble spots on the path, plus the inspiration to keep going.

You too can grab a FREE copy our map and guide to Awakening in the header bar above.  There’s no obligation.  Take it with our blessings! 

Then check back here on Monday for the next fact you need to understand about your own brilliant Awakening.

Speaker: Daria Boissonnas, Founder of the Global Institute for Awakening

Did you know YOU are a healer?  In fact, each one of us is a natural born healer. That means you have a unique gift or way you can reach for Potential, a greater way of being, that can improve and change the world.  

How can you awaken your natural Inner Healer? How can you successfully activate your gift to change the world? How can you learn to do that with less and less effort, and more and more results? Hear what Daria has to say so you can:

• Discover a deeper definition of healing that opens doors to Possibility
• Understand a common way most healers overlook their greatest gift (are you guilty of this?)
• Learn about Daria’s healing experiences and how she came to see that we are each healers  
• Find out what YOU can do to awaken your natural inner healer and bring healing (positve change) through ALL you do.

Play the audio here:

Or download the audio here. (Right click and select “save target as”.)

Videos go viral when they touch us deeply in a way that is basic to our human nature.  If you haven’t seen the “Embrace Life” public service announcement from the Sussex Safer Roads Partnership in the UK (http://www.sussexsaferroads.gov.uk/), view it here:

I’m a weeper, so of course I cried.  By the time I’d showed it to all the kids, I was sobbing.  But beyond the happy ending, there are remarkable things about this video and the fact that it resonated so much with folks around the world that it went viral, with over 9.3 million YouTube views at this writing.

1.  It’s artistic and beautiful.  As humanity evolves forward, arts are coming to the forefront.  Not just in museums, but in the amount and quality of beauty and design in everyday life.  For isntance, things that used to be primarily functional (like public service announcements) are becoming more artistic and beautiful.  Think of all the colored/designed phone covers and computers now, where these items used to be gray and functional.  As humanity shifts out of our logical Navigator Mind and back into our creative, artistic, metaphorical Essential Mind, people are demanding more artistic flair and design in their lives.  You can see this everywhere.

2. It’s positive reinforcement, not negative.  When I was a kid, parents spanked, a technique largely frowned upon today.  It’s based on negative reinforcement: negative actions have negative consequences so you’re trained to avoid the negative ones (in theory… it didn’t work so well on me).  Today, parents focus on positive reinforcement:  positive actions have positive consequences, so you want to do more positive stuff.  In terms of power, positive reinforcement trumps negative, any day.  This reflects a step up the evolutionary ladder from the punishment mindset.  This shift is similar to emerging from the First Phase of Healing Mastery (fixing what’s broken) into the Second Phase (seeking solution w/o interest in causality).

Masaro Emoto did an experiment with rice years ago that has been independently duplicated hundreds of times around the world and demonstrates that positive reinforcement is stronger than negative.  You can do this too: take three identical jars, add the same amount of rice and just cover the rice with water.  Then seal the jars and set them next to each other.  Each day, to the first one say “I love you”, to the next say, “I hate you”, and completely ignore (don’t even look at) the third.  The results?  Generally, the first jar simply ferments, like beer or sauerkraut – it doesn’t go bad.  The second typically goes bad, you see mold, it turns icky colors, etc.  But the third one goes putrid, really gross compared to #2.  Conclusion: positive reactions preserve and sustain, negative reactions (even to negative things) hurt, but ignoring hurts most of all.  This is why kids and adults would rather act out negatively than be ignored.  I see signs everywhere that humanity is shifting into positive reinforcement mode.

3. The PSA is metaphorical.  Now this is extraordinary.  The main character is NOT driving a real car.  We did NOT see blood and guts.  And really unusual — we did not see a single seatbelt in a seatbelt PSA!!!   The child and female represented his seatbelt.  What is the metaphor?  Love saved the man’s life.  He buckled up out of love so he could come home to embrace his loved ones.  And we saw the looks on their faces that showed what seeing him again meant to them. 

Metaphor gets to the essence of the matter — it shows us what we’re really talking about, and what it MEANS.  Here, we saw no car.  No seatbelt.  No gore.  No stats.  No lecture.  But message heard, loud and clear, by millions of people all over the world.

We are changing as a species, evolving more fully into our true form of consciousness, the one that operates through the artistic, conceptual, metaphorical, possibility-oriented right brain, which we at the Global Institute for Awakening call the Essential Mind.  This popular ad is great evidence of this shift.

Intrigued?  To learn more about humanity’s evolution and what we are all ultimately seeking and how to get that for yourself and others, join as a member and receive with your membership our extraordinary two-part class, “How to Find What You’ve Been Missing”, where we go into this in much more detail!  Join here:  http://www.GIAwaken.com/benefits

To learn more about the video and the artist who created it, check out this brief CNN interview with him:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnXH_P9SVAk

Daria, here.  I’m having a personal makeover and getting a special photo taken tomorrow, and it’s already been a surprisingly healing experience.  You might not think of hair, makeup and clothes as very deep, since they all go on the surface of the body, but think about what healing is: connecting with a higher Potential and bringing it into the world. 

Healing brings out or allows true authenticity.  Authenticity is all about matching what’s inside you — your gifts, inner power to make a difference, and endearing personality – to what’s outside you — your behavior, words, clothes, hair, makeup, etc. 

Think about it.  Are your clothes expressing your healing message for the world?  Is your hairstyle bringing out the highest potential in your face’s bone structure?  Or are you hiding from the world, as I have been doing and as I have seen so many clients do, by dressing a diamond in rags?

It’s fine to say you don’t want to dye your hair because of the chemicals or refuse to be beholden to fashion.  You set the parameters in your life.  You are in control.  But given your parameters, are you expressing your power to change the world in everything you do?

The Global Institute for Awakening is here to help you get better at doing that.  As your fearless leader, I’m living an experiment right now.  I didn’t think I wanted or needed to do any of this hair & makeup stuff or get fancy photos taken, but I’m realizing I was rationalizing it all away so I didn’t have to, and so I didn’t have to figure it all out either.  Already I’ve discovered that it’s not a burden to look better and dress to better compliment my figure — it’s actually enjoyable to express who I am on the outside of me.  It’s more comfortable, too.  Who knew.

More story to come. 

From the Director’s Notebook, newsletter 1 June 2010

Our house guest arrived Friday with a surprise case of poison ivy on her arm from weeding the garden just before she left.  The rash developed as she traveled here and itched considerably when she arrived.  I’ll spare you a visual, but everyone agreed it looked just like poison ivy exposure.  After 10 minutes of hands-on Reconnective Healing, the swelling was down noticeably and she said it stopped itching.  Now that’s the way to treat guests so they can enjoy themselves, LOL! 

I’m not familiar with poison ivy recovery having been lucky enough to never have it, but the next day it was crusty and flat and she marveled that “it looks like it would after a week of healing!”

The Global Institute for Awakening is here to help everyone understand how much healing is available to us and how to find it.  We are happy to have you along with us on this quest!

Here in the U.S. we are enjoying a long weekend as I write this.  I am hoping that wherever you are, you are finding yourself increasingly comfortable in your own skin. 

I wanted to share a “wow” healing insight with you, healer to healer. 

This morning I was working on destressing/healing me so the process of stepping out into the spotlight is much easier.  The background story is this:  I’m flying to LA in June — eek, just a couple weeks away! — for this fancy photo shoot with stylists and makeup artists and everything.  Not my typical cup of tea, but something I need to do right now.  For 12 years, I’ve ben “hiding” in my office, working with people one on one to help them heal and step into their own power and health so they can help many others in turn.  But life is calling me forward, waaaay out of my shy comfort zone.   Life is definitely pushing me in Facet #7 of the spiritual journey: Step It Up!

One issue that came up this morning was being stressed about “feeling secure”.  Of course when we step forward in life, we feel insecure (even when we’re fine).  But the type of energy system correction that came up told me that this issue, and this increased stress about feeling secure, was affecting cell metabolism energy in the outer layer of my skin! 

I thought that was fascinating.  My skin, especially the outer layer, is my first line of defense.  Many germs can only get thru when the skin is broken.  My innards are protected by many layers, but skin is the outermost.  So if I had not corrected this issue, my body said, I would likely have physically experienced dry skin (including on my face) as a result of my stress.  Whew, problem averted!

As awakening souls and natural healers, we gain tremendous insights into life when we look at the body and our lives metaphorically.  When we think about what things MEAN instead of what they exactly are.  My healing experience is a great case study showing the metaphorical connection between thoughts or feelings and the body.  What is feeling secure about?  Knowing you can keep the invasive stuff out — something my skin does for me, especially the karatinous outer layer. 

Other aspects of security will affect my body in other ways, so please don’t generalize from this example.  Each person and each healing session is unique, though there are definitely general trends you can see (just always be ready for an exception to the rule).

Hope that was insightful!  What thoughts did you have?

Everything you seek is already bubbling inside you:  an unending supply of power, guidance, love, service, wisdom and peace.  Best of all, when you use it to improve your life, it naturally flows through you to others. 

Your job is to awaken to it, understand it, and use it to heal the world.

Our programs at Global Institute for Awakening can help you change your life — and the world.  Start with our membership program.  We teach you simply and clearly to access your full power.  We help you accelerate easily along your spiritual path towards wealth, wellness and wisdom.  Here’s how:

1. Wealth.  The nature of your most expansive mindset is limitless abundance.  To access wealth of all kinds, use our monthly guidance to to build your connection to limitless knowing and being, what some call the higher self.

2. Wellness.  The body tends towards health always — unless something gets in its way, usually a thought or behavior pattern.  But a lack of wellness limits only the physical body and logical mind.  It does not reach the infinite or limitless part of you.  Healing requires you connect with your greatest Potential so it can flow through your body, mind and actions here in the physical world we live in.  Global Institute for Awakening guides you toward a fuller connection between your two natures. 

3. Inner Wisdom.  To master knowledge, gather information and apply it repeatedly until you can perceive the core essence of it and apply it under any circumstance.  For an even deeper knowing, connect with the unlimited part of you that always knows, that always has the best answer.  Membership gives you simple exercises monthly to help do this.  Other classes give you even deeper knowledge.

We hope you will join us to live a richer life while you change the world for the better.  Explore our ever-growing membership benefits HERE.

I was raised in a meat-and-potatoes household.  In fact, I learned to worry about my health if I did not get meat with meals.  Today, we eat vegetarian a couple times a week.  Visitors have told us we eat much smaller portions of meat than your average household anyway, so I was intrigued when a friend wrote “flexitarian” on facebook this week.

Are you a “flexitarian” — veggie sometimes, and sometimes not?  Are you an ovo-lacto-mom’s-roast-beef vegetarian?  Or are you a purist, who says being semi-vegetarian is like being semi-pregnant?  Newsweek covered the eat-less-meat movement and the book, The Flexitarian Diet : The Mostly Vegetarian Way to Lose Weight, Be Healthier, Prevent Disease, and Add Years to Your Life
by Dawn Jackson Blatner (McGraw-Hill, October 2008, ISBN 0071549579, $16.47 on amazon) in an article you can read here:  
http://www.newsweek.com/id/161559

How have your eating habits changed over the years?  Let us know in a comment, below.

Not 20 minutes into the yardwork today, one of our kids was stung on the inner arm by a wasp.  Crying and saying, “it hurts” over and over, she was gently guided by everyone into my office.  The area was already pink, about 2″ (5cm) across.  A bright red dot marked the center. I went to work.

• 4 minutes later it “mostly didn’t hurt” (only a little bit when she “thought about it on purpose”).  A small welt had begun rising around the red dot.
• 7 minutes in, the welt had elongated and frozen at less than a 1/2″ (1cm) across the long way.  The sting didn’t hurt at all.
• 10 minutes in, the red dot in the center was gone.  You could see a tiny circle there, but it was all skin color. The welt had reduced, and the bigger red area was much paler.  Pain and trauma behind her, back outside she went.

I am so grateful for the possibilities of healing! I feel for people who wouldn’t believe this was possible, who would assume that a wasp sting would really hurt for a while.  This isn’t the first sting that’s all but disappeared inside 15 minutes for me as a healer, and I’m grateful for every disappearance.

Are you fully open to life’s highest potential?  Where in your life are you making assumptions that limit your full enjoyment of life and its possibilities?  How can you let these go?

Woke up from a terrifying dream with a message this morning.  Here’s how I decoded it. 

In it, I had some random house guests I hadn’t seen in a long time, but when we all woke up the next morning in the dream, my body had rotted out in several places, really gruesome.  (I will spare you the details, bleah.)

Panicked, I went from person to person begging for help but they went about their lives as if they couldn’t even see me.  One person was organizing a fun backpacking trip, everyone was excited.  I was panicked and nobody noticed I needed help.

Then it was time to wake up.  Shudder. 

I love interpreting dreams, seeing what our wise deep self has to say about what’s going on in waking time.  I’ve been interpreting dreams for clients for over a decade, and there is ALWAYS something fascinating to learn from them.  All the issues we have been hiding from ourselves come bubbling up in our dreams, where we can work them out and see more clearly what our problems really are. 

In this dream, all the guests in my house had at one time in my life betrayed me, some repeatedly.  Betrayal is a fascinating topic, one which I unfortunately know a lot about personally. It’s been a personal growth theme most of my life (getting much better now, thank you).  By working with it, I’ve discovered that experiencing betrayal in the world, from friends, relatives, or coworkers, reflects some way that you are not being true to yourself.  When you figure out exactly what you’re doing and become your staunchest ally, betrayal in the “real world” magically fades.  I see this over and over as I help clients identify their self-betrayal issues and resolve them, too.  (I love my work!)

So all my guests had betrayed me, and then so did my body!  They didn’t provide help, support, or health.  They just ignored me.  What does it mean?

Notice the betrayers were in a position of honor: guests.  This told me not to look down upon them, but to look more closely at what they offered through their actions.  They showed total purposeful ignorance, happily planning for a fun adventure while avoiding even acknowledging something very serious: a rotting body.  So I should ask myself this:  How am I completely ignoring something wrong with my body while I am busily and happily planning for the future?

OK, I get it.  As a healer for over 12 years, I’ve cleaned a lot of garbage out of my diet, but I have always had a sweet tooth.  I still fall back on it when I’m stressed.  It’s been hard to break, even with increasingly noticeable consequences in my body when I give in.  Last week I hit a big stressor and guess what, craved sugar big time.  (Parents, please don’t comfort or reward your children with sweets!)  I’ll admit, I caved… quite a lot yesterday in fact. 

I’d already gotten the sense recently that it’s time to stop this habit, and had set some new limits.  My whole personal growth path has upshifted this year, and now sweets have to go, 100%, no exceptions any more.  Now I have vividly seen they have the power to rot my body from the inside out.  (This is true: I lost a tooth once that had cavities on the inside, not the outside.)  I know I need to do some metabolic healing work to get my blood sugar to more appropriate levels.  A month or so ago I ramped up my meditation schedule and my exercise program again (from random to an increasingly better schedule).  Now sweets have to go.  It’s time to put my foot down for myself and for all those I help, including my family. 

And I have this wonderful gift to help me: the genuine terror I felt in the dream when I experienced what would have made horror movie special-effects artists proud.  This feeling is terror I really do feel, but haven’t been in touch with because I’ve been, well, blithely ignoring it, like all my guests did.  This dream connected me to my true feelings about sugar and my inner knowing of what it can do to my body.  It became a healing tool to help me stop betraying my feelings and inner knowing. 

I am so grateful for the dream, so grateful that I learned this way instead the harder, real way first.  What have you been dreaming about lately?  What insights can you gain into your life by looking at what your dreams represent?

Sticking out of the Target ad today in the Sunday paper was an insert titled, “Wellness for Less”

The first thing on the list?  OTC drugs.  Then air filters, jello, cookies, sugary yogurt and fish oil capsules.

Yes, on page 3 there were bicycles, weights, and walking sticks.  But what is the common meaning of “wellness”?  What does “health” mean to you?

Is it wellness to require chemicals (drugs, coffee, OJ, candy, sugary yogurt, herbs, vitamins) to feel better each day?

I can see both the “yes” argument (you are taking care of your current condition so you can be as active as possible) and the “no” argument (you are not digging down to heal the real cause of the imbalances that require these things).

One thing I’ve learned from 12 years as a practitioner and investigator of nonmedical healing methods is that the body always tends towards health.  So does the mind.  It is only when we attach to things – ideas, foods, situations, emotions, people, coping mechanisms — that the natural state of health fails.

Yet when we hang on to something, it’s for the best reason:  because we believe it will help us or save us from something worse.  We mean well, but attachment causes all our troubles.  Every one.

Life is a spiritual journey.  Step #5 in the spiritual journey is “Move Beyond Doubt”.  Through education and trying things out in life, we each must discover that letting go is safer than hanging on to blockages.  We must learn to trust the natural cycles of life that pull us out of darkness back into light again like spring follows winter.  We must deeply know that when one door closes another has opened and we just have to find it.  And we must trust ourselves: our hearts, our feelings, our intuitions and gut instincts, and follow them.  We must practice these things daily.

True wellness requires regularly letting go of attachment and building faith in yourself and the workings of the Universe.  Regularly healing the past, overcoming fears, finding your value and place in the world, connecting with yourself and others. 

True wellness keeps you open to find the shortest road to recovery, the higher ground, and the easier way.  The more inner wellness you develop, the faster and easier you recover, find the easy way, rise to the occasion, and excel in life.  Your life will not be perfect, pain will still happen, but you will flip out of it faster and faster, more and more easily.

Here’s to your wellness!  How can you do something to support your wellness right now?

P.S.  Yes, before you complain, I do recommend you take your medication according to your medical healer, and THEN work on healing the issue requiring it.

Another Valentine’s Day, another day of chocolates, roses, and love, love, love!

Whether you already have all the attention, respect, and unconditional love you want, or you think there’s nobody on the planet that has what you’re looking for, I assure you: there is ONE person in the world who will always be there for you, always… well, if you can find them. (I’ll tell you how in a sec.) 

• This person loves you from the moment of your birth to the moment you leave the planet.

• They support whatever you do with loud applause (no matter how mediocre YOU thought the results were).  Whatever you do is just peachy with them, because YOU did it.

• They love, respect and honor your personal preferences, eccentricities, scars, whims and tastes.  They love how you think.  Whatever or however you think.

• They love and appreciate every cell of your body, your shape, your attributes and your so-called ‘flaws’.  They know you are beautiful and handsome and every adjective you want to be, no matter what anyone else says.

Intrigued?  I’ll warn you now: The trick is finding this person.  Many of us have lost track of him/her, but I’ll help you find them right now.  Then it’s up to you to invite them to play with you and declare their love.  To do this, you need to take a very honest and honoring look at yourself.  Do NOT look at yourself through others’ eyes, which you’ve been likely doing your whole life!

Ready?  Do you know who your biggest fan is?

It is YOU.

Now, now, no grumbling!  When you truly become your biggest fan, you open ALL doors to success and happiness (and charisma!)  I’ve seen it happen.

Unfortunately, we haven’t been encouraged or taught how to love ourselves, how to be our own biggest fan.  We’ve been warned against it: ”don’t let that accomplishment go to your head” etc.  Too many wonderful healers go to great lengths to cut themselves down and get in their own way.  We hate the image in the mirror (or that certain portion of it).  We sabotage our divine brilliance, get stuck in fears about what others will think.  We attract attention by failing. And we suffer under the lashes of our own inner critic.

Silly us.  (Silly you!)

HOW CAN YOU allow yourself to love, honor, nurture and support yourself exactly the way you are?  Ask yourself this question right now because when you ask a question you generate the answers. Now all you have to do is find the answer you like (and there are millions to choose from.)

You are a divine being, with a unique message to share with the world, based on exactly who you are and aaaaaaaall your life experiences.  And when you let this message out, when you step into your highest calling, it heals both you and the world.

Best of all, there is NOTHING you need first to fulfill your highest calling.  You are ready right now… because you are perfect, lovable, and delightful (OK, maybe a little cranky sometimes, but even that is cute) just the way you are.

So Happy Valentine’s Day from the one person who loves and supports you the most: YOU.  ♥ ♥ ♥ 

How can you start to love yourself back a little better, starting now?

© 2010 Daria Boissonnas

Counting calories may not be the key to losing weight. Calories is what happens to food when you put it in a machine and burn it, not a body.  This video also offers good info on un-sugar sweeteners like corn syrup. They are best avoided.

How can you take one, just one step to improve your diet today?

We already know that those of us truly addicted to certain experiences don’t get any satisfaction from them.  That’s because they are not what we are really craving.  The use of addictions is either to numb us out to our longings, or an attempt to recreate them with the next-best thing. 

We are creatures of pleasure.  Pleasure, love and connection is our natural state.  We are spiritual beings of infinite love, the pleasure of God, yet we find ourselves imprisoned in a challenging physical existence and locked into the progress of time… at least that’s how it feels.  So we long to be who we really are, majestic cocreators of infinite power and wisdom.  And we long to be connected to everything like we are at the level of our infinite true nature.

So we seek pleasure and love.  But empty pleasure doesn’t work.  What we really want is this deep spiritual connection, not cheap imitations!

Go for the real thing.  The next time you feel the urge for your favorite crutch, give yourself 5 or 10 minutes for this exercise.  Sit quietly where you are safe and comfortable.  Watch your breath for a minute and let your body relax.  Then ask yourself how you want to feel.  Comforted? Safe? Secure?  What are you seeking in the experience you just considered having?  You want to be truly loved as you are?  Respected?  Recognized?  Blessed?  Not hungry?  Wealthy?  Lucky?  Admired?  Loved?  And loved by whom or how exactly?

Then close your eyes and imagine it, fantasize it.  There are no restrictions in your imagination.  The mother who hated you can now love you tenderly and unconditionally.  The absent father is back home and just the way you want.  You can have anything you want.  Crawl up into the Hand of God and be safe, nurse on your
mother’s lap again, reunite with your dead partner or relative, create a different outcome, invent the romantic partner of your dreams.  But whatever you do, don’t reinforce and strengthen your habitual turning towards your addiction.  Break that habit and soar beyond it. 

When I did this exercise years ago, it took me several tries before I realized I wanted to crawl up in my mommy’s lap and nurse and be loved unconditionally.  After a couple more times, I was surprised to realize it was more than that: I just wanted to BE everything around me, that my connection to mother only reminded me of my connection to everything.  Interestingly, nursing puts both mother and child into an altered state, a state of connectivity with The All.  So I created my ideal mommy, crawled up into her adult-sized lap with her arms around me, and visualized blending with the entire Universe. 

It feels good to be whole again.  This is what you are seeking, and this is what you deserve and should have.  I recommend trying this exercise several times (if not every day to stave off cravings), and keep asking yourself “What’s behind that? What do I really truly deeply crave?” until you get to the core.  If you do it enough (or add in snapping a rubberband on your wrist every time you think of indulging in your addiction), you can completely break your addictive thought habits. 

Let me know how this exercise goes for you.  I admire you for caring enough about yourself to try it.

What’s your secret addiction?  Sugar?  Caffeine?  Ice cream late at night?  The standbys: sex, alcohol, smoking or doing certain chemicals…  Or perhaps you’re more subtle: anger, control of others, bullying, or drama?

As healers and people walking our spiritual journey, we feel particularly guilty about our addictions, telling ourselves we should know better.  It’s time to forgive ourselves and look at our addictions as the spiritual quests they are, however misguided.  It’s time to love ourselves and guide these quests properly, to where they can be satisfied and our deepest desires answered.

Studies have shown that addicts have a higher than average anticipation of satisfaction ahead of consumption, and a way-below-average satisfaction afterwards.  Sound about right to you?  No satisfaction, just want more…  My secret craving is sugar.  If I was Edmund in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, I suspect I too would have climbed up in the witch’s sleigh for some turkish delight candy. 

This I know: what you are seeking is not your favorite substance, but something even greater and more satisfying.  It’s that something that feels missing in your everyday, seemingly troublesome physical life.  It’s the missing something that drives many into mid-life crises or acting out.  Why not find it now and save yourself a lot of trouble?  Here’s a clue:  Did you know some psychotropic drugs stimulate the same brain centers as states of deep meditation or spiritual awe do?  (Other substances simply suppress our misery.)

We chase addictions in circles because we seek one thing, and one thing only:  CONNECTION.  A safe, complete connection that holds you, fills you with deep love and comfort and joy and pleasure, a connection to something greater than you within which you can relax all your defenses and be yourself. 

This drive is completely normal.  Addictions and other bad habits happen when you don’t know how to find this connection, so you try all kinds of things that seem to feel good like what you are seeking, but don’t work in the long run.

Next time, I’ll share something you can do to help curb your addictions.

Read The secret of addictions, Part II: bypassing them