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

My friend is putting together a class on clearing clutter, and this perennial struggle has been top of my mind.  Then this morning, my meditation gave me an unexpected insight into the piles and disorganization we call clutter.

As I sat in meditation enjoying an unusually deep peace and nothingness, I began to see myself sitting at my desk, as if my eyes were open.

Oh dear.

I’m still in the throes of removing the large desk (and emptying seven large drawers) in my office. Stacks of paper dot the office countertops as well as my massage therapy table.  Evicted empty drawers huddle in one corner.  The shredder has been throwing a week-long confetti party on the far side of the room.  And a few accretions of miscellaneous… I’ll be nice — stuff… are now seeping across my desk like a glacier field.

As I “saw” this (with eyes closed), I could vividly feel how stressed I used to get about clutter.

Clutter used to drive me nuts.  Whenever I needed to concentrate or start a new project that required thinking or creativity, I would instantly become super-distracted by things out of place in my environment.  (Coincidentally, I lived a fairly ordered but cluttered life, so there was lots to be distracted by.)  The piles around me would scream: “You don’t have time for THAT, you have to take care of THIS.”  And send me reeling into uncertainty.

Ugh.

But this morning, in that lovely meditative place, I felt my old reaction with compassion and love.  (Awww…)  Then the stressed feeling faded completely, and I was looking at my office clutter while once again feeling that kind of deep peace you can only experience far out in nature or in meditation.

Peace? Amidst clutter like this? But… yes. I could feel Peace in the desk, in the papers, in the… stuff. Peace. Stillness. The scene suspended itself, as if it was waiting for me.  And I got it: clutter is OK.  Clutter doesn’t matter.  Only what I thought and how I felt about clutter made it miserable.  Inside the clutter is stillness.  Inside me is stillness.  Inside each atom of clutter is Tao, Presence, or God.  Inside chaos is the deepest Peace.

And I can (and may) find that stillness, in the midst of any chaos.

I sat with that for a while, until I felt I could reach it again in a non-meditative state. Even now, hours later, I feel deeply peaceful.

Do I still want to create systems so clutter does not build up in my life?  Of course. But this I know: should clutter creep up on me, like when I’m moving furniture around or when I get too busy to file for a while, there will be stillness and holiness in the center of that clutter.

Today I activated this insight by plopping my laptop on top of the clutter and peacefully writing this out for you.

How can you find Peace and Stillness in your clutter?

© 2013 Daria Boissonnas

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,

As a coach or mentor to healers, I often meet folks who are really weirded out by their own intuitive gifts. I get desperate emails from strangers asking what to do because they see double numbers on the clock all the time, or feel other people’s emotions, or know what people are about to say, or know what will happen later (and it does). Some see faces in windows or sense what they think are ghosts or spirits. They dream about things that come true.

Worse, they report feeling  frightened by these psychic happenings. They say their family has started to think they’re weird. They “freak out” their friends. And they have nobody to talk to about it.

If you feel the same way, here is what you can do.

1. Accept It with Gratitude

One, we all are naturally psychic, so the first thing is to accept this gift. Intuition is a perfectly normal part of who you are. Humans are not bags of chemicals and bones walking around on timers. We are energy beings, and only the slowest part of us is made of physical energy. Those other parts of your consciousness are connected to everything around you on nonphysical energy levels: to other people and their energies (including thoughts), to the timeline (forward and back), to residual energies people leave behind, etc.

Your energy body inputs a LOT of information that many humans typically ignore. If you are intuitive, you are simply allowing this information to float into your thinking mind. Wow, congratulations! That’s not easy to do.

Now stop whining and start refining. Yes, you are hearing your intuition more clearly, and that’s great. Feel the gratitude! You are connected with the Universe in a deeper way. Become a loving observer and see what your intuition has to say to you. Once, I heard my jacket say “take me with you” to walk to a restaurant on a warm sunny day. I thought it was silly, but did it because I was practicing listening to my intuition. Inside, the air conditioning made the place freezing, and having the jacket allowed me to enjoy lunch. Thank you, intuition.

2. Find Out: How Can This Information Be of Service?

Ask yourself this: how can you use this occasional (or frequent) additional information in your journey? I once had the (weirdest) strongest feeling I was driving to my death, so I postponed my nighttime winter trip to the light of early morning, and still almost wiped out on black ice at one point. I’m very glad I listened to myself.

Intuition can be used helpfully at home or at your job, in analytical tasks, raising your kids, grocery shopping, volunteering, making choices, advising friends, and in your own business to know which clients to accept and turn away, or how you can best help them.

Yes, sometimes you get random information that you just let go of. But ask yourself these questions to start using your intuition: If this were a gift, what would be its purpose? How can I tell the difference between thoughts and intuitive hits?

3. Connect with Kindred Spirits

Support yourself and your divine gift of intuition. Hang out with people who are also intuitive and believe in the importance of it.

Then look at who exactly is “freaking out” about your psychic abilities. Often, we project our own discomfort onto others, or they pick it up from us and send it back. If you were perfectly accepting about your intuition, as if this kind of thing happened every day and is normal, would they be? Or perhaps you need to shift who you hang out with… Sometimes, as we grow into who we really are, our friends change.

Your most important task on life’s spiritual journey is to know and accept yourself as you are. This is the only way you can fully discover your divine gifts and use them, which in my opinion is the whole point of this crazy game.  By hanging out with people who accept you, you can grow to fully accept yourself.

You are a swan. Stop playing with the ducklings and stretch your own beautiful, intuitive wings.

© 2012 Daria Boissonnas

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

~ 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.

The most powerful “cure” for feeling blue, sad, tired or depressed is helping others.

Now, even in the middle of the night, you can be inspired by healing and helping stories. KarmaTube.org offers videos about people who have helped others and overcome their own challenges. It inspires me to stop feeling like I am struggling or feeling sorry for my poor ego and get back on the bike again.

It is not often I come across an outside resource I recommend whole-heartedly, but I urge you to browse the FREE videos at KarmaTube. You can even join to support their mission.

Go here:  http://www.karmatube.org/

Now share your discoveries! In the comments below, please share your favorite video link there, and why it inspired you.

Did you like this KarmaTube? Then enjoy GIA’s FREE inspirational and educational series of audio interviews called “I Am a Healer” — 100 Inspiring Stories of Ordinary People Who are Changing the World and How You Can Too.

“I Am a Healer” — Register here to listen for FREE!

It was hard for me to become a healer.  I am a child of unassailable logic and practicality.  My family of origin worships science.  And I was raised to be more concerned with what everyone else thought of me than with what I thought of me.  (Thus I didn’t think much of me.)

A couple years into my healing journey, when I was reluctantly drawing the painful conclusion that in this crazy energy healing (of all things on earth) lay my destiny and purpose, I found myself in a particularly dark pit of despair, a period of immense doubt.

For a long miserable week I’d been stuck in one of those dark nights of the soul, doubting everything I had heard and experienced about healing, doubting my skills, and wondering if I had been brainwashed. Most of all I wondered if crazy people were aware that they were going crazy. Without a healing support group, and not knowing this was a common experience, I had nowhere to turn and was getting desperate.  (This is one of the many reasons I created the Global Institute for Awakening, the support group I longed for.)

One morning while brushing my teeth, pondering all that was weighing on me, I surprised myself.  Though I had never done this before, I asked for a sign.

It just popped out.  My Christian upbringing had left me with the impression that it was impertinent and greedy to ask Jesus to demonstrate that he could walk on water when you darn well knew he could.  So I assumed that asking God for help fell into the same category of offensive no-nos.

Immediately I was awash in guilt for having asked.  Yet I was struggling sooo hard, waffling between my solid inner knowing that “of course this is the right path for me”, and horrific demons of insecurity and doubt and “what will other people think.”

But out of my desperation it came.  For a moment, my mind actually gave up its constant mental machinations, its weighings and ponderings.  I simply gave up and asked,  “God, please give me a sign whether I should continue with this healing stuff or not.”  I was shocked to feel how much I meant it.  I really wanted to know, to make a decision, then and there.

Still brushing, I glanced up and out our small second-story bathroom window.  It framed a tiny selection of branches from the 200-year-old red oak about 30 feet behind our house.  As I watched, a crow immediately landed smack-dab in the middle of my view.   The exact middle.  Perfectly framed.

I stopped brushing.

The crow cocked her head and looked right at me.  Then she did something I’ve never seen another bird do before or since:  she bobbed her head up and down three times, in a big, exaggerated way.

I gaped.  She had 110% of my attention.  She seemed to pause to measure whether I’d gotten the message.  As if to make sure I had, she did it again, bob-bob-bob, looked at me a final time, and flew off.

If you know crow behavior and can explain what this action meant in the world of crows, please leave a comment.

I know what it meant to me.

I kept studying healing.

At breakfast this morning, I told my daughter she was my favorite child and I loved her more than anyone else in the world.

She said no, that wasn’t true, I loved all my kids the same.

I smiled and said, exactly — I love each of them the best of all, more than anyone else in the world.

How is that possible? 

This concept came from a zen koan story I read many years ago.  It piqued my interest at the time because I LOVE puzzles and it made no sense!  How can each thing be the best? 

There are actually many ways to explain why and how this is true.  But understand this first: you can’t use logic to solve this puzzle.  Your logical, thinking mind categorizes and compares.  It ranks and sequences.  It draws straight lines between points.  It would say my statement was impossible.

Luckily we all have access to different types of consciousness, or thinking if you must call it that.  Our consciousness is like a rainbow, and the logical, thinking mind is merely one color.  My statement makes perfect sense when you are in a different slice of your consciousness.

For instance, try this:  the next time you are deep in a meditative or altered state, ask yourself how everything can be the best at the same time.   You will likely be able to see it then.  (Hint: your higher consciousness is not limited by the sequence of time, either.)

The Key to Healing and Leaving the World a Better Place

Our job as humans is to access the knowing we find at the higher levels of consciousness and bring that wisdom down into the world. The thinking mind is absolutely requred to live our daily lives, but it’s not all you have.  Accessing your greater consciousness changes the world.  It creates win-win mindsets and accesses permanent positive change nobody could have thought of.

Really, would you rather live in a world where everything was best of all, where everything was seen as a stepping stone to something even better?  Or do you prefer a small-thinking world where everything is either good or bad, where there are such things to overcome as negative, naughty, evil, painful, and hateful? 

Connecting with our higher knowing takes us to new and better places in our logical, physical world.  It opens doors.  It is the only thing that creates genuine, transformative healing.

Back to the puzzle.  Once you understand my statement “up there” in your greater consciousness, you can understand it logically in many ways.  For instance:

• Each person is unique.  If you are the only one of you, you must be my favorite one of you. 
• In that moment, enjoying my daughter’s presence, with nobody else in my perception, she is the only person in the world to me and therefore my favorite.
• Each person on the planet is equally valuable, therefore they all fall in the same value category, such as favorite.
• Your turn: In what other ways is each of my children my favorite?

What if each and every child was seen and valued as if they were the most precious child in the world?  This is not pollyanna thinking.  This is enlightened thinking.  It the only thing that creates positive change.

And for the record: you are my favorite reader, ever.

In 2001, I was learning to paint.  On my third project, while working on the water under my leaping dolphin, I boldly added a darker blue to the depths of the waves.  When I stepped back to see the effect, I was amazed.  It looked like a photo, not a painting.  Somehow, I’d done something to make the water look so real you could get wet touching it.  My mouth dropped open.  I did a happy dance.

Excited, I mixed my next color, a lighter blue.  (After all, if that was good, more would be better!)  When I was done applying that color, however, the realistic effect was completely gone.  It looked a painting of water again.

I couldn’t wash the last color off.  I couldn’t redo whatever I’d done with the darker blue because I wasn’t sure how I’d done that.  The effect ws gone. 

It was a little like winning the lottery and dropping the ticket down the drain. 

Learned:  good enough is great. 

Boy did I learn something!  If it’s good, it’s good and it doesn’t need any fixing.  Accept your good fortune.  Don’t overthink.  Be in the moment and enjoy it.

Today, I’d like to think I would stop when the water looked perfect.  I would accept the cool fluke with gratitude, laugh, enjoy it, and move on. 

The funny thing is, underneath the current state of the photo is that perfect picture.  I still have the gift, in the painting instead of on the surface of it, and a new insight to boot.

I’ve always wanted to paint.  In 2001, I took my first painting class from the local recreation program.  I thought of myself as a logical professional at the time, not an artsy type.  I bought the materials relying entirely on the list and the store clerk, shocked at the huge variety of paintbrushes.

I can see myself sitting at the easel in my dad’s old shirt one day, feeling guilty for asking mom to get the paints out for me, staring at the blank paper, needing to create something worthwhile… but completley blanking on WHAT I wanted to paint so badly.  Conclusion: Painting was too hard, too frustrating.  

Turns out, it wasn’t a class as much as an artist walking around the room for 2 hours.  My questions started with, “What do I do?”  Then, “What should I paint?”  She suggested a still life. 

Not having brought the requisite vase and fruit, I ran to the car and collected four plastic kid blocks out of the baby seat.  I followed her rough suggestions, outlining the blocks and attempting to shade them.

When I think of that class, all I remember is frustration and disappointment.  I couldn’t figure out shadows.  She didn’t tell me exactly how to do it.  The class was bad, I thought, the teacher was bad.  The teacher even said my painting was good — was she blind?!  I didn’t like the painting at all.  I was experiencing a world crisis! 

I used to get a sick feeling thinking of that first painting, but yesterday I dug it out and looked at it for the first time in a decade.  I was shocked to see it has a lot of promise for a first painting, though unfinished and unfinessed.  Looking with my eyes today, in fact, I think it’s great!  (And how appropriate: baby building blocks, LOL. See pic.) 

So Many Lessons Learned

1. All my angst was in my head.  It came from me, not the class.  I had expectations about the class, and because it was different than *I* demanded, I got upset.  Really upset.  I created a crisis and then lived the negative emotions and beliefs, for years and years afterwards, to my own detriment.  I did that a lot back then.

2. First paintings are masterpieces too: masterpieces of learning.  Now I see that since you never stop learning, you can let everything in your life be a masterpiece of learning!  Wow, you are SO good.

3. Things you do are never, ever as bad as you think.  Self-judgment is the worst.  We can be more cruel to ourselves than to anyone else.  Believe the compliments you get.  Write them down.  Repeat them to yourself.  You totally rock.

4. Get back up on the bike.  How can you judge your first painting?  Your first book?  Your first song?  Your first client’s results?  Keep going!  You are so much more than any single thing you do.

Will I take up painting again?  …Stay tuned…

Whew, I’ve been going through a major healing wave in the last few weeks!  The kind where I stop calling my friends for a while b/c I’m processing stuff.  (They are used to this, bless them.)  In mid-January, it was like a floodgate opened on a clogged dry riverbed.  As the water has poured through, huge logs, boulders, branches, and rotten things have lifted away effortlessly, piece by piece.  

In the last week it’s been washing away blocks to my creativity.  Yes, I finally saw the pattern that when I start super-creative projects that are really “me”, they all seem to die!  Hmmm.  It’s time for that to stop, and I know that’s why this is clearing itself up. 

What Makes an Artist an Artist?

Oddly, since Tuesday I’ve been badly longing to see some paintings I did in 2001 after I took my very first painting class from the local recreation program.  It wasn’t a class as much as an artist walking around the room.  My questions started with, “What do I do?”  I hated the two paintings I attempted in that class. 

Daria's painting #3

About the same time, an astrologer told me I was so creative I should leap out of bed in the morning saying, “I am an artist!  I am an artist!  I am an artist!”  

Feh.  I was not an artist. I majored in econ with lots of math and computer courses.  I worked in finance.  I was logical, thank you very much. 

Then again, since I was little, I’ve longed to paint.  I remember sitting in front of blank paper, desperately wanting to paint, knowing I could, knowing the feeling of painting, but not being able to do it.  Blocked. 

So at my request this morning, my weekly healing mastermind focused on unlocking and healing creativity.  We cleared dozens of false beliefs that had been getting in my way.  Do you recognize any of these?  (You also can clear them by adding “I choose to lose the concept that…”) 

• Science is superior to art. 
• Art is a waste of time, artsy-fartsy, something to be made fun of, something to hide.
• Art is not valuable.  (So you have to buy cheap materials and you certainly can’t make a living out of it.)
• Nobody can be good at art except the chosen special few like Monet and VanGough, definitely not me.
• <Insert critical comment here about your art.>
• It’s too risky to put yourself out there genuinely through your art.

I hope you can see the utter ridiculousness of these few samples! 

As we worked, I finally went downstairs and dug out the paintings.  I was shocked to find they were MUCH better than I remembered.  In fact, my fourth painting (an unfinished bowl of pears) triggered an almost meditative state of Presence for me.  I’ll be working with that one this week! 

The Secret to Art & Why It Will Always Be In Demand – Always

Am I an artist? Are you?  In 14 years of learning why artists are stuck and sick, I’ve discovered a secret about art.  By observing my healing work with many high-level artists and creatives, I’ve concluded that creativity, intuition, and healing all come from the same place.  It is a place we are each connected to and a part of.  

Daria's Painting #4, Unfinished

It’s not the physical, mechanical, logical, emf side of life.  Art connects us to the nonphysical, intuitive, knowing, genuine, connected, One-with-All side of the universe.  Art connects both the artist and the beholder to that Other Side, that part of ourselves we have a hard time sensing, the part with all the deep Peace, Love, Wisdom, Fulfillment and Bliss we could want.  We CRAVE this connection.  

Intuition also comes from connecting to that place of Wisdom and Potential, of Knowing.  And so does genuine transformative healing.  When we connect to that part of ourselves and use that part of our consciousness, we can shift to a better way of living and being in a way that changes our lives for the better.  Permanently.  That’s healing. 

Yes, perk up, starving artists –  since good art connects us with that infinite, higher side of ourselves, it will ALWAYS be in demand, always.  

My Challenge for You

I’m taking a look at my own art and creativity this week, with loving and accepting eyes this time.  I know I’m ready to do this.  I invite or even challenge you to do the same.  Then share your journey and art with us in the comments.  Post your blog or art links.  The more we share our stories of creativity, the more we can help each other and raise the next generation to accept their Inner Artists.  The more we enjoy art ourselves, the more we can heal. 

Art, at its core, is a level of mastery: mastery of patterns, mastery of connections, mastery of seeing the same thing in a new way.  So too is healing. 

When you master life’s patterns, you can create the GREATEST ART IN THE WORLD: making an art form out of LIVING YOUR LIFE and leaving the world a better place.  You can make an art of living, healing and Awakening. 

Are you an artist?  Am I?  

Yes, my friend, we sure are.  

I see the innate artist in you, and I am blessed by it.  Thank you for that.

Listen to these powerful intuitive consults where Daria taps the higher wisdom of each callers to ask what steps they can take to most effectively and efficiently reach their goal.  (Sometimes, it’s surprising!) 

Sign up and you’ll get the call-in info right away, as well as the audio page where you can listen to the calls any time afterwards.

Here’s a video about last week’s amazing call: 

Sign Up for the Call & Audios

**Required.

Jump on our Holiday Sale through midnight tonight

Check out our holiday sale on your own Clear Wisdom to get a jump start on 2011!  Tap Daria’s 5 wisdoms in one consult, leave your doubt in the dust, and save hundreds of dollars, too. 

Short page with sale prices is here:   http://GIAwaken.com/clear-wisdom

Dear Powerful Being of Compassion,

I hope you enjoyed the long holiday weekend!  We had a great family Christmas, very low key, fun and cosy for all the kids — the ones between 5 and 15, and the two 40-something kids as well. 

For the last month I have been SOOOooo looking forward to the new year.  There’s something magical about a clean calendar, a new accounting year, and a fresh start.  I love taking stock of all I’ve learned, deeply appreciating how far I’ve come and who has helped me get here, and deciding where I am going next.  We have the bubbly fruit juice, champagne, and flutes all lined up for a New Year’s eve celebration. 

How about you?  What do you love about the new year?  Do you do resolutions or not and why?  Tell us in the comments below!

Ever Long for All the Answers?

Tomorrow — tomorrow is even better than New Year’s for three brave volunteers.  Did you ever wish someone could just TELL you, step by step, exactly what to do to resolve a problem or reach a goal — once and for all? 

I know I have.  I’ve been frustrated and stuck trying something SO many different ways and STILL not knowing why it’s not working or what I’m doing “wrong”.

Luckily, all the answers are within you at all times.  Imagine my joy and honor to do that for my clients:  to help them tap their inner guidance and higher self to discover, step by step, exactly what to do to solve their challenges and reach their goals, once and for all. They learn how to PERMANENTLY  break limiting patterns with very simple exercises! 

It’s surprising what comes up.  Last week, one client needed to sing reguarly in front of an audience to better connect with Source and improve her life in all areas.  Another needed to get out of the house twice a day to break a food addiction.  Fascinating!

Tomorrow, Tuesday the 28th, you can hear me do this LIVE for three more brave souls from among our members & fans who boldly stepped up and said “yes please”.  Click here to register.

This type of session is usually done in private, but you have this rare opportunity to listen in to the magic on Tuesday.   Get the audio recordings too when you register for the free call, and you can listen any time.

Last week’s Clear Wisdom holiday gift call was powerful!  Tears were shed and great obstacles to following our volunteers’ spiritual callings were moved and removed!  (Also it was so powerful we got blown off the phone three times, and the conference service has no idea why.  Hopefully things will go more smoothly with a new number!  Click here to register and get it.)

Healing will flow through this session and to all who listen, so if you’d like to break through your own obstacles, please join us! 

Call In, Enjoy the Readings, Get Some Healing

Tomorrow/Tuesday the 28th:  3 MORE FREE Clear Wisdom holiday gifts!!!
Dates: Tuesday, December 28 & NOW JAN 4!
Time: 11am Pacific, noon Mountain, 1pm Central, 2pm Eastern

Phone Number:  Register quickly here for the new phone number:  
http://giawaken.com/2010/12/signup-wisdom-holiday-gift-2010/We

We charge nothing for these calls, but please check with your long distance carrier for any charges.

I look forward to connecting with you on these calls!

Many blessings,

Daria Boissonnas
Founder, Global Institute for Awakening

To give back to our beloved members and fans, we’ve given away six FREE Clear Wisdom intuitive consult calls this month!  Enjoy the magic.  Sign up now to receive the new call-in number as well as access to the recordings and case studies.  (Yes, we’ll be following a couple volunteers as they implement their assignments!)

Our volunteer callers are lined up for Tuesday, 12/28, with questions including:

• How to start a business
• Figuring out one’s life purpose
• Getting a book done
• And more

You can also hear the audio from Tuesday (12/21), when callers received guidance for:

• Where to focus in a busy life
• How to best give back
• How to improve a relationship
• Dealing with allergies
• The strugle of an addiction nobody knows about
• Where am I blocked to funding and expanding my business? And how do I move thru it?

Besides swimming in inspiration and ideas, when you listen to these calls, you tap into frequencies that can help you break through your own blockages, permanently.  Healing flows through Clear Wisdom sessions, and everyone who listens receives what they need.

What’s Clear Wisdom? 

Listen as GIA founder Daria Boissonnas asks the caller’s higher consciousness for the most robust, effective and efficient way they can break their patterns of limitation and reach the goals they seek!  Daria provides five wisdoms in one consult:

1. 13 years of healing expertise & experience helping folks permanently break through their own barriers
2. Life purpose expertise to help you know what you are on the planet to do and DO it
3. Years of business & marketing experience
4. Spiritual mentoring, helping you understand what’s going on in your life, and your role in the universe
5. And of course her lifelong empathic, psychic and channeling abilities

Sign Up Here

Sign up below and we’ll also send our special offer for your own personal Clear Wisdom session at over half off the usual price.  (Spaces are limited, and you must sign up by the end of 1/1/11!)  

Thanks, and we’ll connect with you on the call!

It’s here — Healing 101!

Have a few ideas about how to make the world a better place?  Empower yourself to do that by learning to think waaaaay beyond the box — that is, to think like a healer.

Discover how you already have the ability to do the “undoable,” change the “unchangeable” and make the “impossible” happen.

Register now to listen FREE to Healing 101 and learn:

1. What is healing?
(It’s so much more than physical repair of your body!)

2. Why is every person on the planet a natural healer?
(Just how are YOU a healer?)

3. What three main types or styles of healer are there?
(And which is yours?)

4. How can you awaken YOUR inner healer and tap into your own natural abilities to make a BIG meaningful difference?

5. Five things to listen for to benefit most from each call. Also download in our pdf Listener’s Guide on the listening page.

Once you register, we will send you a link to the listening page, including Healing 101 and our first four interviews.

Discover Our Groundbreaking “I Am A Healer” Series

Register for access to these free calls here and we will send you occasional emails as soon as new calls become available.

You have a tremendous power within you — right now — to make a meaningful positive difference in other people’s lives.  To move beyond problems to a place where they simply become irrelevant:  to heal.

Join us as we celebrate our goal of bringing more healing into the world with our groundbreaking FREE interview series — “I Am A Healer”: 100 Inspiring Stories from Ordinary People Who Are Changing the World and How YOU Can Too.  To listen, all you have to do is register.  Then mark your calendar for Tuesday, November 30th at 11am Pacific/2pm Eastern.

It doesn’t take much to awaken your natural Inner Healer.  Listen to this information-packed call led by Global Institute for Awakening Founder Daria Boissonnas, and expand your possibilities by learning:

1. What is healing?  (It’s so much more than physical repair of your body!)

2. Why is every person on the planet a natural healer?  (Just how are YOU a healer?)

3. What three main types or styles of healer are there?  (And which is yours?)

4. WHat you need to learn to awaken YOUR inner healer and tap into your own natural abilities to make a BIG meaningful difference

5. What to listen for on the calls. 

TO LISTEN TO THIS CALL, REGISTER FOR THE SERIES HERE:  http://GIAwaken.com/100healers

Register for this interview series right now, and listen to this introductory call with Daria Boissonnas, Founder of the Global Institute for Awakening.

On Thursday I made the 3-hour drive to Oak Park, IL (Chicago) to see the nondenominational Mother Meera and receive a blessing from her.  Some say she is an avatar — a holy, enlightened being walking the earth.  While I’ll let you decide that for yourself, I do know she is a powerful healer and a realized spiritual teacher.  Personally, I have experienced transformative upshifts after each visit with her, and I’m so grateful she occasionally stops in just 3 hours from my home. 

Her process is simple and brief, and done in complete silence with a crowd of a couple hundred people.  When it’s your turn, you kneel in front of her (or sit in a chair, as you are able) and she gently holds your head for a few seconds.  When she lets go, you sit back and gaze into her eyes for a few more seconds.  When she looks down, she’s done. 

That’s it.  Just a few seconds. 

The power and briefness of this process remind me that healing processes don’t have to take a long time or be difficult to be profound and effective.  Needing complexity (and, I’ll say it, drama) is a characteristic of human ego.  It’s powerful to simply sit in the room with her and receive.

Whether you consider yourself a healer or not, your greatest natural gift is to make life easier and better for yourself and others.  I believe we could all benefit from reminding ourselves regularly that this process doesn’t have to be hard or dramatic to be effective. 

This time, I brought back a profound sense of peace.  I am letting it flow through me into everything I do, and it is bringing astonishing clarity with it!  Perhaps you can take a moment right now to share this deep peace with me.  :)

More Info about Mother Meera

Located in Germany, Mother Meera travels the world regularly.  Public darshan is free, though you have an opportunity to donate and buy some products – all you have to do is register ahead of time.  Find out more about Mother Meera’s current North American tour schedule here:  http://www.mothermeeradarshan.org/  Get on their email list and they’ll let you know when she’s coming back.

“Think how gratification blocks change.”  This phrase came up in a healing session today and gave me some unusual insights into how we stay stuck.  At first, I thought, “No, that can’t be right.  Getting what you want keeps you reaching towards the next thing.  Gratification of goals keeps you moving forward.”

Not always.  Not for this client.  Test it out yourself — think of those little habits you have that help you stay small and stuck.  Avoidance behaviors, other tasks that seem more important, something that must be done first, helping other people with their bigger and more important problems, all those wonderful things to eat and do and watch and play — all that, instead of reaching for your dreams.

Now ponder in what way gratifying these desires, these attempted sidetracks into pleasure, actually blocks change and holds you back.  Aha, the original statement starts to make sense.  How does gratifying these little escapes prevent you from moving forward?  That’s what the client had to see for herself.  She thought they were helping, making her feel better by indulging her a little to “fortify” her for the effort to move forward.  Nope, it was holding her back.  Today she saw that, let it go, and healed an erroneous, limiting belief or thought pattern.

When you reinforce the “yummy” reaction in those escapes, you reinforce staying where you are.  You create a loop of attachment to how things are now.  You reinforce the habit of gratification. 

Since life moves forward, creating an attachment to this point in time and this way of being will eventually hurt.  Since she’d been doing this since she was about age 7, she already was hurting!  She wondered why she sometimes avoided doing the work she longed most to do.

Can Gratitude Keep You Small?

Then came the second part:  ”Think how grateful allows me to feel safe.”  (As in, falsely safe — safe from stretching into her Potential.)

What?  Gratitude, a problem? 

Yes.  Gratitude is another powerful way to create attachment.  When you use gratitude to inapprorpriately reinforce current patterns (“oh, I have so much, I am so lucky right now the way I am”), it may become easier to avoid moving forward and changing this wonderful situation.  In fact for this client, it allowed her to feel safe – meaning she didn’t HAVE to change. 

To change in this situation, you have to do a little extra work to convince or move beyond the parts of your thinking mind that are grateful in that attached way.  Most people with this thought pattern stay with the gratitude, unfortunately, especially since it’s so popular nowadays to use gratitude.  Then they don’t move forward, and they wonder why not.

Gratitude and other spiritual skills of attachment and detachment are a double-edged sword!  You can use a hammer to build a house — or to commit a crime — it all depends on how you use it.  It’s a tool.  Change comes from the consciousness behind it.

Gratitude and spiritual skills of attachment can help you connect to bigger, more expansive, more healing ways of thinking and being…. or they can help you attach to inappropriately small-minded, outdate, or painful ways of being.  The solution is to learn how to use these spiritual skills appropriately. 

The skill itself is not a panacea.  You must learn to wield it.

Recommended Training

Teaching you to master spiritual skills and move yourself and the world towards success, peace, love, service, and joy is our primary goal in the Life Mastery ~ Healing Mastery™ program that comes with a year’s membership in the Global Institute for Awakening.  Each month, you can focus with our group on building a positive habit out of one spiritual skill.  With our insightful training & guidance, in just 10 minutes a day you can establish the habit of getting out of the way of your own authenticity, success and happiness.

Karen was born a healer and is so full of wisdom specificaly about healing and healers, we could talk all day!  Do join us — it’s free, all you have to do is register, and you can listen to past audios any time.

“Raise your vibration” by listening to these gurus who have mastered living a meaningful life to the fullest and giving back.   Click here to register for the free series.

Healer #3  |  20 August 2010
11am Pacific / noon Mountain / 1pm Central / 2pm Eastern US time

Karen Lamark Wilson  ~  International Academy of Intuitive Entrepreneurs (IAIE)
Professional Healer, Author, Visionary, Spiritual Mentor

Internationally known spiritual teacher and energy healer Karen Lamark Wilson was born a healer with a mission.  Since her childhood instruction by a native healer and her early adoption of Eastern medicine in the early 70s, Karen has been on the cutting edge of expanding humanity’s capacity to live fully.  She founded IAIE to help its members cultivate direct inner knowing and expanded consciousness in their businesses and lives.  Karen has two grown children and lives in Paradise Valley, Arizona, with her wonder dog, Koko, a furry white American Eskimo.