How do we find the strength within us through the tough times of this life?
We all experience challenging moments in our lives when we feel that we are on the edge and can’t handle it. Sometimes we have just moved through a pretty big obstacle or illness only to find another one waiting on the other side for us, before we can catch her breath. Often we keep enduring one challenge after another and feel as though we never get a break from life’s trials. We may question why life keeps piling more difficulty on us when we are all ready our maximum.
We may blame God and even get angry with God, depending on how we view life. When we are continuously tested with one experience after another, it is a learning to be present to our moments directly in front of us. Instead of looking outside of ourselves or blaming someone or something outside of us, it’s an opportunity to go inward and do your healing.
The feelings that come up during these experiences can be completely overwhelming, where you may want to run away from them. The best thing you can do is explore what’s going on with you, what old beliefs you are buying into, sit with the feelings and do your best to let them go.
Depending on what core wounds they are hitting, will depend on your capacity to sit with the feelings. The feelings may be so overwhelming that you feel like you’re sitting in a fire and the need to get out will be extreme. I encourage you to stay with your feelings and comfort the inner child through this experience instead of abandoning them.
Two things are happening when we are faced with challenges. One is the learning so we can understand why we are feeling the way we are feeling and two, to transmute the energy, so we are able to let go. Most the time if we cannot have an understanding for the experience it might be tougher to let go and transform it. So the need to understand it and sit with the feelings are critical to being able to let go of them. To be able to come into a complete place of peace and joy it is important to go through this process to come out the other end.
This is not a journey for the weak at heart, it is for Warriors.
In all of my retreats, the individual intensive, the couples retreat, or the mother-daughter retreat, you will learn about yourself and how to be with your feelings so you can move through the trials of this life with ease and grace.
How tough is it to just sit with your feelings and feel the intensity of them? Most people medicate their feelings away so they don’t have to be with them. They shop, eat, drink, do drugs, argue, complain, blame, they do anything not to feel.
The heart has a wide range of feelings that it experiences, from the deepest of sorrow to the most elated joy. When we restrict feeling any of them because of our old beliefs, they get stuck and it stops our energy, our chi from flowing. It’s much better for our health to allow feelings to bubble up and flow through us.
Often we put our feelings off to the side to deal with them later and we end up storing them in our bodies and minds. If we could get a visual on this is would look like a hoarders house. If we store them for later and never get to them, they stay inside us and block energy from flowing.
No matter how scary it is to look at and be with our feelings, it is always better to deal with them as they come up and not stuff them down, hoping they will go away.
One of the main reason we hide our feelings is because we live in a culture that doesn’t support having emotions. It is our job to allow ourselves to acknowledge our feelings and be with them. If we feel sadness, we can embrace it and let it in and noticing where we feel it in our bodies and allow ourselves to express it through crying or just going inward.
When we give ourselves the right to feel our feelings as they come up, it will be easier for us to let them go. All the feelings want is to be felt. Get out of the story of what is making you feel this way and just feel. Feel, relax and watch your heart open.
Surrendering is to cease resistance, yielding, and give in, and succumb. The biggest issue to just letting go and surrendering is our resistance. Our resistance to change, our resistance to staying awake and looking at our blind spot and our resistance to life being exactly what life is! When we resist anything, we strengthen the energies around what we are resisting.
“What you resist persist”
Do you notice how some issues keep coming around repeatedly, no matter how hard you try to avoid or ignore them? It never works to push issues away that we need to process through. The more we push it away, the more we get push back.
Our resistance gives power to that which we resist and leaves us with unresolved issues. To be able to totally surrender we need to look at what is coming up and get an understanding of what it is trying to teach us. It is critical to stop resisting to be able to surrender. Surrender cannot happen without yielding and giving into the lessons in front of us.
What affects us on the inside is a direct call out to us that we have work to do on the inside. If we avoid or run away from the emotions, this causes a resistance inside of us and an inability to let go and surrender. If we have emotions and feelings coming up from the outside world or our thoughts it’s best to do a deep dive to move through them, not push them to the side.
Everything happening on the outside or inside us with our thoughts and feelings is a reflection of what we need to work through, it’s always an opportunity to go deeper into our learning. It’s difficult to go running straight into our fears and of course you will notice resistance. This is where surrendering to the process will help us go through the fire and come out the other end to peace and serenity.
How can you improve your mother daughter relationship?
Mother daughter relationships are so important. If they aren’t nurtured while growing up, chances are they we be strained in adulthood. Creating a healthy relationship can be complex because of all of our old beliefs. There are so many different you can do to create a better relationship together although if you don’t do the healing necessary on yourself, all of these suggestions will fail.
Look at your expectations of how the relationship should be. Both parties will want different things and it’s important to get your needs met but always remember to compromises. My oldest daughter dislikes talking on the phone. The problem is, we live in different states. I don’t take it personally, thinking she doesn’t love me or want to talk to me. We talk once a week and I make it work and so does she.
If you have an argument, don’t let pride prevent you from making the first move to mend it. The Ego is very prideful and will keep you away from love. Don’t listen to it.
Continuously be working through your own issues that keep you acting out of your ego and away from your higher self. If you’re triggered, you need to do the work around your beliefs. Don’t go outside yourself to make yourself fell better. Don’t put the burden on your mother or daughter that they need to show up a certain way for you to be okay.
Listen to what the other person is saying and step into their reality. Try to see how they feel, realizing there is always a different way to see things. Really explore the opposing side.
Don’t try to fix each other’s situation. Moms do this mostly. If your daughter comes to you with a problem, stay out of fix it mode. Listen to them and maybe say something that lets them know you can relate and hear them. Maybe saying “ I hear how hard this is for you, if you need anything from me, let me know.” Don’t jump into telling them what they should do. Telling them what to do makes them feel inadequate.
Communicate your needs to each other. No one is a mind reader; they need to know what you want. Also be prepared to not get your way. It’s important to express your needs to one another and talk about a compromise.
Realize we are all human. Forgive each other for being human. We are going to make mistake, so make sure you allow room to be human.
Don’t dig up old issues and bring them into the present. Leave the past in the past. Deal with the issues at hand and don’t complicate it with your emotions around old issues. If you are bringing up old stuff it’s because you don’t understand the workings of the mind and need one of my retreats.
Don’t avoid conflict and think that it will miraculously go away; it usually gets bigger. Make time to come together and clean up the issue. So things don’t pile up.
Stay away from blaming each other for feelings you are having. Realize your feelings come from your belief system not their actions.
There are so many more things you can do to create a more harmonious relationship between each other. A good start is to book a Mother Daughter Retreat and get all the tools you need to create a healthy relationship with each other.
In all of my retreats, whether it be, the individual intensive, mother-daughter, or the couples retreat you will learn how to recognize your inner child, love yourself, shift these old beliefs and show up differently in the world.
Why are there so many people with depression and anxiety and what is causing it?
In my practice more than ever, people are coming to me of all ages, with depression and anxiety. Anxiety and depression are the two biggest issues that I work with my clients. Again it is hitting all ages, from the 13-year-olds to the 60-year-olds I am working with.
If it isn’t a clinical issue around depression, it could be a suppression of feelings. When we suppress how we are feeling about ourselves, about our circumstances and about the world around us, it tends to settle inside of us. It could be a sense of hopelessness about your current situation or the world affairs. There is a lot going on with our lives and the world to be having feelings about. If we are stuffing those feelings, they could come out as depression or anxiety.
Depression is an umbrella for what’s really going on. Are you having sadness, are you hopeless or maybe you have high anxiety. It’s important to get to what’s underneath the depression or the anxiety. The work that I do gets to the core reasons you are feeling and why. It is so important for us to feel what we are feeling and have an understanding about our feelings so it doesn’t sink into depression.
Depression and anxiety are great indicators that there is something inside of us that we need to look at so we can transform our thought patterns. If we are continuously looking outside of ourselves to feel better and not addressing our feelings, we could start feeling pretty depressed.
What makes this life palatable is that every life experience is an opportunity to shift my skewed thinking from my old beliefs. If I had to go outside of myself and change the situation, that would be very frustrating, leaving me feeling pretty hopeless, which would lead to depression.
How can we create a different outcome by doing the same action?
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” -Albert Einstein
I believe this behavior is from a lack of consciousness that we continue to do the same thing over and over again, while getting upset with the results. It is very important to pay attention to our behaviors and the outcomes so we can adjust our thought process and behaviors in order to create a different outcome.
The same situation may continue to come up over and over when we don’t recognize and learn from it. When this happens it gives us an opportunity to make a different choice. Sometimes we push really hard up against a situation hoping to bring about change, only to settle into the same results.
With these encounters it is best to pause and look at the situation from your higher mind, digging deeper into old patterns and beliefs and see if it’s possible to create it in a healthier way.
If you notice that you are creating the same situations in your life that don’t work for you, it is time to explore what is happening inside of you. A change in perspective, behavior and your reaction can do so much more for shifting the outcome. It takes a fair amount of self-observation to change our patterns and thus creating a different outcome to a situation.
This self-examination isn’t for the weak of heart; it is for Warriors. It isn’t easy or fun to look at our dark side and then hold ourselves accountable for our actions. If we don’t self-reflect we will repeat our patterns and behaviors. Asking questions directed at our ego minds and little girl will give us the data needed to see how we are seeing things through a skewed lens. Once we see things clearly we are able to make the shift to our higher self. We cannot make the shifts through our ego or little girl (lower mind) because thinking through that lens is what got us into the situation in the first place.
I love it when I am in a mother daughter retreat and both the mother and daughter see how their behaviors have been playing out and causing havoc on one of the most important relationship they have in their life.
In all of my retreats whether it be the Individual Intensive, Mother Daughter or the Couple Retreats you will learn how recognize your ego mind, and stop acting out of your unconscious little girl to shift your beliefs.
Are We Only Teaching Ours Children or Learning From Them as Well?
When we have an awareness that we are also learning from our children as much as we are teaching and guiding them, we become very present to ourselves. When our children come into the world they come in without preconceived notions about things, situations and people. They are not avoiding situations because they don’t feel good. Because of this we have so much to learn from them about our judgments of situations and people.
Children are much more heart centered because they haven’t had the experiences to taint them. We do have so much to teach our children about life in general, but we have to be open to what we are learning from them as well.
One thing that I believe is most precious to learn from children is how they express their emotions without worrying about what people think. How many times have you not expressed how you feel because you didn’t want to seem vulnerable, weak or needy. They live their life fully in the present moment with an open mind, not caring about the judgments of others.
What would this be like as an adult if we were living in this moment completely open-minded without any of our wounds from our past tarnishing how we see things? It would be so freeing and we would feel completely alive and full of passion. It’s our triggers from our wounding that make us look at situations with a judgmental eye.
Another important component about seeing our children as teachers is that it removes the hierarchy of parents being The Great Wizard of Oz. I believe it is important for children to know that their parents don’t know everything and they are on a path of learning as well. I remember when my kids finally understood that I was human too. They had more compassion for me and stopped treating me like a machine.
The biggest problems I see in mother daughter relationships are the mothers treating the daughters less than because they believe the daughters aren’t as wise. The daughters become very resentful when they feel like they have nothing to contribute.
The work I do in my retreats and mentoring is all about learning about yourself and actually using everyone and every situation to become more self-aware. No one is better or worse than another.
In all of my retreats whether it be the Individual Intensive, Mother Daughter or the Couple Retreats you will learn how to live in your true authentic self, come from your heart, stop acting out of your ego and shift your beliefs.
What are some of the things you can pay attention to, to create a happy new year?
I don’t usually set intentions for the New Year or do New Years resolutions. I am always in the process of moving forward in life regarding my personal development and other projects.
I don’t know how resolutions pan out for you, but what I see in other people and myself when I use to set them was that I would do really well in the beginning and then they would slowly drop off.
I think we need to look at the core reasons why we aren’t reaching our full potential. What is our Ego saying to us that will sabotage us? If we have unhealed wounds from our childhood and we still have trauma inside of us, our Ego will be running the show. If our Ego is running the show it will be tough to reach our full potential.
My New Years Resolution is always to heal my wounds and keep a watchful eye on my Ego, so that I know what it is doing at all times.
Here are a few of the things I would like to accomplish in 2019 and what my Ego has to say about it.
Exercising more: Ego-It’s too cold outside to hike and we hate the indoor bike.
Finish my parenting book: Ego-You don’t have time to write and no one is going to buy it anyway, so don’t waste your time.
Stay on top of my health: Ego-Your body is too big of a burden; just forget about it.
Start my relationship book: Ego-You can’t even finish your parenting book.
My Ego is mean and is certainly not out to help me. It is here to sabotage anything in my life that is good for others and me. So I am always giving my Ego my higher mind point of view and letting it know that I will not be listening to it. “Thank you for sharing but no thank you.”
What are some of the things you would like to accomplish and how is your Ego mind preventing you from achieving your higher potential and messing up your life?If you need help learning what your Ego is up to, connect with me.
A great gift for your daughter, partner or yourself is a Soul Retrieval Retreat.
In all of my retreats, whether it be, the individual intensive, mother-daughter, or the couples retreat you will learn how to recognize your Ego mind and stop acting out of it, love yourself, shift these old beliefs and show up differently in the world.
When we show up completely ourselves in the world, keeping it real, we offer the same to others. Most of us know what being authentic means and we know intuitively when were not being a real and when we are out of alignment. When we don’t show up being ourselves it’s mostly because we are afraid of how people will perceive us, and how they may judge us.
I remember being in a five day workshop and one of the exercises had us stand up in front of everyone and express one of our fears. Well, one of my fears was standing up in front of a crowd and speaking. So I was so scared that I actually shot out of my seat first with tears streaming down my face expressing my fears about speaking in public. I was shocked at the response. So many people expressed having the exact same fear and thanked me for standing up and being so vulnerable. Then they stood up one after another expressing the same fear. This is a perfect example of being real allowing others to be real as well. I felt so much love for all these people with the same vulnerabilities as me. I also felt truly seen as the real me.
Being real isn’t easy when we live in a culture that shows us how were supposed to be physically and materially perfect. There really isn’t any room for being human. When we feel like who we are is just not good enough, this is when we tend to cover up our shadow sides. When we walk through life hiding parts of who we are we feel it internally, we know something is off. When we are able to accept all parts of ourselves, and love those parts, there is a comfort in the way we move through the world.
There is such a freedom in just allowing our self to be how we are in every moment of our life. When we have insecurities around our deficiencies, we show up in the world insecure. When we embrace our deficiencies, knowing that we’re human, we show up in the world feeling way more empowered.
One of the rewards for showing up in the world unmasked is that we will inspire others to do the same and attract authentic people in your lives. In all of my retreats whether it be the Individual Intensive, Mother Daughter or the Couple Retreats you will learn how to live in your true authentic self, come from your heart, stop acting out of your ego and shift your beliefs.
The holiday season is here, and so is all of the joy and all of the chaos. The great part about the holidays is getting together with friends and family, shopping for special gifts, baking and just an all over warm and cozy feeling. The downfall of the holiday season is the triggers of friends and family, shopping in crowded malls, and all the baking. If not handled with care can feel like a pressure cooker. Those same things that give us joy also give us anxiety.
How do we move through the holidays being able to experience the fun and excitement, without fretfulness? The process that I teach has my clients taking the situation or person that’s triggering them on the outside and bringing it inside to see what old beliefs they are buying into so they may be able to shift them.
Holidays are no different than any other day for personal growth. Our egos are just up more because we are busier and we have more anxiety. If we could just slow down and pay attention to how we are feeling and what we are thinking, we could take advantage of the opportunities for growth. Even though things are getting ramped up, we have to slow down.
I find adding a gratitude practice daily helps me to remember what’s important. Yes, of course, I want to get everything done, but I don’t have to get it done like a chicken with its head chopped off, I can get it done with grace and ease. Remembering how grateful I am that I have family and friends, that I have money in the bank to be able to buy them a special gift and to bake them something special. There are so many people in the world that are completely alone without family and have no funds to purchase food for themselves let alone a gift for someone else.
When I start getting caught up and rushing around, this is a good time for me to stop take a deep breath and remember how lucky I am. On that note, I want to tell each and every one of you how grateful I am that you are in my life in one way or another. I am so grateful for all of the connections that I have with friends, family and clients.
I wish you all a beautiful and loving holiday season. Love each other like it is your last day to love, laugh with each other like it may be your last day to laugh and be grateful for all that you have.
A great gift for your daughter, partner or yourself is a Soul Retrieval Retreat.
In all of my retreats, whether it be, the individual intensive, mother-daughter, or the couples retreat you will learn how to recognize your Ego mind and stop acting out of it, love yourself, shift these old beliefs and show up differently in the world.
Jealousy is such an odd emotion that we have all experienced probably numerous times in our life. Starting out when we were younger, having feelings of jealousy for siblings or wanting what another child has, leading into our teenage years possibly being jealous of our friends, then moving into our adult life, feeling jealous for not reaching certain successes that others have reached or just simply feeling a sense of yearning for a way of being in someone else’s life.
I believe we have all felt jealous many times in our lives; it is a common human feeling. So even when we feel jealousy, it okay because that is going to happen, it is what do we do with that feeling of jealousy. Do we feed it or do we pull our higher mind into the situation to understand it and not act out of it.
Jealousy is really one of the hardest feelings we come up against, with this aching sense that somehow life isn’t fair. It’s very important that we do not revel in our jealous feelings or allow our ego to come out and play and gossip with others. This is just feeding our lower self and growing these negative feelings inside of us.
All of our emotions give us the opportunity to go inward to see where our growth is possible. Jealousy can show us what our desires are and what we want in our life. It’s just important to recognize that it’s okay to have desires without jealousy. Recognizing what we want is a good thing, because we first have to realize what we want before we can create it. This also allows us to surrender to what is in our life and accept things as they are. This doesn’t mean that we don’t go for what we want, it just means that we are grateful for where we are and we are open to the possibilities of more.
One of the best ways to overcome jealousy is gratitude; gratefulness for life being what it is and realizing it is a complete gift.
In all of my retreats, whether it be, the individual intensive, mother-daughter, or the couples retreat you will learn how to recognize your Ego mind and stop acting out of it, love yourself, shift these old beliefs and show up differently in the world.
