Insightful Inspirations

Gurus, teachers, yogi, monk, etc. these are all the titles of people you might go to for some spiritual help. Someone to show you the path to enlightenment. This week I was reminded to remember the true helpers in our life often don’t come from the likely sources. They aren’t always the ones you want to say “thank you” to and aren’t always obvious gifts.You might find more enlightenment in facing a chain reaction of events brought into your life through an encounter with a person, than from a spiritual master.

For example, lets say you get a job that you need VERY badly. In this job you are unhappy, but it pays the bills. Part of the reason you are unhappy is because you have a boss who is just awful to you. Finally one day, this boss is so awful to you that you snap and tell them off, causing you to loose your job. Then you face finding a new one, financial struggles and anything else that comes along from the chain reaction of events.  In the end you find yourself a job you love, pays better and supports who you are. You gained wisdom about your strength through the struggles to get there. Lessons yu couldn’t learn any other way.  

Can you thank that boss for being the catalyst for your growth? Can you see the wisdom in their involvement in your life?

This isn’t a sugar coated avoidance technique to make every one and everything seem good in your life. This is about having awareness of the wisdom that is constantly around you working with you and for you. This is about noticing the gifts rather than denying them.

Insightful Inspiration of week

Become aware of your catalysts. Who is your life has caused a chain reaction of events that you find unpleasant? Who do you have trouble with because of all the struggle they bring? What are they a catalyst for? Maybe they are just showing you how you don’t want to be. Maybe they are making you reevaluate your life rather than just going through the motions. See if you can find the gift in the chain reaction they have set off for you. Decide if you want to learn your lessons or keep the chain going until you do. You want the lesson or you wouldn’t be there with it. Send them gratitude, forgiveness and love and then do the same for yourself.

I was getting a massage the other day with the intention of releasing some energy that I felt stuck in for awhile. I started to feel the therapist work on me and feel the places that were tense and tender and that they related to this stuckness I feel. Recently I have been looking at moving out matches with things I feel are no longer serving me. However, I was struggling to do so. I was having trouble seeing why. I can move other people’s energy around so easily, yet I am struggling with my own. “Healer be healed!” I was saying to myself.

Then it came to me as I tensed under the pressure of the massage. Like the body clenching under the pressure of a sore spot, my energy was clenching. But why? One reason is that like a massage it hurts to let it go or at least somewhere I perceive it to hurt. But as the therapist worked on me I realize it is sore and tender and then it releases and feels light and wonderful. It helped me to see I want to push through the sore and tender to allow it to release. I can’t just continue to avoid the spot. Touch it with the intention to release, observe the struggle and then just by observing it lets go. Just by continuing to observe. Doing nothing else but that very thing.

This is so true with everything. Just by observing it you change it. Sometimes we avoid facing something head on because we are afraid of it, but once we do, it releases and no longer controls our thoughts.  It is instinctive for our energy to clench up and protect what we think is ours. It won’t just let it go, it much first have a gentle reminder of what is a balanced state, then it will return there willingly while releasing what it thought it needed.

Insightful Inspiration of the week

What sore spot are you guarding and not releasing? Why are you guarding it? What are you telling yourself about that thing you don’t want to face? It hurts only for a moment to face it and then it softens. You can see why you are where you are. Notice any resistance in your body and mind about letting this go. Just notice, without judgement, this resistance.

by Freeman Mester

As you observe this resistance you can begin to see the wisdom in it, with love and trust. Once you see that, you can let it go and make room for whatever you need next. You can open yourself up to the light and the possibilites now available to you. You may not have been ready to open up to it before, which is why the guard was there to begin with. But now it is there for you to open to and be nourished by.

If all else fails, go get a massage and see what you learn about yourself from the experience.  Have a releasing week!

If you are into any metaphysical stuff, you will often hear about the ego. Most of the time the ego is pointed out as something to let go of, something NOT to live your life through. But I personally think that is impossible for most of us. It isn’t the point for us yet.

I read this book called “The Rascal’s Guide to Enlightenment” by Mat-zo the unleavened one. You can tell by the title and author’s name it is a funny one. Anyway in his book he has a “I love my Ego Rebuild Kit”. It says something along the lines of if you have ruined your ego through too much enlightenment work, use this rebuilding kit to fix it up. It is a pretty funny book. I recommend it to anyone.

My point is that everything is about balance. As I watch children grow, I see their ego forming. It is part of development. Without it, we would miss an important part of our lessons in life. As always it is just about balance. We don’t want to run the world with our egos out of whack because then we forget that we aren’t the center of the universe and right about everything.

Sonia Choquette, one of my favorite authors and psychics said this about the ego in an interview. “Every human being has had some experience of guidance. That is not our challenge. Our challenge is: Will our ego humble enough to acknowledge that there is more than the ego running the world and the experience of the human journey through life?”

I don’t think it is about blowing the ego away. But it is about using our consciousness to bring it all into balance. I believe when we aren’t in a body, our ego goes away, so just like our bodies, we have a limited time to experiment with it.

Insightful Inspiration of the Week

This week, check in with your ego. What state is it in? Is it bruised, defensive, puffed up? How much say does it have in your life? Is it balanced with everything else you do? Can you tell the difference between your ego and your higher self? Are you able to have humility and see things differently than before?

As always, you are welcome to share your thoughts.

Wikipedia describes Tickle Torture as the use of tickling to abuse or dominate someone. The victim laughs although the experience is unpleasant because the laughter is an innate reflex rather than social conditioning. I thought this was a great idea to blog about. The concept of having a pleasure response (here it is laughing) as a reflex. What other responses are just reflexes?

It is different for everyone, but I do think we have automatic responses to certain stimulus, depending on our complex make up of personality, genetics, background, gender, etc. Emotions can and do go beyond just social conditioning. Can we train ourselves to remove the reflex and have more intentional reactions. Of course we can, but first we have to recognize our reflex first. The automatic responses we have to things feel necessary and we will defend them at every chance. But if we start to realize we aren’t responding to the outside world as much as we are responding to the inside world, we might give ourselves a little more time in the reflex process and eventually change it all together.

Insightful Inspirations of the week

Pay attention to your reflex emotions this week. Times when you respond quickly and without thinking in an automatic fashion. Because it is a reflex, the initial attention will come after you have already been in the moment. But notice if it was appropriate for you to respond that strongly or with that particular emotion. Or is it automatic because of the person or situation? Did you get the full wisdom of those feelings or did it feel automatic? The mindfulness of these moments give us wisdom to see how our thoughts, actions and reflexes affect our lives, more so than the world around us. It is possible you will still like to keep your emotional response as it is, but just being aware of it, gives you new wisdom within yourself to tap into.

We play with our energy so unconsciously sometimes we don’t even know what we are doing until it’s done. It is like eating half a pint of ice cream before noticing! Now think what that would do to your hips (or thighs, or where ever you prefer to put on weight). Same goes for not taking in enough food. If you are too busy to eat all of the time, you will get too thin to be healthy.

The same thing is happening to your energy field. Without proper exercise, maintenance, and awareness we all get energetically out of whack. Putting too much burden on our energy systems or too little.

Like you body type, the amount of energy you actually need is different for everyone. Some people are naturally heavy and some naturally light and where you store that energy differs too. But the point is that you can manage a healthy energetic weight by bring awareness to it.

Insightful Inspirations for the week

Get yourself on a healthy energy plan. Find time to connect with yourself, play with your energy or exercise it and pay attention to when you are unconsciously taking on too much or too little. Think of it like a meal and plan for it. Work with it, move it, become friends with it. You can get involved in the more complicated techniques to balance your chakras and aura, if you have the time and energy. But you would be better off spending a little time with yourself every day than trying to cram in a completely new way of living all at once and then quit all together. Just like a diet.

One of the questions I get asked by people just coming into listening to their world and intuition is, “how do I know I am not just making it up?” . My response is generally “trust it”. But taking it a step further, I say, so what if you are  making it up?

What if you are just pretending to pick up signals from the universe?

When you were little you indulged in the pretend and grew from that imagination. There are many articles talking about why pretend is important to young children’s development. Check this one out. When did it stop being important for us to think abstractly and problem solve with things never thought of before? It didn’t! So go ahead and pretend. What is reality anyway?

Insightful Inspiration for the week

Give yourself permission to indulge in pretending. Pretend to understand your situation clearer. Pretend you are getting messages from the universe on what you are supposed to be doing. Pretend you know where you are going! You already do this anyway, so why not embrace it and let it deliver the gifts of the unexpected. Let the creativity flow from you and when you find yourself asking “am I making this up?”, joyfully respond, “YES!” and go with it.

I was out to dinner with a dear friend of mine, when she asked me the question I get frequently which is “how do I know when to trust my intuition?”.  My response of course is normally always! But the message that came to mind was perfect for her and perhaps most of you. The message was to assume your intuition is always right, unless proven otherwise, rather than the other way around.

Most people work on in favor of the logical brain. The one that figures things out, thinks through things, makes “logical” decisions. What we forget is that even our logical brain is being driven by our intuition.  Things that are seemingly chance, line up, and we impulsively think through the choices of the given situation without research or asking someone else for those choices. This is all intuition.

However, we stifle this gift of intuition sometimes by taking the logical brain too far. Letting it run things. We let it win over on what started the whole thing to begin with. We choose the side of the logical brain vs. the intuitive side. The second part of the message was let your intuition win every time for a bit and see how it goes. Rather than siding with the logical side, try siding with that gut impulse.

Insightful Inspiration for the week

This week, try and side try assuming your intuition is always right. When you find yourself asking “is this my intuition or just wishful thinking?”  side with the answer intuition (unless all evidence points to something contrary). Try siding with your intuition, trusting it, loving it and using it the way it is intended… without the control of the logical side.  The logical brain is a gift too, but it isn’t meant to snuff out the intuitive side. They are meant to work in concert, shifting back and forth to bring you where you want to be.

As always, I encourage you to share with me on Facebook about how this is going. Have an intuitive week.

This week I witnessed an eighth grade girl coming out of all day suspension for having her hair dyed. I must mention, her hair looked professionally done and quite cute, in my opinion. But her lack of “natural hair color” earned her a day away from her class. This girl goes to a gifted school for highly intelligent children, by the way. Do you think she noticed when her principle, with her hair obviously dyed, came out and said “fix your hair honey, so you can go back to class tomorrow.”?

Honestly, I think we all have a bit of hypocrisy running through us.  We judge someone else for something we do. We tell our kids, friends, family not to do the very thing we do.  We have told ourselves that hypocrisy is bad and we would never do it, yet we do. So there must be a pay off.

Maybe it is just that the world is a reflection of us. It is easier to work things out in our own mind if we are looking at is as a third party.  If we learn to look ourselves with neutrality and less emotionally, we might begin to be able to shift the judgment of each other and simply work on improving ourselves.

Insightful Inspiration for the week

See if you can find something you are being hypocritical about. Is there something you tell someone else not to do, that you yourself do? You might need to get a little abstract here. It might not be a direct one to one relationship. Here is an example: Let’s say that you judge your friend for being judgmental of people who are uneducated. You think that it is a terrible bias. What are you judging someone else for that may be a terrible bias as well… maybe it is how people parent, or people who don’t take care of their yard, or people who don’t work as hard as you think they should at work. You too are judging, probably unfairly.

See if you can take in the awareness of this energy. Notice the thing it is lighting up within you. Offer it a little healing and release it, without judgment, to be transmuted into whatever it is trying to become.  And most of all let you off the hook about things like being a hypocrite. No one is perfect, thank goodness. How boring would that be?!

Perspective – this is something I have blogged on more than once. The two sides to every story, how you can change your perspective, etc. What is so important about this topic? Dictionary.com provides seven different definitions of perspective. Wikipedia breaks it out into groups, i.e. graphical, visual, cognitive. All of which are relevant to the topic of understanding your place in the world. The one I am going to focus on today is “one’s “point of view”, the choice of a context for opinions, beliefs and experiences”.

In relationships with other people we spend a lot of time trying to see each other’s points of view. Convincing others to see our side of things, trying to understand where they are coming from, etc. But this is my enlightening lesson for you… no matter how hard you try and see another person’s point of view, you are still seeing their point of view from your point of view. It is impossible for you to truly see their point of view. All of their life experiences make them unique to how they perceive things. Scientist have proven this even with identical twins who have lived very similar lives. Their perspectives are still radically different. When I read for couples some times I can decode these perspectives to where they have “aha!” moments about it. It seems to relieve stress in the relationship and help them to accept each other more.

This is important to remind yourself of. Because when you are trying to understand or be understood, there is no right or wrong answer. There is no definative “this is the way things are”. We often spend a lot of energy trying to get to “right” vs. “wrong” but because of perspective this is different for everyone. The best part is, this is OKAY! It is wonderful for each and every one of us to see the world differently. It helps us realize endless possibilities of our human form. Our evolutionary possibilities are endless because we all see things differently!

Insightful Inspiration of the week

Are you spending energy and time trying to understand some one’s point of view or have them understand yours? Step back for a minute from this process. See it for what it is and the possibilities that this is creating. Maybe your significant other wants to spend some money going on vacation and you want to invest it on your house. What are the different points of views bringing to light for both of you. Can you take that wisdom with you as you search for a compromise? Why is the universe presenting you with this difference of opinion? What is it trying to get you to see differently?

Embrace who you are and how you think. This is your gift to the world. Share it with an open mind and open heart and encourage others to do the same.

Love to all of you.  Thanks for reading.