Insightful Inspirations

Influences… the free dictionary defines this as “A power affecting a person, thing, or course of events, especially one that operates without any direct or apparent effort”.  We have so many influences in our lives which I think we are only consciously aware of  about 10% of the time. It could be something obvious, like what your friend said to your yesterday or a blog you read. But it could also be something subtle, that you don’t give much attention to. Since this definition says “without any direct or apparent effort” I would venture to guess most of the time you are responding to the influences without even knowing it.

This is why it is so important to surround yourself with love, peace, abundance. The things you want. And when you aren’t surrounded by those things, it is hard to GET surrounded by those things, sometimes. Because you are influenced by the energy around you. Time and time again I see people gravitating in clumps of friends and family that have the same energy around things. This is not always supportive, even when these are their apparent support systems. For example, the friend who tells you all guys are jerks and you will never find a good one, so you might as well settle for what you can get. Or the group of friends who all are struggling to be happy with their lives and sit around and complain together.

Don’t get me wrong. I love to surround myself with people who get me and validate my struggles and don’t tell me to “get over it” or “I am in control”. But sometimes I need to be reminded of how reality is flexible and I am in control. If I was always just a confirmed victim by my support system, there shall I remain. So I want to make a conscious effort to surround myself with friends who encourage me to be the most whole person I can be. Who that it may change over time as we all grow.

Insightful Inspiration for the week

Take a look at your influences in your life. Write them down. Are they supporting you in where you want to go in life? Are they helping you be the best you can be? If not, what can you do to shift the power this influence has in your life? This doesn’t mean you have to disown people.  You have the power to interact with these influences any way you want, if you are aware. Notice these influences and take what you need, leave the rest.

Part two… as you are influence, you too are the influencers. How are you influencing people? Are you supporting them to live their best lives?

This doesn’t just have to be people either. Think of other influences as well. For example electronics, work, the food you eat, the paint on your walls, the lighting in your room, the clothes you wear. It is all influencing you and those around you.

Interact with me on Facebook! I would love to hear what you think about this. Any of your own insights would be gladly consumed by the rest of us.

Recently I had a couple come in to me and tell me a terrible tale of being ripped off by a psychic. This bums me out to no end. It makes me (and others like me)  look bad and makes people afraid of the help they can receive from intuition… their own and other’s. If you live locally, beware of the psychic advertising on the main street of downtown Lafayette, Colorado. I don’t know her personally and this is just two people’s account of her service, but just be aware of where you are giving away your power. It is never good to give away your power to anyone. You should always be on equal ground with everyone you seek advice from, be it doctors, healers, therapist, etc. You know you best and listen to YOUR intuition first and foremost.

The attraction of someone else having all of the answers is a tempting one. Someone to “save” us from ourselves. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just go to a guru and get our lives all straightened out? But that is not the point of all of this. The type of help I provide is simply to support you in having more of yourself in your life. Living your life to its fullest with the ups and downs being equal gifts in your life. Not to “fix” you or take away all your problems.

Insightful Inspiration of the week

Notice who you might be giving away your power to. Just because of their title, status, experience, etc. No one knows the answers for you, better than you. Check in with this relationship and see if you can gently shift it. Bring yourself up on equal ground with this person. Take their advice, and even direction (if they happen to be your manager) but hold in your heart you are choosing to do this because it is for your intuition telling you to do so, not because an outside source is driving you. You are in charge of your life, your energy, your heart. Everything is a choice, choose your power first.

I was going to call this post the dilemma of an over-doer. But I thought is it really possible to have too MANY opportunities? As I talk with friends who are wives, mothers, and or workers of the world. I hear all of these stories about how much they have to do. Me included. As I start to look at all the things I am busy with, it isn’t always what I want to  be busy with, but think I SHOULD be busy with. (the dreaded should!)

My kids have the opportunity to be in this sport, that club, go to this party, etc. I in turn get invited to events, asked to do things, and participate in random things here and there. I feel like I am presented with so many options of things to be involved with. Don’t even get me started on the volunteering I do… that is an endless pit all by itself. But I can feel a twinge of guilt pop up if I don’t take advantage of all of the opportunities. What better do I have to do? Just sit at home! EEK.

What I am seeing now is we have been brought up from a world of lack. We didn’t have what we wanted or we were trained we never would. It was unreasonable to expect it. “don’t complain later if you change your mind” So we end up scooping up all the opportunities that come, for fear we will regret not doing it. We overwhelm ourselves, deplete ourselves and ultimately forget the gratitude that we once had for these opportunities individually.

Insightful Inspiration for the week

Notice all the “opportunities” you are taking advantage of just because you feel you should. Maybe it is even something fun, like being invited to a party, even though you know last night you promised you were going to just stay home and rest for a few days. Try saying no, with the realization that new opportunities will come, when it is time.

If you can’t relate to the dilemma of an over doer… your inspiration is to see where you can say yes to one more thing. It is all about balance.

Tell me how it goes.

Eww… okay, I know, but as the stress of the holidays bears down on my VERY sensitive skin, I get reminded of what I hear regularly from my guides. Don’t push it or force the issue to the surface before it is ready. This isn’t really all about a pimple… I just wanted to get your attention and I love metaphors present in our life. Even the unpleasant ones. Okay, a better one might be that a mother duck doesn’t help her babies out of their eggs. Even though she knows what needs to happen next and it seems like such a struggle. It is a necessary struggle.

But that is just it, it IS related to your life. So quickly we want to rush through hard situations and push things through to the other side when things are “clear” again. We want to force things to be done before they are and in doing so make things worse or make them last longer than necessary.

When I offer healings to others I  have to set my space to allow them to be supported where they are rather than where they “should” be. I do not judge where they are at and try and point them where I want them to go, but simply help them be more present in their power NOW. I am sympathetic to the struggle but often times can find humor in it too, where there typically is none. (not always appreciated by the client but helpful to the healing nevertheless) But my judgement is no more useful than their own, on what to do next.  The reason this is true is for several profound reasons. One most important fact being I don’t know what I don’t know. Meaning, I may have an idea in my head of what might work better. But the direction this person is heading is usually in a place I couldn’t even dream up. So who am I to limit the healing with my thoughts and ideas. Instead, I open up to the power of the miracle and just facilitate whatever goodness wants to show up. Maybe there are some hints in their on where to look, but never a “should” or “must” or hurry and get to the next place in life.

Now if only I could do that in my own life 100% of the time!

Insightful Inspiration of the Week

What are you trying to force to closure before it is ready? What issue are you trying to rush? See if you can allow yourself to drop away some of that urgency and just be with the situation at hand. Notice, are you making it worse by trying to “fix it”? Perhaps you are suppose to just step back and allow it to turn itself. Maybe you are over correcting and it will swing back into balance if you take your expectations out of it.

Release yourself from the responsibility to make things “right” and see what purpose the situation is serving. Don’t beat yourself up for where you are or how you got there. Instead see the good of it. If you can’t figure it out now, try stepping back from it. Find something else to do that is fun and makes you laugh. Then return to it with fresh eyes to see what else you can learn. This isn’t to say the universe doesn’t want us to have endurance, but sometimes it wants us to take our white knuckled grip of the steering wheel and let it drive. Remember, you can’t know, what you don’t know. But divinity is there to help us allow more of the goodness to show up so we can know it. If we allow it to. This is called surrender.

There is more to life than worry but some days it sure doesn’t feel like it does it? Sometime we are consumed with ourselves. The what ifs, the if onlys and the why mes! We just can’t help ourselves sometimes. We use everything around us to validate our victim state rather than validate our success. We have trouble just being satisfied with status quo. We have been taught status quo is BAD!

Status quo isn’tbad. It is just status quo… nothing more, nothing less. Wikipedia defines it as “current or existing state of affairs”. Aka the present moment, how things are, or NOW. Spiritual advisers since the beginning of time have been telling us the happiness is in the now, so  in other words, happiness is in status quo. Maintaining status quo is really what we have labeled as bad and the funny thing is, it is impossible to maintain status quo. It is always changing, moment to moment, even if you held you breath and sat still would be different because the earth is moving, you heart is beating, your stomach is working as so on. Maintaining status quo is impossible, so why are we so afraid of it. We are so afraid we aren’t moving in the right direction we start creating directions we “might”  move into to worry about. Stuff that hasn’t happened yet, yet we are trying to plan for it just in case it does which ironically makes it happen!

I did a reading today that actually was telling her she could move in a new direction, but if she chose not to, she can look around and expect more of the same. I think that is what we label bad. If we don’t like what we see, we don’t want it to stay the same. We want it to change. But if we don’t like what we see we fear change because we are afraid of creating more of the same or WORSE! If we could just get moving and not have any expectations on all of it, we would save ourselves a lot of mental anguish and bring in new experiences, for good or bad… but never dull!

Insightful Inspiration of the week

Accept status quo. Status quo is serving you up a dose of just what you need. Embrace it! Swallow it whole and then keep moving forward. Release yourself from the expectation that you SHOULD be somewhere different or things will be better WHEN something happens. Right now, life is as you have created it. Look around, use it as a shopping experience. Focus on what you want more of and go from there. Congratulations! You have come so far on your growth. The majority of your suffering has passed. Make a mental note of where you are now and know the next path is still unwritten there is more joy to have than pain. Bring it on by firmly planting your feet on all you have already built and allowing the next thing to come as it will with or without your worries.

Generally I am pretty open to my happy, optomistic self. But occasionally, like all of us, I get a little down. It is often a place I resist with fearce determination. I try and meditate, take herbs, get accupuncture, etc. to “fix” the “problem. To feel “better”. I spend so much time trying to treat the symptoms I don’t get down to what is really going on. I am trying to talk to myself about an imbalance I am ready to address. If only I would stop and listen!

Why don’t I stop and listen knowing what I know about all things? Well, what is there to look at is very painful and scary. I am afraid if I look at it, it will take hold and be the truth of who I am. I don’t trust myself to be with this pain and ever get out of it again. So instead of supporting this thing, I try and run from it, which only makes it worse and stronger. So what if I opened up to this and was this way forever? I want to be able to love myself no matter what.  But I have put certain criteria on  myself that make me “lovable” if I don’t meet those criteria I am what… not lovable? Of course not! I am still lovable. Sometimes I just have to remind myself that no matter what I am lovable. It is a test of the faith and trust I claim to have. It is me, like a toddler, acting up, just to make sure you still love me, no matter what. So I rise to the challenge and love my darkness just as I love my lightness in order to make room for light within me to shine brighter.

Insightful Inspiration of the week

This week, have a good cry without judgement on yourself of how you “should” be feeling. We have put obligations on our emotions. Emotions are not obligated to do anything, they are there to tell us about how we are interacting with the world around us. If we block ourselves off to our emotions or judgement as right or wrong, we are stealing away the power they have to communicate with us. Then these emotions stop working properly and get out of balance. We start feeling sad at times when we aren’t sure why. We feel more anger at a situation than is what you truly feel because you have blocked off the last four times you felt anger. 

See if you want things to fall back into balance. As you release this emotional valve, try no to judge it. Just let it open up and see what happens next. If there is a lot in there, don’t worry, it will stop flowing eventually and swing back the other way. When you start to doubt you should have opened the flood gates, just notice. Where is the fear of these emotions coming from? Did you learn as a kid these kinds of outbursts would get you in trouble? Just notice the fear is there as well. Fear of feeling.   Why are you afraid of feeling?  Just notice. Pay attention, see if you can send love to this part of yourself and let it be what ever it needs to be.

If other’s around you freak out by this new openness, just notice that too. That is their havingness for this situation and has nothing to do with the right an wrong of you. Send them compassion, but try and keep it from getting into your space about how you are feeling.

Write me if you want. I always love to hear how it is going.

Since it is Thanksgiving here in the US, I am taking the obvious route here. This week you Insightful Inspiration is simple… gratitude! I have been posting every day this month (since I got the idea from someone else to do it) something I am grateful for that day. It is a great practice that many spiritual teachers promote. It reminds you to be positive and aligns you with greater things in your life. It brings you into present moment too, which allows you to gather up your energy to manifest in the direction you want.

See if you can write down five things you are truely grateful for, every day for a week. Share on the Insightful Inspiration Facebook page if you want, it is always great to see other’s gratitude too, to remind you of what you have.

I am thankful for everyone who gives me their energy to read my blogs. I hope you find them useful!

Gravity is something we live with every day. It defines our life, how much we weigh, how fast we can go, how high we can jump. But if you go out there to places like Wikipedia you can tell right away we are still trying to figure it all out.

How can something we live with every day, be something we never think about, and something we don’t quite understand? This is the same thing with our intuition and inner guidance. We have it there every day, waiting to be used and quite often just automatically playing a role in our lives. But when we try and think about it and control it, it begins to blow our minds. 

With gravity, without it, we would be weightless, unable to hold a posture of our choosing, eventually loosing strength and orientation in our lives. The weightless part might sound appealing to some of you… but the point is the same with intuition. Without our intuition we would loose strength, orientation and purpose. We don’t question whether gravity exists, so why do we question our intuition?

Insightful Inspiration of the Week

This week, don’t question the existence or accuracy of your intuition. Trust it, like you do gravity, to work and be there. You don’t jump out of  bed and say “I hope I don’t float away!” You just jump out of bed and trust your feet to hit the ground. Trust your intuition to work. It may have seem to have been on hiatus, but it is right there, working for you all of the time. The thing to work on is the need to control it, manipulate it, and doubt it. Not to turn on the intuition switch, but rather to work on turning off the insanity that tells you it isn’t there.  Put your feet on the ground and start listening.

If you have trouble trusting, journal what is blocking you from this trust. Focus on the messages that are coming up to block the trust rather than trying to heighten the intuition.

Let me know how it goes.

There is one thing that overwhelmingly comes up in the healings I do for other people… People can not be moved into a place they are not ready for. I can try and heal them, clear them, advise them and tell them their likely path but it won’t help them be somewhere they aren’t. It merely supports them to be where they are. So why bother?  Because you can’t go anywhere until you are somewhere. When I offer a healing to someone, I am offering them grounding, presence and the ability to have more of the NOW.

What does this mean? It means that most of the time we spend trying to propel ourselves forward to some place other than where we are. We are always on the go, moving towards news goals, executing plans and “improving” ourselves. But if we never stop to enjoy where we are, we are always chasing our tails. We can’t put ourselves in alignment with our highest good,  unless we take time to notice what that even is. This is the real reason a lot of spiritual practices talk about being still and meditating or praying. It is because most of us don’t slow down long enough to listen to ourselves and just be.

I am not saying stop moving forward and setting goals. What I am saying is to try and be grateful for where you are first. This gives you a sense of direction. If you don’t first notice where you are, you can’t get up enough energy to go where you want. It is like looking at a map for directions without knowing where you are. It is all just random roads and landmarks that mean nothing.

Insightful Inspiration of the Week

Notice where you are. Be with that feeling and send gratitude towards it. When you are setting goals this week, first map out where you have come to. List out your accomplishments, your amazing life and notice where you are now. Are you fed? Are you warm? Are you in clothes that you like and picked out from a closet of clothes?  Your life is amazing no matter where you are at. Bring yourself fully into that amazing part of yourself and the only place you will choose to go on the map from here is to more amazing places. If you are directly conscious efforts to where you are, you will have more awareness of where you are going and make choices about those directions.

You are not in complete control, but that is the fun part! You never know what is coming next, but once it does you can just be with it.

It is great to set goals and make visions for the future, but this week, try and focus on where you are, not where you want to go. Even if you can only do it for a few minutes a day. As always, you are encouraged to share!