If you are easily agitated, a personal retreat would help you to see what is going on and move through it.
What I notice with people that are on edge and easily agitated, is that there have been many triggers that have built up. What happens is life does what life does and if we don’t go inside and reflect on how we feel about certain situations, it will get the best of us.
Life isn’t going to be all peaches and cream and happy, happy, it is going to be up and down. It’s really all about how we perceive the situation and act on it. If we are triggered we need to explore our old patterns and beliefs around the trigger, not just pretend it didn’t happen. When people are easily agitated it’s usually because they haven’t been doing their internal work. They’re on autopilot in their life, just trying to make it through.
One area I notice that this shows up is with moms and daughters, because there is a familiarity and this feeling that family will be there no matter what, so the agitation tends to be projected onto family members more. This is why adult mother-daughter retreats are so powerful because both mother and daughter learn about their triggers with each other and how to move through them and do their healing instead of dump their feelings onto each other. It’s so transformational to do this work together.
I had a friend come stay the weekend awhile back and I noticed that she was a bit snappy because she had a lot going on in her life and when we talked about it she realized it was because she wasn’t processing through it. It is so important to process through the turbulence in our life so that this turbulence doesn’t stay in our body.
How can you stay calm in this world of total chaos?
How do we maintain a sense of calm in a world of unrest? The world is pretty chaotic right now and it’s important for us to maintain an inner calm so we don’t add to the chaos. Something I have noticed with what’s going on politically is that even the spiritually balanced people seem to be getting extremely upset.
Have you ever been around someone that no matter what the situation holds they maintain an inner peace that makes everyone around them feel less anxious? It’s important to go inward and find out why we are taking what ever it is outside of us personally and therefore creating chaos inside of ourselves. If we can figure out how to stay calm and chaotic times it will help us to function better in turmoil.
It is our inner-chatter of our ego minds that throw us off balance with every piece of disturbing news that comes our way. When we listen to our ego mind it puts us in a very emotional state, which makes our thoughts very unreliable. The thoughts from our lower mind are all fear-based. So when we hear things on the news we immediately go into fear with our ego chattering and then we become off-balance.
The idea is to find our stillness through our higher minds through all situations that cause volatile emotions. When we find this place inside of us, this inner knowing that all is well, we provide a safe place for friends and family. Being around people that find that still place inside them selves is very comforting.
Most of the time these unsettling feelings come from feeling out of control. So part of coming back into balance and letting go is surrendering to what is and realizing we don’t have to control everything. Actually we have little control over anything. Besides doing your inner work around how you feel it’s always good to continue to meditate, Journal and read spiritual books that always helps us come back to ourselves.
Attaching meaning to neutral events can create a lot of suffering in our Lives.
The meaning we place on our experiences whether it be disturbing or pleasant, completely determines how much we suffer or don’t. The actual event is very neutral but our mind translates the event through our woundedness. It is critical to know how we see things through our belief system so that we cannot buy into them and create a more positive outlook.
If we see the world through our wounded self it will have an affect on how we feel about ourselves, other people in the world. If we want to see the world in a more positive way it’s important to see things through our higher mind.
An example of this might be if you get laid off at work and you are having difficulty finding a new job, you have a choice how you view the situation. You can either see it through your lower mind that says you’re not good enough or something’s wrong with you or that this is a new and exciting time for you to explore other areas of your life and it’s an opportunity for higher learning.
It doesn’t matter what the event is you have a choice to view it as an opportunity to grow or a negative experience. Whether it is a loss of a job, an illness, loss of money, or a fight with a loved one. All of these events don’t have meaning until your mind places meaning on them. Life is always happening around us and it is never just happy, happy. It comes with ups and downs, like getting a fantastic job that we absolutely love than three years later losing that fantastic job and having difficulties finding a new one.
Our suffering comes from the lens we see things through. When we start to bring consciousness to what we are making things mean, we may be surprised at the messages we’ve been feeding ourselves all these years. We have the choice to view things in a positive or negative manner, what choice will you make?
Not only are people afraid of telling the truth they don’t like to hear the truth. It’s amazing what people do to get out of being truthful. I get it; it’s difficult and uncomfortable. I just had a situation where I was getting to know someone, dating them and I came to a place where I knew it wasn’t yes, it was a no. It was very clear to me how I felt and yet there was still discomfort around telling him the truth. What came up for my little girl was that she doesn’t want to do something wrong and if you make someone feel bad, than she is making them fell bad. No one can make anyone feel bad; everyone is responsible for their own. So the first thing I do is get to my little girl and let her know she is not responsible for how other people feel and that we are allowed to speak your truth.
It’s critical to know what your little girl’s old beliefs are so when faced with emotions, you are able to figure them out and not act out. Most of the time when we are uncomfortable sharing our truth it is because we are buying into the belief system that is ego based.
We have all been in a place where we have a piece of truth that we were afraid to share because it wouldn’t land well on the other person. There have also been instances where we are not able to handle the truth coming at us. A perfect example of this on a small level is for the last two years my air conditioning repair guy has been telling me that I need a new unit, because my unit is 22 years old. I just didn’t want to hear this for obvious reasons, money. On a bigger level we may not want to accept that someone close to us is pushing us away.
It is almost always pretty clear to see things we don’t want to see if we choose to but we have a sneaky way of hiding the truth from our self, no matter how obvious it is.
We mostly avoid the truth because it scares us, makes us uncomfortable or angry and we don’t know what to do with it. Ultimately, there is no way to avoid the truth, so the sooner we are real with ourselves and look at it, the better we will handle the situation, the more authentic our relationship will be with herself and others.
I read this short piece of an article about shame and found it interesting and though I would give you my slant on it. It’s from DailyOm, which I love and I think it’s a great topic. Here it is:
Shame is a loaded word for Westerners. Like most things, it can be seen in a positive or negative light. Negative shame is accompanied by guilt and self-denigration. It is pointless and doesn’t help us even slightly. Positive shame, on the other hand, is recognizing when we’ve harmed ourselves or anyone else and feeling sorry for having done so. It allows us to grow wiser from our mistakes. Eventually it dawns on us that we can regret causing harm without becoming weighed down by negative shame. Just seeing the hurt and heartbreak clearly motivates us to move on. By acknowledging what we did, cleanly and compassionately, we go forward.
The word shame to me has a negative connotation and as long as it’s shame it isn’t positive. The definition is: A feeling of guilt, regret, or sadness that you have because you know you have done something wrong. : ability to feel guilt, regret, or embarrassment. : dishonor or disgrace.
We can admit our mistakes and clean up our mess without feeling shameful or guilty. The feelings of shame and guilt come from our ego beating us up. What if when I make a mistake, I simple don’t judge it as being bad, I just look at how I want to shift my belief system, clean up my mess with the situation and feel good about the learning. I don’t believe it has to have shame or guilt. Shame and guilt comes from a possible old belief of always doing something wrong, something is wrong with me, or I’m not good enough.
We are humans suffering with the human condition. We are going to make mistakes! It’s what we do with the mistakes after they are made that is important. If we make mistakes, clean up our mess and keep making them, we might want to take a look at that. And if we make a mistake and beat ourselves up, that would be another area to look at.
I think if we are conscious about our actions before, during and after, we will be better equipped to live our lives from a more awakened state. Let go of your shame and guilt around being human, you are going to make mistakes. Just clean up your mess and be conscious not to continue making the same mistake.
How important is it to you to be bonded to your mother or your daughter?
Becoming more and more obvious to me is how important the mother-daughter relationship is. It seems to be so close when we are younger, then we go through our teenage years and it becomes a struggle and sometimes we make it to the other side after our teenage years. But what I see often is a more tumultuous relationship with the adult daughter and mother.
I think we have an understanding for going through difficult times when our kids are teenagers but when we become adults, we expect to be able to work through our issues and have a harmonious relationship. This is not always the case. What usually happens is the issues from childhood get stuck in us as an adult and tend to play them out in our adult life. In other words if we don’t clean up our childhood wounding we will act out of it more times than not.
It’s important for us to look at what happened in our childhood and use these situations to do our healing so that we can show up as mature adults acting out of our higher self. Otherwise we look like adults but we are acting like children! I’m sure you have seen this playing out in many adults.
In my adult mother-daughter retreats, both mother and daughter will learn how their childhood wounding is showing up in their life as an adult. They will also learn how to shift the limiting beliefs that they created and move into a place of love in this relationship. I have seen powerful shifts with these mother-daughter retreats. I always feel so honored to witness the love coming forward that has always been there, but has been blocked by the wounding.
Our biggest healing can come from our mother daughter relationships!
These mother-daughter retreats not only strengthen the mother-daughter bond of love for each other, they help shift all relationships in their lives. When we work through and heal our wounds from our childhood and shift our limiting beliefs we show up for self and others in a more loving way. Ultimately this is what we want to do and when we don’t show up in a loving way it moves us out of alignment with our self.
The reason to enter into a partnership is to create something greater than we can create alone. Not because we have a hole inside of us that needs to be filled but more because we want to heal the hole inside of us.
Going into a relationship requires both parties to be conscious and awake regarding their own patterns. If we have one person that’s willing and the other is not it will be pretty hard to create a coherent holy relationship. When I say holy relationship I mean where both parties know that the relationship is bringing up old stuff to be healed and they do their work around it and don’t project. Therefore creating a very vulnerable and intimate relationship together.
So it’s very important to choose a partner that is willing to look at his or her own patterns and work toward healing them. What I often see while working with couples is that one person is willing to own their own wounding and the other person isn’t and therefore a lot of issues are swept under the rug and they cannot reach a resolve. So if you are single and you do this type of spiritual work, it is important for you to move slowly and consciously in regards to looking for a life partner.
People that rush into partnership are usually trying to fill a need rather than create a holy union that serves their personal growth. Most of the time relationships are just a place to park your woundedness and not heal it. This behavior isn’t okay for people on a spiritual path, because these relationships feel stifling.
I just wrapped up a one-day retreat with a couple and the beautiful part about both of them was their commitment to their own growth through the relationship. In this retreat they learned the tools needed to do their separate work so they could create a powerful, loving, conscious relationship.
I believe that this is what we all want but we don’t know how to achieve it. If your partner isn’t able to look at his or her patterns, a couples retreat would be a great place to start. At least after the couples retreat you will have the tools needed to go deeper into your own limiting beliefs so that you don’t project them on your partner.
The importance of speaking your truth can sometimes feel like a life or death situation. If we hold our truth in it feels like it might eat us alive. Keep in mind the truth I’m talking about is from the higher self not from the ego mind. When we stop the ego from acting out this is a good thing.
I have a client that faced having to act out of her truth and build a bigger wall between her and her daughter or just pretending and making nice just to keep her relationship with her. She had to disengage from the situation, knowing that her daughter’s decisions have nothing to do with her. That this is her daughter’s learning and that part of her learning is to let go, not judge the situation and not take what her daughter is saying personally.
This may have been an easier situation to handle if it would’ve been a friend or colleague but it was her daughter, which makes the cost so much higher. If the mother wouldn’t have spoken her truth and just held it in, resentment would’ve grown and eventually she would projected onto her daughter anyway.
In some important for us to stand in our truth, even if it means the loss of loved ones. I know that I have told the story before about my father and his drinking, but here it goes again. When my mother died, my father became a full-time alcoholic or before he was just a binging alcoholic. I would take my daughter’s then four and five years old over to see him and he would be drunk. I asked him if there was any time during the day where he wasn’t drinking where I would be able to bring the girls over to see him. He accused me of telling him to stop drinking, when actually I just wanted to know if there was a time when he wasn’t to bring the girls. I made this choice because it was a healthy choice for my girls and myself, didn’t see it that way and continued to drink my father so I stopped seeing him.
This felt like a very conscious choice for me but a hard decision to make because my dad thought I was being a horrible daughter. But I was just taking care of the needs of my daughters and myself. So I had to let go and not take it personally. So the loss was huge for me because I lost the relationship with my father. Even though I know that having a relationship with an alcoholic isn’t really a relationship with love and connection anyways.
It is very tricky when looking at speaking your truth because we have to make sure it’s her truth from our higher self not our ego minds so before we speak our truth we first must examine where it’s coming from. Then and only then do we either take action that supports our truth or speak if we need to.
Grieving our pets that have passed can be just as devastating as any loved one in our life.
I find it interesting that some people don’t understand the grieving process around losing a pet. I have heard comments like; “it was just an animal or at least it wasn’t a loved one.” This always surprises me because I believe that our love for our animals sometimes can be bigger than our love for the humans in our life. I think this is because they love us unconditionally; they don’t care what we look like, if our breath stinks, and even if we forget to feed them at the exact time there so forgiving. They have such unconditional love for us that it teaches us how to have unconditional love in our lives. This unconditional love between an animal and human is so powerful.
Having animals in your life can be such a great learning; they can really connect us to our feelings. My last cat, Phil really captured my heart because he was so funny, animated and extremely loving. When he passed I remember having deep, deep sadness and missing him so much. It also brought up past sadness regarding losing my mother when I was younger.
My cat now, Milo has always taught me about things in my life. It’s funny how he has tapped into my old belief of me not being important, not good enough, like something is wrong with me. He has always been extremely aloof and now he is living with my neighbor and only comes home to eat. I have the opportunity to shift that limiting belief that nothing is wrong with me, I am good enough and important even though my cat is choosing someone else. I’m just not taking it personally.
I wanted to give you some ideas about the grieving process around losing a beloved pet. Here are a few helpful tips to support you in the grieving process.
Make sure you allow time to grieve. Allow enough time to move through your emotions. With all losses we need to give ourselves time so that we can experience our feelings fully.
Have a ritual around your animal’s life. It’s important to say goodbye through a type of memorial. This also helps you have closure.
Start a practice if you don’t already have one. Grief can be hard on us physically and emotionally. It’s important to go inward with either a meditation practice, journaling or just sitting in silence.
Talk to friends and family. Even if you’re having difficulties in this moment it’s important to reach out and share with people, this process can help heal your heart.
Be aware of other pets still with the family, these pets may be grieving as well. It’s important that you maintain their normal routine this will help comfort them.
Look back on all the great momentswith your special friend. Take time to journal or do a collage. Talking about the funny and interesting characteristics to others helps.
To this day I still talk about my Labrador retriever Jack and all the crazy things he did and he has been gone 9 years. Talking about him keeps his memory alive for me and reminds me of how much I loved him. It also has helped me heal from the loss.
Having animals and losing them is a wonderful time to go inward and process feelings that come up that may not completely be about your loss of the animal but some other hidden issue.
The loss of a furry companion can be as hurtful as losing a human companion, let this be okay.
Most parents believe that they are here to teach and guide their children and because the children haven’t had a lot of life experiences, they have nothing to teach them. Part of this is true we do have a lot to teach our children and guide them through the turbulent years of growing up. But the other part of this that parents don’t recognize is that they are also our teachers. Because they are so new here they haven’t been burdened with all of the preconceived notions about objects, situations or people. They certainly don’t have the judgments that we have because of our entire life experiences. They also have an easier way of expressing themselves because they’re not worried about being judged.
One of the biggest lessons that children have to teach us is the pure excitement about the smallest things, their playfulness and their ability to be in the present moment with all that they do. If we look at all of our enlightened teachers these are some of the qualities they have.
When we look at children as our teachers and what we can learn from them, it puts us in the present moment with them and in our life. We tend to let go of our agenda and give up the lead and let things unfold. When we play as children play we return to innocence, not having to know what’s next and just let go and let it flow.
When we love like children unconditionally, this allows us to drop all of our judgments about how people should be and what people should be doing. When we play like children we also let go of being judged. Have you noticed how children play, they run around, spinning, and doing anything they want and not caring what people think of them. So how sweet would that be to love and play like a child.
My two daughters had been my two biggest teachers in my life. They have taught me patience, non-judgment, how to say no, boundaries and just pure letting go. They also teach me what old beliefs I need to shift because they trigger them daily, so I get a lot of practice on shifting those limiting beliefs.
What a beautiful gift my children have been and what a beautiful learning.
On Children -Kahlil Gibran
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.
Holding onto the resentment and regret of the past is like carrying all of our baggage around on our backs. It’s exhausting and a huge drain on our energy leaving us empty for the present moment. When we are constantly in the past with our angers, we cannot be fully alive in our present life. When we are clinging to old issues, we are not leaving space for something new and beautiful to grow and be created in its place.
We also know that our current life is created through our thoughts, so if we are always locked into our past we may create the same scenario again and again in our life. I’m not sure about you but I do not want to create the same issues or situations that I worked so hard to move through.
The key to moving through resentment and regret is forgiveness. One way of forgiving is to realize that we are all human and will make mistakes, including ourselves and have compassion for the human condition. Realizing that we are not perfect and that we have probably brought harm to our brother just as our brother has brought harm to us, helps us to forgive.
When we refuse to forgive we keep people locked in the space of our judgments and this energetically does damage to both of us. When we realize that their actions aren’t about us, they are more about their own woundedness, we are better able to have compassion for them and forgive.
Keeping our energy and our mind in the present helps us with our healing both emotionally and physically. When were able to do this we can be in a place of love and not fear. So I encourage you to look at all the places where you’re holding onto resentment and replay how you will let go and forgive and bring yourself into this present moment.
How hard is it to find strength through our everyday trials?
We have all been in a place where the pressures of life have been insurmountable and unbearable. We find ourselves wondering if we will have the strength to make it through. Sometimes we notice that as we are just making it through some major difficulty, there is another obstacle right on its heels. How do we endure one loss after another or withstand several health issues right on top of each other.
I remember a neighbor when I was younger going through one tragic loss after another with her family. Her family of eight dwindled down to two within a three-year period of time. With every loss of her family members, this mother seemed to have a resilient quality about her. All I kept thinking about was how, how can she make it through this.
When we look back at our lives, we see that we have survived many tribulations and often wondered how. It always amazes me the strength that we have. Just when we thought we couldn’t handle any more, we seem to. Sometimes we make it through by just putting our heads down and barreling through and other times we just sink into deep compassion for ourselves and let go.
I look at each obstacle in my life as an opportunity for me to go deeper into my learning and also know that when they are piled on top of each other there’s going to be a huge breakthrough. When I’m deep in it sometimes I can’t see it unless I quiet my mind and look at the deeper meaning of the obstacles. This helps me move through challenging situations with greater ease along with surrendering to what life is and not pushing up against it.
If you are having a hard time with challenges and moving through them, I urge you to check out my Personal Retreats. If you are going through tough times with the partner maybe couples retreat would fit your needs better. Either way you will learn the tools you need to learn to accept life as it is and learn to grow through tough situations.
