by Debra | Dec 14, 2015
Through out my life, I have always been in search of a teacher that can take me to the next level in my personal growth. It’s always comical to me when I am looking how the perfect teacher comes to me. When I am talking to someone about mentoring or a personal retreat, they just know and we start the process. I often hear from clients that when they read through my website, SedonaSoulRetrieval.com, that my words just resonated with them and they called.
In all the spiritual guidance books I have read, they seem to say the same things about needing a teacher to uncover your blind spots. We all have blind spots and we can’t see them, hence blind spots. I’ve always enjoyed my relationship with my teachers because if I am with them long enough, they get to know me as I am seeing myself and can help me with those shadow sides that I am either not willing to see or just simply don’t see. If your relationship is a conscious one, most of the time you are willing to look at what your teacher can see. This may not always be fun or easy, but the rewards of seeing yourself clearer are always enlightening and put you in a better place.
The process that I designed and use gives my clients the opportunity to really see themselves, understand themselves, and make the shifts in their lives that are necessary for their growth as spiritual beings in this physical world.
The process is using life experiences as a tool to see if you are operating from a lower or higher consciousness. We want to be operating from our higher selves, obviously more than our lower selves. But what if we don’t even know the difference? This is where the problem lies. To get to a higher way of living, we first need to know what our lower self is saying and what action our lower self is taking. Then, and only then, can we shift into a higher way of living.
By shifting into living in our higher selves, we can go into the world with a higher vibration and participate with others from our heart, not our fears. We can show up for family, friends, the world and ourselves from a place of love, kindness and compassion.
The first place to start has to be ourselves and then we can take ourselves into the world from an empowered position and help change the world.
“I walked into this retreat feeling overwhelmingly sad, broken and alone. I am walking out empowered awake and at peace. To say that this retreat was life changing would be a huge understatement. This work is incredible and creates huge shifts. I’ve done self-improvement work for over a decade, but nothing ever really changed for me.
This work with Debra made it clear why nothing had ever worked before. She is an incredibly warm, sincere and loving person who creates a beautifully safe place to work in. I don’t want to leave! All I can say is you deserve this retreat. Love yourself enough to give yourself this gift. I will be forever grateful that I get it.” Melissa Sanford
by Debra | Dec 7, 2015
If you were never taught that you had rights as a child, there is a good possibility that saying “No” isn’t in your vocabulary. Because I was abused as a child, lived with a binging alcoholic and a mother that never said no, I couldn’t say it as an adult, especially with men.
The words simply wouldn’t or couldn’t come out of my mouth. If a man was an authority figure or I dated a boyfriend with a strong personality, I wouldn’t speak my truth or ever set a boundary. If I did happen to get the “No” word out, I would immediately think I did something wrong and feel insurmountable guilt.
It has taken many years of processing through my childhood wounding to even realize that I wasn’t speaking my truth, and to shift my old beliefs to get to a point where I can say “No, thank you,” and not have a knot in my stomach or beat myself up.
If you can’t say no, you can’t set healthy boundaries.
If you can’t set boundaries, you will be resentful and be a victim. The first step is realizing it is your lower self that stops you from setting boundaries and saying no. If you were in your higher self, it would know that you have rights and that setting boundaries is for everyone’s higher good.
In my personal retreats, this is one of the basic things you will learn. We will look at your past wounding and explore your old beliefs from those wounds and create new beliefs and behaviors to start living a more empowered life. It’s impossible to be empowered if you are a victim, not setting boundaries, and blaming others for not doing what they should do.
Call me and let’s explore how a personal retreat will help you become more empowered.
Testimonial From a 2-Day Retreat
“I walked into this retreat feeling overwhelmingly sad, broken and alone. I am walking out empowered awake and at peace. To say that this retreat was life changing would be a huge understatement. This work is incredible and creates huge shifts. I’ve done self-improvement work for over a decade, but nothing ever really changed for me.
This work with Debra made it clear why nothing had ever worked before. She is an incredibly warm, sincere and loving person who creates a beautifully safe place to work in. I don’t want to leave! All I can say is you deserve this retreat. Love yourself enough to give yourself this gift. I will be forever grateful that I get it.”
-Melissa Sanford
by Debra | Nov 30, 2015
Through a personal retreat you can learn how to allow your kids to have feelings and not let it upset you as well.
How often do we really allow ourselves and our children to feel what we are feeling? A client of mine was expressing how nervous she gets when her 7-year-old son tells her he is worried. When she asks him what he is worried about, he says he doesn’t know. Then she really gets worried and tries to fix the situation by telling him there is nothing for him to be worried about. She tries to distract him from his worry with ice cream, TV, or calling a friend over to play. Does telling her son not to worry make him not worry? Well, it didn’t stop him from worrying. The anxiety kept building.
My suggestion was to tell him that it was okay to be worried and that everyone feels worried at one time or another, including her. I also suggested that she ask him what it felt like in his body. Was it a contraction or perhaps a nervous stomach? What was the sensation he was feeling? He described the feeling as shaky and sick. Then I asked her to just let him be with the shaky and sick feeling and to ask him if he was okay being with those feelings.
At first, he said he just didn’t want to feel those feelings and he wanted it to stop. But after a while of feeling it, he said it went away. Every time he got those feelings, he would do this, and the bad feelings would go away. He had learned that the feelings and sensations weren’t going to hurt him.
This exercise teaches our children how to be with their feelings. If we start medicating their feelings when they are young and they can’t be with the feelings, then how will they ever learn? Feelings are normal. Worry, anxiety, fear, sadness and anger are all normal feelings. If we are always trying not to feel them, they don’t go away.
Pretending not to have them actually makes them stay longer.
Teach your children how to be with their feelings and let them know they are a normal part of life. Life is up and down. If we can only be with the up parts, the good, then we won’t be able to sustain our joy in life.
How hard is it for you as a parent to allow your kids, no matter what age they are to suffer a bit and be with their feelings? Most parents say it’s almost impossible!
In a personal retreat, you will learn the importance of being with your feelings and letting others be with theirs.
by Debra | Nov 23, 2015
Teens are selfish by nature. Their brains haven’t yet fully developed, which means that it will take them time to grow into the caring individuals they have the potential to become. We can help them become the best possible versions of themselves by teaching proper values from a young age. One of those values is realizing the importance of gratitude. What better time of year to do that than the Thanksgiving holiday?
1. Start Young
If you start teaching your children about gratitude and kindness when they are young, it will stay with them. However, that doesn’t mean it’s too late to get started now. If your kids are already teens, you can still help them learn these values by creating new Thanksgiving traditions to enjoy together. If you’ve never gone around the table to say what you’re thankful for prior to enjoying the holiday dinner, why not start this year? Your kids will probably roll their eyes and get annoyed, but deep down, they will enjoy recognizing all of the wonderful things in their world.
2. Try Not to Compare
Growing up, your parents probably told you that it was important to appreciate and finish your dinner because there were children starving in other countries. While this is true, it just doesn’t make an impact on most kids, especially teenagers. If it does make an impact, it will probably make your teens feel guilty about what they have. You want to cultivate gratitude, and your teen can’t do that if he or she is thinking about how everyone else is suffering. Instead, try talking to your kids about how people can feel grateful no matter what their circumstances. Kids in poor countries might not have all the latest toys and gadgets, but they still feel grateful over the things they do have. It’s all relative, and appreciation is always a good thing.
3. Be a Good Influence
Thanksgiving is a very special holiday, but it won’t do anyone any good to be thankful one day a year. You are your teen’s greatest role model, and if you practice an attitude of gratitude all year long, it will have a strong effect on your teen, even if it doesn’t seem like it.
It’s good to point out the things you’re grateful for, such as having food in the fridge or a nice home, but if you really want to get your teen’s attention, try thanking him or her every time they do something to make you proud. Even showing appreciation for the little things, such as cleaning the bathroom, can do a lot to make teens feel good about themselves.
by Debra | Nov 16, 2015
It’s amazing what we will do to not acknowledge, avoid, or get away from our feelings. Why is this? The answer is because we dislike how they feel. We only want to feel good things and when something comes up in our minds and bodies that feels uneasy, anxious, terrifying, sad, hopeless, etc., we push it away.
Is it possible only to feel good all the time? Not in the world we live in, and not in the bodies we preside in. Life is full of ups and downs. We will have happy moments and sad moments and maybe even tragedies. If we cannot adjust to all of life’s moments, we will be unhappy, sad, fearful, or hopeless.
Have you ever tried to just sit and be with your feelings and, deeper yet, the sensations of your feelings? I have and it’s shocking how they feel in my body. I want to welcome in all the feeling and sensations going on in me, not just the pleasant ones. The growth is in the unpleasant ones, so if I want to evolve and grow, I need to pay close attention to the disturbing sensations in me.
The other day, I was feeling very anxious and after I tracked the feelings and where they were coming from, I sat down and explored the sensations going on in my body. What I found was total terror. The sensations were tightness in my chest, nausea and shortness of breath. I kept the story about why I started feeling this out of the picture. I only sat with the sensations, and within a very short period of time, the sensations were completely gone. In Buddhism there is a belief that when these feelings come up, we are exhausting them not only for ourselves, but for other sentient beings as well.
I was able to feel the feelings and drop the story.
I’m not sure that it is realistic to believe that in this lifetime we can rid ourselves of all unpleasant sensations. If we cannot, then I choose to allow them in with love and compassion and feel them without judgment or resistance. This process allows for such spiritual renewal and teaches us how to be with our feelings just as we are, with all of the pleasant and unpleasant feelings life has to offer. It also helps us see things through our higher self, knowing that all feelings and sensations are for our higher learning.
by Debra | Nov 9, 2015
First, let’s talk about what a projection is. I was talking to a client this morning, and she was telling me that a friend, Katie of her daughter was concerned about the way her daughter was eating. A little background info is that her daughter watches what she eats carefully and has been diagnosed with a disorder concerning eating but not a full blown eating disorder. My client and her daughter are on top of this. The daughter sees a nutritionist, a mentor, and a doctor.
A group of the youths went out after a game for donuts at 11:00 PM and my client’s daughter said she would go but wouldn’t be eating a donut because it would make her feel crummy for tomorrow’s game. Katie said she and Katie’s mother were very worried about my client’s daughter’s eating habits and that my client’s daughter needed to see a therapist, and Katie wasn’t going to be able to hang out with my client’s daughter anymore.
Projection or Not?
It is a total projection. If Katie and her mother are having fears regarding my client’s daughter’s eating habits, it’s their trigger. They should go see a therapist and figure out why they are having so much fear concerning someone else’s behavior. Remember in my blog: Do Your Feelings Come from Inside or Outside of You?, where I talked about lower and higher consciousness?
Lower consciousness is where we feel the need to change other people’s behavior to make our self feel better, and higher consciousness is where we know our feelings come from inside of our self. So, in this situation, Katie and her mother would have to change a lot of people’s behavior in the world so that they wouldn’t feel afraid.
That’s impossible. We couldn’t change other people no matter how much we wanted to. We can only change how we react to the fear inside of us. It would be a good thing if Katie and her mother could look at where their fears are coming from and stop projecting them onto my client’s daughter.
by Debra | Nov 2, 2015
“Life is available only in the present moment.”
-Thich Nhat Hanh
I love these quotes because I know that true joy and aliveness come from being present in the only moment we truly ever have, this Moment!
We are so trained to live in the past and the future. Look at our careers. We look at how we can get ahead, move up the ladder so we can earn enough money to buy the things we want, go on special trips, buy a better car, etc., in the future. We are always looking into the future. If we are single, we are looking at finding someone. If we are married, we are looking to make our relationship better. We are always planning for something in the future.
The past gets us as well. We look at what we have done, and maybe we have regrets about what we have done. We might also look at the past and have a yearning for what we have lost. We also spend time with our memories. We live in a world of high stimulation where we have become quite multitask oriented.
How often are we truly right here in the present moment? It isn’t easy to be in this life as it is unfolding. Our minds are capable of looking back and projecting forward, so it makes for being right here tough.
Let’s look at a few simple ways we can stay in the present moment.
- Slow down-relax and be calm about your daily practice, whether it be eating breakfast, going to work, working out, or cooking your dinner. Do things with intention and ease.
- Start your day with a meditation practice-this helps to bring an awareness to my day and helps me be more conscious throughout. Set an intention to slow down and be in the moment.
- Name what you are doing-I am eating breakfast now, chewing my toast, walking to my bedroom, calling a client. It is a gentle reminder of where I am.
- Do one thing at a time-it has been proven that doing more than one task at a time isn’t effective, and it’s impossible to stay in the present moment when there are two present moments.
- Set daily reminders to be present-I have three reminders/alarms throughout the day that remind me to stop, breath, pause, and bring myself back into the present moment. This is such a wake up call to myself.
Practice these on a daily basis and see if it helps you to be more present in your daily life. In my personal retreat, we work on different ways of making it easy to be present and enjoy your life just as it is.
by Debra | Oct 26, 2015
Can we ask our partner to meet our needs?
What expectations do we have for our partner to make us happy?
Of course, we want to be in a partnership where we can relay our needs, desires and requests and have them heard and understood. But, what if our expectations aren’t met? Is it our partner’s job to meet our needs and be responsible for our happiness?
The answer is NO! It’s nobody’s job to make us happy but ours!
This doesn’t mean that we can’t share what we would desire from our relationship in a healthy way and hope to be heard. What does this look like? When we are wanting our partner to show up for us in a certain way to make us feel better, this is where things get sticky. This is a projection of our wounding being put onto someone else. It isn’t anyone’s responsibility to heal our wounds from our childhood but ours. When we project, there will always be resistance from the party we are projecting onto. This is how we always know if we aren’t owing our own wounding and expecting someone else to come in and save the day from our own pain and suffering.
NOT THEIR JOB!
If our partner gets defensive, there is one of two reasons. One is, we are projecting and needing them to behave in a certain way to make us feel better, or two, we are owning our own issues and they don’t want to own theirs, and therefore they project. It is very tricky to know the difference, although if you are both doing this work, you will both know when you are owning and when you are projecting. Let’s look at this more closely.
Owning your own wounding: “When you did this, it triggered my little girl and she is buying into this old belief and has these feelings. It’s not about you changing your behavior. It’s about me shifting my old beliefs around the behavior.”
Projecting: “When you did this, it really made me angry, and I need you to stop doing that. If you would just stop behaving like that, I would feel better.”
Do you see the difference? The first one shifts old beliefs and heals your wounding. The second expands your old beliefs and doesn’t allow for any healing to be done. If you want to heal the wound and shift the belief you have to own your trigger.
by Debra | Oct 19, 2015
It’s funny, I was talking to a friend the other day about being alone and she said she loves it. Then I asked her when was she actually really alone, with no husband and no kids. She started looking a bit perplexed and said that she never viewed being alone as being without people around at all. She realized she had never truly been alone.
I have always had some anxiety around being alone. When I started exploring my belief about what alone was, I realized it had been skewed by my childhood. Because of being sexually abused as a child, I view being alone as dark, empty, scary, and full of angst. When I actually asked Alone what it was like to be him, he said, “Calm, quiet, relaxing and peaceful.” Wow! I was shocked because I had misjudged Alone totally.
I started to get to know Alone in a new way, seeing past my old limiting beliefs from my childhood to really seeing what Alone was. We do this often with a lot of views we have. We see them through our little girl’s eyes and she has a skewed view of things. If we continue to see through her eyes and live through her beliefs, we will live our lives with an abundance of fear and judgment.
This is not how I want to live!
I want to live in my higher self with purpose, joy and happiness. If I am in fear it will be impossible for me to live there. When I come from this place of joy and purpose, my life unfolds organically with a flow that feels calmer. This isn’t to say that I’m never triggered. It means that when I am triggered, I know that I am buying into my little girl’s skewed way of thinking. Then I bring in my higher self and set my little girl/ego straight. When I do this right at the onset of the trigger, the heat comes out of the trigger and I support a higher way of living, not my old way of believing through my lower self/little girl.
by Debra | Oct 12, 2015
Spirituality looks different for everyone. Some people will describe their spirituality in reference to their religion or their faith. Some people say it’s just about being a good person and treating people the way you would want to be treated. Others may believe it’s about the law of attraction. There are so many ways we can view our spirituality. It really is all about what is working for you.
For me my spirituality is a combination of my spiritual and psychological practice.
As long as I am doing both, I continue to develop and evolve.
Is your form of spirituality working for you?
My spiritual practice involves me waking up in the morning and connecting to my Higher Power and letting my Higher Power know I am up for whatever the universe is going to bring on for my growth. Sometimes a scary phrase is, “Bring it on, Universe!” If I truly want to keep evolving on my spiritual path, I have to embrace everything that the universe brings me, knowing it’s for my higher learning. Then through out the day I connect with Source to make sure I’m not on autopilot. At the close of my day I ask my Higher Power how I did. Did I take over when I could have let go? Was I unkind because I was in my little girl/ego? Was I asleep all day forgetting my purpose in life? I take an inventory of my day and myself.
In my psychological practice I address every trigger, knowing it is there to help me heal and shift my old beliefs. I take it off of the person or thing that triggers me and totally own it, bringing it back to me. If I am practicing consciousness both spiritually and psychologically, I can stay awake and behave in a way that can heal not only my wounds but all sentient beings.
My passion and purpose in life is to show up for people at a high level. If I am not doing my work, I won’t be able to. So, I do my practice for myself and ultimately the world.
I want to show up for myself, my family, my friends, and everyone that I come in contact with. I also want to shift my old beliefs knowing I am shifting them in the world.
by Debra | Oct 5, 2015
Do you have guilt?
Where does it come from?
What actions do you take when you feel it?
How do you process it?
We have all had guilt at one time or another, whether it’s guilt about our parenting skills, our work performance, our exercise regime, eating habits or just a constant feeling of not being good enough.
It’s what we do after we feel the guilt that really matters. We know we are going to feel it but what do we do with it when it occurs?
The first thing we need to do is track where it comes from. Why are we feeling guilty? If the why is, I’m eating poorly and feeling guilty, okay. Now let’s track it further. Why are you eating poorly? Is it because of stress, for comfort, to medicate feelings, or maybe it’s a lack of knowledge of good eating habits? After we have gathered data around what we are doing that caused the guilt and why, we start to have an understanding about ourselves and bring consciousness to the issue.
After we understand this, we now need to determine if the guilt is about our behavior or is it someone else’s projection. A perfect example of it being someone else’s projection would be someone wanting you to do something and guilting you into it. They would try to manipulate you by saying you were doing something wrong if you didn’t behave the way they wanted you to. Be certain before you change your behavior that it’s because this is behavior you want to change and not because someone is manipulating you.
The exploration of guilt is very important because it allows you to know what to do with the guilt. You will need to look at your part and let the guilt know that you don’t need it to beat you up in order to make a shift. This is where a personal retreat can help!
The next thing to look at is the action your little girl might try to get you to take to make the guilty feelings go away. Sometimes when we are feeling guilty, we will appease others to make the feelings go away. This is where guilt is tricky. In the example of eating better, you would want to obviously change your diet and eat healthier. But in a situation where maybe an overweight family member is telling you it’s your fault she eats poorly, this would be a guilting projection.
Does she gain weight when you eat? Exactly!
Processing the guilt by talking to it as well as the little girl is a good way to get to the bottom of the feelings. Ask your little girl about what she is saying about the situation, and then ask the guilt why it is feeling this way about the situation. Guilty!
This process takes an extreme amount of practice and patience, and it’s critical to utilize someone who can see things from the outside. This is why a personal retreat is so powerful. It helps you see yourself from the outside and untangle from your emotions.
If you would like to step outside of your emotional entanglement and see more clearly, please call me and let’s chat about ways you can become clearer.
by Debra | Sep 28, 2015
Do you have good communication skills?
Do you say what you mean?
Do you listen or are you thinking about what you are going to say next?
Are you afraid to speak your truth?
Have you listened to most people communicate? Their communication may sound a bit cryptic. They may think they are expressing their needs, but is their message clear?
If we go deeper into our needs, we will notice that our surface level communication does not address our real concerns or needs. Let’s look at an example of what I am talking about.
You and your partner have planned an evening out to go to dinner and you both just got home from work. You say to your partner, “Are you going to take a shower?” He says yes, and off he goes into the bathroom. You are feeling a bit anxious because when you don’t eat on a regular schedule, your blood levels drop a bit and you start to feel sick. Do you think your partner knows how you feel? No, he thinks you just wanted to know if he was taking a shower. A better way to communicate your needs would have sounded more like this. “I was wondering how long it is going to take you to get ready because I may need to eat a small snack before we go, so that I don’t get a blood sugar crash and feel crummy. I’m really looking forward to our evening together and it would disappoint me to feel bad.”
Pretty obvious which one communicates your needs better, right? We do this all the time. Our partners and the people in our lives cannot read our minds and understand what our concerns and needs are unless we tell them. Unless we are aware of what our main concerns are with ourself, we won’t be able to convey them to anyone else.
The key to helping your partner understand you is:
- Pause before you speak.
- Think about what your needs are.
- Think about what the clearest way to express them would be.
- Communicate them clearly.
Most arguments start because of a lack of clarity in communication. My clients will often complain that their partner says, “I’m not a mind reader.” So, help your partner understand you and show up for you by communicating clearly.
Through out my life, I have always been in search of a teacher that can take me to the next level in my personal growth. It’s always comical to me when I am looking how the perfect teacher comes to me. When I am talking to someone about mentoring or a personal retreat, they just know and we start the process. I often hear from clients that when they read through my website, SedonaSoulRetrieval.com, that my words just resonated with them and they called.
