by Debra | Jun 29, 2015
It’s easier to stay calm when you have small triggers, maybe from your co-workers, grocery store clerks or anyone actually outside of your core family. Have you noticed how bonkers you get when your partner, kids or parents do things that knock you off your center?
Our core family is our biggest teacher!
I am visiting my daughter and grandson this week and I am shocked at how easily I fall into taking things personally, through my little girl. I immediately recognize who is in the driver’s seat and tell her to please get in the back in the child’s seat. If I don’t pull my higher self in, she will create quite the scene, say things that blame, and inevitably there will be hurt feelings. She is not good at communication and negotiation. All she cares about is getting people to do or say what will make her feel better.
I am grateful that I have been doing this work long enough that I recognize when she is in play. If you don’t know when your inner child is up, you play out a very dramatic scene that will cause a disconnect in the relationship you are engaged in.
In a Personal Retreat you will learn how your little girl operates, how to calm her down, and act from a higher place. Ultimately we all want to be connected with the people in our lives. When we act from our little girl, we push people away. When our little girl is acting out by saying hurtful things or shutting people out and pouting, this kind of behavior will cause a disconnect and will keep you feeling separated in your life.
My grandson sometimes acts in ways that are very ME-centric. What I noticed is that my little girl takes it personally, thinking his actions have something to do with her. She feels like she did something wrong, she’s not important or good enough, etc. If I act from my little girl when she is feeling like that, she will try to get him to behave differently to make her feel better. When I’m in my higher self I know his behavior has nothing to do with me. This is very important because if I act from the place of “It’s about me,” I will blame him and he will feel bad and shut down to me and it will affect our closeness.
In my one-on-one personal retreat you will learn how to not take other people’s behaviors personally and develop closer relationships with the people in your life.
by Debra | Jun 22, 2015
Everyone has different fears and everyone handles their fears differently. The first thing we have to do is look at what triggers our fears, then we can see how we behave when they come up.
What are you afraid of?
- Someone close dying
- Health issues
- Your partner leaving you
- Being alone
- Not being successful
- Money issues
- Aging
- How people perceive you
- Not being loved
These are a few of the issues that you could have fear around. I think we might all have a twinge of fear around most of these but what we are looking for are the big fears that makes us run for the hills. The fears you really want to look at are the ones that make you want to medicate the feelings so you don’t feel them.
When we come up against our fears we have a tendency to run away from the feeling the fears give us. We medicate our feelings so we don’t have to feel them.
Let’s take a look at what we might use to medicate our feelings so that we don’t have to feel them.
Medicators
- Alcohol
- Drugs
- Relationships
- Being busy
- Working
- Shopping
- Talking
- Smoking
- Gambling
Do you get the picture?
You may need a spiritual retreat to help you understand your fears and medicators.
We are so conditioned to not feel our feelings that when they come up, we check out either physically or emotionally. Maybe your parents told you “it wasn’t that bad,” or “don’t be a baby,” or maybe no one in the family ever talked about feelings. Was the yelling and fighting so bad you never want to go there again? There could be many reasons why you stuffed your feelings. What we want to learn is how to be with our feelings, to actually learn how to embrace them.
To embrace our feelings, we have to let them come up and just be with them and not medicate them away. Look at them, how they make our bodies feel and what emotions come up with them. If it’s utter sadness, feel it, explore it, and sit with it until it moves through you, even if it’s horrific. Believe me, if you aren’t medicating your feelings, they can seem unbearable! It’s at this point if you stay with yourself, and don’t run from what you’re feeling, your life will shifts miraculously.
It’s amazing what you learn about yourself through this process. It’s also amazing what fears you overcome by going through this process.
This isn’t easy!
You will get see where your addictions lie. The urge to medicate will be extreme, trust me. You will need a support system. A spiritual retreat may be the support you need. I believe we all need teachers/mentors in our life. We have blind spots that only someone on the outside can see.
by Debra | Jun 15, 2015
How do we find forgiveness in our hearts when someone has done something so horrific to us that it seems unforgivable?
Forgiving is not condoning! Forgiving isn’t saying that the act they did is okay!
Forgiving is realizing we are all human beings in our woundedness and we are all broken. The level of harm we cause to ourself and others is determined by our level of consciousness. We can forgive others by knowing that their actions were not conscious.
This is why it is so important to always be moving forward in our personal development, growing to become a better person. I am sure that at some point in your life that you have done something you weren’t proud of and maybe hurt someone. If you allow the anger and resentment to seethe inside of you, it only is hurting you!
“Holding a grudge is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”
The way through forgiveness is to see that we are all wounded and that we are all doing our best. If someone has done something that is so terrible, it only means that something as terrible or worse had been done to him. Most cases of sexual abuse have proven that the perpetrator was abused as well.
To see the perpetrator as so wounded and abused helps us have love and compassion for them and hope for their healing out of their poison. When we let go of the resentment and anger we free ourself of the poison and free them to their healing. It stops the toxic energy from flowing back and forth and then moving on to someone else. This doesn’t mean that the person will stop behaving in harmful ways: it just means that you will be putting a sweet nectar out into the world instead of poison, and this is how we change the world.
I love this story from Pema Chodron about creating heaven and hell inside of us.
Heaven and Hell
A big, burly samurai comes to the wise man and says, “Tell me the nature of heaven and hell.” And the roshi looks him in the face and says: “Why should I tell a scruffy, disgusting, miserable slob like you?” The samurai starts to get purple in the face, his hair starts to stand up, but the roshi won’t stop, he keeps saying, “A miserable worm like you, do you think I should tell you anything?” Consumed by rage, the samurai draws his sword, and he’s just about to cut off the head of the roshi. Then the roshi says, “That’s hell.” The samurai, who is in fact a sensitive person, instantly gets it, that he just created his own hell; he was deep in hell. It was black and hot, filled with hatred, self-protection, anger, and resentment, so much so that he was going to kill this man. Tears fill his eyes and he starts to cry and he puts his palms together and the roshi says, “That’s heaven.” (From Pema Chodron’s book, Awakening Loving Kindness)
A part of my one-on-one woman’s retreat is about forgiveness because it is so important to forgive as a part of our evolution, our personal development. Holding resentment and anger blocks love as well as our personal power.
by Debra | Jun 8, 2015
How a Personal Retreat Can Help Get You Through Feelings of Loneliness
Most of my clients, friends, people I know, including myself, have had moments of loneliness or feelings of separation. Living alone, spending a lot of time alone, breaking up with a partner, or a situation that triggers old wounding can bring up feelings of being all alone.
My mother died when I was 26, six months after my divorce. My father immediately upon my mother’s death pulled away and immersed himself in his addiction, alcohol, leaving me just as if he had also died. My feelings of loneliness were overwhelming. To this day, when certain situations happen, these feelings of total separation and aloneness get triggered. Before learning this work, I would just suffer with the feelings, medicate them, stuff them and go on. The feelings wouldn’t lay dormant for long before they would be right back scratching on my open wounds again.
This is where a personal retreat would help you to identify your wounding, learn how to be with the feelings, transform the old belief so you don’t have to medicate the feelings. If we don’t understand ourselves or do our personal and psychological work to move through our wounding, we will spend our whole lives running from our feelings, which in turn leads to medicating them so we don’t feel the intensity of the pain.
I teach people in my personal retreats how to get to know them selves, shift their old beliefs and heal the wounding. Do you know people in your life that seem to always be suffering? Taking the same actions over and over and ending up right were they started? The only way to actually move forward is to do the work required to shift the old limiting beliefs we created as children. If we don’t, we will be one of those people walking in a circle, going nowhere.
I know what my path is. Do you?
I want to evolve so that I can show up for my family, friends, the world and myself in a loving way, through my heart. When we live in our hearts, we make a difference in the world. When I live through my old belief system, not only do I suffer, but the actions I may take will also create suffering in others.
by Debra | Jun 1, 2015
Aah, the wonderful feeling of the romance phase of a relationship where you love everything about your partner and they can do no wrong. Where you are being the best part of who you are and you feel amazing. It is where we have the most joy and the biggest ability to forgive.
Often couples talk about how it used to be so exciting in the beginning and how their partner has changed. “How do I bring our relationship back into that honeymoon phase?” They call it the honeymoon phase because it is just that, a phase! The definition of phase is: a stage, segment, period, time, or chapter. A phase isn’t meant to be in forever. The endorphins released during the romance phase would not even be healthy to have for an extended period of time.
A relationship needs to go through 3 stages to be healthy; romance, conflict and a real connection and commitment. It’s the conflict stage that most relationships get stuck in. After the romance phase, while we are in the conflict stage, we are wondering how to get back to the romance stage and we don’t have the tools to move out of this stage to be connected on a deeper level. This is where a couple’s retreat can teach you how to move through the conflict stage without doing harm to yourself or your partner.
The romance phase brings us into a relationship so you can start your healing process through the relationship. It’s through the conflict stage that you have the opportunity to work through your old beliefs, your wounding, and heal. This only happens if you have the tools to not project and to own your own woundedness. This is the work I talk about when you are triggered. You have 2 choices when you are triggered with your partner. One, you blame them, try to fix them, and completely keep the trigger about what’s going on out there instead of what is going on inside of you. Two, you can bring it into your learning, knowing it’s not about them, not blame or project onto them and shift your beliefs, therefore moving into a deeper connection with each other.
The connection phase is a much more authentic space to be in with our primary relationship. It is sustainable unlike the romance phase. The intimacy in the connection phase is real unlike the romance phase, which is filled with projections of who you think they are or want them to be. A couple’s retreat can help you acquired the tools you need to move through the conflict phase to come into a more loving place with yourself and your partner which is a healthy way to develop a strong and connected relationship.
Are you having difficulties with creating intimacy in your primary relationship?
by Debra | May 25, 2015
All of our relationships in our lives are for our learning, whether we stay in them or let them go.
When do we know when it’s time to let one go? This is a very simple answer: when the person in the relationship is in resistance to looking at themselves, expressing how they feel, and doing their inner work.
First, if someone isn’t doing internal exploration, they will project their fears onto you and make it your fault. If they are resistant to doing any work to own their own stuff, it will sit in the relationship and rot! If they haven’t had some type of therapy to be able to look at their shadow side/inner child/ego, you will be in no-man’s land.
Secondly, if they are doing internal exploration and they get triggered, they need to work through the process and share their feelings about the upset with you. If they aren’t working with someone, the chance of them being able to do this on their own, is pretty slim.
If a person you are in relationship with isn’t doing their spiritual and psychological work and you are, and they don’t want to, it’s time to leave the relationship. A couples counseling retreat might help your partner see the need for work like this, but if he is unwilling to explore such options again, it’s time to leave the relationship.
Now, primary relationships are a bit different from friendships. You may be able to have a friendship with someone who is not doing the work if you keep it at a surface level. That means not sharing your process with them and just letting the friendship be a place to have fun, liking go to the movies, working out, etc. With a primary relationship, most of us doing this type of work will ultimately want a deeper relationship with our primary partnership.
This type of journey isn’t for everyone!
It doesn’t make your partner wrong if they don’t want to do this process. It just means you are very different in your core beliefs and it will be impossible to have a deep, connected relationship with them. You could have a relationship where you have a companion to do fun things with and not be alone, but you will never know what he is really feeling, therefore you will never really know him making true intimacy virtually impossible.
If your partner says no to the couples counseling retreat, maybe it’s time for you to come to a personal retreat, to really look at yourself, and unhook from needing your partner to go deeper.
Maybe it’s time for you to go deeper with you!
by Debra | May 18, 2015
What is a medicator, and when do we use them?
Sometimes we have a hard time figuring out what we use to numb/medicate our feelings and why we numb. This is why spiritual guidance is so important. We have blind spots that only someone on the outside can see. When we are in our woundedness, we can be blind to our situation. There are so many medicators that we use to not feel our feelings. Some of the medicators people wouldn’t think as ways to numb. Like religion! Never would you think that this could be one, right?
A medicator is something we use to make us not feel what we label as bad feelings. A short list of medicators can be:
- Alcohol
- Dugs
- Exercise
- Gambling
- Shopping
- Relationships
- Eating
- Spiritual practice
Are you getting the picture? Anything we use to try to make us not feel our feelings is a medicator. As a society we are always trying to only feel good. Our goal to feel good all the time.
The problem with this is it’s not reality!
Life is full of ups and downs; good things happen to us and bad things happen to us. We get a great job opportunity, we meet a special person, buy a beautiful house, and on the opposite side of this we lose our job, get divorced, and lose our home to foreclosure. This is life. It is always full of highs and lows. How we react when we are in our lows is what we should be looking at. Do we run away from our feelings of sadness into the arms of another because we lost our relationship or do we sit with the feelings of loneliness and sadness until it passes?
This can be tough because we have no idea how long these low feelings will last. Our tolerance for sitting with our pain might be very little. The more we learn to sit with it, the higher our tolerance grows. With every situation that comes to us it is an opportunity to see where we are in our spiritual development.
We need spiritual guidance because we can be blind to our shadow side at times.
Sometimes we don’t want to see our shadow side and see how we might be medicating because if we see it, we have to stop medicating. Most people don’t want to give up the vices they use to numb the pain they are feeling. Who would voluntarily want to feel crappy? Someone interested in their spiritual progress and evolution, that’s who! The best time to grow is when we stay present with our feelings and decide to move through them instead of shove them under the rug or numb them so they disappear.
Make a list of all your medicators and what makes you run to them. Then make a conscious choice not to use them when you are feeling low. Make yourself sit down and explore those feelings and track where they came from. No matter how horrible they feel, be with them, cry your eyes out, and self-nurture.
Don’t go outside yourself to feel better.
by Debra | May 11, 2015
First of all, let’s look at the ego mind, which I also refer to as the inner child or our thoughts. Ego/inner child/thoughts are all the same. All of our suffering comes from our ego mind. If we are living in our higher self or adult self, we wouldn’t be suffering. I usually talk about the inner child because it is easier to understand than the ego. We can see how an ego might behave in certain situations, but it is clearer to see how the inner child chatters at us incessantly because of past wounding.
Even when we are not triggered, our minds are always talking. It could be about what we have to do, what we haven’t done or won’t be able to do, what so-and-so thinks about us, if we did something wrong, if we are good enough, if we are too fat, too skinny, blah, blah, blah. It’s exhausting!
The only way to be content is to first understand the ego mind/inner child.
Once we have an understanding of why the ego behaves the way it does, we can have compassion for our inner child and at the same time set boundaries by saying, “I understand why you believe this, but I’m not buying into that because it isn’t real.” This is why an individual retreat might be right for you. It is a way to get a deeper understanding of what makes you tick.
When we don’t know why we think the way we do and why we act the way we do, we are asleep. We are unconscious! Becoming conscious is all about understanding our ego mind/thoughts/inner child so that we do not react through our woundedness. This is not an easy process and cannot be done alone. This is why people have mentors and go to retreats. We cannot see our own blind spots because we are in them. The only way out of them is to work with someone who is not emotionally attached to you.
Are you tired off reacting to your partner, family and friends?
Are you exhausted from the constant battle of the thoughts in your mind? Are you ready to get to know yourself in a more authentic way? Call me and let’s talk about how you might be able to live a more harmonious life.
by Debra | May 10, 2015
My mother passed away when I was 26 years old. It was the most difficult time in my life. I remember thinking, what am I going to do without her, and who will have my back. Even though she was immersed in her own wounding, and had a hard time showing up for me, I knew she was always there. It is an empty space in me without her in my life and feel it most when I am with friends and their mothers, on Mother’s Day or on the day of her birth and death. I have read many books that say no matter what age you lose your mother, it is a loss you never recover from.
I am a mother of two daughters and know that they feel a loss because I am not living close to them. It is a loss for me as well. For all of you with mothers in your life daily, stand in gratitude, you are so lucky. To have a mothers love near, no matter how it is delivered to you is precious.
For all of the mothers in the world, know how special you really are. Being a mother is both joyous and heart breaking. The joy that I have felt as a mother has been from the deepest part of my heart. To look at my daughters and feel our connection, our love, and sometimes our aching hearts is such a gift. Being a mother is loving in the most unconditional way. Giving your child your food even though you’re still hungry, giving up your sweater when you are cold and giving them love when you’re so angry you could spit nails.
I have loved being a mother and miss terribly the absence of my own mother. The loss that comes up in most situations in my life today, even though they aren’t related to my mom. I use these feelings of loss to be more connected to myself and others. To know there are others suffering the loss and send them love and comfort.
Happy Mother’s Day to all of the moms out there and here is a piece of my heart to those that have lost their mother. I’m sending my love to all of you on this memorable day.
With Love, Debra
by Debra | May 4, 2015
Happiness seems to be something we are all trying our best to achieve. One way or another we want to:
- Avoid pain and gain pleasure
- Avoid criticism and get praise
- Avoid disgrace and have fame
- Avoid loss and achieve gain
Is it possible to be happy and never be sad?
The problem is, life is a roller coaster ride of ups and downs. We can’t experience pleasure without experiencing pain. We are always grasping for feeling good, not bad, and this just isn’t possible living in the real world. Things are going to happen in life that are disturbing and things are going to happen that put a big smile on our face.
In my individual retreat you will learn to see what you are clinging to and what you are trying to avoid. You will get to explore these parts of you that make you suffer, the old beliefs that are keeping you stuck.
What makes you feel good and what makes you feel bad?
I was talking with a client the other day and she was having difficulty with allowing herself to actually just be with her feelings of sadness. First off, she didn’t want to feel them, and secondly she felt weak for having them. Because she had guilt and shame around feeling sad, she would medicate to not feel them. Cleaning her house was her medicator. I can certainly think of worse medicators, but non-the-less it is an avoidance of feeling.
Why are we so opposed to feeling our feelings?
We avoid feeling our feelings because it’s so totally uncomfortable. Our mind goes off into our story, we start feeling crummy, and then it settles in our body. We might get a stomachache, headache, or not be able to eat. The feelings permeate our physical body. This is why we avoid them. There is nothing comfortable about feelings of sadness, loneliness, or hopelessness, etc. Sometimes feelings of anger feel good in the moment because they cover up the real feeling of sadness. Once we are done with our anger we will usually be left with the raw feelings of sadness.
In my individual retreat you get to explore your feelings and why they come up and learn how to be with them without feeling like you might die. Sometimes the feelings are so overwhelming that you will feel like you are dying.
Hence the avoidance!
The problem with avoiding your feelings is you never shift your old belief causing the feelings. So, you might as well get your hands dirty and start looking at your stuff. When we look at what causes the feelings, we give ourselves the attention and care we need to do our healing work and actually diminish the heat that is in the feelings.
Are you ready to make a shift in your life and start facing your feelings? My individual retreat will give you the opportunity to be in a nurturing environment, working one-on-one, shifting your old beliefs, feeling your feelings, and changing your life.
by Debra | Apr 27, 2015
Let’s look at being an adult in your relationships. Whether it be in your partnership, friends, or with your children and how a personal retreat can change your outlooks and reactions to those around you.
How do you behave when you get triggered?
- Do you shut down and walk away?
- Do you yell and spew your anger?
- Do you shut down completely and withhold?
- Do you get so emotional you can’t gather up the pieces?
- Do you defend your position and get lost in your story?
- Do you go into fix-it mode and try to control the situation?
- Do you take all the blame just to have it go away?
- Do you pretend like it never happened and sweep it under the rug?
All of these behaviors are the acts of a little girl and not a mature adult. A mature adult would explore her feelings around the trigger, track where the feelings came from in her childhood, and then share those feelings with the person that triggered her to keep the lines of communication open and keep safety in the relationship.
When you behave like a child with any of the behaviors noted above, it closes down the heart space in the relationship and eliminates any hope for an intimate and close connection. If you haven’t done your work around your woundedness as a child, there is very little hope for you to behave like an adult during an upset/trigger.
During your personal retreat, you will learn all about your childhood wounds, how your little girl behaves when she is triggered, and how to shift the limiting belief in order to behave like a mature adult.
This process is growing the little girl up!
Not only do you behave like a little girl during an upset but also the emotions that run through your body are sometimes overwhelming and hard to ignore. Wouldn’t it be better to be able to look at all upsets from your higher self, which is calm and capable of making a decision, that will bring a win-win solution and keep all parties’ hearts open?
Acting from our higher self and living from our heart is always a much better solution for creating more connected relationships and more peace in the world in general. It is actually shocking how many people get affected by one person acting like a child.
A child is someone who cannot share their feelings maturely. We expect this behavior from children, not grown-ups. It is amazing how many grown people are living through their wounded little child and behaving immaturely.
by Debra | Apr 20, 2015
I remember being in a group workshop when I was 32-years-old where our goal was to overcome our fears. When I enrolled in this powerful group workshop, I had no idea what I was in for.
This was Spiritual Guidance on steroids!
We started out with about 50 people and as the program continued, it dwindled down to 26 scared, intimated, and determined few with strong desires to overcome huge obstacles that had been running their lives.
Fears will run our lives if we let them! How spiritual guidance can control the fear.
We may always have certain fears and if we hear and acknowledge them, that’s okay. But if we act through them, that is another story. Here’s where spiritual guidance plays a role. A typical fear of many people is being embarrassed in front of others. If we can understand why we have this fear and bring compassion to ourselves around it, that would be a loving way to be with ourselves. But, what happens is we do what our little girl/ego is telling us to do or not do; this is where the trouble starts. An example of this might be, I have a fear of speaking in public. Because of what I do for a living, it would be nice for me to be able to go into groups and speak in order to help them. If I let this fear of speaking in public run my life, I wouldn’t go into the world and be of service because I would be afraid of doing something wrong, making a mistake, etc.
Speaking in public used to be a big fear of mine. It still gives me a bit of a twinge, but I never let it stop me from doing it. I would always put myself in situations where I would have to move through those fears so that they wouldn’t own me. This is where the real value of spiritual guidance comes in.
While in this spiritual guidance workshop, I had to do things that would put me face to face with my personal demons. First, I went to a mall and did cartwheels throughout it. Very embarrassing! Then, I went to work and had to speak in front of a group of people, and I decided to get a double-whammy out of it because I decided not to wear make-up. Not wearing make-up was a big fear when I was younger. I didn’t really want to be seen.
So, after a while of making myself continue to walk through these difficult situations, these fears, it became easier and easier. I wouldn’t say I love public speaking, but I can do it without throwing up.
Fears are all about the story our inner child is telling us!
If I get up in front of people and speak, I will do something wrong and people will judge me and I will die. I know this sounds extreme, but our inner child is extreme. We have a choice to either believe the story and act out of that place, or tell the little girl that you understand why she has these beliefs but that you aren’t going to buy into them. Then no matter what, don’t take the action your little girl/ego is telling you.
Our fears come in all different degrees, from little ones that are fairly easy to overcome to huge ones that paralyze us. No matter what size they are, don’t let them run your life. Take control over them and shift the old limiting beliefs around them.
We can be our own spiritual guidance counselor by just staying awake to what stories our inner child is telling us and not acting out of them.
It’s easier to stay calm when you have small triggers, maybe from your co-workers, grocery store clerks or anyone actually outside of your core family. Have you noticed how bonkers you get when your partner, kids or parents do things that knock you off your center?
