Focus

As a photographer, I love to play around with focus. What to focus on. Some days I love to get up close on the tiniest thing like the seed on a strawberry. While others I’m all about the landscape. Did you know the most desired portrait photos keep the subject sharply in focus while intentionally blurring out the background?

This past week, we had a few winter weather systems pass through, bringing us freezing temperatures, snow, wind, and power outages. And then we had part of a day when the sun graced us while snow stuck to everything. My favorite winter wonderland. And even though it didn’t last long, the incredible beauty called to me and I snapped a few photos.

Other than looking at life through the lens of a camera, when it comes to how I see things in general, I tend to see what’s right in front of me, as do most people.

And most of the time seeing what’s right in front of me works. And sometimes it doesn’t.

After I had my son, life taught me a huge lesson of shifting focus. He had a lot of challenging behaviors that didn’t seem to change if I raised my voice or do things like take away his toys to get him to comply with my wishes. In fact, if I did this, his behavior just got worse. I had to learn to look beneath the behavior. Before too long I learned that my son’s body and brain weren’t wired like mine. I had to figure out what helped him feel better, and when he felt better he’d do what I wanted, and was able to learn what was expected of him without melting down into a tantrum.

Everyone has something in their life that’s a chronic challenge. For some, it’s their finances, and for others, it’s relationships, perhaps a physical or mental health issue, or like me, the struggle to keep a healthy weight. Our society loves to focus on a person’s physical appearance, and a huge part of that is their weight. Doctors use a person’s weight as a marker of physical health, so if you’re overweight, people assume you’re not healthy and you lack the ability to control yourself.

I can still remember being about ten years old, having my annual physical, and my doctor telling my mother I was about five pounds overweight. From about the age of thirteen, I dieted chronically and pretty much saw myself through the lens of my weight. If I was “fit” I was acceptable and was ok with myself. If I was “fat” I was unacceptable and was definitely not ok. My weight fluctuated down and back up. Down some more and up. I was the poster child for a yo-yo dieter.

In my mid-thirties I could suddenly no longer stick to a diet. Not for even a day. And I gave up trying. As my weight increased, I finally realized I needed to shift focus. Instead of trying to control something I was obviously not able to control, I began to look inside. I began to investigate what was beneath my behavior – what was causing the cravings. Using hypnotherapy, I saw how eating saved me when I was so very little, and that cravings were still trying to save me. Food was my balm, soothing my inner child.

As I worked with a few different hypnotherapists I had success healing food cravings. Some success lasted longer than others, and when life brought me new challenges, I’d go have a few more sessions to heal new things that were finally ready to be addressed.

What I didn’t realize years ago, was how my interest in dealing with a lifelong challenge with weight by using hypnotherapy would end up introducing me to a life-altering, consciousness expanding, healing modality. By focusing on what was right in front of me – weight problems – and following breadcrumbs of what worked, I was led to my ticket to easy inner change. A way to make changes in my life from the inside out. Shifting my entire perspective of life a few times.

After having been through two different spiritual awakenings, I’m now able to shift my focus fairly easily when looking at a situation, looking through the lenses of the various participants. Able to empathize and understand different perspectives while withholding judgment and condemnation.

Standing back with a long lens, I now recognize that my soul’s desire has been working behind the scenes, guiding and leading me to a bigger picture of my life. And where it will end up I still don’t know. But I know it’s going to be good!

Welcome 2020

It feels strange to be at the beginning of a new decade, yet here we are. In many ways, it’s just like any other day or week, yet it’s not. When I look back at the past ten years, I’m struck by how much has changed. Not only has my energetic seven-year-old son turned into a teenager who’d rather hide out in his bedroom and spend time online with his friends, but the person I was is long gone, courtesy of two different spiritual awakenings.

These days, my son, taller than his father, is plugging his way through high school requirements, and is little more than halfway through. Because we work with an independent study private school, what school looks like for him is much different than it did when he went to public school. In some ways, it’s much better, because he can get the one on one attention at home that he so often needs, living with learning disabilities. Yet, because of the grueling Kundalini awakening process I’ve been going through for almost three years now, there have been many a day when I wished my son was back in public school with teachers who aren’t me have proper training and having exposure to classes he won’t have at home. Nevertheless, we push on.

Ten years ago, I was a wife and mother with a passion for photography and writing. And just a few months into 2011, through a series of synchronous events, I experienced a very unexpected spiritual awakening. The process wasn’t uncomfortable at all, and in fact, felt like a curiosity that had been lying dormant within me woke up with ferocity. The desire to know everything about energy healing – and to know it yesterday. From 2011 to 2017, life sent me down the rabbit hole of healing and learning about healing. It was magical. And it was invaluable during the time of my parents’ demise, from September 2011 when they were both hospitalized, through my father’s and then my mother’s deaths in 2012, to emptying out and selling the family house early in 2013.

Upon my first awakening, I read voraciously, studied, watched interviews, took classes and workshops, had healing sessions, and every once in awhile practiced healing on my family. By the end of 2016, during healing sessions, I noticed that what was able to be healed was so much more than when I began working with this same hypnotherapist in 2013. Looking for root causes of emotional triggers usually took me back to childhood events that laid dormant in my unconscious mind, but from time to time my regression would end up in a previous lifetime. Leftover emotional pain (often fear) was still affecting me and we addressed and healed it.

By the end of February 2017, so much of my inner landscape had been healed that my soul conspired to create yet another massive shift in my consciousness, another awakening. This time, followed by Kundalini energy opening. The way I saw life began to shift quite dramatically, and Kundalini began its work on me. One of the things about my Kundalini awakening process has been unrelenting inner shifting, healing. Some people would say my ego is dying. It’s not dying, it’s being healed, belief by belief, Kundalini energy helping to bring it all up. Separated parts of my soul are being reunited with me, changing my consciousness. Changing how I see the world (with more compassion and understanding) and how I respond to life (with far less judgment and emotional reactivity).

Because I’ve never been a spiritual seeker and never in my wildest dreams expected to have a spiritual awakening, never mind two, searching for language to describe the hell ride I’ve been on for almost the past three years has been tough. Much of the language to describe what I’ve been going through comes from Eastern philosophies and schools of thought. Westerners are too much in our minds, needing scientific proof.

Yet here I sit, a science geek who needed proof before she believed things she couldn’t see, trying to describe a completely transformational process that can’t be seen or measured by current scientific instruments.

A few weeks ago, I found a YouTube channel of a woman who’s been through what I’m going through and is well out the other side. Keep in mind that each and every Kundalini experience is as unique as every person, yet there are similarities. So, if you’re at all interested in the topic of spiritual awakening, what they look like, and tips to help you survive a difficult one, check out Christina Lopes. She also offers coaching services to help people navigate spiritual awakenings.

I seem to have found the people and support I’ve needed to get through. And the tag end of 2018 through 2019 had me back to working in hypnotherapy after a year and a half break. Two of the biggest challenges during this intense process have been very literally rewiring my body and brain, creating havoc with my ability to think clearly and be energetic. As such, my ability to write has often been severely compromised. Hence, the dearth of posts on this blog over the past three years. It’s a temporary state, yet temporary when it comes to these sorts of awakenings can last for a number of years.

In the meanwhile, more of my postings have been on my sister blog, Remembering My Divinity, where I began to chronicle my healing journey in life back in 2016, and lately, my Kundalini awakening process. It’s real, it’s raw, and filled with spiritual perspective and wisdom.

Several years ago I stopped making New Year’s resolutions focused on my external life. This year, my resolve will be what it’s been for the past several years: to make it through what life throws at me with as much grace and ease as possible, without judging what that looks like.

And if I were to pick a word of the year (WOTY), it would be Clarity. To be able to see things clearly from the 30,000 ft. view of life, or as spiritual teacher Abraham-Hicks says, from a broader perspective. And to have very literally a clearer mind every day. Thinking through mud has not been fun or easy. Here’s to 2020 being full of clarity!

 

Eagles!

Here in the Pacific Northwest our winter weather is fairy temperate. Nestled between Puget Sound and the Cascade Mountains, we see a lot of cloudy skies and rain, which can get difficult when the sun hasn’t made an appearance for several weeks. But one of the rare treats we have here are eagles. Mostly Bald Eagles.

There are several lakes and rivers here as well, and with salmon beginning their spawning run up river, the eagles are returning. They feast on dead and decaying salmon carcasses, and perch in trees overlooking the rivers. Not far from our home is a river, and with salmon making their return we’ve had eagles return to the area as well.

The past several mornings I’ve heard eagles calling, announcing this and that. And a massive tree which is a favored perch, is once again populated by Bald Eagles, both mature birds with their white heads and juveniles with their full colors not yet displayed.

Here are a few photos I grabbed this morning in the drizzle and gray. Enjoy!

Pumpkin Patch

We live in a rural farm county in the Pacific Northwest, and every fall I love to visit one of a handful of local pumpkin patches. I’m not a big cook, so I don’t take advantage of their sugar pumpkins (although I dream that one day I might). But with the heralding of autumn leaves and kids running around in costumes, I feel the need to adorn my home with a few pumpkins and some pretty gourds.

Because my energy has been very low for a while, I wasn’t sure I was going to get over to a pumpkin patch this fall (hence the recent repost). But just the other day, after more than a week of rain and a few sunny days, Little Man and I visited a small patch. I love how the owners take pride in creating displays and making it attractive to families.

We came home with 2 larger pumpkins that adorn each side of our door and a handful of little decorative gourds that are sitting on my kitchen window sill.

Please enjoy this year’s pumpkin patch photos. And a favorite fall foliage shot.

Autumn Interlude

This gallery contains 8 photos.

Originally posted on Life Is A Journey… Not A Guided Tour:
It’s been quite a while, I know. Life has been… well, how can I put it? It’s been a lot of putting one foot in front of the other,…

What’s Beyond #MeToo?

Dear Readers, this post goes deep and might be a bit disturbing to read. So I’ll understand if you skip this one for now. But if you’re up for something real and somewhat uncomfortable, here goes. As much as I’ve shared a bit of my healing journey, sharing the amazing change that can happen using hypnotherapy and other healing modalities, I haven’t written much in this blog about one major part of my life. However, because I’ve experienced so much exceptionally deep inner change to something that was incredibly painful and shameful for much of my life, I want to share what’s possible. To let others know that if I can do this, so can others. To spread hope.

Thanks to many brave women who decided to speak up and speak out about having been sexually harassed or assaulted, especially when it came to having been victimized in the workplace, the #metoo movement was born.

As much as yes, I’ve been sexually harassed and treated poorly at work a few times, my biggest pain centers around having been molested when I was young. In my home. In my own bed. By my older brother.

Boom. There you go.

When it was going on, I was terrified to tell because I believed I’d get in trouble. I thought shit would rain down on me if I told. At the time, I’d been groomed and dominated by my brother for our entire childhood, with him seeing what he could get away with over and over. Again and again, I did what my brother wanted, even when I didn’t want to because I wanted him to love and accept me. I wanted to feel validated in his eyes. And acceptance came when I was the little monkey who danced for him by letting him do things to me. Things no one should do to a little girl.

The thing about being molested by someone in your own home, by family, by people who are supposed to love and protect you, is when it happens your psyche splits. As much as I was terrified and wanted more than anything for it to stop, another part of me blamed myself for it happening. My mind rationalized like a mutherfucker. If only I didn’t do this then he wouldn’t… I should have stopped him. And other lies.

It’s a brain thing.

The thing is, when my parents found out about the molestation, they were horrified and terrified. They were in shock. My father wanted to kill my brother and he wanted to protect me. And he was terrified that if word got out, he’d lose his ability to provide for our family.

What Dad did was put a latch on my bedroom door, swear us all to secrecy and send my brother and me both to psychiatrists. It was no help. The woman I saw made me feel ten times more shame than I already felt, making me believe I should have been able to stop it. And it was evident that the shrink my brother saw had little effect, because two years later when I forgot to lock my bedroom door and he was home on college break, he tried to rape me once again. This time I was able to fend him off. But I didn’t tell.

Life went on and I kept my deep, dark, painful, shameful secret. I believed for decades that it was my fault.

After a career at sea, I finally settled down to create a family and decided to do some therapy. With my therapist’s help, I was thirty-seven when for the first time in my life I realized and owned that I had been a victim. (The majority of victims of molestation who tell, don’t disclose until their thirties or forties if they ever do at all). I still felt shame around what happened, but I was now angry. Really angry. I wanted my brother dead. No, I wasn’t going to take steps to make it happen, but if he’d been killed over in Iraq, it would have been ok with me.

Every time I thought about my brother or had to deal with him, rage flared.

What took me years to realize was, my anger wasn’t hurting him or changing the past, it was hurting me.

The short answer to what’s beyond #metoo, is healing.

All our emotions and emotional triggers like anger, irritation, and rage, come from within. They all emanate outward. And as I discovered and studied energy healing, and had several healing experiences, anger and anxiety that seemed to be constant companions began to dissolve, being replaced by peace. It was magical and miraculous.

Over time, as I thought about the past and thought about what my brother did to me, I was able to remember without being flipped into instant anger. It was freeing! Blaming myself and feeling shame were gone, and anger was leaving as well.

For anyone who has been sexually assaulted, traumatized or violated in any way, healing work is a way to reclaim your sense of self. To reclaim power, dump shame, and heal personal boundaries. Can this be done through talk therapy? Probably, but the process is a hundred times longer and can be painful and draining.

As much as I thought my story was going to end there, a year ago I experienced a healing moment so deep that I hadn’t even realized I still wanted a loving, caring and protective older brother until that part of me let go the desire. The part of me who still wanted validation and a relationship with the person who had spent our childhoods being so disconnected from his own sense of self and power that he had to find it through taking mine, dissolved.

All desire and longing for a relationship with my older brother faded into the sunset. It vanished. Disappeared. No anger, no sadness, no regret.

I no longer wanted what I never had.

I know that before we’re born, our soul creates a blueprint of our life. We meet with members of our soul family and make agreements with them. Relationship agreements. We choose life challenges to give ourselves opportunities to grow. I know I had a soul agreement with my brother and I now feel that the big challenge I sought to overcome through painful dynamics of our relationship has reached mission complete. The growth has been nothing short of miraculous, and there’s nothing for me there anymore.

Because he’s still essentially the same disempowered person with no desire to change, I’m now ok to have nothing to do with him. In fact, I prefer it.

Experiencing trauma in life is shocking. And when our bodies experience shock, trauma becomes physically and mentally wired into us. Having our boss grab our ass, or having a co-worker you hardly know, who’s old enough to be your father unexpectedly plant a drunk kiss smack on your lips when you’re trapped in an elevator on a ship in the middle of the ocean, can be traumatic and shocking.

Shifting perception from blame and shame back into a state of self-empowerment takes time and effort. The solidarity of the #metoo movement has helped millions of women begin to heal. And as much as anger propels us to rise up, take action, and make a change, becoming mired down in anger for years eventually hurts us. Being able to let go of pain and anger takes inner work, and this is where energy healing shines.

Today, as much as yes, a horrible thing happened to me, I’m no longer a victim. I have my power back and am free from the past.

Little Cub

Once upon a time, Mama Bear had a Little Cub whose cub-hood she imagined would be full of all sorts of friends, activities, and school. But Mama’s dream for her cub wasn’t Little Cub’s dream. He had other things in mind, and one of them was taking on some big challenges. Challenges that would make life harder than it was for other cubs. Sure, he played with other cubs, loved to laugh and have adventures, and went to school, but some things were extra scary, like loud noises. And getting his fur cut and having his big teeth cleaned was really, really uncomfortable.

As Little Cub grew up he loved to have fun and help people. He also didn’t have much fun in school. In fact, things seem to get harder and harder. Mama Bear got him help from this bear and that, and everything they tried helped… some. But the times she tried to help her cub with his becoming anxious about things, nothing seemed to help. He just got more and more anxious. To the point when Mama Bear realized her cub needed some very special berries to help it go away, but everyone who could give her cub berries was too busy to see them for a year. Eventually, one day, Little Cub just couldn’t go to school more day. He had to leave.

As much as Mama Bear had long dreaded the thought of having to take on the responsibility of educating Little Bear, she knew it was something she had to do. And she did.

A year into Little Cub being home, Mama Bear had an out of this world experience that began to change her from the inside out. A process began that took hold of her and amongst other things, messed with her mind from time to time. It made her outlook on life very negative at times and brought temporary body aches and pains with the inner changes. The way she saw the world began to change, but because she wasn’t a butterfly, she couldn’t build a cocoon and hide away from the world during her metamorphosis process. She had to keep being a Mama Bear. And sometimes it was very, very hard.

As Little Cub’s friends began getting their driver’s licenses, he was still afraid to go back to school. Even to learn to drive. When Mama Bear’s head was in a bad place she didn’t know if Little Cub would ever learn to drive. But with Papa Bear’s encouragement, they signed their cub up for a driving school. A while back, Mama Bear finally found someone to give her cub special berries to tame the anxious thoughts, and he’d also been talking with a wise bear every now and then. Little by little, the cub began to get excited at the thought of driving.

And then he did it. He went back into a classroom for the first time in three and a half years, making it through a two-hour class where didn’t know another soul in the room. Sure, when he finished his first class, there was a lot of complaining about this and that, as Mama Bear expected. But with each class, he was less and less nervous, and more and more confident. When it came time to go, he came bounding down the stairs ready to go without dragging his paws or complaining about having to go. And he started doing his homework for the class without being asked or prompted.

Little Cub was doing school!

After the third day of class, Mama Bear asked her cub if he wanted to drive on their quiet dead-end road, and with little hesitation, he said, “Yes!” And he did. Down the road and back. And then he wanted to do it again. And then out onto another road, up a few hundred yards, turned around, and back home. And before long, he went out with the instructor and other cubs for more driving practice.

With Little Cub’s first week of driving school behind him, he likes the teacher and is getting used to being back in a classroom. Yes, he forgot to do one assignment which will be done over the weekend and passed in late with no penalty. (Did I say the teacher’s great?) He’s got a few hours behind the wheel, driving with Mama Bear, a driving instructor, and Papa Bear, and he’s catching on fast.

As much as some things about life are extra hard for this cub, driving isn’t one of them. Yay!

It’s September

I can and can’t believe it’s September first. School starts this week, and in preparation, I watched an online summit all about executive function last weekend, picked up a small folding table that will be a work station for my teenager this school year, and bought a memory stick for him. Because school happens at home now, it looks very different from regular public school. Most of his classes conclude when he’s put in a set number of hours because he’s working with an independent study private high school, so even though we took a break for August, he didn’t necessarily finish all his classes. But he’s only a few hours shy of the one class he’s required to have all four years: English.

Basically, we pick up where we left off a month ago. Some of Little Man’s classes are ones we create based on his interests, and because he’s into things online like gaming and virtual reality, we’ve been able to incorporate things like game characters and storylines into English class and writing. As with most teens, there are subjects Little Man likes and does without too much complaining and ones that are the bane of his existence, like math.

A week after we get school rolling again, Little Man will be taking driver’s ed at a local driving school. As a parent, we all get nervous thinking about our kids becoming new drivers, but Little Man’s biggest hurdle won’t be behind the wheel, it will be getting back into a classroom. The first time since he left public school three and a half years ago due to severe anxiety and panic attacks. We’ve traveled a very long road since then and as much as just walking into the room and getting through that first class will be anxiety-provoking, I’m confident that he’ll make it.

Other than getting ready to jump back into school, my own personal inner world is still shifting and changing bit by bit courtesy of Kundalini energy being active in my body. Doing healing work every now and then has been helping get through the process of extreme change. The process that has devastated me for the past few years, rewiring my body and brain to such an extent that my life has become a shell of its former self when it comes to being active and productive.

With limited energy, I have to prioritize what I can get done, so things like yard and house projects are on hold. The only yard work that’s getting done with regularity is because Little Man has been our mower. I haven’t been able to do squat and my man doesn’t do regular yard work, but if a tree needs to come down he’s your man. My house isn’t as clean, organized, or as uncluttered as I’d like, but I know I’m doing the best I can. One day I’ll have more energy and will be back in the game again.

In the meanwhile, the way I see the world is very different. It’s expanding and opening, seeing black, white, and all shades of gray in-between. Understanding and appreciating the world in new ways.

Here’s to a September filled with blue skies, white puffy clouds, comfortable temperatures, and apples ripe for the picking.

Oh, The Madness!

I bet you think I’m going to write about the recent insane gun violence going on in my country right now. Psych! No. Well, not exactly. Maybe a little. I was prompted by a quote I came across which stated, “A saint was asked, What is anger? He gave a beautiful answer. It is a punishment we give to our-self, for somebody else’s mistake.”

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned through the world of energy healing and developing a spiritual outlook in life is how our emotions work. Both for and against us, and often both at the same time.

Being a sensitive person and at times a deep thinker, when I’d get upset it would hit me hard. And sometimes I loved to wallow in my feelings. Let the sorrow flow through me, going round and round, or hold onto anger as it burned within.

Sometimes the fire in my belly moved me to great heights, and sometimes it brought on heartburn.

Anger is strong. It can motivate us, get us moving, get us up off our butts. Yet it can stop us in our tracks just as quickly. It rages deep within or simmers just beneath the surface waiting to erupt.

When I was in my early twenties, anger toward blatant sexism from my boss and his son motivated me to earn a small boat captain’s license. Their disdain for my being female spurred me on. “I’ll show them!” And I did. To this day I believe I was the only female captain my old, sexist and racist boss ever hired.

Anger toward the status quo has moved people to make change. Big change.

But the flip side of anger helping people move forward is when it scares them. This was what I grew up with. Big, scathing, dark anger. Anger that attacked me. And I grew up afraid of anger. Having anyone around me become angry was dangerous because the number one experience I had with anger was from my mother viciously attacking me.

The irony was because I never learned how to hold personal boundaries and speak my feelings, anger would simmer and boil within me until it pulled a Mount Vesuvius. And it was not pretty. I’d say something scathing to someone and I’d stop talking to them for a few days, thinking that the longer I stayed mad at them, the more they’d be punished. It was not a healthy cycle at all. And worse yet, I’d think about things from years ago, and rage would flare up just from thoughts in my mind.

In reality, when I got mad, it was because something deep inside me was becoming triggered. Activated. And when I began to using hypnosis to explore my unconscious mind, the thing that runs 85% of our day, I discovered these knots in my energy field that were beliefs I’d created when I was very little. When someone or something made me mad it was because a belief I held about myself became activated. Something along the lines of, “I’m defective and broken.” What a revelation!

I discovered that how I feel about everything in my world is a product of my own mind. And my mind is a product of a combination of my own personal biochemistry combined with my upbringing. Expectations of my family and society helped mold me, as they do with everyone. And experiences I had helped me create beliefs about myself that became part of my programming.

The cool thing about learning how to not only access but deactivate unconscious emotional triggers is experiencing far fewer of them. Walking around on a daily basis with more peace in my heart as a permanent state of being.

So for those who read the headlines and are angered yet again by senseless killing and our leaders not acting appropriately, we can either use that anger to propel us to create change in the world or if it’s too overwhelming, recognize that something within us is being triggered. And it can be healed. After all, how we feel about the world around us emanates from within our own minds and bodies.

Trip To The Northeast

Recently, I had a chance to fly from the Northwest to the Northeast and spend a few weeks by the ocean in Maine. This is one of my oldest happy places, where I spent many summers on the water learning about boating, reading the weather and the water, running around on the rocks, and picking blueberries. I spent hours walking with my gaze downward, looking at all the rocks, seeking treasure.

This trip I didn’t do as much adventuring as I often do, but I took pictures every day. Pictures from our deck and around the island. Sunrise and sunset, sunny days and stormy weather, local water foul, boats, and Fourth of July fireworks. Enjoy!

Leaving the Northwest…

Made it to the Northeast.

Caught some late day light.

Made it to the local harbor Fourth of July fireworks.

Then the weather went from humid, hot, and hazy to a thunder boomer with downpours. When a house on the other side of the island was hit by lightning, we lost power for several hours but was treated to a magnificent sunset.

Lots of birds and boats enjoyed the clear weather.

The variety of sunrises were beautiful. I love the sun sparkling on the water.

A cove on the other side of the island features working lobster boats and a small yacht club where I learned to sail many years ago.

And more of the cove.

As I looked out from a local beach, the fog rolled in.

One of the island’s two lighthouses sits at the end of the beach.

 

A great blue heron, several eider ducks, seagulls, osprey and other waterfowl frequent the waters around the island.

This mischievous little beast was forever being told to get off the sofa. His solution was to lie on a pillow, as if to say, “I swear! I’m not on the sofa.”

It was great to get away for a while, and good to get back home. Until next time.