Healing & Personal Growth

When you have made mistakes, or are in a desperate place, it’s easy to fall into the habit of criticizing yourself or beating yourself up.
There is often a voice that says something like, “I need to beat myself up to keep myself on track. If I don’t, I might become lazy or worse and then [...]

People are attracted to truth. If you want people to follow you, stand for something. Stand for something you believe is true and good, and make your business reflect that.
Write a credo, a manifesto. Why are you in business? What matters to you?
And then demonstrate it.
For example, let’s say you do massage.
You credo might sound like [...]

The general idea is this: we are a conduit for Divine energy/purpose to manifest. We are channels, we are the mouthpiece, we surrender, we hand it over, and we become part of something much larger than ourselves. We are fulfilled and happy, and everything is glorious.
All good. Really.
But you MUST take care of your human [...]

“Prosperity consciousness” is usually associated with material abundance. But there is a subtle poverty that is deeper than the scarcity people feel around money (although they are related). And no “abundance” strategy will heal it if it isn’t dealt with first.
We often live with daily emotional and spiritual scarcity. We don’t feel like enough.
We don’t feel [...]

It’s a lazy post-gorging tryptophan-sleepy kind of day. And I want to say something about “The Holidays”. Which is that you have a choice about how you do them.
I know a lot of people don’t like “The Holidays”. They get depressed, or overwhelmed, or burned out, or just hate the whole thing.
I get it. I [...]

All emotional suffering and stuckness is caused by closing down and contracting around pain. Pain happens, and change happens – this is the nature of life. However, suffering is an add-on that we create through our reaction to that pain and change.
Healing is the process of grieving and accepting this pain and change, and [...]

This is a common story: a skilled artist or creative decides to become a designer because there is more job security. Or a lawyer. They never really develop their creative talent and feel unfulfilled.
Or the other side: a skilled artist decides to work at a cafe to have free time/brain-space to pursue art. They never [...]

Completing a major project (or job, or other major part of your life) and letting yourself move on involves:

recognizing that you are “done”
giving yourself permission to be “done”
actually completing the thing

When and why is it hard to recognize and accept when you are done?

If you think you ought to not be done yet.
If you thought [...]

It always surprises me when I realize I’ve forgotten something rather basic and have to relearn it. Over and over and over again.
Feel your feelings.
All of them.
All of them, feel them, as much of the time as you can.
But, don’t identify with them.
Don’t loop around in thoughts that make them worse.
They are messages, they are [...]

I’ve gone through a long process healing my relationship with comments, and I want to describe it because I’m guessing it’s something others go through.
Fear and anticipation, approval and validation
When I first started blogging four years ago, I didn’t have online buddies, I didn’t have Twitter, and consequently I didn’t have any commenters for a [...]

I’ve been going through my books as part of a de-cluttering jag. I found this one – which I loved when I read it and I now think I need to re-read. It’s called The Renaissance Soul “Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One”.

Does the thing you are doing, even [...]

I’ve just had a revelation.
I’ve been feeling all BLAH about this blog, and about writing in general, and trying to figure out why do I write anyway.
I think what happened is I briefly got caught up in the whole blogging-twittering-”internet famous”-popularity-contest aspect of blogging. Which can be fun and all (I guess), but what seems [...]

I did a vision board workshop with Kaya last weekend, here is what I made:

It is sort of a progression as you start at the bottom and go up.
The theme is summed up in the statement in the middle – “The seeds of our inner light and vision germinate as the darkness begins to wane.”
This [...]

I subscribe to a daily quote about the Law of Attraction and this morning it was:
 We would like you to release the word “achieve” or “earn” from your vocabulary and from your understanding, altogether, and we would like you to replace those words with the word “allow”. You’re wanting to allow your Well-being, not achieve [...]

Resistance is when there is something you “know you should do”, but you don’t seem to get it done. Something you want to do (or at least some part of you wants to do), but for some inexplicable reason, you can’t get it to happen.
Maybe it’s something you want to do for yourself personally – [...]

This post is kind of a book review and kind of a technique review. Yup, it’s a lazy winter hibernation blog post.
EMDR = Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. EMT = Eye Movement Technique. It’s a thing.
Here was my first response to EMDR: Huh? Moving your eyes back and forth? You’ve got to be kidding me.
But [...]

I’ve been playing around with my fears of biggification over the past month or two and I’ve come to some conclusions.
And I’m not afraid anymore.
Here’s what I learned: I was really afraid of myself.
I was afraid I would get latched onto the idea of being “biggified” and start doing inauthentic things to try to be [...]

Note: This is a follow up post to My Gnarly Cave-Like Fear of Showing Up Bigger In The World).
There are two fears I am still working through around showing up bigger in the world.
Fear #1: People will only like me for my coolness, not for me.
This is a weird fear. It goes like this:
As a [...]

About two months ago I was at a Biznik networking-in-the-park thing where we each looked at what we needed to do to become more “visible”. To show up bigger in the world.
And we drew it with crayons and pens. (Have I mentioned how much I love Portland?)
When I asked internally what I needed to be [...]

Diversity and creativity are sacred right order
If God was some kind of conformity-loving force, we wouldn’t all have such passionately divergent ideas and desires. We all share common needs and yet we all have preferences and strategies. Thus our sacred call is to discover and express our inner soul desires–and encourage each other to do [...]

Havi started a conversation about fear yesterday. My other business-spirituality-buddy Mark posted a response. Here’s mine! (Isn’t blogging fun?)
This is in response to David’s comment:
I guess I’m a little thrown off because it seems like every way of dealing with fear is appreciated and supported… except bulldozing through it, and feeling like a rock [...]

A year or so ago I made a document called “My Heart’s Desire”, and listed what I wanted out of life. I just came across it and decided to update it.
I’m struck by the difference. The one I made before focuses a lot on what I want to get. And they are mostly things I [...]

The ability to walk forward without knowing exactly what is around the corner is essential to creativity and growth.

I was at Fred Meyer today getting some storage bins and three of the lids slipped off the shelf and clattered to the floor in three different directions. I halfheartedly tried to catch one, but for the most part I just let them fall. I said “D’oh!” under my breath and looked sheepishly at a fellow shopper nearby [...]

Attachments, in the spiritual/emotional sense, are when you strongly want something to be a certain way (or not a certain way), and you have an emotional investment in it. They feel like a tension, tightness, clenching in your body and are accompanied by persistent and generally unpleasant emotions that arise whenever you think about the [...]

What happens when your business partner or employee is also your friend…but they aren’t good for your business?
Sometimes you don’t realize right away. You want to give them a chance, so you let things slide that you wouldn’t if they were anyone else. Perhaps they used to do a good job but lately things never [...]

I think prosperity boils down to two things:
1. Knowing who you are, what you want from life, and what you have to offer.
2. Offering yourself to the world with love.
When we’re doing both, things are good. We are aligned with our inner self, and with the laws of the Universe, and prosperity happens naturally.
But getting [...]

Several years ago someone I had recently befriended declared me an artist. Not directly, but in passing, she mentioned our “artistic connection” and how important it was to her. I immediately protested, because my picture of an artist was someone who painted and sold art in galleries and maybe went to art school. But she [...]

Mentoring is not just about the transfer of knowledge. What happens when we enter into a relationship with a teacher, mentor, or even a group that has members more expanded in a certain area is that our energetic vibration expands and elevates to match that of the leader or the group.
We may learn specific skills [...]

There’s this idea that our purpose in life is this defined, concrete thing, and that if we find it our lives will “click” and if we don’t we’ll forever be wandering and lost and not really “living up to our potential”.
I’m beginning to think that maybe that’s all BS.
We all definitely have needs for self-awareness [...]

Why do affirmations get a bad rap? I think for two reasons: people use them in a way that seems fake, or they try to force positivity over a negative situation.
I don’t use them that way. I have found them quite useful, but only if used with certain understanding in mind, which is that they [...]

I’ve been doing a MasterMind group for about 3 months or so. I highly recommend it.
(Some background: a MasterMind group is a concept various people have talked about–they seem to be most widely used for business people who want feedback and growth and to access the “Master Mind” — the collective knowledge of their groupmates [...]

I don’t make commitments from my mind alone. I always check in with my soul.
Mind-only commitments lead to ego-commitments rather than soul-commitments. For instance, I’ve tried making a commitment to making a certain dollar figure per month or year. It just doesn’t work for me. Because I’m not really committed to it. And no amount [...]

Employed people from time to time tell me something like this: “My job sucks. I have to work all the time. No one appreciates me. Maybe I should start my own business. Oh, but I don’t know. My job pays pretty well. And I have benefits. Maybe I should just be happy with it.”
If this [...]

Today I am all about this book: Now, Discover Your Strengths. It comes with a passcode that lets you take their online test that identifies your 5 key strength areas (make sure you buy a new copy as the passcode can only be used by one person, and while you’re at it get the new [...]

Happiness is not a secret. It’s a goal.
The reason I am happy, as a person, is that I just can’t stand to be unhappy. It irks me, and whenever I’m not happy, I work continually until I figure out how to wrestle my life (or relax my life) back into that peaceful state of flow.
There [...]

I’ve been growing and expanding my business and life in all kinds of ways in the past month, so I was puzzled this morning that I was not feeling happy. Instead I felt like I had a loooong to-do list and I felt tired and grumpy.
So I took a long walk, stared at some ducks, [...]

What is Codependency?
Robert Subby defines codependency as “An emotional, psychological, and behavioral condition that develops as a result of an individual’s prolonged exposure to, and practice of, a set of oppressive rules.”
The term comes out of treating alcoholics and their loved ones, who developed codependent patterns to cope with the alcoholic’s behavior. Codependency is a [...]

Terry Cole Whittaker describes the creative flow in terms of having an internal faucet. We can open the faucet, and let divine creative energy flow, through us, out into the world. We become a vehicle for the expression of the living creative energy of the Universe. We feel a part of something bigger than ourselves [...]