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What if we’re asking the wrong question?

What if we’re asking the wrong question?

I took my book and made my way into the backyard this afternoon. The sun in Brisvegas is unseasonably warm and being a girl who loves the heat, I was keen to make the most of it.

My backyard includes a pool, thick green grass and a view of the river. But it hasn’t always been this way.

A few weeks ago, I left my home of 13 years to move here. It was a big choice to sell my house and I’m still feeling the reverberations of that choice, even now. My life is different now. The way I live is different now. And the space I inhabit within the world has changed.

It always intrigues me how when we change one thing in our lives, things change around us too. When we shift so does our energy and those ripples inexorably spread out into the world affecting our relationship with others and indeed, our relationship with ourselves.

Change one thing and many things change. Change a lot of things and you can imagine the impact is little more significant.

For me, my recent big change has led me to see much of my life through a different lens. I feel freer because in many ways I am starting anew. How I interact with strangers has shifted too. I am more open and I find myself feeling even more curious about the human condition. I observe more, feel more. Certainly my psychic channel feels much stronger, more attuned and more powerful than it has been.

My house was a home and a refuge. But eventually it became a place where I felt stuck and hidden from the world. Perhaps it was also a symbol of a life I thought I would once have that never eventuated.

So now I’m here.

As I sat beside the pool, relaxing in the sun, I found myself asking that question we frequently ask when seeking clarity about our next steps and where we want to go:

“If you could do anything, what would you do?”

As I rolled the question around in my head, I realised something that had never really cut-through my psyche before. I had asked the wrong question. The real question is:

“You can do anything so what are you going to do first and when are you going to do it?”

The second question is the true question and I laughed at myself when I realised it.

So many of the reasons we give ourselves for not doing what we truly want are mere excuses. They may be very reasonable and logical excuses but they are excuses just the same.

And when we start the discussion from a place of restriction with a focus on perceived obstacles, we cut ourselves off at the knees even before we start the race.

I was sitting there in that beautiful setting because I made some difficult but necessary decisions to change my life. To be honest, the Universe in many ways brought me to metaphorical knees before I would make those decisions, but I still made them. And I don’t regret them for one minute. Because once you let go of what you ‘think’ your life should look like as you move towards your goals, you allow whole new perspectives to show up that will take you to places you never expected to go (and sometimes resist visiting) and soon after you will realise you are exactly where you need to be.

I never thought I would end up living somewhere like this, but it’s perfect. So as I settle in, I now know what question I should really be asking.

Are you ready to ask it too?

Why Memoirists Can’t Hide

Why Memoirists Can’t Hide

I sat in a café today fighting back tears yet staring determinedly at my computer screen. Part of me wanted to run away while the other part thought, no, I have to do this.

I’d begun pulling my poetry collection together and as I began revisiting each piece, one by one, all the emotions they held rose up again within me.

A year a two ago, I found myself working on the same floor as a specialist I had first met in my 20s. As a man with a curious and active mind, who remembered me from way back then, he was keen to read my book as soon as I mentioned it. I still remember the look on his face afterwards. He looked at me intently and said, “It must have been very difficult to write a lot that.”

I nodded and said, “Yes. Yes it was.”

When you’re a memoirist and you write from real life, your life, it’s extraordinarily difficult to hide from yourself and the experiences of your past. You must look at yourself, study where you have been, unpick the threads of your life, then somehow sew them back together.

It’s not an easy journey to undertake. It’s often emotionally challenging. When you write about yourself, you cannot hide from yourself. This is why I frequently use journaling activities with my mentoring clients – what better way to uncover your true desires than to pick up a pen and begin recording your brutal self-honesty in writing.

Just like my first book, my poetry collection is autobiographical and traverses my relationship landscape with all its pain, heartbreaks and disappointments. There is a little humour in there too and this time, I also begin exploring the complicating influence of being psychic.  

I’ve found that being highly intuitive can work for and against me in romantic relationships. Yes, it may provide an extra level of insight about the person you are interested in but on the other hand, when your emotions are involved, your ability to easily to discern between your intuition and what your heart would like to happen can fly out the window. Factors like soul contracts and past life connections (or past life hangovers as I call them) can also mess with your head, a lot.

I am not one of those women who can put her emotions in a box. In truth, writing my first book was very much like my own personal version of therapy. It was only through writing about my experiences, editing it then revisiting it again, that I was able to finally clear a lot of debris from my psyche. With the birthing of that book I was able to step back and see where I had learned the lessons I needed to learn, and then let the rest go.

I find that my poetry is far more raw than my prose. It always knows what it wants to be when it arrives. It has a clear intention and energy of its own. Once written I can only change a word here or tweak a phrase there. Further self-indulgent editing inevitably destroys the life of the piece leaving it a bedraggled and shallow version of its former self. So I leave most of the words as they arrive.

The memories in my poetry are vivid. They are unavoidable and, judging by my emotional response today, I still have a lot to process about their contents. Two hours was about all I could manage today before I needed a break. But I am going to persevere. There are other books waiting to be finished and released.

Interestingly the themes of relationships, love, and energetic connections are increasingly showing themselves in my work. I guess my Muse is determined that I learn the lessons that are being delivered to me and I continue to be her reluctant yet committed pupil.

You can create change when you share your story

You can create change when you share your story

I met a young guy today – let’s call him Mickey* – who is going for what he believes in. He is establishing a business and believes he can make a difference to people’s lives through what he does. I believe he can make a difference too.

What was interesting is, as I thought about my appointment with him (which was for a personal issue of my own), I found myself picking up information about how he could promote and market his business more effectively. This is one of the ways my psychic channel often works – I seem to be good at picking up how people are blocking themselves from achieving their next level, and then I tune into the way forward and up. Sometimes this happens without any intention from me – being psychic means I’m a bit like a giant antennae and will sometimes just pick up stuff because that’s how I roll.

Although we have a mutual friend, I had never met Mickey before today. But I could feel his energy and passion for what he is creating long before I walked into his office. So when we met in person, I shared the insights I had felt with him.

As so often happens in these situations, he had been thinking about some of the things I mentioned but had been stopping himself from following through. He also shared that others had made some suggestions but yet, still, he had not moved forward.

This made me laugh because it is exactly how the Universe works when we are preventing ourselves from shifting.

The Universe will send us the same message over and over again, via conversations, books, movies, signs, random thoughts and other ways to try and get our attention. We humans are often slow learners and don’t like the unknown so I guess the Universe knows it has to ‘stay on message’ to get through our resistance.

Mickey and I talked a little about what was getting in the way and I gave him a few new marketing ideas to think about. I hope he actions them because he has a lot to give but people won’t hear about it unless he pushes that edge of his comfort zone just a little bit more.

When I was about to leave Mickey mentioned a topic he is passionate about. He has a slightly controversial perspective and when I noted this he said, he believed it and wanted to talk about it.

I said, “Go for it”.

I believe you should take your conviction and passion, stand on it and use it to lift you up so you can share your story with the world and create the change you want to see.

I look forward to seeing how Mickey’s business grows in the future. His willingness to back himself and speak his truth will help him to forge ahead and create the difference he wants to see in the world.

I hope if you’re reading this, you take a chance on sharing your story too.

Are you picking up everyone else’s stress at work?

Are you picking up everyone else’s stress at work?

I’ve worked in a few high-pressure projects over the years where it was imperative that you do your job well and you put in all the hours you need to get it done. I can’t say they were always enjoyable roles but I certainly learned a lot about myself and other people in the process. And for that I am profoundly grateful because I have grown exponentially as a result.

In those kinds of environments, people who are energetically sensitive and empathic (yes, you can definitely count me in this group) but unaware of how they respond to energy can often experience ill effects but be unaware of the true cause. This can lead to even more heightened stress, emotional responses, tears, anger and dysfunctional teams in already challenging workplaces.

Energetically sensitive people frequently feel the emotions of others keenly and when they couple that with the challenge of managing their own stress levels (and sometimes, perfectionist people-pleasing tendencies), it can become very messy indeed. After all, if you know the people around you are in pain and you’re in pain too, how can you find a way through?

It is important to understand how to manage your sensitivity in these environments so you can buffer out the energetic turbulence of others and keep yourself in balance. If you are consumed by their stuff you won’t be able to deal with your own or, in the end, provide any useful assistance. I understand this is often easier said than done and I am not suggesting you need to become some cold-hearted robot. But if you’re going to do more than just survive in these environments and you want to be there because you feel it is part of your calling, then you will need to do things differently.

So, where do you start?

Begin to notice how you respond to the energy of the people around you. Does being around someone make you feel less or more stressed. Can you somehow know when they are upset or anxious or happy? Notice how that feels in your body and in your emotional state.

As you do this, you will be raising your awareness and becoming more conscious of how energy works for you. Keep in mind, that other people aren’t responsible for your response to their energy, you are simply picking it up because that is one of your gifts.

When you are sensitive in this way, other people’s energy can wreak havoc on your internal state of being. So how can you manage that?

One of the most useful and simple techniques I have learned (and now teach to my clients) is as follows. If you find yourself feeling overcome by emotions that don’t feel quite right, ask yourself, “Is this mine or someone else’s?” Trust the answer that comes up for you intuitively. Don’t question it, just accept it. And if the answer is, “It’s someone else’s” then simply acknowledge that and say to yourself, “Okay, I’m letting that go and releasing it”. You don’t need to know who it belongs to or why it exists. Just let it go.

This simple practice will help you begin to understand and manage your own energy more effectively and in healthier ways for you.

Of course, there is much more complexity to this topic. Energetic sensitivity is a multi-layered gift that shows up in a multitude of ways. But this practice is a great first step towards helping you to harness your gift so you can live the fullest expression of you and not become a burned out mess in tough work environments.