When this heart warming book arrived at my door as part of the Hay House Bloggers Book review program, I had no idea the profound impact it would have on me. As I began to read the story so beautifully detailed by Scott Blum I welcomed the warm sense of joy that I always feel when told of pregnancy. All the possibilities seem to be open to us in that moment. As a mother of three little ones I feel such a strong connection with those who have been pregnant and also feel a profound loss when their pregnancies have difficulties.

This is a book written about the process a family/couple traverse when the desire to create a child is so strong that they have planned for years spiritually and physically. This story takes a turn down the road of miscarriage which so closely resembles the miscarriage of a dear friend of mine. I found myself resisting the turn of events as Madisyn’s body released her pregnancy. My heart wrenched as I recalled my own friends turn down this road. I felt the fear of loss so tangibly within myself that I too needed a break from this subject and put the book to the side for a day. As I warmed to reading again, I found tremendous healing as the author honestly depicts all that goes through ones mind and heart at this time.

As the book continued I found the most remarkable similarities between my dear friend and Scott and Madisyn as I was given the beautiful news that my dear friend was once again expecting a child. This beautiful book is an honest depiction of the challenge of pregnancy, loss, and rebirth. I feel so fortunate to have the opportunity to heal and release through reading this heart warming story and find the synchronicity so beautiful, I will carry this story with me as I attend the home birth of my dear friend who’s story resonates so closely with Scott and Madisyn’s.

Click Here to get your own copy of Winter Moon Rises

As you all know I only recommend people whom I feel work within integrity, are truly living in their truth, and are passionate about helping others. It is in this spirit that Anthony is offering you a discount of $50 off an Astrological Consultation if you mention my name when scheduling.

Wanna read more about his work and what exactly a Psychic Astrological reading is? Visit his website: Astralogix.
Ready to schedule? Call his assistant at: 714.273.6665 (be sure to mention my name for a $50 discount)

Arriving right on time, we collected our passes and walked towards the stage. As I relaxed into in my seat, I listened as Louise Hay and Cheryl Richardson discussed their new book together.  Sitting only a few feet away from these two amazing spiritual leaders I found myself fully immersed in the feeling of love and guidance. I let my mind wander for a moment as I recalled the serendipity that brought me to be sitting there in this arena with these two amazing beings. A few weeks earlier I thought to myself that I would love to attend the Hay House I Can Do It event, It really wasn’t in my budget so I declared to a friend that I was going to attend the event and be invited to come without having to pay and in fact I would bring her along since she is also a writer. Sounds good to me she replied and that was that, I sent a couple emails to a few of my contacts, asked for my guides to assist in this adventure and voila – 2 press passes were awaiting me at the door. I sent gratitude to the universe and to my contact at Hay House and was on my way.

As we arrived at the event it seemed that the universe and our guides continually rolled out the red carpet, we easily found front row seats, parking places with the exact numbers I had been seeing for months, amazing new contacts and conversations, and lectures that seemed to be speaking directly to us. We floated through our weekend fully enraptured with the flow of abundance. I felt immense gratitude for all that is available to us at any moment and excited that I had set an intention and desire and it was met with a Yes You Can from the universe.

With the myriad of lectures available each day, we attended the ones that we felt called to, which turned out to be beautifully synchronistic and rich with wisdom. As the event began we took our seats up front and I found myself reaching a dream I had set into motion at the age of 12 when I first read Louise Hays book “You Can Heal Your Life”. That book changed my entire experience of life, I began to understand the world and my response to it in a much more profound way. Seeing Louise Hay and Cheryl Richardson take the stage brought such warmth to my soul. As they began their introduction of the event, it felt more like we were all sitting in someones home, reminiscing with old friends. The stories they shared and wisdom they channeled brought an energy of joy about the space.

Louise Hay shared with us a poignant truth when she said,  “How you begin your day is how you live your life”. I smiled as I sensed the audience all thinking exactly what I was thinking – we were all thinking back a few hours to how we had each began this day.  For me it was slightly hurried jumping out of bed, making pancakes for the kids, rushing rushing rushing until I plopped myself down on the red velvet seat in the auditorium. Yikes. I hadn’t taken a moment to look into my own eyes as I got ready and I most definitely had not thanked my bed for being so comfortable, the pillow for being so soft, my heart for continuing to pump so perfectly etc…all things that Louise Hay does every morning and night. What a beautiful way to experience the world. Sharing personal stories with the audience comes easily for Hay and you can see that she is who she is in every moment. Her tools for self love continue to reflect the same principles in her first books such as offering gratitude, being kind and gentle with ourselves, and mirror work. In fact she had the entire audience rolling on the floor with laughter when she whipped out her small mirror from her bra and handed it to Cheryl Richardson after Cheryl mentioned she needed to do more mirror work. A moment I’ll never forget.

The next lecture I attended was with Brian Weiss, the well known master of Past Life Regression. A past life regression is much like a deep meditation that can be used to access information about other life times. During which you may find information, events, and experiences that could be affecting your current life.  As he guided us through a deep past life regression, I found myself easily moving back in time in this lifetime and eventually entering my body in another life time. The experience, although not my first regression, was very profound and brought me to a life I had never seen in all my years of meditation and past life exploration. His voice gently guided us through this lifetime and brought us back easily and effortlessly. I found our regression to be very healing.

“The essence of who are is your greatest gift to the world. Be authentic”. – Cheryl Richardson

Later I attended a lecture by Bruce Lipton and had the opportunity to speak with him and his wife before his talk. Their loving connection was so easy to see in the way they spoke and interacted, it was clear what kind and gentle spirits these two are. Lipton discussed with us The Honeymoon Effect which he describes as being in a high vibrational state and harmony with another person. Lipton says, “We are a reflection of light.  We are filled with energy.  We emit energy.  Our energy brings us all the things that we manifest.  We manifest disharmony when we move out of the honeymoon phase.” He also says that there is a way to stay in the honeymoon effect all the time by learning and mastering the following:

1. Become consciously aware when disharmony happens.
2. Perform a subconscious mind review (What negative habits and patterns are we   playing out that we picked up from our environment when we were young.)
3. Reprogram our subconscious mind (via energy psychology work, i.e., meditation, hypnosis, tapping, subliminal tapes, or PSYCH-K®)
4. Communicate with the other person what we are experiencing.
5. Have patience as the habit may continue to recur over and over again until the changes stick.
6. Practice, practice, practice until it becomes second nature.

Listening to this lecture affirmed that I was not the only one who believes that it is possible to create a relationship and life that rests in that glorious feeling of high vibration.  Of course it is a joint adventure and both people must be striving for the same level of harmony that once is reached can also be sustained.

The next day after waking I thanked my bed for her support, I thanked my home for its comfort and I thanked my heart for continuing to beat. I floated around my kitchen making breakfast for my 3 cute children and found joy in choosing my outfit. As we arrived at our one of my favorite authors lecture we could hear laughter, music (that 70’s “I will Survive” tune) , and clapping from down the hall. Yep that must be Sonia Choquette’s lecture. Entering the large room we giggled as 100% of the people were standing up, 95% were singing and at least 80% were breaking it down with some pretty amazing dance moves. As the music ended we all took our seats and Sonia began speaking on The Power of Your Spirit. Sonia says that even though you can’t control the outside world, with the power of your Spirit, you can create a sense of purpose within that brings about profound contentment and personal peace—no matter what is going on around you. This was such a welcome reminder to me. Sonia guided us through tools to use daily such as meditation, journaling, playing with our spirit, connecting with our guides and following our bliss that help us create a sense of inner balance and calm. By having a daily practice of connecting with a nurturing your spirit you can create a profound change in your life. As we ended the lecture the room was buzzing with the excitement of people connecting with their spirit. It was such a light, uplifting experience, I could almost see years of emotional baggage being left behind by everyone as they all left smiling ear to ear.

As the weekend came to a close I found myself in a space of what I can only explain as authenticity. It is as if this weekend reminded me of all that I already knew to be true about life, love and joy.  It was an immersion into the high vibrational state of love and creativity, each lecture bringing more understanding and more clarity to topics in a way that a book alone cannot do. Seeing each author speak and watching their energy as they moved about the stage made their work come alive and felt totally personal and interactive, even though there were thousands of people there. We were each reminded of the importance of loving ourselves and loving each other. Many Blessings to you and May you make Love the real work of your life.

The Fable of the Gilded Cow highlights the truth of mans constant struggle with the complexities of desire.  This book draws the reader into the dynamics that become engaged when given the opportunity to have that which represents wealth, fame and fortune. As the book neared the end, i found myself entranced in the story, and was truly moved by this provocative tale of the GIlded Cow.

To purchase  Click Here

In this book Sonia details out the four stages of a powerful spirit, each stage building and deepening on the others. Within each chapter we are continuously guided into making the shift, asking the questions, and are given a daily practice. Upon finishing the book, my wish is that you will have found exactly what I found, a deep connection with your Powerful Spirit.

To Purchase Click Here

The beauty lies in the design my child, the designs are interwoven within your heart, that which you love, that which you experience. Your Joy, Your Pain, all Yours. Remember the rhythm within the moment, fall yourself into the divine structure – that which magnetically replenished your soul and spirit. The doorways are open, unlocked, they are constructed by you to understand your reality. Rebirth, of yourself the divine ability to rejoice in a reconnection to all life. Your spacial plane is limited in its sense of reality, your magnifying glass only sees the smallest section of pain when you focus downward.

Death is not a death, but rather a rebirth into the full scope of vision, of beingness. It is here on your earth plane that is the limited in its vantage point. Death allows us to feel the surrender to all encompassing love and joy – that is what brings the pain, the distance between where spirit moves to and where you are in your limited state. In death of another you feel their expansive nature- their limitlessness and your soul and spirit longs to be reunited with that which always is, instead you are harnessed to the earth plane with its beautiful delicacies and delineations of spirit. so be here, be in this moment, be this gift to yourself, of yourself and always remember, there is no death and we Love you very very much.

It is your choice and your challenge to step out of the shadows where you have been patiently waiting for inspiration, walking ever presently with your candle – lit to lead. You may lead from the light or dark, from the shadow or spotlight. We act as the ever present loving guardian gently nudging you as you swing your way higher and higher, you have been pumping on your own, much to our delight – the delight of an ever present ever patient guide. The playground is filled with twist and turns, boulders and streams – laughter and depth.

Be ever present as you attend your daily life and recognize opportunity as it gently whispers in your ear – we are whispering to you -  You are Loved – You are Beautiful -  You are Divinely Guided into action. Be persistent as the water moving your way forward allow our gentle winds to accelerate your momentum – now is not the time to lay in stagnant waters creating a puddle of yourself. Puddles are for resting, observing, and can create complacency. You are not a being of complacency my child – you are a creator, generator, and reminder to yourself. You are divine, you are divinely guided, you are divinely guided to a greater call. We send our love continuously like the waves of the great sea ever rolling ever embracing ever changing but always containing our love for you and all that is. Be your own truth my child and remember your spirit.

I want to preface this area by saying that I do not like to take part in “dooms day prophecy”.  Over the last year I have been receiving insights about natural disasters and they are becoming increasingly clear and accurate. When I was younger I was very tuned in to majorly devastating catastrophe’s such as school shootings, plane crashes, and my own auto accident which was overwhelming as a child.

Now that I am an adult and  have spent several years developing my own abilities and created a sacred space for myself to connect with the divine source, I am now once again finding myself connecting with information about natural disasters all over the planet.

My intention with these postings is to share what I am receiving and tuning into as I go about my day. There are times when deceased people have contacted me to speak with their loved ones but I am not able to make the connection, I also intend to include these here. Please know that I am not attempting to scare or lessen what I am seeing – I simply feel the urging to share what I am getting as my predictions are becoming more intense and less able to ignore.

Your Part:

If you feel guided to share any of these predictions or spirit connections please feel free to share them with the understanding that I do not agree with or condone fear based approaches to prophecy. Nothing is set in stone and of course there are many times that we are able to change the path we are on by becoming conscious of what is creating the pattern.

With all of that said, I wish you all much Love and Joy in your life and may you always be connected to the Divine Guidance that is available to us all.

September 2011

Texas – recently I shared with several of my clients and friends that I was feeling like something was going to happen in Texas. I kept seeing Lines and mistakenly thought it was connected to fault lines. Two days ago I was in the grocery store and saw a photo of the fires happening in Texas. When I thought about it more I couldn’t figure out why I had seen lines until it was brought to my attention that when they are trying to contain a fire there are sometimes what they call fire lines which is an area that is burning under control in lines.

Oregon - As soon as the energy cleared on Texas for me (which means that it no longer was in my mind as something that was about to happen because it was already happening) I started to feel a blip on the radar for Oregon. Even now as I tune into Oregon I see waves splashing on a large cliff. I feel that something is going to happen that could be seen as small – like a small earthquake – but will then signal a course of action that will cause the level of water on land to rise. This feels imminent and soon – just as my feeling with Texas. If I tune into anything else with this I will keep you updated.

For now that is it. I will say that these intuitions come to me as I am living my life – I have three children after all so the time allotted for meditation is limited. Usually my “feelings” come while I am doing normal mundane things – like driving, grocery shopping, watching TV (which I rarely do) etc. It usually starts as a slow rumbling feeling that builds until I cannot help but share it with someone else. That is how the Volcanic eruptions, mudslides, earthquakes and fire have all been. For several days before the volcanic eruptions (spring 2011) I couldn’t help but share my feelings with my college friends at a children’s birthday party, when I got home and opened up my computer staring back at me on the screen was a big image of the volcano erupting. I literally jumped backwards out of shock – you see the night before I had made a connection with a very well known surfer who had passed suddenly back in November 2010. He requested that I contact his family and so I agreed to sit with him and write a letter to them – not knowing if or when I would have the chance to share it with them – or if they would think I was crazy – especially since I didn’t really care much for this person when he was alive and I hadn’t sought him out- actually he started nudging me from the spirit world two nights before. He wanted me to send the letter that night because as he put it – there was going to be a volcano erupting and he wanted them to have it before the volcano erupted so that when they read the letter and then later saw that the volcano had actually erupted, they would know that the letter was for real. Unfortunately all attempts to connect with his family have not panned out. He did come back a month later and once again spoke to me about his family and the details surrounding his death. Both times that I sat and wrote with him which both times ended up being on the eve of two events: 1. information being publicized about his death 2. followed by a volcanic eruption. Although I originally thought him to be an annoying athlete, upon speaking with him after his death I found him to be misunderstood. His brooding nature was heightened by a bipolar disorder something he told me about and I later read in the news. This story is a reminder for me and you that our loved ones will do whatever they can to connect with us, they watch over us and are with us more than we realize.

It also was a lesson to me that I must always share what I am receiving as long as I am within integrity – even if its hard. There have been times when I see something continually about someone I have met and I feel compelled to share it with them in a confidential way. Often times this has been met with gratitude but still other times I have received a “thank you” but there is no interest in finding out why I was intuiting something about them – even if it is something wonderful like a message from a loved one they had been praying to get a message from. Often times I am the messenger and other times I am only the observer. I hope my sharing my stories helps you see that we are all really connected.

Much Love to you and Many Blessings Along your Path. Namaste

Dr. Rubin is widely regarded as one of the leading authorities on the integration of meditation and psychotherapy.In his recent writing and workshops on The Art of Flourishing, Dr. Rubin is especially interested in illuminating both those forces in the world that are driving us crazy and those personal and collective resources we can draw on to not only stay sane, but to flourish in challenging times.

Christine spoke with Dr. Rubin recently to get the goods on How to flourish, from the author himself.

Christine:    I love the title of your book, “The Art of Flourishing: A New East-West Approach to Staying Sane and Finding Love in an Insane World.”.  So often, we find both the idea and act of self care and intimacy are given in ego stance of lack and scarcity where if we put ourselves first, for the most part, people think that that’s a selfish act.  I love that your book really helps people explore that belief and that understanding.

In the beginning, you touched on human capacity for self deception and the elaborate strategies that we put together to self protect.  I was wondering if you could talk about why do we do that, why do we try to protect ourselves, why do we create this whole idea of doing what we’re supposed to do, what people tell us that we’re supposed to do instead of what we’re really meant to be doing.

Dr. Rubin:    It’s a great question.  I think we protect because most, if not all people go through earlier woundings, pain, trauma, and we developed a strategy that I call self-splinting, emotional self-splinting.  Just like if there were two children, 10, 14, playing in the woods before dinner and one sprained an ankle.  The other one might say, “Don’t panic.  Let’s take your sock.  Let’s get some bark.”  And they created an artificial splint and they hobble home.  It wouldn’t be wise to keep that splint on the rest of the person’s life.  It would get weak, discolored, infected.

Christine:    Yeah.

Dr. Rubin:    And we all have that.  We all have our earlier solutions to the dilemmas we face growing up that caused us to protect around areas of vulnerability and I think there’s a cultural piece too.  I think there’s a great taboo against selfishness in the culture.  The psychoanalyst, Derek Firm, wrote about this decades ago and it’s especially dangerous for women I think because women that equate taking care of themselves ie: being authentic, being self-nurturing, many women feel that it’s ruthlessly selfish and then they become guilty if they take care of themselves.  So this is a huge block towards self care. I think that if men and women were more comfortable seeing self-care and intimacy as 2 sides of the same coin, you can’t have one without the other, relationships would be much more healthy.  So if we take better care of ourselves, we’re actually more available for other people. Wether we’re in a committed relationship or it’s friendship or it’s parenting or colleagues at work, we just can do whatever jobs we have in a much deeper way if we also take care of ourselves.  Self-care and intimacy don’t have to be at odd and they don’t have to be fighting with each other.

Christine:    How is it that we can tell if we have self-splinted and maybe this is an area that we need to revisit to heal.  How can we tell if that’s where we’re at?

Dr. Rubin:    One way is that our behavior is very restrictive and very repetitive and we keep getting into the same kinds of problems, the same kinds of problems with self-care, of neglecting ourselves, we have the same kind of problems with other people where relationships keep ending badly in a similar kind of way where we keep avoiding some area.

There is a principle that splinting leads to and I call that invisible psychological fencing.  In invisible fence, our animals get shocked if they go to the edge of the fence.  Invisibly, you can’t see it but the animals get shocked if they go to the edge of it.  I think people have that too what I call this invisible psychological fencing and if we get to the edge of what we can handle, we shut down, we get scared, we live in a restricted way so it’s as if many of us are living in 2 acres but we only use 20 yards of it.

So one signal about the self-splinting is areas we don’t go to.  When people say, “Oh, I can’t do that,” or “I won’t do that,” to bring gentleness and compassion and patience but to start to get curious about it because while it’s a very fearful area and it’s very natural for us to stay away from it, it actually provides a great opportunity to open up to more of life.

Christine:    Absolutely, So if we find that we have this area that’s kind of been locked off by this invisible gate, what are some steps that we can take?  Because usually, like you were saying, it’s something that’s repetitive.  So how do we break through that? How do we move past the repetitiveness even if we know all the things we need to know, we just keep doing it anyway?

Dr. Rubin:    That’s a great question, Christine.  I mean I think the first thing is really to bring a spirit of humility and patience because it’s going to be tough and maybe tough at first because we’re traveling at a new territory.

Christine:    Yeah.

Dr. Rubin:    One thing that’s helpful in addition to humility and patience is to get really curious about why we needed to do it, why in earlier time in our life that may have felt like the only or the best solution to the dilemma we faced.  So let’s take a very prominent example women who are caregivers.

Christine:    Yes.

Dr. Rubin:    Sort of compulsive caregivers.  It’s something I talked about in the book and it’s something men and women know but the women are often very, very trained in that.  To look at why the person had to develop in that way, maybe they felt very conditionally accepted, maybe they felt very unloved, maybe they learned that the only way of increasing the chances that they wouldn’t be neglected would be to give to somebody else.

So the first thing is to see the value actually in the splint and the value in that fence.  In other words, why was it necessary?  And to remember that it was necessary and functional but it just may not be the best solution right now.  That’s the first thing.  Does that make sense?

Christine:    Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

Dr. Rubin:    The second thing that’s related to that is to see the gain we got from it to really become familiar with it.  So I have a friend who knew a lot about health and took yoga classes and so forth and was a smoker.  And every 3 months or so would get respiratory issues.  As I talked to her about it and got more clear about it, I think that what I detected was that she was afraid of gaining weight so she smoked to not gain weight.  I call this in the book, “right impulse, wrong solution.”  It’s fine if she doesn’t want to gain weight but maybe there’s another way to do it other than smoking which may create additional problems.

So often with the splints, they were the best solution we knew at an earlier time to dilemmas we face.  They might not be the best solution now.  But if we start with why did I need to do it then? What was the dilemma? Thats sort of the wounding underneath the splint, then they can start to see now as an adult or now as a teenager, can they approach the wounding in a more holistic way, can they approach the wounding in a better way, not a reactive way but in a creative way.

Christine:    It really speaks to visiting the inner child and coming from a place of now being the adult.  What happens for people because I’m sure as you’ve experienced when there has been severe trauma, you know, they can’t access some memories.  In fact, a lot of times, whole pieces of their childhood are missing.  Is it still something that they can access the healing on their own?

Dr. Rubin:    That’s a very good question.  You’re exactly right.  Sometimes, that cannot be accessed on their own although what they might find is if they do some kind of awareness practice which could be sensory awareness which is an older practice developed by Charlotte Selver, or tai chi or meditation, whatever tradition, Christian, Buddhist, or yoga especially done in a mindful way, or body work, those often bring up encoded memories in the body of stuff that at first, all there is is a feeling tone or a quick vision of something but those can often be roots to it.

Often, it has to happen either in a close friendship or in a therapeutic group, some kind of therapeutic relationship which could be a relationship of congregate and a minister or a rabbi and someone in that community, or Buddhist teacher and a student, or traditional therapist and client.  But often, you need the emphatic response of another which helps bring stuff up a safe environment.  Because often, what I think happens with trauma is the double trauma.  There’s the trauma of physical violence or there’s a trauma of neglect, emotional neglect, or there’s a trauma of some kind of sexual abuse.  Actually, it’s a triple trauma.  The second trauma is often when the traumatized person goes to another adult, the other adult sometimes invalidates that experience.  “No, he didn’t sexually abuse you,” or “No, she wasn’t violent towards you,” the other parent says or the other adult says, and that then makes the person doubt the validity of their own reality and it scars them for the rest of their lives because they begin to systematically doubt themselves.  And then they are set up to put themselves in abusive relationships moving forward where the other person also invalidates them and mocks them and undercuts them.

The third part of the trauma that extend to the original trauma and the invalidation by the other person, the third part is that often, there is no one to hear and witness our pain especially the emotional side of it.  Then we learn we then learn to sequester the feelings because it’s not safe to bring them up.  So often, there is some kind of healing relationship, we slowly learn through testing the person that it is safe to bring up what we thought was shameful, what we’re too scared to face ourselves. Then, if that person can greet the pain and woundedness and trauma with a loving heart in an accepting way, then we slowly bring out a little bit more and eventually more and more.  It’s like the tip of the iceberg, more and more of what’s underneath can emerge and then healing can begin.

Christine:    Yes. Having somebody to hold that space and ask the right questions even they aren’t necessarily answers.  Sometimes that allows the answers to kind of come up.

Dr. Rubin:    Yes exactly. I think we all possess capacity for healing and creativity that we might not usually recognize.  It’s within all of us and sometimes, when we’re set on the right course through someone else’s loving witnessing of our experience or for someone else caring about us enough to ask us a deep question, that can sometime start this internal process which I think is very mysterious and magical.  We can’t always cognitively rationally map how it works. But we set a process in motion where someone else’s question then helps us begin to search out for us the answer.

Christine:    Absolutely.  And the word that you’ve used a few times is curiosity and I love to say, “try to cultivate some curiosity” because it just even in that word, it signifies that there is no judgment, there is just an open approach to looking at things and being curious about what could be the cause of this.

Dr. Rubin:    Exactly.  And realize that it was the best they could do at that time.
Even if now, it looks disturbing, dysfunctional, perverted, perverse, it was the best solution that they knew at that time. The deeper we can go with self acceptance and self-compassion, then it’s a little bit easier to greet other people’s vulnerability with a more loving heart. But if we can’t face those areas in ourselves, it’s tougher to face it than others.  So if we keep working with deepening our own ability to sit with more and more of what we went through and understand and feel that it was the best we could do, then we set a process in motion where we can do more and more of that for other people.

Christine:    Does that include self forgiveness and forgiveness of others?

Dr. Rubin:    Yeah.  But to be honest with you, one trap I have seen with “spiritual seekers” is too quickly rushing to trying to forgive.  I had a session years ago when a person said at the end as we’re leaving, I forgive my parents, I forgive them, and I was really confused because we hadn’t really talked about anything related to that.  So I said, I’m confused, what do you forgive? And the person said, I don’t know, and I said, well then you don’t forgive yet. I think we have to be a little bit wary of, and not to rush to forgiveness because it’s a wonderful quality, but it’s better if we first go through what the experience meant to us and the pain it brought us.  And then if we stay with that and work with it overtime, the forgiveness can emerge but it’s earned forgiveness.  It’s not the rush to forgiveness.

Christine:    Yeah.  It’s the real depth of forgiveness.

Dr. Rubin:    That’s right.  It’s not the depth of I forgive but I’m still angry at you but I think that I should forgive and I’m unspiritual if I don’t forgive.  It’s I really come to terms with it in my heart.  I choose not to be with you or you’re not safe for me but I understand why you had to do that to me and I don’t wish ill towards you.

Christine:    Yeah. Really being able to come from the place of really feeling that instead of just wanting to feel that and so “acting as if”. Maybe forgiveness is not something you can “act as if”.

Dr. Rubin:    That’s right.  Although I think it’s important for readers to realize that all of us are different places on the continuum with these kind of things.  And again, if you can’t forgive and you’re judging, just try to be compassionate about the fact that you’re being tough on yourself and just try to settle into that, accept that, and if we keep working with this stuff, it has an organic flow and it seems to open up but we have to accept wherever we are, we’re going to be in different places, at different times with that sort of stuff.

Christine:    In your book, you mentioned a certain phrasing that I loved which was emotional allergies where you described human beings inability to experience the pains and the fears, which is a little bit about what we’re talking about here.  Is this something that you see mostly in the west or do you feel that most cultures hide from these feelings.

Dr. Rubin:    First lets define an emotional allergy. By emotional allergies, I mean a similar kind of process that goes on with physical allergy.  A physical allergy is something where let’s say pollen, triggers a reaction in our immune system and the system panics and we treat a non-enemy as an enemy and then we mobilize against it. We have allergic symptoms but pollen may not be the problem, it’s the hyperreaction of the immune system.

So an emotional allergy is a similar process.  We overreact to emotions that don’t have the power to hurt us and then we fear feelings like fear or shame or guilt and we panic in the face of them and we shut down and then we want to get rid of these feelings or we blame our neighbor or we dump them on to someone else instead of being able to stick with the feelings that open to them. Once we can sit with them and open to them, we can do what I call in the book emotional composting, which is openness to the feeling, the curiosity you were just speaking of, Christine, and then decoding them, in other words, translating what the feelings mean and then action, what do we do about it.  Transformation, what do we do about it and how do we respond.

So let’s take the feeling of jealousy.  Jealousy at least in the west, it seems to me, is probably almost universally stigmatized and judged.  So if I feel jealous towards someone else and I become aware of feeling jealous, I’m going to immediately feel very badly & guilty, it’s “How can I be jealous towards my friends.”  But that’s the emotional allergy.  We’re panicking and overreacting in the face of jealousy but what if I say to myself, oh let me open.  Here is jealousy, let me open to it, let me translate what it means, let me figure out what to do.  Something very interesting happens which is: jealousy is feedback about what we want more in our life.  So if we are jealous about a friend who has a more leisure lifestyle or sees more sunset because they’re not working so hard, that’s an indication, that’s a doorway into what we would like to have more of.  It’s not really about the other person, it’s about where we’re feeling.  I love it what you use earlier, scarcity where we have a kind of hunger mentality where we need more.  And then we can say is there a constructive way that I can see more sunsets or sunrises or whatever.

So these are the way our feelings work.  Fear often covers hurt.  So when we have fear, we close down or we attack someone else.  We fight, we flight.  There is fight or flight. But what if we say, what is fear trying to say to me, what is fear trying to communicate?  It’s a kind of letter from ourselves to our self that I think what I am arguing in The Art of Flourishing is we would do better to open a letter and see what it says and see if they can enrich our lives.  Just like in physical composting, we take what looks like trash that we’re going to throw away, we put it into the soil and it enriches the soil.  In emotional composting, we take what we think is garbage or trash that we ordinarily would throw away and we use it to enrich ourselves and our relationships. That’s the composting part.

Christine:    Absolutely. It really gives us the ability to transform how we look at something and I love that you’ve used that example of jealousy because often I find many, mostly women but men as well, become so locked in the pattern that has been set before them or what they are supposed to do that they’ve lost their connection with what they even want.  So when you present them with “How do you want to create your life? What would you like to do?” it almost immobilizes them because they have no idea.

Dr. Rubin:    That’s right.  I feel that this can be an epidemic for people and one thing that I talked about the book, there’s a chapter on passion, is if we can try to begin to be alert to what we’re passionate about. Passion is different than obsession and it’s different in addiction.  You can feel the difference.  We don’t feel depleted later, we don’t feel caught in it’s grip in a bad way but a passion is a signal of our potential purpose.  It’s a signal of what we love.  What we do when there are no should’s, when it’s a holiday, when it’s evening, when it’s the weekend, and what do we seamlessly gravitate towards, because that’s often a clue as to what direction we need to go  in and now the problem for many, I need specifying genders but the problem for many people and many, many women that I have seen is that they are not even in that stage, this is exactly what you’re talking about.  Either they lost connection with it or they never developed a connection with it because they were trained to be such exquisite caregivers or such exquisite, what I call in the book, accommodators, figuring out what other, using their intuitive ability to suss out what other people need and to merge and blend with other people but then they get left out.

If we could help men and women to and more into what makes us come alive, what vitalizes this, what we’re passionate about, whether it’s sailing, whether it’s the flowers on your night table, whether it’s tutoring someone else, whether it’s kind of work you do, whether it’s swimming or being a healer, whatever it is, if we can embrace that more, we actually have more to give to other people because we come from the place of a little more joy and more flourishing and then we want to support other people having the same experience.

One of the lucky parts of my own development was that I fell in love with basketball when I was a kid.  There is a basketball story right at the beginning at the book and it was my first love, it was my passion and I really learned a lot of important life lessons from it and I feel sad about people that I look at and they’re teenagers or they’re adult and it’s just sort of nothing they ever got really excited about.  If we could value more trying to get in touch with that or trying to create the conditions that will make them a little more possible, our lives will be transformed and enriched.

Christine:    Right.  And you know, the economy is really, even though it seems like it’s a far distant connection really when we’re really feeding ourselves with the truths of what we really desire, the excessive spending isn’t necessary and the living beyond your means doesn’t even come into play because you’re living on purpose and in your passion.

Dr. Rubin:    That’s right.  There’s a chapter in that book on embodying your values, living your values.  There’s a talk I gave at the UN and I realized writing this that one of the things that’s not talked about the moral free for all that’s going on right now, in all sectors of the culture from professional sports to politics to organizations, Wallstreet, it’s everywhere.  One of the things that’s missed is how people that do that are actually harming themselves forget for a moment harming everyone else but harming themselves and Eric Hoffer who I quote and he wrote a book years ago called The True Believer, he was a long shoreman in San Francisco.  He said you can never get enough of what you really don’t need to make you happy.  The problem with seeking what I think of a false substitutes for meaning, purpose, intimacy, connection with other people, the cost of  having the false substitute is that we can never get enough of it so we need 2000 pairs of shoes or we need another conquest or we need to build another building.  The problem is it’s like we are an empty bucket with a hole at the bottom and we feel empty and we keep pouring things in but it leaks out and it’s never going to be enough.

This is what I called in the first chapter of the book, cotton candy.  So cotton candy, those who went to amusement parks. Cotton candy looks good, tastes good, but 3 seconds later, it disappears and we’re hungry for more.  So the problem with a lot of self-care I feel in the west, is a lot of our self-care tends to be cotton candy.  Looks good, taste good, and at the end of the evening, we watch the rerun of such and such ago and we feel we want to stop later because we’re not really nourished.  And if we had done something that truly spoke to us that evening, connected with a friend and in nature, taken a walk, whatever truly nurtures them, then we don’t need to seek these false substitutes of money, power, fame or all of that.

Christine:    Absolutely.  And you gave an example of an artist.  In the book, you gave an example of an artist who is spending his time on the internet instead of creating art and I think that’s something that a lot of people and myself included at times get sucked into, updating things and checking on this.  It’s almost like the bottomless pit that you were talking about or eating cardboard instead of something that has nutrients in it.  You know, it’s not going to fill you up.

Dr. Rubin:    Exactly.  It’s kind of empty carbs of the spirit.

Christine:    Yeah, it really is.

Dr. Rubin:    I have that done that too.  I think maybe everybody has done it.  You know what I would do is just try to open it up, become curious about it, bring some patience and compassion rather than judgment and shame and then see if we can truly tune in what nourishes us.  The civil right activist & comic, Dick Gregory had it taken for years ago.  He had wonderful book on nutrition, a small paperback on eating & nutrition and I remember one thing from the book, he said, would anyone put garbage into their car, would you stick rocks or trash into your car as fuel.  Nobody would do that.  Nobody.  But if we put trash in ourselves, either mentally, spiritually, physically with that food, we’re literally polluting ourselves and I think we’re all capable of figuring out what truly is good fuel for us, what nourishes us, what helps us.  And if we can start to look at that and without any judgment and again with patience and compassion, we can transform our lives and genuinely nourish ourselves.  That’s what I call genuine self-care in the first half of the book, the first 10 chapters.  And then we’re at a much better places to be related to other people either an intimate relationship, friendships, whatever because we’re centered, we’re nurtured, we’re feeling more vital and alive and then it’s easier to connect to the deeper level with their friends and loved ones and so forth.

Christine:    Absolutely, for the most part, we have an idea of what we should be doing or what is best for us but we’re just choosing something almost out of default.  It seems that we get in these patterns and when we get curious about it, we can open it up and slow down the pattern.  I also liked in the book when you talk about going against the grain, when you do have the knowledge, you know the intuitive part of it, you know what you’re meant to do, you know that this job or this friendship or this relationship is it’s over but you’re still staying in it for whatever reason you know in all levels.  Can you explain that a little bit.

Dr. Rubin:    Absolutely.  I’m glad you picked that up because it’s an important concept.  It’s an idea in the yoga sutras, to see with opposite eyes.  So let me give a very personal example.  I am a pretty careful guy, sensitive to what I put inside of me. I love movies, and one of my vices is: I love buttered popcorn. I started noticing a year or so ago that I was feeling cloggy the next day and I wasn’t positive it was related to that but I suspected it might be, that I might be allergic to the butter or the artificial butter or whatever was in it.  So the next time I went to the movies, I sort of habitually walked towards the concession stand and then I visualized how I’ve been tending to feel the morning after the movie, the morning after buttered popcorn, and I visualize sort of the cloggy, a little bit foggy head itself.  And in that moment, I saw that I really didn’t want to be in that place and so I just got some water and went into the movie without the popcorn.

So part of this is just bringing this curiosity and this awareness to what we’re doing and sometimes we need to go against the grain of what feels familiar. One of the essential teachings of Taoism is that it’s about opening to and becoming connected to the grain and the flow of the universe, the grain of the universe so that the taoist sage is one that is supposed to flow with the grain.  One way to think about that is if you’re cutting the tomato, you can cut it against the grain and you lose a lot of juice or you can cut it with the grain and you don’t lose juice.  There’s a way to live according to the grain of the universe.

Working on the book, I realized that the opposite was also true, that sometimes we need to go against the grain because sometimes, the grain is what’s habitual or what’s familiar. So for me, what was habitual or familiar was walking towards the concession stand, getting the popcorn and then having popcorn while I was enjoying the movie.  And then sometimes, we need to challenge that.

My first yoga teacher, Jill Kramer, wonderful teacher in Northern California talked about, in yoga, playing the edge. The edge is the place after no challenge but before pain. It’s a way that sort of go beyond what you’re familiar with but without doing it the way that’s harmful or too much. Going against the grain is kind of like playing the edge, it’s challenging your way of thinking, it’s challenging your limits.  And it takes millions of forms.  It could be that you’re a gentle soul who’s afraid of complex aggression and gravitates towards meditative practices or yoga practices and you got in touch with the fact that while they’re wonderful, secretly they allow you to hang out.  What you might need to do is take a kickboxing class where you face a little bit more aggression or you can be someone who is a little bit shy and introverted and you can love meditation retreats where you don’t have to talk to anyone or you don’t have to look at anyone and maybe you need to go to some kind of social function where you actually look people in the eyes.  That would be what going against the grain would look.

There’s an idea, wonderful idea, in the yoga sutras, Vinyasa Krama and it means an orderly progression, a logical progression.  So if you were going to run the 5K race, you would just go out and run the 5k race, you’d might walk around the block once.  And then 2 days later, you might walk around the block again once, and then a week later, you might walk around twice and then eventually, you might start slow jogging, you do things in a slow logical ordered way so your body and your mind can assimilate it.  It’s the same thing with playing your edge, you don’t want to do something that’s just too much and too terrifying.  You just gradually do a little bit more.

Christine:    Right.  And it really, I once read a quote in a magazine where it said, I don’t want to get to the end of my life and say that I only lived the length of it.  I want to be able to say I lived the width of it as well.

Dr. Rubin:    Oh that’s beautiful.

Christine:    Yeah, it was beautiful, it is beautiful. It’s challenging those areas that maybe once you just challenge it just a little bit, it will expand and it really allows you to experience both aspects.  It’s almost like you don’t know how light it is until you go into a dark room and then turn on the light.  You know, having those opposites really allows you to get a tangible experience of what it is that you are wanting or how to transform something.

Dr. Rubin:    Yes. Often what happens is we’re too attached to how we feel about something.  So in other words, something doesn’t feel good and we think we should stay away from it or something feels good so we go towards it, and sometimes, we need to take our feelings very seriously but sometimes, we need to not make them everything. So something could feel like we can’t handle it but we could handle it. Or something could feel like it’s too much and it’s okay to lean into it and open to it.  One trick with this is not to let feelings dictate everything.

One of my first meditations teachers, a wonderful teacher, Joseph Goldstein, I once heard a tape and he said, if you can remember this one thing, your meditation will be totally different.  Good is not good and bad is not bad.  And I think what he meant is bad feelings don’t always mean you’re doing badly, it could be you’re scared because you’re challenging something that needs to be challenged.  And good feelings don’t always mean you’re doing well, it could just mean you’re staying within an narrow comfort zone or you’re staying within an invisible psychological fence and not venturing outside.

So one trick, and this easier for me to explain to people then for people than do it.  It’s a listen to your feeling but be willing sometimes to play with them and to challenge them.

Christine:    A good example of that is someone who’s really meant to be a public speaker but has stage fright and you see it time and time again where they’re really meant to speak to people but maybe they’re afraid of getting on the stage and if they were to just push past that initial discomfort, they would be able to explore and really reach and grow.

Dr. Rubin:    That’s the perfect example.  You totally have explained what I’m saying, that’s exactly right. I was shy and introverted in high school, and I think that just doing therapy for so long and spending my working life sitting and talking to people, I became more and more comfortable sitting and talking to people.  Then it sort of naturally morphed into feeling very comfortable speaking.  Another key to working with this is not to get always get locked in our self-image.  The self-image is one of the pillars of the invisible psychological fence.  Fear is the pillar of it, habit is the pillar, not knowing something is a pillar.  In other words, these are the things that keep us locked in — not knowing something, fear, habit, but another one is self-image.  Because self-image is often who we think we are and what we tell ourselves we can do.  So I would have told myself I can’t really be involved in more public speaking because I’m shy and introverted. Then I sort of just forgot about that and I probably still held it in the self-image, but then I started doing more and more writing and then I was asked to speak on my earlier books, Psychotherapy and Buddhism, was one I was often asked to speak on.  And then when I was asked to speak, it threw me out and I just went with the challenge of it and then I came to discover, gee, I really liked talking to people, I love communicating, I love learning where other people are at, it’s wonderful.  So yeah, not to let the self-image totally dictate but to be willing to play the edge of our self-image.  So one way you can come quickly to this is write down who you think you are.  I said it that way on purpose.  I didn’t say write down who you are but write down who you think you are.

Christine:    Yes.

Dr. Rubin:    And then you can do an interesting experiment which is hunt for examples of where the opposite is true.

Christine:    Wow.  I love that idea.

Dr. Rubin:    Hunt for life experiences where so if I was doing the exercise, Christine, and I said, “Well, I’m shy and introverted” and you were guiding me, you can say, “Well, Jeffrey, are there any examples in your life of where you weren’t shy or introverted or were you were involved in public speaking?” And another way to finding, you’ve been a good scientist, you’re finding counter examples to your theory and like the scientist when you find counter examples, you actually refine your theory.

Christine:    Yes.

Dr. Rubin:    Not all of it but it’s a part of it.  Because if we have a very, very narrow conception of ourselves, if a woman said to herself, I’m not entitled to equality in this relationship, I’m not entitled to speak up and tell my friends, partner, husband that I feel deprived or I need more, and you got to listen more to me or take me more seriously.  If we don’t feel entitled, in the old sense of the word, that becomes a virtual prison.  In other words, that serves as a prison even though there is no prison there.

Christine:    Right.

Dr. Rubin:    But it becomes the best we can do that we just, you know, sometimes I jokingly think we don’t need a dictator, we don’t need a censor because so much of the time, most of us are dictating to ourselves and censoring ourselves and it serves like a little prison.

Christine:    Absolutely.  It reminds me a little bit of, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with it but Byron Katie’s work where she says “is that true.  Can you be 100% sure that that is the truth?”

Dr. Rubin:    Yes.  It’s very, very similar. The way I’m trying to make it emotional not cognitive, is finding examples.

Christine:    Yes.

Dr. Rubin:    And you’re not in your head but at this point, it’s something concrete.  And then it needs you to hold on to it.

Christine:    Absolutely.  And it’s interesting that you use that word concrete so many of the ways that you explain things makes it much more concrete for us to understand.

Dr. Rubin:    That’s important.  I had a teacher in college.  He has since died, but he was a very prominent philosopher named Richard Wordy, and he would explain the most esoteric stuff in a very down to earth way and it really affected me. I think one of the things the world needs is for us to work on better communication, connecting more with ourselves, connecting more with other people, and the more we’re careful with the communication and the more we’re pin down things into the very concrete, it decreases the chances of misunderstanding and it process communication.

Christine:    There is no right, there is no wrong, you can see how everything is connected.

Thank you so much for your time Dr. Rubin, I really feel like I have some great new tools to utilize in my own life and to share with my readers.

Dr. Rubin:    Thank you Christine, take care of yourself.

To find out more about Dr. Jeffrey Rubin you can visit him at:

www.DrJeffreyRubin.com

Although I have read many books on this topic, I found the approach fresh and exciting. Beginning by discussing what energy medicine is, Deborah comfortably walks the reader through well defined and easily understood mechanisms through which healing may occur and how to understand ones energy field. As we move through the book I enjoyed the depth of history that is brought forward in the stories of healers like that of Mary Baker Eddy, Agnes Sanford & Kathryn Kuhlman, whom all lived in the early 1900’s. Deborah’s truth and personality, as well as her personal stories are woven into the fabric of the chapters bringing a greater understanding to each tool, each idea.

On several occasions I now find myself bringing practices from the book into my daily life, such as the sweeping breath of recapitulation. Often times when we are processing an emotion or event we become so connected to it that its difficult to release it, I found the sweeping breath technique amazingly effective at assisting with the releasing.

Along the shamanic journey there is so much rich information, to try to contain it all in a book is a very large task – one of which I feel is achieved in this 21st century approach. I especially appreciate the chapter on Initiation in which Deborah brings to light some important questions and answers on what happens after a step up into the next level of consciousness. For those one the spiritual journey I am sure you have had moments where you could feel yourself making a big shift, followed by a difficult time where it feels as though your guides and the universe are not as easily accessible. This is part of a natural cycle and rhythm, as are the physical changes that occur after an initiation. I have often felt a surge of heat move through my body as I worked with certain clients. Hearing from an outside source what I knew to be truth, helped me more fully understand how higher levels of healing and energy affect our physical bodies.

When reading Be Your Own Shaman, there are so many truths and wise teachings within the words, I would recommend reading this book through a couple times, your thinking mind will love the rich content and your spirit and soul will enjoy the reemergence of truth and understanding. I feel very blessed to have been able to read this wonderful book and work with Deborah King through her writing.

To find out more about Deborah King, please visit her site: www.DeborahKingCenter.com

To get your own Copy click on the book below: