#WildlyWoman

I have decided that I want to be wild. Or rather, go back to being wild, like I was born. I am tired of being someone else’s version of woman, of feminine, of acceptable. Of what men think I should be, but just as much, of what women think I should be. Or any of us should be. I have decided that I’m too old, too wise, and too not giving a shit enough to not love and own every inch of my life. My curves, my breasts, my muscle, my fat, my silliness, my temper, my whole self. I have decided that I want to be #wildlywoman. To love every shape and mood I come in, to thrive in that dance of emotion and sensuality and strength and tenderness.

I have shaved my head and pierced my nose (25 years ago), I have run barefoot late at night down the streets of Manhattan, I have climbed a Mayan temple in the jungle at dawn, I have sipped champagne in my apartment in Paris, I have lived alone in an adobe casita in the desert of New Mexico. I have been unemployed and heartbroken in San Francisco. And they were all different versions of me. For a long time I wasn’t sure which one was real. But they are all real. They are all me. They are all acceptable and beautiful and sensual and strong. And if someone doesn’t agree, then that’s fine too. Now I have decided is the time to be #wildlywoman. Which means something different to every woman who decides to be it. It means fully me, fully sensual and empowered at the same time, light and playful and ditzy, if I want. Smart and powerful and strong, if I want. Or one one day, and the other the next. Right now what that means is I work. Hard. I am divorced. I earn all my own money, I support my family, my household, I am raising my children, and several animals. And considering chickens. I run my own business, I (try to) heal the sick. I run. I eat. I drink a little too much wine. I drink whisky. I eat organic sometimes. And junk sometimes. I want it all. I want to sway my hips when I walk, and do ecstatic dance and twirl like a Sufi, or better yet, like a toddler in a tutu. I want to love my body, to feel sensual and powerful – like one doesn’t preclude the other. Which it doesn’t. I want to sleep deeply and naked. I want to run my life with joy, raise my children with tenderness, listen to spirit quietly. To be soaring, but grounded and earth and mother. To be free from guilt. I always feel I’m the one who has done something wrong, I am the one who needs to apologize, to work just a little bit harder to make everything alright. But I have seen the light. I have been conditioned to be that good little apologetic girl, but it’s not who I am. #Wildlywoman means living without regret or apology, which means I must always live with integrity and love, but those are my only boundaries. The rest is wild country.  The rest is whatever the hell I want it to be, and I will fiercely defend my own happiness, my right to love myself, my right to not always need to apologize and be nice and be small. #wildlywoman to me means sensual, twirling in dance, swaying and intoxicating, flirtatious, vulnerable, and at the same time, powerful enough to change the weather, to brew a storm, to change the world. What does it mean to you?

Divorce Should Be About Love…

Ok, to start off of course I don’t know anyone else’s experience. And certainly some people are in extreme situations. But having just come through a pretty difficult divorce, two kids in tow, I really think we are doing divorce wrong. In our culture it’s all about anger and winning. But for our heart’s sake and most importantly, our children’s sake, it shouldn’t be. Anger serves nothing, other than to start us off, to motivate us to change. After that it never hurts the other person, the person you are divorcing. It ONLY hurts ourselves and, worst still, our children. In the early day so my divorce my Former (I like that more than ex. Still working on finding a really good word) was horrible to me. I would get text after text, several a minute, just tearing me to pieces, threatening different things, accusing me of horrible things, attacking who I was at the very core. They hurt. And eventually I had to tell him to stop texting me all together and go through our lawyers till he got himself under control. But I never, not once, emailed back angry. You can’t squeeze something out of someone that isn’t there. And I’m not angry. I’m not resentful. I had a LOT of things I was angry about in our marriage, that’s why it ended. But I was not willing to be that person who would respond nastily to nasty texts, or calls and emails, I got them all! I would not be that person for 2 reasons. One, if I am hateful then hate lives in ME and I don’t have a place for that in my life. That would make ME angry and a victim and nasty. And I am none of those things. But also it would hurt my children. There were more days than I can count when I would be solid for them, keep to our routines as much as I could in a move, be optimistic, be loving, but most of all be solid for them. And then after they were asleep I’d curl up in a ball and sob until I was almost sick from it. But I never was nasty about their father. And hear this…you may think they don’t hear your phone conversations, or pick up on your toxic anger, but they do. If it’s in you, they feel it. Kids are mostly psychic. They hear our words, but what they really pick up is our body language, our energy, our unspoken reality. So don’t kid yourself that you can be nasty and angry toward your spouse and they don’t know. Even though I was being portrayed badly to my own kids by my Former, I had to sometimes gently set the record straight, but I never blamed things on him. Even things that were totally his fault. Because my goal was not to be right. My goal was not to win. My goal was to return to being joyful. My goal was to stop suffering in an unhealthy marriage. My goal was to show my children what a happy self sufficient woman looked like. Don’t get me wrong, I made mistakes and have things I regret. Of course. And most of all I wish the divorce could have not happened at all. But since it did have to happen, I always kept my North star in sight and my north star was joy. Health, self love, joy and a good example for my kids, every decision I made in that time when I felt like I was being tossed around helplessly by waves in a storm, every decision, every word I spoke, was to try and get a hold onto health, joy, self love. Anything that took me farther away from that I let wash by me in the storm.

 

Divorce was a heart breaking concept to me. I know it hurt my children, at least in the short run. Terribly. And it broke my heart. My parents were married for 52 years until my mother recently died. My friends and siblings are married, most of them. I never wanted or expected it. And it broke my heart. But what I realized is, if we are going to divorce, let’s do it right. Don’t cheat first. Don’t blame everything on the other spouse. Don’t ever ever put your children in the middle. Your feelings are secondary. Theirs are primary. Be there for them even if it takes every ounce of self control. But above all this, try to divorce with love. There were times my Former hated me, he told me in no uncertain terms. There were times I was so angry at him I could barely breathe, but I always came from a place of love. Because that’s the most loving thing I could do for myself. It was selfish. Hatred feels awful. Hatred is sickness. No matter what, I come from love and I gave that to my kids too, the ability to love them and to love my Former no matter what. It doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt, it did. It was hard. It felt like it might kill me some nights. But I wanted my kids to see two people who still loved their children, and two people who could change the shape of a family without destroying it. It doesn’t take 2 to do this tango. Only one. If you are sent anger, you don’t have to react with anger. You can react with compassion that the other person is suffering. And you can let it go and remain in a place of love. It’s really all about self love. When you are loving to yourself, you are loving to others without effort. Now this doesn’t mean I took any crap. There were times I would not communicate with him, and there were times he couldn’t come over at all for a while, we had to put up some boundaries and let things settle down. But they did. And the damage was so much less because if one person holds a space of love for someone in anger and blame and suffering, there is a much easier path to healing when the other person shifts.

 

Some people misunderstood me and my actions. Some still do. People thought I should be pissed. If I were a strong woman I’d be much more angry and accusatory. I was just sad. Because anger is just a cover up for hurt. And I wasn’t angry, I was hurt. I was hurt and sad and grieving the loss of my marriage, the loss of an intact family for my kids. But I wasn’t angry. I could have screamed and accused. But for what purpose? It’s easier and less painful than feeling the devastating grief. But it won’t heal you. You’ll have to feel the grief in the end anyway if you want to truly heal and move on. So I started there, at the grief. But not at anger. I grieved mostly on my own, with family and friends, and occasionally, in intentional ways, with my kids so they could see that I was also going through this process, I was sad too, which is appropriate! But that I was also ok. And they would be too. So I guess my point is, let’s try and divorce with love. We are just changing the shape of a relationship and it is so hard and so painful, but it can be done with love. Even if just one person does it with love it is worlds different, especially for children involved. Start with self love and go from there. In divorce and in anything in life. If you start with self love, the next step is always love toward others. And you can never go wrong from there.

If You Want Something To Change, You Have To Change Something

If you want to change something, change something. I learned this piece of wisdom by trying to get fit. I have always been fit and slim. Then 2 kids in less than 2 years, work, moving and other life stressors led me to be just slightly overweight. No big deal, but I really wanted to lose the last 10 lbs. So for about 6 years, I thought about losing weight. I made very slight, insignificant, tweeks to my diet, but really I didn’t actually change anything in my real life. But boy I THOUGHT hard about how I wanted to look, feel, how much I wanted to weigh. Then one day I realized the scale had reached a point I just felt was not ok. So I changed. I got an app and started to learn what foods had what calories. I joined the gym and went from running the occasional mile to running 4 or 5 miles several times a week. I ate only lean meats and vegetables. And lo and behold, I started to lose weight! This example has been true for me over and over in my life. I often want something to be different, but I don’t actually DO anything about making it different. Whether that is leaving a relationship that isn’t healthy for me or beefing up my income through getting more clients or whatever. I’m really good at imagining things. And feeling I deserve things. And feeling frustrated when they don’t appear. But it always takes me a while to realize I’m not actually DOING anything differently. I wasn’t going to be able to keep eating anything I want whenever I want, and not exercise, and suddenly start losing weight. And I was kind of pissed about that. I wasn’t going to go from living in a town I really didn’t like, to moving to a place I love and really “fit” by thinking about it and wishing it was different. You have to do the work. You have to pack up the 100 boxes and rent a moving van, you have to put down the fourth cookie and go for a walk, you have to change something to change something. Every time I figure this out (again. for the 100th time) I realize that it is both a pain in the butt – the having to change a well worn pattern – and incredibly empowering. I can accomplish just about anything I want in life, if I’m willing to not only visualize it and dream about it, but get up every day and do the hard work. Make the changes. Dive into that uncomfortable place where routines and habits get changed. And when I do, every time, I end up learning so much about myself. It’s like entering a new part of me that had been hidden under layers of familiarity and routine. Changing patterns isn’t easy. It can be scary. It can bring up issues. It can seem daunting. But it is also empowering, exhilarating and invigorating. So next time you want to change something in your life….change something in your life. Most likely you will find that the one small change leads to many others, and that the surprises and accomplishments along the way are even sweeter than you imagined. First think about what you want. But then don’t forget to get up and act on it. When you do, there’s nothing you can’t accomplish!

Here’s The Secret To Being Happy

 

Know those people who seem happy even when life is kind of crapping on them? The people who seem happy even when you aren’t and you’re wondering what their secret is….? This is the secret to happiness: It’s not a human affair. Here’s what I mean. If you are looking to any person in the world to make you happy, you are looking in the wrong place. Other people may make you happy for a while, but then they will have a bad day, or lose their job, or decide you remind them of their cousin that they hate and then they’ll be mean to you. Humans are unreliable. The true source of happiness comes from above. I’m not particularly religious, though I am very spiritual. You can call this source of love anything you like. But here’s the scoop: True Happiness comes from tapping into the inexhaustible source of love that is available to us all. To be happy, or to be loving for that matter, we need to be full, we need to feel joyful, and then that happiness, that loves flows into others.  Most of us look for happiness in our spouses, partners, children, dogs. It isn’t there. The source of joy is universal energy/God/Great Spirit/Whateveryouwanttocallit. To be joyful daily is to rise above the struggles of daily life. We all have them. Some people’s lives look easier or happier than others, but this thing about being human is hard. It’s hard for everyone. Even the person whose life looks perfect. We can amass friends or money or homes or cats. But true joy is something else, but that won’t make us joyful. Yes, being able to meet our basic needs it important, but beyond that it’s all icing. The cake is being tapped into the source in order to have this flow to you constantly. For me I find it in nature. Others find it through meditation. Actually, meditating in nature is my favorite. But it can be any way you find: prayer, walking silently, petting your dog, drinking wine. Ok, maybe not that last one. But the key is that you need to slow down and quiet down enough to hear that higher voice, that higher source of joy, of love. If you knew there was a constant, uninterrupted source of love available somewhere, you’d want to go there, right? There is. But the source is only found through being quiet, through connecting with something greater than yourself. On the darkest nights of my life I have been able to connect to that and know that I am ok, that there is joy at the end of my struggle, now matter how that struggle plays out. When you take the time to sit quietly and connect to your higher self, to that inner voice, to universal energy, you will know when you’ve connected to it. All worry disappears. All fear disappears. Even the big ones. Even money, even death, even loss. When you fill up at that water fountain, you come away full. And it is only from a place of fullness that we can share. It is only when we are full of that sense of love that we can love. Love without needing anything in return. Smile in the face of anger. Heal when there is sickness. Be joyful for no reason at all. So next time you are wondering why so and so hasn’t made you happy. Stop. Let him/her go. Sit and be silent. And when you connect to that constant, inexhaustible stream of joy, jump in, flow along until you are full, then come back and see how your life looks to you. The same life that may have had you feeling beaten just minutes before. The key to happiness is making your SELF happy. Then you are able to share that with others, not look to others to fill your tank. Then your happiness is unshakable because it is not dependent on some unreliable imperfect human – which we all are. Then you are strong because you can go back twice or two hundred times today to fill up again at that spring of happiness that is there for you any time you want to drink from it.

Finding Your Life’s Purpose

Have you ever struggled, like I once did, to figure out what you’re really here for? To figure out why you go through the motions of your day but don’t feel renewed and energized and joyful, but rather that you have been slogging along, doing what’s expected of you, but without meaning, without deeper purpose? Or have you wondered if you even do have a purpose in life? Well you do. You are here for a reason. Every person on earth is here for a reason. And one of the greatest feelings of joy you can have in life is knowing you are fulfilling that purpose. But so many of us struggle to know what it is. Or how to find out.

I always think, if a greater power put you here on earth for a specific purpose s/he is not going to then make it nearly impossible for you to find out what it is! What a cruel joke that would be. The powers that be want you to know your purpose, and you did when you were younger. When we are little we know exactly what brings us joy, and that is how you find your purpose, find your joy. So in a nutshell that’s the answer, find your joy. It will lead you to your purpose in life. If you love spending time with your kids, parenting may be your purpose, if you get pure enjoyment from gardening, from writing, from teaching dance lessons, from preaching….it can be anything and it can be as small or as large as you want it to be. If you get true joy from painting, you can make watercolors in your kitchen or you can be an artist with 20 foot canvases in galleries around the world. Just follow your joy. The other sure fire method to clarity, on your purpose and on everything else, is to shut up. Just stop talking, stop moving, stop doing. Your higher self is desperately trying to talk to you, desperately. But most of us never clear a space, just for a few moments a day, to sit quietly and listen. At first you will most likely just have your mind full of things you need from the store, and what you have to do at work, who you forgot to call back, etc. But if you just sit quietly and listen, you will start to hear a voice. Some might say this is prayer and you’re hearing the voice of God. Some say it’s your higher self, I say it’s the universe or Spirit talking, doesn’t matter what you call it, you will start to hear your truth. Now your higher-self may have been knocking on your door for years unanswered so at first you may get a bit flooded with information. But just download it all, this is a cosmic download, it’s effortless, you just need to receive. Though this is often harder than it sounds. just sit in silence, and receive. And when you get information that way, boy do you know it’s true. That information is the kind that raises the hair on the back of your neck you feel it’s truth so deeply. Make this a daily practice, just moments a day. And as a full time single working mother I can tell you, we all have a few moments a day, somewhere, we can set aside for this. And that’s it. Follow your joy and be quiet. That’s all you really need to know to find your purpose in life. To live a life that is fulfilling on the deepest level. Our purpose and our joy may look small to the outside world. We aren’t all going to be Oprah or James Patterson or Malala. But we are here for a reason. We have a gift to share. You have a gift to share and the world needs it. And when you are aligned with that gift, you feel joy. Deep, uplifting, inspiring joy. So just find that joy and follow it. And if you get lost on the way, just sit quietly, the map will be shown to you. And before you know it you’ll be living a life of purpose, of satisfaction of inspiration and of joy.

Your fellow traveler,

Heather

I’m Going To Settle

That’s right, I’ve decided it’s time to settle. And I’m so happy. That word has such negative connotations, settling – like it means accepting less. And for me, it does mean settling for less, but in a good way! In fact, at the risk of being dramatic, it’s changing my life, this settling. This year has been the most stressful of my life with a major debilitating illness, a 400 mile move with children who struggled with it, financial stress, and then the unexpected death of my mother just two days after she left our house at Christmas. It has been awful. Plus I work, I have acupuncture practices in two different states, and run I a home, am raising two boys and two young energetic big dogs, I was stressed! So much so that it started to impact my parenting, and that’s always where I draw my line. Or maybe where it’s so obvious how badly I’ve been treating myself that I finally see it. A few  weeks of watching my stress and short temper effect my kids and I thought something has to change!! But what? I can’t just never clean my house or do laundry or exercise the dogs or help the boys with their homework or go to work or………you know how it is, the list goes on. So what did I do? I read the word “settle” somewhere, in passing, and it was like a lightening bolt. That’s It! I thought. I needed to teach my mind to settle. Like muddy water in a pond all churned up my mind was chaos. My reality is busy. My mind was chaos. So that even on a rare day where I had a little free time, I still felt totally frenetic and swamped, even if I wasn’t. Because my mind was always in overdrive. I didn’t know how to settle down. How to let my mind settle, let the pool of water settle, let all the junk flying around in the water settle, let my breathing settle. Settle. For some reason this word has helped me enormously. I have meditated on and off for 20 years, but even that sometimes feels like an effort, “Clear the mind” – but sometimes I can’t. But settle, that I could do. I started sitting for 20 minutes in the morning and 20 in the afternoon. This is what’s recommended in Transcendental Meditation, about which I know nothing, but I decided that sounded reasonable. Long enough to make a difference but not a ridiculous thing to ask a busy working mother, like an hour morning and night. 20 minutes I could do. And I have. And the results were instant. I mean instant. No struggling to get meditation “right”, no wondering if my mind was clear enough, my inner voice quiet enough or positive enough. I had no agenda. I just let my mind settle. Tried to empty my mind, but if thoughts wandered in and out, that was fine too, I’d just ask them to be quiet, like patrons joining a violin concert a few minutes late. Just keep your voices down little thoughts and you can stay too.

Whatever it was about that word, it has shifted me. I instantly, that first night, slept through the night for the first time in months. And this week when I’ve woken and instantly gone into my default mode these days – panic – I just tell myself kindly to settle. And next thing I know I’ve gone back to sleep (this is a major development for an insomniac). And I feel as if I had so much more time in my day. That’s the strangest part. I don’t. But I felt all this room to get through my day more peacefully rather than rushing and short tempered and always feeling like I didn’t have enough time. My life on the outside didn’t get less hectic, but my life on the inside did, and so there was all this quiet space that hadn’t been there before and it changed everything about my day. So there it is. Really I am settling for less. Less stress, less chaos, less pressure inflicted on myself by myself, less worry. I see my mind as a cloudy pool of muddy water and I let the silt settle to the bottom, let my mind be clear and wow, it’s beautiful when that happens. I was instantly kinder, more patient with my children, and happier. Just happier, which is always a good thing. So there it is. It’s time to settle. Nothing wrong with settling for less 🙂

The Year of the Snake is Ending. Time to Shed Your Skin…

     The Year of the Snake is ending. Soon we will enter the exciting year of the Yang/Wood Horse which I will write about at Chinese New Year at the end of the month. Was your year of the snake a complicated one? Snake years are an interesting combination of things. Snakes are seen as symbols of wealth in China as snakes seem always able to find a meal. Images of snakes wrapped around a rabbit are often hung on doors and windows during spring festival to indicate prosperity. But the snake is also considered jealous and suspicious, even malevolent. So if you have had a year that was confusing or particularly full of ups and downs, you may be glad to see the snake slither away at the end of the month.

But as with all years, we have gathered information and experiences, good and bad, that help us grow. And as we grow it’s important to shed our old skins. Let go of things that held you back, inhibited your growth or got in your way. The things you no longer need will only weigh you down as we gallop into the year of the horse so take a moment to let those things fall off you like the snake does and be ready to begin a new year newly emerged, fresh and just a little bit older and wiser.

More on the year of the horse coming soon…!

The Year Of ______ (fill in the blank)

A friend on Facebook (Dr. Amy Sheinberg to be exact, check out her FB page, it’s fabulous) told me she has randomly decided to call this the year of kindness. I loved that. Then I got an email yesterday from my MIL saying at church the Priest had talked about that idea. To name this year. Chose something you want to create, or to foster, or to be able to see in all circumstances this year, and name the year. My MIL named it the year of joy and said that in all things that happen this year, good or bad, she will try to see the joy in her life. I have named mine the year of Delight. I don’t want to enjoy things, or be less grumpy, I want to be delighted! I love that word. I love that it contains the word “light” because one of my struggles is that I get too heavy, I take things too seriously, I get weighed down. I want to delight, be light, be fizzy with pleasure in my work, in being with my children, in cleaning the kitchen, yes really, even there. Because I have so much to be delighted with in my life and yet I spend so much time trudging through things just to get them done. So for me this is 2014, The Year Of Delight. What do you name yours?

Thanks for reading & Happy New Year!

Does Your Outside Match Your Inside? Or…Are You Being a Fake?

What I mean is, are you being a fake to yourself? I was. I sort of started realizing this this year, in little ways. It’s almost cliche it’s such and Oprah eipsode- woman has kids and stops taking care of herself. But I don’t mean in a way that can be fixed with a makeover and a good colorist (well, that would help!). I’m talking about deep down. Does your life around you match who you really are? Who your soul and essence are? Mine haven’t totally for a while. I did have kids, and I work part time, and we struggled financially for a while, and man I was maxed out. I ate food that was less healthy because it was convenient and came in a boil in the bag package. I didn’t compost. I dressed sloppy and boring. I stopped running. And writing. I lost the mojo of my life. There is a wonderful saying, “What is within is without” meaning whatever is going on in your internal life is shown by what’s going on in your external life. If your internal life is chaotic and stressed, your living space is probably a mess with an old bath robe thrown over a piece of pizza and important mail under a pile of unmatched socks. If your internal world is not juicy and alive and plugged into your soul, your external world may be lackluster, career not going as you’d like, home not juicy and renewing to be in. You get the picture. If you’re full of rage you probably have angry friends and are always in conflict at work and at the store and yelling at your cat. That kind of thing. So for me I ended up living in a super wealthy and snobby and not diverse suburb of NYC. Don’t get me wrong it’s wonderful in some ways (great schools, gorgeous beach, safe…), but it SO does not reflect my true inner world. I’ve been dressing in beige sweaters and jeans for years because…well because they were clean and I have kids and that’s totally success if you can have the combo of a clean outfit and kids so I didn’t care what it was. But I had let my life get beige. My marriage got beige and almost fell apart. We just weren’t living our real lives.

This post is about looking at our actual out in the world lives. Not what we are thinking. I can think about healthy food but get drive through McD’s and that’s not a match. I can say I’m green but buy convenient super packaged food and not recycle or compost but that’s not a match. And this isn’t about judgement. It doesn’t matter for the sake of this post what the match is, just make sure your world actually matches, in and out. If it’s important to your inner world to look really good, then dust off that makeup bag and plug in your hair iron. If it’s that you feel very strongly about something political, go to a march, donate $1 if that’s what you can, volunteer. But match. It’s about doing. Creating. Sort of the opposite of how important it is to meditate and go inward. This is about the outward. Are you all talk (even self talk)? Or if someone looked at you and your home and your choices and your everything, would they see a reflection of your soul? Otherwise your soul isn’t really happy. You aren’t plugged into what really feeds you, and you aren’t being authentic. I know, I did it for a few years. I mean I’m always kooky and I do acupuncture and meditate and am generally who I am. But a lot of my external life wasn’t a match and I told myself it didn’t matter. But it did. I wasn’t lying to anyone, but I also wasn’t me. Suddenly I got it. I have to compost (for some reason this is so important to me, almost symbolic of my being authentic), I like to dress funky even if I’m in a town full of Stepford wives, I need to write to feel good, it’s important for me to eat well, to eat as organically as I can afford, to support local businesses, the list goes on. But when I get off track I don’t do these things and it just feels bad.

No one but you will ever know if your inside doesn’t match your outside. You won’t ever be called out on this except in your own heart as no one knows what’s inside unless you show them. But when the outer world matches the inner world, that’s when authenticity starts, that’s when we feel real and empowered and happy and fearless because there is no disguise, and no hiding, and no excuses and no false statements. You’re just you. And it feels great. It’s like that fabulous outfit you once bought, or dreamed of buying, where the top and the bottoms and the accessories all match and you feel like a million bucks walking around in it. It’s like that perfectly matching outfit – for the soul. 🙂

How To Start Trusting Your Intuition

Maybe the title should be “How to start trusting your intuition and knowing you’re not crazy!” We all have it – the 6th sense. Some stronger than others. Those are the people like Long Island Medium (I love her!) or someone who finds lost dogs by closing their eyes and looking and seeing where they are (I have a friend who can do that, I’ve seen him). But for all of us, no matter how sensitive, learning to recognize and trust our intuition is hugely important for living our truest and best life. There is a wild ocean and jungle and universe of information out there that a lot of us are just totally missing. Information that’s just not going into the pot of things we consider when making life’s decisions, big and small. But often that “psychic” or intangible information is the most important of all. It is almost always right. Haven’t you found that? That gut feeling? First thing that popped into your head? Intuition? It usually is. And we are taught in this culture to totally ignore it. Some cultures honor that information, go on quests to hear those whisper voices. Those are our life guides. Our souls speaking to us. We really should listen. But how? Half the time we have shut that voice out for so long we can’t even really hear it any more. It’s actually pretty simple. It’s like anything new…practice.

I had a wonderful spiritual teacher in Santa Fe with whom I still speak now and then (note to self, call her more!) and she helped me recognize this type of energy. I met her because I was starting in acupuncture school and I had to observe treatments in the clinic. My first observation was a treatment involving a man who was alcoholic and had a lot of intense anger. He got his needles in and I got all hot in the face, then felt like I was going to throw up and the room started to spin. I had to rush out and go sit down. It was very embarrassing. I found a few more times that around people with intense energy this would happen to me (and I’m not a fainting kind of person. I’m not put off by blood or needles or strong people. This was inexplicable to me). Someone in the waiting room said to me, “You’re just sensitive to energy. You should work with so and so. She can help.”

The main thing she taught me was this…listen really carefully. Intuition is talking to us all the time. But we often squash it before we even hear it consciously. We have to practice. Some hear information, others see things as an image, a vision. But it’s like anything new, it’s learning a skill. Try to catch those whispers, about people, places, situations, decisions. Hear them so we can use that information along with what we gather from the physical world – facts, statistics, reviews, etc – to make decisions. Something like 80% of all the information we get communicating with someone is non-verbal. A lot of it is gestures, expressions, etc but a lot of it is also “psychic”, intangible. So I did as she said but I was amazed at how long it took me to really trust the information. There are tons of little examples like – you’re leaving the house and you hear a little voice tell you to take something with you that there’s no way on earth you are going to need that day. So you don’t. Then by some strange twist of events you find yourself hours later just wishing you had that exact thing with you. This has happened to me so many times that no matter how strange it seems, I listen. Going out in the morning to the car wash and I get a psychic “hit” as it’s called to take bandaids and some lemonade? Ok? I do it. And somehow hours later I find myself on an impromptu beach picnic with friends, one of who falls and cuts her knee. Ok that never happened, but you get the point. I hear it, I do it. Most of the time. Though I still do get caught out having clearly intuited something and ignored it. It’s a challenge to really listen. But it’s like anything, a practice. A journey. Just start trying to hear that little piece of information before your rational mind tells it to shut its gob. And then see…see how often it proves surprisingly accurate or important. For things small (like bandaids and lemonade) to things enormous (it’s how I decided to pursue acupuncture and move to Santa Fe and change my life in big ways). Those gold nuggets often come disguised as flashes of intuition that we must grab and heed. Certainly now when I have a big decision to make, I gather all the logical information that the world tells me I should gather (and which is very valuable), but then I always sit and ask that higher source what it has to say…and I sit very quietly and listen for an answer. That feeling that comes from the gut, whether it arrives out of nowhere or is in response to a question, is almost always right. It has helped lead the way and lighten a path when I’ve been at a confusing crossroads many times. So maybe that is our own personal true North. That inner guide that never steers us wrong. For me it is anyway. So I make sure I try to hear the whispers and value them, even if a tiny piece in my mind still tells me it’s crazy. Crazy or not, for me, it works!