Memory is an energetic imprint. It can be hidden in the subconscious, but it is still there. When the energy of an experience is particularly high, it is more likely to leave a deeper imprint, something lasting and influential. Within the human life, there are two times when the energy is usually stronger, and that is birth and death.

In conducting past life regressions, I find it helpful to take the client to a past life death if at all possible. It is in those final thoughts that the imprint is created, and often we are then reacting to something in our present life for which we are puzzled and have no memory. For example, Barbara came to seek relief from her high stress life. She regressed to a life as a Native American warrior killed a short distance from his village, knowing soldiers would wipe his people out and feeling he had let his people down. He died with a terrible guilt and sense of failure for not protecting the women and children. Barbara was the main breadwinner in her home working long hours and had also taken on community board positions tasked with helping others. She does not really enjoy the work on the boards and is frequently frustrated by the futility of it all, but feels driven, and exhausts herself.

Birth is thought to be a happy time when we welcome new life and new hope. But it is also a time of anxiety, stress and trauma. Whatever the mother is feeling, the baby, who will not learn to differentiate from mom’s energy and emotions for some time yet, picks up on it all. One client regressed to her birth described being taken from her mother right away and feeling anxious and confused. When she was returned later, her mother was angry with the doctor and nurses; she picked up that anger in her first feeding, leading to eating issues later.

This March I will be attending the Mongan Method for Hypnobirthing certification training in Florida. I’ve seen what a huge difference it makes in the birth experience for mom to be calm, relaxed, and in a trance-state, deeply in touch with her baby, and embracing the body’s natural ability to bring that baby into the world. My client, Emma, came to me because she wanted as natural a childbirth experience as possible. Her preference was to give birth at home, but as a compromise with a nervous husband, she opted to find a doctor who supported her wish for as natural a birth as possible without drugs. In our first session, I had Emma imagine meeting her baby. Every night for months, she listened to the CD recording of that session. When she returned a few weeks before the birth, she had become a strong advocate for her baby, trusting that she knew how to care best for this baby, and not willing to just be jostled along in a system that holds the energy of fear around childbirth.

While her birth story did not go exactly as she hoped, her daughter was breech and so she agreed to a Caesarian birth, Emma described the moment her daughter entered the world, and losing one point on the Apgar scale because she didn’t cry. She didn’t need to. She opened her eyes right away and recognized her mother and father, immediately attaching to them, calmly and peacefully. The doctor told Emma that she’d never seen a child bond so swiftly to her parents. Through the entire experience, Emma used her self-hypnosis training and so when she held her daughter for the first time, it was from a place of peace and well-being.

I can’t wait to return to my area of Northern Minnesota this spring and begin offering Hypnobirthing classes. Stay tuned for more about this and if you or someone you love is expecting, check out hypnobirthing.com (The Mongan Method). 

I had oral surgery yesterday. It involved one of my favorite teeth, the front one. Right there as a main feature of my smile. My own body is attacking the root, and so there is only a small portion of the original left now. The rest was reinforced today with whatever the latest material is that they use to simulate a tooth, and the doctor advised I not spend any more money on that tooth for cosmetic retouching until it is certain I’ll get to keep it.

 I looked up teeth/root canal in Louise Hays’ handy reference book, You Can Heal Your Life, wherein she catalogs emotions underlying physical issues. It mentioned being unable to sink my teeth into anything, and core beliefs crumbling. Sounds about right. I probably do only have about a third of my original beliefs of how God and the world work, and the rest is sort of up for grabs. There is a loving God/Force/Universe (don’t even know what to call Him/Her/It) who knows my name and calls me to seek a deeper understanding of this Force. That’s pretty much it the sum total of what I am sure of. That, and meditation/hypnotherapy give me the stillness and spaciousness to experience a sense of God/Goddess. 

 What I’ve been learning lately, is that seeking a higher spiritual plain is not the same thing as gaining all the answers; nor is it the same thing as stopping the chaos around us. My spiritual journey has not prevented my tooth from resorbing, and it hasn’t made me fabulously wealthy. I meditate every day, but it hasn’t stopped my husband from getting crabby while he figures out our taxes. Wars have not ended. My body is still aging and though I’ve overcome many habits and fears using hypnotherapy and past life regression, there are a few that linger persistently. More work to be done.

 I have to live for now with the moment-to-moment thought of being careful of everything I put into my mouth. And even with precautions, one day, that beautiful pearl in my mouth might break and become useless to me. That is living with uncertainly. Upon a scale, there are other, bigger things to focus our worries on. We have all watched as the fickle finger of fate hits loved ones and acquaintances. While we are momentarily glad it skipped us this turn around the wheel, it also proves to us how we are still vulnerable.  I could wake up in the morning with a mouthful of rubble, all of my teeth ground to nothingness in my sleep from fear and worry.

 Yet, there is hope and a promise in this seeking, in learning meditation and prayer, and allowing into your heart the belief that we are not alone here. That hope arises when we find stillness within the chaos and noise. When we stop looking at the endgame as eliminating the cacophony and see instead that it is to be in the midst of chaos and at yet at peace that the whole world finally shifts. And when the world shifts, we become opened up to see the spaciousness, the possibilities that we’d missed before, distracted by the drama.

 Mindfulness meditation, learning self-hypnosis and relaxation, and seeking the wisdom of the Spirit are all tools towards finding that peace and stillness.  And that is the part that I can seek my teeth in to. 

November and December were challenging months in our household. Perhaps it was simply Mercury in retrograde, maybe the effects of long-term holiday sugar over-dosing, or whatever, but words were exchanged. Looks, too.  And then, as it always does for us, it passed, like a bad cold, and harmony has been restored. It’s nice to be on the same team again.

Right towards the end of this time of disturbance, husband Keith and I were heading into town together. We’d just gotten to the stop sign about a half mile from our house when we both noticed a Red-Tailed Hawk out in the field about twenty feet from the ground, just hovering in the air. It wasn’t windy out or even slightly breezy. This bird was not flapping its wings at all. It looked like a photo of a bird caught in time and space for us to casually examine. Keith had the leisure to get out his binoculars and confirm it was a hawk. Finally, the hawk flew just a little ways, and then it hovered again. We watched it, amazed. Now though I live in the country, in all honesty, I’m an indoor girl, and perhaps hawks hover like that all the time, but I’ve never seen anything like it. Keith could never be called an indoor boy. He is positively Zen in his habits of sitting out in nature for hours, nay, days, just being still and observing wildlife. He was amazed. After a few minutes, the bird flew directly towards us and then veered off in the direction of our property.

As a totem animal, the hawk is the messenger. Either we are to bring a message to someone, or we should be alert, prepared for a message, sort of like the TV announcer who says, “Stay tuned for these messages from our fine sponsors…”

Hawk medicine people, so I read, often choose earthy mates who keep them grounded because they know they spend way too much time up in the air. (Sounds a little familiar).

I saw Jeanne Troge later that day and told her about the hawk. “I know all about their meaning,” I said. “Except for that hovering thing. What in the world does that mean?”

Jeanne pointed out to me that birds of prey are known to be very patient, very still, when they are hunting, but it is an active stillness. There is nothing passive about them. That reminded me of meditation. Being in stillness and being mindful is not passive at all.

“But the hovering?” I persisted. “There was almost no wind. How was the bird able to stay in the air like that?”
”But it did,” Jeanne stated the obvious. “It didn’t fall, did it?”

 No, it didn’t fall. As simple as that, really and what in my life ultimately doesn’t apply to that message? I’ve felt a bit like that hovering bird lately…waiting, watching, seemingly unsupported and doomed to crash to the ground.  Then, effortlessly lifting and moving onward. 

It’s that time of the year when the self-help writers tackle the topic of New Year’s Resolutions. How to make them and keep them. A couple of decades back someone thought of something new to add and wrote about the value of NOT making a resolution. claiming that making the resolution was a setup for failure. I suppose I fall into the camp of not making resolution, not so much out of a worry about failure, but rather, it’s a safe way to be a nonconformist, and for all my mild-mannered sweetness, there is a hell of a rebel within me.

If any part of me had free reign this past year, it was the rebel. One of my favorite clichés right now is, “What we resist, persists.” So this year, I let the rebel yell. I let her shout and cause all sorts of turmoil and drama. Then mindfully in meditation and self-hypnosis, I let her know that she was still loveable, and while the label of hellion might fit, she still deserved to be heard and honored. A surprising thing has happened. That rebel is becoming calmer and more cooperative.

Now I will be honest here and say that without baking a single Christmas treat other than a pumpkin pie, my kitchen has been positively loaded with all manner of sweets. Bless the hearts of all those bakers, generous as they are to my family and me. I love sweets and with the long holiday to-do list, the tight time schedule, and the myriad of memories and emotions, being a stress-eater, I decided not to pick this month to discipline the rebel, but gave her free reign. She told me a lot of stories—some of them heart breaking—and she ate cookies. My fat jeans grew tighter. I listened to her more, sitting in stillness with her and actively listening.

And all along, there was a calm voice within, my angel voice, the God voice, reassuring me that when disciplined behavior comes from a place of love and self-acceptance, it is successful. I knew that the cookie binge would not last. And it hasn’t. It’s over now. The rebel is at peace once again. This year, I didn’t fight her and with no one to resist, she has not persisted.

For some, a resolution works beautifully because there is no rebel to fight back against. The head and the heart are both on board and motivated. For others, especially where there is a part that wants to resist and persist, resolutions can have the opposite effect from what we think we desire. If you are pondering making a resolution, check with your rebel first. If you hear a whoop and war-cry, you may want to skip the resolution and instead book a hypnotherapy session to find out what that little warrior is really fighting so hard for that she/he will put any and all obstacles in your path, even if it kills you. The rebel always has a cause.

Resolution or no resolution, you can be sure that this next year, you will find ways to challenge yourself towards growing and changing. Edgar Cayce, in one of his readings, advised that whether we are moving forwards or backwards, the thing is to move. Progress is made in either direction. What would you decide to do if you knew that you couldn’t get it wrong? Resolution or no resolution, you couldn’t fail? Go ahead then—move! 

 

But this blog isn’t about miserly old men doomed to wear chains unless they mend their ways, or even catchy songs from 1970’s cinema. It is about Scrooge’s reactions each time he returns to his bedroom after traveling with the ghosts. “Was it all a dream?”

There are a few questions within that question. First, did that really happen to me? Second, am I going insane? And third, if it’s a dream, I don’t have to do anything about it. I can dismiss it, right?

There are certain people we stereotype as the sorts who will believe anything. Gullible. Flibbertigibbets. Easily led down the primrose path.  They talk about fairies as if they are real. They see ghosts and aliens and UFOs. The thing about these people is—they dare to talk about these things. Scrooge may ultimately come to the conclusion that the spirits of Christmas past, present and future were real, but Dickens ends the story before we see if Scrooge ever confesses to anyone about his spirit adventures, or if he just lets the lucky villagers wonder at his changed heart. So allow me to speculate. If Scrooge did sit down to Christmas lunch with his nephew and their guests, he may, having not yet come down from the bliss of his epiphany, tell the story. But the fact that he is a wealthy man will allow others to listen to the story asking those same three questions Scrooge asked when he wondered if it were a dream and ultimately, the lunch guests are free to dismiss Scrooge’s transformation as simply a man getting old and senile. Perhaps they will invite the doctor around eventually.

In past life regression work, the question arises, “Is this just a dream?” I tell clients all the time that they will feel they are making it all up, but once they emerge from the trance state, there is this sense that what they have experienced is not like any dream they’ve ever had.  I spent months, no years, wondering about the validity of what I learned in past life regressions and ultimately I came to the same conclusion as Scrooge—what difference does it make? In Past Life Regression there is a great gift (I would say a gift from God) to see beyond our own denial and delusion and make changes, make new choices.  If that also makes us flibbertigibbets, well, Scrooge is clearly a happier man.

May the milk of human kindness run down your chin this Christmas time, and may you at least allow the possibility that there is more going on in this world than that of which logic informs us.

We live our life in a trance state. To my way of thinking, becoming hypnotized is in some ways more like finally waking up. For those who feel they can’t experience hypnosis, it is really a lack of willingness, a fear of losing control.

We go into trance when we read a book, watch TV. Advertising has trance inducing jingles, repetitions and suggestions that make us hungry. Why else would we continue to buy food that if we slow down enough when eating it, we realize it tastes pretty disappointing compared to our expectation? But we keep buying Oreos because we are acting on a hypnotic suggestion that we want to be true. I heard a politician speak at a church service shortly after I earned my master certification and about five minutes in recognized that I was going into a trance state. I really listened to him and wondered if he had formal training himself because he was a master hypnotist. For those open to his message that morning, he probably just sounded like a good speaker. He taught me a great lesson in how our politicians operate.

I talked to a smoking cessation client yesterday who had come for one session several months earlier. The day after the session she called sounding amazed that she wasn’t lighting up and asked, “What did you do to me?”  She never came for her follow up session and she opted not to take home a CD recording of her session to  reinforce all suggestions. When she told me that hypnosis didn’t work for her and she didn’t think she could hypnotized, it hardly came as a surprise. She runs her own business, has no trouble telling people what she is thinking, and really isn’t too worried what others might think of her. She is the kind of woman who will not be told what to do.  “But you’re the expert,” she said to me. “You should be able to get around me. Maybe I just need to be really tired.”

I  suggested to her that until she is comfortable enough to know she won’t lose control, but she is safe, and really willing to quit smoking, I could be the greatest hypnotist on the planet and she will still feel that she hadn’t gone into trance. To use a holiday themed cliché, it is the difference between “Seeing is believing, and believing is seeing.”  When she is willing, it will work.  As long as she is determined to see hypnotherapy as out of her reach, she will be right.

So are there those who can’t be hypnotized? My teacher and mentor, Dr. Allen Chips, answers by saying, “Yes, provided one has normal physiological and psychological functioning and therefore the ability to concentrate and/or relax. As long as a normal human being is willing, he or she may undergo hypnosis. Insusceptible people are simply not willing. There is a positive correlation between one’s willingness to relax and concentrate and the ability to undergo hypnosis.”

Whether you go into a deep trance your first time or a light trance the first time you visit a hypnotherapist, the more often you experience the hypnotic/trance state, the more easily and quickly and deeply you can attain that state. Going into trance for the first time is like a trek through the jungle. The first time you go, you bring a machete and carve out a narrow path. Each subsequent trip, however, is simply widening the way. I can now take a deep, signaling breathe and almost instantly attain at least a light, relaxing trance quite easily. I use it to calm myself, to write, and to meditate. I use it to check in with my intuition, gain information I can really trust and connect to the spiritual part of my being.

If you feel you would like to give hypnotherapy a try but you are certain you can’t be hypnotized, ask yourself if you have ever driven a few miles and spaced out, later wondering how you arrived at your destination without causing an accident. If that has happened to you, then you’ve been hypnotized. 

There has been a theme running through the regressions I’ve conducted of late revolving around Medicine Women—the healers in the community.

What I conclude is that through out the history of humankind, being a healer of any kind is not only a calling to help those in pain and need, but to offer one’s life up, literally, to others’ fears and violence. In other words, it isn’t an easy path to take on the ills of the world. Thus far, the world hasn’t necessarily offered up its thanks; it’s been more likely to present a bonfire, a bomb, or an invitation to live alone at the far, far edge of the village—deep in the woods is even better.

Companionship is found in the sharing of skills and wisdom, old to young. But largely the life of a medicine woman has elements of lonely, hermit-like existences. Amazingly, in the majority of these regressions, it is the healer who has cared too much, who held too tightly to the suffering of others, who is literally physically suffering now. They have taken on the negative/unbalanced energies of other people/nature to transmute it, but forgotten how to release that energy, as if half the equation is missing. Using integrated imagery those who are ready and willing have been able to begin to let go; to let the negative in, but then let it out, changed into a positive or neutral energy.

All of this makes me think of conversations I’ve had recently about our troubled medical world. With pharmaceutical companies seemingly running our hospitals, it behooves us to make note of the statistic that tell us there are hundreds of thousands of deaths each year related directly to medical error. Enter hospitals at your own risk. I prefer to consult my friend, the herbalist or a medical intuitive these days, myself. The last time I did consult a doctor about a health issue, I was given two minor surgical options, neither of which was a sure thing, but a possibility for alleviating my symptoms. I thanked the doc for his time, and then went into self-hypnosis where I had a little chat with my body. A short time later, things returned to normal for me.

My point isn’t that the medical world is bad. We, as a society, somehow feel entitled by our fears and victimhood to condemn those in the healing world for our ill-health. It may be time to start taking more responsibility for our own health, honoring healers as helpers, rather than miracle workers who have an obligation to fix us. Most healers are simply people who have chosen a path of helping others. Whatever the tools are that they use, sometimes the outcome is nothing short of miraculous, and other times, it is a disaster. When we have good outcomes, like the success of my dad’s bypass surgery almost ten years ago, we are happy. When there is nursing care like my mother-in-law received a short time ago, it seems impossible to express enough gratitude. When a prescribed medication makes a loved one sicker, we are quick to place blame. When it is someone praying for us, and quietly absorbing our negativity, we often remain consciously oblivious to the help received.

I am not talking now about the healers who are down right unethical and negligent now like Dr. Conrad Murray, but rather, the medicine people who have chosen a path that leads them through pain, death and suffering, and still they take it on as a sacred calling.  May they all remember how to transmute the suffering into joy and may that joy be returned to them ten fold. 

I set the cards down and reached for a bowl of sea beans I use as decoration on my expo table and put one in her hand.

My grandmother first introduced me to sea beans when we would visit her in Florida. An avid beachcomber, she called them heart beans or lucky beans. They look like brown stones and are either round or heart-shaped. In fact they are seedpods from vines that grow in Central and South America and Africa. They fall off into the rivers and float out to sea. Because they are light, they float, going on journeys of thousands of miles, (15,000 miles has been recorded) on the oceanic currents and eventually they wash up on distant beaches. Because of the hard shell of the pod, fish can’t bite them. They are rare and hard to find, hence, the idea of them bringing good luck. My sister and I might find one every two or three years, though we spent hours looking. Because they spend time in water, they represent becoming comfortable with emotion, learning to float through feelings and flow with the creative power of the subconscious. 

The year my grandmother passed, we spent Christmas with Granddad. In a few days I found over 50 sea beans.

While I covet my beans, occasionally Spirit nudges me to put one in someone’s hand and tell them about the beans, and to encourage them that they have all they need to keep going until they once again reach dry land. The beans have a message of transformation–leaving one life and traveling to another. One was found in an Egyptian tomb and when it was cracked open, it actually sprouted, and so they represent immortality. It is hard to envision the lush vine waiting inside the seed, even as it is tossed about on it’s long voyage.

When I threw cards for this young woman, not surprisingly they were all water cards, save one fire—the one that spoke of her heartbreak. She asked me mid-reading if I was picking up any messages from the other world; there was a lost loved-one she needed reassurance from and she’d come to the expo with that single purpose. I paused, trying to think how best to answer her. I am not a psychic medium. I have friends who do that and I so honor their gift and their courage to share it. When I told her that I only read cards, she accepted this with a quick nod. I only hope she was able to hear the advice of the Tarot, which was to love herself as a mother would love a child, unconditionally (no matter what!) and to remember that she is not alone. She told me her story, which I won’t share, but suffice it to say it will stay with me for the rest of my life.

The outcome card in her reading was hopeful, encouraging, and that makes me feel better. I can only guess what she thought of the reading, if she was able to hear any of it at all through her grief. As the reading came to a close, she handed me back the heart-shaped sea bean and I told her to keep it. My sincere hope and prayer is that as she moves through the powerful currents of her life, that little bean will remind her that though her heart feels waterlogged and broken, in Spirit it is whole and perfect. 

Anne described a house in the woods. There was a tree in the front yard with a tire swing. She took me into the house, but everyone was out in the back yard. “They are getting the baby out of the well,” she told me. I asked her how old she was and she told me she was six.

“I put the baby in the well,” she said shyly, her voice sounding like a child’s.

After more questioning I learned that this little girl, Susie, was in an orphanage. She’d been placed there right after birth, never being held by her mother or hearing her mother’s voice. In the orphanage they called her “Baby” and the other children held her and gave her attention. Then, when she was six, a new “baby” came along.

“I just want him to go away. I’m the baby,” she told me.

Shortly after the baby was saved from the well, with no one ever the wiser of how he had gotten there, a terrible fire consumed the house and the woods. Susie had run out the front door and the rest were trapped at the back of the house. She sat on the swing and watched not knowing what to do or where to go.

Anne had been dealing with a difficult relationship with her birth mother in this life time, trying again and again to forge a healthy, nurturing relationship, and time and again being frustrated. In her time Between Lives, she was shown so beautifully how she is never alone, but always loved and supported. She was shown that she could mother herself now, love herself unconditionally.

Anne lives a distance away in a town south of Park Rapids so I had not seen her for some time when she contacted me, recently. She sent me a follow up email letting me know that at the time of the regression, she had a sense that a good friend of hers was the baby.

“He is very scientific,” she wrote. “He even has a PhD.” She said she had not been sure if she should tell him about the regression, but a moment arose that felt right. Before she had given many details, her friend’s face grew pale, and a distant look came into his eyes. “It was an orphanage in Nazi Germany, and I remember you were always the one on the tire swing,” he said. “I remember it.” He said he’d always been uneasy around wells and usually stayed clear of them.  The whole thing left him quite dumbfounded.

I believe the time has been coming where more people will spontaneously remember past life experiences. They may think of them as odd thoughts, unexplained fantasies, but they are all a part of the stories we are living out in our subconscious minds that then create this life we are living now. As the veil between this and the other world continues to thin, we will become more attuned to those connections we have with one another.

There are special people over the course of my life for which I’ve immediately felt drawn. I offered to tell one of them about a past life where we ran into one another, but they were not open at that time, feeling it would challenge their belief system too much. Perhaps one day they will remember it all on their own. In the meantime, if you wonder if someone has been with you before, they probably have been. And chances are, they will be again, even if at the time you wished they would just go away. We are all here to grow and learn and learning to love others and ourselves may be most important of all our lessons.  Remember this—we are never here alone.  

Oracle cards are decks that stand all on their own. Each card comes from the creative imagination of the author/artist and so each deck is as individual as the creator. The first deck I learned was not a tarot deck at all, but the Medicine Cards created by Jamie Sams and David Carson. That helped me to build my vocabulary of animal totems, which serves me very well now reading tarot. I set those cards aside a long time ago and have just picked them back up, drawing one each day to remind myself of the catch-words Sams and Carson use. Today I was gifted with Raven’s magic.

I am finding that you can never know it all in tarot because each reading teaches me more. I did a reading the other day and the Two of Swords and the Two of Wands came up. The client had a question about a relationship with a man that was getting hard to navigate. My advice to her was to talk to him, not from a place of passion, but as though she was discussing an important business matter. “He can’t hear or understand your anger or your passionate nature. But he can hear you if you speak his language. If you learn to speak his language, then you can begin to teach him yours.”  I’d never thought of the Two of Swords being about communicating with someone who is locked up in their head before, rather the key phrase of this card is being torn between your head and your heart. Well, his being all in head was breaking her heart. She confirmed that they were also in business together and lately that is all they seem to discuss, meanwhile, her other needs were not being met.

I also use Doreen Virtues’ Healing with the Angels oracle cards mostly for their positive and encouraging messages. Each card offers reassurance that I am not alone. I keep this deck handy on my desk and as I wait for something to print or down load or inspiration to arise, I pull a card. Whatever I pull always makes me happy. Just now I drew the card of Serenity. I am told in the book that it isn’t necessary to solve problems to finally find serenity. The opposite is actually true. As I trust God to take care of me, even in the midst of turmoil, there I find serenity.

Whatever deck you pick up to work with, be sure it sings to your heart. Do the pictures speak to you? Are there images with which you can easily relate? To learn to read cards is to hone your skills at listening to you intuition, learning the language of the Spirit, and learning to listen to the Divine Source that ultimately has little to do with ink and cardboard and everything to do with what is inside of you.

Intuitive Tarot Meetup this Thursday from 7-9pm at Brigid’s House. See events for more details!