Transparency

My mother died when I was 14 years of age.  She committed suicide.  I was in the room next door and awoke to a gunshot.  It was the day after my last day of my freshman year in high school.  It sounded different than I would have thought a gunshot would sound like, but I knew.  She had talked about it and even had tried before when I was 8 years old and it was me who had found her then.  

I made my friend go into her bedroom, using the excuse that I couldn’t put my contacts in to see. It was an excuse, but I couldn’t go in.  How could I?  It was my mom, how could I go and find her like that?  The image of it used to destroy me inside, but as I have grown, I have chosen a different way of looking at what happens when we die, that the spirit lives on.

To most people that know me, they have no idea that I have not only lost my mother at a young age, but that she had committed suicide.  Tragic.  For years after, I couldn’t tell people without cringing every time they reacted to my story.  I almost didn’t want to tell, but I knew I had to tell.  When the moment arose, and it often did when I was young, people asked where my parents were.  

Here’s the clincher, it wasn’t just that I had lost my mom, but I also lost my father to heart failure when I was nine years old.  Forget it.  It's at this point when I’m telling my life story to people, they are usually looking at me with enormous eyes of pity, which I hate to see.  Don’t pity me, I think and get angry inside.  Even now at 38 years old I think to myself, I’m the one who lost them. I’m the one who went through the pain and have had to grow up without my parents, not the person listening to my story.  Then, I feel bad for the other person interrogating me and become empathetic to their emotions of my pain.  Don't they get that I’m strong and have made it through? These are the facts.  No need to feel sorry for me.  Their sorrow only validates the pain, my pain.  I’m the one who has suffered it, not them.     

Very soon after my mother died, when I was in high school and telling my story to one of the many friends who had asked what had happened to my parents, I made the decision that the healthy thing for me to do was to be open and honest, not care about others’ reactions.  I didn’t want my story to be a taboo subject or a secret.  I also felt that I owed it to my parents who had suffered enough while they were here.  Honor their memory and forgive my mother.  By telling my story, it would also tell hers, which meant she could know wherever she is that I don’t blame her for what happened. I have always thought that her story could change someone elses’ life for the better.  Maybe encourage them to seek the proper mental health care that wasn’t available to my mother 24 years ago.

I am expressive and have to tell my story.  I can’t control other people’s reactions to what I have been through.  The truth is that they are not me and I’m not them, so how could they really have an idea of what it was like to lose my mother and father at such young age.  I decided that being transparent would be the best thing.  If this happened to me, it had to have happened for a reason. 

Why keep it all inside? 

When you keep pain inside, it erodes your insides.  It gets bigger. It leads to disease and illness.  It is just not healthy.  It’s definitely painful to share sadness with others, but to keep it in and internalize can be overwhelming.  I have chosen not to be closed.  I am usually an open book, when asked.  I wouldn’t walk around and announce my life story, but when it comes up, I share and I hope my tragic story may help someone else with theirs.  I have survived and become stronger as I have grown.  Being open and transparent is difficult, but by sharing, it may give someone else more strength and will to carry on with their own pain. 

If years of pain is covered up, it can turn into layers of built up emotion that will need to emerge in some way.  I realize when I was younger, when something around me would trigger an emotion relative to my loss, then I would get anxiety and panic.  When I would share my emotion and lay everything out, I could cope and move forward.

I used my instincts and my intuition to know that it was okay to lay everything out on the line.  What did I have to lose?  I had to release my thoughts and then would be okay. 

We go through phases in our lives as we grow and transform in our spiritual selves.  We can choose to embrace it or choose to ignore it.  I choose to embrace it and know the right path and the right people will come my way, if I am open to it.  I can feel it.  It’s always right if everything is clicking together, then you know you are on your right path. 

One of the primary ways to feel intuition is to be open and release the pain.  Share it, peel away the layers if they have been building for years.  Sometimes, we don’t even know what the layers we need to peel away.  Sometimes, they are small in the beginning and just by being open and sharing a personal experience with a friend, the onion begins to peel, layer after layer.  Transparency, like the layers of the onion, can make you cry.  It hurts, but it’s a cleansing.  An awakening and it’s scary, but it can grow the spirit and help move forward the journey.  Transparency can encourage greatness.

 

Mirrors

Mirrors.  They are reflections of our appearance gazing back at us.  I was always fascinated by them.  How is it that we are able to see ourselves in them, I would wonder.  I still think...I know it's about light reflection, but as we are standing in front of a mirror, gazing and understanding that it's our self gazing back at us, it is literally and energetically an image of us, our reflection that we see with our eyes.  It's so plain to understand, if you don't think too hard about it.  

Light is a form of energy, our very being, our soul is also a form of energy and we create more energy by simply living our lives, whether its good or bad energy that we put out there, energy breeds energy.

It makes sense, mirrors are similar to the concept of understanding that what you put out into the universe comes right back.  They say in Feng Sui, mirrors do not belong in our bedrooms when we sleep, because as we sleep our dreams our reflected back to us and this can be repeated over and over while we are asleep, which is not good for our restful minds.  In our sleep, our subconscious is trying to resolve the conflicts we experience in our conscious mind throughout the day.  How horrible it would be to keep reflecting this energy again and again as we sleep as our conscious mind is trying to heal itself.

I believe what you do always comes back to you in one form or another and have always been able to read energy.   I can feel shifts of energy.  Anyone can feel energy if they let their intuition take over and stop listening to their mind and its thoughts and just feel the experience and situation they are in.  There are forms of meditation that can guide you to that place if it can't be accomplished by quieting the mind on your own.  

When the United States went to war in Afganistan and Iraq, remember how the world experienced many major natural disasters around the same time? Asia suffered a devastating Tsunami, the United States suffered through numerous devasting hurricanes, floods, fires, etc. There were major earthquakes and more happening around the same time in the world.   I felt that it was the reflection of what was happening in the Middle East. It was a mirrored reflection of the negative energy from the war.  President Bush and his cabinet pushed negativity and fear out into the world and it the world got caught in its wake.  Today, we are feeling a major energy shift because it is trying to rebalance itself.  It's trying to regain and maintain its footing.  The new economy is the proof that we are feeling the ripples of what the world has been through in the last few years. 

In an interview on CNBC, Warren Buffet said we are in a "vicious negative feedback cycle," which could be another way to explain that we are now receiving feedback and reflection from the energy that was sent out into the world in the last few years.  We have to work through the pain, work it all out, which is painful for all.  If we want the payoff, we all have to do the work, even if we aren't directly responsible for the intention.  This is not to say, we are living through a punishment for what others have created, but we must to to work and go through this shift in the role of humanity.  We are now in this together, whether we want to be or not.  

"The goal of the path is to transform your awareness from separation to unity. In unity we perceive and express only love."  Deepak Chopra

As much as some capitalists and entrepenuers disagree with the current way Obama is handling the economic problems that we find ourselves in.  Unfortunately, it has to be done.  We have to suffer through it together.  He's trying to rebalance and clean up the old messes, the old capitalism, to hopefully make way for the new cleaner way of doing business in our country.  It will never be perfect because we are all just human.   

Maybe as long as we can still build businesses in our country, as long as we, the American people who love instant gratification will understand that the 'get rich quick" scheme days are few and far between.  

It's possible that only the ones who have created value in their businesses and as a mirror to that, in their own humanity should be able to survive the storm.  Companies and individuals may find themselves tredding water to stay afloat, but at the very least, we still have freedom. We are still able to create as a country because of our freedoms.   That's what will continue to make us a great country.  We will have success again after all of the anxiety, we just need to ride it out and look squarely at our reflection in the mirror, once we've followed the lighthouse back home. 

  

Change.

No way, not change.  We only voted for it.  We only wanted it.  It was only time for it. Intuituvely speaking, it was time for change.  Just like when Bush first got into office, right before 9/11.  We know it was not fair how he got in, we all realize that, but it was time for him to take over.  It was meant for him to be in office at that time.  We felt a sense of "John Wayne-ish" security with him being the one speaking to us after we were terrified and afraid.  We needed the cowboy to save us from the mean terrorists. Remember that?  

Now here we are, with Obama.  I have faith.  I still get chills when he speaks, even if Wall Street ices over every time.  I am with him.  I see the light at the end of the tunnel.  He's cleaning up, which isn't fun for anyone.  

Remember being little and building that tent in your basement out of every blanket, pillow and chair down there and playing in it all day?  Then, your mom came down and said it's time to clean up and your friends to go home.  Not fun.  It's time to clean up and it's time to balance out the energy that President Bush impeded on our country for eight years.  With Bush, the rich got richer and the smart got rich.  Now, that group...the top 1% are all very upset with Mr. Obama and so is Wall Street.  It will take time.  Why does our country thrive on fear?   Because we are impatient, impulsive and require immediate self-satisfaction.  We are an ADHD America.

Don't we realize we are protected?    It's in our All-American blood.  We are inevitably the leader of the free world...still!  Media, online conversations and blogs are all just chatter. Chatter.  We need to filter the chatter.  We have the privilege of freedom of speech, which to me is the most important part of our democracy, freedom of expression and be who we are.  It's great that we can chatter...that we can twitter...that we can speak.  It's up to each person individually to filter all of these messages and follow their own intuition and let this guide then into the right path of their lives.  We just have to do it.  We are fortunate that we are allowed to do it here, which is greatest part of the battle.  We shouldn't suffer from intuitive deficit disorder any more. 

We will be a successful country again, even after all of the anxiety...Wall Street, banks failing, zombie banks, car manufacturers' bailout, etc.  We are going to emerge again.  I feel it and it will happen faster than we think.  Seriously, don't believe the hype.  

We, as a country, just don't like change.  We don't like upheaval and movement.  It makes us uncertain.  We like certainty...security.  It's what our great grandparents and great-great grandparents were promised when they came here.  They passed down the notion that we will live here in freedom and feel secure, especially after what they all escaped from to come here and start over.  Change is inevitable.  It happens, we learn from it and move forward.  We have before.  After the Great Depression, when my own mother at age four had to live with her aunt and uncle because they couldn't afford to feed, clothe and shelter her.  We are not in that deep, although it may look that way to economists. We will make it through these changes.  

Everything will balance out.  We went from following Paris Hilton and Britney Spears on TMZ to following David Gregory to learn about the State of our Union on Twitter almost overnight. Right now, we live in an incredibly fast paced micro-country at the moment and if we are patient, the recession and suffering will be short-lived.  The internet will see to that!  We will be strong again.  The recession on paper looks horrible, but it's a mentality.  Once we get the all of the markets moving again by spending and creating and stimulating, the circulation of money will move and we'll emerge in the rapid speed we have become accustomed to as a nation. Money has an incredibly strong energy and when it moves, it moves mountains.  

Connecting

Raw, Cut and Uncensored:

Everyone has a deep need to feel connected.  It's a part of being human, feeling loved and as if you are a part of something greater than yourself.  This basic human need fuels us in directions that can be both good and bad.  I grew up without parents, so my very important first connection was cut off at a young age.  I was 9 when my father died, then 14 when my mom died.  My situation forced me to self-parent.  I was lucky enough to have many adults around to provide me with guidance, but obviously it wasn't the same had my own parents been around to teach me life lessons.  I've learned many on my own and at age 38, I'm still learning everyday.

 

Self-parenting has forced me to follow my inner wisdom and look beyond the world we see and understand.  I feel there is something larger than us that guides and parents us.  Call it a higher energy, G-d.  Whatever, you call it, there are a million religious terms to explain what I'm referring to, but whatever it is, we are always ridiculous to think we have full control.  It is up to us to move forward and learn from everything we experience, the happy, the sad, the difficult and the simple.  Even in the state of the world in which we live right now, with the economy in deep recession and people without work, without homes, without...just without, there is still a plan bigger than us. 

In the last 8 years, I had felt that humanity was losing our connection to one another.  Let me preface this by explaining that I live in an affluent area, where sometimes the people have the reputation of being jaded, self-centered and self-indulgent, so maybe my view is skewed a bit. Maybe, if I lived back in the south where I grew up, then I may have felt differently.  But, even the times I visited the south in the last 8 years, I felt that although there human kindness still existed, it had faded slightly.  

I can't blame it all on President Bush because I believe he was the right president at the right time in our history, but his drive for us to fight against "evil" led us to feel to defensive and live in fear.  It created anxieties in our culture that we didn't need to feel.  Now, we are facing real anxiety as we look around and find less abundance, but I think we are handling it better as a whole nation as we are relearning how to appreciate relationships and true connections to others again.  Now today, financial anxieties and worries are there, but this time unfortunately they are real "in-our-face" anxieties we see and feel daily.  Although the degrees differ in how the recession is affecting each of us, we are all in this together.   Tension is created among differing opinions, but that's what happens when humans connect in "real time."  

Just this past weekend, as my family and I were heading on a road trip to a cheerleading competition.  We stopped at a highway rest stop Starbucks and while my hands were filled with a latte, a frappaccino, and a mocha, I couldn't manage to put the little cardboard thing onto my hot latte, a stranger, a middle-aged woman, assisted me by holding the cardboard open so I could slide my hot cup in.  I thought it was a miraculous act of human nature, given the selfishness I had felt in years past at the same Starbucks stop on the way to previous competitions.  I felt the human connection was repairing itself, even if just slightly.  

Obviously, Obama was elected by this country's need for change.  It was not just change of policy and politics.  I think we missed the need for connection again.  Our country leads the world on many fronts, culturally, financially and maybe it's time to lead spiritually, too.  Not religiously, but simply with the human connection. 

Intro to my blog.

In the United States, we are led by the mass media and pop culture around us.  We are driven to always compare ourselves to what others are doing and it without realizing it, we find ourselves expelling countless energy to keep up.  There is tremendous information around us on a daily basis and the list is growing by the nanosecond.  Because of the pace of the internet, we are receiving new information globally and sharing energy and thought faster than ever in the history of humanity. It's reassuring and terrifying at the same time.  

Since, there is so much information around us, we can have the tendency to get very caught up i it.  So much so that we may lose ourselves and lose our own purpose for existence.  It is important to stay informed, make informed decisions, but to also follow our own intuition to live our lives and not solely do what the media and our pop culture sways us to do.  One important part of every day is to feel grounded by gaining energy from nature to feed your own spirit.  Study a tree, for example and it may sound really silly, but "be the tree."  Feel what the tree is feeling.  It just takes a minute, but it can ground you and help to refocus your energy so you can follow your own path and not where another's path may be dragging you. 

I have always been very sensitive to the world around me, from a very young age and have always perceived human behavior and energy without quite grasping that not everyone else sees and feels the way I do.  Everyone is intuitive, in some way.  It's how we perceive our intuition and use it that makes us different.  I have lived by my instincts and always followed my intuition to guide me throughout my life.  If there's anything I can offer that will inspire or enlighten anyone reading it, then it's been worth my while.  I have always had the strong need for self-expression and it most likely stems from my core belief that everything happens for a reason and yet we have freedom to make our own decisions and choose our own paths, there is still a strong force of energy that has determined much of our fate.  As I blog, I'll cite examples from daily and past experiences that will explain where I've come up with most of the stuff I believe.  I'm not saying I'm always right or have all the answers in any way, but if my experience can help even one person with their own life struggles, than it's all worth it.