Do I or Don't I
Shining the Light
Q. How do I know if this is right for me?
A. When you ask yourself a question such as this, you are creating an opening. You are inviting exploration. You are perhaps wanting to know if it serves your path and/or if it aligns with your values. Now it is time for discernment. I suggest you take some deep breaths, focus on the question, allow space for thoughts and feelings to come into your awareness, and then simply observe them without attachment. When the thoughts and feelings have been acknowledged, I invite you to take the question into your heart. What does your heart say? Your mind generates answers from past experience serving what it believes will keep you safe. The egoic mind—survival consciousness, is only concerned with survival (safety and security). Your heart speaks from the present moment serving you to align with your truth—with wholeness.
Q. The Birthing Your True Self process may work for others but will it work for me?
A. The Birthing Your Self process is designed to serve your needs. You are an active participant in you process and in its unfolding. Your experience is determined by what you give of yourself to your process and what you feel worthy of receiving. My role is to guide you and to support your process.
Q. I am interested but what if I don’t have enough time or money? Should I just wait for a better time?
A. One truth that I have learned as I have walked my own path is that there never seems to be a good time — at first. However, when I felt and knew that my participation would be in alignment with my healing journey, and I valued myself enough to say “yes”, the timing that I had thought was so wrong always turned out to be perfect. Things that I thought were going impede the process fell away and space was created for me to do the work required. The same experience unfolded with the money. When I was in alignment and said “yes”, money became available. The key for me was believing I was worthy. How important is it to you to free yourself from your emotional pain? Are you worthy of living without the emotional pain that has been keeping your stuck?
Q. I would know if story had power over me, wouldn’t I?
A. This is a really beautiful question. At one time, I believed that I would know. However, my stories lived in my unconscious so I could not actually comprehend the power they held over me until they came into my conscious awareness. The truth is we can’t know what we are unconscious of until we become conscious of it. We can only be aware of what is in our conscious mind. The most fascinating part for me was when other people, who were aware of my story, tried to make me aware, but I couldn’t relate and was often angry at them for what they believed about me. I was certain they were wrong and that they didn’t really know me at all. When I became aware, I was angry at them for not telling me. I believed they could have prevented much of my suffering. They would always say the same thing, “I tried, but you couldn’t hear me.” They were right. I couldn’t hear them because what they were saying was not in alignment with my story.
The truth is you have no way of knowing what stories have power over you until you become aware of the patterns you live out in your life. It is the repeated patterns that are keeping you stuck in story and in the emotional pain.
Q. Why can’t I just figure things out for myself?
A. You most likely can figure things out for yourself, but the challenge with figuring it out yourself is that it takes time. My experience, and the experience of many I have worked with, is that figuring it out on your own involves going around in circles, gaining encouragement from a small breakthrough, continuing in more circles, and then experiencing the hope and excitement of a big breakthrough, relying on it to propel you onwards as you resume your very repetitive circular route once more. It takes a lot of energy and the journey may feel very hard. With a guide who is ahead of you on the journey, they know the path and the pitfalls. They know where the challenges are and provide the support required for you to work through them. Once I felt worthy of guidance I no longer experienced going in circles. My breakthroughs were, and continue to be, profound and if I do experience what feels like a step backward, I then experience a big leap forward. What appears to be going backward is simply a time of integration.
Q. Aren’t most, if not all, of the choices I make in my life conscious?
A. It is believed that we have up to 70,000 thoughts a day and 95% of those thoughts are the same thoughts we had the day before. The same thoughts lead to the same choices.
It is also believed that by the time we are 35 years old 95% of our mind is a set of memorized behaviors, emotional reactions, beliefs, perceptions and attitudes. This allows for 5% of our mind to make conscious choices. I once believed that I was making my choices consciously until I became aware of the intergenerational stories that were impacting my life. I was surprised to learn that my choices were actually being made by my unconscious mind. I thought I was in the driver’s seat but I learned that my stories were.
Q. I want to do this but I worry about the cost. How do I know if the cost of remaining stuck in my story is higher?
A. This is a very deep, thought-provoking question. It is very difficult to assign a monetary value to something that cannot be measured. You can see and touch a piece of furniture. You can sit on it to determine its comfort. Perhaps you have a choice of colour to compliment your space and then you weigh the cost to see if it is worth it to you. Unsticking from Story is an investment in yourself. The impact of a story on your life is unknown until you have completed the process. The stories that keep one stuck are survival stories. Survival stories cost you your power (disempower you). When you unstick from survival stories you align with creation and your truth becomes your power. With this knowledge the question becomes, “Is being free of my story and living in alignment with my true self worth the investment ?” Or more simply put: “Am I worth the investment?”
Q. Is my story impacting my life enough to do this? It is a big commitment.
A. Liberating yourself from story is indeed a big commitment. It is a process of unlearning and relearning. It is a dedicated practice. Like the previous question, the question can be rephrased in a number of ways: “Am I worth the investment of the time and energy?”, “Do I love myself enough to do this?”, “Is living an empowered life free from my emotional pain that important to me?” One of my guides used the analogy that my desire to free myself from my story needed to be greater than a drowning person’s desire for breath. I didn’t understand the truth in that analogy until I was free of some of my stories and I could see how they were stifling my capacity for life — my ability to breathe and to live fully.
Answering these question is a process that requires you to be microscopically honest with yourself. They support you to shine the light on you and your inner world.
Your answers will reveal to you how committed you are to the process of healing your wounds that have developed from living intergenerational stories that are not in alignment with your truth. We have all been wounded by the patriarchal story and healing our wounds is part of our journey in this time of transformation.