I have come to believe that everything unfolds in perfect divine order, that everything that happens is a lesson here in Earth School, and that what actually happens to us is not as important as how we deal with it. This is quite a different philosophy than the one I used to live by, and it was severely challenged five years ago when my house was infested with ticks. 

Brown dog ticks are the only ticks that have been known to  take over a human habitat. Being a researcher, I learned more about BDTs than I wanted to know. Given the reproductive rate, it is fair to assume that I had between 2,000 and 8,000 ticks in my home. Living in my rugs, furniture, clothes, walls, and of course on my dog, they took over my consciousness and my life.  I wore only white clothes because I could hold them up to the light and see if they were already occupied.  I pulled more than 50 ticks off my dog every day. I could only sleep with the lights on, and then fitfully at best. I could not relax in my house. I realized I was in trouble when one walked over my foot while I was talking on the phone and I started to hyper-ventilate. Being petro-sensitive, I could not even consider pesticides, since all professionally used pesticides at that time were petroleum based. I  diagnosed myself with Acute Anxiety Disorder and felt hopeless, like I was being held hostage with no way out other than to abandon my home.

Obviously, I did find a solution. But that is not important to this story (unless of course, you have ticks, in which case, please contact me!)What I learned from this experience was  not to give up hope, to have faith that I would be led to a solution. And  I learned that I was brave and resourceful, that I could call out my Warrior self. In this experience, I reclaimed parts of me that I had lost. There was a time I used to call my friend Bonnie to come and take ticks off my dog because I couldn't bring myself to do it; today there are very few situations that intimidate me (and none of them involve removing creepy crawlies).  I learned that I did not have to solve all my problems by myself and it really was OK to ask for help. I learned that if you talk to enough people, someone can give you a direction and that research pays off. I learned that I could get a grip on myself even when I was stressed to the max.  I learned that my biggest problem was not my situation, but my fear. And that if I could face my fear, if I could turn to love and faith and open my mind to seeing something new, I could find my way home again. And I learned to be grateful for the challenging things that happen because they bring powerful lessons. I learned to practice gratitude no matter what: every day that I was not bitten by a tick, I was grateful for that. I lived with thousands of blood sucking parasites in a relatively small house and not once was I bitten. What a blessing that was!

In Japanese writing, the symbol for crisis is the same symbol that is used for opportunity. I've known that little tidbit for a long time, but I didn't really "get it" until the ticks taught me. Everything is an opportunity to learn about ourselves and to call back parts of ourselves that we have lost. It's all good, it's all part of the lesson plan. 

According to Forrest Carter in his controversial book The Education of LIttle Tree, love and understanding are pretty much the same thing. He describes his Cherokee grandparents' language of affection "I kin ye" as meaning "I love you". His grandma told him that you "couldn't love something you didn't understand" and his grandfather said that back in the day "kinfolks" meant any folks you had an understanding with, that it meant "loved folks", not simply the connection by blood that it tends to mean now. 

Unlike Carter's family in Little Tree, the culture I grew up in tends to accept the illusion of intimacy rather than the actual knowing of how another thinks and feels and values. Skilled artifice seems to be rewarded and being physically intimate is often accepted in lieu of taking the time to learn who another is. As individuals, we are often taught to think and feel in accordance with consensual reality rather than our own. How can we know ourselves or another when we are acting and speaking in ways we think we should be instead of as who we are? Probably half of the work I did as a marriage therapist involved translating spouses to each other when fear and anger had compromised the ability to listen and the willingness to understand each other.

Choosing to put our attention on what we want rather than what we are afraid of or don't like is a place to start. It is easier to choose love instead of fear when you have a working definition of love that makes sense to you. To try on Carter's concept and look at 'practicing love' as 'seeking understanding' offers a way to improve our relationships, to bring compassion and acceptance to our interactions with others. I like the word play of intimacy: "into me see". I think it may be in the willingness to know others that we learn to know ourselves. Steven Covey in his book Seven Habits of Highly Successful People emphasized "seek first to understand, then to be understood", suggesting that we put aside our ego in the interest of connection. It seems to me that when you open yourself to understanding another it is an invitation for love to enter the room. 

Come Monday I usually start to wonder what am I going to write about for the week's Tidbit.  And this Monday it became evident that Relationship is the theme of the week. I am blessed to have relationships with people that give me so much opportunity to learn and grow and express myself. So a moment of gratitude here to all of you who support my education. 

My first therapist told me that relationships were the ways in which we resolved our own internal conflicts. It took me a while to get that. And then ten years later I got it again, a little differently. And today, it has a whole new spin. Relationships are opportunities to know who we are, to grow ourselves, to find our wholeness within ourselves instead of looking outside for others to make us whole. And to share that glorious process of discovery and to support each other.

It is our choice how we structure our relationships. We can build on a foundation of love and appreciation (and we all usually start there) or from a perspective of fear and lack (where many of us tend to go when something happens that scares us).  We can learn to stay open and receptive and choose to respond from the heart no matter what; or we can live in old wounds from the past and re-enact old conflicts. When we recognize that our heart is shutting down we can ask what we need to do to keep it open. And then take action to do it. Take a breath or go to the beach, talk to a friend (doesn't matter how many legs they have), pray, tap, do yoga, dance, hug a tree.... It takes practice to choose positive action and we will make mistakes and that is OK because mistakes are how we learn. Or we can choose to let our heart shut down and abandon ourselves to self pity or misery or catastrophic thinking, which often becomes habitual and familiar. 

I am not saying that experiencing negative emotion does not have its place. I remember a night I was so depressed after a break up with my boyfriend that I went to bed with a bowl of popcorn (comfort food), and a box of tissues, and Linda Rondstadt on the stereo singing her sad broken hearted love songs. And I cried and cried and cried myself to sleep. The next morning I felt wonderful! I had released all the old broken hearted pain and had a new day without all that old baggage. Cathartic emotional release (drama therapy is a great example) is wonderful when we have a lot of stored up energy that we become willing to let go, but repetitive negative patterns can evolve a life of their own and they do not serve our higher good. What they do serve is the conflict between conscious and unconscious beliefs and intentions, but that is another tidbit (I have been told that these tidbits have grown certainly into appetizers and perhaps even into full course meals, but they are still tidbits to me).

We need to  learn to take care of ourselves in relationships rather than expecting the relationship to take care of us.  It does not serve us well if we interpret another person's attempts at self care as abandonment of us. More often, we abandon ourselves by not speaking our truth or listening to our inner knowing. Sometimes we project our own feelings onto others; that they are doing it to us, when in reality we have let go of our practice of making ongoing choices to take responsibility for staying with our higher self. We have all been "abandoned" at one time or another; it is part of living on this planet. We were born. People come and they go. We all die. (And, paradoxically, at the same time we are all one, never alone, never abandoned; if we keep our hearts and minds open it is easier to recognize this.) Our job is to learn to take care of ourselves and choose how to support positive emotional vibration in ourselves first and thereby empower others to do the same, creating relationships based on mutual growth and appreciation. 


"If all you did was just look for things to appreciate you would live a joyous, spectacular life. If there was nothing else that you ever came to understand other than just look for things to appreciate, it's the only tool you would ever need to predominantly hook you up with who you really are. That's all you'd need." Excerpted from the Abraham-Hicks workshop in San Antonio, TX on January 26th, 2002
 

For years people have believed in the immutable power of genetics as the primary factor in human behavior and condition. While the debate between nature and nurture  continues, isolated genes have been given credit for ADD and heart disease and dyslexia and cancer and a whole range of dis-eases. I have often heard people use family history as immutable evidence of not being able to change being overweight  or some other issue in their life. However, the dogma of DNA as the immutable determiner  is now being challenged in the fields of energy psychology and energy medicine. 

"Scientists are discovering the precise pathways by which changes in human conscousness produce changes in human bodies. As we think our thoughts and feel our feelings, our bodies respond with a complex array of shifts. Each thought or feeling unleashes a  particular cascade of biochemicals in our organs. Each experience triggers genetic changes in our cells" writes Dawson Church, in his book, The Genie in Your Genes. If experiencing trauma triggers genetic change, must the healing of trauma also effect genetic re-organization? And if each thought or feeling sets off biochemical changes what happens to those of us who live with a daily barrage of unpleasant reactivity due to stressful work or living environments? 

Back in the day, I learned a technique called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) that evoked an accelerated processing of a targeted trauma memory. At that time, it was  acknowledged that current understanding of neurobiology did not provide a scientifically exact explanation as to how it worked but many of us who used it in our clinical practice really didn't care because it was effective in reducing trauma symptoms in our clients. Today we have Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) and Tappas Accupressure Technique (TAT)that offer ways to effect internal changes that seem at times almost magical in their effectiveness. Having recently  resolved an issue using EFT that had been problematic for 15 years and unresponsive to a multitude of other  treatment approaches, I will testify as to the impressive power of these methods. And if "Magic is no more than a change in consciousness," as Jamie Sams and David Carson propose, then magic these techniques are in their ability to produce change in our physiological as well as psychological being.


What a magical world we live in today. With new understanding of energy medicine and energy psychology we are finding tools to support our ability to manifest the changes we desire. What it takes is to choose where you put your attention, open your mind, and begin. Not to say that it is always easy, as most of us have a lot of programming to overcome. But it is starting to seem pretty simple, and it can start with the intention and practice of choosing love over fear. And then opening to the tools and resources that are available to you.

When I was preparing to move from California to Florida, I had an idea in my head that I was going to create a way to earn income from my interest in fabric and yarn and crafts. I have been noodling around with pins and needles for most of my life and it has ever been my goal to follow this piece of wisdom attributed to  Confucius: "Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life."  So why not put my love of crafting to "work" for me? I certainly did that with my psychotherapy /counseling / coaching career, combining my love of talking and learning and helping others into a practice that has  kept me financially afloat for thirty  years. 

Martin Luther King once said "Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase," and that certainly was my approach to starting my first private practice. I was living in a little town in Northern California whose population at the time was about 860 people. There was a loft over my garage and I converted it into an office. I read Marsha Sinetar's Do What You Love The Money Will Follow and watched the movie "Field of Dreams" to help counterbalance the input of well meaning nay-sayers who told me I was nuts to try to start a psychotherapy practice in the "middle of nowhere". (Yeah, and they laughed at my intention to manifest a horse, too. By this time I had two horses.)Within six months I had a thriving practice that started with one woman who referred her sister who referred her friend who referred her co-worker, etc. 

So here I go again. Thanks to a jump start from my step daughter, I just opened Earthwise Designs, a cyber shop on Etsy that specializes in handmade items made from recycled materials. And because I am ever the student teacher, I am including tiny tidbits of inspirational quotes or recycling ideas with each listing. The process of setting up a cyber shop has made me more internet and computer savvy and I now have free license to knit, sew, and recycle fabric to my heart's content as well as the opportunity to empty my closets of completed projects in order to make room for more abundance. 

This is what I have learned about manifesting your dreams:

1. Get clear on what it is you want. You don't need to have the whole picture in detail, but a basic idea is helpful to start. And then add possible details, snapshots, images, create a dream board collage or draw a picture, in your mind or in tangible reality, both are valid. Focus on what it is you do want, feed it, it will grow.

2. Take action: give your dream positive attention every day. Write about it. Journal your thoughts and feelings, write your daily progress towards your desired goal (even if it is "I dreamt about it today"). Create images in your mind. Choose to believe it is in process of happening. I remember the story of one woman who wanted to manifest her soul mate. Every night at dinner she set an extra plate for him at her table. He showed up. Not that first night or even the first week, but he did show up. Be persistent. 

3. Notice without judging any obstacles that arise in your mind and attend to the inner reorganization necessary to attain your goal. Get a coach, therapist, do TAT or EFT, balance your chakras, pray and meditate ....... take whatever positive action you need to release those fears that prevent you from having what you want.

4. Talk about it to anyone who will really listen. Research and learn. Shamelessly self promote. You just might say a word in the ear of someone who has information or direction to give you. By the way, my shop address is 
http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=7092530

5. Choose love. Surround yourself with inspiration and support. Choose not to spend time with people who drain you or belittle your feelings and dreams. Interact with books, tapes, natural environments, and people that nourish you. Do things that you love and that make you feel good. Practice gratitude for everything, including this dream coming true. (Remember Einstein's concept of time.) 

6. Let go of any attachment to how it has to be and be ready to receive what comes to you. At the same time, be specific as to what you want. Honor paradox. Trust the universe to bring it to you in the best possible way. And let yourself recognize opportunity when it comes even if it does not look the way you expect it to.

May you have wings to fly,