Diary of an Intuitive - Blog 2 "Running to the beat of your own drummer"

My daughter is 6 years old.  Her name is Eleanor.  Her name is the same as her grandmother’s, my mother, who is no longer here in physical form.  Eleanor, my daughter, “Runs to the beat of her own drummer.”  This was the caption of a Charles Shultz, Peanuts poster I had in my room growing up.  It pictured snoopy running while listening to his headphones and oblivious to the dozen or more little yellow woodstock birds that ran in the opposite direction from him.  My daughter does run to the beat of her own drummer.  She embraces her spirit through song and dance.  Any afternoon after school or on the weekends you will find her singing or dancing to her own made up songs.  She is always coming up with her own words, music, and dances that inspire her and elate her spirit.  She truly enjoys what she does and is able to bring her entire being into what she is doing while she is doing it.  Last night she decided to sing ‘Opera’.  She curiously asked me, “Mommy, what is Opera?”  I responded with the best answer I could, “Well, it is a type of singing where the singer sings fully and entirely from the fires of their belly.  They bring up the most incredible sounds that are loud and long sounding where it almost seems like they can create their own echo in a room.  They are not yelling but rather they are able to produce these beautiful sounds in such a way that their song is soft and soothing to your ears.”  Wow, I thought I could never get all of that out and she would never understand all of that in one breathe.  But, to my surprise, she said, “Can you show me?”  With that, I bellowed out in my most untrained and uncharismatic voice, “Yes my dear, this is what it sounds like!”  I raised my arms and sang to her as well as I could.  She loved it!  And my daughter began singing her own version of Opera around the house announcing as she sang, “I am singing opera!  I can sing opera because I am an opera singer!”  I chuckled to myself and smiled in approval knowing that she is developing self esteem and a courageous heart through all of this experimenting she does around our house.  She feels safe to be herself and that is something that is a gift. 

I thought of my own childhood and how I too had a singer in me that wanted to sing all the time and dance around the house.  I used to sing outside, sing inside, and dance anywhere my body would take me.  I remember calling my mother to the front room window of our house so that she could watch below as her daughter told her to listen.  I sat outside in the front driveway and sang the tune “Maybe” from the play ‘Annie’.  I sang long and deep and did so without reservation.  I wanted my mom to know what a good singer I was because I thought so!  I didn’t care if people were walking by or if the neighbors were listening, I wanted them to hear me!  I had a strong and open throat and a desire to be anything I wanted to be, even a famous singer.  I also remember roller skating with my friends on the same block we lived on.  With my friends we practiced our roller skating moves and were always putting on performances.  We had sparkly skirts and outfits that we fancied in our skits that we performed in the neighborhood streets.  Sometimes we just did the skits for ourselves and sometimes we gathered our friends and families.  We were good.  We knew it too.  Our creativity and our sparks were open and on fire!  To us, there was nothing that we could not do, create, or become.  We were empowered little 6 year olds with a desire for life.

So, what happened to all of that?  What happened to the little girl with a courageous heart?  Well, she became scared as she grew up.  As she grew older she witnessed abuse in her own home.  She learned that it was no longer safe to be herself.  She learned that hiding from her parents during their nights of rage was the only safe way to live and justifiably translated this over to several parts of her life which included the singing and the dancing.  The skits and the singing became confined to her own bedroom four walls.  As she grew older, she never stopped performing, she only limited her audience to her stuffed animals, her mirror, and the Peanuts poster of Snoopy and Woodstock that hung in her room.  She always made sure her door was closed and that she was never too loud so that someone could hear. 

As an adult, I now realize that this was the beginning of the closing down of my throat (5^th) chakra and my empowerment (3^rd-Solar Plexus) chakras.  Your 5^th chakra, which is around the location of your neck, allows you to be able to speak your truth.  When it is open we feel that we can be who we are and speak of this freely to others.  When it is closed we feel like our ideas and our thoughts are not worthy of being expressed and that we do not have the right to express these.  Our 3^rd chakra is right around our belly, above our naval.  It gives us the freedom to feel safe and to be who we are.  When it is open we feel safe and secure in ourselves and free to express our personalities with the limitless power to do so.  When it is closed we feel powerless like there is nothing we can do to help ourselves.  We feel tired and depressed.  As you can probably see these two chakras are related and work closely together.  If we feel safe then we have the power needed to allow our hearts to speak our truth.  If we don not feel safe we close down and hinder our possibilities.  Unfortunately, these areas learned to remain closed most of my life and affected many of my life’s experiences and decisions I made about my future. 

Today, I have come to a point of healing in these areas.  As I express myself through these words that I write, as I watch my daughter embrace and sing out her songs of truth, and as I continue to take risks throughout my business practice that thrives on helping others to heal, I continue to heal and open to further and further states of pure trust and gratitude.  I have returned to my little girl and have embraced what I lost so long ago.   Especially, as I watch my daughter, Eleanor, express and become the ideas that she makes up in her head, I too go back to my little girl and allow her to express her ideas that she has in her head.  It helps me to remember that I will always, “run to the beat of my own drummer”.  Only now, my inner child knows that it is finally safe to do so thus bringing my adult back to remembering who I truly am; a child of light.   As we all are children of light that must remember the importance of play amongst our busy lives.  We must remember the children we once were many, many years ago.  We must embrace the children within us and remember what gave our eyes their sparkle.  Was it going out into the woods for hours and exploring?  Was it endlessly searching for rolly pollies in the back yard?  Was it dressing up in costumes and developing our own story lines and characters?  Or was it soaking up a book for hours upon hours?  We must get back to what made us laugh and our spirits soar as children.  We must remember.  This is where we left our sparkle dust.  It is still there, it is just waiting for us to reclaim it and to remember.  Re-member, re-unify, re-join with our inner child and reignite the flames of joy, celebration, uninhibited bliss that we all share.  This is when we are truly living.  This is when we realize how our children are truly a gift to our hearts.  This is when our spirits sing.  Our children help us remember and rejoin with who we once were.  They help us bring back the light in our eyes that they own without effort.  They help us remember our own beats as our own individual drummers running to the tune of our inner light.  This is their gift to us.  Find your inner child and allow her/him to laugh again (-:

On Sunday, I plan to run a 3.2 mile race with my middle, 9 year old son.  Some will be running to win, some will run for their own individual goals, some will be running for just the experience.  My son will be running as his first time ever running a road race.  I will be running mainly to experience the race through my son’s eyes and encourage him to keep going.  I wonder what he will say and see and express.  I wonder what kind of ‘beat’ he will bring to the race.  I wonder what we will learn together.  Until then, I wonder…

Namaste and blessings 

Diary of an Intuitive Healer - Blog 1

Diary of an Intuitive Healer- Blog 1

So where do I begin?  I begin at the beginning.  There are so many beginnings I have had.  I mean just look at all my past blogs and you’ll see the frequent starts and stops to my writing.  So what is the difference now as compared to before and all my other writing I have manuscript out here in blog world?  There is a big difference.  A mega shift.  There has been a boulder of confidence and knowing that is unexplainable unless you experience it firsthand that has come over me.  It did not happen overnight.  I wish I could say that….but it has taken a loooooong time.  It may have taken many lifetimes, but who knows because I refuse to go back into past life stuff.  That is not my calling.  My calling is to be in the present moment with you, and everyone I meet.  My calling is to be in the here and now and to never base decisions on the past but actually what is present at this moment in time.  To never count on old energy but to always bring in the fresh more vibrant stuff that makes flowers, sun, and happiness light, pure light.  Hmmm….so what do you want to know?  How did I get to my point, to this point in my life where I am ok with all that I am and know that ‘I Am’ what ‘I Am’ which is a part of it all, including you?  That is, like a said before, a long story.  So sit down, have a cup of ‘Joe’ and relax into my bliss that I hope transforms into your bliss as you seep into my words and feel the healing energy that arises over you as you read. 

You are light, pure light, a mega structure of unconfined matrix of light and stars and peace and happiness and pure bliss.  Nothing can shatter this within you.  It is impossible.  It may seem like it is happening, like someone is taking your light away, or that you are under a rock of darkness that is too heavy to remove.  This is not so.  It is all an illusion.  A grand illusion that we made up ourselves, which we painted with our own paints and canvas.  It is until we understand all of this and know this to be true that we continue to suffer through the illusions that come in and out of our lives every day.  Do you want to suffer anymore?  Do you?  No, I think not.  Then listen to my story as I begin to tell you how and why I have come to be who I am.  Where I came from and what lead up to this point in my life where I can say I am living proof that happiness and joy does abound in us all and it is never but a footstep away when it doesn’t feel close.  How can this be?  Just listen, listen to my words.  And as you do, imagine healing magic smoke coming over your body and melting deep into your skin taking on the roots of your fears and sweeping them all away.  There is never anything to fear my child except fear itself.  And once we know this, ‘Fear’ doesn’t even have a hold on us anymore.  fear no longer has a capital F, fear will cease to exist and this is what it will look like, ____.   Why not?  We shouldn’t this be out truth?  We are all light anyway, never needing to go back into the darkness.

I grew up in a small town at the time…in Greenwich, CT.  Mind you this was 40 years ago.  Greenwich is alot different today than it was back then.  I had a brother, Richard, who was 5 years older than me and immensely devoured by his own psychotic break of schizophrenia when he was 21 years old.  A father, Richard, who had a deep and irresistible drinking habit that eventually took over his life and destroyed the world around him.  A mother, Eleanor, who still speaks to me today despite that she, passed on when I was 16 years old due to cancer.  I also had a Grandfather, Charles, on my mother’s side that loved me dearly but had his own phobias that kept him secluded…he, also, speaks to me today as he has passed on as well.  I had an Uncle, Charles, my mother’s brother who did so much to help me on a physical level so that I would be provided with food and shelter when times became unmanageable beyond belief.  I also had many friends, this was my strength…my friends kept me going and connected despite the pitfalls and land mines that would go off day after day and week after week until eventually the family structure I had, collapsed.  So, what am I talking about?  What am I referencing in my life?  The years that I remember most as a child were the darkest years of my life.  I have had many other dark points in my life, but these early years were my foundation of the darkness that would take over my life.  My first 16 years imbedded and ingrained times of terror and unexplainable fears that are much similar to someone who goes through Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  The thing is, I remained illusioned until much later in life when I began to see how all these early experiences affected me to the point where I had built strong walls of darkness all around me.   The life I lived was a life in a cage built of brick that I personally stacked up myself.  This brick cage was easily justified by everything I had seen and heard as a child.  It felt so real, and so much like that living in darkness was the only way there was to live.  It was a cage I spent years building up and has taken more years to break apart. 

I can honestly say there were parts of my childhood that were filled with goodness.  I had friends that were deep and lasting.  Friends that I could count on that were as my true family.  I also had family members who cared and kept me afloat, like my Uncle and my Grandfather.  They provided stability in my later childhood years that if were not there I would have been completely lost.  They gave me a base where I could eventually escape the madness; they gave distant support that I needed at the time.  What I really wish is that someone could have swooped in and just loved me unconditionally.  But that did not happen…So here I write about that which made me who I am today and also healed me from illusions that never worked for me in the first place.

I didn’t know it at the time, but as a child living in an environment of constant fear I learned to put out my own light.  I learned that fear was the way to live your life.  I learned that there was everything to fear and nothing you could do about it.  How did I learn all of these illusions?  Through watching my parents live out their life of illusions.  My dad had a sever alcoholism problem where coming home drunk from the commuter train after work was a daily problem.  My mother didn’t like this.  She was a very judgmental person.  I can hear her today chastising and yelling at my dad for being drunk again.  Eventually my dad just couldn’t stand my mother’s grumbles any longer and would just ‘let her have it’ with his fists.  This paranoia party was a nightly event in our home.  I believe I was only 5 years old when I began to remember these nightly occurrences.  Dad would come home drunk for the third time that week in a row, mom would have a fit, dad would use mom as a punching back to get out all of his aggressions.  There would be lots of yelling and screaming, I would hide in my room with our schnauzer dog ‘Corky’ and my brother would hide in his room.  Eventually as my brother got older, around 11 or 12 years old, he could not take the yelling and screaming and hitting fights between my mom and dad and he would attempt to ‘save’ my mom.  So now it was my mom and brother screaming, yelling and fighting against my dad who would beat the crap out of both of them.  Of course, I tried a couple of time to join in and help my mom and brother out but I would either get yelled at and sent back to my room or pushed out of the way.  As it would seem, the 6 year old girl didn’t have enough power in her body to make a difference any way.  So, sometimes, I would ask my dog to go out there and try to distract them into stopping their craziness…usually that didn’t work either and eventually I became afraid that something was going to happen to the 15 pound ball of charcoal grey fur.  We lived in a duplex home where my father’s mom (my grandmother, Anne) lived in the basement and another single woman lived above us with her mom.  Well, eventually you could guess that my family made a lot of noise on these nights of rage and that the neighbors would get tired and scared of listening to it.  My grandmother’s way of dealing with this was to pound on the ceiling with a broomstick and yell at my dad to stop.  Well, my dad would just tell my grandma to ‘shut up’.  I remember him declaring one evening of rage, ‘Mom, just shut up or I’m commin’ down there, you hear!?! ‘.  Finally, our neighbors were fet up and would either call on the phone to complain or came down in person to knock on our door.  This worked just a couple of times to calm things down and eventually everyone would stop.  Unfortunately, this was not enough to make the crazy evenings end.  Eventually, the local police became our Angels.  Our neighbors became smart and called the local police instead of dealing directly with my dad.  When they came to knock on our door, everything stopped.  It was like Superman showed up at our door and stopped the freight train with one muscular arm that was ready to charge off the cliff to its drastic death.  These Super Beings that would show up on a continuous basis would make drastic changes in our life.  Now the game of crazy nights of yelling, screaming and fighting had an edge…with the touch of a few buttons on that yellow banana phone with spirally chord a man could appear to save us all from our hell!  Now that I had seen what a phone call could do I suddenly became charged with the power of a finger on a button.  When my mom and brother could not get to a phone because they were caught up with my dad’s fury, I could.  Several times I was personally instructed by my mom or my brother to call 911.  It was my job to secretly do this so that I would not be harmed.  Usually, if I were discovered, the banana phone was only ripped out of the wall and then it was a scramble to find the other phone that was in the house.  By then, the fighting had escalated so much that the neighbors were calling in the police for us.  My dad was even taken away by the police several times but my mom would never press charges.  We spent years living like prisoners to alcohol abuse.  My dad went to rehab several times and would religiously go to AA meetings.  But nothing ever worked.  We would find bottles of vodka hidden in trees and bushes or beneath frozen foods in the freezer.  We had no way of knowing how long he was on the vodka because you can’t smell vodka on someone’s breath.  This was his way of getting his fix without us knowing and fooling everyone around him.  He would lose jobs and get new one’s like the newest ice cream flavor of the week.  But the excitement of starting over and kicking his addiction would always wear off and we’d be back to where we were months ago…living in alcohol abuse hell.  I lived like this till I was 15 years old.  For 10 or more years I lived under the power of substance abuse.  It had such a deep hold on my family life that I carried this cellular memory of alcohol abuse well into my adult years.  I would revisit these patterns later in my life. 

For now, you have to wonder…why would someone, such as my mom, put up with such abuse for so long?  She never left him.  She tried many times.  But, she would always go back to him.   From what I know, there is a lineage of abuse in my mother’s side of the family.  My loving grandfather (towards me) used to yell and occasionally hit my grandmother.  Watching this on top of low self esteem sent my mom into a codependent relationship with my dad that she never could seem to get out of.  Yes, she had low self-esteem, she had monster fears about her abilities and skills, she would stop and start projects and never seem to get things off the ground for herself.  Over and over again, as a child I would watch her try to leave my dad and start a new life for herself but she would always go back to what was familiar and could never make a permanent break from the destructive energies.  As I child, I took this in as the way life is supposed to be.  I BEGAN TO SUBCONSSCIOUSLY BELIEVE THAT LIFE NEVER GETS BETTER.  I later realized that I shared this same pattern with her.  This is a pattern my mom and I have been working on together and have finally healed into the present moment, today.  My mom and I talk about this stuff, while she is over on the other side.  She is constantly edging me on to go forward into my fears and not to give up.  She doesn’t want me to live my life like she did.  How do I know this?  Years of living my life just like my mom and finally realizing that I don’t have to live this way and breaking the ancestral pattern, that’s how.  Yes, it helps that I can hear my mom.  How do I hear her? I hear and know she is present by a rose, or asking a question and then feeling her response.  There is no magic to this, just a peaceful knowing and a picture or thought that may come to my head with an answer.  I often smell something that reminds me of her, or my children will speak words that remind me of something she would say.  I often hear her in my mind call my name, ‘Jennifer’, with that unmistakable New York accent I grew up listening to.  The messages come and I just allow.  I don’t question them anymore and I don’t doubt.  I just trust and know.  I know my mom is proud of me and excites in the energy of my children and my husband.  She loves to see their smiling faces.  She is there for me when I listen.  But I have also spent years shutting her and all the light out as well.  I became so deep in my fears that I set myself up to live the life that my parents lived.  No matter how much light would come my way I would always sit in my childhood fears and shut the light out….only going to what felt familiar no matter how much pain it caused.  It took years for me to realize this and I still have realizations come to me today.   But the difference is my heart is open today and I can listen freely with the most useful tool of all…the most useful, healing, and miraculous tool that we all have…our hearts.  When your heart is not open, you fear everything.  When your heart is not open, you are in the illusion.  When your heart is not open, we fail to see the light.  We close our hearts in order to protect ourselves.  But what we are doing is hurting ourselves more in the process.  Now, my work is based on keeping myself and everyone I come in contact with in the light.  In an open heart.  In the feelings of fullness that come from intuitively living our spirit’s passions.  I can do this now, because I have spent half my life seeking the light.  When it was forever inside of me.  Like us all, I had no idea it was right in front of me the whole time.  I had no idea it was right inside of me.  I learned to distrust myself and press down my vibes that naturally speak to us and reveal our truths.  So, now, in shining my light I light the way for others to find their light.  How do I do this?  Through believing in your light.  Through the constant knowing that we are all full of light.   If you are not living your bliss you are not living your light.  All good things come to you and all is good.  It doesn’t matter where you came from or how you grew up we all have it…pure internal bliss & pure eternal light.

I promise to keep writing about what comes to me and how my tumultuous child hood and illusionary adult life lead me to where I am today as an intuitive healer.  Why not?  We could all use a lot more honesty in our lives, lots of healing, and a little grace to help all of this happen whimsically. 

Namaste and blessings