Tag Archive: happiness


How to Overcome Depression and Reignite a Passionate Connection to Life and Spirit

Filed Under: Emotional Well-being, Healing by Soul Arcanum — Comments Off on How to Overcome Depression and Reignite a Passionate Connection to Life and Spirit

on healing depression…
Copyright Soul Arcanum LLC. All rights reserved. :)
 

Dear Soul Arcanum:

I am a 38-year-old single mom. I work in the mental health field, am studying the healing arts, and have a long history of being intuitive. I also come with a history of abuse and have worked hard for many years to live a stable and healthy life. This year I made some changes that included leaving my fiance and moving to another state. I know in my heart of hearts I am exactly where I am supposed to be. Many wonderful opportunities have come my way to make all of these changes possible. Here’s the part I am having a hard time understanding: Before I became more stable and healthy, I used to experience times when I felt very connected to Spirit and had feelings of hope. Now that I’m older and in a much better place in my life than ever before, life seems rather dull, and I often find it difficult to tap into the positive feelings of Spirit. Is this common depression due to all the recent changes in my life, or am I suffering from spiritual disconnection? What can I do differently to jumpstart some positive feelings toward Spirit? Many blessings and thank you!
– Lisa

Dear Lisa:

Most likely you’re just in a phase of integrating what you’ve learned in the past and enjoying some of the fruits of your labors before your next big adventure begins. It’s like when we start a new level of school: At first, it’s thrilling and unnerving, but after a few months, what once seemed exciting has become a dull routine.

For quite some time you had some really big, dramatic challenges to chew on. Now that you’ve managed to build a solid foundation for yourself and things are going more smoothly, you’re more content but life seems less exciting and meaningful.

Many people are unknowingly addicted to the emotional highs and lows of lots of drama. Constant angst makes them feel alive and gives them something important to do. They think they want life to get easier, but when it does, they sabotage themselves because life seems boring, or they wonder why, now that they have everything they thought they needed, they aren’t as happy as they expected to be. Of course, as we evolve, it’s natural to experience less drama, hardship and conflict since we’re gaining wisdom and our vibration is rising, which empowers us to create what we want in our lives.

People who struggle with depression for long periods of time suffer from a lack of strong desire. Life is actually too easy; what they need is a big challenge. When a crisis arises, people who couldn’t get out of bed to go to work can suddenly leap into action. It’s passionate desire that makes us feel alive – not the fulfillment of that desire.

There is a certain point in everyone’s spiritual development when what you’re describing is common. After we’ve conquered the basics of survival and pulled ourselves together emotionally and psychologically, we may have no idea where to go from there. At this point, we must redefine our sense of meaning and purpose in life because we’re ready to shift from focusing on keeping our heads above water to empowering other people.

Through our own suffering and struggles, we develop compassion. Once we’re out of pain and hardship ourselves, we can help people who are still in it. Some people have a natural desire to be of service to others, while others don’t really see the point. If you remember that when you leave this life, you’ll go through a life review, and how well you loved yourself and others will matter more than anything else, then you’ll see that there is a lot in it for you if you devote yourself to being of service.

Please also remember that depression can often signal the beginning of new spiritual growth and awareness. Depression turns our focus inward, away from the endless distractions of the outer world. Our desire to leave this emotional pain behind motivates us to ask new questions and find new answers. Eventually, we emerge from depression on a higher level of experience, with new personal potential. It’s natural for boredom and depression to arise during a period of relative abundance and stability because it’s at these times that we can work on making inner progress.

Our higher selves are constantly pulling us toward the realization that we are already whole and always connected to the Divine. It’s the ego that feels lost, dissatisfied and separate. When one pursuit after another fails to fulfill our longing for something greater, eventually we recognize that we’ve been chasing our own tails the whole while – that we’ve had what we are longing for all along.

The answer, then, is to know and remember this truth. By recognizing that we’re in ego when we’re unhappy, we can remember to shift our vibration higher and focus on the one thing that has been with us from the beginning – our own Divine nature.

Here are some more tips for cultivating the habit of feeling alive, passionate, inspired, and connected to Spirit:

  • First make sure your physical habits encourage well-being, happiness, personal power and high energy. Eat fresh, high vibration food, get regular exercise, get enough sleep, etc.
  • Meditate to uncover and connect with your true nature, which is always content and at peace. Recognize that you determine how excited you are about life, and you determine the quality of your connection to Spirit. The same feelings of magic and excitement you experienced in the past are always available to you.
  • Read spiritual books, especially books about near death experiences, the afterlife and the law of attraction. Watch movies like Joe Versus the Volcano, Shirley Valentine, Under the Tuscan Sun, Contact, Patch Adams, etc.
  • Live on the edge. Ask yourself what you would do if you could do anything, and then go for it. Reach for dreams so big that they thrill you a lot and scare you a little.
  • Find ways to help people who are struggling with challenges you’ve overcome. Begin to teach. Organize a support group or book club for spiritual seekers, or find some way to help people who are a step or two behind you.
  • Experiment with spiritual subjects that interest you. You could focus on manifesting amazing things, join a mediumship development circle, try some EVP research. Push the envelope in terms of what you believe is possible.
  • Actively dialogue with Spirit. Ask what you can do to move forward and manifest a sense of connection, wonder and excitement about life again, and then watch for signs to come to you.
  • Remember that if you’re bored or feeling lifeless, you’re not fully awake. The Universe is an incredible place! There is so much to learn about, so many places to see, people to meet, things to explore. The possibilities are endless. If you’re not seeing anything to be amazed at or excited about, you’re not really looking. There is always something new to learn or invent.
  • Volunteer at a children’s hospital, a hospice or a prison. Nothing will make you feel happy and grateful like being regularly reminded of how truly blessed you are.

– Soul Arcanum

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Fully Healing Negative Feelings

Filed Under: Emotional Well-being, Energy/Vibration, Healing by Soul Arcanum — Comments Off on Fully Healing Negative Feelings

Copyright Soul Arcanum LLC. All rights reserved. All rights reserved. :)
 

Dear Soul Arcanum: A while ago you wrote about letting go of blame, guilt, etc. in your column about cancer. What are some good ways to do this? I find that I may think I let go of something one day, but then the feelings are back the next. Any ideas?
– Soul Arcanum

Dear Soul Arcanum:

First it’s important to allow yourself to feel what you really feel. While I am a huge believer in thinking positively, I have lived and learned enough to know that denying our negative feelings or stuffing them down doesn’t work in the long-term. That’s just like pushing junk to the back of a closet. Sooner or later, it will come right back up as you describe. Besides, with all that “baggage” in our space, we end up living with a sense of constant hassle as we try to maneuver around it. Eventually, all the stuff we have pushed back or to the side has to be sincerely dealt with.

When I am feeling angry, frustrated, impatient, etc. with people, I try to remember to keep things in perspective. You might try reading, Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl. Mr. Frankl was a POW in a Nazi concentration camp, and in this profound book, he writes about how some POW’s managed to keep their hearts, minds and souls “safe” from the Nazis, despite all that was happening to them on a physical level. They never lost faith and hope; they never lost their ability to love and have compassion for those around them; they retained their humanity, their personal spirit. He writes about the one freedom we each have that no one can take away from us: our freedom to choose how we will think and feel about life and respond to our experiences.

Similarly, I have clients who are dealing with some very intense issues, such as a child being murdered, a spouse being arrested for a humiliating crime and losing his life’s career as a result, trying to recover from the traumatic experience of war, etc. When I remember that there are many, many people who have been wronged in far worse ways than I have, it’s much easier to accept my own challenges with a positive attitude. This is not to be taken as a “should.” Telling ourselves that we “shouldn’t” be so upset about something is shoving it to the back of the closet. I’m suggesting instead that we bring it out into the light and dust it off, where we may discover it’s not as scary or ugly as it seemed when it was in the shadows. It’s amazing how when we let go of ideas about how we “should” feel and how fast we “should” heal, etc., our higher selves can step in and lead us to new peace and freedom.

Further, it is not what we experience, but how we interpret our experiences – the stories that we tell ourselves – that determine how we feel. All emotional pain takes place in our heads, not in our outer experiences. Thus, we can mentally relive an experience over and over again and feel the same degree of pain if the story we tell ourselves about it never changes. When we obsess about something someone has done to “hurt us,” we allow them to hurt us not just once, but over and over again. You know that already, and are wisely asking, “So how do I stop doing that?” The answer is to change the story you are telling yourself about that experience.

You might begin by reminding yourself that everyone is doing their best; some people’s best is just a long way from how you would personally handle that situation. Had you been born into that other person’s life, raised by that person’s parents, and experienced all that that person has experienced, however, you would probably behave the same way.

Further, it is very wise and powerful to remember Victor Frankl’s message: that no one can force us to feel a certain way. We create our own experiences in life. Metaphysics aside, you can see that this is absolutely true simply by observing how different people deal with the same sort of experience. At one end of the spectrum, people are completely crushed by trauma. They either kill themselves or they never truly recover. Some part of the heart and soul is forever missing afterwards. At the other end of the spectrum, people not only grow through traumatic experiences, they turn them into assets, and perhaps even a greater life purpose. Through the fire of deep challenge, they forge new spiritual growth and strength, and go on to help others follow in their footsteps. When we really own the truth that we can’t blame anyone else for how we feel, it becomes natural to let go of negative feelings like anger, hatred, bitterness, etc.

As we begin to change the stories we tell ourselves about hurtful experiences, the way we feel begins to change. The ultimate in healing bad feelings is to find compassion for those who hurt you. In fact, this is the only way I’ve found to permanently heal those intense emotions.

For example, when I was 16 years old, I was stalked and raped by a young man who was about 20 years old. (I don’t know for sure how hold he was.) He was the son of the woman who cut my hair; that was all I really knew about him, beyond the fact that he saw me, became obsessed with me, started stalking me, and eventually raped me. Throughout this ordeal, it became undeniably clear that this guy was CRAZY. He had such a tormented, twisted soul inside that it was very easy for me to be grateful that I was not him. When I realized that I would rather be his “victim” than to be as dark and empty inside as he obviously was, it wasn’t long before I started to feel compassion for him, and to truly forgive.

I know this idea may sound really radical and challenging, but once you have worked with all the ideas above and found compassion for your “enemy,” there is one more thing you can do that is very powerful to heal your heart and move on to new joy and peace: purposefully do something kind for the person you’re feeling negative about. It’s usually best if they don’t know you did it, and it can be as simple as praying for them. In fact, that is a very powerful thing to do.

You will feel a strange sense of freedom come over you if you embrace this goal with the intention of rising above the drama and loving yourself to new well-being. You will feel yourself lift above it, and end up feeling beyond that drama, for what you wish for others – what you send out – is what you yourself will attract.

Then you will naturally move on and focus on other things. It will be easy to forget about whatever happened in the past and to fill your life with new blessings like positive people, new projects and opportunities, new learning and growth. You’ll then be so busy with all the good stuff that you’ll have no time or room in your life to reopen those old wounds again.

I’ll leave you with one last bit of common spiritual wisdom that we all frequently forget: if not for your “enemies,” whether they take the shape of people or challenging life experiences, you’d never experience new personal growth. Our enemies are indeed our greatest teachers. When we can find appreciation for the lessons they bring us, we flow so beautifully through life that we never get stuck in negative emotion for long.

– Soul Arcanum

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She Always Wants What She Can’t Have

Filed Under: Emotional Well-being, Law of Attraction, Manifesting, Relationships, Spiritual Growth by Soul Arcanum — Comments Off on She Always Wants What She Can’t Have


Copyright Soul Arcanum LLC. All rights reserved. :)
 

Dear Soul Arcanum:

I have a very bad case of wanting what I can’t have, especially when it comes to relationships. I might have a crush on a guy until he becomes a real prospect, but then I begin to have doubts and get scared off. There are two men in my heart who were boyfriends in the past. I wasn’t serious about them when they pursued me and I easily let both of them go. When I thought about committing to them, I had all sorts of excuses for why they weren’t right for me. Years later, they are married fathers leading happy lives and I am single and going through tough times alone. I am now able to see how great they were and how my excuses for not getting serious about them were poor ones. I can’t tell you how hard I kick myself for letting them go. It’s truly eating me up, loving them deeply now and wanting them back and thinking how much more meaningful and fulfilling my life would be now had I been wiser before. I don’t want to be obsessive and stuck, which is how I feel, but I don’t want to stop loving them because even with all the painful regret, the love somehow feels better than indifference and the petty criticisms I had for them when I was dating them. I want to move on, stop the cycle of running from love, and be happy. Please help!

O.

Dear O:

Thank you for doing such a wonderful job of explaining your situation. What you describe is a common pattern; in fact, I know a number of people personally who do the same sort of thing. I’m sure you’re familiar with the term self-sabotage and the idea that many people unconsciously sabotage their efforts to create what they want in their lives. As a hypnotherapist, I see this a bit differently. While it’s true that people may do things that don’t appear to make sense, there is always a good reason why people do the things they do.

For example, Joann came to me at more than 200 pounds, deeply frustrated and desperate to find a way to lose weight. She had been on countless diets in her 47 years and had lost tens of pounds over and over again. Every time she got down to a size 8, she would start putting weight back on and regain all she had lost and more. In this way, she crept from around 145 pounds to over 200 despite years of dieting.

When I took her into a deep trance and asked her to go back to a significant event in her weight struggle, she at first relayed some upsetting but relatively minor experiences such as being embarrassed of her body as an adolescent and an incident in which she couldn’t fit into the jeans she was trying to borrow from a friend. These were just the outer layers of the onion, however. Eventually when asked to go back to the next significant event, she began to cry and hyperventilate. As I walked her through what she was experiencing, it came out that she had been raped at the age of 22; it was after this that she began to put on weight in an effort to feel less attractive and thus safer. She had been a size 8 at the time of the rape, and every time she became a size 8 again, she would grow very uncomfortable and immediately try to remedy what her subconscious perceived to be a problem by gaining weight again.

When I brought her out of trance, it was clear that a light bulb had come on: She now understood that she hadn’t been sabotaging herself – she had been trying to protect herself. The problem wasn’t a lack of self-love; it was the unfounded belief that if she didn’t carry extra weight, she would be hurt again. Once we healed and released the past trauma and put some empowering new beliefs in place, she found it relatively easy to lose the weight and keep it off.

Perhaps you’ve already figured out what this has to do with you. In case you haven’t, I’ll offer you a case that is a closer match to what you’re going through. Sarah came to me with a problem similar to yours: she was in her late thirties and had never been married because she too always wanted what she couldn’t have. She only wanted men who were unavailable for some reason. A couple of times, she did develop crushes on men who eventually returned her interest, but once she could have them, she didn’t want them anymore.

Regression therapy uncovered a number of possible causes for this pattern, such as her father abandoning the family when she was small, which led her mother into a depression from which she never recovered. From this she developed the belief that it’s never safe to give your heart completely to another human being.

More powerful, however, was the past life she relived in which her parents wanted her to marry a man of means but she chose to marry a penniless youth for love. Though he was handsome and romantic when he was courting her, her husband turned out to be a mean drunk who beat her and the children they had together. They lived in miserable destitution because he was too drunk to earn a living and would spend the money she was able to bring in on alcohol. She would sometimes see the man she had chosen NOT to marry with his wife, looking happy and prosperous, and think to herself that she had made a terrible choice. She died young in childbirth, and as she was dying, she was very worried about what would become of her young children with just their alcoholic father to depend upon. As she was dying, she was filled with regret and thoughts of how just one bad decision can ruin your life.

As a result of this traumatic past life experience, she was incredibly indecisive in this life: every time she was faced with a decision, she would get anxious and second-guess herself. She was also forever thinking that the grass must be greener on the other side. Though she consciously believed that she wanted to fall in love and get married, on a subconscious level, she did not believe this was a wise or safe thing to do. This led her to constantly chase after men she could never actually catch, and to run away from those who chased her. Within two years of resolving this past trauma and the limiting beliefs underlying her lack of fulfillment in love, she was happily married to the man of her dreams.

To resolve your pattern, first you must stop beating yourself up about it. Assume that your subconscious mind is trying to help you and that your job is to get your conscious and subconscious minds working in harmony. Imagine that your goal is to move a dresser: if your conscious mind is pushing forward on one side and your subconscious mind is pushing forward on the other side, you’re going to end up very frustrated. Now imagine that you can bring your subconscious mind over to your side to push WITH you: suddenly, things start to move forward with surprising ease.

I know of no faster way to totally transform your life than to begin to consciously work with your subconscious mind and higher self. Since every person’s story is unique, I encourage you to seek hypnotherapy so you can uncover and resolve whatever may be keeping you from a truly fulfilling experience in love.

Finally, it’s normal to continue to love people we’ve loved in the past, but that doesn’t mean we’re meant to be with them in the future. I think you’re hung up on these old boyfriends because they are symbols of the sort of man and relationship you want. Instead of lamenting the ones who got away, I encourage you to focus on the future and open your heart to meeting someone new.

Soul Arcanum

 


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The Law of Allowing

Filed Under: Emotional Well-being, Energy/Vibration, Law of Attraction, Manifesting, Spiritual Growth by Soul Arcanum — Comments Off on The Law of Allowing


Copyright Soul Arcanum LLC. All rights reserved. :)
 

Dear Soul Arcanum:

I have been studying the law of attraction for about five years, and have manifested a number of great things so far. Part of this process has included working with a life coach who has taught me to focus on what I want in my life, pour lots of positive emotion into my visualization efforts, wish for what I desire with all my heart, but then surrender whatever happens to a higher plan and power. This is the part I’m struggling with: if we can create what we want in our lives, why do we have to surrender to a higher plan? My teacher tells me that the more I strain for control, the less control I actually have. Can you explain this? Also, do you think we can decide what we will create in our lives even if it goes against some pre-established higher plan?

Bob

Dear Bob:

I chose your question because this is something I’ve struggled with myself. We hear a lot about the law of attraction, but not so much about another law that is just as essential to the process of manifesting: the law of allowing. In my experience, most people are much better at working with one of these laws than the other.

People who are better at working with the law of attraction tend to be successful and good at manifesting what they want, but they also tend to experience lots of stress and frustration. These sorts of people are better at getting what they think they want than being happy with what they have. People who are better at working with the law of allowing tend to be easygoing, relaxed types who struggle to make ends meet and often feel sorry for themselves because life just seems unfair. They are better at being happy with what they have than they are at creating what they want and need in life.

Of course, these are gross generalizations: each individual is a unique mixture of all sorts of traits and qualities, and there are many well-balanced people in the world who draw the best from both camps. This is the goal, by the way: to get good at working with both laws so that we can create what we want in our lives and be happy and at peace at the same time. Instead of a warrior or a dreamer, we want to be like a Tai Chi master: both a powerful force to be reckoned with AND able to flow with the other forces around us instead of fighting against them.

As I mentioned, your question is something I’ve struggled with myself. In fact, this issue of control recently reared up again. Before falling asleep one night, I was pondering just how much control we actually have over our course of experience, and I thought to pray to Spirit to send me an illuminating dream. I had a number of dreams that night, but there was part of one dream that felt powerful and stayed with me when I awoke:

In the dream, I am plowing a field with a donkey, and am strapped to the donkey with an old-fashioned leather yoke. I am aware that this is the first time I have done this sort of plowing, and there is an invisible force guiding me, telling me what to do and how to go about the whole process. When I get to the end of the first row and try to bring the donkey around to go back the other way, the donkey angrily whips around on me and knocks me backwards. This scares the heck out of me, but it doesn’t kill or seriously injure me. (I remember thinking with great surprise that I was neither killed nor injured.) I then feel that invisible force guiding me to regain control of the donkey and set it moving back on course again.

When I woke up, I knew that this dream was in answer to my prayer. I see it as a message about how much control we have over our course of experience and how we go about working with the creative forces of the Universe. As I meditated on this, a long message from Spirit came through about how creating what we want in our lives is very much like working with nature to cultivate various crops.

Here is some of what was relayed to me:

  • We aren’t the only force influencing what happens in our lives. We can harness the creative forces of the Universe to create what we desire, but since we are dealing with wild forces, sometimes this is easier said than done. If we don’t completely know what we’re doing (and who ever does?), we may sometimes experience some backlash. The bigger the goal or dream – the bigger the “donkey” and the field – the trickier things tend to get.
  • We can choose what we are going to cultivate as well as how we will go about it. We choose how much time and effort we put in and how much we study nature and how to go about growing lush crops, but there will always be factors that remain beyond our control.
  • The weather/climate we are working in will always play a big factor in our results. Even if we cultivate very carefully, sometimes forces beyond our control can destroy what we’ve been working on. Of course, those same forces can also prove ideal and make our crops grow especially lush. Though we are forever looking for ways to control our results or at least understand why some things happen at some times and other thing happen at other times, there is much that remains beyond our scope and understanding. This is the realm of so-called bad luck and good fortune.

Many people have a hard time working with both/and thinking as opposed to either/or thinking. The less rigid and limited we are in our outlook, the more we can understand and work with laws of the Universe. For example, most people think they must choose between believing that we either have control over what happens in our lives OR we don’t have control and must surrender to “God’s will” or chance. I’m suggesting that we both have control over what happens in our lives AND must surrender to a higher plan.

This is the way of the farmer who does his best to grow what he wants and needs in his life. He gets up early, harnesses his donkey, heads out to the fields and does his very best to cultivate what he wants. He reads the Farmer’s Almanac, studies the ways of nature, and allows both his learned knowledge and his instincts to tell him when the time is right for planting, watering, weeding and reaping. He prays to higher forces to bless and guide him in all of this, and he listens within for that guidance. Ultimately, however, he knows that much remains beyond his control. He feels that he is a part of the nature he is working with, and this makes him feel safe: he is at home in this world, for the very forces that hold so much power over what happens in his life are the source of his own creation. He therefore wisely surrenders ultimate outcomes with faith that no matter what happens, everything will be fine.

I believe this is a wise and powerful approach, for it allows us to both cultivate what we want in our lives while at the same time feeling a sense of peace with the way things are. Ironically, letting go of outcomes actually makes us more powerful cultivators of what we want in our lives, for when we can relax and feel good without straining for control, we are able to maintain a high vibration. This is like being calm and assured when yoked to that donkey. If we approach the donkey feeling stress, strain, anxiety or frustration, the donkey will sense it and may rear back on us and make things very difficult. If, however, we are calm and assured, we remain masters of the situation and are able to steer toward where we want to go and align with a smooth journey to fulfillment.

Soul Arcanum

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Self-Betrayal and Depression

Filed Under: Emotional Well-being, Healing, Spiritual Growth by Soul Arcanum — Comments Off on Self-Betrayal and Depression


Copyright Soul Arcanum LLC. All rights reserved. :)
 

Dear Soul Arcanum:

Over the years I have become emotionally depressed and unhappy. I used to be a gal who would keep herself clean. I was happy and a go-getter. However, for the past seven years I have been emotionally depressed. I stay in the same clothes for weeks at a time and rarely shower or brush my teeth. I think about suicide a lot. My blood relatives are abusive and uncaring, and I live with a man I have a child with but I don’t feel an emotional attachment to either one of them. I want so badly for this man to leave my home but he refuses. He does nothing for me emotionally, physically or spiritually. This is a very unhealthy relationship. I’ve also lost my looks and gained 60 pounds. Sometimes I can’t even leave my home to shop for groceries. I need insights into what to do before I just can’t take this life anymore.

Randi

Dear Randi:

Since you’re having suicidal thoughts, I urge you to get medical help. None of the spiritual or practical ideas I suggest will be helpful if you can’t summon the will to live. In addition to your family physician, there are suicide hotlines you can call to get information about other local resources; please pick up the phone and reach out for local help today.

There are many things that can cause depression. Generally speaking, depression occurs when life force energy is inadequate or repressed. The greater our life force energy, the greater our health, happiness and personal power. Depression isn’t a feeling so much as an absence of feeling, a lack of passion, desire and all that gives life color.

Your depression probably began when you were going through a period of great angst due to the troubled relationships in your life. Perhaps you felt there was no good answer or solution, or you felt guilty for feeling the way you did, so you shut down emotionally to escape endless torment. Unfortunately, this eventually led you to stop feeling much of anything at all.

To break free, you’ll have to find the courage to feel whatever is behind this emotional numbness. This won’t be easy; you must be very afraid of facing the truth to have put yourself through so much suffering already.

In failing to honor the truth in your own heart, you are betraying yourself. When we deny our true feelings, when we say yes instead of no, when we don’t allow ourselves to leave miserable relationships due to guilt, when we do anything that goes against our true desires and needs, we disconnect from our emotional body. This leads us to disconnect from the voice of our intuition, which is why people can get endlessly stuck in depression: they can’t hear their inner guidance trying to tell them what to do to feel better.

As I mentioned above, the first thing is to seek medical help. After this, there are lots of practical steps you can take to shift toward positive change, but it may be hard for you to summon the will to get moving. This is where a sincere, caring hypnotherapist and/or energy healer may prove invaluable.

A hypnotherapist can help you consciously realize the fears that are keeping you stuck so you can face whatever is behind the depression and find a way through it. An energy healer can help you get your chi moving again without you having to summon the will to do anything except passively open up to receiving an influx of the life force energy you’re starving for. Such a healer can also temporarily clear away blocks and thus facilitate a greater flow of energy through your whole being, which will empower you to take constructive action.

For changes to last, however, you will have to renovate your inner world, and this is going to require a lot of effort on your part. You’re going to have to learn to think more positively, visualize what you desire, and take good care of yourself. You’ll have to learn how to better control what you think, feel, say and do; how to generate a higher flow of life force energy yourself; how to cultivate healthy relationships; how to love yourself better. There are endless spiritual practices and therapies that can help you with all of this.

It would be helpful to view depression as primarily a life force energy problem. You might explore Eastern ideas like feng shui and Qigong to gain understanding of how energy flow affects our health and happiness. This will motivate you to take the practical steps necessary to encourage a greater flow of life force energy. By taking small, simple steps to boost the energy available to you, you’ll empower yourself to take on the deeper issues at work here.

Once the outside help you receive has you capable of taking action on your own behalf, there are many little things you can do to launch yourself on an upward spiral.

First, clean yourself up! Take a shower, wash your hair, put on clean clothes. If you find this daunting, take just one step: turn on the faucet to heat the water. Then take another little step, and another. Before you know it, you will be clean and feeling much better. (Physical hygiene is directly related to metaphysical hygiene, so if you’re dirty physically, your aura is full of yucky energies too. This is why taking a shower can make us feel emotionally and mentally refreshed.)

There are lots of other things you can do to raise your vibration and boost your life force energy, which will both make you feel better and empower you to create whatever you want in your life. I don’t have room to list them all here, so check out this former column. These ideas may sound too simple to do much, but if you summon the will to work with them, they will work for you.

Above all, however, you must remedy the root cause of this depression to be free of it for good. As I mentioned above, this appears to be a classic case of self-betrayal. You are forcing yourself to deny the truth in your heart by staying in this relationship. Further, when two people are very unhappy together, negative feelings just keep circulating and dragging them both down into an ever more toxic situation.

To break free of depression, it’s imperative you trust your heart and take action accordingly. If your inner being is telling you that you must get out of this relationship, then your emotional pain is actually trying to help you by pushing you to take action. A good therapist can help you figure out how to create the outer circumstances your inner being is calling for.

To find true peace and happiness in life, you must listen to and honor the truth in your own heart above all. While you’re learning to do this, it would be wise stay away from people who bring you down, stress you out, or make you doubt yourself. Also, strive to act loving to yourself and others regardless of what other people do. This will make you feel good about yourself, draw positive energy to you, and shift you into harmony with a higher level of experience.

The fact that you wrote me for help is a positive, encouraging sign: it means you do want to live and find happiness. If you take the steps outlined above, you’ll begin to pull yourself out of this hole of despair, and eventually you’ll find yourself in the sun, feeling like your old self again. Please also remember the power of prayer: you have spirit guides and angels who are ever ready to help you find your way to greater health, peace and happiness.

– Soul Arcanum

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Self-Betrayal and Depression

Filed Under: Emotional Well-being, Healing by Soul Arcanum — Comments Off on Self-Betrayal and Depression


Copyright Soul Arcanum LLC. All rights reserved. :)
 

Dear Soul Arcanum:

Over the years I have become emotionally depressed and unhappy. I used to be a gal who would keep herself clean. I was happy and a go-getter. However, for the past seven years I have been emotionally depressed. I stay in the same clothes for weeks at a time and rarely shower or brush my teeth. I think about suicide a lot. My blood relatives are abusive and uncaring, and I live with a man I have a child with but I don’t feel an emotional attachment to either one of them. I want so badly for this man to leave my home but he refuses. He does nothing for me emotionally, physically or spiritually. This is a very unhealthy relationship. I’ve also lost my looks and gained 60 pounds. Sometimes I can’t even leave my home to shop for groceries. I need insights into what to do before I just can’t take this life anymore.

Randi

Dear Randi:

Since you’re having suicidal thoughts, I urge you to get medical help. None of the spiritual or practical ideas I suggest will be helpful if you can’t summon the will to live. In addition to your family physician, there are suicide hotlines you can call to get information about other local resources; please pick up the phone and reach out for local help today.

There are many things that can cause depression. Generally speaking, depression occurs when life force energy is inadequate or repressed. The greater our life force energy, the greater our health, happiness and personal power. Depression isn’t a feeling so much as an absence of feeling, a lack of passion, desire and all that gives life color.

Your depression probably began when you were going through a period of great angst due to the troubled relationships in your life. Perhaps you felt there was no good answer or solution, or you felt guilty for feeling the way you did, so you shut down emotionally to escape endless torment. Unfortunately, this eventually led you to stop feeling much of anything at all.

To break free, you’ll have to find the courage to feel whatever is behind this emotional numbness. This won’t be easy; you must be very afraid of facing the truth to have put yourself through so much suffering already.

In failing to honor the truth in your own heart, you are betraying yourself. When we deny our true feelings, when we say yes instead of no, when we don’t allow ourselves to leave miserable relationships due to guilt, when we do anything that goes against our true desires and needs, we disconnect from our emotional body. This leads us to disconnect from the voice of our intuition, which is why people can get endlessly stuck in depression: they can’t hear their inner guidance trying to tell them what to do to feel better.

As I mentioned above, the first thing is to seek medical help. After this, there are lots of practical steps you can take to shift toward positive change, but it may be hard for you to summon the will to get moving. This is where a sincere, caring hypnotherapist and/or energy healer may prove invaluable.

A hypnotherapist can help you consciously realize the fears that are keeping you stuck so you can face whatever is behind the depression and find a way through it. An energy healer can help you get your chi moving again without you having to summon the will to do anything except passively open up to receiving an influx of the life force energy you’re starving for. Such a healer can also temporarily clear away blocks and thus facilitate a greater flow of energy through your whole being, which will empower you to take constructive action.

For changes to last, however, you will have to renovate your inner world, and this is going to require a lot of effort on your part. You’re going to have to learn to think more positively, visualize what you desire, and take good care of yourself. You’ll have to learn how to better control what you think, feel, say and do; how to generate a higher flow of life force energy yourself; how to cultivate healthy relationships; how to love yourself better. There are endless spiritual practices and therapies that can help you with all of this.

It would be helpful to view depression as primarily a life force energy problem. You might explore Eastern ideas like feng shui and Qigong to gain understanding of how energy flow affects our health and happiness. This will motivate you to take the practical steps necessary to encourage a greater flow of life force energy. By taking small, simple steps to boost the energy available to you, you’ll empower yourself to take on the deeper issues at work here.

Once the outside help you receive has you capable of taking action on your own behalf, there are many little things you can do to launch yourself on an upward spiral.

First, clean yourself up! Take a shower, wash your hair, put on clean clothes. If you find this daunting, take just one step: turn on the faucet to heat the water. Then take another little step, and another. Before you know it, you will be clean and feeling much better. (Physical hygiene is directly related to metaphysical hygiene, so if you’re dirty physically, your aura is full of yucky energies too. This is why taking a shower can make us feel emotionally and mentally refreshed.)

There are lots of other things you can do to raise your vibration and boost your life force energy, which will both make you feel better and empower you to create whatever you want in your life. I don’t have room to list them all here, so check out this former column. These ideas may sound too simple to do much, but if you summon the will to work with them, they will work for you.

Above all, however, you must remedy the root cause of this depression to be free of it for good. As I mentioned above, this appears to be a classic case of self-betrayal. You are forcing yourself to deny the truth in your heart by staying in this relationship. Further, when two people are very unhappy together, negative feelings just keep circulating and dragging them both down into an ever more toxic situation.

To break free of depression, it’s imperative you trust your heart and take action accordingly. If your inner being is telling you that you must get out of this relationship, then your emotional pain is actually trying to help you by pushing you to take action. A good therapist can help you figure out how to create the outer circumstances your inner being is calling for.

To find true peace and happiness in life, you must listen to and honor the truth in your own heart above all. While you’re learning to do this, it would be wise stay away from people who bring you down, stress you out, or make you doubt yourself. Also, strive to act loving to yourself and others regardless of what other people do. This will make you feel good about yourself, draw positive energy to you, and shift you into harmony with a higher level of experience.

The fact that you wrote me for help is a positive, encouraging sign: it means you do want to live and find happiness. If you take the steps outlined above, you’ll begin to pull yourself out of this hole of despair, and eventually you’ll find yourself in the sun, feeling like your old self again. Please also remember the power of prayer: you have spirit guides and angels who are ever ready to help you find your way to greater health, peace and happiness.

– Soul Arcanum

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Does Profound Loneliness Have Spiritual Roots?

Filed Under: Emotional Well-being, Relationships by Soul Arcanum — 1 Comment

 

Copyright Soul Arcanum LLC. All rights reserved. :)

Dear Soul Arcanum:

My whole life I have felt deeply lonely. This was true even when I was married and regardless of what was going on in my life. I’ve always felt like a part of me was missing. I have a few theories but would love to hear yours.

Mary

Dear Mary:

Before I delve into the subject of existential loneliness, I think it’s important to cover some of the simpler dynamics that can cause people to constantly feel the way you describe.

First, we are all subconsciously missing people we’ve loved profoundly in other lives. Though we may never have known them in this life and have no conscious memories of them, our souls still remember, so it’s normal to feel a vague sense that there is great love <q>out there</q> that we can’t seem to find. We can even miss our spirit guides with whom we have ongoing but subconscious bonds that surpass all the physical relationships we may form. On some level, we remain aware that there is greater love and union possible than we’ve ever consciously known in this lifetime. Fortunately, our love and longing for reunion with those souls is like a gravitational force that will lead us back to them eventually, if not in this life, then on the other side.

Also, we are all missing parts of our own selves in various ways, and this can leave us feeling incomplete. This may include our higher self – that part of us that is eternal and remains in the spirit world when we incarnate here – to which we may be more or less consciously connected depending on our level of spiritual development. We can also miss parts of ourselves that we may have ‘lost’ due to traumatic experiences and the desire to avoid pain. Since my space here is limited, for more information on this idea, research the term ‘soul retrieval.’

Finally, we all naturally long for the bliss and ease of the spirit world and the greater sense of union we experience when we’re not so compartmentalized in physical bodies. For example, it is easier to commune in the astral, for there we can communicate telepathically and consciously meld energies with other beings.

Of course, we are ultimately all one, and just like the Universe supposedly exploded in a big bang, thus creating a force that will eventually draw everything back together again, there is a force that acts like a gravitational pull on our souls and is forever tugging us back to Source.

So what you’re describing is something that we all experience to some degree, though artistic types and deep thinkers perhaps suffer from it on a more profound level; it’s what fuels their endless introspection and extraordinary creativity. This is not loneliness due to a lack of healthy, fulfilling relationships. It’s more existential in nature, so no matter how good our relationships with other people may be, they can’t remedy this loneliness because what we are longing for is a deep and personal relationship with ‘Spirit’ – with ‘God,’ the Universe, the Divine.

While being alone in life puts us in the quiet space in which deep ideas and feelings grow best, in fact, it is often after we achieve highly fulfilling relationships with other people that this loneliness begins to surface. I suppose this is because we expect relationships with other people or some other worldly goal to make us feel happy and complete. When we finally ‘have it all,’ we are dismayed to note that we still feel a sense of inner longing, angst or loneliness, and this is when we begin the deeper work of exploring our true natures and consciously pursuing direct experience of Source.

Most people are constantly running away from this loneliness by staying forever busy with external affairs and investing more importance in temporal matters than those matters warrant. This running is one of the driving forces behind addictions like alcoholism. When someone is terrified of what lies beyond everyday experience, they will do anything to avoid facing it. Similarly, when someone finds the will and courage to face their fears, they gain the power to heal themselves.

Of course, on some level, we are all constantly aware of the impermanence of life and how some day we will lose every worldly thing we treasure. We will be separated from our bodies, from the bodies of the people we love and from all we build and cherish on Earth: our homes, our careers, our accomplishments. Some of us avoid thinking about such things as much as possible, but nevertheless, this awareness remains on some level, where it fuels a desire to find something meaningful and eternal. For some people, this desire only surfaces occasionally; for others, it becomes all-consuming and sends them on a spiritual quest for that which is both lasting and truly fulfilling.

It is this fear of death and longing for Divine comfort that drives the religious/spiritual impulse in humankind, and thus the spiritual quest is the answer to the suffering of existential loneliness. Such a quest won’t erase this deep feeling, however, for that sense of longing for something more is essential to the human experience. If embrace this feeling and work with it, however, it can fuel our spiritual journey and inspire us to reach beyond mundane life to explore that which lies beneath the surface, and motivate us to develop higher qualities like love, compassion, wisdom and integrity.

The key is to stop fighting this feeling as a sign that something is wrong, and instead, embrace it as a precious homing device that is ever trying to guide us ‘home.’ It’s like we’re explorers on another planet, and though we may get absorbed in our adventures, in our pockets, we have a device that is ever ready to lead us home when we’re ready.

This deep loneliness inspires introspection and spiritual exploration, so without this feeling of incompleteness, we can become entirely absorbed in superficial, temporal concerns. Existential loneliness thus moves us to lose interest in the mundane business of daily life and transcend everyday concerns to search for something more meaningful. Many spiritual practices that have survived the test of time are designed to help us in this transcendence. Two that come immediately to mind are yoga and meditation.

By working with our existential loneliness, we begin to dance with the Universe. We ask for signs and receive them, wonder over the meaning of our experiences, open up to new ways of perceiving life, and explore new spiritual practices. We are then blessed with moving dreams; spiritual powers; otherworldly adventures; and moments of healing, grace, peace and ecstasy.

So though our first impulse is to run away from spiritual suffering, it is what ultimately leads us to new growth and awareness. When we stop fearing this deep longing and instead embrace it, everything flips around. Then instead of fleeing our existential fear, we move through it and discover that this seeming void is actually the heart of bliss we have been longing for all along.

I encourage you to redefine your loneliness as longing for Divine union. If you meditate to get past ‘yourself,’ you will find that part of you that is eternal and always connected to Source. Cultivate this relationship; move into the center of it and begin to live your life from there. Then, like sad but beautiful poetry, your longing will bless you with a sense of deep feeling and purpose. It will keep you questioning, exploring, and ever reaching toward that vast spiritual horizon beyond which a whole new level of experience awaits us all.

Soul Arcanum

 

 

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Happiness is an Open Heart

Filed Under: Emotional Well-being, Energy/Vibration, Healing, Relationships by Soul Arcanum — Comments Off on Happiness is an Open Heart


Copyright Soul Arcanum LLC. All rights reserved. :)
 

Dear Soul Arcanum:

I dream things before they happen and most of the time my dream world is hell. My waking life is hell too. Very few people can understand these things. I’ve had OCD since I was a teenager. I don’t fit anywhere. I feel tormented, alone and disappointed with myself. People just really don’t like me, and the few friends I allow myself always tell me I intimidate people with my intelligence. A gifted psychic told me that people don’t get me – that they are frightened because they sense that I know things. He said I was a strong empath and I hadn’t learned how to control it. My energy is really strong but not in a good way. I’m a psychologist by profession, so I’m supposed to be helping people spiritually but I can’t even help myself. Everything seems so bleak and it’s not getting better. Can you please advise me about how to feel better? I’m an Aquarius Sun, Cancer Moon and Cancer Rising. Thank you.

Cat

Dear Cat:

I chose your question because you remind me a bit of myself when I was a teenager. Though I was popular and generally happy, I too had trouble forming meaningful relationships, and I often felt profoundly lonely. I was often told that my energy was overwhelming and I was intimidating. I also struggled with OCD for a couple of years, though I licked that for good a long time ago.

Like many psychologists, it sounds like you went into this line of study in order to help yourself. (No offense, but psychologists are ironically known for being troubled souls.) I’m glad to hear that you can see the connection between being able to help yourself and being able to help others.

Here’s the thing about Aquarians and everyone who is highly intellectual by nature: though we may impress others with our minds, we’re not usually warm and fuzzy types. In fact, often the more intelligent a person is, the more challenged they are emotionally because they’re out of balance: their strengths and energy are skewed to the mind more than the heart, body or spirit. A lack of heart energy can hold us back socially and keep us from attaining deep fulfillment, especially in relationships.

Though the reasons may sound obvious to other people, intellectuals like Aquarians can be truly baffled as to why people don’t like them. After all, they’re bold, intelligent and interesting, opinionated, confident and original. If what we want is to be happy, however, our heads can’t take us there – we have to go through the heart.

It took me a ridiculous amount of time to figure out that what people crave and really respond to is love. (Isn’t love what you’re really craving too?) People are attracted to humble, self-effacing types, not brilliant know-it-alls. Further, even when we intellectuals have studied the law of attraction and think we know how to create what we want in our lives, we tend to overanalyze everything and work from the head instead of the heart.

To effectively work with the law of attraction, we have to know how to get into the feeling state of the quality of experience we desire, and sadly, feelings aren’t our forte. Like all of us, you are creating your own reality, and what you focus upon will expand in your life. From your letter, it seems you focus mainly on your fears (OCD), how your life is miserable and how no one seems to like you. You write that things aren’t getting any better, which suggests that you’re waiting for that to happen instead of taking charge and working with the law of attraction to create positive change. To attract positive experiences and people who love you, you’ll have to fill your inner world with love and positive vibes first.

The Cancer in your chart would tend to make you more emotional and less aloof than the typical Aquarius. It would also make you much more sensitive, which supports the idea that you could both be highly intellectual and highly sensitive/empathic. Astrology aside, however, much that you wrote suggests that you are really centered in your head, and what you need most is to develop your heart by cultivating love and faith. Love will attract others to you like a magnet, while faith will heal you of the OCD. (OCD is driven by fear so pervasive it takes over your life.)

The main event that changed me and my course was the death of my first love, which led me to develop compassion for the grieving and inspired me to want to help ease their suffering. This is different from pursuing work along a certain line in order to try to help ourselves, though one usually does lead to the other because to help others heal, we have to care about their struggles and have overcome them ourselves.

Along the way, I spent years working on myself and reaching for spiritual growth. Looking back, I now see that the thing I needed most was an open heart, and I believe this is true of you too: the magic elixir you’re looking for is big love. I don’t mean more love from others, but to center yourself in love and cultivate a greater capacity to love others and radiate divine love in all you say and do.

Another turning point for me was realizing that constant mental activity wasn’t a good thing. When I began to practice meditation, I realized that there are all sorts of different types of wisdom in the world, and if what I was after was enlightenment, endlessly processing things in my head wasn’t smart but detrimental.

I also noted that people who seemed to truly be at peace didn’t care one bit about how smart they were, impressing other people or convincing anyone of anything. Instead, they looked for the beauty in others, offered others love and support, and kept their hearts open to each moment. This was radically different from the way I was accustomed to living, which largely focused on proving that I was worthy of admiration and always right.

Love demands that we rise above the endless fears and desires of the ego to care about more than our own happiness, satisfaction and popularity. Ironically, by letting go of endlessly worrying about ourselves, we gain the peace, love and happiness we’ve been longing for all along.

The first thing I recommend is that you own and work with the truth that what you focus on will determine how you feel. The remedy for unhappiness is gratitude. Though your life may seem hellish in some ways, it is endlessly blessed in others. Look for things to appreciate in others, in yourself, and in every situation, and point those good things out. The more you do this, the better you will feel and the more others will be drawn to you.

Next, strive to send the warmest, highest energy you can out into the world.
Instead of trying to have all the answers for people, just give them the love, support and understanding they need to get through their struggles. Strive to be kind-hearted instead of right. Whenever you’re tempted to try to prove that you’re lovable to others, instead, focus on uplifting them and making them feel good about themselves. Since we get back what we send out into the world, this will quickly turn your course of experience around.

Finally, take up a spiritual practice that gets you out of your head, centers you in the heart and puts you in touch with gentle, spiritual people. Yoga would be a great choice, as would meditation designed to open your heart and guide you to love yourself more while sending more love out into the world. As your thoughts, feelings and inner world grow brighter, your outer experiences will follow suit. If you sincerely try, you will see that by working with the power of love, you can profoundly transform every aspect of your life.

– Soul Arcanum

 

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He’s Emotionally Shut Down

Filed Under: Emotional Well-being, Healing, Intuitive Development by Soul Arcanum — Comments Off on He’s Emotionally Shut Down

Copyright Soul Arcanum LLC. All rights reserved. :)
 

Dear Soul Arcanum:

Growing up, I always felt I had an unusual emotional connection to people. I was able to sense what they were feeling and interact with them in a caring, helpful way. Sometimes people around me made me feel like I was a bit crazy, and eventually, I’d had enough of this and stopped being in touch with people on that level. I put my emotions in check. This helped by toughening me up to outside influences, but it severely hindered my intuition. Now I’m seeking to find a bit of inner peace and understanding, and am realizing that my emotional life is basically non-existent. I rarely get excited about things, and when I need to accomplish a goal, I end up not caring whether I achieve it or not. It’s like I just don’t care. I never have intense feelings of desire, anger or any other emotion. How do I get in touch with my emotions again?

Jason

Dear Jason:

I think it’s important to realize that many people are dealing with emotional disconnection to some degree. Think about the wild range of emotions that little kids display versus how most adults behave. In fact, part of the process of “maturing” is gaining control of our emotions.

Further, spiritual wisdom leads us to live “in the world but not of it,” which means that even as the human side of us is experiencing something intense, there is a spiritual part of us that is just calmly observing. This means the more centered we grow in our higher selves, the more we tend to embody a calm equilibrium at all times.

When we grow to understand that life is just a game – a world of illusions that is just a tiny fraction of our existence – it kind of takes the sting out of situations that used to get us all riled up. While this calm higher perspective empowers us to create whatever we want, suddenly we don’t want anything anymore – we’re content with where we are and mildly curious about what life will send our way next.

So as we move into higher levels of spiritual awareness and wisdom, feeling mellow is perfectly normal. When we eventually shed all desire, we move beyond the vibrational range of the physical, after which we incarnate on other planes.

It sounds like you’re more blocked than enlightened here, however, and there are some healing processes that may help you.

Many highly sensitive people will try to shut down in order to protect themselves from overwhelming energies, or to avoid feeling humiliated or rejected for being different. When this becomes a habit, or when it happens as a result of some traumatic event, the emotional body can get squeezed to the side, which can lead to the emotionally dead feeling you describe.

We have seven spiritual bodies that correspond to the seven main chakras. Moving out from the physical we find the etheric, which is like a blueprint for the physical, and then the emotional body. If we feel overwhelmed or burned out due to high emotional sensitivity, the emotional body can get shut down or pushed aside. This is especially common in natural empaths – people who tend to feel others’ emotional energy as their own. These folks may unconsciously block certain chakras in order to try to prevent discomfort.

This dynamic is illuminated in common phrases such as when we say that a person is beside himself, out of it, shut down, closed down, out of his mind, turned off, etc. Some people even say that someone is close-hearted.

By contrast, being open means being receptive to the energies all around us, which can be very overwhelming, especially for sensitive people. We all filter energies to a certain degree, except when we’re feeling blissful and totally open, such as when we are in a very peaceful place where the energies flowing in are gentle and pleasant.

The more we open up our chakras to process more energy, the more alive we feel, the healthier we are, and the more fully we can live life. In fact, when we close down or block our chakras, we may eventually experience depression and dis-ease.

When people feel emotionally shut down, the chakras affected are typically the second (sacral) chakra, which governs the emotional body; the solar plexus chakra through which we sense things in our guts; and the heart chakra, through which we love others. So in closing down emotionally, you would indeed close down your intuition or gut instincts.

While it’s natural to try to block ourselves from unpleasant experiences in the future, our ultimate goal is to learn that there is nothing to really fear. By shedding the fears behind our efforts to emotionally protect ourselves, we naturally rise above the extreme highs and lows we used to experience. However, when we’re centered in a higher perspective, we don’t feel depressed and indifferent but peaceful and content. (This is how you can determine whether what you’re experiencing is a result of spiritual growth or a symptom suggesting that emotional healing is needed.)

If you determine that you’re blocked, there are many things you can try to affect emotional healing. I recommend you begin with hypnotherapy. If I were working with you, I would regress you back to when you used to feel intense emotions and from there, ask your subconscious to take us to the events, impressions, beliefs or decisions that led you to disconnect emotionally. This would both reconnect you with your emotional body and guide you through the process of melting the frozen energies blocking your emotional flow now. Through hypnotherapy, you can also reprogram any fearful, limiting beliefs that led you to try to protect yourself in the first place.

If you are blocked, it’s because on some level, you don’t believe that the world is a safe place to be emotionally open. Often it is fear of rejection or humiliation that leads us to shut down, which sounds right given what you wrote about people acting like you were crazy. By healing those old emotional wounds and updating your belief system as well as embracing new spiritual growth, you can leave the pain of the past behind and shift into a much higher level of experience.

In addition to hypnotherapy, you might try yoga, which will help you melt energetic blocks so you relax and balance all aspects of your being. You can also see an energy healer for help with releasing blocks, or a shaman for something called soul retrieval. We all tend to distance ourselves from emotional pain by repressing or denying it, which causes parts of ourselves to “leave.” One classic symptom of soul loss is the sense of feeling emotionally shut down that you describe. In soul retrieval, a shaman engages with your soul on a higher level in order to retrieve and reintegrate aspects of your being that left when you experienced some trauma.

Finally, ask your own inner being what you need to do to feel better and then trust what you receive. One of the fastest ways to get past our fears of rejection and to reawaken our intuition is to do something “crazy.” You clearly have some old fear of being labeled crazy, and have disconnected from your intuition. If you relax and tune in and then act on whatever so-called crazy ideas come to you, you can quickly melt through those blocks and reconnect with your inner guidance system. Similarly, when people feel emotionally dead inside, there is nothing like a true crisis to wake them up. I’m not suggesting you put yourself in danger or wreck your life, but a big spiritual adventure – something way beyond the realm of what you would normally do – may prove just what you need to feel emotionally reborn.

– Soul Arcanum

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Allowing People to Stay Stuck

Filed Under: Emotional Well-being, Relationships, Spiritual Growth by Soul Arcanum — Comments Off on Allowing People to Stay Stuck

Copyright Soul Arcanum LLC. All rights reserved. :)
 

Dear Soul Arcanum:
I’ve really been working on myself for the last couple of years in terms of personal development, prosperity consciousness, business success, spiritual growth, etc., and I now find that I have no tolerance for B.S. I find it frustrating to be around people who refuse to crack a book, move forward with their lives, or do something progressive instead of just repeating the same situations over and over again. That said, I also know that everybody is on an individual path and there are reasons people stay broke, ignorant, selfish, etc. Still, it’s a tough balance for me to allow while knowing there are other options for people. What do you do about people like this? There are also a lot of people in my life who lean on me like a walking cane. I guess I appear to be more competent and balanced than they are. I’m wondering how you (with your skills) deal with such people.
D.

Dear D.:

We have a lot in common, for I’ve been struggling with these issues for a couple of decades now. After you’ve been walking a conscious spiritual path for many years, it becomes the only way you know how to be. It’s then easy to forget what it was like before you became devoted to self-improvement, which can make it hard to relate to all the folks in the world who are just trying to get through each day with as much pleasure and as least pain as possible. You can share with them all sorts of enlightening ideas, but if they’re not ready to embrace them, you’ll drive yourself crazy if you’re attached to what happens after you cast your pearls of wisdom out there.

In terms of the law of attraction, I see two separate forces at work in situations like this. First, your lack of tolerance for B.S. is common in people who are adept at the law of attraction, for you are ever raising the bar on what you desire and expect from life. I must point out, however, that freaking out about B.S. is also B.S. After all, once you achieve this level of spiritual development and know that you can create whatever you want, it makes no sense to keep creating B.S. and then getting upset about it. When B.S. rears its ugly head, it’s time to examine your own vibration and lift yourself into a higher level of experience.

By allowing yourself to get annoyed and irritated, you’re hurting yourself: your own vibration is suffering and you are setting yourself up to manifest more frustrating experiences. (Remember – what you focus upon expands!) Instead of wishing other people were more like you, you’re wise to look for something to appreciate in them and assume the best in every situation. When you’re able to stay in pure positive energy even when others are leaning on you or bumbling along, the quality of your experiences will change, and you’ll begin to attract more happy, successful people.

In order to deal with B.S. or the potential frustration of watching people repeat the same limiting, self-destructive problems over and over again, and NOT have it lower our vibration, we have to rise above ego. When we’re centered in our higher selves, there is nothing to get upset, angry or frustrated about; instead, there is calm faith that all is well and everyone is doing just what they need to be doing in order to learn whatever they need to learn at that time.

It is much easier to achieve this higher perspective when we’re dealing with people we don’t have close personal relationships with. In fact, the more important someone is to us emotionally, the more attached we will feel to them making the decisions that we think they should make in order to feel the way we think they should feel.

When you start getting upset about others’ habits and choices, it’s a sign that your ego is getting attached to a certain outcome again. As this is a test of your faith, it’s time to ask yourself if you truly believe that everyone is just where they need to be and doing what they need to be doing.

Second, the brighter your light becomes, the more people will be attracted to it, and the greater your life grows, the more people will take notice and want to emulate you. It is thus entirely natural for people who really have their acts together to attract all sorts of hangers on. It’s easy to see how this is true of successful business owners like yourself; the owner creates a thriving business, and in doing so, he creates jobs for people who don’t have the personal power and ambition to create something similar for themselves.

This too is natural: not everyone can be the business owner or there would be no employees; not everyone can be the shepherd or there would be no flock; not everyone can be the teacher or there would be no students. Everyone is doing what suits them given their present level of development.

Further, all of this is relative, and everyone has both strong and weak suits. When we are feeling irritated or critical of others, we are wise to stop focusing on their problems and realize that our own flaws are begging for attention. Just as you may look down on someone as hopelessly blind to their own issues, someone else may view you similarly. (I feel for our poor spirit guides; if they had egos like we do, I’m sure they’d have given up on us a long time ago.) Also, the people who struggle with some of the stuff that we find easy may have some beautiful traits that we have yet to develop, so we are wise to remain humble and look for the Divine in everyone we meet.

Speaking of humility, I must warn you that it is daring and foolish to tell ourselves (and the Universe) that we can handle anything because we’ve got our acts together, for this sends out a signal just begging for a greater challenge. The bigger our egos swell, the more likely we become of bumping into something sharp and ending up in an embarrassed, rubbery mess on the floor. (Trust me – I know this one really well!)

Finally, when I’m struggling with this sort of situation, the thing that helps me the most is gratitude. I am profoundly grateful for knowing what I know and being able to do what I do, so it is my pleasure to share what I’ve learned with others. I strive to live by the truth that we get what we give, and I believe that of those to whom much is given, much is expected. With the power to consciously create what we want in our lives comes a lot of responsibility.

We may end up feeling like we give out and put up with more than our fair share, but if you think about it, it’s not really true. In fact, our lives are for the most part relatively wonderful and stress-free. Since we are so richly blessed, we can afford to generously and patiently guide the kindred spirits coming up the metaphysical trail from behind us.

That said, please know that you are not required to help or save anyone. I believe that doing so will bless you in countless ways, but not if you end up feeling frustrated, drained and taken advantage of. We are wise to do what we feel called to do as long as it feels good to us, but as soon as our vibration starts to sink, it’s time to surrender the results, get recentered in faith, and focus on whatever makes our own hearts soar.

– Soul Arcanum

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