Tag Archive: personal growth


Breaking Free of Helplessness

Filed Under: Emotional Well-being, Energy/Vibration, Healing, Spiritual Growth by Soul Arcanum — Comments Off on Breaking Free of Helplessness


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 Margo:

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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Knowing When It’s Time to Move On from a Relationship

Filed Under: Emotional Well-being, Relationships, Spiritual Growth by Soul Arcanum — Comments Off on Knowing When It’s Time to Move On from a Relationship

Copyright Soul Arcanum LLC. All rights reserved. :)
 

Dear Soul Arcanum:

How do we know when we’ve learned all we can from someone, and it is time to move on? I’m a Gemini who has long been married to a passive-aggressive Leo who is emotionally abusive in a subtle way. I’ve tried to leave several times in the past, but when I do, the Universe seems to create situations that make leaving unfavorable. I’m in love with the “inner being” of this man, which I can clearly see, but which he won’t allow out. He certainly has been a great catalyst for my personal growth, but there must be a time when there are no more lessons to be learned from a particular person, and staying with them is not in our best interests. I would greatly appreciate any clarification on the difference between running away and leaving because it’s just time. Thanks for a wonderful column. There is always something to be learned here!

Linda

Dear Linda:

Thank you for a wonderful question. This is really a biggie. It’s an issue I encounter all the time in my spiritual counseling work from people who are feeling bored with their careers, constricted by their relationships, or uninspired with life as they know it. Everyone who is in conscious pursuit of personal growth must tackle this eventually. The fundamental question is if we’re avoiding personal growth when we avoid discomfort, or if we’re simply listening to our inner guidance when we want to get away from situations that don’t feel good and right to us.

We might simplify the issue by comparing it to eating right. I have a very picky little eater at my house. Not only does she shun vegetables, but she’s averse to even trying new foods. This pickiness may be related to some primal instinct designed to keep us from poisoning ourselves, but it’s obviously more than that in her case, and she needs to eventually get over it. After all, vegetables (like learning) are good for you. If you, however, took a bite of some thing or experience and it tasted bad to you, that could be discomfort with something new, or it could be a warning from your body that what you’re eating is truly bad for you. Should you force yourself to eat it? Should you spit it out? Would you judge yourself harshly if you didn’t choke it down?

We’re told that we should always follow our bliss, and despite all the questions this raises, it ultimately DOES WORK. If we follow our bliss and just eat ice cream and candy all day, (or stay in jobs or relationships we’ve outgrown) we’re not going to thrive. In fact, before long, we’re going to feel really bored and yucky. Following our bliss will then lead us to do something different. Relationships are tricky because we often fail to realize that just as people have different levels of tolerance for pain, they also have different levels of tolerance for pleasure. One person’s “bliss” may be relatively low on our own scale of well-being – and that’s fine for them. Maybe we need to eat tons of vegetables and embrace new challenges to maintain our own high vibration, and guess what…that’s also fine! It seems you’ve allowed your husband to be “subtly emotionally abusive” for a long time now. Can you allow yourself to want something different?

It seems that what was once your bliss is longer your bliss. You may have been sincere in making huge, unfathomable promises when you married this man (to happily stay with him forever and ever and ever), but now your inner being has risen in vibration, and this is no longer bliss for you. To follow your bliss now may mean making new choices and arrangements. Inner conflict is most marked in people who are into self-development despite their high level of personal awareness. Not only do they expect themselves to grin and bear everything uncomfortable as some kind of “lesson” and to do the “right thing,” but they blame themselves if they’re not happy about it. An inner battle then rages between following their bliss and fulfilling their promises. What a dilemma!

The answer to your quandary lies in knowing that you have not really been learning anything FROM your man. You have learned plenty from this relationship experience, but he hasn’t really taught you anything. Your learning is your OWN, and it will continue whether the relationship thrives or fizzles.

The question is therefore really whether or not you want him along as a companion on your own quest for growth and fulfillment. Does the relationship support you in becoming all you desire to be? Does it comfort you and sustain you when you are down? Does it inspire you and fill your life with passion? Does it feel like an exciting adventure or like a wet, itchy, shrunken wool sweater?

Since you’re motivated by personal growth, have you considered that you may be avoiding it by staying IN the relationship? Perhaps your lesson here is to let go of what you think you “should” do, and bravely honor your heart.

This is not easy, I know. The hardest decision I’ve ever had to make was whether or not to end my first marriage. I was totally miserable. My husband was miserable too, but not to the degree I was. (He was a workaholic, so he was too busy to deal with emotions). I silenced all the initial messages from my inner being that this relationship had become “bad” for me. What about my children? I answered back. What about the promises I’d made? How selfish could I allow myself to be? It was only when I became ill with severe chronic sinus infections that I realized that I was not buckling down to spiritual lessons by staying: I was ignoring my own inner guidance out of fear of what would happen if I honored the truth in my heart. When I left, I experienced profound relief. I could breathe again. It was only in actually doing what I both desired and feared to do that I finally knew what was really “right” for me.

Spirit’s advice in such situations is often to simply lighten up and take a break. Experiment. Take some time for yourself. (Take a bite of what it’s like to be free of this situation, and see if you like how it tastes.) Because this is such an individual matter, you need to give yourself permission to take some time and space to figure it out.

If your husband balks and ends the relationship because he’s upset that you would be so bold and “selfish” as to take some time alone (as mine did), then I think the Universe has made things patently clear for you (and kindly taken the decision off your shoulders.) If he supports you in trying to “find” yourself, then he is at least a true friend. No matter what happens, getting some distance from the relationship will lead you to new clarity about what really works for you and what you really want.

Take some time for yourself, Linda. Do whatever your resources allow you to do: rent a place of your own for three months or stay with a friend. If you get some distance from this relationship, your energy will separate from his, and you’ll be able to sort out what is what. You may even discover that you’ve been projecting some of your own inner conflicts onto the relationship, that it has no more power over the quality of your inner experience than you give to it, that your learning is not dependent on him or anything else outside of you.

By the way, no one can subtly emotionally abuse you unless you let them. Perhaps when you take some time and space away from him, he’ll be motivated to examine his own issues, too. Just remember: you are not responsible for his learning.

I’m confident that if you take some time away from the relationship, you’ll find new clarity. May your inner being direct you to the right path for you with unmistakable feelings of true well-being.

– Soul Arcanum

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