Write From Your Heart; Learn to Love Veggies & Exercise; More... transformation for 2018!

GREAT New Classes for 2018 on the Learn It Live platform!  Join me and start transforming yourself from the inside out......

https://www.learnitlive.com/class/11734/The-3-Wise-Women-Blast-Thru-the-Barriers-to-Your-Heart

Embrace the 3 Wise Women - Connecting, Healing and Creating - and the tools they use to make you come ALIVE in body, mind and spirit!

In Connecting, you practice powerful new practices of meditation (moving!) and mindfulness that bring you into direct communication with your need and essential Heart.... 

The Wise Woman of Healing brings you reiki energy healing, the spiritual practice that the AMA says is science and evidence-based, for pain and anxiety .Because when the distraction and drama is stripped away, when the frustration and anger are not driving your bus, you come alive with all your energy. When you are healed of your harmful patterns, you are coming from Love and living in your Heart. You will have activities to practice, and a series of videos to watch while you do!

The Wise Woman of Creating brings you the alchemical power to bring beauty to the world. Many people have embraced coloring as a road to this expansiveness, but you will go much deeper. You will also learn how to create a new you through hypnosis.... the ultimate act of creation is the forging of new Heart to replace the parts that you've outgrown and that don't serve you.

This is an action packed workshop..... not to listen to, but to engage you in your transformation!

https://www.learnitlive.com/class/11733/Writing-From-the-Heart-Let-Your-Unique-Voice-Create-Health-and-Spiritual-Growth

Writing from the heart is a POWERFUL tool for stress reduction and for spiritual growth and personal insights. In the first class you get an action plan to follow to make writing part of your proactive physical health care, by sharply reducing your levels of cortisol, the dangerous stress hormone.

In the second class, you will get a second action toolkit that gives you spiritual growth and personal insight.
This is not a simple learning about it class - you get actionable plans that will make a noticeable difference in your daily happiness level!    NO critiques. Writing practices cover a dozen types of writing, so you can work at them all and decide which ones are "what you need right now."

This class will open up your heart on multiple levels, fill you with spiritual and emotional joy and allow you to hear your own unique "voice," perhaps for the first time. Victoria's writing from the heart has nothing to do with talent, skill, DNA or anything else other than willingness to DO IT - and see what results you get.

Additional Information

Victoria is the author of over 12 published books, including co-author of the Best-Selling 2018 title Grandmother Legacies, and her solo-authored Red State, Blue Heart https://www.amazon.com/Red-State-Blue-Heart-Victoria/dp/1974032272
and 101 Healthy Meals in 5 Minutes or Less
https://www.amazon.com/Healthy-Meals-Minutes-Less-Transformation/dp/1979815445/

https://www.learnitlive.com/class/8844/The-Spiritual-Path-to-LOVING-Exercise-Veggies-Yes-you-will

So many Americans hate exercise and won't do it. Not MY clients! They have learned the spiritual path to genuinely (no gimmicks) loving to feel their bodies move, and loving how they feel with veggies. We never have trouble making time for the things we love to do, and the things we love to eat. No willpower needed for me to spend an hour creating things with crochet, or photographing distant planets and galaxies. I love it! 

You love things, too. And you don't have to use any willpower to get yourself to do these things, do you?

In this one hour class, I will start you on the road to LOVING your body, moving, and loving the taste of really good, healthy food. The spiritual path is unrelated to any religion or faith. Your spirit core is where your deepest desires live. Not the substitutes that you crave, because your life is too stressful and too filled with have-to, and not enough true joy. Not that. Your spirit core will lead you to the vision of yourself, and the decisions about your life that will transform your life - and your surface desires that now are driving your life in unhealthy directions.

You can love exercise as I've learned to love it - because it is a time of loving myself and my family, preparing to do my very best as a healer, and having fun. In a typical week, I joyfully splash and play in water, deep-end in wonderfully creative dreams of crochet and acrylic artwork, and touch the deepest core of my soul. It's a wonderful life! 

No matter how many hats you are currently juggling and how many years it's been since you had anything other than popcorn and TV for yourself, if you take this class, you will be setting forth on the Hero's Journey to Health.

After the class, you'll have the option of discounts on the entire transformation program. www.soaringdragon.biz

https://www.learnitlive.com/class/8839/Harness-Your-Goddess-Energy-to-Stop-Self-Sabotage

Have you been trying to stop your self-sabotage and generate more confidence for your life, your business or your family? Not working, huh? STOP beating yourself up! You are using the wrong tools, that's all.

In this workshop, you will connect with your inner goddess energy (not associated with any religion or faith!), and watch the real barriers to your successful completion of your goals start to crumble before your eyes. Take effective action against the barriers that are holding you back.

Enrollment is limited for the highest-quality experience.

3 Videos to de-stress a Busy Life (and more resources)

It's so busy-busy in December.  But you need to stop, do 5 Breaths and the rest of the 5 Tools in 5 Minutes to maintain good decisions, and to maintain joy.


https://youtu.be/0uBe29Cx7XQ

https://youtu.be/mOXKJxct_KY



Looking at the stark color differences the day after rain turns to snow.  The bright white against the deep green, you see the big outcomes from small changes in elevation.  And our "Small decisions" can have equally large impact in our lives. There are tides in the affairs of our lives that can lead on to victory... Be mindful of every breath you take, the decisions you choose, and do the 5 Tools every day.  The small investment of time yields a huge crop of  joy, clear decisions, health [the ultimate goal!] and even income.

https://youtu.be/pRmk0FS8Lb8

For more resources:

www.soaringdragon.biz

New books:

https://www.amazon.com/Red-State-Blue-Heart-Victoria/dp/1974032272/

Humor, inspiration, thought-provoking essays on how to make American culture healthy and kindly

https://www.amazon.com/Healthy-Meals-Minutes-Less-Transformation/dp/1979815445/
101 Healthy Meals in 5 Minutes or Less

https://www.amazon.com/Busters-Healthy-Longevity-Through-Barriers-ebook/dp/B01MZ4HNRZ

101 Stress Busters

Online classes

5 Tools in 5 Minutes/Day:  Strategic Self Care for Entrepreneurs & Other Busy People
https://blastthruthosebarriers.thinkific.com/courses/106742

Kick Dieting to the Curb
https://blastthruthosebarriers.thinkific.com/courses/76428

http://blastthruthosebarriers.thinkific.com/courses/pain-free-without-drugs

Inspiration: Light in the Darkness

All we need when we are worried or confused is one light in the darkness.  That light is always there, if we are willing to see it.  Not an upending of whatever outcome we don't like, but an amelioration of pain - or any other way to be happy, without the person or outcome that we wanted for all the good reasons that we want things.

And Light never shows off so well in the daylight as it does in the dark night.  Gratitude in the dark times is the graduate degree in wisdom.  To have some peace and contentment when everything goes your way is easy, but gratitude in deep night?  That's the Victoria Cross.... for Valor under the fire of Life.

https://youtu.be/9lo7wtnqPsA

For more resources:

www.soaringdragon.biz

New books:

https://www.amazon.com/Red-State-Blue-Heart-Victoria/dp/1974032272/

Humor, inspiration, thought-provoking essays on how to make American culture healthy and kindly

https://www.amazon.com/Healthy-Meals-Minutes-Less-Transformation/dp/1979815445/
101 Healthy Meals in 5 Minutes or Less

https://www.amazon.com/Busters-Healthy-Longevity-Through-Barriers-ebook/dp/B01MZ4HNRZ

101 Stress Busters

Online classes

5 Tools in 5 Minutes/Day:  Strategic Self Care for Entrepreneurs & Other Busy People
https://blastthruthosebarriers.thinkific.com/courses/106742

Kick Dieting to the Curb
https://blastthruthosebarriers.thinkific.com/courses/76428

http://blastthruthosebarriers.thinkific.com/courses/pain-free-without-drugs

Do Insurance Companies have more impact on how long you live than the drug companies? Some new data to think about!

Publications aimed at doctors are where I get a lot of my health information. This article on the role of health insurance companies in not only the opioid epidemic, but the overall cost and effectiveness of medicine - and the reason why we as Americans DON'T live as long as Europeans, Canadians and others is chillingly logical.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/blogs/revolutionandrevelation/68935

Trauma caused by hearing truth from your doctor; Is this a real problem?

Have you heard?  A new type of trauma, caused by medical doctors who tell you the truth about likely effects of your disease, and the pros and cons of various treatment plans.

Truth has now become the enemy.

I thought I must have misheard it, so I listened to the lecture twice.  Timothy Trujillo, in an AHA class on hypnosis for the cure of immune system problems, actually denounced doctors who show you pictures of your hair falling out as a result of chemotherapy, saying that the reason your hair falls out is that doctors tell you that it will.  If doctors lie to you and tell you that the treatment will be completely symptom-free, then your hair won’t fall out, you won’t have any nausea, the cancer will magically and entirely disappear and you’ll all live happily ever after in Neverland.

Mr. Trujillo is not alone.  The alternative health field is riddled with this nonsense – and then we wonder why licensed and competent healers despise us!  And why doctors won't give us a straight answer to a simple question! 

In case you were wondering, I am a practitioner of hypnotherapy and the mind’s ability to change water into wine is truly, truly remarkable.  However – and please pay attention to this! – that truth does NOT mean that all the laws of biology and physics can be changed by wanted it to be so.  My beloved, but sadly deluded, sister kept saying “It’s nothing, it’s just fibroids,” believing that saying it over and over again would make it true.  The cancer that was growing inside her killed her, because she refused to consider that repeating a sentence a thousand times does not make it a fact.

Chemotherapy kills cancer cells by targeting cells that are dividing rapidly.  That’s why you get gut problems and your hair falls out.  It also targets your cancer, you doofus.  If your hair follicles aren’t impacted, neither will the cancer cells be.  [Immunotherapy is very different, a targeted attack on just the cancer.  But it does not yet work on every kind of cancer, in every human body.  You need Star Trek and Dr. Mc Coy’s Sickbay to get that level of miracle.] 

The real medical communication problem is not the doctors who give you complete and accurate information about potential illnesses and potential cures and treatment – it’s the doctors who DON’T.  The doctors who have been too traumatized by terrified patients and their families, who are horrified that you actually talked about death or gave someone an accurate and responsible answer to “how long am I likely to live?”  

Another sister of my heart is 3 months into an estimate of 6 months to live and the honesty of her doctor gave her the ability to make honest and accurate plans for herself.  She took a cruise with her grand-daughters during which everyone could speak from the heart, with no one so terrified of loss that they ran away from the chance to speak their love. She did that, instead of the perennial "I can't afford it, maybe later," because she knows that she doesn't have "later" as an excuse any more. She is spending quality time with her husband and her friends and her beloved dog.  And me, at the 9,000-mile-distance that we have managed to surmount in spirit as well as occasionally in body over the course of 35 wonderful years.

With truth, you can take back real power, the power to choose how to spend the time you have, and let go of the phony power that denial gives you.  And I put all the “it’s NOT going to happen to ME!” that Trujillo et al. promotes into the denial category.  Try like hell to avoid as much pain as possible.  Try like hell to stretch 6 months to 6+.  But accept that it might be 5, and the pain can’t be avoided, and your best-loved goals and dreams will not be achieved.

You really want truth too, my friends, no matter how seductive denial is and no matter how terrified out of your mind you are.  Truth is the only possession you truly have, the only real power no one can take from you.  Truth is the only place where you are truly free.

Make a vow to yourself, today, renewable every day for the rest of your life:  In small issues as well as life and death, I choose Truth, no matter how messy or frightening or not-what-I-want-to-hear.  I choose Truth.  I have the courage to face Truth, and I will use Truth to lead me in all my decisions.

[This doesn’t preclude spirituality….. don’t raise that red herring, darlings]

And remember that the reason why I want you to choose Truth, is that Truth is also the only reliable road to lifetime joy.  The exact mechanism of that road is the subject for another day.  For now, just acclimate yourself to your own courageous soul, and let that butterfly called Truth get used to alighting gently on your shoulder and whispering into your ear.  Truth is the sweetest music of all.

Read the We’re #1 chapter in my new memoir Red State, Blue Heart to understand how denial kills thousands of black women in the USA every year, who should and would live, if they stopped believing that they can dodge reality by refusing to Claim it.  Can’t blame this one on racism, friends!  Our refusal to insist that we live our lives in accordance with facts has to end… before it ends more and more of us.

https://www.amazon.com/Red-State-Blue-Heart-Victoria/dp/1974032272/

5 Minutes to Better Sleep, Better Income, Clever Problem-Solving - and it's great fun, too!

The launch party for Red State, Blue Heart was a great success - lots of new and returned faces, big discounts and prizes. The book is still on sale at Bloomsbury Books, and of course Amazon and all the usual places.

Early reviewers were in stitches over the humor and the travelog aspects - 5 stars from everyone on that!

The calls to action are calls to think over the ideas. You don't have to agree with everything. All I ask - and with all the life in my soul - is that you really, really be open to hearing what is being said, and not shut down into ideology immediately.

I encourage everyone to write about their lives, and to do it constantly. Write out the funny things your dog or kid did, the goofy thing your husband said that made you laugh. When you re-read it 6 months or 6 years from now, you'll laugh again.

My newest book Red State, Blue Heart grew out of the stories i wrote down when I was living in the South - not intending or expecting to "make" anything of it.

In the same way, you need to create every day, not because it's part of a grand plan, but because it ISN'T part of a grand plan, other than the plan to have a graceful and powerful life. Reading the funny times allows you to see a life of joy. Seeing the anger, sadness, grief on pages allows you to be proud of all that you have accomplished. Yes, it was hard but you got through it, day by day, tear by tear.

You can be as Real as real gets in the privacy of a journal. There's no fool to call you weak because you cry or call you any other insult because you're angry. No one to mock you because you admit to some other "unacceptable" emotion, like the desire for revenge.

Your life matters. Your life deserves remembrance. And your mind and soul deserve to have the emotions of the day dumped. [This tool is Dump the Garbage, part of the 5 Tools in 5 Minutes/Day class and also explained in 101 Stress Busters for Energy, Joy & Healthy Longevity.]

When you write every day, pouring out the pratfalls and delights to be remembered, and the hurt and sadness to be purged from your body, mind and soul...... then you can start soaring with dragons!

Yours FREE:

https://blastthruthosebarriers.thinkific.com/courses/106742

Being in Pain = Shorter Life! And it's not for the reason you think.....

A comprehensive medical study in the UK says that we can say that being in chronic pain by itself is enough to boost your chances of dying in the next year by a statistically-significant amount.

"Just" pain, say people who don't know what they're talking about. But, as I explain in my new class

http://blastthruthosebarriers.thinkific.com/courses/pain-free-without-drugs

I DO know, as a health coach and transformational healer, and as a former sufferer.

Why the higher % of death? The side effects of constant pain: lack of exercise; going for comfort food rather than veggies and nutrition, sedentary life; stress, worry, anxiety.

So my mini-course becomes even more relevant. If you're in pain, you need to get it to stop, using non-drug methods that work. And you have to be aware of the gentle exercise [see my min-course] and the easy healthy eating [101 Healhy Meals in 5 Minutes or Less http://www.amazon.com/101-Healthy-Meals-Minutes-Less/dp/] and you need to find ways to distract yourself from the worry-thoughts [101 Stress Busters https://www.amazon.com/Busters-Healthy-Longevity-Through-Barriers-ebook/dp/B01MZ4HNRZ].

NEW Mini-Class: Pain-Free Without Drugs

My new mini-class has gone live on my website.
-
Do you suffer from chronic pain?  Painful joints due to arthritis?  Pain caused by another underlying medical condition?  Or pain that has persisted after the underlying problem was healed?  The common back pain?

You are not doomed to either pain or powerful drugs.

Two mainstream medical techniques - Reiki and hypnotherapy - have a powerful impact on pain and a long track-record of success.

Come explore them, along with some fun secondary techniques, in this step-by-step mini-class!

http://blastthruthosebarriers.thinkific.com/courses/pain-free-without-drugs

3 Things to NEVER Say to Someone Who's Just Lost a Pregnancy - and 3 Things to Not Forget

I just got an email from a business colleague en route to being a friend.  She’s lost several pregnancies and has to bid that dream of her life farewell permanently – two losses, both the present and the future.  Shattering. 

I lost my only child before she could be born.  People who have experienced other losses think they understand, but they can't.  Even a fellow of the child-loss fraternity can't, because every one of us is unique.  Losing your child is a deeper form of grief than anything else, because at the core of our souls we want to put ourselves between our children and all danger.  I would cheerfully have died to save my daughter-to-be, and when I couldn’t, I crawled into the grave with her, emotionally if not physically, for a very long time.  When we do all that is humanly possible, and it's just not enough, we slide into an unknown country.  We feel such desperate failure.  The very definition of “parent” has been violated and we blame ourselves.  We always blame ourselves. 

My friend experienced this loss six months ago, and is finally able to email about it.  She knew what she needed : some "doing" when she needed distraction, while she grieved and cried and lit incense and prayed, created memorials and memory books and every other healthy thing we do when we know better than it bottle it up and “just carry on.”

This kind of loss really is too devastating for you to say anything except I love you. 

Reach out and enfold them in love and then exert every fiber of strength in your being to just shut up – because 99% of us want to offer advice, and all of it is hurtful, in result if not in intention.  The thing you need to understand about your “helpful” advice is that it is, at its base, a very powerful need of YOURS.  The emotions of child-loss and indeed any loss awaken our own fears for our loved ones because we do understand emotionally how fragile human life is.  We want the grieving person to shut up, stop crying, talk and act “bravely,” because that’s what WE need to quiet our own fears.  We can’t just let ourselves feel pain and grief and fear and shame and everything else, and your raw, expressed emotion makes us so all-fired frightened we quite literally can’t stand it. 

And I understand.  So tell the person you love them and then leave the room.  Drop off the rum cake or the casserole, kiss them and get the heck out of there.

You want to share your words of wisdom because you want the bereaved to stop feeling.  You want so desperately to talk about God, about trying again or about adoption.  As for this latter, I natter on about the joys of adoption all the time.  After all, I’m adopted and I’m wonderful.  If someone is having trouble, and flinches from any thought of adopting, then I know that it’s the ego trip of reproduction and pseudo-immortality that they are desperate about, not the glorious adventure of nurturing, but that is a truth I rarely state out loud, unless someone gets really offensive about it.  I am not technically a mother, but I’ve nurtured children, for a decade in one case.  Love has nothing whatever to do with biology.  But I never, ever, talk about adoption to someone who has just lost a child.

Grieving is healthy.  Grieving actually gets you to a new path faster than “getting over it” quickly.  Some personalities, and some cultures (like New Zealand) value quiet grief to overt actions like my friend and I would take.  But the process is the same.  Don’t offer advice.  Just offer love and then shut up until it’s time to offer love again.  Hug IF the person values it and back off if they don’t, knowing that needs will shift over time and even in the space of 5 minutes.  I couldn’t bear to be touched, for years.  Others need hugs, hugs and more hugs.

Understand that the overwhelming need to advise is also born of ego – I know how you should think, and you don’t, so let me tell you.  When you understand that you don’t. it gives you the strength you need to shut up.  Hey, I’m a professional mental health practitioner, and what do I, in my brilliant wisdom, do in situations of loss?  I tell people I love them and then I shut up.  If they want to talk, I listen.  You know, that thing where your mouth is closed?  That one.  Except for empathetic “hmms” and echoing their feelings back (without launching into your “I can top your story,” another ego-driven urge), companionship without content I call it.

I so much wish I could hug my friend, but she’s 3000 miles away.  I wish I could tell her it will be a new path but one worth living, eventually, but it’s not time for that, and besides, I’m not God – how do I know, really? 

I tell her I love her, I send her Reiki and prayers, and I hope that her life will be joyful again someday.  It’s all that we can really do for each other.  And all we can do is always enough.

Grief support when you want it.  www.soaringdragon.biz/webinars-events.

5 Reasons Why You Need and Deserve a Retreat....

I’m just back from a 4 day in-home spiritual retreat.  Phone and internet OFF.  No nasty political news.  None of the things we all react to.  No bills, no hassles, no external demands.  

For 4 days, I took guided hypnotherapy journeys with Belleruth Naperstek CDs, and my own specific journeys, and I posed issues to myself to resolve through insight-journaling – pages and pages of insight and solutions and pain and sunlight at the end of the battle.  Exercise taking care of ¾ of an acre on the weekend, when my usual gym classes don’t run; no diminution of my traditional good sweat every day.  Healthy eating. 5 hours of Reiki energy healing every day.  A long, detailed visit with angels, goddesses and the Runes. 

The results were as amazing as always: insights and ideas for action pouring from my pen; powerful journeys that left me lighter of the barriers and darkness that bedevil our lives.  Staring into the abyss, alone with myself, until the abyss started to yield answers.  Inviting levels of unexpressed pain, because it’s through pain getting out of our bodies that we become free.  Realizing how much there is yet to do. 

Engel’s book on traumatic shame is must reading for anyone who has experienced childhood abuse or neglect, especially, although it is also a factor in adult traumas as well.  The emphasis on being strong can be so cruel when circumstances are truthfully that no one could be physically strong enough, or emotionally strong enough (unless you’re a sociopath). 

My work involves powerful transformations through reaching skillfully into the deep unconscious to change, eliminate, add beliefs and conclusions that are absolutely not accessible through ordinary (surface) means like affirmations and “thinking positive.”  So the healer needs to take time to heal herself from time to time.

I recommend these concentrated retreats!  Find a friend or relative who needs a house-sitter for a few days and hole up.  Nix the social media.  Say sayonara to the news.  Turn it all OFF and listen to the sound of your heart and soul.  

After you stop screaming, the insights will come tripping lightly or exploding into existence; each breakthrough has its own sound and flavor.  But they will come.  Get Dr. Naperstek’s CDs or get a session with me.  Bring some creative exploration from my new book 101 Stress Busters for Energy, Joy and Healthy Longevity.

You’ll be glad you did!

Is Integrity Obsolete?

“Yeah, cash is great.  You don’t have to pay tax on that,” Sally said.

 

I just stared at her, stunned.   “I report all of my income.” 

Now it’s her turn to look at me like I’m an alien lizard from Alpha Centauri, or clinically insane.  “I prefer cash for my international clients because it’s easier, that’s all.”  Now she’s looking at me with pity.  I’m really, really stupid, she’s thinking. Could be.

I admit to disappointment in my friend.  Professors Kohlberg and Gilligan developed frameworks to explain the levels of sophistication of our human moral reasoning, and doing whatever you can get away with is the level typical of a 3^rd grader.  Later in our development, we grow through understanding that general lawfulness makes everyone safer, on up to doing The Right Thing just because it is The Right Thing, from focusing solely on yourself through level after level until you arrive at the place where all living creatures are your siblings and the earth itself is your mother and father, and you devote yourself completely to the alleviation of suffering in the world.  Nobody gets to that summit but some folks get closer than Sally seems to be aiming.

Then there’s another colleague, who changed her email signature to “Amazon Best-Selling Author” a month before she even finished writing the dang thing.  Her reasoning: she had hired someone who guaranteed to make her book a best-seller (it only sold 200 copies), and thus she was just jump-starting what WOULD be true.  Except that she didn’t change it when she saw the sales results.  [Which were totally predictable, for a newbie author tackling a popular topic that had dozens of real bestsellers to compete against.]  I’ll bet that “I’ll make you a star” charlatan suggested it, but it was my colleague who did it, and still refuses to own her lie.

And she’s not alone.  Everyone who releases a print or even an e-book these days claims it as an “Amazon Bestseller” before it’s even on the metaphorical shelves.

I pity the real bestselling authors, who have their hard work and quality product cheapened because everyone (including me) who knows about the “Amazon Bestseller” scam, assumes they are lying also.  Except Ian Brodie, who does such good work, he doesn’t have to lie to impress you.  I’d be willing to believe that his book really IS the best seller in its category of e-mail marketing.

That’s something that my blow-hard pals don’t seem to understand.  If you cheapen the status of an Amazon bestseller because everyone with any level of thrown-together product is claiming it, then when and if you ever do achieve that real pinnacle, no one will believe you.  It’s a short-sighted strategy, based on the belief that the rest of us are too stupid to see the pattern.  We’re not.  So cut it out, already.  Work for your accolades, like your pre-iPad ancestors’ generations did.

My colleague – whose name really isn’t Sally and isn't even a woman – who thinks that integrity is something you turn on and off, is an example of the driving force behind so much cheating, on every  level, these days.  You tell yourself [and there’s always at least a tiny grain of truth in here] that you have been cheated, or the whole system is unfair and corrupt; this belief and the resentment it generates frees you from your moral imperative to being fair and honest yourself.   And then anything is possible.

Many people have a situational-cheater’s response to taxes.  Taxes are, as my anthropology students learn [see my YouTube channel Anthroisfun], the way that complex societies make sure that resources are redistributed.  In small groups of 20-40 individuals, as our ancestors lived for millions of years, until around 7,000 years ago, we shared our good and bad fortune on a daily basis.  No one hoarded; you shared the food you gathered or scavenged (or later, hunted) and no one went hungry.  If you made two knives, you gave one to your sister or cousin-in-law.  Once a money economy emerged, people could contribute coins instead of wheat and barley and goats, and still no one went hungry.  

Modern Western societies have become so complex, and so many of them,  including the USA, are unequal, unfair oligarchies, that the original purpose of taxing – to share food and provide for common goals like roads, medical care, education of the young, and defense against enemies – can be ignored, while you focus on the things you don’t like or approve of.  It’s impossible to have 330 million people agree on anything, including “the sky is blue.”  For example, in Seattle, the sky is actually varying shades of grey.  If we get a tiny patch of blue sky, we all go nuts and stop talking about politics for the duration of the blessed event.  My otherwise-admirable colleague could give you a litany of things that she refuses to contribute to, and thus is morally justified, in her own mind at least – maybe in yours – in pocketing cash that she refuses to share.

But taxes support children and disabled people, and I’ve been both. You have been a child.  If you are blessed to live a long life, you will be too old to earn a salary.  Taxes fix the roads, provide fire protection and libraries, and you need those things.  Taxes provide Sesame Street and Nova, the National Weather Service and Meals on Wheels; I’ve learned from the former and may live long enough to need the latter.  We all may.

 

I know how selective resentment can make nearly anything seem morally acceptable – and I am asking you all to become aware of it, too.  I have a class that brings people into connection with all the components of their ancestry (Meet Your Ancestors, launching on www.soaringdragon.biz/classes) including the noble and heroic.  These heroes are the parts of your DNA that you can tap into when you feel yourself getting up a head of steam around justifications for resentments.  A new class on Freeing Your Soul From the Poison of Resentment is debuting soon to give you tools for this.  

It all starts with awareness of what is really going on inside your thinking, and a commitment to listen to the better angels of your nature.  Deep breath and make a choice.  Pay your taxes, on all your income.  Give generously to those who have less than you do.  Realize what a hero you are for doing both.  YOU, my friend, are protecting seniors and children, and the disabled, and you are the guardian and protector of your community.  Be proud of yourself.  

And remember the Hindu scripture, “Do not despise your neighbors who are poor, for many poor people were once well-off.  And you may someday be poor.”  We’re all in this together, my friends, we truly are.

If we all learn how to call on our inner hero, regardless of the choices that the swamp around us makes, we will have a roadmap to creating a paradise out of this Earth that we have inherited. 

  Take a step on that path today.  Take another step tomorrow.  Repeat until the day you die.

The Most Wonderful Mistake of My Life...

I’m going to say a word and I want you to respond with the first words that come to mind.  Ready?

Ready…  set… MISTAKE

Now, if your mistake is a real ethical failure on your part – you betrayed your spouse’s trust, you cheated or lied in some other way – do the Ready…. Set again.  This article is for the merely boneheaded, not  for times when you betrayed your own soul.  [Forgiving the Unforgiveable by Flannigan is the way to go on this serious stuff.]

Did you immediately think about a mistake from your past?  Of course you did.  Know that If you remember it as a mistake, you haven’t forgiven yourself for it.  If it popped into your mind, it has been, in its own teensy or not-so-teensy little way, dragging you away from having compassion for yourself. 

I’ve been working on the self-compassion issue with clients this year, as I see it as the cornerstone of most of the rest of what I do.  For all the “Oh, I wish I had taken the other road” times of life, you end up with better choices in future if we do the deep work with me that gets you to wrap yourself in compassionate forgiveness and move on.

I’ve just been pole-axed by a blinding “aha!” that I have to share.  I KNOW you all that at least one of these “mistakes” from the past.

So come with me on a journey.  I’m teaching a class and answering a question about some subject-specific vocabulary – and I realize that I am explaining the Latin roots of the word, which entirely explains its function.  Everyone is amazingly impressed.  And the staggering reality hits me:  I have been a whiz at science terminology, including human anatomy [taught it at the college level for years], and a whiz at English vocabulary AND IT’S ALL BECAUSE I STUDIED LATIN IN HIGH SCHOOL.

Latin??  Yup.  Latin. 

No, I wasn’t at seminary. 

I dug in my heels and refused to listen to guidance counselors or any other adult who tried to tell me that I needed at least 3 years of a foreign language to get into college.  [Turns out they were right as far as that goes.  My two years of German got me the snooty-disdain treatment from some colleges.]

What in hades was going on with me?  Just me picking an unusual form of adolescent rebellion?

Not really.  What I did was fall in love with a guy who had died nearly two millennia earlier.  That’s right.  I was crazy-mad in love with Hannibal of Carthage and all things Punic.  In addition to book after book on Carthaginian culture and the 2^nd Punic War, I also insisted on learning ancient Punic and Latin.  I couldn’t find any Punic classes anywhere but graduate schools, which weren’t available to a 15 year old, however nerdy, but my school did have a classics track with Latin language.  So there I labored for two years, slogging through the Gallic mud with Gaius Julius and his castra ponere and castra movere.  [Caesar was constantly pitching camp and then moving camp and leaving two cohorts behind to guard the impedimenta, the baggage train.]  I would have committed total academic suicide and taken a 3^rd year of Latin but instead of military Latin they switched to Ovid’s love poems.  Yuk.  So I trundled off to German, and my self-study Russian.

Of course I consciously knew, through all the decades of my life since high school, that the Latin study had made so much of English and science much, much easier for me than it was for my cohort, but it wasn’t until today that I understood down to my elemental DNA that Latin had been a very good choice, a valuable choice and NOT A MISTAKE AT ALL.  Really, truly, madly, it wasn’t a mistake.  It smoothed my path to my eventual career.   It enriched my class this week. 

It was such a small thing, but watching that judgment dissolve away to nothingness, to be replaced by shining sunlight, reminds me yet again that even the most positive of us, even someone like me who is dedicated to blasting through others’ barriers and bringing them more productivity, more happiness, more of whatever matters most to them, is carrying a Marley’s chain of regrets. 

Today I let one of them go, with a laugh.  God bless Latin.  And bless all of your mistakes that you have not yet realized were not so bad after all, and all of your non-mistakes that have smoothed your way through life in ways you’ve never realized or acknowledged.  Pour gentle compassion on them, hug the younger you that made those choices. 

And I still love Hannibal and all things Punic…..

..........

Want to clear away the boulders that are standing in the way of your goals?  When Hannibal’s army was stopped on an Alpine pass by a big boulder, he had his men build a large bonfire and when the stone was very hot, they poured vinegar on it.  The stone cracked into smaller pieces that could be moved, and the elephants, horses and soldiers could get back on their way to destiny.  I can blast away your boulders, too!  Sign up for a FREE Getting Unstuck session to get your transformation started. Victoria@soaringdragon.biz.   www.soaringdragon.biz

Want Intense Joy, even Bliss? You don't need drugs... or even other people....

One of the broadest roads to mental, emotional, physical and spiritual strength is the creative arts, and I just came across a wonderful quote.....

Vincent Van Gogh: "If you hear a voice within you saying "You can't paint!", then by all means, paint - and that voice will be silenced."

Amen, brother. If I had a dollar for every client who has shied away from creativity because of the fear of criticism/perceived failure, I would be sitting on a beach in Tahiti for two months every year.....

When I tell people I paint, they assume that I am beloved by hundreds of fans, who eagerly buy my stuff. Nope. I create stuff that I either love and hang up or decide "Nah, that doesn't warm my heart" and throw it out or paint over it. Who cares? It's the process of doing art that is the fun, that processes all the frustrations or joys of the day, week, life, into - something that has never existed before.

You will never be so close to utter bliss in any other context, as when you are overcome by transcendence - that out-of-yourself feeling you get when you are the presence of beauty so intense it makes your teeth ache and tears form, or when you behold your newborn child, or when you hold another form of creation in your hands. Sometimes what comes out of me and onto the page poleaxes me to the point where I can hardly breathe. *I* created that. And it is a Something that has never existed before. It came out of my consciousness and took form on the written page,or the collection of paints or the juxtaposition of images torn from magazines and added to by ink and colored pencil,

Until you do this, and do it regularly enough that you can get past your fears and start to feel transcendence, you will never really understand what the Biblical authors (and the original Babylonian authors) meant when they imagined the Creator looking on its handiwork and proclaiming it Good. Not an artistic judgment, that. No, Good meant that undefinable feeling you get when you look on something and it is just 100% just-the-way-it-is harmonious and Right, in an ineffable way that only your soul and the soul of the universe understands.

Get some cheap watercolors ($3.99, I swear to you) and play. Buy craft-quality acrylics for $1.50 each. Create. You deserve to feel so good you cry. Then make another appointment with yourself and do it again.

Are you laughing yet? No? It's OK, I'll come back in 5 minutes......

Online personal ads consistently say “Sense of humor,” and some studies of who gets called and responded to suggest that we do, indeed, care about this characteristic in our potential mates. 

Makes sense, too.  Try this logic chain:

·         Someone with a sense of humor is likely to take the small things lightly.  A genuine sense of humor is inconsistent with dramatics, and

·         Laughing is good for your health and

·         Laughing makes you attractive.

 We are biologically programmed, from earliest neonate to elder, to respond to a smiling face with an answering smile.  If I can get myself honestly laughing on the date, it not only means that I am having a good time, it also means that I will appear more attractive to you.   [Chimpanzees and gorillas know that a human smile means positive intentions, so it must go back at least 15 million years.]

Humor is a real asset in life as well as dating, for all three reasons.  Call up funny videos on You Tube or Facebook.  Flush the cortisol out of your body with short breaks to laugh.  Allow those tense muscles to naturally relax.  Your brain will clear, solutions will pop into consciousness and you’ll actually notice that the sun is shining, or you’ve got some blessed rain, and you’re alive.   You’ll take a deep breath and remember that it is very, very good to be alive, and loved by the universe and probably quite a few people and other animals.  You’ll take another breath and the whole day has shifted on its axis.

Pretty good ROI on 2 minutes of laughing, wouldn’t you say?

Step Forward from Intention to Action!

I just finished an interview on sharewisdom.tv, on Marianne Marlow's show Conscious Conversations. Marianne was my mentor when I was learning hypnotherapy, and now she is starting a new TV show!

My segment (from 20 minutes to 40 minutes of the hour) continued her theme of taking action. We have to step away from the thinking about it phase to the taking action. You don't want to race off a cliff in an excess of enthusiasm, but after you have done serious and analytical as well as intuitive searching for info, you need to put steps in your calendar and start SOMETHING.

[Or call me for a FREE Getting Unstuck session. This is not an offer for a sales pitch. I will get you through your first, starting step - the hardest - on your road to your goal!]

If you enjoy Marianne's content, some more wonderful free content on the same subject of taking action in my YouTube channel humanbio4everyone. Lots of encouragement as well as specific steps! Go for it!

And the funniest part of it is that until 30 minutes before airtime, I thought that it was a radio interview! [I was a last minute addition to the show, so some details fell through the communications cracks.] When I got a checksheet telling me about lighting, backgrounds, etc., several very genteel and ladylike expression fell dulcetly from my lip as I dashed into action. How appropriate for the theme of the show!

Earrings and lipstick, because my mum always said you can walk out the door for a meeting with the Queen with just those two. Eyeshadow because I didn't have time for makeup. No time for my truly spectacular, gorgeous wardrobe. So I had my tv debut in a denim dress and fabulous earrings. A tan in place of professional skin products. My hair all which way from a hair-wash 30 minutes earlier. If my philosophical framework is wrong and there is a humanistic deity in charge of events, all I can is that he, she or it was splitting their sides laughing.

How do you take action?

1) Start with the overall goal and break it down into specific, small, discrete tasks to get you to the first milestone. Forget about the rest, just focus on the first milepost.

2) Choose the easiest task on the list that doesn't depend on an earlier step and do that. Feel yourself moving! Cheer when you get it done!

3) Pick another easy step. Don't agonize over which one. Just one easy one. See you your muscles are unknotting as you are in Action?

Keep moving until you get to the milepost. Celebrate.

Name the next milepost and create steps. You're in motion. Just keep going.

The minute you feel resistance, stop. Meditate and ask your unconscious mind to tell you what it's really about. If the answer doesn't come, call me for your Free Getting Unstuck session and I'll get you moving again. [Not a sales pitch, remember.]

www.soaringdragon.biz 253-203-6676

What is the #1 "Pain Point" people come to me to relieve? Go ahead and give it your best guess....

 What is the #1 quest people come to me for?  It’s not fame and entrepreneurial fortune, although many of them do, and I can definitely show people how to get more fortune.  It’s not a better career, although ditto.  It’s not freedom from physical pain and significant health problems, although many of them do.

Nope, the absolute #1 quest is – clarity.  If there were a tagline for this age it might very well be “I’m so confused and I don’t know what to do.”  What they mean is that what they really WANT is buried so deep under layers of “This knowledge is too scary – don’t, whatever I say, let me know this truth” that they couldn’t excavate it with a power-shovel.

Truth is so scary for so many of us because if we knew what we really needed and what we really wanted for ourselves we would have to initiate really, really scary conversations with people about the amount of relative power we have in our lives.  We might need to have conversations that threaten our financial survival or our definition of ourselves. 

When someone comes to me seeking clarity, it is nearly always true that clarity is being deliberately obscured as a self-protection mechanism by the person’s deep unconscious.

I particularly admire the clients who, when they start to realize what clarity would really mean, take a deep breath, strap on their Courage backpack, take their Courage vitamins, and plunge into the depths.  When that happens, the most glorious transformations become possible.  Sometimes, the reality isn’t as scary as the nightmares dreamed up by their (frequently mistreated or emotionally abandoned) child-selves.  Sometimes the reality is about right.  Sometimes the reality is much, much worse.

What is always true is that the courage to dive deep and face truth with deep breathing and slow steps and as many emotions as come up is a rare and glorious commodity.

The people who walk that path to their own and genuine truth, whether they are looking for clarity, more entrepreneurial success, a better career, better health or better something else, are my personal heroes.

God bless you all, every one!  You are the brave souls who bring light to human life.  Bless you all, every one.  

Get a FREE Getting Unstuck session!  Not a sales pitch, a real session.  Contact me at www.soaringdragon.biz or call 253-203-6676