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!

Stress Busting - and Having FUN!

I’ve never done this before in my life: 240 pages, written, rewritten, edited and polished in a little over 6 weeks.  Georg F. Handel did his Messiah in about that long, but he was a genius.  Oh. My. God.  The newborn 101 Stress Busters for Energy, Joy and Healthy Longevity is on its way now to bookstores, Amazon and me.  As I contemplate this blank page, I feel like a battery that is completely devoid of charge.  Yet, thinking about this amazing experience, I can feel psychic energy sparkling through my exhausted soul, and suddenly I’m a bit less exhausted.  Just enough to pick up my fingers and pour my soul out on the page.

Two hundred and forty pages, most of which is about creativity.  There are preliminary chapters about fun ways to breathe and meditate and walk and exercise, and there is a chapter on making plans and making sure that you execute on them – so important! - but the bulk of the tome is page after page, tool after tool, that takes you out of your worry mind, away from the tunnel-vision that stress creates and into the realms of divinity.  After all, in the beliefs of most faith traditions, there is a deity who creates the world from the raw materials at hand.   The Bible creation story, and the Babylonian Tiamat story that it cribbed from, involves breath and clay soil and the transformation of dead nothingness into glorious somethingness.  God is God because he, she or it brings forth life.  God is the Creator in Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, the Norse pantheon and most animisms.  [Buddhism is the only major faith that doesn’t have a creator being.]  There is nothing that so closely mimics the divine as this simple path of creating something with your own hands and your own soul.

What flows through your mind and what frisson of excitement flows through your body when you first behold the works of YOUR hand?  Regardless of how imperfect it may be – and when you do anything for the first time, it won’t be the Pieta, so if you are perennially in the humor to tear yourself down, plenty of scope for it – it is creation.  It is beautiful in the same way that all newborn babies are beautiful.  The awe that overcomes you when you see the results of your work, the vision and the execution of your heart, your soul and your spirit resembles nothing else on Earth.  Even the transcendence you experience on the mountain top, or sitting on the rim of the Grand Canyon, or driving down a road three feet away from a live bison isn’t the same awe as the awe of true creation.

Creation of any kind, whether it is a vegetable bed or an oil painting, puts you in a mental and emotional place that transforms your physical body as well.  The adrenal stress cascade stops or slows.  Your heart stops laboring.  Neurons remain intact and new ones are created from neural stem cells; your memory improves and the clarity of logic sharpens.  Your kidneys stop laboring; your immune system, especially the T-attack cells and the Natural Killer cells that go after cancer as well as outside invaders, generates its full complement of soldiers, ready to protect you from killers within and without.  Chronic inflammation quietens.   The chemicals that scratch the walls of your arteries and allow plaque to attach become fewer and far between.  All over your body, from your skin to your bones and everywhere in between, the deadly effects of stress are muted.

Time spent in a creative fog is time that exists outside of the normal minute-by-minute “real time” that we are all used to.  The first time you can put aside your OMG, I’m Doing It Wrong, I Know I’m Doing It Wrong thoughts and really deep-end in the process, narrow your thoughts and focus to simply what you are doing, you will sink deep into the Time Without Time.  Time simply ceases to exist as a reality. 

And the act of creation doesn’t seem to even involve you.  People have reported feeling as if a power took control of their voice, their typing hands or the hand holding the brush or the glue pot while the Real Me just watched.  They are absolutely right, if the Real You is your thinking, planning, analyzing Pre-Frontal Cortex, the part of you most active when you are consciously, logically trying to “figure something out.”  In order to create, you need to let your PFC step back [“take a nap,” in a hypnotherapy journey] and let the part of you that knows how to play and that knows the real agendas and the real goals of your heart take over.  This is the part of you that passionately wants to express those agendas and goals – dreams – in whatever medium you allow.  Let the real Real You come out to play, and to express to you what is truly Real, and you will have a gold mine of Truth about yourself and how you truly perceive your world and your life.

I’m not immune from the glorious results of allowing Truth to flow.  I thought my new book 101 Stress Busters for Energy, Joy and Healthy Longevity was about health through blunting the deadly ravages of stress, and it is.  But if you look at the page count, and at the chapters that flowed out of me like a mighty stream, it is the power and glory of a life spent creating that the book is really about.  My subconscious was so insistent on this book that I bumped my planned 2017 releases to accommodate it, and I worked at a fever pitch to finish it, rewrite it, polish it, edit it and produce it in 6 exhausted weeks.  I mean, stress causes a lot of the problems that my work erases, but still – why?  Now, looking at the finished product in printed form, I know why.  My soul wanted your soul to create, and it produced a 240-page how-to guide to all the forms of joy that would fit into 101 tools, and still leave some space for breathing, meditation and the importance of moving. 

Want to learn more?  Come visit me at www.soaringdragon.biz or check out my Facebook group Healing Minds, Healing Bodies and join my monthly (or whenever I get around to it) newsletter.  I offer free and low-cost classes on Learnitlive.com as well as a free Getting Unstuck session (not a sales pitch) for entrepreneurs who want to wake up every morning, do their self-care and then execute, execute, execute all day long, no wasted time, for the maximum income and greatest joy.  I also invite anyone who thinks they’re “not creative” to call me or buy 101 Stress Busters, and I invite people who’ve had traumas in their lives, to know that the impact on their lives today can be ended - permanently.

What do you invest your life in?

My dearest friend for 27 years died this week after a very short illness.  I'm very glad that her illness was so short, for her sake, but have struggled with the huge hole in my heart.  Such a loss, such an angel she has been.  The outpouring of support and affection for her, and for her husband and two daughters, has belied the fear that some of my clients have: why should I spend my life being a good person?  No one will care or remember me.  If you pour good wine into a golden goblet, it will taste ambrosial.  If you pour good wine into a peeling vessel, or one with holes, you'll end up with nothing. It's not being good, kind and generous that is sometimes wasted; it's continuing to pour your good wine into rubbishy glasses that is the potential problem.  So stop wasting time with biological relations who aren't good, kind and generous, even if they are your descendants.  Spend your time exclusively with good people.

The Dhammapada tells us that what we surround ourselves is what we ourselves become, so surround yourself with the good and virtuous.

I loved Cindi Johnson because she was so lovable: kind, generous, funny, smart, tenacious, dedicated to her remedial college math students (how many lives did she save by helping low-income kids get their AA and start a career-track?) and always ready to open her heart.  But I really loved her because of who I became, year by year, because of her.  At my wedding, where she was matron of honor, I told my assembled friends that I was the person I was because they had honed me and shaped me, year by year, like you create a sparkling gem from an unprepossessing stone.  To the extent that I am good and virtuous, it is because I surrounded myself with the good and virtuous, and walked away from the mean and selfish.

I will miss Cindi at one level or another until the day I die.  And her legacy is much, much more than just three grandchildren.  Her legacy is also the array of sparkling gems that her life honed and polished, all the lives that deviated from their course and moved closer to goodness and virtue.

Every faith and wisdom tradition on earth, now and in the past, extols the value of one precious gem vs. a pile of junk-stuff, and the value of one good person to change the world.  They were right.  I was blessed by this good woman's life for 27 years.  There is no greater epitaph for a life.

Soar With Dragons to Genuine Joy (part 2)

In the first part of this exploration, I recommended learning new things, exploring creating things and slowing down to the point where you can actually experience the world you live in.  Today I want to look at some examples of joy that came to me like a bolt from the heavens - unplanned, unexpected and amazing.

It was almost two decades ago, and a Russian colleague was visiting Silicon Valley to share best practices on the use of technology in education.  At that time, I was director of a university extension program in network management. [Too true.  Before I saw the light and switched to healing minds and bodies, I used to teach network engineering.  My first published book, by Prentice-Hall was titled Networking and Data Communications and was the first readable tutorial on LAN technology ever published.  For your homework assignment, research how long ago that was and DON’T TELL ANYONE!]

I was in a major-league funk, not whining about anything, just much more subdued than usual, in a serious crisis of confidence.  He noticed that I wasn’t my usual sunny self, nagged me to tell him why, and I gave him the 20-words-or-less version of What Wasn’t Working in My Life.  I’ll never forget his words, because they not only brought me out of my funk, they have sustained me for two decades.  He said, “Remember: you are the beloved child of God.”

Not so extraordinary, you say?  Well, consider this: I don’t think he believes in God.  I know I don’t and never did.  While I’m a very spiritual and religious person, my faith doesn’t have a First Cause (God/Creator being).  The universe follows laws and arose however Stephen Hawking and his colleagues say it does and did.  We Buddhists don’t care.  Religion is about ethics, conscience, love, honor, transcendence and the meaning of our human lives, all the things that chemistry and physics and biology can’t create experiments to study.  But what my colleague was saying wasn’t about the simplistic definition of God as creator being.  He meant God as a word that equals “the spirit of love that animates the universe,” which the Upanishads, humanity oldest literature, says is the axis that all matter revolves around.  Every faith I’ve ever studied sees that three-letter word as denoting a concept or an energy, not an actual being.  What he was really saying was “Victoria, it’s just a trough in the overall arc of a good person’s life.  The universe still rotates on an axis of pure love.  See that.  Don’t forget it.”

Seeing to the heart of what he was communicating transformed my whole conceptualization of what my life was about and what my response to the latest life-insult [a serious health issue] should be.

Fast forward to two years ago, when I was spending four days above the Arctic Circle in mid-winter, and it was every bit as icy cold from 10PM to 5AM as you are envisioning – times twelve.  The auroras were glorious; I could feel those magnetic fields resonating in my soul.  They danced their sparkling dance across a sky blazing with starlight. 

I noticed a Japanese woman who was traveling alone and reached out to try to share the experience, but her English was poor and I wasn’t pronouncing my 7 words of Japanese correctly.  So I held her hand, shared some reiki, and crocheted her a scarf, with reiki symbols in them, so they would continue to create a channel through me to her even after we all went on our ways.  So few words.  But the channel was profound.  We stayed in touch, she continued to study English.  Today, she is marvelously fluent, I’ve learned to pronounce better and we are doing wonderful spiritual healing work together. [If you can read Japanese, find Wami Amami online and sign up to work with her.]

We can find joy, we can find wisdom and we can find deep connection with unfamiliar words and with no words at all.  Joy can flow down like a mighty river into our unsuspecting souls, if we open ourselves to it.  I hope you will.

Bio: Victoria Leo offers both science-based and spiritual solutions that really work! Visit www.soaringdragon.biz and choose the program that will transform your life.  You deserve to soar with dragons! Victoria’s Facebook group Healing Minds, Healing Bodies welcomes you, as does her blog SoaringDragoninJapan.blogspot.com. You can find her books on Amazon or at your local bookseller.