Make it a happy new year …

Happy New Year!

Have you made your new year’s resolutions? Did you remember to include one that says “be happy”?

Some years back, I stopped making resolutions because I never kept them. I was going to eat right, exercise more and swear less. I was going to change my car oil regularly and keep up on my laundry …

Usually, within the first month, if not the first week, I would break every one of my promises to myself and then walk around thinking about how lame I was and feeling soured on the new year. Sound familiar?

Now, I focus on how I want to feel about my life and my choices.

What choices can you make to create happiness in your life?

Resolve to be kind to yourself; set reasonable goals and have a reasonable time-line for accomplishing them. Don’t beat yourself up if you you stumble. Aim for happy and have a great a new year!

Why do you do this?

Today, I was working with a new client who took advantage of my free reading offer. “Why do you do this?” she asked, “most people charge.”
I explained how I’m transitioning from my full-time teaching job into my intuitive practice and the free readings serve multiple purposes: they introduce people to my services, allow people who cannot afford a reading to have one, give me more meditation time, and help me to keep my skills sharp.

But the most important “why” is that I feel I’m helping people in the most direct way possible.

The bulk of my professional life was spent in the hospitality industry, specifically, I was a bartender, and then I was a manager. In many ways, I loved what I did …

… okay, okay … people who know me will tell you how I complained viciously about my restaurant work. The service industry is rough. The general public is rough. On more than one occasion, I, like many of my coworkers, found myself sobbing uncontrollably in the kitchen because the stress of service had become too much.

But there is also great pleasure in giving people an enjoyable dining experience. I thrived off other people’s happiness … I’m selfish, I know.

Eventually, I began to feel that providing a pleasurable dining experience wasn’t enough. I wanted to do more. I went back to school, and armed with my shiny new diplomas, I went in search of teaching jobs.

This is how I became a college writing instructor, and I love it!

Writing is an intensely personal endeavor. When students write for me, they share a part of themselves, and I’m touched that they trust me with the things they don’t express to just anyone. Sometimes they come to me for advice; as an instructor, I can do only so much for them, and then I hear my intuition calling to me …

“I’m here! I’m here! Use me!”

Of course, I can’t go spouting psychic communication to my students, so what to do?

Be a professional intuitive! And so here I am. And yes, I love it … I feel useful and productive and I get plenty of meditation time … yeah, there’s that selfish thing again … 😉

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Free reading? What?

Yes … it’s true … I’m offering free readings to first-time clients. Interested? Come armed with your question … it generally takes about twenty minutes … you can see what I do and decide if you like the service I offer.

What do you have to lose?

Intuition is real.

Gut feeling. Hunch. That little voice. Intuition. Inkling. We have many words to express that unknown sense that we all get from time-to-time, that sense that we are often too quick to dismiss because it doesn’t come from anywhere logical.

I was cruising around on Reddit the other day … because I do that … and a headline caught my eye. It said something to the effect of “psychic or mental illness?”

I didn’t click  on it because … squirrel! … another headline seemed more interesting, but later that day, my brain kept going with that first idea: psychic or crazy?

One of my friends and I laugh about this. She is on her own spiritual journey and occasionally she shares what she sees with me. She also confides that her insights often cause her to question her sanity.

Likewise, despite how many people I’ve read for, I still have the occasional experience where I think, “Huh … did I really just receive that communication or is that completely crazy?”

Interestingly enough, when I voice a strange insight to a client, “Um, so … I see an iguana rowing a canoe … does that mean anything to you?” the client will frequently say, “Oh, yeah …” and then go on to explain it to me.

Cool, I’m not just making that up …

In their book, Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People, Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein report the words of Albert Einstein to his colleague, Jacques Hadamard, in respect to his weak math skills and his physics research:

The words of the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be ‘voluntarily’ reproduced and combined … The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. (3)

Einstein goes on to explain how he used his intuition, and through clairvoyance and kinetic sense, imagined he was a photon, cruising around at the speed of light. As that photon, he observed how he moved and what he experienced. He then imagined he was a second photon and observed what he could of the first photon. He was unable to explain how he did this, he only knew that he did and that this inexplicable insight informed his understanding of his subject matter.

In their book, the Root-Bernsteins report the intuitive experiences of many other thinkers, artists and scientists. I used to take this book into my Creative Problem Solving class and read various passages from it to my classes … trust your gut, I would tell my students. It will take you to interesting places.

Intuition is real, if not necessarily completely understood by those who use it, so, the next time your gut tells you something, consider taking it seriously … look what Einstein accomplished with his.

The best laid plans …

So far this month, we’ve had 10.45″ of rain … life in the PNW … but the weather reports all said we would have partly sunny skies today.

This morning, as I was looking over my jam-packed to-do list, I eyed the sky as the sun was coming up and saw that yes, indeed, there were patches of blue out there.

“Hmmm,” I thought, “great day for a walk,” but my full list tugged at my conscious, so I scrapped the idea.

I began my morning with a bit of cleaning followed by a couple of client appointments. Next on my list were several errands. Grateful I wouldn’t have to drive around in the rain, I put on my jacket and grabbed my keys. I went out, got into my car, started the engine and began to roll down the driveway … but something was wrong. I got out to see what I could see and sure enough ... my rear tire was flat. So much for my to-do list.

I dragged the compressor out, filled the tire and drove directly to the tire place where the nice lady behind the counter told me it would be at least an hour.

One of the stops I had planned making was about 1/2 a mile away. I decided to walk there to do my errand … and just like that, the powers that be arranged it so I got that walk.

… my to-do list? largely unfinished. The walk? amazing … look at the blue in that sky!

Just bless it …

Awhile back, I embarked on a meditation adventure designed to bring more money into my life. It was a fascinating experience that, in the end, had little to do with my ability to make more money, but a whole lot to do with my beliefs about abundance and success, but I digress …

One of the things the author of the manifesting money book suggested was that when we begin to feel frustrated by the process, we start blessing things … everything, he said, bless everything you can think of. And so I did because, why not?

I cracked myself up because I found myself blessing things like the ancient, scarred vinyl floor in my kitchen, or the piece of lint stuck to the back of the jacket of the guy standing in line in front of me.

At the very least, I got a good laugh out of it when I was blessing these odd things, and laughing is always a plus.

Not long after that, I had a reading (yes! psychics get readings from other psychics!). During that reading, it came up that my partner always leaves doors and drawers standing open …

“What,” I began to rant to this patient, wise woman, “is so difficult about closing a drawer!?”

Happily, she empathized, and then she gave me some sage advice, “Give a little blessing each time you close a door or drawer behind him.”

Because really, it’s a choice: I can get angry, or I can accept that this is part of who he is.

As it turns out, this is a great technique to apply to multiple aspects of our lives.

Stuck in traffic and watched the light turn from green to red twice and you seriously need to pee? at the DMV? in a meeting where those who love to hear the sound of their own voices bring up subjects better addressed in email?

Start blessing things. You don’t even have to bless the things that are irritating you although that’s helpful, too.

Yesterday at lunchtime, I ran into the grocery to get something from the deli because I was starving and I had a coffee date to go to, but I needed to eat something first … I shoved some samosas into a container and fast-walked to the check-out stands to discover only three of the twelve lines open and those three lines were jammed with shoppers.

Sigh.

Now … anyone who knows me will tell you: I am not a patient woman, but I am learning. Yesterday, I could have stood there and stewed then left irritated and cast a pall over my day, but who needs that?

So I began to bless things. I blessed my samsoas (I was SO hungry!). I blessed the droplets of water dripping off my rain coat onto my shoes. I blessed the guy in front of me who made the woman he was with laugh. I blessed the long lines to either side of me. I blessed the sound of the cash drawer opening … you get the point … and before I knew it, I was paying for my stuff and laughing with the cashier as she handed me my change and sent me on my way to fill my belly …

Just bless it. It works.

So, what do you do?

As I shift from my current career as college writing instructor to professional psychic, I have come to dread the inevitable question: “So, what are you doing now that you’re not teaching full-time?”

“Well … um … I’ve been freelancing.”

Sometimes people accept this and assume I’m taking freelance writing jobs, the conversation is over, and I’m relieved. Sometimes they look for a clearer answer, “What kind of writing are you doing?”

“Well …,” I hedge, “It’s mostly proprietary.” It’s sort of the truth …

But really, I want to tell everyone what I’m doing … I want to shout it out and be excited about it and have everyone be excited for me: “I’m setting up my practice as a psychic advisor!”

But right now, I’m not brave enough to do that. The word “psychic” evokes strong emotions, and none of them are positive: psychics aren’t real! they’re fakes! crooks! they scam people out of their money! Or worse, they’re “weird,” “crazy,” or “dangerous.”

Certainly there are plenty of unethical “psychics”; fakes who prey on the desperate. All trades have these people, but the esoteric, less tangible nature of energy work tends to inspire even more distrust than say, the contractor who cashes the check and starts a cut-rate project before abandoning the job disappearing with the remainder of the funds.

But here I am, being psychic, and carrying the weight of that label.

One of my goals with this new venture is to help to normalize the idea of psychics … intuitives, healers … those of us who work between the spiritual plane and the physical plane.

We’re just regular people; we wear blue jeans and t-shirts, we stand in line next to you in the grocery, at the movies, at the coffee shop. We have lives just like yours. We have friends and families. We love and we cry, we have mortgages and use credit cards …

The only difference is we use different tools … tools we’re happy to share with anyone who wants to create new things for themselves.

So, if you ask me what I’m doing these days, and I hesitate, now you know why … I’m me, but doing something unusual. I hope one day to be able to say, without hesitation and with pride, “I am an intuitive advisor.”

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For more information about what I do or to book an appointment, email me here.

Recharge!

Recharge.

This is the theme that has run through my encounters with people in the past few weeks. Whether I’m talking with my students or my friends or giving readings to clients, my intuition shouts, “Recharge!”

Despite the conveniences of our modern lives … or perhaps because of them … smart phones! iPads! binge tv watching! … many of us seem to struggle to find quiet time for ourselves. This results in fatigue, stress and anxiety.

When I say quiet time, I don’t mean slouched in front of the tv, scrolling aimlessly through our smart phones, chatting with friends, or mindlessly surfing the Internet … I mean 10 or 20 minutes a day that we devote to quiet so that we can rebalance.

There are many, many ways to achieve this. Meditation is one way although it, too, takes many forms. Some people sit quietly and breathe, others chant and yet others simply allow themselves to “be.”

Nature is another place where people can go to recharge: the beach, the mountains, the forest … anywhere that people can be close to the plants and animals and the earth that birthed them. Nature is the perfect place to find that proverbial inner-peace … walking, sitting, hugging trees.

I once had a friend who told me he used to accomplish this by putting on his headphones and cranking his heavy metal music, then he would lay on his bed, guitars screaming in his head, and let his mind go blank … he swore it worked …

We all have our own ways of clearing out our days and resetting ourselves for the next set of experiences.

So … how do you recharge? Comment below!

Do it, don’t dream it …

Dreams are lovely. We all have them. We value those moments when we can close our eyes and be in our dream

My dream has been to work as a professional psychic. I’ve dreamed this for so long, I can’t say when it began.

Like many people, for years, I consistently relegated my dream to dream-status and never took any real action to make it happen.

A few years ago I took a few tentative steps, stalled, took a few more steps, stalled. More recently, I began creating a website. That website became my starting mark. My mantra became “when my website is ready.”

“When” is a vague word.

A few days ago, I simply decided and began to take action.

Turns out, taking action is pretty easy.

I put together a Twitter page and a Facebook page. Facebook changed the way pages work, and I pouted for half the day because it all just seemed so difficult, and then I put on my big-girl panties and got it done.

My website isn’t ready, so I had to abandon my long-held mantra of “when my website is ready,” and created this blog because all of a sudden, I want to do this.

Dreaming is lovely because dreams are perfect. Real life is scary because … well … life isn’t perfect. The manifestation of my dream is like a newborn baby … sort of wrinkly and red, covered with goopy stuff and screaming its head off … and I think it’s the most beautiful thing in the world.

I’m still fussing over images, but whatever. I’m still finding my voice, but whatever. I’m going to make some mistakes, but whatever. I’ll figure it out.

Oh, well, you say … your dream is simple; mine requires much more. Maybe. Probably. But in the end, until you begin taking those concrete steps, it will remain just a dream, won’t it?

To book a reading email me here.