Ingredients for Life

I don't know about you, but I don't like raw eggs. I don't like their texture or their taste. But once they are cooked, I love them! I can relate this to all the life experiences that 'tasted' nasty when they were 'raw' and didn't evolve until they were heated with the fire required to 'cook' them.

I don't like flour or baking powder or baking soda either. What do these have in common? They are ingredients to most delicious treats people bake. Mixed all together, they create something you eat, share, and even sell at fundraising events.

Life includes ingredients, too... a mix of nasty tasting and sweet. All together, they create character, wisdom, confidence, and the ability to guide others. I didn't appreciate any of these single ingredients while I was going through them. I wonder how many people do.

Whatever my Creator was 'baking' in me had LOTS of ingredients. It would have been nice if I could have seen what Creator was baking from that perspective -- the bigger picture -- vs. my perspective, a bunch of ingredients in a large bowl being stirred together in chaos.

If only I had known all those years that I was being made into something grand that could be 'eaten' (my writing), shared (my writing), and sold at fundraising events (my books.) I was only conscious of the bitter ingredients. I had done this to the extent that I didn't even pay attention to the chocolate chips in the cookies... the experiences that were joyful. This is what I learned is one of the cognitive distortions called Discounting the Positive.

Occasionally, I have tasted a bitter chocolate chip cookie (perhaps unmixed baking powder), but not many. When it came to cookies, I threw the bitter one away and continued eating the tasty ones. I would eat an entire batch of home-baked cookies or an entire bag of pre-packaged ones -- in one day. There was NO discounting the positive -- I would just simply throw the bad ones away and forget about them. It would have been nice if I had been able to do this with life experiences.

I didn't realize that there were toxic chemicals in many of the ingredients I was eating -- and the emotions I was holding onto -- that my body was reacting to. I just knew I didn't feel well, developed intense pain, and the fatigue was vicious.

Over the last five or so years, I've been working out the 'bitter' ingredients... isolating them so I know what they are... mixing them together into something that tastes good.

In addition to my own personal experiences, I discovered there were (are) also the generational ones. Perhaps there is reincarnation (which I do believe in), but lately, I've been reading about memories (and emotions) that can be passed down through your DNA. One of the exercises we did in ThetaHealing was clearing these memories and replacing them with feelings like love, peace, trust, feeling safe, and acceptance.

EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) can also be used to process buried emotions which can manifest as health issues... both mental and physical. I recently listened to a tapping session with Nick Ortner and a woman who was traumatized when she was 5 years old by her father. She had been a mess ever since. In the session, they uncovered many layers that were involved in that trauma and she was so much happier after it was all brought to the surface and tapped out. I've saved this video on one of my Pinterest pages.

A whole lot happens in our imaginations... even our perception of past, present, and future. Life is an incredible journey... and some of us travel longer distances than others. In the meantime, Spring is a time for renewal. If nature can renew itself after a season of death, so can we.

Reflections

Life is a journey, not a destination. My personal journey has been about self-discovery and I titled my first memoir, "Appearances: A Journey of Self-Discovery". I titled the sequel, "Love, Life, & God: Getting Past the Pain".

For the last year, I've been listening to a number of personal development seminars, book marketing seminars, and relationship seminars. The common denominator seems to be the necessity of developing self-confidence and self-esteem, areas I've struggled with for most of my life. In the area of relationships, I really wanted to identify the core blocks I knew were still lingering in my subconscious... and the only way to do this was to face them.

Many of my past relationships were abusive ones, and according to Law of Attraction, we attract to us a reflection of how we feel about ourselves. While I have been making strides in self-confidence with exercising, friendships, writing, and music, I became aware that I still was doing some self-loathing for allowing situations with some of the men I've been with to happen, which included rape and molestation. I knew self-loathing had to go, but how?

In listening to about half a dozen dating coaches talk about the issues many women face (and men, too), I kept asking myself, why did I allow those things to happen? 

I contemplated whether energetically, if I disliked myself that much, perhaps the men were doing what they felt they were supposed to do, which was treat me like crap because I believed I was crap. And I couldn't help wonder if I would have been treated the same way had I loved and accepted myself, physical challenges and all. 

I had agreed to doing things I didn't want to do out of the fear of being rejected. I let the resulting injuries linger for way too many years... and emotional baggage gets stored in your muscles. I swallowed a lot of pills to cope with pain in my muscles that I didn't realize were non-physical energetic emotional memories. 

Several years ago, I discovered EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique). I did a 20 minute tapping sequence with Carol Tuttle to work through the symtoms of fibromyalgia relating to the car accident I was in when I was 21. A boy I was in love with had just broken up with me and I was devastated. When I was driving home, the fatique of the event along with CFS (after a bout of mono) resulted in my dozing at the wheel and I woke up just in time to see the car I was about to crash into.

In the EFT exercise, I tapped through all the emotions I was experiencing at the time of the car accident which released some of the emotional memory from my muscles. I definitely felt the difference. 

However, I couldn't find any EFT sequences for the other traumatic experiences... and so they lingered... until recently, when one of my sisters told me about Robert Smith's work with people who had been traumatized using a method called Faster EFT (Emotionally Focused Transformations). There are a number of YouTube videos demonstrating how Robert works with people on a variety of topics, including PTSD and rape. I copied the following paragraph from the FasterEFT website:

"FasterEFT is a methodology developed by Robert G. Smith after many years of studying and working with thousands of people. It is a collection of new cutting-edge techniques and processes that integrates the most effective elements of EFT, BSFF, NLP, spiritual understanding, science and the mind’s great ability to transform itself. One of the greatest aspects in FasterEFT is that it is fast, direct and to the point. It has a healthy and logical belief system that is easily accepted. With this great mix of understandings, FasterEFT can quickly transform how you represent your past, shift your emotional disruptions and restore your physical health."

In the meantime, I've been writing Fairy Tales. The most recent one is titled, "Twin Flame". I often experience the magic of spirit (God) talking to me through my fingers while they type on the keyboard. In this tale, an elder tells a soul who is in "heaven", that humans have to live certain life cycles to become mature souls, and we make contracts with other souls before we are born to work out relationship issues. 

And so I wondered... perhaps I had made contracts with the men who had hurt me and they were only doing what I had previously agreed to do. It's definitely time for me to let the pain of the past go and move on to new experiences.