Learning to Still One’s Mind

I meditate!  Well doesn’t everyone?  Ok, maybe not, but I’m a big fan of Meditation, and I know it’s very helpful to my mind, my mental health, and even my creativity when I can just shut out the noise of my daily life and slip into that pleasant place where Everything and Nothing meet in peaceful, manageable harmony.

The challenge is constantly there to make time for meditation – for me it means sacrificing reading time first thing in the morning, which is hard – or my favourite thing to do is find a quiet beach and sit in the sand and let the sound of the waves take me where I need to go.   But the busier my life gets, the harder it is to stay in the mediation and not let the crazy (and the mundane) aspects of my life take over my peaceful space.  So last week I asked my angels for some real tangible help, and a lesson in how to do this.  I want to share it with you in case you are also searching for a way to ‘chillax totally’ into your own meditations.

First I was guided to create a file, for each and everyone one of my areas of thought to drop into.  As each thing came into my mind, I simply put it into a file with ‘Child’, ‘Work’, ‘Car’, ‘Friends’, Christmas planning…’  you get the idea right?   As I dropped each item into a file, I found it was easy to move on to the next thing until the things stopped flowing and I finally had an ‘Empty Room’ to dwell in for a while.

Meditation at the beach is my favourite space!
Meditation at the beach is my favourite space!

Then I was guided to create a room in my mind, where I could decorate it the way I wanted, shape it my way, and furnish it with a big comfy chair etc.  I even added a fireplace with a mantle so I could choose to either watch flames gently warm me, or rest an item on the mantle, or even take a thing and release it into the flames of the fire.    Outside my ‘room’ was a garden and a path I could walk down if I wanted to have a meeting with any angels or guides, but my room would be my meditations sanctuary that I can return to again and again.

Wow – this worked so well!   For me, the time flew by, and I found it easy to dwell in this space and allow what needed to flow to do so without being cluttered by my daily life matters.   Answers, ideas, connections with spirit, is something we all want when we go into our meditations, and sometimes also just to rest fully in the silence.   This was made so easy for me that day, and it’s a process I’ll continue to use.

If you have a special meditation process or method, please share it in the comments section below, or try this one, and let me know how you get on.

Listening to Guidance from Spirit

I remember reading a book one night, it was Spirit Guides and Guardian Angels, by the wonderful Richard Webster.  He wrote about meeting our guides, and learning to listen to their messages.   There was a simple exercise in the book that was simply to close our eyes, and imagine what our guardian angel might give us as a sign that they were there.   The next minute I felt a soft feathery touch on my cheek.  It was firm, but definitely felt like being touched by the softest of feathers.  I enjoyed the feeling for a moment,  opened my eyes and wondered if maybe I’d really just imagined it.  But the feeling was so real, I remember feeling very confused as a put the book down then went to sleep.

The next night, I was reading the same book, and I distinctly heard a voice inside my head tell me to “put the book down, we want to show you something”.  I looked about, wondered about it, then felt compelled to close my eyes and to just trust whatever what happening.   I felt guided by this voice.   It was a feeling that’s still hard to describe… but I went a long with it, and with closed eyes, I heard/felt the voice instructing me to let my mind go gentle into being a little like an old radio, with a dial on the side where I could ‘tune in’ to the right frequency.   It seemed to take a while to get it right, and then suddenly my grandmother was there, in my mind talking with me.   My Grandma and I were quite close and in many ways I was not surprised to see her.   The guide at the side of my mind was there, and helped me to have a conversation with her, and ‘hold the frequency’ so that we could talk just like talk to anyone else, except it was all happening inside my head.

At the end of the conversation, I asked Grandma to help me know that this was real.  She then told me a few things about herself that I’d never known, but was able to check the next day with my mother – who was decidedly intrigued and delighted by what I told her.

This was the start of many lessons I’ve had from my guardian angels, and I’m sharing it with you as I want you to know that it can happen to anyone who is open to learning about working with their guardian angels and spirit guides.   Learning to ‘tune into the right frequency’ is one of the first steps, but one of the most interesting and challenging.  I still have to work at getting it right sometimes.   It’s something that takes practice.  Like getting into the flow of all those good energy vibrations, finding the right levels or frequency usually doesn’t just happen, without some consious effort on our part.

Finding a quiet place, then learning to listen is a wonderful way to  just ‘be’.  And sometimes wonderful things happen when you are in that space.

 

Practical Help and Advice for a Young Widow

I wrote this in reply to a woman who is really struggling with the first year of  being widowed, and it is also a  lot of what I tell others when we meet and they are caught in the grip of grief in such a way that makes them feel like they are drowning in it.  So I decided it would also make a good blog.

My heart goes out to you and sincere wishes for comfort and love. These feelings of loss – the sheer emptiness you feel right now is a natural part of your situation – how you feel, the anger, and the anxiety – I’m telling you it’s a normal part of widowhood with the hope that you understand that this is part of a process that DOES GET BETTER. It WILL pass, and you will look back on this stage, and many others, with a lot of feelings, both good and bad about what you are currently going through.

So here’s some practical help

1) Every night before you go to bed, plan ONE SMALL THING to look forward to about the next day. It might be ANYthing. From treating yourself to a walk, buying yourself something (a block of chocolate or a movie ticket. Anything) Treat yourself to ONE thing that will make you smile – even if it’s only on the inside for now. that’s how you start to get through one day at a time.
2) Get yourself a journal, or set one up on-line, and write or draw everything you are feeling. If you can’t draw, buy some crayons and just put colours on the page. Write a caption on what you draw. Write about how pissed off you are feeling. Write about something wonderful you remember about him (or her). Write a letter to him. Just let your feelings start to come out through your fingers onto  paper somehow.
3) Talk to another widow – especially someone young – if you can’t find one, you can write some more or talk to me ok.
4) Make a plan now for what you will do and where you will go for Christmas. Maybe you’ll make 100 plans and screw each one up – but make a plan every day. Until you find one that you can live with and look forward to.
5) Remember this – please remember this… What you are feeling now, what you are gonig through, how devastated you feel WILL get better.
I can say that with absolute surety – because someone once said it to me, and we all say it to each other. This is a hell you just have to be prepared to cry your way through. I used to be so surprised that so much water (tears) could physically come out of my body with such regularity.
6) When you manage to get out of bed tomorrow (and every day) set a time that you will make yourself get up and dressed by – every day, no matter what. Don’t break that rule for yourself. Just do it, and when you do, every day take a couple of deep breaths and talk to your lost one for a few minutes. Ask him to help you get through the day. He will, and he will let you know he’s there. HE WILL do this. Whether it’s a feeling, a smell, a song on the radio, or a goosebumps down your back, or an unexpected something related to a dog in a park… somehow he WILL let you know he’s there to support and help you ok.
Your lover’s love for you did not end with his physical death. He will not want you to suffer this way. And you can’t join him yet… ok. If that were the case, you would not still be here – you have to let time work with you to deal with this. Widowhood is not somethign you ‘get over’ you simply allow it to shape you a little. One day you wake up and find you are actually able to count more than days, weeks, months… and you’ll know yourself in a new way.

Please read and reread the above – and remember there are people who care and want to help you. Congratulations on venting today. Do it again tomorrow – and the next day… just do WHAT EVER you need to day by day to get through this.

Big hugs,
Maria

Spirituality meets Practicality

I want to share something with you…

  • Not all spiritual people are what I call ‘woo woo’ people
  • Sometimes weird things happen we can’t always explain except to know that there’s a higher power
  • Angels, spirit guides, and guardians do exist – even the bible refers to these often
  • God, by any name, including Allah, Lord, Yawah, Dieu, the Universe,  (and any of the 500 + names you’ll find on Google) is what ever God is to you personally.   For many people ‘G.O.D.’ [spelling] is the simply name that refers to their understanding of what or who God is.
  • Spirituality transcends and pre-dates organised religion.

Spiritual viewpoints will not always be embraced by those with religious viewpoints and vice versa!

But life is what it is, spirituality, both the questions and answers that come with any form of it, is what helps us to work through our lives on a daily basis, especially when we are working through grief.

The best we can do when faced with our crises of faith, our rages against God, or our celebration of miracles, is to understand that we all may experience, understand, and embrace our faith differently, and that right or wrong does not exist – for that creates judgement, and who are we all to judge that which not one of us has a single complete answer to.

When we swear, praise, curse, question anything in our day we are invoking some form of Spirituality to meet practicality.  “By Christ I wish…”  “Oh my God…” “Bloody Hell!…”  “Mon Dieu!”  These are expressions of exasperation, pain, shock and a multitude of things…   For many of us, our practical natures seem to need to express ourselves this way.

My point is, that what ever is going on in our practical daily lives, there’s always a level fo spirituality, even for those who claim not to be spiritual, religious, or otherwise.  And when spirituality meets practicality and we get that for each of us it’s different, then it’s a pretty good place to be really!

 

 

Signs

Today I went to watch the sunrise from the beach, and have breakfast with my lovely friend Julie Cross.  Like me, Julie is a widow with young sons – and like me, she talks to a lot of other young widows.    We feel it’s important to share the light and pass the torch to those of us still struggling with this weird world of widowhood.  (Yes even a dozen or so years on and it’s still a weird world).

We were blessed to see dolphins just a few metres offshore today – that was a blessing, but for me a particularly big deal.   You see, I’d been working through some thoughts about what to do with my gifts, and having had a firm nudge lately to share more of my psychic gifts with others, I had specially asked my guides this morning as I wa driving up to the beach to please give me a sign to help with some clarity and intentions about this issue, and I asked for the sign to be a sighting of dolphins.  I specifically said, please send me dolphins today.

I later found out from another friend – a newly widowed lady named Tessa – that in the 2+ years since she moved to live in that particular spot, right on the beach, that she’s never seen dolphins there before.  Wow!  I was feeling very blessed indeed when I learned that.

I mentioned Julie, not just because she is a lovely friend who also happens to be a widow, but because Julie is a lady who is big on signs.   Feathers are her ‘thing’.   Mine too, but perhaps to a lesser extent.  Julie finds feathers on a daily basis, and always at times and in places where she knows for sure they are sent to her by either her late husband and/or her guides.    As we were talking about ‘things’ it finally dawned on me that helping other widows is how I most want to use my gifts.  And there it was. The words fell out of my mouth, the signs were there, and the people present were all perfectly aligned with my intentions at the start of the day.   And it felt right.

The thing with signs is that they are truly everywhere if you know how to spot them.  From the song on the radio, to the feathers at your feet, to the people who come into your life – these are all far from co-incidence.  The guidance sought is often sent to you as signs.  Signs as physical manifestations, ideas in your head that seem to come out of ‘nowhere’ but are ‘perfect’ at the time, and in many cases we may find a guardian angel in our path with a comment, helpfulness, or special care for us on any given day, in any given moment, and always just exactly when we need it.

Next time you are unsure about signs, and have a decision to make or something to work through, as for a sign.  Then look for it.  Be aware that sometimes it may even be a little more subtle than dolphins or feathers.   But you’ll know it for what it is when you are tuned into to see/hear/feel it.

 

Helping a child to understand their spirituality

We have a no-holds-barred rule in our house when it comes to discussions and topics for airing.   Maybe that stems from having survived our own personal tragic situation many years ago – the death of my husband and father of my sons, while I was pregnant with the younger one.  We kind of got used to talking about Daddy hanging around us.  Maybe it’s also because as a single mother of sons, you kind of have to adapt quickly to farts being funny, as well as other boyish things that make up boy-humor that is usually bound up in our bodily functions.

When it comes to spirituality, I have an indigo child who is a little more inclined to want to loose his soul in music as a means of contemplating his inner self, and a crystal child who is out there loud and proud willing to be helpful and heard for his philosophies and understanding.  Both are very aware of the journey I’ve been through, and how that has helped me to evolve and grow as a medium.  The fact that my Crystal child is also profoundly psychic is interesting to all of us, and we long ago decided that with the no-holds-barred attitude we have to anything on the table, nurturing rather than judging odd things and ideas was to be our normal way of treating anything odd that arose.

If my son needed to have mental health days off school sometimes, this was how we framed it.   And the teachers be damned if unwilling to accept the lack of a doctors certificate.  If he found it really hard to be in some places, or around some people at times, we did our best to help him and anyone else who needed to know, to understand that this was ok, normal for him, and not something to make a fuss of.

If he’d rather have crystals in his bedroom than posters on the walls, or soft toys instead of bo0ks (even as a teenager) that’s ok too.

I guess the crunch comes when said child starts to know an awful lot more about his friends than they may necessarily feel comfortable about, that the times comes to have that conversation about ‘coming out’ or at least being able to say to his close friends that he really is a little ‘woo woo’ but that it’s not something they should be worried about.    I don’t know if coming out as psychic is the same as coming out at gay – both my sons are straight.  But it has crossed my mind to wonder if the same things go through parent’s minds about that:  Will he lose any friends? Would it make people treat him differently? Are people more accepting of this nowadays, really?

As someone who is a medium still struggling to get really comfortable with how many people I open up to about that, I know that for him to have to face this kind of speculation by his friends and fellow students, that this is a big deal.   Maybe it can be something he just keeps to himself for a whole lot longer.

Maybe we just have to trust – both of us – that our respective guides and guardian angels are in mind of it all and that ‘letting go and letting God’ has to prevail.

When is the right time to be open about who you are, when who you are gives you insights into people that some would rather you didn’t have.

At the very least it’s always a good time for discussions about discretion, integrity, and honesty.

Temperature Control

Sometimes no matter how much we may think we’re on target for what we imagine is a very big deal in our lives, little things come along and like a puff of wind, intention vanishes.  That’s when it’s important to find someone you can tune in with who has perspective and the ability to help you clear your vision and see the bigger picture – again.

This week I went from high energy, to wobbly energy, and yet managed to obey that inner voice that took me away from my work and make time to just sit and talk with someone much wiser than I am. Not that she knows I think of her in that way. Sometimes the best people to be with are the ones who can just casually and almost without conscious thought, drop gems of understanding into the conversation that are arresting and perfect in that moment.

She said: “remember to stop being human sometimes and just accept you are having a human experience today – and maybe today’s human experience is just more intense than usual.”  I love the concept of our being spiritual beings having human experiences (as opposed to human beings having spiritual experiences) and accept this as my truth.  But that is not to say I find it easy to always be in the natural flow of spirituality.   Some days it just really is hard to remain in the bigger part of the picture and trust that I will be looked after, that things will be as they are intended and that my lessons are all so necessary.

My coach reminded me of the importance of ‘checking my temperature’ daily – not just at those times when I’m spiritually either too warm or too cold.  Instead of striving to stay at an even level and enabling life to happen around me and to end up worrying about losing control.

  • So how often do you check your temperature and tune back in to who you really are and why you believe you are here?
  • Do you have someone to help you return to your real self when you need to?

Why not acknowledge that some days are more intense or harder than usual and work on your temperature instead of trying to control the cause of what stresses it up or down?

It can be far too easy to let daily life just take over but when we consciously decide to allow ourselves to be part of the flow, magic really does happen.

As soon as I let go today and allowed my temperature to calmly return to my level of normal, great things started to happen. It was almost immediate and this affected my energy levels in such a positive way that I felt as though I was physically glowing when I attended a function at lunchtime.

I Love it when that happens!

Sparks igniting the world

Should anyone be viewing us from only a few generations past, I believe what they would be most fascinated by is how quickly a spark can travel, and ignite the world. Via the internet and social media, networking has become an incredibly fast and seems to be completely without limitations. Manifesting anything that requires connections with others happens faster, and we are increasing our ability to create, develop, move mountains (both literal and figurative ones) at astounding rates.

You only have to consider for example, the rate that Difference Makers Community is growing. The wide reach this community collectively has makes me appreciate the magic in our ability to communicate simple ideas to the furthest reaches of the world, connecting leaders, innovators, igniters and implementers effectively and enabling big things to happen at a global level.

So ponder this… how are our collective and individual guides assisting us to spark so well? They say nothing happens by accident and there’s no such thing as coincidence – a much bigger game is being played and many of us are truly starting to sense it.

Does the speed of the play excite you, scare you, or are you able to find the stillness inside and see the underlying order so that you can enjoy the ride, allowing the journey to unfold before you?

I’m learning to recognise that there is in fact a great deal of quiet tranquility beneath the chaos that seems to rule the days as they race by, but it’s taken a lot of input from people – mentors, guides, those I like to call ‘signposts’. From meditation, to health and wellbeing, there is much to learn, both about myself as an individual, and as a ‘spirutual being enjoying a human experience’, and to trust in the journey, without worrying about the outcome.

This makes me very aware of the need for us all to share our knowledge – what we know, sense and how we come to these awakenings. As the speed of our world gathers momentum, and continues to shrink we will rely more than ever on each other to be connected.

What wakes us up

Not everyone grows up hearing voices or seeing ‘ghosts’ although certainly a number of well known psychics do, and not everyone how is ‘psychic’  can see auras or know the future either. What’s I’ve learned is that we all have some ability to be tuned in to various frequencies, and that as we grow or work through various big challenges in our lives, often this seems to be enhanced. The death of a loved one or a near death experience can sometimes seem to up-the-anty, but then for some people just having your first child can start to wake you up as your senses sharpen in other ways.

The death of my husband was the starting point for me, and I became aware of his presence for a number of years (and sometimes still do even now) and that led on to a growing awareness of an extra-ordinary number of coincidences in my life (or so I thought then) and also synchronicity became my new best friend!  On many occasions I thought to myself – wow, that’s cool, what a great series of links or co-incidences.

Then, I started training to become a coach and would find myself working with clients and things would come out of my mouth that were just totally unfamiliar things to me and while not ‘thought about’ by me before I spoke the words, they made complete sense at the time and were always very helpful to the clients!

I’d also be aware of things that I just knew and didn’t know how I knew them about the clients I’d be working with that were totally relevant to the objectives they’d be working towards.  Then I’d start to actually feel as though someone were behind/beside me giving the information that I was somehow speaking for them.

Channelling as I learnt it to be, came naturally for me and still does and  each time I ‘let go and let God’, I find myself in the most comfortable place and wisdom seems to come through in exactly the right way for the time and situation at hand.

The more people I talk to about these things the more I hear of similar stories and situations which slowly dawned upon the person, and was like a gradual awakening.  I don’t know why but most of those I have had these discussions with say it started in their mid 30s or early 40s.

What’s waking you up?