Tag Archive for: emotional healing

Q & A Interview with the Edge Magazine

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I was featured in the March 2018 edition of the Edge Magazine. I’d like to share it with you to give you some background about how I became interested in hypnotherapy. This interview shares details about my work and also who I am as a person.

The article also gives me a chance to highlight the Edge Magazine and the valuable role it has played in my life. It’s a metaphysical magazine that has helped me grow and evolve over the past 25 years. It offers consciousness-expanding interviews and articles of practitioners on the forefront of healing and spiritually awakening.

Please enjoy the Q & A interview here!

 

A New Paradigm in Emotional Healing

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For awhile now, the approach to emotional healing has been to notice what the problem issue is, such as anxiety or depression, and then manage the symptoms the best you can with medications or coping skills. There is certainly a time and place for symptom management. However, as consciousness rises, a new perspective in healing is emerging which is to view the emotional symptoms as not something to fight against, but instead as something that is yearning for your full attention, because it is ready to be released from your body/mind system. And in so doing, you will also understand why it has been there, like a puzzle to solve.

A natural response to a triggered feeling, such as anger or fear, is to avoid it. However, when you give it your full presence, a type of alchemical reaction takes place. The feeling becomes reduced to a sensation in the body. As you become fully present with this sensation and allow your awareness to sink deeper into the heart of it, you shift from thinking mode to feeling mode. This means two things: 1) you no longer suffer because suffering is generated by the thinking mind, and 2) you become present-moment focused and able to access the subconscious mind. As a result, images or pictures can emerge that give clues as to what the triggered emotion relates to. And as you dive still further into the sensation, other feelings may emerge that underlie the triggered emotion. These are the layers of thoughts, feelings and beliefs that hold the triggered emotion in place. Ultimately, as you allow your consciousness to drop through the physical sensations of all the layers of emotion, you may eventually find your consciousness immersed in a vast nothingness. This usually marks the nearing of the end of the journey, because as you continue to focus intently on this nothingness and notice what’s deeper still, you begin to feel a very light, vast, expansive presence that you are not separate from. This is who you are at your core self…a boundless, infinite presence of oneness which is your deepest essence. In this bottom foundational layer, the words commonly used to describe it are “love, freedom, peace, joy, light, and expansiveness.” There is no longer emotion, but pure awareness, and you know and experience your true self to be this presence which underlies all feelings and limiting thoughts…exactly which people like Eckhart Tolle have been writing about! It’s also known as Source energy.

The result of steeping in this core Self is ultimate clarity. You fully see through all of the deep-seated negative, limiting feelings and beliefs that you have been operating from. An example might be “undeserving and unworthy of success and love”. These limiting feelings/beliefs are easily seen through as not having anything to do who you are, but rather they are seen for what they actually are…an untrue mind program that got passed down, usually through the generations like an unconscious virus. In that moment you know without a doubt that who and what you actually are goes far beyond any limiting thought or belief, thus these limiting beliefs begin to release their grip on your subconscious mind and your identity. Thus you awaken to your true self.

Lately I’ve been guiding many of these healing inner journeys to freedom as part of the Emotional Healing Session that I use. I first read about the process years ago in a book by Brandon Bays titled The Journey, a book well worth the read. I’ve since observed a number of practitioners who use variations of this healing process which essentially utilizes negative feelings as a portal to the profound peace that we all possess within ourselves. It’s been my experience that healing happens in layers, and each journey inward allows you to feel more peace, joy, clarity and freedom as the negative mind programs lose their grip on your subconscious mind and identity. Guiding people to fully experience their true, authentic Self is absolutely part of the new paradigm in emotional healing.

Befriending an Unwanted Emotion

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It feels almost instinctual as a human being to avoid a negative feeling. If something from the past doesn’t feel good, it’s quite common and understandable to distract yourself from it through any number of ways such as using chemicals, overeating, overworking, etc. This may seem to help for awhile, however, the act of avoidance keeps it locked in your body/mind system, unconsciously influencing you in a limiting way. You may even to decide to deal with the symptoms of the unwanted feeling with medications or coping skills, which can be helpful. But there may come a time when you decide to heal and release the root of it. When you do, a key to releasing an unwanted emotion lies in the last place one would expect to find it…inside the negative feeling itself!

Where would you look to find the unwanted past that has a grip on your underlying feelings and beliefs? Although the past no longer exists, it can have a strong, influential hold on us. The body is a good place to look because it is a storehouse of old, outdated feelings that have not been given a chance to be fully articulated, expressed and/or processed.

In the paradigm of higher consciousness, unwanted feelings are not avoided, but instead viewed more as a small child nagging for attention because they are ready to be liberated from your body/mind system. As this happens, you become a freer human being…a clearer expression of your soul, rather than an expression of the fears from your past programming and conditioning. A negative feeling is simply a guidepost that informs us that we are out of alignment with our soul’s perspective, while a feeling of harmony and joy indicates we are in alignment with our soul’s purpose.

These days there are an increasing amount of emotional healing methods such as EFT, EMDR, Emotion Code, etc. The right fit varies among individuals. It’s important to note that healing is a process that happens in layers. A triggered emotion means you’re ready for the next layer to release. I often use a light trance method that is a combination of effective techniques called the Emotional Healing and Awakening session. It’s a process that’s best done with a guide who can keep your focus anchored in the present moment. When you permit a negative emotion to be your guide, it illuminates the unconscious beliefs it operates from, as well as where it originated. The key is to place your full attention into that negative emotion. As a result, the past is then reduced to a sensation in the body. The moment you fully feel it in the body, you have switched from thinking mode to feeling mode, and you’ve become anchored in the present moment. When anchored in the present moment, you can access the subconscious mind, thus uncovering the unconscious beliefs that this emotion operates from, as well as allowing it to point toward any situations, events or circumstances that contributed to this feeling. With your will and intent, you can send the negative energy out of your body and recover the part of you that was lost when you took on that negative emotion.

Here’s an example: A man came to me with debilitating anxiety. As he fine-tuned his focus on it, he could feel it most in his stomach. Often, I ask the client to give the emotion a voice and let it say what the feeling is. “I feel fear,” is what it said. I had it continue…”I feel most afraid because…I might make a mistake.” Again I had the feeling continue, “And that means…I’ll be judged and criticized.” “And that means…I won’t be loved, and I’ll be all alone.” In this manner we got to the subconscious beliefs which were lying beneath the anxiety, and were fueling it and locking it into place. Next, we allowed the anxiety to guide his awareness to the scenes and situations earlier in his life that caused the feeling. The scenes all related to a father who would not tolerate mistakes, thus it became imperative for him to not make a mistake. These tense energies from early events had been trapped and replayed in his body for years, creating a pressure-cooker effect that exacerbated his anxiety. As he focused and felt the feelings from the past in his body, he could then release them from his body/mind system, and bring in the part of himself that was covered up and lost when he took on the fear-based energy. After then doing healing work on the timeline of his life, his body steeped in the lighter energies of freedom, strength and confidence, and these positive emotions became more strongly embedded in his subconscious mind and in the cellular memory of his body.

Our negative feelings are not who we are, but who we are can observe, understand, release and heal them with intention. As long as we fear and avoid them, they will enslave us. But when we allow them to guide us to what wants to be acknowledged and no longer hidden within us, we can liberate these negative energies from our body/mind systems, enabling us to live from the true freedom that we are as souls, and which we can never really escape from!

A Fascinating Past Life Account

A Fascinating Past Life Account

Reading Time: 9 minutes

Recently a client sent me a narrative of her past life regression that she wrote as part of a collection of past life experiences that I’m gathering for a book. It was a fascinating session on many levels, so with her permission I’m sharing it here. Since her soul had been an American soldier fighting in Vietnam prior to this life, the information that she obtained in the regression experience was recent enough that it could be verified through research. The session demonstrates many things besides the authenticity of past life memories and our transcendent soul nature: (1) very young children can often be aware of the spiritual realm until they learn to shut it down later in life; (2) souls can travel across the world after death to be with loved ones, and then later be aware of how their loved ones are getting along; (3) souls often incarnate in groups; (4) love transcends time and space; (5) the subtle feelings you receive from your soul are worth listening to; (6) although this physical life may seem like it’s all there is, the lives behind the forms here are involved in another experience in the spiritual dimension, and they can intersect with ours. I’m sure there are others that you may pick up on. I’ll add on a side note that, interestingly, this is one of several cases recently in which a client has reported a huge spike in intuitive abilities that somehow got kicked off after their session. The veil between this physical realm and the spiritual is getting thinner.

Enjoy this fascinating account. It could have been much longer, but has been written in a condensed version.

 

“Throughout high school I had a persistent urging to do a past life regression.  I had read books on the subject but had no idea where to go about finding someone who would be able to do something like this.  I often thought about my career goals and had an inner knowing that I wanted to work in a Medical Examiner’s Office and specifically helping families find answers to why their loved ones had died.  Although I had not personally experienced death, I often dreamed that I was a man floating above my body as it was leaving this earth.  I would wake up crying because I missed my former family so much.  It felt strange but at the same time so real.  It was almost immediate upon enrolling in college with Mortuary Science as my major, that these dreams subsided.  Upon graduating from college, I landed my first job as a funeral director.  Although I wanted to work in a Medical Examiner’s office, at the time it wasn’t something readily available and I had this nagging feeling I wasn’t qualified or skilled enough to meet the requirements.  I worked as a funeral director for approximately one year.  In hindsight I realize that the hostile work environment, while extremely challenging at the time, was in many ways a mixed blessing.  Feeling somewhat downtrodden and dissatisfied, I resigned from that place of employment and which literally empowered me and gave me the necessary time to set about doing a few things on my “bucket list.”

The internet was very resourceful to learn more about past life regression and how to go about making an appointment.  When Eric’s name came up, I had a strong intuitive response and immediately knew he was the person I needed to go visit.  I wasted no time scheduling my appointment.  In a way, I felt like this was just a way to entertain my long-standing curiosity and I would go with an open mind and see where it would take me.  I honestly wondered if perhaps this might be a little over the top but there was no way I was going to miss this opportunity.

On the day of my session, Eric and I discussed my purpose for coming and I expressed that I wanted clarification as to what I should be doing in regard to my career.  We also talked about what a normal session would be like and that if at any time I did not feel comfortable enough to continue he would bring me back to a safe place and I was free to express my concerns.  I quickly settled into a state of relaxation and Eric asked me questions about what was coming to me.  I began seeing static, sort of like that of when you push your fingers into your eyes.  While I was present with that I observed it turning into black and white rushes and forming plant-like shapes.  After what seemed like seconds of this, I began to see green jungle-type trees and a lush array of green plants that appeared to be everywhere.  Suddenly, I sensed myself in chaos, in a jungle, there was fighting.  Eric asked me to look down.  I noticed that I was wearing black combat-type boots, green itchy clothes, and could feel a helmet on my head, and my hand and arm clinging onto a rifle.  I kept turning, watching my back, knowing there was an enemy closing in on me.  My comrades were beside me.  Panic was overtaking me and just then I saw bright flashes of white light from bombing and fire.  Eric sensed my anxiety and gently asked me to let go of that realm and back into a gentler and earlier time in my life.

Before me was a red barn, tall green fields of corn, and a white-washed fence.  Tears flowed down my cheeks and I began crying.  There was a consuming feeling that I did not want to leave my family behind; I did not want to go to war.  As my sobbing increased, I could sense Eric’s concern as he asked me what was my name and about my hometown.  I actually gave him a person’s name and the state I was living in at that time.  He asked me to go back in time even further.  I breathed a sigh of relief and there I was a young boy, perhaps about 10 years old.  I was sitting on a bar stool in what appeared to be an old soda shop from the 1950’s.  My parents were behind me and my three siblings were off to the side playing.  Gazing out the window, I was observing cars from the 1950’s era driving down the street.  This was my childhood and it felt so familiar.

Again, Eric asked me to go forward in time.  I am seeing a pregnant young woman and a 2- or 3-year old boy next to her holding her hand.  I recognized her immediately as my wife, and coincidentally enough, she looks exactly like I do now.  I am feeling an excitement as our second child is soon to be born.  A sadness and tears flow again.  I have a consuming feeling that I don’t want to leave them behind.  Eric senses this and again took me forward in time.

I am at base camp.  I see a large green truck with what looks like a white star on the side.  There are endless small buildings every direction, planes overhead, a landing strip in the middle of the camp, and a tall sniper tower.  I turn around and see men in white jackets behind me and feel surrounded by troops at the camp.  I am walking into a building and there dead bodies scattered endlessly.  Oddly enough, I am not scared.  Eric asked me at this point if I see any combat and then the scene changes.

My vision turns black.  I cannot feel my lower legs, and a prickly sensation vibrates up through my upper legs.  I am walking in something deep like thick mud or quick sand.  My gun is heavy above my head; it is night-time and I am in a heavy swamp.  There’s a comrade on each side of me and we move together as a unit.  We make out a vision of a small boat in the far distance; there are men on it, and they are wearing pointy hats.  I struggled to site in my rifle and was aiming when suddenly I am blacking out.

I have no idea how much time has passed but I am waking up in what seems like a prison.  My hands are tied above my head in a dimly lit room.  There is a man in some sort of cage to my left.  There is also something very significant about him, but I cannot comprehend what it is.   There are many fellow comrades and they are caged and tied up as well.  I see a man in a chair that is tilted back being water boarded and it is by Viet Cong.  A dense and overwhelming sense of doom comes over me and I desperately need to get out of here.  At that point, Eric again sensing my anxiety, suggested moving forward in time.

I am lying on the ground in some sort of field, on my belly, my face sweats of blood and there’s a sensation that my face is smashing in on me.  I feel the uniform that I am wearing.  My strength is draining and I am so weak.  Seconds later my spirit is rising and it is leaving my body.  However, there is still a perpetual sadness.  I am missing my family; I want to be at home.  I resist rising with my spirit and hang on with all the resilience I can muster.  I need to see my family.  I get a vision of me beside our toddler.  He is in a highchair.  He sees me.  He is giggling and waving at me.  My wife and other son are with him.  I am here; how can they not see me.  This contributes to my intense grief.  The baby continues to realize my presence and we have this almost telepathic way of communicating.

My wife goes through a dark period of time after my passing.  Eventually she remarries.  I do not like her new husband.  I see a dark shadow around him as if he were wearing a dark suit and hat all the time.  He seems like some sort of a salesman.  Again, I am pulled into the moment realizing I am crying and that all encompassing sense of missing my family is filling my heart.  I have a knowing that they feel like I ran away and deserted them.  My body has not been found.  At that point, Eric gently guides me to my afterlife and asks me to describe my experience.  I experience a huge shift into the most beautiful, peaceful, and loving place and feel like I am a part of it.  It is beyond words as if being part of a heaven beyond what we are capable of even imagining.

At this point in time, Eric asks me about my family from that lifetime.  I know my sons are still alive and living in the state that I was able to pinpoint earlier.  He asks me about my wife and I see a rural cemetery where she is buried.  The date on the tombstone is 1989, which is after I was born in this current lifetime.  I begin to feel her spirit and a heartfelt elation comes over me.  It almost feels like I am having some sort of outer space experience.  I see her outline as a female with a glowing pure white star where her heart should be.  It feels like we are locked in hug that should go on for eternity.  We belong together in this realm and are reunited at such a soulful level.

Eric asks how she died and she points to her heart.  I have a knowing that she is still in the spirit world and she tells me that she is going to come back to me in another form.  She will be incarnated and born to me as my daughter one day.  She assures me we will be together again.  I feel another male spirit kind of “butting in” and Eric wants me to talk to him.  This spirit looks the same as my wife except for a male outline to his spirit.  He takes me back to the torture scene and shows me that he was the man next to me in the cage.  We had so often talked about going back to Nashville where he was from and that we were going to make it out of this prison together.  Eric asks me if this person had reincarnated and he responded to me that he was for a while but died as a baby.  Eric asks me if I knew him and I answer, “of course, he was our neighbor’s baby that died a month before I was born!”  Our mothers were pregnant together much of the same time.  Eric asks me if he knew he was going to die and he replied “I died of SIDS and I did not necessarily know that was going to happen.  It is okay though because we will meet again in this lifetime when I am born as your son.”

Needless to say, this experience with Eric was deeply profound.  I found so many answers to questions that I earlier could not even be prolific in identifying.  What was deeply moving was the emotional breakthrough into feelings I had never come close to touching.  They were so real and so intense.  My heart experienced a thawing and for the first time ever, I was in touch with who I really am on a deeper level.

I went into this session with Eric wondering about my career goals and came out knowing my life purpose.  I was put on this earth to be the voice of the deceased and give families answers that they need to know or hear in order to begin healing and finding peace in the passing of their loved ones.  I know this especially because of the pain I felt in my family by what they went through not knowing.  I realized that my vision of working in a Medical Examiner’s office is exactly what I needed to pursue.

Not only do I know why I was put on this earth, but I know that I will get to be with my soul mate (my wife from the past life who will be in a precious form which I can love and nourish) as well as my future son and that death is never the end and love really does have an eternal realm.  I have learned how to love and appreciate the people important to me in this life and also how to empathize and have compassion for people in a variety of life circumstances.

I want to end this on a note where I am proud to say that a few months after my session with Eric, I was offered and secured a position at a Medical Examiner’s Office.  I absolutely LOVE my job!  I also have realized my life partner in this realm and we are engaged.  Had I not done a past life regression, I shudder to think that I might still be stuck in a same old previous pattern and going through life half-heartedly coherent enough to know something significant was just under the surface but clueless as to what that might be.  Most importantly is that I have learned what it means to love another person in a spiritually unconditional way regardless of gender, circumstances, and have experienced  how that eternal love transcends time and space.  In miraculous ways this regression session with Eric integrated an unconscious past into a current consciousness where I am much more aware of life on many levels and with this special knowing the past integrates and guides me as I move forward.  With this known confidence, I am able to deal with challenges from a much higher state of consciousness and assist others as circumstances present, not only in everyday life but in my career with the Medical Examiner’s Office.”

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What is Hypnosis?

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‘Hypnosis’ is perhaps one the most misunderstood words that exists. It is actually the opposite of what most people think, which is often derived from stage hypnotists and movies. The two main myths are: 1) you are not in control; 2) you are not awake and aware. No matter how deep you go in hypnosis, you will be in control and you will always be wide awake and aware. For example, when you are swept up in the drama of a film in a movie theater, you are actually in a fairly deep state of hypnosis. In an engaging movie, you are very focused on the story that is unfolding on the screen to the point that you barely notice the people eating popcorn near you. But of course you’re not asleep…you know that if you wanted, you could get up at anytime and buy popcorn or use the bathroom. The same is true with any form of hypnotherapy – even at the deepest point of the session — if you wanted to, you could open your eyes and declare that you want to use the bathroom, or write something down, etc. It’s just a different level of consciousness that you’re accessing.

Hypnosis is a relaxation of the body and mind, together with a focusing of the mind. A definition of hypnosis is “a bypass of the analytical and critical thinking factor of our minds.” To apply this to the movie example, it’s when we don’t continually tell ourselves during the film: “what’s happening on that screen is not real, it’s only light images from a projection booth, and besides, those people on the screen are only acting, none of this is real, etc…”. If we continually focused on those facts, we could not let go and enjoy the movie. We go into varying states of hypnosis every day, such as when you are driving down a road while being lost in a daydream. Therefore, anyone can and has been hypnotized.

It’s important to know that all hypnosis is really self-hypnosis. I don’t actually hypnotize you – you hypnotize yourself using my suggestions and your imagination. Therefore, you can allow yourself to go into as deep of a hypnotic experience as you want to be, and you’ll always be awake and aware, knowing that you’re in the chair. During the experience, you may hear a car going by, or a dog barking outside, but none of that disturbs you as you continually focus inward.

The power of hypnotherapy is that we can use it to access and change the subconscious thought patterns that govern our lives. When we dream at night, sometimes those dreams are filled with metaphors that mirror the issues that are going on with us, whether we are aware of them or not. Who gives us these dreams? No one else does, yet we don’t consciously give it to ourselves. It comes from an unconscious, very wise part of us. Using hypnotherapy, we can easily access the same part of us that gives us our dreams, yet the difference is that we are awake and aware during the process. It is a very effective tool in healing because we can access and heal the emotional core of our anxieties or any stuck, limiting pattern where the root of the problem lies – the subconscious mind.

With spiritual hypnotherapy we can also access information from other lives that our eternal soul has lived, simply because we cannot separate ourselves from our indestructible soul self which exists outside of time and space. As we quiet our thinking mind and go deep within, we can tune into our “more permanent”, eternal aspect of ourselves.