Reflection on Past Lives

Posted on December 30, 2019 by bluelilystorm

It doesn’t matter if past lives literally happened or if they are mythological and archetypal stories informing us of the soul’s life. What is real versus what is not real, in terms of esoteric information, cannot be solved by the human mind and empirical means. Our ability to know what constitutes the whole of reality is limited and always will be.

Different pathways of knowing are designed for different knowings. Science, empiricism, logic and reason has its place. Intuition, feelings, imagination, and belief has its place. Both are needed and valid. Knowledge may be discovered in many different ways.

When it comes to spiritual knowledge, people tend to either go on blind faith or felt experience. I always recommend the latter as blind faith tends to create enslaved minds because it is often fear based and a way to give power up to a larger external institution. But felt faith is different. Felt faith is a lived experience of faith and full bodied, placing the power source within.

I believe in past lives because I have remembered many of my own. The memories feel like memories I remember in this life. Ever notice how memory has its own specific feeling? My memories have come through past life journeys, dreams, and instantaneous sudden awareness. I have been shown signs. I have vomited and cried upon first meeting somebody in this life I have known from past lives. And all the lives I have recalled have all helped me heal.

I could deconstruct every past life I have recalled to sift out the major psychological themes happening in my present life. Meaning, I can turn any past life into a metaphor. Which one is true? Is the past life a metaphor or literal? It doesn’t matter to me. I hold both as true. I have a critical thinker and an esoteric priestess in me. The latter is more my true self and knows past lives are literal. The critical thinker in me is always humbling the priestess by saying, “this may be all in your mind.”

I like to be humbled by the critical mind. Nothing is more falsely seductive and bypassing as a spiritual guru type claiming to have all the answers in their new book, class, technique. The real gurus are the ones hardly saying a word and living off the grid without materialism at all in pure service to humanity. All the rest of us may be wise, psychic, and intuitive healers but we are very human with egos and desires that constantly want to feel needed, valued, and empowered.

Let go of trying to prove something right and as my friend said the other night, “bring it back from the dead with the power of belief.” Belief activates what is in the collective unconscious. Think of it like a vast place as big as space that we all psychically spring from. In this vast space everything exists in essence. The infinite void contains all, contains the multitudes. When you believe in something you resurrect it from dormancy by pulling it up from the collective unconscious infinite void into your waking self where life is lived out loud.

We are supposed to believe in myth. Stories inspire, guide, and heal. Our ancestors pass down their stories through the collective unconscious through patterns of behavior we exhibit, through feelings and desires bigger than our own, and through dreams. Each ancestral life lived a particular story with particular wounds and longings unmet that travel through the DNA hoping to be lived out by the next generation. This is a form of past life too. Our ancestors are our past lives.

The way I see it in my mind is in two axises. The vertical ancestry and the horizontal ancestry. The vertical is the soul’s journey from group soul to individual soul, from starseed to human, from lifetime to lifetime, and from dimension to dimension. The horizontal ancestry is who you are in your earth bloodline of ancestors. Where the two intersect is where the true self roots. We are a verb not a noun. True self is an expression of the vertical and horizontal ancestries living in the present moment.

We are never a separate being plucked from the collective. We are an expression of both ancestries at all times. You have your great great great great grandparents in you, your star home in you, your past lives in you, on and on. You are history living in the now. You are the future living in the now too but let’s not get too trippy in this blog. Who you are is a collective pretending to be an individual. This pretend game is very serious in that spirit aches to express, evolve, grow, and play all the time. Spirit is always alive in the present moment, always dancing. You are spirit dancing.

There are many ways to recover past lives. You can go see a past life regression therapist. I have guided many people into past lives. The guidance is very simple and the basic technique is relaxation of the body to go deep into the unconscious self to recover the life through imagination. The hard part is trusting the imagination. Many people think regressions are where you are not conscious while “going under” but you are conscious. You must trust what your imagination reveals to you because the imagination is the movie showing you the life.

Dreams can reveal a past life too. You may not be literally told in the dream that it is a past life but the scene, the people, and the scenarios may all feel very familiar, vivid, and important. Both journeying/regressing and dreams require trust in the self. This is where I see the most blocks in others. Self doubt. We are so conditioned to only put validity in science and empirical knowing that the intuition and imagination muscles may be weak.

The only way to increase psychic skills is through practice. Practice journeying, practice imagining, practice listening to your feelings and intuitions. Meditate a little bit every day. It takes work and effort like anything else. In our society, the gym and making money hold much more importance because we put more value in the body’s health and appearance and in the status and comfort level of the ego. There’s a grave imbalance. On the other end of the spectrum you have people going on blind faith and believing with no lived experience, no critical thinking, ignoring the body completely and living all for a future place in an after world.

I diatribe but just want to make the point that balance is key. What you focus on grows and what you ignore atrophies. Simple as that. If you want to remember your past lives you need to practice developing your journeying, intuitive, and imaginative skills. Although some people go deep right away when being guided by somebody or self guiding. You might already be gifted and just need to create the space and time to go within and take a journey to remember.

Past lives may be felt when reading or watching something on the screen too. You might be watching a period piece and find yourself crying for no reason. You may be obsessed with a period in history because it is a life you lived. You might detest a period in history. Clues surface all the time when coming into contact with history through entertainment, school, stories from elders, walking through a museum or a library. Trust the feelings. Listen to the feelings. Follow the feelings and allow your imagination to unfurl.

I have uncovered past lives with clients when pulling tarot cards. This happens when the client is already somewhat skilled in using intuition and imagination. Through talking, pulling cards and our mutual intuition, out pours the lifetime. Sometimes I see past lives in others suddenly. When I see the past life of a client I share what I see but I never want to hold more power than they have to know the self. I share with humbleness. Back to the top of this blog, what I see can be used as a healing metaphor only.

This is why I travel back and forth between literal and metaphor, spirit and psychology, the esoteric and critical thinking. Keeps it real. Keeps the ego from inflating and soul from deflating. Keeps the balance. Feel free to share what you see. We are not performing surgery when we share, it’s ok to be wrong or off and to stay playful about the vision. Sharing what you see may be a gift for the other person.

Getting out of the glamor of the esoteric is important because if you sink into the glamor you bypass the healing work. If you are all ablaze with importance because you remembered you were the king of a country, you will bypass the feeling of being insignificant that needs out of the shadow. You can as easily be ego inflamed from a horrifying and sad past life if the ego over-identifies with the wounds it carries, bypassing empowerment trapped in the shadow.

Just like somebody with a beautiful physique may live fully in the attention they receive for their outward appearance, ignoring their inner life, a psychic maven may ignore her lower chakra creature life and live in an inflated sense of importance with her intuitive gifts, the attention this gives her, and the power she feels from helping others. We all have gifts and we all have areas of weakness and the human ego loves to inflate the gift to repress the weakness in order to feel loved, needed, validated, and seen. Not one of us is above the craving for attention and the hunger to be loved and needed.

In astrology you can find your past lives in your south node and Chiron. Some schools find it in Pluto and Saturn too. In my own channels, I find Chiron to reveal the deepest wound carried from past lives, the south node to reveal the past life character wishing to be integrated but not identified with, Pluto to show where the soul feels the most loss from past lives and Saturn to show where the soul feels most limited and challenged due to past life influences.

There are a few lifetimes I have recovered that transformed me through remembering them. They involved meeting the souls I share this life with too. Soulmates are not just romantic. They are siblings, friends, parents, teachers, anyone. Romantic soulmates are very intense because lovers are intense and most closely mirror attachment with parents or caretakers.

The key to healing from past lives is to understand that all feelings that were not let go of and made peace with before death travel with the soul into the next life. This is karma. Guilt, for example, may be traveling with your soul through the vertical ancestry from life to life and be traveling down the horizontal ancestry through the bloodline from the first Grandmother who was oppressed by the patriarchal system. Until guilt is released it will travel with you.

If guilt is traveling with you, the unconscious will create relationships that will make the guilt rise up to the surface to be felt because feeling is healing. To let go we first must feel what needs to be released. If you feel the guilt and choose to accept it without judgement and let it go by not believing the story around it, you set guilt free from the soul. You no longer carry it. You release the karma. This is the key to karmic healing and the point of remembering past lives.

There are many paths to the same place. You can not believe in past lives and never talk about it once and still heal as deeply as somebody doing past life work. Through accessing your feelings in this life you can release all karma and understand yourself fully. It’s all a matter of choice, belief and individual expression.

The Journey of Grief

Posted on December 26, 2019 by bluelilystorm

The inspiration for this blog comes from wanting my journey of grief to inspire and help you on your journey of grief. I want to pioneer more therapists sharing their own life stories and reflections because those of us who have been through it to be a guide for others have much to offer from our personal experience. We can speak in a universal way in order to connect with others on the healing path and to release muck from the collective unconscious.

On January 9th it will be one year since my mother passed away. The experience of her death is a treasure in my memory as my sisters and I sent my mother into death with our words and comforting presence. A rare opportunity. This was my first experience of sending a human into death. I did this with a doggie and the feeling was similar. Peaceful. My mother was not scared to die. She was ready and trusting. She felt spirit and soul to be real, not in a religious way, in a way she could feel on a personal level. Her felt experience gave her inner peace. She was only scared of the actual passing moment and she called her daughters to be witness and help her transition.

Although the few days she was in a coma prior to dying were two of the hardest days of my life, I am beyond grateful to have been a death guide for my mother. I asked her in the hospital, days before her death, how she wanted to die. She said with certainty, “at home, surrounded by my family.” I told her we would make that happen and the conviction in my body was so fixed nothing could stop me. I learned a lot about that feeling of fixed conviction. I learned that it is a transpersonal and archetypal force that rose into my ego to make my mother’s death be as she wanted. We have help from the transpersonal/archetypal realms whenever we need it.

Her year and half battle with cancer was brutal toward the last six months. I have thought a lot about it since her death. I have thought a lot about my behavior. I worked very hard to accept her battle and accept how she wanted to proceed through it. I remember distinctly learning the lesson of letting go of trying to control her in order to make myself feel better. The lesson of surrender is deep and life long. I did the best I could and I don’t harp on myself. I showed up with a lot of presence. I also recall all the times I was irritated with her, angry with her, wishing she made different choices and all the ways I reacted without presence and surrender. Part of grief for me has been going through each memory and forgiving myself for every time. It’s a process.

I also have needed to go through the awful memories of her vomiting and in pain with me as witness. I have felt so much pity and pain for her when these memories rise up. I then hear my mother in my head say, “I am free of that now, don’t dwell on the pain,” and I know she is right. This is a hard lesson for me because I feel so strongly how she did not deserve to go through all of the pain she went through. The anger for her having to endure cancer and the battle to kill it, flares up strongly in my heart. I then tell myself all the crone wisdom: life is unfair for everybody, life is suffering, life is dark and light… and it helps. I make the intention to release the anger. Again, this a process and it just takes time.

What is important about grieving is that every step is treated as important. You cannot rush grief. Everybody grieves differently and for different amounts of time too. I cannot control my father’s grief and my sisters and I grieve each in our own way. Grief control us, we don’t control grief. You must let grief have its way with you and not judge others for how they grieve. Grief will teach you to endure loss, surrender and become much more aware of time and the shortness of life if you let it do its magic. If you resist grief you will become more addicted to the things you are addicted to: shopping, hustling, working, drinking, eating, controlling, whatever it is. People resist grief all the time and dive into doing all the things and escaping in all the various ways.

I have learned that grief comes in waves. I have cried the hardest for missing my mom about ten months after her death. In the beginning, the tears were more violent and deluging storms of shock. Once I accepted my mom’s death (stages of grief) about six-seven months later, the tears have become about missing her versus being shocked she is gone. I did not think about it until these new “missing her” tears…about how the longer the loved one is dead the more you miss them because the longer time passes without them. A very logical thought that I did not consider. Grief is not logical. I miss her presence so much.

I miss my mother’s voice, her scent, her sayings, her mannerisms. Grief has taught me that love for others is much more about their particular essence and much less about compatibility or beliefs. My mother and I were very opposite personalities but we found connection when shopping, watching television, having morning coffee, sharing our love of animals….but it’s not the connecting I miss about her. I miss her. Vivian. I miss her being in this world. The lesson this teaches me is so potent. I realize that love really is about love. It’s not about what I get or give. Sure, I miss how she nurtured us with her domestic ways and I miss giving her my love too but what I really miss is literally her presence as a living human being existing in this world.

I come from my share of abuse, dysfunction, and trauma like most of us do. Yet I am also very lucky that my family knows and gives unconditional love. I got very close to my mother over the last twenty years and we healed our stuff. I know me being a healer had much to do with it as I stubbornly pushed for healing in the early years. Yet also, my mother was open and healthy enough in her psyche to go through the healing journey. Many mothers do not have the capacity to heal or even relate. Many loved ones are so mentally ill that their children and siblings need continual distance and hard boundaries at all times. Grief may be very complex with the pain and mental illness involved in family systems. This still does not tell you how you will grieve though. Grief will surprise you.

Grief transforms you, a friend and fellow therapist told me. He has been through a lot of death. That sentence sticks with me. I have witnessed myself transform over this past year. Solitude is something I need much more of since my mother’s passing. It may not always be this way but for now, I don’t feel like being very social like I used to be. I have become a ghost friend. I know those who love me and are closest accept me for my ghost phase and those who cannot accept me, I let them go. I need a lot of space around me and a lot of time to go within. I don’t feel like doing much of the “fun” things either. I don’t want to go out much. I go to bed early. I am more serious, somber, and internal. I am sure this will balance out over time but for now, I need what I need.

One of the biggest transformations is that I no longer care what other people think of me, for the most part. I used to be much more concerned, as many of us are, about being liked and accepted by others. Now, I don’t care. I have an attitude that feels like, “if you don’t like me that’s fine, whatever.” All shame about being me has vanished. I feel a major increase of self love. I also feel more shit cutting, pragmatic, and honest with myself and everybody. I am not trying to people-please and any ideals carried over from my twenties have dissolved in the grief journey. I want to continue to dream, grow, and live with fulfillment but it comes from a much more grounded place inside now.

Again, my friends who are close honor this change in me. The people who count allow me to change as I give the same allowance to them. If we need to grow apart, that’s ok too. Those who needed me as I was before, I release. It feels really wonderful to be free of needing to be liked or to hold on to relationships that don’t serve me or them anymore. The self love increase is nourishing too. I am so much more gentle with myself. It feels as if my mother’s soul went into me and is helping me to become more gentle and balanced.

I feel that when the soul leaves the body, a piece of it enters those who were close. I feel the piece of my mom that went into me is her dignity, her shit cutting attitude, her grace, her pragmatism, and her love for fashion. Not all of these traits lived in the conscious world of my mother’s personality but all these traits lived in her being nevertheless. I feel these traits mix with my own and make me new. I have worn more make-up since her passing, feeling her love for make-up and being lady-like in that New York city way. I feel her quiet grace and earthy poise become a part of my former stormy celestial sparky self. I feel her shit cutting wisdom permeate my ethereal attitude. This makes me feel close to her too as I transform.

As we approach the year marker of her death, I feel a sense of joy. I feel joy that she is free of her body and her life here. I have connected with her on the other side. She is actively becoming a spirit guide and very happy with her life choosing to not reincarnate but to be a soul guide for the incarnated. Not every soul gets this choice. You have to die with enough peace in your heart to see the choice in the first place. How we live in this body continues after we leave it, with the same continuity of emerging into unknown possibilities and choices whether we are human, in another kind of body, or not in a body. But I will save the esoteric for another blog. I feel joyful for my mother’s happiness.

At the same time, I feel sorrow for my father being left without her. This is the dark side of love. Somebody will grieve the other when you get into these long partnerships. The lesson returns of not controlling. I cannot control his grief. I cannot control his life. I have learned so much about how we want control others when they are hurting because it hurts so much to feel their pain. Through my mom’s cancer battle, her death, and my father’s journey now, I see how much I want to take away the pain of those I love with my solutions, my way of seeing things, my way of healing. The lesson is to let it go. Allow others to experience life as they need to and only show up to help as asked. Pain is not bad and pain should not be avoided. Surrender.

Surrender means making peace with what is. Making peace with what is means making space for what is. Making space for what is means not saying or believing things like, “this should not have happened” or “this is wrong and unfair.” To make space means to allow all of it. ALL. I have discovered how to allow life to be grief, pain, hurt, and loss just as much as growth, pleasure, gain, and expansion. It means letting all of life express itself, the good, the bad, the ugly as they say. It means letting go of controlling the cycles. Paradoxically, you must put effort forth to self-care, heal and grow to allow yourself to let go of controlling the natural vicissitudes of life.

I always recommend the book, “Dark Nights of the Soul,” by Thomas Moore. He inspires me to find the richness in the dark night, whatever it may be. What bothers me is the collective ignorance of “turning the frown upside down” or bypassing the stages of grief (denial, bartering, anger, depression, acceptance) with sayings such as, ” don’t be sad, she’s with you in spirit.” These sayings are so the sayer can control your pain so they don’t feel afraid of it. It is vital to go through the grief journey with all the frowns, tears, stages, and for as long as you need. The difference between getting stuck and moving through the stages is that the former comes from resisting the stages of grief and the latter happens when you surrender to the stages and allow them to pass through you.

Reflections on Fear…

Posted on December 5, 2019 by bluelilystorm

Fear is the inspiration for this blog. Good old human creature fear and how it effects the psyche, the body, and the human experience. My intention for this blog is simply to reflect. I want to honor the process of contemplating, intuiting, and understanding in service of allowing the unconscious to unravel in the moment…

When fear is pushed deeply into the shadow of the psyche, going unfelt and unseen, it manifests as physical ailments. Digestive issues. Constipation if the human body retracts and tries to protect itself. Or diarrhea, the other direction, if the temperament of the creature tends to run more anxious than withholding…

Attachment wounds reveal themselves inwardly as much as outwardly. When we are not securely attached (most of us) we tend toward avoidance or anxiousness, the former being anxious too but withholds/hides/avoids and so it doesn’t seem to present emphatically.

It’s not just how we are raised that determines our attachment style and wounding, it’s the temperament of the body which has everything to do with the multigenerational family system. Avoidance style (the island) or anxiousness style (the wave) may be a pattern running down the DNA line. Digestive issues may run in the family through the female or male bloodline with each creature carrying fear that gets pushed into the shadow.

Feelings have to be felt to be released. Healing is feeling. Must fear be felt to be released?

How hard might it be to feel fear if you are wired to push it into the shadow and present with digestive issues and probably a neurotic mind. Usually when fear is hiding in the shadow the mind is defensive, controlling, and fanatical or extreme in certain ways to compensate for the unseen fear.

Fear is big. The country is big with fear. The family system is big with fear. The creature if big with fear because living a human existence is scary. We are not given any guarantee of safety, control, or happy endings. People experience undeserved tragedy all the time.

I think about animals that experience tragedy and how they are not conscious of themselves with a cognitive mind so they don’t have the ability to think, “why did this happen to me,” or “I am not good enough” or “this person is bad and I am a victim of evil,” or any such conclusion that only a self aware cognitive mind could come up with through the thinking process.

Fear is not the summation the mind makes. Fear is present in the body and then leaves. In animals, it presents and leaves if the animal gets to live a healthy life but trauma from abuse or neglect will collect just as much in their bodies, proving that the consequences of trauma live in the body first and foremost. The human mind only makes it worse.

The body collects what is not processed and this is a region of the shadow. I am thinking of an abused or neglected doggie living on the street that presents as mean and vicious (the wave) or through slinking and hiding away (the island) if anyone approaches to bring love. The doggie’s body is filled with fear from the trauma of being abused or neglected.

The only way to heal the doggie is exposure therapy to love.. First the doggie must be tricked into being caught (maybe a piece of food in a cage). Next the doggie must slowly be introduced to loving care, allowing her body to slowly release the fear and accept love. This proves that love is the healer of fear.

Humans are the same. Fear collects in the body from trauma, abuse, or maybe there is no abuse/trauma but there is the multigenerational absence of affection, attunement and acknowledgment of being seen, heard, and loved without conditions (the feminine side of the psyche). Only love can release the fear the body holds.

Not some parlor trick for the mind. Ok, I have a bit of irreverence for certain modalities of therapy I think trick the mind into “feeling better” by changing the chemicals but I don’t think this is healing. I think it is temporal band-aid. I feel true healing is always rooted in the experience of being loved, listened to, and acknowledged.

The feminine aspect of life knows this. Knows that love heals all. And what is love? Love is how we behave. It is not a concept. It is not an ideal. It is how we care for the self, others, and life. How we show up. How we tend to fear. Fear, like with the doggie, will leave the body with love. It just will.

Self love is a start and usually the base of love. Self love releases fear beginning with not listening to self-sabotaging neural pathways, the well worn path, the shitty narrative in the mind that says, “I am not good enough, who do I think I am” etc….or the other direction of, “they are ruining my existence, they are to blame for how I feel,” etc.

Ignoring the sabotaging narrative is key and the base of self love but then what? It is it truly different for everyone. For me, self love is practicing mindfulness so I don’t listen to the narrative of doom, keeping up with my exercise and creativity practices that make me feel balanced, inspired, and confident, and being nurturing and easy on myself.

I truly believe in being easy on the self. Sure, there is a time to face fear with a wand of courage and determination. But back to the doggie, if you push him he will fall apart. If you give him time, patience, understanding and slowly expose him to love and new life, he will heal.

I am somebody who needs to go very easy on myself in order to heal, maybe more so than the average person (is there an average person?) and so I attest to this path as being pertinent in healing because I have been healing with great results over time. I speak from my own lived experience and find that the gentle path brings proven results.

Fear needs to be handled with skill and fear is attachment. We fear because are attached to security, health, love, and success….as we should be. Nothing wrong with being human! Yet in this messed up world with broken bloodlines riddled with too much suffering, we need major skill to bring healing to fear.

Like the doggie, learning to let more love in is an exposure process. Love will dissolve fear but it’s so scary to let love in. Letting love in may feel scarier than the fear. What a paradox.

Unfortunately the doggie cannot respond to humor but I think for humans, humor is a major healing tool for exposing the self to the fear of letting love in.

My god can we laugh at life for a second? I say this with emphasis because my own typical tendency to take life too seriously. You could say it is a privilege to have a light heart…and…it is also temperament. There are those who seem to have a light heart even when enduring the worst of circumstances.

But don’t beat yourself up if you have a heavy heart. I have a fairly heavy heart and I love my heavy heart because it allows me to sit with people in their deepest pain and give love, it allows me to analyze the psyche and discover new territory, it allows me to sit for hours and write about big ideas. I would not want to be romping around like a Pixie but more power to the Pixie.

Honor your temperament is what I am getting at here. You can heal from fear with a heavy or light heart but even heavy hearts can heal from humor. Laughing is vital. Laughing at the self releases the grip of those pesky narratives that shadow the fears.

Life is unsafe. We can create as much safety as possible by living in sheltered homes and communities with organized cultural institutions that allow us to experience more of the light and less of the pain. We can learn to love more so that we don’t have to feel unsafe with each other too.

At the same time, life is unsafe, suffering exists and it always will. People will cause violence and tyranny over others. Nature can wipe out a community in one cataclysm. Illness strikes even the most healthy. The dark side of life is not evil and cannot be eradicated. We can reduce suffering and achieve balance but we cannot be rid of darkness. Dark and light are equal forces of nature.

Fear will rise again and again, Fear is as natural as love.

All this being said, learning how to deal with fear is more pragmatic than trying to get rid of fear forever in the mind by demanding reassurance of continual safety (the wave) or through avoiding fear by living in one safe routined rut forever (the island).

I am all about living a fulfilling life where we get to keep growing and evolving each day and this is rooted in healing.

There is no healing arrival point where all fear is banished. Yet results are real. Healing the psyche brings more peace, love, fulfillment, ease, and all the other desired adjectives that balance out fear that will rise again and again.

I radically accept fear. I radically accept life not being safe. I radically accept the dark and light aspects of being human. I radically accept the patient process, the gentle path, love, and humor as medicine. This is my deepest reflection…

The more there is acceptance around fear the more body can stop expressing fear through digestive problems or other ailments, the more heart can let in love, the more mind can let go of self sabotaging narratives and the more soul or true self can rise out of the shadow and express in this world.

A Psychological Reflection on Autoimmune Disease’s Effects on the Body and Psyche

Posted on November 24, 2019 by bluelilystorm

That’s a long title up there and living with autoimmune disease feels like a long road. I am writing this blog in the spirit of sharing my personal journey to inspire you if you are also on the path of living with autoimmune disease.

I have lived with an AD since I was eleven but I did not know it was an AD until three years ago when a doctor causally said, “Oh you have Hidradenitis Suppurativa,” while giving me an exam. Before that, I only knew that I had some skin curse with no cure. I lived with it by ignoring it even though I was always dealing with it. Denial is strong.

My particular disease is ugly, insidious, painful, and a fucking cross to bear. I have immense compassion for anyone bearing the cross of AD because whichever one you have tends to be incurable and wreaks havoc on the body and psyche.

My disease caused me to feel shame my entire life. I have worked through shame by feeling it with love and letting it go. I am free of it now and it wasn’t easy to release but I did it.

In my mind, I tell myself that we all bear our crosses, all bodies are imperfect, ugliness is an aspect of life, and that being a brave advocate who knows my beauty is what can bring myself and others inspiration. I rewrote the shame story into a story of empowerment and acceptance.

I could not release shame and rewrite the story of living with AD until I got mostly in remission. Remission of my symptoms led the way for the healing of my psyche.

I say mostly in remission because I still go in and out of remission but overall I would say I am in 90% remission and it is completely connected to food and going on the AIP and ketogenic diets as a lifestyle for the long term.

I am no longer a “normie”, a term addicts use to classify those who can use alcohol or drugs in moderation without being addicted. I feel there is a big of a distinction when living with AD.

The first year I knew I had HS, I ignored it. Denial is powerful. I was in grad school and my mom was battling the cancer that would kill her a year and half later. I had no room in my psyche to face my disease. But then I did have room. I was ready in the summer of 2018.

I looked up HS online and found blogs, forums and a lot of people finding remission by going on the autoimmune paleo diet or AIP for short. I started this diet the very next day. I was desperate because my flares were so bad I was willing to try anything.

The AIP diet eliminates all sugar, grains/rice, nightshades, caffeine, seeds, nuts, alcohol, and dairy. Basically everything but organic meat (grass fed and free range), fruit, and vegetables. I switched my diet in one day, eating only chicken breast, apples, carrots, greens, and a fruit smoothie to start me off the first week.

Being a genuine food addict my entire life, I battled not having “my foods” on very deep levels, much deeper than somebody who is not addicted to food. Every day for a year I felt despair, anger, and every uncomfortable emotion yummy food had been stuffing down. I also felt isolated from my friends because I could no longer eat out or have a few drinks and I was used to doing that most days of the week.

What gave me strength to stick with it was that I went into immediate remission within weeks of staring the diet. It was a sheer miracle!

The remission did not last and new flares appeared but far less flares cropped up and they were far less severe. Remission from the severity began and has stayed with me since I began the diet and so began my journey of figuring out all of my trigger foods.

I went to a naturopath to get some help and started the journey of learning I have a huge yeast allergy and needed Vitamin D, along with other aspects I won’t get into that have helped me to deepen remission with healing the gut.

To make a very long year and a half journey short, I learned that yeast, nuts, seeds, grains, dairy, sugar, beans, fruit and many vegetables are trigger foods. I learned that I need to not only do AIP but I need to go ketogenic because insulin is a trigger. I need to cut out all fruit completely and keto adapt so my body uses fat instead of glucose as fuel. This has greatly improved remission.

I reintroduced alcohol the night my mother died in the beginning of 2019. I learned I can drink hard spirits with nothing added but I cannot touch beer or wine. I learned I can eat eggs (so far). I can also have coffee in moderation.

I tried nuts and bacon but after a few months they became triggers. This happened with avocado and broccoli. Some foods cause immediate flares while other foods build up and then cause flares. The journey is constant and never ending.

I learned that lectins, phytates, and oxalates are poison to my body and this is why vegan foods harm me which is another aspect I have had to grieve. I have the heart of a vegan. I spent many years of my life eating vegan and vegetarian unknowing of how sick it was making me. Now I am a carnivore. I had to let go of my treasured belief system so my body could be healthy.

I have grieved and continue to grieve the loss of food as addiction, celebration, and comfort. Emotional eating is over. Eating out with friends is over. Eating to “treat myself” is over. Normies say that all the time, “treat yourself”. But if I treat myself with food I get a huge flare and it’s just not worth it. The treat is poison.

Those of us with AD who go AIP, keto or both to heal cannot treat ourselves with food because it makes us feel like complete shit. I tell myself that food is fuel and nothing else. This is my new story.

Don’t count me in when you make celebratory food plans. I have no desire to celebrate Thanksgiving because I can’t eat the food and from now on, I am done thinking I need to partake of any holiday with food. When I travel food will not be part of the adventure. When a partner comes into my life he will have to live with food being only fuel for me too.

I like the foods I can eat. I like eggs in the morning, salmon, Brussel sprouts, cauliflower, chicken breast, coconut milk, burgers, steak, and arugula. I am satisfied when I eat even though not a day goes by I don’t crave cheese, bread, hot pepper, beer, tacos….I mean, the grief is real and the loss is daily. I compare myself to an addict in sobriety taking it one day at a time.

What feels amazing is being mostly in remission all of the time. My body is healing on deep levels too, beyond just remission of symptoms. I am healing my organs, gut, skin, bones, losing weight, and all anxiety is completely gone. Within a month of the AIP diet all anxiety left my psyche as anxiety truly does live in the body. Within a month of being keto and AIP my ability to focus greatly increased and my energy levels began to even out. The healing continues.

I love that I eat like my ancestors. I feel that how I eat connects me to them. I feel more rooted to the earth. My sleep is pristine and I no longer suffer from insomnia. I have become strong and disciplined in every aspect of my life. I exercise five to six days a week. I do what I say I will do in terms of my daily and long term goals. I can handle anything, is what it feels like.

I have no anxiety, no procrastination, no split in the psyche where what I want and how I behave are out of alignment. I have come into a much more profound sense of self love, ease, and integrity. My psyche has never been healthier and more at peace.

Funny, how each day I feel loss and cravings but each day I feel at peace with myself.

I no longer respond to loss and cravings with fear or resistance. I have learned the power of surrender. I accept loss, pain, and my AD. Grief is not something I need to avoid anymore. I am no longer in denial of the dark side of life. I am at peace with my limitations, the ugly, and all that is hard.

For now, I have whisky, mezcal, and coffee with coconut milk as pleasures I can still indulge in. I cannot overdo it so I drink in moderation and I am also willing to let these drinks go the moment my health needs it.

I have become so emotionally strong that I no longer depend on any food, drink, or substance to keep me feeling ok or to enjoy life. I cannot stress what a big deal this is as I have been a food addict and hedonist my entire life, always using food as comfort and enjoying the party. Now, I can find comfort and enjoy the party in a new way.

I am in the process of learning how be a hedonist in new ways that are good for my health. Sexual expression is something most people never explore fully and is one of our greatest gifts as human beings. No shame. What possibilities exist to explore and merge with another soul on a sexual level and experience deeper levels of pleasure, replenishment, and love?

How can my body express through any form of movement that brings heightened pleasure? Dance, hiking, sky diving, fire walking, floating, strolling….

There are many possibilities.

I find hedonistic pleasure in essential oils, incense, crystals, flowers, the beauty of nature, fashion, putting on make-up and dressing up. I find hedonistic pleasure in gazing at art, listening to music, and reading books. There is so much to imbibe and indulge in that is not food and drink. I also feel immense satisfaction when I paint, write, sing, and express myself creatively.

AD has transformed me for the better.

I know in my heart of hearts that AD is connected to multigenerational trauma. Interesting that my mother and father both had the same AD as me.

My mother had it killed with near lethal amounts of antibiotics from a certain doctor in Vegas who had his theory. I believe this treatment destroyed her gut and led to many health issues to follow. She eventually got colon cancer. I do not follow in her footsteps with my AD and for very few has antibiotic treatment worked. My father said he stopped having flares in his fifties and that it just went away. I can only hope for such a healing to happen to me. I cannot count on it.

For now, I must eat keto/AIP to stay in remission but I am thankful for this diet beyond being in remission because I am healing my body completely, healing multigenerational trauma, healing completely from anxiety, and healing food addiction all while transforming into a stronger, more centered, disciplined, equanimous, and poised individual who is no longer dependent on “the cookie”.

It has taken a year and half to get to this place of love, strength, balance and health that is not static or fixed. Like I said, I still get flares and have to figure out why. I still feel loss for food and cravings rise up all the time (though going keto took away 80% of all food cravings). There’s always work to be done and progress to be made in body and mind. Just like in a yoga pose, you need a constant focus to stay balanced.

If you are reading this and have AD, I hope to provide you with some inspiration from sharing my story. Food truly is the biggest culprit of many if not most of AD symptoms.

AD seems to be rooted in generational trauma passed down through the DNA and from diet. The AIP diet works and for some of you, keto will also work.

Western medicine still looks down upon all holistic routes but go ahead and let them. If you dedicate yourself to trying the diet for 30-90 days you will experience the results for yourself. You can reintroduce certain foods after the initial period and begin cultivating the exact diet that works for you.

Will power gets easier over time as you adapt and your body feels better as it adjusts too. Anxiety will diminish and you will become more disciplined and emotionally independent.

Grief is real for no longer being a normie and getting to eat what you want but there is liberation in no longer fearing grief. Life is suffering, Buddha said. If we face the suffering with an open heart, willingness, and a mindful approach that does not resist limitation, pain and loss then suffering will transform your soul from a mud ball into a pearl and your body will be a sanctuary living with illness.

You are not Crazy and Three Skillful Steps

Posted on November 16, 2019 by bluelilystorm

This blog is inspired by strong feelings rising in me to protect who you are. There are many types of people in this world and yet some types are more glorified or seen as normal while other types are marginalized and seen as abnormal. Plenty of judgment exists for all kinds of humans, unfortunately. This blog is for the sensitive healer types who feel everything at volume level ten and often doubt themselves. “Am I crazy?” is often uttered in the mind or from the lips. I am here to tell you that you are not crazy and you are not too much. You are a valid gifted type of human being needed in this world and you are very misunderstood.

Usually one sensitive healer is born into any given family. You are the one who absorbs all of the pain of the other family members and this happens unconsciously. Most people don’t know how to feel their feelings. Our messed up culture promotes the repression of difficult feelings as if feeling anything not positive or happy or on top of your game is bad and wrong. This is unfortunate because it makes almost everyone stuff all of the difficult painful and weak emotions down into the shadow and lose feeling connection with self and others. Feelings are what connect us.

Stuffing down feelings requires distraction, dependance or addiction on some level. Doesn’t have to be eating, drinking, drugging, partying, or losing self in another person. It can be working, exercising, losing weight, or trying to be the best all the time. Over focus and dependance on getting the “cookie” (food, booze, drug, sex, relationship, attention, shopping, working, exercising, screen time, etc) keeps the mind distracted until the feelings are stuffed far out of awareness.

But you, sensitive healer type, cannot stuff your feelings away. You just can’t. You feel it all. What makes it worse is that you are not only feeling your own feelings but you are feeling the feelings of everyone around you that cannot feel their own feelings. This just happens because of systems theory. Humans function in systems and feelings travel. What your family members can’t feel, you feel along with your own feelings. You don’t know what feelings are your own and what are others, unaware there is a mix of both you are feeling. You grow up this way and then turn into an adult that absorbs the feelings of your partner, your friends, your co-workers, everyone around you. You feel everyone’s feelings inside of you and cannot tell the difference whose feelings are whose. You develop acute anxiety and perhaps depression too if you survived a difficult childhood. You think you are crazy and too much and you suffer more.

You are not crazy. You are a sensitive healer type meant to feel everything so that you can bring healing to yourself and everyone. It’s just the way it is. Not everyone is a healer. You are and when you heal yourself, you also heal those whose feelings you feel inside of you. Not all the way but to a certain extent. You heal seven generations backwards and forwards. You heal self and others too when you use the skills I am going to mention below. If you don’t become skillful with your natural healing abilities, which is your destiny, you will suffer all the suffering of your own life and those around you. It’s not worth it, trust me. You want to get yourself into therapy and any other version of healing you are drawn to.

You want to heal yourself, which is essentially rooted in differentiating your true self from everyone else and allowing your true self to live in the world, to love your true self and to honor your destiny as a sensitive healer type.

To the extent you heal others depends on the others but you clear feelings out of them that are stuffed down when you absorb their feelings and you release them from your own body. Eventually you will learn to not absorb other’s feelings as much and this will release you from a great deal of constant emotional overwhelm but just know while you are healing and growing, it’s ok that you cannot help but absorb the feelings of everyone around you.

You are meant to be you. You are meant to feel everything. You are meant to process these feelings. You are meant to be ultra sensitive. Don’t let anyone tell you different. You just need to learn how to be who you are skillfully. You need to heal your own traumas and psyche first. This blog isn’t going to tell you how to do that but self healing comes first. It is preliminary and brings real results.

What I want to share are three simple steps to help you with your feelings when you are a sensitive healer type.

Know you are not crazy and own your skill of being a healer here to help humanity process all of the repressed feelings in the collective shadow. Allow your feelings to come out. Do not reframe them with a positive story. Do not reframe them with a negative story. Feel without the mind getting involved at all. If anyone tries to tell you to focus on the positive or gratitude go ahead and pour water in their face. Just kidding. But don’t listen. They do not understand that scientifically speaking feelings need to be felt to leave the body and the worse thing you can do is to stuff the feelings into the body further with some sugar coated platitude. Most people are not skilled and terrified to feel their feelings. You are not. As a sensitive healer type you have a natural skill and courage to feel the hard feelings, you just doubt yourself because the world tells you that you are crazy or too much or too sensitive. Don’t believe the majority. Don’t tell yourself that you are bad, wrong, not good enough or anything negative. Feel everything you feel fully. Fully.
Express the feelings you feel creatively. If you are a naturally creative person, which as sensitive healer type you probably are, get it out through painting, singing, dancing, cooking, sewing, acting, writing, gardening, whatever your outlet is or whatever outlet you are drawn toward. Get messy and raw with this. Do not try to create a master piece, you can save that form of art making for another time. When feelings need out, get raw and messy and let it out without edit. You may need to prep for this because you have been told your whole life that you should not feel all you feel and that creativity should be polished and pretty. You probably have some perfectionist narrative. You may need to meditate for a bit to get outside of your head and into you heart. Maybe you need to blast music or stay up late or get up early. Find your path to releasing the feelings creatively and get them out. This assures full processing as feelings speak through the creative outlet or the body outlet not the mind. Cry and paint. Scream and sing. Weep and garden. Or maybe there is no body outlet such as tears or sounds. Maybe you cook or write or sew and are just deeply in the creative expression itself. This will release the feelings fully. Also, receiving other creative expressions may initiate the same release such as listening to music, watching a movie, looking at art, reading a story, etc.
Protect your energy. Find your way. Call Archangel Michael (a very powerful being much older than the Judeo-Christian religion that appropriated the angels) and say, “Michael, put a bubble of light around me, any feelings not my own keep out of my body so that I only feel my own feelings one hundred percent of the time.” Wear a red string around your wrist. Do something magical or make a witch potion or spell if this is your thing. Imagine a bubble of light around you at all times. Wear protective stones (all the black stones, also pyrite). It takes effort, ritual, prayer and intention to not absorb the pain of those around you. Some of you may be so sensitive that you absorb the feelings of people around that you are not close to you. In fact, many of you do this. You get on the bus and you absorb everyone’s pain. You walk into a store and absorb everyone’s pain. You must learn to have more control over this power. It is a gift but the curse is when you don’t harness it and you collect too much from others and feel like crap and confused all the time. Find the protection rituals that work for you and do them morning and night and perhaps more. Consider it as vital as teeth cleaning. For as yucky as your teeth get missing one brushing your psyche gets missing one protection ritual. Feelings live in the body literally, like poop and need to constantly be cleansed out of the body. Protection rituals really do protect you from taking too much from others. Michael and other beings really do help you when you need daily support.

If you continually follow these three steps you will stay emotionally balanced and be well on the path of healing but of course it’s not so simple or easy. You will battle the narrative that you are too much, too sensitive and think you are crazy, especially when other people try to make you not feel your feelings with platitudes or tell you negative stories that you are too this or that. You need to get strong with this.

The one tough skin you need is to put a big wall up when other people’s words try to get you to not feel whether in judgment or caring. Understand that they only want you to “feel better” because they love you or they are so uncomfortable feeling their own pain that they cannot handle you feeling pain. They may not know what to say or how to handle you. Be kind with people because they are doing the best they can. Only healer types know how to feel fully and attune so keenly to the feelings. Most people are way too scared and uncertain and this is ok. They are really good at other stuff that you suck at. We are all supposed to balance each other out with our strengths and weaknesses.

Other people you are close with may be great at being the rock of stability, making money, doing practical things, being light hearted, etc. You are the one who is good at healing and creating intimacy by tuning into feelings, being nonjudgemental and compassionate. It’s meant to be this way. We are meant to be symbiotic with one another but due to all the untended wounds and tangled mess of the human psyche, people wind up comparing themselves to each other and expecting those they love to be just like them. People also think everyone should be equally skillful at everything. On and on the comparison, judgment and negative stories build. It’s all crap.

Truth is, you are gifted at feeling and healing and you are meant to be the one healer in your family system, with your partner, in your profession, or even all by yourself as you heal the self. Learning to trust who you are, heal, and become more skillful is a process.

Archetype Talk and Diving into the Fool

Posted on October 1, 2019 by bluelilystorm

One of the groups I facilitate is taking a transformative healing journey through the major arcana of the tarot, as The Fool, the first archetype out of twenty two that make up the tarot. This morning I feel inspired to write about The Fool and every now and then focus the blogs on these specific archetypes.

An archetype is a sentient collective instinct.

Sentient because the archetypes have a life of their own, independent of the individual, larger than the individual. Transpersonal.

The archetypes live in the collective unconscious. In a shamanic framework this may be known as the underworld. In the indigenous framework, which we all come from as we are all animal creatures of earth, the archetypes are known as gods and goddesses. Indigenous wisdom of life is connected to nature because we are nature and hence, wisdom is connected to the natural world.

The archetypes are just as much a part of nature as a tree or a layer of the earth’s interior. The psyche, individual and collective, is a part of nature not detectable by the five senses but detectable to felt senses experiences on deeper levels. These deeper levels of awareness are not in fashion in today’s religious or atheist black and white cultural narrative, but they are real and exist.

An archetype is a collective instinct because it is an urge we all share in common.

The urge to dive into a new experience with no past or future is the instinct of The Fool. The instinct to mother, create, nurture, and love unconditionally is the The Empress…and so forth. Whether you use the tarot or another archetypal system is does not matter. You can use Jungian, tarot, astrology, pantheons, or channel your own names for the archetypes….it is up to you.

The archetypes don’t have names and they live in their own dimension as psychic nature forces that the ego names in order to have a relationship with them.

Depth perspectives in psychology (Jungian and beyond), occult magic, shamanism, astrology, and tarot all narrate the same archetypal forces with different titles, beliefs, and frames of reference. The important thing is to choose what narration and belief fits you the best.

Naming, beliefs, and narration itself is a mental process that helps the ego connect with life. It is a function of being human not an objective solid truth outside of our minds. We get so caught up in the mental narration of beliefs in culture, warring over who is right, needing to be right, craving power, or even just wanting to put your name on a system of thought and get recognition for it…all of that is ego play and nothing more.

Nature cannot be claimed.

Back to The Fool!

I love The Fool because this archetype is free of the past and future. The Fool lives in the present. The Fool literally does not have a past or future.

One of the most literal understandings of The Fool is the fetus being born into the world for the first time. The brand new infant has no memory of the past, no awareness of a future, and no understanding of linear time. The new born does not even know it is different or separate than the external world.

A infant experiences being one with all of life. This is The Fool.

From a more spiritual perspective, the soul dives into the body of the mother but once nestled in, forgets where it came from. This is the first deep dive of the soul. Incarnation. To forget the origin and only know the absolute present is The Fool.

From a healing perspective, The Fool is the instinct to start anew with no preconceived notions, feeling the urge to experience life in a new way, forgetting the hurt, wounds, stories, and the behaviors of the past. In relationships this could herald a fresh new perspective in the relationship you are in, a new relationship, or a returning relationship wanting to start over in a new way. Internally, The Fool invokes the urge to be new inside…and it always starts from within no matter if relationships, jobs, locations, or circumstances are asking for newness in your life.

To experience internal and external life anew the healing has much to do with letting go of what was.

This is not so easy….but that’s the brilliant beauty of the archetypes. They are sentient transpersonal forces that give us help, life, internal shifts, miracles, and ease in the form of an urge inside to express their agenda.

They need us to express their agenda. We need them to express our agenda. It’s a two way street.

If The Fool rises up in your psyche, you will not only feel the urge to begin anew and be only in the present, you will also find it easier to let go of the old because The Fool has got your back.

Caution may also be needed as the archetypes don’t stop, don’t hold back, have no concern for human needs, The Fool will metaphorically or literally throw you off a cliff and cause careless action in the shadow of its urge if you don’t learn how to have good boundaries with its instinctual force.

Part of consciously working with archetypes is understanding each force has a light side and shadow side. A friend recently said that it wasn’t about the coin or black and white taking of sides but life is more like a prism. I love her prism metaphor and paraphrase it here to say that the archetypes contain a prism of urges from destruction to creation and they don’t care about how their force effects humans. This is not because they are devious or malicious, no…it is simply because they are not human and so they are not moral story makers like we are. They simply express with no limitation until the human ego puts up a limitation.

It’s up to the human ego to say yes and no the archetypal urges that rise up in the psyche.

For instance, I often feel The Fool rise up in me to blow up my entire life and move to a different city. I say no to this urge from The Fool unless it fits in with my chosen plans and soul narrative because it would be destructive and careless of me to do this. The Fool rises up in me just as often to chuck my beliefs about myself and relationships so that I don’t become dogmatic or rigid in my thinking. This Fool urge I always embrace to cleanse my psyche.

Consciously working with the archetypes is a wonderful way to connect with the transpersonal and feel supported and loved from within. We are never alone.

Consciously working with the archetypes is a wonderful way to create your life for as much as you are able in this world. It is a wonderful way to connect with nature and your psyche.

There are many tools to connect. As a therapist, I work with clients to connect and consciously work with the archetypes using tarot, ritual, and journeying. I use the same methods on myself on a regular basis. I also take the journey along with the others in my group. We form our crucible and journey together. Each time I journey as The Fool I get to start anew and the journeys get more specific over the years.

You can take this journey too in therapy, in a group, in a class, through watching videos or reading books…it’s up to you. You can use the tarot or Jungian archetypes. You can use a specific pantheon or blend pantheons. You can set up an alter for the archetype you are working with or paint, draw, sing, dance or creatively express it however you wish. I want to stress taking the creative and individualized path because how you connect best is what is most effective.

Is The Fool rising up within you?

A Different Blog…

Posted on September 26, 2019 by bluelilystorm

To be honest and frank…and in the spirit of transparency….I admit I am tired of writing “how to” or “this is what it is” type of blogs on the topics of healing.

I have been on the healing path my entire life. Healing is so much a part of who I am because it is my life long journey, my work and my soul purpose. I have many years under my belt now and from this lived experience I will say that the most effective healing tool, for me, is love.

Love as compassion, acceptance, forgiveness, letting go, inspiration, creativity, connecting with the transpersonal (divine) and with self and with others.

I have traversed a huge plethora of healing modalities in the metaphysical and psychological world. CBT, EMDR, Hypnosis, NLP, Shamanic healing, past life regression, astrology, tarot, Reiki, crystals, Kabbala and magic, attachment theory, family systems, depth psychology, on and on….all have been very helpful for me and most of these modalities I use on myself and with those I work with….

And…

Still…

The greatest healer, time and time again, is purifying the heart to let more love in.

Love is peace that lasts.

Happiness is fleeting as is pleasure and pain. But love is a stable solid foundational energy within that makes the difficult and painful moments tolerable and something to grow from.

Love connects us to our true source of power within that cannot be taken away by anyone or anything no matter how unjust or tragic… and…

Love also tempers the joy so that it doesn’t turn into addiction or an escape hatch.

But I am not going to write a blog on “how to love” or “this is what love is”.

I feel compelled to simply….write from the heart.

I pulled a few oracle cards this morning on what to write about and these three cards showed up: Memory, Harmony, Anguish.

Perfect timing with the new moon in Libra of which I do not want to explain either. There are many astrologers to refer to on this. My favorite is Kaypacha who puts out the free “Pele report” you can find on YouTube every week.

Anyhow…my clear intention this morning is to write on these three words, from the heart.

Anguish is a feeling most people run away from like it is the plague.

I tell myself and all of my clients the same thing on repeat, feelings are nothing more than chemical storms coursing through the body.

You are not your feelings.

Feelings cannot harm you.

Feelings do not last.

There is nothing to fear about anguish and yet fear is a feeling to also learn to not fear….(the paradox is always present).

I know anguish very well. I feel anguish for the state of humanity and this country. I feel anguish for every child, elder person, and animal enduring abuse. I feel anguish for the homeless and mentally ill. I feel anguish for my own sense of deep unmet soul longing that flares from starvation.

I don’t fear anguish and when it courses through me in a storm of emotion, I watch the storm as I cry, wail, bitch, paint, write, or however anguish expresses….

Then, like magic, the anguish that is not me leaves my body and is gone forever…or until the next storm.

I used to wrap up anguish in a story that said I was bad, wrong, not good enough, not loved, and other negative interpretations created by a youthful me, that stuck like glue as stories do.

It took a long time to learn how to detach from the stories and not identify with them anymore.

Did you ever see the movie, “A Beautiful Mind”? That movie is the perfect metaphor for learning to detach from the story. That brilliant man in the film (a true story) needed to learn to ignore his best friends because they were delusions. He did not feel them to be fake but they were.

The stories of anguish can feel so real but they are not real. They are delusions.

Humans are delusional creatures. Look at the state of our world. Look how we hate, judge, create moral systems, religions, principals, and ideas about what life is and what life should be.

I know many people believe in a being in the sky who decreed it all and that’s their right to to believe as I have my right to believe. Whose to say who is accurate?

Who is the judge of reality?

Nobody or God? Yourself?

I pay more attention to wanting every human to experience love, equality and freedom more than I care to know the facts about the metaphysical nature of reality. This is my heart’s desire and stand by it.

My metaphysical interpretation of life is solid but I am always willing for it to evolve and I always take it with a grain of salt.

Love, freedom, and equality for all people, on the other hand, comes first and I will not budge on this ever.

The New Age, witchy and metaphysical communities can be as arrogant, narrow minded, and dogmatic as fundamental religion or atheism communities, even if only the religious extremists are the violent ones.

The need to be right, feel powerful, have power and relevance in the world lives in all of us in the shadow if we don’t own it.

I own my desire for power so it doesn’t stink up my shadow. Our human nature is our human nature. I want love to rule and I too, like us all, am a self centered desirous animal. I have no shame around this.

I do have shame though. We all do.

Shame, like anguish, is only a chemical storm coursing through the body. It is not me. Or you. This leads me to the next word.

Memory….

Shame rises up strong in me when I think back to my past. I feel so much embarrassment when I compare myself to others or feel the weaknesses that exist in my temperament. Oh well. I let the shame pass through.

Look, my shadow is dark alley way filled with despair but I don’t live there. Sometimes I fall into this alley way and suddenly I feel lost and confused.

I have learned to tell when I fall into my alley. It’s usually in the body I notice first. Anxiousness rises up in me. I may also notice that I feel young like a child and insecure like something too soft and vulnerable.

Soon as I notice I am in the alley, I am no longer in the alley as much because I am witnessing being in the alley from that point on….

Awareness creates distance and detachment, it’s so cool!

Developing the witness is the whole entire thing Buddhism is about. I dig it. I live it. I would say that at the very core of my mind is a Buddhist monk.

My spirit is not a monk though. My spirit is Blue Lily Storm here to return people to their inner source of power and tear down outdated structures, cleanse and purify like storms do. My spirit is not concerned with mental anything but is more a force of nature that seeks to transform energy. My spirit is a conveyer belt of transformation…

My soul is a gypsy wandering through lifetimes, a karmic being sewing a tapestry of time….Danu, Isis, Sophia, the goddess in many forms longing to tell the story of what really happened in humanity’s past that is still hidden. My soul longs to share this myth. She has no pragmatism at all in her nature….and she roots only to wisdom, nothing in the physical…

Luckily, my Animus, which was born the moment my soul entered this body, is a stoic masculine force who finds peace in emptiness to balance out all of the passionate feminine. My inner masculine has light eyes and weathered salty skin who spends most of his time contemplating within. He believes in nothing and steeps in the vastness, He likes to create things and finish works…

Did you know that falling in love is when we are struck by the arrow of our Anima or Animus in another person? All of us have an inner compensating force to balance out the conscious self we identify with…I love that, it’s such a brilliant trick!

I am waxing poetic and sharing some of my personal self…busting the old system that therapists need to be blank slates. I will not share very much of my personal life and what I share I hand pick with intention, keeping it pertinent to healing or for inspiration but I will not be a blank slate. Down with that old crusty perception!

We are all in this together and I just so happen to have a lot of experience, intuition and knowledge which makes me a good guide.

We cannot escape that we are mirrors for each other all the time…

Harmony is remembering this so we own our own shadow, see every relationship as a healing opportunity and purify our hearts to love more…and more…

We cannot escape the personal connection between each of us at all times. Boundaries are needed. My boundaries are firm and supportive and I will say, it took a solid five years of intense work. How are your boundaries?

Boundaries are the most vital aspect next to love it feels to me, because if you lose the boundary between your true self and the story or the feeling inside, you lose your center. Just like your sense of self can shatter in the energy of another person it can also shatter in the energy of yourself.

If you can keep your sense of self firm and centered in the presence of every feeling and story that courses through you then you can keep your sense of self firm and centered in the presence of another, no matter who they are…..

When sense of self s firm and centered you are in harmony.

Love is the firm center.

Vulnerability and Attachment Wounds in Romantic Relationship

Posted on August 27, 2019 by bluelilystorm

This blog is inspired by the topic of vulnerability. I wanted to write about it after writing about the sacred emptiness because vulnerability is what births inside the chrysalis of sacred emptiness.

A new form of vulnerability births in the emptiness…based upon attachment wound healing…that opens us up to a more joyful and fulfilling experience of being vulnerable.

Attachment wounding is the root of not being able to be vulnerable in relationship with others and self. Attachment healing turns the tables and allows vulnerability to become a secure and happier experience.

My reflections on attachment will be very brief and stream of consciousness…

If you want to know more in detail there are a ton of books, Youtube videos and podcasts on attachment theory. I highly recommend listening to the “Psychology Today” podcast. The subscription is only $5 dollars a month for many deep dives into pertinent psychological topics. Kirk Honda is my favorite describer of attachment theory (and any topic in psychology) as he makes content accessible to everyone with a harmonious blend of knowledge and heart.

This is my reflection on vulnerability and attachment today….

Our brains are the place we develop our personality (ego) very early on in life (infant to about age seven) based upon how we are parented by our prime caretakers. The personality formation is strongest the younger we are and gets cemented after age seven.

Our attachment style is the aspect of the personality that relates with others and with self. It is the way in which we desire relationship, behave in relationship, and express vulnerability.

The romantic parter most closely mirrors the prime caretaker and hence, we face our attachment style/wounds the strongest in romantic partnering yet attachment styles show up in every single relationship including the one you have with yourself.

You do not need to have experienced trauma or abuse to have an attachment wound. If you have endured trauma and abuse your wounds are specific to that yet a child can develop a very deep attachment wound in a home with zero abuse and no big traumas.

The avoidant attachment style/wound (often broken down into anxious avoidant and dismissive avoidant) is created by the prime caretaker(s) not tending to the child’s emotions. There is no emotional attunement. The parent(s) do not talk about feelings or they may see emotions as weak, dismiss them, or avoid them. Boys may be more apt to be taught to repress their emotions due to cultural conditioning as well.

As with everything psychological, avoidance shows up as a spectrum. How much did your caretaker(s) avoid your feelings and avoid feelings in the home between family members? There tends to be a basic structure in the avoidant home with bedtime, meals, routines with school, etc and there may also be morals taught and other principals that foster the mind but the emotional realm of the child is not seen, acknowledged or nurtured.

Avoidant style people do not feel safe in close relationships because they feel cut-off from their own feelings. They experience anxiety around intimacy and tend to use dismissive remarks or behaviors to maintain a certain level of detachment, independence and aloofness in relationship. They either believe they do not need intimacy or they push intimacy away in a variety of ways that may be unconscious (flippant remarks, sexual impotency or lack of desire, minimizing issues and the feelings of the partner) or conscious (having a strong belief about the independence they feel gives them strength, for instance or saying they are not relationship oriented).

The avoidant style is often called the island.

Anxious attachment style people (often called preoccupied or ambivalent) is created when the prime caretaker(s) sometimes tune in to the child’s emotions and sometimes ignore them. The key is inconsistency in attunement and often anxiety connected to emotional attunement when it is present. There is some semblance of structure in this attachment style as if there were no structure in the home it would fall under the disorganized attachment style but the structure does tend to be as inconsistent as the emotional attunement. Maybe meals and bedtimes are not always around the same time or maybe the structure is generally chaotic though the child is fed, taken to school, and put to bed at some point. Perhaps the child switches homes a lot or is handed off in a chaotic fashion. The anxious attachment style is often referred to as the wave.

To be clear, emotional attunement is when the care taker responds to the child’s feelings, names the feelings for the child so they may learn to name feelings themselves, nurtures the child when upset and models how to tend to feelings in a loving way no matter what feeling is arising. Emotional attunement when secure in the caretaker, does not cause intense anxiety. The caretaker is not anxious when the child is hurting nor are they living in anxious fear of the child getting hurt in the unforeseeable future.

Anxious attachment creates a person who is not sure if they are loved. Do you love me now? How about now? If you find out (insert trait here) about me will you still love me? The anxious person needs constant validation and reassurance that they are loved. They don’t have any consistent sense of being tended to that is imbedded in their sense of self. They fear love leaving, being abandoned, and being betrayed. They may put themselves at constant fault for creating abandonment or they may build a false case where their partner will leave them due to (insert criticism here).

The wave is very overt with their insecurity and feelings. The island is very covert as beneath every island is a wave but the island is too anxious to deluge. Avoidant people want intimacy deep down underneath their fear just as much as the overt wave. It’s as if islands have an extra defense mechanism around their anxiety that the waves do not posses and this is molded by how we are parented.

The wave is usually the pursuer of the island. Islands and waves tend to attract each other because the island needs the overt display and pursuit of the wave for them to feel loved and the wave is used to feeling insecure about not being loved and very familiar and comfortable with chasing the unavailable island. It’s a recipe for healing or disaster depending on how willing and skilled the partners are in dealing with these wounds. Without skill or willingness the island first pushes the wave away and then the wave overwhelms the island when they express needing more and this pushes the island away more until both express extreme versions of avoiding and deluging.

Disorganized attachment is molded in the brain when the there is abuse in the home, major trauma, or the care taker(s) do not provide adequate structure or emotional attunement to the point where it is neglect. Disorganized people may vacillate between being an island and a wave, never feeling a consistent sense of self. The disorganized wound is chaotic and never follows a certain pattern other than the pattern of not being patterned.

Not having a strong sense of self is also the case for the island and the wave. Sense of self is developed in the brain by the child being emotionally attuned to and given proper structure by the caretaker(s). This is a literal process that happens in the brain (mirror neurons) that forms sense of self in relationship with others, self, and the world. With all attachment styles other than secure attachment, the sense of self is shattered in varying qualities and degrees of intensity based upon upbringing mixed with temperament (nature and nurture).

The temperament (soul, true self, the mysterious uniqueness we each posses) of the child plays a big if not a bigger role in the shaping of the sense of self.

A shattered sense of self is the attachment wound.

Secure attachment happens when there is no trauma or abuse and the caretaker(s) tune into the child’s feelings in a nurturing and loving way while also providing the child with a consistent structure. This assures the child develops a healthy sense of self if there is no trauma or abuse outside the home and if the child is not born with a struggling temperament due to multigenerational wounds or a past life wound (if you believe in this).

It is important to note that a child may also absorb anxiety from any family member conflict even if it has nothing to do with them. Families usually have the one “healer” or empath of the family who tends to absorb the anxiety from other family members and become mentally or physically sick as a result. These types are more apt to struggle and often cannot discern their feelings from the feelings of others due to their sensitivity levels yet they are also meant to be as sensitive as they are because they are the healers of this world.

Attachment wounds also present inwardly with self. For instance, you can have a disorganized attachment with yourself where sometimes you tune into your feelings and validate yourself, sometimes you avoid your feelings using some form of addiction or avoidance to ignore them, and sometimes you tend to your feeling but feel filled with anxiety and self doubt about whether you are good enough.

You can also express different styles consciously and unconsciously. For instance, you can be a wave consciously and an island unconsciously by consciously wanting and choosing intimate partnership yet always unconsciously attracting unavailable islands…or…when you attract an available partner you really like, you start pushing them away by finding fault with them at every turn. In this way the island and wave within the self and in partnership tries to find harmony.

The healing of attachment wounds is rooted in learning how to be vulnerable in the relational field and with self. This starts to show up when you no longer need to build a case against self or the partner, drink booze or take recreational drugs to feel comfortable, lay on the criticism, demand proof that you are loved, or push away the other with conscious or unconscious tactics of any kind.

Being vulnerable and intimate looks like letting each other in your feelings, communicating your feelings, being transparent about your feelings, and tending to one another’s feelings….whether during an argument, when times are rough, or during times of passion, joy, and tenderness. It means showing the real you and allowing yourself to trust your partner.

First you may need to do this for yourself but this is not always the requirement. Some people heal more through being vulnerable with a partner (or friend) first. We can build a sense of self love by going within and being alone and also through being in a relationship. It takes the right relationship if it is the latter. You cannot build a sense of self love with a partner who is unable to create intimacy and be vulnerable with you much of the time. Maybe not all the time, as we are flawed beings learning how to love….but a good chunk of the time at the very least.

Also, if you are an island, being vulnerable and close with another may not feel good for a long time. Perhaps years. You have to be willing to enter the not feeling good zone and go through the anxiety and fear. You have to be willing to enter intimacy with more courage to learn how to be vulnerable in the first place. This may feel awkward and challenge your avoidant personality that has protected you for so long. You have to learn how to trust another to care about you and you have to learn how to want to be cared about.

If you are a wave you may enjoy intimacy and even being vulnerable but you come on like a deluge every time you get triggered. This is important to understand for the island and the wave…

The moment you are triggered your animal brain takes the driver’s seat and your higher mind takes a hike. This means that you go into flight/fight/freeze mode and you cannot come out of it through logic, talking, or anything cognitive. When the wave is triggered they deluge the partner who is usually an island. When the island is triggered by the deluge they minimize the communication from the anxious wave which then triggers the wave more who thinks the island is a jerk which triggers the island more who thinks the wave is crazy and the storm intensifies into destruction.

When you get triggered in the relational field all you can do is breathe, touch, and/or take space from the other in order for the higher mind to get back in the driver’s seat. If you both are triggered, stop arguing and breathe, touch one another or allow one person to take some space. Nothing will change how to recover from a trigger because it is brain chemistry. Skill is vital when learning how to become vulnerable in a way that creates feeling more safety and joy.

Most of us are used to vulnerability feeling scary, disappointing, taxing, overwhelming and leading to our detriment. Islands build a mote around them acting like they don’t need a partner or intimacy, in order to survive. Waves desperately try to make the partner their one safe place in all of life’s pain and chaos. Both feel slayed by vulnerability. Both need to learn how to build trust through building a sense of self.

This is the key of all keys. Building a sense of self.

When you have a strong and solid sense of self you can allow yourself to trust getting hurt in the relational field because you can return to yourself as the safe place.

This is the healing of codependency, toxic unions, and everything relational. When you no longer fear being hurt, rejected, disappointed, broken up with, being single, or left alone because you have a safe, reliable, and loving sense of self to return to if the worst happens. Life never gives us a guarantee in the external world so we need the self to be the security and foundation. Islands, don’t contort this to mean you don’t need intimacy in one form or another. The sense of self is a home base and not an escape hatch to avoid the relational field.

It can be safe and feel fulfilling to be vulnerable in the relational field if you build your sense of self and love yourself with more emotional attunement and loving structure. You won’t give your power away to the partner or to addiction or avoidance. You can handle emotional pain and discomfort and in turn, experience a form of joy in relationship that arises only by being tuned in and true to self. Reparenting the self blossoms us into our true self.

True self creates vulnerable and intimate relationships that heal and fulfill our essential needs and desires in waves…and when the waves wane we can return to self for sustenance on a healthy island that can still welcome the other….

Reflections on the Sacred Emptiness

Posted on August 26, 2019 by bluelilystorm

This blog is inspired by the sacred emptiness that most often is the mental and emotional space we enter when letting go of patterns, attachments, identifications, and addictions.

Ego wants the immediate gold star or the metaphorical cookie whenever we do something we feel awards us. A feel good moment. Satiation. A happy arrival into a never ending sunset. These are expectations of ego when we do the healing work of letting go of what is not serving our health, thinking if we have the courage to let go, right on the other side is an arrival into fulfillment.

But the fulfillment of letting go takes time because you are reversing the flow from getting love outside of self to feeling love within self. Building a secure attachment with self is a learning process…

The reward for letting go of patterns, attachments, identifications and addiction takes time to feel in an embodied way.

Suffering initiates ego into the dark night of the soul or the process of letting go of what is not healthy for self. We are used to suffering and have become familiar with low self esteem, shaky self worth, self doubt, unhealthy relationships, addictions, and all of the patterns of thinking and behaving that support a comfort zone of pain.

Suffering only initiates you into the dark night of the soul when you are ready to face the new an unfamiliar suffering of letting go. Suffering that comes from letting go is temporary and necessary, unlike the chronic and familiar suffering of a painful comfort zone.

The familiar comfort zone of pain is a neural pathway in the brain paved over the years by patterns of thinking and behaving that form from attaching to a person or thing outside of self because inside a wounded self feels lost, powerless, fearful, and insecure.

For instance, you may have a pattern of thinking that love is stronger and more valuable than logic which rationalizes the behavior of staying in a relationship that is logically very unhealthy for you. You are used to unhealthy attachment because you grew up with it in your family system. The neural pathway has been paved in your brain to accept the current unhealthy union because your inner child ego developed self worth wounds early on and knows nothing else. Your adult ego identifies with a compromised sense of self worth either consciously or unconsciously.

You do not realize staying in the unhealthy union is a continual and often addictive attempt to get mom and dad’s love and attention on an unconscious level. The inner child in the shadow is operating through the adult ego by projecting onto the person the role of being your care taker or savior in some way. You do not realize you either play a victim role or blame self and glorify the other, when neither are true. The truth is that you need to let go of the unhealthy person, heal your wounds, and create a secure attachment with self. You need to be your own savior and heal yourself.

Addiction forms when the person becomes your everything and you can no longer live without them. This is when the brain chemistry relies on the external person or object to literally keep self afloat. Be it a person, food, drug, alcohol, shopping, working, you name the thing; when wounds are not healed and the sense of self is insecure, the external world holds all the power and we get hooked on it in one way or another.

Readiness to heal and let go is key.

When you are not ready, you are not ready. Our patterns, attachments, identity, and addictions serve the ego by helping us stay afloat, feel valued, safe, secure, and loved…until we are ready to let go.

Pushing before readiness might lead to a mental breakdown, too much fear at once, crisis that cannot be overcome. Suffering is our initiation into the dark night of letting go but suffering in just the right amount is key. Too much suffering and you won’t heal.

The timing is the timing. Patience and love for every stage is needed.

When you are ready you let go it may feel empowering or you may have to force it mentally and enter the grief despite your fighting heart and instinct telling you to hold on. Usually it is the latter.

Letting go and entering into the dark night means the ego is not going to receive the gold star or the metaphorical cookie. Letting go means entering the emptiness.

You may first may go into withdrawals, kicking and screaming your way through. During this stage of the dark night you might try to talk yourself out of letting go and you might succeed and hop back into the safe zone of the familiar pain.

If you make it past the withdrawal, kicking, and screaming stage you enter the stage of the sacred emptiness.

In the sacred emptiness there is nothing to replace the security of that well-worn neural pathway. Even though it’s a pathway of pain and self worth wounds, you knew what to expect and you were used to the crumbs and the anxiety. You did not have to try and risk failing or risk the vulnerability of succeeding which can feel very exposing.

There is nothing to soothe the ego in the sacred emptiness other than….

the sacred emptiness itself….

In the sacred emptiness you may find comfort in the nothingness if you can allow yourself to not resist the nothingness by trying to get that dopamine hit from the outside world, person, pattern or thing that feels like love (but isn’t). You sense of security that comes from familiarity will be gone so you must also not resist feeling scared.

If you can allow yourself to feel scared and empty without resistance to those feelings you can discover a sense of comfort and inner quiet as you traverse through this stage which may take days, weeks, months and maybe even a year.

Stop trying to make anything happen in the external world to try to get the cookie or sense of security and instead find a reliable and self soothing routine to support the emptiness stage.

Maybe you need more solitude, more sleep, going to bed and waking up early, exercising more, eating healthier, taking life more slowly, getting out into nature, coloring or knitting or some form of soothing creative outlet…watching Netflix may help or reading books and allowing yourself healthy escape in the stories of others…or maybe sweating, running, dancing and having a more fiery and yang type of practice is your balance.

Find that balance within self by rooting into a routine that becomes the foundational structure to build a new healthy sense of self, heal the wounds, awaken the soul, and fully shut down the old neural pathway.

If you can allow yourself to surrender into the emptiness and into a routine, slow yourself down, and move through the scary unknown….you will enter the next stage of the dark night.

Here, you may still be in the emptiness but also be tested and need to say no to the old pattern showing up again. If this is the case, do not take it personally. It takes a certain amount of experiences for a new neural pathway to become paved and it only becomes paved through experience. Each time you say no to the unhealthy pattern, you pave the new healthy pathway. It’s science You are not being punished.

Surrender is the key to moving through the emptiness stage whether you are being tested or laying low like a seed in the dark soil. Initiation is surrender.

The suffering of the emptiness stage may show up as needing to say no to the familiar pattern rising up again. If this is the case, say no as quickly as you can and if you mess up, it’s ok. Healing happens in a spiral not a line. Fall and get up again knowing every human being grows through making mistakes.

Suffering in the emptiness stage may also show up as feeling perpetually insecure, bored, doubtful, stagnant, confused, disoriented, and lonely. Know that these feelings are natural and do not take them personally. Allow these feelings to express as you would allow a child to express their feelings without judgement or making a big deal out of them. This will allow the feelings to leave the body.

Surrendering to a higher power is what the Anonymous (AA, NA, OA, etc) philosophy teaches and it is a real quality that provided real results. The transpersonal aspect of life is larger than self and requires no spiritual belief or experience. Call the transpersonal anything that feels right for you, the Collective Unconscious, Nature, Life, Consciousness, God, Goddess, Spirit, Source, Prime Creator, Oneness, The Infinite, Jesus, Isis, Odin, Lakshmi, Universe, Ancestors, Angels, Allies, Archetypes…it does not matter…when you call out to the transpersonal you invoke help from the great mystery and from love.

You do not have to do this work alone and truly, you are never alone. The sacred emptiness is here to serve your liberation and initiate the ego into becoming the true self securely attached and connected to your true source of power within.

Romantic Love Musings Inspired by Cheers

Posted on August 19, 2019 by bluelilystorm

Contemplations on romantic love…with plenty of ellipses…

I have been watching the tv show “Cheers” for a stint. Haven’t seen this show since I was a teenager when it aired in real time. I want to give kudos to the writing and I see also how watching this show is like watching theater, especially in the scenes between Sam and Diane.

Sam and Diane play classic star-crossed lovers who are complete opposites. Sam is earthy, grounded, simple minded, pleasure seeking, and a conceited player with women. Diane lives in her head and is intellectual, romantic, deep, complicated, and moral.

Cupid shoots his arrow and they cannot help it. Sam and Diane are in love with one another. This is how falling in love goes, it is a mysterious experience that happens to us out of the realm of control.

Sam and Diane’s relationship, whether romantic or trying to just be friends, always winds up returning to romantic love but it’s always fraught with conflict…not so much due to being opposites but due to how they treat one another.

Who we fall in love with is out of our hands. You love who you love and you love them for as long as you love them.

Knowing real love from some form of attachment wound projection happens once you have formed a bond and made it past the initial stage of any form of relating. Once you get to know somebody the projections fall and you see one another for who you actually are…and this is when love really begins.

You see this happen with Sam and Diane quickly as television goes. They realize each other’s true nature and they drive each other nuts on a constant basis with their opposite ways of expressing love from these opposite natures. Yet they always come together sexually.

It may not always be the sexual bond that is the glue as with Sam and Diane. It might be the emotional, the spiritual, even the mental where romance expresses. Romantic love is a feeling radiating deep down beneath the constant shifting and changing of the emotions moving like weather through the body.

Love is a constant even if you are able to avoid or detach from it. You cannot escape love. Love can seize in one instant or can grow over time. Love chooses how it moves, not us.

When relationship conflict rises up between two people in love it is not due to a lack of love but usually due to the psyche’s state. Sam and Diane did not handle conflict well due to not treating each other well in their opposite natures but you also see why in their similarities…

Both Sam and Diane are competitive, stubborn, and hot headed and so they both tend toward arguing, holding their point and not seeing the other’s, and both want to be right.

This is a major cause of continual conflict for many. If you cannot come out of your perception to see the other’s as valid, you won’t turn conflict into intimacy or harmony.

If you cannot find some kindness and compassion for the other person’s way, you are doomed to fail. Diane always expects Sam to be romantic and moral and deep like herself. Diane lacks having kindness and compassion for Sam’s blind spots and for his nature too at times.

Sam always hopes for Diane to accept him as he is but he also desires to be a better person and in a way, needs her to push him to be a better version of himself. This is another aspect of relationship conflict. Sam relies on Diane to help him grow and as a result, pushes her away by being nonchalant when he feels too scared to level up.

It’s natural for lovers to need each other to grow, feel secure, feel validated…this interdependency only goes wrong if the other holds too much of what we need to hold for ourselves. Maybe Sam needed Diane to hold too much of his own integrity…

Diane may have integrity but she cannot see Sam with enough kindness and respect when he acts like a buffoon. She does not trust Sam. Sam feels belittled by her and maybe not good enough for Diane. He makes Diane hold all of his integrity and cannot see that perhaps he is not good enough for himself.

Diane makes Sam hold all of her security so she can avoid her own deep rooted insecurities. Her lack of trust is rooted in her lack of trust in herself.

This is what we do in romance. We make the other person the bad guy instead of looking within and facing our own struggles and insecurities. Becoming vulnerable to our inner stuff allows us to move through relationship conflict without destroying the entire container. It’s hard….

Sam and Diane both hold their own perspectives like flags raised high and mighty, refusing to be supple with each other’s needs or way of being because Sam needs self integrity and Diane needs self trust. It becomes quite complex when we refuse to look within to see how we mess up relationships…

If you cannot look within and do your self work then you cannot let go of the mighty expectations you have for your partner…and then you cannot sustain the partnership.

But…what’s the difference between an essential standard to uphold and an expectation to release?

An essential standard is a core value.

Does Diane need Sam to be deep and romantic in her core values or is it an expectation for Sam to be like herself so she feels validated because she cannot validate herself?

Does Sam need Diane to take love day by day without romantic gestures and grand commitments or is this an expectation he places on her because he is fearful of failing due to being out of integrity?

This is the big exploration if you want love to sustain in a partnership and there are many compromises to be made. Where can you meet in the middle? Where do you need to hold a standard? And what’s an expectation you can let go of?

The compromise is what you do when it’s an expectation you have some wiggle room to play with.

Core values are standards to be protected and upheld.

Sam and Diane both value marriage and monogamy (TV, especially back then tends to only show dominant cultural values…) There is no conflict in their standards about the kind of relationship they want. Sam only wants Diane to be more in the moment so he can have time to grow into his integrity and Diane only wants Sam to be more romantic and sweeping in his expression so she can feel trust and validation.

In real life maybe you want one version of a relationship and your partner wants another. This cannot be compromised. A poly with a mono cannot flow. Someone who wants kids wont flow with somebody who does not want kids. Core values and lifestyle are usually the non-negotiable aspects they may bring tragedy to star crossed lovers.

Love will express in harmony, tragedy and everything in between.

Expectations are usually more shallow and rooted in wanting your lover to be just like you so that you feel safe, secure and never have to face conflict, failure or not getting what you want. Wanting the other to enjoy doing the same things, like the same music, look a certain way, act a certain way, and express in a certain way…all fall into the category of expectations…

You want to enjoy some things together but you don’t need to enjoy everything. One person can love going to museums and another can hate it. One person can be extroverted and one introverted….so long as you enjoy time together in certain ways.

Sam and Diane have fun together even though he hates intellectual cultural activities and Diane hates sports. When Diane dates Fraiser she gets to be with the male version of herself and yet even having all her expectations met with Fraiser, Sam is the man she loves.

Doesn’t matter how similar or different lovers present. We love who we love.

Love wants to be a mystery and we never know what our karma will be around love…if we are meant to be with somebody very opposite or very similar…or be with somebody through very difficult circumstances….lose lover early on or have it last a lifetime and experience the grief of death…

Love is a mystery without a clue….this was the first line of the first poem I wrote when I was in the sixth grade and it sticks like a tattoo in my heart because it speaks deep truth to me. I don’t know my karma with romantic love before I live it. I take love as it comes…

Sam and Diane never fully commit to one another in the show. It seems as if they will infinitely break apart and come back together. I am sure neither wishes for their love karma to be as such…

My inner child hope is that they eventually learn how to stay together. If Diane can lighten up on her expectations and if Sam can grow as a person and if they can both learn to let go of their pride and needing to be right when conflict arises….maybe?

I hope for love to work out between star crossed lovers because it is my temperament to be hopeful and idealistic in my heart (to a certain degree). We all have our ways. I am not right or wrong. Perhaps this resonates with you and perhaps not.

I am also a very pragmatic person and I honor self liberty at all times. I think conscious divorce, separation and breaking up is important and valuable. Very hard to do though because of our short comings…

If you fall out of love it is best to not stay out of morality and model for your children to sacrifice your core values (if being in love is a core value to begin with) to protect them from painful experiences. Painful experiences are not bad or wrong even if they are painful. Pain is meaningful lesson and growth tool. This is my opinion and there are many opinions to be valued…

If you are both still in love but cannot find harmony no matter how many times or how hard you try, maybe try to be with somebody else? Falling out of love makes it much easier to separate, as does not having a family to consider.

Sam and Diane have no kids and are archetypal representations of lovers in love coming from opposite sides of below and above…

I find is easy to see both sides and validate both Sam and Diane. I always see both sides with couples in real life too. I see how harmony can be found from a bird’s eye view. Yet to accomplish harmony we must learn how to take care of the brain.

Lovers trigger the most in one another due to mirroring when we were teeny ones with our care givers. It is what it is, we all work the same. Once triggered the animal brain takes the driver’s seat and fight/flight/freeze, projections, and intrusive thoughts dominate like massive storm in the psyche.

The logical higher thinking brain can no longer operate when these storms occur and this is when couples destroy the relationship, themselves, or each other with the actions taken and words spoken during the many storms that rise up in the relational field.

It’s only natural to grow through these storms but without skill you either repress it all and unhappily stay or sabotage and kill what could have grown (but that’s for another blog….)

Thank you Sam and Diane for inspiring this blog. May we all keep learning, growing, and loving the hell out of one another.

Bloom Counseling

Michelle Bloom, MA, LMHC

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