This appeared in the Daily Soul Retreat today.  I thought I'd share it here on my blog as well.  

Empty Your Backpack and Claim Your Power by Barbara Wilder

Recent studies have revealed that school children develop long term back pain from carrying heavy backpacks.  Like children with back packs all people carry a heavy load of past traumas, hurts, disappointments, losses, and grief.  And what I have been noticing in my practice is that most of my clients not only have stored all these past miseries in their consciousnesses, and deep in their cells and molecules, they have also created an oversized psychic backpack in which to haul them around.

A lot of my clients, like so many people in our society, have been working on their psyches and their emotional growth for some time.  Many of them have done various kinds of therapy and have come to me to help them tofinally heal.  My particular form of transformational therapy uses light energy to reveal and then shift the shadow material and burn it up, leaving behind only the essence or the nuggets of truth that each of life’s challenges hold.  But our highly psychoanalyzed society has put such a heavy degree of importance on the work with the inner-child that we have forgotten that the inner-child needs to grow up eventually and become integrated into the healthy adult.  Instead, I find many people so engrossed with their inner-child and parenting their inner-child that they have become over-indulgent, giving away their adult personal power to the wounded child.

In my book, Embracing Your Power Woman, I teach women to reconnect with their teenage selves, in order to unlock the door to their second half of life purpose.  To do this they must delve into the traumas, hurts, disappointments, and shattered dreams from their teenage years, embrace them, and love them into healing, so that they can move through the dark passage of menopause into the light of their true purpose.  But again, I often find women wanting to hold onto the pain instead of lifting up into the light of higher frequency, by pushing through, or diving down through the muck to come out the other side in the light.  How much easier it is to coddle the wounded child’s tantrums, than to love her while simultaneously expecting her to heal through that love and come to stand on her/his own.

We humans actually prefer to stay in the old familiar patterns than push through into joy.  Perhaps this is because joy is such strange new territory, and whatever is unfamiliar is frightening.  But what if we could experience the joy?  Would we still want to go back to the old patterns of worry, and pain, and anxiety?  For many people the answer is, yes.  For some people joy seems fleeting, ephemeral.  Worry, anxiety, unhappiness, and drama seem more real in this world of illusion.

My grown son, Sean, and I have talked often about the necessity to dive deep into the darkness and continue until we come out on the other side to discover the light.  One day he called me from Cancun where he was vacationing.  He had gone snorkeling in a lagoon that afternoon with a couple of young women he’d met.  As they dove down into the lagoon Sean saw what looked like a corridor that he felt might lead somewhere interesting.  When he and his friends surfaced he said he was going to dive down there and check out where that corridor led and asked if they would like to join him.  They rejected his offer and he dove by himself.  The deeper he went the darker it got, and he was close to running out of breath.  Then just as he was about to return to the surface, he heard a voice in his heart reminding him that when diving deep you must continue through the darkness.  So he kept going.  Suddenly, he saw light above him and swam toward it.  As he reached the surface, he saw that he had come up inside an underground cave with beams of sunlight shining through breaks in the ceiling of the cave.  The light danced on the water and glinted off the walls.  The water was the purest aqua color he’d ever seen.  He felt like he had discovered paradise.  He was so glad he’d listened to his inner voice that reminded him that to find joy one must continue to dive down when in the darkest place.

But to dive deep and find the light on the other side you must trust your own path.  You must know how to hear the voice of your spirit and differentiate between it and the voices of your wounded child or its extension, your fear driven ego.  The less pain you have in your backpack and the more essence you have in the pouch in your heart, the easier it is to hear the voice of your spirit.

One of my clients, MaryLee, a lovely woman in her early forties, was quite agitated recently after making the decision to attend her high school reunion.  She has suffered all of her life from low self-esteem as the middle child who could never live up to her older sister’s popularity and success.  MaryLee is very bright, attractive, talented, and an immensely loving and caring person, but this lack of self-esteem had kept her living in her sister’s shadow and taking her abuse for far too long.  When she came to see me, she had almost no sense of self.   So, the fact that she had decided to attend her high school reunion after just a few months of therapy was very brave and represented a giant step in her work.  She came for a session the day before she left, and, though she was nervous, she realized after we talked for a bit that part of her nervousness was the old expectation that she should be nervous.  By the time she left, she was in high spirits looking forward to both the Friday night cocktail party and the Saturday night main event.   

Then on Saturday morning I received an email.  The subject line read, “Not what I expected.”  She had been to the first event and was terribly disheartened, reporting that most people didn’t even remember who she was, and that those who did either called her by her sister’s name or asked her, not about herself, but about her sister.  I could see that three months of therapy were about to be washed away if she didn’t find a way to step into her power and not let her shy, frightened, and rejected teenage self sabotage her newly awakening adult strength.

I wrote back reminding her of how far she’d come since high school.  No one would forget you now, I told her, and then added that since few people remembered her she had the opportunity to make a brand new impression with no old concepts to overcome.  I said her job that night was to be the beautiful, strong, and talented woman who she was in the process of becoming, in spite of the sadness that her teenage self was experiencing.

“You are no longer she.  You are in the process of blooming.  Look to this event as a time to heal the little girl who wasn't acknowledged, and embrace the woman you are and are becoming.”   Then I gave her an exercise.

I teach my clients a form of light energy meditation, which helps release the shadow material.  So I suggested that she first go to her bedroom, close the door and begin the meditation.  In the mediation she was to ask her teenage self to come to her.  When she appeared she was to take her into her arms and hug her and ask her how she could help her.  “Then pour the light through yourself and your teenager and be aware that she is being healed.”  I guided her to then spend the rest of the day being with her teenage self.  She was to talk to her throughout the day and especially while she got dressed and did her hair and make-up.  That night she was to bring her teenage self along to the event.  I told her that her teenage self was the most important person she would be with all evening.  And that she was to keep reminding her teenage self that she, the adult MaryLee, was there for the soul purpose of helping her heal.

The next day I was thrilled to get an email from her.  She had done the exercise and the evening had been a huge success.  She had met new people, men and women, who were excited to meet her.  She had reconnected with old friends who were very happy to see her and learn about what she was up to.  And she had had a deeply healing experience with a woman with whom she had had a bad falling out when they were girls.

What MaryLee did on this occasion was to stay in her power as a grown woman, and treat her teenage self as the wounded girl that she was, and offer to help her heal.  Once the wounded child was acknowledged she no longer was in charge of the evening.  Since the adult MaryLee was in charge, the teenager felt safe in the presence of her grown self, and was able to heal.  And to top it off, the grown up MaryLee had a great time.  She stood in her strength and power and no longer had to carry around that wounded teenager in her backpack.  Now, the adult MaryLee has a healthy new part of her personality that is no longer mired in the past.

When we allow our wounded child to run our lives we can’t possibly stand in our strength and power as adults.  But it takes more than acknowledging them.  We have to meditate with them.  We have to talk to them. We have to listen to them.  We have to take charge.  And we have to be willing to let go of the addiction we have to carrying around their pain and indulging their woundology.  (Thank you, Caroline Myss for coining this useful word.)

The light energy meditation that I work with and teach my clients to work with directs the light through the body to release the consciousness of the remembered pain and suffering from deep within the body down to and beyond the cellular level.  This is what makes it so effective.

We do need to release the pain, and assimilate the essence, the gems of wisdom that the pain taught us.  Then we must invite our inner-children to grow up and join us in the present.  And we can’t do it alone.  We must have a connection to spirit.  Because it is the connection to spirit that makes the joy possible.   It is the connection to spirit that allows the healing to happen.  It is the connection to spirit that shows us that this world is not the painful mess it seems.

When we carry the backpack filled with our old pain we make the pain our god.  We allow the pain to drive our lives.  We have been taught that our past is who we are.  It is not the past; it is the lessons learned from our past gathered together in our present that makes us who we are.  When we empty our backpacks of the pain and carry only the essence in the magical pouch in our hearts we will be much stronger, healthier and more powerful.  And we will have the strength to dive deep and come out on the other side where the light dances on the aqua blue waters and we experience true joy.

© Copyright Barbara Wilder. All Rights Reserved.

Thoughts about the Lighted Grid and My Two Broken Feet

Hi, my dear friends,

So, one week before my birthday, Saturday, February 11, I was out in the beautiful Southern California morning walking, Gage.  He's my dog, if you didn't know.   I had just begun an intuitive painting class that week, and I had painted three paintings that morning.  One was simply the work Help painted diagonally across the paper, with a red dot in the middle of the "e".  I assumed that was, a request for Help from the Divinge universe.  I also had become aware that doing intuitive painting was opening up a pathway into my consciousness that was revealing beautiful new awarenesses that I had never known before.  So, knowing all this, I will continue.  While I was walking down my street, I suddenly felt my heart chakra open and fill with warmth, and the vision of people, all feeling like family, playing together in a field of gold and greenery and pure abundance of everything.  It was so incredibly sweet.  And it was a new sense of abundance that I had never before experienced.  As that continued to infuse me, I saw a beautiful Dogwood bush and looked over to examine one of the blooms.  At that moment my right foot hit a very large break in the sidewalk that rose up about 9 inches.  My right foot twisted causing my left foot to reach out in front of me to stop the fall, but there was another very high break in the sidewalk, like a small ledge, and my left foot landed right on it, and I fell foward over the ankle, and broke it.  Suddenly, after all this loveliness, I was lying on the sidewalk going in an out of consciousness with what I would come to learn was a fractured and sprained right foot, and a broken left ankle (both the fibia and the tibula).  I didn't have my phone, and there was no one on outside.  I realized all I could do was cry for Help.  And then, less than an hour after having  painted the Help in black with a red dot.  (for blood perhaps) I did just that.   

What happened from there was amazing.  An elderly couple passing in a car stopped.  She went up the street and got my neightbor, Dawna.  In the meantime the couple who lived in the house on whose sidewalk I now lay sprawled came out.  They tried to help me up.  He brought out a walking stick, but there was no way that I could stand on either foot.  The woman called 911, and a fire truck arrived, as did my neighbor Dawna.  The firemen made a cardboard splint for my worst foot and carried me into Dawna's car.  She took me to the ER and the rest is history.  The strange thing is that they sent me home with crutches and not a wheel chair, which was on the absurd side, since both feet were inoperable.  When I got home my 6'10" basketball player neighbor picked me up, carried me into the house, and set me in my rolling desk chair which was my mode of movement for the next twelve days until I finally got a wheel chair.  All of the stuff with doctors and insurance was a comedy of errors and craziness, which I won't bother with here.  Just know that my feet are both healing.  I can stand on my right foot for a few moments at a time, and I'm getting around quite well in my wheel chair.  The pain is still pretty intense, but I manage that with pain killers.  

But in the meantime I'm painting up a storm.  I'm not a painter, I'm simply expressing my inner experience with  paint on paper, and it is a sweet sweet exercise.  And I am meditating, journaling, and healing.  Sweet people have gathered around me to Help me through this.  And what I am seeing is the birth of that community of love and abundance that I saw in my vision just before I fell.  

In my Light Work practice the Light energy that is anchored in the feet chakra is called The Joy of living.  I knew from the instant I became conscious lying on the sidewalk that what had just happened was that  my feet chakra was breaking open to let in The Joy of Living.  I feel it more and more each day.  

Yesterday I was speaking with a lovely friend, Jamie, who is also and energy worker and healer.  She is struggling with monetary woes right now, and I am struggling, of course, with my broken feet.  Before we hung up I told her that I was sending her lots of healing Light energy for her finances.  And she responded that she was sending me lots of healing Light energy for my feet.  Suddenly I saw what that looked like.  Beams of healing energy stretching across the map of the US (she's in NY. I'm in LA).  And then I saw a vision of what the earth will look like when we are all sending healing energy to one another.  It was a gorgeous grid of Light, like a web of healing, criss-crossing the planet.  And I realized that that is what will, or is, shifting humanity up into a new world of peace, abundance, and joy.  

So, my suggestion to you all is to send as much healing Light energy to as  many friends as possible each day, so that we can intensify the Lighted grid.  And also, open your own heart to  the healing Light coming to you from all around the world.    

 With much love, joy, abundance, and great goodwill,

Money in the Time of Ascension

Wow!  It’s finally 2012.  Many of you have been anticipating this magical year for decades.    We still have eleven months to get to the end of the world as we know it, 21 December, and the beginning of the new paradigm, 22 December.  In the meantime, my sense is there is magic taking place behind the scenes, and we are the magicians.  We each have within us a portion of the great mosaic masterpiece of the new paradigm.  And it is our mission, if we choose to accept it, to strip ourselves of all our old demons of shame, fear, lack, anger, co-dependency, and victimhood that we’ve carried for lifetimes, so that we are brand spanking new to enter the new paradigm, or the ascension into the 5th dimension.  And therefore we each will be a beautiful shining tile of the great new mosaic. 

What exactly the new paradigm will be like is not yet known, because it is being created by each one of us, each moment of each and every day.  This process has been going on for quite some time, but now we’re in the final hours.  So much of the heavy lifting has been accomplished.  Now it’s the time for fine tuning, polishing, and digging up the last of the shadow material and giving it to the Light. 

Each of us came into this life with life themes, such as illness, death of loved ones, feelings of low self esteem, never having enough love, or money, or success.  These life themes aren’t random occurrences, but what we chose to work with for our own soul’s growth and expansion and for the growth and expansion of humanity’s collective consciousness. We are not islands unto ourselves; we are part of the greater human beingness.  But having said that, there are times when we must be alone to go inward to polish our mosaic tile. And this is one of those times. 

If you find that one of your life themes is the pain around Money, you are not alone.  All of us, from the poorest to the wealthiest, share in this theme, because in the old paradigm Money was imbued with the energies of fear, greed, lack, anger, poverty, extreme wealth (as opposed to comfortable wealth for all), power over others, war, hunger, and domination.  This  has caused spiritual people to disdain money, thinking of it as a necessary evil. Some believe that the only way to be free of painful money issues personally and globally is to get rid of Money altogether. 

There is a lot of discussion and experimenting with ideas of going back to the barter system, or creating new currencies to replace Money.  But though these are noble efforts, they aren’t practical or effective.  Barter worked in earlier eras because we lived in small communities.  Now seven billion people live on the planet, necessitating a more fluid currency.  And not effective, because creating a new currency doesn’t address the root issue, which is the false belief that there is a limited amount of Money in the world, and we must fight and even die to get our share. 

One thing we do know about the new paradigm is that Money will vibrate at the frequency of Love and abundance for all.   It will be understood that Money is a gift of Love from Source to support every one of us.  We won’t have a new currency;  Money will have a new consciousness.  For this shift from Money based on the old paradigm of fear, greed, and power over others, into Money based on Love, abundance, and goodwill for all, we each must heal our own personal money issues, and transform Money into Love within ourselves so that it becomes part of the new mosaic.  The knowledge that there is enough for all will help us let go of ego attachment to being better or worse than others because we have more or less Money, and allow ourselves to flow into our own life paths and our own divinity. 

Truth is, Money is part of the holy universe.  It is here to support us all, and all it takes for this truth to be made manifest is for us to heal the feelings of lack, fear, greed, and anger within ourselves. And each time we heal a tiny part of these feelings, we heal a part of the greater human consciousness around Money.  Each time we heal within ourselves a sliver of guilt, a modicum of greed, a small bit of low self-esteem, we are healing the World consciousness around Money.  Because when we heal, we open up to the flow of Love and abundance and that Love and abundance then amplifies throughout the greater consciousness, which will in time shift the world’s economy from a fear based economy into a Love based economy. 

As we polish the mosaic tile of our own money themes, the world banks will, without even knowing they’re doing it, shift up into the higher vibration of Love. And Love is limitless. All of this is being accomplished within our own hearts and minds. We are the magicians behind the scenes.  We are creating the magic of the new paradigm. 

Copyright © by Barbara Wilder 2012