The woman running the class was amazing and I had such a wonderful time going into the main journey. I held a large long crystal in my lap, wrapped in a purple felt napkin like a burrito. It was in my lap to protect me ‘just in case’, I’ve been through enough to know ‘just in case’ is always best practice in new age circles! The journey can be straight but still have its’ up and downs.

As the journey went deeper I was overwhelmed with panic, intense pain and suffering, images of blood and being suffocated. It was horrible. I did not understand what was happening. I kept myself together as much as I could calling on my ‘skills’ which I won’t go into in a blog….

We came out of the journey and went around discussing things. Sitting next to me was an older woman who started crying a little. She told her story…

She had an image so very very clear of being wrapped up like a burrito and rolled horizontally on her side…. then she relived her brutal rape from decades earlier. She sobbed the words out. It was then that I knew I was reliving it with her during the journey, that my panic and pain was from experiencing this thing with her. When she talked about being wrapped up like a burrito I knew my crystal had done its’ job of protecting me as it was wrapped up like a buritto on its’ side, in my lap ‘just in case’ (by the time I got home it had broken in two) I was so glad she shared that detail as that clued me in that she was entering my field and the crystal in my lap had held her at a safer distance.

She went on to say that she spent decades trying to heal this episode in her life and it wasn’t until now that she felt she had finally succeeded.

Was it worth it? During the experience I would say ‘no’ I never want to experience and help someone heal such a thing again but of course what’s a few moments of panic and pain to help  someone else find a lifetime of freedom? That depends if you wind up taking it on in their place or not. You have to have other skills in place and helpers to call on when needed.

Most empaths do not have any skills at all and often wind up taking on way too much for others. Moving suffering from one soul to another solves nothing. Self love and boundaries are spiritual, all love starts with love of the self.

I set out to learn how to do this without having to experience it with the person… to remain a witness… to allow the universe to step in and share the experience and not try to do it all myself. In fact I really didn’t try to do anything at all and that’s what scared me. It just happened. I was expecting a nice calming journey.

I haven’t been to a class since, I’m blessed to have an awesome mentor this time, and I will do more to set the energy toward what I want and intend for the class. Perhaps I was too open to having any experience and left a vacuum. Perhaps I was meant to experience this so I’d know I did have it in me to make a difference and I needed to get some more skills and tools.

Victoria Lynn Schmidt

“Just to give birth to a child is one thing – to be a mother is totally different. Any woman can give birth to a child; that’s a very simple phenomenon. But to be a mother needs great art, needs great under-standing.

You are creating a human being – that is the greatest creation! A painter paints a picture; we call it great art. Picasso – we call him a great artist. But what about the mother who created Picasso? A poet writes beautiful poems, but what about the mother who created Shakespeare?

We don’t think about mothers as the greatest creative people on the earth. That is one of the reasons why women are not great painters and great poets – they need not be: they can be great mothers. Why does man try to become a great scientist, poet, painter, this and that? – he is jealous of women: he cannot create children. He feels impotent. Sigmund Freud has talked much about phallic Jealousy – that women suffer from a jealousy because they don’t have penises. Now this is utterly meaningless, absurd. It is as if a woman Sigmund Freud is born and starts talking about men suffering from breast-jealousy because they don’t have breasts.But, one thing is certain: deep down man always feels jealous that he cannot mother, that he cannot carry an alive life in him, that he cannot reproduce life. To substitute it he paints, he sculpts, he writes poetry, he composes music; he goes to the moon, he goes to Everest. He wants to prove at least to his woman that “I can also do something,” otherwise he feels impotent. Compared to woman’s capacity, he looks like a child, looks almost accidental. His work is not much: giving birth to a child, he simply triggers the process. A small injection can do that; that is not much of a work.

The woman passes through those nine months of agony and ecstasy. And then the work is not finished! In fact, then the work, the real work, starts – when the child is born.

And the child brings again a fresh quality to life. Every child is primitive, a barbarian; now the mother has to civilize. Every child is a barbarian, remember; he is animal, wild. And the mother has to give him culture, has to teach him the ways of life, the ways of man. It is a great work.You have to remember that – that your work has not finished, it has started. Take it joyously!

You are creating something immensely valuable – you are carving a life, you are protecting a life.

The work is such that no sacrifice is great enough for it – any sacrifice can and should be made. One thing. Second thing: don’t take it too seriously, otherwise you will destroy the child. Your seriousness will become destructive. Take it playfully. The responsibility is there! but it has to be taken very playfully. Play upon the child as one plays upon a musical instrument – and she knows how to play on musical instruments. Let the child be your instrument now. Play carefully but play playfully. If you become serious, then the child will start feeling your seriousness and the child will be crushed and crippled. Don’t burden the child; don’t start feeling that you are doing something great to the child. When I say you are doing something great, you are doing something great to yourself.

By helping this child to grow into a beautiful human being, into a buddha, you will be becoming the mother of a buddha. You will not be obliging the child: you will be simply enjoying your own life; your own life will become a fragrance through the child.This is an opportunity, a God-given opportunity.

And these are the two pitfalls: either you neglect the child, you are tired of it; or you become too serious about the child, and you start burdening him, obliging him.

Both are wrong. Help the child – but for the sheer joy of it. And never feel that he owes any debt to you. On the contrary, feel thankful that he has chosen you to be his mother. Let your motherhood bloom through him.If you can bloom into your motherhood, you will feel thankful to the child forever.And, naturally, there will be sacrifices, but they have to be made…joyously. Only then is it a sacrifice! If you do it without joy it is not sacrifice. Sacrifice comes from the word sacred. When you do it joyfully, it is sacred. When you don’t do it joyfully, then you are just fulfilling a duty – and all duties are ugly, they are not sacred. This is a great opportunity. Meditate over it, go into it deeply. You will never find such a deep involvement – in fact, there is none as it is between a child and the mother. Not even between the husband and the wife, the lover and the beloved – the involvement is not so deep as it is between the mother and the child. It cannot be so deep with anybody ever – because the child has lived in you for nine months as you; nobody else can live in you for nine months as you.And the child will become a separate individual sooner or later, but somewhere deep down in the unconscious the mother and the child remain linked.If your child can become a buddha, you will be benefited by it; if your child grows and becomes a beautiful human being, you will be benefited by it – because the child will always remain connected with you. Only the physical connection has been disconnected; the spiritual connection is never disconnected.

Thank God! Motherhood is a blessing.” Osho

The other day I was walking down Main st and came across a homeless man YELLING at the top of his lungs at a group of people. I silently… IN MY HEAD (that part is important) said a blessing for him to find peace.

I walked passed him and waited at the corner for the light to change.

He stopped yelling, came over, and looked into my eyes.

I was a little on edge but he just regarded me for a long moment then said:

“Thanks but what I really need is a bus ticket to Colorado”

Well, I was quite surprised. Was he psychic? How did he know what I had done? Fortunately I’m used to this kind of thing (my teachers are awesome) so I centered my self and replied:

“Well, then may you be blessed with that ticket as well as peace”

He smiled, I crossed the street.

So often we see homeless people talking to themselves, we judge them, we are afraid of them, but maybe just maybe some of them are not as ‘crazy’ as many of us like to think (so we can separate ourselves from them & ignore them) Maybe they just see the world differently and have a tough time fitting into ‘normal’ ways of living.

Maybe they are really talking to someone when we think they are blathering on.

I walked the beach boardwalk and came across another homeless man going on and on to an unseen ‘friend’.

I stopped to listen rather than ignore. It was quite interesting:

“Well you know they just keep reincarnating here because they can’t get enough of the drugs and sex, that’s all they care about, over and over and over again they come. They will never stop. They will never grow. This planet is a prison for them.”

Not the babble most of us would expect to hear. Often we pass these moments by, wanting to be in oneness, but oneness includes everyone and everything so take deeper looks around you… if you want to be in oneness, then you must be allowance and go below the surface of things. You must also be willing to lose yourself completely. (but that’s the subject of another post)

You can’t say ‘we are all one… but not that guy, he’s nuts’

Victoria Lynn Schmidt

The love of a pet can help us a great deal on this path if we are with them in a conscious way.

When I adopted my beloved Oliver a corgi/retriever (now deceased) I was clear on what I wanted in a dog and in the energy I hoped he would have. I wanted him to fit with what was happening in my life and be able to enhance the changes that were coming. I was truly blessed with Oliver. It’s been 2 years since his death and I haven’t been able to adopt again, yet.

His energy was so wonderful and spiritual, everyone who met him fell in love and in awe of what he was vibrating. (Though he had a very protective side to him as well!) In fact I even had some strange happenings with his guides walking up to us on the street and telling me things about him and how I should take care of him. Yes, strange people walked up to me on the street and just blurted out stuff that I should do for him (long story). Once I was worried about his heart and a man walked up without me saying a word, and examined him like a doctor might and said “I wouldn’t worry about him, he’s fine” and walked away. (note: I later offered to help Oliver with karma he needed to clear but that’s a whole other post on working with karma in a conscious way, boy did I have to step up for him within 24 hrs of making the offer! I worked on some stuff too, as he almost died (my biggest fear) and I got to step up as a healer (my baby was not leaving just yet))

Originally I wrote about an extreme case of misfortune my friend experienced when she randomly, unconsciously, adopted a cat she found on the street but I’m afraid in such a short space here, it will seem as if I’m giving permission to blame pets for our misfortunes and that is not the case.

So the essence of what I want to impart is to be conscious in your relationship with your pets. They really can support your spiritual growth in many ways and they can challenge you and bring up karma as well.

Pets are souls, they are beings here to learn and grow just as we are. They are not just for sitting on the couch waiting to love us when we demand it. They have their own karma and energy to work on.

“don’t DO THAT”.

And they focus on the DO THAT part because that’s the only thing you have given them. If I walked around telling you all day long to stop doing things you were doing you would go crazy in a few hours and probably say

“Well, what the heck can I do?”

Identify the positive behavior you want… do you even know what you want?  Get clear on how you would like your child to be and then foster that behavior.

How?

Positive reinforcement. This is how we train dolphins to jump over bars you know! If we can get dolphins to jump over bars, we can certainly teach your child how to behave better. Aren’t they smarter? And they speak English!

This training of dolphins is started by placing a bar at the bottom of a pool – no room for error…. see? Then they periodically raise the bar until it is at the surface and the dolphin has to jump out of the water now to get his treat.

Go over bar, get treat… go over bar, get treat…

Why do so many parents opt for the “don’t swim over there, here’s a smack” option.

The behavior that is rewarded will increase.