http://www.secrets2tell.com/2011/12/31/loud-proud-bombastic-my-2012-promise/

I’m weary, but driven to carry this mission, along with my broader mission of empowerment, to wherever it may lead. Adversity has a way of birthing fearlessness. That it has done. And I’m just getting started.

In the meantime, here’s my latest post from my site geared toward sexual abuse recovery,  www.secrets2tell.com, titled “Refuse.” Access it at the below link:

http://www.secrets2tell.com/2011/12/29/refuse/

Until we meet or I type to you again, have a blissful, blessed, happy new year!

As the battle wages, I’ll keep you posted. I’m planning on 2012 being a prolific year for outreach of all kinds. It’s hasn’t been easy, but it’s a worthy cause affecting millions worldwide. We have the power to stop it. Let’s do it. Stay safe, not silent.

http://www.secrets2tell.com/2011/12/21/legal-update-why-you-won%e2%80%99t-see-certain-posts/

http://www.secrets2tell.com/2011/11/02/why-i-am-not-safe/

http://www.secrets2tell.com/2011/09/20/this-truth-i-own/

http://www.examiner.com/dating-tips-6-in-richmond/esmeralda-barnes

But prison orange isn’t your hue. Hurt and desperation make you feel like a love-starved zombie jones’n for pain. You wonder what force compels you repeatedly through the revolving door of dead-end relationships.

Dumped or dateless or both, the only one way out of a love life that sucks (and keeps sucking) is through the damage that got you there.

No one is a loser magnet by fate or accident. You attract people who reflect, in one way or another, the level of emotional health and stability you have built throughout your life, health to health, or damage to damage. If you’re stuck on rescuing or being rescued, helping or being helped, you will attract a perfect partner. And it will be hell.

But you don’t have to be a lifetime member of Loser Magnets of America. You do have to choose to stop the madness, and take a break from mindless, loneliness-induced dating that one day will claim your soul and drive you to the brink of insanity and desperation.

What do I do? ask the dumped and dateless, with repetition worthy of a trademark. I wonder if (insert name here) is The One? How does (see previous) feel about me? they ask, searching desperately for answers that lead to freedom on healthy higher ground.

If you don’t start somewhere, you’ll be nowhere, says one of our favorite yogis about embarking on difficult journeys.

Start by reflecting on where you are in your life. Are you happy? Why or why not? How did your last relationship(s) end? How did you deal with the disappointment or sadness? Our relationship patterns, for better or worse, speak volumes on how we attract love into our lives, and the health (or lack of mind/body/spirit health) that magnetizes those relationships. Most of us need help unearthing ghosts of relationships past because they are tied to our earliest relationships. They’re not exactly exorcists, but a good counselor (spiritual or traditional) can help you exorcise the relationship demons that bind you.

It’s a public and personal service to keep your emotional sludge  to yourself before it leads to the only thing it can lead you to–more destruction.  Destructive patterns don’t stop until you consistently make healthier choices that form healthier patterns. Here are a few keys to maintaining your balance while you restore your mind, body and soul mojo.

Watch your investments. Don’t invest more than you can afford to lose in time and effort to attract and keep any relationship. Balance your level of attention and trust to reflect the energy and effort you see EVIDENCED in your partner or potential partner. For example, does your potential partner have empathy? Do they acknowledge hurting you? Are their words and deeds consistent? Do they use a lot of excuses? Do they drop out of your life for periods of time with no explanation? Many of us are aiming for the golden ring– marriage. But marriage is like a corporation, which means relationships are  like early start-ups with many details to ponder.

Communication, consistency and commitment are as good as currency, making or breaking any relationship. Forsake any one of them, fail to learn to use them and maintain them at healthy levels and you are sure to have a date to join the love zombie death march. You don’t have to be left sucked dry and miserable.

Background Check. Pay attention  to how people speak about past relationships. Do they own their weaknesses? Do they have overall empathy and respect for the other person? How they are inclined to handle one situation is how they will handle all situations. Cheaters, liars and losers don’t find cures in their next victims. People make mistakes. But love junkies, and the predators they sometimes become, have excuses for everything, taking little responsibility for their roles in failed relationships. Let’s face it. New Relationship Energy, commonly called NRE, is the drug of choice for many loser magnets and relationship junkies. Just say no to NRE and begin your journey from victim to victor in love.

Signs. If it’s healthy, it won’t take over your mind and turn you into a love-obsessed maniac. To experience real love is to feel balance and affirmation of your choices and free will. It spurs you to greater wholeness, making you bigger, not smaller. You’ll have two feet on the ground (skipping being swept off your feet so you don’t notice the secret toxic center) with access to passion that makes love’s ups and downs worth the trouble. Signs that you aren’t quite ready for the relationship you crave include anxiety about wanting to be with a certain person, even when you’re life is falling apart. If you don’t love you enough to secure you own peace, affirm your love for yourself, what do you really have to offer a potential partner? What do you think they can truly offer you? How will you recognize “real” love if the only “love” you know isn’t love at all, but mere obsession, compulsion or addiction?

If you must have said person and can’t conceive of not having him?  Cupid, we have a problem!  If  bad, disrespectful and hurtful behavior doesn’t make you take a stand for yourself and what you deserve, call for back up. Immediately!  NRE may be holding you hostage. Stop and  fix you, so you won’t be clamoring for some broken relationship, as if you really aren’t a Super God/Goddess worthy of the very best in love.

Rejection is direction, espouse some of our favorite spiritual gurus. You know what suffering is. You may be an expert in it.  What you owe yourself today is the possibility of having love that doesn’t hurt.  You can’t and won’t attract that kind of healthy love until you stop hurting you with dreadful choices leading to dead-end relationships.

Acting to heal your broken heart and spirit is an important step in taking back your power and starting to attract relationships worthy of you. Resources range from books such as Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life to guided meditation CDs from such experts as Kelly Howell to myriad counseling resources.

Be conscious, present and deliberate about the choices you make in love. Leave the zombies to Hollywood.

Within you is the power to draw the greatest love you’ve ever known.

For more information, resources and help, email us at powerwithinyou@verizon.net or call Rev. Barnes at 703-863-5491.

http://spiritualnetworks.com/corletta-clay/blog/dealing-with-disappointment/

So you mustn’t be frightened, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen. If an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you. That life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. ~German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke.

When we are grounded in the focused, clear energy of love and abundance, we make sound choices, stay motivated, seek healthy counsel and resolution to issues, and take calculated steps and risks. Sometimes the pay-off is immediate and we secure fast resolution to financial woes. Other times, delays and mounting expenses wear down even the strongest of us.

Where does that leave us, since lasting solutions are rarely simply “magical?” Feel it, say it and everything goes my way is not the whole story for most of us. The energy and language we choose and use are vital to the next step we take to discover our respective financial promised lands.  Action. But that can be complicated, if  true financial abundance is our goal.

Our last post in this blog column addressed the energy and the language behind attracting abundance, no matter what. Now, we lay the groundwork for the next step: action. But action any action will burn a body (and resources) out. Fast action (read fast solutions, like borrowing outside of our means, credit card misuse etc.,) is often fear-based, leading to more reasons to fear, like taking the short-cut that wasn’t.  That haste left many of us sleepless, with questions spinning panic:  What do I do NOW? What’s the right thing [right action] for me, now?  How do I get out of this financial mess? I don’t know what to do, where do I find  help?

If changing our energy and words begins our journey to financial abundance, taking the right action, at the right time, lights the way home to financial recovery and victory. Start by hitting STOP on that treadmill that has you thrashing about in despair, running worst case scenarios and taking desperate actions that deplete you in every way. Stop, take a breath and be still. Face yourself, and fill the present moment with the one thing that will begin to change your life, for good.

Be honest with yourself: Am I happy in general, and specifically with how I earn money? Am I tired, worn out and missing passion for what I do? Do I feel lost? Am I bored? Am I afraid?  What am I afraid of? What would I do if I felt anything were possible?

(Employment issues are dominating many of our clients’ worries, so we’ll use that common financial challenge for this post.) Many of us don’t make bold changes while we have a stable income and have most of our needs met, even if we hate where we earn that money.  Crisis is often a catalyst that forces us to ask these and other questions. This is your time to invest in your freedom, beginning with engaging in dialogue that holds keys to your true happiness. Only you know the answers to those questions; only you can change this. You are powerful enough to continue working in a manner that makes you miserable, but would that set you free or buy you a date with another financial crisis? Many do just that, following fear of lack right to a future that yields them trouble with interest. This is your time to be proactive, explore your heart’s true calling, re-connect with loving yourself enough to hold financial abundance (and blissful work) possible.  Fire the treadmill. The next step will show you how.

Find bridges & resources: We said it before. This is Earth, not Heaven. We don’t often produce miracles by wiggling our noses, although it’s an intriguing notion. Being unhappy, afraid and feeling plagued financially is often a sign to look deeper at how what you are doing isn’t and hasn’t been working for you. Talk to someone who can help you unload unexpressed fears, overwhelm, sadness, etc. Often those unexpressed emotions are so toxic that we become blind to resolutions right in front of us. You may have a friend or loved one who will listen to you. If not (and sometimes even so) counseling, be it spiritual or traditional or both, is a sound and safe way of dropping the dead weight and restoring your energy as you plan healthy steps to begin anew, greeting brighter days. How do you know you don’t have the next best great idea, save for the reality that you are too tired, sad, overwhelmed etc. to conceive it and believe it and make it happen? What if your next step is to make a big change that you could be ready to make, with the right support? Love yourself enough to talk to someone. Suffering it out, guarantees more despair and burn out.   Remember tools, such as guided meditation CDs (Kelly Howell has some great ones), community resources such as free or low-cost classes in yoga, breath work, group meditation and other healthy activities, such as exercise. Choose the energy and the words, then take simple steps, on your own behalf, to lead you to the peace you deserve. Set the tone consciously for what come next, and soon you will have the courage to take healthy, bolder steps toward brighter days. That leads to the last and perhaps most important step.

Consider what you can do, what is in your control.  Release the rest. No one ever solved a single problem by looking at that problem and beating their heads with it repeatedly.  But they did drive themselves nuts, cause undue harm to their minds, bodies, and spirits and cause even greater problems for everyone. Hasn’t life’s challenges done a sufficient job of that without your assistance? If it’s money you owe, speak to people. Face your debtors, in integrity, honesty and with the knowing that you are valuable and worth kindness, worth relief. Ask  for relief, assistance, a sliding scale, a payment plan, etc. You can hold your head up high knowing that having a financial challenge is NOT shameful.  It’s just one of life’s possibilities, just as financial abundance is a possibility well within your reach. Love and abundance can be ever present as you face your debtors, standing on integrity and affirming your own worth. The last thing you need is to suffer more. Be part of your solution by being an advocate for your own financial victory and restoration.  Better yet, be an advocate for your own well-being, of which financial stability is a part. Create “a safe place to land” by being kind to yourself, asking for what you need, and believing that you deserve the help. Commit pride to love, as it is of no healthy use to you now.

Inspiration sets us free! It’s where  true resolutionS to our financial woes live. That wasn’t a typo. There are infinite resolutions when we are inspired, in our own (divine) rights. When we take steps to ground the energy of love and abundance in our lives, we become divinely inspired, we apply for the right jobs, seek out and attract helpful resources, get organized and gain the courage to let go of old, oppressive burdens  that stand in the way of us manifesting rich, abundant financial futures. So before you act, stop and consider your overall state of being. Address THAT first.

It’s OK to feel DONE and sick and tired and scared. It is NOT OK to do nothing about it. You deserve better. A power lives deep within you that commands better. May peace, love, grace and ease light your way home.

Economic recession.  Foreclosures.  Lay offs.  Unemployment.  Homelessness. Hopelessness.  No way out…

The news drones on about it, affirming troubled times and human despair. We listen, soak in the words. Before we know it, (and often without thinking about it) we start using (read choosing) words that speak into existence the very things we fear the most. Simple cause and effect. We are not only what we eat, but what we hear, what we receive and believe, what we think and what we speak.

Ultimately, if we do not recognize, challenge and shift the energy behind the messages and events that bombard us, we indeed will be powerless as we careen toward more adversity.

But powerLESS  is the last thing we truly are, in spite of the most defeating lies our media-fueled fears tell us. Yes, we lost money, houses, jobs, retirement funds, hope and more. That’s hard evidence difficult for a human mind to ignore. But how did this happen? What did we lose first, the robust economy or our spiritual connection to an unlimited, self-sustaining source of abundance?

You may think you know the answer. But it’s never that simple.

What fuels our drive for wealth–the energy behind how we amass our relative fortunes– is as important as what we do with our money, once we have it. There are only two energies that mother our experiences on Earth, for better or worse: love and fear.

Fear requires us to surrender to it, give it our power. And it’s tricky. It speaks in the first person, affirms itself with familiar images, messages and events that reinforce doom and gloom. The compelling lies it tells begin with the biggest lie of all: that we don’t have a choice, that we’re ever lost and that nothing will ever change.

The truth: We always have a choice, beginning with choosing possibility rooted in the energy of divine abundance, of love. Hopelessness is fear’s progeny and we always have the power to disown it and render it homeless.

But too often, we fail to challenge what we fear, and fear ends up building condos in our head and heart spaces, gaining our consent and amassing greater power to destroy our lives than it ever would have had on its own. It is weak, fear. We make it strong by holding fearful thoughts that form fearful beliefs that mix with fearful emotion that meets our powerful, reactive will, ultimately creating self-defeating, self-destructive patterns. Writing that took my breath away, but that’s fear’s rhythm. It’s  fast, takes no pauses, makes no pit stops.

It takes discipline, focus and conscious choice to face and oppose fear’s dark call to surrender. It counts on us forgetting who we are, our origins. We are children of an abundant universe, ruled by love. We were born knowing this, knowing how to love, ourselves and others.  If you love you and are invested in your inherent worthiness, you won’t long entertain anything that would harm you or another.  You will always return home to love even when you do appear to forget who you are and let fear lure you away. This will happen to even the most spiritually sound of us. We do live on Earth, not in Heaven. We are humans, not angels. Choosing the energy of love is a commitment  that fear will oppose, even taunt, as we go about harried and lost in the bustle of life.

Fear counts on us forgetting that we can choose differently. It counts on us mindlessly forgetting that we can choose to shift our focus back to love, reclaiming our true points of power and finding our way back to abundant, brighter days sooner than we ever imagined.  Real-life miracles await, but we won’t ever find them if we don’t face our fears and change our thoughts and words to conjure love’s miracles, as opposed to fear’s real-life seemingly interminable nightmares.

The concept is as old as the universe: And the word was made flesh… As within so without.… Like attracts like. Spiritual theories long espouse the notion that thoughts and emotions inform all the elements that guide, for better or worse, our paths on this Earth. One of my favorite teachers, Louise Hay, built a revolutionary, spiritual empire on the principles of love versus fear and how thoughts, words, emotion, attention and intention inform our real-life circumstances. If you hear her in my words, it’s because she is one of the spiritual teachers I’ve been reading for 20 years. “There is no new information. All is ancient and infinite,” she declares. Our greatest challenge, then, is remembering that we are love.

Although these ancient, infinite and simple principles have been around forever, the timeless relief they have the power to bring seems to turn to vapor in the presence of our worst fears rising, faith falling and our capacity for love being tested to its limits. So many of our clients come to us at a total loss for what went wrong, even while their language reveals the root of their suffering. So lost are so many of us that we no longer hear the fear-based frame we put on our gratitude vocabulary–be it thanks for a new job, a promotion or a friend’s gift.

Have you heard people say things like this? I’m grateful to get a raise at all, in this economy. Thank goodness I got a job, in this economy.

Their experience is real, reflecting the messages and real-life events trumpeting lack, poverty and financial destruction. But if we continue to give the ailing economy place in our gratitude vocabulary–if we affirm The Economy’s power to set limits on our blessings–then we are at its mercy, on a leash of perpetual lack. No. That is not our destiny. That is not who we are.

What if we chose to recognize the true energy, the true power, at the root of our words? What if we chose differently, consciously shifted our energy from fear and lack to love and abundance, leaving love open to render our capacity for wealth limitless?

That might have us affirming anew:  I am grateful for this raise. I deserve financial abundance. I am open to receiving financial abundance. A love-based affirmation about a job might be I am grateful for this job that pays me more than I need and honors me in every way. I deserve abundant employment that stirs my soul’s passion. If you don’t have a job and are looking for one, you might want to add: I now attract the ideal job for me that pays me more than I need and honors me in every way. I deserve abundant employment that stirs my soul’s passion. I am grateful for my financial abundance.

Gratitude for financial kindness might sound something like, “I am abundantly loved and am willing to receive. Blessings are everywhere. I lovingly honor the cycle of giving and receiving. There is more than enough for everyone. All is well.

Take note that an affirmation does not affirm or mention the opposite of what it is seeking to draw. The use of the word “need” is subordinate to the abundance-rooted “more than,” as in “more than I need.” Keep it simple, using words like “now,” “more than,”  “open”  and “receive.” Remember that when you don’t know what to say, something really simple and open works just fine:  All is well and I now receive divine guidance. I am open to peaceful resolutions and blessings.

For some, wounds are so great that destructive patterns seem to follow them, lining their paths with bitter tears. Love ever awaits their return home to peace of every kind. I once heard a wise yogi say, “If you don’t start somewhere, you’ll be nowhere.” When all seems so lost and everything feels shaken and broken to its foundations, try creating a subtle shift in energy: I am safe. I am loved and I am open to peace. I am open to solutions that lead me back to love. I love myself and am willing to receive divine and earthly help. All is well. I am open to miracles.

It isn’t wiggle-your-nose magic, but it is a call to love, a call to make better, brighter days possible. It is a living prayer to the divine of your understanding opening wide your heart to possibility, with you as the vessel willing to overflow with miracles of every kind. Be willing to let your cup runneth over! Our universe is loving, abundant and conspiring to help us achieve our hearts’ desires. Suffering was our idea, but that is really a topic for another blog post.

For this one, know this: You are greater than fear, greater than your biggest loss, greater than your deepest misery…. You may have lost financially, but you are not lost. You can stand squarely in the energy of love, both feet on the ground, ready to meet your miracle and call forth your better days. Command that they be filled with peace, love, grace and ease, and our benevolent, willing universe will say YES, to you.

Who knows what your financial resolution or relief will look like on Earth. Forget those details. Set intentions on love and abundance and those energies will inform what comes next. In the meantime, be open to the possibility that you deserve more than living with fear and allowing lack to rule your life. Observe your thoughts, words and feelings.  Counter fear when it tries to rise, with simple affirmations that ground you in a higher energy. Be grounded in love, insist and return to it, no matter what.  This is your point of power from which all things are possible.

Civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks called today’s mighty oak “yesterday’s nut that held its ground.” You hold your ground with love. Speak financial abundance into your life, invoking the divine authority you possess to create total, unlimited abundance rooted in love. The power is, and always has been, within you.  Call it forth:

I deserve and receive financial abundance, peace and freedom now. I reclaim my time, my energy, my focus and my financial abundance. I create the best days of my life now. I greet them happily and receive more money than I need. I have enough to share and do so happily. I am blessed, protected and growing in divine wealth and happiness every day.

May peace, love, grace, and ease open wide the doors to your bright, abundant financial destiny. Right now.