Clinically crazy? Yes. Certifiably FIERCE? Yes. I dabble in animal medicine (because I can) and without realizing it, I had been carrying around an illusion of myself that no longer served or even excited me. In a nutshell, dragonfly medicine teaches us that everything we believe about ourselves is in fact, an illusion. It is our job in this lifetime to sort through these many illusions of self in order to discover which ones remain effective and which ones are dragging us down in any given moment. Letting go of the dream I’ve carried in my back pocket since I was 15 wasn’t and isn’t easy, AND I’m so glad I did.

Processing the Shift—Recognizing Truth Change vs Quitting. The next day the inner war began. My inner downer voice screamed, “Quitter!” in the very same moment my inner JOY voice was whispering, “…way to go girl!”. Over the years I have learned that my truth is spoken in small, barely audible whispers while my inner critic shows up as a maniacal, depressing aggressor. Hence, this is why it is only in the quietest of moments that I can actually hear my truth—aka 3am-ish. In the aftermath of the war, I applied a Values-Based Experiment I use in coaching against this new truth, only to find consensus. What I felt instinctively and what ended up on the paper matched. Do a little dance, sing a little song…

In life, we can only connect the dots backwards. Time will tell why I needed to shift this energy into a different stream (Hitting the eject button on Need To Know Everything Now version of self). One thing for sure, I am slowly detaching myself from the idea that my creativity flows only in the realms of art. I am learning to love this new illusion that everything I do is creative, that in fact I AM the creative flow. This dragonfly welcomes her new colours.

As each of us expands in our own understanding and consciousness, that growing level of awareness raises the level for everybody on the planet. The trick lies in how to open up to your true identity and inner power so that you can live from the heart without losing your mind, right!?

The Focused Intention Technique process, also known as FIT is a simple technique consisting of questions which take you into your ”feeling body”, the part of you guided by heart centered consciousness. This is where your personal truth strives to harmonize with the divine. When we choose to create feelings of love and compassion in our lives, we can feel this energy radiate from our heart and outward into the world. We feel supported and connected by all that is. Our bodies feel lighter and at peace. When those feelings are not apparent in our life, we know without a doubt that we are out of alignment with heart centeredness.

FIT is a tool or language that can be used to communicate with the part of ourselves that is subconscious. Opening up to Higher Truth requires the ability to speak to the part of ourselves which governs our actions and our attractions. If you’re not attracting the life you want to create, you can use FIT to recognize where you are limiting yourself based on your belief system. With each belief you change, you break out of rigid structures and beliefs no longer appropriate to birth a new you, more aligned with your truth and power.

Your consciousness always seeks to express itself in ways that are aligned with the totality of your being. When you practice inner awareness and honor the voice of Spirit within, you evolve; when you suppress it out of fear or some such emotion, you devolve.

Our senses are constantly bombarded by information from our subconscious mind but do you ever fin it challenging to hear or understand what is being communicated? With FIT you can create the awareness of your vibration and train yourself to understand the energetic dialogue.  It is our authentic nature to be happy and joyful, to feel abundance and harmony in our lives. Whenever you realize you are out of alignment with those feelings, you can use the FIT process to discover the core beliefs which need to be transformed in order to bring your energetic body into balance with Source energy.

With FIT you can start the dialogue by connecting with the wisdom of your body and listening to what is being expressed. The questions are simple and take you deeper and deeper into your subconscious mind. The process invites you to listen to your body and hear/see/feel what is not working for you. Once you’re aware of your limiting belief/issue, you can then change your perspective and move yourself from the darkness to the light. You are inviting the disowned part of yourself to join the whole of you by transforming the belief with resource states. These states are voiced by the subconscious because it knows what it needs to move forward and continue to evolve.

Throughout the process you become aware of how you made decisions based on your perspective at the time of an event or series of events.  FIT allows us to build an infrastructure of personal power and truth necessary for the foundation of manifesting our desires. Each time we transform a limiting belief at its core, we grow stronger and more grounded in our everyday reality. We begin to see the law of attraction work in ways we barely imagined. Life becomes easier; there is less struggle and more room for allowing. We realize our sense of control is a false sense of security. We understand that we have a common theme transcending all aspects of our lives. Once we are aware of our theme, we can make better choices in alignment with our authentic self.

FIT is a gentle yet very powerful way of transcending into our subconscious to transform the obstacles sabotaging our journey to ‘lightness’.  FIT assists in reminding you that infinite viewpoints exist and if you continue to transform ideas or beliefs limiting your potential you can create the life you desire. Every time you use FIT on yourself or with a client, an energetic shift occurs.  Even if your conscious mind is not aware, your subconscious mind lets you know by the way you feel. You feel lighter and more liberated.

The greatest impact FIT has on the world is that this process easily and magically allows us to temporarily drop from mind to heart—to take us to a place of feeling. We are reminded of how we are all energetically connected and if we each focus on how to heal our own bodies; we heal each other at the same time. http://justlivingyourlife.com/

For example, one client came to me because she was having trouble trusting the new partner in her life, even though they were getting along and he treated her very well. She couldn’t shake the belief that he would one day discover that she ‘wasn’t worthy’ of him and trade her in for a prettier, younger version. I hear this story a lot for some reason- as an unbiased observer, it always strikes me as ludicrous because the woman sitting before me is inevitably bright, beautiful, and lovely with everything going for her. But hey, I’ve been there myself so no judgment on my end.

Once we examined her family-of-origin and recent relationship history, it became extremely understandable why she was having this particular reaction to her new mate. As a child, her father didn’t ‘get’ her because she was shy and sensitive and needed emotional connection from him and he was the exact opposite temperament. This set up a devastating dynamic for the little girl who always felt that her daddy was rejecting her and came to the conclusion that because he was uncomfortable around her and couldn’t meet her emotional needs that there was something horribly defective about her-that she was basically unlovable.

Fast-forward twenty years when she’s in a long-term relationship and chooses a partner just like daddy- who doesn’t ‘get’ her and is emotionally unavailable- and you have a formula for lifelong pain and suffering. In fact, the boyfriend before her latest love went even further than her father had- he kept leaving her, and thus, she was always on edge when they’d reunite, wondering when the other shoe would drop once again and she’d be without him.

With this background context, it’s understandable why she was having such trouble trusting her new boyfriend and believing that he was actually there for her and wasn’t going anywhere. What was extremely helpful for this particular woman was to gain an understanding of where all of these anxious thoughts and feelings came from (i.e., past experiences with men), letting go of judging herself for having them, and instead, finding some closure with her father and the previous boyfriend who had helped create this state of high anxiety for her in relationships with men.

One of the best methods I know for obtaining closure with the past is through letter writing. This is what I prescribed to this particular client and it worked wonders. In her case, I suggested she write letters to both her father and the most recent ex that she did not send to them. This part is extremely important! This exercise is for your own therapy and can cause terrible boomerang effects if it’s shared with the people you have unfinished business with. You write such a letter by stating the facts of what happened in the past between the two of you and what they did or said to you specifically that has caused damage. Then you write about how the behaviour and/or words affected you and how it’s still affecting you now (especially in your current relationships), and why you want to let it go for good.

If you don’t feel safe leaving this writing to be found by others, simply type it out in a blank Word document and delete it immediately after writing so there is no trace of it for others to find later on.

Then write a letter to your inner child (the darling little girl you once were and still are inside) stating the opposite of what you were taught that was so damaging. In the case, my client told her little girl that she was totally lovable and deserved a wonderful man who could give her what she needed. She also told her that the big her (i.e., the adult she is now) totally loves and accepts the little girl exactly as she is and that she deserves all that she desires in relationships.

Good luck with putting the past where it truly belongs- in the past.

In fact, I cannot even count how many times I have come to this land! Since the age of 19, I’ve averaged one visit every second year, and more recently, once a year since my only surviving grandparent is here and I want to spend as much time with her as I can. In my teens, all four of my grandparents lived in London, as well as an aunt, cousin, uncle, and too many great aunts/uncles and second cousins to count- all of whom I am lucky enough to be close to thanks to so much time spent here while I was growing up.

Sadly, many of the elders have passed away, but I still have a number of relatives living here that I feel the need to visit yearly. It’s kind of weird when I’m in Canada and I meet someone with an English accent and get all excited and tell them about my Englishness because I have a Canadian accent (although I use a lot of ‘Englishisms’ in my speech) and also weird being in England, feeling like it’s my second home, and being seen purely as a Canadian, or ‘foreigner’. Sometimes I wish that I had been born and raised in England so that my accent matched that of my family and I felt as though I fit in a bit better, but then I wouldn’t have the wonderful life and opportunities living in Canada has afforded me (which are many).

It’s an odd feeling to feel homesick for two different countries, which are so unique and separate. While living in Canada, I comfort myself by watching BBC television and renting countless British films and reading as many English novels as I can get my hands on. I also like to bring back little trinkets for use in my home, which remind me of England  (wanted to bring back matches but realized that these would most likely be confiscated at security on my journey back to Canada).

During my regular visits to England, I like to Skype people in Canada and read novels by Canadian authors and excitedly chat with random strangers in the street who are displaying a Canadian flag- I think I nearly caused a woman to faint with shock yesterday when I did this in a local supermarket- she wasn’t expecting such enthusiasm from a fellow Canadian…

It also causes much confusion to fellow Canadians that I am Jewish as well as partly British- for some reason they can’t understand how you could be both. It’s not strange to me as I know that Jews live all over the world, in many different countries and take on the accents/languages of that place and often move around a lot even once they’ve settled somewhere. We are, after all, a nomadic tribe.

I’m working on an exciting project regarding eating disorder activism in Canada and the UK and am hoping to bridge the two countries I have come to know and love so well together. We’ll see how that goes. For now, I’m going back to my granny’s for dinner, then hopping on a plane tomorrow morning back to Canada where I will jump into the arms of my dear hubby and relax once again on the small, laidback Canadian island we call home.

Even with all of the blessings that have come in my 30’s (i.e., material comfort, wisdom, grounding, and a great marriage), I am completely bewildered at how I could possibly be turning 40 on my next birthday and don’t exactly relish the thought. Ideally, I’d love to be able to magically mix my 20’s looks with my 30’s wisdom and stability and stay 30 forever, but as we all know, this is an impossibility (maybe not for long due to how advanced science is these days…)

So I guess my only choice is to proverbially ‘like it or lump it’…I choose liking it-okay, maybe I don’t exactly LIKE it, but I am choosing to feel positive, excited, and empowered about growing older. I guess it beats the alternative- being fearful, resentful, and living in regret or staying stuck by denying the entire ageing process altogether. I definitely don’t want to become one of those women who do anything and everything in her power to stay youthful looking as long as is humanly possible. I definitely don’t find that empowering.

The fact is, we are all going to get older (that’s if we live long enough and are lucky enough), so we might as well have a positive attitude about it. To end, I’ll leave you with a list of some things I hope to enjoy in my 40’s- the next decade life will soon hand me:

Continuing the amazingly rewarding and successful career I have and trying some new things like doing more video/television work, seeing more and more clients via Skype and telephone, speaking at conferences and doing more tours with my books.
Enjoying more of the good life with my darling hubby- taking fun trips, more dance lessons, more barbeques on our back deck, and enjoying our dear friends.
Richer and more satisfying friendships with other women- I have started to build these in my 30’s and look forward to nurturing and enriching these amazing bonds with my peers.
More time with my family- travelling to exotic places together and enjoying family vacations/family time.
Letting go of painful things, which happened in my past in other words-more therapy!
Enjoying my hard-earned wisdom and passing it onto future generations of girls and women.

Accepting my looks and body, as they are no matter what age I am.

Enjoying more hobbies I love but don’t spend enough time doing like reading, knitting, mosaic-making, dancing, and doing hot yoga. Doing more writing and publishing.

However, a lot of us still have fear to take the next step in life that is needed to go in the direction that we truly want to go in.  This does not involve the type of strength that appears suddenly when hit with crisis.  Most of us don’t take the steps necessary to go for our dreams because we think we are not going to be strong enough to take on what it involves to go there.  Or we are afraid of failure?  Or success? What if?  Attached to outcomes…we all want things to turn out exactly the way we see them…but what if they don’t?  Do we have the strength to handle that outcome?  Do we have the strength to make it through if it is harder than we thought?  What if people around me think I am crazy?  What if my spouse doesn’t like me anymore because I am doing things differently?  What if I can’t pay my bills?  What if I take time away from taking care of everyone else?  What if I appear selfish?  Am I being selfish?

First of all, stop and think of all of the things that will be positive about the changes you will make.  Write them down.  What if it does create everything you have always wanted?  What if your journey takes you in a different direction than anticipated, yet it is still better than where you are now.  What if your new experiences create such positive energy and excitement despite the difficulties that come with change?  What if you find that you are an even more incredible person than you ever thought you were capable of becoming?  What if you do have the strength to handle anything that comes your way?  What if people turned around after you started your journey and noticed how incredible your life is becoming because you took a risk, believed in yourself, and no matter what, the process made you stronger, created positive  change and now your friends and family are coming to you for advice on how to improve their lives?  YEAH??? Well, I can tell you that most likely the positive things that I just mentioned will occur.  Now are you scared?   If you only knew what you truly are capable of…you would never fear again.

Over the last decade there has been an explosion of plastic surgery and a lot of that has been given as gifts for the Holidays.  I can’t think of a more disturbing gift at a more awkward time!  At a time when we should be enjoying the fact that we are all perfect gifts from God we are hoping to find a tummy tuck or a nose job under the tree!  More and more of those people are finding they are not happier after having the work done.  People the world over are searching for beauty on the outside when it truly starts with feeling content and empowered.  So back to my point, where should we start finding our peace…inside!  Let’s use this time to find your inner zen.

Let’s envision that you are gift to the world, a wonderful gift in fact, one that should be re-gifted often.  What is the most important part of that gift?  Is it the wrapping paper, ribbons, and bows?  You know as well as I do that what really matters is not only what’s inside the box but does it do what is intended to do?  If it is a beautiful diamond, does it sparkle and shine?  If it is a toy is it fun to play with?

When something or someone is true to their purpose and simply enjoys being they are source of beauty for the world.  Before waiting for New Year’s resolution season to come around take some time to explore what it is that brings purpose and joy to you.  Consider what you would be doing in your perfect job, relationships, and personal life that will bring beauty to your soul. Now take that a step farther and actually write that down as more of a to-do list.  There is something about the process of putting pen to paper and seeing your dreams in front that helps bring them to reality.

Next, unlike making a wish list of gifts that you don’t have, think of the beautiful things that you do have.  It can be your beautiful smile, buoyant personality, intuitive feeling and connection to those around you, constant optimism, or just about anything else.  By taking this mental and emotional inventory you remind yourself of the value that you already hold rather than thinking there must me something more.   That is the point after all, you are already more than enough! All too often we think of ourselves in terms of the “mizpah”, the beautiful friendship necklace that we gave each other as kids to symbolize the eternal bond that was each half of heart coming together.  The true gift is one whole heart given to as many people has you can throughout your life.

Put yourself under the mistletoe and pucker up, it’s time to love you!

I want to start by defining your beauty from the inside.   So let’s get to the definition, are you ready?

Webster’s dictionary, defines beauty as; the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit. Wow!  We’ve been obsessed with physical beauty for thousands of years and there it was right there in the dictionary, ‘pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit!’

Okay, so that’s the dictionary talking but what are your words for what exalts you inside and out?  And how do you get there?  If you were to think of your life as a business you would want to come up with a catchy name, check! That’s your name.  Then you would want to think about what you want the business to do and be and accomplish.  Of course you would want to be well regarded and respected.  Inside and out you would want to be nice to look at and be with and definitely something that plays an integral part of society right?  Well let’s do the next step in you want to live your life.  Let’s take a very important bit of time here to carve out exactly how you want to be perceived from this day forward!

It’s homework time. I want you to write your name, and a little dash next to it like you were writing a definition.  Next I want you to define how you would like to be perceived.  This is your vision for the ultimate you.  If you already are many of the things you would like to be, outstanding!  But be sure to jot those down to reinforce your who you would like to continue to be.  Whether that is funny, outgoing, respected, well-read, generous, positive, influential, resourceful, business-like, well-mannered, (fill in) whatever that is that would be the best you for you that is going to be the right answer.  Now go ahead and jump on that, I’ll give you a minute.

Right now I hope you are looking at the page and thinking that sure looks like someone you’d like to be best friends with, work with, be married to, etc.  That’s exactly the point!  Far too many people go through their lives wishing that had said or done things differently.  Far too often we lose a friend or relative too young and think of how unfortunate it is that they had so much to give to the world.  Let’s not wait until it’s too late, let’s start today living the life we want.  The first part of living a dream life is dreaming what it should look like and we just did that.  Now the task becomes walking boldly into that visualization, keeping the words we wrote above displayed somewhere to remind us of who we are and who we are going to be.  You will take those attributes and qualities that you aspire to and make a conscious effort to turn them into reality.  I know it sounds simple, because it is!  One of my favorite author/speakers, Wayne Dyer, has a book and a phrase that I love, “Change the way you look at things and the way you look at things will change.”  You are going to start by finding your true beauty where it has been all the time, in your heart. Quit asking the mirror on the wall who’s the fairest of them all, wake up and TELL the mirror!

During the last few weeks of 2009, I started to feel more and more like it’s become more painful to hide and repress who I am and how I feel than to express it. When I first started to feel this way, it came with a nice hot side dish of attitude: Hey buddy, if you don’t like me *blank* you! Now, of course I realized that I didn’t want to stay there, but I still sensed there was something healthy on the horizon. After a lifetime of seeking approval, I finally felt little need for it. I had a confidence and a love for myself that I had never had before.

I look around and notice how hard this can be for most of us. We really do live in a society that does not celebrate truth – in fact we celebrate the illusion most of the time. Sure, things are evolving little by little, but at this point in history there is still more of the b.s. out there than the real deal.

I’ve noticed in my commitment to truth that it is incredibly freeing to say exactly how I feel while trying to express myself in a healthy and loving way. However, I still notice that it can make people uncomfortable and sometimes trigger their own “stuff” to come up to the surface. I think it’s why many of us prefer to not rock the boat rather than say no, express anger, set boundaries or limits, or simply state our own truth. On some level, it must mean that we value the approval from others more than from ourselves.

Remember what they say on the plane? “Put your own oxygen mask on first?” If we go through life trying not to say something wrong, hurt someone’s feelings, make someone angry with us, or say no to a person or situation that we know in our bones is not serving us anymore – we exhaust ourselves. When we do what is best for us first, stay true to who we are, and love ourselves – then we can show up in the world in an authentic and loving way. People in your life will trust you even more because they know that if you didn’t want to be there you wouldn’t, and if don’t like it you’ll say so.

In starting off a new year, or even a new day, it’s important to remember that if you don’t take care for yourself and take care of others first, someone is getting the short end of the stick. This is about valuing ourselves and letting the world know that we’re valuable – and setting that shining example for others. The truth is, yes – someone may get upset with you if you say how you feel. Someone may not like it when you put up a boundary. Someone might kick and scream if you say “no, I’m tired – you’ll have to make your own dinner tonight”. That is true.

Is it worth it? Will that make everyone happier if you say yes, while seething and screaming on the inside? If you think your thoughts are not landing somewhere, think again. If you stay true to yourself and you feel good, you feel free, you feel valuable – what will you be sending out then? Trust me on this: the world needs your honesty and love more than your politeness and repressed anger.

Think about it! Right now, even today as you read this, an opportunity will come for you to practice this. If we want to live in a world that values truth, it starts with you and me. Go on and tell ‘em how you feel. It’ll get easier the more you do it – I promise! Let your truth and light shine for all to see today, even if it comes with a hot steaming side dish of a little attitude from time to time. It’s okay – we can handle it.

For so many of us, that would have been the end of it all. For Kaminski, it was just the beginning.

Kaminski is a dream tender and a doctoral student of depth psychology at the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara. Dream tending is a technique of activating the dream images that visit us and honouring them as embodied entities that are greater than ourselves. Kaminski believes that to understand a dream, you have to enter into a dialogue with the dream image, give it a persona, invite it into your living room, and understand the wisdom inherent in it.

For her, dreams are not merely symbols that need to be analyzed; she calls dreams the language of our souls. Take the scary owl dream.

“It’s an act of imagination, but that owl comes and sits on my shoulder.” Kaminski says, tapping her right shoulder softly. “It takes me to the forest, it guides me, it becomes a mentor, and it reveals its wisdom. It stops being scary.”

But scary dreams are an indicator, Kaminski says, that deep down somewhere an emotional wound still festers. She says bad dreams are touching into really sensitive, emotional issues buried deep somewhere in the mind.

“Nightmares are asking for our attention,” she snaps her fingers and waves her hands. “They are saying, hey, look up here.”

In the process of tending to a dream, Kaminski peels away the layers of the subconscious. By the end, a revelation occurs that can be therapeutic.

“There is anger and there’s crying, and some people feel exhausted and they want to sleep and there are some who just feel light,” she says.

Stacey Kaminski says to understand our dreams, we have to honour them first.

Kaminski has lived in Squamish for seven years. She has studied dreams all her life, both the western psychological traditions, and the South American shamanic ones.

Say the words dream interpretation and the image of an old bearded Austrian might spring up in the mind. Sigmund Freud. His idea of dreams as the voice of our repressed desires has been denounced by feminists and his own followers. Kaminski goes one step ahead. She says Freud and other psychologists have treated the dream image as a static object to be studied, almost like a dead rat in the laboratory.

Dreams, Kaminski says, are not clinical subjects that can be dissected, but are a medium to reach a higher plane of understanding about your own self. Getting to that level of awareness is the first step to happiness, she says.

Kaminski was interested in dreams and their hidden meanings since her childhood. She read extensively on the subject, and soon people started asking her to interpret their dreams.

“People would be like, ‘so, I had the wildest dreams yesterday. Can you explain it to me?’ I think people are just drawn to their dreams,’‘ she said.

Recently, she decided that she wanted to offer this as a service. She said she had dreamt about it.

Get in Touch

You can get in touch with Kaminski at 604-935-9022 or email her at info@soulspacesquamish.com. Her website is www.soulspacesquamish.com

This article was created by the Squamish Reporter. Visit them at http://www.thesquamishreporter.ca/index.php?id=32