“Bridge of Contemplation” from the Connection Photography Collection available in my shop.

Are you happy? Truly happy?

My grade 6 teacher didn’t think that “being happy” was an appropriate response to “What do you want to be when you grow up?”.

My answer remains unchanged, however, and the Dalai Lama agrees:

“The purpose of our lives is to be happy”.

So how do we do that? The answers, I’ve often been told, are within.

I thought I fully understood what that meant.

I considered myself a good listener when it came to my Spirit Calls, living a life of passion and purpose.

As I’ve written in a previous post, I’ve followed my intuition around the world, constantly growing and stretching my comfort zones.

In 2015, however, I realized that my listening skills weren’t as good as I thought.

Although I’d followed my inner guidance, devoting all my time to building my website and artist career, I was still operating with the beliefs and emotional coping patterns learned in childhood.

I pushed myself too hard and became the toughest boss I’d ever had.

My self-imposed expectations, pressures, and judgments were taking their toll. I could physically feel the anxiety and stress. Fear started running the show.

I became too busy to listen to the gentler voices inside, so my body became the communication channel. It protested.

As Dr. Gabor Maté writes in his book “When the Body Says No – The Hidden Costs of Stress”,

“What has happened is that we have lost touch with the gut feelings designed to be our warning system… (T)he salient stressors in the lives of most human beings today – at least in the industrialized world – are emotional. Just like laboratory animals unable to escape, people find themselves trapped in lifestyles and emotional patterns inimical to their health. The higher the level of economic development, it seems, the more anesthetized we have become to our emotional realities.”

Fortunately, years of mindfulness training helped me recognize the energetic tremors and physical stress, but childhood conditioning kept me pushing longer than was healthy.

I was determined to be good enough, strong enough, perfect enough, etc. Sounds familiar?

The cost of repressing, denying, avoiding, or overreacting to our emotions, is high. We’ve been paying it all our lives.

As children, we learned to fulfill the conditions of everyone around us, trying to make them happy and ignoring our own emotional guidance system.

The result is that many have lost touch with the messages of their bodies, minds, and spirits and end up in a state of physical, mental, or spiritual dis-ease.

We end up unhappy and unhealthy.

Luckily, I stopped denying what was happening before I burned out. Instead, I chose to re-establish harmony, balance, and alignment.

This wasn’t easy – leaving the computer for even a day initially made me more anxious. It’s pretty scary jumping off the hamster wheel when you think it’s going somewhere…

As Abraham (a group of evolved spiritual teachers channelled through Esther Hicks) explains,

“Until the stakes are really high, most of you are … chronically holding yourselves away from the vibration of alignment that is so natural to you, so a little bit of attention to how you feel as a determination to feel better more of the time will take an effort.”

Hearing the same message from spiritual and medical experts helped me accept that I was still hanging on to beliefs and emotional coping patterns that no longer served me.

“A major contributor to the genesis of many diseases … is an overload of the stress induced by unconscious beliefs. If we would heal, it is essential to begin the painfully incremental task of reversing the biology of belief we adopted very early in life. Whatever the external treatment is administered, the healing agent lies within. The internal milieu must be changed. To find health, and to know it fully, necessitates a quest, a journey to the centre of our own biology of belief. That means rethinking and recognizing – re-cognizing: literally, to “know again” – our lives.” Dr. Gabor Maté.

My career choices may have been aligned with my purpose and previous intuitive guidance, but the anxious vibrations I was putting out into the world weren’t bringing back the results I wanted – either in my business or in my being.

I was off track. I had to get back on. As Abraham says,

“when you relax and get back on track, you can feel the clarity, abundance, your worthiness, fun, vitality, eagerness, and passion, and life feels good.”

So that’s what I did. I got off the computer, traveled to see my family, connected to Source through nature, painting and inspirational podcasts, and I’ve kept a better balance ever since, even if I’m currently participating in another online business course while also reviewing last year’s course.

But I’m much happier and healthier now.

We have access to Divine Guidance all the time – we simply have a tendency to listen more when dire circumstances cause us to stop and pay attention.

Why wait that long? The answers truly are within. They’re in the stored emotions calling to be healthily expressed and released as well as in our moment-by-moment emotional gage.

For your sake and all those around you, listen. And seek help when you need it.

There are many empowering tools available to help you on this transformational journey. I offer 3 (see Custom Services in the menu tabs). Think of these as hearing aids.

In selecting tools that resonate with you, you’re creating the necessary expectation of healing that enhances their benefits. You create the intention and open yourself to happiness.

As Dr. Maté and Abraham both teach, whichever modality of treatment or empowerment tools people choose, the key to healing and happiness is your willingness to ask the questions and make informed choices in alignment with your true essence.

It’s important to remember though, that alignment with your Higher Self -happiness – is a moment-by-moment process.

It takes time, patience, practice, and unconditional love.

It’s worth it! You’re worth it.

What is your body saying? How are you feeling? What hearing aids do you believe will best help you?

Please don’t wait until your body says no to start listening.