self-compassion
The Wise Approach To Mercury Retrograde
According to astrology, our lives can be in upheaval when Mercury goes Retrograde. Its effects can be felt by anyone, regardless of your zodiac sign.
However, some signs may be more sensitive to its influence than others. This is because Mercury is the ruler of Gemini and Virgo, and people with strong placements of these signs in their birth charts may be more likely to experience disruptions in communication, technology, and transportation during a Mercury retrograde.
Although this concept is widely touted in the spiritual and metaphysical communities, I find that many people affected by it do not understand its true meaning and are not well informed on how best to deal with it.
Mercury retrograde is indeed a challenging cosmic influence. It tends to feel like we have just finished one round of it, and the next one is already looming on the horizon.
A common side effect of Mercury Retrograde for many people is unexplained nervous energy or restlessness. You feel anxious and stressed about everything, and you can’t figure out why? Sometimes you feel anxious about things that have never bothered you in the past.
You may also have a hard time concentrating on things. Retrograde energy can throw even the most calm and centered person off balance.
Letting Go Heals Our Silent Pain
Too often we are not aware of the emotional pain in others. We are blissfully ignorant of the invisible pain that they are suffering. This is the secret pain of grief, of tragedy and loss. It is often the silent pain that many of us carry inside, a pain we secretly endure every day.
Our grief and sorrow is something we hide from the world, because we tend to feel ashamed, embarrassed or guilty for not being ‘stronger.’ The fast-paced modern world we live in has little patience with those who need time to mourn and heal. Life goes on, they say.
Those who are grieving must get through their pain as best they can, often without having anyone to talk to or no one wo cares to understand. They must simply put on a happy face and get through the day.
Sometimes people are having a hard time processing a loss or disappointment because they do not want to let go. Why would anyone choose to hold on to the pain, you may ask? Well, there is sometimes a strange comfort found in a state of holding on. When our world feels upside down and the future seems uncertain, we tend to hold on to the familiarity of the past, of the life we once knew.
The energy of such an ongoing state of silent pain soon becomes an imbalance in the throat chakra and blocks our ability to heal. The throat chakra plays a very big part, because it is our energy center of truth, the seat of our power to communicate our free will and talk about our true feelings.
Suppressed mental and emotional pain in time manifests itself in our body in many debilitating ways, such as migraine headaches, stomach aches, physical discomfort and a variety of other symptoms and potential health problems. Only when the pain is addressed and processed, will it go away and will our well-being improve.
Honor Your Past Life Memories
Sometimes we experience unusual memories accompanied by intense emotions, when nothing unusual has happened to trigger it and there is no apparent reason for us to feel this way. These memory flashbacks may be due to past life experiences that had a profound impact on our soul evolution.
Past life memories tend to come out of nowhere. For example, I love traditional parades, but whenever the marching band passes by I always get the shakes and even begin to cry.
I am also deathly afraid of covered bridges, to the point that feel traumatized whenever I must cross one. I also have a claustrophobic phobia to be trapped in confined spaces, or climbing up to a high place and being unable to come down. And last but not least being tickled freaks me out completely!
I believe these fears are all due to energy imprints from traumatic previous life experiences. As constantly evolving souls we all journey through many lifetimes on the path to spiritual transcendence. It’s not simple or easy to shape a fully enlightened spiritual being.
So, why do we sometimes ‘remember’ these former traumas and why do we let it affect our current life? There is always a reason we carry things over from lifetime to lifetime. Some are things we still need to heal or overcome, while others are protective warnings of past life dangers that are meant to shield us from repeating the same mistakes.
In my work as a professional psychic and healer, I have also found that many people carry a fear of what caused their deaths in previous lives.
Sometimes these cellular memories from former incarnations are also beneficial and positive, even amazing. For example, I have heard of people who mysteriously just know how to sew, speak a foreign language, or handle a gun with confidence. Some people are inexplicably gifted to play musical instruments with no training, or paint, or dance. Some are naturally born healers or inventors with no formal education. Their abilities and skills just seem to come naturally.
The Courage To Rescue Your Inner Child
Many people wish they had better memories of their childhood. For some the traumatic experiences of their youth is something they would much rather forget. But spirit has shown me that each piece of our life happens for a reason.
Learning to overcome and rise above the negative events in our life enables us to grow and expand. We do not get to pick and choose the parts we like, and discard the rest in the deepest closet of our mind. We become an empowered, improved version of ourselves when we find healing and forgiveness by redeeming even the worst parts of our life experience.
We all matter. We all bring unique gifts to this world. No matter what has happened to us, we must rescue every lost or damaged moment of our life journey. Those tragic events and awful experiences are what molds us into who we are today and who we are meant to become.
Nobody chooses some the things that might happen to them: family dysfunction, separation, divorce, rivalry, abuse, loss, death. As children we often blame ourselves for the things that happen around us, or we block it out, never wanting to remember it again. But this only means that you have left a part of yourself behind in the darkness of the past. But now that you are older and wiser, wouldn’t it be awesome if you could go back and save that part of you?
As a little girl I loved horses and dogs, but we could not afford to keep any. I made up for it by drawing them. My parents could also not afford to buy me expensive drawing paper, so I had to wait until my mom returned from the grocery store, because I would then get the used brown paper bags to draw on. It may seem somewhat silly, but to this day I still buy lots of paper whenever I get the chance! One would think there was going to be a shortage on paper, based on how I tend to stock up.
What Were You Thinking!
Looking back on your life, I’m sure you, like myself, have often questioned certain people you hung out with and wondered why you wasted so much time dating or hanging out with them; or you wonder why you told that certain person something very private, which later came back to bite you, because you discovered that your confidante was a back-stabber. They key after you learn such a life lesson, is not to repeat it. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
The good news is that there is enlightenment to be had and reaped from ill decisions made in the past. You don’t have to keep rehashing it over and over in your head; you can say: “What was I thinking?” Be glad you have learned from it, because now you are free from to move forward.
So many people are not shifting forward, because they keep tripping up over bad choices from the past. For example, they may feel that they cannot date a certain type of person, because they had a bad experience dating someone like that in the past and now they don’t want to give love a chance. I believe love always hurts one way or another – whether it’s a healthy relationship or a bad romance. It’s all about learning how much of yourself to give.
I have heard so many say, “I wish I had the self-esteem I have now back then. I was young and I had the body, and I was in better shape.” Don’t have regrets. Be thankful you finally learned to love yourself enough to not worry about what you do, or don’t have now.
Enlightenment and self-knowledge comes with age, but some never pick up on what life lessons had been laid down for them. They keep repeating the same mistakes, and hence have to come back and do it all over in another lifetime.
Healing The Karmic Patterns Of Ancestral Trauma
Sometimes during meditation, I recall past events and childhood memories that had been long forgotten. A recent vision, for example, took me back to the home I was raised in. But the scene was one I do not remember.
I saw myself as a little girl, around three years old, and members of my mother’s family were visiting us. Everyone was singing and playing instruments together. I saw myself watching them and enjoying the music, but then felt guided to look diagonally upward to another scene happening simultaneously.
In the other scene I saw my ancestors; at least that is what I concurred because they were going back in a line. Behind my great grandmother, who was playing the piano, there were people who I sensed to be her parents, and then her grandparents behind them, and so on.
In that glimpse into the distant past, I observed how the behavioral patterns and family dynamics of our ancestors, some of it dysfunctional and unhealthy, had become the patterns of my family. I also saw how these patterns were passed on to me and how it has shaped the patterns in my life and my own family to this day.
I then invoked the Heavenly Light to wash over all of us: myself and my family, my living relatives, all my ancestors who came before us, as well as all of our future descendants. I prayed that all of the disharmony in my family lineage be healed, and also that any other families and individuals we had disharmonious interactions and relationships with be healed too.
In Hawaiian culture this kind of healing prayer is known as Ho’oponopono. It is an ancient spiritual practice of reconciliation and forgiveness, which in English literally translates to ‘to make right,’ or ‘to make good.’ Ho’oponopono is essentially a personal responsibility and forgiveness prayer or ritual to heal, among other things, feuding families and ancestral trauma. When practiced repeatedly, it is said to balance out karma. I do believe in praying for those who wronged or harmed us, because within their healing we find our own as well.