self-liberation
Empowering Life Lessons From My Abusive Father
My father Jim had to grow up quickly in the tough pre-war years. He was the eldest of six children and he did not have an easy childhood, nor tolerant parents.
But life became even more challenging for Jim as he reached adulthood. My parents were married at the age of 21 and had three kids by 23, and another baby at 34.
Jim faced many challenges. As a result, to vent his frustration and process all the stress, he often took it out on those closest to him, namely his wife and children.
Let’s just say my father was not always the ideal husband and parent. It became so bad by the time I was an adult that he would do whatever he could to disrupt my life and my family in any way that you might imagine. The sad part was that he actually wanted to hurt us, as doing so gave him a bizarre sense of satisfaction and control over those closest to him.
I first became fully aware of my father’s desire to disempower his kids when I was about 22 years old. The year was 1982, and jobs were very hard to come by in the United Kingdom in those days. I had an office job but wanted something better. So, I decided to attend school for a year to learn shorthand and typing at the local technical college.
One day, I asked my dad if I could get a ride with him to college, because I had to sit an important exam at 2pm that day. He said I need not worry, as he would drop me off in plenty of time. But then he proceeded to make every excuse not to leave the house!
By quarter to two, I started to panic, as I could not possibly walk or catch a bus from my house to the college with so little time. At ten minutes to two, he finally agreed to take me to sit the exam, but then when we got in the car, he said he needed to go to the garage for gas. I looked at the fuel gauge and saw the car’s tank was full.
I suddenly realized he did not want me to sit the exam, as he did not want me to pass it and better myself and become more independent. Thankfully, his sabotage attempt failed, as I did pass the exam and went on to get a higher paying job.
Keeping The Family Out Of Your Love Life
Family and our relatives have a huge impact on our romantic lives, whether we realize it or not. We bring so much from the way we were raised into our love relationships and marriages.
But having had a difficult childhood does not necessarily set us up for challenges and failure in our relationships. In fact, for those who are self-aware it can be an advantage of choosing not to bring the toxic drama of your childhood home into a current relationship.
For example, if you saw your father treat your mother without respect, you might set your mind to never allowing that happen in your own relationship. This kind of courage and personal responsibility can break the cycle.
We all have things that happen in childhood things that happen that are out of our control, it is all in how you deal with them that forms us as adults. We have a choice always.
The other aspect is culture and the values and customs with which we were raised. Depending on the circumstances it can have a significant impact on our relationships. Once again it is a choice how we want to handle it. Do we follow the family traditions, or not?
It takes courage and an open mind to march to your own drum. Standing up for what you believe can also go a long way. Sometimes this is vital to ensure a healthy, happy relationship that will last.
Of course, the biggest challenge for most couples is having the family up in your relationship business. Do your relatives influence your decisions and interfere in your relationship? Navigating a relationship or marriage successfully in this day and age is challenging enough.
Transmuting Enemy Energy
Some clients ask for readings about people they think of as their enemies, and I’ve seen certain commonalities with this over the years. In these relationships there are typically an energy pattern that has formed to create a dynamic of mistrust, tension, and resentment.
One of the most prevalent issues I have noticed in terms of long-standing resentment or hatred towards another, is that both parties usually consider themselves the ‘victim,’ and that the other person is always in their mind the one who is in the wrong.
When you take it a level deeper, you usually find there was an initial intense or significant energy when these two people first met – be it a lover, friend, or work associate. It is usually a conflicting energy that sets the tone for their future ‘vibe’ with each other.
This initial energy has a resistance to it and eventually takes on a life of its own, separate from the two conflicting parties. Peel away the layers of this ‘enemy energy demon’ and you come to find it is essentially comprised of nothing more than simple fear.
Also, this enemy demon resists the idea of resolution and will not accept its own demise. It will do whatever it can to stay alive, and it feeds off the emotions anger, fear, and sadness. I believe this is what may be responsible for some suicides, violence, acts of terrorism, mass corruption, and others evil we see in the world.
There is never an excuse for violence. If someone is attacking or harming another person, safety and protection come first. Recovering from trauma is not typically something that happens quickly. However, when we are better informed about what is behind the behavior patterns of those who hate us, we can better see to the root of the disease.
Free Your Soul From Toxic Negativity
It is usually advisable to get over it and move on. When we continue to vent about people or things that annoy or frustrate us, or when we cannot forgive someone who has wronged us, and we go on, and on, and on about it, we are affirming the negative and attracting more of the same energy into our life.
Revenge or vitriol does absolutely no harm to another person, only to the person pursuing it. Anger or hatred does not affect the other person, only the person sending it out. What comes from your own spirit, your thoughts, words, actions, is what you will create in your own life. You are hurting or changing no one with your negative feelings other than yourself.
That person who hurt you has moved on with their life. In fact, they might even be living their best life, while you are still stuck and stagnant in the pain and misery of the past. It only becomes baggage that carries forward into the now, and into the future.
I once had a client who obsessively held onto anger, hatred, spite, and revenge towards her ex for over a decade. She could not figure out why every new relationship and project in her life since then failed miserably, usually with almost the same endings.
Finally, after years of struggling to bring her different insights, she was able to look at the person who hurt her, release his memory with loving, forgiving energy, and let the whole thing go. Then, as I had predicted, the next person who came into her life was everything she had always wanted in a partner!
In fact, her new beloved was far better than anything she ever had with Mr. Most Hated, before it went wrong, and had she continued on her path of anger and toxic baggage carrying, this new love miracle would most likely never have happened.
The True Power Of Your Worst Nightmares
When I was 24 years old, I was a somewhat disempowered young lady who went to work for the city council. All the girls in the office had an active social life and a boyfriend, except me.
In fact, I was bullied for it and became a bit of a joke around the water cooler, to the extent that I could not properly concentrate on the task at hand and ultimately lost my job. Looking back, it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. But, at the time, it did not feel like it.
About a year ago, I started to have a recurring dream that I was 24 again, and sharing an office with the same mean girls, supervised by the same misogynist boss. But this time I had a very different mindset.
In my dream, the boss had criticized my work. So, I pick up the documents he complained about to, walk up to his office, put it on his desk, and tell him politely to type his own letters in future. I was going home now, because I am no longer prepared to put up with his nonsense.
Well, if only I had the same courage back in the old days, I might have suffered far less emotional anguish! I felt really empowered in the dream, and it brought me the realization that I no longer have to suffer fools and that I need to stick up for myself more often. However, the dream also revealed to me that I still had not entirely made peace with the past, otherwise the dream would not be recurring.
The moral of the story is that dreams do not only reflect how we are doing in the present, and how far we have advanced in life, but also what we need to do to work on ourselves to be even better in the future. How powerful and life-enhancing is that!
Another compelling dream I have been having of late is of myself flying a light hovercraft over the estate where I lived as a child. I faced several challenging, traumatizing things growing up there, including poverty and domestic abuse. However, this liberating dream confirms that I have managed to rise above those childhood setbacks and obstacles, and I am now in control of my own life and destiny.
The Divine Magic Of Manifesting
We cannot always control our environment, but we can be an active force in how things play out in our own lives. Through our actions and choices we impact our personal universe, even without any occult practice.
However, this changes once we become aware of our metaphysical ability to manifest, and we realize we have already been doing it our entire life as spiritual beings in human form. And once we become aware of our innate power to manifest we simply need to improve it and have a deeper conversation with the many layers of reality.
Our minds and, in particular, our expectations already influence the world around us. We do this unconsciously every day, and without direction. Sometimes we let our fears run wild and then we create dark mirages that end up taking shape in our material world. Yes, indeed, these are mishaps of our own creation.
We all want to guide, foresee, and control life, but for some of us this possibility has always eluded us. There seems to be too many variables and our judgments appear to lack the clout required to guide even our own most basic wants. Maybe reality is simply too complicated? Perhaps we just need more resolve? Or maybe ‘magic’ may teach us something about that.
The magic of manifesting is a technique or method, as well as a spiritual path. It is a tool for self-discovery, since it rearranges our perceptions of reality and it is a path because it leads us to personal revelations and inner realizations. Furthermore, it assists us in seeing how malleable our life really is, which is unquestionably the first step toward personal transformation.
Magic as an occult tradition has a bad reputation. It may appear that anything related to so-called magic is supposed to be dark and dangerous, even evil, but this is not the case at all. Instead, the magic of manifesting brings our true desires into reality. It is a continuous process that teaches us a lot about our minds. We actually become more aware of our most difficult personal aspects by engaging with the things we desire. In the pursuit of magic we often discover how we are sometimes our own worst enemy.
Let Your Authentic Self Shine
Most people at some point change something about ourselves in the hope of being better liked or accepted by others. Whether it’s a group of friends, a potential romantic partner, or the manager at work, there is constant pressure to conform and fit in. But in the long run, does this help? The truth is: it really doesn’t.
The notion of simply being your authentic self is challenging in an era where everyone seems to be seeking approval and attention. Therefore, the authentic self or the true version of our soul is something one hardly sees in the digital era of social media, influencers, likes, and followers.
However, we may think that a person we see online is someone others won’t like. Maybe our internal critic sees that person as ‘too much’ of something or ‘not enough’ of another. But we are often mistaken, as someone being true to themselves and keeping it real is what most people are spontaneously drawn to.
You might feel like you’re the only strange person at work, or the black sheep of your family, but you’re not the only one. There are thousands of ‘odd’ people out there right now with the same doubts as you!
The old saying ‘there’s a lid for every pot’ is always good to keep in mind. Your authentic self is just what someone else has been looking for. If you feel you don’t fit in with the crowd, take a step back and ask yourself whether you truly want to be part of it anyway? Knowing your true value and finding the things most important to you, will help determine who you want to surround yourself with.
It’s also important to set healthy boundaries. If you feel peer pressured into joining a group, or liking something simply to fit in, ask yourself if this is true to your core. Does it resonate with your authentic self?