Love and Not Love I recently saw a post on facebook about a study showing that spanking is harmful even if the parent has a warm and loving relationship with the child. Wow, ok, so this really set some wheels spinning for me... Inflicting physical harm or pain on other human beings is considered violence, aggression, assault or abuse. Nowhere else in our culture do we sanction inflicting physical pain/harm on another human being, not even on violent [...]
Subconscious Family Patterning Have you ever noticed that family relationships can be some of the most challenging? This is often because there is a lifetime of history we are bringing into each interaction, history that often includes painful experiences of not having our needs met from people who we have an evolutionary expectation to meet them... history that often includes struggles for power in one way or another, struggles to meet those needs, or get the people we [...]
Looking Beyond Family Labels to Find the Truth of Your Experience I have found it to be a very powerful experience to realize my freedom in relationship to my family of origin. Many of us even as adults feel bound to our families in some way. We feel obliged to participate or engage in ways of relating that we do not enjoy. Something about the realization that I am no-longer obligated to be part of their lives, to [...]
Finding who you BE beyond your family Through some deep work and exploration with one of my clients, what I'm coming to see as a real step into adulthood is being able to create yourself and your life beyond your family. That is, to choose for you your own beliefs, thoughts, ideas, or ways of being. To make choices about how you spend your time and run your life based on what you want and what works for you, [...]
Emancipating Your Anger So, I recently spent the whole day super duper depressed. That doesn't happen to me very often anymore but when it does it can be super intense. There are those days that I experience a little wave of depression and easily find my way out of it, (Hint: Who does this belong to?) and then there are those days when nothing seems to help. This was one of those days. What I discovered at the end [...]
Lessons from Depression Lesson Number Two: There's some part of me that I'm denying Another discovery I'm having around depression is that when it is mine, it usually means that I'm cutting myself off from some part of myself- that I am engaging in some form of self-denial. This could be something I don't want to be aware of- like how angry I am- or having lots of judgment and wrongness toward myself rather than space and acceptance. How [...]
Lessons from Depression I'm no stranger to depression. It's something that has been part of my reality, probably since I was about 11 when my beloved teacher of four years died of cancer and I was moving away from childhood into puberty. Dealing with hormonal changes and confronting the realities of life and death at 11 on my own were way too much for my 11-year-old self to handle. So I just kind of cut myself off from [...]
Choice I’ve been thinking a lot about choice and the power of choice and how it’s the magic and the secret to having what you desire in life… Really. Think about it for a moment. What you choose really does determine the life you’ll have both now and in the future. So many of us desire, dream of, wish or pray for change in our lives, and yet, what we choose stays the same. If we don’t make [...]
How far have you already come? Have you ever changed something or overcome something in your life and then almost forgotten about it, or who you used to be? Like the way you are now is the way you've always been? Sometimes what I've noticed happens after a big shift or transformation, is that we feel different and once we've integrated the shift we proceed from that different place as if it's our new normal. Because it now [...]
Empathic Women in Relationships: Four Questions to Ask Yourself (That can improve your mental health and happiness and move you in the direction of having better relationships) How loved do you feel? How much does he actually love you? You “Love him so much” but how much are you loving you, how much is he loving you? I have heard so many women say this phase (myself included!): “but I love him so much”. Yes, ok, you love [...]
When you think of self-care, what comes to your mind? Bubble baths? Massages? Days for yourself where you get to do whatever it is you want? Vacations from your life? Sure, that's awesome, that's all forms of doing something nice for yourself and making you feel good, but why have we relegated self-care to something separate from the rest of our life? From our everyday activities? Self-care is not something to be saved for nights and weekends, something we only get to after [...]
Well, a whole lot actually! A name becomes part of your identity and represents who you are.Even more true when it comes to business...Back in 2015 when I picked the name Divine Essence Coaching, I was still a glorious generalist, still figuring out how to describe and articulate my work in a clear and concise way. My work in a lot of ways is about helping you reconnect with your (divine) essence and remember the truth of who [...]
I used to make all sorts of relationship lists- You know the ones- The qualities he should have, what he should look like, what kind of job he holds. How he compliments me, his degrees, is personality, his family. And on and on and on… I've made lots of those lists and know people that swear by them, though I can’t say that they ever really worked for me. Then I fell in love with someone who met [...]
Create Something Different for Your Life This Year A few years ago I got really fed up with looking back at the end of each year to see that I wasn’t really much closer than I’d been the year before to where I wanted to be in my life. I knew something had to change! Wishing and hoping, even visioning and vision boarding weren’t really working. I’m pretty sure you’ve heard that “insanity is doing the same things [...]
Receiving Your Awareness We cut off our awareness for many reasons, one because we have learned not to trust it and believe that it is wrong, and two, because sometimes what we are aware of does not match the conclusions we have about how things should be. Then when things turn out differently, we are surprised. Yet, how often was there actually part of you that knew? This weekend I had the chance to connect in some beautiful [...]