EricaTucci, Author at Sarah's Gift

How do you communicate with the Divine?

I read a post on Facebook fairly recently by someone who said that meditating or following other similar modalities was not the way to have a personal relationship with the Divine (Spirit, God, Creator, Providence, Allah, or however you name the Higher Power). I beg to differ! I feel that we all have our own way of communicating with the Almighty and that this sacred relationship is what provides a deep connection to one another. Since the Divine is everywhere – within and without…

There is not just one way to feel the presence of Spirit in one’s life. Click to Tweet

I love the sit outside next to my favorite tree, feeling its energy, with the sun shining brightly in the sky as the clouds flirt with it, with a warm breeze brushing across my face and hearing the cacophony of cicadas. I hear Spirit beckoning me as the wonders of nature surround me in a loving embrace. To deepen my experience, I may close my eyes and go into a meditative silence to listen for the inner divine voice that speaks to me. I also have a meditation ritual where I try to meditate every morning upon rising. I will sit in front of my altar and open my heart up to the messages that Spirit may have for me each day. I also use Tarot and Oracle cards to tap into my intuition, allowing the inner voice to speak divine wisdom. That divine wisdom has also come to me in my dreams.

And then there’s journaling; shamanic journeying; doing energy work; working with crystals, angels, the elementals, power animals, and color; near-death experiences and the like, which all open the door of communication to Spirit. There are so many different ways to have a personal relationship with the Divine and it disturbs me when someone discounts all but her or his way; as this, to me, is what causes separation, not connection, in our world.

We all have our own life journey, being spiritual beings in human form.

We are Spirit and Spirit is us, no matter what religion or spiritual practice(s) we embrace. Click to Tweet

If you are interested, please sign up for Sarah’s newsletter in the form to the right. I hope to bring you information that will be inspiring and enlightening to you. Also, you can find my Sarah’s Gift series as well as my other books on Amazon.

ERICA TUCCI had a full life as a corporate manager of a Fortune 500 company, a healing arts business owner and an author. It all came to a screeching halt in June 2011 when she had a stroke. During her recovery, she gained much wisdom about what’s really important in life. Although she was a Reiki master, massage therapist and life coach as well as a corporate cog for many years, she realized that her passion was her books. Her hope now is that the messages of her books will be an inspiration for others, young and old. Visit her websites at www.ericatucci.com, www.sarahsgiftseries.com and www.radiantsurvivor.com.

Is there a hole in your sidewalk?

hole in sidewalk There is a story that I feel is a metaphor for how we, as humans, typically deal with challenges in our lives. At least, it seems this is the way I have faced them thus far in my life. Being a former dancer, I see it as a series of dance steps.

You may know the story and if I don’t explain it as you remember it, please bear with me. It has my own twist with a bit of embellishment. It goes like this…

There was a huge hole in the sidewalk waiting to swallow anyone who wasn’t paying attention to where they were going. Click to Tweet

1…Late for her Monday morning meeting, a woman was mindlessly talking on her cell phone and checking her watch. As she walked down the sidewalk to the building where her office was, she fell into the hole. How did she not see it?…

2…The next Monday morning, she was rushing down the sidewalk, again on her cell phone and checking her watch for the time. This time, she saw the hole, but just as she approached it, she tripped and fell into it. What caused her to lose her footing?…

3…The next Monday morning, as she approached the hole, she put her phone away. She checked her watch to see that she was on time for her meeting. Walking around the hole, she continued her trek to the office. Looking ahead at the building she would be entering, her shoulders drooped and she sighed deeply. What made her heart heavy?

4…The next Monday morning, she decided to quit her job. No more phone calls. No more checking her watch. She took a longer route to her office, stopping by the corner bakery for a cup of tea and an almond croissant. Later that day, she exited the building carrying all her belongings. She looked in the direction of the hole and smiled. What made her smile?

5…The next Monday morning, she took a walk in the city park. Birds were chirping. The sun was shining brightly overhead. Children were playing, with their moms looking on. Joggers passed her by as she strolled along the sidewalk. An image filled her mind momentarily – the hole in the sidewalk – but then it faded, no longer part of her vision.

After I finished writing this, I did some research to find out the source of this story, and I found it – Portia Nelson’s book There’s a Hole in My Sidewalk: The Romance of Self Discovery. I bought the book and can’t wait to read it! Have you read it?

Are you in the intimate embrace of self discovery? Where are you in this dance?

1…Are you living a frenetic life, possibly unaware of how it may be affecting you or denying that it IS having an impact on you? Kind of like a hamster on a treadmill, mindlessly getting nowhere?

This is where I was before I fell into the hole and had a stroke. Click to Tweet

2…Are you living a frenetic life, knowing what it’s doing to you, but feeling that you have no other choice. You feel off kilter because you know you’re spinning your wheels.

3…Or do you realize in your heart that what you’re doing just isn’t what you want to do with your life, and you know you need to find another way, another path?

4…Or perhaps you have already begun to make a change. How exciting it must feel to be able to let go of something that just doesn’t serve you anymore, that just doesn’t have any meaning in your life anymore. This is where I am now, having “moved from my head to my heart”, so to speak, surrendering to my heart’s desire. Living consciously instead of in a fog, in the darkness of the hole.

What I aspire to is the last step of the dance…

5…Where the hole is a part of the past. It has served its purpose and is no longer on one’s radar. No longer does one live unconsciously, anesthetized to the goings-on of one’s life. It’s time for change, a metamorphosis…like the butterfly in its chrysalis.

So, I ask you again… where are you in this dance? Are you romancing yourself down the self discovery path?

Reflecting on the Full Moon

“I feel a release,” I said to my mother as we ate dinner Friday evening. I had just had a brain MRI to see what might be causing the incredible malaise I have been feeling for the past month or so. I thought I may have had another stroke. Later in the evening, shortly before going to bed, I remembered that it was a full moon that night, which meant it was the phase in the moon’s cycle when we are called upon to release anything in our life that isn’t serving us for our higher good.

So what was this release that I felt after having my MRI? I have been pondering this for the past couple of days and this is what has come to me…

Could it be as simple as feeling comfort that I would soon find out why I have been feeling so bad? Knowing what is wrong would allow me to take the steps necessary to face the challenge. For example, if it IS another stroke, perhaps that means returning to rehab, taking medication and/or having surgery. So perhaps the release I felt was just that – the knowing.

OR, was it something more profound? If you know anything about me, you know that I always look for the deeper meaning in everything. So what was this release telling me on a more esoteric level? And then I remembered the dream I had Thursday night before the full moon.

I dreamed about Bob, a man from my past whom I worked with in corporate America at IBM in the mid-1980’s. I feel that he was in my dream as the emissary of the same message that I have been struggling with since I had my stroke – “surrender, let go”. You see, Bob was a very laid back, go-with-the-flow sort of man, the complete opposite of the way I was back then – driven and controlling. He was a peacemaker; I was a warrior. He was the feminine; I was the masculine. As you might know, the stroke that I had in 2011 has been the catalyst for my journey in which my feminine essence has begun to emerge and integrate with my more dominant masculine essence. The final desired outcome is the union of the two.

In my dream, I felt myself being slightly resistant to Bob’s missive, as my warrior side was making one last attempt to have the upper hand. His unspoken message of surrender was bringing balance between the two opposing but complementary energies. On a profound level, that is what I feel the release was all about.

For me, surrendering equates with full healing and the resultant sense of harmony. Click to Tweet

On one hand, from the “mundane” view of my release, the MRI would give me the information I (and my doctors) need to determine the appropriate physical treatment to fully heal. On the other hand, I have the inner wisdom to know what I must do to fully heal. They will work in concert to propel me further forward down the path to my full recovery. But how will they work together?

First, I would like to tell you of a message I received during meditation about a week ago. It said “Don’t worry. A miracle will happen.” Needless to say, I had been anxious about my MRI and what it might reveal. Would it be another stroke? Or something of even greater magnitude since the pressure in my head has been incredibly intense? What was this relapse about? I had been doing great, going to the gym and building strength, stamina and stability. I thought I was finally on the road to full healing, ready to take on the world after so many fits and starts. And then I took a nosedive, spiraling out of control. My head was a pressure cooker. I couldn’t get up off the couch to go to the restroom. I didn’t want to get out of bed. My right side felt disconnected from my body. I didn’t feel human anymore. A psychic reading confirmed what I felt. I had truly spiraled downward one final time (at least for this phase of my spiritual journey, which is neverending so long as I am incarnated in a physical from).

What I needed to do was surrender to it, accepting what is, having the inner wisdom to know that all was divinely orchestrated as part of my journey and that if I tried to resist or control it, it would be to my detriment. Yet I still needed to do my part, and that also included surrendering and accepting what is, but also knowing that, on the physical level, I would need to do what it took to physically heal my body, whether that would be rehab, medication, surgery, etc.

And when our beliefs and actions converge with our soul’s purpose, that’s when magic happens and miracles occur! Click to Tweet

So…I look forward to seeing what happens from now until the New Moon on September 30, the time of new beginnings, and then the next Full Moon on October 15, the next time for release. And so on…the neverending story of life! What will the MRI reveal? What will be the treatment? What about the miracle? What it will entail? When will it happen? Oh dear, I am asking too many questions. I can hear Bob calling “surrender, let go!” I still struggle. I still want to command, to control.

Release, surrender, let go!

What I learned from talking to a prophet

Prophet I had a long discourse recently with someone who called herself a prophet whom God speaks to. The conversation brought out the best and the worst in me, and I am grateful for the dialogue for what it showed me. It concretized a lot of beliefs that I already had. One thing that was brought up in our conversation was my last blog post about Nothingness, which brought out our different viewpoints.

First, I must say that I have difficulty with the notion of a self-proclaimed prophet who says that God speaks directly to her, since I attribute that to the likes of Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Muhammad and the like. (Perhaps that is just me.) But a prophet can also mean anyone who claims to be a healer, teacher, leader or foreteller of the future.

A prophet of an elevated state such as Jesus is humble. And having God-given power does not preclude being gentle and subtle. Being powerful to me means being comfortable enough in your own skin so that you don’t feel the need to continue explaining yourself after a disagreement.

Sometimes it is just better to agree to disagree, and let it go. Click to Tweet

Let one another sit with each other’s own experience of the dialogue without trying to sway the other’s feelings about it with more words.

Words mean different things to different people. They can be interpreted differently and can be misconstrued. There is the literal dictionary meaning, but there is also the figurative symbolic meaning as well.

Accept others for who they are. Everyone is on their own path of evolution, with their own truths. But we are also mirrors of one another, reflecting the good and the bad in each other. So when we see something we don’t like in another, we should reflect back to see if it is something we don’t like in ourselves.

This brings me to a final point, something that I talk about in Radiant Survivor: what’s really important in life. To me, a strong relationship with myself, with others and with Spirit are what is most important. If you have these, you will have abundance in all aspects of your life.

You will radiate your inner sense of joy, peace, love and fulfillment, and others will feel it. Click to Tweet

Being embraced by nothingness from which all of life begins

The Sacred Womb, the Great Silence, the Nothingness…these are terms that you may have heard used to describe that place of complete solitude from which all of life, of creation, begins.

If you have ever seen the movie The Neverending Story, a fabulous tale about how our imagination (Fantasia) is destroyed by the Nothingness and how, within that nothingness, lies the very spark that can recreate Fantasia. You see both sides of the Nothingness…the positive and the negative: the spark and the destruction of life.

As children, Fantasia is as real as the physical world. As adults, most often we lose the connection to Fantasia – the mythical, magical, mystical world of fairies, elves, gnomes and other elementals, angels, archetypal figures, power animals and spirit guides, ascended masters and the like. In shamanic terms, it is called “non-ordinary reality”. We become robotic as the Nothingness consumes us.

But what if we went into this emptiness to revive Fantasia, to reconnect with this so-called “invisible” world?

This sacred space is the womb from which all of creation is born… Click to Tweet

just like the princess in The Neverending Story showed Sebastian, the male protagonist. She revealed how just a spark of imagination can recreate Fantasia and how the more sparks of imagination one creates, the larger Fantasia grows…in other words, it never ends!

I have recently entered that vast emptiness, that great silence, after having descended into the jaws of hell, releasing (all) the muck of my past, that which I delineated in my “Love letter to myself” in my last post. The descent was excruciating, to say the least, as I peeled off layer after layer of the baggage that I have carried for so long.

But now I am in the stillness, a period of gestation, where life will begin anew, where I will be naked, exposed, vulnerable and wobbly since I don’t have the artificial props of my past to support me. What I DO have, though, is the nurturing warmth of the Sacred Womb from which my Fantasia will be reborn, from that small spark. The phoenix will rise again!

It’s like being a butterfly in its chyrsalis stage, developing its wings that will liberate it. Click to Tweet

It’s the time of total transformation that ends with the release of the magnificent butterfly.

However, being in this stillness isn’t much easier than plummeting into the depths of hell. It takes a lot of effort to create the structures that will evolve into a new life, a new reality.

But isn’t it all well worth it? To move from a state of karmic release to a state of dharma. To move from a life of fate to fulfilling your destiny? Where Fantasia is the sanctuary in which your purpose in life is played out? The neverending story of life!

And now as I sit in silence in the stillness, I repeat to myself “I am in the loving embrace of nothingness, where all of life begins”.

Writing a love letter to yourself!

We have had a shaman visiting us for the past week doing healing sessions on our entire family. It has been an experience to say the least…a wonderful experience! After one of my sessions, my homework was to write a love letter to myself to honor those beliefs from the past that have held me hostage for so long and then release them by burning the letter. I finished writing it and was pleased with what I wrote, but then in a meditation afterward, I got a message that said that I needed to change it a bit.

You see, in writing all the things I wanted to release, I used the words “I am this” or “I am that”. For example, I am not worthy, I am unloved, I am undeserving, etc. (Have you ever found yourself using these kind of statements?) These statements were saying that I AM these things, that this is the state I am in. But this isn’t true.

I may feel these things, but I am NOT these things. Click to Tweet

Instead, I FEEL these things deep in my heart. The inner message was telling me that there was an emotion that underlies these feelings, causing them to surface…the emotion of FEAR. And what I needed to do is to get to the root of these feelings, get to the fear. And what would be the best way to do that but to replace that fear with LOVE?

So, here goes…

Dearest Erica,

First I want to tell you that I love you. I hope you know that. I know I don’t always act like I do, but that is because of old beliefs that I have had, and that is why I have written this letter to you.

There are many fears and thoughts and beliefs that have clouded my mind for so long that have prevented me from opening my heart to love, and thus, you have not felt loved like you deserve.

So be with me as I hold everything that I need to let go of, in love’s embrace before I release them…

I don’t feel deserving!…I hold you in love’s embrace
I don’t feel worthy!…I hold you in love’s embrace
I feel abandoned!…I hold you in love’s embrace
I feel unloved!…I hold you in love’s embrace
I feel unable to love!…I hold you in love’s embrace
I feel frightened! Life scares me!…I hold you in love’s embrace
I feel shy!…I hold you in love’s embrace
I feel incapable!…I hold you in love’s embrace
I feel imperfect!…I hold you in love’s embrace
I feel stupid!…I hold you in love’s embrace
I feel like I can’t do anything right!…I hold you in love’s embrace
I feel ugly!…I hold you in love’s embrace
I feel jealous and envious!…I hold you in love’s embrace
I feel mean and angry!…I hold you in love’s embrace
I feel impatient!…I hold you in love’s embrace
I feel controlling! I feel like I am not able to let go!…I hold you in love’s embrace
I feel selfish and ego-centric!…I hold you in love’s embrace
I want things my way!…I hold you in love’s embrace

All of you have been with me for a very long time and I honor your presence, but it is now time to release you into the ether to be transmuted into light. You have served your purpose and I bid you farewell.

Now dear Erica, my heart is pure and free from the weight of the past. I embrace you with loving arms. I am you and you are me! We are one!

Much love,
Yourself

Misa Hopkins, bestselling author, healer, speaker and teacher, who healed herself of MS, introduced the Holding Meditation, an ancient meditation where one is held with compassion in the womb of the loving Sacred Feminine essence. When the shaman asked me to write the love letter, embracing myself in love, I thought of the meditation, which you can download for free here.

Yesterday, I took my letter and put it in a despacho, which was burned. A despacho is a shamanic offering to the Universe, in my case, a ritual of energetic exchange for healing. You may be familiar with burning as a technique of getting rid of the baggage of the past. I look forward to seeing what the impact of the burning will have on my healing. Of course, I also have a tremendous amount of “homework” given to me by the shaman to continue my healing and become the “new me”…rituals, creating an altar, flower and salt baths, body movement and reciting a new mantra that is positive and replaces the negative beliefs of the “old me”.

Have you ever written a love letter to yourself? Click to Tweet

Or any letter, for that matter, that helps you release the beliefs from the past that have held you back from really being who you are, from expressing the genuine YOU? If so, what did you do? Did you burn it or cut it up or bury it or release it to the wind? Did it have an impact on your life? I would love to hear your story and its outcome!

Unprecedented time for us!

We are in a historic time with the prospect of having the first female in the White House. With this historic moment comes a huge shift in the global consciousness that is so needed in our world…the shift from patriarchal domination that we have lived under for so long to honoring the feminine in a big way.

Granted, Hillary Clinton has (excuse me for saying this) bigger testicles than some men I know, but she needs them to fight for what she believes in against the “trainwreck” that is trying to perpetuate this male rule in the most chaotic way. Understand, I am an independent and I don’t particularly like either candidate. I am looking at this scenario from a different perspective – a more cosmic perspective.

What would Donald Trump’s wife, Melania, as first lady, do for women? A beautiful model who has posed nude in photos. Trump may love her, but he wears her like a trophy just as he did his other wives. To me, this perpetuates the attitude towards women about being nothing more than a prize for men. On the other hand, Hillary stands for women’s rights, breaking the glass ceiling and demanding equality among men and women. Women have been subjugated under man’s reign for far too long, and now women are standing strong in all their female glory, swinging the pendulum to the left where they can be heard.

Once woman has firmly planted herself as the equally powerful force of nature that she is, subduing aggressive masculine forces with her compassion and grace, then the pendulum can settle in the middle where the two polarized sides can work in concert. As the consciousness of our world continues to be raised where there can no longer be separation, or dissension or divisiveness, let us continue to seek only unity.

It may not be obvious that Hillary as president would make this happen. But the fact that she would become the leader of the most powerful country in the world with numerous female heads of state already in place globally says to me that this shift in the world’s consciousness has been gaining momentum and is beginning to move at lightning speed.

Let’s enjoy the ride!

Reaching a new level of awareness!

Have you ever had an experience where something happens and you have a huge AHA! moment, a breakthrough that takes you to a new level of awareness? I had one recently that I wish to share with you, as I hope you will be able to relate to its message.

First, I have to let you in on a little secret. My mom is a shaman in-training. She just returned from a month-long intensive workshop with Dr. Alberto Villoldo, world-renowned shaman and anthropologist. And of course, like any skill you are trying to develop, you need to practice, practice, practice. Mom has spent 40+ years on her own very profound spiritual journey, but she needed to learn the techniques to bring this inner work out into a practice that could serve others. And guess who has been one of her guinea pigs? 🙂

She has been performing illuminations and extractions on me and has lifted the symbolic “vice” that was implanted on my head by my father in a dream when I was younger. This steel contraption has kept me in mental and emotional bondage my whole life…my inner masculine self (my father) suppressing and dominating my inner feminine self (me as a child), much like what has been going on for centuries in our world. We have lived under patriarchal rule for far too long, to the detriment of the feminine.

Because the vice was implanted on my head (symbolically) when I was young, I never really grew up, and since my emotional and mental growth was stunted at such a young age (I was six years old in the dream), I didn’t really learn what it was like to play as a child either. That’s why Sarah’s Gift has been so important to me – it’s letting my inner child come out and play, yet teaching me lessons of growing up simultaneously.

But what’s really exciting to me is that, after the extraction Mom did on me, something extraordinary happened…

The next day, I opened the door to the closet that houses all my Tarot books and cards, and right in front were my Inner Child Cards: A Fairy-Tale Tarot. I bought them quite a while ago, but it wasn’t until now that they would have meaning in my life as I try to let my inner child speak through Sarah’s Gift. It’s interesting too that I have recently become very interested in fairies. I have been planning a fairy garden, gathering material that I may need. I just need to come up with a theme.

As you might know, I am a fairly new Tarot practitioner/reader, but I had put my Tarot aside to focus on Sarah’s Gift. Now, I feel that the two are intertwined and will play a united role in what I do from here on out. In the Acknowledgments at the beginning of the elaborate and instructional guide that came with the cards, the authors thank their publisher for “believing in the magic” of their project. Imagine how I felt when I read that at the heels of the release of Believing In the Magic, the second book of the Sarah’s Gift series about how powerful the magic that we all have within us is. I feel that this message rings strong and true, not only for me, but for many of us.

With all the turmoil in the world, we have become disconnected from our true nature, our core essence, both personally and collectively. We’ve lost the magic in our lives. We discount our imagination – the magic, the myth, the enchantment – as not real. But it’s within our imagination that we “find” ourselves by empowering our inner child through the ancient wisdom of magic and fairy tales. Fairy tales show us how we can prevail over adversity and bring the kingdom of “happily ever after” into our physical reality.

I really can’t wait to delve into the Inner Child Cards to see how they may pave the road to new truths, further healing and transformation.

What is going on in your life that is paving the way for you to a greater sense of awareness, a “happily ever after” state of being? I would love to hear your story!

If you are interested, please sign up for Sarah’s newsletter in the form to the right. I hope to bring you information that will be inspiring and enlightening to you. Also, the second book of Sarah’s Gift Believing in the Magic has been released on Amazon, and my virtual book tour to celebrate its launch is going on right now from July 18 to 29 at bewitchingbooktours.com.

Spirit messages from Crow

Remember in the last blog post, I spoke about the spirit messages from Bear, who was the guide in Standing Up for Yourself that helped Sarah build confidence in herself and her psychic gift? In Believing In the Magic, the second book of the Sarah’s Gift series, Crow is the spirit animal who comes to Sarah to help her and her new friend Leila realize the power of their thoughts, and to see the magic in everything.

Crow’s messages, like Bear’s, can be used as guideposts for us all, giving us guidance in various situations. Below are Crow’s messages and possible ways that we can use the messages in our lives.

Crow carries the power of prophetic insight, as the messenger of foretelling and clairvoyance. – Have you ever been able to sense something before it happened? Or perhaps you just sensed something to be wrong (like someone having an accident) and then you received word that there had indeed been some tragedy (the accident actually occurred). Or maybe you have a vision of a new house in the country where your family moves to, and months later, your vision becomes reality. What do you do with that kind of information? Do you tell someone about it, or do you fear that they will laugh at you or think you’re crazy? They may even think you caused it to happen since our thoughts can be very powerful, as Crow tells Sarah when Leila starts using her thoughts to make things happen in Believing In the Magic. Think of a time when you were able to foresee an event before it happened. It could be as big as seeing someone’s death or as small as getting a phone call from a friend that you had just thought about. How did you feel about it? Did it frighten you or excite you? Did you tell anyone? What was their reaction? What did you learn from the experience?

Crow carries the power of intelligence by having the knowledge of ancient wisdom and magical ways. – Have you ever had a dream or vision of another time period in which you were living, and something in that time and place seemed very similar to the circumstances in your current life. Or your previous circumstances seemed to have some bearing on the way things were in your current life. For example, maybe you saw yourself drown in your vision and in your current life, you had a great fear of water. Write about it to see what bubbles up from inside. Allow yourself to just write your story without permitting your mind to put restrictions on what you write, as if it doesn’t believe you. What might the vision/story be telling you about your current life? What might you do to reconcile any feelings that it stirred in you? It may be necessary to seek some help from an adult.

Crow brings the message of “passing of the old to make way for the new”. – Remember that the crow is associated with death, but instead of seeing death as something bad, Crow wants you to see it in a different light. It wants you to not fear death, whether it is death of a person, the death of a friendship or other relationship, the death of some plan you were looking forward to, or whatever kind of death you may encounter and fear. With the changes in the cycle of life, life is followed by death is followed by life and so on. There is a rebirth after death. When something or someone dies, there is something greater that will be born. If a loved one dies, he/she is reborn on the other side where there is no suffering. When a plan goes awry and dies, there will likely something better to take its place, or perhaps its demise actually prevented something bad from happening. When a friendship dies, there will likely be a better one waiting for you in the wings. So fear not! Death makes way for the new. What experience with death have you had? How did you feel? What did you do to handle the situation? Were you able to see the good in it? Now that you understand death a little better, do you think that you will have less fear if death rings again in whatever way?

Crow tells us that it is a time of great change, where we must become who we see ourselves as, not who others think we should be. – We must be true to ourselves. Do you ever feel that you do, say, think and behave certain ways because that‘s the way you’ve been told to be? Or perhaps you are like that because you feel that’s the only way you’ll be accepted by others? When you do that, you are not being true to who you are, the real you. A butterfly can’t be a dragonfly even though they are similar. It’s the same with you. If you’re a butterfly, you can’t try to be a dragonfly to fit in or because someone told you to be that way. You want to stand up for who you are and what you want in life. Talk it over with your loved ones and possibly your peers. Explain to them how you feel. Hopefully there will be at least one person who will be supportive of your requests and will help and guide you. So, take the time to describe who you are: how you look, how you think. What are your emotions? What is your spiritual background? Anything that you would consider a trait. Write it down. Is this the real you, as you see yourself and as you want to be? Or are some of your traits based on what others have wanted for you? If you don’t feel that you’re being true to yourself, what can you do to change that? How can you get the support you need?

So if Crow shows up in your life in some way (through a dream, meditation, vision or in physical reality), think of what it may be telling you to look at in your life.

Claim Your Past, Present and Future

A few weeks ago, I brought some boxes home from my storage unit where I put all my belongings after I had a stroke in 2011, and I can’t believe the stuff that I have! I forgot about how nice a lot of it is. But I have also been working on simplifying my life since my life-altering experience, so where does all that stuff fit in? How do I reconcile my need for simplicity in my life with my desire to reclaim a part of me that I had forgotten about? Have you ever been in a similar situation, where you have gone through a major change in your life that has completely turned your world upside down, and you aren’t sure which way to turn?

For me, seeing all of that stuff made me feel like I was getting well, if that makes sense. I have been having feelings of wanting to be back on my own, since I have lived with my mom since my stroke. I have been dreaming of having a home of my own again (a small one, mind you, that would suit my simple lifestyle!) and reclaiming my independence. Seeing all this stuff and feeling about it the way I do, I think, has actually become just another indicator that I am getting well and that I will fully recover, so that I can realize my dream.

We always hear and read that we need to move forward in our lives, to put the past behind us, to let go, to surrender. I too, have been in that mindset. In fact, I have been trying to surrender for the past five years, trying to let go of the way I used to be pre-stroke. I didn’t have the stroke for nothing, you know! Spirit decided that it was time to “bonk me on the head” to get me to stop moving in the direction I was going.

And you know how hard it can be letting go of something that has been a part of you for so long. Well, I have finally come to that place of surrender, I think, and that has brought me to a new place, the place in which life is much simpler. So, now what do I do with all those belongings from my past? Do I keep them or do I discard them because they are of the past?

I feel that I need to embrace them for what they represented in my life in my past, and what they represent in my life now. We can’t just forget our past. It is what made us who we are today. We need to use our past as a springboard to make our present and future as fulfilling as we can make them, so that we can realize our dreams. Like I said, seeing all my belongings from my past has become a catalyst for my full healing, and that is a wonderful feeling for what it brings to my life now and in the future. I wish the same for you, that you claim your life, past, present and future!

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