Month: September 2014

True Confessions of a Storyholic

Maya Christobel4 Comments

Back on the Road Again

I am about to be on the road again as a Gypsy. Willy Nelson nailed it with the lyric about bands of Gypsy’s in his song, On the Road Again, which I find myself humming as I pack a few more boxes here in Asheville, NC. But, I relate a bit more to Linda Hamiton in the Terminator when at the end of the movie she is alone and pointed west going into a storm. Very dramatic don’t you think?

Like in all time warps, I awoke to having left my life packed in boxes three years ago to hit the road right after my mother died, but suddenly had gotten a little sidetracked in intention. Now I am resuming the journey, which started for me in Tulsa Oklahoma in 2011.

A Case for Becoming Sidetracked

What does that mean. We say sidetracked as if it is not an intended path. We say it like it has been a diversion, a mistake, and now it is time to get on the Right path. Well, I think this is a misconception. All paths lead to one path. Life. And when we look at a “sidetrack” as a mistake we miss the truth that these detours are just that, a detour.

Haven’t you ever taken an unexpected detour and where you saw a house in a new neighborhood you loved, a stray dog you picked up and he was yours forever, a breathtaking vista that you would never have seen…without the detour? You are changed and then resume an intended direction all the richer and wiser for it.   And maybe the detour slowed you down, maybe it avoided an accident. Detours are part of our path. For me the last three years have been a breathtaking detour. But I did not know it.

First Flight

“In 1903, Orville Wright piloted the first powered airplane 20 feet above a wind-swept beach in North Carolina.” 

What prompted me to leave my life back then, say goodbye to my friends, my therapy practice and all my stuff, opting for a car full of the simple basics and my adoring and patient cats, Snow and Hazel, was nothing short of a miracle whispering in my ear one night: “Fly Maya and find out what truly makes you happy?” After 30 years as a psychologist, a wife and a mother, I was not sure I knew any longer. So, I set out to find the answers.

Like all of us, I made plans. I had a map of all the stops I wanted to make. I made a commitment to following the “signs” and to listen to coincidence and see where the road would lead. And like you may have heard me say before, “If you want to make god laugh, tell him your plans”. Well, I have no idea who said that first, but in my life I found out exactly what that meant in about one week of travel.

The X-Files

Mulder Scully Simpsons 

“An X-File is a marginalized, unsolved case involving unexplained phenomena”. 

I have shared the saga about why I took my car off the road and stayed indefinitely in Asheville, NC after only ten days with Oklahoma in my rearview mirror. Nothing sexy, just that my driver’s license expired and I had to get a new one. I went to the DMV and short of them taking scissors and cutting my license up in front of me, like they do with credit cards that have been revoked, my license had been “cancelled” indefinitely due to a little, insignificant, pain-in-the-ass detail that the Social Security Administration could not fix.

I thought to myself, “no-brainer, I can make this happen and get back on the road in no time”. So I hunkered down with my daughter Jessie in her apartment, which was wonderful although she got more time with me than she ever wanted.. More time with her beautiful spirit was a great gift for me. But, with regards to my driving out of Asheville, I am here to tell you three years later the glitch did not get fixed.

Lawyers could do nothing no matter how much money I spent, the government did not care if I had to walk to the nearest ER with a heart attack, two appeals to court got dismissed and my unusual situation got stamped and filed in what I came to know as “the gray files”, back in some official’s pitch black closet that no one ever looked in again. I felt like the X-Files, Scully and Mulder would have been stumped too as my case just got buried since the governing officials didn’t want to take the blame for anything which fixing the glitch would have led to. So, as citizens, our freedoms become expendable at this point.

What Happens When the System Does Not Work?

dark-alley

TV News, the D.A., the Mayor and the Governor of Colorado said, “Their hands were tied”. What does that mean anyway? So, I took matters into my own hands and this summer I am now legally driving with a shiny new photo of me smiling on my brand new driver’s license. But, the road to getting that license is not only another story, but, a carefully guarded secret. It sort of involves meeting a strange man smoking a cigarette on a back alley somewhere. Well you get the picture. I am happy to share the solution with anyone who is “Gray-Filed” in life.

With all obstacles come opportunities. And as I slogged through the bureaucracy of a broken system, grounded in NC, I met Richard Gannaway from AOMusic and knew that my reason for becoming sidetracked in Asheville was to meet him, to hear the music of AO and to feel the certainty that I would become a core support for making a new album, for getting future films made and seeing this extraordinary magic of music change the hearts of people around the world. So, for these last three years I have been doing just that, as well as working on a project with the renown singer Miriam Stockley, which has been an immeasurable gift in my life.

My life, love and work for AOMusic, with Miriam, and with the angels I met in Asheville has changed me entirely. And in the process of being part of this richly creative process I began to notice some things that disturbed me. I became tired although my creativity ran high, I found myself suffering from a weariness that I could not explain. I started to have a long bout with insomnia.

Then sometime later I became ill, had a car accident, become dampened down by a shadow of some kind that I couldn’t shake. I was soul-searching about a dozen times a day to see what could be the cause of my electrical plug pulling out of the socket of my life. My heart started feeling like it was getting a little dimmer. But I was doing work I loved, I was creative, I was with people I loved. What was the problem?

“The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs.”

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

sasha and jess black and white

Out of the Mouth of Babes

One day I was on the phone with my daughter Sasha, having a heart to heart. Now, you need to know that unfortunately for her, all too often this translates as Mom in her giving-advise-mode, which I experience as some kind of hostile take over of the wiser version of myself who knows better than to give unsolicited advise to my grown daughters. But, I did it anyway like a crazy person and what happened next changed everything.

As I was on a Skype with Sasha, who is 30 going on immortal, and we tried to hear one another over the thunderstorm bouncing off the Blue Ridge Mountains on my end and the cement floor coffee shop she was in with whirling blenders and a cacophony of voices blasting through her headphones on her end, that shoe you never want to drop, did. I was met with a stern stare burning right through the computer screen, since she could see that I was about to rev up into one of those Mother Lectures we all know about. I paused.

In the pause, while I am grappling with what should or should I not say, I see an older girl, black horn rimmed glasses making her look scholarly and like an authority on life, lean up close and personal and say. “Well Mom, I think all we can do to help each other is not tell one another what to do, but maybe you just might think about leading by example”.

Ouch.

I heard her like an arrow to the heart makes you sit up straight and get that you are in a life changing moment.   My daughter had the only really wise thing to say. “Lead by example, don’t try to fix anyone”. Ugh.

The Accidental Life

I think I was staring at the screen for a long time after the Skype ended and then I did what any good mother would do. I imploded with the truth of what she has said.

I plummeted briefly into that place of feeling like a total failure with her, with everyone, in life. A failure with myself. The next three days I went off the grid and encountered revelations one after the other. I looked long and hard at my overworking, over-caring for people, worry about money, giving myself away in love or in the need to be perfect. I had become the energizer bunny for everyone, but myself. It was exhausting.

Then I did the bravest thing I could do and got up out of my chair and went and looked in the mirror of my own life. And all of a sudden my depression, exhaustion, and my accidental life came clear to me:

I had been living the dream, but it was someone else’s.

When my daughter confronted me to lead by example what she truly meant was “Mom what about your dreams, what about that book you were writing, that movie you wanted to make and what about that life on the road you didn’t take?” She was all too right. I had found the most amazing people and projects full of love and nobility, all the things that I love and live for. But, the projects were not what my soul came here to do. My soul finally just got exhausted trying to tell me.

This was about one month ago and I have pushed the pause button on my life entirely. Not without guilt, but with a bit more courage than usual to do hard things. Disappointing people is one of those things I hate doing. But, for three years I have put a part of myself on my own “Gray Shelf” and forgotten to check in with the part of me that hit the road to find what made me happy in the first place.

I have surveyed all the work I have been doing as an entrepreneur, a producer, all the people I help, all the commitments I have made to shore up other people’s visions, and asked if I loved what I do. The answer was this: I love the people and the projects but I do not like who I have become in order to live inside someone else’s dream.

Impulse or Inspiration: The Thin Line

im·pul·sive

adjective \im-ˈpəl-siv\

: doing things or tending to do things suddenly and without thought : acting or tending to act on impulse: done suddenly and without planning : resulting from a sudden impulse

in·spi·ra·tion

noun \ˌin(t)-spə-ˈrā-shən, -(ˌ)spi-\

: something that makes someone want to do something or that gives someone an idea about what to do or create : a force or influence that inspires someone: a person, place, experience, etc., that makes someone want to do or create something: a good idea

When you take a dash of impulse, a pinch of inspiration you come out with the recipe for Faith: Faith is belief not based on proof.  The word faith is often used as a synonym for hope, trust, or belief.  This is the engine of my life.

So, with one deep breath I stopped it all in order to get back to that basic, all important question, for every person on the planet: What truly inspires me and am I allowing all of who I am to shine? The answer? Stories inspire me. Movies inspire me, listening to people share their stories inspires me. I am a writer. I want everything that I do for myself and for work in the world to be about writing.

Wow, that was a long overdue relief. But, with awareness comes that thing that makes us all stumble just a little: Action. Now I had to recalibrate my life, reassess my work with AOMusic, downsize a dozen other commitments and put myself out to the world in a more authentic way. Right about now I started sleeping better. My energy came back, and that dimmed heart light went from a 15 watt bulb to an outdoor floodlight.

The other surprising recipe goes like this: A dash of feeling liberated, an ounce of courage, and watching all the dots connect can in fact just… piss you off. Just when I thought I was to the other side of this massive wake up call, I was seized by the need to go out in the dark and get into my car and scream.   As soon as the door closed I started yelling at God, the Universe, Spirit, my parents, myself and anyone else I could yell at. About everything.

And what came of emptying my reserve of pent-up emotions was a new certainty: That all that procrastination, workaholism, exhaustion, worry and fear was simply the by-product of not believing in myself. This was the real epiphany.

This was what my daughter was trying to tell me. I finally looked in the face, my habit of tying my star to someone’s dream no matter how amazing the dream was, because I did not think…I was good enough. Husbands with big jobs, little children, and clients in need, colleagues who I thought were more talented than me were always in the front seat of my life. I sat there in the dark for a long time. I was waiting for the tears to spill over and never stop. But, they didn’t.

“Fuck it”, I said. I felt energized, motivated and excited instead. This usually goes hand in hand with when you align with your soul. I got out of the car and sat in the clearing and listened to the Cicada’s as they tuned up for the approaching rising Blue Ridge moon. And in that quiet after my storm, I heard myself say only one word out loud. “Yes”.

Yes, I will be all of me, yes I am enough, yes I will simply risk over and over again, yes I will have money, yes I will…lead by example. Yes, my daughter is right. Then I said what I had tried to say for decades. I said, “I will be writer I am, tell the stories I have been given and I will make my living as a writer. I will write my own story. I will heal my life”.

Enter the Sledgehammer

 sledge hammer

There is another saying that I have coined that goes something like this: “If in your heart you feel the truth of a dream and set an intention, sit back and watch the Universe line up behind you to make it happen”. I forget this all too often.

Suddenly, the phone rang and I left the buzzing of the forest and went inside to answer it. It was a friend who wanted to talk to me over coffee. I set a time. I then went to the computer and found two emails from friends who said they needed to share some feedback with me. Hmmmm.

For three straight days eight random people approached me saying the exact, verbatim, remarks: “Maya I don’t know why I am telling you this, but, stop helping everyone else, write your book, sell your screenplay, believe in yourself”. It was staggering and as clear as the Universe knows how to be when using a cosmic sledgehammer.

Beware What You Wish For

I put out that what I wanted was to write my story and make my living by writing. I posted on Craigslist, I sent emails, I shared my clear intention with friends. That was on a Sunday. Five days later I had three inquiries to coach people on books they wanted to write, signed contracts, received money, closed a ghostwriting deal in Denver, started my blog http://www.mythotherapy.com and three other people have approached me to be their writing coach. I then dug out my unfinished books, second draft of a screenplay and began collecting what is ten years of writing. I am a bit breathless over the whole thing and it is not stopping. I guess that when god is finished laughing at your plans, she gets to work on miracles.

Then I decided to pare down my life to the basics once again, let go of my paradise apartment and get back on the road. If I had not been sidetracked by life I would never have come to this place…in myself. The road is where I can see the signs better, where I gather stories, live simply, stop paying rent and utilities and spend that money in the service of writing, discovery and growth.

So, my tiny apartment in Asheville is nearly packed. My two cats are now one since sweet Snow died in the spring. I am getting new tires, hugging the best people in the world here in Asheville and pointing west for an indefinite road trip. And funny, my first stop is back to Oklahoma. My future will once again be full of couches and the good will of great friends. I will let you know where I will be stopping in case you want to have a cup of coffee and… I have a front seat if you want to come along

“We live in a world where bad stories are told, stories that teach us life doesn’t mean anything and that humanity has no great purpose. It’s a good calling, then, to speak a better story. How brightly a better story shines.― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

jump off cliff

The Stalker

Maya Christobel6 Comments

Stalker

“If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.”

—Barry Lopez
(as Badger, in Crow and Weasel)

Since starting this blog this past week,  I have been inundated with emails. And, as you can imagine, people were sharing that there was a story to be told, a story that no one knew, a story that scared them, would unravel their family or the worst of all…a story that the writer was afraid would be….boring. How many of us tell ourselves every day that our story is not interesting enough, or that “no one would want to hear about MY life”?

Well, I’m here to say that fear to tell your story, since you are certain it will be a snoozer…is a cop out.  And the second thing I am here to tell you is …you are not telling the story for someone else. You are telling your story for you, your health, your liberation, to find the humor in the tragedy and to simply honor that it is in fact the story you were born to live. Telling our stories is a sign of respect and self-love. And in the end how you share it is up to you.

So, now that we are looking at the obstacles to recording, writing, filming, painting your stories we want to take a peek at why in the world you would want to tall a story that is a secret or is only garnishing the pages of your journals, filling the boxes of photos you have kept for the entire family for a lifetime or is a story that is just being ignored.

The answer is, because we were all born to tell the stories we have been given and entrusted with and because the story is an entity with life and breath and who needs to be released to a life outside your mind and body and heart. Why? So that we all can be challenged, changed and healed. Story is your medicine and your story is someone else’s medicine in this world as well.

And, I am going to bet that many of you feel like your story haunts you, chasing you in your dream life, nudging you awake, making you want to write down ideas while driving or washing the dishes. Right?  Your stories are relentless stalkers.

“Australian Aborigines say that the big stories—the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life—are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators, hunting their prey in the bush.”

—Robert Moss, Dreamgates

Real quick, lets just strip away the thoughts that keep us from breathing life into our stories. Thoughts about fear are simply walls between the mind and our heart. We keep these walls of fear up so we don’t have to feel what is on the other side of the imagined fear.  Took me three decades as a psychologist to get that one.

stalking cartoon

Lets look at the top three fears and just exorcise them, like taking off a Band-aid: Fast and then put some ointment on it and go about living and writing or speaking your story. What are the top reasons you may not be telling your story? We will get the biggest one out-of-the-way first,

“I am not a good writer”.  Answer.  No one is and they learn to be.

“I will be embarrassed.”   Many people are embarrassed to tell their real story. Did anyone see the excruciating and amazing film version of the book, August: In Osage County, with Meryl Streep? This Pulitzer Prize winning story was semi-autobiographical and cut to the jugular of our culture. And you can bet the writing of it was no picnic for Tracy Letts. When you open up the windows to your soul and share your inner secret struggles and how you overcame the demons of fear, self-doubt, inadequacy, bad decisions, personal failures and weaknesses you gain the respect of everyone just like you…which is…. everyone.

“The truth will come out and offend people.”  Many people are afraid to tell the truth because they don’t want to offend others.  People wait until a family member passes away before they are willing to tell the true story of their childhood.  It might be an ex-spouse they are afraid will contradict their story or concern about a child, a college buddy or a colleague. We are afraid people will lose respect for us when we tell the truth, blow the whistle on family or friends, when actually the opposite is true.  The important thing is not to let fear stop you from telling your story.  The world needs to hear your story, and you are the only one who can tell it.

And, the heavy hitters as writers in our culture are never immune to doubt and fear. This is what a few of them have to say:

“For me, putting my work out there is a risk, and it can be scary.”

Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love.

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
Maya Angelou

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”

Stephen King

“My post-memoir mental state is a mixture of euphoria, disbelief, accomplishment, confusion, titillation, exhaustion and shame.”  Tom Robbins

All good writers started somewhere and in most cases if their knees were not knocking then someone should have poked them with a “pen” to see if they were still alive. We all quake at the first leap into the unknown. And for those of us who now write as a way of life we can tell you two things are true: First, that with every leap, which is usually every day you sit down to write or paint or speak, you act as if you have never leapt before and panic. Second, half way down after you have jumped, some illusive parachute opens over head and breaks the fall, allowing you to run headlong into the unknown without too many bruises.

I think they call this…Grace.

jump off cliff

Quack or Quantum

Maya Christobel4 Comments

oscar winner

“Those who tell the stories rule the world.” –Hopi American Indian proverb

 I have been a psychologist for over 30 years. Carl Rogers was all the rage when I went to study for my graduate degrees at Harvard University in Developmental Psychology. The year was 1980. America had imprinted on our favorite therapist through the Bob Newhart Show, and it was the decade of the Rubik’s Cube, Cabbage Patch Kids and Bill Cosby. So, when it came to being a shrink, Carl Rodgers was a next great step forward from Sigmund Freud and the movie What About Bob.

What I took away from Carl was a process called “mirroring”. It goes something like this: “Oh, what I hear you saying is that you feel like throwing your cat out the window”.  At that point the client throws the tissue box at me. This approach rapidly became a tool I tossed in the trash.

Then I became a bit obsessed with Fritz Perls. He was an unorthodox psychologist and I felt I would give him a try while my client was sobbing uncontrollably. The approach was an utter failure. Fritz not only believed in ruthless honesty, but also believed in disarming the facade of the client by eliciting a “spontaneous and uncensored response” through what amounted to insulting and antagonistic remarks, like, “You’re such a phony, in fact you’re a bitch”. The only place that took me was to the closet to get yet another box of tissues. I wrote a lot of apology notes during this time. Therapists aren’t perfect.

This approach proved equally as unhelpful in the process of doing therapy with a client who simply wanted the only thing that any client wants in the end: To be loved and feel lovable. My sacred job was to find out where the story of love was broken.

The One Story

After decades as a therapist I have found that there is only one story any person is recovering from and hoping to heal: A Love Story. Every client, every trauma and every impasse to healing is only about… Love: Self love, the love of a parent, falling in love, betrayal in love or the love of god. The ultimate longing is about feeling loved, feeling worthy, feeling enough. It didn’t matter if Dad was an abusive alcoholic, whether mom abandoned the family, a husband or wife cheated, a car accident left a young woman disfigured, whether someone was penniless and on the street or couldn’t hold down a job, it all led back to the most primal place in each human and the spiritual core of who we are: Feeling the certainty that we are unconditionally lovable and abundantly capable of giving and receiving love.

When I saw this truth embedded in the thousand stories that walked through the door of my office, Story became the only place I focused with each and every client. Their hoped for love story, their fractured love story, their mad-as-a-hatter-I-hate-the-world story of love gone wrong, of loves betrayal and their story of broken heartedness. Helping a full-throated version of their story emerge is the most powerful tool for healing I can offer.

Story as Medicine

As I helped clients dig down deep to the core of their own personal story I saw something begin to happen that was unexpected. People’s physical ailments, chronic health issues, cancer diagnosis and near death experiences turned on a dime toward healing, health and life. So, in 2003 I embarked on the study of how we hold our stories, like books, in the library of our neurology as jammed vibrational frequencies. And, I began to study Quantum Entanglement.

Quantum Entanglement is one of the central principles of Quantum Physics though it is also highly misunderstood. In short, quantum entanglement means that multiple particles which can be atoms, cells or people, are linked together in a way such that the measurement of one particle’s “quantum state” determines the possible quantum states of the other particles.

I was participating in Quantum Entanglement every time my client wrote and shared their story, chapter by chapter, with me or in a group. I was changed in the same ways as my client was in the movement of energy through the telling of story. And the movement of energy was initiated through the powerhouse of the heart, the largest electro-magnetic field in our body.

I then began a decade of using biofeedback to neutralize the imbalances in our neurology, which create those nasty “triggers” in life we just seem to respond to over and over again no matter how much therapy we do. We can all relate to having done a load of therapy, spent a pile of money on dealing with anger or fear and just when we think we are well beyond our issues, we hear a parent yelling at a child at the local mall and are instantly transported back in time to feel all the emotions we felt when we were yelled at as a child. We cannot help it. It just takes us over. Our neurology flips a switch and produces a full-blown regressive state. Most of us have dozens of repeating triggers that just don’t let go with regular therapy, because they are body memories. Energy cluttering up our electrical system.

I then started to work with soldiers who had returned from Iraq, broken and suffering from PTSD and only being given mind and soul numbing drugs as a solution to their pain. Working with how our physical bodies held the memories and the experience of trauma and then helping them to release these body memories through biofeedback was a monumental success.

In the process of watching my clients move how they held their stories in their cells, their neurology, their muscles and their minds it became even clearer that moving energy through the telling, the writing, the drawing, the dancing of our story had unlimited healing potential. Story has a vibrational frequency that goes with it and is shifted in the telling of story. Every word, name and emotion has a frequency as well.

There is agreement among science, medicine and metaphysics that certain frequencies can repel disease, and certain frequencies can destroy disease. Herein lies the link between frequency (vibration) and health. Everything in nature vibrates at different frequencies. In fact quantum physics describes the universe as nothing more than vibrating strings of energy! Scientific research has shown that different parts of our bodies have their own sonic signature. In other words, the sound of the cells of your heart differs from the sound of the cells of your Lungs

The awareness of Quantum Entanglement and the power of changing a person’s vibrational frequency changed my life and the lives of my clients. Therapy began to look like this: When one person fully shared the story they were born to live and tell, the experience of two or more people in a room sharing in the story changes each and every person in the room on a vibrational and cellular level. Cells began to spin differently and each individual was physically altered by the experience. New brain chemistry then takes over, hearts beat at a higher vibrational frequency with the presence of vulnerable emotions. In short, story heals and changes our physiology. And sharing a story in its fullness with those who are hearing you is simply an act of unconditional love. Now we have story as medicine.

So what does an M.D. have to say about story as medicine?

Lissa Rankin, MD is an OB/GYN physician, author, keynote speaker, consultant to health care visionaries, professional artist, and founder of the women’s health and wellness community OwningPink.com was discouraged by the broken, patriarchal health care system, she left her medical practice in 2007 only to realize that you can quit your job, but you can’t quit your calling.    She embarked on a radical path that has led to revelations about the power of story and how it can heal the body.

Lissa says, “Telling your story—while being witnessed with loving attention by others who care—may be the most powerful medicine on earth. Each us are a constantly unfolding narrative, a hero in a novel no one else can write. And, yet so many of us leave our stories untold, our songs unsung—and when this happens, we wind up feeling lonely, listless, out of touch with our life’s purpose, plagued with a chronic sense that something is out of alignment. We may even wind up sick.

Every time you tell your story and someone else who cares bears witness to it, you turn off the body’s stress responses, flipping off toxic stress hormones like cortisol and epinephrine and flipping on relaxation responses that release healing hormones like oxytocin, dopamine, nitric oxide, and endorphins. Not only does this turn on the body’s innate self-repair mechanisms and function as preventative medicine—or treatment if you’re sick. It also relaxes your nervous system and helps heal your mind of depression, anxiety, fear, anger, and feelings of disconnection.

When we tell our stories …a sense of disconnection eases and you start to glimpse the truth—that we are beings of vibrating energy, connected on the energy internet through processes like quantum entanglement, with overlapping consciousness that connects us to a divine source and to the inner pilot light of every being on this planet.”

As a psychologist and a writer I decided to embark on a path of therapy and healing that focuses on helping people unearth and tell their story, write their way to health and healing and share the uniqueness of who they were born to be and the story they had lived, with the world.

Countless people who have no idea that they are creative and have no intention to tell their story but instead, keep it under lock and key in their hearts, their bodies, their bottom drawer of a desk, have ventured to tell their stories unabridged, fully felt and fully disclosed only to find it was the most powerful choice they had ever made.

My spiritual belief is that we are the authors of each and every painful, exhilarating, mind-boggling story we have lived. Ultimately, we are not victims to a story. And as the only keeper of these stories, we incarnate on this planet to live the stories and learn, but to then share and teach. A story that is buried and that does not see the light of day in consciousness or in reality can create a toxic illness of the body and a stagnation of the soul.

It is my dedication at this juncture of my career as a writer, as a storyteller, as a therapist and as a teacher to help healing happen through the blissful, terrifying, passionate, challenging process of telling our stories to each other and the world. But, to ourselves first and foremost. Words are power and each one of them carries a vibrational signature that can alter reality.

“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.”
― Nikola Tesla