 Magic. The only way to verbally capture the essence of life these days, it's just pure magic. Things are becoming so clear. My most recent shift is realizing a deeply rooted life-long emotional misalignment: that i'm not loveable or valuable. This is fundamentally untrue for all of us, but - somehow - it's imbedded in a lot of us from day one. Some might feel the world is untrustworthy and hostile, or that they have to scream and fight to get their way. It's just more ego stories - which are NEVER logical - and ultimately doesn't matter what it says. It just wants to be seen. Now that I recognize this has been a predominant force shaping my life experience, I can begin the healing (acknowledgment) and release (feeling) of it. This core belief within me has determined how I interpret things people say/do (or don't say/do) . For instance, since I was little, my feelings would get hurt easily. I would usually take things personally. I would feel devalued, because I would view peoples behavior as confirming my deeply held beliefs that I'm not loveable or valuable. But that's just been my ego's interpretation of reality. It's not true, and has not been why they acted the way they acted. They had their own reasons based on their own ego stories. I finally get it. One of my most amazing relationships that has been teaching me this is with my girl cat Sunshine (her majestic self pictured above).  She's taught me about love in the most profound ways. We've been together for almost 10 years - by far the longest committed relationship I've ever had! Over the last few years she's become increasingly needy - to the point where I was feeling frustrated that I couldn't please her emotional needs despite my best efforts. One behavior is her incessant need to get behind me while I'm sitting down and meow like crazy. She'd claw up my back yelling at me. I'd try to pet her but, from behind me, she was tough to reach! And don't even think of picking her up. If I turned around to pet her, she'd go behind me again. This has been her way of showing me that what's behind me needs to be realized, and my reaching back for superficial "pets" wouldn't cut it. What's behind us - metaphysically speaking - is our shadow side. Our "dark" heavy emotional areas that we try to shove down / ignore / gloss over. She's been trying to get me to REALLY look at what's back there. Acknowledge it. Not appease it with feel good, superficial "pet's". (Pictured above - while laying on my stomach reading, she actually sat on my back to school me lol.) Additionally, her willingness to receive affection from others is VERY limited - whether you're feline or human. Our boy cat - Rufus - can groom her but only for a few seconds, then bam - he's whacked on the head. She's had a rigid list of criteria for affection:
Related to the not feeling loveable and valuable thing, this effects my being receptive (as Sunshine has so eloquently been demonstrating). Culturally we're conditioned to DO and GIVE constantly. But being still and receiving is a crucial part of being in balance. This is part of our feminine nature which - as we've seen - has been suppressed on a mostly-global scale (men and women need to embody both feminine and masculine energy to be whole). We're learning though - and no doubt the Sunshine's of the world are helping guide the way...head bops and screams along the way :) We're constantly searching and doing and covering-up and escaping. That background buzz of discomfort is where the magic lies though! We're afraid of facing the pain. We think things keep "happening to us", when really they're happening FOR us. And that discomfort has gems to deliver - on the other side is the bliss that's our birthright! And is subsequently the only way to be free from the discomfort...we gotta go through it. Only when we're still and observing what's going on around us can we see where we have harshness in our mellow :) Starting to slow down and observe our lives is priceless. Especially our relationships (whether they're covered in fur or not doesn't matter - they're the best mirrors actually!) So observing these feelings as they come and observing the stories that accompany them is where the change happens. Feeling it - in the raw - will allow it to dissolve. Magic! That's all we gotta do. Depending on how deeply embedded it is in our psyche, it may take a few sessions of observing / releasing. I've done a few already and can't begin to describe the lightness I feel. Living life free from baggage and burdens and defenses is where the juice is baby! What's been screaming / meowing / barking at you?!?!?! And the alchemy continues! Meow <3!
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 I finally did it. I've been sitting on this issue for a while, (seemingly) locked in the land of no way out. But I did it...I let go of needing to see a clear plan (or even a foggy plan). I just made a move forward, for my own good....totally blind.
And it worked. Holy socks did it work. I've needed to move from where I'm living for a while now, but have had an impressive list of "Yeah, but.." 's holding me back. And by "list" I mean "story". Anything but impressive. The last couple of years of my life's journey has been a fascinating melt down of sorts. Slowly but surely the infrastructure of my reality is crumbling. Part of this new paradigm deal. Something we're all feeling in one way or another, just may not identify it as a "paradigm shift". But I do. Cuz it is. And the shift has definitely hit the fan. And fear has no place in it. If it's guiding our behavior, it'll be challenged. Fear is a HUGE sculptor in our lives. Not fear of being hit by cars when running through traffic (a healthy fear....just don't run through traffic), but imagined fear of "What if...?" These are endless yet meaningless, and are great for manifesting the destiny we don't want. Fear based choices will undoubtedly create suffering in one form or another. Which includes preventing us from living truly meaningful lives, to our highest potential, with our most liberated and unapologetic creativity guiding our way. As of late, it's felt right to challenge these "What if" fears. This most recent challenge outcome rhymed with "Bucket" I've been struggling with(-out) money and solid work this year, so moving from my current low-rent-room seemed like a pipe dream. My efforts to land a new set up kept bombing. Frustration and fear were building (picture an internal volcano here). It's been recommended that I just walk anyway. Just leave where I'm living. Make a move and the Universe will take me seriously. Eek! The "impressive list" of reasons why I hesitated included "Yeah, but i have 2 cats! Many boxes of things I'll need...eventually. Lots of clothes! You know, STUFF! Am I just supposed to be homeless? Give my cats away? Couch surf? Just go move in with my sister in Boston?" I've put the word out to my friends that I was looking for a place to go while my life continued to unravel itself into whatever it's going to look like, but I've not found any leads to date. This process of letting my intuition steer the boat can be scary at times. The irony there is, when fear takes over, we can't hear our intuition! My inner knowing has gained strength over the last couple years, so i've become more comfortable "reading" that guidance. Doesn't mean I always listen (part of this whole free-will-human-condition I'm riddled with right now). Sunday night, I looked deeply into my gut (not literally....you know what I mean). I asked her (my gut...she's female) - for the umpteenth time - if I need to just walk away. This was my last yes. So I finally said "Fuck it. I'm walking". I meant it. Not in a frustrated, defeatist way. It was a fearless "Ok here we go...". Inside I felt a shift, and an immediate expansion....a lightening, if you will. I felt PEACE. The next day, I went about my business, knowing I'd have some temporary-cat-caretaker calls to make later that evening. After work, I visited a friend in the hospital who suffered serious bodily injury, requiring months of time living in a rehab facility. After just 10 minutes of catching up on his situation, and him knowing i've set the wheels in motion to up and move from my current home, he tosses his apartment keys at me saying "I have to live in a nursing home for a few months, just live at my place with your cats!" People...you can't make this up. This was LESS THAN 24 HOURS AFTER I SAID FUCK IT. His apartment is only 1.5 miles from my work, across from an amazing vegan pizza joint, I can bring my cats, and I'm able to help him with home delivery things (food, laundry, books, etc.). WINS ALL UPPIN HURRRR! This isn't the only time where I've listened to my gut (guiding my actions to go against prevailing wisdom and suggestions) and had an AMAZING turn of events yield better results than anything my wildest dreams could come up with. Let's stop kidding ourselves. Our cultures "design" is flawed, and in more ways than we can fathom. We gotta let our fearless creativity start redrawing this scene! I'm being given a chance to help a friend, myself, my cats, and clear through "baggage" i've been dragging around with me (emotional and material). We're co-creating a new world that will NOT resemble this crazy system we recognize today. I feel it in my fingernails. If you KNOW something isn't right, but have an impressive list of "What if..."'s, take time in stillness and ask yourself for guidance. Your highest self. LISTEN to the answer packaged as a feeling, chance encounter, lyrics of a song on while you're thinking of the issue, whatever. Pay attention! We're being guided to a better way of being, which surely won't look like what we're used to now. Be open, flexible and have childlike curiosity. Lots of new adventures await! Onward <3  I spent my whole life always looking for something that made sense. When I formulated my opinion about animals in captivity, it felt so "right". For the first time in my life of searching, I recognized a deep knowing: other animals are valuable, deserving freedom and support to live for their own reasons.
I dove into animal advocacy immediately after college, ultimately landing the perfect job any animal advocate could dream of: outreach coordinator for my local animal rights organization (Florida Voices for Animals). I was already thinking about ways to help animals - around the clock - so to be PAID to get involved full-time was sheer bliss! After a year of working for this organization, researching all the different issues and ways to help, I was surprised to still feel the inner urge to explore something bigger. I had engaged in every form of legal advocacy: demo's, lobbying, tabling and leafleting, media outreach, ballot initiatives, delivering presentations - all of it. Though getting the word out about animals needing help felt right, none of these modalities felt like my niche - an emptiness lingered. I was devastated...back to square 1. Right around this time, our worlds economic climate was at it's worst in my lifetime, so naturally FVA's employee fund dried up. It had been upwards of 8 years since I discovered my "path" as a voice for animals...what the hell do I do now? Going from fierce determination to a big fat question mark was scary, depressing and irritating. I began drawing unemployment and pumping out resumes left and right. But so were 10% of all other Floridians at that time. My impressive resume lay under an impressive pile of impressive resumes. I detached from all things "animal rights" (as far as activism was concerned), and figured I just needed to regroup. Clear the slate. I sought the guidance of a friend and former employer for her life coaching and intuitive services, Maria Bott. Her insights were priceless, all the way down to asking me who I am versus what I do. A question I highly recommend everyone ask themselves. My inability to answer it - on its face - was enough to quantify pursuing a deeper truth. Pivotal question! I went on a trip a few months into my unemployment and wound up in the most depressed state I had ever been in, and for the first time I couldn't "snap out of it". Freaked me out! Normally the depression / awkward feelings would go away pretty soon, or I could go have a few cocktails and drown them. Not this time. It got funkier with each attempt to shake it. Shortly after coming home from this trip, I came across Eckhart Tolle's "A New Earth: Awakening To Your Life's Purpose". SHAZAAM! After reading just a few pages, my woes melted away. Immediately upon learning about the human ego and our accumulation of emotional baggage (ie pain body), my dark heavy cloud lifted...someone let the air in the room! Brilliant. Fabulous. BLISSED to say the least. I couldn't peel myself from this book or his interviews online. THIS MADE SENSE! EUREKA! You know how I love stuff that makes sense. On the daily I was practicing being fully present, detaching from my ego, observing my emotions and thoughts - a full time job, this was! Twas the beginning of the beginning.... After a couple months of relentless failed attempts at applying for work, and not even having interviews, I reached out to a restaurant I worked at out of college. My gut burned at the thought of going back, but I felt pressure (from both inside and outside of my head) to do "something" rather than drain government resources. When I emailed my friends to say I was probably going back to waiting tables, Maria replied first thing saying "Ok, well, if you need a break....go for it." Need a break?? From being unemployed??? A part of me perked up (my higher self) and a part of me shut up (my ego). It was just my ego who was drill-sergeanting me into doing "something" rather than drain government resources. My higher self knew my time was best spent healing from within, detaching from my identity as an "animal activist", so I could allow a more authentic self to emerge. My ego was scared and imposed a guilt-trip on me. We all know this leads to wise choices. (Not). Maria affirmed what I intuitively knew (per my gut burn) that going back to the restaurant was a bad move. So I didn't, and stayed on unemployment into the new year, only applying for jobs that "felt" right. Thanks to Maria and Tolle's guidance, my life began to flow with greater ease. My ego was losing control as my view of life expanded beyond fear-based limits. In February of the following year, I received a job offer from Vegan Outreach to finish up leafleting the campuses in southern California for the spring semester. In those 2 months, if it was a good fit, I could keep the job and move out there. And it was. So I did. It was the best fitting shoe for the better part of 3 years. I grew beyond measure during my leafleting career. I owe so much of my evolution to the opportunities and encounters it provided, not to mention the overarching impact of connecting with hundreds of thousands of people about compassion. What's significant here? Two things:
This was my first real step outside of the box. Beginning a relationship with my intuitive guidance and deeper "knowing". It's scary and uncertain at first, but the "knowing" gets clearer and stronger with time and practice. I've not mastered this skill yet but am being offered NUMEROUS chances to practice. It does improve :) This is greatest truth i've ever learned: our intuition is HELLA smarter than our ego-logic-brain. The ego-logic-brain misinterprets events/people/things more times than not, our intuition does NOT. So many of us are having our realities and comfort zones rattled these days. NOW is the time to ditch the fear based ego ideas and follow our intuition. The more we clean up our inner space and get still, the clearer our intuitive guidance becomes. **Ditch the fear!** - - most importantly. Fear based choices land us in a heap. We can all name at least 3 stories where this was true for us. Please feel encouraged to share a time when your intuition lead you down a great path, despite fear or pressure to conform! Share it here and with others! We need all the inspiration to grow that we can get. For the love of love,  I wasn't raised in a religious household. My sister and I were baptized Catholic as babies, but our parents left it at that. They wanted us to formulate our own truth.
I remember asking my church-going friends what all that stuff was about, and being puzzled by a lot of it. Especially that my fellow 8 year old friends had to confess. In the "eyes of a creator", what the hell could you do at 8??? The stories of having to live by a book, interpreted multiple ways by multiple different groups of people (and later revised...?), was enough for me to question it's "truth". Plus, I just couldn't imagine that all life was created by a fear-inflicting, vengeful deity, who commanded that you apologize regularly and go sit in a building every week. All this coupled with the disturbing number of inactive "God lovers" who supported the abuse of animals, our planet and / or "different" people, or just sat by, doing nothing to help "God's creation" as terror reigned, really turned me off of organized religion, and that 3 letter word, all together. In my teen years, I realized that I genuinely enjoyed being nice and helpful to others. I didn't need fear or commandments to dictate my behavior, so I let go of wanting to know more about this god thing. I embraced the title "atheist" and left it at that. Sometime in my early twenties I developed a new perspective: saying there's NO god seems just as arrogant as saying their IS one, since there's no way to prove or disprove - it's all perspective. So my "atheism" label morphed into "agnosticism". I felt my moral compass was guiding me down a humane path anyway, so this label change didn't matter. Plus labels are limiting. Fast forward to today (and by "today" i mean more like 2009-ish). I began my spiritual journey with the recognition of energy as the force behind all things. My college days really illuminated the "process" of life (I was an ecology major). I spent time pondering what motivated a seed to germinate, cells to divide, genes to mutate, etc. I realized there was a force, what I called a "life pulse", and it seemed to drive life. As I continued on my spiritual path, this "life pulse" was being discussed by countless thinkers and visionaries that I listened to: Eckhart Tolle, Wayne Dyer, Selacia, Gary Zukov, Marianne Williamson, etc. What they all said is that this life pulse "energy" is referred to by many names: Source, Holy Spirit, God, Universal Source, Universal Energy, etc. Eek. That God word???!!! It was WILD how I would just shut down inside as soon as I heard that 3 letter word, incapable of hearing anything said after it. The part of me that judges (ie the other 3 letter word - ego) would throw up a brick wall and want to discredit everything the person said from then on - instantly! Even if they previously reiterated that the word God does NOT refer to the idea of a supreme being watching over us, commanding that we behave or else (throughout history, "man made god in mans image", distorting what was meant as the energy that drives ALL things, of which humans are merely one piece of, not the entirety of). Even in the midst of hearing beautiful words from loving enlightened people, my knee-jerk ego would internally say "Ok, if you believe in God, you subscribe to all that angry vengeful deity stuff, so clearly you're not a reliable source of information." Frikkin' hilarious to watch my ego do this! It judges other people as right / wrong / stupid / smart / superior / inferior / evil / righteous / pretty / ugly. These are all opinions, formulated by the limited aspects of ourselves (c/o the ego), the part that doesn't realize we're all connected. It has a superficial view of itself and all life, and dysfunctionally feels it has to uphold an image, since that's the extent of the egos reality - the image (a body, social/economic status, opinions, book smarts, relationships, jobs, etc.) When we view someone else as "wrong", we're making ourselves and our beliefs "right". But to whom? To our limited perspective of life. We're all part of the same exact energy source, no one being is superior to any other. Division is ego based and brings dysfunction and suffering. It's easy to type this, and "see" this, but that internal pattern takes a while to disarm. Learning to love it, not fight it, is the secret weapon ;) My view point of this god thing has morphed over the years. If I was so right before, how can I be right now? I can't. There is no wrong or right. Only perspective. The 3 letters making up the word "God" have no meaning, other than what I give them. My ego wasn't just assessing the message, it was automatically discounting the messenger based on my ideas of rightness, even when I knew it was being misinterpreted! My ego's image as an anti-God feels it needs to assert it's position, lest it be annihilated! All the ego has is it's image. No wonder it freaks out so easily! HILARIOUS! Once you begin to see the ego in yourself (and others), you start to take shit like this less seriously. It's so automatic, yet ephemeral. Humans are losing their "ego control" on the daily (crises motivated, yes, but it's happening). What's cool is that over the years, I've been detaching from my ego's control, and am seeing results. These days, when I hear the word "God" come out of a spiritual / motivational speaker, my knee-jerk response doesn't have the power to shut me down inside. There's still a twinge of "eek", but - since I don't let my ego's interpretation of things drive my life - it's a fleeting eek. Those are harmless :) If you, too, are embarking on the spiritual path and find yourself stumbling on the word "God" (or struggle with bits and pieces of dubious information seemingly credible people share), take what works for you and leave behind what doesn't. After moving to LA in 2010, I decided that I wouldn't "think outside the box". I got rid of the damn box. THERE'S NO BOX! Let limitations be a thing of the past and know your internal discernment will sniff out bull shit easily. You don't need to be on the defensive listening to visionaries speak. To this day, I don't subscribe to ANYTHING anyone says. If something feels right intuitively, I go with it. Things shift so frequently, holding onto ANYTHING as truth is limiting. Except for love. Like REAL love. That's timeless :) |
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An east coast native, Nikki spent her college years and beyond as an activist for animals, the environment and social justice issues. Needing to make sense of and come to peace with everything along the way, she began her work on the spiritual level. When she realized that the conditions of our outer world are just reflecting the conditions of humanities inner world, her focus shifted to energy healing arts and yoga. Now a Reiki Master, yoga instructor, author and speaker living in Miami, Florida she hosts discussions and teaches on the importance of living a heart-led life, inspiring steps for self-love and personal mastery: the recipe for global peace. Services offered listed under HEALING SERVICES tab. Archives
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