Welcome to the first episode of The Love Alchemy Sessions. I’m bringing you channeled guidance, oracle cards, and energy & meditation exercises to bring more love and more positive vibes into your week.
The long and the short of the message this week: You are not broken. Where ever you are on your path right now is exactly where you are meant to be.
If you missed this week’s episode, you can watch here:
Energy Shifting Exercise: Meeting Yourself Where You Are
What You’ll Need: A journal or paper, pen or pencil, quiet space.
Tapping & Visualization Exercise: This exercise is a combination of visualization, meditation, and tapping (a mind-body acupressure technique), but I want you to focus on the visualization portion first. I include journaling in this exercise to help those who have difficulty visualizing, and to help you remember the information that you gather in this process. Unless you are having difficulty visualizing and choose to use drawing and writing to help you complete the exercise, feel free to use the journal portion of this exercise after you’ve completed the visualization, just to jot down any thoughts, reactions, or to simply record the information you receive for later reference.
Before we begin this exercise, I want you to make sure that you’re tapping or pressing on one of the EFT Tapping points. EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Techniques, and this form of mind-body acupressure helps facilitate cognitive shifts and create a sense of safety as we explore parts of yourself that you may not have encountered before. In my experience, tapping or pressing one or more of these points during a meditative or introspective exercise, it can greatly help increase access to the subconscious and creative parts of the mind. If you are already familiar with the EFT Tapping points, simply choose one or more of the points that you feel comfortable with and make sure that you’re tapping or pressing these points the entire time you are doing this exercise. If you are new to tapping and are unfamiliar with the points, the easiest way to incorporate acupressure into your work and meditations is to hold your wrist (see the image). Simply holding these points stimulates several acupressure meridians that run from your hands and fingers through your wrist, and won’t require you to find other points or worry about how to use them just yet.
Once you’re comfortable with holding or wrist or tapping the points you’ve chosen, you can begin the visualization. Close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and imagine there is an empty chair across from you. In this chair, imagine the specific part of you that you want to change, or the habit you want to break. It’s important to choose one, single, specific change or habit for this exercise. Avoid lumping all of the changes you want to make together – remember the clarification work you did in the previous chapter. Allow this specific part to appear however it chooses to appear, even if it seems not to make any sense. I could appear as an object, a version of yourself, a person, or something else entirely.
If you have difficulty visualizing this part of you, I’d encourage you to take out your paper and pen and draw the part. It doesn’t matter how well you draw or don’t, just put onto paper whatever comes to mind, without judgement. It could be as simple as a scribble or a stick figure, or perhaps a more elaborate image will come to mind. Just breathe, try not to overthink, and allow your pen to move on the paper. Whatever comes up is exactly what’s supposed to come up right now.
Once you have an image, either in your mind’s eye or on paper, use this opportunity to have a conversation with your habit. Ask it the following questions, being open to it’s responses. I often encourage clients to go with the first thing that pops into their head after a question is asked. Often, this information is the information that has a chance to come forward before the conscious, thinking mind can interfere, and if there’s anything I learned, it’s that you can’t think your way into the subconscious mind.
- Where did this part come from?
- What purpose does this part serve?
- What need is this part meeting?
- What problem did (or does) this part help you solve?
- When was this part created?
- Does this part belong to you, or did it come from someone else?
- What does this part of you need?
Take your time as you move through each of these questions, and give yourself permission to be flexible as you ask them. Feel free to ask them more than once, ask follow up questions, push and search for the clarity and answers you need to have clarity and insight about this part of you. If you notice feelings or emotions coming up around this part of you– fear, guilt, disgust, anger, sadness, etc.– acknowledge them and, for the moment, see them as additional information about what might be attached to this part of you. When we begin to listen to the parts of use that are behind our habits and the things we wish we could change, instead of trying to force our way through them with guilt, anger, and self loathing, we set ourselves up for success. The information you gather in this exercise will help you begin to approach the parts of you that you want to change as something to work with, not against.
When you are finished with this visualization, jot down the information you received. You may not understand all of it right away, and you may find that you need time to process the answers that came up. Likely, you’ll want to revisit this information again as you learn to view your habits and changes from a new perspective. Simply having this information is only the beginning of the process of rewriting how you’ve probably viewed change and your habits for a lifetime. Remember that in this stage our focus is on grace and flexibility, and you deserve to show yourself grace and flexibility even as you figure out how to assimilate this new information.
When we work with the parts of us that we want to change, acknowledging that they exist for a reason, serve a purpose, or meet a need within us, we open ourselves to creative solutions and guidance to begin to solve those problems and meet those needs in new and different ways. When we have new realizations about the changes we want to make that don’t involve self loathing, guilt, and other negative emotions, we can create new paths to change that inspire and excite– new paths that are based in positive, open solutions.
Now that you’ve gathered this information around this part of yourself, you will find that some of the insights may require further work and resolution. This will likely be in the form of your own processing and may also come in the form of outside support. One of the primary things I encourage my clients to work through is the process of identifying and resolving the wherever it is they learned their habits worked. The moments in our pasts where we learn to meet needs with ineffective behaviors that no longer serve us are more often than not rooted in high emotion, and sometimes even trauma. Our subconscious minds can cling to old learnings in effort to keep us safe, keeping us rooted in old behaviors based on past experiences and old learnings. The quickest and fastest way I’ve found to resolve these past experiences and resolve the attachments our minds have created between our habits and the places that we learned to use them as a solution is using energy meridian techniques like tapping and Matrix Reimprinting.
If you would like to explore how these techniques, let’s chat! I offer a limited number of one on one private sessions for exactly this type of powerful energy work. Don’t be shy- Click here to reserve yours!