Tag: spirituality

Being Spiritual Sucks – It’s Not What People Think

Posted on by Katherine Bird

So many people want to be ‘spiritual’. Workshops to learn how to be intuitive, psychic and spiritually connected are all over. Ceremonies that open people up are happening all the time. 

People want to feel less alone, get spiritual downloads and have the information they receive lead them to more love, money and purpose. 

But, honestly, this path is not all about bright lights, chubby angels and everything feeling good. 

When you are open to spirits, when you are open psychically to the world you are open to more than just the ‘good stuff’. 

The unseen world is massive. Psychic information is not always easy to process. 

People want to have spiritual connection… until they realize that part of the job description is sometimes helping suffering souls to the other side. 

And that sometimes means seeing and feeling the pain and torment of spirits that have been trapped and learning how to effectively help them leave this plane of existence. 

People want to be energy healers… until they realize that part of the job description is sometimes feeling in your body the pain of another person and being present to a person’s darkest moments. 

We have been sold a strange bill of goods. The new age has made it seem like this path is angel cards and unicorn farts. It isn’t.  

It is often deep trips to the underworld. 

It is meeting with guides that scare the shit out of us. 

It is removing hooks and cords and dark, sticky tar. 

It is being flooded by the intense pain of a being who has been murdered or witnessing the past life of someone tortured and abused. 

And being centered, grounded and present enough to stand in that and do the work that needs to be done. 

When you are tuned in this way you are a beacon for this work. You decide at a certain point to be okay with the weirdness of it all and commit to service. 

That service will not always look or feel ‘good’. 

You will confront the darkest parts of yourself as you are schooled by your guides into the layers of the underworld. 

Through that, you become strong, effective and a true light. 

This work is needed. Yet so many push it away, trying to be ‘normal’.

Fuck that. You can master this service which is often uncomfortable. You can be safe inside of it all. And, imagine what a human you will be at the end.

So, if your spiritual, energetic development feels like it sucks sometimes… that’s okay. 

Part of the path. 

And it is totally worth it. 

Receiving Spiritual Guidance: When your Spirit Guides or Inner Guidance isn’t Giving You the Answers You Seek

Posted on by Katherine Bird

Do you feel like sometimes you want your spiritual guides and teachers to share more, give more clear advice and show up in a more concrete way? Do you find yourself sitting and asking for support and then feel like maybe you  aren’t connected at all? Have you had some significant spiritual experiences, yet are feeling like you are having a dry spell and not getting the guidance and support you are looking for?

Something that people often come to me with is that they are seeking so much, working so hard and asking over and over for guidance and not getting ‘clear answers’. 

There seems to be a disconnect from the space of open connection, having some significant experiences and yet feeling like the messages one gets from guides or Source simply aren’t loud enough, clear enough or strong enough. 

Yet, on looking more closely, usually these people are very guided. 

It seems there are a few things at play here: 

  • Your guides don’t want to give you all the answers all the time. They want you to have free will, your own process and choose based on your values and creative life force, not just being guided. 
  • When we work with only a vertical plane (you to the guide) it is coming through energetically and there isn’t a need for translation as there would be with someone sitting in front of you. No pull on that horizontal plane (you translating the energy for another)? Not as concrete information. It’s almost always easier to receive for someone else instead of yourself. 
  • Guides will transition out of communication as you go through other important life and energetic shifts. You might be reconnected or you might connect to a different primary guide later. 
  • You are probably getting a lot of information and it is subtle. It actually becomes more subtle over time. This requires more trust, more patience and deeper listening. Of course your guides want you to develop this!
  • Do the things that you have already been guided to do. If you ask for a bunch of advice from someone and never take it, how long do you think they will keep giving you advice? Sometimes the guidance we receive feels too big and it takes a while to fully align to it. Keep taking those small steps.  

What I want you to get from this is to stop questioning and worrying so much. You’re Not Alone. You are guided. 

But, what this also means is that it is important to stay connected:

  • Offer gratitude even when you get nothing. That opens the flow more than anything. You aren’t coming from a needy, less than space but ‘in right relationship’. 
  • Do your practices. This means energetic clearing, cultivation and connection practices, prayer, gratitude, making offerings and sitting in silence not asking for anything. 
  • Invite others into your process to see if you get more for them. 
  • Be patient. Be kind to yourself. Listen deeply and open your heart. 
  • Align to your values and create based on those. Do your work and be willing to not know. That’s part of the fun of being human isn’t it? Take aligned action again and again to enter the stream of guidance. 

Guidance can take the form of something that you don’t expect. A person arrives. A book pops out at you. A teacher emerges. You are invited to an event or place. Energy slowly integrates into your being.

Even something challenging might be just the opening you need to find healing, growth and evolution. THAT is what this work is about, not just knowing everything all of the time. 

I support people to develop consistent and effective connection to inner guidance and their spiritual team. 

If you want to develop your channeling and mediumship abilities and trust your guidance fully, You can sign up for early registration for Open Your Channel cohort this year.

Open Your Channel-Sign up

If you feel called to that work but know you have more stabilization and practice cultivation to do, empower your energy, clear out what is holding you back, heal your nervous system and emotional upset, address your underlying trauma and learn effective practices in 5 Elements for Empaths. Learn Qi Gong, Chinese Energetic Medicine, Breath Work and how to work with emotions and trauma. 

You can jump into the waitlist now!

5 Elements for Empaths – Join the Waitlist!

Spirituality and Entrepreneurship Must Be Intertwined

Posted on by Katherine Bird

Spirituality must be intertwined with business and entrepreneurship. These aspects of self can’t remain separate. As you evolve and grow you will only be more drawn to a higher alignment with your spiritual self. 

Your spiritual life will hold you as you grow. It will help you to make decisions based on trust, intuition and higher understanding instead of fear, scarcity or trauma. The decisions you make now will affect the way that your life emerges in the future. Ones rooted in self-awareness, service and connection are sustainable and will grow with you. Ones that are held back by lower desires and habits will be harder to break free of without destroying what you have already built. 

You want your impact in the world to be one of integrity, service and full creative expression. 

Entrepreneurs are their work. Business is connected to how one is living and growing. You can’t separate yourself from your mission. By engaging in spiritual and energetic practices and then integrating them fully in a heart-centered and aligned way, you can emerge as a thought leader that people want to follow, collaborate with and support. 

More importantly, what they are following will lead them to a place of more self-love, fulfillment, joy and service to the world instead of the influencing forces that are only giving them a desire to be an illusion. 

What you create and comes through you will be more true and not just another business, but a contribution to the world. 

In this time of upheaval, great shift and change, as old ways are dying and new ones emerge we are being called to higher levels of self-awareness and awareness of our connection to Spirit and energy. Our old fears, beliefs, projections and wounds are not going to serve a new world being built from our very thoughts and feelings. 

We have seen what disconnected decision making has created. Maybe you have even seen it in your life as you’ve had to move away from choices, relationships and businesses that you have invested your life force into. 

We can’t afford to keep looking at the world from the perspective of, “How much more money can I make?” or really, “How can I try to make myself feel safe by building something even if I do not fully believe in it?”

We can’t keep ignoring the call of our soul because it will leave us dissatisfied in the end. And, maybe everything will have to crumble in order to hear that call fully. 

In order to elevate more people, to have a greater impact we must be willing to commit to our own self-growth, worth and development. 

You don’t need a new marketing strategy, you need a fully aligned, integrated mastery that emerges when one is willing to step into their full power, expression and service. 

It is about healing, opening, cultivating more energy and awareness and coming from that place. 

Being aligned in this way allows greater intuitive information to come in and empathic skills to emerge without being taken out by other’s energy and emotions. It brings ease, flow and a level of certainty to path and process that does not happen otherwise. 

I am interested in how we can fully activate and then integrate our new spiritual and energetic awareness so that it is of the highest service to what is being created. 

If this is resonating with you, let’s chat about my one on one program called INTEGRATE, Spiritual and Energetic Development for Leaders and Change Makers.

Integrate – Spiritual and Energetic Development for Entrepreneurs, Leaders and Change Makers.

What Does It Mean To Be Healed?

Posted on by Katherine Bird

I am going to break down some considerations of what it means to be healed and some questions and practices that you can engage with right away to support your own path to understanding what it means to be healed.

Have you ever sat in the painful inquiry, “How can I have done so much work and still not be healed?!”

Have you had clients who struggle with the fact that they are still dealing with certain issues even after what feels like ‘forever’ processing them?

Have you ever doubted yourself, your tools or your own commitment to your work because of your own or other’s inability to move past a certain point?

I think that this is almost a more complicated topic in my work because most of the people that I serve are in some way a healer or coach or one focused on healing for many years for themselves and their clients.

Often anything less than complete reduction in all symptoms and a total and complete shift to a fully whole and functioning life in every aspect is seen as some sort of failure.

I see that people discount or even forget how much progress that they have made. There is little celebration of small victories.

The focus is primarily on what is not working, what is still the sticking point or the pain and the transformations, realizations and expansion are forgotten.

It is easy to focus on what is not working. It takes more effort to focus on what is working, what has progressed. Yet, this is where the full reprogramming occurs. This is the doorway in which we travel to full transformation.

This is a function of our brain and it’s wiring to focus on negativity because it is both an ancient orientation to stay safe and also a learned aspect of our being.

For example, if we can focus on danger and negativity, we will be more likely to get into shelter at dark avoiding predators. If we are able to focus fully on pain in our bodies, we will tend to treat it instead of letting it get infected.

And, as we grow we are taught that we must pay attention to what is wrong, the wrong answers on the test are marked in red and cause pain, shame and change. The right ones, we rarely think about again. In fact, a lot of people get shamed for getting things right when others struggle.

So, like I said, it takes a lot of conscious effort to recognize our progress and what we have done and take into account our process might be one that simply has some twists and turns as we learn, train and move through our emotions, energies and physical limitations.

Again, the question can be asked, “What does it mean to be healed?”

Honestly, this must be answered for each one of us as we go along and it will shift and change with the tides of your life.

Healed = Wholeness

You have probably heard that plenty of times.

If you want to see a cool video on healing, here is one from Chinese Medical Qi Gong Practitioners reducing a tumor in a patient. When I was shown this video, it was explained to me that they are chanting basically, “Already Done” and they are focused and imagining not that the patient is healing or the tumor is lessening but that it is “Already Done”. Full, complete, integrated and whole.

It is important for us as we go through our process to have this attitude. To see and imagine ourselves on a consistent basis as already whole, healed, complete and “Already Done.”

What might change if this was your mantra and meditation?

 

See if this practice helps:

Think of an issue that you have been dealing with.

First drop into your body. Feel yourself connected and receiving form the Earth and from Above.

Take some calming and deep breaths.

If this issue, pain, situation was completely healed, how would you feel?

What would you be doing?

Let the first things that come to you come out. Write them down. Imagine yourself feeling that way. Imagine yourself doing those things.

And, then… go do that. What will help you feel that way right now?

What can you do?

Before you start arguing with me about this one, just do the exercise.

And then.. you might argue.. “but, I have this pain, this issue so I can’t do the thing that I want”.

OK, maybe. Maybe your issue is that you broke your foot so you can’t go scuba diving like you want. But, maybe you can go to the seashore, you can go do something that will help sea life in some way, you can go float about in a bay.

You might be in really bad shape right now and all you can do is put on a recording of whales, lay in the bathtub and imagine to the very best of your ability that you are truly swimming about.

This will change your outlook. It will engage your muscles even through the power of imagination. The magical thing about us is that our brains don’t know the difference in what we are doing and what we are imagining. The imagination is a primary key into our healing.

All of the sudden more peace is found, more joy, more connection.

The body and soul start to heal themselves through this power of play and imagination instead of the ‘work’ that so many of us have become accustomed to as the path to healing.

Maybe you are depressed. If you consider, if you weren’t what would you be doing…and that might be making art. You might then come up with a lot of reasons why you can’t make art. Shift that to find some small way to engage with art. It might be just coloring, or building a beautiful altar or area in your home. It might be using materials from nature to make a mandala.

Because, what is healed? It is finding our way under the emotional, energetic issues that are holding us and manifesting in our bodies. It is finding a place of peace, joy and presence despite our issues, pain or struggles. It is moving forward, step by step acknowledging the profound shifts that we have already gone through, celebrating the small victories and leaning into the uncomfortable places.

I believe it is when we are able to be devoted to our practices, our intuition, our boundaries and our gifts. Because, you can go to one of those Medical Qi Gong Doctors, have them reduce your tumor, but if you are not making life changes, processing old emotions, coming into higher alignment with your truths and virtues, the healing has not really happened and disease will slowly come back.

We will all have pain, illness and struggle. Often, it is how we engage with these struggles that makes all the difference. They are our teachers. They ask us to show up brighter, more devoted, more caring and more compassionate to ourselves and others.

We are all healing, but we are also already whole. Be with your wholeness and allow it to inspire your actions.

If you are interested in this discussion of what is healing and how can we be of the highest service in healing, I hope you will join me for The Healer’s Masterclass Series starting Sept 12th. Sign Up For Free

9 Ways To Not Feel Like a Fraud

Posted on by Katherine Bird

We see all of the beauty and success on Instagram and Facebook and we assume that everyone always has their shit together and is just killing it. In this work (i.e. coaching, healing, channeling, facilitating), you will, again and again, hit up against various ways to feel like a fraud and a fake. And in the world of healing and coaching: shit goes wrong. We over-invest, clients drop out of programs, things fail, we get sick, we need to continually keep adding more clients to our programs and private sessions, etc., etc.

What Makes us Feel Like a ‘Fraud’?

Just before and after big pushes and expansions (big retreats, larger programs, charging more, doing something new), we often rubberband back into a familiar form of despair and the feeling that we might not do so good again, or people didn’t really get that much from it, or we aren’t really qualified or good enough to do this new thing.

Strangers criticize us on the internet when we put out our most heartfelt posts and blogs. There are so many ways that we can fall, once again, into this place of “not good enough, I’m a fraud, I’m a failure.” It is these moments when we think we could just quit it all and go to work in a cat cafe pouring lattes for kittens.

 

Yes. This is actually ‘a thing.’

So how do we avoid giving up?

Every Healer Needs to Know These 9 Simple Truths:

1. You have to have that one person.  One person that you can call and who will listen to you cry and not judge you because you are supposed to have all of your shit together.  Someone who will remind you of who you are, your talent, your mission, and your heart. They see you and know you and are able to do for you what you are often doing for others.

2.  Know that everyone goes through this. You aren’t alone. Everyone fails. Everyone has a hard time with money. Often those who seem so put together from the outside are in just as much of a struggle as anyone else. Healers and others focused on service, are often burdened with financial struggles -sometimes even more than other entrepreneurs.

3.  Keep in mind that you are actively swimming upstream. You are trying help raise the consciousness of the planet, guide people through healing themselves, expanding their awareness and living more free, joy-filled and heart-centered lives. All in a global structure which does not support these things. Schools, the financial systems, food, work and even relationships are all designed to keep people small, under control and barely getting by to fuel industries of pharmaceuticals, alcohol, porn, and shopping. Even not doing much you are still swimming upstream and that can be exhausting in and of itself.

4.  Honor that you are at the same time working on yourself. You are expanding, growing, healing, learning and mastering yourself. This can be uplifting but can also send us into healing crisis, overwhelm and sudden realizations that big things have got to change – fast. New gifts and abilities are coming online and there is more need for time integrating spiritual practices and experiences.

5.  Realize that you are grounding Spirit to Earth. You are actively asking spiritual concepts and awareness to come through you to Earth and be made manifest in a way that people can understand, purchase, take in and integrate. Sometimes these messages are just known as feeling states that must be translated into human language. Sometimes they are elaborate practices, rituals and modalities that must then be tested, practiced and taken through a process of the best ways to share and teach them to others. This is what it means to truly be a spiritual warrior, to not be only in the upper realms but grounding it back down into the tangible form.

6.  Accept that you are possibly doing something completely new. It’s pretty hard to get a certification in a channeled work that you are bringing through. It is hard to stand up and say with conviction, “This is right” when it hasn’t come from a master teacher, mentor or lineage. You are a change maker and a thought leader who is bringing new energies and ways of doing things to the planet and you have to figure out not only how to bring them, but how to explain why they are important, what people will get for them, and why they should invest. These are probably things people aren’t even aware they are in need of, so add another level of explanation to the masses beyond just doing the work.

7.  Know that you are actively creating.  Creation takes energy.  Not resting and honoring the ebb and flow of creative process can leave you feeling down when things seem to dry up for a spell so that you can go inward, work on yourself, rest or play in the human world.

8.  See yourself as the Alchemist. You are doing Alchemy, which means this is a process of transformation. And, not all phases are comfortable or fun. Sometimes you get stuck, sometimes things take longer than you would like. You are learning the processes as you are going along.  Your teachings and wisdom often come from your own learned experiences, and so it requires going into the underworld of fear, doubt, shame, and failure in order to properly teach or facilitate.

9.  Give yourself a ton of credit for running a business in the midst of all of this stuff! Meaning: bills, taxes, bookkeeping, managing a team, marketing, planning, doing, doing, doing. Often these tasks are not in your zone of genius in order to make a living at the only thing that you could possibly do.

Because, let’s face it, the minute you start thinking about working in the cat cafe, you smile, think, “Yes! That would be amazing!” and then come back to center and admit that you were designed to bring this very specific special medicine and contribution to the planet, so you jump back in and keep on swimming.

You are amazing!  Keep on swimming!

Inspired by the latest Light Warrior group call.  Join us at the next retreat!
Special thanks to Michelle Hawk for always being the one I call when this is coming up for me.

Join Me For The Healer’s Masterclass

Leaving Our Religions

Posted on by Katherine Bird

What some might consider alarming is the fact that in America people are leaving their religious institutions at a high rate.  

From http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/

“But the major new survey of more than 35,000 Americans by the Pew Research Center finds that the percentage of adults (ages 18 and older) who describe themselves as Christians has dropped by nearly eight percentage points in just seven years, from 78.4% in an equally massive Pew Research survey in 2007 to 70.6% in 2014. Over the same period, the percentage of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated – describing themselves as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” – has jumped more than six points, from 16.1% to 22.8%.”

Where are these people going?  Religious organizations have long served as the backbone of the community. They host birth celebrations, weddings, coming of age ceremonies and they acknowledge you when you die.  They are a place that people have turned to when they lose a job, a family member or find depression seeping in.  They are the places that we have educated our children and sought council when marriages went sour.

Now what?

I see more and more people that seem to be coming out of these systems and desperate to find spirit and heal themselves. People that would traditionally be turning to religion are reaching out to me and those like me for help.

They are often wounded from their religious upbringing in the areas of magic and sex.  

Magic is evil, of the devil and witches deserved to be burnt.  So, when these people are little they shut off their natural sensitivities.  The healers, mystics, empaths and energy workers stop their natural flow of energy.  They close down their systems and react with fear when things like synchronicities, deep inner knowing and spontaneous healing occur.  They distance themselves from ‘witchy’ things and people such as tarot cards, Yoga, astrology, Reiki and even massage and meditation.  All the while, they might be having a deep inner desire to explore these things or they are so natural at it they are surprised when they finally come in contact with them.

Sex is obviously bad in many religious homes and communities.  So, the natural sexual energy that lives in the lower parts of the body is shut down.  Often, people get to the point that they are unable to feel anything in the pelvis at all and have lost desire and purpose, have no idea how to cultivate and store energy and feel lost and off mission.  Bringing things to fruition in the world feels a burden or even impossible.

The guilt and deep shame that was learned in these religious homes has to go through a process of being released from the body and spiritual systems.

This is where energy work, body work, movement practices and conscious communities can help.  

We of the ‘New Age’ spiritual communities have to be ready and open for these new seekers.  

Let’s face it, there are a lot of spiritual snobs out there.  We have found our way out of the mainstream, have moved to the west coast, found out how to wear a bindi  http://hinduism.about.com/od/bindis/a/bindi.htm and then we have an air of superiority over the unenlightened masses that haven’t been to a conscious organic potluck yet.

Humans don’t do well without a spiritual home.  When someone is depressed or having crisis having a spiritual community that stands by them, supports them and accepts them is vital to their getting on their feet and finding peace.  There are so many people that have first been energetically shut down by their old religion, are now in pain and suffering and have no place to go for the spiritual sustenance they so desperately need.

So, what can we do to support the exodus?  

Reach out to your friends that seem on the edge.  You might get some rejections and some sideways glances, but invite them to your spiritual center, a meditation or a Yoga class.

Listen.  This is a tough place for a lot of people.  This has been all they have known and now there feels like so much more. This can be overwhelming, it can bring up a lot of issues around being ‘bad’ or doing something that will put them on the wrong side of God’s wrath.  

Be kind and patient.  Do unto others and all that.

Share your personal story.  Maybe you grew up super alternative and felt rejected by religious friends in school.  Maybe you were deeply in an organized religion and went on a long spiritual quest to find your truth.  What was that like for you and how do you feel now in your journey.  Make a connection.  Relate to them so that they see that we are all one.

Walk your talk.  

Be an example of your truth.  

Show up and be present.

Be loving and generous.

Because that is what ‘being spiritual’ is all about.