Fog to Fire

Clients have been asking me for books and other resources to support their journey ever since I’ve been in practice. While I love giving a personal referral tailored to a person’s need, I also believe there are many people out there like me who just need the right book to get them started.

My journey to self-healing began when I cracked open my mom’s copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull at age 15. So what you’ll find on my list of resources are some unexpected things mixed among the proper Self-Help books.

As my first Teacher, Richard Bach, says, you have to go through life like a baleen whale, sucking in great gobs of seawater and searching for plankton of truth. Some books are a buffet and some contain just the one kernel you needed.

Enjoy and comment here with your favorite books (or movies or whatever) that turned the lights on inside of you.

Check out my recommendations.

In March, Laura Cruikshank and I led an amazing workshop called “Yes You Can! How Spirit Helps You Let Go of the ‘No.’”

We helped over thirty women get connected to something they wanted to change in their lives, release it, and then use positive intention to attract their hearts’ desires.

I just found a couple photos of this workshop on Laura’s interactive magazine WWISH and wanted to share some of the positive energy we generated that day.

• Do you want to know more about how your energy can affect your business?
• Want to learn more about energy healing and why/how it works?
• Want to learn the signs of when it’s time to seek help, whether therapy is for you, and what your life can be like?

This is what I talked about on the Brent and Brandi show!
Click the green button to listen in: 
 

Rachel Whalley filmed by Mitch Mattraw.

As you evolve in your life, trying to learn to trust your intution, your path seems to become much less….dependable. And not so much a straight-down-the-line-to-where-you-can-see-the-end walkway. It’s more like an invisible yellow brick road. And nobody else can see it or feel it but you.

So how DO you know or learn to trust that you’re going the right way?

Karen Floyd of Innate Design and I talked about this today on my Emotions in Small Business radio show.

Here are a couple gems from our chat:

• Try to release the self-judgement that you’re being “fickle.”
  You have to follow your passion and find your happiness, or else no one (not your clients, your family, or you) will be happy.
• Recognize that a closed door is guidance, too.
  Rather than take your pickaxe to the wood, consider that maybe this a sign that you’d be better served doing something else.
• Reframe your definition of yourself.
  I loved Karen’s clarification that she’s not “abandoning” anything, she’s simply adding passions to her life and career.

Be sure to listen to the end of the show, when Karen shares her Four Questions that help her decide whether to follow any opportunity.  I thought they were beautifully phrased, easy to remember, and insightful enough to show me where I get tripped up sometimes in my decisions.

I love the TV show Scrubs. Have all seven seasons on DVD. And tonight, after a couple’s session, I found myself thinking of a scene where all the characters are doing one-on-one interviews about relationships with a shrink.

There’s one moment where Elliot says this:
“…but relationships? I always heard that relationships were easy. That even when they were hard, they were easy.”

I remember watching that for the first time, and thinking who the hell has SHE been talking to?!

Let’s get this clear, right off the bat here: relationships are hard.

Sometimes, when the clouds clear up and the planets are aligned, we have some smooth days together. Nobody gets triggered, everybody is peachy happy keen. And yeah, at the beginning of a relationship, all the stories are new, the chemistry is super fresh, and the things that will later feel irritating are easy to overlook.

But if it’s the not the very beginning of your relationship, and all the stars are doing their own thing, well, you’re going to have to work in your relationship.

Actually, I lie. What’s closer to the truth is that you’re going to have to work inside yourself for the sake of the relationship.

What feels hard about relationships is how they urge us to change ourselves. To compromise or sacrifice…or more often, fight AGAINST compromise and sacrifice.

Working on yourself–learning to pause when you start getting sad or angry or depressed, learning to listen more to your inner observer, learning to stop yourself from saying something defensive and to instead acknowledge you made a mistake–that’s the hard stuff.

But it’s also the great stuff. Most of the time, I think self-work just feels hard because we don’t know where to start and we don’t know what to do. Things always feel hard when we aren’t happy and don’t know what will fix it.

If you just take a step though…find a book to get some wisdom or ides, start a daily affirmation practice, journal about your conversations with your partner to try to find patterns…you’ll discover that the payoff is incalculable.

Hey, I’m addicted to self-work for a reason. And if you need help finding a place to start, I’m here.

Do you think you have to be an expert in something before you start offering it to clients?

Do you ever think, “oh, so-and-so has been doing this longer, so I should refer out to him?”

There’s a fine line between listening to your integrity…and self-sabotaging.

If you want to hear more about this, tune in to my radio show where Kim Trimmer of Realize Your Radiance and I will talk about taking risks without being an expert.

This Thursday, Feb 26 at 3pm PST at www.blogtalkradio.com/rachelwhalley.

Last Friday, I went to another training in Systemic Constellations, a way of working that helps people connect with their ancestry for support and reconcilliation. (This is putting it very mildly–you can read more about Constellations here.)

Partly, I attended to get more training in work I deeply respect. And partly, I wasn’t sure why I was going, but I knew something in me needed support. I was having some conflict in a close relationship. Someone I care about deeply was really struggling and I was struggling to know the Right Way to help.

In my anxiety to help my friend, I was offering all kinds of tactics and techniques. You know, the “what about trying this?” or “how about you think of it that way?” or even “let me do some EFT or healing or process work with you!”

My friend wasn’t interested in any of this, but instead felt frustrated and pushed away. Now, I’m a therapist and healer, so you can imagine my own frustration at not being “able to help.”

As I’m sitting at the constellations training a day later, another workshop participant brought an issue forward that closely resembled my own. And the facilitator brought up the most useful concept in that moment. He said, “In judging this person, you are not respecting them or their path.”

Oh.
Right.
This thing I can do so well with my clients (who are not intimately tied to my personal life) is SO much harder to do with my friends, family and spouse:

Respect their path.

Everyone gets exactly what they need in exactly the way that they need it. I may have two hundred tools for transformation, but that’s not meaningful to the person who needs to find their transformation in the two-hundred-and-first way.

The journey a person takes to healing is unique. It is sacred. And it is absolutely personal. When it comes to my friend, I forgot that.

As I came out of my workshop, I called my friend and apologized for not respecting her Way. I metaphorically bowed to her process and her path. And this created a deeper bond between us, as she felt finally heard, held and understood, and I felt a release of me trying to help shoulder her burden.

What a relief and what a blessing.

I offer thanks to all my clients, past, present, and future, who continue to help me learn this Way of Being. Peace be your journey.

I was on the radio with Laura Cruikshank of WWISH for about 2 minutes when a caller appeared. I let him on the air with us and within a few seconds of him speaking, I realized who it was!

I’m always amazed by the serendipity and magic of life. I had thought this would be my last radio show…the spark seemed to have left and I figured why keep doing something that isn’t giving back to me on some level. I don’t expect to make any money on my show, but I’d better at least be enjoying myself and hopefully helping some people.

But with so few listeners and little feedback and dimishing enjoyment, I didn’t feel like I was getting any return on this show.

Then Spirit/Serendipity/Loki, or whatever you’d like to call it, jumped in and waggled its behind at me. Ha! Surprise caller! The show goes a little off the rails! And honestly, everything was better for it.

Yeah, I know this is the post where usually I talk about the content of the show, but this seems to be more important. Just like the show was sidetracked in the best way, so should my post about it be.

I think this was a huge reminder (I need them often, cause I forget important and profound things all the time). It was a reminder that when I try to force things to happen, to grab at any mood or idea or plan, I’m not aligned with my greatest good.

So what if I just hold my plans lightly? What if I believe in my goals and ideas, but I don’t get quite so committed to how they happen?

What if (ha! again) I remember to TRUST SPIRIT?!!!

When I did this, I found out a most useful thing about my radio show plan:

1) I’ll agree to do this show as long as the schedule keeps coming easily (my next guest for Feb 12th just fell into my lap right after I got off the air).
and more importantly,
2) I am NOT a stand-and-deliver speaker.

I realized this because I enjoyed this show more than any I’ve done so far, and I believe it’s precisely because we all went “off script.” Most of my talking points and plans went out the window once my mystery caller came on. And I LOVED what happened to the conversation once it did.

Yeah, I can deliver points, give a speech, what-have-you, if I need to. But I don’t really love it. And here’s the key point: it’s NOT my true calling.

But facilitating something new, a conversation that goes a little off into creativity, that generates some heat and some light and some new thoughts. Hells yeah! I’m into that!

So expect to hear something fresher and livelier from my next shows. I may make mistakes, be surprised and certainly less polished, but my guess is I’ll sound like I’m feeling more me. And I hope that’s what you all want to be hearing anyway.

**If you’re curious about the caller who became our additional guest on the show, you can listen in by scrolling down a bit and selecting the show called “Building Trust” in the media player on the right-hand side of this page.

How does someone decide whether or not to hire you? What might be keeping potential customers from signing on the dotted line…or maybe even calling you? How does it feel to have something amazing to offer and yet still somehow miss the very people who could benefit?

Tune in to my radio discussion with special guest Laura Cruikshank of Women’s Wellness and Integrated Social Health (WWISH) as we talk about the role of trust between service provider and customer.

Visit my radio show page to setup a reminder that will email you as we near showtime. You can listen through your web browser or call (646) 929-1479 to listen or contribute to the discussion.