Circle of Stones

I gather a circle of stones.

I am grateful to live in a place of natural abundance. At least a dozen species of wildflowers greet me during each walk. I've also grown in the habit of noticing the plentiful, powerful minerals that grace this place - quartz, obsidian, jade and others I cannot begin to name.

I am intuitively called to ritual each day:

* Sending gratitude, love, blessings, and Reiki to the earth

* Asking for stones to speak to me during my walk, especially those who would like to be included in my circle of stones to assist in expanding my spirit

* Noticing shapes, sizes, and colors

* Sensing how they feel to me and how they make me feel

* Talking story to myself during the gathering as if I sit with the circle of Elders

* Sitting by my circle after the gathering to place my new stones

* Meditating on the circle, sending Reiki blessings to the circle and all-that-is

Today I notice a freshly burrowed hole on the crest of a hill. A heart-shaped chelcedony lay kicked out by the new residents, an offering to me, a treasure. The heart appears nearly quartz-like, pristine white with a red slash from top to bottom down the middle as if to signify the two ventricles of a heart coming together in union. Feeling the hard, cool stone in my hand, my life begins to synergize into a whole I haven't felt in several days of witnessing the earth's and ocean's attempts at healing. I feel a flood of creativity enter into my heart and mind in a way that feels completely integrative.

I gather a circle of stones. They nurture me, inspire me, and feed my creativity. They call to me in my sleep, in my dreams, away from waking slumber and into life - awakening!

What new ritual calls to you?

What would your heart like to create? to integrate?

Power of Integration: Coaching plus Reiki

Don't ever think you know what's right for the other person. He might start thinking he knows what's right for you. Paul Williams, Das Energi

This is my secret about what I love the most about life coaching and Reiki. Neither one is about me. One of the most common misperceptions I've encountered about life coaching is that it's about advice-giving. Nothing could be farther from the truth! In my tradition of life-coaching, I ask questions that help others discover their inner wisdom. I may offer my own intuitive hits, but I do so without attachment that they resonate with others. Somewhat similarly, Reiki is spiritually guided universal life force energy. I don't direct the energy and it doesn't come from me. It comes through me, and though I intuitively place my hands in certain positions, Reiki knows where to go all on its own. It flows in service to the receiver's higher self, for the greater good of all.

I find this all incredibly freeing. When I practice non-attachment, I am able to release ego energies and influences so that I can just be with others. I am able to trust, knowing I am, s/he is, and all-that-is is in perfect order.

It isn't what you know. Stop showing off. Stop showing off. It isn't what you do. It's what you are that matters. Paul Williams, Das Energi

I am learning more and more about the incredible power of integrating life coaching and Reiki. Each of my coaching clients receives a complimentary Reiki healing attunement each month. We may intend that Reiki will help with head-, back-, or ear-aches and such, but often we focus more on life-balance, harmonious relationships, or empowering goals. Here are some of the benefits I've seen over the past several months:

• Obtaining awesome jobs in a tough economy


• Experiencing more free-flowing money energies


• Healing earlier-life traumas


• Creating harmony during significant relationship transitions


• Opening the heart, allowing a free-flow of love energy in daily life


• Experiencing more joyful relationships in all areas of life


• Gaining clarity around life purpose and passions to fuel conscious creation


• Creating more autonomy and self-assuredness to break unhealthy patterns


• Experiencing more joy and abundance, laughter and love, light-heartedness and passion


• Living with more integrity, according to true nature and values


• Experiencing more depth of intuition, consciousness, inspiration, awareness and gratitude

It's all up to you. You are completely responsible for your life. You are the creator. It's an awesome burden and a great freedom. Paul Williams, Das Energi.

Conscious Community

Sunny and Myo

always conscious, fully present,

giving love

with a dose of mischief

~ oh ya, believe it ~

When you close your eyes and imagine Reno, Nevada, what comes to mind? Saloons, gunfights, and tumbleweeds of olden days? Quickie marriages and divorces? Slot machines and craps? Or winding roads to mountain lakes, crisp air, and ski slopes?

Or do you think of a place where people find encouragement to live intentionally, embracing love, integrity, courage, service, and respect? Or where people collaborate to create strong community ties that promote spiritual growth, cultural transformation, and a sustainable local economy?

We're all that here in Reno, and much more...

Conscious Community is a movement, building in strength and influence for several years. The goal is spiritual as well as cultural transformation. Embodied first in the way we live, transformation radiates outwardly into our families and into our social and work lives.

In February, I attended a Weaver Group training as part of the Conscious Community movement. I enjoyed myself thoroughly, exploring spiritual concepts and community development principles. Many of you know how these align with my passions. Mostly, I enjoyed the wonderful angels in earth suits who came. Everywhere I turned, I met smile after smile, loving hearts, and warm energy.

There I learned all about facilitating Weaver Groups, a grassroots strategy within the Conscious Community movement were we get back to the basics of our humanity by breaking down barriers that divide us. In Weaver Groups we connect heart to heart with one another and also with the positive aspects of our community.

Through this movement, and through our connections in Weaver Groups and in the community, we consciously create our community - one that supports and nurtures us, and one that inspires us to live in compassion and love.

Do you want more honest, authentic, loving relationships in your life?

Would you benefit from the support of others in your spiritual journey?

Would you like to see your community transform culturally, economically, spiritually?

Are you inspired to be a catalyst creating a better community?

If you are interested in joining a Weaver Group right here in Reno, please join us on March 24 at 6:30pm. Contact me, 775.970.5476 or denisesheehan@yahoo.com, for more information, or call Richard Flyer, the visionary and creator of Reno's Conscious Community, 775.851.2993.

Ah, but so many of my friends live outside of Reno. Bummer! Not really, because Conscious Community can come to you too. It works better when we spread the love! Richard has resources to help you get started, and I've listed links to some below.

I'm totally jazzed about Conscious Community. I'm ready to embrace transformation on many levels. Are you?

To learn more about Conscious Community in Reno, visit: http://www.itstimereno.org/

To access information on the training guide, visit: http://www.instimereno.org/calender.asp

To watch the new video about Reno's Conscious Community, visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gK-QOf1HDfs

Being at Choice

Everyone asks me,

What's going to happen?

I don't know.

What will you choose to do?

Proterrian

During the Bruka Theatre's delightful Valentine's Day production of "Love Squared," a character in the scene "Breakfast One" demonstrated his obsession with food by creating a cream puff. He told of how he lovingly rises before dawn to fire his wood stove to bake the pastry. On stage, he dolloped custard sauce and fresh cream between the pastry slices, then dabbled chopped hazelnuts and drizzled hot chocolate sauce on top of the decadent creation. With my mouth watering, I mumbled, "amazing." My friend, Lucie, turned to her husband and whispered, "I want that." The character handed off his creation to a lucky lady in the first row just as intermission began.

When I returned from freshening up, Lucie was eating the cream puff! Lucky Lady returned the puff to Nicky's Bar, and Lucie's husband asked for it. "Wow, Lucie, you're a powerful creator!" I told her. I must be too, because she shared huge bites with me, each one creating an eye-rolling ecstasy. In that moment of joyful awareness, I realized how most of the big intentions that Dana and I shared during our New Year's manifestation ritual have already come to pass, even before Valentine's Day! Remarkable!

My friend, Tim Glenn, is a spiritual reader, metaphysical teacher, and sound healer (soulpurposereadings.com). He's also a channel for Proterrian, quoted above, who are a collective of ascended master beings who offer us guidance during these times of transition and transformation. Tim, Proterrian, and other spiritual leaders practiced in the Law of Attraction, tell us that we are manifesting our desires more and more quickly these days. It's important, therefore, to safeguard our thoughts, to focus on what we truly desire rather than what we don't want.

However, in these days of crumbling systems, economic downturns, doomsday prophecies, and overall uncertainty about how our future will look, many of us are frightened, i.e. focusing on what we don't want, and desperately seeking answers out there in the world.

What are you envisioning in these times of turmoil and transformation?

What emotional response do you have to your vision?

What vision would bring you more strength and joy?

What inner guidance do you receive about how to prepare?

This is a time to turn away from fear-based thinking and much of our old programming. It's time to open our hearts. Proterrian offers advice for any season, but it's particularly helpful now:

1. Come from a loving heart

2. Put one foot in front of the other

3. Walk in faith

What and who in your life opens your heart?

How can you be more patient and present in the moment?

Where do you find faith and inspiration within?

I notice more and more that my heart holds my passion to make a difference in service to my community. My heart serves as my compass.

My mind helps to create the path for my loving, creative expressions, as long as I don't give it too much control.

What my heart creates, I hold as sacred. What my mind desires, I hold without attachment.

Reiki for a Vibrant Life

What in the world is Reiki? Reiki (pronounced "ray-key") is spiritually guided "universal life force" energy that promotes stress reduction and relaxation and contributes to healing. Reiki works on physical, mental, emotional and spiritual levels, restoring balance to body, mind, and spirit. Reiki also helps to remove barriers and challenges, while empowering goals.

People often think of "hands on" healing. It's different than massage, because it's not invasive. Light touch, or even just hands over the body, are all that's needed. It's super easy and fun to learn. Once we learn Reiki, we can offer it to ourselves and to others. I know first hand, the results are amazing. In addition to the huge benefit of healing from chronic illness, here are some of the benefits that I've experienced and shared with others since I integrated Reiki into my life:

• Minimizing negative or self-defeating thought patterns
• Feeling more bliss, joy and gratitude
• Attracting more abundance, beneficial experiences and joyful people
• Feeling more love and compassion for myself and others
• Enhancing intuitive abilities
• Relieving stress during times of external pressures and transitions
• Accessing quick relief when feeling fearful, hurt or angry
• Feeling love energy more deeply in day to day life, using that to guide choices
• Feeling more connected to my life purpose
• Accessing spiritual guidance more readily
• Healing archetypal patterns (such as saboteur and victim energies)
• Balancing heart and mind energies
• Relieving acute and chronic pain
• Clearing rooms and other spaces of negative energies
• Helping others to heal
• Helping others to transition from this life

Reiki has been nothing short of a transformational force in my life. In truth, part of me didn't fully believe in it when I first learned Reiki. Once I had nowhere else to turn, Reiki really pulled me along on my healing journey. For those who already enjoy vibrant health, what a gift to have the added preventative healing energy of Reiki in stressful times like these. How wonderful to offer healing, loving energy to our aging loved ones just by touching them.

How would you benefit from Reiki's healing energy?

With whom would you like to share the gift of Reiki?

For information about my special Valentine's Reiki workshop, please contact me at denisesheehan@yahoo.com or 775.970.5476.

Living with Incongruence Part III

To change, a person must face the

dragon of his appetites with

another dragon, the life energy of the soul.

Mevlana Rumi

In "Living with Incongruence Part II," we explored the different ways that incongruence shows up in our lives. Whether doing or not doing what we know we need to stop or start doing, or whether buying into limiting beliefs that hold us back, we may experience excessive mind chatter, energy drains, diminishment of our personal power related to not exercising our will power, and even disease. In this part of the series, we'll explore the role our heart's desires and thinking play in awakening our willpower. Aligning our hearts, minds, and willpower are essential to effecting positive change in our lives.

Here are some ways that incongruence between mind and heart shows up. We may find that our heart isn't into something even when our logical mind knows exactly what must be done. For example, we know we have to earn a living, but we might hate the time we spend at our current job. We may find that our mind is only interested in playing it safe without considering the whole of our lives. For example, we may stay in a destructive relationship because we're afraid to hurt the other person, live on our own, or begin life anew. We may find our mind vacillating wildly from one way of thinking to another. For example, when receiving a pep talk from a friend, we may feel wildly courageous, but then we go home or to work and feel much more humbled, even fearful of change. Believe me, living with incongruence can make us feel a bit crazy, especially as we face a major life transition when we must dig deep within, over-riding our mind chatter, in order to find our authentic way in this world.

Caroline Myss, in "Energy Anatomy," (http://myss.com/) suggests that when our hearts and minds are not aligned, like in the examples above, addictions will rule our willpower. Addictions, as Myss defines them, are not necessarily related to alcohol, tobacco, drugs, sex, or gambling. They are connected to anything we believe we need for tranquility, perhaps a person, a job, or a system of beliefs. In order to transcend our addictions, we may consider strategies to realign our heart's desires with our thinking in order to awaken our willpower. The path for all of us will be different, based on our own needs and desires. I will offer a few things that have worked for me, in hopes they are of use to you too. When practiced together, the strategies below created a synergistic transformative energy that wouldn't have occurred using each in isolation.

The most important strategy for me is to be on fire with my life purpose. However, when I feel my purpose is too big, or when I become lost in the details of making it manifest, I sometimes become overwhelmed. I may distract myself or self-sabotage my efforts with procrastination, indulgences, etc. in order to slow down the pace of my life, as well as to my destiny, making the journey more comfortable. Paradoxically, it doesn't work! It just creates mind chatter, guilt, shame, and even disgust. It's a bad trip! I find that it's healthier for me to remind myself of my life purpose each day, to say it aloud, and to feel the joyful vibration it brings to me. It fuels my sense of purpose for the entire day, empowering both heart and mind, while leaving less space for my addictive, self-sabotaging behaviors.

I also like to keep my busy mind collecting data from a place of curiosity. As a personal example, I mentioned before that my healing process has been connected with diet, so I open myself to whatever and however information appears related to my energy. I notice how I feel when I eat a salad versus a garden burger versus cheesecake. I notice how high and empowered I feel when I make a commitment that honors my higher self versus how guilty I feel when I break my commitment to myself.

Then I work to change my programming to match the data I've received. Affirmations, especially when stated aloud, can be really powerful in reinforcing new neural pathways that align with what I'm creating. When I create succinct, present-tense, powerful beliefs - Everything I eat nurtures my vibrant health! - that replace my former thoughts that keep me stuck - No matter what I eat, I never seem to heal - I find that my heart and mind align in ways that support positive changes and growth.

Affirmations help to build my internal strength for positive change. Another way is to live in a space of gratitude. I've found it helpful to journal ten things for which I am grateful each night as I process my day. It's also essential to surround myself with others who accept and invite my most authentic self to emerge, those who are not afraid of life changes I make, and who agree to support my journey.

For challenging and changing my thinking, especially with over-riding old programming that doesn't serve, I find Byron Katie's web site, http://www.thework.com/ or her book, Loving What Is: Four Questions that can Change your Life very useful. Our thoughts are much too powerful in creating our reality to allow them to run wild, especially when they work against us.

If you seek change and liberation from your mind chatter and self-sabotaging behaviors, and if you struggle with creating the changes you desire, you may want to work with a life coach to create a life purpose statement that lights you up and helps you stay focused. Life coaches support your path in an on-going way to creatively address the mind chatter and to minimize other internal and external challenges. They help you to uncover the secrets within you that will help you create the most fulfilling life you can imagine. Reiki, a form of energetic clearing and balancing that promotes healing, is another wildly valuable resource for aligning heart and mind. Treating yourself to Reiki sessions can support your positive growth and help you to release addictions and attachments.

Life is so complex, it's no wonder we humans come with so much incongruence. By exploring our own patterns consciously, we may learn to embrace our quirks and creativity and to see all the possibilities that exist in our lives, all while accepting our humanness. It helps to know that wherever we are is exactly the right place for us to learn and to grow more deeply into who we are becoming. We may release judgment or our tendency to make ourselves wrong, which only fuels what we wish to diminish. By being open to what is in this moment, and by loving ourselves just as we are, we open the doors to infinite growth, transcending our old programs, addictions, and paradigms, and embracing the world of possibilities.

What would your heart and mind like to tell each other?

Where do you find your distractions and addictions?

What strategies help to align your heart and mind?

What is one way you would like to honor your inner knowing?

What commitment would you like to make to yourself from this space of knowing?

If you would like to learn more about life coaching and/or Reiki, please contact me at denisesheehan@yahoo.com or 775.970.5476.

Living with Incongruence Part II

When I initially wrote what became my former blog post, "Living with Incongruence, Part I," I felt certain that this would be a creative, whimsical topic and nothing more. Then, shortly afterward on a road trip, my Sweetie and I re-listened to "Energy Anatomy" by Caroline Myss (http://myss.com/), and I couldn't ignore the synchronicity when Myss began talking about incongruities. I realized there would be something more to explore around creating congruence by aligning our thoughts with our actions, and so this discussion follows. What I offer below and in my next post is but a taste of a much larger, remarkable work by Myss, with some of my experiences peppered in as they relate to what she shares. I offer this because I'm seeing how this shows up in the lives of so many of us.

Myss explores incongruities in our lives, how they drain our energy, how they relate to willpower, and how they point the way to growth potential. Incongruities show up in different ways, and their effects in our lives can be quite dramatic.

First, Myss suggests that incongruities can show up as things we want or need to do, things that continuously nag at us, but that we never seem to get to. Similarly, there are some things we are doing that may be better left undone. We know better, but that doesn't seem to stop us. I see these struggles come up often with regard to exercising, changing diet, and other health-related choices that are easy to put off for another day, month, or year. When we focus our energy on what we should or should not do, but neglect to empower our will to make the changes we know are in our best interest, we lose energy. Energetically, we relinquish our power and authority over our lives to our "shoulds."

Yet the path to claiming our power and authority over our lives is not always easy or clearly laid out for us. Here's an example from my own life. During a particularly intense meditation, I had the insight that I would have to radically alter some of my habits in order to further my spiritual development, and that the process would involve something around the healer archetype. In that moment, I had a delicious sense of possibilities in stepping into my destiny, but I knew it wouldn't be easy for me to override my epicurean and workaholic tendencies, and that I would need assistance to alter my life patterns. In that moment of bliss and bravery, I embraced the transition and requested help, however it might show up. I leapt into the unknown in total trust and abandon. Turns out, I almost immediately developed a physical condition that was strongly related to diet, environmental energy (good vibe vs. bad vibe) effects, the quality of my thoughts, and my habits around workaholism. I would have to choose between either my attachments to certain foods, environments and habits or my vibrant health. Putting off the changes that I needed created lots of suffering and energy loss. Eventually, I just had to do the work, release a lot of attachments, and create life changes in order to heal. Truth be known, I still struggle at times, especially when I lose site of the grander vision of what I wish to create in my life. Also, it wasn't always easy to accept ill health as the blessing it proved to me. Yes, there were intense moments of self-pity, which were not at all useful in reclaiming my personal power. I'm so over that now...

Another way that incongruities show up, according to Myss, is through limiting beliefs that we know aren't good for us, but that we picked up during childhood or that were transmitted through our culture. Common ones that I've encountered include: I don't know enough to take the next step; If I make this choice, the people in my life that I love won't understand me and I'll be separated from them; I will have to do this all alone; If I follow my bliss, I'll never make enough money to survive. Here's a clue: These thoughts are not yours! They are old programs from years of social conditioning. Here's a new one to try on: When I break away from old beliefs that hold me back, I find amazing new freedoms!

Here are some examples of limiting beliefs that have created and perpetuated fear and victim consciousness in my life: No one can succeed starting a business in an economy like this one; I'm not good enough, ambitious enough, or smart enough. And then there's the big one, a ghost from my way-back past: Who do you think you are? Oh, ouch. Now, I don't walk around like Eeyore all the time. Most of my moments feel like wild clarity, optimism, and appreciation for the yumminess of life. Still, in recent years I've grown very accustomed to noticing the background presence of these fleeting thoughts. I've witnessed the destructiveness that they can create in our life patterns and even our health as they keep us stuck in avoidance of anything that feels like a risk. The messages grow in intensity with the degree of change we contemplate. I've learned that as quickly as the thoughts come, I must release them without judgment. To make myself wrong only feeds them, and dis-empowers me, further.

Until I release Part III of "Living with Incongruence," you may want to just notice your thinking patterns that show up for you.

What does your mental chatter should like?

What is the impact on your life?

What have you been putting off far too long?

What are the consequences of putting off your decisions to change?

If you made a choice you're not honoring, what are the consequences?