Networking, Fear of Success, True Colours, and Muffins

Banana Nut Muffin

Ah, this week was a very busy week for me! It was filled with a personal learning curve, which definitely has effects my business.

One of my main concerns this week was muffin making! I have made an agreement to trade a gluten free sugar free and vegan muffin recipe for an Akashic Record consultation where I plan to get my business name from as I’m currently operating under none. After finding out that Victoria is the “City of Roses” my old name of Rose Tree Healing would get lost in all the rosey businesses. And it has no oomph to it. So lets see what Spirit has in store!

Thursday night I attended a YES mixer (Young Entrepreneur Society) with another participant in the Youth Means Business program and Mr. Business Coach. I really did not enjoy it, however I do not like crowds of people especially being in a crowd of people in a small confined space. I also dislike people I don’t know touching me which happened often, as it does in crowds, as people move around from one point to another. This mixer definitely took me out of my comfort zone. The other participant I went with seemed quite comfortable and the Mixer seemed profitable for him.

On Sunday, I had requested a friend of mine do some work on me. We focused on my Abundance issues and gleaning clarity on the underlying blockages to abundance. The session definitely met it’s goals of clarity around abundance.  Among a few issues that came up one really stood out to me, which I focused on this week: Fear of success.

At one point in time I had become aware of this fear within my consciousness but I had never done anything with it. It makes sense that it would be a contributing factor to the blockage of abundance, especially financially, that I have felt in my life.  I see that it would contribute to the habits of self-sabotage and procrastination. There are probably other habits or patterns that I am unaware of as well.

After the session and dragging my feet for Monday and Tuesday I said to myself  “Okay, you have to stop this Serafina. You have to deal with your fear and you know how to do it!” So, with much hesitation and crying (It was an emotional moment to possibly loose a long-time buddy, even if it’s for my own good!) I sat down and meditated on my fear.

I pictured him in front of me and asked him what lessons he had to teach me. And then I removed him from my life, and filled that area with white light. This was repeated until he said “You can only deal with me so much in this way, the rest must be dealt with in day to day life… Take care of yourself.”

I would like to share with you some of what he “said”:

“You can love yourself. It is a simple choice…. Self-love will make you radiate… Acknowledge that you are beautiful in the mirror everyday… Don’t be scared to give of yourself, for this is how you will make your biggest contributions to mankind, to humanity.”

On Wednesday I went to the True Colours Personality Workshop that Youth Means Business put on for program participants and I finally got to meet other women in the program! I also learned about the True Colours, which I think are a very simple and fun way to think about people. I’m blue. And my secondary colour is orange. What are you? The only free online quiz I could find for you is here.

My week was emotional. I felt a lot of things moving and shifting. Things that have been held in my body are releasing, and I feel some patterns and ways of thinking are being lifted. It is good!

Also, got a bike! And a helmet! Very excited! Went on my first bike ride and its perfect for my plan to get me into shape! A giant hill almost killed me! Lol. MUAHAHAHAHAA!

Have a great week!  🙂

Full Moon, Clothing Swap & Life Lessons

Off to the Sunday Market I went, and there I met some amazing people. While there, since it was slow, I had plenty of time to think, reflect and have intriguing conversations. One woman I now call my Speech Doctor because she has a beautiful way of speaking and expressing herself. This led to my reflection on some lessons I would like to share with you. 🙂

  1. Words are extremely important. It’s best and improves life to use positive words as much as possible. The Speech Doctor gave me my first lesson: Avoid/notice don’t and won’t.
  2. Names are also extremely important. Remember, and use them. I’ve always been bad at recalling names, at one point I completely stopped using names unless absolutely necessary for fear of using the wrong name (which I often did). To counter my memory failure I’ve begun to visualize people with their names printed beneath their picture.
  3. I am what I complain about. This amazes me. Just amazes me.
  4. Its getting quite easy for me to identify abuse, codependency, boundary issues as well as passive aggressive behaviours now that I have become more knowledgeable and aware. I still have much to learn, however I feel like this awareness shows that some progress has been made on my own journey to heal myself, as they are all issues that I’ve been working with.

On Monday Mr. Business Counselor stated, much to my excitment that I’m almost done three parts of my business plan out of about eleven parts! Some of the pieces I’ve been working on for a few weeks I’ll finally get to retire! YES!

The full moon came around, and with it the opportunity to go to a Full Moon women only clothing swap/get together. A girl I had met on Cortes also came out that day and ended up spending the night here because she joined myself and Lori on our adventure to the clothing swap.

I had made about two dozen chocolate chip cookies that are gluten free vegan and sugar free, and brought some old clothes. Lori brought old clothes as well. When we arrived there were about ten or twelve woman encircling a huge pile of clothes. We dumped our clothes on top and joined the swap, looking at pieces.

I had some AMAZING finds, including purple pants, and yellow high heels. It pretty much made my night when I got home to find that the pair of heels I had thought to be beige were yellow. The realization actually caused me to dance on the spot.

The night was wonderful and after conversation and creating connections with a few of the many women who were there that night I left with a smile on my face, and two cookies on my plate. I will definitely be attending another clothing swap night, and recommend it to you if you encounter one!

Have a great day ladies and gentlemen!

P.S.

I learned recently that Victoria is the land of roses! There are so many here that they are sometimes considered weeds. Well, this I find amazing, as roses are one of my favourite flowers ever. I even tried to grow them one year, but Manitoba winters kill a lot of things. So this new was very exciting to me, and then when I encountered a blooming rosebush on my way home one day I absolutely had to take pictures!

Avocados, Tea, Crystals and Business

Fruit and KettleSunny days have arrived in Victoria!

Along with this my body has decided to lean heavily on the potato and avocado and mango fare. Avocados calm my stomach when it hurts I’ve discovered and I never knew mangoes went on sale this time of the year! Seriously! This is all I’ve been eating for the past two weeks. And lots of tea.

Its been highly difficult for me to stay grounded this past week as well. It’s never been my strong suit to be grounded but I think it might be all the meditations with crystals…

Life:

I’ve been practising a lot with the gemstones that I own. One of the things I would like to accomplish is personally connecting with each stone that I own to see what they bring to my life, and what else they would like to offer. For some reason, I have never really worked with stones in this aspect as I’ve always intuitively followed my guidance and it always matched what they wanted. Now I’m having conversations with the stones.

This week the stone of note is a mystery stone that has been travelling with me since I left Winterpeg! It is a small round purple stone, that most people I brought it to for identification thought was glass. With a suggestion from one of my friends, I place the stone with Angel Quartz, and boy, did he ever start talking loud and clear! He identifies himself as Purple Cat’s Eye.

Business:

This week I was working hard at my business, doing as much work as I could with my business plan for the Youth Means Business program. I was mainly focused on my product list. It was about Thursday that I began feeling overwhelmed at the actual amount of work it requires to complete a business plan. Even though I feel like I’ve done a lot, there still seems to be so much left to do.

Today I choose to relax. This morning I met with the business mentor and a few other participants to have a round-table discussion about our businesses and meet each other. I stated the (what I believe to be) seed, of my feeling of overwhelmed: the sheer variety of gem elixirs I can make!

I’m at seven pages…

Using the wise words of wisdom from Mr. Business Mentor, my product list will be done quite soon, even with the realization that I may have focused on the “wrong” things for what I need right now.

This week too, I’m going to start scoping locations to practice Reiki and Card Readings out of, so if you know of any possibilities that I may be interested in investigating, give me a shout!

And if your out and about this Sunday in Downtown Victoria, I’ll be working at the Dream Collective’s Market, located at the Well between 12 and 5 PM. Yay!


First New Moon of 2012

Victoria had snow! It was pretty awesome!  I thought it I might actually go through this winter without seeing any of the white fluffy stuff I’m so used to.  When I woke up and the streets were white I called my mom just to tell her that it snowed here. There was silence on the phone and then laughter. “Is that like the first time that’s happened this year or something?” Remember, she lives in Winterpeg.

Then two days later the snow is all gone! Mysteriously disappeared overnight leaving green grass behind! I was impressed.

I was pretty excited for this new moon, in fact, I was waiting for it. I have come to love doing a small ceremony with my bestie on Moon nights. My last great manifestation was a 2012 Agenda. Did I ever have plans for this night!

Among the usual things that I am manifesting, this night  included a business. Currently I am working on a business plan with Youth Means Business, a governmentally funded program to help me write a plan and to provide training so that my business might be successful. The business keeps forming, changing, growing, evolving as I work on the business plan. Now I am manifesting space for a storefront and to practice out of that is affordable. It’s in my manifestation box. *crosses fingers*

Since starting to do these moon ceremonies I have begun to notice when the energies shift between moons. Its a very subtle change of feeling in the air around me, and in the things that I personally am working on, and what comes into my life. I am also more aware of my personal cycles.

My first two gem elixirs were effective, and so I’ve created a third with ethereal crystals, an elixir to give more energy to people. It is soon to be tested, I will let you know on the results. I am excited to see if it works.

I decided too this  past week that I needed to change my ceiling. There is only so long that I can stand pale colours. I like strong vibrant colours that make a statement. “I AM PURPLE.” Not, “I… might… possibly… be purple… or an odd… off white…”.

It has been a dream of mine to have a room decorated in fabric, and now, my ceiling is draped with red, pink and orange fabrics. My room feels so much better and much more like “my” space than before. Life goal accomplished! *fist pump*

This Friday night I am going to be doing Reiki and card readings at a party in Downtown Victoria. It is my first time offering Reiki at a party; I am excited and curious about it with a small amount of nervousness. If you are in Victoria, you are now invited to come check it out at the Well. Click here for more details. 🙂

Book Review: Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

Hello!

Something I want to do on this blog is a review on some of the many books that I read and the decks that I use in my readings. I plan to do one of each a month for fun! I like to share my thoughts, opinions and ideas about these things. 🙂

First up: Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chogyam Trungpa

Spiritual Materialism is a book I loved. It was a book that the Universe very strongly wanted me to read. Within a week I met a few people who told me about this book and how I need to read it. So when I found a copy in a community book case, I traded books. Now I own my own copy (gratefully so) because this is one book that I would read over again. Possibly again.

This particular book is actually a transcription of a series of lectures given by Trungpa Rinpoche in the early seventies. The book flows extremely well even with the lecture and a Q & A at the end of each major section to further explain the lecture. The author has a brilliant mastery of English and Sanskrit, teaching throughout the book Sanskrit words and their true meaning from the very root, which I found interesting.

We are guided humorously yet deeply through the inner workings of the ego and mind, and all of the stages from where we begin on the path, to when we get a guru, to beyond the guru and into Tantra. It’s all done with a Tibetan Buddhist point of view and context, with stories to illustrate important points. I felt that I was uncovering things within myself as I read the lectures, and often had to stop and contemplate what was being said.

I found the material covered in the book to be deep and intense. A sense of humor is one of the things most valued by the speaker, and he certainly makes use of it in his lectures. The details of what Spiritual Materialism is – the pursuit of spirituality that feeds the ego- starts off the book, but it quickly turns onto another topic: The ego. The line of thinking is that in order to understand how spirituality can feed our ego, we need to understand the ego. Rinpoche guides us with a very simple metaphor of a monkey being stuck in a room. With this monkey we learn how ego is created and the patterns it has.

One of the things I enjoyed most in the book is that there seems to contain a guide of a spiritual path that most people tend to follow. As different parts were described I could identify with particular parts that I have witnessed in my life, some of the good parts and some of the bad ones. This book is definitely a keeper, and one that I will definitely enjoy re-reading.

Near the end of the book, even though I was reading through the book rather slowly for my pace my brain started to feel overwhelmed. I felt that there was a lot of information coming from the book, and I’m not confident in my ability to recall information from the last chapter or two of the book. There were a few incidences in the book where my beliefs don’t match up with Rinpoches beliefs, and that’s okay. This book is heavily from a Tibetan Buddhist point of view.

This book is one that I loved. I think it is one that I will keep in my library for a long time coming, and is one that many people would find a good read at some point on their path. It is an honest look at the ego and Spiritual Materialism, one that is rarely found.

To purchase this book and get more info, you can follow my amazon link if you would like to support myself and this blog! Affiliate link to Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chogyam Trungpa. Thank you! Your support is very much appreciated.

Emotional Outbreak at the Full Moon

Full Moon

The full moon from my bedroom window!

Hello!

Today, I decided that I have been undergoing a full moon release for the past couple of days. It actually started about two weeks ago with a dream… A dream of a volcano about to explode, breathing out smoke and ash as it has for a while. None of the villagers knew when it would explode, but eventually it would, and so they were moving out of the way. I was on my way to be the bride in a wedding.

Well, I thought about it a little bit, asked a couple people about what it could mean, and we came up that it could mean a huge emotional outburst with my boyfriend. I couldn’t see it happening any time soon since things between us were going well.

Then I have another volcano dream, one I can’t remember details of, while at my boyfriends house. Immediately I get up and look it up in the dream dictionary, and it states “emotional outburst of pent up emotion.”  Interesting.

Then that night overwhelming anger comes up. I rant. I cry. My heart feels so full of pain. I don’t understand the worlds cruelties. I know that this world is not supposed to be like this. It is supposed to be a place of love and joy for everyone. My boyfriend listens and hugs me.

The next day I feel a bit off, a bit blue, but what are you going to do? Sometimes I have blue days. Later that night I feel it deep in my soul and I pray, crying for help from the Universe and the Ones who work with me. And I fear I don’t have the strength to do the next major piece of my journey.

All I hear is “You do. You have the Strength.” And I know they will help me. I can do it.

I cried for a few hours that night, and it seemed to release a lot of things emotionally. I could feel things shifting around inside my body and my mind. I also have a new focus in my life: Self-sustainability.

I am very happy and excited for this part of my journey. I know I will make it.

So tonight, for my full moon ceremony I wrote a short list of what I want to release and burned it. I then spent time expressing gratitude for everything – those that work with me, the people that surround me, that where I am now is such a better place on all levels than where I was last year at this time, and more.

Now I am happily off to accomplish my mission for 2012: Self-sustainability!

P.S.

Jade is one of two stones that help increase one’s ability to be self-sustainable. 🙂

New Years Eve

“Your Vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens.” ~ Carl Jung

It’s that time of year again where many of us come together to celebrate the beginning of something new, something that goes deeper and that has been celebrated probably for centuries before us. We come from around world to gather together with loved ones or in places that we love to welcome into our world a new beginning, and new energies with new hopes, dreams and desires that maybe we can accomplish them this time, in this new year.

We share a similar vision for humanity, the vision that this year will be a better year than the last for everyone, that this year will be better for us, that this year the planet will begin to heal, that poverty and world hunger will be solved, that cancers will be cured, that new positive energy will find it’s way into making this world, our world a better place.

Photo courtesy of Sean MacEntee

I have spent the past few years figuring out what New Year’s means to me. I now make resolutions on my birthday for my “New Year” and my birthday incorporates a lot of the excitement of what a new year will bring. Now, for me, New Year’s Eve is that one important time of year when a large majority of humanity gets inspired, gets together and as one large mass of consciousness  welcomes new energy and change into our lives, something most of us resist in our day to day life.

Having been released from my job just two days ago, with enough money to pay January’s rent only, change is something I am being very aware of these past few days. The thought’s I had the as I left my old job for the last time were along the lines of “This job no longer serves me. The Universe has something better planned for me.” And “It’s interesting that I was fired two days before New Year’s Eve…”. I really don’t know what’s going to happen in this new year for me.

I can tell you for certain: I know its big. I am scared, excited, hopeful, and doing my best to ride it out with the least amount of resistance I can manage, to let go and let God (a phrase I keep encountering lately). Enjoy the New Year and all its blessings, even the undercover ones.

“Everything in your life is there as a vehicle for your transformation. Use it!” ~ Ram Dass

P.S.

New Year’s Eve is an awesome movie! So is Hugh. 🙂

** This year I did join one of my good friends in making New Year’s Resolutions… First time in a couple years…

New Moon and Christmas Eve

Merry Christmas everyone!

It’s that merry time of year, when everyone is supposed to be full of holiday cheer! This year does not feel like Christmas to me at all. I barely heard anyone, and I myself, say “Merry Christmas”. There is no snow on the ground here in Victoria, unlike in Manitoba where I’ve spent all my other Christmases. Alas, my bestie and I are set to make dinner tomorrow night, and pancakes, and it shall be a great day! I am making vegan gluten free pizza tomorrow, which I’m very excited to make!!

Today is the New Moon, and I have been happily paying attention to the moon cycles for the last few months. It helps me, refocuses me and see where I’ve come in the last little while. Check out the Manifestations page if you want!

I think too that the New Moon ceremonies help speed up the manifestation power, and helps me see where I need to be clearer in my life. Today I noticed that asking for a new job, in the past three months my requests have changed. One month I was asking for a job that pays $12/hour, then $18/ hour, then a loving peaceful environment with no pay listed… How is the Universe supposed to know exactly what I want and need?

Christmas is a time for love to enter the hearts of all humanity and for humanity to ascend into the Christ Consciousness. May you have an amazing journey!

Lot’s of love!

Serafina

First Post of New Intentions

Today is my first day as a twenty-two year old on this planet officially.

My birthday was filled with so much love!

And I have decided to begin blogging again.

I have a lot of ideas for this blog now. I see it as a different thing than I did two years ago, which is a good thing. The old posts are being kept because they show a bit about who I was when I first entered the world of blogging, and I don’t feel a need to erase my history.

People need to know that people beyond this computer screen are real people. And this blog is an expression of a real person. Therefore, I will post the good and the bad, and this blog will tell my story, my learning, my mistakes, my humor, my loves.

The following is from my journal:

Blog Intentions

I intent this blog, and therefore it will be, to be a blog that is a place that brings love into the world. This blog is a safe, open place to grow, learn, expand and to express my story, and my knowledge and wisdom. This blog allows an opening for expression, love, growth, abundance and opportunities. May this blog be written with love and for the highest good of all involved, always. Allow this blog to be an expression of Divine Love.

Let it be done. So be it. Amen. Mote.

And so it begins!

Looking forward to my next post! 🙂