Dear Ones,
I am sorry I missed Blogging the last two months. As some of you know, it has been mostly because of my workload of working and studying, and because last Newsletter I published my essay on Bach Flowers and Dreams at the Dream Time magazine.
You can check/read the article in this webpage that I dedicated for it (you can also download the PDF with the whole article). If you read it, I hope that you enjoyed and it was inspiring. https://www.bachflowertherapy.us/2-read-my-publication-on-dreams.html
In regards of my studies, I have such great news to share with you. On February 6th, 2018 I became a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. I passed my second MFT (Marriage and Family Therapy) Licensure exam at my 4th attempt. Yes, at the fourth attempt and after 10 years of landing in California, when back then I already had my Master in Psychology in Spain which took me 7 years to graduate.
Since I started this journey in the path of studying Psychology, since 2000, now it is 18 years ago! The first licensure exam in California, I passed it in 2016. After the long 2-year process since I finished to gather all my 3,000 hours with clients back in 2015, and after studying and attempting to pass it for several times, I feel deeply grateful, happy, and greatly satisfied with such an accomplishment! And, it feels amazing to celebrate and share it with you all.
After all the hard work that it took me of many hours of study, I kept noticing that along this process a part of me was like “abducted” and "out" of usual reality. Having to go through the amount hours of study that requires to study and also having the negative experience of the exam’ pressure when I was onsite performing the exam, it really was for me like an "abducting experience" – meaning that it was draining my psychic and physical energy (which it became very hard to be grounded doing other things I needed) but most of all, I can say that an experience like that, it also takes away your Soul. In this case, we all have the physical, mental and the soul level reality -that are all levels interconnected.
I would say so because overtime, it became a “soul-less experience”, especially when I couldn't carry it through to succeed the first, second and third times, and it became an imposed assignment that it feelt a burden. And, as I am highlighting it in here, when this burdening experience is repeated for a very long period of time, it can be very traumatic, an excruciating and life taking assignment.
It felt for me like I was committed to face a sort of an “impossible mission” and that felt very negative in a very deep level, undermining my sense of worth and preventing me to move forward with my career in the way I wanted and I needed the most.
As you surely know by your own life experiences, tasks that we need to accomplish and moments like this when we need to face our fears and our resistances are “life taking experiences.” Those are like "imposed" experiences upon us and our growth that they take out our breat. Take out our most precious reservoir of energy and part of our Soul.. because we have to put a big portion of our persona to get accomplished this specific purpose even though we know that it is for our own benefit and best interest.
Most of the time in the Psychology field and in our social interactions, we use the word or construct which we call it “stress.” The word “stress” or the adjective “stressful” illustrates well about the pressure and the sense of “feeling overwhelmed” when we sometimes feel that the effort that life demands from us is a very big demand to our minds, bodies and Souls that ends up depleting us from the normal range of the energy we usually have available, or remains at our disposal. And to succeed in this assignment, the task requires from us to go beyond our comfort area and push our limits.
In this regard, I want to mention here some of the Flower Remedies that I believe they can be of great aid to any of us when we feel out of breath, or when our energies are depleted - as it can happen many times, in many different contexts, for many different purposes, in-and-out of our working lives.
The following remedies can help us undertake stressful assignments in different ways:
1) Olive, as a regenerator remedy after suffering from much mental activity and when there is a sense of exhaustion and weariness.
2) Chestnut Bud, can help slow down learners who fail to learn from their mistakes and unwillingly, they commit these mistakes over and over again; it helps to understand the bigger picture at play.
3) Oak, its key aspect is to provide strength in the face of adversity.
4) Aspen, the great remedy for fear of the unknown. In case of fear of a specific event (like the case of fear of facing an exam, then we would use Mimulus).
5) Elm, as Dr. Bach tells us: “Helpful for those who have over-extended themselves in doing good works, and have become overwhelmed and burdened by their responsibilities”.
6) Hornbeam, for those who have trouble energizing themselves to face the day; who procrastinate often and feel constantly tired.
7) Larch, when the person expects failure, diving in a complex of inferiority and lacks the usual confidence in accomplishing something with determination to bring out the most.
8) Pine, when someone blames themselves for everything, lacking self-worth and feels guilty.
9) Sweet Chestnut, helps people who have reached the limits of their endurance and are in a state of deep despair and anguish which seems to be unbearable. Brings hope and strength into an impossibly difficult situation.
10) White Chestnut, when the mind becomes cluttered with unwanted thoughts and concentrating becomes very very difficult.
11) Impatiens, to be able to be patient with your self and others.
When everything feels hard and daily routines become arduous and tough, fears also arise on the horizon of your psychic radar.. and it can be very difficult to feel the simple comfort and satisfaction of our daily routines (yes, those should provide us with ease and satisfaction if we are aligned with our minds, bodies and souls).
Those hard moments and the difficult emotions that are involved are often reflected in feeling depleted, out of creativity, and most of the times, this negative and low state of consciousness that no one likes to experience appears very easily in dreams, and its reflected in moods, showing us that our energy and emotional tone is very low.
In dreams, we can see stories of how for an example, a car runs out of gasoline, a character in a dream is often distracted or displaying different sorts of defense mechanisms to avoid being on task (failing an exam, or responding an important question, missing a bus, a train, etc.) Seeing the narrative of the dream, can help us to truly understand what is really happening to us at an unconscious level that is often hard to acknowledge in our conscious mind, and this way understand the true reasons why we get out of ourselves, and why we run out of the precious reservoir of energy.
If our daily routines are not aligned with our Souls, every breath we take, and every task we undertake feels mundane and boring, with no life, with no sense, with no purpose. And, I say "Soul" in capital S because now I can clearly see that this big assignment I had to go through in my career (passing the licensure exam) was (normally) keeping me out of fully savoring my spirituality as I usually do. And, as wired it might sound, it was keeping me away from the freedom that I usually feel of having my time to regenerate myself more, be wild and irrational sometimes. It seems there was no room for making mistakes or failing.
For this long period of time of many months, it seemed that all in my life had to do of this very important exam. Being precise, it all had to do of not missing the right answer. All had to be exact, precise, very calculated, which I had very small room for being creative and being connected to what my Soul demanded from me at any given moment. I had to postpone the call for that most of the time.
Whatever it was, had to be kept a side, waiting for another moment, having to postpone it.. and that led me to feel very strong emotional states of rejection, of feeling frustrated, unsatisfied, resentful.. which turned on in being very hard on myself when I kept feeling that I was not accomplishing much or it was not enough effort to pass the exam at a different times.
In this sense, I was mistaking the normal effort that undertaking this exam process was (what it takes) with my personal value and worth. Well, in this case, what helped me the most was the wise general knowing that "all sacrifices that we have to endure for achieving something that we want or we need to obtain in order to grow or become better persons/professionals.. later it will have its recompense".
If you keep up your commitment, you will reach the time and moment when all will be compensated, even if during the process it seems that you will never get there. We only need the time for us to check within and align all that is necessary for us to commit to it in the best way we can, with the best attitude. And this can require from us to have some preparation that speaks of having the good plan or strategy to align our mind-body and soul, as I mentioned in previous Blogs.
A good question that you can ask yourself is: Are you ready to stay and do what it requires? Whatever it takes for you to succeed? Really, for me, in this case, the answer was yes, I do want to commit to pass my exam (whatever it takes), and finally, the moment came along and it was a big release and triumph that I will never forget. As I also commented in a previous blog, freedom is a psychological sort of construct, and to this construct, we all tend to attach many things and many different ranges of qualities onto it.
Thus, when you know what you most need, and at that time, life provides you with these moments to do what you need, just embrace it! My wish at this time, is to make the best use of my freedom as long as I am allowed to, to be able to relax and savor the victory, but especially, I must say that what for me in this case, is to be able to go back to connect and be aligned with my Soul.
With this part of me or this part of me which I call "my Soul", that I had to put aside and deny many times during this long period of study, at least now, the enjoyment I get when I feel freer to be in touch with my Soul having no such pressure of having to be studying, makes me feel great now. And now I feel that I can enjoy much more of what is in this realm of my Soul! And the achievement will give me also more freedom, so that pays for the search I was looking to attain.
By the same token, this is the reason why I like to keep studying and understanding about the mind-bodies and soul aspects, and learn how these are affected by our daily living experiences. And with that, reflecting on myself and keep doing my inner work, I am then more able to help others to connect with themselves and become more conscious, more integral in their lives and more embodied in their purpose as human and spiritual beings in this planet.
Yes, as Humans, we have Souls. On the contrary, machines, like computer devices that we use today, they certainly “lack Soul”. We can attribute Soul to images and texts that we watch and read, definitely! These emanate energy, and these texts and images can have more Soulful or less; but in general terms, the reason why they are more or less “soulful, is because - when these images, its drawings, the music that contains in them, or the words that emanate from them when you are listening, watching or hearing them - these are made and created by human beings.
And human beings have Soul, they animate what is not animated. They animate the matter with psyche, soul and purpose. An isolated image, computer or phone is nothing unless there is a context, a witness, a field of consciousness, and a use is made of this object when a person has a thought, intention or has the necessity of it. So, in the Blog this month of April, due that we already entered last month in the Spring season, I just want to reflect with you about the Soul and what our Soul has to do with our health, well-being, and relationships.
In this sense, we can also expand this theme with more questions: The first one: How to blossom into the world what is unique and alive in your core being? What this last question has to do with the Bach Flowers remedies? What has to do with dreams and healing? How do we know that we are in synch with our Souls?
Next month we will continue this chapter exploring about the dreams that speak about the state of our Soul and how these dreams can be analyzed and can help us to see how our mind, body, and Soul is doing and what we can do about it.
Till next time… may you be well, healthy and conscious! Much love to you and to your dear ones!
I am sorry I missed Blogging the last two months. As some of you know, it has been mostly because of my workload of working and studying, and because last Newsletter I published my essay on Bach Flowers and Dreams at the Dream Time magazine.
You can check/read the article in this webpage that I dedicated for it (you can also download the PDF with the whole article). If you read it, I hope that you enjoyed and it was inspiring. https://www.bachflowertherapy.us/2-read-my-publication-on-dreams.html
In regards of my studies, I have such great news to share with you. On February 6th, 2018 I became a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. I passed my second MFT (Marriage and Family Therapy) Licensure exam at my 4th attempt. Yes, at the fourth attempt and after 10 years of landing in California, when back then I already had my Master in Psychology in Spain which took me 7 years to graduate.
Since I started this journey in the path of studying Psychology, since 2000, now it is 18 years ago! The first licensure exam in California, I passed it in 2016. After the long 2-year process since I finished to gather all my 3,000 hours with clients back in 2015, and after studying and attempting to pass it for several times, I feel deeply grateful, happy, and greatly satisfied with such an accomplishment! And, it feels amazing to celebrate and share it with you all.
After all the hard work that it took me of many hours of study, I kept noticing that along this process a part of me was like “abducted” and "out" of usual reality. Having to go through the amount hours of study that requires to study and also having the negative experience of the exam’ pressure when I was onsite performing the exam, it really was for me like an "abducting experience" – meaning that it was draining my psychic and physical energy (which it became very hard to be grounded doing other things I needed) but most of all, I can say that an experience like that, it also takes away your Soul. In this case, we all have the physical, mental and the soul level reality -that are all levels interconnected.
I would say so because overtime, it became a “soul-less experience”, especially when I couldn't carry it through to succeed the first, second and third times, and it became an imposed assignment that it feelt a burden. And, as I am highlighting it in here, when this burdening experience is repeated for a very long period of time, it can be very traumatic, an excruciating and life taking assignment.
It felt for me like I was committed to face a sort of an “impossible mission” and that felt very negative in a very deep level, undermining my sense of worth and preventing me to move forward with my career in the way I wanted and I needed the most.
As you surely know by your own life experiences, tasks that we need to accomplish and moments like this when we need to face our fears and our resistances are “life taking experiences.” Those are like "imposed" experiences upon us and our growth that they take out our breat. Take out our most precious reservoir of energy and part of our Soul.. because we have to put a big portion of our persona to get accomplished this specific purpose even though we know that it is for our own benefit and best interest.
Most of the time in the Psychology field and in our social interactions, we use the word or construct which we call it “stress.” The word “stress” or the adjective “stressful” illustrates well about the pressure and the sense of “feeling overwhelmed” when we sometimes feel that the effort that life demands from us is a very big demand to our minds, bodies and Souls that ends up depleting us from the normal range of the energy we usually have available, or remains at our disposal. And to succeed in this assignment, the task requires from us to go beyond our comfort area and push our limits.
In this regard, I want to mention here some of the Flower Remedies that I believe they can be of great aid to any of us when we feel out of breath, or when our energies are depleted - as it can happen many times, in many different contexts, for many different purposes, in-and-out of our working lives.
The following remedies can help us undertake stressful assignments in different ways:
1) Olive, as a regenerator remedy after suffering from much mental activity and when there is a sense of exhaustion and weariness.
2) Chestnut Bud, can help slow down learners who fail to learn from their mistakes and unwillingly, they commit these mistakes over and over again; it helps to understand the bigger picture at play.
3) Oak, its key aspect is to provide strength in the face of adversity.
4) Aspen, the great remedy for fear of the unknown. In case of fear of a specific event (like the case of fear of facing an exam, then we would use Mimulus).
5) Elm, as Dr. Bach tells us: “Helpful for those who have over-extended themselves in doing good works, and have become overwhelmed and burdened by their responsibilities”.
6) Hornbeam, for those who have trouble energizing themselves to face the day; who procrastinate often and feel constantly tired.
7) Larch, when the person expects failure, diving in a complex of inferiority and lacks the usual confidence in accomplishing something with determination to bring out the most.
8) Pine, when someone blames themselves for everything, lacking self-worth and feels guilty.
9) Sweet Chestnut, helps people who have reached the limits of their endurance and are in a state of deep despair and anguish which seems to be unbearable. Brings hope and strength into an impossibly difficult situation.
10) White Chestnut, when the mind becomes cluttered with unwanted thoughts and concentrating becomes very very difficult.
11) Impatiens, to be able to be patient with your self and others.
When everything feels hard and daily routines become arduous and tough, fears also arise on the horizon of your psychic radar.. and it can be very difficult to feel the simple comfort and satisfaction of our daily routines (yes, those should provide us with ease and satisfaction if we are aligned with our minds, bodies and souls).
Those hard moments and the difficult emotions that are involved are often reflected in feeling depleted, out of creativity, and most of the times, this negative and low state of consciousness that no one likes to experience appears very easily in dreams, and its reflected in moods, showing us that our energy and emotional tone is very low.
In dreams, we can see stories of how for an example, a car runs out of gasoline, a character in a dream is often distracted or displaying different sorts of defense mechanisms to avoid being on task (failing an exam, or responding an important question, missing a bus, a train, etc.) Seeing the narrative of the dream, can help us to truly understand what is really happening to us at an unconscious level that is often hard to acknowledge in our conscious mind, and this way understand the true reasons why we get out of ourselves, and why we run out of the precious reservoir of energy.
If our daily routines are not aligned with our Souls, every breath we take, and every task we undertake feels mundane and boring, with no life, with no sense, with no purpose. And, I say "Soul" in capital S because now I can clearly see that this big assignment I had to go through in my career (passing the licensure exam) was (normally) keeping me out of fully savoring my spirituality as I usually do. And, as wired it might sound, it was keeping me away from the freedom that I usually feel of having my time to regenerate myself more, be wild and irrational sometimes. It seems there was no room for making mistakes or failing.
For this long period of time of many months, it seemed that all in my life had to do of this very important exam. Being precise, it all had to do of not missing the right answer. All had to be exact, precise, very calculated, which I had very small room for being creative and being connected to what my Soul demanded from me at any given moment. I had to postpone the call for that most of the time.
Whatever it was, had to be kept a side, waiting for another moment, having to postpone it.. and that led me to feel very strong emotional states of rejection, of feeling frustrated, unsatisfied, resentful.. which turned on in being very hard on myself when I kept feeling that I was not accomplishing much or it was not enough effort to pass the exam at a different times.
In this sense, I was mistaking the normal effort that undertaking this exam process was (what it takes) with my personal value and worth. Well, in this case, what helped me the most was the wise general knowing that "all sacrifices that we have to endure for achieving something that we want or we need to obtain in order to grow or become better persons/professionals.. later it will have its recompense".
If you keep up your commitment, you will reach the time and moment when all will be compensated, even if during the process it seems that you will never get there. We only need the time for us to check within and align all that is necessary for us to commit to it in the best way we can, with the best attitude. And this can require from us to have some preparation that speaks of having the good plan or strategy to align our mind-body and soul, as I mentioned in previous Blogs.
A good question that you can ask yourself is: Are you ready to stay and do what it requires? Whatever it takes for you to succeed? Really, for me, in this case, the answer was yes, I do want to commit to pass my exam (whatever it takes), and finally, the moment came along and it was a big release and triumph that I will never forget. As I also commented in a previous blog, freedom is a psychological sort of construct, and to this construct, we all tend to attach many things and many different ranges of qualities onto it.
Thus, when you know what you most need, and at that time, life provides you with these moments to do what you need, just embrace it! My wish at this time, is to make the best use of my freedom as long as I am allowed to, to be able to relax and savor the victory, but especially, I must say that what for me in this case, is to be able to go back to connect and be aligned with my Soul.
With this part of me or this part of me which I call "my Soul", that I had to put aside and deny many times during this long period of study, at least now, the enjoyment I get when I feel freer to be in touch with my Soul having no such pressure of having to be studying, makes me feel great now. And now I feel that I can enjoy much more of what is in this realm of my Soul! And the achievement will give me also more freedom, so that pays for the search I was looking to attain.
By the same token, this is the reason why I like to keep studying and understanding about the mind-bodies and soul aspects, and learn how these are affected by our daily living experiences. And with that, reflecting on myself and keep doing my inner work, I am then more able to help others to connect with themselves and become more conscious, more integral in their lives and more embodied in their purpose as human and spiritual beings in this planet.
Yes, as Humans, we have Souls. On the contrary, machines, like computer devices that we use today, they certainly “lack Soul”. We can attribute Soul to images and texts that we watch and read, definitely! These emanate energy, and these texts and images can have more Soulful or less; but in general terms, the reason why they are more or less “soulful, is because - when these images, its drawings, the music that contains in them, or the words that emanate from them when you are listening, watching or hearing them - these are made and created by human beings.
And human beings have Soul, they animate what is not animated. They animate the matter with psyche, soul and purpose. An isolated image, computer or phone is nothing unless there is a context, a witness, a field of consciousness, and a use is made of this object when a person has a thought, intention or has the necessity of it. So, in the Blog this month of April, due that we already entered last month in the Spring season, I just want to reflect with you about the Soul and what our Soul has to do with our health, well-being, and relationships.
In this sense, we can also expand this theme with more questions: The first one: How to blossom into the world what is unique and alive in your core being? What this last question has to do with the Bach Flowers remedies? What has to do with dreams and healing? How do we know that we are in synch with our Souls?
Next month we will continue this chapter exploring about the dreams that speak about the state of our Soul and how these dreams can be analyzed and can help us to see how our mind, body, and Soul is doing and what we can do about it.
Till next time… may you be well, healthy and conscious! Much love to you and to your dear ones!
(1) Copyright Image: <a href='https://www.123rf.com/profile_geribody'>geribody / 123RF Stock Photo</a> - Image of woman with butterflies.
