How to Transform

What do we mean by transforming?
Transforming is a process by which the individual learns to understand how the energetic, spiritual and physical body work, and how all three work in tandum to create either a positive or negative reality. In the transformation process, the individual learns to understand how these three different levels of self (energetic, spiritual & physical) work together to transmute negative energy into positive energy. The individual learns to let go of negative thinking, past experiences & old ways of believing that do not serve one well and move into living from a place of love, acceptance of self and others, tollerance for all, and eventually into a living as a beautiful being of light and love.
This process does not happen overnight, but will happen with patience, effort and persistence. Remember this: Soul’s work is not easy work, but work that will make your life easy.
It is important to note that there is no one journey of transformation that is the same. Each individual will have different needs, different energy to work with, from and through and it is ultimately up to the individual to take the steps outlined below in the order or disorder that is right for them. Putting transformation down in a linear, step-by-step process is simply a way to understand an overall potential process, but is certainly not going to be a blueprint for all to follow. Listen to your intuition and you will be directed exactly where you need to start, and if you cannot hear your intuition…start at step one.
Step 1: Learn to breathe
Learning to breathe correctly is an essential first step to learning to transform. For a brief moment, sit with your eyes closed in a quiet room free from distractions. Breathe as you normally do and pay attention to where you are breathing from. Are you breathing from your throat, your chest, your stomach? Imagine that you have a little sticker in your hand and you are going to place your sticker directly on the spot where you are breathing from. Where would you place it?
Your goal is to eventually learn to breathe consistently from you abdomen. Do not be dismayed if your sticker seems miles away, that is typical of any individual who has not trained themselves to breathe free of stress and anxiety. This life can be very difficult and causes our physical body to remain in stress mode where breathing is strained and constricted. The physiological effects of staying in stress mode is that we continuously emit the stress hormone, cortisol and restrict our flow of serotonin which can lead to a moody behavior and sometimes depression. It is very important that we learn to relax all throughout our day by limiting the release of cortisol and increasing our flow of serotonin. How is this done…take a deep breath. It’s as simple as that.
The first thing I’d like you to do is breathe as deep and deliberately as you can into your abdomen. Let your abdominal cavity move out and “fill it” as large as you can. Do this a few times and imagine that as you breathe in you are breathing in cool, clean, pure light and love and when you breathe out, you are breathing out stressful, hot, vaporous negativity from your body. Every time you breathe in you are breathing in beautiful source energy (God energy, light energy, love energy) that refuels your body and every time you breathe out you are releasing anything negative that does not serve your higher purpose. On your following breaths, imagine that your abdomen and neck are like a large vase with the base at your abdomen and the neck of the vase at your throat. Take a deep breath filling the vase from the base to the neck. Once this is filled, hold it for a brief moment and then slowly and deliberately release the breath from the neck to the base. Imagine that every time you release your breath you are releasing anything negative that does not serve the greatest you and your highest wisdom and light.
Do this breathing exercise as often as you can throughout the day and if it is not possible to fill your “vase” and deliberately release without raised eyebrows, simply take a deep easy breath into your abdomen. Pay attention to how you are breathing throughout the day, where is your sticker? If you sticker is high, make a mental note to move your sticker to your abdomen and breathe from a place of peace. This can be done in the middle of a meeting, in the car, as you are standing in line at the coffee shop, anywhere. When I was learning to breathe, I printed a bunch of labels off of my computer that said “breathe and I placed them all over the placee–on my mirror, my car dash, my computer, my coffee cup–so that I would remember to breathe from my abdomen and relax.

Step 2: Recognize Your Ego
To many, the word ego means, “I”, “self” or “identity”. In the clearing of your spiritual energy, we refer to the “ego-self” as the opposite end of where we want to be on our spiritual journey. One end the spiritual journey is the “ego-self” and the opposite end is “I am” or the God-self. Ego-self is that of operating from fear, greed, self-righteousness, pride, jealousy, anxiety, or a need for power and control. Operating from “I am”or God-self is that of living from an understanding that you are not a sum of what you do, how you are viewed by others, your talents, your specialness, your looks or how you behave. You are simply a loving, living being who is a perfect manifestation of your creator… you are living from a place of “I am”.
One of my beautiful teachers, Renee Beese, taught me about recognizing who’s on top. She explains that there are always one of four places of self you will operate from in your actions, reactions and existence: the ego-self, the child-self, the wise woman or man or that of operating from love and light, or God-self. A next possible step in our evolutionary process is to learn to recognize who is on top.
The Ego-Self
Needing to be right, fear, greed, self-righteousness, pride, jealousy, anxiety, needing power, needing to control others or your environment.
When you see one of these surface in you actions, thoughts, beliefs or reactions, take a moment and recognize it for what it is…your ego. Our egos have a purpose and need to be in place because we are spirits having a human existence in a sometimes brutal place–we must fear danger, we must exercise some control and it is often our ego that gives us a fighting spirit and motivation, sometimes misguided motivation, but motivation nonetheless. We can’t eliminate our ego, we are human, but we can recognize when it surfaces and then begin the journey of learning to significantly soften its blows.

The Child-Self
Very often, when the ego surfaces from ourselves or others, we feel hurt, sad,depressed, offended, or angry. These are described as child-self reactions. It is usually something we are holding within ourselves that has caused the emotional reaction. For example, someone may not have wanted you along on an excursion. A child-self reaction might be to feel hurt and sad, but what is below the surface is a scar from feeling rejected or unworthy of someone’s love in your past. That scar is what actually caused the sadness or hurt to surface. Until we clear the deep rooted cause of your sadness, we need to recognize that the child-self is on top and validate the feelings that have surfaced. If you are sad, imagine yourself holding yourself and acknowledge and validate that you have pain surfacing, if you are angry, go for a walk, hit a pillow and let the anger flow in a safe manner not directed toward anyone else, and once you address the child feelings, move to a place of wisdom.
It is not wise to ignore or bury your emotions, but it is wise to recognize, validate, and acknowledge the emotions for what they are without involving anyone else in on your emotional release that causes them to feel blame or responsible for that emotional release.

Wise-Woman or Wise-Man

Once we recognize either a reaction from ego-self or recognize and validate a reaction from child-self we can then move into a place of wisdom. Operating from wise-self, or wise-woman or wise-man means that we can understand how to process reactions, situations or experiences beyond our ego and emotion. We are able to look at any situation and look for the deep rooted cause of our or someone else’s behavior and respond to that cause with insight into the potential of the situation. Keep in mind that any reaction we have is usually a result of an experience in our past, how we learned to react or behave or due to the environment we were raised in. This is true of anyone interacting with you as well. Once we learn to try to see any situation from a wise analysis of the potential cause of another’s reaction or a wise analysis of how the situation developed we can then rationally examine how we want to react. Think of this simple example: A car swerves in front of you in a seemingly reckless manner. You are caused to slam on your breaks, barely missing this car as it drives away oblivious to your fright and drastic reaction. You have a choice as to who will surface? Will ego-self surface, “How dare he do this to me, I feel slighted and annoyed! No one treats me that way! What an idiot!.” Will your child-self surface? Will you either cry or tumble into an explosive episode of road rage? Or will your wise-self surface, “I have no idea what that person has gone through this morning, whether they are in an emergency, just heard their mother has cancer or are not feeling well. Therefore I am not going to worry about the experience, let it affect me negatively or spend any unnecessary energy on thinking about it any further. I have a great day to get on with.”

This wisdom is an exercise in true tolerance and love and does not happen overnight by any means. It typically takes some intense examination of why we ourselves react the way we do to situations to then understand why others react as they do. Once we get to the place of moving from child-self or ego-self into wise-self we can then move to a place of love. In the situation above, we would move into sending the person who swerved in front of us love. Love because they may be in an emergency, not feeling well or possibly in a bad state of mind. Or we will send love because that person is filled with ego-self, hatred, selfishness, greed, power or whatever negative ego they are operating from and that is never a healthy place to live from.

God-Self or “I am”
Living as God-self or “I am” is when we live from a place of love. Our wise-self is prevalent in this existence and quickly works to recognize ego and child emotion when it arises. One gets to a true place of living form love when they learn to truly love who their are first. This takes clearing of baggage and negative history and a shift in a paradigm of living. This shift in paradigm is moving from accepting what is presented as acceptable existence in society–environmental practices, governmental and political practices, financial, medical, and educational practices, our food and disparity on our planet and inequality & intolerance–to knowing that we deserve something better and beautiful for ALL. When we want to see better for ALL, we then learn to love and tolerate all that comes our way so as to bring love and light into even the seemingly worst of situations and people.

Step Three: Meditating
more to come…