Ride the Emotional Wave: How to Create Wealth, Health & Love Through Emotional Mastery

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∼Where It All Begins∼

Our whole life is but a greater and longer childhood.

∼Benjamin Franklin

Ride the Wave

When we learn to work with our emotions rather than fight them, that’s emotional mastery. To deny or suppress our emotions, as most of us were taught to do, is to deny the guidance system that lets us know what is right for us.

When I think of emotions, I think of their similarity with water: there are ebbs and flows…sometimes calm and quiet, sometimes wild and out of control. Some people are flooded with emotions while others have learned to live with a drought.

I think of a surfer who goes out for the first time to learn to ride the wave. He rests on the water, waiting for that perfect swell. Then, he paddles out to try to meet it. He gets on top of his board and tries to control it…the water rises…he feels a momentary rush of energy run through his body…and CRASH!!!…he plummets into the depths. Hurt, but still hopeful, he tries again. As he struggles to his feet, he feels his board wobble on this next wave. He tries to control it again…and…down he goes!

If he keeps at it, he gradually gets the hang of things. Now, when he goes out on the water to surf, he looks ahead and sees that perfect wave. With strength, purpose and direction, he swims toward his goal. His legs have developed so that as he steps onto the board, he can better maneuver it as he feels the water rise under him. He no longer tries to control his experience – instead, he knows how to ride it through. He works with it. He feels exhilarated as he realizes he and the water are one. He has mastered the wave!

Learning to work with your emotions is just like this. When you first start out, you’re bound to get knocked around a bit. As the floodgates open, the gush of suppressed emotions from a lifetime may feel overwhelming. However, as you keep going, it gets easier.

As you become more and more clear, you trust what your emotions are showing you. Your eyes and your heart are open, and you make better choices. The old drama gradually disappears as you remember you can choose peace instead of conflict. You are aware of the daily miracles sent your way - often in places you never expected. Your emotions add color and flavor to life and, now, you relish them.

A Light in the Darkness

While going through my second divorce in 1985, I began to see I had a pattern of attracting abusive men into my life. I was only 25 years old, but I felt like something was dying inside me, and I realized I needed help. I had no idea at that time how much work I had ahead of me, but I was willing to do almost anything to heal. This was the beginning of a journey in self-discovery and self-improvement that became the central focus and purpose of my life.

I started doing group self-improvement programs that set a foundation for me and helped me to realize I wasn’t alone in my suffering. That first step led me to Breathwork in March of 1987.

When I started into the deep, full, connected breath in my first session while my practitioner guided me, I began to release toxins from years of medications, anesthesia and antibiotics. The Breathwork brought up the helplessness and grief I had buried over the sexual abuse that had gone on throughout my childhood, and the rage that no one had done anything to stop it. I can’t fully describe the relief I felt from releasing this layer of negativity from my body.

Halfway through that first session, I knew I wanted to do the Breathwork as my career. I had known since early childhood that my greatest gift was my ability to love other people. I recognized my natural empathic and psychic abilities would be an asset in this work. I also knew that with every step I took in my own healing process, I would be able to share what I learned to help others.

Soon after I completed my practitioner training, I had two flashbacks of abuse as an infant. One flashback explained the stories I had heard while growing up of how sick I had been, and how I had almost died during my first year of life. The other flashback revealed why my right leg had been paralyzed for nine months the year I turned six.

During the session when I released the second flashback, I heard a voice as clearly as though someone outside of me was talking to me. It told me to get out of Utah as quickly as possible. A few months later, in April of 1988, I moved to Phoenix, Arizona.

Over the next several years, I became certified as a Teacher and Master Teacher of Connected Breathing and developed my business with Life Breath Integrations, with offices in Scottsdale, AZ and Los Angeles, CA. I worked with private clients, trained and certified practitioners, and facilitated workshops internationally.

In 1995, I became a Minister of Mind/Body Healing for the Association of the Integration of the Whole Person. At that time, I also opened a holistic healing center in Venice, CA and ran it for five years.

I continued to relentlessly pursue working on healing my mind and emotions. I realized I was dealing with Post Traumatic Stress and would easily get triggered with deep anxiety if someone came at me with angry or abusive energy. I would shut down and become almost paralyzed for days.

I didn’t trust most people to go into those really dark places with me, so I did much of the work alone. However, I did find a few therapists I could trust. These therapists and I honored our mutual intuitive abilities and our work became more like a dance as we interacted in our sessions.

Our work uncovered my unconscious belief that everyone else came first and my feelings didn’t matter. At an early age, I had learned how to read the people around me and then, to conform in whatever way was necessary to be safe. Often, I gave my power away and went along with things I didn’t want to.

I also realized I carried a core belief that I didn’t deserve to live. There were times when those dark beliefs and emotions felt so overwhelming, I turned to drugs and alcohol to escape them.

My mind was split: there was the really good part of me and the really bad part. Although I had a deep compassion and love for other people, I believed I deserved to be abused, and that I didn’t deserve a healthy relationship with a man or prosperity. I would often sabotage myself because of fear of my true power.

For a long time, I had crossed wires that equated love with sex, and men seemed to sense this. I couldn’t go to a gas station or grocery store without a man coming onto me.

I gradually learned how to rein in my sexual energy so that it wasn’t projecting out all over the place. I became very cautious of the men who wanted friendships with me. They rarely wanted just a friendship. I learned to say no.

When I left the center in Venice, I felt completely burned out. I realized much of what had motivated me to take on so many projects was my low self-esteem. I had been trying to prove my worth, to justify my very existence.

Over the next several years, I lived in both Phoenix and LA. I brought more balance into my life; literally scheduling in my workouts, quiet time and fun. I created strong boundaries for myself with other people, and I cut several people out of my life who were draining me. I learned to speak up for myself more. Eventually, I was able to find better coping mechanisms and was able to let go of the drugs and alcohol. Step by step I was getting stronger.

Throughout the years since I left the center, I worked on this book. I would often get triggered emotionally by what I was writing and it would take a while to calm myself so that I could get back to it.

I worked hard on learning to love myself and to clear the last of my abuse issues. I knew I had to so that I could get the book published and began sharing with others on a broader scale than ever before.

I have come to fully own a statement I received from my guidance while going through my practitioner training in 1987: I am a pioneer. I am a Light in the darkness and a way-shower to others in channeling and sharing the Light and the Word of Love to the world.

What motivates me now to share what I have learned over the years is my deep love for people. I am willing to step through any fear I may have of being visible and, therefore, vulnerable, to share that love with the world and to be a Light in the darkness.

A Typical First Session with a Client

As I sit across from Peter, I can see he feels troubled about what to do with his life. All these years, I’ve done everything everyone told me would bring me happiness. I worked hard and got good grades in school. I went to college and got my degree. I got a good job and got married. Within a few years, we had a couple of kids. I’ve been running my own business with several employees for over a decade now. I’ve reached a level of success in my life…but, somehow, I feel like I was lied to.

What do you mean? I ask.

I don’t really feel fulfilled with my life, and I don’t know what to do about it, he says.

Peter has come to see me because he is having problems in his marriage. We’ve been married 17 years now, but we don’t have the passion we had in the beginning of the relationship. Our friends look to us like we’re an institution.

Are you happy?

Yes, I’m happy.

But you say you don’t feel fulfilled…

I have Peter fill out a personal history questionnaire. As we go over it and discuss his answers, I ask more questions to help me understand his background more completely.

You wrote here that your parents were loving and supportive while you were growing up and that your home life was normal. I’d like you to give me more specific details, if you will, I tell him.

Peter grew up in Chicago, in an upper middle class family. Although he had done well in school and in sports, he could never seem to measure up to his father’s expectations. His father had also been the disciplinarian in the family.

His mother had been a stay-at-home mom. She was supportive and did everything a mother was supposed to do. However, as Peter and I continue to talk, he admits she had never been very affectionate.

As Peter divulges more of his personal and family history, I begin to understand what had led to the distancing he is experiencing with his wife. He shares with me that she was raised in a family like his own, with similar ways of relating to each other.

Peter admits to me that sometimes, when he comes home from work, he knows his wife and kids are walking on eggshells around him when he shows signs of anger or frustration.

One of his sons is doing well. The other son is acting out by selling alcohol to other kids at school; he also just wrecked the truck his parents recently bought him.

I have heard this sort of story many times before. This is a good example of a typical family that hasn’t yet become aware of the unconscious patterns that cause upset for them.

If Peter chooses to stay with the work of emotional clearing and he experiences the breakthroughs that come with it, his family will be affected, too. This is true even if he never says a word about the work he’s doing.

Also, Peter’s relationship with his wife will naturally improve over time. As Peter allows himself to look at his patterns and works to correct them, his life will change for the better; so will the lives of his loved ones.

How Does Emotional Clearing Create Positive Life Changes?

Emotions are Energy. Energy – the Life Force that animates you and me - cannot be destroyed. It just is. It may change form in the physical world, but its essence continues on. Since we are made up of this universal energy or life force, it follows that our spirits existed before our birth and will continue on beyond death. It’s only our form that changes. We literally trans-form ourselves.

Our existence has purpose and meaning. The physical world offers us the experiences of Time and Space, which seem to extend backward and forward and all around us. Our conscious awareness moves through this seeming reality, collecting information through our perceptions of our experiences. A stream of events, to which we have given meaning, makes up our experience of Time and Space.

Upon conception in our mother’s womb, we are indoctrinated into the Collective Consciousness of the physical world. At this time, most of us forget who we really are. We forget that we chose to perceive and, therefore, experience this realm so that we could know ourselves in relationship to God. We forget we are expressions of God manifested in physical form.

It is as if we have fallen into a deep sleep; a dream in which we label our experiences good or bad. We judge everything, including ourselves, in a futile attempt to define and thereby control events, people and situations, so we can feel safe.

Even experiences we have judged as good keep us locked in this mass illusion. By our belief in duality, we set ourselves up in our minds to experience the opposite of good in the physical realm. Duality, by its very nature, requires every good experience to be balanced by a bad experience.

The ego, which develops from the belief that we are separate from God and All That Is, identifies the self with the body. It uses the body as proof of the separation of our Self from God. We, as Observers in Consciousness, forget we are not our bodies because our physical senses seem to define reality.

If our minds identify with the ego and the body, we believe we can be hurt. We defend our meager piece of flesh, which only serves to increase our forgetfulness and provide seeming evidence for believing we are separate from all that is.

This belief in separation affects nations, races, cultures, religions, genders, and the individual mind itself. Look around at the state of the world, and you will see the destructive nature of the ego, expressed through conflict, bloodshed and war.

The suffering created by the belief in separation from God is so intolerable to our true Self, our mind seems to split in order to serve two masters: the ego versus God or Love. The ego will literally fight to the death to hold on. In truth, it has no power except for the power we give it.

We think we are alone in our suffering, cast out from the very gates of heaven itself because of this mistake of the mind.

In fact, we are not alone.

We have been given a guide who can lead us back to perfect peace. We have spiritual Guides and Teachers to support us along our journey.

These holy spirits include beings from all races, religions, both sexes, and different dimensions, both in physical and non-physical form, who work with the Light of Love to assist us in healing the belief in separation and the suffering that follows. They are aware of our state of confusion, but also know the truth of what we are which is Love.

This divine guidance can and will use every relationship and situation in order to help us heal our minds. Out of their great love for us, our Guides are working to help us shift our fear-based perceptions to those based on love.

The power of the ego is so great that most of us require a process of reawakening in order to shift our perceptions.

Our challenge and opportunity to choose differently is available to us every moment of every day.

We choose how we see or perceive situations, people and relationships. In truth, based on the choices of our perceptions, we are choosing how long we will stay in our suffering. Why suffer any longer?

We have soul mates, like mates on a ship, who work with us, and we with them, to heal. We make agreements with our parents and family members before we come into this incarnation to work through karmic issues and grow in consciousness. These agreements were made out of love. The experiences that stem from these agreements, especially in the formative years, help to set up the beliefs and patterns we came to work through in this lifetime.

When Are the Formative Years?

The formative years begin at conception. The memory and sensations of being in utero and the birth process are imprinted on a baby’s brain, just like a hologram, engraving on our psyche these first experiences. We retain in our bodies, at a cellular level, the memory of every experience in our lives, both positive and negative, and the emotions and energy that went along with them.

We make judgments and decisions about these experiences, which are then pushed into the subconscious, and run our lives as adults. These beliefs often sabotage our capacity for abundance, as well as our ability to create and maintain fulfilling relationships.

Some of our most powerful unconscious beliefs begin at birth, such as:

Abandonment issues, caused by being separated from Mother too quickly.

Scarcity issues, i.e., There is not enough air when we take that first breath, or There is not enough love. This can play out later in life with beliefs that there is not enough love, time or money.

People hurt me, if the doctors and nurses were rough.

Life is a struggle.

The list goes on and on, based on the different birth scenarios.

As we grow, we project the irrational beliefs that developed from these first impressions onto the people around us…and the world. For instance, cesarean-born babies may have the belief that when the going gets tough, someone will step in and save them. This can be expressed in an empowering way, or a disempowering way.

For instance, this person may unconsciously create trouble for themselves and the people around them, yet always expect someone to step in to help them (perhaps they even feel entitled to it). On the positive side, they may easily draw in healthy support when they need it without negatively affecting anyone.

A baby’s obstetrician represents an authority figure. Later in life, we may feel hostility toward authority figures such as bosses or police officers. These people may remind us, at a subconscious level, of the doctor who assisted at our birth. If the doctor was rough with us (and doctors often are), we may respond with those original feelings, such as anger, toward our boss or a police officer.

A child who was born prematurely may tend to rush into things in life. A child who was born late may tend to take her time moving from one thing to the next, or may have difficulty letting go of relationships, jobs, feelings, etc.

As children, we are not capable of making rational decisions until the right and left sides of our brains separate, at the age of seven or eight. This is what specialists call the Age of Reason. Our undeveloped minds may not have understood events or situations as well as our adult minds do.

As children, we made decisions that our rational adult minds would never make. Later in life, we may wonder why the same kind of relationships or situations keep happening to us, not realizing our irrational, subconscious beliefs draw them into our lives.

Not only did these first moments leave deep and lasting impressions on us, but we were also affected by what we learned and were programmed with from family, (especially our parents), peers, friends, learning institutions, religions, races, society and the media.

Children need structure and routine to live by when they are young. As we grow into adulthood, we may still be living our lives according to those old structures or habits. When we step out into the world, these programs are reinforced over and over again. We come to believe this is just how things are, never questioning whether we can live our lives in a more joyful and loving way.

Tribal Agreements

Every family resembles a small tribe in which we first learn how to survive. To gain acceptance and approval from adults is crucial to us as children. We intuitively know, as children, that we need the aid of our primary caretakers or guardians to survive.

How we learn to exist within the family structure will deeply affect how we see the world, and ourselves, as we grow into adulthood. These perceptions and beliefs will deeply influence the dynamics we develop in other relationships later in life.

We make both conscious and unconscious agreements with our tribes for survival. Some of these agreements are made at a psychic level, where we may not be consciously aware of them. Nevertheless, they still keep us locked into the ways of that particular tribe.

For instance, Margie became acutely aware of a significant agreement she had with her family during the work she and I did together. She realized she had an unspoken agreement with them that she would never be more successful in business than her younger sister.

While growing up, Margie heard repeatedly that her sister would succeed, but she never received that kind of encouragement for herself. She had grown up believing she couldn’t be more successful than her sister, and had unconsciously gone along with the belief.

To change the agreement and create success for herself might mean facing the disapproval of her family. It would mean change for them, too, at a certain level. They may even put pressure on Margie to go back to her old patterns. It would take courage to make the changes she really wanted and withstand the pressure of her family. Margie had already done a lot of work on herself emotionally, and was able to clear this limiting belief simply by realizing it was there.

The agreements we make with any group can be just as binding as those we form within family. Almost every moment of every day, we are bombarded with messages that keep us locked into these agreements.

On the path of healing our minds, there may come a time when we no longer need or want the security of a particular tribe. We begin to question everything - including these agreements.

Usually, the people associated with these tribes won’t want us to leave. They know it will mean change for them, and most people don’t want change. They may do or say almost anything to keep us locked into the system, including using guilt, shame, coercion or whatever other means they can think of. They may even believe they are doing it out of love, for our protection, or for our salvation.

Most Children are Taught to Distrust Themselves

Children experience everything at an empathic, psychic level. They live between worlds during their transition into physical form. Some children see energy around people and play with their invisible friends. Some even have memories of past lives.

Most children are taught that the psychic realm doesn’t exist. They are discouraged, or even put on medication, when they talk about such things. Often, it will scare the people around them (fear of the unknown). They are told they are making it up or that they are crazy or evil. So, they suppress this gift.

Adults minimize these psychic abilities by calling them intuition, a gut feeling, or instinct so they don’t feel threatened by them. They deny this gift and then believe it doesn’t exist. We have these abilities to help us, and they can be reawakened and developed.

If we experienced something as children, whether in the physical or the psychic realm, and then were told it didn’t happen, we learn to mistrust ourselves. Then, we wonder why we can’t trust ourselves and second-guess our decisions later in life.

As children, we may have experienced our parents or primary caretakers suffering at some level: verbally, emotionally, physically, or psychically. We take on their beliefs and pain, thinking we are helping. But it doesn’t help. We end up carrying this energy throughout our lives, and