Living a perfectly imperfect life

Living a perfectly imperfect life

As my life unfolds I feel like a witness as well as an active participant. I am seeing more clearly the way things develop as I make choices for my highest good, but I also see that the Universe has this bigger plan for me and all of the things that I thought were bad choices were also part of the journey.

Every interaction with each person, all the pain, all the joy, all the humiliation and all of the courage, they are all intricate pieces. Each one as important as the next. You can’t skip over a piece because the puzzle will be incomplete. For many years I think I tried to believe that I didn’t need to experience some pieces…that my life would have been better without them, but if I had not been through and been a part of all that I have I would not be the person I am today.

It’s OK to get angry, it’s ok to be sad, it’s ok to be manic and it’s ok to rest. it’s ok to explore relationships that aren’t meant for you and then it’s ok to leave them. It’s also ok to pretend you are a victim…and it’s also ok to realize that you chose it…all of it, just to have the experience of life.

I wake up this morning knowing that the choices I have made or are about to make aren’t perfect…but then again maybe they are…just because I don’t have it all together and am not graceful all the time doesn’t mean that it’s not perfect in some way. Maybe figuring out how to be the best kind of human just looks and feels weird sometimes…and maybe…just for today I am going to embrace feeling weird and uncomfortable…and I am even going to love it…

What are Chakras?

What are Chakras?

 

Many thousands of years ago in India someone figured out there are energy centers in and around our physical body that help us to understand emotions and how to process the energy that is all around us. These energy centers help us to give and receive different kinds of emotions and energies.

 

The main 7 chakras are:

Chakra 1: Root Chakra: Grounding and feeling safe: Located at the perineum.

Chakra 2: Sacral Chakra: Relationships, creativity, sexuality: Located around and just below the navel.

Chakra 3: Solar Plexus: Your power center, making things happen, using your will do the things you want to do, feeling sure of yourself : Located at the diaphragm

Chakra 4: Heart Center, how you love and are able to receive love: Located in the center of the chest.

Chakra 5: Throat Center: How you communicate with yourself and others, also how you are able to understand what others are trying to communicate to you. Located in the center of the throat.

Chakra 6: Third eye: Gaining insight about yourself and others in a deeper way. Located in the center of the forehead.

Chakra 7: Crown Chakra: Your connection with God, The Universe, The Divine, whatever that higher power shows up as for you. Located at the top of your head.

Each chakra has a front and rear aspect. The front comes out of the front of the body and the rear is connected and opens in the back. The front aspects are about how we give the rear are about how we receive. Someone can be able to give a lot of love if their front heart chakra is wide open, but often times there is an imbalance with the rear chakra being closed and so it creates someone who give a lot of love but is not able to receive love at all.

All chakras are connected front and back and also from the top of the head through the root with a channel of light that runs through the center of the body. There are also 2 other channels that run on either side of the spinal column.

There are many more chakras and connections, but a basic understanding of these 7 will probably be more than enough information if you are just starting out.

All chakras work independently, but they also work together. It’s kind of like your hands work on their own, but in order for them to work properly you need your arms and shoulders to be working as well. If your shoulders are out of alignment your hands are going to have a more challenging time doing what they need to do. The same goes for chakras.

When your chakras are open, flowing and in communication with one another you are able to interact with the world in an easy and effortless way. You feel like you are at one with everything and everyone and life is a beautiful place to be. When one of our chakras is out of alignment it causes a breakdown in understanding and communication with the other chakras. An example of this would be: Let’s say you were feeling really amazing one day and you wanted to share something you saw with a good friend. That friend might not have been in a good mood that day and told you they didn’t want to hear about it. If your throat chakra is open and flowing with the rest of your chakras you might just brush it off, but there might be an old memory hidden from childhood that says, ‘Nobody wants to hear what I have to say, what I have to say isn’t important.’ Your throat chakra might close down thinking it is protecting itself. When your throat chakra closes down you are not able to communicate in an open and flowing manner. Even if you feel a deep experience of love in your heart, you won’t be able to express it. It’s often the reason that we feel so much love welling up inside of us but we don’t know what to do with it. There is a disconnect.

What do we do when we identify that perhaps there might be a disconnect or trigger in the chakra?

Get yourself into a quiet place. Calm your body and breathe deeply.
Scan each of your chakras for feelings of resistance. If you come across some resistance, breathe into it. Allow yourself to relax as much as possible. You might feel deep intense emotions and that is ok, just breathe with them. You have already been through the hardest part of the pain, what you are experiencing is the emotions coming through your body to be released.  Imagine that the emotions you are feeling are coming from a small child who is afraid and is in need of some comforting. The more relaxed you can be during the release, the easier and faster they will dissipate. Keep present with these feelings and dive deeper into them, seeking out every last little bit of them and as you do they will quickly dissolve like dew in the sun.

(Interesting note: Many times when we experience a painful event we want to run away from the feeling. But when we do that it is only stored in our energyfield until we are able to deal with it. We go from painful experience to painful experience thinking we are running from it, but each time we are creating these little pockets of pain to be opened later and they are often triggered out of the blue later by some other event. The more we can be present with the pain as it is happening, the faster it can be released from our body. Pain is just a way our body tells us that there is something that is not quite right, not in alignment, so as we feel it and bring light to it, it can be released from the body forever.)

If you’d like a little more assistance with how to clear the chakras you can go to my YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/joannaalbrecht
Or you can schedule a SpiritBody Integration where we go more in depth into all of the chakras  front and rear as well as their aspects and release any energy or cords that are keeping you from full clear flow and alignment.

Thanks for reading!

Wishing you Clarity, Alignment, Strength and Balance on your journey through life!

Joanna

Vulnerable Exploration in the Waves

Vulnerable Exploration in the Waves

I have been receiving a lot of deep energetic healing lately as well as massage sessions as I go through this meditation process…
Yesterday as I was coming out of a session I felt more vulnerable than I have felt in a long time. I couldn’t stop crying, I made my way over to the Lake and watched the waves and reminded myself that the waves of emotions that were crashing over me would soon calm…

There is something about going into these emotions, fully feeling them without trying to stop them…Oh I tried to stop them every once in a while…texted a friend, tried to distract myself from the moment…but then I remembered this time many years ago when I was just learning about healing…

I was Quantum Leaping in consciousness, working, studying and doing healing during the day, doing dream work at night, taking massive amounts of herbs and fasting for body cleansing. Then one night I was in a deep meditation and I just sat up out of my body. I looked around the room and freaked out a bit when I looked back and saw my body…I then looked over at the phone and was thinking, “Who can I call to help me with this?” But then it dawned on me…you can’t use a phone when you don’t have a body…

Eventually I was able to settle myself back into my physical body…but that experience serves as a reminder to me…

Sometimes during this intense exploration of consciousness we go deeper than we have gone before. It might seem scary, it might seem like we need help. but these things we are experiencing…it is us exploring us…no other person is going to be able to guide you through your process…the best that can happen is you reach out to someone who can make you feel more at ease or calm you, but this time of learning…it’s something only you can do for you….and as terrifying as it might seem during the process, once the waves settle you come out with a greater clarity.

When I go through these intense sessions I am reminded of a poem by Maira Rainer Rilke

That some day, emerging at last from the terrifying vision
I may burst into jubilant praise to assenting angels!
That of the clear-struck keys of the heart not one may fail
to sound because of a loose, doubtful or broken string!
That my streaming countenance may make me more resplendent
That my humble weeping change into blossoms.
Oh, how will you then, nights of suffering, be remembered
with love. Why did I not kneel more fervently, disconsolate
sisters, more bendingly kneel to receive you, more loosely
surrender myself to your loosened hair? We, squanderers of
gazing beyond them to judge the end of their duration.
They are only our winter’s foliage, our sombre evergreen,
one of the seasons of our interior year, -not only season,
but place, settlement, camp, soil and dwelling.

During the process it seems like it will last forever and there is a fair amount of wanting it to end quickly but if you can remember that this is a time of deep learning and transformation. When you come out of this you will have a deeper understanding of what your truth is…a deeper clarity. So if in the midst of these stormy waves  you can remember to breathe and pay attention to what is happening.

Today the storms have all past and I feel lighter and more clear than I have in a while. I look back on yesterday as a journey into dissolving the walls I had been building around my heart, that I didn’t even know were there…and I feel so grateful for the experience.

 

If you love someone, set them free

If you love someone, set them free

I had a deep healing last night and today I felt like I had let go of everything and everyone…

I noticed that I can love everyone so much more when I am not attached to them.

It seems so ironic…I know, but if you love someone…set them free…

I think I know what that means now….Letting someone go is the only real way you can love them….because only from a place of detachment can you see that person for who they truly are…not the Attachment Story.

The Attachment Story is the filter you put up between you and another person that causes you to only see them from your point of view. Their thoughts feelings and emotions go out the window and you project onto them what your thoughts hopes and dreams are…”I will love them only if they do what I want and if they don’t do what I want I will attack them….”

What they want is not as important as them fitting into your story line…it’s very twisted, but it happens all the time and people see it as normal…until you break it apart and look at it.

People can become quite upset at the ones they say they love if they don’t full fill their part in the made up role they are supposed to be playing.

Wouldn’t it actually be more loving to let go? Let go of that person you love every day. Making every day a new day of exploration with them. They are new, you are new…seeing each other with fresh eyes. And through a place of detachment. They become another person separate from you. You get to learn them all over again.

Letting go can be scary at first because you might think that attachment and control mean love and the only way they will stay is because of an obligation attachment….but you can only control someone for so long and when you get tired or they get tired, things start to break down.

Setting our lover free in every moment we can meet them again and again. Fall in love again and again…and when we give up our control it frees them to choose us again and again. Because doesn’t it feel better to be chosen from a sense of freedom and not obligation?

I used to think it took a strong person to think this way…but more and more I have begun to realize, it just takes someone with the courage to let go. To free the ones they love continuously so they can be free too…letting go is not an act of war…it is a loving act of peace.

When you have an Attachment Story about someone, you in essence enslave them to your way of being, and if you have enslaved another you then in turn become a slave…

If you truly want to love your fellow humans…

Free your prisoners…
Free yourself…

What if you already have access to that perfect lover?

What if you already have access to that perfect lover?

One of my favorite things to experience is love. I love falling in love, being in love, seeing other people in love…Love is my thing…it’s my super power…
 
However…something interesting has been lately. I have been vacillating between wanting a partner to fall in love with and tapping into the Divine love within…
 
The interesting part is…when I think about having a partner, I get a little sad. Mostly because I am focusing on the lack of having one, but also, I think, because putting my focus of love outside of myself makes me feel sad. It basically tells me that I am not enough and in order to feel love I need someone outside of myself to feel it…and that is a lie…and lies always feel a bit yucky…
 
I was driving home last night having this discussion in my head and decided to tap into my Divine Lover…my Divine Lover is that part of myself that knows me, understands me and kind of feels like a more mature, future me. It’s kind of like a middle personality between me and God, if that makes sense. It shows up as a strong masculine presence for me. I think that some people experience it as Jesus or a guardian angel… I don’t think it’s unique to me, this is just how I process the experience.
 
So I started a dialog and it asked me, “Ok so what do you want to talk to your best friend about?” I talked at length about what was going on in my life, my hopes and fears, wishes for the future…and my Divine Lover talked to me about it all, letting me know how proud he was of me and how it is challenging, but I am doing a good job and the tough times aren’t going to last forever.
 
Knowing that I can tap into this presence anytime I want to makes me relax and feel safe and loved…Even if I did have a human lover, they would be able to show up 100% all the time and this presence is always there…
 
Today I am thankful for this loving presence in my life <3
And thank you for being present on my journey <3
Letting go of the past

Letting go of the past

Your thoughts, feelings and emotions all resonate at a certain frequency and vibration. When you tell the story of your past you tune into that specific frequency of energy and vibration. This is unwanted for a lot of reasons but one of the main reasons is, if it is an unpleasant memory it makes you feel bad, second it puts you in a negative mind loop, where you keep repeating the same thoughts over and over and the energy gets stronger and stronger and snowballs the energy. When that happens you not only start resonating at the same frequency again but you actually become a magnet that attracts similar energy to you. This is why people tend to repeat unwanted relationships… if you keep talking about the things you didn’t like in the last relationship you will call it in again because you keep recreating that same vibration every time you talk about it.

A part of us will always want to try to fix the past by bringing up old stories, but there is no changing what has happened, you can only shift the energy of this present moment to make sure you create a better future.

When you find yourself thinking of something that happened in the past or re-living a story, say. ‘Present moment. Forward thinking.’ This will bring you back to this moment and shift your ‘Thought Stream’ into a new direction. And when I say ‘Thought Stream’ I mean it. If you knew the intensity of the flow of energy you are using to think about the past it would amaze you. When you are able to shift all of that energy into the present moment and point it to where you would like to go, your life will move forward faster than you knew was possible.

Sometimes we focus on the past because we may be afraid of what comes next. The past, even if it was a crappy past, seems safer than an unknown future… But most of us are only afraid of the future because we are afraid we may repeat the past, but we will only repeat the past if we keep thinking about it…there in lies the cycle. There are all of these organizations that keep saying, ‘We should remember the past! Lest we forget!’ Let’s just talk about the word Remember for a moment. Re-member we are putting back together, we are Re-membering something that has happened in the past. We are literally bringing it back together and creating the energy of it again and again.

I believe a more productive way to create a better future is to actually create a better future. Think about what you want to create and then take the steps to make it happen. The same goes for your new relationship. Create in your mind’s eye what you would like to experience, then go one step further and bring up the feelings you would like to feel in this new relationship. Bring them up every day. Feel them as much as you can. Have as much fun as you can. Talk to your future partner, have fun with them, go for walks and talk to them. Feel what it feels like to be in their presence. This brings you into the vibration and frequency of what you wish to create. When you are in the frequency for long enough you become a magnet for that same frequency to come in. Eventually a new partner can’t help but come in, and when they do it will feel easy and natural, like they have been with you for a long time…because in essence… they have, you have been in each other’s same energy and frequency for as long as you have been calling it in.