Awakening means you’ve come home to yourself, that consciousness shifted back to its original nature.” – Maria Erving

As children, we are heavily conditioned by our environment. We need tremendous love and acceptance from our parents in order to be able to develop a positive self-image; which is strongly developed by the tender age of 7. As we get older, we begin to realize that our parents are just people, functioning from their own conditioned delusions, which get passed down. Throw in a divorce, a surgery when we are children, a death to someone close to us, and our self-image becomes distorted and our own reflection can seem grotesque.

We begin to look at ourselves as if through the lens of a hall of mirrors, believing that we are not good enough seeing only the fabrications we have come to accept as true about ourselves. Beliefs that we are bad, inadequate, not lovable, unacceptable, undeserving, not smart enough to become our “truth”.

We have become addicted to these stories as they are firmly planted in our psyche. I have heard it said “what wires together fires together” so after so many years, thoughts, ideas, and our belief system is now part of our habitual pattern of engaging with life. Until we start to wake up and we desire more than anything else to live from our soul and authentic nature.

So what do we experience when we begin to realize that we no longer are capable of living the lies that we have told ourselves? What happens when we have come to question these long-held beliefs that we have embraced as our sacred truth? You dive in head first into the sea of “who the hell am I” and nothing in your world fits the same as it did before. You miss the ease and security of knowing what your life is about and you begin an inner exploration that will take you apart piece by piece.

Welcome to the “Dark Night”, it is time to experience your inner “death” and to expand into a greater version of yourself, one that you may not even know is deep inside of you. Join me as I share the intimate details of my life and intense awakening process through my soon to be released spiritual memoir, “Hugging Trees in the Dark”, Finding the Courage to Free the Heart. A painful, but necessary spiritual initiation back to your uniqueness and true destiny. I love you..RJ