Going through difficult times can send us into a downward spiral where we forget the gifts we all carry. The elders say we are the only ones on the planet who have forgotten our original instructions.

What if your original instructions can be found within you?

They can. We just need to know how to access them.

Our original instructions as human beings – our unique individual selves but also humanity – can be found within the 7 gifts we all carry.

Gift #1: Life, Love and Light.

I consider life, love and light the same energy. In fact, I can see the life force that connects us all, so to me it is irrefutable that we are all connected.

We ARE Life, Love and Light. That is who we are at the core, even if we carry trauma.

That Light never goes out completely. In fact, even when we leave our bodies for the spirit world at the end of this life journey, that Light still burns brightly. We just shift into another form, another way of being.

That’s kind of what we’re doing right now globally: shifting into another form, another way of being. It’s just a very slow process, unlike what you see in all those apocalyptic movies where it all seems to happen in a few days or even hours.

The Life, Love and Light that we are can enrich the whole planet if we allow it.

Gift #2: Breath

I could spend a whole workshop just teaching you about the power of our breath. After my son was murdered, I stopped knowing how to breathe.

I had to relearn how to fill up my lungs, heart and belly with enough breath to sustain me. Grief and trauma literally take your breath away.

This microbe in our lives has weaponized our breath against us, making us think twice before breathing in too deeply in crowded spaces. This strange time also has many of us living with ongoing grief, so it’s become even more important to make sure you’re resourcing yourself with good old Life, Love and Light… in the form of breath.

BREATHE deeply into your lungs, heart and belly. Hold it for a few seconds and then release the breath.

Did you know that in some Indigenous languages, breath, spirit and wind are the same word?

Gift #3: Water

It’s in our breath and bodies, it surrounds us 24/7 and without it we cannot live as human beings. Everything on the planet carries water.

Water is the first medicine that literally brings life into the world. The waters break and the baby is born.

Water carries memory and its physical structure changes according to our thoughts and feelings.

What are the messages you are telling your water within? 

That breath you just took in could’ve contained water from the Atlantic Ocean. It could’ve contained dewdrops from a 200 year old tree. It could contain vapour from a melted glacier or ancient summer rains from the other side of the planet.

Wherever your water within is coming from, whatever it contains, YOU have the ability to remind it of the Love, Life and Light that it really is. With every thought, feeling, breath in and breath out, you have the power to send a ripple of love through you and out into the world.

Remember you are Water. Fluid, clear, musical, magical and full of life, that’s you.

Gift #4: Heart

Don’t let your heart be a storage place for feelings you would rather not feel. Your heart will do what hearts do and pump blood all throughout your body, so if you don’t feel the feels that show up for you, you could end up depositing them anywhere in your body in the form of pain or disease.

Take it from me. I developed chronic pain shortly after losing my son. I remember going to one of the Indigenous elders I used to see in Toronto and asking her, “Why don’t I feel angry at this person who killed my son?”

I couldn’t access the anger but she told me I was carrying so much anger at that point that I could blow up a city. Ouch!

Sometimes with trauma, you might need some outside support to feel the deeper hidden feelings. Our brains do protect us and that is okay. It is also okay to get support.

Our hearts hold the power of Love, Light and Life and constantly flow it through our bodies but we need to open our hearts in order to experience the power of that flow.

One gentle yet powerful exercise I practice and sometimes get my Picking Up the Pieces students to do is simply to put your hand (or both your hands) over your heart and breathe slowly into your heart. Add a little healing music and what I find is you will eventually start to feel something. If it gets to be too much, you can just remove your hand from your heart, take a big belly breath and blow out the overwhelming feelings.

Connect with your heart and from your heart, and you will find your conversations feel a whole lot more REAL and down to earth. Most people’s typical conversations are head-to-head. When you have a true “heart to heart,” you know it.

Gift #5: Soul

Whatever you want to call it, this is our core. When a person dies, their soul lives on. They just transform into a different state of being. Energy cannot die. It only changes.

You know you’re connected with your soul when…

• You’re “in the zone”
• You’re doing something that brings you joy
• You forget the time.
• You have a burst of creativity or sense of feeling spiritually connected.
• You have an “aha moment” or spiritual download.
• Inspiration strikes.
• Your intuition speaks up and you can actually hear it.

Your soul lives inside your body where your belly button is.

Guess what? Your soul KNOWS and CARRIES your original instructions.

How it expresses those instructions? Through your body. And…

Gift #6: Vibration

I would have called this one Sound, but not all of us have the physical ability to sound our voice. But you certainly have your own unique vibration and energy signature that your body emits.

Much of that vibrational signal comes straight from your heart. Kind of like a fingerprint, your energy signature is yours and yours alone.

Same with your voice. Nobody else has the same voice as you.

We are all vibrating all the time. Science tell us this fact. It’s interesting how we humans are so terrified of change when change is always happening within and around us.

We may not be able to change all of our outer circumstances, but we can usually change our vibration, thoughts and feelings, and, with time, our beliefs.

We can lift up our vibrational frequency by smiling, laughing or doing what we love. Connect with your spirit and you connect with – and lift up – your vibration.

When we spend a lot of time uplifting our vibrational frequency by feeling good and being in alignment with who we came here to be, our presence grows and people can feel you when you walk into a room or when you sound your voice. That’s why people get healing from hearing me sing.

Gift #7: Our Senses

Since 2006 I’ve been teaching about multi-sensory visioning and just using all of our senses in the embodied resilience work that I do.

First, there are the 5 senses, but then there is a whole world of other senses and I don’t even have words for them all. Some people call some of them “the clairs” (clairvoyant, clairaudient, clairsentient etc.).

The most important thing about our senses (and “extra-senses”) that I know is that the more we involve our senses in our own self-care and healing, the more present we can be in our bodies.

Your intuition gets stronger, your connection to Spirit and to life itself gets stronger, and you open the doorway to more connection.

Connecting with your senses can be overwhelming for empaths and neurodivergent people, so go easy on yourself and protect your energy and your senses from overload.

Create safe sacred space in which to connect with your senses but NOT connect with what I fondly call “other people’s energies.”

We all have our own unique energy field and sometimes we need to put up protections or boundaries. During a pandemic and a war among other things is the PERFECT time to practice upholding your energy boundaries as well as your physical ones (saying no to energy vampires).

Our senses can easily become overloaded but they can also ground us and bring us back home to ourselves. We just need to keep developing our relationship with our senses, and notice what brings us into sensory overload.

When you know your triggers and also know what connects you and brings you home to yourself, you open the doors more widely to those original instructions, to your purpose here in this lifetime.

Want to experience all 7 of these gifts? Join me for one of my virtual events. The work that I do in my workshops, circles, keynotes and healing concerts can help you access your 7 gifts and begin to remember your original instructions.

RESOURCES:

• Want to dive right in and get some support? Head over here.

FOLLOW ME ON SPOTIFY – MUSIC FOR THESE CRAZY TIMES:

• Follow My Artist Account on Spotify.
• Follow my Global Pandemic Playlist on Spotify. The studio (CD, not live) version of the songs I sang in the livestreamed concert are also in this playlist.
• Follow the RENEWAL Playlist for springtime on Spotify