Raised on fear…shifting to joy….

Photo by Stephanie K. Nead

        Photo by Stephanie K. Nead

Through your body, you are feeling happy.  Receive that happiness, revel in your own feeling of happiness.  From within your body, allow yourself to be rooted and grounded in your body and in your happiness.  You have a right to your happiness.  You don’t even have to have a reason  for it.  You have a right to happiness, beloved, an absolute, inalienable right to happiness, in your body, in your Being.  You don’t have to explain or defend it.  It is your birthright to be joyful.  You can be happy in your body; you can feel happiness flowing throughout your body and Being.  

When you have been raised on fear, your first reaction is fear…even to happiness.  If you are in your body, happy and celebratory, experience says someone is going to want something from you; someone is going to want you to physically and emotionally give yourself up to them; you are going to be obligated to move into pain and away from happiness.  Your happiness is someone else’s permission.  When you are happy you no longer have a “No.”  You are supposed to say “Yes” to everything.  

That is not happiness, beloved.  That is unhealthy boundaries.  That is coercion and manipulation.  To make someone believe that if they are happy and expressive and joyful and dancing, in love with their body and Being, that if in their own joy they have “turned on” someone else, then they owe that person something, is profoundly unkind, even cruel.  No.  You never owe.  If you have given joy by your own experience of joy, of happiness and pleasure flowing through your body, that is enough.  That is wonderful.  If in the course of enjoying yourself, another is given pleasure, what a blessing to them…and to you.  You owe nothing.  You don’t owe to continue that.  You don’t owe to expand it.  

Feel happiness and know you deserve to be happy because it is your birthright.  It is your body’s right to feel joy, to feel sensual, to feel sexual, to feel grief, to feel any way you feel.  It is your sovereignty; it is your Being.  You are never therefore required anything.  

For your body, it is important to always know that you have a “No.”  You have every right to go back to being a teenager, and give yourself the right you had, but were not allowed then, the right to say “No.” The fact that others talked you out of it, threatened you out of it, cajoled you out of it, manipulated you out of it, hurt you with the violence of their thoughts, their voices, their words, their manipulations, that is not your fault.  It never ended your right to set your own limits.  It never ended your right to be curious, to say “Well, in this moment that sounds interesting or exciting or attractive,” and to go one inch into it and decide “No, I’ve changed my mind, don’t like it, don’t want to do that,” and say “No.”  Or to go a foot into it “Hmmm, no, feels icky, changed my mind, No.”  Or to go ten feet or a hundred feet or a mile into it, or all the way through it and say “I don’t want to do that again.”  You always have the right to your “No.”   Your body always has the right to her “No.”  Always, always, always. And you have the right, from within that space of choice, to own in every cell of your body, and every fiber and energy of your Being, your “Yes,” your joy and happiness.  

Surrounding your joy and happiness, as expansive and beautiful as it feels, is a sovereign fire, and it has its boundaries, just as a fire within a fire pit has boundaries.  It burns passionately, brightly and hot within itself, but it has a boundary of self.  And so do you.  Even in Creation there is a boundary to energy where it meets another energy.  Tis very different from humans and bodies, but not completely different.  The idea of bodies came from something similar.  And so, your ecstasy, your passion, your joy, your happiness, however high it might rise, however deep it might be, however far it might extend, it is always contained within you; it exists because of you; it is fueled by you, and always you are the sovereign Being to say “Yes” or to say “No”  how you move it, when and where.  You own it.  It’s always coming from the fuel at the base of you, in your soul, in your Being, in your heart, in your passion, just like the logs that fuel the fire are at the base of the fire.  It is you, and so you say where you shall burn, when, with and for whom.  Always for yourself.  

Allow yourself to be happy beloved, to experience happiness fully embodied, to let loose those armors that have kept you from feeling happiness out of fear.  Because anytime you felt happiness, someone took it away from you as though you had no right, and they very often did it by invading you with negative opinions, with criticism, or with manipulation that you had to give up who you are, what you want, and your felt “Yes” in your body.  You never, ever, ever give up the yes in your body, in your soul, in your heart, in your Being; it is the you of you; it is the very core of the essence of your Being; it is your “Yes.”  You surround it with the right to say “No,” and in that way you create the space within which the yes can burn and burn and burn, and ever replenish. 

For private 1-1 time with Stephanie & Our Friends, please email sknp4710@aol.com

All sessions are recorded and emailed to you.

Couple & Group sessions are also available.

Stop by https://innerteacher.net/contact-and-session-information/

Thank you Leslie!

A gift I received in my inbox today!  Thank you Leslie Lightfall.  For more, see my “Testimonials” page at bottom of right hand column.

I have been working with Stephanie and Our Friends for about 15 years now.  They have greatly helped me to discover mySelf, explore my multi-dimensionality and understand things about mySelf and my experiences that are very difficult to understand from only a human perspective.

I highly recommend Stephanie’s work to anyone who is committed to living and fully expressing as their full, expanded, multi-dimensional Self. Our Friends’ influence was integral to my having the courage to trust my guidance and support from the unseen world with such marvelous results on my recent trip to South America.

Namaste,
Leslie Lightfall

 On YouTube:

Blogs:

Healing

"Dancing Together" Stephanie K. Nead

From a recent session:  With permission, I share it here.

Question:  How to create prosperity, abundance…of money, of joy, of love?

It is to differentiate from the you, you were taught.  It is to differentiate from the you who feels so small and dark and weak and hurt, and cleave to the strength of your soul, of your gifts, of your mind, of your Being.  To know that your soul is always there in all its purity, beauty and strength, that love is always with you.

We know there are times when you feel you cannot trust, have faith, feel loved, when you feel that all of your fear and pain comes between you and communion, comes between you and Creation.  Yet, everything that you need is there.  All of Creation, and all the allies you need, are ever with you. 

Be in process: feel yourself, be true to yourself.   Feel the negative experiences of this child you were, this adult you have been, what you went through, how painful it was.  Look at and learn the imprints it gave you, see how you have lived by those.  These things are important. 

It is important to breathe this, to sweat it, to swim it, to work it, to walk it, to yoga it, to scream it, to cry it, to be with you, to be with the you who has felt hurt, and to nourish and nurture that you in a way that you never received before and that only you, only you, with G-d, with Creation, only you can give this to yourself, because it is from you that you need to know you can get it at all times, the one who never leaves you. 

This is a very human process.  Pain does not mean you are wrong or bad.  Often it means that a healthy part of self has been pressed down for a long time.  It struggles to rise and be free.  In your learned holdings, you feel pain. 

See it as a process to freedom, a process you can only engage by engaging, by breathing, being present.  So often adults do to themselves what they were taught as children: that freedom comes through bondage, the bondage of suppression, repression, “pretend,” denial. 

Thus, the free self, the full soul, the life-force of full breath and embodiment/incarnation remains unexpressed, and the struggle takes new forms. 

You must clear the pain, you must listen to it; you must be with your whole self, the whole experience of your body and being and life, so your soul, with your gifts, can come through your body and Being and life with greater and greater clarity.  It will bring wholeness and richness, nectar and nourishment, more and more and more as you clear what needs to be cleared, by listening to yourself, to what you experience, giving your ear to yourself. 

You can give to yourself the listening.  You can give to yourself the truth of your experience and your feelings.  You can listen to you and care for you, own and honor and protect and nurture and love you in the truth of your experience.  In that, you will heal and you will bring in more light and more openness, more expansion of your soul and your Being, and you will gain confidence.

Most humans lack confidence.  The part of you that is wounded and hurt feels so weak, feels incapable of doing the work of your soul.  You see it, you feel it, you know it is there, but you are more grounded in the pain, in the ways it has bound you and ground you down.

And so you need to be present with yourself, you need to clear out the pain.  Through this, you gain confidence that pain is not going to overwhelm you, is not going to overtake you.  You gain confidence as you have more and more space in yourself, in your life, as you have more energy in your days for the flowing of your soul, for the energies of your soul to come forth and be.  You gain confidence that you will follow through, that you will be able to stay in that light of Being, that you will be able to be the wholeness of your soul, because the pain will no longer be constantly threatening to surface and drown and overwhelm you. 

This is a necessary process, this relieving, this letting the pain out like opening a dam, letting it move, releasing it from your body so that you can be free.  It is in openness; it is in letting your cells and your body speak and release, through your movement, your energy, your thoughts.  Through this you grow clear for the flowing of your soul, in all the ways that your soul wishes to flow. 

Know, learn, realize, feel that your gifts are always there.  Your gifts are always with you.  The strength of your gifts is always there. The truth of your gifts is always there.  The need is to live in genuineness, in truth, in clarity of communion within yourself, and to bring forth who you are with a clear, rooted, groundedness, without dishonesty, without hype, without persona, without pretense.  You can learn to do this. 

Be in your path, be true to your soul, and in being true to your soul, remember that your soul is in your gifts, not in your pain.  You pain is in your body.  Your pain is not your soul.  Your beauty, your gifts, your strength, your aliveness is your soul.

In this, you will remember life and light, happiness and joy, prosperity.  It will bring your own love into the world, and in bringing your own love into the world, you will draw to you a love song…and in that there is abundance, there is prosperity, there is care, there is joy, there is all. 

Blessings as Winter spins into Spring…unfolding new life…

May Gaea Be Our Guide...

“I bend my knee beside the pool of blessings at the threshold of eternity.”        (traditional Hebrew prayer: translation by Rabbi Sue Morningstar*)

The ultimate spiritual teacher is moment-to-moment daily living.  The ultimate challenge of spiritual unfolding, of Becoming, is to bring through whatever is in the moment, the heart of your highest self, your Being, your Essence.”  Our Friends

Hello My Friends,

I am thinking of you as the year turns and the inwardness of winter begins to shift to the rebirth of spring.  I hope, wherever you live, and however your life is unfolding today, you feel within the newest shoots of life’s endless rebirth.  I hope everything in your life is well and good. 

The past year was amazing for me…starting with the building of my blogs: for Our Friends sharing www.innerteacher.wordpress.com.  My artwork can be found at www.stephanieknead.wordpress.com

A summer article about my communion and sharing of Our Friends (http://www.roseyroundtherogue.com/column8-16-10.html) was wonderful and introduced me to a new group of truly lovely human beings. 

I was blessed with an ongoing presence at Ashland Art Works Galleries, an artist collective here in my hometown.  (If you ever visit southern Oregon, please drop me an email or call.  I’d love to meet you, and I’m always available for in-person, as well as phone, sessions.  Meeting Our Friends in person is filled with love.)  I spent the late fall happily ensconced in my art studio creating new work for a show starting February 1st at Illahe Gallery here in Ashland.  (the photos will be on my art site as of February 1st.)

My poetry has been flowing.  As you will see, each new piece for this show is accompanied by a poem. 

So, the grace of the past year has been the infusion of my creativity, including Our Friends, more fully, day-by-day, into my life.  A greater gift is hard to imagine.  It is the inflow and epitome of abundance for me.  They say “Do what you love and the money will follow.”  Well, then, I should soon be very wealthy! 

May you be blessed with all you need this year.  May you recognize both the need and the receiving.  May you hear with your heart and body, letting go the stories of your mind and history.  May love light your way and may you feel yourself blessed every day.  May life always be received as a gift, a mystery, an honor.

Love,                                                                                                                                       Stephanie

*This translation is based on the multiple meanings inherent in every Hebrew word.  For those of you with a Jewish background the transliterated prayer is “Baruch Atah Adonai, elohaynu melech haolam.” 

Baruch means “blessed” or “knee.”  Atah means “One” or “pool.”  Olam means “threshold” or “eternity.”