2012: Angels and Pepperoni Pizza

“I ordered the pepperoni and onion pizza,” said my husband a few weeks prior to his passing and after one of his longer and longer rests in his big armchair. “I saw myself at this place called the Gateway Café. I was told that it’s the place where all beings–spirits–angels–hang out to choose where they’re going to go and who they’re going to be their next time around as humans. You get to decide your next lifetime just like ordering off a menu.”

“Wow,” I said. “But I’m thinking coming back might not be a choice I’d make. I mean, it’s been pretty rocky this time.”

“Exactly,” he said. “They told me we’re really all vacationing angels—spirit that wants to experience being human. As energetic beings, the idea of being human, mortal beings in biodegradable human suits with all the magnificent senses we enjoy, it feels like a vacation.”

I thought about it. Here my husband is dying and talking about how being human is supposed to feel like a vacation. Although I dutifully jotted down a few notes in the notebook we were keeping of his ideas, the only thing I heard in my head was, “If this were really a vacation, we’d both be having a lot more fun—and, oh, BTW, you wouldn’t be dying.”

I kept that part to myself.

12 Years Later

There was a lot of grieving from then to now. A lot of life and living packed into what felt like at first more like an endlessly scorched spiritual terrain until the rains came and there was verdant abundance once again. I’ve learned about living alone and living without a partner. I’ve experienced the massive benefits of self-discovery through meditation. Learned what it really means to live as a high-functioning HSP without denigrating my sensitivities; learning to view them as gifts and talents.  But most importantly, I’ve learned what it truly means to live as a “vacationing angel.”

This philosophy has stood by me through thick and thin since Randy’s passing. Sure, it took a while. “Vacation” isn’t usually the first word you think of when someone dies and you can barely climb out of bed every day. Yet, with his ongoing prodding and poking, and my continued efforts at listening to him from the other side of the veil, the message began to make more and more sense.

Here’s the way my reasoning went.

For many years the only real thoughts swimming around in my head sounded like this: “What’s the point? What’s the purpose of being human?  What’s MY purpose for being here?” Not reassured by the obvious dearth of answers, I continued along a path where nothing—nothing—made any sense. It wasn’t until I began reading books like Conversations with God that my eyes opened. Suddenly, there was another option for looking at life, death, and being-ness. Another option for living with purpose that included more than a decision about which career path to follow.

Embracing (remembering, one might say) the idea that we have all made our contracts before we live our first, second, or thousandth human lifetime opened the door to a whole new world. If I agreed to the contracts with my mother, my father, my sisters, my friends, then how could I be angry at them or disappointed in them or blame them for anything?

My contract = My responsibility.

It’s as simple as that. Navigating that lifetime’s contract, however, can be pretty darn challenging if/when/because we tend to get stuck in the “why” of it all.

“I am a Vacationing Angel, spirit in human form.

I chose, and choose, to be here.

I will make the most of it while I’m here.”

If we are all one, then . . .

It’s all about life, death, angels, & pepperoni pizza

If I accept that we are all one energetically, which I do, then when we “die,” we simply take on a different energetic frequency and state, the way heated water turns to steam. We’re still here, but in a different form. I have always believed that when we’re in that different form—in the non-physical—so, why not imagine we’re somewhere like the Gateway Café? Some place where we have and hold an awareness that goes beyond the physical and yet offers us an outline for the physical world we choose? Some place where we have and hold a sense of selflessness along with self-full-ness that propels us to enter the physical realm for another lifetime?

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The Psychic Octopus: The Perfect Tool for High Sensitives

The psychic octopus is absolutely without a doubt the best tool I have ever come across for HSPs. It’s the single tool that changed my life. Applying it is not only easy, one you get the hang of it, but endlessly helpful, endlessly soothing, and endlessly effective.

Are you globbing onto someone else’s energy?

Learning to know the difference between your Unique Energetic Signature, your personal energy and other people’s energy is the basis for everything when you’re an HSP. Here’s why. When you’re highly sensitive, when you’re a “high sensitive,” as you now know you are and have probably always been told you are, you feel things that other people don’t seem to feel, and you feel them on a level that often feels overwhelming, even disturbing. Over time, your feelings can become so intense that you live a life of concern, fear, even anxiety and depression.

Controlling these reactions to your environment becomes a pervasive need. In order to save yourself from the pain and discomfort you feel, most people who are high sensitive learn to shut down, deny, or otherwise distract themselves from, or avoid, those feelings at all cost. The problem is, none of these options is helpful in the long run. They all rise out of fear, lack, and defensiveness, as opposed to acceptance, worthiness, and love for self…love for who we really are, and love for the world around us. This includes feeling hate, not love, for our own sensitivities and for the magnificent gifts they truly are.

We are spirit in biodegradable human suits!

We are all more than our physical selves; we are spirit in a human body, a human form that come into and leaves the physical world. Another way to say this is that we are simply all energetic beings. And if we’re all energetic beings, it’s only a short step to knowing that we are all connected energetically, through our energetic fields of vibration, in some way. When we realize this, we also realize that if we’re constantly open, constantly feeling all the energies around us, the good, the bad and the ugly feelings of the people and places in our environment, it’s all too easy to lose our own sense of self in the process. If we’re busy feeling what other people are feeling, how do we know what we are really feeling? How do we know if what we’re feeling is truly ours?

How do we know that we are living a life driven by our own thoughts and beliefs and sensations? That we’re being guided by connection with source and loving intention, as opposed to other people’s thoughts and other people’s intentions? Frankly, we don’t.

Be the octopus!

Here’s what to do. Start by picturing yourself as an octopus. That’s right, an octopus. You know, one with all its far-reaching tentacles, all those feelers that octopuses have. You are able to reach near and far, and curve around and into things you can go through and past in order to explore and probe and find and identify what’s around you. You are free to seek and react to all that’s out there.

Here’s the difference, though, between you and the octopus. You are doing this seeking and probing on an energetic level. You have your own personal psychic octopus. So what’s the problem? Well, the problem comes in when you’re not aware that you’re using your energetic tentacles to tap into other people’s energy bodies–their emotions and experiences.

You’re not aware that you have built your relationships on this ability to know how other people think and feel. And you do it to the extent that you are actually feeling what they think and feel might seem like a good thing. It might seem like it gives you a sense of empathy and compassion to know what they feel. But in actuality, it keeps you from knowing yourself.

You’re literally taking on the feelings of other people. So you lose the sense of who you really are. It keeps you from being centered and aligned. And then it’s all too easy to lose yourself in a relationship, to forget what you really want and to find yourself basically out of touch with who you really are in your essence. Did you ever say you felt “beside yourself”?

How to reel in your psychic tentacles (or wring out psychic sponge)

That’s probably because you were—energetically beside yourself, that is. But when your octopus is in, when you’ve reeled in your psychic tentacles, you’re no longer at the mercy of other people’s stuff. You’re no longer in constant reactive mode that keeps you off center, off kilter, because it’s only when you remain in your own energy that you have the ability to truly be a guiding, present, presence for anyone else.

Practice how it feels to pull in these psychic tentacles. When you pull in your tentacles, when you’re fully engaged in your own energetic pulse, you have no leftover strands of energy, so to speak, that are trolling around, seeking to tap into, or engage, or feel what’s inside anyone else. This not only allows you to have complete freedom to be who you are, but invites you to feel safe and protected wherever you are whoever is in your space, and whatever shows up in your sphere.

When your psychic octopus tentacles are “in,” you’re free!

Another reason this is so wonderful is because you begin to accept the person who you really are in your essence without feeling the need to put up a protective barrier against the world or against other people. You pull your tentacles in, as opposed to pushing away from and building a wall against.

Simply put, being aware of your psychic octopus is not only the gateway to freedom, but the first, most critical, leg of the journey on your roadmap to your own magnificence!

The post The Psychic Octopus: The Perfect Tool for High Sensitives first appeared on Elevate Your HSP-ness!.

One day I woke up thinking, “What if I’d woken up this morning and had no idea who I was? What if I realized I had amnesia? How would my life be different? Would I remember I always woke up depressed and anxious? Would I remember I was afraid to start my days because they always seemed to go from bad to worse? Would I remember how bad I felt about myself?

The idea felt like a lightening bolt.

Who would you be?

If I didn’t know I was Heidi Connolly with her ego, identity, knowledge, experiences, beliefs, and her emotional, mental, and spiritual constructs, who would I be?

Start with depression. How would I know I was depressed if I didn’t know I had a reason—or didn’t have a reason—to be depressed? Without a label of “depression,” would I even look for such a reason? If I couldn’t remember why, would I still tell myself I felt that way? Without any validating external factors in evidence—my friend dissed me or my husband forgot my birthday or I hate my job—how would I know how to be, how to act? Would I feel anything at all?

If everything we are and everything we do is in direct relationship to the world around us, how do we ever know what is simply a reaction to stimuli or a true act of self?

What defines us?

You might say they’re the same thing. If there’s nothing to react to, no outside stimulus, then what provides us with an identity? How much does the backdrop of your life color, constitute, create, give birth to, support, confine, define, and refine you?

Say I woke up and the first thing I heard was, “Hey, Shirley, are you going to walk the dog this morning?” How long would it take before the message kicked in that (1) I wasn’t called Shirley, (2) I don’t have a dog, and (3) I’m usually by myself when I wake up, so, um…who was talking to me?

In that moment, however brief, before realization of self/ego takes over, who would I be then? And if there’s a “me” that isn’t tied to the experience of being Heidi and the experiences that have created her, what would be left?

What if there were no labels?

How might you experience the world if all your labels and beliefs fell away?

• Would you discover you don’t like scrambled eggs anymore or that the color on the walls drives you insane?
• Would you discover you weren’t afraid of the deep woods anymore or that you’d forgotten how to swim?
• What part of who you are is founded on muscle memory, signals that underlie and reinforce a habituated, patterned life? One that, as a human, is based on profound constructs that you label reality? How often do you hear, “It’s just the way I am. I can’t change now.” Have you said it yourself?
• If you forgot why you were angry at your parents, would you still be angry?
• If you forgot why you had a stack of fencing materials in your driveway, would you remember you didn’t like your neighbors?

If, magically, the experiences that have shaped you were to no longer be part of your consciousness, who would you be?

Shifting gears

I’d like to think there’s someone else in there—inside me, inside you. Someone who is free to make choices based on senses outside the mind’s projection. Free to be curious and open without holding on so tightly to beliefs that may have outlived their feasibility. Free of constricting identity and ego.

Free to be…me.

Free to be you.

Free to be.

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