THE AWAKENING PATH
Newsletter articles containing great ideas, inspiration, and encouragement to get the life you want!
Harvesting Your True Life
Dr. Jerry Dean Epps
Founder of The Awakening Path
My beautiful garden is a constant reminder of growth and transformation for me. Last year I hired a professional landscaper who mapped out a new design for my front and back yards. As a result, I've added three beautiful ponds, well over fifty trees, and a circular driveway. What a change! What once was an ordinary yard can now pass for a delightful retreat in the mountains. This wasn't accomplished overnight - great care and attention was given to each phase of the design.
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In the beginning stages, the yards were an eyesore. The old growth had to be examined, uprooted, and hauled away to allow space for the delicate new plantings. I had no idea of the extent of the planning and execution of this grand metamorphosis. I was totally invested in the process from the beginning and am now enjoying the fruits of my commitment and my landscaper's work.
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My clients are another reminder for me of the transformation we consciously invite into our lives. Each client desires to chance his or her life and experience more meaning, joy, and happiness. Through intense and loving therapy sessions, I see each one shifting to new levels of truth, breaking old patterns, and reclaiming their lives. I deeply respect my client's courage and commitment to dig up, recognize and allow their wounds to be "hauled away" to create space for a richer, more meaningful life.
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As a spiritual psychotherapist, I work with clients both emotionally (therapy) and spiritually. This unique combination allows clients to access their emotional core where wounds are deeply recessed and stops them from moving on with their lives. This work is accomplished through melding the sacred (spiritual) and emotional in three ways, privacy, trust, and potency.
Privacy
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The parts of their lives they let me enter are the most private areas of human life. As a result, I am very respectful and I recognize it as such an honor - a sacred experience. It's like a grandmother who only opens her special chest stored in the attic once every five years. She selects very carefully the one person with whom she will share a viewing of her treasures. And lo and behold! This time she picks you... and you are so respectful as you participate in the viewing, because almost no one is ever admitted into this very private place.
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Trust
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When my clients share their trust with me, it allows me to help them break through long held blocks and release stored up energy. This new found energy reveals their true nature. They feel more authentic, alive, and passionate! They have taken back their power and begin to take chare of their lives. They are more open, loving, and forgiving; they find relationships to be more fulfilling.
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Potency
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These places to which I have been admitted are the deepest levels of another human. This is their foundation - where the very nature of their lives is formed. One small change made at this deep level affects this person for the rest of his or her life. They cease to walk through life asleep. Unbound from their limiting wounds, they leap forward into a life of their own choosing. It is analogous to the lasting effects of laser surfer and the temporary effect of a pin scratch on the skin's surface.
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I am a landscaper of sorts - I help clients prepare the ground for new beginnings. Whatever is not working, not growing, not serving you can be cleaned out and hauled away. You decide what you will make room for, what you will nourish, and what you will harvest.
Let Go and Grow
Sometimes we hold on to things (emotions, people, events) even when the wisest thing to do is let go. Although we may think we lose, in reality, we only gain when we learn to let go. It is like this: Preservationists have found that monkeys are very bright and active making them difficult to catch without causing them harm. So some people have devised a simple technique to capture them for tracking in the wild. They empty out gourds, fill them with peanuts, and them patch up the gourds so only a small opening remains in each one. Then they attach the gourds to trees and leave the area.
After a while, when the monkeys feel it is safe, they come down from the trees, stick their hands in the gourds and grab a handful of peanuts. But once they do this, they can't get their hands out of the gourds. To escape, all they need to do is let go of the peanuts. But they hold on, screaming with fear and frustration. And eventually the trackers are able to safely study them.
What are you holding onto in your life that if you let go of, would serve you better?
The Awakening Path, under the corporate umbrella of The Church of Spiritual Healing, Inc., and inspired by spiritual teachers from many different traditions - like Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Dr. Martin Luther King, Peace Pilgrim, Sri Ramakrishna and others - aims to bring people, regardless of spiritual orientation, to emotional wholeness and universal spirituality.