Finding our path in life

What do people generally want to know when they go to a psychic? Not surprisingly, I find it's similar from person to person, and even from continent to continent.

• Love life
• Job and/or life purpose
• Family and loved ones
• Health
• Financial security

But what happens before we get to the psychic? Some people head for the psychic as soon as they run into a glitch but in my experience this isn't the norm. For many people, a visit to a psychic is a last resort. We usually try to figure things out on our own. It's only when we feel we've exhausted all other avenues that we decide we have nothing to lose.

I think this is one of the reasons that we feel so emotional when the psychic sees just what we're up against, without us having to articulate it. We feel seen and understood, when often that isn't the case with other people in our lives, either because we feel we can't reveal our vulnerability or because we're not even sure how to define it ourselves.

It has been suggested to me that these same people only want to know about their future, and not the present or the past. While I think that may be true in the abstract, I don't think it's true in the particulars. I think most of us would prefer to understand what's going on for us in the present, and how we got there, so that we can find our own way into the future. It's only in the absence of understanding what's going on in the present that we feel blocked and hopeless about the future.

The famous Dr. Seuss expressed this very nicely in his last children's book before he died, entitled "Oh the Places You'll Go". I think it applies equally to adults. In it he says:

And when you're in a Slump,
you're not in for much fun.
Un-slumping yourself
is not easily done.

You will come to a place where the streets are not marked.
Some windows are lighted. But mostly they're darked.
A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin!
Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in?
How much can you lose? How much can you win?

And IF you go in, should you turn left or right ...
or right-and-three-quarters? Or maybe not quite?
Or go around back and sneak in from behind?
Simple it's not, I'm afraid you will find,
for a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind.

He suggests that this is when we end up in the 'Waiting Place'. And when we come out of that place, we can find ourselves in the place where we're playing games against ourselves. That's when it gets lonely and scary. Actually, I think he describes beautifully what state people are in when they search out or stumble across a psychic.

They could be:

• in a 'Slump', or
• not know if they should 'turn left or right', or
• in the 'Waiting Place', or
• playing games against themselves.

But whichever it is, I think they usually need reassurance that they aren't crazy or deluded, and/or they need another perspective, like putting a new frame on the old picture so that they can see it in a new light.

So you may feel you'd like someone to take over and make the choices for you, or just tell you where you're going to end up, but I'll bet that if someone tried to take the reigns out of your hands, you'd fight to get them back again. I've had several clients who say they wanted to know what the future held for them and when I told them what I saw (which was only a probability in any case), they fought me. It wasn't the 'right' future, the one they had envisaged, although they didn't know that until 'it didn't fit'.

We say we want to see what choices we have but sometimes we can't see the fork in the road because we're preoccupied trying to figure out why it isn't where we expect it to be. It's frustration and hopelessness that makes us want someone else to take the whole thing out of our hands and make it all right. Our foreheads get sore from banging them against the proverbial wall and we just want to see some light. So is it as easy as just asking someone, like a psychic, to tell us what to do?

Ah, I doubt it! Life is sometimes the slog of a march on a road with no markers but I think it's also equal measures of dance, which does not proceed in a straight line. Neither can we expect life to be all one or the other. Too much of either would be really tedious!

I think it's a shame that we're programmed with so much fear... Are we doing enough? Are we doing the right things? Why did this happen to me? What if I don't make the right choice? A pinch of serendipity, an ounce of magic, some patience and a dollop of hard work; that's the recipe. And sometimes you need to reach out for some reassurance or another perspective. It isn't 'cheating'. Then, "Oh the Places You'll Go!"

The good Doctor says, at the end of his book:

And will you succeed?
Yes! You will indeed!
(98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed.)

Lies, lies, and denial

There is an energy around a lie that is different from the energy around the truth, or the truth as we know it to be. Several of the readings I've done in the last few weeks have raised the topic and so I have been giving it some thought. As I get older and more experienced with people lying to me or to others around me, I find my awareness increasing around when it's happening in the moment; as opposed to seeing it in hindsight. I may not always know what the lie is, or why the person is lying, but I think I can often tell when it happens.

I think denial is a kind of lying to the self. I've come to the conclusion that it most often comes from an inability to face the truth, or what we fear is the truth and what it might mean, perhaps because we feel we are helpless before it. This would mean that very often we lie out of plain old fear. It seems to me that fear is so powerful that the person who is in denial can refuse to see what is pointed out to them, even when the evidence is overwhelming.

How does one get through to that person? Is it even possible? When confronted with lies and/or denial, I find myself hanging on to the hope that one day the person will see what the lies really do in their life; the pain it causes, the further lies to cover up the original lies, the betrayal. We tend to hang in and hope that the boss, family member, or friend will say, "Maybe there is something to what you're saying. Let me have a look at it and I'll get back to you." I hear people saying that they would be happy just to be able to open some dialog. Or they get too frustrated and they give up and walk away.

I'm coming to understand that such an admission of the possibility of letting go of the lies is much more difficult than we might imagine when we wish for it. I suppose it depends what we imagine is the underpinning issue that is causing all the fear. For instance, if the person in question were to believe that he or she is basically a flawed and unworthy human being, and that they would be completely abandoned if anyone were to find out, then that belief would form the cornerstone of their behaviour around everything. It would be the seminal denial and every lie they told would spring from that fear and be designed to protect themselves against ultimate abandonment.

By the time someone came along and pointed out just one little lie or one form of denial that was part of that fabric of lies, acknowledging it would be tantamount to letting someone take the end of the ball of yarn and pull on it. It could unravel their self image and their whole life could fall apart. For them, it might have to be all or nothing in terms of defending the lies. They couldn't allow anyone to touch any part of the web without their whole self image being put in jeopardy.

For some of us, our self esteem is solid enough that we can take a look at what comes our way without it disturbing the bedrock of our identity, although it might still be uncomfortable or even painful to look. Perhaps those people in our lives who are lying or are in denial see that basic confidence in us and believe that we wouldn't understand how they feel. They might feel that such a strong person has 'all the cards', certainly in the confidence department, and they have fewer cards, or none. The other person has power; they don't. The other person is resilient; they're vulnerable. The other person has nothing to lose and they're at risk. It wouldn't seem like an even playing field to them and therefore not safe enough to take such a huge risk as to uncover themselves, even to themselves.

Those people with strong, basic self confidence might try showing their vulnerability, believing that this would demonstrate that they have fears as well, but even that may not work. It's as though even that disclosure is something that you can only make if you're confident enough. And you can't pretend to be less confident than you are; that would insult their intelligence.

The realization I'm finally coming to is that there very often isn't anything you can do, except love them and leave them to get on with their path in life. Even if you're naturally more confident, or even if you've worked hard on yourself to get there, you're still human. You'll misspeak at times, and lose patience, and feel angry. But banging on the door of the person who's in denial is only going to give you a sore hand.

Occasionally, with some people, you might be able to get through. We tend not to have as much emotional baggage with people outside our families and maybe it makes it easier to resolve conflicts with them than it is closer to home. We tend not to be as invested and so are less likely to take offense or get so scared that it's beyond our ability to find a solution.

Having said that, there are times when most of us get triggered by something that pushes our hot buttons and makes us reactive. I had one of those this week! I've done a lot of work on myself over the years, enough to be able to see when it was happening and to pull back and reconsider my reaction– this time.

What I hope is that there are enough of us who are willing and able to take the risk to face what we fear and do the work of rebuilding our confidence, to the point where we don't feel that denial or lying are our only options, so that way down deep inside ourselves we will be confident that we can somehow find our way through the fear and conflict and out at the other end.

In the meantime we need to remember that, sometimes it won't be within our ability to affect the situation directly. That's the key: not within our ability. We do have the power to work on improving our abilities, all of us. But whilst we're doing that, sometimes we'll have to wait and trust that there will be someone, somewhere, who is in the right position to help that person we care about, even though it might not be us just yet.

Kindergarten and the 'Blue Line'

Conversations around me have been turning lately, and with a degree of hopelessness and cynicism, to the present state of the world. This includes the looming American presidential election, the investigation of ex-prime minister Brian Mulroney's investment dealings with a shady German 'businessman', the state of our global environment, the effects of the current drop in the value of the US dollar, teachers molesting students, gang-style murders in our province, and the list goes on.

Division, deception and suspicion seem to be dominating our news and it makes me so sad. How can it be that we still have not learned that we need to share, that we need to clean up after ourselves and that killing doesn't beget anything other than more killing, no matter how good our intentions? There's a folksy writer living on a houseboat in Seattle who wrote a book called: All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. (Robert Fulghum, Ivy Books, New York, 1986) In it he reflects on some of the things he has learned in life, summarized in this list:

Share everything.
Play Fair Don't hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don' take things that aren't yours.
Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.
Wash your hands before you eat.
Flush.
Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
Live a balanced life–learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
Take a nap every afternoon.
When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
Be aware of wonder.

This isn't a remedy for everything that ails us but I think our world might be somewhat simpler if we tried to live by these maxims as a starter.

Bearing in mind how young we are in kindergarten, I'd like to share with you the words, with permission, of my young friend. He's nine years old and I really like his way of looking at the brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity. Sometimes the young are our best teachers.

When I was little I used to think one thing: I thought that everyone was connected in our family by a blue line. Blue is the colour of the sky so it's very hard to see these lines, but sometimes on gray days you can make out little blue flake molecules if you look really hard. This blue line is connected for miles and miles and miles, even to Australia and beyond. And every person in the world is connected to his family through these lines. I believe that this line can never be cut. the air in the world is squished around us because part of it is the blue line because that blue line is connected to every single human being everywhere. Every time a person dies the line fades to a really light blue, but it is still there.