Courageous Journey from Childhood Abuse to Law Changer!
CONTENT TRIGGER WARNING: This episode discussed child sex abuse.
Kathy Picard is an inspiring award-winning advocate whose work centers on increasing awareness of the harsh realities of sexual child abuse.
As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, through her own process of trying to understand what happened to her, Kathy discovered that there was very little information about the subject of sexual abuse—even in the library. It was as if sexual abuse was “a secret” no one was willing to talk about! Since then, she has educated herself, and now actively seeks opportunities to speak about the importance of awareness, to share the resources she’s personally vetted, to educate people who want to know and do more, and to offer information and encouragement to fellow survivors and their family and friends.
Kathy’s Books: Life with My Idiot Family: A True Story of Survival, Courage and Justice over Childhood Sexual Abusehttps://geni.us/Azqx5I (Amazon)
Kathy’s Children’s Book: I love you so much that…
Check out Gems of Wisdom from Kathy Picard – Use them as journal prompts, contemplation points or conversation starters.
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Linda Donovan Grief and Stories of Soul Connection Afterwards
After losing someone it can feel as though it is impossibly difficult to feel whole again, particularly when the loss is unexpected, Linda talks of her own experience and of the connections she felt after the death of her beloved husband.
https://lorrainenilon.com.au/wp-content/uploads/Podcast-cover-Insight-and-Awareness-Spiritual-Explorer-Lorraine-Nilon-series-1-10-4.jpg19201920Lorraine Nilonhttps://lorrainenilon.com.au/wp-content/uploads/Lorraine-Nilon-4.pngLorraine Nilon2022-12-21 21:32:282023-12-09 13:34:59Episode 006 – Conversation with Grief Support Advocate and Author Linda Donovan
New beginnings aren’t a right; they are earned. This is the motivation for the author of “On to the Next Thing,” an entertaining true crime meets an encouraging spiritual awakening.
Spirit World Connection for Healing Messages and Soul lessons
Natalee appears regularly at leading national Psychic and Spiritual Expos such as Health, Harmony & Soul Expo, the Mind, Body & Spirit Festivals in Australian cities such as Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. She also makes appearances at local Canberra Expos annually.
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David Berriman Men Are Not Toxic We’re Wounded. Judgement doesn’t empower us it traps us.
He has dedicated his life to mastering himself so he can help others to do the same.
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Steve Pavlina Personal Development for Smart People, Becoming a Memory Maker.
Conscious growth has been the central focus of Steve’s life for many years. He has study what it means to grow and how we can deliberately invite, process, and integrate new growth experiences.
https://lorrainenilon.com.au/wp-content/uploads/Lorraine-Nilon-Steve-Pavlina-2.jpg19201920Lorraine Nilonhttps://lorrainenilon.com.au/wp-content/uploads/Lorraine-Nilon-4.pngLorraine Nilon2022-12-21 20:54:542023-12-09 13:35:41Episode 002 – Conversation with American inspirational speaker and blogger with one of the most popular personal development website in the world – Steve Pavlina
Charmaine Wilson Spirits whispered and she heard the call and life has never been the same.
Charmaine Wilson is a world-renowned Australian medium, who has been consistently recognised for her skill and compassion since awakening to her gift in 1999. She was the winner of Channel Seven’s inaugural season of ‘The One’, and was also honoured as Queensland Psychic of the Year in 2008 and Australian Psychic of the Year for 2005
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If one of these points resonates with you, triggers an internal knowing, makes you self-reflect, or is part of your own aspirations, you are a spiritual explorer.
Are you willing to question everything?
Do you seek the truth and aspire to reconnect with your authenticity or the pacification of a desire to be special?
Soul searching is uncovering the truth; it can get messy and emotionally raw as you question why you feel the way you do, acknowledge the motives behind the things you do and expose what you have suppressed within, hidden under layers of camouflage.
Recognising the uniqueness of your soul and embracing your significance, occurs as you deal with how you have camouflaged the unresolved emotions that shield you from the truth of who you naturally are. As you recognise your resonance with truth, accept reality and respect the value of choice, you begin to appreciate life.
If it is an image of being special or spiritually elite you seek, you will miss the mark and could easily bypass doing the inner-work.
Exploring isn’t easy, but is always rewarding!
Pacifying a desire to use spirituality to hide from your internal reality; is like pitching a tent on a floating iceberg, with a campfire. You are only seeing what you want to see, filtered through a desire that is not based in reality. It might not be too difficult to get the fire started if you have brought your supply of firewood—established beliefs about spirituality, the image you want to portray and avoidance techniques—but keeping it going will be taxing and will get to the point of undeniable pretence.
Eventually, the fire is either going to be unreplenishable in that environment causing you to abandon your campsite, seeking another location to do it all over again, until you have a campsite that accommodates your beliefs and supports your denials.
Or you might abandon camping in a tent, swapping to a caravan—belief hopping.
Or it will leave you unable to exist in your tent, due to the melting ice—representing how the illusory spirituality chips away at your sense of self and can cause damage to your emotional and spiritual well-being.
When you realise you were not looking at reality, you can begin to learn how to be truthful with yourself. Instead of trying to create an alternate reality that does not feed your soul or rejuvenate a relationship with yourself, truth or others, you can begin to explore what does. You can begin to be present in whatever environment you find yourself in, exploring reality.
Your experiences create opportunities to recognise the flaws in your beliefs, images, illusions and denials. Instead of abandoning, you can begin to objectively observe and seek to understand what you feared questioning, examining and acknowledging. This is a stepping-stone to exploring what is meaningful through the exploration of what you have experienced.
Learning from all your experiences enables you to walk away from any event with greater awareness. Throughout the expedition of life, you experience learning and then expanding on what you’ve learnt; it is a continuous and exciting process.
If you are prepared to question everything, and seek to understand truth, regardless of whether you like the answer or not, you are ready to explore.
Are you prepared to challenge and deal with your unresolved emotions, beliefs and fears?
Do you seek to justify or to understand what is unresolved within?
Every evolutionary journey involves soul-searching and truth-seeking because you will confront your unresolved emotions, embedded beliefs and fears. We are all on the journey of life, and some feel the internal yearning for it to become an evolutionary trail and tale.
The internal yearning grows stronger the more aware you become of the void within. The void you feel is a recognition of your separation from being aware and attuned to your soul. This includes authenticity, sense of being and your core essences, such as unconditional love, self-kindness and compassion. (24 key—core essences are explored in my books and courses.)
When you turn your attention to your soul, you will also awaken to the labyrinth of unconscious energy—emotional baggage—that sustain your separation from the truth of your soul. Soul-searching is required; you have to work out what is of value to you and how to resolve why you have carried and sustained what is hidden in your baggage.
Soul-evolution is returning unconscious energy to consciousness. It is understanding, aligning and unifying with truth. As you do this, the walls of the emotional labyrinths crumble. At times it is a wall you have to climb, to understand each component. Others you’ll hit with a sledge-hammer and some have secret compartments attached, but as each wall crumbles it enables you to see further, unobstructed by self-distortions. Your perceptionchanges, because you are aware of more and it changes the foundation you stand on.
When you seek to understand, you begin to take the filters off, which enables you to embrace what you discover, knowing it is a stepping-stone to resolution, recovery and evolution.
The evolutionary process requires contemplation about the purpose and consequences of your decisions; it is acknowledging the truth—as much as you are aware of at that time. It is also reflecting on our actions, and taking responsibility for
where you have been, where you are now and where you can choose to go.
When you seek to justify your unresolved emotions, you’ll forget the mission is to resolve and evolve; to be free of the emotional angst your suppressed emotions create. You will get caught defending what fortifies your emotional labyrinths. Instead of deconstructing, you’ll be the architect of your own wall construction, creating a prison out of your emotional labyrinth. This leads to denial of self-responsibility and soul-accountability.
If you are prepared to acknowledge the significance of self-responsibility and of being the caretaker of your soul, you are ready to explore.
Can you be a friend to yourself and accept truth as a friend?
Are you willing to explore your relationship with yourself and truth or are you trying to control yourself and truth better?
The most important relationship you have is the one with yourself. Treat yourself like a friend (or how you would like your friends to treat you). Try to inspire yourself by being supportive, compassionate and good company to be around. It is important that you show yourself respect and acknowledge you are not your emotions; they are part of what you are experiencing.
Accept the path you have walked so far and acknowledge that you decide the direction you follow. You cannot control what is going to happen on the road ahead but you choose how you deal with what has or is occurring. You choose how you deal with yourself.
You are important, even when you believe the world does not see you.
Truth is your friend, it guides you and as you accept it is always supporting your soul, you realise that it is you who could improve your relationship with truth. Truth-seeking is done with truth, it is not hiding, it is waiting for you to decide it is worthy of your attention.
Truth is not something to control, it is either accepted, denied or exploited. It asks nothing in return, just to be acknowledged and valued, because it knows every truth accepted, enables you to travel further down the evolutionary road.
Controlling yourself to what you believe, is different to taking truth by the hand and exploring the good, bad and sometimes ugly beliefs, fears and emotions you have carried and protected. Exploring is being in the arena of freewill, knowing you are responsible for the relationship you have with yourself (your soul), truth and others.
If you are prepared to be a good friend to truth and yourself, or to learn why you struggle to do so, you are ready to explore.
A definition of a friend might help you realise the importance of a friendship with yourself and truth. (Sourced from Urban Dictionary – by tangles10, April 28, 2010)
‘A friend is someone you love and who loves you, someone you respect and who respects you, someone whom you trust and who trusts you. A friend is honest and makes you want to be honest, too. A friend is loyal.
A friend is someone who forgives you no matter what you do, and someone who tries to help you even when they don’t know how. A friend is someone who tells you if you’re being stupid, (unconscious, lost in denial or acting-out emotionally – just adding a bit to this), but who doesn’t make you feel stupid (worthless, not good enough or insignificant – just adding a bit more).
A friend is someone for whom you’re willing to change your opinions (explore new possibilities). A friend is someone you look forward to seeing and who looks forward to seeing you.
A friend is a partner, not a leader or a follower.
The word “friend” comes from Old English “frēond“, which is actually the present particle of “frēogan“, which means “to love” and “to honour”.’
You may be the friend you have been looking for? When you realise truth is a friend, it makes the evolutionary journey easier.
Remember if one of these points resonates with you, triggered an internal knowing, made you self-reflect, or is part of your aspirations, you are a spiritual explorer.
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1.30 minute read… As truth-seekers, we are aware that we want to reconnect and embrace the truth of being souls. It stems from the aspiration to ‘know thy self’. This means to have an honest relationship with ourselves. Truth-seeking means our curiosity has been sparked and there is an internal thirst for knowledge that resonates with our inner being—soul. We want to reconnect with our authenticity and feel the meaningfulness of our existence.
It is not “finding ourselves”; it is recognising we are a soul, and that isn’t something we need to chase. It is accepting we aspire to understand the truth of who we are, knowing we have an opportunity to resolve what limits our self-perception and to evolve beyond those limitations.
A seeker applies effort to their curiosity. Curiosity enables us to explore, to be inquisitive so we can learn more about who we are. However, there are many pitfalls to be wary of, one is the pursuit to prove we are right in our beliefs. This is not curiosity and will leave us looking through distorted filters. Distortions create limitations and lead us to be selective in what we will acknowledge.
We often ignore everything we decide is an interference to our beliefs, leaving us oppressing our own awareness. We exert a lot of effort as we attempt to ensure what we don’t want to know remains hidden in our denial.
Truth-seekers are always confronted with their denial, and this is when the explorer within must step forward and take the reins. An explorer will acknowledge the unknown, and are prepared to travel through the unfamiliar, looking to discover what is there. A soul explorer removes filters and is willing to investigate—contemplate reality, through objective observation.
A spiritual explorer embraces their curiosity, and allows the yearning to discover and comprehend truth, to be the compass to their adventure.
An explorer recognises the importance of soul-searching, to carefully examine their thoughts, beliefs, words and feelings. It is being prepared to acknowledge the truth of our motives, reactions and how we interact with others and our life experiences.
All evolutionary journeys require us to seek, search and explore. This builds our self-awareness and fosters a healthy relationship with ourselves, life and others.
There are many pitfalls that often leave spiritual seekers, even those with the best intentions, to lose themselves to illusions. Illusions conjured by their desire to be spiritual, elite or an attempt to escape their internal turmoil. We have all fallen into them, and some are difficult to detect because they feed our spiritual ego.
It is important to recognise when we are spiritually bypassing our real issues and behaviours.
John Welwood, a Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist, in the early 1980s first coined the term spiritual bypassing – “the tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to side-step or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds and unfinished development tasks.” This beautifully sums up what many do, often unintentionally and yet with conviction.
It is easy to become lost in denial, especially when we run an internal narrative that feeds the illusion of transcendence or transformation, before we have even identified the truth of our emotional selves.
When we fool ourselves with spiritual beliefs and practices, it becomes easier to oppose being truthful. Life has a way of revealing the truth to us, and all spiritual journeys are fraught with crossroads of decisions that basically come down to either:
Acknowledge the rawness of our truth, while being willing to explore the truth with an open mind. Get real about it.
or
Cling to the story we want to believe, while protectively deflecting any evidence that proves we don’t understand our truth. Create a distraction that ensures we don’t even look.
We do the latter by ignoring and justifying any behaviour that exposes what is unresolved within or is used to shield us from having to face our own reality.
Spiritual bypassing is telling ourselves what we want to hear to justify our denial of our reality. It is attempting to remain in a performance derived from a spiritual illusion, to not only avoid facing the reality of our emotional issues and behaviours, but to also feel in control of our suppression of them.
Spiritual by-passing: Ignoring the reality of yourself, while clinging to a spiritual belief or illusion that distracts you from being honest. Using spiritual concepts, words and beliefs to deny self-responsibility and soul-accountability. (Sourced from glossary of Spirituality, Evolution & Awakened Consciousness)
Feet-on-the-ground spirituality means the opposite of spiritual bypassing. It means to get real, face our emotional issues and behaviours with honest self-observations. It is being prepared to acknowledge the truth of our unconsciousness and do the work required to resolve it.
Doing the work means to be truthful, acknowledge the emotions, feel the reality of them, develop an understanding through self-reflection and contemplation. And then use that information – awareness, to apply a conscious response to what was once an unconscious aspect of ourselves.
Feet-on-the-ground spirituality is to be spiritual in reality, not to create an alternate reality to be spiritual in.
When we acknowledge part of any spiritual journey is learning the truth of our emotional reality, we become willing to confront what we have suppressed and hidden within with self-compassion.
Life is a rise and fall from grace journey. We can be operating extremely authentically and then stumble and fall into embodying the unconsciousness of our soul – some refer to it as the shadow-side.
Feet-on-the-ground spirituality means we are willing, sometimes reluctantly, to recognise and take self-responsibility for the energy of our unconsciousness. Spirituality is knowing that we are souls, and when exposed to the truth of our own energy, we accept that there is an opportunity to learn from ourselves. This requires truthfulness, which we all know at times is difficult to muster, as we compete against all the embedded beliefs, fears and triggered emotions that cause us to fall from grace.
Fall from grace is operating separated from our soul’s consciousness – the divinity within, our authenticity. This is, in contrast, to rise with grace, which is to operate in unification with our soul’s consciousness and truth. Spirituality is the journey of creating unity within. Spiritual bypassing is sustaining the separation while believing there is no separation, and filling the void created with spiritual illusions and performances.
Grace stems from our acceptance that it is truth, in all its forms that will aid us to be honestly present, willing to objectively observe ourselves as we endeavour to discover the truth of who we are, as we resolve what oppresses our soul-awareness.
Spirituality is the recognition that there is a continuum to our souls, and life is a part of that journey. When we are willing to resolve what is unresolved within, which is to heal.
Resolving what burdens our soul, enables us to evolve beyond the limitations of our unconsciousness, because we will no longer carry the energy that burdens our soul.
Feet-on-the-ground spirituality is honouring the consciousness of who we naturally are and of our origins, by being prepared to face, learn from and deal with what impedes our relationship with truth. It is then the practice of being truthful, especially to ourselves about ourselves. Applying what we learn to our day-to-day existence. This improves our relationship with ourselves – our souls, truth and our origins. It also enables our consciousness to flow freely, expanding our awareness of truth. This is evolution.
Feet-on-the-ground spirituality is to be conscious of your soul journey, seeking what nurtures your soul, while respecting that life and all the messy emotional adventures are positioning you to discover the present reality of yourself.
I believe if you took the time to continue to read this to the end, you seek to be spiritually authentic.