Working Those Imprints! Manifesting What We Want rather than Our Fate

I had several questions from clients this week on why working an imprint is so hard.  An imprint is a belief system that has become so ingrained that it manifests outcomes for us unconsciously rather than consciously.  People come to me to unravel imprints because the outcomes are painful and unwanted.  However, it is possible to unconsciously manifest great outcomes.  The key to remember is that all imprints come with a belief system attached.  If we have faulty beliefs, we will wind up with unhappy outcomes.

When we have an unhappy pattern in our lives, an imprint with its faulty beliefs is at work.  This imprint can come from cultural beliefs, archetypal beliefs, family beliefs and personal beliefs.  Personal beliefs are the easiest to change, and many times we can change our personal beliefs without outside help.  Clients come to me for underworld work usually because of hidden cultural, archetypal, and family beliefs.  These hidden group beliefs tend to run our creations without our ever knowing we have these beliefs.  The shaman can go into the subconscious mind (the underworld) on behalf of the client and begin dismantling the imprint and its corresponding belief system.

However, even with shamanic intervention, it is up to the client to make sure that his words and actions reinforce his new belief system.  If that does not take place, we will still manifest unhappy outcomes because of old habit.  It is this conscious work that so many people slip up on.  Too many clients expect the shamanic work to magically take away unwanted outcomes.  However, the client creates her life, so it is always the client who has to make sure that the change on the energetic and mythic planes comes down to the mental, emotional, and physical planes as well.

Our relationships with our family will change, as well as how we belong within our culture.   Most of the time other people in the group are enslaved by the same imprint and so do not appreciate our new behavior.  They want us back in our role and they will feel betrayed and confused that we are no longer playing.  As you can see, this is deep, hard work.  Change on this level is difficult and challenging.  Too many of my clients expect easy, graceful, magical change without these repercussions.  While that can happen in some instances, working at this level take tremendous courage and practice.  I say this not to be discouraging but to encourage my clients who are in the thick of dismantling sticky family and cultural imprints not to give up, to keep plugging through.  It is worth the effort to create a great foundation of supportive imprints and beliefs.  Then life does become easier and more magical.

We begin throwing off our predetermined fate and more options and outcomes become probable for us.  This is the heart of personal work.  I hope this helps to answer why this work can feel so hard and confusing. 

much love,

Elaine

The Empath and Archetype

Hi Everyone,I hope you all are enjoying this beautiful summer!  In Portland we're starting another thankfully short heatwave after a few weeks of cool days in the 70's.  I had an interesting synchronistic experience last week that I wanted to share with you.  As most of you know, when synchronicity is in action, Spirit is in action--we've stepped out of linear time and into circular time.  It's a cool and magical experience.  I had this plus the veil between waking time and dream time lift briefly to give me a glimpse into my own healing process.  What magic, but whoa!As all of you know I've been working on a series of essays to collect into a book for the past two years based on the healing journey of most Empaths.  What I've concluded from working with clients and from my own personal healing work is that Archetypal forces shape our lives more than we might think.  Our lives feel very personal to us (especially if we have the Archetype of Empath) but in the larger picture, we are living out similar archetypal patterns.  So, my book and my Empath Telecall have been centered around these archetypal forces so we can understand what is happening to us and step out of archetypal forces, or at least use the best parts of the archetype for our benefit.For the past three calls I have been pulling lessons out of my own personal story to illustrate the collective force of the Family, and how that force can be so strong we may not break free of it to lead the lives that we might choose for ourselves.  I had been afraid that I might step too strongly into my own personal story when it came to describing the archetype of the Fan, because in my past people with the Fan archetype have irritated and disappointed me greatly.  (The Fan is the archetype that is most concerned about the group and maintaining the group or family, even at the expense of the individuals involved.)The night before I held my telecall I had a dream in which tornados were taking out the buildings of my college campus.  I had looked behind me, and two tornados were tearing a building apart.  As I turned my head to the right, three more tornados were taking out another building.  Now I was terrified and afraid that I was going to be caught in the twisters and killed.  I started to run.  But, when I looked ahead of me, two more tornados were destroying yet another building.  In that moment I understood that I was not going to survive this, and my fear went away.  It was OK to let myself die.I woke up feeling well rested, oddly enough, given the dream!  Usually I do not know until the last minute who will be on these telecalls.  As it turned out in this call all the participants had Fan mothers (including me.)  The lecture that I had prepared was pertinent personally to each of them, and it made such a difference as to how they were viewing their relationships with their Fan mothers.  In fact, the call helped me understand my own mother, and the Fans in my husband's family better as well.  Spirit brought the right participants, and my worries about becoming too personal were unfounded; after all, I was talking about the collective's archetypal patterns.The next day my husband and I were at the park with our toddler son.  We were talking about the insights I had come to from giving my telecall, and how we could let the anger and guilt we still had at leaving his family system die.  While we were happy that we had escaped the powerful group think so we could have the lives that we really wanted, there were still parts of us that cycled between guilt and anger at having done so.  Of course, the remaining guilt and the anger are residues of the strength of influence the family group think had over us.As we talked about this, on my right, just out of my arms reach, a dust devil stirred up.  It swirled into a mini twister about a dozen feet tall, threw up bark chips in my hair, my husband's hair, then moved past me to my son and threw chips into his hair, then it chased a toddler across the park before dissipating.  We started laughing at this, given my dream of two days before.  We were getting cleaned out to the very roots, and not only had I seen it in dream time, I had seen it in waking time, too.  Progress in our healing made, with comfirmation from Spirit!I love working with Spirit!  Healing work is usually a mixture of hard work and joy at the freedom coming our way when we really step in to the path of power.  But for me, those meetings of Spirit making the huge signs are the most rewarding.  I hope this story helps you step in and claim those places where you are still giving your personal power away instead of using it for your own creativity and joy.much love,Elaine 

New Essays Available

Hello Everyone!I hope you all are enjoying your summer.  I am happy to say that I am feeling much much better, so much so that I've been able to return to writing, and to working one-on-one with clients on a limited basis.  Right now I'm able to take new clients for Intuitive Readings, but I'm limiting energywork sessions to those people who have worked with me on my Empath Telecall.  If you've been waiting for a reading, please let me know.I've published six new essays to the website for purchase.  The new essays are around our Soul's Calling, and the challenges of following a Spiritual path and being a co-creator with Spirit.  You can see these essays by visiting my website at this link: http://www.elainelajoie.com/EmpathyandRelationshipsBook.htm These essays are toward the bottom of the page, and labelled added July 23rd.  Many thanks to my clients for inspiring these essays and for letting me be a facillitator in their healing process!Also, I've posted a new essay at  around the challenges of giving up denial, especially when we may be still surrounded by other living in Illusion.  Sometimes we can wonder why we started on the path at all when life can feel excrutiating.  Denial is like an emotional immune system, keeping us happy when all is really not well.  For those of us on a Spiritual path, we consciously turn off that emotional immune system.http://www.elainelajoie.com/GivingUpDenial.htmI hope these are helpful.  For the rest of the summer I'll be focussing on finishing up those essays on Family Reinforcement, the Emotionally Dissociated Hero, the Fan, and the Empath.  Once those are complete, I will announce it here.  In the meantime, I hope you'll enjoy the website and the Empath Telecalls.much love,Elaine 

Shamanic Work and Family System Reinforcement

Hello Everyone,I just recently returned from working with Marv and Shanon Harwood of Kimmapii Energies up in Alberta, Canada.  This was a great opportunity for me to revisit the South work of Shedding what no longer Serves, plus I had the chance to see Marv again.  While I am recovering from my experiences of the Spring, I highly recommend Marv if you need energywork done.  He certainly did some amazing work on me while I was there!  His website is http://www.kimmapii.com/Also, I just finished recording the Eighth Empath Telecall.  In this call we talked about how our Family System keeps us stuck in old patterns and behaviors that might not be in our best interest, and how painful it can be when we stop colluding with our family of origin.  The next call we'll talk more about how shamanic work can undo family belief systems that began generations ago that still keep us bound in the present.  In both calls I use my personal experiences and experiences with clients.  If you are interested in listening, go to http://www.clearreflectioncoaching.com/EmpathTeleclassPurchase.htm

Changing the Collective Nightmare

Hello Everyone,Yesterday one of my clients asked me,  "How do I stop feeling guilty for all my blessings when most of the world is in pain and has nothing?"   While I didn't channel the pain of the world as my client has done, I did have guilt that kept me from really enjoying and embracing my life, when I was first getting started in my personal healing. After years of schooling in physics, and then teaching, I used to feel guilty that I was able to stay at home and work on my own dreams, write, and play, and do tons of self-care required to heal enough to be creative. (At the time I wanted to be a sci-fi and fantasy writer---I had no idea that I was going to be struck psychic and a practice as a shaman was coming.) From the outside, from external comparisons, I looked like a decadent weirdo.  I had friends who were resentful and jealous that I was sponging off my first husband; I didn’t have to work as hard as they did.  And I felt guilty and defensive, and yet, a really cool life that I dreamed of living was a life that included creativity, play, and not working very hard at dreary jobs. The reasons I felt guilty and defensive were that I also bought into the belief system that I had to work hard, that life was a life of suffering, and I wasn’t putting value on the spiritual and the creative aspects of life.  No wonder I felt guilty! What I had to realize was, if I truly wanted a life of joy, I had to insist upon it.  I had to use the circumstances I was born with---born into the middle class, given a great education, given a very well developed mind---as the foundation stones to make my life into the best life I could have. What I discovered as I did so was that Yes, there is a collective nightmare out there.  And that nightmare is horrifying.  All of us are part of the collective, so we are all susceptible to being caught up in it.  At the same time, when I focused on what my Heart and Soul craved, life for just me became much, much happier and brighter.  Because I was willing to commit to myself, I found this beautiful, universal, and intelligent creative force was matching my efforts and bringing me more and more. I discovered that the beliefs that we hold to be facts, and the emotions contained inside those beliefs, are what hold us prisoner in the Collective nightmare.  When I decided to wake myself up, I was stepping out of the collective nightmare.  What also began to happen is that my immediate circumstances began to change for the better.  The people with the old belief system went away to be replaced with others with expansive, life-is-good belief systems. I have worked with clients who have invented their own prisons just by the beliefs that they keep.  I have also worked with clients who are subject to the group think beliefs of their culture or family, and have a terrible time creating the lives that they want because the group think is so strong.  And yet, every once in a while there is someone that breaks free of the collective.  In every case that is because they were strong individuals, deeply commited to their souls and to their hearts. What this made me decide was that my feelings of guilt were a mistake.  Somehow I was a product of my own culture's group think, too.  That was just part of the start-button for all human beings.  Freedom comes in learning how to cultivate that Soul Strength, that precious originality that we all have.  And when we do that, then we become these magical creatures. The really neat thing that happened when I got this was that I found that the people around me started picking up on the changes going on inside me.  My vibration was affecting the vibrations around me.  By my healing myself I was healing others simply by my presence.  I'd hear stories later of how I inspired them when I hadn't intended any such thing!  It was now the reverse of where I had started from: one individual being beaten down by my local group think---I had now grown so powerful I could actually change the group think around me instead! So, perhaps the way out of feeling so guilty is to say, Yes, the world is as it is.  It is full of pain, it is full of horror, it is full of unfairness, and very few people out there have purposefully created that for themselves consciously.  That is all true.  But, each of us has the power and the resources within us to gain personal freedom. You can gain personal freedom by acknowledging your own power.  Ultimately, if you *do* commit to your soul, that will mean that you will have to indulge yourself in the best life has to offer you, and that might feel decadent.  But it is precisely that mechanism that makes your Soul strong and allows you to change the collective nightmare into more of a collective dream of bliss.  And man, do we need that!!!! I think each of us has the potential to change the world by our very presence.  But to do that, you have to really commit to living a wonderful, happy life, revelling in it, engaging in it, and not denying the hard parts, too.   I guess I don’t feel guilt at the state of the world any longer because I know that each of us has the same internal resources to heal themselves.  And I also know that each of us must come to that healing in our own time and in our own way.  And I know that it is a mystery how that happens!  I know what I must do, and I put all my energy in following the calling of my Soul.Feeding your soul, commiting to your Soul's Journey is the surest and most honest way of changing the Collective Nightmare that I know of.Elaine

Letting the Heart Break Open

I had the honor of assisting a client through the beautiful but difficult process of letting her heart break open.  Like most of us, she had many defenses over her heart, and yet she wanted to bring a soul mate into her life.  I very clearly had seen for her that she was going to have this beautiful soul mate after she jumped off the cliff into her path as a shaman healer, and that they would travel together.  The man in the reading looked like the actor who plays Superman, so we called him Superman fondly.            As my client settled in to clear those places in her life that were holding her back from stepping into her calling, wonderful opportunities began to manifest for her.  She brought in a job that would solve her financial problems which required a relocation.  As she was waiting to relocate, she decided to follow her heart and try new and fun things.  She met some wonderful people to whom she connected on many levels.  She knew these relationships were temporary because of the upcoming job, so she let herself enjoy herself in the moment.  And she started a very close friendship and connection with one of the men she had met.            Because she was in the moment and she had told herself it was temporary, none of her defenses were up, and she was able to deeply connect with this man, and he with her.  Her heart was opening, and yet she was fearing the loss of having her heart break if she really let herself love him, since she knew that he wasn't ultimately for her.  I encouraged her to let her heart break all the way open, to let herself truly see and be seen by this man, to let herself love him with no strings attached, if she respected, admired, and loved him as much as she said she did.  It did not matter if he wasn't Superman, what mattered was her being authentic and willing to be truly intimate with him on all levels.  The truth was that she loved him, she knew that he loved her, there was nothing preventing declaring this except wanting to spare herself pain and grief when it came to an end.            And she went for it!  She held him in a beautiful heart space and told him she loved him.  He didn't respond immediately with his own declaration of love for her.  She was able to not take it personally that he didn't immediately declare his love, because the open heart does not need to take everything personally and understands the soul is on journey.  Because her Heart Space was so wide open, it allowed his to open, and he declared his love for her the next day.  Then their relationship blossomed, they could see each other as life partners, and an exciting future together was very easy to plan out.   I had actually felt the shift in my client from glancing at their picture in between sessions on accident and knew she had jumped off that cliff and found her Superman.  Before she took the action and made the declaration, the energy of the picture was completely different.           It was the Open Heart, the willingness to act from that space, and the declaration of love that changed her into Superwoman ready for Superman.           But my client remembered that the original reading told her that he wasn't her soul mate.  So, she was in a bind of fearing that she was giving up the destiny that she really wanted for a man that she loved who wasn't meant for her.  She was conflicted and confused.  How could what she had with her lover not be the relationship, how could it not match up with her path as a shaman healer when everything about it now felt fantastic and right?  She still was leaving for her new job in just a few weeks, but even the long distance didn't matter, they were both confident that it would work.           When we next spoke she was reluctant to discuss with me her relationship because she  wanted to become clear that she was hearing her own soul before I added any more information.  It was with the great pleasure to confirm for her that Yes, this was it!!  And that she had made it possible with her huge open heart.                  It was part of her journey to walk the painful path of opening her heart without a guarantee of success.  It had been a possibility that her lover wouldn't have responded with his own open heart, and wouldn't have stepped in as her soulmate.  Ironically, it was also part of her journey to feel the conflict of apparently going against what she had thought was her path versus what she knew to be her path.  Now she will know for the rest of her life that she can trust her heart, and that she can trust her soul to guide her.  She has the visceral experience of knowing what was right for her soul versus what was an old interpretation that didn't fit the new energy she herself had brought in.  My client will Source from her Soul now instead of from anyone else, even her shaman teachers.            I am so excited for this couple, I was laughing and crying as she was telling me her good news.  What a joy!  This is the magic of the Open Heart.  It brings healing and expansion to relationships, it literally pulled in a joyous destiny that was unavailable without the Heart Space to activate it, and it is the only guarantee to a rich and meaningful existence.

Destiny Retrieval

Hi Everyone,I just returned from another Soul Retrieval Training given by the Four Winds.  This training concentrated on Destiny Retrieval.  Sounds intriguing, doesn't it!!  Destiny Retrieval includes the art of journeying to the upperworld and retrieving healed states, gifts, and the essences of what we would like to create in our future. I have many inquiries from potential clients who want to have a Destiny Retrieval.  However, the key to a successful Destiny Retrieval is to work on all the old stuff that needs to be put to rest (die) in order to bring in something new (rebirth)  That means lots of soul retrieval work, extractions, and illuminations to clear the old imprints so the person's energyfield is ready to receive the new information.In my work with my clients, every once in a while, usually after several months of working together, I am not allowed into the underworld (where soul retrieval work is usually done) but told to go to the upperworld instead.  Those times are very exciting for me because it's a sure indication that my client has done his or her work that they are ready! and the Great Spirit agrees.Destiny Retrieval IS wonderful, but it is powerful work.  If we don't step into that powerful destiny retrieved for us, our lives can turn bad.  I've actually seen this happen to people who don't have a formal shamanic destiny retrieval, but who instead commit to a big change in their lives (to go to school, to bring in the right mate, etc.) and then they don't take the steps necessary to bring it into being.  So, it is important to recognize that we already do create our destinies with each dream we dream and each choice we make.The shamanic work adds more power to what we already do in a clear way. If you have questions or comments, let me know!Elaine