Elaine's Interview Airs Saturday June 9th!

Hi Everyone,It's hard for me to believe, but it's already time for the second season of The Integrated Empath Summit hosted by Karyn Kulenovic!  Karyn interviewed me about Shamanic Energy Work and how it can change the lives of Empaths, especially around trauma.  I hope you will tune in, especially if you have had questions about Shamanic Work and whether it would be a good fit for you.The Summit includes interviews from 28 experts and is especially geared for Empaths.  It begins June 1st and runs through June 18th, and it is FREE!  My interview airs on Saturday the 9th.  To sign up please click HERE. (This is a referral link, which means that if you click on it and then purchase the whole series to keep forever, I will earn a small commission, which I greatly appreciate.)I'm also excited to report that I will be returning to a regular schedule in the fall, which means a new book should be available in 2019 and I may also be taking more clients and writing more blog posts.Stay tuned--my mentor Marv Harwood, and his wife, Shanon, of the Kimmapii School of Shamanism are coming to Portland at the end of August to teach a weekend workshop, no prerequisites required.  More information to come soon.  Until then I hope to see you at the Empath Summit!much love,Elaine

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

Fan-Hero Family System Ebook Now Available

Hello Everyone!

I've just posted a new ebook on my website in the shop called The Empath and the Hero-Fan Family System.  I first published these essays in 2009.  These essays have been revised and expanded.  If you are an Empath and you've found yourself caught in confusing relationship patterns where everything seems normal, healthy and happy on the outside but on the inside you feel crazy, sick, tired, and confused, you may be dealing with unhealthy Heroes or unhealthy Fans.  These essays cover what this type of family system looks like, how Emotionally Dissociated Hero behavior is reinforced by Fans. 

Also included is a description of Secret Drama, a painful relationship dynamic between an Empath and a Hero  in which the Empath keeps secrets for the Hero but then the Hero makes the Empath into a scapegoat for the entire Family so the Family can keep its illusion of health and happiness.  Many people find my website because they have this painful relationship with a Hero.  I map out why this relationship unfolds the way it does and how the Empath can extract herself and then heal using shamanic work.

I hope you find this new ebook helpful!

much love,

Elaine

Overcoming Our Ingrained Patterns

These past few weeks I’ve had several women email me about problems they have been having with other women.  These cases were interesting because they each involved a generational imprint that was passed from mother to daughter.  While the imprint causes problems and misunderstandings in the mother-daughter relationship, it also leads to those problems being projected onto other relationships with women. 

When I work with my clients long term, I have my clients get to know their imprints or patterns intimately.  The reason for this is so that they can gain enough consciousness to change at least one little action in the pattern the next time it arises.  Each change little by little leads to a dismantling of the pattern.  Catching ourselves before we can take the actions that lead to the unhappy outcome becomes a practice.  It’s a difficult, confusing practice because our intuition and our instincts are inaccurate when it comes to navigating the pattern—otherwise we would have mastered it long ago and we wouldn’t need to consult a shaman.  Deliberately questioning our instincts when we’ve worked especially hard to accept our intuitive side can be highly confusing.

This is why each of us must get to know our patterns and how we tend to project those onto our relationships.  The place to start when we notice a pattern (an outcome that has repeated three times) is to ask ourselves when we first experienced the pattern or felt the feelings in the pattern.  Usually it stems from early wounds in childhood—many times because of a misunderstanding or a trauma inflicted by one of our parents, intentionally or not.  Many times these traumas are handed down generation after generation, so that energetically, emotionally, and mentally they carry the extra force of our lineage.

In one case this week, one woman had worked hard on a mother issue that manifested as her giving her power away to other women she thought of as peers.  Somehow the relationship would turn from one of peers to one with her in the one-down position as either lowly apprentice or mentee.  The outcome of this pattern was that she rejected the woman who put her in the one down position while feeling betrayed and embarrassed.  To prevent this pattern from manifesting the same outcome of suffering and a broken relationship, we had to look at where it came from.

This client had a withholding, selfish mother.  As a consequence my client consciously and unconsciously sought approval but was usually shot down by her mother.  Without knowing it my client put these other woman peers in the mother-position.  Usually what would happen is that she would ask for advice in an area especially dear to her heart, expecting to be treated as a peer.  But the advice hardly even felt like it came from a peer.  Somehow the other woman wound up in a more powerful position than my client and abused that power.  Part of this is vibrational, (after all, she unconsciously came to these relationships as a supplicant for her mother’s approval), but we also looked at how my client asked for and received the advice.

She had to assume that she was going to set the situation up unconsciously to unfold so that the other woman would belittle her.  While an important and essential part of healing this pattern was to work directly with her own relationship with her mother with soul retrieval and underworld work, my client had to carefully look at how she operated within peer relationships with other women at the literal level as well.  With these deeply ingrained patterns, ones that we’ve been living out for several decades, we have a sort of body-memory that we must overcome.  We must also look at what we do, think, and feel as the pattern unfolds.

My client had to assume that when she felt betrayed, annoyed and confused the pattern was in play and that she wasn’t seeing the other woman clearly.  Walking away from the relationship was the last step in the pattern.  Did she really want that outcome this time or could it be avoided?  Much of the time the pattern came about because she was asking for advice as a peer, but the advice came back with her in the one down position.  She had to look at how she was asking for advice.  What language did she use?  Was her subtext one of supplicant asking for a favor?  Was she inviting a shift from peer to mentee?  Changing her language so that she remained in a strong peer position also helped.

One aspect of the mother-daughter relationship that my client didn’t see without outside help from her shaman was that her mother had her own insecurities that she projected onto her daughter.  Because these patterns have a strong energetic component, my client’s pattern meant that unconsciously my client would pick a peer that was likely to project her insecurities onto my client and then put my client down, just like her mother did.  To be on the receiving end of this would be no fun for anyone, so it wasn’t a big surprise that my client ultimately walked away from these relationships.  However, before she walked away she spent considerable time wondering if she were imagining the abuse of power when everything had begun so nicely.

However, walking away without consciousness around the pattern only set up the next iteration to manifest in the same way.  Unconsciously my client was looking for perfect advice from a perfect mother-substitute, but was doomed to disappointment because no one can give perfect advice and no one can be a perfect mother.  The rejection of her mother took place through other women but wasn’t a resolution because the original wounds and unconscious beliefs weren’t healed.  Doing the soul retrieval and underworld work helped to heal those wounds and beliefs, but now she had to work on taking different actions when the pattern unwound itself again.

The same feelings and thoughts arose when the pattern came up again, but the difference that next time was that my client could say to herself, “This is the pattern.  I’m in a peer relationship with a woman that I really like.  At some point I’m going to set this up so that she’ll project her insecurities on to me, and then I’ll have reason to reject her.  I’m going to be aware for each of these stages.”  As my client practices she catches herself at the last stage and can avoid rejecting the friend but sets better boundaries about asking for advice. 

In the following iteration she catches herself feeling those feelings of betrayal but notices in time that in a peer relationship she can take advice or leave advice, but she shouldn’t shoot the messenger and so manages to not act on those hurt feelings.  In a later iteration she might catch herself asking for advice but then notice that she herself has set herself up as a mentee instead of a peer.  In a later iteration she might notice that she’s picking insecure women to be peers with even though they might be highly qualified in their fields.  She might then choose not to get too close to them or she might not be completely taken by surprise when those women project those fears and insecurities outward.  Each iteration of the pattern is an opportunity to master the pattern until finally it is broken and my client has taken her power back.  She’s also managed to grow up a part of herself that still needed approval from her mother.

Sometimes we have experiences with soul retrieval and underworld work that are so spectacular that the energywork session clears everything up on the emotional, mental, and literal levels.  I love those.  But, with an unhappy pattern that’s become well ingrained by taking action again and again in the literal world, it usually takes several practice attempts at the pattern to fully unwind it.  Staying conscious, giving ourselves a break for having to practice at it, and making those small changes again and again means that we heal our lives and give ourselves freedom.

Next blog post, an example of a mother-daughter imprint shifting to the next generation and how to prevent that outcome. 

Family System Reinforcement Essays

Hello Everyone! I hope you enjoy the labor day weekend.  Here in Portland we're planning on enjoying a bbq on Sunday despite the rain in the forecast.  I just love autumn! This week I've published several new essays on my website around Family System Reinforcement.  These essays follow one Empath through a Family System and show her path in healing from the typical Empath wounds of rejection and abandonment so she can form her own happy marriage and family.  If you are an Empath, these essays are for you.  If you are an emotionally dissociated Hero these essays may also be helpful in seeing how the Archetypes of Empath and Hero interact.www.elainelajoie.com/EmpathyandRelationshipsBook.htmThe new essays are toward the bottom of the page under the heading, Family System Reinforcement.Enjoy, and have a wonderful holiday weekend!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 

Anger and Generational Imprints

One of the more common generational imprints I've seen within my practice are those in which Rage is passed down generation to generation.  Most of us understand that anger in itself is not a "negative" emotion, although most of us are uncomfortable expressing that emotion.  We've all had anger directed at us that when expressed has been done in such a way that causes damage all around.            Anger can be a force for good.  Most reform happens because someone and then a critical mass of people have become angry enough to stand up for themselves and enact change.  In fact, I tell my empathic clients not to be afraid of their anger for it is usually a signal that they have let their boundaries and limits be overrun by someone else.  Then we break down the incident so the empath can learn where her limits are so she does not have to become angry in similar situations.            In this way, Anger can be seen as a survival mechanism.  It can be very protective and helpful.  However, when we are enraged, that is usually because we have old bottled up anger that is ready to explode and wipe out everyone around us.  If this anger is generational, then not only do we have our own old anger, we have our ancestors' anger, too.  This sort of rage can be very hard to control, and we may need help understanding it, or we may need to understand why it became a part of the family contracts so we can rewrite those contracts in a way that serves us better.            There is usually some hidden benefit to becoming that angry.  The benefit may be that it keeps us from being totally overwhelmed by life circumstances.  It may be that it prevents us from dealing with grief or sadness that underlies the original anger.  In my own life, I have a very strong anger streak that runs through my father's side of the family.  We even call it the Moran family anger.  My great uncle, with humor and chagrin, told stories of how his aunts met in wagons at intersections out in Minnesota, and yelled, screamed, and insulted each other on the weekends.  My great aunt, this great uncle's wife, told stories of him throwing food around the kitchen when he wasn't satisfied with his dinner, and she also told stories of my grandmother angrily cutting off family members for tiny slights.  This was hard to picture, visiting their calm and tidy house with my great uncle's beautiful garden during the holidays, but I had seen my own father, normally quiet and introverted, fly into similar rages.            Needless to say, I was terrified of my own anger and that I, too, had inherited this curse.  I saw it play out with my father and my mother, and I did not want to have those outbursts myself.  But I did anway.  It took great practice to label my anger as my own responsiblity.  Each time I tried to say that that person "made" me angry, I had to very firmly take responsibility for my anger back to myself.  I had to ask myself, where did I allow my limit to be crossed?  Did I know my limits?  Was I inviting someone to fail so I could take a stab at them later?  Did they know what my expecations were, or was I expecting them to read my mind?            I also journeyed to take a look at what the benefit for my family was in holding all this anger.  There was a strong sense of justice that came along with it---that ancestors had been wronged in the past.  The anger gave them the strength to survive.  I had Irish ancestors that weren't well treated, and then later I had French Canadian and Native American ancestors that had continued that pattern.  But, the gift was clear---anger led to a sense of strength and endurance, and it also led to a sense of justice and fairness when it was not twisted into victimhood and blame.            So, in understanding the benefits of the generational imprint, I was able to honor the gifts my angry ancestors had given me, and discard all the rest.  It is still a practice to honor my anger, and express it without insult and on time when it does arise, so it doesn't blow into rages.            If you are suffering from unresolved rage, it might be generational.  It probably is if as a child you had an angry parent.  Soul Retrieval and Extraction Work will probably help a great deal.  Becoming conscious of the benefit of the anger will also help.  But ultimately, taking responsiblity for the anger, owning it completely, reminding ourselves that we are the ones responsible for our anger and our expressions of it puts the power directly in our hands.             As we practice taking responsibility for our anger, at first we will discover to our horror how much damage we have done to the people around us.  We have probably been holding our loved ones hostage if we have been blaming them for our anger.  They might have stopped speaking to us their real needs, thinking that all they will invite is an angry outburst.  They probably have their own resentments brewing since they do not feel safe enough to express them to us.  Or, they might have left entirely just to get away from the constant sense of danger.  They could also be so beaten down and victimized by our anger that they have given up entirely and tip toe around us, and then we may be angry at them for being so weak and cowardly.            The practice is, whenever we become angry, to step back and ask ourselves, where did this come from?  It is perfectly OK to say to the person with us, "I am so angry right now, I don't know what to do!"  Refrain from blaming (i.e. You are making me angry!)  If we need to leave because we know we are about to fly out of control, we can tell that to our companion, and go for a breath of air or leave the room.  Then, we can look at what limit has been reached.  What happened to trigger the anger?  Is there a need that can be met?  Is this old anger, or is it really something new?            With practice, we can move into conscious competence of this powerful emotion.  We no longer have to be frightened of the anger that lies within us, but can use it for self-discovery and personal power.

Soul Retrieval Stories

Hi All,Some of you have requested more information on what it's like to have a Soul Retrieval with me, and what Soul Retrieval can help. I've just set up a new page on my website that contains links to client stories of soul retrieval and other energywork.Just go to:http://www.clearreflectioncoaching.com/SoulRetrievalStories.htmEnjoy!!

Energetic Healing, Energetic Contracts

A client asked:Hi!I have never posted a message on a discussion board before...but being that I just went through an energetic healing session with Elaine (who really rocks!) I am making good on the "welcome home party for my long lost soul part" phase.ANYHOO!My question is about Energetic Contracts - as in what are they? How are they formed? Does a person/soul impose it on themselves, or is some other person/soul involved??? How is it that they bind other family members (soul family members?) and/or the same soul over different lifetimes? Why are they so difficult to break??? Are there ones that are good too, not just ones that really suck a lot of energetic butt?Looks like my question kinda multiplied like bunnies there...Must be SPRINGTIME!;O) Wendy

Past Lives? (Generational Imprint)

A client asked me:I was wondering if you could possibly help me with this....I've been working on my own psychic pathway now for a while and the subject of past lives have always intrigued me...every since i was a young child I've been haunted by a dream I had of being in a factory and seeing a conveyer belt of severed hands passing by me and what seems to me to be a witch running the machine....The interesting thing is since I was a young child I've had OCD...in particular not wanting to get my hands dirty and always feeling like I need to wash them....is it possible there's a connection here...Any insight would be greatly appreciated....Jason