INTRODUCTION
Many of us have dreams and goals that we
want to manifest in our lives, but we fall short of achieving them. Some fizzle
out and die because of a lack of action. Sometimes our dreams and desires
fester inside, making us angry, bitter, and confused.
It usually isn’t a lack of desire or
motivation that prevents us from reaching these dreams and goals. In fact, it’s
sometimes even more frustrating for the Type A personalities, the ones who
believe we need to try harder, dig deeper, find the right blueprint and follow
it precisely, even perfectly.
Society tells us that everything has a
formula, and that if we do our part to complete certain checklists, we are all
but guaranteed success. Master the concepts of kindergarten,
move on to first grade. Get a certain degree to land the career we want. Even
our personal lives have checklists, defining for us what constitutes a
successful career, family and or, spiritual life.
The trouble is, that formulaic approach
often fails us and leaves us wondering why we still feel unsatisfied or
unhappy, why we haven’t reached our goals, or why we grab onto something for a
moment, only to watch it slip away once again.
Something is missing. Underneath all of
this, we need the right mindset – and that starts with knowing who we really
are.
Our potential stretches far beyond the
formulas and restrictive rules we follow. It isn’t until we get creative and
think about our capabilities and talents instead of those prescribed formulas
that we truly succeed. This is what Steve Jobs did when he dropped out of
school to start Apple. Jobs discarded the formula even when everyone around him
said he was crazy, because he knew in his soul who he was and
what he was capable of.
It took me years to learn this lesson. I
lived by the myth of formulas and checklists well into adulthood, using them in
my career, in relationships, in my health, even in my faith.
In my mid-twenties, someone called me fat
and not long after, I went all-out to lose weight. I went to the gym and hired
a personal trainer, but I still didn’t drop the pounds. Later, heading into my
thirties, I started to understand that it wasn’t about going through the
motions of exercising and dieting; I understood that I had to dig into my mind
about food.
Some of you might relate to my experience
as a first-generation Haitian American raised by parents who wound up in an
“Immigrant Time Warp.” This phenomenon describes a situation in which
immigrants are locked into the social norms of their native countries at the
time they left. Despite living in America, some immigrant parents raise their
children as if they were still
“back home.” I say this with respect. I
wouldn’t change a thing about my upbringing. It made me resilient.
This involves a delicate balance of honoring your native culture while still
embracing the positive aspects of the Western American culture.
Food had come to symbolize many things in
my life, and none of it was about fuelling my body. I had internalized messages
of scarcity from generations who remembered what it was like to not know where
their next meal would come from (so eat as much as you can when you have it).
Food was comforting after a bad day at school. Food was celebration – the
delicious puff pastry called Pate’ that’s made with lard, the dish called Griot
that’s made of pork double fried in bacon.
Food was tradition and love too. I might
insult a family member if I turned down their food, or someone might tease me
with, “What kind of a Haitian are you?” if I declined the red beans and rice.
Even as my conscious mind worked to
follow a formula to lose weight, my subconscious carried messages that told me
to “eat more” … and the subconscious message always wins out.
I thought for a while that I had
conquered the weight loss goal and learned what I needed to learn about food,
but that wound up an incomplete lesson. Although I had figured out some of my
internal messages about food, I had not yet learned about the fallacies of
formulas.
So, another message kicked in:
Perfectionism.
I was an executive at a bank (following
my career formula) and started working out three times a day: a three-mile run
to my aunt’s house in the morning to join her for a mile-long walk, then a
three-mile run back home; a workout at lunch; and another workout after work. I
also counted calories obsessively, and I went from a Size 16 to a Size 4.
Once I had the weight loss formula, or
what I thought was the formula, I was going to do it to the best of my ability.
I carried this mentality into my career, my family life, and my religion. Can
you relate?
It all came crashing down in the form of an abusive relationship and burnout at work. By then, I had
studied the Law of Attraction (LOA) and understood that I had attracted a lot
of this to me.
In my downfall, I realized who I really
was and that I have the ability to change. I learned that there are more laws
than the Law of Attraction, an insight that helped me reconcile the dichotomy
regarding those experiences in our lives that we have not attracted. Like too
many others, I had experienced trauma in my childhood. It was entirely out of
my control and I could not say I had attracted it. But I COULD decide it
wouldn’t be the thing that destroys me.
We are created in God’s image and
likeness, which means we have an ability to create and to change who we are. I
studied all types of religions, philosophies, and modalities. I learned about
the ways our energy can be blocked and held in our bodies when we experience
trauma. And until you deal with your trauma, your desires and dream manifestation
will be warped.
I studied and learned about my soul and
had a spiritual awakening: we have a higher self that is trying to experience
certain things in life.
We have contracts with other people in
our lives, soul contracts. As I examined events in my life, I started to
reframe them and think, “Maybe this is something my soul wants to experience.”
Today, I work as an intuitive counsellor
and embrace my gifts for doing Akashic readings, Energy work like Reiki (to
help balance the flow of blocked energies that affect our body and emotions). I
help people deal with trauma and then find their soul’s purpose. I earned my
MBA and am working toward a second master’s degree in counselling to help
people with trauma.
If you have unresolved trauma, I’d like
you to set this book aside and work on that first with a licensed therapist.
This book won’t work for you, no amount of life coaching will work, if you
still have deep unresolved trauma. That’s a process that involves intensive
exploration into the past and layers to unravel and address.
How can you tell whether you have trauma? You still remember it, or it’s been the hindrance that
prevents you from accomplishing a goal you’ve been working on for years. The
trauma can be yours in this lifetime, it can be generational, or it can be
carried over from a previous lifetime. It needs to be dealt with properly and
cannot be ignored.
This book is for those in need of
coaching.
It is divided into four sections that are
meant to be read in sequence, with concepts that build upon one another. I will
show you how to know who you are in order to create the life you want.
You’ll learn about the three layers of
the mind and how our thoughts create; the difference between dreams and wishes;
the power of our words; and you’ll receive structures and tools of creation. At
the end, you’ll receive access to an accompanying workbook that will provide
exercises to implement these ideas in your life.
This isn’t another formula, but a guide
to your own awakening so that you can create the life you want.
