Seven Questions to Create a Meaningful Life

For decades, I was taught that I needed to accept what I could not change and have the wisdom to know the difference.    Despite years as a graduate student in Neuroscience and post doctoral fellowships in psychiatric epidemiology at the most prestigious medical schools in the country, whenever I saw a doctor or counselor at these same institutions, more often than not, I would be either told my problem wasn’t real, or that I just had to learn to accept it.

I had become disillusioned with Western medicine when I realized how little coursework my colleagues were getting in nutrition and lifestyle management, and how much coursework was dedicated to pharmacology.   There seemed to be an underlying motive in Western medicine that made me uncomfortable, 

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My Response to “That Won’t Work”

I was couch surfing in Portland, and stayed with *Stella who had in her words, “a very naughty cat. *Frankie was only a year old, had tons of kitten energy, but would regularly stalk her, lash out and scratch the couch.   She told me that Frankie was vengeful and would regularly “get back at her” when she tried to discipline him.

Having taken classes on cat behavior, I had strong doubts about her interpretation of her cat’s behavior.   As an expert on cat behavior, Jackson Galaxy says,

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From Poverty to Abundance with the Body Code

*Karen had a coaching business that was her principle means of income.   While she was able to pay her basic bills of food, utilities and rent, she had no money left for anything else. She was struggling to earn enough money to invest back into her business, and it had been 5 years since she had a vacation!

We released blocks to abundance. In addition to emotions, beliefs and sabotage stemming back from generations past,  we found a couple of key beliefs that were getting in her way.   While she was not consciously aware of these beliefs, her subconscious believed that her ability to keep money won’t last, and that she would not have the money she needed.

After releasing these beliefs,

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3 Tips to Find the Courage to Change

For most of my life, I ran away from opportunities because I lived in fear.   I had no courage to change. When I was a child, I wanted to be an actress. I remember one of my earliest performance experiences. I was playing a young Chinese little sister who had to bring out a Chinese dust broom to the girl playing my mother.   When my teacher cued me out on stage, I handed the broom to ‘my mother’, and we dropped it. We picked it up again, and in my nervousness, we dropped it again.   By then the audience was laughing, and I couldn’t get off that stage fast enough!

I remember in High school, my school put on really fun musicals that I would have loved to be a part of. By then I was playing the French horn, and I felt safer in the theater orchestra with people I knew. I was afraid to be associated with the acting crowd, and resisted, even though acting and dancing seemed like so much fun!

In college, there were opportunities to live abroad.   I would have loved to travel, and explore other cultures, but I passed those up, because my experience living in Hong Kong as a child was so traumatic for me.

I’ve missed out on so much that would have made my life more fun and more meaningful.   But thank goodness, I now have tools to release my fears!  

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Not Reaching Your Dreams? Ask This:

I have a client who kept sabotaging herself. She needed to lose weight. She had high cholesterol, sleep apnea, and shortness of breath that were all largely due to her weight.   In addition, she had extraordinary knee pain that was so bad that she could barely walk. She was mostly homebound, and relied mostly on her daughters to help her get to appointments.   The doctors had no solutions for her, and would not operate on her knees until she lost weight.

She knew what that she needed to healthy vegetables and was working with a nutritionist to optimize her diet for weight loss.  But she’d regularly find herself making excuses and going back to her old habits and her old diet.   Her weight was not changing.

When she came to me, I asked her what she thought was getting in her way.  

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How to Pick Yourself Up When Life Sucks

On the way to a speaker’s conference in Vancouver, BC, I carpooled with Peter Feysa, who is a personal trainer, coach and film-maker.   He told me that he had just made 30 calls to retirement communities, asking if they would be interested in his workshop. I asked him how it went, and he said that he only got one positive response!   I asked, “What makes you so determined when you get turned down so many times? How do get past all the rejection?”   He told me the secret to his determination:

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