When Maggie Shayne asked in her weekly blog, “What will you be when you grow up?” I laughed at her answers, partly because we have a lot of similarities.  Maybe that’s why we’ve always gotten along so well, though.  Many people who know me only as a writer ask, as with Maggie, “If you couldn’t be a writer, what would you be?”  Usually, they have no idea how many other things I’ve been.  And then there’s the AARP’s “When I Grow Up” campaign, which I think is excellent for adults who need to remember how many options they still have.

That’s the thing about the question:  it gives us all options. Whether you’re 13 or 113.

I hated it when the local school system forced my daughter at 13 to declare her major.  To me, given the fast spin of the planet and how quickly technology and politics change the world, I’m not sure that the same set of majors will be available to her between the 8th and 12th grades.   I’m sure the school system had good reason for setting the kids on a track that early, but I still rail against it.  I hate the idea of deciding at 13 “what you’re gonna be for the rest of your life.”   Maybe if they’d rephrased it as “what foundation you’re going to lay first and the build many possible careers on.” 

For me to imagine what else I might have been or will be, I have to look at what else I’ve done or dabbled in or wanted to do.  Essentially, these are where my interests lie, what I’m good at, what I still have a passion for.  I always–at least as far back as the age of 3–wanted to be a writer.  My mom wanted me to be a musician, which was her dream, but for as much as I love music, I never had it in my blood like I did writing.  But what else would I have become if not a writer?  Well, I did become a contract negotiator for Department of Defense.  It’s been a good career with lots of excitement (and stress, too), but it’s definitely afforded me a chance to travel, use my mind, make a difference, and stand on the cutting edge of technology.

The next childhood dream I had of what I wanted to be when I grew up was “master spy” or “secret agent.” I was fascinated with the world of espionage from a very young age–still in the single digits–but alas, I never became La Femme Nikita or Alias’ Sydney.  I poured those fantasies into my suspense novels with characters like L. Madison Steele in The Lorelei Files’ Access or Aubrey de Lune in the Madonna Key’s Dark Revelations. While I don’t have the physical stature of Angelina Jolie or Katherine Heigl to be a secret agent, I did very seriously consider joining the CIA or FBI when I was in college and, even a few years ago, switching to the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI).  I would have been–and would still be–good at it.   As it turns out, I have a real knack for researching, analyzing, and preparing persuasive cases.

I also considered becoming an English teacher.  A professor, to be exact, with a specialty in Dark Ages and folklore.  Having wiped out two years of college with CLEP tests before I ever left high school, I was on the track to having my PhD shortly before I turned 23.  A change in the university system got me off track for a while, but at one point in my mid-20’s, I tried to return to it, with plans to be an English professor in a junior college, but I instead was hired by the Department of Defense.  It’s still an option, though.  I have the Master’s Degree and could easily–and lovingly–teach at a local college or online college.   I might also think about teaching English as a foreign language while I travel the world.  Or I might teach acquisition skills I’ve learned in my Government career once my younger daughter has fledged and I’m free to travel more.  Oh, but I love options!

Another thing I dream of being was a photo-journalist.  That, too, is still an option.  I have a degree in Journalism, I’m decent with a camera,  I have the investigative skills, and who knows?

I also wanted a career in marketing, but I added in bits and pieces of that to my writing career and for a while in the 90’s and into the turn of the decade, wrote a couple of successful books (now out of print because they’re way out of date) and a newsletter for writers on how to promote their books.  I got too busy with other parts of my life to continue it, but I still love brainstorming publicity ideas with anyone who asks. Marketing, in various forms, is still a viable possibility for when I grow up.

I wanted to be a life coach about 8 years ago, took the courses and training I needed, and do it on a part-time basis now.  It was primarily a skill set I learned from my Federal career–the combination of coach, trainer, and cheerleader.  I’ve loved working with my clients to help them make their dreams come true, but  so far, I’ve chosen not to make it a full-time job.  It’s still a good possibility though.

There were various other dreams that came and went (like being a doctor) and still hold a spark, but it’s oh-so-great to know that everything I ever strongly yearned to do or be is still an option, at least some form of it.  Whether I refresh an  old dream when I retire or when my nest is empty or when I fall in love again and want to move to some place new and exotic or just want to do something different with my life, I still have lots and lots of alternatives.

At this pace, I may never grow up  if growing up means having to choose just one thing to be for the rest of my life.

I’ve been divorced long enough that few people tell me what to do anymore, or how to do it, or –heaven forbid—how to play the game.  Maybe they grew tired of it.  Or maybe it was the less willing ear I give them now, accompanied by plenty of eye-rolling if I’m nice enough to sit through more than 10 seconds of it.

I’m not a game player.  Most men tell me they don’t want a game-player, yet they’re so focused on game-playing and how it’s always been that they don’t know what to make of me.  They keep asking what the catch is.

There isn’t one.  If I like you, you’ll know it.  I don’t hide my feelings, even if that means you’re uncomfortable enough to run away or create a drama you know will cause me to end the relationship in one fell swoop.  I don’t play games, and I won’t put up with a man who does.

When I was first divorced and dating again at mid-life, I made a lot of mistakes in the first few years.  Most of them were because, after a long marriage,  I lacked the confidence to do what was true to me.  I listened to friends’ advice on dating—friends who’d been married for two decades or longer or hadn’t had a  date in a dozen years.  In general, their advice was all about how to play the game so I could pair up again.  Some would encourage me to make a bold move and then suggest I quickly back off.  Others would suggest I be subtle and calculated.  In any case, I was told that I had to wait, then play it cool, pretend not to care, and let the guy make the next move.

“Ball’s in his court,” my friends would warn.

In hindsight, most of those guys never knew there was a ball, much less a court or that the game was on.  I took my friends’ advice and kept my opinions and my feelings to myself so I didn’t scare anyone away.

And I didn’t scare anyone away.

I did, however, become a lot happier after I ditched my friends and their expectations and rules and relationship games.  I also began to enjoy dating a whole lot more and reached a startling perspective—most of those people weren’t very happy in their own relationships but they could certainly dish advice on how to be.

The only way  it’s ever worked for me is to be unabashedly who I am, and not the least bit worried what a man thinks.

The ball’s not in any man’s court.  The balls are all in my court—crystal balls, snow globes, spinning and sparkly things.  They’re mine to command…though I’m willing to share.

Recently, Jason Pitzl-Waters of The Wild Hunt blog directed my attention to an article by Adrienne Jones, “Lessons My Bullies Taught Me.”  It hit close to home, both because I had more than my share of being bullied and mercilessly teased as the “weird kid” or politely as the girl and later woman who was “diffffffffeerrrreeeeent,” and also because it ignited conversation with several friends.  The crux of our discussion was how adults become part of the bullying problem, removing themselves from being part of the solution by letting victims and children know that they are not worthy or, at the very least,  not heard.  That extends beyond bullying to parenting and teaching in general and how an adult’s own darknesses and fears are transferred to less powerful representatives of themselves.  Yes, often their own children or students.  They’re powerless in their own lives but there is something reassuring about not being the least powerful of the food chain.  That’s what children are for, huh?

I’m in a far more powerful place in my life now, without needing to see others in pain to feel powerful–though a part of me does enjoy the karma of abusers being punished.  I look back at these times now in a more distant way emotionally, but note with certainty that they happened and the feelings I endured.  The way I look back at those times now is not from the perspective of the wounded child but more as her champion, speaking out for her now because she couldn’t then.

The following article  is from the upcoming book, Passion to the Third Degree

(Originally published in 2007)

It’s easy to look at someone else and wonder how they could ever have had self-esteem issues when growing up. I guess there are always ways that the message is sent that a child is worthless. Or, at least, worth less than someone else.

When I was a kid—and later, too—authority figures always said the right words, about how I could be anything I wanted to be and how valuable I was as a person—but I often felt they didn’t believe it. It was one thing to murmur praise and platitudes when life was peaceful, but when it was hard or desperate or dangerous? That’s when those defining moments came out.

I’ve journaled about many of them as my way of understanding them and releasing so much of the pain attached to those events. I can’t remember them all. I don’t care to remember them all. But a few always bubble to the top. And considering how far back some go, that’s a long way to bubble. I guess most of mine have to do with not being listened to or believing that no one would listen.

- When I was a very little girl and the dog attacked me when I was petting him, I was repeatedly asked what I’d done to provoke the dog and warned not to tell anyone that I’d been petting the animal because no one would believe me. I never went near the dog again, but he would hide in the shadows whenever I would go outside, and then he’d run up and bite me on the wrist and run back to hide. This happened many more times before a home was found for him, and I never told anyone about the other dog bites or scars. I’d already been told that I wouldn’t be believed, and besides, the scars on my face were still hidden under surgical tape. The bite healed but the psychological damage has always been there.

- When I was repeatedly sent alone to give an uncle a smooch and hugs at his car even though I kept finding excuses not to go and was shamed for not being grateful for the presents the old man brought me on his visits. Just before Daddy died last December, he found out the extent of the molestation and Daddy held me responsible for not having spoken up and stopped it when I was 12 and so sheltered that I didn’t understand any of it except I didn’t want an old man’s hands down my pants, or anyone’s for that matter.

- When Daddy finally wrote me a letter telling me he was proud of me…not for the awards I’d won or anything I’d accomplished in my career or education or any of the good things I repeatedly told him to win his approval, but because I’d married a banker and had a baby. He especially liked the banker part.

- More recently, when I told my mom that things in my marriage were bad, really bad, and how I was dying inside, and she told me not to do anything to “mess things up” and end up getting divorced.

- A relative who implied that my grandmother’s death was somehow my fault (at age 7) because I was crying and trying to be brave and not admitting that I was crying.

- A relative who refused to listen to my screams, particularly when I had lather from a bar of water-logged white Ivory soap on my hands at the lavatory and he thought it was paint from his job outside that he’d told me to stay away from, and he hauled me into the yard and angrily drenched my hands and arms in gasoline to clean off what he insisted was paint and then I got into more trouble for getting into the paint and him having to fix the situation. No one else believed me either…because he was the grown-up.

- The lack of any response at all from my paternal grandmother when I hugged her and her stating in front of me that as far as she was concerned, I was nothing to her. It was just a few years later that she took a nugget of my news of my first weeks at college and turned it into a horrific tale of how her granddaughter was living in sin in a co-ed dorm and probably, no not probably but most certainly, sharing showers and beds with boys in the dorm. Why worry about nasty rumors when your grandmother creates them from scratch before your very eyes and ears?

I understand why all these people said what they did and how so often it had as much or more to do with their own sense of worth or lack of it. They didn’t really listen because they were lost in their own ego, pain, situation, whatever. I could never depend, really, on what I was told because I wasn’t convinced that the people who loved me believed I was really as special as they said because their actions sometimes said loudly and clearly that they were not hearing me.

I think I’ve always had better luck getting people to listen to my writing than ever to my spoken words.

So how do you get people to hear you?

When you’re in the midst of a heartbreak or trauma, it’s very easy feel stuck in the muck.  I have come to see the turning points of my life in a different light, because that’s exactly what the worst moments of my life have been:  turning points….turning to something better, even if that was impossible to see then.

If I look back on the path my life has taken, every time there was a really rough patch, it forced me to change the course I was on.  Usually, I was not content with the course I was on but I didn’t know how to change it, to craft it into something better for me.  In a way, I suppose I brought that to me, Law of Attraction-style, because I was looking for something that would force a decision. I wasn’t proactive in an action sort of way but rather in a thought sort of way. 

That was true of my back injury when I was so focused on my career that I wasn’t doing much toward fulfilling my dreams or tending my spiritual needs.  It was true of how my marriage ended. It was true of home-business decisions.  It was true of health decisions.

It was true of several relationships I had that were really forks in the road for me.  I was happy with how things were going but wanted more.  If I’d gotten more, I would have been taking a particular fork that would have led to misery.  I couldn’t see that at the time because I needed that aerial perspective to see where the path beneath me was headed….into fire pits, swamps, and far more heartbreak than I got from a break-up.  Those break-ups put me on different path, one that was smoother, wider, gentler, and far less violence to the emotions.  The break-ups were just a few horrendous days wide as I got pushed onto a different course, rather than the miles of sameness before walking through years of hell.

What started as heartbreaks put me on better paths to more confidence, independence, happiness, serenity.  I could have spent the rest of my life–easily–with any one of those men.  I would not have grown in the ways I have, been loved in the ways I have, or learned to love myself.  If I were to map my life, you would see drastic zigzags with markers at each course correction, each with a name or event, but each directing me to higher ground.

Photo credit by eyesore9; creative commons license

First dates are perhaps the best example ever of energy bubbles and making those first important energetic connections with someone else.  That’s because there are few other situations where we are thrust into an environment with a new person and expected to stay and hold our own for at least 20 to 30 minutes before deciding if we want more.  Wouldn’t it be fun is we could see the energy bubble around us in living color?

I write a lot about energy, a rather nebulous term for people who’ve never been around healing circles or bonfire drumming.  As an empath, my awareness of energy has grown to the point where, even though energy is invisible, its effects are not.  I feel it much as I feel the wind.  I can’t see it but I can see it bend the trees, and I can hear it howl or sing sometimes, and I can feel it.   I think we can all feel it if we’re aware of it and use it to diagnose how well a first date or first meeting is going.

A typical first date–even if you’ve been talking to the other person online, via email, via text, and on the phone or even webcam for months–is fertile ground for studying how energetic connections form, or don’t.  Like most people, I tend to have an upsurge of energy and excitement just before my date shows up.  It’s anticipation, wonder, curiosity.  I’ve had some people walk through my front door and felt as if I’d known them all my life, and the energy between us has been gentle, passionate, flowing, caring, happy.  I’ve had low-key DVD/wine/cheese/sitting on the floor dates in my family room that were just one big colorful energetic bubble and floating blissfully skyward as he exited my home and then allowed me to sigh my way off to bed and sweet dreams.  These are the ones I’m dancing around the house over and can’t wait to talk to him the next day.  That’s the kind of date I want, every time.  Who doesn’t?

The horrible first dates aren’t as easy to feel the bubble, possibly because it bursts at first glance or so soon after that you’re not even aware of it.  It’s just a huge disappointment that hits you so early that you don’t hang around to watch that energy bubble float between you.   But who cares about those dates?

The best use of the bubble to diagnose a first date is when you’re not sure how the date is going.  Those…mediocre dates…that sort of fizzle at some point.  A great date is the kind where you lose track of time because you’re so caught up in each other’s energy and that bubble just gets bigger and brighter and before you know it, you’ve been locked in deep conversation for three hours  and spend the next five making out because you can’t bear to tear yourselves apart.  You are both in that bubble and floating away, spinning, with it.  A mediocre date is the kind where the…pacing, if we were watching a movie…begins to lag.  If the pace picks back up, the energy bubble is stable.  If not, it either fizzles or pops.

For myself, about the longest I can sustain the energy of a mediocre date is 30 minutes, though most of the time, it pops at about 20.  (Yes, I date a lot, and most of my dates are great these days…though every so often, one will surprise me.)

That’s the point where suddenly the energy falters.  It doesn’t matter how good-looking the guy is, how nice he is, how entertaining he is.  I know at that instant that the date is over, usually for both of us.  It’s rarely something we don’t both seem to know at the same instant, with the exception (for me) of the rich guy who reverted to his good ol’ boy loud-obnoxious-racist roots in a ritzy restaurant after he’d had a few drinks with dinner.  He was too inebriated to be aware of the change in energy between us.  Most of the time, however, you both can feel the drop in energy.

This happened recently on a really lovely date with a really lovely gentleman.  Sweet guy, and on the surface, we had a lot in common.  About 30 minutes into our date, though, we’d hit most of the most obvious subjects that we had in common and we started getting into more of the subject matter akin to whom we are under the surface.  That’s when little things about our differing value systems popped up and I felt the quivers in the bubble as it began to deflate.  This bubble didn’t pop, it just fizzled, rather suddenly.  It wasn’t one particular question but a short series–how was it I could be happy now when I’d been through a divorce and why wasn’t I still devastated,  what was my most bizarre date since being single and how could I ever have considered dating a potential cross-dresser?  Nothing wrong with his belief system–just much more rigid than my open-to-almost-anything way of thinking.  I saw in his eyes that he could not fathom what I consider “openness,” and I knew that I could enjoy dinner with this man, but that I’d never be able to be myself around him…and him hang around.  It was a little sad to feel that bubble pop, right on time, but rather than drag things out and try to revive the bubble (that never works, ever), I called it a night much like an ER physician calls a death.

Most of the time, the bubble doesn’t fizzle and deflate to nothingness.  It pops after one particular question, whether you acknowledge it or not.  That question varies from man to man, but at some point, a hot button comes up in conversation.  Ylike ou never know until the question is out there and maybe not until after it’s answered if that was the magic question that ended the date.  It’s anything from “What do you think of Sarah Palin?” to “Do you think Nietzsche was insane?”  to “What’s wrong with these wontons?”  The most WTF moment I’ve ever had in a date was 20 minutes into appetizers–after weeks of talking on the phone–when he asked a simple question about what I’d done the night before, I told him, and he lost it with a diatribe on how educated people like me think we’re more important than people like him.  Huh?  I’d never mentioned my literary aspirations before then…just never came up…but in explaining that I had been researching Medieval history for a new novel I was working on, something touched off his hot button and he exploded.   I never had a clue as to what exactly happened back then but I understand better now.  Even though we tried to pull the date back together–we’d met half way and had driven way too far to walk out after 20 minutes–the energy bubble had burst and it was definitely over.

Watching the energy level and letting it act as a gauge in first dates has become something of a game now, not as much fun as great dates but fascinating enough to make mediocre dates more enjoyable.  By the way, first dates never start out as mediocre.  It’s just one of the directions they can take when it fizzles or pops. If that bubble expands, you never want it to end.

My dearest, darling Lorna:

We are about to send you someone who will tell you some great and useful things, many of which you already know but need a new way of thinking about them… but the real gift will be more in what this man shows you than in what he tells you.

Love you muchly,

All the Hosts of Heaven

I was getting messages from the “Universe” long before I signed up for Mike Dooley’s Notes from the Universe mailing list.  Since the mid-90’s, I have frequently referred to Deity—God, Goddess, The Trinity, The Higher Power, That Which Is Greater, The All, The Source—as the “Universe.”   Though some people (surprising to me) consider it a disrespectful term, my use of it is to convey the vastness and magnitude of Deity, whether I’m talking to a Christian, Wiccan, or occasionally an atheist who can find commonality in more scientific approaches.  In any case, I often ask for insight and the Universe doth provide!

Last year, I was trying to figure out how to pull all my projects together to get them out to the people who need them.  I’d come up with a solution—put it all in one place—but didn’t have the right processes in place at the time, so I spun my wheels a lot.  The vision began to develop but I had qualms, and those stopped me from pushing forward toward fulfilling my vision.  There just weren’t many role models for what I was doing.  So I asked the Universe to send me some guidance.

Enter Mike Dooley of TUT.com and his famous Notes from the Universe that landed him a part on Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, the hype-friendly movie about the Law of Attraction.

Okay, well, I did ask the Universe for help—and what happens?  The Universe sends me notes.  I’m still amused by the irony of that.  If the Universe had sent me textbooks, I probably wouldn’t have paid attention, given my sometimes short attention span.  I mean, who wants to read Textbooks from the Universe?

I’d heard about Notes from the Universe much earlier but only in mid-2009 did I join up and become a fan.  In case you’re not familiar with them, the notes are uplifting insights—often humorous—and they’re sent from the viewpoint of the Universe and personalized with the recipient’s name.  (You can sign up at Tut.com.)

They reminded me a lot of the Gifts for the Goddess mailing list I started over 10 years ago and, in spite of its uber-fast growth,  let lapse because my own personal life crises (divorce, extended family illness, job changes, etc) got in the way.  For almost a year, I sent out a short article every day, Monday through Friday, each day focusing on a different category.  After three months, I suddenly realized I had enough “gifts” to create a seasonal book.  I did the same for all four seasons, though the last two books got side-tracked for a number of years while I agonized my way through family issues.  The series was well-received, and when I offered to give away free ebooks in a non-ebook-friendly world of a decade ago for a period of 2 months as my way of giving back to the community, I was shocked that my fledgling publishing company gave away $75,000 worth of Gifts for the Goddess on a Hot Summer’s Night, which is the shortest and simplest of the four books (and actually my least favorite!)

Whereas I abandoned my free “Gifts” mailing list when it was at its peak subscription count, Mike continued with his freebies, building a list that now swells to 275,000 or more.  His “Notes” became his connection with a market of 275,000 fans—and potential buyers for any other products he created.  So when I joined his subscriber list, I was pleasantly surprised that he lived in the same town as my daughter’s college and gave monthly speeches there—and that he had a single upcoming hometown seminar that was within a day’s drive of me and about 20 minutes from Shannon’s apartment.  I was so excited!

I loved his 6-hour seminar, “Playing the Matrix and Getting What You (Really) Want,” by the way, and did get a lot out of it.  Although I’m already quite well-versed in Abraham-Hicks, The Secret, and a whole host of other Law of Attraction gurus and  although Mike’s material was not anything particularly new to me, he had a different point of view that helped me make a few wonderful changes in my life.  But that was based on what he had to tell me in his products, not what he had to show me.

By becoming a buyer of most of Mike’s material, I saw something that I wouldn’t normally have felt comfortable with for myself or that it would work for me:  the whole idea of how you package your products…and repackage them.   The first time I “bought” Mike was through his free “notes.”  That sold me on his style and unique humor.  The second time was when I found out he offered a subscription to the audio from his live monthly speeches, which are usually 1 to 1.5 hours long.  I bought the yearly $98 subscription so I could tune in once a month and hear new goodness.  After the $200 6-hour seminar I attended, I purchased his 12-CD series for $80, bought a new CD series called Leveraging the Universe and Engaging the Magic for $30, and bought a book.  Okay, for most people (including me)  these were not inexpensive and I ended up gifting them to friends.  The information was very worthwhile, however, and might have been even moreso if I were not already so familiar with works of this type.  I always appreciate a new perspective.

But what Mike showed me that is affecting me so much now is that much of his material is re-packaged.  During one of his CD series, I recognized most of the stories from his seminar.  Told a little differently but still the same story and same lesson.  By the time I’d finished another CD series and gotten half-way through the monthly audio subscription, I wasn’t finding much that was new to me—but it was being told to me in different formats.  And that was what Mike had to show me that went beyond what he had to tell me.

Back in January 2005, I had started my Supergirl@40 blog—what I called my healing journal—to work through the aftermath of my defunct marriage.  My older teen convinced me to use her own blogging group and I started very small, with just a handful of people I didn’t know  off-line.  I kept few things truly private and wrote my rawest emotion, usually working through situations cathartically to get to my solution.  In the process, I uncovered occasionally profound insights into human nature, spirituality, and life in general.  It wasn’t long before abuse survivors started showing up to share their stories with me, as well as people who were currently going through the same territory I’d just come through.  As I worked through my starting over process, I started to note the patterns in my life and make course corrections though my self-inquiry.  I also started digging into much older wounds and patterns from my childhood and then clearing out very old shadows.  That doesn’t mean that everything became perfect or that I turned into some kind of Ascended Master or something as some of the New Age gurus seem to have achieved—I still backslide sometimes but I can note it and correct it more quickly now, and  then share my process for my latest “course correction”  with others.

Over a few years’ time, I quickly wrote around 3000 essays, though essay is usually a rather negative term for epiphany-filled scribblings.  I learned a lot in the process about how much people have in common beneath the skin, and ever moreso the closer to the bone you go.  I began getting letters from readers who told me they were “addicted” to my articles and that they used my writings as a “blueprint” for their lives.  I heard from strangers who swore I was writing about their own lives—right down to the same stories about in-laws,  things that go bump in the night, and OMG-I-put-together-a-home-gym-that-can’t-be-taken-apart-and-won’t-fit-through-the-door-when-I-sell-the-house.  Strangers marveled that I seemed to be writing about their lives while people who knew me swore I was spilling secrets that they’d never told me.  I did not, however, go the way of many writers and “monetize” my blog at that time with AdSense or corporate ads.  I simply wrote what I felt and shared it.

I wasn’t aware of Mike Dooley at the time to copy him and I no longer remember how I came to the decision, but around the time I’d written half a million words  in blogs and articles, I decided to take the best of the articles from the first year or two and put them in a “blog book” for my readers who wanted to catch up on the earlier material.   There was just one problem:  how to decide what to put into the package.  My friend and mentor, Vicki Hinze, was the one who suggested that instead of publishing one book with my favorite articles, I should publish them all, but break it into a trilogy.

“Life is in the details,” she told me, explaining that the greatest value of my articles was in the detail of what happened and how I worked through it.

So I turned my articles into fifteen 150-page blog books covering January 2005 to Fall 2007, in chronological order for those who wanted to follow my story and my growth process.  I have now made 11 of the 15 available in digital form on this site—4 are still in production—and the first 4 are available in print.  For much of the work I did at the end of 2007 and through the next year, I packaged both old and new articles into themed books, which became—thus far—The Long-Awaited, Honest to God Secret to Being Happy (which I also teach at regional spiritual gatherings), Give Your Life Direction:  23 Life Coaching Tips to Motivate You, Re-Focus Your Time, and Overcome Resistance to Positive Change (which was a bundle of my favorite coaching tips), and Attract Him Back:  Master the Law of Attraction to Bring Back Friends, Lovers, and Relationships from your Past (different ways I’ve used the Law of Attraction to bring former lovers and friends back into my life).  Those 3 ebooks have outsold everything else I’ve published that wasn’t overtly sexual in nature.

But my dilemma has been what to do about “overlap.”

Thanks to Mike Dooley and his Notes from the Universe and all the material that launched from that experiment, I’ve stopped worrying about overlap and I’m gleefully pushing my work out there to an audience that craves it and can made good use of it.  At this point, I plan to reconvene the chronological blog books under the Third Degree Diaries series but also package them (along with new material) in themed collections with many more on the Law of Attraction and its lessons, on romance and relationships, on starting over, on meditation, on empathy and intuition, and on bizarre metaphysical events.  Some of these will become audio books, and others will become new courses that can be licensed to the life coaches who read this site so that they can teach from my articles and make money doing it.

I’ve considered all this before but felt unsure of my steps.  I wasn’t sure where the draw the line between the books, but I don’t necessarily have to.  I’m glad I asked the Universe to send me some guidance—and that I’ve had the chance to see how Mike puts his material out to his audience.   I don’t see myself climbing on stage in front of crowds—I’m more a fan of writing than talking—but who knows what will turn up next?

Book cover for Working through Grief: Tips for Coping with the Pain of Loss

Traumatic experiences, grief, and loss can take a heavy toll. Death, dying, divorce, sexual abuse, and suicide aren’t things you just “get over.” You have to heal them from the inside out.

Forget everything you’ve heard about “getting over it” and coming out of mourning on a specific time table. Time does not heal all wounds—it merely gives you perspective. What does heal the wounds of traumatic experiences is being able to look hard at what happened, slowly reaching a point of being able to honor your experiences or what you lost, and release the weight of your mourning. Not that the scars left behind won’t be sensitive to the touch, but you can get back on your feet and walk again and, yes, eventually dance again.