Yesterday Julie Ann Turner guided me in mining for gold from my past.
She invited me to crack open my childhood memories and see in them the golden nuggets of my life’s purpose and my message.
Here are a few examples:
Playing house with my brother while my mom worked in the kitchen nearby revealed my nature as a co-creator using my imagination.
Sewing clothes for my doll at 10 and for my brother at 16, using scraps and small remnants of fabric, heralded my skills of resourcefulness and making something from nothing.
Retreating to the secluded lilac bush where I soothed my middle school loneliness with delightful sensory exploration showed my preference for authentic expression over following popularity and early recognition of the value sacred space in Nature.
Gold mining was fun! I found lots of it! The exercise is helping me discover and claim my unique gifts and values that I had unconsciously hidden when, as a young adult, I believed my Dad’s discouragement of my pursuit of a career in outdoor education as “not a real job.”
Now that memory conjures up the opposite of gold! It’s more like toxic waste. I resist it. I want that kind of memory to stay buried in the deepest mines of my subconscious, never to see the light!
What do I do with those memories? What about the ones of hurt, and pain, and abuse? What about the ones of rejection, failure, and betrayal? Those are not gold-veined ore, are they?
I laugh, discovering that once again, a childhood experience has a gift. It’s like that fairy tale, Rumpelstiltskin, when the girl is locked in the castle store room until she spins that pile of straw into gold. “There’s no way!” she cries. “I can’t spin straw into gold!” She’s immobilized with doubt and feels like a failure. She’s trapped and hopeless. Until that little man, a surreal visitor, comes to her aid and does it. He spins that straw into gold!
“But that doesn’t really help,” I moan. “Rumpelstiltskin is no more real now than in that story, right?!!”
I laugh again, realizing that I do have something that can spin straw into gold. That’s my skill! That’s what I do with my clients. I help smart, talented, courageous women and men get a new perspective on their unhappy circumstances and reframe their old victim stories into new stories of peace, empowerment, and possibility. The transformation seems like magic in the way it works, but unlike Rumpelstiltskin, I use practical, easy, and transparent tools to spin those new stories.
Do you have memories, or even current circumstances, that look more like toxic waste than gold? Have you buried hurt, shame, anger, or abuse hoping it wouldn’t show up, but it keeps popping up uninvited into your life? Do you feel trapped in hopelessness or discouragement, stuck in the room of your life with only straw to work with?
You can wait for Rumpelstiltskin to magically appear and do it for you.
Or, you can grab these tools from me at Forgiveness Walks and get to work on spinning that straw into gold yourself! When you’re ready, come get a free sampling of the easy practices that you can use in your everyday life, loving yourself and your circumstances just as they are.
Click here to sign up for Clearing the Path, a series of five short audios in which I guide you through easy visualizations that can help you feel lighter and more accepting of yourself and your situation, whether it’s that toxic sludge from your past or something happening right now.
Turn your straw into gold with Clearing the Path.
In joy,
Regina
P.S. If you’re ready right now to have some straw spun into gold, email me at regina@forgivenesswalks.com and describe that “straw” story. That will get the spinning going right away. Then, we can set up a time together on the phone to take your next steps. That’s what Claudia did, and shared this with me afterwards:
“Thanks so much for taking time to talk with me privately. …..Little by little you helped me feel better about everything I was feeling bad about. ”
I’m here to help you too, at regina@forgivenesswalks.com