The secret meaning of an "Aha!" moment

We've all had them, although we may not have known that's what they're called. It's a pristine moment of clarity that makes us stop whatever we're doing and say "I get it. I really get it!" We're fascinated with these moments, whether they happen to us or to someone else. Even Oprah finds them worth writing about. She includes a feature at the end of each issue of O Magazine describing an Aha! moment of a celebrity or respected figure.

What is the foundation of an Aha! moment? What makes them different from an ordinary moment of understanding? The difference is in the quality of our thoughts and our sense of self in the moment we receive the wisdom. I was looking at the word Aha and had my own realization. The secret is hidden in the word itself.

A - Authenticity. An Aha! moment happens when you tap into your genuine self. This is your deep self who rests beneath the outer layers of personality and ego. Your authentic self is the heart of Who You Really Are. When you connect with your true self, the wisdom you receive is untainted by the surface worries and thoughts of everyday life, what some call the "monkey mind". It is the voice of your purest wisdom and when it speaks you cannot help but listen.

H - Humility. These moments are filled with the humility of recognizing the smallness of your understanding and the immensity of the greater Intelligence that surrounds us. It is that age-old paradox of knowing that you really don't know anything at all. Even in our most insightful moments, we only touch the surface of a very deep pond. Kumu Etua Lopez often tells his students, "You look into the pond and see only yourself. You don't know how deep the water is. " When you have the humility to let go of how much you know, the Aha! moment let's you glimpse deeper forces, a greater Intelligence and mysterious order that exists beyond us.

A - Awareness. An Aha! moment comes when your awareness, your attention and your presence is in the Now. Without you giving your awareness, the moment passes you by. When your Conscious Mind acknowledges a new learning, it creates immediate integration with the deep level of understanding in the Unconscious Mind and essentially reprograms your beliefs in an instant. Your conscious awareness allows the shift to occur. Ekhart Tolle in his book, The Power of Now, teaches us the power of living in the present moment. Your awareness empowers the moment and sets the roots of the learning deep into Who You Really Are.

Aha! moments become more frequent as we nurture authenticity, humility and awareness in our lives. These characteristics build a foundation of integrity that supports a life of eager anticipation for the next new experience and the next new learning. With each Aha! moment, you become more attuned to your purpose, your wisdom, and your connection in the matrix of life.

The secret of the past

It's been a busy few months. I wanted to grab this opportunity to share something with you that I discovered accidentally. This little secret gave me a leap forward in my personal evolution and it has helped many of my clients change their lives. If you embrace this and make it true for yourself, you'll experience the same freedom and relief.

The secret is....the past is just a story. It's a tale we tell over and over again to remember and record what "really" happened. Funny thing is, if you ask two people who were in the same event what "really" happened, they'll both tell you a different story. That's because there is no true past. There are just lots of stories about the past.

So, if the past is just a story, what would happen if we just told a new story? What would happen if we imagined it the way we wanted it to be?

Let me give you an example. I experienced childhood abuse at the hands of a family member. For many years, my story about the past was of the horror, outrage and injustice that was done to me. It's true that I felt that way and I had a right to tell that story. It's also true that there is another story about what happened to me.

This new story feels a whole lot better. What really happened to me is that I found myself in a very difficult and challenging place at a young age. That experience defined many aspects of Who I Am today. It taught me how to follow my heart and fight for my right to a great life. I learned skills of survival, perseverance, intuitiveness, and courage. I discovered my passion for self-growth, and an accountability to my reason for being here on this planet. I also was gifted with a fierce determination to have the most amazing life I could make for myself. That's the "true" story of what happened to me as a child. I LOVE that story!

Now, when I float back over my past, I see the things that happened and I notice the Me that was forming in those times. I see the budding of my sense of self-worth when I stepped forward and confronted my abuser. I see the emergence of my independent spirit and courage to meet challenges with focus and intention in the times I felt alone and unprepared to deal with the situation. I became my own best ally and champion. What more power and healing can a human wish for than to direct your own destiny? The learning is in the journey, in each moment.

Once I was working with a client who was experiencing health problems, career challenges and a lot of emotional blocks that kept her from being happy. I noticed that she kept telling the same wounding stories over and over, as if to keep herself from forgetting. It dawned on me that she was the only person in the room who could verify the facts of her tale. If she's her own "Keeper of the Facts" about her past, couldn't she just rewrite them in her head? Who would know or care that she created a new story for herself? A story that helped her heal, find peace and satisfaction in her career, and release the misery. Believe me, the misery has no attachment to sticking around. She's the one who has the attachment to the miserable "facts".

In truth, "facts" are just a selective story, too. We gather selective data (facts) and interpret it to understand their meaning. We can only gather facts based on where our attention is. Facts don't exist at all unless someone pays attention to them enough to write them down and keep a record. And even then...EVEN then, they're just one little bit of data someone gathered and while they were gathering that data they missed millions of other bits of data that were present in the exact same moment. It's the nature of a quantum universe.

So what's the truth about the past? It's the story you choose to write in your thoughts. It should be the story that helps you be happy in the NOW and moves you forward with joyous intention into the future. After all, the future, too, is just a story waiting to be written.

A kazillion intuitive realities

The intuitive world within us is our unique reality. A brief definition of reality would be to say that it represents a set of laws that govern our ability to interact with the external world. The physical world has it's rules and patterns, most of which have been measured, studied and documented by science. The intuitive world also has its own rules and patterns.

We each have an intuitive reality that is uniquely our own. It is made up primarily of two things: 1) the common knowledge and understandings we share as human beings, what Carl Jung would call the collective unconscious; and, 2) the learnings we have gathered from our personal experiences.

The collective unconscious is where we all begin, the stuff we were born knowing without anyone having to really teach us. Each one of us is cut from the same universal fabric and therefore we all share its common threads, patterns and textures. What's interesting is that this fabric is a dynamic thing. As we change, new threads are added that represent our new discoveries. As new humans are born, they naturally inherit the qualities of that expanded universal fabric. For example, have you noticed that young children today seem to understand intuitively how to use computers? It's as if our collective unconscious expanded over the last 15 years to include a knowing about computers and their role in our lives. Today's children are born with the expanded awareness and they don't even realize it. It is only we who were born before the innovations who recognize the difference in reality.

Sometimes I think of the collective unconscious as our "spandex factor", the potential we have within to stretch our imaginations. The more humans witness new discoveries, the more they and their children can imagine even greater things. Our human awareness expands along with the discoveries we make as a society.

The other aspect of our intuitive reality comes from our own personal experiences. These create the laws and patterns we have in our own lives. As we go through life, we experience things and we make decisions about what those experiences mean. For example, if someone pulled my hair when I was six, I decided what I was going to think about that experience. Maybe I decided something very specific such as "that girl really doesn't like me", or maybe I generalized to something broader, "nobody likes me at all". Little decisions like that get tucked away inside of our intuitive self and we begin operating based on that assumption. This happens every moment of every day. We continue having experiences and making decisions about them, and soon we have created an entire reality that becomes our day to day life. As we do, we stop seeing anything that doesn't fit our expectations and we become fixed in our beliefs about what is "real" and what isn't.

Imagine how many realities there are out there! In NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming), we call that a person's model of the world. And what we've learned is that every single human being has a unique reality inside them that is more real to them than anything else in the universe.We cannot change another person's reality; only they can do that.

One of the most fascinating things about my work as a hypnotherapist is that I get to peek inside the realities of my clients. In doing so, I have expanded my own reality and I have learned that so much more is possible than I ever dreamed when I was limited to my own model of the world. There are more ways to expand your reality than I can possibly list here. I hope you'll find one...or two....or however many it takes to awaken your intuitive self to more than it knew before.

Side note.... I like the way Michael Harner describes the idea of realities and their truths in his book, The Way of the Shaman. He speaks of the Ordinary State of Consciousness (OSC) and the Shamanic State of Consciousness (SSC). In one "reality", the person experiences something as real while in the other that same something would be called a myth or fantasy. Ordinary things like trees and water look one way in the OSC, but when experienced in the Shamanic State of Consciousness they appear as energy or light, or even as speaking entities who are aware and who possess power. Isn't this true for other realities, too? Think back to the last dream you had. Isn't it true that odd things happen in dreams and you accept them completely at the time because dream realities are different than the Ordinary State of Consciousness? Then there's the reality that happens at a family gathering, where we all seem to slip into some other regressive state of being that doesn't reflect the truer selves we live day to day. Reality truly is relative to our state of consciousness, or what could be called our intuitive self.

A breath of fresh air

One of my favorite sources for spiritual renewal has been reading. Finding a good book that really makes you think about, say.... thinking, for example....is like finding a flower-filled meadow at the top of the mountain you just hiked. A sweet perfumed surprise, well earned and thoroughly enjoyed. Books that have brought that sweet breath of fresh air to me include:

• Oahspe, an old bible-like story of man's physical, social and spiritual evolution
• Bringers of the Dawn, by Barbara Marciniak
• Think and Grow Rich, by Napolean Hill
• The Secret Science, by John Baines (a Rosicrucian-based publication)
• Initiation, by Elizabeth Haich
• The Hermetica, by Timothy Freke & Peter Candy
• The Four Agreements, by Don Miguel Ruiz
• Conversations with God, by Neale Donald Walsh

Some of the above titles are more controversial than others, but thinking about new ideas stirs the imagination and prompts growth beyond what you were able to accomplish before. I say go for it. I'd love to hear your comments on any of them. Or, feel free to recommend a few titles of your own.

Silence really can be golden...

It's not always the best idea to talk about your dreams and aspirations with others, especially when it's a fledgling dream that hasn't fully taken form yet.

In the beginning, you may have a sense of its shape or a prescience of your future direction if you choose to follow the dream. In these times, the dream may be fragile. It exists in your nurturing mind, a mind that accepts it even though you may not have answered all of the questions that must inevitably be answered about its impact on you and your life. The excitement lights your eyes and your heart soars with the possibilities before you. Most eagerly, you attempt to share with others and discover that they may well question for details that you do not have in this early stage. Trying to bring your inner knowing to the rest of the world could put your tender new dream in jeopardy. Sometimes these things are meant to be kept inside.

So, for now, let the dream be nurtured within, as a baby is held safely and warmly within its mother during gestation. Let no one prod or poke at your tender new reality. Hold it, learn who it is, experience the precious joy that comes with any new discovery. Create a knowing between you and your dream that strengthens your understanding of it. When the emotional and spiritual giddyness has transformed to deeper surety, then it is time to share.

Newborn dreams are too precious to throw to the unappreciative and careless. When your dream can stand safely on its own legs, though a bit wobbly even still, then it is time to test it against the outer world.

Coming from the source

I get reminded of this often enough that you'd think I would have it down pat by now. Perhaps this time I do.

The true source of my ability to create the life I want comes to me from within, from that source of knowing that has no name. I could call it God. I could call it Intuition. For some, the former would strike a chord, for others, the latter. As a hypnotherapist, I might call it your Unconscious Mind. And as a student of Huna, I might say my ku, my na'au, or even my aumakua. Whatever you want to call it, it's the voice of knowing within you. Some are so completely unaware of that inner voice (as I was in my younger days) that they don't even realize it's speaking. They simply respond to it without conscious thought about what it is to which they respond. No matter the name we use or the awareness we have of it, it is an inner source that guides us and one that we can trust unfailingly.

Abraham's Perspective on the Source
I don't know if you've read or heard about Abraham-Hicks. Abraham is the non-physical spiritual guide that speaks through Esther Hicks. Abraham describes this voice as our "inner being" who speaks to us in the form of emotion. When we experience a negative emotion, our inner being is telling us that our thoughts are not in line with Who We Really Are. Emotions guide us toward creating what we really want in our lives.

Personally, I've found the trickiest part isn't understanding Abraham's explanation. The trickiest part for me has been to identify the thought I'm having that is causing my emotions to give me negative feedback. It's helped me to become more aware of what I'm thinking. Surprising to me was the realization that I have a constant train of thought going on in my head that is not originating from the current moment and its happenings, but from past events and experiences. My thoughts tend, if I'm not being attentive to them, to mull over what past experiences mean or how I should behave now so that I can avoid pain, anger, disappointment or sadness. Here I am, Ms. Progressive, and most of my time is spent looking backward! That was an eye opener.

Externalizing the Source
When I'm not mindful of my thoughts I tend to externalize the decision about whether I am acting in a right or wrong fashion. In those "auto pilot" times, I find myself looking to others for confirmation that I'm doing OK. I fall into the trap of externalizing my guiding voice, looking outward for the source of my direction rather than inward.

A perfect example of this came to mind this morning as I was writing in my journal. A dear friend who I respect immensely gave me feedback once that I allowed to alter my self-perception. This friend, let's call her Sue, is a very talented career coach. She has a knack for helping people focus in on innate talents and find work that uses them. I confided in Sue one day that my deepest desire is to transform my software training skills into personal & spiritual growth training. Her response was lukewarm at best. In fact, she changed the subject! I was devastated.

Believing that she may not have understood how important this was to me, I tried again to explain it to her a few weeks later. The same response; lukewarm, polite "ahs" and "how interesting", then a subject change. Now I was getting angry. How can she call herself a career coach when she can't see what I long so deeply to create in my life?

Months have past since those conversations. My upset continued throughout as I internalized her belief that I couldn't do my dream. I faltered and became depressed, trying to focus on my current job in the hopes that my success there would rid me of my blasted hopes for another career. Everytime my dream would resurface, turning it's trusting face toward me for encouragement, Sue's face and words as she expressed her doubt echoed in my mind, bringing an immediate sense of hurt and loss. How could she steal my dream that way?

The true stealer of dreams is probably more obvious to you than it was to me at the time. Rather than ask how she could steal my dream, I should have been asking, "how could I allow her to steal my dream?"! I believed her when she expressed her doubt. I accepted it. Buy why? Why was it so much easier for me to believe her doubts than to believe in my own dream?

Reflecting Our Inner Voice
it was easier to believe the doubts because her doubts were actually my own, reflected back to me. She served as a mirror to my own internal fears, and I accepted her doubt because it struck a chord within me. A little voice inside said, Yeah! She's right! You're not good enough!

When I realized from where the true source of doubt came, I felt an instant lightening of my spirit. If it was truly coming from within me, then I had the power to change it. Again, my thoughts returned to Abraham's message that emotions are messages from our inner beings. Negative emotion (as I felt toward Sue) is often projected outward as blame. I felt angry and wounded because of what she said, or so I thought. Truthfully, I felt angry and wounded because my own thoughts were undermining my dream. The thought came from within me and my emotions alerted me. What a wonderful gift Sue gave to me. What a wonderful mechanism of learning and awareness our Creator has given us!

Identifying the Source in All Its Disguises
The tricky part in coming to the awareness that Sue was not the stealer of my dream was in recognizing and accepting my role in the experience. I knew the negative emotion was there, but I mistakenly looked outside of myself for its cause...as if someone else's thoughts could speak for my soul. It was only when I identified the source as coming from within me that I found my way out of the doubt and fear and back on track to my dream.

The source always comes from within us, no matter its disguise. Remembering that we can only respond to and recognize words and actions that mirror our own thoughts and experiences will help you to bring your focus back to your inner voice. One cannot recognize a yellow boat if one does not know what "yellow" and "boat" are. Be aware of this and claim your power.

And so we begin...

As every journey begins with the first step, so does this personal journey begin with its first post.

Wisdom
For as long as I can remember, I've craved wisdom. I want to know how we grow into being who we are as individuals. I want to know how we learn to recognize our foibles and faults...and ultimately, how we learn to change them, mature them. I want to know how we can consciously evolve ourselves.

I know I'm not alone. It's nearly impossible to list the number of books written on the subject of personal growth. Each has its focus. Each has its perspective. Some are very practical and others delve deeply into spiritual realms. I've found every sort of topic helpful over the years, as I'm sure you have, too. What interests me most, though, is the spirit.

Spirit & Personal Growth
The spirit survives all other elements of our life here. We can focus on very solid personal growth, such as leadership skills, and get that great job with the nice six-figure paycheck. But when we die, the paycheck ends and we're left with our spirit. The spirit has also grown in the skill of leadership and can carry forth that skill to its next adventure. The same can be said for almost any personal growth that first begins as a means toward earthly reward. It seems that the most satisfying personal growth happens when, at its core, the growth is truly spiritual. It has been my observation, both in my own life and the the lives of others, that it is the person who creates long term spiritual growth who finds the most all-encompassing happiness.

Logic and Intuition
You'll discover as you read these writings that I often wander between logic and intuition. Logic serves well when it comes to organizing and ordering thoughts. We all are probably most familiar with its tenets and methods. While logic is well-rewarded in this science-based world, intuition often suffers sneers and dismal as a valid tool for personal growth. Intuition, I've learned, is a human's best friend. It is that inner voice that speaks in the language most perfectly matched to our own thinking. Given the powerful role it has played in my life, I expect you'll hear a lot about it over the upcoming span of time.

Work calls, so I'll end this for today. I truly hope that these wanderings are a contribution of value to the many that have come before and the many that will be written in the future. I cannot promise to be so perfectly phrased over time, but I do hope to be easily read.