Our society is enamored with the Cinderella myth. We like to believe a young girl’s prince will come and carry her off into the sunset. With the notable exception of James Lapine’s Into the Woods, most fairy tales don’t end in divorce. They are about happily ever after. And thus, most of our young girl fantasies involving finding our one and only who will make us happy for the rest of our lives. Yet the reality is that happily ever after rarely happens in a Cinderella story manner.

In my first marriage, I though I had found my Prince Charming. My ex-husband and I had a very unusual relationship for modern America in one particular way: we were each others’ first and only partners from the time we began dating until we separated, a duration of 22+ years. This came about in part because of how young we were when we began dating. I was 14 years 8 months and a sophomore in high school when we changed from being friends to being romantic interests; he was recently turned 17 years old and a junior in high school. Neither of us had dated anyone else previously.

After many years of chronic illness, our relationship grew apart. We both were raised Catholic though we have each evolved in different ways in response to the tragedies and difficulties we encountered in life. My ex doesn’t believe in past lives; he sees himself as somewhere between an agnostic and an atheist. On the other hand, I have become highly spiritual but not at all religious as a result of all the challenges I have faced. However, I couldn’t explore my spirituality fully while I was still partnered with my ex-husband because I felt intimidated by his belittling tactics towards ideas he didn’t understand or agree with. For me, it felt safer to hide my beliefs from him. (And yes, that is a sign of an unhealthy relationship!)

Once my ex-husband and I separated, I began exploring my past lives in earnest. Learning about my past life relationships with other souls helped me to be less devastated by the loss of someone I thought was my “one and only” for this life. I was able to break away from the cultural myth that we only have one soulmate and instead understood that we the potential for many soulmates in each lifetime. Thus, when one soulmate relationship ends, it doesn’t mean that you have used up all your romantic love for one lifetime. It simply means that the person who was right for you previously is no longer right for this part of your journey. I believe that the option for other love interests, including soul mates, is available to all of us more than once in a lifetime.

As I explored my past lives, one of the first souls I had to deal with was my lover from my three most recent past lifetimes (and probably more that as well). When he showed up to talk to me just before the summer solstice, he tried to convince me he was one of my guides, but things felt very wrong. The more I learned about him, the more I realized what a toxic soul he was and how much work he had to do as an individual. He was very mad at me for reincarnating without him this time around, but it was time for us to move on separate paths so that we (or at least I) could heal. I cut ties with him and sent him away. Yet the experiences with him helped me to realize that my relationship with my ex-husband in this life was definitely not my one and only soulmate relationship. I have been partnered with many souls across the millenia, and some of those souls are still in my life in different types of relationships in this lifetime.

The lyrics of "For Good" from Wicked strike me as a powerful way to explain this relationship with our soulmates. They declare:

We are here for our paths to cross, and we will forever change each other when they do. Yet there comes a time when we must say goodbye. That doesn’t mean we will never encounter this soul again nor does it mean we will never share love with them again either. But for this lifetime, our journey together is done. It is time to move on to share in new adventures, new love, and new growth with another soulmate.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

My own personal healing has involved a lot of very deep shadow work in recent weeks. Shadow work is facing the pieces of ourselves that we’d really prefer not to admit were parts of us. However, when one frees oneself from the pain of those shadows, one’s life becomes much happier.

I’ve previously blogged about my past life in World War II when I was a British spy working in Germany. Some of the worst trauma from that life surfaced again, this time from a different emotional perspective. Previously we had processed how the trauma had affected my liver (anger) and my heart chakra (love). This time, the healing work was centered on my kidneys (fear), my gallbladder (resentment), and my throat chakra (being heard).

When we were working on clearing out the issues around World War II Germany particularly relating to my fifth chakra, a different past life came up as well. This is not unusual for me: I often have processed multiple lives around a similar type of trauma at the same time. For instance, one week we processed four breathing related deaths including being trampled by an elephant, dying from lung congestion due to a mining cave-in, dying from polio, and being pitchforked in my diaphragm.

This time, the past life was one in Egypt that I had not seen previously. I have learned about at least three other lives in Egypt prior to this, and none of them were the least bit happy. Exploring past lives has made it clear to me why I have absolutely no desire to travel to Egypt since I endured so much misery there. In this particular past life, I was working in the court of Neferneferuaten Nefertiti (ca. 1370 – ca. 1330 BC). I had gotten the position by misrepresenting my abilities. When the truth came out, I somehow ended up dead with a bashed in skull. Not a happy ending to my life!

Both this particular Egyptian life and the life as a spy in Germany involved me deceiving others and dying as a result of that deception. In the Egyptian life, the lying was just plain stupid but was part of my soul’s learning process. In the British life in Germany, the lying was part of a war strategy, but it also ended up getting me killed in service. As I was looking at this common thread between the two lives, my guides told me, “Pretending to be someone you are not can be a deadly decision.” That struck me as pretty powerful advice. Most of us usually don’t have to face death for our lies and deception, but this wisdom helps drive home how vital it is for us all to be honest and to be ourselves.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

I often talk about my past lives in my blog posts and in real life, but I also say that I am willing to work with whatever spiritual beliefs that my clients may or may not hold. Most people in America don’t believe in past lives; one estimate places the number at around 25% (which I think might actually be a high estimate). In metaphysical communities, though, that belief rate is closer to 99% in favor of past lives. So how do I reconcile the two vastly different perspectives about the afterlife for the 75% of Americans who believe we only live one life?

I tell clients that I believe in past lives, but I understand that they may not. I am fine with that. We all have different belief systems that shape our views of our lives. I speak of my past lives because they have been very influential in my healing process. For me, those lives are as vivid and as real as the one I am living now.

Yet for those who are skeptics or are not believers, I am happy to present past life information as stories that our minds create in order to distance us from our traumas. With that space between us and our intense pain, it can be easier to chip away at the often repressed or inaccessible trauma rather than confronting it head on. Past lives become like metaphors in this situation: they are aids to help us understand something that is hard to grasp otherwise. Through the imagery of past lives, we can work on healing traumas that we otherwise might not be able to heal.

What I have actually found in receiving healing messages for clients, though, is that the clients who don’t believe in past lives don’t usually get information on them. Those who are open to the idea or who are believers are far more likely to receive information on healing from past lives that needs to be done. In this way, the spirit guides who provide the messages help give clients exactly what they need to hear when they need to hear it.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

My journey into exploring my past lives began several years ago as a fairly naive attempt at healing. I have a scar on my body that causes me a great deal of pain 29 years after the event that caused it in this life. I had read that in such cases, where nothing seems to heal the pain of the scar, that there usually is a past life issue involved. Once the past life is cleared up, the pain in the present life will often recede. I had always been open to past lives, but I had no concrete evidence to make me believe that I had lived them. Speaking with my mentor one day, I told her that I wanted to explore past lives to see if I could find the root cause for my pain. My mentor cautioned me that it’s best to do past life regressions with a human guide because of the traumatic incidents that the regressions bring up and release. We agreed to meet again in a week or two to begin exploring my past lives.

Except that didn’t happen. My spirit guides must have been laughing at our conversation because as soon as I opened myself up to seeing my past lives, they began showing them to me. I didn’t need a human guide to assist me; I was perfectly capable of seeing the past lives on my own with the help of my spirit guides. I’ve seen dozens of past lives at this point in my journey, and yet I know there are many that I still haven’t seen. Some of the deaths that I have seen include:

• Being executed by an elephant crushing me in the far East for having given birth to a deformed child
  
• Drowning myself as a shaman because I felt I’d failed my village when a natural disaster occurred in the Maryland area
  
• Being thrown off a cliff as a child sacrifice in a central American culture
  
• Being poisoned with hemlock by my wife (I deserved it!) in Germany
  
• Dying in a hurricane in the Gulf Coast region
  
• Having a friend kill me after I fell from climbing on a pyramid as an adolescent boy and ended up partially paralyzed and in immense pain. His mercy killing was a gift to me.
  
• Being killed by my jealous mother in a Native American culture
  
• Dying from polio in the 16th century in France
• Being shot to death during an accidental spy interception during World War II in Germany
• Dying from lung disease due to a mining accident in South America

Seeing the previous deaths your soul has encountered is very difficult. None of those are easy events to contemplate, but when doing past life regressions, one can actually end up reliving the traumas of the deaths. In the case of trauma that happened in Ireland about five lifetimes ago, I actually had to relive the events leading up to and including my death. I was on my massage therapist’s table, and she was working on my diaphragm. It had been rigid for several days, and nothing seemed to be able to loosen it up. As a result, my breathing had been constricted. In a split second, my massage therapist was able to get into my diaphragm and release it. When the release happened, I was transformed into the moments before my death. I watched a crowd rioting around me, and an angry man with sandy red hair and a red beard came lunging at my abdomen with a pitchfork. The pain was unbearable, and the emotional agony was even worse. The situation in Ireland ended with me being burned at the stake as a witch. Back in the present day, my massage therapist could tell whatever was going on with me was horrific. This was by far one of the most awful deaths I experienced, and it was one which stopped me from using my metaphysical gifts for several lifetimes.

Despite the painfulness of learning about these deaths in past lives, I have also been able to find freedom from inexplicable fears in my life through learning about the past lives and releasing the traumas from them which I was holding onto. I was able to figure out that some of my claustrophobia and dislike for spelunking comes from the mining cave-in that eventually lead to my death. I discovered that my fear of heights especially along cliffs was due to having been a child sacrifice. My strong dislike of guns in this life came about from having been shot to death in my life during World War II. Simply bringing awareness to the roots of my fears helped loosen their hold on me.

What’s most obviously not on that list of deaths is the event in a past life that caused the scar that gives me so much pain in this life. There are some lives for which I haven’t seen the actual deaths because they aren't necessary to heal. Sometimes the trauma that sticks with our souls results from our experiences in our lives. Traumatic incidents from those lives have included:

• Seeing a murder in Versailles
• Losing my fiancé to typhoid fever and my lover to beheading for political reasons while never giving birth to much desired children during that life
• Enduring sexual abuse across many lifetimes
  
• Being mentally ill and involved with an abusive husband
  
• Being enslaved in Egypt after my abusive homosexual lover abandoned me
  
• Marrying an abusive man who damaged my legs to keep me from running away from him in Egypt
  
• Being a Roman soldier in at least one, possibly more lives
  
• Being abandoned by a friend to die in the woods though I survived
  
• Being a brutal raja who learned the pain of war and loss the hard way through the death of my son in India (the only life of royalty I’ve seen)
  
• Being a transgender person on a Pacific island in an era when transitioning wasn’t possible 
  
• Being a brutal general who tortured innocent women and children in Mesopotamia
  
• Being a medicine man who took advantage of the women of his village simply because he could

All of these events didn’t kill me, but they were traumas, and one of them is part of what has created the ongoing scar pain on my body in this life. You’ll also note that there were many lives where I could easily be described as a horrid person. That’s true for all of us. As we learn how to become good people, we experience all sides of issues including being perpetrators, victims, and witnesses. Somehow our souls carry those experiences along with us between lives. The traumas continue to add up over the years, stored in our reincarnated bodies, unless we work to release them. For me, healing from Lyme has actually turned out to be a major journey of releasing these lifetimes of trauma in order to allow my immune system to function better. I honestly don’t understand how we can store the pain from previous traumas, lives and deaths in our bodies. However, I know that I have experienced it time and again in my journey to health. 

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Last Friday was another powerful day of healing in my world, both personally and globally. The spiritual work I have been doing on myself reached another major turning point as my healers and I released one of the deeper traumas from my childhood. As it released, I saw that the emotions from that incident tied back to traumas in another life hundreds of years ago; the past life experience involved the same soul who also hurt me in this life and many others as well.

After the trauma released from my body, I was told symbolically that this was the last thing that was blocking me from finding unconditional and spiritual love in this lifetime. In the past few years, we’ve pulled out many other energetic blocks related to other people who’ve harmed me and related to beliefs I have previously held. At one point we even had to clear away the soul of a female ancestor who lived in the 19th century in Tennessee. She had been sexually abused by four or five different men in her life, and so she held the false belief that all men are dangerous. She was trying to protect me by keeping men away from me, something I definitely didn’t appreciate even if she was doing it with the best of intentions! My mentor and I helped her crossed over, leaving me happily without my unwanted guardian.

I’ve been working for a long time to reach this point; I was starting to wonder if I would ever reach it. So the news brought me great joy. I left that healing appointment feeling pretty happy and headed to my next appointment. Before it started, I had a few minutes to check to see if my kids had emailed or texted me. They had not, but I noticed an email from a friend who said, “Just saw the SCOTUS decision! :)” I knew that could only be good news, and Googling confirmed that the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of same-sex marriages. Tears began misting in my eyes, but I had to move on to my appointment. Afterward, though, when I got a chance to read some of the articles about the announcement, more tears came streaming down my face.

I don’t have any friends or family members who were waiting to get legally married in Texas. Many couples I know have already gone to Canada or other states to legalize their unions. However, for me, this was a victory that I had been waiting for for a long time. It says a great deal that our society is finally open-minded enough to accept that same-sex marriage will not bring about the end of the world. There’s still a great deal of progress to be made in terms of ending discrimination against those who aren’t cisgendered or heterosexual. However, this is a big and public step forward.

One part of the announcement seriously disturbed me, though. The Supreme Court decision was a 5-4 victory, a very narrow margin. Still, a victory is a victory. What bothered me most was that conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, the only African American on the court at this time, voted against same-sex marriage. Given his conservative voting record, this isn’t a surprise. Yet looking at his personal life, it is. Clarence Thomas married his second wife, Virginia Lamp, in 1987. They are considered an interracial couple as she is of Caucasian descent. Yet it was only twenty years earlier in 1967 that interracial marriage became legal in Thomas’ home state of Georgia thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision of Loving v. Virginia. Less than fifty years later, Thomas is now on the side of the privileged, those who can marry whomever they want, and he voted against letting all citizens have the right to marry their partners. To me, that was a bitter pill to swallow.

While I rejoiced on Friday with many others in the rest of the nation, the fight is far from over in Texas. Certain politicians seem to have a distorted belief that the SCOTUS decision of Obergefell v. Hodges is not the last word. Texas Governor Greg Abbott immediately issued a statement allowing state agencies to refuse to issue same sex marriage licenses on the basis of religious freedom, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has also encouraged county clerks not to issue same-sex licenses. The only county in the Austin area to begin immediately issuing licenses on Friday to same-sex couples was Travis, the liberal bastion of Texas. Other local counties are twiddling their thumbs, blaming a need to update software, and “investigating” what the Supreme Court ruling actually means for their offices. I don’t have great hopes that all county offices in Texas will be offering same-sex couples their now legal right to obtain a marriage license by the end of July. I suspect it is going to take more federal action to make it happen. In my mind, I keep seeing the military involvement  in 1957 that was necessary to enforce the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that desegregated schools.

Despite these new hurdles, I am grateful that both the nation and I have moved forward in a major way when it comes to liberating love. I hope that when the time is right, all of us will be able to find the partners we seek and will be able to decide if and when we choose to get married unhampered by the prejudiced "religious" beliefs of others.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

I am one of those people who had recurring nightmares as a child. One of them was induced by the dinosaur scene in Fantasia, one of the first movies I saw in 1977 at the age of 3; I figured this out in high school during science class when a film showed a clip from Fantasia that exactly resembled my dreams. I still can’t watch that video clip without disturbing emotions coursing through my body. Until recently, I never understood what the other recurring childhood dream was actually about or where it came from, but it was terrifying for me. I’m not sure how often I would have it as a child or even when I stopped having it, but decades later, I still remember it in vivid and nauseating detail. 

Over the past few years, I’ve learned a great deal about my past life in Europe that ended during World War II. My spirit guides have given me the information slowly, piece by piece, during many different meditation and bodywork sessions. I have an enormous amount of information on that life, perhaps because it was so recent and so powerful, but more likely because I have had so much healing work to do around it. What has become very obvious to me over the years as I worked through the issues that have come up is that most of my current life could be described as PTSD from my last life. So many of the decisions I’ve made or the fears I’ve had are direct results of what happened then.

The basics of what I know is that I was born around 1920 as a woman to lower class parents who lived somewhere in rural England; I’m not sure where exactly. I had a sister who was beloved to me and a grandmother whom I was very close to, but I don’t know much about other family members aside from some basics about my parents. When I was a young teenager, I left school against my wishes to go into service at the home of a local minor nobility. This man was an alcoholic and a generally miserable controlling person. He had a daughter whom he’d sired at 20 with the family’s secretary; the daughter was five years older than me. As he aged, he was getting much more desperate for a male heir. Thus, when he forced me to have sex with him and I got pregnant, he actually married me despite the 25 year age difference and my lower class origins. Much to his dismay, I miscarried midway through the pregnancy, possibly due to the chlamydia that he had given me. Despite his best efforts, I did not become pregnant again, and I assumed I was sterile.

From there, my life became crazier than what one would normally expect for a wife of that class and era. I began having sex with a neighbor; my husband was not pleased about the affair but turned a blind eye because our distaste for each other was so great at that point. I also had an affair with the step-daughter metioned above. When World War II began, I jumped at the chance for adventure and escape from my husband, and I became a British spy who was sent abroad. I slept my way across Europe: I’ve seen at least four men whom I was sexually involved with but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more. The sexual activity was for both business and pleasure. One of those affairs resulted in a pregnancy which I had illegally terminated.

For a long time I questioned how I could have gone from my simple English origins to being a spy in Germany. It just didn’t make sense to me. However, I eventually was shown that my father was a German Jewish immigrant to England; my mother was a native and an Anglican. I was raised bilingual. There were other German-speaking Jews in our community as well. Thus, I was someone who would have been optimal to serve the British government best in the war: A woman who could pass as a native German without arousing suspicion. I worked my way through France to Germany, though I’m not sure how long I was actually in France. It may have been just one fateful train ride (and romantic hookup). In Germany, I was working at a military factory as part of my spy work, but I was also secretly doing relief work for a Jewish refugee camp for immigrants from Eastern Europe.

Sometime last year, I finally made the connection between my childhood recurring dream in this life and my past life in Germany during World War II. On the day when I finally understood what the dream was about, I had a complete and total emotional meltdown. I called my therapist for an emergency phone session; in her words, I was confronting true evil in its darkest sense. As I talked to her on the phone while pacing the back porch, green dragonflies were literally circling around me, an unusual occurrence in my yard. Symbolically, dragonflies are “connected to the symbolism of change and light.” Their green color related to my heart chakra, indicating the change in my energy relating to love and compassion. In retrospect, the symbolism couldn’t have been any more powerful.

Most of us were taught the horror stories of what happened to Jews and others in the concentration camps in Germany, but the worst of it didn’t make it into the history books. The things I saw during the war and then in my recurring dreams in this life were so horrific that I don’t discuss them with most people (including here on the blog) because they would be traumatizing for most highly sensitive people, empaths or those who had family members who were lost or killed during those terrible years. However, once I had calmed down many weeks later, I consulted one of of the professors who had been on my dissertation committee and who has published a book on the concentration camps. He confirmed for me that what I had seen was highly suspected and had been hinted at in cultural artifacts. It’s just not something that has ever been widely published.

My soul was deeply traumatized by what I witnessed and participated in during World War II. There are no words to express it all. This created the spiritual root for the Lyme disease and many other traumas I endured during my current life. I truly believed at the soul level that I deserved to suffer terribly for my part in the war even though I was acting as a spy when I took the actions I did. When I first began having major health problems in 2003 and 2004, I used to tell people, “I must have been a Nazi in a past life to deserve this kind of suffering.” My subconscious knew what was going on at a soul level.

The past few months have involved a great deal of work reprogramming my body to undo the damage from World War II that I brought into this life. The stored emotions, entities, and pain had to be released so that I can heal completely. That release has involved a great deal of physical and emotional pain as I addressed the issues, let them surface, and then removed them from my body, often with the help of the various healers on my team.

Last Monday, we hit an apex of healing. In what seems absolutely unimaginable and unrealistic, my body manifest an actual lump in my abdomen in the area of my liver that was a result of one of the bullets that killed me somewhere around 1941. While the bullet from the past life was not literally there, the lump was real. Two different healers were able to palpate it and sense the pain from it. Using several crystals and flower essences as well as energy work, we were able to dissolve that large lump. The whole situation was amazing to experience, yet I am so grateful to have that energetic bullet gone. My healing is not yet over; we continue to clean out whatever comes up. I am not sure how much more there is to go, but removing that bullet was key to my healing. 

I have been given the names of my husband and me in that life, and someday I hope to be able to go to Britain and do research to find more information though I suspect a great deal of it is still classified. I also may go back to Germany someday to the city where I was stationed and attempt to find complete peace with what happened there. My body was never returned to England, but I suspect it was put in an unmarked grave. I also doubt there are any remnants of the other activities I was involved in during my past life, but I still would like to see and experience the area again, this time under the banner of compassion, healing and peace.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

During grad school and while my older children were young, I watched very little tv. I had no real need for it in my life. Yet in the days after 9/11, I left the tv on more than I had previously. In that time, I stumbled upon Crossing Over with John Edward, a show in which psychic medium John Edward gave gallery readings for those who were wanting to reach loved ones who had died. I was captivated by the show, but I hid my viewing habits from my then-husband because I knew he would ridicule such things.

Many years later, I better understood my attraction to Crossing Over as my metaphysical gifts came to fruition. As I started to develop my gifts, I wanted desperately to read John Edward’s books, but because of my multiple chemical sensitivities, I could not read the paper versions and there were no digital editions available. I bought the paperback books and put them on my shelf, waiting for the day when I had enough health to read them. Eventually that day came, and over a few weeks, I happily read through most of his Edward’s non-fiction works. They were easy, fun, enjoyable books for me.

As I read through the books, I quickly recognized that Edward’s dysfunctional father was both an alcoholic and a narcissist; as a result, Edward was mostly estranged from his father as an adult. I understood completely from personal experience how and why that narcissism can create a situation in which it’s best for the child to separate from the toxic parent. It’s a very difficult situation for the adult children involved. Our society does not support this kind of “divorce” between a parent and child. Instead, adult children are chided for breaking the Judeo-Christian commandment “honor thy father and mother.” However, in situations where the converse of “honor thy child” is not being respected, a parental-child divorce can be the healthiest thing for all those involved.

My mother undeniably has narcissistic personality disorder, though for the almost 17 years she was in my life, she never received an official diagnosis. It’s rare for narcissists to receive diagnoses because they are often able to present themselves very well to strangers. It is only in living with narcissists or working extensively with them that their true natures are revealed. I have dozens if not hundreds of stories that typify my mother’s narcissism though for the purposes of this blog post, one will suffice.

After my daughter Rebecca died, we received abundant condolence cards for the month afterward. About eight weeks after her death, a card arrived from my mother, whom I had not had any contact with in over seven years at that point. I had not informed her of my pregnancy or my daughter’s death, but we still had common contacts; she likely found out through one of those channels. Unlike most people who sent us bereavement cards, my mother sent me (and not my husband) a card that was about how wonderful daughters are. To someone who doesn’t understand narcissism or my mother, this would seem like a cruel and demented sentiment: I had just lost my only daughter (at that time) to death, yet my mother had sent me a card telling me how wonderful daughters are. However, if you analyze the situation with the knowledge that my mother is a narcissist, the situation makes a great deal more sense: She was only thinking from her point of view. She was trying to express emotion about my loss, but the only way she could do it was by vocalizing her position: She missed her daughter. She couldn’t think through the whole process that I had actually lost my own daughter and that her card was incredibly inconsiderate of that.

For years, many people had told me that I would regret my estrangement from my mother when she died. I would suddenly realize that it was too late for us to work through our differences. There would be no second chance. But as I read chapter 11 of John Edward’s book After Life: Answers from the Other Side, I found a very different perspective. Edward discovered that he was actually able to begin working through his issues with his father after his father’s death once his father was freed from some of his earthly burdens such as alcoholism. While Edward clearly encourages that people should “communicate, appreciate, validate" every day before they lose their loved ones, he does offer hope that reconciliation can happen after death. Working from that place, I finally came to true peace with estrangement from my mother. I realized that even when she dies, I don’t expect to grieve for her. I may once again grieve for the healthy mother whom I never experienced, but I know I will be fine whether she is in this world or the next. I’ve spent many hundred years attached to her soul, and I no longer have any desire to be associated with her. Losing her in no way seems like a loss.

My mother’s parents have both come to visit me from the other side. I never met my grandfather in real life as he died ten years before I was born; my grandmother died when I was 17. Interacting with them after I opened to the metaphysical helped me to understand that while they might have shed burdens such as alcoholism, unless they choose to work on their souls after death, they still carry their soul level issues with them. Neither of my maternal grandparents had done extensive work on themselves, and thus, interacting with them was not inspiring or sentimental. They were very spiritually unhealthy people whom I didn’t want to have around. Quite honestly, if my mother takes the same position of not working on herself after death as her parents have, I definitely don’t want to get back in touch with her then either!

I am grateful for the peace I have reached with being estranged from my toxic mother. I have known from early on that it was for the best, but our society doesn’t always understand that. Instead, mother-daughter relationships are glorified in a way that isn’t always true. While I didn’t receive that love as a daughter, I have been able to experience it as a mother with my living daughter, and for that blessing, I am truly grateful.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance

It’s often posited that our souls travel in soul groups: We reincarnate repeatedly with the same people, often the ones we love the most. We change our roles with those people, though. Sometimes we might be a man, sometimes we might be a woman, sometimes we might be lovers, sometimes we might be parents or sometimes we might be children. My ex-husband in this life was a friend of one of my lovers in our most recent past lives; one of my sons was a lifelong friend in that life; my parents were the same souls as in this life. My mentor and I also suspect that I have been a mother to my ex-husband in a past life, but I have not yet seen details of that life. No matter what our relationships in past lives, our roles may change in current or future lives. We retain our soul level love but we change the dynamics of our relationship to meet the needs of a particular incarnation.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve had some amazing past life experiences involving one particular platonic friend whom I’ll call Andy for anonymity purposes. When using atlantisite, I saw a Native American past life we had shared together many centuries ago in what is now known as Wyoming. In that life, Andy and I were young lovers of the same sexes we are now. We were engaged but were not formally bound to each other, and that became an issue for me after his death. We were out gathering berries or herbs or something on a hillside away from our tribe’s camp when he collapsed. I was left in a horrid quandary: Abandon my lover in pain as he lay dying to get help or stay with him and watch him die. I chose the latter, and he died in my arms within an hour.

When I shared this information with Andy in this life, he and I began a running joke of him cajoling me, “I can’t believe you let me die!” and me teasing him, “I can’t believe you wouldn’t go see the medicine man! Typical man!” Despite our joking about the situation, there were deep wounds from that past life which had stayed with our souls and which were playing out in this life. Andy follows the beliefs of a spiritual teacher who argues that we shouldn’t investigate our past lives but should instead deal with the issues in front of us in this life. On one hand, I see the logic in that. Past lives that come up in spiritual work usually do so because we have deep and powerful work to do regarding them. It’s not the fun experience that most people expect when they start looking for their past lives. However, I believe that if we are shown past lives, we are meant to work through the issues that they bring up. Thus, Andy even agreed that this past life issue was sitting before him in the present life in the form of me, and so we had to deal with the issues that seemed related to different health problems both of us were having.

The first thing that came up between us was a spiritual cord joining our gallbladders. Cords are connections that we make when we want to bind a person to us, usually not in a healthy way. They join us across time and space to others' souls. These cords can be means of draining energy from others; they can also cause emotions to be felt by the person on the other end of the cord. All of the cords which I have found on my spiritual body were ones placed by toxic abusers or for unhealthy reasons. They needed to be cut through energy work so that the burden they entailed could be removed. In this particular case, the spiritual cord was one that my soul had created when Andy’s former incarnation was dying. I didn’t want him to leave me, so out of desperation, I tried to bind us across the ages. The cord served no healthy purpose for us, and so we agreed it was time to remove it. Both Andy and I are healers in this life in different professions. Our varying skills and metaphysical gifts have complemented each other well as we worked to heal our past lives together. In the case of cutting the cord between our gallbladders, it was Andy who did most of the energetic work after I had seen the visions which helped us locate the cord. Subsequent to seeing the cord and its removal, I was shown that both Andy and I need to work with red poppy flower essence and with black opal. Both of us began using them, but not much happened.

Nine months later, I received more insight about Andy and me during meditation. I called him and told him that we both HAD to make using red poppy a priority so that we could heal whatever needed to heal. The time was now ripe to do so. Andy is used to my crazy visions and impulses, and he knows that I’m almost always right in what I see. As a result of what I’d seen during this message from higher powers, Andy and I booked a session with my mentor (who also happens to be a client of his) so that we would have a neutral third party to assist in the healing session that needed to happen between us. This turned out to be an excellent idea on Andy’s part as having a third person involved in the healing ceremony greatly facilitated our healing as individuals and as a past life couple. She was able to direct each of us when we needed to do individual work and weren’t in a place to devote attention to each other; this greatly assisted in the flow.

The result of our healing season was a powerful experience that showed the connections between Andy’s and my relationship in that particular past life with the various problems our former marriages (to others) in this life. As I worked through my resentment toward Andy for dying before we married in our past life and towards men in this life for failing to love me when and how I wanted, he worked through issues of feeling ensnared by various women in this life and that one. What ending up happening can best be described as therapy by proxy: We were able to state things to each other that we couldn’t state to others in our lives who had hurt us or whom we had hurt, especially our ex-spouses. Andy said the exact same words that my ex-husband had previously said to me, but this time I actually heard them because they were not tainted by the anger and pain of our current situations. The result was spectacular. It’s something I wish could easily be recreated for others, working with a more neutral stand-in who is in the opposite situation as them in order to find healing. I actually said at one point, "If only marriage therapy had been this easy!"

The healing that we both received during this session was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. Andy experienced temporary remission from his physical pain during the session, something that never normally happened for him. There was another cord between us which we removed as we used crystals, essences and words to facilitate the process. It was still very difficult to approach some of the deep and emotionally painful issues that came up, but it helped us both to do it. Perhaps the most amazing thing I felt at one point during the session was being overwhelmed by a soul level love for Andy. If you’d asked me previously how I felt about him, I would have told you that he’s a good friend. I never would have used the word “love” to describe our relationship. However, the sensation of love was so powerful and consuming during that moment that it left me in awe. The experience gave me a much better understanding of the soul level love that we can carry for others between our lives.

I feel incredibly blessed that we were able to share this healing session in this life when we were friends and not romantic partners. The distance between us let us heal deep past wounds with each other and others. Andy’s current romantic partner is another close friend of mine; she is someone he has introduced to my soul family. While I haven’t had previous incarnations with her, I can definitely see having future ones with her. Because of her love for both of us and her desire for both of us to heal, she gave her blessing for us to engage in this healing session together. I could see another woman not being so willing to facilitate this kind of work with past-life partners and responding with jealousy or worse. Instead, she gifted us with the ability to work together as friends to find past life healing.

Since then, I’ve since seen two other past lives with Andy, neither of which required major healing. In one, a life in an Aztec community many centuries ago, he was physically and emotionally abusive to me; I was mentally ill and treated him terribly as well. We simply need to forgive each other so we could move forward with our healing in other ways. The other past life was one in Native American days in what we now know as Wisconsin in which we only played tangential roles in each other's life. When I first met Andy’s father in this life, I had that déjà vu feeling that I already knew him. When I checked with my guides, they confirmed that Andy's current father had been Andy’s and my child in another past life. However, the guides refused to give me any more information. I have found that unless we need information for healing, we don’t learn about past lives. If we knew all the details of all our lives, we’d likely be overwhelmed! However, when past lives surface in our healing work, moving through the issues they bring up can bring amazing healing in our present lives.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

The good ol’ days weren't always good, and tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems. ~Billy Joel

A friend recently encouraged me to watch Midnight in Paris, and since she and I often enjoy the same movies, I checked it out from the library without even looking to see what it was about. Unfortunately, this was one instance where the friend and I differed vastly in our movie viewing tastes. Owen Wilson’s acting was horrid, and once I Googled to discover that Woody Allen was the director and writer, I immediately understood why I was hating the movie so much. I avoid Allen’s films like the plague because his style is very much not one I enjoy; I also have issues with his alleged past actions towards his daughter.

I was only able to endure the first 20 minutes or so, but early in Midnight in Paris, one of the characters discusses the idea of some people that they would be more satisfied to live in another time period:

We’ve all seen evidence of golden age thinking in our society. In 1999, a reality tv series called The 1900 House was popular on PBS and was followed by numerous sequels set in different eras in different countries. The basic premise was that a modern family had to live their lives exactly as they would have been lived in 1900. Even before the much-hyped series began, I didn’t see the romance in it. Perhaps it was my studies as a historian that made me all too aware of the realities of living in past eras. However, for a show of this type, The 1900 House made quite the stir in popular culture. Perhaps it was because so many people have a fascination with other eras. More recent popular internet quizzes seek to discover what era one “really should have been born in.” I know many people will obsessive over fashion from a particular previous era, and others will devotedly study the history of a particular period. As someone who believes in reincarnation and has seen many of her past lives in visions, I often wonder how much of this obsession with other eras and places is based on our past lives.

A few years ago when I was looking at a friend’s vacation pictures from Glastonbury, England, a place I’ve never visited in this life, I got hit with a terrible wave of homesickness and the thought, “I want to go home.” It was amazing and powerful. I suspect that one of my many British lives was lived in this area of England, prompting the feelings of homesickness when I viewed the photos. I also tend to like British television series and British humor better than American; one person accused me of a Britophile many years ago, something I can’t deny. I know my most recent past life in England was in the 1920s and 1930s, and I’ve had many issues in this life that I’ve had to work through from that life. Perhaps that is the root of my fascination with elements of English culture.

I’ve also had a great deal of dislike against Germany in this life even though I am genetically at least 30% German; one grandmother was 100% German-American. I have always hated the harsh sounds of the German language. I can’t handle watching movies about World War II, especially ones set in Germany. I’ve never seen Schindler’s List, and I never intend to. Movies of that era strike absolute terror in my heart just looking at their covers. Since exploring my past lives, I’ve discovered that I was a British agent in Germany during World War II and was exposed to many atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi regime. I also died there during the war, and my body was never returned to England. My guess is that those traumas of my past life have motivated my dislike for almost all things German in this life.

Likewise, I’ve realized that my Pinterest fantasy travel boards initially were to locations that I had lived somewhat recent lives: Oregon, Montana, Wyoming, Minnesota, Maine, New York, England, Ireland, Scotland, and France. I’ve never been to any of those places except New York in this life (and then only driving through). It makes me wonder if many people’s obsessive desires to travel to certain places are based on past lives. 

I’ve also noticed an interesting phenomenon with certain people who have a strong desire to be a from a different ethnic group or culture than their own. It’s as though they forget their own origins and become a part of that different culture which they are obsessed with. One man of European descent whom I know wants desperately to be Hispanic; he married a woman of Mexican descent and speaks Spanish as often as possible. Another woman of European descent whom I met was obsessed with all things Far Eastern. India, China, Korea, Japan: It didn’t matter. She only dated men descended from eastern Asia, and she became active in various community relations for immigrants of that area of the world. With no known trigger from this life to cause these people to obsess over another culture to the point that they changed the way they lived their lives, it makes me wonder what their recent past lives were like.

As for me, I am quite happy to be living in our current era. When people indulge in golden age thinking, I am never induced to do the same. I always have a feeling of “been there, done, that, don’t need to do it again.” Perhaps in one of the most interesting and amusing ways in which I feel like the past eras have influenced my current life, though, involved the Y2K phenomenon. Out of fear of what might happen with the computers had to face the date of January 1, 2000, many people began stockpiling basic supplies of food, water, batteries, and generators. I bought my usual food and a few extra things that week. However, what I actually stockpiled was toilet paper. The modern version of toilet paper was only invented in the 19th century, and it was in short supply during World War II. Toilet paper is a luxurious necessity of this era, one which I don’t really ever want to be without. Another friend admitted to stockpiling tampons before Y2K, something that probably didn’t dawn on me since I was pregnant for the second year in a row. Were these present day fears rooted in our past lives? It’s an interesting question to ponder.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

I thank God for my handicaps, for, through them, I have found myself, my work, and my God. ~Helen Keller 

One of the ironies of human life is that some of the most painful things we experience end up being incredible blessings in the long run if we can look at them through the right lens. For me, Lyme has been one of those bitter blessings. Enduring the struggles of late disseminated Lyme disease has been one of the hardest challenges of my life, far worse in ways than going through a divorce, earning a Ph.D. or even having a child die unexpectedly from natural causes. I have been through a very difficult twelve year war with Lyme that has involved being bedbound, homebound, misunderstood, and in hellish physical pain. Yet despite the misery that I have endured because of Lyme, I see it as having been a catalyst for many other incredible blessings in my life.

The stress that Lyme placed on my former less-than-healthy marriage was what dealt the final death blows to the relationship. However, without the influence of the Lyme, I probably would have stayed in a marriage that was less than satisfactory because I was blinded from the reality I was living in. Lyme helped clarify how dysfunctional and unsupportive of a relationship it was and how the relationship wasn't built to sustain those vows of “in sickness and in health.” While the end of the marriage was deeply painful, I am far happier since I separated from my ex-husband than I was in most of the relationship with him. I am very grateful to be able to say that I am happily divorced.

Because I was so sick with Lyme, I was bedbound for the better part of two years and homebound for six. The isolation resulting from the illness has been a huge part of my growth.  As Shakti Gawain writes in Living in the Light:

For me, the severity of the illness I endured forced me to have this time of isolation when I could grow without the overwhelming influence of the external world. While I still had access via the internet, I also spent a great deal of time in silence, and that was crucial to my healing. Now that I have been able to regain health, I am challenged to take my acquired knowledge into the world to help others.

Lyme has also forced me to me evolve spiritually. I would never have walked down the path I am now on if it hadn’t become a vital component for me to regain my health. I would have continued to spend my life, as I did in many previous lives, denying my metaphysical gifts out of fear of rejection and ridicule by those around me and in our society at large. Yet when accepting and using these gifts allowed me to heal when all else had failed, suddenly it no longer mattered what anyone else thought. I needed to be me, and I needed to help others to heal and be themselves, too.

Like any major illness, enduring Lyme for so long showed me what truly matters. I no longer take for granted things like going to the grocery store. I view it as a privilege, not a task. I no longer have an overwhelming need for material objects in my life; whenever I have a burst of health, I tend to use it to clean and purge as I’m still digging my way out from 12 years of accumulated clutter (partially due to living with a packrat and partially due to my inability to do anything besides the basics when I was so sick). I was never an incredibly materialistic person, but now, I’m even less so. Those things that used to bring me happiness no longer seem relevant.

I have also discovered who my true friends and family are. I believe strongly that family is the group of people you turn to both when you want to celebrate and when you want to cry. For many of us, those people aren’t our biological relatives. We create family where we can find it. We adopt families who accept us and love us exactly as we are. I definitely believe this is true for me. I have lost many friends along the way of my journey with Lyme, but I have also gained some new ones who are more amazing than I could have previously imagined.

So does this post mean that you should tell people who are going through some terrible trials that they are blessings in disguise? Absolutely not, unless you want to lose friends or risk life and limb with their reactions! Not everyone is in a space to be able to understand that their trials may eventually turn into blessings. Instead, the best response to people who are undergoing difficult times is simply to tell them that you’re happy to help them in whatever way would best serve them. Until they reach the point that time has helped heal their wounds and allows them to see what they have gained through their pain, the best thing to do is acknowledge their pain and offer loving compassion.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Recently a friend asked me if my ex-husband changed a lot, would I be willing to get back together again with him. The answer to that is no.  Plain and simple. We were once a great couple who met each other’s needs and provided the perfect opportunity for each of us to learn and grow. Our relationship also served the purpose of bringing some really amazing children into the world together. However, that time has passed. We’re now in a place where we have grown in very different directions. 

Several years ago after my ex and I had been separated for about six months, we decided to try a reunion. He had been doing some work on himself, so I felt like I owed him that much. In retrospect, a sense of obligation is really not a good reason to try a reunion. When I told a close friend that my ex and I were trying a reunion, his immediate response was, “You don’t seem very happy about that.”  The only thing I could say to him in response was, “It is what it is.” He had definitely read the situation correctly.  Three days into the reunion, I already knew that the relationship was not going to work out. Everything about the reunion felt wrong to me. It only lasted about a week, and then I came down with influenza, a clear sign that my body wanted nothing to do with this reunion, either. After a little over six weeks, we both agreed it had been unsuccessful. I don’t see that reunion as a failure, though: The experience very clearly taught me that reuniting with him was the wrong thing to do for me on many levels. It helped keep me free of other reunion fantasies as the divorce proceeded. 

In the past decade as my beliefs have changed and grown, I no longer believe that we only have one soul mate. I believe we have many. I also believe that romantic relationships are meant to end eventually. While some of the romantic connections we make may last for an entire lifetime, others are only meant to last for part of our lives. To separate or divorce is not a failure.  It’s simply an acknowledgement that you have completed your journey together and are ready to move on to different challenges. Many times we will unite again with those same lovers in other lives as we continue to share a love and work on issues between us that we haven’t resolved. In this life, I've had the privilege of knowing at least two men whom I was partnered with in past lives. With the one, we are only friends and have no romantic connection in this life. However, we share a soul level love between us that creates a unique and powerful relationship. From this perspective outside romantic love, we've done a great deal of healing work on our past and present lives together. I consider it an amazing blessing to have reunited with him as a friend in this life rather than as a lover.

I'm not alone in these beliefs about romantic relationships not being meant to last forever though the predominant view in our Christian society says otherwise. I recently came across an internet article entitled, “15 Real Marriage Vows I Should’ve Made on my Wedding Day.” By far, my favorite vow is the last which reads, “And if one day we realize that the most loving choice in our marriage is to part ways, to grow in different directions, with different experiences, I promise to be okay with that. While I'll never threaten divorce out of anger or fear, I promise to be honest about the health of our marriage, and to ALWAYS hold love and kindness for you in my heart.” This is a healthy view of romantic relationships that I endorse; I love how the author has phrased it so beautifully.

I still have a soul level love for my ex-husband.  I always will.  He was someone very special to me for a large part of this life.  However, he no longer needs to be in my life in that way.  Our relationship will never return to what it once was.  Even if we wanted it to, there’s no way it could because neither of us are the people we used to be.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Yesterday morning, I was greeted by a robin hopping down the sidewalk toward me. What a wonderful omen on the first day of spring!  As spirit animals, robins are seen as symbols of change, growth, release and new beginnings.  This symbolism certainly applies to the deep personal work I am doing right now.

In addition to being the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere, Friday also brought us a new moon and a solar eclipse.  The moon is also seen as a time of new beginnings and rebirth.  While they’ve brought great amounts of fear in centuries past, eclipses are now generally seen as signs of change, be it positive or negative.  All three of these celestial events (the new moon, the solar eclipse, and spring equinox) definitely have created an increase in spiritual energy over the past few days.  I know of many women who had a difficulty sleeping because of all that energy!

In my own life, the equinoxes and solstices are almost always powerful days of change and growth for me.  I can pretty consistently expect something major to happen for me on or around those days.  This spring was no different.  I’ve spent the past month working on the deep and dastardly spiritual root of the suffering I’ve encountered in this life.  Yesterday, that root began releasing, bringing a great deal of relief to the physical pain I endure.  I expect that I have another month’s worth of work on this issue before I am able to clear it completely, though I’m optimistically hoping it will be less time than that.

As a result, I’m going to be taking a bit of a sabbatical through the end of April, though if I am able, I will start working with clients sooner.  For now, all of this change, rebirth, and healing in my own life is taking the entirety of my metaphysical energy.  I know that this process, while very difficult on me physically, will only make me a better practitioner and person in the long run.  Blog posts in the next month will continue to be sporadic, but I will be posting as I can because the blogging I do on this site is part of my healing journey while simultaneously benefitting others.

Happy Spring!

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

In recent months, my kids and I have been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I watched a bunch of the episodes back in the 1990s in reruns, but this is the first time around for my kids.  It’s been fun seeing their reactions to the series, especially to “‘80s hair” which they love to ridicule.  For me, I’m seeing totally different things this time around than I saw twenty years ago.

In season six, many of the episodes at the beginning of the season were appealing to me for how insightful they actually are.  One episode in particular, “Realm of Fear,” deals with psychological phobias.  As a clear parody to fear of flying in our time, Lieutenant Barclay has a severe fear of transporting.  Ship’s counselor and empath Deanna Troi teaches Barclay a Betazoid relaxation technique known as plexing.  To engage in plexing, the person who is experiencing fear taps on a point on the neck behind the ear.  This point corresponds with gallbladder 12 in Chinese acupuncture; one of its uses is actually for regulating and calming the spirit.

As I watched this episode and as Troi began teaching Barclay about flexing, I immediately thought, “That’s basically EFT!”  EFT is short for Emotional Freedom Technique, and it’s an increasingly popular method of conquering psychological, emotional, and physical issues.   I've known people who have used it for releasing stored trauma, for controlling stress and anxiety, and for weight loss among many other issues.  While it is always great to learn a method like this from an experienced practitioner who is also able to assist with issues that might arise along the way, there are videos on the internet to teach it to oneself.

In EFT, which is sometimes just called “tapping,” an individual taps on a series of acupuncture points while reciting a formulaic mantra that s/he/ze adapts to the specific situation at hand.  So, for example, if I were dealing with stage fright, I would tap on the designated series of points while reciting to myself, “I deeply love and accept myself, and I am an amazing actress who feels completely comfortable on the stage.”  I would recite this mantra as I worked my way through all of the EFT tapping points.

I was first introduced to EFT about eight years ago.  To be honest, I absolutely hated it when I was introduced to it.  It made me feel awkward.  The formulaic mantra did not work for me.  Nothing about it felt right.  However, I was open to trying it because I had several friends who absolutely loved it.  Despite my efforts, it just didn’t seem like the right approach to me, so I gave up on it.  

A couple of years later, I began working with a group of chiropractors who use a different set of tapping points across the entire body without a mantra as they help process stored trauma.  They tap on the patients using the points that show up during an applied kinesiology chiropractic session.  This set of points actually rings far more true for me, and I will often notice that some of those points are the ones that hurt when I am in emotional distress.

As I developed my intuitive abilities, I began pulling up emotional traumas from this life and past lives that I needed to work through.  As the deep painful emotions came to the surface, I began tapping on my own.  I listened to my intuition, and I tapped where I was being told.  Most of the points are the ones that the chiropractors I see use, some are EFT points, but others are acupuncture points that aren't commonly used for processing emotional pain.  They are ones that I need to use, though.  I then formulate my own mantra that works for me for that particular situation.  For example, sometimes the mantra is, “The past is the past; I am safe now.”  Other times it might be, “I am alive and healthy.”  Whatever the necessary mantra is, it quickly comes to mind for me and I am certain it is what I need to work through that issue.  On my own, I have used tapping to help clear various stored traumas.  I couldn’t imagine not having that skill to help me in my healing.

As I began talking to my youngest child after we watched the show, I told him that plexing was a version of a technique that therapists use to help people with stress.  His response was, “That’s real?”  It was a surprise to him that there a similar successful method for handling stress; he had assumed it was totally science fiction.  Plexing may be a science fiction, but EFT is definitely not.  It helps many people to release stored emotions in their bodies and to find a greater peace than talk therapy alone can provide.  If you are searching for a new therapist or life coach, I highly recommend working with one who uses EFT or one of the many other techniques out there for processing the traumas that might be holding you back.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

(I received a complimentary copy of this work from Hay House via NetGalley.  The opinions here are my own and are not influenced by anyone.)

I’m a fan of many of the Hay House authors, so seeing that publishing house associated with a new book induces me to try an author I might not have read otherwise.  In most cases, I’m pleased with the selections I read from Hay House.  This was not one of those cases.

In Love Never Dies: How to Reconnect and Make Peace with the Deceased, Jamie Turndorf, Ph.D., explores her newfound connection to the spirit world after the death of her husband, former Jesuit priest Emile Jean Pin.  As a former atheist, this new world of spirituality is an adventure for Turndorf, one she approaches with the blind enthusiasm of a young child after she conquers her initial misgivings.  After her husband’s unexpected death from a reaction to a bee string, Turndorf is surprised to discover her connection to her beloved Jean continues through their deep spiritual love for each other.  She writes that together they have a ministry to help others in processing death and connecting to those in the afterlife so that all involved may continue to grow and heal.

Love Never Dies does have a few good qualities.  It is simply written making it accessible to the popular masses.  The book also has the potential to comfort many in the first and last sections where Turndorf describes her experiences and the experiences of her clients as they reconnect with their deceased love ones.  The book brings up an incredibly large number of questions for a book group to discuss around life, love, healing and death.

From there, however, the book simply falls apart.  It’s repetitive and poorly edited starting with the weak rhyming poetry at the beginning of each chapter.  Turndorf proudly declares that she hadn’t checked out the “competition” before writing her book making it an all original work.  While there are merits to an untainted narrative, those merits are outweighed by the negatives in this book.  Turndorf’s lack of vocabulary to discuss concepts such as synchronicity weakens her arguments and presentation immensely.  The result is a book that feels like an amateur falsely pretending to be a professional.

Turndorf also is blinded by her own narrow experiences regarding the metaphysical world.  She only sees what she wants to see and doesn’t consider that there are possibilities beyond the definitive answers she purports to reach.  For example, Turndorf declares that demons or negative spirit entities might exist though she’s doubtful about it.  She thinks that if negative spiritual beings do exist, Jean protects her from them always.  Any experienced psychic, intuitive or medium who has worked extensively with the metaphysical will cringe at this naïve view:  In his Hay House publication Infinite Quest: Develop Your Psychic Intuition to Take Charge of Your Life, John Edward speaks extensively on the importance of spiritual protection when one is working with the other side.  Turndorf’s inexperience becomes dangerous as she guides readers into murky waters without life jackets.

Furthermore, Turndorf blindly believes that all the departed are willing to work on their faults and help their living loved ones heal.  This, too, is a declaration of an inexperienced practitioner who is, in my words, blinded by the white light.  Other gifted mediums such as me are able to encounter spirits in all their essence, seeing their soul level faults which do not miraculously heal upon entry to the afterlife.  Many souls choose not to work on their own healing in the afterlife, no differently than their course here on earth.  In those cases, Turndorf’s advice risks connecting hurting individuals with souls who will continue to emotionally and spiritual abuse them from the other side.  This is not only ignorant, but it’s dangerous and is the last thing a psychologist should want for clients.

Even on a much simpler and less dangerous level, Turndoff offers bad advice to those wanting to begin meditation as a means to connecting with departed souls.  Setting up beginners with the task of meditating for many hours is going to defeat many people before they even get out of the starting gate.  It’s far better for beginners to slowly introduce themselves to meditation to reduce the risk of perceived failure and to encourage successful future experiences which may eventually be longer.

Turndorf’s faulty logic is so convoluted at times that it is difficult to follow.  Throughout Love Never Dies, she contradicts herself on larger philosophical issues.  Turndorf presents the concept that things that happen more than three times are a scientifically valid result. Unfortunately, she fails to recognize that even if something occurs three times, it’s still possible to misinterpret information about those results.  Throughout the book, I feel she often misinterprets her experiences because of her lack of experience and narrow-minded views.  For example, Turndorf declares many times that we avoid loving fully because losing a loved one is so painful.  However, there are other possibilities for why we might restrain our love that she never even considers.  It’s possible that we don’t love fully because we don’t know how to.  It’s also possible that we don’t love fully because we don’t believe we deserve love.

This narrow perspective continues as Turndorf obsesses over her theories that she is metaphysically gifted because of her premature birth and three month NICU stay away from her mother.  She writes about high fevers and illness predisposing people to being able to being open to spiritual contact, yet she fails to examine the role of her own experiences with Lyme Disease in regards to her metaphysical experiences.  As a practitioner who has had Lyme and who works with many others who have Lyme, I would argue that the vast majority of people who deal with chronic or late disseminated Lyme Disease are those who are metaphysically gifted.  A little research outside of her own bubble would help Turndorf to see these other possibilities. 

As the book progresses, I found Turndorf’s words to her clients and to her readers to be cruel and potentially damaging.  I cringed as Turndorf relates how she said to a newly bereaved parent that “she could view this recent loss as a gift from the spirit.”  While this lesson is true on some levels, the way she phrased this to a parent who has recently lost a baby is heartless at best. 

Furthermore, comparing our pain to others’ is not beneficial.  Telling ourselves “it could be worse” demeans the pain we are experiencing.  Turndorf writes, “When we see someone in pain, we’re being invited to stop feeling sorry for ourselves and give thanks for the problems we have that pale in comparison.  Another person’s difficulty reminds us that we could have it so much worse.”  What she fails to contemplate is that some of her readers (including me in my not so distant past) will fall into that category of having things “so much worse.”  Having been told many times by others that they could look at my life and realize how good they actually have it, I can speak from experience that such an attitude does not help the person undergoing the trials.  The heartless response simply makes their pain increase.

If all of these issues aren’t enough, I found Turndorf’s basic psychological advice to be weak at best.  After 30 years’ experience in practice, she is not a novice.  She earned her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from California Coast University in 1994.  She is a nationally known psychologist using the pseudonym “Dr. Love.”  However, her personal relationship with Jean raised many flags for me as a reader and life coach, beginning with the fact that she was 21 and he was 58 when it began.  Turndorf claims that she and Jean had a perfect spiritual love, yet the aspects of their relationship she shares demonstrate a couple that struggled to love each other in their earthly forms.  She asserts that Jean was “one of the world’s true mystics” but he didn’t know he could be so close to her in spirit form.  This doesn’t build his credibility or hers.  Even Googling her late husband (who died in 2006, after the advent of the internet) does not turn up the abundance of hits one would expect from a man whom she claims was a one of the 50 most holy people to have lived in the eyes of the Dalai Lama.  As she describes their relationship after he “left his body,” Turndorf sees her late husband’s love as fulfilling her and becoming her own love.  Almost all psychologists would argue that seeking to use another’s love as a replacement for self-love is not a healthy approach in the long term.

Finally, in one of the experiences at the end of the book, she details of a client named “Mo.”  Turndorf uses guilt to trick Mo into working with her deceased husband.  This woman clearly has spent a lifetime being manipulated by others who prey on her overactive sense of guilt.  A healthier treatment option might have been to work with Mo to recognize her issues around guilt until she regained the self-esteem necessary to work on herself out of self-love.  The ends did not justify the means in this treatment.

Turndorf seems to think grieving is the only reason people need to connect to Spirit and those on the other side.  As she presents the issues in Love Never Dies, she fails to see how other tragedies can be more devastating and more impactful that grief.  Her narrow-minded and uneducated views result in a book that will help facilitate discussion about important topics but which ultimately may give some very bad advice to vulnerable readers.

(Attached below is a PDF of questions that could be used for book group discussions.  Feel free to alter or edit these questions for your own personal use in a group discussion or journaling.)

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

In this lifetime, no, I do not identify as a witch.  I have many friends who identify as witches, though.

But what is a witch anyway?  Despite some of the images in our mainstream culture, a witch is not a negative old woman who might eat small children for fun.  A witch is often a woman who often practices Wicca, an earth-based religion.  There are many other women who identify as witches but who are not active Wiccans.  Part of being a witch for those women is doing spells.  They use herbs, crystals, metals, elementals, and other items to create energetic transformations.  While I do work with herbs and crystals, I do not use them to create spells.  I work with energy in different ways.  It’s a fine line of difference, but I just don’t identify with spells I read nor do I really identify with Wicca though my spiritual beliefs are very earth centered.

I have seen a past life which I lived as a witch.  That life occurred hundreds of years ago in coastal southeastern Ireland.  My father died when I was six, and as an unprotected and impoverished innocent girl, I fell victim to the sexual abuse of the parish priest.  I didn’t dare tell my older brothers what the priest was doing to me for fear that they might kill him in revenge.  However, the damage that the loss of my beloved father and the sexual abuse caused was great.  My bitterness against the Catholic Church grew.  I ended up becoming a hermit, retreating from the people of the village into a nearby forest.  I was a practicing witch who functioned much like a medicine woman.  Eventually some of the villagers felt I was a bad example to the children.  I was captured, tortured with a pitchfork which punctured my diaphragm, and then burned at the stake.  It was a horrific way to end that life. 

© 2015 Green Heart Guidance

When I awoke from my nap this afternoon, I was in that space between this world and the other one.  The place where I can hear and see things that aren't totally on this plane of existence.  It's the place where my visions happen.  It often occurs as I enter or leave the world of sleep as the veil is thin then, but it definitely is not dreaming.  It's a totally different sensation and experience.

Today, I awoke to screams and cries.  I couldn't tell if it was a battlefield after the war or a natural disaster or some sort of riot.  It was filled with pain and anger and suffering.  It was not a pleasant sound to hear.  I couldn't see any kind of visual.  It was all aural.  I questioned if it had anything to do with the past life regression I experienced today to the 4th century CE in Greece.  I got no further information to lead me to believe it had anything to do with that.  The screams just continued.  And so I got up, disturbed by what I experienced.

It's only now dawning on me and concerning me that it might have been a premonition of the Ferguson events tonight.  I grew up in a far different suburban area of St. Louis, and it pains me to see this all happening.  I am now praying for the peace and safety of all those in Ferguson, the surrounding areas, and far beyond as this decision is issued this evening.  If you are also of the praying mindset, consider offering a similar prayer for those involved.

*The pink water lily flower essence "helps unburden our hearts of their deepest aches and sorrows.... Pink Water Lily anchors us to the vibration of love no matter what emotional events rock our world.  This one works so softly and deeply that it feels like a prayer of peace moving through our bodies."

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

Every day is a surprise. There are confirmations of an interconnectivity and synchronicity which inspire, titillate and confirm the inherent comedy of the universe.  ~Billy Zane

We do not create our destiny; we participate in its unfolding.  Synchronicity works as a catalyst toward the working out of that destiny.  ~David Richo

There's no such thing as coincidence, I say. It's synchronicity.  ~Raven Kaldera

What is synchronicity? I would describe it as the love child of "it's meant to be" and "what a coincidence."  Synchronicity is based on the belief that things are orchestrated by a higher power in order for things to happen in a meaningful form.  Things that seem coincidental are actually happening for a deeper purpose.

Synchronicity can play out on a relatively low level.  You and a friend might both show up at a movie theater wearing the same dancing friendly outfit because at the last minute you both independently decided that you wanted to change plans from going to the movies to going dancing.  You might be sitting in a coffee shop and look over to notice the person at the next table has the same casual reading that isn't a recent best-seller.  In such a case, you're probably meant to meet and talk to that person for whatever larger reason.  Perhaps it's your new best friend.

Sometimes synchronicity plays out in a much bigger way.  After my youngest was born, I asked my doula to find me a massage therapist who would do outcall because my body was in a lot of pain.  The woman she sent was nice, and I enjoyed the massage.  Many months later, I saw the massage therapist again at a presentation I was giving on infant loss.  Not long after that, I responded to an ad on Craigslist, and the massage therapist turned out to be the poster.  Then her daughter ended up in the same kindergarten class as my daughter at a charter school.  At that point, I surrendered to the Universe and accepted that this woman and I were meant to be friends.  As we got to know each other, we discovered that had I gone to public high school instead of private, we would have graduated from the same high school in the same year in another state!  Clearly our paths were meant to cross in this life for a higher purpose.

In another instance of paths trying to cross multiple times, I used to love a certain road in the town where my grandparents lived.  When we would visit at Christmas time, I used to love to drive on that road but for no particular reason.  It's just a typical suburban road with homes along it.  I later learned that my boyfriend and eventual husband lived along that road at that time!  Later, as a freshman in high school, I went to an educational summer camp.  My parents decided I would be taking physics though I really wanted to take the pottery class.  It turns out my eventual husband was in that pottery class.  We finally managed to actually cross paths at a youth group at his high school that same fall.

Even Google somehow seems to be tied into higher powers' control of synchronicity, or maybe Google has taken over the higher powers.  Either could make sense!  ;)  During a personal message I received a while ago, I saw a man who looked like John Astin driving a 1950s convertible car on a rural British road.  I did quite a bit of Googling on John Astin, but I couldn't find anything that made any sense with regard to this message.  A few days later, I typed "William Clark" plus a few other search terms into Google as I worked on another part of the message.  One of the first hits was William Clark Gable, known to most of us as the actor Clark Gable.  As I looked at his picture, suddenly everything in the message made sense.  I'd mistaken Clark Gable for John Astin!  Sometimes translating messages is a little too much like playing Pictionary with the other side.  However, I'm grateful for when Google helps me to figure things out.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

As I’ve jokingly told friends, “Some people sleep with men.  I sleep with rocks.”  When my kids help me change the sheets on my bed (since my mobility often limits my ability to do it on my own), my daughter always knows to ask, “How many rocks are there hidden in the sheets?”  The usual answer is that I’m not sure.  It’s always an adventure emptying out the bed to see what I’ve been stashing away in there like a squirrel over the previous week or two.

All jokes aside, one of the primary ways I use crystals is to change my metaphysical energy while I’m sleeping.  I fall asleep with rocks near my feet, near my pillow, in my hands, or alongside my body.  It can be less than pleasant to wake up during the night to a jagged object attacking you, but aside from that minor drawback, crystals can work amazing changes in one’s metaphysical energy during sleep.  If you subscribe to the school of thought that I do, crystals raise one’s vibrations and help change the way one’s body and soul interact with the world.

I’ve had several deep spiritual experiences falling asleep with crystals in my hands, especially during my afternoon naps.  Early in my work with crystals, I had gone to Nature’s Treasures during one of their sales.  I found myself standing in front of one of the clearance tables for a third time, and even my daughter noticed that I couldn’t stay away from the purple fluorite that was there.  It was $3, so I figured, “What the heck” and bought it.   About three weeks later, the fluorite seemed to be calling to me as I was going to bed, so I grabbed it and fell asleep with it in my hand. 

Two hours later, I awoke to a violent jolt as something flew out from my body.  When I looked up, and I saw an entity leaving my body.  It appeared to me like a digitized bat-like creature, but as my mentor has taught me, our minds don’t really know how to process evil when they see it.  So the bat was probably the best approximation of what my mind could do with something it was seeing outside its normal view. 

That happened on a Tuesday afternoon.  On Thursday morning, I went to see one of my healers.  I told him, “I’ve spent the past 36 hours thinking about this, and I don’t think this could have happened, but here’s what I experienced.”  His response?  “That happened.”  And it did.  It was my first experience with seeing something on another level of existence, but not my last.

On a different occasion, I fell asleep with a piece of Atlantisite (pictured above) in my hand.  I was hoping to get some insight on time I spent on Atlantis in past lives.  However, what I ended up seeing was a past life with a friend of mine in Wyoming hundreds of years ago.  I awoke from my nap hearing Native American chanting and drumming in my room.  I couldn’t understand why the neighbor was listening to that music so loudly until I finally figured out that the neighbor wasn’t the source of the music.  I allowed myself to receive information at that point, and I saw the first of three past lives I’ve seen so far that involve this friend.  In this particular message, I also got some information on his current life health issues.  I sent him a text about it, and he wanted more information, so I did another session that day to gain further insight.  In turn, these past life experiences have led to some intense and powerful mutual healing sessions with that friend.

If you are considering working with crystals at any point, I highly recommend sleeping with them in the bed with you.  As I’ve found out time and again, it can create a life-changing experience.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

(Forewarning: This is a long post!)

After my daughter Rebecca’s recent birthday and death day, a relatively new friend sent me a message asking, “I believe every person has a reason for being - if you also believe thusly, have you discerned what Rebecca's purpose in her much too short life was?”

First of all, I would like to acknowledge how beautifully this question is phrased.  This friend is a spiritual adviser and has worked with people of many faiths as they are dying.  She recognizes that her beliefs are not the beliefs of everyone, and her question left room for me to disagree with her.  It turns out that I do agree with her:  I believe that every life, no matter how short, impacts the world in some way.

Second, I want to point out that this is not a question that anyone should ask a recently bereaved parent.  It’s been 15 years since my daughter died, and this friend knows that I am willing to talk openly about my daughter’s death.  That greatly changes the situation.  In the situation of a stillbirth or neonatal loss, though, a recently bereaved parent is more likely to be in a stage where they can’t see what purpose their child’s life and death has served. They are surrounded by pain, grief, anger, depression, and many other dark feelings.  They may feel they were cheated out of the future they had envisioned.  To ask them what purpose their child’s life served will feel insulting and possibly amplify their pain.  If they bring up the topic, it’s certainly appropriate to talk to them about it, but until they have healed some of their wounds, they may not be ready to move on to this stage of understanding.

So what purpose did Rebecca’s life serve?  I think that there are many answers to that on many levels. One of the first things that came from Rebecca’s death was that my ex-husband and I established a scholarship in her memory.  We used the memorial donations from friends and family towards this scholarship, plus we put in a large amount of our own money over five years.  The Motorola Foundation matched our donations as well.  This is something we never would have done if it hadn’t been for Rebecca.  Now each year we get the joy of seeing the scholarship reward someone who devotes time and service to the Marching Owl Band (aka the MOB) at Rice University.  The annual report on the scholarship often brings me to tears, but they are good tears!

One of Rebecca’s other gifts was to her siblings who were born after her.  I had planned to breastfeed Rebecca, but I wasn’t very passionate about it.  I knew it was best for the baby, best for mama, cheapest, etc.  However, when I was holding Rebecca’s dead body in my arms, I was hit with the most overwhelming urge to nurse her.  I knew logically that I couldn’t nurse her, but the hormonal urge was amazing.  That response drove my dedication for breastfeeding my subsequent children.  I had a very rough start with nursing my twins due to their slightly early arrival (36 weeks 5 days) and rampant thrush which impacted my supply, but I was determined to breastfeed them.  Eventually we succeeded and nursed until they were almost 18 months old.  If it weren’t for that experience with Rebecca, I probably would have given up as so many overwhelmed and undersupported mothers do.

As part of my breastfeeding devotion, I discretely nursed all my subsequent children in public.  It was something I never questioned that I was going to do with my twins since I knew if I left society while breastfeeding them, I’d pretty much never see other people for many months.  This actually triggered a chain reaction.  My friends, who hadn’t publicly nursed their first children, realized that if I could discretely and comfortably nurse my babies in public, they could do the same with their younger babies.  I am sure these women’s change in their stances on breastfeeding in public helped other women feel more comfortable, too.  I see all of that change as having been instigated by my experience with wanting to nurse Rebecca so desperately.

On a much deeper level, Rebecca’s death taught me a level of compassion and understanding that I would never had known had I not lost her.  While I had lost family members and friends prior to Rebecca’s death, the death of a child is incomparable.  Only a few years after Rebecca’s death, I began speaking publicly to help health care providers, especially those in the natural childbirth community, have better resources for dealing with infant loss.  Through feedback I received from those who heard my presentations, I know I made an impact in the lives of others who subsequently lost babies.  My e-mail address and phone number were circulated for a while in the midwifery community of Austin, so I would periodically get messages or calls from women who had lost a baby and who needed to talk to someone who truly understood.  This in turn has led to the life coaching work I do with bereaved families.

On a metaphysical level, Rebecca’s spirit periodically stayed near me for almost four years after her death.  At the time, I didn’t really believe in such things, but I knew what I was experiencing.  I didn’t discuss it with anyone because I didn't think anyone would believe me.  I unfortunately didn’t know that I could interact with her, but I was aware when she was around me.  She was the first departed soul I know I encountered and experienced.  After her youngest sibling was born, I believe her spirit moved on to whatever her next mission is.

I believe in reincarnation though I respect that others don’t.  I think that my experience with Rebecca in this life ties to my most recent past life in the 1920s-1940s wherein I had both a late miscarriage (four or five months gestation) and an abortion (not my husband’s child).  I have also seen another male life of mine hundreds of years ago wherein I lost a child in battle; that loss greatly shifted my soul’s beliefs and actions in this world.  Somehow I think that my losing Rebecca in this life was to help me process those previous losses in a way I did not or could not in the previous lives.  I can’t be certain of this, but it rings as truth for me.

One other meaning for Rebecca’s short life came up for me in recent months that was deeply profound for me.  In a healing session, I learned that Rebecca’s soul also needed the experience of coming into this world and leaving it so quickly.  She was not happy about her quick departure, but it served some purpose in her soul’s growth.  This isn’t all just about me and my loss of her!  I still haven’t fully understood what that purpose might have been for her soul, but I know that she too gained something from the painful experience.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance