One of the many roles I have in my practice is coaching other coaches. I serve a role as their first practice client. I play a role where I go in and out of character...meaning that I ask them questions to which I already know the answer...but which I also know a first time client will typically ask. I also give them as much of myself as I can as a real client.

When they work on beliefs with me, I give them a real belief to work on. I do this for two reasons.

First I want them to be able to feel the joy of really helping someone have a realization about something and secondly, so I can continue to have those realizations and as a result continue to grow.

Last week, I gave a client a belief that was one of my deepest Core Negative Beliefs about myself, "I am not worthy." The coach ran the belief on me and during the course of her doing this, I re-discovered a well of emotion that nearly overwhelmed me in session.

Because I knew on an intellectual level that I could not just lose it in session with her and because we were near the end of our session anyway, I wrapped things up, gave her feedback and then hung up.

I sat there for a few moments and allowed these memories to flood my mind. As I have posted before, many years ago I laid in an ICU bed having just been given a pretty dire diagnosis by their Chief Internist. He told me that he saw three outcomes for me...that I might not live, that I might lose my left leg at mid-thigh or that I may never walk again.

I was in the Navy at the time and had called home to let them know what was happening to me.

My parents had divorced when I was two and so I had to call both my mom and my dad. Both told me that they couldn't afford to come and see me.

I tried to explain how serious it was, but again I was told by both that they couldn't come.

When the doctor walked into my room later, he asked me if my parents were coming. I just shook my head. He said, "Did you explain to them that you may not live? Did you tell them what I told you about your options?"

I nodded yes and as he stared at me in disbelief, I felt all of the abandonment and sadness in my life rushing back over me.

I remember thinking, "I don't want to be here any more. This hurts too much."

I was hooked up to a variety of monitors and did not feel like I could express what I was feeling inside. I also had long ago stopped giving myself permission to cry about anything anyway, so as I had done all of my life, I just swallowed all of those feelings.

In doing so, it was simply too much for me.

I felt like I didn't matter to anyone and that I didn't belong here any longer. I know that my fever went up that night and I was told that I almost died. I was unresponsive to whatever they tried to do with me.

At some point the next day, I awoke. The feeling of dread and sorrow had left me and I woke up with a new sense of purpose. I felt like since I woke up, I must still be here for a reason.

Yet last week, all of those buried emotions came rushing back. I felt once again the tremendous sadness of how I felt not only in that bed, but of all the times I had felt abandoned in my life. The emotions were so great, I could barely function and I slipped into a depression.

Even with all of the tools I have at my disposal, I could not shake how I felt. That lasted for three days until finally, instead of replaying the events in my mind and continuing to think all of those painful thoughts...I just let myself FEEL it.

I closed my eyes and scanned my body with my awareness. I found pockets of pain in different areas of my body and I started breathing into each one. As I did, the pain would lessen some. It helped, but it was not enough to really shake me out of this.

I prayed, asked God for an answer and then went back to my meditation. In a meditation last night just before I went to bed, God gave me a different method. I was reminded that "no two things can occupy the same space at the same time."

So what I realized is that feelings of sadness and hurt occupied space within me and if I wanted to change that, I had to allow Love into those places.

I imagined myself surrounded by the Light and Love of God. Then I saw myself taking in a breath and seeing this Light come within me. In seeing this, I saw the Light that was already within me and then watched that light start to grow. I felt for those areas that still felt painful and sent light to those areas. I felt myself start to Love those areas...to feel Love there.

I imagined myself in that hospital bed and instead of seeing myself as alone, I imagined myself surrounded by angels.

I took myself back to the other painful areas in my life and saw my guardian angel always there with me and suddenly I felt comforted.

I realized that what I really needed in all of those situations wasn't necessarily a parent's touch or presence. What I needed was to feel safe...and loved.

I realized that my parents gave me what they had to give and while I may never understand the reason that they could not come and see me while I was in that hospital, I realized there was a greater reason for me.

Perhaps if they had, I would have continued to depend on them for my feelings of safety and security. By them not showing up, I started a path to seek it elsewhere. I started to look to God to provide what I needed.

Over the years, I had allowed little bits of God within me...as much as I felt I deserved. But in unearthing this belief, I realized that I deserved so much more than I had ever allowed.

I realized I deserved Love and that God had always been with me in each of my darkest moments.

In learning to turn to God in my "dark night of the soul," I offer hope to others.

There is safety and security waiting for you. There is the Love you seek waiting for you.

But I have learned that God will not choose it for me. He allows me to make that choice for myself.

I am still allowing God into these dark areas that I have kept hidden away for so long. Fortunately, I also have tools that I am using to help me create different thoughts and beliefs to replace the ones that no longer work for me.

But in what I learned this week, I offer hope to those of you who may be struggling with depression. There is Hope and you do not have to be on a pill for the rest of your lives.

You can learn to replace your sadness with Peace and your pain with Love.

For as I have learned this week. Love truly does heal ALL.

Namaste

Jeff

Many people in this country have been going through a transition in the past few years. Companies that once provided steady employment have transferred jobs to other countries to take advantage of cheap labor.

This happened to me last year and to many of my colleagues. Most of us picked a career when we were in our early 20's and we had simply followed the path of what we thought we were "supposed" to do.

Conventional wisdom from generations past told us to get a "good job and work hard until you can retire." Our parents and / or grandparents lived through the Great Depression and the lessons they learned from that experience were passed down to subsequent generations.

The main theme was simply to get a job and hang on to it. Find a career that will support your family...but little in the way of living your dream. Somehow this period appeared to dampen the "pursuit of happiness" for a generation and this dampening effect flowed out to other generations like the ripples on a pond.

In my experience with other cultures, parents prod their children towards professional careers. While the parents intentions are honorable, what is lost is what inherent talents and abilities the child has. What is overlooked is what the child feels like their life's calling is. I say overlooked, but it's really more like buried because many people felt like they never had the opportunity to make that choice.

So when a career suddenly vanishes that they have been working towards for half of their life, it can be devastating. "What do I do now?"

Many pick up where they left off. They know of no other way to be, so they go out and find another job in the field they have been trained for and go back to living a life in which they are not entirely comfortable. It is comfortable to be making steady money again, but uncomfortable because they now feel the tug within them perhaps for the first time in their life.

They know they had an opportunity to make a change, but the idea of that change was so new, so frightening that they just couldn't get past their worries as to how it could possibly work.

Others make a different choice. They feel that tug within their hearts and while they appreciate the purpose their old job served in their life, they now look out at the world and ask, "How can I serve?"

They recognize that they have inherent unique talents and abilities that lie virtually untapped within them. They recognize that for much of their lives, they felt like they have been living a lie.

They have always done everything that they thought they were supposed to do and now...NOW they have a chance to start over.

But do they have the courage to do it? How will it work out? How will the bills get paid? Will my marriage survive?

All of these are unknowns and the ego mind simply does not accept unknowns. And if a person is firmly identified with their ego mind, the possibilities of a new life just don't seem realistic.

So they meekly look out at the world and ask..."how can I serve?"

For even some of these, their minds tells them to follow the only path they know. They go back to what their mind knows and ignore the calling within their heart.

But for a small and growing percentage of people, this is no longer acceptable. They do not know how it will work. They just know it will.

Instead of looking out at the world, they look inwards to the seat of their very soul and ask "How may I serve?"

If they have never allowed themselves to explore their innate talents and abilities, they use every method they can find to investigate this. They even turn to some unconventional sources like Astrology or Numerology...anything to move beyond what their mind is telling them to new possibilities.

They pray for guidance and meditate on having peace and fulfillment in their lives.

And if they believe it enough to actually start following the path of their heart, stepping stones start appearing before them. They may never see beyond the next few steps, but those steps are there.

They may find themselves stopping occasionally because their ego mind is screaming, "I CAN"T SEE THE END OF THIS PATH! WE NEED TO STOP RIGHT HERE!"

But they find that they cannot stop for long because the pull in their hearts has grown stronger and that pull eventually becomes stronger than their fear.

They have asked the question to their soul...to God and to God in everyone else, "How may I serve?"...and the unseen force that pulls them forward is their answer manifesting.

If you or someone you know have come to this crossroads in your life and you feel that tug within you, but do not understand how to follow it, just be aware that there are many Spiritual, Life and Business coaches who can help you with that decision.

A good coach will not make that decision for you or even guide you to one path or another. They will simply help you to see options that you have not been aware of...and help you work through your fears so that you can make the best choice for your life.

I myself have come to that crossroads in my life. For me, I knew that time was coming and I had already been following my heart in another direction. When that time came, it was still painful but I did not spent much time looking backwards at the door that had closed. I turned my eyes forward to the short path that now lay before me.

I admit I still have days where my mind freaks out that I can only see about two or three steps in front of me...and I wonder if I should just follow that other path.

I can easily look down that other path and know exactly how that will go and while that feels comfortable and safe...there is also a certain amount of boredom that comes with it...because I know how that path is going to go.

My heart yearns for adventure, big risks and the resulting big rewards. Some of these rewards may be financial...may be recognition...or they simply may be the fulfillment of the answer to the question of "How may I serve?"

Namaste

Jeffrey L. Scholl

© 2008. All rights reserved

Jeff Scholl is a Certified Spiritual Life Coach through Holistic Learning Centers and a Board Certified Holistic Health Practitioner through the American Association of Drugless Practitioners.

He graduated from Southern Illinois University with honors in 1994 receiving a Bachelor of Science in Electronic Management. Jeff is also an Honorably discharged U.S. Navy veteran serving from 1983-1992.

He started his career in Spiritual Life Coaching in 2005 after a 22 year professional career in the military, electronics and telecommunications fields. Jeff spent over 11 years with a Fortune 500 company as a Senior Quality Engineer and Quality Manager before leaving to become a full time Spiritual Life Coach. He is married and lives in Fort Worth, Texas with his beautiful wife Pratima who is also a Spiritual Life Coach.

As I wrote about earlier, one of the first books I started with was Louise Hay's "You Can Heal Your Life." Within this book is a sort of diagnostic encyclopedia for many common and even uncommon dis-eases.

What it had told me many years ago was that blood clots were the result of closing down the flow of joy within me...and I knew that to be true. I just didn't know how to resolve that. It didn't matter how positive I tried to think or how much I concentrated on feeling love and joy, my mind would keep returning back to the same pessimistic pattern of thinking as before.

Now that was until I learned how to do much of what I have talked about in this book. It was before I started validating (giving value) to my feelings about what had happened to me as a child. It was before I had remembered even how to feel those feelings. It was before I learned the power of Forgiveness and how amazing re-parenting my inner child could be.

Until I learned all of that, those thoughts were kind of trapped within me...bound by the very energy I wanted to change.

After reading some of the Abraham-Hicks books such as "Ask And It Is Given" and "The Art of Allowing," I started to realize that it wasn't just what I was thinking that was my problem. It was what I was feeling about what I was thinking that prevented me from healing.

The problem I had was that every time I started to feel, my default program told me that it wasn't safe to feel what I was feeling or express that, so my mind shut off the feelings and either repressed, denied or avoided them.

But then I learned in Self-Mastery that feelings are a natural part of life. I learned that "processing healthy feelings can be as natural as processing healthy food. They are designed to be ingested, digested, processed and eliminated."

But since I was taking in experiences that caused me to feel, but never actually feeling those feelings, I was unconsciously sabotaging the natural process of feeling my feelings.

As I started to apply the exercises I learned in Self-Mastery, I started having what was essentially "emotional bowel movements."

Sometimes what that meant was that I cried for several minutes if something touched my heart. Sometimes it meant that I suddenly felt my feelings very intensely...and early on when that happened, it was scary as hell.

But over time, as my mind started to acclimate to feeling my feelings, a shift started to happen. Instead of thinking about my feelings first, I started to feel my way through my experiences first.

By doing so, I realized how much energy had been trapped within me for so long...and I realized that because most of that energy was negatively charged, it had been primarily that which had caused the various ailments in my body that the doctors could not figure out.

I started to realize that my reality was constantly mirroring back to me a reflection of the negative energy I still carried within me. So for example, if I kept having relationships that disappointed me, it was not that I just needed to find the right woman. It was that I needed to find the disappointment I carried within me and replace that with hope and optimism.

If I was experiencing pain, embarrassment and shame about my body, I found that no matter how hard I tried, I could not heal it or lose the weight that I was seeking. But once I let go of the feelings that were holding me back, I found that foods that I once enjoyed and contributed to my weight issues just no longer appealed to me. I found that if I went too long without exercising, I could feel the sluggishness within my body and I wanted to exercise. It wasn't about looking in the mirror and having my mind tell me what I should be doing. It was about what I was now motivated to do.

In "You Can Heal Your Life," Louise Hay documents how she was once told that she had terminal cancer and through the application of these principles, the cancer went into remission and has never returned.

I recently read a similar account by Brandon Bays called "The Journey." For anyone that is struggling with a physical dis-ease that the doctors cannot effectively treat or explain how this happened, I highly encourage you to read her book. She has some great exercises to use that you can have someone coach you through.

I use her techniques in my own practice occasionally. It's all essentially the same idea...just slightly different applications, but that difference can be huge for some people who have not found healing elsewhere.

I often wonder if almost all dis-ease is related to our emotional energy repressions and how much different our healthcare system would be if practitioners employed traditional Western medicine with emotional energy medicine. Each certainly have their place and we still have a long way to go.

I hope that someone reading this can benefit from what I have learned or knows someone that can benefit.

For anyone seeking a coach who understands the miracles of the physical / emotional healing phenomenon, have them contact me.

Namaste

Jeffrey L. Scholl

© 2008. All rights reserved

www.learningtoflow.com

Jeff Scholl is a Certified Spiritual Life Coach through Holistic Learning Centers and a Board Certified Holistic Health Practitioner through the American Association of Drugless Practitioners.

He graduated from Southern Illinois University with honors in 1994 receiving a Bachelor of Science in Electronic Management. Jeff is also an Honorably discharged U.S. Navy veteran serving from 1983-1992.

He started his career in Spiritual Life Coaching in 2005 after a 22 year professional career in the military, electronics and telecommunications fields. Jeff spent over 11 years with a Fortune 500 company as a Senior Quality Engineer and Quality Manager before leaving to become a full time Spiritual Life Coach. He is married and lives in Fort Worth, Texas with his beautiful wife Pratima who is also a Spiritual Life Coach.