This morning I woke up early to get a jump on reading my book while my kids were still asleep. I sometimes let them sleep late on the weekends so that I have precious time alone. Don’t worry, they are healthy, productive, wonderful members of society. We all just need rest sometimes. They need the rest of sleeping in on the weekends, at least one day and I need the rest of not having to attend to anyone else’s needs for a rare few hours.

Usually, I have about fifteen books going at the same time…Currently, I have one on my books app, one on Audible, and a couple of physical books that I am reading. One of the physical is work related and one is “pleasure”. I seem to pick pleasure books that echo the line of work that I am in. Let’s play a fun game and see if you can guess my profession by the title of the book I was reading this morning, “Complex PTSD: From Striving to Thriving”. Hmmmm…Anyway, I highly recommend this book. While reading it the author, Pete Walker talks about how when people heal they get the pleasure of rediscovering who they are without their trauma. This is something that can have a whiplash effect because if you have been traumatized and you have been wrestling with that trauma most of your life then you really don’t realize that you are devoting a lot of time managing those trauma induced strategies for coping. I’ll get a teensy bit personal here and say that one of my strategies is hiding for fear of judgment or punishment. Lately, I have been noticing that this particular strategy has been a little less. Hence, I have shared my blog on social media when I only intended this for me to begin with. (I know, a preposition at the end of a sentence…move along, grammar police..nothing to see here). Do you know what my inner critic told me about sharing my love of oracle cards and writing? Buckle up, this is about to get stupid and mean. “People will think you are unprofessional”, “People will think you are some kind of witch”, “People will have insight into you that you don’t want them to have”, “Someone else does this WAY better”, “Why would tell anyone your business?”, “You may cause harm with this”. See, I told you. Stupid and unnecessarily mean. How I know that I am healing is that I did it anyway. Go me.

I heard someone say recently that you cannot be held accountable for how people perceive you. I latched onto that like a life preserver. I know that I go out of my way to be helpful and compassionate to people. Am I perfect? No way! Have I been mean or rude? Absolutely! You will never catch me advertising myself who is someone who is kind all the time, because that is completely laughable for any human being. I try my best and when I mess up I do my best to own it. I know I have people out there who think I am the problem, that I am rude or that I have attacked them. I want to issue an apology right now to anyone that I have hurt. I want you to know that I have probably taken responsibility for every conflict I have ever been in, any body language that may have seemed rude, a facial expression that might have hurt your feelings…and on and on. I own it. I’m sorry! I will remember it forever and that’s just how I roll. Let me add here that I do know that I do not bear the sole responsibility for all conflicts that are not resolved in my life. For those unresolved conflicts, I have put in boundaries, but you better believe I still carry the sadness even when I have done everything I believe I can do on my behalf to make it right. Some things just cannot be or shouldn’t be fixed without the cooperation of both parties.

Anywho…on to the card of the day. Today, I thought I would try something different. I have this really cool deck of cards called “Hack Your Nervous System” and you can find them here: http://www.briannaroseflows.com. They are not oracle cards, but they ARE really cool cards to help you with some somatic release of stress. Let’s see what shuffling them brings up!

Oh, the universe is laughing at me now! I can’t get away with ANYTHING! I shuffled, got a card and thought..meh not this one! What happened? You guessed it…I got the SAME ONE! Ha! Here it is..Voo breath..Take a deep breath, make a fog horn sound, let the word voo extend until you have used all the breath in your body and then begin again. With practice, you will feel the vibration of the sound in your stomach. Now, making sense of this about what I wrote above? Keep breathing deeply until the healing helps you feel the healing effect of what you are doing.