By Hildegard Gmeiner
Copyright © 2006 Hildegard Gmeiner
During the early nineteen nineties I faced one of the most difficult challenges of my life. I was a stay-at-home mother with three little children, yet didn’t have the energy to look after them. In fact, while visiting my parents in Germany in spring of 1992, I collapsed on a department store escalator. As it turned out, this was the beginning of an every increasing cycle of fainting spells, the cause of which could not be determined by the medical professionals.
I clearly remember one doctor telling me that the next time I would collapse it could potentially be due to a heart attack and that unfortunately, in some cases the first heart attack could be fatal.
Once I realized that the problem I was dealing with was beyond the current paradigm of allopathic medicine, I decided to do what ever it takes to figure out what made me tick and what caused me to faint all the time.
In the process of my self-explorations I discovered, I was raised in a workaholic home, was married to a workaholic, and last but not least I was a workaholic, too. The most challenging part in this process of becoming honest with self about my situation, was the fact that my way of going about my daily life, was considered to be normal by the world around me. Workaholism is unlike any other addictions, because of its very strong deniability factor.
Looking from the outside in, I was living the perfect life. I was married to the successful businessman with the six-digit income. We had three healthy young children, a house in the suburbs of Toronto, had two cars in the driveway, and we were able to travel once or twice a year. However, while on the outside all was ever so perfect, on the inside I was living a life of quiet desperation.
I was losing weight faster then I was able to regain it. I barely got any sleep, due to the demands of the three little ones, and my husbands frequent out of town travels. Most importantly, however, the emotional connection my spouse and I once had, appeared to be disappearing with every day passing.
My husband’s executive job demanded a great deal of his attention. At the time he didn’t know how to balance the demands of his work with the responsibilities of a husband and father of three young children. His understanding of being a good father was to provide well for his family financially and the rest would take care of itself.
I clearly remember the frustrating discussion we had about his lack of involvement in the boys daily life. While my spouse genuinely had good intention, it seemed as if his work was a place where he could get his fix. While an alcoholic reaches for the bottle, a workaholic get’s busy to numb an unconscious or in some cases even conscious pain of the past.
While trying to find ways to have my spouse recognise that he indeed was a workaholic and needed help, I had to admit to myself, that I was very much in denial about my very own issues about work. I had become a human ‘doing’ and had all but forgotten what it meant to “BE”.
At some point a book on workahlism had fallen of a shelf in a bookstore, right in front of my feet. I bought the book, read it, and work through my issues with the author of the book. It was during that time, when I suddenly realised that I was a workaholic and hence it was only natural behaviour for me to have married a workaholic as well.
I consider it to be the most devastating addiction, because society is currently still ignoring it and fails to recognise the impact it has on our society as a whole. I venture to say that the values and beliefs we are holding in western societies support and even encourage workaholic behaviour, which is creating great dysfunction in all facets of daily life.
After researching and studying this addiction for over fifteen years now, I believe my body was addicted to biochemical changes, which occur in the brain during the fight and flight response, the body’s self-defence mechanism. The innate survival process, is designed to provide us with large amounts of energy, while we are in life threatening situation. Once the brain is switched to the fight and flight, all regularly bodily function are temporarily suspended, until the threat is over. During the emergency many physiological changes occur. However, most importantly stored sugar deposits called Glycogen, are liquefied and rushed to the big muscles of the legs and the arms, enabling the person to physically defend self or to flee from the aggressor.
Besides that the parts of the brain, which allow us to feel empathy, compassion, and take in the big picture of life become inaccessible to us. Certain hormonal changes speed up the blood clogging mechanism, as to prevent us from excessive blood loss, when injured. One of the most profound symptoms, which led me to believe that my body was literally suck in the fight and flight biochemistry, were my continuously enlarged pupils.
At age eighteen eye clinic of the University of Heidelberg in Germany established that I had what they called an “Aidis Pupil” in my right eye. Apparently nerve, responsible for the dilation and contraction of the pupil had died, causing the pupil to be permanently dialated. After the birth of my first son in 1986, the second pupil stayed permanently enlarged. I was so very sensitive to light that I needed to wear self tinting glasses all the time.
While I wasn’t very satisfied the explanation I was given in Heidelberg, my eye doctor here in Canada, equally accepted the fact that there is nothing he could to but prescription for self tinting glasses.
Today I very much believe that my stuck pupils were very much a message, my body was sending me to become aware of the much bigger problem – workaholism.
Monday, December 4, 2006
Saturday, December 2, 2006
Consciously Creating a New Reality by letting go of Fear and embracing Love
by Hildegard Gmeiner
copyright © 2006 Hildegard Gmeiner
Are you aware of how you are creating your reality on a daily basis? For the first three decades I didn’t have a clue what made me tick and why my life was the way it was back then. At 33, the life I had once known, as a stay-at-home mom with three little boys under the age of five, fell apart. I fainted quite often, but the cause of those fainting spells couldn’t be determined, nor would the drugs prescribed, improve the situation. I saw many medical experts, who gave my issue a variety of labels, among others anorexia, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and irritable bowl syndrome, just to name a few.
I had been ignoring my inner voice for the most part, which had been telling me to write down the insights it wanted to share with me. Now the time had come to listen, because the outside world and all its experts apparently had no answers for me and there was nowhere else to turn for assistance but within. I had heard it being said before that all the answers to our life’s problems are lying deep within us. My problem was that I had to learn to calm my unruly mind long enough so I could actually hear my inner voice. Next I had to overcome my conditioning to value the opinions of others more, then what I deep inside of myself knew to be my truth. Ironically enough, life evolved in such a way that I was forced to look within and accept that truth that no one had any answers for me, but me.
Once I finally begun to listen it became quite clear that past traumas, such as abuse, mental, verbal conditioning, and misperception of reality when I was a little child, had led me come to believe the world is a very unsafe place, and I didn’t have what it takes to survive in it.
I lived in what I like to call the worldview of the fear paradigm. It seems to me that many people live in this frame of reference. Make a note of your thoughts and become aware of whether they are predominantly positive or negative. Whenever we feel guilt, shame, blame, judgement of self and/or others, are jealous, feel hate and contempt for someone, we are allowing fear to rule our heart and our lives. My personal experience has shown that all of these emotions are counterproductive and add up to ill health and a dissatisfying life on the long run.
Stuck in the mess of my own unconscious creation, I came across a book on quantum physics “The Tao of Physics” by?????? I learned from it that everything on this earth and beyond is energy. This ocean of energy is governed by natural laws, universal laws, which are active in our daily life, just that up until then I hadn’t been aware of them. I realized that we are, in fact living in a sea of wave patterns, and depending on the make-up of our personal wave pattern, do we come from fear or love, we attract painful or wonderful things, people, and situations to ourselves, regardless whether we are aware of this process or not.
When the dense energy of fear dominates our human energy field, we generally hold many self-limiting beliefs, which give rise to negative thought patterns. Hence we focus on all that potentially can go wrong, rather than fill our consciousness with thoughts about a potentially positive end result.
Reality is created by each and every one of us in a very unique way, based on the make-up of our belief system. Past negative experiences led me to believe that I didn’t have a right to have my needs met. To make matters worse, I didn’t even have conscious awareness of what my needs were, and therefore I couldn’t communicate them to others. Not surprising then that my life wasn’t very satisfying.
Before I could make the necessary changes to improve upon my life circumstances, I had to accept one hundred per cent responsibility for 33 years of unconscious creations on my part. I had to acknowledge all I had, the good, bad, and the ugly, was nobody else’s creation but my very own. After all our current reality is nothing but an accumulation of the consequences of the choices we made in the past. Taking total responsibility for all we do and create is most important, because then there is no one to blame, and which lets us unhook ever so slowly from the fear emotions of guilt, shame, and blame. Taking 100 % responsibility for my creation is a turning point at which my energetic patterns are beginning to transform away from fear to those of Love.
Once I realized that I am not just a victim of circumstance, but have a very big part in designing my life, things begun to look up for me. I realized a tiny shift in my belief system, one different thought, one word spoken differently, and take one different action a day would certainly make a positive change to improve my life, one tiny little step at a time.
Researchers have established we humans are thinking about 60 thousand thoughts a day. It is my experience that what we think about and preoccupy our minds with ultimately becomes our reality, for what we focus on expands. The quantum physicists have discovered and proven that during the early twentieth century already. Hence our currently reality, physical, emotional, and spiritual, is a result of our beliefs, thoughts, past choices and past actions. So, if you don’t like where you are at in your life, make a decision to change. After all Decisions, Determine, Destiny. Know that you, too, have the power to improve your current life circumstances. If you want to learn more about my journey, come out and join me at the Keeler Centre on September 19th. Find out why mediocrity is self-inflicted and genius is generally self-bestowed.
Hildegard is a writer, speaker, and consultant to those who are interested in raising their awareness of how to create a life, guided by the inner wisdoms of the soul, rather than being driven by societal conditioning of the left brain alone.
copyright © 2006 Hildegard Gmeiner
Are you aware of how you are creating your reality on a daily basis? For the first three decades I didn’t have a clue what made me tick and why my life was the way it was back then. At 33, the life I had once known, as a stay-at-home mom with three little boys under the age of five, fell apart. I fainted quite often, but the cause of those fainting spells couldn’t be determined, nor would the drugs prescribed, improve the situation. I saw many medical experts, who gave my issue a variety of labels, among others anorexia, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and irritable bowl syndrome, just to name a few.
I had been ignoring my inner voice for the most part, which had been telling me to write down the insights it wanted to share with me. Now the time had come to listen, because the outside world and all its experts apparently had no answers for me and there was nowhere else to turn for assistance but within. I had heard it being said before that all the answers to our life’s problems are lying deep within us. My problem was that I had to learn to calm my unruly mind long enough so I could actually hear my inner voice. Next I had to overcome my conditioning to value the opinions of others more, then what I deep inside of myself knew to be my truth. Ironically enough, life evolved in such a way that I was forced to look within and accept that truth that no one had any answers for me, but me.
Once I finally begun to listen it became quite clear that past traumas, such as abuse, mental, verbal conditioning, and misperception of reality when I was a little child, had led me come to believe the world is a very unsafe place, and I didn’t have what it takes to survive in it.
I lived in what I like to call the worldview of the fear paradigm. It seems to me that many people live in this frame of reference. Make a note of your thoughts and become aware of whether they are predominantly positive or negative. Whenever we feel guilt, shame, blame, judgement of self and/or others, are jealous, feel hate and contempt for someone, we are allowing fear to rule our heart and our lives. My personal experience has shown that all of these emotions are counterproductive and add up to ill health and a dissatisfying life on the long run.
Stuck in the mess of my own unconscious creation, I came across a book on quantum physics “The Tao of Physics” by?????? I learned from it that everything on this earth and beyond is energy. This ocean of energy is governed by natural laws, universal laws, which are active in our daily life, just that up until then I hadn’t been aware of them. I realized that we are, in fact living in a sea of wave patterns, and depending on the make-up of our personal wave pattern, do we come from fear or love, we attract painful or wonderful things, people, and situations to ourselves, regardless whether we are aware of this process or not.
When the dense energy of fear dominates our human energy field, we generally hold many self-limiting beliefs, which give rise to negative thought patterns. Hence we focus on all that potentially can go wrong, rather than fill our consciousness with thoughts about a potentially positive end result.
Reality is created by each and every one of us in a very unique way, based on the make-up of our belief system. Past negative experiences led me to believe that I didn’t have a right to have my needs met. To make matters worse, I didn’t even have conscious awareness of what my needs were, and therefore I couldn’t communicate them to others. Not surprising then that my life wasn’t very satisfying.
Before I could make the necessary changes to improve upon my life circumstances, I had to accept one hundred per cent responsibility for 33 years of unconscious creations on my part. I had to acknowledge all I had, the good, bad, and the ugly, was nobody else’s creation but my very own. After all our current reality is nothing but an accumulation of the consequences of the choices we made in the past. Taking total responsibility for all we do and create is most important, because then there is no one to blame, and which lets us unhook ever so slowly from the fear emotions of guilt, shame, and blame. Taking 100 % responsibility for my creation is a turning point at which my energetic patterns are beginning to transform away from fear to those of Love.
Once I realized that I am not just a victim of circumstance, but have a very big part in designing my life, things begun to look up for me. I realized a tiny shift in my belief system, one different thought, one word spoken differently, and take one different action a day would certainly make a positive change to improve my life, one tiny little step at a time.
Researchers have established we humans are thinking about 60 thousand thoughts a day. It is my experience that what we think about and preoccupy our minds with ultimately becomes our reality, for what we focus on expands. The quantum physicists have discovered and proven that during the early twentieth century already. Hence our currently reality, physical, emotional, and spiritual, is a result of our beliefs, thoughts, past choices and past actions. So, if you don’t like where you are at in your life, make a decision to change. After all Decisions, Determine, Destiny. Know that you, too, have the power to improve your current life circumstances. If you want to learn more about my journey, come out and join me at the Keeler Centre on September 19th. Find out why mediocrity is self-inflicted and genius is generally self-bestowed.
Hildegard is a writer, speaker, and consultant to those who are interested in raising their awareness of how to create a life, guided by the inner wisdoms of the soul, rather than being driven by societal conditioning of the left brain alone.
Friday, December 1, 2006
What Makes you Tick?
What Makes you Tick?
By Hildegard Gmeiner
© 2006 copyright Hildegard Gmeiner
For the longest time I had no clue what made me tick. When I was forced to ask myself this question, the following transpired. Decades of living an illusionary existence based on conditioned responses alone were taking its toll. What appeared to be the ideal life on the outside was one of quiet desperation on the inside. I was living in a golden cage of my own, unconscious construction, designed to maintain appearances, while my soul was struggling for my attention.
Then one day, the life I had once known collapsed like a house of cards. Everything I had once believed in, and had given me a frame of reference, dissolved. My body was severely ill. I was heartbroken and my spirit was weak.
Weighed down by self-criticism, anger, blame, and self-pity, I was stuck in a seemingly hopeless situation. My mind rushed about in circles, yet it couldn’t come up with any constructive resolutions to the issues at hand. Finally, with nowhere else to turn, I put pencil to paper. In time many new insights came to me through my journal.
There is a saying: ‘When the student is ready, the teacher will appear!’
When I eventually became humble enough to ask for guidance, my teachers appeared in a variety of shapes and sizes. They were from both the physical and the non-physical reality. They also showed up in form of books, advertisements, messages on milk cartons and transport trucks. The universe seemed to be magically trying to rub in the messages I was too stubborn to accept, until I finally got them. In time all of this brought me to higher altitudes, from which to view things. Now I was able to make different and conscious choices, giving my life a new direction.
During the shift from seeing myself as a victim of circumstance, to accepting myself as the creator of my very own reality, it became obvious that I had to detoxify my mind, as well as my body to make room for my spirit.
It was time to discard the fear-based thoughts and feelings and consciously adopt those of self-respect and self-love. During this process, however, many layers of fear based issues and traumas had to be addressed. Over time one becomes freer, healthier, and ever so much lighter.
Feelings are the tell tales of where we are at in life. Begin by taking note whether your feelings are fear based or those of love.
Guilt, shame, blame, jealously, self-criticism and judgement of others, feelings of none worthiness, or not-good-enoughness are fear-based feelings. They were all too familiar to me for the most part of my earlier years. Acceptance of self and others, empathy, compassion, and unconditional acceptance of what is, are some of the love-based feelings we can choose.
Once we are able to understand what we are feeling and why, we can then make a conscious effort to transform them. In so doing we are recalibrating our body’s energy field, enabling us to attract self-respecting people and mutually satisfying opportunities.
Once we are no longer seeing everything tinted through the victim lenses, we become open to give freely and receive easily. Then life no longer has to be a struggle. I believe God never intended it to be one in the first place.
Acknowledging the good God within and putting forth our God given talents, ultimately improves life on all levels. Simultaneously we are contributing to the greater good of all, doing our part to enhance the universal puzzle of creation. Consciously choosing the love vibration truly makes life magical.
Hildegard is a writer, speaker, and consultant to those who are interested in raising their awareness of how to create a life, guided by the inner wisdoms of the soul, rather than being driven by societal conditioning of the left brain alone.
By Hildegard Gmeiner
© 2006 copyright Hildegard Gmeiner
For the longest time I had no clue what made me tick. When I was forced to ask myself this question, the following transpired. Decades of living an illusionary existence based on conditioned responses alone were taking its toll. What appeared to be the ideal life on the outside was one of quiet desperation on the inside. I was living in a golden cage of my own, unconscious construction, designed to maintain appearances, while my soul was struggling for my attention.
Then one day, the life I had once known collapsed like a house of cards. Everything I had once believed in, and had given me a frame of reference, dissolved. My body was severely ill. I was heartbroken and my spirit was weak.
Weighed down by self-criticism, anger, blame, and self-pity, I was stuck in a seemingly hopeless situation. My mind rushed about in circles, yet it couldn’t come up with any constructive resolutions to the issues at hand. Finally, with nowhere else to turn, I put pencil to paper. In time many new insights came to me through my journal.
There is a saying: ‘When the student is ready, the teacher will appear!’
When I eventually became humble enough to ask for guidance, my teachers appeared in a variety of shapes and sizes. They were from both the physical and the non-physical reality. They also showed up in form of books, advertisements, messages on milk cartons and transport trucks. The universe seemed to be magically trying to rub in the messages I was too stubborn to accept, until I finally got them. In time all of this brought me to higher altitudes, from which to view things. Now I was able to make different and conscious choices, giving my life a new direction.
During the shift from seeing myself as a victim of circumstance, to accepting myself as the creator of my very own reality, it became obvious that I had to detoxify my mind, as well as my body to make room for my spirit.
It was time to discard the fear-based thoughts and feelings and consciously adopt those of self-respect and self-love. During this process, however, many layers of fear based issues and traumas had to be addressed. Over time one becomes freer, healthier, and ever so much lighter.
Feelings are the tell tales of where we are at in life. Begin by taking note whether your feelings are fear based or those of love.
Guilt, shame, blame, jealously, self-criticism and judgement of others, feelings of none worthiness, or not-good-enoughness are fear-based feelings. They were all too familiar to me for the most part of my earlier years. Acceptance of self and others, empathy, compassion, and unconditional acceptance of what is, are some of the love-based feelings we can choose.
Once we are able to understand what we are feeling and why, we can then make a conscious effort to transform them. In so doing we are recalibrating our body’s energy field, enabling us to attract self-respecting people and mutually satisfying opportunities.
Once we are no longer seeing everything tinted through the victim lenses, we become open to give freely and receive easily. Then life no longer has to be a struggle. I believe God never intended it to be one in the first place.
Acknowledging the good God within and putting forth our God given talents, ultimately improves life on all levels. Simultaneously we are contributing to the greater good of all, doing our part to enhance the universal puzzle of creation. Consciously choosing the love vibration truly makes life magical.
Hildegard is a writer, speaker, and consultant to those who are interested in raising their awareness of how to create a life, guided by the inner wisdoms of the soul, rather than being driven by societal conditioning of the left brain alone.
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