http://wanderlustcounseling.com/

Wanderlust Counseling, 1230 Big Thompson Avenue, Estes Park, CO (2025)

03/14/2025

You already are your Higher Self.

Therapy is really just a process of unravelling...

Unravelling from all that you are not and the stories keep you in the shadows. We are not, of course, just throwing away all that unravels, just turning the strings back to the light. Brokenness and Wholeness are really the same thing, one is simply split out of fear, the other integrated in love.

While the “Self” is revealed more as the darkness is removed, it’s also something, I believe, that can be experienced early on.

First, let me say, this is not bypassing. It’s important to know when to feel your emotions (any time you’re triggered), and know when you might just be in a little bit of funk. Or you can do this when you’re simply feeling good or “neutral”.

For example (a lot of you HSPs will follow me here), if you wake up feeling a little “blah” most days, do get curious about it. For me, I’m just highly sensitive, and the world can be a bit of a painful place. The “blah” or slightly depressed feeling was a “gray safety blanket” that kept things a little dull so my feelings wouldn’t be so intense. But that gray blanket really wanted to be a “light blanket”, surrounding me with love and hope, even through big emotions and painful events. If you’ve felt similarly, you can both work with it as a part but not get stuck in it...and perhaps begin practicing how you want to feel throughout your day.

At any point in your journey, you can ask yourself: How does the highest version of me FEEL? How does s/he/they walk, talk, and act? (You can use the “8cs” of IFS or “empowered”, “peaceful”, “knowing” if you need some suggestions.)

(Pacer is always in her “higher self energy, as are most dogs… eventually bringing their human along.)

03/08/2025

Attention is not Love, but attention IS an important way we show Love.When parents take time every day to put down their phones, work, and even to-do list to offer their full presence to their child(ren), they’re sending the messages: You matter. I care about you. You’re safe with me. Similarly, in a relationship, when one partner send a text to the other such as “I’m thinking of you” even on a day their busy, or on other days responds back in an appropriate time frame (this is absolutely individual and can vary by daily circumstance, but let’s say 1-3 hours) and makes time for a date or at least a phone call, their saying, “This relationship matters to me.” “I care about you.” This builds safety, which again, may not be Love in and of itself, but it is closely intertwined.

So let me say it again: Attention is not love, but it is an important way we show Love. Attention says “You matter.” Existentially, attention says, “You exist.” But, because we so often conflate attention for Love, we can mistake negative attention for Love. On one side: At least we are important enough to have someone mad at me, be treated poorly, even abused. On the other hand, even hate can feel like Love, when it’s really just the chemical effect of attention: They hate me, which means I’m important (perhaps not conflating both attention and power with Love).

On an internal framework, this is the basis behind parts work. When we give the shadowed parts (as an example, think of your emotions when you get triggered) of ourselves attention they often ease up. I usually tell my clients that our parts are like little kids inside of us, just asking to be noticed (and treated with curiosity and compassion), and usually they’ll settle.

Your attention is not power, but it is powerful. Use it with Love.

* I’ve heard other professionals say attention is a form of Love, and I don’t disagree. I think it’s more of a matter of the subtle difference in how we’re defining the word. If we want to play semantics, I might say that “presence” is a better equivalent to Love.

02/13/2025

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
– Rilke

02/09/2025

Please feel free to share.

We all belong. We all deserve to be loved.
When we deny this from others, we deny this for ourselves (the narcissist wound can block us from seeing this.) When we acknowledge our own wounding, we have a choice: do I want to be predator, prey, or Protector?

02/02/2025

Just a reminder that right now, in this moment, you are completely and infinitely loved. Even if you were to make a mistake, or achieve something cool, you could not be any more loved because our love, your Higher Self’s love, and Consciousness’s love is unconditional. Just as you are right now, you are worthy of all that Love, forever and always. ❤️😘💜🥰💛

01/31/2025

Gratitude practices have been scientifically proven to change how our minds function. We can train our minds to go from hyper vigilance and looking for the negative to looking for the good and what we want more of in our lives.

Yes, we should have learned we have the ability to train our minds (rather than allowing our minds to run the show) in childhood through gratitude practices, meditation, mindfulness, and choosing our beliefs… but hey, we can be grateful for what we learned in the challenging moments and that we have this information, and power, now.

While journaling gratitudes (or Yay!s) is helpful, I often like to make it easy and start right when I realize I’m conscious in the morning, for things like a warm bed and fluffy puppy, or throughout the day when I’m eating, can afford my grocery bill, or get to be outside.

12/25/2024

Merry Light Days!

I’ll be out of office until January 6th and look forward to continuing to be a light in the dark on your human-spirit journeys when I return.

12/13/2024

Hope is the intermediary between old and new beliefs.

Maybe you can see that beliefs are just repeated thought that have become ingrained into your identity, but your not ready to let go, or maybe you can but you can’t yet see or feel the new, the possibility of freedom. Hope, is the intermediary, moving us forward from dismay into “yes, I believe that might be possible”. Hope is the salve to worry. The ointment of healing.

11/01/2024

The most powerful question we can ask ourselves is, “How is this happening for me?”

While this question is thrown away by some as too woo or too spiritual, that is perhaps a sign that person is still trapped in a victim mindset. Many of is are, without even realizing it. We believe life happens to us, that we have no control over our stories, or attempt to believe we do by adopting perfectionist and externally controlling tendencies. Yet true control is over our thoughts, the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. True power comes from inside of us.

In the end, I don’t know if it really matters if an experience does or does not have inherent meaning. What does matter is the meaning we give it, if we decide to use the experience to step into our light even more.

10/20/2024

You are only truly conscious if you are in a state of love.

****
I work with a lot of clients who are very “self-aware”… they can describe to me their habits, their wounds, and their stories of pain and trauma. Yet they still judge themselves. What I ultimately try to help clients see is that anytime they feel they have acted in a way they believe is wrong, is because they were acting from the wound and the suppressed emotion underneath it. I help clients see the root of their wounds, that almost always stemmed in childhood, to help them unravel from their stories. Ultimately, this is all to increase self-compassion, which is the gateway to consciousness and Love.

10/16/2024

There will always be pain when the story you are telling yourself is too small for the life that your soul wants to live.

Like a crab that has grown on the inside but the shell wasn’t shed, remaining small and tight, attempting to cram in what had grown. The shell that was once protection is now a source of great pain.*

*It might not make sense to our logical brain, but to our primal brain it makes complete sense for a child to create a story about being too much or not enough, so that they the could fit in (and be loved) by their family (and feel safe). This story was a protection, but now that the soul has expanded and is capable of witnessing and loving itself, the old story/protection of not being enough is painful.

Liberation is a state of mind, when we set ourselves free of the stories, the shells, that trap our souls’ expansion. After a failure, we can create a story that we failed because we are not good enough, or we create a story that we had a great experience and found something that didn’t work for us. Achievement can be an even bigger trap, telling ourselves we are enough only after we have reached success, setting up for a series of highs and lows throughout our life. When a loved one dies, especially young, we could create a story about how god is cruel and doesn’t care about us, or we can create a story about how lucky we are that we had a chance to stand in that person’s life, and perhaps create more meaning and beauty in our own earthly lives.

Therefore, we hold the key to our own liberation. Even in events outside of our control, we can tell the story of what happened in any narrative we choose. We can aspire to our earthly dreams and not reach them, but still find joy and love in the experience. We are the master of ourselves, the creators of our beliefs, and the writers of our life.
We may not control fate, but we have the power to create the story that gets told, and in doing so, we open up the doors to destiny.

10/10/2024

Be yourself. Be authentic. Just be you.

Great advice…

… the problem is, most of us don’t know who we really are. We don’t know how to authentic or how to trust our intuition.

And this is to no fault of our own. From ages 0 to 7, we’re in a brain state similar to hypnosis, and we’re just soaking in our environment. The message we take in, or the meaning we make about events we don’t understand, aren’t consciously accepted. They become our subconscious. So even as we get older and we reject the fear-based religious teachings passed down to us, or say that our parents divorce didn’t affect us, or refuse to pay homage to a materialistic society … well, that’s great, but the problem is, those things weren’t necessarily the problem (I mean they were, but not in the obvious way.) The bigger challenge is the subconscious wiring, the shame-based beliefs we took on about not being enough, feeling unworthy of love, and feeling certain something is wrong with us.

The good news is that we can, with some committed effort and adamant love (therapy isn’t required, but it sure helps to have someone on your team), unravel ourselves from those beliefs. Triggers will often lead us to the wound, giving us the opportunity to re-parent ourselves through fears and big emotions. And in the unraveling, in remembering who we were before love was first invalidated, we return home to ourselves. Finally free of the stories running our behavior, we can once again be our authentic selves.

09/12/2024

We can love our human selves and all the emotions we are capable of feelinging while also remembering we are spiritual beings. In that sense, we can be in grief while holding ourselves in a space of love.

***

I have had more conversations than I can count with my mentors on therapy-spirituality topics. Good thing my mentors are patient, because I have a lot of questions. A recent one went something like, “Well Eckhart Tolle just said to ignore our thoughts because we are not our thoughts and we don’t want to give them more energy* but in therapy and parts work we are working directly with our thoughts and emotions. What are we supposed to do?!?” (Insert frustrated grunt) I think I ended that one with, “Well, at least we are honoring our human selves.”

*I am probably very mis-paraphrasing Eckhart Tolle.

As usual, the answer (I believe) lies somewhere in the middle. It is true that we are not our thoughts. Most of our subconscious thoughts were learned in childhood through experiences we had no control over. Unexamined, they often direct our adult lives without our knowing. So first, we do actually have to become conscious of the thoughts running through our mind. The key is not to get attached to our thoughts, to identify with them, but instead to be curious about them. This is the basic practice of mindfulness. When we can question our thoughts from the place of the observer rather than identify with the thought (or emotion), the thoughts can loosen their hold on us. And if we follow them from this place, they often unlock stored emotions and pain we’ve been holding on to since childhood. This release can lead to greater unification with our spiritual selves.

While we can skip over this part with spiritual practices...we can manifest what we want or quantum shift into new reality...and it can feel good, it can still often be from a place of lack, or using power from an unhealed place. It’s not bad, it can just keep us from accessing our true potential as a spirit-human.

# mindfulness

08/28/2024

Trust and safety is one of the biggest themes I explore with clients. Ultimately, the heart of trust and safety having nothing to do with the external and everything to do with the internal and our own connecting with the light and love within us.

08/26/2024

*If you are a parent reading this and have done this before, don’t fear! Children readily accept repair…you get to both apologize and try again the next time your child has big emotions.

**This might take days, weeks, to months for some of us. If we’ve been really good at stuffing our pain down throughout our lives, this wounded part may take time to gain trust in us again.

08/14/2024

Whether you’re in a disagreement over politics with a family member, in an argument with your partner, or parts of yourself are in conflict with one another, this is the most important thing to remember: We’re on the same team.

The result might be moving on from the conversation, continuing it after a pause, or setting firmer boundaries (I don’t give my energy to people who aren’t willing to to be open minded with me, but I can love them through my very strong boundary).

Our minds and fear try to separate us. But when we come back into our hearts, we always know that love is there to connect us.

08/05/2024

And all the wildflowers are screaming, “We love you! We love you! We love you! You are loved! You are loved! You are loved!”

Now pause. Feel that. Embody the love of every flower, every blade in of grass, every needle on the pine shouting to you that you are loved, sending you their divine energy. Feel the glow of the sun wrapped around you like a warm golden blanket. Feel it in every cell of your being. Because that is how loved you truly are.

Wanderlust Counseling