When we change our narratives, releasing all our old stories, we transform. A Shutterstock Licensed Image.

It’s time to begin again! This time, create a plan and stick to it! You can always write a new story. If you do, commit to it. Let it lead you somewhere new.

Each of us projects ourselves into every story we hear and see. Each narrative we absorb satiates a unique part of our temporary self-identities, bringing to life a part of us that may have been dormant or undeveloped.

Narratives are potent and they can play out whether we are conscious of them or not. The ones that we most align with can be representative of our pain or our power.

Narratives play substantial roles in our lives. They can compound our apathy and confusion. Or they can help us expand and heal. Our most prized narratives have the power to dismantle our self-identities, rebuild us, and define us.

What is a narrative?

~ A story; a written account of connected events; portrait, tale or chronicle.

~ A moving vehicle, much like a train, with a set of rules and requirements.

~ Enabler of living, breathing, relatable characters that move within the train, while on the train.

~ Sometimes the characters steer the train, other times the train steers the characters.

~ Once you get inside that train, you’re committed to a journey that has a beginning and end.

~ Often involve commitments, loyalties, disagreements and treachery.

~ Brings to life a variety of emotions, some new, some deeply seeded in our cores.

~ They can change at any time.

We all love a good movie.

It turns out there’s a reason why: over time, storytelling in movies and television has crystalized to perfectly mirror how our lives tend to play out.

In each of our stories, there’s a hero, a villain, a goal, and drastic twists and turns. It turns out that when we’re pursuing a goal, our minds are set-up to expect upheaval. They’re also set-up to expect success. This is why Hollywood movies have two act-breaks.

The First Act-Break

The 30-minute mark is about when all that yummy, warm-fuzzy excitement in the first act bumps into a wall. The first act-break occurs moments after the love hits a peak. It’s when the problem or villain arrives.

The Second Act-Break

At the 60-minute mark, we seem to be winning, when all of a sudden a crisis emerges, and we lose everything. This is the second act-break. We can all relate with this structure, and it’s why we love movies.

When creating business plans, or plans to improve our personal lives and relationships, it’s easy to give up on ourselves. We’ll happily forsake a more vibrant future if we can avoid confrontation and changes to our routines.

Rather than confront and change our patterns directly, we’d rather build co-dependent relationships with our loved ones, our businesses, and our goals. We want to adore them, but we also want to control them. This makes it very difficult to change our stories and improve ourselves, and transform our relationships. We’re just a tad addicted to the self-identity we’ve created and defended for so long.

If we can rewrite our narrative, the journey from here to there, and map out the act-breaks and strategies that could bring that narrative to life, we can change our lives. By creating and then becoming a lead character in our new story, we will naturally fall in with his or her journey.

By stepping into these inspired characters’ shoes, we begin to create energetic vessels that are built specifically to attract success in our three-dimensional physical realities.

If we can remain detached from our former self-identities and stay out of fear, we can be victorious.

Many of us find it difficult to change. We declare a new goal, make plans, and we might even enroll someone to help us. But when it comes down to making the hard choices and fully committing to the new narrative and self-identity, we’re unwilling. We find it too egoistically challenging to release our prior self-identities and venture into a new story. We regress into our old shite, rather than tunnel toward the new light that awaits us.

When we rewrite the rules, stories, and strategies related to how we work, live, and behave, we can become completely new. It’s not rocket science. It’s a fact. As long as our goals and plans reflect parts of our core attributes, we can become new.

If you’re hoping

to make some changes in your life,

write the narrative first.

Write a short story of how you want things to play out.

If you’re running a business, map out where that business needs to go. Create a strategic plan. Keep your self-protective reactive-mind in check. Write out every step of the plan, as if it were a Hollywood movie.

If you’re looking to have a personal rebirth, map out the journey. Write down every change you want to make, and every joy you want to attract to your life. Write it out as if a Hollywood movie depended on it. It’s your script!

Allow your self-identity to be rejuvenated with a new, relatable, and inspiring narrative.

Become the lead character!

Establish a story that takes you from here to a new horizon.

This is how heroes and warriors have achieved success for centuries.

1. They decide what they want.

2. They decide where they’re going.

3. They declare who is going with them.

4. They create their plans and GO!

Now, YOU! Answer these questions:

1. What do you want?

2. Where are you going?

3. Who is going with you?

4. What is your plan?

5. What is your timeline?

You can do this!

One more thing, sometimes you can’t listen to your heart. While minds can be traps, hearts can be needy, fucked-up, and wrong, always seeking nurturance and connection.

No, you do not always need nurturing and connection.

Sometimes you just need to get over yourself, make some solid decisions, map out a realistic plan, commit to it, GET THE SHOW ON THE ROAD!

Clairsentients & Empaths Heal: A Shutterstock Licensed Image

Each person comprises a unique set of attributes, and therefore embodies and projects a unique vibration. It’s our vibration that attracts our lovers, friends, partners, and circumstances. Our vibrations also determine whether or not we can directly and immediately access information throughout the vibrating universe. If you can source and intuit impressions via the interconnected fabric of life, by interpreting what you sense or feel, you have a psychic gift, and might be a Clairsentient.

If you are also an Empath, you might be extremely sensitive, and can fully embody other people’s feelings, along with their muscle memory and emotional residue. In addition to living Beings, you might feel or absorb this residue from the environments you inhabit, which might also include sensing and feeling the vibrations of the objects around you.

Empaths might not be more “spiritually evolved” than others, but we can feel other people’s pain, happiness, sorry, and shock. In many cases, we might feel a variety of emotions and not realize that they have nothing to do with us. Being an Empath can be challenging, but if we channel our skills correctly, we can be helpful and healing to those we engage.

Clairsentient Empaths can become attuned to any vibration in the universe. Through gentle and straightforward practices, we can utilize our emotional bodies and higher senses to plug into the vibrational substratum of other worlds, species, and entities.

Many people are Clairsentients, Empaths, or both, but haven’t invested in this aspect of themselves. Growing into these types of roles might require meditation, emotional release, forgiveness, and exhaustive explorations of current and prior relationships. It can be hard work, but the benefits can be immeasurably valuable.

Meanwhile, Claircognizance is just a fancy word for the ability to “know” specific information about a person, place, or event, that may or may not have already happened. This is identical to being psychic. A psychic is someone who can answer specific questions by channeling, sensing, and seeing related energies, images, and feelings connected to others.

Are you Clairsentient?

You might have all the skills, sensitivities, and attributes of a Clairsentient, but have not yet explored it. See if any of these Clairsentient abilities resonate with you:

• Immediately aware of the positive and negative energies in a room
• Able to absorb someone’s pain and then reflect it to them in some way
• Able to name other people’s precise feelings
• Acutely aware of impending dangers for yourself and others
• Able to sense answers to other people’s questions
• Extremely selective about who is allowed into your inner circle or “family”
• Knowing, without reservation, what someone’s life-path might be
• Understanding the depth of someone’s pain upon meeting them
• Occasionally feeling triggered, either emotionally or intellectually, with no provocation
• Feeling sensitive to criticism, even when it’s presented in a loving way
• Often have a deep “knowing” about the interconnectedness of the universe
• As you feel and sense other people and environments, floods of information pour into you

What is a Medium?

Clairsentient people and Empathic-Mediums, or just “Mediums,” engage their sensitivities at higher and expanded levels. A Medium uses her senses and sensitivities to explore three-dimensional reality, which allows her to source information from someone’s past, present, or future. Mediums can sense energetic forms, feelings, and images connected to an individual. This can help them answer important questions about health, love, relationships, work, and more.

Can Clairsentients, Empaths, and Psychics help you?

Any person who is able to source information from the other realms can be beneficial to us. They might feel what we are feeling, long before we feel it. Sourcing energetic intelligence might seem like a trivial ability, but it can heal hearts and relationships. It can also improve people’s physical health and save lives.

If you know an Empath or Clairsentient, open your heart to them. Chances are since they’ve known you, they’ve been processing bits and pieces of your emotions, thoughts, pains, and burdens. If you allow them to, they can help you work through difficult decisions and conflicts. They might also help you know yourself better.

When these lovely folks communicate what they have absorbed from you, you might feel provoked into an emotional release or a deep inner-knowing. Afterward, you might feel healed – emotionally, physically, and spiritually.

If you know a Clairsentient, Empath, or Psychic, treat them with love and respect. When they share their discomfort and pain, whether it’s about you or someone else, pay attention. By allowing them to clear what they’ve gathered or absorbed, you help them liberate, which, in turn, helps them serve others – including you.

How can you love the Empaths and Mediums in your life?

Trust these loving, influential people with your secrets. They probably already know them anyway. If you’re able to “come clean” with them, you’ll benefit greatly, and you’ll remove a burden from their shoulders.

Sometimes Empaths and Clairsentients will be confused by the walls you put up. Since they can already see through your blockades, they’ll wonder why you don’t trust them. They might even doubt their understanding of you. There are probably 30 things that your Clairsentient Empath friends have been dying to tell you, but you have not yet shown signs of being open to hearing them.

Truly empathic and psychic people can easily become overwhelmed, and might not see it coming. They might suddenly stop talking, or they might appear to be dizzy or confused. When this happens, hold their hands, give them a cup of water, and sit with them. They might need a few minutes to expunge the energies they unconsciously collected.

As always, give these open-hearted folks lots of space. If you’re having a party and they decline to attend, don’t take it personally. Intuitive people sense impending events and take their perceptions seriously. If they decline, it’s probably for a good reason and of benefit to everyone involved.

I’ve declined attending events that felt questionable to me, and later changed my mind because I was coerced or “needed.” Not only have I regretted attending these events, others have also regretted it.

How to nurture your sensitivities and your empathic and psychic abilities

If you believe that you’re a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), Psychic, Empath or Clairsentient, consider scheduling time every day to explore and expunge your emotions. You can process your residual and trapped emotions through meditation, journal writing, and “feeling through” the related imagery that your mind continues to conjure. With each release of emotions, comes wisdom. Without the recognition and expression of emotions on some level, we might not advance according to our potential and abilities.

Every early morning before 6 am, sit quietly and invite your angelic guides to join you in your awakening. With each session, you’ll unveil a hidden pocket of emotions, along with precious gems of insight and awareness. Each session does not need to be longer than 15 minutes. If you can commit to this daily exercise for several months, your heart will relax, your mind will dissolve, and your anxiety will lessen.

Over time, you will become aware of your relaxed and expanded Self. If you’ve done this type of work in the past, the moment you re-engage, you’ll immediately experience your prior work’s accumulated benefits. As you deepen, you’ll expand a part of the universe’s collective consciousness, and all Beings will benefit.

The world needs more HSPs, artists, healers, seers, Empaths, and Clairsentients. Given all the pain, confusion, and chaos throughout the universe, we need more sensitive people to commit to becoming Energy Warriors and Channelers of Light and Wisdom.

As you explore and expand your divine Self, consider repeating this mantra from Amma, The Divine Mother, “May All The Living Beings, In All The Worlds, Be Happy.”

Real love is not romance, it’s service – A Shutterstock Licensed Image

We can explore the fantasy definitions of love, including Eros, Storge, Philia, Ludus, Pragma, Philautia, and Agape. We can enjoy Robert Sternberg’s 3-component theories of love. Or we get into the down-n-dirty reality of love — the stink of it all. Yeah, let’s do that.

Real-world love is complicated, messy, and it doesn’t often come with instructions. While love can be delicious, nurturing, and near-perfect, it tends to be mysterious and elusive. Love is a tough concept to grasp and even more challenging to attract.

While there have been many brilliant people who have outlined profound concepts on love and relating, here’s my take on The eight Real-World Types of Love:

1. Ego Love

Ego Love relationships are born from what other people provide and represent. It’s a self-centered style of love that is most often based on need-fulfillment. When Ego Lovers appear to be full of light and goodness, it’s often because their life requirements are being simultaneously met. If the slightest thing goes wrong or if an ego is pinched, the relationship can collapse in a heartbeat.

When two people are relating from this position, it’s all based on expectations. This is not necessarily bad, but it can be wrought with issues.

2. Romantic Love

Romantic love is another form of Ego Love, but with a twist. As the 2nd lowest form of love, Romantic Love is chock full of fantasies and projections, and it’s often infused with the drippings of mutual objectification.

Romantic love is the gooey, yummy, fake love that makes our toes tingle. It’s love based on how others inspire you to feel. As you feel bliss, you assume that you love the other person. The sad truth is that, when experiencing these types of relationships, you’re projecting your lack of something, not your love of the other person.

What makes this type of love so addictive, sad, and ridiculous, and yet delicious, is that the mutual fantasies and objectifications often occur at the same time. This is when people usually have babies, planned or otherwise, make long-term commitments, and start families.

In about 25% of these marriages, couples eventually stumble into higher and more service-based love relationships. The other 75% live with a numb sadness, in complete denial, or they get divorced.

3. Self Love

While Self Love, one of the types of love, might be elusive for some of us, it’s a vital step in our evolution. We must learn to love ourselves. If we can learn to love ourselves (garbage and all), we will undoubtedly stand a better chance at loving others.

4. Servitude Love

While on the surface, Servitude Love appears to be pathetic and potentially dangerous, being in servitude to another human being can provoke extreme leaps in personal growth. It might also placate or heal someone on the verge of a breakdown.

For example, a husband might be in servitude to an angry, self-centered wife, with whom he shares several children. Over time, with his dedication, his servitude can turn into a Contractual, more resilient, or deeper love. Similarly, if a woman has become a slave-like housewife to an absentee husband, she might eventually embrace the depth of her loneliness, give birth to the full breadth of her power, and break free.

Sometimes our most destructive relationships force us to self-actualize. Without them, we may have never reached the top of the mountain. This is why, no matter what you’ve experienced, you’re not a victim. You’re an experiencer. That’s all.

5. Contractual Love

When we know and love ourselves, we are better equipped to fulfill our agreements. When we understand our limitations and issues, we are more successful in meaningfully participating in mutual relationships.

Contractual Love requires clear objectives and agreements, whereby both parties have evaluated their positions in the relationship, and considered every aspect of the other person’s position. In doing so, both participants can make clear and clean commitments in the form of contracts. Within the confines of the agreement, both parties feel safe, and they begin to develop a mature and durable bond. Because it’s based in clarity, these bonds stand a good chance of evolving into higher forms of love.

While this Contractual Love might feel a bit antiseptic, it’s often the most successful form of love. Why? Because both parties put deep thought into the concept of their relationship, and they considered every aspect of the other person’s agenda. They may also have extinguished their selfishness, expectations, fantasies, and projections.

When we thoughtfully and consciously evaluate and improve ourselves, can stand a better chance at building the types of foundations that can carry us through the realities of life.

6. Light & Friendly Love

Light & Friendly Love produces beautiful relationships that feel like gentle breezes, flowing in and out without tension or restriction. We might have sweet hopes and simple desires with these lovers, but few demands. In our relaxed and loving states, both participants blossom, and all is well.

As these relationships unfold, we feel gratitude upon every experience, and at every juncture. It would be rare for this type of relationship to produce any measurable levels of anger or disappointment. Mostly, this love reminds us that human beings are beautiful creatures with exponential potential in all directions

7. Interdependent Love

Interdependent Love is when two or more people enjoy supporting and loving each other. While giving and receiving, they tend to refrain from adding unnecessary requirements to the relationship. Participants in Interdependent Love might have bad days, but they would never require the other person to solve their problems. In fact, Interdependent Lovers would also never blame others for their challenges or emotions. They might even work on specific, personal challenges without ever telling their primary partner.

While codependence has been given a bad rap, it’s an important step toward interdependence. Without experiencing codependence, we could not know its opposite, and we might never understand our shortcomings. When we enjoy giving and receiving within an Interdependent Love, we tend to feel validated by it. In a way, this is also codependent.

Interdependent Love takes responsibility for intentions, actions, and outcomes, without playing the victim. An Interdependent Love is where you stand strong, I stand strong, and there is a bridge between us. If one of us falters, our bridge sustains us.

Interdependent Love relationships are often elegant ecosystems, as each participant takes responsibility for every aspect of their participation, while also consistently creating value for others.

8. Human Service Love

When we realize that we are each one with all of creation, and one with every Universe and realm, it becomes first nature to seek ways to serve others. Upon the recognition and empathic embodiment of other people’s pain, we merge with them. Doing so, we feel what they feel and endeavor to gently lead them to lighter and lovelier states of being.

While Human Service Love is the ultimate way to serve humanity, it’s a tall order. If you struggle with loving yourself or releasing your ego, you might refrain from loving and giving in this way for some time. If you have not learned to love yourself and give without ego, your intentions to lovingly serve others might sour, which could result in doing more harm than good.

To start your exploration of Human Service Love, take baby steps. Make a note of how your ego reacts to each gift you give to the world. As you learn and grow, make adjustments, then explore some more.

On The Road To Love

Within each of these types of love, there are nuances, subcategories, parallels, and offshoots. You know yourself best. Be gentle with your heart. Set boundaries that protect, nurture and honor you. And find loving ways to relax your ego into the nothingness from which it came.