Redfin reached out to me for some advice on how to create a backyard zen garden. Here's the article. 
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Episode Date: 7.20.2024
Hosts: Karen Frazier, Chuckie G, and Cheryl Knight-Wilson
Show Summary:
In this episode of Mindful Mystics, we talk about techniques for grounding rituals and why it's so important. We delve into personal stories and practical tips for staying grounded in a hectic world. We also explore daily rituals, the benefits of nature, and the power of crystals in promoting mental clarity and emotional stability.
Check out:
Paranormal Underground magazine: https://paranormalunderground.net/
Author and psychic medium Karen Frazier: https://www.authorkarenfrazier.com/#/
Paranormal Investigator and psychic medium Chuckie G: https://chuckieg.net/
Timestamped Show Highlights:
[06:46] Importance of Grounding and Centering Rituals*
-The significance of grounding and living in the present.
-The physical and mental benefits of grounding.
-The importance of grounding for presence and happiness.
[10:05] Personal Grounding Experiences
-Karen shares her journey of learning to live in her body and the benefits she’s experienced.
-The importance of being present and reducing expectations to decrease stress.
[15:23] Spiritual Surrender
-Karen talks about surrendering control to the universe and the transformative effects it had on her life.
-How grounding and centering practices help break negative thought patterns and promote positivity.
[19:55] Meditation as a Tool
-Meditation as a method to recharge and stay grounded.
-Dealing with seasonal affective disorder and using light therapy to stay grounded.
-The importance of making grounding practices a habit and not being too hard on oneself when they slip.
[22:49] Daily Grounding Rituals
-Cheryl’s preferred grounding practices, including listening to music, aromatherapy, and digital detox.
-Karen and Chuck discuss their grounding routines, including visualization and breathing exercises Plus, meditating and connecting with nature.
-The grounding benefits of spending time in nature.
[31:01] Grounding With Crystals
-How to use crystals effectively in grounding rituals.
-Types of grounding crystals.
-Using crystals during meditation and creating crystal elixirs.
-A crystal grid overview from Karen.
-Using crystals in various ways, including in baths and under pillows, for grounding and restful sleep.
[43:04] Grounding and Meditation Techniques
-Karen shares a quick grounding method using sensory awareness.
-Karen explains her meditation technique using a mantra and visualization for grounding.
[52:03] Anchoring for Grounding
-How to use gestures and objects to anchor grounding energy and interrupt negative thoughts.
[54:29] Grounding With Intention
-The importance of grounding after meditation and how it enhances resilience.
[57:36] Dealing With Life's Challenges
-How grounding and meditation help cope with life's inevitable challenges.
[01:01:03] Spiritual Bypass
-The concept of spiritual bypass and how grounding practices are different.

Get ready to meet your angels and understand your angel numbers with this free 34-minute guided meditation.

Greetings. We are delighted and overjoyed to speak with you Now. We wish to share a message. We invite all who read to look beyond our words and feel the truth and Love behind what we share.
 
Beloveds, you are not your story, no matter how invested you are in it. It doesn’t matter what your story is – you decide whether you want to dwell within its energy or re-member Who You Truly Are.
 
Stories have vibration, and vibration shapes what you experience as reality. Dwelling in any vibrational frequency attracts similar. For example, holding the vibration of pain and grievance attracts the energy of aggression and harm. Dwelling in fear attracts frightening circumstances. Holding the energy of anger attracts people and events that make you angry. Dwelling in the energy of not enough attracts lack. Holding an energy of need attracts want.
 
This is not to say that the experiences in your story do not feel very real or that your experiences of harm are insignificant. Of course they feel real, and of course your pain feels significant. You currently travel the planet as flesh and blood, and humans have a history of perpetuating their pain and fear onto their fellow embodied souls. Your history tells you these things have happened, and we in no way suggest that you ignore that history or dismiss it with a wave of your hands.
 
Instead, we suggest that to the extent you are able, you don’t allow the history of humanity on your planet to become the fear and pain you carry with you and use as a justification for intentionally or unintentionally inflicting harm on yourself and others. You can remember your history and not allow it to control you. You can have compassion for self and other embodied humans who have experienced great harm but not continue to carry that energy as part of your being or through your thought, word, and deed.
 
What is your story? It is a set of circumstances you believe to be true about yourself and your world. It is a script you have written based upon your “past” and your “future.” Your story is dense. It is of a lower vibration than that of your true nature. It comes from conditioning, and you believe it wholeheartedly. Until you don’t.
 
We want you to know this: your story is never true, no matter how true it feels. Why? Because every story stems from the mind and the ego. It comes from experiences of the past (conditioning) and fears about the future (worrying).
 
Truth always stems from Love, and it always happens Now, as Now is the only moment that exists, and Love is the only energy in the entire universe. Even stories that feel good, while they may contain elements of Love and Now, aren’t entirely true. But, because they feel good, they are easy to attach to, and they feed human ego and need just as your negative scripts do.  
 
Part of the human journey is to learn to dis-identify from every script and story you hold, regardless of whether it feels positive or negative. We know this is not an easy task, and many embodied souls don’t achieve dis-identification from their own scripts until the moment of their bodily death. Some stories have a deeper hold on you than others. Some expand from one embodied human to a few, and from a few to many, and from many to nearly all of humanity.
 
And, like any good actors in a play, whether a story is believed by one or almost all, you each step into your scripted roles and continue to act as if the story is true. You do so until the stage lights go down and the houselights come on, revealing the truth that you are acting out a script on a small stage, and that the story you so brilliantly acted only moments ago is nothing more than a highly engaging illusion.
 
We invite you to find ways to step away from the story – even for a brief moment every day – to re-connect with the Truth of Who You Are. Find quiet place free of distraction, close your eyes, and focus on your breath. Detach from your thoughts – experience them, look at them dispassionately, do not judge them, and let them drift away into the Light of Love.
 
The difference this makes may seem insignificant at first. But, if you make this a daily practice and then begin to string together a few moments at a time and do it a few times throughout the day, you’ll start to notice the non-attachment to your story trickling into your life even when you’re so deeply identified with your script that you’ve forgotten you’re an actor on the stage.
 
We invite you to allow yourself the Grace of these moments of peaceful, benevolent, non-attachment. We invite you to find flickers of Who You Truly Are shining through your ego-identification. By allowing yourself this Grace, your vibration will begin to rise, slowly at first and then exponentially, because just as low-vibration energy attracts more of the same, so does high-frequency energy. And as your vibration rises, so will the vibration of everyone and everything around you. This is important work, and it is the way forward for all of humanity.
 
We have been with you in every moment throughout your “history.” We have wrapped you in Unconditional Love as you have experienced and inflicted pain and harm. We have held you up and celebrated when you have shared and experienced love and joy. We have offered our guidance through every moment of it all, and we always will. We long for You to re-member that You Are Light and that Source is loving and benevolent.
 
As always, we walk beside you, and we honor you no matter where you are in your frequency. We Love You.

~End Channeled Message~

Read the first message from The George Collective

Greetings beloved souls! We are overjoyed to speak to you Now. 

Today, We wish to discuss the nature of pain. Pain takes many forms and can manifest in any of the realms of embodied human existence - physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual. It goes by many names in your language and manifests in seemingly endless ways. So, while you may identify a part of the human experience as something else, ultimately it is another manifestation of pain. And pain is ultimately a manifestation of fear.

In duality, fear is the opposite of Love. In Ultimate Reality, there is no separation between fear and Love--it is all the same energy that radiates throughout the Universe. Fear is not the absence of Love, but rather the dis-memberment from it. For a while in the human experience, you forget that All There is is Love and All You Are is Love, and thus, you feel separate from your Source, which creates fear. When you re-member Who You Are and rejoin Source, the fear falls away and once again, you rejoin (re-member) with the only true experience in the Universe, which is Love. 

All of humanity's deepest issues arise from pain, which is a manifestation of fear. When you experience pain, it can feel all-encompassing. And it's true that from a vibrational standpoint, pain is a low-frequency energy. Ultimately, however, pain has a high-vibrational purpose: it propels you to re-member. 

But that high-vibrational purpose is lost in the experience of an embodied human having pain. We understand this and have deep Love and compassion for you in your pain. In our Love for you, we extend ourselves to you. You may notice Our Love and compassion as Light that seeps around the edges of your pain or peeps through the spaces within it.

The low-vibrational nature of pain coalesces into tightly-packed strands of energy that make it  dark and dense. To the embodied human, the darkness and density of pain can feel solid and unrelenting. But even the heaviest darkness has edges of decreasing density that taper off into the Universal space of Love. And even the densest darkness has space in between its energy strands through which tiny pinpricks of Light will creep. However, when you are lost in the experience of pain, these cracks, fissures, and edges that let the Light in are very difficult to discern.

It's a challenge for embodied humans to step back from the heaviness of pain to notice the Light. We have profound compassion for this, and in your deepest pain, We shine the brightest and reach the hardest to allow glimmers of Love to reach you.

We invite you try this. To the extent that you can, take a quiet moment to notice your pain. Start by finding its edges. At first, this may be the easiest to do with physical pain since it is the most concretely perceptible. Notice where your physical pain is. Then, notice where it isn't. Without judgment and from a space of awareness, simply notice the pain and the lack of pain. Shift your perspective back and forth between the two - spaces of pain, spaces of no-pain. Then, move your awareness to the edges of the pain. Notice whether they are sharp and defined, or whether they slowly taper into no-pain. 

Once you've explored the edges, move into the pain and notice it. Is it solid, or can you locate spots within the density where there is no-pain? Once you've located the spaces of no-pain within the density of pain, notice the edges of that. Do this with another space of no-pain within the density, and then another. 

Next, notice the solidity of the pain. Is it steady and relentless, or does it come and go? Does it pulse? Does it vibrate? Are there momentary lapses? Does it rise and fall? Strengthen and abate? 

This exercise allows you to explore the permeability of pain, and it can help release pain's hold on you. It also helps you to recognize pain's impermanence. When you notice this, it shifts your perspective. What originally seems solid, steady, and permanent reveals itself to be permeable, intermittent, and temporary.

What you notice with physical pain, you can also notice with mental, emotional, or spiritual pain. It is always permeable. It is always intermittent. And it is always temporary. And so, in noticing your pain, We also ask you to notice Love. Notice the spaces and moments where the Light slips through. Find these and allow yourself a moment of peace. At first, these moments may be fractions of a second; tiny, nearly-imperceptible flashes. But as you invite them, seek them, notice them, allow them, and appreciate them, the moments of Light will become larger, more frequent, and last longer. This is the path to re-membrance, which is the ultimate purpose of pain.

Know that no matter how large or dense your pain is, We are reaching to you around the edges and through the spaces, sharing Our Love and Light to help you on your path to re-member. We are always with you no matter how deep, dark, and unrelenting your pain feels in the moment. We encourage you to also be there for each other in a similar way. Never let someone else's pain push you away. Hold space for another's pain. Surround them in Loving Light with the intention that in the moments they can find the edges and permeability of their pain, they will be nourished by the Light of your Love and compassion.

We Love You.

Read the first message from The George Collective.
​Read the next message from The George Collective.

Last night, I dreamed about a skunk. Now that might not seem so unusual to people who know that we have a cute skunk that frequents our backyard and (thankfully) doesn't stink up the joint because we leave it alone and watch from a respectful distance as it does its thing. However, in dream interpretation, when a skunk appears in a dream, it's often a sign of repressed anger. It's a reminder that you can't stuff your anger and must release it in order to sustain physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. Point taken, skunk.

And it's true. Recently, I've been feeling massive amounts of anger in response to all that's happening in the world. And I suspect many others have, as well. But it has felt like so much, so frequent, and, at times, so overpowering that I feel like if I give into it, it might just consume me. And if I am consumed by anger, how can I go about my work as a spiritual practitioner?

I am a woman of a certain age. I carry a lot of conditioning surrounding the topic of being a woman and having/feeling/expressing anger. Mostly that I shouldn't, that it's unattractive, that it's not spiritual, and that it's unlikeable. I also carry the spiritual DNA from past lives as women and other people who were far more oppressed than women today (we all do), and so I have many unconscious scripts that tell me my anger is inappropriate and dangerous.

Many women have received these messages and this conditioning throughout their lives. Suppress your own negative emotions for the greater good. Be a perfect example of womanhood (whatever the bleep THAT is). Use a calm, kind, and measured tone. If you feel anger, take a breath and wait for it to go away.

While I can't know for sure (I can only truly understand my own embodied experience in this lifetime), I imagine it's exponentially more difficult and overpowering for BIPOC women, who battle stereotypes entrenched in both racism and sexism, as well as all BIPOC people and other oppressed, marginalized, or othered individuals. 

I've certainly had a lot of reason to be angry throughout this lifetime. I've been on the receiving end of bullying, physical and emotional abuse, sexual assault, sexual harassment, narcissism, chronic pain and illness, infidelity, misogyny, and all of the other things that often happen to women on the human journey. Those are the types of things that can really piss somebody off, and with good reason. But because of cultural messages surrounding women and anger, we're also left with emotions we don't know what to do with since we've been conditioned all our lives (and across many lifetimes) that it's unseemly for women to be angry.

And so what do we do? We suppress the rage. We develop defense mechanisms to help us cope with that repressed anger simmering just below the surface. For instance, one of my defense mechanisms has historically been humor. For a while there, the funnier I got, the more pissed off I probably was.

I remember the first time somebody told me it was okay to be angry. I was in the midst of a contentious divorce, and I was talking to someone on the phone. I can't remember my exact words, but the essence was, "I am so angry about this, but I know I shouldn't be. I'm a spiritual person. I should be better than that." The person I was talking to interrupted and said quite forcefully, "Karen - where did you get the idea it isn't okay to be angry? Of course you can be angry." I was stunned. It had never even occurred to me that maybe my anger was okay. 

That was several years ago, and I've had a lot of time to understand what led me to that place, what I was doing, and why I was doing it. I was using what I've come to realize is my other defense mechanism, spiritual bypassing.

Spiritual bypassing is an unhealthy coping mechanism in which we use spiritual practices or beliefs to suppress negative emotions instead of allowing their healthy expression. When we fail to allow ourself to experience negative emotions like anger, we don't move through them and release them. Instead, we repress the anger, turn it back on ourselves, and bury it deep inside where it develops dense, sticky, low-vibrational energy that can negatively affect our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. Spiritual bypassing is common in people of various spiritual practices, and especially women. And it can block our growth, keep us from our true paths, and make us mentally, physically, or emotionally sick. 

The term spiritual bypassing was actually coined by transpersonal psychologist John Welwood, who wrote the book Toward a Psychology of Awakening. Welwood's definition of spiritual bypassing is, spiritual ideas/ practices used to sidestep emotional "unfinished business."

I see spiritual bypassing a lot, and I even engage in some myself when I feel like I just can't cope. And I  do it even though I know it is unhealthy, energetically damaging, and keeps me from stepping into my true purpose to raise the vibration of the planet. It's something I continuously try to be cognizant of in my own life so I can catch myself as close as I can to the moment when I begin spiritual bypassing. 

Once I recognize I'm doing it (and sometimes it takes a while), I go someplace safe so I can sit with my rage or whatever negative emotion I'm trying to spiritually bypass, and I jump in headfirst. It's often painful and scary, and it frequently involves an ugly cry (I did one today before I started writing this post). But after a a while, it's also incredibly beautiful. Why? Because in the moments where I allow myself to move into my deepest pain and rage, it begins to move through me and flow out of me until I am cleansed. And after the darkness, even the faintest glimmer of Light is breathtaking. 

Often, it takes a lot more than a few minutes and an ugly cry. Sometimes, it comes in waves, occurring across days, weeks, or even longer. But as it flows from me, it leaves space that I can fill up with something that isn't dark, painful, or scary. I experience the rage so I can release it and step into Love. And once I have stepped into Love, I can begin to come up with meaningful ideas and solutions that come from a place of empowerment and compassion instead of anger-fueled actions that may cause significant damage to others (and myself) and create a downward energetic spiral fueled by anger, pain, fear, and retribution. Spiritual bypassing is disempowering and lowers vibration. Moving through the emotions instead of suppressing them empowers and raises vibration.

Which brings me to now. I don't know about you, but it feels like we've been in a period where we've had the opportunity to experience rage and practice sitting with it and releasing it over and over again. Usually daily, sometimes hourly. I find myself getting angry a lot these days. But each time we experience a new rage-inducing incident, it presents us with the opportunity to experience it, sit with it, greet it with curiosity, and ultimately move through it as it moves through us.

Getting through this process isn't instantaneous, it isn't easy, and we frequently handle it imperfectly. But ultimately for our own wellbeing, the wellbeing of others, and for the vibrational wellbeing of our lives as embodied humans on this planet, we must greet the rage, experience it, and come out the other side embracing the opportunity to create a better, higher vibrational world for all of humanity. Even the assholes.

All that is to say this. Ladies, I know you're angry. So am I. And I know each day brings new, outrageous, painful things that fuel that rage, pain, and indignation. And it feels awful. It feels terrifying and dark. And it often seems that what would feel better than almost anything in the world is to strike out at whatever has caused the rage and make the person or people behind it hurt as much as we do. Take an eye for an eye. Get our pound of flesh.

I get it. I understand. I walk beside you in your rage, and I share your pain. Feel it. Experience it. Dive into it. Don't spiritually bypass it. Go someplace safe and be in the rage fully and completely. Do it for as long as you need as often as you need. And in the spaces between the waves of rage when you can start to find the glimmers of Love from Source energy that surround and support us, allow yourself to be fully enveloped in that.

Allow the waves of rage their full expression. And use the moments of Light in between to take loving, compassionate, and meaningful action. Share your voice with the world. Be an example of how to bring about change. Speak from Love fueled by purpose. Support those who are struggling in the darkness and hold space for them until they find a glimmer of Light, knowing that when your wave of rage comes crashing back, they will support and hold space for you. Now more than ever we need to recognize that we are a Sisterhood* and hold space for one another--especially those who are in a different place emotionally, mentally, and spiritually than we are. 

Don't wallow. Don't suppress. But do allow, because I promise it will pass if you don't try to stop yourself from experiencing it. Get help if you need. Seek support. And in the moments it passes, even if it's only temporary, you can use the leftover energy from the release of rage as the impetus to become a Loving force for change and support for all who continue to struggle in the darkness of lower vibrational energy. Even the assholes.