My financial security trial came to an abrupt halt when I had an intensive healing session and so much began to shift in me. After the session, which, incidentally, was for financial security, I was suddenly able to write a poem I had been wanting to write since last March. Day by day, as I rested after that healing session, my attention shifted to more spiritual endeavors.

After writing that poem, I realized that there could actually exist work I could do that I would love and be both confident and competent at – something which I had come to believe was impossible in this world. It would have to be work that was close to my soul, and I also realized that I had come a far distance from my soul over the traumatic decades.

Now, a month after that session, I am beginning to think that I could even do the kind of work I have been doing, translation and proofreading, and feel very good, just as long as I always focus more on my spirituality, and the work takes a back seat in my life.

I have abandoned all concern and worry and I have no idea what will happen to me. I have too little income to even buy food these days, have savings to last about 6 months, am looking for a cheaper apartment and have no idea what will happen or how this will change, if it does. I’m just meditating every day and doing spiritual things, doing work when it comes. I figured that for 8 months I was worried and scared about how I would live and pay rent and did all kinds of stuff to get more work, while absolutely nothing panned out. Why should I be in a tizzy all my life, frantically trying to secure an income for myself to no avail, when I could at least enjoy the money I have for as long as it lasts? The worst that can happen is that I will lose my apartment and have to either sell or find free storage for my things and become homeless.

Who cares, at this point. I’m dead sick of struggling to live. If life wants to kill me, let it.

Ok, so I have been in Sweden for a year now – having left the U.S. on the day after Thanksgiving last year. And what do I have to show for my efforts? Let’s see…well, on all fronts things seem to be going quite well – except the financial front.

I have a nice studio apartment, which is nearly empty, because I have no money to buy anything. I had been receiving work from my usual employer in decreasing quantities and was forced to begin my own business in Sweden in order to legalize the limited money that I was managing to earn.

Since September I have had my own business and the work I had been getting from my one client has been steadily dwindling, for reasons that I can only guess at . This month I hardly earned enough money to pay for a phone bill.

Although I have not had time to write about it yet, during the summer I was able to visualize the relationship I wanted with my boyfriend into being by following instructions taught by Abraham-Hicks about how to consciously use the Law of Attraction. This was such a mind-boggling, unprecedented and impressive success for me, that I have now decided to use the same method to manifest my financial security – because if something doesn’t change soon, I will either be homeless in a few months (when my savings runs out), or I will have to terminate my business and go on Swedish welfare.

So, I am going to use my blog here to document and implement this 30-day push for financial security.

I had been in a real funk since last week. On Friday, I had a terrible day involved in mind-bending interchanges with a client who had asked me to do an extremely thorough proofreading. My interchanges with that client had such a horrible effect on my emotional state, that it has taken me this long to pick myself back up. And how?

This morning I woke up and wrote out a list of some things I had been taking for granted recently and I felt gratitude for them. I love making these gratitude lists, because once I get started, all kinds of new things and aspects of things to feel gratitude for pop into my mind and I add them to the list.

By the end of this exercise, I was feeling as high as a kite. When you deliberately list out things you can feel grateful for, by the end of the process, if you spend enough time doing it, you feel like an ultra-special person.

After this experience today, I decided I am going to make a gratitude list every morning for the next 30 days. It is a great-feeling way to start the day and to stay optimistic and it served to pick me up out of my funk when nothing else I tried was working.

I thought I might like to start doing some short free reiki sessions on other people. I was just thinking that if any of you who find your way to this little corner of the world wide web have some things disturbing you in some way, maybe you might like to try a short free distance reiki session with me.

With all of the new changes coming into my life now, I feel like getting a little more experience on giving reiki to people who are not me. So if you are not me, and you want to see what reiki is like, just send me a message on my contact page and maybe we can arrange a time.

If you want to do this, be aware that you will have to discuss with me whatever issue (emotional or physical) you want healing on.

I have just returned from swinging on some playground swings near where I live. There was no competition for the swings – in fact, the playground and the streets are practically deserted – since it is pouring rain outside. And I feel great!!

I was feeling really angry at someone and I had been angry at her all week long and I couldn’t seem to shake it, even though I had done reiki on it.

So, in spite of the rain and the 13 degrees Celsius outside, I put on a raincoat and rain boots and off I went to the swings!

I swung and swung for I don’t know how long. No one was anywhere near, so I took the liberty to voice my anger at the lady I was so angry at. After a certain point, I went quiet and was staring up at the tree branches as I swung back and forth. Then I began singing “Raindrops are falling on my head…” And I was lightened, free of my anger and laughing at myself for swinging in the rain.

People seem to find it a little odd that I swing, but swinging in the rain was even weird by my own standards – and my clothes got soaked through and I got some odd looks walking home. However, I knew it would do me good and I believed it could get me out of my angry rut. And sometimes it just feels downright fun to get funny looks from grown-ups .

Swinging on swings and reveling in the rain are just two of the things I love to do that defy the list of “things grown-ups don’t do.” I don’t understand why, but once you turn a certain age, you are not “supposed” to do a lot of fun things that feel really good. “Adults don’t” swing on swings, or revel or walk out in the rain without hiding under an umbrella, they don’t stomp in puddles, they don’t stand on their heads or sit upside-down on the couch. No singing (especially not while swinging on a swing), no doing handstands against the wall, no running around and doing cartwheels in big open spaces…What a truly tragic existence adults must live – thank God I’m not one!

Do like Gene Kelly – It’s fun!

Well…I had all but abandoned this website, because I’m not quite sure what to do with it anymore. I’ve stopped posting in the “diary” category because I’ve decided to turn that into a book instead, so I won’t be making that section public anymore. I won’t delete the diary posts I have up unless/until I actually get so far as to submit the book for publishing though.

I only came back here now thanks to 2 inspiring comments from 2 people in recent months. And then I read my own “quick updates” and decided this would be a good place to write about current occurrences and endeavors.

Unfortunately, I haven’t written anything about my experience since coming to Sweden, and there were a lot of great and crazy things. I kind of regret that I forgot about the site during that time. I could either go backwards in time and write about them all in an attempt to catch up (and that kind of defeats the purpose of a “quick update” – I wonder if I can do anything quickly and concisely when it comes to writing…)

I’ll think about it and decide what to write about…or maybe start another category that I might end up deciding to turn into a book again…Maybe I should just take away all the categories, because categorizing my posts seems to be inhibiting my writing!

Ideally, once I catch up in telling about what has happened since I came to Sweden, I ought to be able to continue the same section as “quick updates.” But for the time that I write in retrospect, they aren’t updates.

Now, it seems this period of devotion to healing myself is coming to a close, though I am quite far behind in posting here about my progress. I will continue to heal myself as long as I am conscious, but now the main focus of my life is turning to reaping the benefits of my healing.

I have just bought a ticket to Sweden, where I have decided will be a good place for me to settle. After living for 2½ years in stuffy, little rooms, freezing cold in winter and deathly hot in summer, having to put up with the idiosyncrasies of roommates, not being free, sharing the bathroom and paying 3 times too much money to live like that, I have decided that the very first thing I will do is rent my own apartment! I want to make my own home.

At the end of November, I am leaving the U.S. to settle and start my new life in Sweden.

One of the side effects I hoped to gain from healing myself, was the ability to manipulate the Law of Attraction to my own benefit, for once in my life. Now that I feel I have “cleaned out” a lot of the negative energy that was perpetuating the negative experiences I was having in my life, I feel like, theoretically, I ought to be able to be happy in my life now, and succeed in getting what I want. Well, right now I want a home in Sweden, with a small variety of jobs, not just one; I can handle a certain amount of translation, but I want to gain some experience teaching English, and have time to develop certain other things online.

Ultimately, I feel like I really want to do spiritual work and abandon the intellectual work almost entirely. For now, however, I will aim to teach some English and continue translating.

Sitting out on the deck of my mother and step-father’s house, looking out at the backyard and basking in the beauty that is autumn. Autumn was never this beautiful to me. It’s warm, 60° F. The sun is shining on me, as I sit on the hard wooden bench.

The sun warms me. It has painted the leaves with vibrant yellows and heartwarming oranges and reds. Golden carpets under our feet as we walk along the sidewalk beneath bronze and golden canopies.

For me, autumn had always signified a time of death, darkness, silence and alienation. Autumn – a magnifying glass on my misery, my loneliness and despair. My worst autumn ever was the autumn of 2005, when I wrote Finnish Autumn. Today, I can barely remember the depths of despair I was in when I wrote that, which, even as bad as it was, and as bad as my life had already been to that point, was just the precursor to the worst that was yet to come.

But today, this year, autumn is beautiful. My favorite season and a natural complement to my hair .

I am a different person. I am happy. I have peace. I feel loved; and this is the first time, ever, in my life that I can say this.

I love autumn!!!

Yesterday, [I]the very same scenario[/I] occurred with my bf. A different trigger for me, but still he called me crazy and got angry at me. Everything was the same – [I]or was it[/I]? No, because I had healed myself and no longer had pain or emotional charge on being dismissed offhand .

I am so happy about this, I can’t even tell you how wonderful it feels to be able to have the power of the solution in your heart! . I feel so good!

Last week, I had a big fight with my boyfriend. Essentially, I had a reaction to something and he completely dismissed me by calling me crazy. I was upset already from the initial thing, but he has often called me crazy when he doesn’t understand me and it often sets me off. Meanwhile, he’ll call me crazy and then I start to get angry, ballistic angry, because then he disappears and stops talking to me for days and I’m left with so much upset and anger because he won’t speak or listen to me!

Last week when this happened, it was a big blow-up and I was questioning if I could salvage this and if I even wanted to. As I always do when I have bad feelings in my relationship with him, I reikied myself. As I reikied myself, I had the insight that I become “crazy” when he treats me like that, not because he is calling me crazy, but because he is dismissing and discounting me, judging me as crazy because he doesn’t understand me and doesn’t want to. He shuts off all communication.

As I continued to reiki myself, it dawned on me that this phenomenon hardly began with him. Indeed, this is a complaint I’ve had about all of my immediate and non-immediate family members ever since I’ve had a memory. It only began with family, but I have experienced it to lesser or greater degrees across the board throughout my whole life and it’s taken a horrible toll on my self-esteem and concept of self-worth. And here I found myself with someone, who is really fundamentally very good, moral and peace-loving, thinking he is the cause and blaming him for this recurring fight and wondering if I should even continue to stay with him.

This realization gave me the focus of my next reiki session. I spent the next 3-4 days without contact with my bf and doing reiki on myself for this upsetting issue of being dismissed, all the while not being sure if he and I would be together again. That didn’t matter. What mattered was that, if I didn’t heal this issue, it would recur in every romantic relationship I would attempt.

Then…

Yesterday, the very same scenario occurred with my bf. The thing that triggered my initial reaction was different, and my reaction too was different, but he still called me crazy and got angry at me. Everything was the same - or was it? No, because I had healed myself and no longer had pain or emotional charge on being dismissed offhand .

Soooo…when he called me crazy, I said “Just because you don’t understand me, doesn’t mean I’m crazy.” He continued to be angry at me, but not like last week, and I maintained myself the whole time. He was angry, but he was at least able to communicate with me, while last week he just shut me out and disappeared. Because he was able to communicate with me, I was able to answer him, explain my behavior to him a little. His anger at me didn’t bother me to such an extent that my reaction to it was controlling me.

Throughout the whole experience, I never once felt myself separated from my love for him by my own personal issues. Because of that, there was no fight and, in the end, I was able to get him smiling again and us speaking loving words to each other again. I was able to keep the peace between us, even though he got angry and called me crazy.

I am so happy about this, I can’t even tell you how wonderful it feels to be able to have the power of the solution in your heart! . I feel so good! I think that being able to stay with your love for someone as they are being poked and prodded by their own demons, and likely even to uplift them from the effects of their demons, in a relationship feels more wonderful and more rewarding than being in a relationship with someone who appeases the complaints of all of your own demons!

The most upsetting thing I am wondering, though, is how often is being told to dump someone actually the worst advice anyone could ever give you in a relationship??