Let’s talk about the places where you feel stuck. Like not knowing how to get out of or make it work in a stagnant relationship, making difficult decisions, or making career choices and not seeing results. You then go into making or creating reasons and explanations about your situation. There’s a tendency in all of us to get stuck into a point of view or a story that we run in our heads. And the more you re-iterate it, the more it gets lodged into your consciousness and your way of being. Or you desperately try to dig your way out of the mud.

One way to shift your thought process is letting things be. Instead of explaining or threading through thick mud, let the mud be. Sit in the mud, have a conversation with your stuckness. While at it, invite it over to have coffee or tea with you. So that you can begin to get familiar with it and see it differently.

In that familiarity, you see that mud isn’t just mud. There are layers to it, nuances, cracks, fullness, emptiness, maybe a lot of yuckiness, and also some light in between the cracks. You become an expert at mud and the mud responds by opening up its rich moist life to you.

What is awaiting you in your mud, in your stuckness? What can you sense and see about it after having a conversation with it? Let me know.

With love and light,

Damla

When we are in the grip of fear, doubt becomes an easy ally. In the face of the uncertainties of our lives, while we face all that we cannot control, change or grasp, fear is our first reaction. Doubt and worry revolve around our fear that all of our reality will be based on the potential possibilities of what we fear most coming to life.

Fear is a reminder about our vulnerability. There is nothing that can be guaranteed in life including life itself. And maintaining a safe, comfortable, pain-free life throughout your lifetime may not be possible for you and for the ones you love.

Worrying gives you a sense of control. By always expecting and fearing the worst, you feel prepared for what might come your way. Doubt tells you to only see the unfortunate possibilities. I have no problems with either one as healthy initial responses to what life throws at you, except that they limit your possibilities and the way you relate to them.

Another way of looking at life involves hope. Hope that you already have the resources, life tools, support and unique solutions for whatever life throws at you. This is available in your blood and in your field as evidenced by your ancestors’ tenacity, survival ability, and creativity. I don’t know about you, but I grew up hearing story upon story upon story about my grandparents and great-grandparents on how they managed to survive wars, famine, hunger, financial difficulties, loss of loved ones, sickness, adversity, corruption, immigration and so on.

Not everything you are dealing with can be resolved, eased or navigated through easily or quickly. However, you have the option to lean on hope and the belief that you can go through it thanks to the creativity and the resourcefulness passed down to you by your ancestors.

I am sharing a resilience story about my grandmother and her rose garden in this recent interview. What do you remember of your grandparents or other family members? What resilience stories have been passed down to you by your family? Please email me with your thoughts.

I am opening my blog to guest bloggers who will share their strategies for maintaining hope and inspiration about life. If you are interested in becoming a guest blogger and sharing your insights, or know someone who has something to say about this topic, please let me know.

I highly recommend that you listen to this interview with Junot Diaz from start to finish. Regardless of where you stand on the political aisle, there are important messages in it like men and vulnerability, the gifts of silence, and the lessons to gather from our ancestors.

With love and light,

Damla

One of the things I tell my clients often is the case of the fried toaster. Imagine a toast machine whose electrical wiring got fried because of an access electrical shock. If you’ve had a traumatic childhood, adolescence or adulthood, you are the fried toaster. If the unusual charge happened early enough (as early as in the womb or during birth), you end up living with an electrically compromised system your whole life, feeling, struggling, stressing more than usual.

Then imagine toasting your bread with this fried toaster. There is no chance that it will work like one who didn’t go through what this one went through. Even with some repairs, this toaster may not be able to process the charges that go through it effectively. Much like those of you who got burned early enough that you had to live like a fried toaster, feeling everything a lot more than others, getting overwhelmed easily (because your system is overcharged to compensate for the burnt parts), feeling like your life is going to end with every little stress that comes your way.

Living as a fried toaster is not easy but there are tools that can help you better manage and care for your precious machinery. It means that you need a little more care than someone who didn’t get burned (which by the way at one point or another all of us do), a lot more gentleness, tons of space and time to process new things, people, emotions, situations, and in general letting yourself know that you are your own ally and you will hold your fried cables with a ton of self-compassion and give yourself the space and the opportunities to heal in your own time.

What matters most is for you to find your own normal, your own unique, crazy, eccentric, maybe nerdy way of living life. And if you need any help along the way with patching up some old wounds and old cables, just send me a note.

With love and light,

Damla

I keep coming back to sensing my heart lately. Closing my eyes, I first feel what needs to be felt, then I drop my attention right into my physical heart, resting within its constant beats. As I stay longer in this space, another quality emerges, I feel my energetic heart, expanding, creating light, reaching into and out of my body. I stay with it and my physicality melts into the delight of experiencing this spaciousness.

Dropping into your heart is a way to find out what you need most. Your heart knows. You already know. All it takes is taking three minutes out of your day to connect with your inner sensation of living. Then slowly but surely the truths begin to surface. Where are you stuck at? What is taking too much time and effort? What do you need to let go? What do you need to say, do, think or imagine differently? You stop, you wait, you listen, and then you take inspired action.

When there is a struggle in your body, the safest place to drop into is your heart because it can keep you centered. It gives you not only a physical place to concentrate into but an emotional refuge. When you come into contact with your knowing heart, suddenly things don’t seem or feel that hard any more.

When is the last time you dropped into your heart? When did you last seek your own counsel, your own wisdom, or your own companionship? I invite you to take a moment, drop everything else and rest comfortably in your heart.

With love and light,

Damla

It is 10:30pm. On a country road on the West Coast of Turkey we stop on the side of the road and rush out of the car. There is a thick smoke and a burnt plastic scent coming out of the front of the car. I carry my five year old daughter quickly a few yards away. Luckily she is blissfully sleepy with her headphones on, listening to her music. As my husband and in-laws try to find a flashlight, a car stops and two women and a guy come out asking us what we need. They then quickly produce a flashlight. We figure out that the engine ran out of water and overheated. The guy runs to the back of his car and brings out a 30 gallon water container. It turns out that they don’t normally carry water with them. But earlier that day they stopped by a friend’s house and their friend insisted that they take the water with them. We fill the water tank and in less than 15 minutes we are on our way safe and sound.

As always, please feel free to reach out to me with anything you would like to share. There’s a daily conversation going on about how to bring bliss into our lives and chakras, at our private Chakra Bliss Party Facebook Group. You can join in the conversation or listen quietly to the wisdom of the beautiful and amazing souls who hold this virtual space for each other.

With love and light,

Damla

Our energetic wounds live in our bodies, minds and our electromagnetic field (about 6 feet out all around our body). Anything that is not loving is recorded in our fields, minds, and bodies. We often associate deep wounds and trauma with physical or emotional abuse. What we don’t understand is for something to be a wound, it only needs to ‘feel like’ and be perceived as trauma or stress by our system. In the mind of a child, the uncontrolled anger of a parent is trauma, because they are never sure when it is going to hit even if it doesn’t immediately hurt them or it isn’t about them, which creates a constant state of heightened alert and stress in them. Being exposed to your parents arguing is trauma. And I am finding more and more, ignoring any need of a child or adolescent is traumatic.

What I am finding more and more with myself and my clients is tending to only one side of a wound is not enough, you need to work with and on all three aspects of how it shows up: the body, the mind, and the field. We often think that when we change our mindsets and for instance forgive a past offender, all will be well. The electromagnetic charge of any life event still lives in the body and the field even when you update your story. Same is true for tending to the body or the field only. All three aspects of healing need to happen in harmony.

Here’s what you can do about your wounds:

• Take some time right now to feel into your body and mind, what comes up in your system that feels like a disturbance, numbness, pain or dis-ease? What is repeating itself as thoughts, emotions, or life experiences? What is the wall that you keep hitting? All of these are clues about where the wound lives and how to release its charge. Listen in and take action, anything big or small you can do right now, to be with what is and to tend to your wound.
• We have been working with daily mantras on how to change our stories and mindset at the Chakra Bliss Party Facebook Group. You can join the soulful group of women of this group for daily inquiries.
• To work with me privately on your wounds, or to attend one of my workshops, please go to this link. All of my private offerings are available through Skype or phone.

The purpose of spiritual development and inquiry is only one thing: inspired action. Inspired action happens when you are aligned with your soul in your body and mind. The opposite is simply reaction where we follow the trail of our wounds and reenact them over and over again.

The reaction is the place of suffering and pain. It is where you hurt and you are most likely to hurt others. During a reaction, the emotions run high and there is a sense of things not being right. This is the place where your needs are desperately screaming to be met.

The inspired action is when you are acting from an impetus that feels authentic, unique and truthful. You are not acting out of a desperation, retaliation or righteousness. You are acting from a place of calm knowing that your needs are already met.

Going from reaction to an inspired action is a lifetime journey that starts with accepting that you are responsible for taking care of yourself. This life, this heart that beats inside of you really needs you to be present. Can you give yourself the time, attention and the care that you deserve? Can you be with yourself with an immeasurable compassion to identify what your needs are during a reactive state? Can you then be responsible for taking action to take care of those needs?

Over time, your care helps you develop a sense of presence and the space to take more and more inspired actions. When your needs are met, it becomes easier to listen to your partner, your child, your own body. It becomes easier to say the right words, do the right things or sometimes not say anything or do anything at all. When your sea is calm you can bear witness to the storm around you with the awe of a Goddess. Every raindrop becomes something amazing to watch and be with because you have cleared the lens of your camera.

During reactive times when your emotions are running high, just take note of this: you have a need that is asking you to be heard and it is just the right time for you to stop and listen to it.

Here are a few ways for you to work with what you need and awaken inspired action in your life. To work deeply on your energetic wounds that are keeping you in a reactive state, consider working with me privately. All of my offerings are available as in-person sessions in my home studio in Durham, NH or over Skype or phone.

• Sound Balancing: A revolutionary method that detects the disturbances in your energy field and corrects them with the help of the purifying tones of the tuning forks. Through sound balancing, it is possible to detect and re-balance energetic wounds in your field that result in changes and release in your physical system. (Appointments begin after May 19th)
• Chakra Bliss Healing: A blissful crystal chakra energy healing with your chakra measurement, assessment, chakra balance recommendations and personal intuitive messages for each chakra.
• Consult: One on one meetings for bliss and transformation. We focus on one area and create a plan to change your relationship with anything that is between you and a blissful life. With personalized chakra, crystal and mantra guidance, intuitively channeled messages, distance healing, and practices you can add to your life right away, you can embark on a journey of bliss.

Please contact me to book your session or if you have any questions.

With love and light,

Damla

When stress hits us we usually revert back to what I call our ‘factory settings’, meaning we handle the stress the same way we handled it when we were little, which usually is the way our parents handled it. There is usually an age we go back to as well. Depending on the situation, you may find yourself as a hungry/angry five year old, grumpy 13 year old or a sad two year old.

No matter how much self-improvement you do or how many times a day you meditate, going back to the factory settings is inevitable. It is a part of our wiring to seek what we need in a way that is wired in us at an early age.

The trick is then realizing when you are in a five year old state of mind, pausing to notice what you really need, and choosing to behave with the wisdom and the experience of your current year old self.

There is a better way to satisfy your needs, I call this ‘returning to the source code’. The source code is your life energy, connected to all the life energy around you. Some people call it electromagnetism, some call it the soul and the unified field, and some call it love. This is the place where you get your fuel, your inner resourcefulness, your ideas and creativity. This is the place that can help you rewrite a new behavioral pattern instead of the one you played out a million times before.

What you need to connect with your source code are only two things: making time for a sacred pause and your intention. I am hosting a Chakra Bliss Group Healing this Sunday to give you the time and space for a sacred pause to connect you with your source code. Hope to see you there.

With love and light,

Damla Aktekin

I’ve been thinking a lot about the power of a sacred pause. It can be as short as a breath, as long as a one-hour meditation or a week-long retreat. What makes it sacred is the intention to bathe yourself in enoughness.

For the duration of the pause, you stop trying to change or fix anything, make yourself or things better. What brings you to the pause is that you have already tried that and it didn’t work. In this moment of complete exhaustion, you have nothing else left to do but pause your thinking mind and leave yourself in a sea of beingness.

Being as it turns out is completely enough. You are enough when you exist without your preconceptions, assumptions, conditions and conditionings. You are enough when you let go of the place you’d like to reach or the person you strive to become.

In the lack of striving lies the fertile ground of creative connection to the life in and around you. You become a sacred container that can hold life and transform it into joyfulness, resourcefulness, renewed energy, and beauty. You can dive into the realm of possibilities instead of holding on to what you think should have been.

The sacred pause holds the key to be with what is. In being, we become.

I am hosting a monthly sacred pause, a Chakra Bliss Group Healing, in the Seacoast New England area. Hope to meet you there soon.

With love and light,

Damla Aktekin

I’ve been nursing a cold all week. Feeling foggy and tired with a low-grade fever and waiting for it to run its course. I woke up tonight in the middle of the night with a ‘my sinuses are too full’ feeling. Unable to go to sleep, I got up and took care of a few things including drinking some water with lemon (always helps with anything). Then it occurred to me.

Consciousness is a sum of all our aware moments. The more aware you are the more conscious (aka awake) you are. And you can’t be fully conscious just by being aware of all the good-labeled moments, feelings and emotions. You need to expand your consciousness to include the totality of your life experience. This takes work, effort and brutal honesty.

So for me this means tending to everything that my body is feeling right now without judging or labeling. And drinking lots and lots of water with lemon juice 🙂

What are you aware of right now? What can you include in your field of awareness that you normally push or wish away?

Here are a few ways to work with me to bring your conscious awareness to what needs light and to transform your outlook so that you can begin to hold more and more in your loving gaze.

Have a blissful week.

With love and light,

Damla

Photograph by NASA