KAJAMA.COM NEWSLETTER

January 8 through January 14, 2024

The Capricorn new Moon occurs on Thursday, but the energy for fresh starts will abound all week long. There's a tendency for lots of talk and little action under Monday and Tuesday's Sagittarius Moon, but it's all part of the plan to bring us back into work mode, so let's not worry if we don't get much done. The Capricorn Moon is the aspect that will get us back up and running on Wednesday and Thursday, and we'll be able to catch up in record time, allowing us to tie up any loose ends from last year and put a stake in the ground for new enterprises. Change will be the theme as the Moon dances through Aquarius on Friday and Saturday, whether we are looking for a new job, home or relationship. Finding new ways to manifest our dreams is essential now, because as we know, nothing changes if nothing changes! Sunday's Pisces Moon will inspire us spiritually, so let's listen for that small intuitive voice within that is sure to direct us forward.

An Excerpt from Let Us Be Greater by Michelle Madrid

As an international adoptee and someone who has worked with adopted adults and youth as a life coach, I’ve identified eight adoptee pain points, places of hurt that adoptees need to heal. These pain points can cause challenges in the adoptee’s life, keeping them from a place of peace and wholeness within. Setting the course to compassionately and soulfully heal and reframe these eight primary sources of pain — transforming points of pain into points of light. The adoptee pain points are:

The pain of feeling unwelcome in the world

The pain of broken bonds and a deep sense of loss

The pain of being denied access to truth

The pain of familial rejection and of words that harm

The pain of distrust

The pain of banished biology

The pain of pleasing others versus pleasing the self

The pain of lack of transparency and acceptance

Adoptees may feel out of control and at the mercy of one, several, or all of these pain points. Our work here, together, is to transform this pain and to empower our lives as adoptees.

The motivation to transform can be found in this question:

What if this is as good as it gets?

Is this what you’re asking yourself as an adoptee about the pain you’re carrying? Do you believe that the pain will never get any better? I learned, through an exercise called the Dickens Process, to sink into a painful limiting belief and imagine what it would feel like if I was still living with it one year, three years, five years, or ten years down the road. The Dickens Process is an NLP (neurolinguistic programming) technique that guides you to use your conscious mind in identifying the consequences of a limiting belief and in deciding whether you want to continue with that belief. The essence of this exercise is based on the character Scrooge from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Scrooge is famously shown his past, his present, and what his future will look like if he doesn’t change his ways. The Dickens Process has you identify a limiting belief and then look at it in depth through the lens of three questions:

What did this limiting belief cost you and your loved ones in the past? What have you lost because of this belief? See it. Hear it. Feel it.
What is this limiting belief costing you and those you care about in the present? See it. Hear it. Feel it.
What will this limiting belief cost you and the people you care about one year, three years, five years, or ten years down the road? See it. Hear it. Feel it.

Once you’ve dwelled on the pain of this limiting belief and experienced what it feels like to hold on to it, you will be motivated to create a new limitless belief that inspires and empowers you. Here’s my question for you:

What limiting belief is holding you back today? What if the pain you feel right now, because of this belief, is exactly how you’ll feel one year, three years, five years, or ten years down the road? Maybe you’re telling yourself, as I once did, that you’re just one of those people meant to live a life that’s smaller than the dreams you hold inside. Maybe you believe that staying quiet and concealed, as an adoptee, is how you’ll stay safe from rejection. Maybe you’re living on someone else’s terms. Are you? Are you living someone else’s narrative for your life? Are you falling in line but secretly falling apart inside? I don’t want you to feel this way — not for one more second. What would it be like for you to leave your limiting beliefs behind, once and for all, and move forward with new and limitless ones? Take time to consider the questions of the Dickens Process. It’s a game changer. It works! We’ll revisit this process in chapter 1 during a reflection exercise.

My adoptive mother once told me that I could start finding out more about my first family and my ethnicity once she was no longer around. This was a damaging comment, and it came from my own mother. The comment was based in fear, only I didn’t know that at the time. Mom was fearful of losing me, and I was petrified of being rejected by her. Neither one of us was operating from a space of unconditional love.

And so I did what my mother asked. Like a good adopted girl, I sat inside the waiting room of my own life. The only thing that grew during that time were the pain points. Like thick vines, they entangled me in fear. I felt trapped and lost. Maybe you do, too.

We’re not here, as adoptees, to live someone else’s life. We’re here to live our own lives, our big and beautiful lives! We’re here to be who we are and who we’re destined to become. We’re here to do that from the purest place of authenticity and essence.
My desire to get to the truth of me and to reignite the light within me has taken me on a transformational journey of self-discovery, self-compassion, and self-love. That journey began when I picked up a book by Louise Hay in graduate school called You Can Heal Your Life. The title didn’t say that you can heal your life — unless you’re adopted. No, it offered me the assurance that I really could heal my life, even as an adoptee. Hay’s book awakened me to a place of pure love, empowerment, and self-acceptance. I wanted to get to that place in my own way and through my own experiences. I want to help you get there, too.

My potential once seemed so limited. Today I view my potential as vast and without boundaries. I used to perceive adoption as my weakness, but now I see it as a source of my strength. I’ve traveled deep within in order to transform my life. I’ve learned to shift limiting beliefs into limitless truth. I’ll be asking you to do the same as we, adoptee to adoptee, move through the pages of this book.

You see, the pain you may be struggling with right now isn’t as good as it gets. It’s not all there is! There’s so much more awaiting you beyond the pain. Do you have the power to heal your life? Yes, I believe with all that I am that you do.

Michelle Madrid is the author of Let Us Be Greater: A Gentle, Guided Path to Healing for Adoptees and host of the Electricity of You Podcast. She is an international adoptee, former foster child in the UK, and an adoptee empowerment life coach who has been recognized as an Angels in Adoption® Honoree by the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute (CCAI) and inducted into the New Mexico Women’s Hall of Fame for her work in adoption. She lives in Los Angeles and you can visit her online at http://TheMichelleMadrid.com.

Excerpted from the book Let Us Be Greater: A Gentle, Guided Path to Healing for Adoptees ©2023 by Michelle Madrid. Printed with permission from New World Library — www.newworldlibrary.com

I've been in a safe, secure marriage for ten years. I have two wonderful daughters, and my life is blessed with good health and a great family. Here's the problem: I have the most vivid, intense, passionate dreams. Often in these dreams, I'll reunite with ex-boyfriends, and when I wake up, I can't shake the feeling that I am deeply in love with them. It leaves me feeling like I took the wrong path in life. Sometimes I want to just dream my life away, and sometimes I'm actually afraid to fall asleep, because my dreams seem more real than my waking life, and I'm afraid sometimes that I may never wake up. It can take days for me to shake just one dream. Please help me. I feel like I'm losing touch with reality, and am afraid to talk to anyone about this because they might think I'm crazy.

- Dreamer

Dreamchaser:

I think you already know what is going on here, but you don't really want to face it. You said you were in a safe, secure marriage with two wonderful daughters, good health and a great family, but you did NOT mention that you were in love, felt loved, or were in any way satisfied.

I believe your gut told you when you were making this choice that you were choosing safety and security over being IN love. You were content with that choice when you made it because of what was going on in your life at the time.

Now, however, you are bored out of your mind. You are too honest and upright to go out and have affairs, however, so you dream. You dream of past boyfriends, of men you lust after that you would never dare proposition, and of men you have never and will never meet.

In those dreams you carry on in all kinds of ways. You do and say and think whatever you want. You are wanton and you are fulfilled. You are brazen and satisfied. When you wake up, it's very hard for you to leave behind the unbridled passion of your dreams for your "cookie cutter" existence.

As I often explain here, many people lead two very different lives. One is the life they lead while they are awake, and the other is the life they lead while they are sleeping and dreaming. I have actually heard of this "phenomenon" that you are experiencing many times. People who are bored, critically ill, shut in, etc., tend to live more in the astral world than they do in the physical world.

Now I must remind you that there are four equal dimensions of experience: spiritual, mental, emotional and physical. The physical is what people tend to view as either the only reality or at least the most important one. You lead different lives on all those levels. Your "safe and secure" life is just your experience on the physical plane.

Throughout the ages, many types of people have believed in the power of dreaming. Australian aborigines, for example, believed that in Dreamtime, beings with great powers would either arise from the ground, come down from the sky, or appear on the horizon and lend their powers to the dreamer.

I think you wake up with feelings of love that you bring back from your own personal Dreamtime. Since you can't love with abandon in your physical world, you do it in your dreams. Then you come back to the physical plane with a "love hangover." If you want greater fulfillment, I encourage you to explore what these dream experiences may reveal about your repressed needs.

I wish you fulfillment in every dimension.

*****

Astrea:

Though it seems you have a perfect life, something must be bothering you to cause you to want to stay in that dream world. Perhaps things are on SUCH an even keel in your waking life that your subconscious is looking for a way to keep you alert and entertained.

This sort of experience is not as unusual as you might think. After being happily married for as long as you have, many people end up not getting enough stimulation while they're awake - at least, not enough to be completely happy. You shouldn't be afraid of your dreams. Dreams are just dreams! Nothing is going to happen in your waking life that you don't want to happen. From what you wrote in your question, you seem in complete control of yourself.

What you are experiencing is a need to search within yourself for some new sense of purpose. Everything you're doing now, you can handle, but your mind yearns for more challenge. Just because it picked the old boyfriends doesn't mean that's what you're seeking. You ARE looking for something to shake up your life, something to excite you, something that YOU can be excited about doing.

What are your interests outside of taking care of yourself and your family? It's time to expand your world to include something for which you can feel real PASSION. If you like to volunteer, now would be a great time to be certified by the Red Cross or to join a group devoted to hurricane relief.

There are all kinds of activities that would be worthy of your time and energy, but you should try to find something that fulfills you in a DIFFERENT way than your family does. Once you become passionate about doing something outside of all that seems to be good and perfect but ORDINARY for you, those crazy dreams will stop.

Feeling that you are "losing touch with reality" is NOT a good thing, Kiddo. The good news is that you are not crazy - you are just bored. Many times deep desires and issues will manifest so clearly in our dreams that we KEEP the dream feeling going when we wake up. Everyone experiences this at times of stress, and if you're having dreams that seem so much more real to you than your waking life, it's time to examine what is stressing you beneath the perfect surface of your waking life, and then make some appropriate changes.

You have to be able to enjoy being awake just as much as you enjoy dreaming, one way or another. Find and make a passionate choice to do something very DIFFERENT from what you're used to doing. It will really clear your mind of all that foggy stuff!

Astrea:

Many times in life we hear, "You will always have what you NEED, but not necessarily what you WANT." Your spirit must have needed to experience the feeling of leaving your human body, and the suggestion in the next chapter of Sylvia Brown's book was all it took to get you there.

Even though you hadn't read it yet, your SOUL recognized the title of that chapter as something it had been seeking, and your soul, knowing that you had that reference to read after your experience, got with it and out you went!

While I don't usually recommend her books, Sylvia Brown has a wide reaching and powerful effect on lots of people. A Gemini like you would be able to relate easily to her writing and put it to good use. Synchronicity - you gotta love it!

I like your description of "getting caught." That's exactly what it feels like, isn't it? One minute you're free and hovering above the room, and the next minute, ZAP! back down into your corporeal form you go!

As a little kid, I loved that "feeling of return." With practice, most of the time we can control that event, but sometimes, when our physical ears hear a distracting noise or something else occurs to knock us back into reality, back we go. With practice you will be able to control your return better.

I find it interesting that you were visiting your mother-in-law and not someone in your own genetic family. Evidently, you and your husband got married for reasons that are even deeper than love. His family's interest in "psychic stuff" will nurture your children in such matters and help them to grow into their own abilities.

You'll never have to be concerned that when your daughter visits them, she'll be discouraged from exploring her own psychic life and power. My parents encouraged me to develop my psychic senses in a time when it wasn't nice to even discuss such things in public. Heck, it's STILL not considered a great topic at the dinner table in some families!

Your kids will get to talk about it ALL and ask questions and read and study. This is going to give them such an edge in life! Talk with your husband about how you want to present this to your kiddos, so that you are united in your approach and ready to tell them their experiences are all natural and okay.

A word or two of warning: Geminis often have difficulty staying grounded in REAL LIFE. Don't get so strung out on your ASTRAL life that you neglect what you're doing here on Earth.

You are at the beginning of a long journey to learn where your power really lies. Try to be patient with this process and take your time.