Birthday Celebrations on Nov. 24th

Tomorrow is both the celebration of my dear friend Corrine’s birthday, and also the celebration of me giving birth to my son, Loran.  What a gift to have them both having a birthday on the same day.  I believe that each of us has a gift to bring to the world, and so it is important to acknowledge how amazing and courageous it is for a soul to make the decision to come to this planet to grow and share their light with the world, and to bring forth their special gifts.      I met Corrine in Telluride, CO, in 1984.  We met while I was going through a very challenging relationship and living in a difficult situation in Rico, CO, just south of Telluride.  Rico was a very small town at the time, and probably still is. Corrine was such a gift to me, so insightful, supportive, challenging.  She was the light that shone during a very dark time, that made it safe for me to heal and step forward on my path.  We stayed in touch throughout the years, but not often.  She is now back in my life and we talk every two weeks, and it is such a gift.  She is older and going through her own health challenges and yet her mind is still nimble.  She can remember conversations we had back then; my circumstances, my learning, and has been a precious mirror to show me how much I have healed. She is also an avid cheerleader, applauding all my growth, and helping me see how much I have changed, as well as reminding me of my special gifts and talents.  I feel like Spirit has brought us back into each other’s lives at an important time, so that we could support each other through our present transformation and challenges.      I met my son 38 years ago.  I loved being pregnant and even wrote a paper for a college class about all the physical and emotional changes I was going through.  It was during my Catholic phase, so as I would go for five mile walks each day, with my dogs, Oblio and Arlo, I’d talk to my son and say the rosary.  So there we were, Mother Mary, Oblio, Arlo, my inutero son and I, together in the desert as we bonded.  After 4 months of Braxten Hicks contractions, and 17 hours of hard labor, my son was born the day before Thanksgiving, and boy was I grateful to finally meet him.  It was love at first sight, just as the love had grown over those nine months of conversations.       The relationship hasn’t turned out how I thought it would but for many years we were the best of friends.  No one could make me laugh as much as him. I always loved being a Mom. I read to him most nights and also sang and played guitar for him, until he went to college.  We had great fun playing games and football catch, singing songs, reading books, taking several week long road trips after I’d check him out of school, cross country skiing excursions, and hiking sometimes 7 days a week. We loved birthday celebrations so much that we’d often celebrate his birthday twice a year, making up a random date for the second birthday celebration. In a way we grew up together.  I am so grateful for the learning that takes place in motherhood, as you experience being responsible for someone else.  We were always aware of other lives we’d shared, so we knew the bond was an old one.    What a precious gift it is to get to journey through life with these people,… to cry, to laugh, to travel through both the dark and light.  So, tonight, on the eve of their birthdays, I want to take the time to salute them, thank them, and wish for them a more peaceful path to walk, open doors to joyful opportunities, love to expand their hearts even more and light to show them the way. Katelon T. Jeffereys Seattle Life Coach www.empowerandbalance.com

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( R ) evolution!

My mother told the story that I used to have some wave to my hair, but she braided it a lot, so that began to straighten it out.  Then as I grew up, I went through pretty bad perms and bad hair years.  My hair always seemed to reflect what was going on in my life.   I started out as a very active, hyper, singing, dancing, moving the entire time child…climbing everything I could.  At two my parents had to put the Christmas tree and presents in the playpen so that I wouldn’t get to them. I often crawled out of my crib and took off, just as I took off from the hotel room in Georgia, when I was two, and ended up heading off to the town, later jumping into the pool and almost drowning. At my childhood home, I could go from one end of the block to the other end, starting out on our wall, traveling over all the fences and walls down the block, never touching the ground.  But my joy, my loudness, my expressiveness was too much for my parents and slowly, month by month, year by year, I learned to suppress my joy and my movement.              By the time I entered school and faced rejection after rejection for being smart, being sensitive, having freckles, having asthma, being thin, being aware of the racism and cultural differences used to discount others…all the things that children find to use to reject another, I was getting the message that who I was, was not acceptable.   So between that and the suppression at home, I learned to be quieter and quieter, until my parents could barely hear me talk.  My hair got straighter as I tried to climb into a smaller space within, taking up less room in the world.             Since I grew up remembering other lifetimes, and saw other dimensions, as well as talking to other spirits that I saw in my room, this set me apart even more.  Luckily my parents let me leave their church and go on to explore others and sing in their choirs.  Music and singing was a wonderful outlet for me, since I had grown up making up songs since I was two.  But other than the time spent in choir, swimming in the ocean, drawing, reading or hiking in the desert, I kept shrinking, as my hair grew more fine and straight.             By the time I graduated from high school, I was emotionally suicidal.  Even though I had been a cheerleader and been enough of an activist to get the school to change their selection process from a popularity contest to try outs taking place in front of a board of other cheerleaders and teachers, president of a club, a singer in an eight person singing group and part of other clubs, I was dying inside. There was little room to breathe in the space I had shrunk into, to hide my true self, so that I could fit in. I spent the summer, after summer school, hanging out in my parent’s family room drinking screwdrivers and painting.  One of the best paintings I did at that time was entitled schizophrenia.  It was my face but one half of it was light skinned, with blue eyes and blond hair.  The other half was my olive skin, brown eyes and brown hair.   It out-pictured what I felt inside…so divided, so torn in two, so much in pain. Then my big brother died that November and the damage felt permanent.            After many changes, and six years later, I ended up in the best semester of my long drawn out college career.  I was studying Faustian literature in an English class, Russian literature from a Russian existentialist, world religions, and American history from a teacher who taught us everything that the conservative textbooks I had grown up with never told us.  I became friends with an older woman, a woman who had been raised a socialist.  I started taking finger picking guitar lessons.  I was introduced to a wonderful alternative school for my son; one based on Dreikurs’ natural consequences, and started volunteering there. I spent more time hiking the desert and the mountains around Tucson, AZ.  I was so enthralled and overtaken by it all as what I’d learn in one class or situation was confirmed and enhanced in another. My mind was spinning and expanding as these experiences were supporting and confirming all I had known myself to be before closing down so many years ago.  As I expressed more, letting myself crawl out of the cave I had spent so many years shrunk into, my hair started getting wavy from underneath. I had now grown it out and was wearing it long.  Pretty soon it was wavy all over and becoming curlier.  It felt like a socialist take over in my hair!!!!              My life has taken me through many relationships as I explored people much different than what I had grown up with.  At one point I was with a Marxist man who preached Marxist revolution, as I spoke of spiritual revolution instead.  Since our politics didn’t match, it didn’t last, but it did assist me in my evolution as an activist.  Living on the Navajo reservation educated me even more about the politics of this country and the repression that still takes place.  In 1989 I was living in Humboldt county and ready for change in my life, so I decided to take a leap and I cut my hair into this outrageous mullet, with very short hair on the top and sides, spiked, and long wavy hair in the back.  I bleached out parts of the top and sides and put a hot pink cellophane on it.  My son was incredibly embarrassed and to try to explain this strange hair I had, he told his high school friends that I was a rock musician.   I’m sure at the time he would have preferred Leave it to Beaver’s Mom.  But for me, it expressed how much I was growing as I started leading solstice and equinox celebrations publicly, teaching creative music and movement to children ages 2 ½ -13, leading workshops in corporations and publicly, learning more mind/body/spiritual therapies, writing more music and playing more guitar.             After moving to Seattle in 1998 and experiencing one trauma after another, I found myself getting smaller again, shrinking into a dark place, trying to burst out, and looking for some light. This town has been the story of the Phoenix, as I have died in the fire. It has been a long journey to heal the pain of my own repression, learning to love and accept more about myself and my choices as I expand into living and expressing my true divine nature. This seems to be the most worthwhile journey I can take.  I believe it is our soul’s journey, to crawl out of our self and societal imposed cocoon and burst forth and fly!!!  Now I am proud to have my curly hair…unruly, anarchistic at times, and yet soft and yielding at others.              In sharing my story of pink hair with my hairdresser, Barry Thomas (206-293-4847….check him out!!!!), I told him that I didn’t have any pictures of my hot pink hair and would never get a cellophane again.  He asked why not, and recommended a layered cinnamon red and ginger gold cellophane, so that is what we did and it is pictured above.  As I am now ready to fly from this fire, arise from the ashes, it is fitting to have a new “do” to out picture the changes that have taken place within me and where I am ready to go and how I’m ready to live.                                (  R )evolution one strand at a time!!!! Katelon T. Jeffereys Seattle Life Coach www.empowerandbalance.com

Great Fun Healing Session

I just finished a very fun and effective trade session with my friend, Dena Przybyla.  She is in Hawaii right now, and I’m here in Seattle.  She does great EFT work (Emotional Freedom Technique), a tapping technique that uses acupuncture meridian points to assist in releasing negative beliefs, habits and conditions, and manifesting desired results.  It isn’t just about releasing things, but in a way, rewiring them so that they are aligned with your desired results. People use it for all kinds of things from headaches to weight loss, to manifesting new jobs, relationships or whatever. Dena has a great website www.eft-seattle.com  She has written a wonderful e-book with great scripts to use with EFT. So, Dena helped me work on my issues and things I desire to manifest in my life.       First though, I did a combined hypnosis, NLP, past life regression/between lives/future life work to assist her in manifesting what she is desiring to have in her life.  I have been doing this work for years and even created my own therapy to use for it as I didn’t like the ones I had received from others.  So, we looked at a past life that held information that she needed to clear in order to manifest what she wants now.  In order to help heal that lifetime, her unconscious mind and I ended up taking her in between lives and into a future life to gather resources to take into the past life, shifting it, and then taking all those new resourses, beliefs and remembered talents and skills into now, to create the future she desires. It was great fun and I got to see that this work can be done effectively, efficiently and easily via the phone. I’m used to doing Spiritual response therapy, reiki and other spiritual energy healing work long distance, and have done some NLP via the phone, but this session today really opens up the possiblities to what I can do with people around the world!!! Pretty exciting! To find out more about Dena’s work: www.eft-seattle.com Katelon T. Jeffereys Seattle Life Coach www.empowerandbalance.com

Michael Jackson Official This Is It Trailer 2009 HQ

via youtube.com

I got introduced to Michael when my son got into his music. I grew up with music and dance as my deepest passion. I would walk around the house making up songs since I was two and I was often dancing. I used to have entire dreams where I’d be on stage playing guitar and singing, with dancers behind me, an orchestra in front of me, and movies on a screen behind me. I would hear the entire concert, and this was long before the time when concerts were performed this way. But nothing I ever saw before in my dreams compared to the genius, passion, devotion, determination and creative vision that Michael had and shows so well in this movie.

I went to see the movie today and actually saw it 1 3/4 times as there was a fire alarm 3/4 of the way through the first showing of it!!! So, my friends and I went to eat, came back and watched it again!! I”m glad I did, as I was more able to focus on the other dancers and other things happening the second time I saw it.

A review in Entertainment weekly noted that Michael was holding back his singing and performance because it was just rehearsal, and I could hear that he was certainly protecting his voice, but to watch the sheer endurance and energy he was dancing with, all while suffering chronic insomnia, is amazing to me. I can imagine how magical it was for the singers, dancers, and crew that were gifted in being a part of this creation and how horrible a loss they must be feeling now. Certainly Spirit was inspiring and sustaining Michael so that he could share his love and vision with the world. May he inspire us to do the same! As he stated in the movie, he wanted to bring this love to the world, inspire people to wake up and do something to change the course of this planet. Great movie showcasing the creative process that pushes us forward to fulfill and share our dreams! (Unlike the trailer for the movie “2012” which takes a sacred transformational shift that is 2012 and turns it into another excuse to disempower people with fear and dread).

Katelon T. Jeffereys

Seattle Life Coach

www.empowerandbalance.com