Wednesday, July 31, 2013


With the pace of my life picking up lately I've been around a lot more people in the last week than I had been for a while and it became a kind of accidental empath experiment. Most of my interactions with people are one on one -at the salon, driving the gypsy cab (not really, but yeah, kind of), etc. though occasionally I'll find myself with a small group. Either way, having recently had so much time on my own and with the changed attitude of accepting and embracing that "down" time, I realized more deeply than ever just how it feels to be me. So following this lovely down time and thrown in again with all these people I suddenly realize so much more clearly just how chaotic it sometimes feels for me to be around others. Their energy whirling around me and sinking into my own until it's all soaked together and I feel indistinct and sometimes straight crazy.
At the same time, I seem to be finding more and more magical community and am realizing both my potential and also my needs. Although I'm not sure I'll ever be well enough attuned to be able to clearly interpret what I feel (as empath/intuitives do for the purpose of healing others) I'd like to at least be able to maintain feeling like me when I'm around a large group or even just one person with really strong energy, some of those people are really great and I would enjoy them so much more if I didn't feel like a tornado was whipping through me. So I recently looked around and found some energy training exercises for empaths. As meditation seems to be the be all end all to everything I shouldn't be surprised that this is again a big part of the exercises -which is good since I already do this and which is perhaps why it has become so much easier for me to discern when someone's energy is whipping through me like a tornado- but some were a little different and surprisingly simple.
The first of the two I remember best is to focus on how much noise or energy inside me is "others", measure it like it's a volume knob from 1 to 10. Then focus on how much is my own in the same way. Once I know where I am and where "others" is I focus on turning "others" down to 0 and me up to 10. It's so simple, yet so brilliant.
The other is to get into a meditative state and imagine that with each breath my energy expands creating a larger and larger field around me until it fills the room. This one is also brilliant and I identified with it right away as when I'm feeling my worst I do feel like my personal energetic space is totally deflated and I can't seem to gather the strength to fill it back up.
It's been kind of an exciting experience for me to get closer to understanding this part of myself and I'm really excited to work with it and see how I develop and what I decide to do with it. I have to say, nightmare though it's been, I'm glad to be who I am and have this experience of life.

Sunday, July 28, 2013


Two nights ago a coyote came into my backyard and killed my cat. I have to say I've been really impressed with the way I'm dealing with it and I just realized why.
When it happened I was wracked with guilt. I allowed her to stay out all night whenever she wanted. She was an old cat who had developed persistent health problems. She had been very healthy until fairly recently and had always been a mellow cat, not a fighter or hunter or even very adventurous. She never even left our yard. She simply loved to be outside during the summer, like so many of us do. Enjoying the sunshine before it's too hot and then later the nice cool evenings. I'm the same, I get it, it's a beautiful season until the heat becomes too much. Who would ever want to live inside all their lives? Sounds awful.
I know a lot of people who feel the same way, about their cats I mean. They know there's a chance of danger (cars, wild animals, even the pets of others) but they want to give their cat a whole and happy life.
Sad things happen. At first I was comforted that at least she was in one piece. (Which came after the strange horror/relief that at least she had been left in my yard where I could find her and know this for certain.) I didn't have to try to convince myself for a week or a month that she hadn't just wandered off or being left maimed and suffering somewhere I could never find her, not wanting to really face the most likely truth. So in a way this tragedy happened in the best possible way.
I also knew that she wouldn't have to suffer being more and more sickly and more and more yucky trips to the vet. And that she had had a good life and been very happy in the time leading up to her death. She had felt free and brave enough to stay out all night. This is a cat who used to hide under the bed whenever a stranger was around. But who had finally gotten so comfortable and tough with my bigger dog that she had swatted at his butt the other day, totally provoking him, and then gave him a disgusted look when he protested. I like that my cat was so happy and comfortable doing what she pleased, what a great role model to have. I'm very sad that she's gone but I'm going to be proud of her and myself for being willing to brave the risks.

Thursday, July 25, 2013



One of the greatest lessons I've worked through over the last few years -quite a few, actually, if I think all the way back to the earlier, uglier lessons that sparked the transformation of the lesson- is understanding the magnitude of the concept that what I believe in creates my life.
It sounds like such a simple thing. Overall, big picture you can be thinking, 'I'm going to have a happy and adventurous life' but if you're lacking the details as to what that means to you it can be really challenging to keep believing that statement. For years I didn't really know what I wanted to be when I grew up, I truly still don't but am much more open to the journey now rather than focusing on a set destination. One of the things I've learned had been that sometimes you set your sites on a destination and it either doesn't work out for you at all (you never get there and feel like a failure), you get there but there are many detours along the way, you get there and it's not what you wanted after all. The variations can go on infinitely. That's the beauty of the details you can't know but that doesn't mean that you can be more specific than 'happy and adventurous'.
Lately I've been focusing a lot on synchronicity. It seems every time something catches my attention more and more supporting coincidences follow until I've drawn something entirely new into my life.
It's only recently, really, that I've drawn into my life people and events that support my more fully embracing this part of myself and allowing myself to express it more openly and more often. The beauty of individualized faith, I've found, is just how individualized it is. No two people believe in exactly the same things in exactly the same way. It's made for me feeling awkward sometimes. I was taught as a child conflicting points of view in regard to religion and beliefs but most of them shared an element of judgement. I'm working it out these days and learning a lot more tolerance for  views that are dramatically different from my own.
I'm also kind of coming back to astrology a little more these days and embracing it and learning how to work it into my current spiritual puzzle (what a great expression of Neptune in Pisces transiting the first house, yes?).

Saturday, July 20, 2013


I am just now hearing that the coming full moon this Monday is another super moon -meaning that it's very close to the earth. It's also in Aquarius, my sun sign, so it's extra special for me.
Following the healing session I had earlier this week with Mojan she made a special bath for me, or rather she made me special bath salts to be used in a bath, and instructed me to start with the first bath (of three) on the full moon coming up.
It was just minutes ago that I went searching for something and found that this full moon will be super and at the same time learned that it's the first of two consecutive full moons in Aquarius, making the second one a blue moon and making both extra special. I'm kind of beside myself except I'm not sure why.
I'm very much feeling Mercury direct today and Mars joining Jupiter (and the grand water trine) in my 5th house. It's all making me want to GO now! now! now! And to know the unknowable rather than waiting to find it out as it happens -which is the only way. I have to remind myself how I love surprises! Am tempted to get lost in the internet searching for something to tell me what it all means, what it will bring but you cannot tell much from the research alone, it has to be synchronized with your souls experience in the actual moment to be accurately interpreted. There is no knowing the unknowable. I'm going to have to meditate a lot...

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Now that it's been nearly a year since I've received any kind of predictably timed paycheck I have to say that making money every day makes me feel very free whereas I used to kind of feel like I got a prize for making through another two weeks and that prize had to keep me alive so that I could scramble my way to the next one.
Since leaving my old job one of the things I've struggled most with is not knowing where money would come from. I haven't had any hourly paid jobs in all that time. I've come to find that even when I try to convince myself that about $200 per week will really help and I should give up both my days off and take a day off of the salon schedule so that I can go work for $9 per hour somewhere I ultimately realize that I can't accept that. I feel that my time is far too valuable (and it makes me sooo sad that anyone should be expected to make so little, every person in the country is more valuable than that no matter what) and in addition to that, any stress or exhaustion I have to deal with will take away my energy from the salon and ruin my baby business and really set me back. Even the days that feel a little wasted because they were slow are worth it, those are my surprise rest and clean house days and I'm learning to enjoy those too and not stress.
The key to everything is simply happiness and optimistic blind faith. It's truly beautiful.
This has been my lesson with Saturn transiting my 8th house, moving into Scorpio and being a third of the grand water trine that is happening this week. I've been learning it for quite some time now and it's been incredibly amazing. During it's recent retrograde I had a really hard time with it, though the easiest hard time ever. I left all of my material external world problems in the material external world as much as possible and it was easier this time. It's amazing how events in life line up to teach us lessons. This one was stunningly beautiful.
The other houses I'm dealing with in this grand water trine, by the way, are the 1st and the 5th -so you can see the whole picture: Saturn in the 8th transiting Scorpio, Neptune in the 1st transiting Pisces, and Jupiter in the 5th transiting Cancer. It's lovely. Everything is magical, everything is spiritual, everything I ask for is placed gently in the palm of my hand. And it's taken an INCREDIBLE amount of work to get here but it was worth it.
Tuesday afternoon I had an appointment with an excellent empath/psychic/healer. When I made the appointment three weeks earlier I was a little disappointed with the wait ahead of me but decided that, since she'd been delivered to me by my wish, there must be something for me to do for the three weeks between and I set about working hard on my meditation and daily practices.
The past two weeks I lived in an odd place. I was completely devoted to happiness, productivity on a personal level and preparation for the inevitable deluge of goodness I've been certain is coming my way. On a material level I was at rock bottom, but on a personal level I was soaring. It was quite a strange contrast and could well have pushed me over some invisible cliff and plummeted me to "crazy" but I didn't accept that as an option. I just kept climbing however I could. Reading, meditating, writing, acknowledging all the questions that were coming to the surface. Honestly, I was working so hard inside me that even though I desperately wanted to put some of that free time into intensive housekeeping (lulls don't last forever, it's nice to get ahead of the chores while you can) I barely had the energy to get through a sink of dishes. And this is from someone who is not really a clean freak but I do usually enjoy doing the work and seeing the reward of cleaning house.
Throughout that time I thought quite a bit about what I wanted and might get from the session I was waiting for. I didn't want to hear any predictions of the future -I like to be surprised. I wanted to get the most out of it but I didn't want to ask really specific questions, I learned long ago that other people can't answer the questions we ask ourselves no matter how talented they may be. And in the last few days before the appointment I just let go of it all. All expectations and feelings of wanting to have some kind of control of what I took away vanished. Questions were forgotten -maybe they'd come up just so that I could ask them to my self?
When Tuesday arrived I had a sudden flurry of work activity to attend to. I had an interview for a part time job mid morning, I had a sudden rush of new clients for the salon (so exciting!) starting that afternoon and I felt that the universe was acknowledging me after two long weeks of stillness. As our conversation began she touched a little on the current astrology. I assured her I was up to date in that area and we moved forward. She told me that there was a focus on my past for this appointment and began to share the abstract messages she was receiving for me. 
I have to admit here, I've not been one to embrace the "angels" phenomenon. I think that, for better or worse, what people are trying to name when they use the term "angels" is the part of our souls that echoes out into the atmosphere. But I must say, whatever you want to call it, it is wise and incredibly nuanced and I'm really amazed by those who can tune in to hear it and express it and work with it. I love that so many people with diverse perspectives on very similar and converging idea's are creating vocabularies to express all of these things and if "angels" is the most recognized name for this energy then angels it is.
I want to somehow be able to express what I took away from this experience but it doesn't feel appropriate to just repeat the exchange we had. I want to say I feel something specific following this experience but while I have felt very different since, I can't really explain how. I think I'm still finding my balance. Every experience in life changes me from day to day and the only things I do know are that I was meant to have this experience and it provided me with a sense of something so intangible that I can't think of words that will accurately describe it. 
Part of it is just me, what we sometimes fail to recognize is that we are the only ones who create anything in or around ourselves. The overall message delivered to me was that I'm at a critical time of awakening in my life. An enlightenment. (I should stay away from the word "change" and use the words "freedom" and "awakening", apparently, which do feel much more comfortable.) And in the midst of all this, just following the big burst of energy to share my experience and my practices, I suddenly feel entirely unequipped to do so. 
Nearly every concept that came up in that session I could illustrate with an example of a recent experience. And yet, at the time I was experiencing it I had no idea that what it meant or that it meant anything at all. 
I suddenly feel entirely... what's the opposite of wise? I'm like the brand new skin of a baby, delicate and inexperienced at how to process the environment. I'm learning everything over again and I don't even know what I'm learning. It's both magnificent and bizarre and perhaps I should be a bit terrified but I'm in love with the adventure of it. 

Friday, July 12, 2013

This beautiful article and the video of singing trees and plants at the bottom are such a beautiful example of how you can understand what Pantheism is about, what it means. Pantheism, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (to keep it brief) is "the religious belief or philosophical theory that God and the Universe are identical (implying a denial of the personality and transcendence of God".

Thursday, July 11, 2013

The stars have been good to me.

The magical moments really surprised me today. I get a bit stuck in my head when I'm trying too hard which is what happens when I have too much time on my hands...
Earlier in the day I had some things to attend to and felt really in the flow but by the end of the day all I seemed to be doing was waiting around for the routine markers: time for the animals to eat, time for our walk, etc.
By the time I was out walking the dogs I was conscious that I was trying to keep things flowing. And honestly, I almost didn't get why this evening's magic was so hard to interpret.
It came in the form of a random encounter with an old work friend from quite a while ago. I knew it meant something as I haven't seen her in so long but I didn't get it because talking about old work gets in my head and bugs me.
Hours later now and a number of revelations later -all brought on by the insights she shared in out conversation- I realized just how lucky I am to be in the position I'm currently in.
I've always known this but I have to admit that I had never fully noticed and acknowledged all of the magic and luck that I encountered on my path to the present. I have known that I am doing what I'm supposed to be doing for a long time. I sometimes feel a little awkward about it as doing hair isn't really all that "important", like being a doctor, for example. But I enjoy it, I have a natural talent for it and it really makes sense to me as being both creative and practical -it's something that cannot be done by a robot, cannot be outsourced and everyone gets a haircut at some point. I actually did consider this when making my decision and was surprised that she came up with this same point, as well.
As I was saying, I knew I'd been lucky in a number of ways but you know, sometimes you lose track. Also, sometimes you don't feel like you're getting the support and enthusiasm you feel you need from the universe and you need someone to remind you in language that really speaks to you and this is what happened for me in that conversation.
Mazel tov means "good luck" in Hebrew. I already knew that, I was raised Jewish. What I didn't know is that the literal translation is actually "may the stars be good to you".
My favorite recent story of magic is this one:
If you read the previous few posts you already know that I practice meditation and am really into maintaining my health as naturally as possible.
After reading an article about vitamin D I decided that this summer I would try a little experiment -sunbathing every day on my back porch for 15 minutes. Business has fluctuated between very slow and picking up, week to week, since I started out on my own. I wanted to spend all of my time being as productive as possible and I also wanted to always be focusing on how to improve business. And as I also know that the state I'm in is as important as anything else, there are times when it all is one. 
So one day as I went out for my quick sunbath I decided that I was going to try to meditate without listening to any recorded messages or sounds. 
I lay down on the porch and tried to clear my head. I acknowledged the wind that I could feel and hear, I acknowledged all the sounds around me and the feeling of being outdoors which is so different than the feeling of being indoors. I acknowledged the feeling of the sun and the brightness on the other side of my closed eyelids. I thought to myself, "Dear universe that is within me and all around me, please send me what I need." At the time I was really wanting to have some new appointments booked and so what I hoped would happen is that I would get some new messages from my online booking system or a phone call or an email from a new client or two but I wasn't really trying to be specific. The phrase just felt appropriate in that moment.
After the timer went off (to keep from staying out too long and getting a serious burn) I went inside and just as I walked through the door my phone rang. I didn't think all that much of it but when I answered it was, in fact, a brand new client. Brilliant! I thought. We talked for a couple minutes, working out the details of her appointment, and when she mentioned that she also worked for herself I asked her what she did. She told me she was a spiritual healer and my initial "Brilliant!" kaleidescoped internally.
I'm sharing this, in part, for the obvious story of having manifested something amazing in a mere 15 minute sunbath, but also because it brings me to this really fantastic message: we often think we know exactly what we need. We ask for it over and over, we're always focused on it and when it doesn't seem to be coming to us we get reeeeally frustrated and disappointed. The truth is, you always get what you need. You may not know it or recognize it but it always comes. Give the universe a break and stop asking for specific things at specific times, if you really want to see it work just ask for it to send you what you need.
When I met this woman to do her hair it was the most lovely visit I've had with any person in many years -and I have some really fantastic clients. I felt almost as if I were taking advantage because just being in her presence is very healing and I have never met anyone before who seemed to see me and intuit me so accurately. I have my first appointment with her next week and I'm beyond excited. I have no idea what we'll end up talking about or what she might tell me or help me work out but I know it's going to be really amazing. 

For a quick shift of mood or perspective I've recently learned the beauty of list making. I've always been a list maker but perviously they were generally toward the practical -tasks I needed to keep track of, things I wanted to do for myself, and elements of the future I want to create. That last one may seem less practical and more in line with the magic, it was intended to be.
I recently saw a video of an excellent talk given by Mike Robbins and followed it by reading both his books (ok, I devoured the first one and am halfway through the second one now) and becoming a super fan. While what he talks about is, basically, pretty common personal development stuff he presents it in a brand new way and clearly has a pretty strong grasp of the magic but with his background in sports he comes across as very much a man's man and it's a beautiful blend of qualities.
Following his advice I've started to make gratitude lists at least twice a day. Once in the morning to get me thinking in the best possible way and once in the evening when I can incorporate things that actually happened during the day and the ways that those things shifted my perspective and process.
When I initially read about this I thought that I kind of did this already and I wasn't super excited about incorporating it into my life but I'll try anything once or twice. As I wrote the first list I was really amazed at how I felt myself changing into another person, I felt my vision clear, I felt a little lightheaded and the results were amazing.
Much as we all know that there are many things we're grateful for, it's interesting how little we realize just how grateful we are until we actually sit and give them some undivided attention.
The first time I made a list it started with really obvious things like how grateful I am to have this lovely apartment that I live in. I knew this all along, just last fall when my building changed owners I thought about it a lot as I wondered if I'd be asked to move out. But at that time, wanting to embrace the possibility of change with a positive attitude, rather than think about how grateful I was to be here I thought about where I might want to move and how amazing it would be there.
As the list progressed I touched on all the every day things and eventually more spiritual things but each item I added amazed me at the feeling of actually expressing it. I'm very grateful to have all of my arms and legs and very grateful that they all work but I never think about it. I'm grateful for the freedom I have to make my own decisions independent of the needs of another, but rather than consider or express that I usually am thinking how nice it would be to have a boyfriend or a husband to share responsibilities with. It amazed me that to simply choose to look at what I have made such a huge difference and I know that I'll never go back. I've since been making lists every day. It was a great exercise to start up during the brief time when my meditation practice fell by the wayside. I do kind of wonder just how much of my time I can devote to the many practices I'm collecting but when I start to think that way now I only realize how grateful I am to have the time to do these things for myself.
As I said earlier, once you start paying attention to all this stuff, it just keeps appearing before you. I have never seen any of Russell Brand's movies or performance but I keep coming across interviews with him that are totally brilliant. I love how easily and succinctly he expresses it all. Click the link to watch him explain it all in mere seconds.

As promised (to myself) I'm trying to be more disciplined about my daily practices.
When I decided to get serious about meditating a couple months ago (though not for the first time) I spent a couple weeks using a recorded guided meditation from the fantastic Dr. Joe Dispenza's website. I first learned about his work when I read his book Evolve Your Brain which absolutely amazed me and confirmed and expanded many things I had long suspected about life and health and my own potential. I can't even begin to share with you the amazing information in this book, if you're interested you'll just have to read it yourself, I'm sure I'll be talking about it more in my future posts.
I wanted to mention this because meditation can be very hard. My mind doesn't want to be quiet and clear, it wants to fabricate scenes and possibilities and thoughts, which is great, the problem is that unless I put some work in it just keeps recreating the scenes, possibilities and thoughts it already knows. It's hard to learn to generate new and original ones, and to enable change in your life and world you really have to learn how to generate new and original thoughts.
I generally would do the meditation at night before bed and again in the morning after breakfast. For a few weeks it was great. I'd get really excited about my before bed meditation and was really finding a great routine in the preparation and practice of it. But after a while I found that, maybe because I had come to know the recording so well, it wasn't working for me the way it used to. Sometimes I would fall asleep mid-way, sometimes I'd get annoyed with a particular stretch and my thoughts would creep in and interrupt.
My morning meditation practice was following a similar path but I was sticking with it (it was a little easier to not fall asleep, at least) until some guys started building a deck in my neighbors back yard and my morning meditation became impossible. Once the routine was broken I found myself forgetting to make time for it when it was quiet and possible but I had found some great books to read that were providing me with other exercises to work with so I felt that at least I was doing something and I was certainly making progress. This leads me to one of the things that really takes discipline: not only making time for my practice but having the flexibility to implement more into my practice, to not just choose meditation or list making but to find a way to place these throughout the day in a balanced way. (In fact, though I was really great with my meditation last night and this morning, I totally slipped up on my lists -maybe I'll talk more about in the next post.)
Moving on! After reaching a point where the recording had become more of a repetitive distraction than an aid I changed my meditation practice. As I said, it's very hard to keep a clear and quiet mind for an extended period of time but since I'd learned some techniques from the recording I decided to use something else to accompany me: binaural beats. Binaural beats are a really interesting concept. I've read quite a bit about them now and I'm not entirely sure what's true. Some people claim that listening to binaural beats stimulates the creation of specific brain waves and allows you to retrain your brain using their influence, others say that at best they aid relaxation. Either way, I'm interested. Using binaural beats to meditate gives me something to block out the subcity noise that's all around, it gives me something to focus on when my brain wants to be more active than it should be during meditation and it encourages relaxation all in itself.
So that's my up date for this morning on meditation and discipline. I might add that trying to get my thoughts organized enough to write these posts is also a discipline I'm not entirely accustomed to yet so I hope that the information I'm sharing is useful and inspiring and I promise to alternate between topics like this, which I think are toward the practical, and topics that deal a little more with the magic of life.


The most amazing magic that's been happening in my life lately is synchronicity. It seems that all I have to do is exist, as I naturally do, and some perfect piece of information, inspiration or guidance finds me just as I need it. 
This evening I read a spiritual forecast for the month of July on a website I found via a friend posting to facebook an article from the same website they were sharing with another friend. 
The forecast for July talks about the energies for the month, which are Expansion, Discipline and Magic(!). 
The first reason I love this so much is because there is a voice in my head telling me that I always have to push and work hard for even just bits of gain. There's no logic behind it, it's simply the mainstream notion that this is the only way to create anything in your life: make happen by action. What I'm really working to master is making things happen by intention and understanding that it is my intentions that determine what my actions should be and that, in fact, my intentions will generate the need for action rather than action generating the need for action.  
So I was really excited when I was reading this article but it was a little bit conceptual at the same time so as I read my thoughts were kind of wobbling between, "This is exactly what I've been working on!" and "Maybe I don't understand what they're talking about..." the latter thought encouraged by the section on Discipline that I hadn't yet reached. But as I did reach it I found that the Discipline that was encouraged was the Discipline to continue working on Expansion and my heart smiled and I felt... justified?
Which brings me to why I'm writing about my experience of having found and read this post (and why I decided to write about all this): keeping focused on any kind of work can be really hard at times. Sometimes it's hard to make yourself clean the house, sometimes it's hard to make yourself work on something for your job, there are times when what we know we should do feels hard. What I'm working on that is feeling particularly hard these days is my faith in my self, my intuition, and my values. These are all really important things, obviously, but some days when life isn't going quite the way I (really, really) need or want it to, it's easy to wonder if it's a total waste of time to meditate or write lists of what I'm grateful for twice a day or get myself someplace where I can be immersed in nature. 
Just as I've begun questioning my practices and everything that I believe in, I find something that tells me that what I'm doing is important and so important, actually, that now (when it's just become so difficult to focus on) is the time to not just keep at it but to make of it all a discipline. 


Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Resurrection, Rebirth & MAGIC!



If you've been reading this site regularly you may already have a general idea of my what some of my beliefs and values are. I'm an avid student of astrology and have even begun to develop my own theories about it, after spending more than ten years consuming all that I could. I feel very strongly about the power of belief and all things that are created in the mind. And I see how obvious it is that all of nature and the world and it's millions of bits and pieces are one massive, complicated, bizarre organism.
Over the past two and a half years I left a job I worked at for fourteen years, had a bit of time off, went back to school, got my cosmetology license and became a hair stylist. I'm now about six months in to being entirely self employed -although, not entirely by choice- and when I'm not working, I'm working on ME. Partly because, ofcourse, I want to be fantastic in every possible way both for myself and for everyone else in the world and partly because I believe in what may just boil down to magic.
I use the word magic lightly and only because I can't think of a better word to sum it all up. A lot of my reading and research and learning brings me into contact with various shades of the idea that your life is simply what you imagine into fruition. And I love this concept and am working with it as much as possible. But there does seem to be a learning curve and it's all kind of a big experiment anyway, right?So what I aim to do from here on is continue to share information that I find and tell you in as much detail as possible how I use the information, what practices I introduce into my life and how it all works out.
I hope that the results will be stupendously amazing and I think that in order to see the transformation I will have to tell you exactly what's going on with me now so that as things unfold you will see the contrast, and the magic.
I now present to you: all the gory details.
As it stands now I have about $100 in the bank and maybe $25 in my wallet. I pay $150 per week for my hair studio and have a couple small monthly expenses related to my website. I also live in a very affordable apartment and have all the usual living expenses, minus a student loan payment, cleared that a while back. 
Clearly, where business is concerned, things are not developing as quickly as I'd like them to be and I am often pretty uncomfortable with this. I'm working really hard with as many marketing tools as I can find, constantly looking for more and better ways to grow my business. I'm also searching for additional sources of income both traditional and creative which is part of what has brought me to this point.
For years I've read about and experienced manifesting miracles. (This is when the "magic" starts.) And the thing about it is that it's really hard. It all seems to happen in that moment when I feel that there is no hope and I have no idea what to do next. 
One of the first times I experienced this in the recent past was last summer. I was taking care of a families pets while they were away on vacation (one of my other sources of income) and one evening when I arrived I found the saddest and sweetest dog hiding in the alley behind their house. He was in terrible shape: had awful scars all over as if he'd been used for fighting as well as some fresher, though minor, wounds. His fur was sparse and dry and he was so skinny you could see his bones sticking out all over. As I passed by his hiding spot my eyes were immediately drawn to his and I tell you it was a religious experience, I have never seen anything like them. Obviously I took him home with me. In the time between finding him and arriving home we'd already encountered a lot of people and a number of animals and his behavior was excellent. I could tell he was pretty scared but he seemed to trust that I wasn't going to let anything happen to him. I already knew that (even though I really wanted to) I couldn't keep him, I already have two dogs and a cat, but I figured I'd take him home and figure it out from there. He was not going to the shelter under any circumstances.
Unfortunately this is when I learned that my younger dog would not accept any new family members. I must have gone terribly wrong somewhere because although he has always been sweet and friendly with all people and animals we've encountered before and since, for me to escort another animal into the house is forbidden and met with crazy gorilla behavior that I find utterly unbelievable. Sadly, I put my dog back inside and took the street dog down to my local pet store to ask about local rescues. There are so many active in my area that I thought surely someone would be connected, willing and able to help me find a place for this poor dog to stay but their best advice was to take him to the shelter and I felt that was simply not an option. So I sat down outside not knowing what to do. I literally did not have a thought in my head. I couldn't go home and I didn't know where else to go. My only hope at that point was that someone passing by might stop and have some better advice for me. 
In less than five minutes a neighbor I knew only slightly passed by, out with his own dog for an evening walk. He paused and shared a treat with the street pup and I told him the story. He asked me what I was going to do and I honestly told him I was stumped. After considering the pup for all of 30 seconds he offered to let him stay in his garage and in that instant I felt I'd experienced a miracle.
The way I see it, it all comes down to this: you do everything that you can possibly think of, you never give up trying in whatever way there is even if it seems you're getting nowhere. And when finally you pause and give up and stay open (this is key: you cannot pause and give up and close, closing is when you feel like you know what is going to happen -in this case if I had even considered taking the dog to the shelter that's where he would have ended up but I knew it would be a terrible and I refused to even consider it) the miracle happens.
I have since miracled up $16,000 -literally out of the blue- which allowed me to pay off my student loan and last years taxes, take some advanced classes, start my business and helped me support myself for the last seven months. I was in a similar situation to where I am now: working as much as possible but making nowhere near what I needed and with no idea what to do next. 
So you see, I'm now working on creating a similar miracle but also a more sustainable one. Staying positive takes a lot of discipline when you're not sure how you're going to pay your rent or feed your pets or yourself. I have a vision of what I want to create but I know that I have to stay open to surprise developments that may take me on a different path. I am exercising every creative muscle in my mind and body at all times and I've decided to share it all with you here. 
This here is a fairly new idea for me and one of the challenges is sharing all this personal information but I believe that if I do and if everyone who reads, is at the very least somewhat entertained and at the most inspired, sends a kind and supportive thought to the universe for me it can only help strengthen whatever wonderful life I am working toward and, hopefully, it will also challenge people to create more for themselves. So check back for new stories and all the great practices I'll be writing about. 

(Photo's are of my sweet street pup who is the most wonderful dog I've ever met. He still lives very happily with the neighbor who took him in and has a very good and happy life.)