Greetings from the Councils of Light. We see clear themes in the deeply transformative
processes so many of you are experiencing. One theme is the release of patterns developed in childhood to cope with dysfunctional, chaotic, and confusing home situations. Your coping mechanisms, necessary to help you survive the unconsciousness of your childhood, are hardly adaptive in your increasingly conscious adult life.

We speak here of your "automatic" reactions to things. Perhaps you defend without hearing what is really being said, you feel hurt or scared as your past gets triggered and you act from that feeling, you lash out or disappear because you have always done so in this type of scene.

Think of it. How can ways of handling stress developed by a child with little or no guidance possibly be better than what you and Spirit can think up today. "God/ Goddess save me from my own coping mechanisms", might be your prayer. "Help me move beyond reacting as if every person were my abusive father or my abandoning mother."

Its hard to let some of these designs go, these old friends who have saved you. After all you devoted a lot of energy and life force to their creation when you had to build your defenses strong and make thick your barriers to invasion, engulfment, and unhealthy intimacy. It took years and years to perfect ways to keep from being affected by the inconsistent loving and sometimes abusive treatment from your parents, teachers and community.

You cannot cope with the present as you coped with the past and get anything different than what you've gotten before. Unless you look with fresh eyes, your mind will make "now" look like then. Once you remember, truly re-member yourself as Goddess created you, the Divine Child (is there any other?), you are ready to kick the habits of your coping mechanisms.

Your mind unfolds your "reality" moment to moment by putting meaning on the images and impressions you see and feel. Meditation and spiritual work help you get out of your mind and come to your senses. You may find the world not looking exactly as you projected to.

As you get busy (who isn't now with all your “labor-saving devices”!), your mind gets lazy. You begin to guess at what the world offers you and react to stimuli as if they were familiar. Under stress you may react to people as if they were someone from your past, and under great stress, your mind makes you believe they are the same. "You don't just seem like my mother, you act like her, you think like her. You are her!" Yes, in your mind, she is, therefore she shows up that way to you.

The spiritual task, a quest on which we'd like to send you, is to take enough time to focus your attention on the eyes and heart of the person in your now and let in what is really happening this moment. See what is, breathe with it, not what your egoic mind makes you think is happening so you can run the same old reaction as always, your coping mechanism.

Be diligent to look with fresh vision at what each current moment offers you, as if you haven't seen anything like it before. The ego wants to fit the situation, if your are under stress especially so, to what it understands so that it can have a fast and predictable reaction. Invite your higher essence nature present and give it the reins. It may well have more adaptive and effective ways of responding (not reacting) to your world.

You know how to do this. All the tools have been given. Meditation, yoga or stretching, exercise, chanting, ritual, lighting candles and smudge, setting altars, journaling, changing self-talk, affirmations, manifesting intentions, prayer, channeling, inner child work, writing, singing, dancing, laughing, playing, communing with nature, conscious love-making, eating healthfully. Many paths up the mountain. The practices work if you work the practices.

Don't even try to make your life all you want it to be if you don't do at least 7 of the above practices. Its like trying to go upstream without a paddle. Consider you need to regularly use at least enough of these tools to give you two paddles, a rudder, a mast, a sail or two. The more you add to your self-care regime, the bigger your conveyance down the river of change toward full consciousness and enlightenment.

Your destiny is in your own hands. The more of each day you devote to thinking, working, eating, moving, and feeling consciously, the more aware and alive you become, and the easier your life becomes. Once you transcend the tyranny of your little mind, the prisons your ancient fears create and the coping behaviors they spawn, you can choose to create a life that nurtures your spirit and feeds your soul.

Eventually, you grow enough that what family thinks of you, even what they tell you is true, is no longer any of your business. You no longer need to change them or how they feel about you to be ok. You no longer reference them to determine how you feel about yourself or how you show up in the world. You realize happiness is an inside job and you finally get acquainted with your Authentic Nature..

Be thoughtful to avoid the traps of entertainment toys and high technology tools. Though we come to you through technology which has its Spirit-filled uses, we warn against letting it so fill your life with options that there is no time left to live it. Like all good and mood-altering things, these can be used to excess, even to addictive and life-damaging proportions.
Claim, against all agendas and busy tasks your little mind calls up to distract you, enough of life to enjoy being in a body. Pleasure is one of the reasons to incarnate--get a lot of it.

Rest and recuperation must be reclaimed. A Sabbath once a week was written into the "rules" for this Universe because being human is so exhausting, one's spirit needs to rest from it by parking the body somewhere and flying off in fantasy or dreams on a regular basis. The spirit needs dream time. When you go, go, go without stopping, there's no renewal for this highest aspect of yourself.

Overwork is a coping mechanism, so are overeating, overthinking, oversexing, overexercising, overtalking. You need only reclaim your power to choose. Some say "I can't help acting this way, my so and so treated me in such and such a way, and I'm just like this." We assure you. You are not like this, not You whom Spirit created.

Your mind makes it up that you are helpless to change this, but you are not. You have the power to make life be as you wish it. You must simply disbelieve your mind and invoke your true mother, Divine Mother, to recreate you in Her Image.

In Her Image, created She them. This phrase is to teach you that all of life is made up, imaged in the mind of the Creatrix, as you are. Image your life well as the creator god you are. It is as you make it to be.

Namaste, The Councils of Light.