Learning to Understand Yourself and Others
by Naomi McDonald
Last week while washing grapes for my granddaughters I popped one into my mouth. As the sweetness burst onto my tongue I detected a delectable earthy taste and had an instant recall of a memory thirty years prior in a California vineyard. The hot dry sun was shining down on my skin and a tall dark man was proudly showing me rows and rows of plump grapes that would soon be transformed into luscious raisins. The savory taste of the grape had unlocked this experience that was coded into my subconscious and brought it forward to the present.
In my shamanic practice I work a lot with old traumas from present and past lifetimes and how they can form imprints in our energetic field that affect us today. The recall of the vineyard made me understand that most of our likes and dislikes are also a result of past experiences and realized how a previous lifetime had affected so many of the events in my life.
From the time I was very young, I loved horses. Even at the age of five I would sneak out of my house and walk to a nearby riding stable to watch the horses as people would take them out on the trails. Sometimes, the wrangler would let me sit on one that was saddled and waiting for the next rider. I was in heaven! That is until my mother found me one day and dragged me home saying that horses were for rich people not poor folk like us. Even after we moved away, I was contented to daydream about riding and knew that someday I would have my own horse.
It was always the same daydream; a horse barn, dusty corrals and several horses. As an adult this daydream manifested itself into several different locations. Horses gave me such a profound sense of peace that even when I went on vacation the cabin I rented would be by horse corrals. My ultimate dream came true in my late thirties when I was able to quit my corporate job and began my own horse training facility. My boss announced to my co-workers that once I had to physically work that hard, I would be back within the year. Well it took fifteen exhilarating and successful years to learn all the lessons the horse experience needed to teach me before it was time for a change.
One of the most important lessons was the ability to move into my own self confidence. While I was training horses one experience after another came up that made me feel not good enough. After a few years of this issue causing anger to surface and tension with my clients I began to understand that the trigger wasn’t external but internal and discovered the root of the unwholesome emotion. When that work was out of the way my business relationships were much smoother. It wasn’t my clients that had the problem it was me. What a biggie!
