SoulCollage® and Life Alignment – Images of your Soul

Finding inspiration in difficult times, in a fun and playful way. Is this possible? Let’s talk to Orit Inbar, Advanced Practitioner and Teacher of Life Alignment in Israel, about her experience with art and the human soul. Orit believes that there is creativity in every single person.

Well let’s hope so, because art and creativity play an essential role in the intellectual, emotional, cognitive and aesthetic development and perception of one’s own reality. Art is a form of communication that often works better than the spoken word. A form of communication that is suitable for presenting complex relationships in a simple but clear way. Creating art is a model for a flexible appropriation of reality that does not cling to rules and norms, but seeks the essential with intuition and imagination.

Orit, tell us more about your relation to Artwork and Life Alignment?

 

All my life I knew the joy and power of creativity. Therefore I decided to study Psychology and Art Therapy. With this background I was able to facilitate personal and organisational Change Management with dynamic and powerful processes.

At some point I entered a personal crisis. I was physically and emotionally very hurt and didn’t come further with the tools I knew back then. A friend of mine gifted me a Life Alignment session – up to that time I wasn’t even aware of that kind of work. The first session felt so strange to me as it was way too accurate and powerful. How could this be? You need to know I have a very rational mind and back then was very committed to conventional therapy. Only 2 months later I went again, mainly to prove myself that Life Alignment can’t be that miraculous. It was too powerful again. I understood this is much more than a healing modality. It’s a life changer and a lífe philosophy. From that day I was hooked :).

 

Oh I love such stories, when the mind experiences that not only the conscious but also the unconscious and the heart are a centre of excellence.

 

Yes, today I like it as well! Exactly this is the reason why I love to bridge the power of Life Alignment with artwork. There are a lot of people out there which need energy work to be more tangible in order to understand and work with it. Not only creative people like to use art, it’s actually the opposite. For rationally minded clients, art can become a way to express themselves beyond the mind. It’s a way to assimilate energy into matter – and that is all about living here on earth in this life circle – isn’t it? When we come to this world, we come to a world of matter. We have a body, we have houses, we have cars etc.

 

I was already a Body Spin teacher and with Life Alignment for over 7 years when I happened upon the modality SoulCollage® at a conference. The workshop I actually signed up for was closed even though I had a ticket and the only lecture hall still open was on SoulCollage®. Definitely a beautiful example of universal coincidence. Because after this workshop it was clear to me that this artistic method would help me a lot with some of my clients in my Life Alignment practice.

Tell us more, what is SoulCollage® and how does it help your practice?

 

SoulCollage® is a way for me to get greater access to the soul of people. No judging, but for example for people with a conservative background or government institutions committing easier to Art Therapy than to Energy Therapy. It’s sometimes easier to break the ice with art work than with energetic work.

Everybody has imagination, even if they think they don’t. SoulCollage® is an inspiring and creative process with the aim of making the many facets of a life story visible. It’s a creative way into the inner realm, in a very simple process so that everyone can do it. I like the modality of SoulCollage® as you don’t have to be a big artist. You only need to cut out images and glue them together in the shape of a card, using your intuition and what you found in magazines or wherever. People that are having difficulties connecting to something that is abstract can create in this way something they can touch and feel.

SoulCollage®, so to speak, are creative images of your soul with amazing impact and depth. However, there is a limit to where you can get by working with the cards and this is why I facilitate it with the system of Life Alignment. It enables much deeper work, using inner guidance which appears through our artwork.

Interesting, do you have examples?

 

There are so many examples. Intuitive art processes help us to recognize what needs to be balanced within us and which energy comes up asking for self-development.

Just recently I had a client which needed help finding more information about his collage. “The card refused to speak to him”. With a Life Alignment balance we have the tools to create familiarity to the artwork. We can deepen our connection to it and how it can guide us in a meaningful way.

 

“In the Shadow is the gold.”

 

The quote above from Carl Jung refers to those elements of the shadow that are actually quite precious elements, relegated to the shadows due to painful associations, societal judgments, and cultural disapproval, etc.

In Life Alignment we enter the realm of the Higher Self and with it’s magical options we can open up some doors or shadows to the subconscious matter that needs to be brought into light. Our subconscious is getting the opportunity to say what/how does “it” feel and be handled carefully.

The fun and not threatening key to this realm may be using creative processes which also bypass the defensive mechanism of the ego-mind. When we created intuitive art, we can continue with the Life Alignment process to connect to the expressed inner guide, belief or program and shift it to something that serves us better. If you don’t work with SoulCollage® you can bring other intuitive artwork to your Life Alignment practitioner or you can ask to do it together. This works online and offline, no limitations!

Maybe you can relate to the feeling when talking to someone directly, it sometimes can be intimidating. But if you’re talking about a collage or image it is then referring to something that is out of you which makes it less intimidating. It’s because working with art lowers defences of the mind and ego and enables people to reach some repressed emotions.

I am getting inspired! I really like the idea of unlocking creative soulwork. I can see that there is no limit to it. What other examples can you share with us?

 

Archetypes! Identifying which archetypes are influential in our lives can thus lead us to self-discovery, self-awareness, growth. In SoulCollage® we have the so-called council suit in a deck of cards which are directly related to archetypes. Archetypes also come up in a Life Alignment session as part of the system. Creating a collage for a specific archetype may help us have a very concrete and perceptible image of the archetype which might be easier to connect to. And vice versa. After working with an archetype in a balance, one can create a card for it, using the energy and emotions that were manifested during the balance and the card will “keep” the memory of the work and project its energy each time it’s needed.

 

I have found over the years that the cards help the client both during and after balance. A card can come up when it comes to connection, for example inner child. But it can also be incredibly useful to intuitively create a collage after a balance to manifest and capture the energy shift. Whenever I lose the feeling of the session but need it I can use the card to feel and sustain the frequency.

Ok Orit, I wouldn’t call myself being creative but you’ve got me. What can we do at home if we don’t have access to SoulCollage®?

 

Sure! Just start to create a deck of cards. You don’t need a facilitator for that, it’s simple, it’s cheap! Sit down and find magazines, use rubbish – I call it upcycling – or search on the internet for keywords which come up for you intuitively. Print out pictures which resonate with you and create collages like in the example images above (there will be some of your examples). You just have to agree to trust your intuition.

It is important to understand that it is not about analysing the cards. It is a concentration of a certain energy that is created from your soul. Nothing needs to be understood mentally, nothing needs to be done. You can only be with the vibration of the card.

So enjoy the creative process and start using them as information parts and bring them to your Life Alignment balance. The energy of the balance will be “poured” into the cards and can stay with you after the balance is finished.

NON-VIOLENT COMMUNICATION

Is the way we communicate violent?
In this month’s newsletter, we explore Nonviolent Communication with Renate Stoecker. This is a process through which we can learn to express ourselves honestly while listening to our feelings and those of others. Renate is a Life Alignment teacher in Germany and has worked as a Transformational Coach for many years.
Maggie: I have not considered the way I speak violent, however I do know that I have hurt people with my words. When do you consider communication to be violent?

Any form of judgment, demand, discrimination, blaming ourselves or others, gossip, negative self-talk, thinking in terms of right and wrong, in categories of “should have”, trying to achieve something by inducing feelings of fear, guilt or shame, is a contribution to violence in some way.

Nonviolent or Compassionate Communication as it is often called, is like learning a new language, the language of compassion and consciousness, of listening and speaking from the heart and looking beyond the words.

Maggie: Knowing there is no way to NOT communicate, I can understand it's like learning a new language. What changed for you, getting introduced to this form of communication?

I was born in the 50’s and my family background is shaped by the fact that people were still traumatized from the war, busily reconstructing their existence and doing what needed to be done. Connecting to feelings and needs seemed irrelevant at that time. It’s the generation of “follow demands and rules, do what is supposed to be done”. A common way of punishment in those days was also not talking to a person anymore for a while. So this language of speaking and listening from the heart felt to me like feeling vibrantly alive all of a sudden and making contact in a new, humane way. Learning this art of listening to what a person is feeling and needing and listening beyond the words, showed me the how to really making contact and resolving conflicts in a good way.

To listen empathically to yourself on the level of feelings and needs, also helps in dealing with your inner critic. When we are blaming ourselves, or when we are hearing blame, we are either buying into it and feeling bad, or we are defending ourselves. Either way, we are disconnecting from ourselves. When we don’t feel well and our needs are not met – instead of taking responsibility for it, we rather blame someone or something for it. It is essential to be aware that something may have triggered a feeling in me, but it is still MY feeling and need and I am taking responsibility for both.

 

Message from Jeff Levin:

“We had a woman in London years ago and she had to mentally communicate with her husband during a session. The same old pattern of blame came up which is what happens when our buttons are pushed. A wall comes up and from this place you can’t listen but only judge. I said to her “Is he hearing you?” No, he still doesn’t hear me. “Can you say it in a way that comes from your heart to his heart with kindness and compassion”? This woman did a few takes and when we finally got there she felt completely different. “Is he hearing you now?” Yes, he’s hugging and loving me. The reason I’m sharing this is that an hour later her husband came to pick her up from the seminar. The whole energy of the relationship had changed, he felt it without knowing anything about the session and there was a new line of connection.

A Life Alignment process is about rewiring old habitual patterns of behaviour and communication. In a session very often, there is a need to communicate to “an oppressor” and the old patterns can come up as we take the individual into a safe space where they access their sole frequency and their heart. There is then a re-patterning of a trauma related wiring which changes the line of communication from then on”.

Maggie: This reminds me of situations in the work environment. Renate, I am sure it's a very useful tool there as well?

Indeed! Many years ago I was asked to help resolve a conflict for an intercultural project, which was run by Germans and Malays. The Germans accused the Malays of being unpredictable, which made planning for them impossible. The Malays meanwhile thought the German were inflexible, too direct and arrogant. Of course this web of judgments and labels brought up anger and resentment in both parties and made cooperation seem impossible.

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field, I will meet you there”
Rumi

When I was called in, I had been told about all the things that had gone wrong, I focused however on deep listening and understanding “what does each party need in order to work in the best possible way”. Once the whole project team focused on that level of “we can listen to each other”, the energy changed the team became very motivated to look for mutually satisfying solutions. Only when they feel really heard they are ready to open up. That is when compassion as a healing tool comes in and works miracles.

Maggie: This resonates so much, especially when I look at the way of communication during this current pandemic.

Yes. In this time of disruption and transformation many of us feel that it can also be a gift to have the time to tune in with ourselves and feel into what really matters for us. Compassionate Communication can also help to bridge the polarities we see worldwide. Just look at the vaccine opponents and advocates, both groups reacting extremely opinionated, blaming each other of being “insane, stupid, unaware…”. There is so much polarisation going on at the moment instead of listening to fears, worries and needs. Instead we could use the opportunity to meet not only the other person’s needs but also ours! Well, Life Alignment is indeed a powerful tool to deeply connect to ourselves, find out about our fundamental needs and speak our truth.

Maggie: That means Life Alignment Balances do help to learn the language of Nonviolent Communication?

Definitely. In Life Alignment we are connecting on the level of the heart and soul and we realise that it is our inner environment and old trauma, beliefs and hurt, that is triggered by other people or events in our life. By releasing those traumatic memories, it becomes easier to connect to ourselves and be aware of our feelings and needs in the present moment.

Healing comes about when compassion and deep understanding comes in. We are clearing our filters of perception. From the perspective of the heart and soul, the world looks very different.

We also take responsibility as we know we have co-created our experience and realize that it is our inner environment that makes us suffer the most, especially the thoughts and beliefs we have bought into. We know, we can make conscious choices to bring qualities into our lives we truly desire.

Maggie: I can only agree! How can I start practicing Compassionate Communication in my daily life?

A good start would be to connect to your own feelings throughout the day and be curious, what the need is behind your feeling, met or not met. A process of Compassionate Communication consists of four steps:

1. Perceive what is happening and describe the situation as a pure observation without judgment, which is not easy to do. We tend to mix what we perceive with how we evaluate it.
I’ll give you a very common example:

Violent: “She is very disrespectful of our time to always be late for our meeting.”
Compassionated: “She came 15 min late to our meeting for the 3rd time, I wonder what was going on.”

The difference between these approaches is big. The harm originates from the thoughts, interpretations and meanings we attach to an incident.

2. Connecting to yourself – What are you feeling?

Feelings show us whether or not our needs have been fulfilled. When our needs are met, we may feel inspired, balanced, free, enthusiastic, peaceful, etc. On the flip side when our needs are not met we may feel frustrated, discouraged, angry, sad, depressed etc. So when I see you coming later than we agreed, I become unsure, because I am thinking, the meeting is not important to you and I would love everyone to be on board to make decisions together.

3. Find the need behind your feeling:

I am feeling sad, because my need is … because I would like … I desire …

Violent: “Can you not come in time when we schedule a meeting? We all needed to wait for you”.
Compassionated: “When you come late for the meeting I feel sad as I really wish that we are all on board equally. How do you feel about this”?

4. The last step is to express a doable and positive request.

Please will you…; Are you willing to do this?
It is important, not to confuse a request with a demand: Requests mean that you are open to accepting “no” as a response and then find a new arrangement together.

You can practice this at any moment during the day.

Maggie: That sounds fantastic Renate. Thank you for sharing your experience and wisdom about Compassionate Communication. I am excited to learn this new language and I heard there will be a relating Life Alignment workshop very soon :). I will keep us updated!

Inner Child

Most of the time, we feel pretty comfortable as an adult, right? Being able to do whatever we want without asking for permission, whether that means spending our own money or wasting away on the couch for an entire Sunday. But do you also know the feeling when someone gives you a snarky comment and suddenly you feel like a child again, wanting to throw a temper tantrum? No matter how old we grow, we carry our younger selves within us day-to-day. By connecting with our inner child, we gain access to “new” information about our unhealed wounds. In this month’s interview we will speak about inner child work with my muse when it comes to emotional balance, compassion and radiance, Life Alignment’s advanced teacher and practitioner Tanya Harris from South Africa.

Maggie: Tanya, as my Life Alignment teacher, I have seen you many times doing outstanding inner child work. Why are you so in tune with it?

I have done extensive work with my own inner child. I had debilitating panic attacks, which is actually how I discovered Life Alignment. I went to my very first Life Alignment session with Arleen Hanks who now lives in Australia, to help with my panic attacks. The session guided us straight to inner child work. By listening to my wounded inner children I had such a profound shift, that I wanted to continue working with it.   

Maggie: Interesting, because you are talking about it in plural. Does this mean we have more than one inner child?

Absolutely. A child responds differently to an event depending on their age. For example, the baby in the womb, the 6 year old who just started school, the teenager who is trying to find where she belongs etc. These are the inner children and each with their different responses to trauma, and their own needs. It is important to note that we don’t only have wounded children, we also have golden children within us. When we can access the golden child we can bring a lot of happiness, joy and freedom to the adult. 

Maggie: Do you need to have childhood trauma in order to have childhood wounds?
We all have inner child issues and not all of them stem from trauma. To give you an example: Maybe you performed very well at school. Every time you get a report your parents praise you and say, “Well done!”. The belief system that may have kicked in is, “When I do well, I get praised – I am valuable”. Naturally I then want to achieve and perform well because then I get loved. And this comes with “When I don’t perform well, I am not loved”. You see the parents are not bad at all, however this belief system might affect your future habits. So you become an overachiever. 

Little things like that can become stuck in our heads as children. So not all inner child work is because of severe or complex childhood trauma such as physical or emotional abuse. 

Inner child work is about finding out where your limiting beliefs started and how to let them go.
 

Each child comes to earth to be loved. Babies are coming to this world just to give love, be love and experience love. If you ever held a new born baby you can feel this pure Divine energy, right? But if we experience unavailable or conditioned love as a baby we start believing this is our fault. For example when your mom is a child herself when she gives birth and she doesn’t know how to treat a baby, it grows up thinking “There must be something wrong with me, I am not good enough to be loved”. 
 
Maggie: Why is that? Why does a child blame itself and has even the ability to blame at all?

It’s not really a conscious blame, it’s more like the child feels that they are not valuable or wanted. When you are a very small child your parents are everything to you, sort of like your Gods, as they give you life. We come into this world through the mother and we are received by the father. When the mother’s love is not available or if the mother is rejecting you, because of issues she is going through, then the baby feels, “there must be something wrong with me – there is no one that will nurture me”. 

The father receives us, so represents the world. If the father is absent, the baby feels ”the world can’t accept me, I am not protected, I am not safe”. 

So if a baby is not getting love, connection and protection, it can not blame the “Gods”, it starts to believe that it is not worthy of those things – something is wrong with me.

Later in life this can play out in many different ways. We might think “I do not deserve”, “life is supposed to be hard” or “I am not worthy” and this can become habits in very different ways. You might become a people pleaser to not be rejected. Or you reject before anyone else can reject you. 
 
Maggie: Please tell me more about how we can transform ourselves with the golden child? When I watch children or puppies I can see so many things we can learn from them, but it always looks like qualities adults don't have access to?

Sometimes we can go back to an age where we were free, wild and happy. As we get older our golden child gets subdued. We forget that we have these qualities and wisdom within us. The golden child however is just as important and accessible as the wounded child. It remembers being part of God and being pure love. It knows who we truly are. We can access these aspects of ourselves, once we heal and let go of all the wounds that stop us from being true to ourselves. For example people come to a Life Alignment session because they can’t connect to their purpose on this planet. Very often the golden child will come through to remind us of the purpose of shining love, playing and having fun. 

The golden child is just as important as the wounded child

 
Maggie: Inner children seem to be able to teach us so much! Would you say they really exist within us or is it just a memory?
The inner child exists. If you have ever seen an adult throwing a temper tantrum, you have seen their inner child in action. The wounded child is the button that gets pushed and the reactions that we express are the defence mechanisms that we learnt when we were very little, to survive that situation. 
So for example when we are sitting in a meeting and a colleague gets upset, that could be his (or her) inner 5 year old which gets emotional, because somebody might have said something that reminded him of how his father used to criticize him – so this unresolved button is pushed and he starts throwing a tantrum. At that moment he is no longer the 40 year old, he has regressed to the 5 year old and accordingly feels and reacts as a 5 year old who does not have the tools to manage the situation. 

The inner child is alive in all of us and if you become aware of it, you can actually catch yourself a few times a day responding as your wounded child. One of the ways when we work with the inner child, is to be able to recognise ourselves in those moments. 

However, the last thing you want to do after you recognise you behaved inappropriately is telling yourself “how could you behave like this, why have you done this” etc. What you are doing then is shouting at your inner child and you are becoming the abusive parent. What we need to do is look at ourselves with compassion. That’s another whole topic, becoming your inner parent. The whole point is to heal the triggers or buttons, by doing for the child what you needed back then, so that you don’t react to them anymore but simply notice them. 

Maggie: I can imagine recognition is the most difficult one. We so often think “This is who I am, this is my opinion, this is me setting boundaries”, not realising the inner child which is triggered.
This is why modalities such as Life Alignment are so important. As it gives us an opportunity to get into those spaces where we had the reactions to see which aspect of us is actually reacting. Then finding out what that aspect of ourselves actually needs in order to heal. To break the cycle of inner abuse and inner triggers, we have to find out what the root cause for this is. But you have to be patient. It takes a while. When you become aware you slowly but surely can start to introduce a new parenting style to your inner self. In a way you fire the old parent which wasn’t good for you at this specific point of time in your life and invoke a new parent. The old parenting style is based on the parenting style of your parents, which also has been influenced by their parents. You don’t want to have this in your unconscious mind. Now we can invoke a new, divine style of parenting. Subconsciously you alter it as a massive aspect of your psyche. 
 
Maggie: Can you please explain a bit more in detail what our subconscious mind does in a Life Alignment balance?

In a LA session you connect to such a deep and pure space of being, that you subconsciously get the opportunity to rewire your neurological pathways. The trigger and root cause connected to it is not running with the same internal programming anymore. The root cause is unveiled, the trigger is tackled and the neurological system is firing a new pathway and now you can respond differently to when your button gets pushed. That old belief-system and pattern of behaviour is broken. Yes, it takes a while for the conscious mind to catch on. That’s why I am saying you might sit in the next meeting and see yourself reacting in the same way. However, half way through you recognise it’s your inner child coming through and you calm yourself down. To give you an example: In the past I felt intimidated by some women and would turn into a people pleaser. The moment I watched this trigger I would excuse myself and go to the bathroom. There I checked in with my inner child, felt that she was scared and reassured her “this woman outside is not your mom, you are safe, I love you”. I would give her permission to not be in that meeting. As why must you subject your inner child to something she is not capable of dealing with? It’s too big and scary for her. So I give her permission to play with the fairies while I, the adult, go back into the meeting. Remember this. You don’t need your inner child in each situation in life. You took care of it and gave her permission to be vulnerable and play somewhere else, so that you the adult can face the “danger”, as you are very capable.  

Maggie: What practice can we do at home to get in touch with our inner children?
There is a really good exercise you can do to explore your triggers. Let’s use anger as an example, but of course you can do this with any feeling or reaction you may have.
I recommend putting yourself in a Vortex Circle, then going within and just feeling the last moment where you got really angry. When you are right in that feeling, ask yourself who is the inner child in that moment. Trust your imagination as this is the key to your subconscious mind.  How old is she (or he), what is her body language like, what is going on in her life?
Once you know who she is and what her circumstances were, ask her what she needs. Let her tell you or show you and then immediately do for her what she needs or asks for. It could be love, to be held, to be heard, acceptance, protection, to sing to her etc. She will know.
Then when she is feeling better, safer etc, tell her that you, the adult is in charge and that she does not need to be present for scary conversations or situations, you got this! You, the adult, will deal with all the adult stuff, she can stay safe in your safe place, whatever that may be for you. You can even follow up: What can I do in future to make sure you are safe? Never make promises that you cant keep, to your Inner Child.  Rather say that you will try your best and then prove to her you are more trustworthy than the adults she knew in childhood. 
Maggie: Thank you so much Tanya, this sounds like a fascinating, complex and lifelong transformation. It all makes so much sense and I can't wait to attend one of your next Inner Child Workshops on Zoom.