Author: Annie Emprima

Blog Series | The View From my -SHIPs

 

Welcome to my fleet of -SHIPs: my stories on leadership, friendship, personal relationships, business partnerships, personal ownership, the money-ship and a sneak peek into my world on the metaphysical mothership.

 

The First Thirty Years

 

Before we get into the good stuff, let me first bring you up to speed in this chapter’s worth of blog posts to give you an idea of my mindset, mental wellbeing, and the events leading up to joining the military. Along the way, I’ll add in a few psychological and metaphysical concepts to understand this section in a deeper way.

 

First and foremost, I describe my childhood from my current age perspective. I don’t know anyone like me who can take me to the same places as an energetic observer in the same way I do for my own clients. I don’t know anyone who can take me into my own master memory so I can gather the details of how my younger self processed events. The best I can do is tell you how I remember them from this adult perspective.

 

Some of my earliest childhood memories are of laying on my grandfather’s bed crying from the pain of ear infections – except my memory isn’t from the first-person view of a young child crying on the bed and staring at the adults trying to calm me with cool washcloths; my memory is from the ceiling looking down.

 

The same with many memories. It was as if I dissociated away from my body and floated up to watch.

 

A lot of my childhood that didn’t make sense as I recalled it back in my twenties now makes a little more sense in my forties — voices, promptings, unexplainable calmness while others were freaking out. That’s not to say I was calm all the time; quite the opposite in fact. I just didn’t freak out with the big stuff. I still don’t. The small stuff, on the other hand, consumed me for many decades.

 

For example, there was one time in high school when I was hanging out with teens I didn’t know but who were friends with my friend. We hung out with them because they had a car. They decided they were hungry and wanted French fries from Wendy’s. After I got my food at the counter, I heard a voice in my head tell me to exit through a different door instead of the door closest to where these kids had parked. The moment my friend and I turned the corner around the backside of the small brick building, I knew the boys were up to no good. They were waiting by the front door with the landscape water hose on and positioned, waiting to spray us both down with cold water.

 

There were so many times I swore I was being followed by an energy being! It didn’t feel like a ghost in the once-was-human sense, just energy. It followed me around my house, it was with me when I was scared to walk home by myself, it was with me when I walked through the streets of New York City at night. It was with me that one time my ex-boyfriend decided he was going to smoke his cigarette in the attic of my childhood home, knowing I was not okay with it and that my mother certainly would not have been. I’m pretty sure that energy released the clamp light from the support beam above the top step of the attic, causing it to dangle inches over his head and for him to never step foot in my attic again.

 

It wasn’t until I became an energy practitioner and started taking people back to their past to observe their memories and how their younger selves processed what was happening, did I realize what I had actually experienced. The energy being wasn’t at all what I thought it was. I didn’t realize it initially because the first wave of clients that I took back were clairaudient or clairvoyant, so they could communicate with their younger self using Pictionary style gestures or by verbally communicating. I felt the world as an empath, and feelings are really super hard to translate to words when fear is wedged in the middle of the experience.

 

My capabilities have always been intuition based; I feel in a clairsentient way. But feelings can get extremely confusing when there isn’t a secondary sense to partner with. Sensing plus hearing, or sensing plus seeing, make the experience a whole lot less scary. Sensing plus hearing plus seeing make it a whole lot easier. I was unintentionally scaring myself, not knowing I could travel back and pop in and observe any scene in my life that I wanted. Being extra empathic (and not knowing this fourth dimension option of travel existed) didn’t help the situation in any way. Imaginary friends. Ghosts under my bed. Energy in my closets. Yup. Mysteries solved. All those times I was scared shitless thinking I had a ghost following me…yeah, it was some other version of me popping in and visiting that younger version of me. I was answering the call to help myself.

 

Turns out we all have an internal Bat phone. We just need to learn how to use it properly.

 

Annie is a doctor of metaphysics. She specializes in the impact of energy in the form of emotions on mind, body, business, and life. Many of her clients come to her because modern medicine and traditional psychology failed to relieve suffering while others come to her for spiritual advancement or metaphysical mastery. Want to learn more?

 

Visit https://oneemprima.com/ to schedule a free 15 minute session or follow her on social media.

Blog Series | The View From my -SHIPs

 

Welcome to my fleet of -SHIPs: my stories on leadership, friendship, personal relationships, business partnerships, personal ownership, the money-ship and a sneak peek into my world on the metaphysical mothership.

 

Remember how I mentioned in a past blog post that I take my clients back to their childhood as spiritual observers of the memory rather than as participants? This is an example where the adult observer and the child did not agree on the intelligence of the Self.

 

My third-grade teacher, Mr. Bradley, was a full-time substitute who encouraged clapping, celebrating, and moving kids around every few weeks so their desks were sometimes in the front next to the teacher. We were seen, heard, engaged. Every so often, he would issue little paper awards that had been decorated by the class the week before. For the most part, I enjoyed my teacher and learning and school. Unfortunately for the incoming 2nd graders, the teacher in the next classroom constantly complained of the excessive noise, and Mr. Bradley wasn’t invited to return the next year.

 

Then came 4th grade and I went invisible. I failed English all four quarters. The teacher was Mrs. Davis, someone I now can now say in retrospect probably started her teaching career at a Catholic school where hitting students was legal. She had the same disgruntled energy of my drill sergeants, except my drill sergeants were primed to be mean and were forced to stay awake for 24 hours once a week; they also weren’t allowed to eat during sunlight hours for the first month of basic training. Cranky and hangry was an Army strategic move. For her, it was a choice. She chose to dim the child’s spirit by telling the kids that there was no such thing as Santa Clause, that we were too old for trick or treat, and so on.

 

The next year I had another teacher that I didn’t care for, but this time I was too visible. Her name was Mrs. Ditmar. Not only did she make fun of me every time I said the word decimal, but she also made a point to bring me to the front of the room to say it out loud in front of the whole class. I tried using the word “point”, or “dot”, but she insisted I say decimal. To this day I still don’t know what was wrong with how I spoke. I vividly remember the moment when I declared in my head that I hated her and I vowed I would become a teacher and teach better than she did.

 

Then came middle school. The only teacher I connected with was my seventh grade English teacher, but she was gone most of the school year because someone had broken into her house in the neighboring rural town of Richmond, tied her up, and left her there after robbing her. It was several days before she was found. She wasn’t able to teach for months because she was processing trauma in a very real way. It seemed like something always happened to the teachers I liked the most.

 

Fast forward to high school when I hung out with both the geeky honor students and the edgy cigarette smoking street kids. I became the covert rebel. There was a rule that let honor students leave the property during study hall while the rest had to hang out in a classroom somewhere. Since the principal saw me eating lunch with the studious kids, he never questioned when I would walk out the front door with the honors kids to go to get a burger at a fast food restaurant in the middle of the school day despite not being in any honors classes.

 

At my high school graduation ceremony, I was second to last person staged to receive my high school diploma. I would have been third to last except the family of the missing student (who ranked between me and the last student) didn’t have a car to drive to Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and annual location for my high school’s graduations. I don’t know if she had any close friends to drive the 8.5 miles to the venue. But there was a moment right before I reached the stage that it hit me – I realized we were placed in GPA order from highest to lowest. They say there are definitive moments in our life that alter the trajectory of our life. Up until that moment I had no clue where I ranked in the school. How dumb could I be that I didn’t even realize I was that low in the rankings?

 

There was an event prior to high school graduation where the seniors that elected to go to Berkshire Community College (BCC) were invited to visit the campus and tour as a group. I hadn’t received an invitation despite applying. I learned about the event from a high school classmate who happened to be in the same PE gym class my first semester at BCC. She was surprised to see me at BCC because I hadn’t been part of the group that was invited to the event. I processed that as the school administration not having any faith in my stubbornness to move forward. Admittedly, I struggled immensely with auditory, dictation style teachers. I struggled trying to study biology, chemistry, economics, anatomy and physiology, and subjects I had no interest in. It didn’t come naturally to memorize subjects and topics when I had no ambition or reason to learn them. That ambition and interest to learn biology and anatomy didn’t come for another 25 years when I had a reason and purpose to study those topics.

 

Moving from community college to university was a big jump for me financially, geographically, and in intensity. The school is now a university but at that time it was just a four-year college, a lot smaller in size, but still 1.25 hours away from where I lived. I failed a class; however, in my defense, why we were required to take Calculus 1 and 2 for a degree in accounting baffled me. Never once have I ever used Calculus for anything in my life that couldn’t be solved faster by Google. Although, in fairness, Google wasn’t a thing yet and we were still toting $150 TI-83 scientific calculators. I squeezed my way through Calculus 1 the way an octopus moves through a 3″x3″ hole, passing with a D. Not so lucky with Calc 2. My GPA was already a small boat in an ocean storm but that F in Calc 2 really sank the GPA score.

 

EMPRIM MEDIA

 

From 2005–2006 I had created a small-town media company E.M.P.R.I.M. MEDIA. It consisted of a black and white publication distributed to most of the middle and high schools in my county, plus a public access TV show that broadcasted to the three public access stations (central, north and south Berkshire County). The topics focused on the hard stuff about being in middle and high school, things like how to ride a public bus for the first time, what to expect at a first interview, the dangers of interacting with predators online, what to expect in Driver’s Ed, things we were ashamed or afraid of, and other subjects tweens and teens wanted to know about. The kids who showed up the day we interviewed at a TV station became the ones who ran the cameras, staged the floor, operated the controls, etc. The interviews would then be transcribed into print for all the kids to read.

 

The intent of the show and magazine was to help kids like the ones I hung out with in high school feel more normal. A place to be seen and heard. My high school years consisted of spending a lot of time with the other misfits in school — foster kids, latchkey kids, kids who smoked pot (that was most certainly not a social norm in the early 90s). There were kids so poor they couldn’t afford a dress for the harvest festival, never mind the expenses of prom; there were kids that were institutionalized in 2–4 week lockdowns for feeling suicidal, and kids who had really shitty parents too drunk to care that the electricity had been shut off. In many ways, I related to their emotional emptiness of being a teenager. Amidst the façade of living an upper middle-class life in a middle-class neighborhood, my tribe was the misfits of the school.

 

I had created the magazine and TV show 12–13 years after I graduated high school when technology wasn’t as readily available for personal use as it is now. The editing software the public access TV station used was great at the time, but not compared to what we know today. I produced just a couple issues of the ‘magazine’ and a couple dozen episodes of the TV show. As much as I loved doing it, I found it was more than a full-time job for zero pay, and I couldn’t sustain doing it alone. It was too hard to do solo. The issues had mistakes that my friends and I had missed, and although it wasn’t the most polished piece of art I’d ever created, it did serve a greater purpose.

 

It helped me heal from old rules and wounds. I still didn’t consider myself particularly smart, but at least I had helped rewrite my brain’s poor “software coding” regarding my capacity to write and express myself with words.

 

It also gave me insight into the mindset of high-risk middle and high school kids. I was granted permission to visit the alternative school once a week. We did anonymous writing submission about hard topics, things like what’s one thing you wished your parents didn’t do, and we read stories of kids having to go home to their parents and cook dinner for the family because one or both parents were too drunk or drugged up to wake up.

 

Again, everything was anonymous, but along the way I unintentionally learned graphology and could match handwriting to personality, anger, career interests, and other factors. The first time I noticed handwriting was with my first therapeutic foster kid who brought home a science paper that had an A grade. The problem was I knew it wasn’t hers. Her name was at the top of the paper but the handwriting wasn’t hers. It was too curvy, too bubbly, the ink wasn’t thick enough, and it was missing the felon’s claw strokes in her lowercase e, g, and y letters. I didn’t know the names of strokes at that point, I just knew she wrote with a heavier hand and had pointy marks on her lowercase letters. Ironically, the felon’s claw indicates a writer’s tendency to cheat.

 

There were other reasons for creating EMPRIM MEDIA. I may have grown up in a middle-class family but there were many unspoken secrets hiding in my head. I had a lot more in common with the foster kids who openly talked about their traumas than I did with my own family members that shoved secrets in closets. My friends didn’t steal from me like my brothers did. My friends didn’t care about outperforming me like my studious and athletic sister did. My friends didn’t care that I didn’t know everything. My friends didn’t ignore me and or blame me for my brothers’ actions like my father did. My friends just wanted to hang out.

 

Many of the themes I chose for the public access show were things I wished I had known in high school so I wouldn’t have felt as dumb. Many of the topics were an attempt to allow other kids the chance to express their genius despite the hardships of life.

 

The ASVAB

 

The first clear sign something was amiss in my seemingly validated rule that I wasn’t smart was when I decided to join the military and had to take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB for short. The exam was broken down into sections and each section was timed. Each person had a different paper version noted on the front of their test ranging from A-D. This was before the ASVAB testing was done electronically. I sat in the front of the room and found I was finishing each section early — paper turned over, pencil down, looking around and seeing that no one else was looking up. So I put my head back down and reread the entire section just in case I missed something — that kind of early. We had to exit the room once we finished all the sections so the instructor could print and place our results in an envelope with our name already written on it. He then called each person in the room and handed them their envelope. I didn’t open my envelope until I got closer to my vehicle and skipped over much of the details to zoom in on the score. The important number was the overall Armed Forces Qualification Test score because that determined which tier of jobs I qualified for. The test ranked from 1 to 99 and the score showed a 32. My heart sunk. This just didn’t make any sense. I knew I wasn’t the smartest person but to be so close to the cut-off of not being allowed in the military (the minimum was 31 at that time). It just didn’t make sense. That meant I was limited in the jobs I could pick in the military. Right at the point I was catching my breath and convincing myself that the computer was wrong and I must have erased too many answers and confused the computer, a guy’s voice gradually increased in proximity and interrupted my confusion. He asked if I had his paper, pointing to the paper in his hand that had my name on it. The envelope had my name on it but the paper did not. I had scored in the top 9%! That also caught me off guard.

 

My younger child believed she was dumb. My adult self was now in conflict with that belief. Looking back as the observer from a conscious state, I realize the poor grades were due to having parents that weren’t actively involved in my upbringing, parents that spent more time fighting with themselves than focusing on our education, an immigrant mother who learned English and math as I was learning it, and a home life that wasn’t a safe haven but a battlefield of mistrust. I spent much of my teen years trying NOT to be home.

 

Even before that, I would wait until the last minute to do any sort of middle school project and then ask for help only to endure hours of my father talking at me about whatever his beliefs were, or his relationship to the topic, but not actually sitting down and helping me complete the task. Neither of my parents made it past a high school education. My mother didn’t work until I turned 13 and my father worked for his father, never needing a formal education. I didn’t grow up watching my parents read or study or dive deeply into any hobbies other than my mother’s desire to sell Mary Kay cosmetics. To this day I have no clue what my father likes other than those nasty junk food tasty cakes that a diabetic shouldn’t be eating, or collecting things from the dollar store or Goodwill that I’ll later have to trash in a dumpster when he dies. Homework completion and concentration and pronouncing the word decimal correctly and learning chemistry and biology and writing senior thesis papers weren’t my priorities. My priorities revolved around social connections, feeling seen and heard, and feeling like I belonged somewhere — even if that somewhere wasn’t my home. There wasn’t much of a chance to feel confident or competent in my intellect as a child.

 

Gold Tassels

 

The second sign I needed to shift my beliefs about my intelligence came during the housing crisis in 2009. Tim and I had just learned I was was pregnant again, only two months after my third miscarriage, which sort of explained why I had been getting lightheaded at work. 2009 was also marked with other firsts: we had just purchased our first house, my job at the Hoover Dam was eliminated and I was on unemployment for the first time. 2009 also included Tim getting laid off and me enrolling in an online program at the community college for the Montgomery GI Bill money so we would have extra money to pay our bills.

 

I expected community college to be easy since I had already completed a bachelor’s degree. What didn’t expect was that I would get high honors in my online program without really trying. I didn’t really study for my grades, I just did it my way. Turns out, my way got me gold tassels.

 

For most of my life leading up to joining the military, I constantly fought a battle in my head with one voice telling me I was smart and that I had a purpose, and the other voice reminding me how stupid I was based on past performance. Neither voice won the battle.

 

Where would I be right now had I not taken the ASVAB?

 

Who might you become if your limiting beliefs from childhood had a chance to be proven wrong? Let’s take that journey together.

 

Annie is a doctor of metaphysics that specializes in the impact of energy in the form of emotions on mind, body, business, and life. Many of her clients come to her because modern medicine and traditional psychology failed to relieve suffering while others come to her for spiritual advancement or metaphysical mastery. Want to learn more?

 

Visit https://oneemprima.com/ to schedule a free 15 minute session or follow her on social media.

Blog Series | The View From my -SHIPs

 

Welcome to my fleet of -SHIPs: my stories on leadership, friendship, personal relationships, business partnerships, personal ownership, the money-ship and a sneak peek into my world on the metaphysical mothership.

 

A typical telephone conversation with my father usually started off by asking how my son was, completely skipping over me, then transitioned into venting about all the things going wrong in his life that are ‘outside his control’.

 

For example, a call I had on January 14, 2020, the conversation revolved around his current affairs. The first was that my father needed to sell the restaurant property that had been neglected for 8 years. When the Chinese buffet tenant first vacated 8 years prior, I told him to hire a commercial real estate agent. He didn’t want to pay the $85,000 in real estate agent commissions, fees, and aesthetic repairs on a $1,000,000+ property because it was a waste of money. After all, he could do it himself. Instead, he had a FOR LEASE vinyl sign printed and hung it on the existing free-standing sign on the corner of the property, covering up the previous tenant’s business name. Now, eight years later, he was trying to sell it for $350,000 AS IS. You might be wondering why AS IS. Well, when the tenant moved out my father never touched the property. He blamed the tenants for being bad tenants, but I can’t, in good conscious, say that he did his best as a landlord to ensure their complaints were heard. I had a real estate agent and her team go in to look at it during the start of the pandemic and based on how they described the place, I would have though we were talking about a carefully crafted movie set for a post-apocalyptic thriller. They reported back that there were large Jello trays still sitting in the roll-away lunch buffet carts and wet spots in the carpet from where the roof was leaking. Salt and pepper still sat on the tables. Apparently, the tenants just walked away after a day of operation, and nothing was touched in the over 8 years it had been vacant.

 

The second topic was the current condition of his liver failure. “I just don’t know why this is happening. I don’t drink alcohol. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

 

“You’re a diabetic and obese, dad.” (Keeping what I really wanted to say out loud to myself: “…that kept eating shitty foods like Hostess cakes and glazed donuts and didn’t deal with your internalized anger. WTF did you think was going to happen?”)

 

Then he mentioned that he was upset that he had to spend money on his 1990-something truck. He just didn’t understand why it was giving him so many problems. “It was doing find until recently. I don’t understand.” So I asked him, “when was the last time you had a maintenance checkup done?”

 

“Those mechanics are a rip off. They’re all crooks.” And there was my answer.

 

And the final topic before I’d had enough of the conversation involved the house my father purchased with cash at auction in 2006 but never lived in. He told me that it was falling apart ‘all of a sudden’. So I asked, “What have you done for upkeep since you bought it?”

 

“Nothing. It’s been virtually maintenance free. Just needed a new boiler.” He said.

 

The house needed work when I stayed there back in 2009, while I was visiting for my baby shower. At that time, the basement rooms were not useable because it had flooded and the sump pump was doing its thing. I couldn’t imagine what the house looked like in 2020.

 

My brothers shared that the neighbors had gotten together and created a fake citation from the city stating he needed to maintain his yard or he would be fined. They were trying to help. Now, fifteen years after buying the house, he wasn’t physically well enough to mow the yards and expected my brothers to do the work…just because.

 

My father never dated after my parents divorced in the early 90s. He was afraid of the stock market because he got burnt in the 1980s. As I’m writing this in 2021, he uses a flip phone that doesn’t allow texting. I don’t know if texting cost too much to add to his pre-paid plan or if he didn’t want to buy the bigger phone with the bigger buttons for his bigger thumbs or if he just wanted to make life harder for those that wanted to communicate with him. Maybe all of the above. He isn’t willing to learn how to use a smartphone. He’s had the same iPad for about a decade and still hasn’t mastered liking or tagging photos on Facebook and doesn’t know what to do when it doesn’t work right.

 

His view of mental health therapy is the same as the mechanic, the real estate agent, the restaurant down the street… well you get the gist. They’re all crooks and it’s all a waste of money. You can’t trust any of them. From my view, it appeared that everyone was out to get him, no one is trustworthy, and nothing in life is safe. He’s not able to do it himself but the world outside isn’t safe, quite a paralyzing predicament.

 

The more failures he experienced, the fewer risks he took and the smaller his box got. He is still stuck in the 1990s when most of his trauma occurred, while the rest of the world moved forward. His life keeps getting smaller and smaller like the capability of a 1990s computer running Windows 3.0 compared to today’s Windows 11 touch screen technology. It just can’t keep up.

 

In 1965, Martin Seligman, Steven F. Maier, and Bruce Overmier discovered something unexpected while conducting experiments on dogs. Before I go into the significance of this experiment, understand that this was the 1960s and we didn’t have the development or understanding of mental health in humans that we do now. What Seligman did then would now be considered cruel animal punishment but at that time it was significant and incredibly relevant in understanding learned helplessness in humans. The research offered huge insight into understanding human behavior. If you are uncomfortable with animal experiments, please skip over this section and move to the next post.

 

The intent of this experiment was to understand “the relationship of fear conditioning to instrumental learning.” Mongrel dogs (mixed breed) were collected and used for these experiments and placed in a Pavlovian hammock, a sling like hammock for the underbelly with four holes so that the limbs of the dog fit through and the dogs were able to stand fully on the metal flooring below. It would make it so that the animal couldn’t move in any direction but could stand on all four legs.

 

The dogs were split into 3 groups: Group 1 dogs were placed in the hammock and heard a tone then received shocks from the metal grid flooring without any way to escape; Group 2 dogs were also strapped in the hammock but received no shock; Group 3 were also strapped in the hammock and received the tones then the shocks but were able to cease the shocks by pressing a button with their nose. The shocks were moderately painful but not physically damaging.

 

All three groups of dogs were then moved to part 2 of the experiment and placed in a 2-chamber shuttle box to receive shock once again through the floor, sans the hammock, but this time they could hop over the short wall to safety. How I would describe the shuttle box is to imagine two cardboard boxes bigger than the dog, positioned side by side, with the top half of the shared inner wall removed to leave a half wall so the dog could jump over to the other side but couldn’t escape the contained space of the two boxes. Except these were more structured chamber walls, not cardboard.

 

What Seligman found was that the dogs belonging to Group 2, the controllable situation group, the ones that received no shock, quickly figured out they could run around and jump over the short wall to the non-electrified ‘safe’ side of the shuttle box. Group 3, also known as the naïve group, were the ones that had used their nose to stop the shocks, after running around frantically would accidently discover that jumping over the wall brought them to safety. Group 1, the group that received shock without any way to escape, didn’t jump over the short wall to safety. After about 30 seconds of running around frantically, they just laid down. They whined, cowered, and just accepted the round of shocks as part of their fate. The Group 3 dogs had acquired learned helplessness. Seligman says in his book Helplessness, “When the emotional balance is disturbed: depression and anxiety, measured in various ways, predominate.”

 

But the experiment gets more curious. The experimenters then took the Group 1 learned helplessness dogs and physically helped them over the wall, making them perform the behavior of seeking safety. Essentially curing them of the learned helplessness. Further concluding environment can create learned helplessness and learned helplessness can be cured. Learned helplessness is not a permanent state. They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks but this experiment proved otherwise…assuming the dog is willing to learn the new trick.

 

As an adult child, it’s paralyzing to watch learned helplessness up close and personal. No amount of my effort or suggestions could stop my father’s world from shrinking. That, in itself, is a helpless feeling.

 

There are many stories in this blog series highlighting the emotional effects of trauma on personal relationships, business partnerships, and life. Trauma impacts every facet of our life over and over again until we face it head on.

 

Annie is a doctor of metaphysics that specializes in the impact of energy in the form of emotions on mind, body, business, and life. Many of her clients come to her because modern medicine and traditional psychology failed to relieve suffering while others come to her for spiritual advancement or metaphysical mastery.

 

Visit https://oneemprima.com/ to schedule a free 15 minute session or follow her on social media.

Blog Series | The View From my -SHIPs

 

Welcome to my fleet of -SHIPs: my stories on leadership, friendship, personal relationships, business partnerships, personal ownership, the money-ship and a sneak peek into my world on the metaphysical mothership.

 

What happens when psychology and metaphysics play together in the same sandbox?

 

Trauma works with the mind and brain in funny ways. When working with clients with severe childhood, adult, or tragic trauma, I’m less concerned with having them access a specific event (the when) as if time existed in a linear fashion — which would be standard for a psychotherapeutic modality — and more concerned with getting them to access mind, body, and spirit (all three attributes of the self) in the present moment using a 4D approach. Sometimes that requires showing them that there is an essence of them that exists outside the concept of time.

 

I can pull forward a client’s future and past self and put them at a conference table to have a ‘Self-Committee” meeting on what to do with the situations at hand. If that doesn’t work, I review the lifespan laterally and pull in other versions of the self from other places in the multiverse using a philosophical metaphysical belief based on String Theory. Yup. I really do that. Somewhere out there is a version of them that’s already figured it out and we just need to go exploring to find that person. It’s really amusing to have a client describe their other versions as these versions arrive on the scene. It usually takes a bit of time to move past the confusion but it’s like an unexpected family reunion with fractals of the Big-Self. The client and their other versions act like it’s a family reunion! If we happen to pull in a future self, they, being independent of the current self, won’t divulge specific information of what’s happened or not yet happened unless absolutely necessary. What they do, instead, is act like a life coach to prompt the current self to reach the conclusion on their own. After all, each version exists as the same time as the others because time is not linear. After the newness wears off, we get down to business.

 

One of the metaphysical methods in helping people release trapped emotions in the mind and body is to step them outside of time to speak to a younger version of themselves. I discovered a pattern emerging as I worked with clients in accessing scenes from their master memory, separating the younger from the older self: the two seldom described the same event the same way. Our memories of events are stored in the master memory bank according to our interpretation of how it happened but also including revisions after the event. Think of it like an original Word document of the experience titled WordDoc1, later revised as you retold the story and saved as WordDoc2 then WordDoc3 and so on. The more times we change the narrative, the more versions get stored in the master memory filing cabinet. But our recollection of an event is tainted by maturity, judgment, new knowledge, assumptions, embellishment, and other factors that change over time, revising the original document. In rare cases (for me as a metaphysician), I may come across someone with a file folder so full of revisions that the most recent document is completely blank and so disassociated from the original event that the mind no longer remembers the event took place.

 

The method I use allows for a different form of clarity, unlike traditional talk or psychotherapeutic modalities, or quantum healing hypnosis technique (QHHT), which all look through the lens of the event from the first person perspective. Stepping into a traumatic memory as an adult observer viewing the younger self allows the two fractals of the self to engage in conversation, much like a parent and a child might discuss a bad situation. The current self and the younger self (or current document version and previous document version) are allowed to speak in the language and understanding of their age. This allows the client to assess the situation from multiple views and triangulate a more positive or less painful experience of the event.

 

For example, I was doing an unscheduled Clubhouse (audio-only app) mini-healing session and took someone back to his middle school years. We thought we were going back to a scene to heal a traumatic wound or help the younger self in some way. What happened instead is that we popped into a happy-moment scene (as opposed to a traumatic moment) where the younger self was casually playing football with friends on the middle school field. We asked the younger self if we could talk to him, and he gave us just a few minutes because he wanted to go back to playing football with his friends. So we froze time using a method I created, which isn’t really freezing time, but for purposes of this blog makes more sense. The individual I was working with remembered his middle school years as being very tough because of family turmoil and challenges at school. School was an escape from the stressors of home life, but he was bullied at school so it wasn’t a complete escape. What ended up happening is that the younger self disagreed with the older self, stating that middle school was fun and he was happy.

 

Younger self: “I like school.”

 

Older self: “How can you like school? You’re being bullied.”

 

Younger self: “I don’t know. That doesn’t bother me.”

 

With much confusion as to what was happening, the current version relayed back to me what the younger self was saying. I coached him to continue engaging with his younger self with curiosity. The older version rebutted, stating that x, y, and z happened, all valid reasons in his mind for those years NOT being happy memories. The younger self insisted that he was happy and was irritated that the current age version was attempting to change the memory and tell him how he felt.

 

The current age version (now well into his adult years) relayed back his confusion, wondering how he could have remembered it wrong. The younger self, able to hear both me and his future self in our sidebar conversation, interrupted our conversation and injected, “do I look unhappy?”

 

Older self: “No”

 

Younger self: “I’m going back to go play with my friends.” And he restarted time and walked back to the field so he could continue playing.

 

In fairness, if given the choice of playing football with my friends and arguing with my older self about my emotional state, I’d choose football too. The current age self and I were left on the sidelines to chat about what just happened. I explained to the adult self that he wasn’t remembering it wrong, per se. Over time, he had just come to view parenting and peer behavior in a different way, a way no longer from the child’s perspective but from the perspective of a more seasoned adult. That transition came with social norms, judgment, evolved opinions, expectations, interpretations, and so on — much like comparing the 15th revision of a document to the original document.

 

That scene provided wisdom for the current self to understand how his brain processed childhood memories, relieving him of the trapped anger he acquired as an adult for the turmoil he endured as a tween. It was easier for me to clear energy associated with the trauma after the event now that we were able to honor the younger self’s version of the events.

 

This isn’t the norm though. Most of the time in my practice it’s the opposite, where the adult self believes their childhood was wonderful and caring, while the conversation with the younger self reveals data that the mind buried like a crooked defense attorney would bury key evidence in a high-profile criminal case.

 

Sometimes our memories are comically distorted, like the well-known internet Photoshop prankster, James Fridman, who returns submissions in very comical but very literal ways. Someone might request James Fridman to use Adobe Photoshop to make their eyebrows “bushier” and he’ll return the photo with images of the former United States Presidents of the same name in place of the original eyebrows. Or he might receive a request to make a person look larger in their photo, so he’ll enlarge the image to the point their head is pushing up drop-down ceiling tiles. Our brain (hardware) and mind (operating system installed in the hardware) are able to do the same, most of the time without the comical interpretation.

 

The great thing about our master memory is that no matter how many revisions we make to the original document, Version 1.0 is still there, just hiding at the bottom of the revision history dropdown menu.

 

Annie is a doctor of metaphysics that specializes in the impact of energy in the form of emotions on mind, body, business, and life. Many of her clients come to her because modern medicine and traditional psychology failed to relieve suffering while others come to her for spiritual advancement or metaphysical mastery. Want to learn more?

 

Visit https://oneemprima.com/ to schedule a free 15 minute session or follow her on social media.

Is 4D and 5D just spiritual woo-woo talk or is there something more to this?

 

This is a supplemental post for “The View From my -SHIPs” blog series

 

4D Tesseract or Hypercube

 

Time is a human construct. It doesn’t exist outside of this dimension as we know it; the past and present are merely placeholders within our construct.

 

When we view our existence from a three-dimensional perspective, we are viewing life from the formula of length x width x height. For example, a cardboard box has length, width and height; however, we step into a fourth-dimensional existence by adding time. Imagine a cardboard box that can move on its own and be more than just here as we know it because time doesn’t exist outside of 3D, at least not in the way that we understand it from a 3D perspective.

 

Let’s backtrack a little and look at time in a simplified mathematical way: zeroth dimension (0D). At 0D, a cardboard box would only be a point, a dot, since size and length have no value. The box isn’t a cube yet, it’s just a point. It’s irrelevant whether it’s the smallest or largest point you can imagine. There is no length, width or height yet.

 

In the first dimension, the dot now becomes one straight line, introducing length. There are now two points (a beginning and an end) that are connected to make one line. Metaphysically, think of it like a skilled tightrope walker who can only move forward or backward in a straight line but not up or down or around. There’s a linear past, present, and future but not all at once. Just one direction, and I don’t mean the boy band, where every memory fits neatly on a horizontal timeline from birth to death.

 

In the second dimension, when we add width perpendicular to length (90 degrees), the line becomes a square with four points, one in each corner. There are only two variables: length and width. But it’s still not looking much like a cardboard box. Think of it like using sticks on the floor to mark where the box would be.

 

Metaphysically, 2D is disappointing, like printing out a life size picture of a Ferrari that you can never drive. Four points connect four lines to make the shape we understand as a square. Living in the second dimension while the rest of the world is living three dimensionally is like the children’s book character Flat Stanley. Since he’s flat, he can fold himself up into an envelope and travel by mail or stick to a wall or tuck nicely into a backpack to easily sneak into another school. Life is flat to Stanley, but the rest of the characters in the book live in 3D, including his brother and parents. From the side he’s almost invisible.

 

The third dimension adds depth perpendicular to width. This makes the square a cube and we now have our cardboard box. There are 8 points and 6 squares. There’s length, width, and height, the core elements in measuring volume of a 3D geometric box. This is the world we live in. Trees are three-dimensional, Earth is a 3D sphere (despite the strange number of followers that believe it’s flat),and you are three dimensional. There are a few exceptions, of course. The doodle drawings and stick figures you drew in kindergarten are still 2D. At least now you have a Ferrari that you can do something with.

 

Now, here’s where it starts to get a little psychedelic trippy. In math, the fourth dimension adds time to the length x width x height formula. The cube can be here and expand to there at the exact same time. It’s NOT a 3D object in motion. 4D entails being here while expanding to exist in another location at the same time since now we don’t have just one cube of space, we have 8 cubes to occupy. That’s called a hypercube or tesseract. From a metaphysics perspective, 4D is not jumping to a different universe or parallel existence, it’s more like leveling up our ability to experience reality in two time places, or in this case, 8 cubes worth of time places at once. Past, present, future, across the dimensions. It’s a lot to take in.

 

A 4D object living in a 3D world is a lot like a Ferrari engine being dropped in a KIA minivan. It’s just not the same. I’ve only met one person who could walk through walls and do unexplainable things, and she was a Harvard graduate and is now a retired doctor of clinical hypnotherapy and professor emeritus of anthropology.

 

Fifth dimension adds location to length x width x height x time. 5D is not just about moving backwards, forwards or across the multiverse; it’s the ability to be in two places at once. Location is no longer fixed. Most of my clients get dizzy or light headed on the return of a tour guided journey to a 5D location because it’s super confusing to the mind and the body. Spirit can travel all dimensions with no problem. The mind can play in a few dimensions with some training. The body, not so much.

 

To recap, we need 2 points to create a line and 4 lines and 4 points to create a square. We need six squares and eight points to make a cardboard box. The hypersurface of a hypercube or tesseract takes up 8 cardboard boxes or cubes worth of space. 5D is ten tesseracts. When I talk about “The Campus”, I’m actually talking about a 5D training campus. Imagine how much you would learn if you had access to a library that was 39 cubes bigger in wisdom and understanding than your local library?

 

Another way to understand this from a metaphysical perspective is how we process a 4D object with our 3D trained brain. Imagine you cut a tiny keyhole in one of the walls of that empty cardboard box and peeked in to observe a 3D magical holographic glowing ghost-like hand moving up into the box, back down through the bottom of the box, and around the inside of the box. You would only see the parts of the hand that existed inside the 3D box, not outside (iceberg effect). Tracking me so far?

 

Now imagine how you might see that hand moving vertically up into the box if you had never seen 4D objects before! At first, it would look like a single mound, then another two mounds, then a fourth pinky-like mound, then a fifth thumb-like mound, then they would appear to not be five separate finger-like mounds but all connected, just at different heights. Finally, they all come together at the trunk of the object and you realize they aren’t five separate objects, but rather one oddly shaped object that’s above the bottom of the box and still below the bottom of the box.

 

By existing in two places at once, we just can’t see the whole picture to perceive it’s a person’s hand that’s still attached to a person. There’s more to the person than what we can see from our view. Our physical eyes are meant for 3D reality but our 3rd, inner mind’s eye is not limited to 3D reality. For our optical eyes to process 4D, our retinas would need to be more cubed and less curved. In fact, our 3rd eye uses different data receptors to pick up what the optical eyes cannot. Just like we would switch from naked eye vision to a high-powered telescope to observe Saturn’s rings, we have to switch from our 3D optic vision to the inner eye to see higher dimensional existence. The goal is to get the two tools to work together at the exact same time.

 

In our world, we have multidimensional objects beyond 3D understanding. Take an electron for example. Through the use of technology, our eyes would observe an electron appearing and disappearing as it orbits around the nucleus. It does something funny though — it jumps around to different distances from the nucleus, like an ocean surfer appearing on one wave then disappearing and reappearing on another wave, instead of staying on the same predictable circular-like pattern the moon takes around the Earth or the Earth around the sun. It doesn’t have to stay here; it can go there too. Here and there without limitations. We speculate but we don’t really know where it will resurface as it orbits the nucleus. To us, it’s no different from the viewer of the glowing ghost hand only seeing what enters and exits the cardboard box. The electron isn’t really disappearing as it orbits, but that’s exactly how we process the movement in and out of our 3D reality.

 

Our true existence as humans is not 3D or 4D — it’s more than that. As humans, we have much more than a soul or internal energy system inside; we ARE energy systems with a physical component within us. This trips up most of my religious opponents that think anything outside of the 3D existence is witchcraft or the devil’s work or whatever they believe to remain safe in their bubble. No, it’s really another extension of us, much like the pinky finger is attached to a hand that writes but isn’t part of writing. Instead, it’s a valuable support for other things such as typing or opening a door while the rest of the fingers are holding bags of groceries, or it’s part of a gesture such as the shaka sign (hang ten) or used with the thumb and pointer finger to say ‘I love you’ in American sign language. And that hand is attached to the rest of the body. There is much more to us than what we can see, feel, hear or know that’s visible in the 3D box. There is a 3D self (the body), a 4D self, a 5D self, and so on. We don’t need to limit ourselves to only what fits inside the box! We can exist outside the box too. If you are reading this book, it’s certain that YOU don’t fit inside any box, so why should your reality?

 

To look at this differently, image 0D is a blank piece of paper with nothing on it. 1D is a piece of paper worth of information. 2D is a folder or packet of information. 3D is a single drawer filing cabinet of information. 4D is an 8 drawer filing cabinet worth of information and 5D is 40 filing cabinets worth of information.

 

Metaphysical Energy Exercise 1

 

Take your hand and place it on your chest. Take in a few breaths and become one with your hand. Close your eyes if you wish to shut off one sense so you and strengthen another. Then pull your hand away from your body very slowly. You should feel a very subtle shift in magnetic pull. The initial shift might just be body heat, so try it a few times to separate temperature heat from magnetic pull. Find the first shift then continue pulling your hand away until you can feel the next three layers of your energy field. It might take some practice to pick up on the micro-shifts, but after some practice you’ll be able to find them quickly. Then, once you’ve found the first few layers, practice breathing to get those layers to push out — more like blowing up a balloon except you’re inside your energy balloons expanding the energy. Now you are operating more like a hypercube.

 

No worries if it doesn’t work the first time. Sometimes we need to hydrate more to feel our external energy layers. We are made up mostly of water so if we are dehydrated, it can feel a lot like a remote control car operating on a low battery.

 

Energy Exercise 2

 

At times we need to adjust our internal frequency by shifting the internal dialogue. What does this mean? Put your hand on your chest again and try repeating the word SHAME or GUILT (do shame if you can) over and over again in your head for 30–60 seconds. Notice anything happening with your body? Does it feel like you are constricting or shrinking? Do you feel the energy around your body moving? Now switch it to ANGER and repeat. Then REASON. Then JOY or PEACE or LOVE. What changed?

 

No worries if you still can’t figure it out. Hop on one of my events on the Clubhouse app or Zoom (like the quarterly energy showcases) and I’ll increase your vibration so you can feel your own energy. Of course, you are also welcome to schedule a free 15 minute session.

 

Now, if you’re cynical and convinced what I’m saying is bs, I challenge you to comment; but if you do, have the courage to schedule the 15 minute session.

 

Like the expansive shifts from 0D to 4D, “The View from My -SHIPs” blog series is about the messy path I took to connect the points in time to show you how I created more tesseract experiences in my life and to give you some examples of what is possible.

 

Annie specializes in the impact of energy in the form of emotions on mind, body, business, and life. Many of her clients come to her because modern medicine and traditional psychology failed to relieve suffering while others come to her for spiritual advancement or metaphysical mastery. Are you ready to learn more?

 

Visit https://oneemprima.com/ to schedule a free 15 minute session or follow her on social media.

Part 2: Football, Gurus, and Nikola Tesla

 

Welcome to my fleet of -SHIPS: my stories on leadership, friendship, personal relationships, business partnerships, personal ownership, the money-ship and a sneak peek into my world on the metaphysical mothership.

 

Back in 2017, I, along with two of my veteran colleagues, retired Army Major Ross Bryant and retired Navy Master Chief Petty Officer Jim Knudson, created a leadership training program called “Lead from the Front”. The basis of this weekly training program was to touch on topics that built on basic concepts using military terminology to help people become better leaders in the military and in the civilian sector.

 

One of my counterparts told the story of Vince Lombardi, an American head football coach of the Green Bay Packers from the 1960’s, and the hidden power of mastering the fundamentals. Each year at training camp, Lombardi began training his professional football team by holding up a very obvious object and stating, “Gentlemen, this is a football.”

 

The most fundamental lesson we miss in life is about mastering the fuck out of the basics. Ego gets in the way. We get ahead of ourselves and think we’ve checked that box as we become famous or senior in ranking, and we forget what it is exactly that we’re holding on to. We can’t move forward without a solid foundation, whether it’s in the military or metaphysics or on the football field. We have to master the fuck out of the basics first.

 

“The only difference between you and I is I’ve thought about these things a little bit more than you have. It’s my intention this evening to hold up a mirror. A mirror that you can look into and examine for yourself the breadth and the depth of your goals and the commitment and the discipline and the perseverance you bring to the pursuit of those goals. It’s my intention this evening to create within you a little dissonance, a little disharmony, a little dissatisfaction which is the essence of motivation. So for the balance of the evening, you begin to ask yourselves some questions. And maybe you’ll be satisfied with the answers and maybe you won’t. I’m not going to tell you anything you don’t already know. Just maybe present it a little differently. Perhaps in a manner you haven’t seen or heard before.” — Vince Lombardi

 

Along my journey I came across the psychology term “Dunning-Kruger Effect”. It refers to a cognitive bias in which people believe they are smarter, more capable or wiser than they really are. They don’t know what they don’t know but they are convinced they know. I see this frequently in my industry with spiritual and metaphysical practitioners that appointed themselves gurus, masters, O.G.s, energy experts. The problem is I can feel through the delusion. They don’t know that they don’t know, but I hear it in the words they use and how they respond to curious questions. It baffles me when people proclaim to be the Spiritual OG of Instagram or the Spiritual Guru of Clubhouse and get tens of thousands of followers, yet they are ignoring their own traumas. The vibrational pulsing of the body isn’t in congruence with what they are saying. That’s the downfall of an unregulated industry; there’s no standard to meet. Gurus, true gurus that is, did enormous work to clear their emotional junk to vibrate differently. They talk about trauma and human experiences differently. They emit a stronger pulse and not in a subtle way either. Their human energy field is expanded and unbreachable. We can’t trick science. I’m not a physicist or a science geek but I know what I feel, and I feel energy like a badass metaphysician should feel energy.

 

My journey from the military to metaphysics was NOT easy. No good story worth telling or reading is easy. The narratology and comparative mythology of the hero’s journey is outlined and scripted in such a way that it doesn’t allow for shortcuts, secret portals or VIP passes to cut to the front of the line. There are ups and downs, laughter and tears, stories and parables and unexplainable moments that appeared to be miracles. This blog series highlights my flaws and ego and stubbornness, and all the messy parts that made me imperfect in an attempt to provide you a space to allow you to honor your flaws, and ego, and stubbornness and all the messy parts that make you, well, YOU. This blog series was written for those new to my world that are seeking more real-world examples of a spiritual awakening journey — in other words, a peak through the keyhole of what I do without fully immersing in the wild ride of quantum existence. By the end of this blog series, I hope you find the courage to use the keys you find in my writing to unlock that quantum door and walk through it with faith, in whatever way that word may mean to you.

 

“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.” Nikola Tesla

 

All matter and psychological processes — thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and attitudes — are composed of energy. The journey in understanding the power of human energy starts with knowing that we know so very little so let’s start with the basics, shall we?

 

Ladies and gentlemen, we are made up of energy.

 

Welcome to my fleet of -SHIPS: my stories on leadership, friendship, personal relationships, business partnerships, personal ownership, the money-ship and a sneak peek into my world on the metaphysical mothership.

 

Annie specializes in the impact of energy in the form of emotions on mind, body, business, and life. Many of her clients come to her because modern medicine and traditional psychology failed to relieve suffering while others come to her for spiritual advancement or metaphysical mastery.

 

Visit https://oneemprima.com/ to schedule a free 15 minute session or follow her on social media.

Part 1: Warning Orders, Secret Handlers, Passports & Palapas

 

The fun part of working with the Universe — and I mean this in the most sarcastic way possible — is that I don’t always get the instructions when I get the quantum tools. Sometimes I have to wait years to figure out how some metaphysical or spiritual tool works in the quantum space. Sometimes I just receive a metaphysical WARNO* but the full set of instructions never arrive. Sometimes the instructions arrive and only years later do I get the “tool” that’s needed.

 

*An Army Warning Order is an abbreviated as WARNO and is a crisis action plan order based on limited information.

 

The WARNO to tell my story arrived more than 20 years ago without any instruction or direction. I could feel it was something I needed to do; I just didn’t realize it wasn’t something I needed to do right then. Without further guidance, I made up a partly fictional story about a female private investigator stumbling through dating life in a small town in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts, collecting clues, acquiring tools, and meeting strange people along the way. Her friends and family didn’t really understand what she did for work so they would interfere with her investigations and downplay her self-employment as an investigator.

 

My character had a secret handler whom she had never met. This handler would send tools to her apartment to help her solve cases; however, the tools never came with instructions or any clues as to what those things did or why she needed them! It was a mystery how the handler knew who she was and why he was helping her. She just knew that he sent her items she needed or wanted, such as a GPS watch in case she got lost (smart phones and smart watches weren’t a thing yet), a gun for protection that was small enough and light enough to hide in her bra, a night vision monocular camera to see things the naked eye couldn’t see, and expensive stilettos, etc.

 

Note to reader: Before you judge me for putting stilettos in the same category as a GPS device and a compact pistol, know that if I can drive a nail into a wall with a stiletto heal, I can also cause great damage to other things that might come in contact with my foot in said shoe. Never dis a good shoe.

 

I completed writing the first few chapters about my fictional character and came to a dead end. I simply couldn’t figure out what came next. The first few chapters came like a hailstorm download and then there was literally a blank slate in my head. Nothing.

 

Little did I know that the plot for the woman in that book was a metaphor for the journey on which I was about to embark in real life. Much like Santiago in Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist, I was in pursuit of my personal legend and treasure. I had my own version of Melchizedek and the Alchemist to guide me through the challenges, and there were plenty of omens to follow. The problem was, I didn’t know how to figuratively turn on the internal night vision equipment to see what my optical eyes couldn’t. I felt as if I were guiding myself on a journey without a road map, a compass, or any protection. The only thing I absolutely had was a closet full of inexpensive stilettos. And you can only walk so far on 4” daggers before your knees and feet ache and the heels break off.

 

Many spiritual, religious, and metaphysical books reference Earth as a classroom. Each person or group of people is an assignment or lesson. For instance, I dated and married my father — not literally my biological father of course. The men who played the different roles of “father” all had very similar personality types. My ex-husband, my ex-boyfriends, and my real father all had some medical or mental issue, some trauma they denied which manifested in their interpersonal relationships — such as co-dependency, disinterest in personal development and spiritual growth, or some type of addiction. I could name so many — over-eating, hoarding, spending, drinking, video gaming, gambling, body lifting, self-medicating, and so on.

 

I kept taking the class over and over again with newer versions of the textbooks and different teachers, but the core content and my reaction to the scenarios repeated… That is, until I looked back over my shoulder into the past and realized somewhere along the journey, I had cleared those particular challenges and could reflect back on them from an elevated view to understand why I kept choosing the wrong answer on the tests. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t easy. It was ugly and messy.

 

Neale Donald Walsch, the author of Conversations with God, writes that there is no school and there are no lessons; we are all here to simply experience. “School is a place you go if there is something you do not know that you want to know. It is not a place you go if you already know a thing and simply want to experience your knowingness.” “You obviously haven’t spent much time with me!” I replied in my head. “If you did you would see the synchronicities, patterns, coincidences and lessons that align in a way that’s so obvious, even to me in my most oblivious of moments. There is no mistaking what was about to happen. The lesson gets dropped in my lap sloppily wrapped in wrinkled and gaudy abrasive paper, tied with an obnoxiously large bright red bow, topped with an excessively flashing marquee arrow dangling from above, with a cute little note containing three bold words — JUST FOR YOU — written in pretty calligraphy.”

 

After deploying, I found that each year contained overarching experiences that fit nicely into primary and secondary themes. The experiences of 2016 were about leadership and spiritual awakening; 2017 was about personal relationships and letting go; 2018 was about business partnerships and business sophistication; 2019 was about healing and grieving from loss, and 2020 was… well, we all remember 2020. It was a lesson in expanding instead of shrinking and it was the giant social experiment of polarization and divisiveness. 2020 was when I truly embraced my mission in life. I thought for sure that was it. The story even had a working title at that point: The View from My -Ships — Stories about Friendship, Leadership, Partnerships, and Life. Again, I wrote a few chapters and just couldn’t get the pieces to fit well enough to complete the story.

 

It still wasn’t right.

 

In December of 2020 I took an unplanned trip to Aruba. My friend Kellie in the Berkshires was supposed to go to Aruba for her 50th birthday party in April 2020, but as we all know, the world had just shut down and she and her party group couldn’t travel. I had flown back to the Berkshires the last week in October because my grandmother was starting to physically fade, plus the airfare rates were cheap. Kellie mentioned there wasn’t anyone to go to Aruba with her — either they were still afraid to travel or couldn’t get the dates off work. Also, the resort wouldn’t push the scheduled dates back since travel was officially open and Aruba was allowing people in.

 

What it boiled down to was that she had to go in December or forfeit the $2,500 deposit. All I needed, she said, was to pay for my flight (if you remember, flights in 2020 were stupid cheap) and the all-inclusive resort wristband. The funny thing — and this happens a lot in this series — is that I had a feeling back in 2019 to get my personal passport (as opposed to my official military/government passport) without any valid reason for feeling rushed to do so. So there I was… not afraid of traveling during the pandemic, self-employed so I could schedule my work around the trip, had a personal passport, and all my debts were paid so I could afford to go. Kellie is quite the salesperson, and I had already said yes to passport, time off, financially able. The only thing left was getting my ex to cover my trip by watching kiddo. And — people, brace yourselves — he said yes. Granted, I told him it was for a work-related event and technically it was. I worked on this story, so it was work related, right? Sometimes life is about reframing and viewing the same scene from a different perspective.

 

If you’ve watched the Netflix drama The Queen’s Gambit, you might remember how the protagonist Beth Harmon, a fictional female chess prodigy, would take a sufficient number of tranquilizers which caused her to see giant chess pieces moving upside down on the ceiling. She could play out whatever chess game she was studying to find the best path to checkmate her opponent. Substitute the tranquilizers for an all-inclusive resort wristband with access to unlimited pours of alcohol and you might have an idea of what it was like for me to sit on the beach at the Hotel Riu Palace in Aruba, watching God move the chapters around in the hot morning sky while I sat under a well shaded palapa obligingly trying to write this all down while simultaneously waving off sand fleas.

 

What the Old Sorcerer in the sky forgot to mention was that 2021 was going to be the denouement of this military-to-metaphysics journey that tied everything all together. There was so much more to come and many more adventures to be had but every story has to start with a beginning.

 

I’m frequently asked how I learned to do what I do, how I know how to use quantum tools and scan bodies for trapped energy, and how I communicate with human energy and play with energy like it’s sand in a sandbox. I can’t give you that answer. It could have been some weird sequence of coincidences and actions that brought me to this point in time. Maybe it was my daily use of prescribed Alpha-Stim issued by the VA + monthly acupuncture sessions + a non-hormonal copper IUD inside my body + monthly overconsumption of Trader Joe’s gluten free cookies + hiking on the highly spiritual Sloan Canyon hiking trails+ infusing the aroma of boiled orange peels or cinnamon sticks throughout my house weekly + drinking Las Vegas water with chlorine and fluoride + inhaling beige (maybe it was tan?) air on my deployment + seven hundred other seemingly irrelevant factors that, when combined, brought me to this point. Maybe all of that is what got me here, maybe none of it. Maybe, I too, got bitten by some radioactive spider during my deployment. Maybe I’m really an alien and my parents sent me to this planet moments before my planet exploded. Maybe I was born this way (and suddenly you’re hearing Lady Gaga singing the modified line in your head).

 

Many people just assume my skills came from academic studies, and they want to enroll in the same doctoral program I paid for. I can assure you that program was a waste of money in terms of academic advancement. It served only to give me the courage and confidence to do what I do because it gave me the right to use “Dr.” before my name in the same way a permission slip excuses a kid from gym. That’s all I needed from the program. I even told the program director that my sole reason for registering was because I wanted to have letters after my name. I had created a rule in my head that said I wouldn’t be able to do what I do unless I had letters by my name, and so the Universe played along with my silly game.

 

Maybe this was my personal legend all along and it wouldn’t have mattered what, where, who, or why. This blog series isn’t here to show you HOW I got to where I am. It’s intended to share my lessons learned through the lens of my life, my eyes, my classrooms of lessons. Every one of us is experiencing this Earth School with a different set of lessons, experiences, purpose and life injects (I’ll touch on that later). Mine is unique to me; yours is unique to you. My story is not intended to veer you from your path of learning. What I hope, dear reader, is for you to audit my class notes, borrow my study notes, and gain some wisdom and validation to help and support you along your journey. If nothing else, I hope it will give you some sense of validation that you’re not the only weird one living a messy life filled with crazy stories and inexplicable paranormal activity, moving through life as if it were a spiraling labyrinth of sometimes aromatic flowers with prickly and thorny bushes, and figuring out the hard way that shame and guilt are poisons to our body.

 

Traveling in a straight line would have been a whole lot easier and certainly more pleasant, but I wasn’t born to travel in a straight line. It’s not who I am. Just look at my hair.

 

Much like Santiago in The Alchemist, this is the journey I took in pursuing my personal legend and finding my treasures.

 

Welcome to my fleet of -SHIPS: my stories on leadership, friendship, personal relationships, business partnerships, personal ownership, the money-ship and a sneak peek into my world on the metaphysical mothership.

 

Annie specializes in the impact of energy in the form of emotions on mind, body, business, and life. Many of her clients come to her because modern medicine and traditional psychology failed to relieve suffering while others come to her for spiritual advancement or metaphysical mastery.

 

Visit https://oneemprima.com/ to schedule a free 15 minute session or follow her on social media.

Things to Note Before Beginning the Blog Series

 

~ Throughout The View From my -SHIPS blog series, I may use words that mean different things to differing belief systems. Feel free to replace my words with words that better align with your belief system. If I use Source or Universe and you prefer Creator or God, just swap out my word for yours. Likewise if I use spirit or energy and you prefer chi, qi, prana, or soul.

 

~ Wisdom in this area of expertise takes time, effort, and learning from those that came before me. Throughout this series I cite some of the hundreds of books that I’ve read that opened my eyes to a world beyond our three-dimensional understanding. I’ll add my list of favorite life-altering books, TedTalks, and studies below as they are mentioned in the series.

 

~ I am not a licensed clinical therapist or social worker nor am I a medical doctor. The findings in my research are from a metaphysician’s point of view, an unlicensed and unregulated industry. The research itself is based on my years of data collected from intuitive life coaching, quantum exploration, and cross-dimensional sessions with clients, and reading thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of transcripts and lessons learned from others who work in the same field. Wisdom comes in many forms. The most important is curiosity.

 

~ As you will learn as you read later posts in the series, my short-term memory was and still is affected by my level of stress, the foods I eat, and the amount of sleep I get. Or, if you are also like me and read ten different books at once, characters in this blog series will start to blend with other characters in the other books or blogs. To assist with memory loss or cross-character confusion, I’ve added a character reference list below so you can follow or refresh without having to back-read the posts. Characters will be added to the list as they are mentioned in the series.

 

~ There are no villains in this story, just unhealed wounds being played out in life-long live-performances. You’ll find as you read through the blog series that the characters in my life are a lot like the characters in the 2004 movie Crash where lives collide and the line between victims, persecutors, and rescuers get blurry. It is not my intent for the reader to have to take sides or pick favorites or feel sorry for anyone. Okay, so I do call one of my former officer counterparts an arse, the British word for anus/buttocks, but that’s only because his last name sounded similar. He didn’t play much of a role in my life other than to fill a seat for a short period of time, much like an unimportant tertiary character in a B rated movie. And quite honestly, he had been CPT Arse in my head for so long I can’t even remember his real name.

 

Character List

 

Mentioned Books