Through fifteen years as a spiritual healer, these are just some of the things that people I work with will hear or say themselves when dealing with issues of abuse, neglect, and betrayal. By the time a client gets to me, they've often tried everything and still find they continue to have problems in relationships, and chronic health and emotional challenges that won't seem to go away. Most start out avoiding and then medicating, but the litany of treatments and pills just don't work. Eventually, they get sick and tired of being sick and tired and look for a spiritual answer to heal the hole in their soul.

Spirituality is scientifically proven to lead to a longer, healthier life with greater satisfaction. For those who truly immerse themselves, I've watched it provide lasting comfort and, in some cases, instant relief. But how and why does it work? If you're looking for an answer, I’ve developed A.M.E.N., a four-step process to face fears, process pain, and forgive the unforgivable for you.

If you’re just beginning to deal with painful experiences or have been at it a while, A.M.E.N. is grounded by an integrative look at the body, belief, and behavior and explaining how Higher Self and spiritual energy work within an evidence-based, neurobiological viewpoint. It describes how you form energy blocks from painful experiences, or core wounds, and how the resulting thoughts and reactive emotions cause stress, which becomes a disease. It explores how energetically we are drawn to similar experiences and the unconscious shame, fear, and anger that it creates. How this victim trap can be healed and the importance of grieving and avoiding emotional detours. Then through real spiritual connection and forgiveness, how there is a constant realignment of beliefs to what is genuine and loving.How this changes how you feel and see the world without stress, disease, and victimhood.

It’s not about forgiveness that lets abusers off the hook, but mercy and grace that take the hooks out of you. Even if you can’t remember the actual abuse, but show all the signs, through forgiveness, you can transform the adverse emotional and physical effects of abuse into real spiritual growth and better health. You can develop and grow into a higher awareness of compassion, and a calm acceptance of your truth as you learn to stay in the present. Afterward, you can discover a life filled with love and finally thrive, not just survive, by eventually leaving those experiences behind as blessings that brought a deeper connection.

Time is the glue that holds us in illusion. Our life, or our consciousness of a single life in a body, is measured in time. We believe that we begin and end in this life, without a memory of before or much concern for after. But reality is that we are immortal and exist beyond this life and before it as well.

This temporal consciousness is also the basis for our belief in fear and security. We begin to believe in our life as finite as we also do in our separateness from our Creative Source. As we watch the sun and moon, rise and fall, and the seasons come and go, we see life in the physical natural world beginning and ending in a consumptive struggle for survival. We believe we are born and die and in anticipation count moments in between.

As we suffer with hunger and through hardship, we count time as it passes until our rescue or demise. The sun and moon and seasons are reliable benchmarks for the duration of our experience of suffering. So we begin in our separateness to make them the basis for our new false reality. While the rhythms of life and death are measured as time, when we meditate time disappears and seems to contract. It passes by quickly when we are consumed with our consciousness focused on the present. But our sadness from our past and worry of the future is born in the illusion of time. As we believe in time, we begin to hold on to our negative emotions. Suffering is paramount in our beliefs as our primary focus.

Our painful experiences give birth to our fears because time holds our reality. We believe as time passes we may repeat this painful experience, so we hold it in our consciousness and then compare each new experience to it. If it is vaguely similar we respond in our body and mind. So our temporal consciousness allows for our fear cycling mind.

Time is also the basis for our desires. If we count the time of our suffering it expands. Time seems endless when we are gripped in fear. It is as if one night of suffering will never end, while at peace and bliss pass by effortlessly. We then believe in scarcity. When we don’t obtain things we need for survival in a timely fashion, we begin to anticipate our future suffering. We hoard and compete with others to obtain our needs. Here our separateness solidifies in our consciousness. We no longer are aware of our needs being constantly met by our creative Source but as a result of our ab ility to manipulate and control others and our environment. We give our individual will away to the collective.

As we focus more on this ability to obtain and control we begin to associate happiness and peace with satisfying what we want. As a co-creator of our world, we value it only for how it serves us. We rationalize any and all negative behaviors to make this real. Our separateness now extends past our Creative Source and includes all others.

Our false reality is cemented together with time. Our values goals and roles are seen only through this viewpoint and keeps driving our fear, suffering and unfulfilled desires. How we focus our consciousness becomes the dictate of the time over will.

We work to eat. We only eat as well as our work is valued by others. Time then gives birth to another illusion money. We receive paper or metal for our labor. We begin to believe our worth is about how much of this we accumulate. We believe having more will provide us happiness. Our lives march by and we are slaves to this illusion, which is only real because it is widely held and we believe it.

We then begin to value time. Time is money. We neglect our relationships and push down our emotions to best spend our time. We set goals and then reassure them with time. Pursuits that do not increase our value of time and money become worthless. Our life becomes obsessed with the efficient use of time in order to raise its value. We stop making time for each other. Science and technology amplifies this temporal consciousness. Each new innovation amazes us with its compression of time. Tasks that previously took months, become hours, and days become minutes. The labor of many becomes the job of a few. But this worship of time does not create more of it.

On the contrary, as we continuously master time we are mastered by it. We no longer have meaningful communications but lots of it. We become preoccupied with email, cell phones and other technological tethers to our consciousness. We thing we are mastering our time. We spend little time in actual constructive labor and much of it in managing how it is spent.

But how much time do we spend with our Creative Source each day? It becomes increasingly harder in a modern world to find that time. How much time do we spend revisiting our questions, reexamining what we believe, value and our purpose for being. How much time do we spend working on our key relationships or even valuing our self? The illusion of time begins to claim our life, not just define it. We must break free of our temporal consciousness by reconnecting to the Everlasting Truth.

Then we being to see time as just an illusion held together by fear. We remain in a world measured by time and valued by money, but this world begins to leave us. We start to see a greater reality that is timeless. By seeing it we grow closer to it.