Letting Go: Danny Gokey American Idol

Author: Dr. Nicole Sundene

Last week on American Idol, many of us assumed it would be Danny vs Adam in the final showdown, until he was eliminated in a sudden and heart wrenching moment.

Tonight on American Idol we finally determine the Idol of season eight! Will it be Adam or will it be Kris?

I had been rooting for Danny since his very first audition, there was something undeniabably special about him….but it was a tough season.

Probably the best American Idol has ever had, and the Kindergarten Teacher inside of me wants to announce everyone as a winner!

I wasn’t just voting for youth pastor Danny because of his amazing voice, but because of his perseverance. His wife had died suddenly of congestive heart failure a month before the competition started; “Tragedy turned in to Triumph,” as Danny refers to it.

A friend passed along the information for the foundation created for Danny’s wife, Sophia’sHeart.org, and thought it would make for good kitchen table talk. She recommended reading his blog post telling how he was managing to cope with the severe depression brought on by the sudden death of his wife weeks before one of America’s biggest competitions.

“I felt like I had to put on a face for everybody to cover what was really going on inside. Deep down inside, I felt there was not hope for me and I really wanted to die. If I had not dealt with this, it probably could have somehow or someway took me out. So, I began pray and cry out to God for help and I believe I found the answer.

The answer I found was exactly this; “let go” or “cause yourself to let go”. I admit that answer was not appealing to me because I found no justice in it, and most of all it didn’t instantly remove any pain. But I knew that if I continued down this road it would have a price that I could never afford to pay.

You see, the cost of hanging on to the bitterness and anger was actually much greater than the cost of simply letting go. I was very reluctant to do it. At times it was hard and I literally had to cause myself (force myself) to let go. Letting go doesn’t mean forgetting about Sophia but does mean releasing the toxic emotions tied to the situation.”

I have a lot of admiration for someone who can pick themselves up and go on, anyone going through troubled times should take a few minutes to read the insightful blog post on his battle with depression and “letting go” of his wife’s unexpected death. So many of us hold on to everything….we carry around all this baggage from our past and our childhood.

I talk to patients that have been in counseling for years and they sit down and tell me everything that is wrong with them, they bring all these “labels” with them, they blame it all on their parents, or their molester, or their rapist, or their child hood bully, or their father’s death, or that they didn’t get enough attention as a child, they say, “I’m this way because someone else did ____________ to me,” and so forth.

They refuse to let it all go, instead they cling to their core hurts and core wounds, and as a doctor who believes in the mind/body/spirit of medicine….I know they will never be better until they forgive and let go.

Sometimes we have to forgive our abuser, sometimes we have to forgive our parents…. After all they are just human beings too, not demi-Gods…. I know BREAKING NEWS!!!

Let Danny Gokey be a remarkable example of “Letting Go” and trusting Life/God, however you choose to see it.

Even after his elimination he said, “What affirms me as an artist is… [my fans] because week after week they voted…and that shows me they believe in me and that they see something inside of me,” Danny said. “I want to tell them I love them, and I think that they’re the best out there.” Danny continues, “I was a nobody, and this show turned me into a somebody, and I’ll always be thankful for the roots that I came out of because I do believe that the best is yet to come for me, that this is not the end of the road. I’m just very grateful. I’m so thankful my life has turned around, and I can’t say it enough.” (Source)

Today’s Question: What in your life do you need to let go of? Anger, hatred, bitterness, guilt, shame, depression, anxiety, sadness? Are you tired of carrying around all that baggage? May is weight loss month and it is time for us to lose some weight. Let’s start with our own baggage.

Let’s be reminded by the strength of Danny Gokey that sometimes we just have to “let go.”

For more information on how Danny intends to use his gift for future fundraising endeavors visit: SophiasHeart.org.

If you are holding on to something and need to let go….find a rock and carry it around with you for a while, let the rock become the symbol of the thing that you need to let go of.

Squeeze the heat of your anger from your hands into it, cry your tears on it, let it rest on the place in your heart that hurts for a while, keep it in your pocket everywhere you go, or at least try to.

The attempt will remind you what a burden hanging on to this baggage from the past is.

Sleep with it under your pillow….and eventually realize that this rock is weighing you down….this rock needs to be let go. Then take some time down at a special place and throw that rock far into water.

Let go of the pain, let go of the past. Live in the present, don’t live in the past.

We cannot change the past, but we can change how the past affects us today.

Just don’t throw any suitcases in the ocean, or hit any birds or ducks on your therapeutic mission.

~Dr. Nicole

©KitchenTableMedicine.com, LLC ™

Being Healed By Our Compulsions

By Mary O’Malley

Author of The Gift of Our Compulsions: A Revolutionary Approach to Self-Acceptance and Healing and Belonging to Life: The Journey of Awakening

What would it be like if your compulsive behaviors were no longer problems that you need to get rid of?  What would it be like if they became doorways into the clarity, peace and joy you long for instead?  This is entirely possible.

It is possible not only to release yourself from your compulsive urges but also to become free from the core compulsion we all have, the compulsion to struggle with ourselves and with our lives.  And we are masters at it.  I love to say that we are like little old people endlessly trying to unravel a ball of yarn and all the while we are sitting in paradise.

Your compulsion, rather than being the enemy, can be a guide through the world of struggle and back into a deep and trust filled relationship with yourself and with your life!

It certainly happened for me that way and for many people I have worked with over the years.  How did that happen?  You may know my story about how I gained 97 pounds in a year and at the same time was washing a lot of that food down with alcohol and taking every kind of pill I could get my hands on.

I tried to stop drugging myself and tried every diet under the sun – only to have them all fail.  Was that because I was a weak willed ninny?  No!  They didn’t work because it is a law of the psyche that what you resist you empower!

But gradually I was taught how to be curious about what I was experiencing rather than always trying to control or change it.  And as I learned how to be curious about what was happening within me when I was compulsive, my compulsions calmed down.  For it is another law of the psyche that what you embrace ceases to have power over you.

So let’s take a good look at how we have been with our compulsions and recognize that it doesn’t work.  95% of all weight that is lost in the US is gained back plus some within a year and a half.  Why is that? Because what we resist we empower, and because how we try to control our compulsions doesn’t work – not in the long run.

There is another way to work with your compulsions, a way that takes you beyond struggle itself.  It is what my work and my book, The Gift of Our Compulsions is about.  And now I am going to do something that I have never done in these newsletters.  I am going to tell you about a CD set I just completed.

I haven’t ever done this because these letters are not about promotion.  But these CDs contain a truly life-changing message, a message I want you to hear so that you can move beyond the struggles inside yourself into the joy of truly being fully alive that is your birthright!  The CD set is from a workshop I did in DC last spring called, “Being Healed by Our Compulsions,” and it is a window into the incredibly healing experience of moving beyond our core compulsion to struggle with life by being present for what is showing up in our lives.

If it doesn’t call to you, that’s fine, but I invite you to at least contemplate the radical notion that your compulsions are a gift from life to wake you up out of struggle.  As Stephen Levine would say, “May you be so blessed to come across something you can’t control.”

Why would he say that?  Because control is an endless game of the mind, a game that you will never (thankfully) ever win, and because who you are is so much bigger than the game of control.   May we use our compulsions to take us beyond the struggling self so we can discover who we truly are, and in that discovery may our world be healed!

~Mary

The Gift of Our Compulsions: A Revolutionary Approach to Self-Acceptance and Healing and Belonging to Life: The Journey of Awakening are both available through Amazon, and are highly recommended at the kitchen table.

Mary’s books are both endorsed by Eckhart Tolle who offered the phenomenally successful web class with Oprah on his book “A New Earth”. You can sign up for her monthly newsletters by going to the home page of her web site. Each month you will receive a letter containing insight and information on how to stay in touch with your peace and joy no matter what is happening in your life.

©KitchenTableMedicine.com, LLC ™

The Healing Power of Music: An Interview with Jeremy Dion

Hi Kitchen Table Medicine readers! Ever wonder about the healing power of music?

Well, I have invited therapist and musician Jeremy Dion to the kitchen table to discuss the therapeutic benefits of music.

I am delighted to host this interview because it is wonderful to see health care professionals use their creative talents to further help people. Please welcome to the kitchen table therapist and musician Jeremy Dion…

Jeremy, what is your professional background?

I make a living as a psychotherapist in private practice, in Frisco, Colorado. I work mainly with kids doing play therapy, and teens, but I also work with couples, adults, and families. Adolescents were the last group of people I wanted to work with as I made my way through graduate school, as I keenly remembered the type of teenager I was. Yet after graduation I took a job with a Wilderness Therapy program, and would up providing therapy to the roughest and toughest kids on the block. I learned how to reach and care for kids who weren’t getting that from many other sources, and it flipped a switch in me.

Now, working with the “trouble makers” is one of my specialties. I have degrees in music therapy and counseling psychology, but somewhere along the way I decided to focus my musical efforts on my own songwriting and performing, rather than using my specific training as a music therapist. I am in the midst of the transition to making my living as a professional musician.

How long have you been playing music?

As long as I can remember. I grew up playing the piano, and singing to myself. I was in the Middle School choir, but so was everyone else it seemed. Later, I began singing in earnest with the encouragement of Issaquah High School vocal teacher Lavonne Watson. It was during that time that I really developed the internal awareness that I could sing, and sing pretty well. Up until that point it was mostly family members giving me positive feedback on my singing, but they can’t be trusted to be too objective.

So I sang all through High School, performed in the school musicals, etc. But It wasn’t until I was a freshman at U.C. Berkeley that I picked up the guitar and began to write my own songs. Since that time, making sense of the world through songwriting has always been a natural outlet.

I enjoy the performance aspect of being a musician, of course, but even if I wasn’t performing, I would still be writing songs and playing the guitar. Corny as it may sound, sometimes I feel like I might explode if I didn’t write songs, play guitar, and sing. It has become so much a part of me at this point that I would be literally lost without it.

What are the therapeutic benefits of playing and listening to music?

Oh man, how much space have you got for this interview? Pick an aspect of being alive, and therein lies a musical benefits. Whether we look at physiology involving things like heart rate, measurable stress level, breathing patterns, neuro-synaptic activity, or the less tangible things like motivation, emotional awareness, emotional processing, memory recollection, etc. music has been demonstrated again and again to bolster health.

Furthermore, spirituality and music have been paired long before recorded history. As a species we resonate with music as a means of worship, as a way of connecting more deeply with the divine both internally and externally. Music therapy as a field has been around for generations, but sadly still fights an uphill battle for recognition in our western medical models. Yet we all seem to know intrinsically that music adds innumerable dimensions to the human experience, and we use this knowledge in unique ways. We use music purposefully to match our mood, to conjure memories, to shift our mood, and to feel more deeply.

In addition, with the advances in fields like quantum physics, we are reminded again and again that everything is vibrating, from the largest knowables in the universe to the most microscopic sub-atomic particles, we are vibrations. In a very real sense, everything we know and everything we are is music.

How has your professional training in psychology been of benefit to your career as a musician?

First of all, I went through a very unique graduate program at Naropa University in Boulder. As a three year program, it focuses on one’s internal process as much as (if not more than) the academic information. We had years of training in meditation and mindfulness, were required to participate in our own therapy, and were encouraged to become painfully familiar with our own habit patterns and nuances before we could hope to be of benefit to someone and theirs.

In that sense, my graduate training reminded me again and again to go inward, to dig in the dirt, plumb the depths, and get in touch. I must say, this type of program does not suit everyone. Yet it was perfect for me, and encouraged me to learn more about myself in those three years than in the previous twenty three combined.

From this depth of understanding, most of my songs are born. As a result, my lyrics are intensely personal to me, and releasing this first CD was akin to publishing my personal diary. Thankfully, people have been resonnating with music. In addition, my career as a psychotherapist has continued this path of understanding, of seeing aspects of myself in my clients’ process and heightening my awareness about my own personality, my own idiosyncrasies, and my own divinity. All of this informs my writing and my performances.

Who is the musician that inspires you the most?

Paul Simon. His brilliance shines through on so many levels both musically and lyrically. He has a way about him that I very much admire – a way of speaking simply, but giving the sense that he is really getting at so much more.

I have never been accused of under-analyzing anything, and I’m sure I read much more into his music than others might, but his music consistently inspires me the most. My own journey as a songwriter has been to become more transparent in my writing. I used to write very poetically but in a way that was wide open to interpretation, and often left the listener feeling detached from the music.

That was purposeful at the time, because I wasn’t ready to open up and get too clear about my internal world. That has been changing, and as my songs become more true and clear, they have been reaching a broader audience. I credit Paul Simon with some of this.

What kinds of positive messages do you promote through your music?

Elvis Costello wrote, “What’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding?” My music, I suppose, promotes those things in such an unabashed way that sometimes I just have to laugh at myself. As a described earlier, my music is about me.; it is about being alive on the planet; it is about love and loss, anger and resentment, beauty and laughter, joy and pain.

Others may read into it many other things, and that is welcome. That’s what music is about – being able to personalize it and make sense of it the way it adds up to you. But in the end these songs are about me and the things I think about and feel about. To me, that’s the positive message: go within.

Share with us a specific example of lyrics intended to make a difference.

They all have made a difference. I don’t mean that in a “I can save the world” sort of pompous way. I mean in the way that I am different for having written them, having worked through them, having sung them again and again. As I said before, if I didn’t have this outlet, the world would make less sense to me and I might explode out of sheer overwhelm. If I had to pick a lyric to share, it would be from “Back Breaking Wall,” and was intended to extoll the virtue of looking within:

“Every now and then I feel one more step away from being here
Even though in earnest how I try to get back to you, my dear
Resurrecting all these ancient bones under centuries of soil
The sanctity of self-reflection separates the water from the oil”

Where are you currently on tour?

Mostly in Colorado – Denver, Boulder, and the mountain cities around Breckenridge.

What is your favorite stress management tip?

Exercise, meditation, and some sort of creative outlet. I don’t care if it’s painting, drawing, poetry, journaling, music, dance, scrapbooking, etc. Just create.

Thanks Jeremy for sharing your creative and professional wisdom with us!

To purchase Jeremy Dion’s CD’s you can visit www.JeremyDion.com. You can also add Jeremy as a Myspace friend, load his songs to your Myspace profile, and follow Jeremy’s tour updates on Facebook.

I am always interviewing various health care providers, contact us if you have a unique health related story to share at the kitchen table.

©KitchenTableMedicine.com, LLC ™

How to Transform Fear

By Mary O’malley

Author of The Gift of Our Compulsions: A Revolutionary Approach to Self-Acceptance and Healing and Belonging to Life: The Journey of Awakening

In his first inaugural speech in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt said “…the only thing we have to fear is fear itself…”

This was a profound thing to say given the economic climate of that time and was intended to shake people out of their focus on their material losses.

But what if that is not actually true? What if we don’t need to fear fear. In fact, what would our lives look like if the voice of fear inside of us couldn’t catch us in its web?

This is certainly a time on our planet in which fear is up big time – financial fears, terrorist fears, fear for the future. But what would happen if, rather than being seduced by fear, we could frame this time differently?

Rather than seeing it as a time of breakdown, we could see it as a time of break-through.

Yes, it certainly looks as though things are breaking down, but that is true of all breakthroughs. Think of a woman giving birth. It is challenging and it is messy and it is necessary for her body to contract in order for the baby to be born. What would it feel like to see what is happening on this planet as a time of birth, of going through the contraction of the birth passage so that we can emerge into a more aware level of consciousness?

The key to this birth is a different relationship with fear itself.

Let us go back to the butterfly story we explored last year because it holds the keys to the evolutionary shift we are currently undergoing. For our purposes, the caterpillar represents the old level of consciousness this planet has been living in which is based in fear and reaction.

The caterpillar is, for its size, one of the most destructive beings on our planet, and if you recognize that human beings in the last century killed over 100 million of their fellow human beings in the name of war, it is reasonable to say that we have been in our caterpillar phase.

As the caterpillar’s time comes to an end, it creates a cocoon, and in its dark embrace, the caterpillar turns into goo. Out of that goo comes a wave of what they call imaginal cells – the first appearance of the butterfly. The amazing thing is that the goo kills this first wave of cells! In other words, the old tries to kill the new. Such chaos! And if we looked at all the great evolutionary shifts on this planet, we would see that there is always chaos as the old phase is dying out and the new is being born.

This chaos of the goo killing the new cells of the butterfly causes these imaginal cells to come together into communities that begin to differentiate into the butterfly. This is the place where breakdown (the caterpillar turning into goo) becomes the breakthrough into the new expression of life called a butterfly. The butterfly is life transforming itself as it has done billions upon billions of times as evolution has progressed on this planet. The butterfly is a completely different kind of being than the caterpillar. Rather than being destructive, this new being gives to the world, both beauty and pollination.

I believe that the butterfly of human consciousness is being born – a much wiser, more loving consciousness – and fear is the birth contraction. We are in the “goo phase” where our fear-based perspective on the world is now coming to an end, and more of us are beginning to see the possibility of living from a level of consciousness that is as transformative as the shift from caterpillar to butterfly. This level of consciousness doesn’t divide us like fear does.

Instead it unites.

And at its core it deeply trusts life, so rather than living through fear and all of its reactions (that cause so much devastation on this planet), it lives from wisdom and heart. This allows us to live from the level of consciousness that recognizes we are all in this together and each person is a necessary and integral part of the human family that we are.

You are the place where this evolutionary shift is happening – right there inside of your own mind and heart. Life is asking you to relate to fear rather than believing what it is saying. It is asking you to move from “I am afraid!” to “That is the voice of fear inside of me.”

What would it be like in your life if every time you noticed fear showing up in your mind, you took a breath and came back fully to life right here, right now and said, “I choose to trust life.”

Is this a lot to ask our fear based consciousness? Yes! But fearing life comes from a misunderstanding of life. And trusting life comes from the truth. Life is in charge of life and it is much smarter than our little egos. It has created stars and planets and galaxies and waterfalls and ladybugs and you and me from light, of all things!

To trust life is to step off the cliff of fear and, rather than falling to our death, discover that it is our nature to fly!

~Mary

The Gift of Our Compulsions: A Revolutionary Approach to Self-Acceptance and Healing and Belonging to Life: The Journey of Awakening are both available through Amazon, and are highly recommended at the kitchen table.

Mary O’Malley, author of “Belonging to Life” and “The Gift of Our Compulsions”, is offering a retreat February 21st – 27th on the beautiful Hawaiian Island of Molokai.

For our readers she is offering a $200 discount on this nourishing retreat that restores your joy, your trust in yourself, and your connection with life. Visit MaryOmalley.com for more information on Mary, and visit the following link for more information on the Hawaiian retreat Waking Up in Paradise Residential Retreat in Hawaii.

Mary’s books are both endorsed by Eckhart Tolle who offered the phenomenally successful web class with Oprah on his book “A New Earth”. You can sign up for her monthly newsletters by going to the home page of her web site. Each month you will receive a letter containing insight and information on how to stay in touch with your peace and joy no matter what is happening in your life.

©KitchenTableMedicine.com, LLC ™

Meet Dr. KC Kelly Online Psychotherapist at DOCintheBiz

Editorial Note: Please welcome to the kitchen table a very dear friend of mine, guest author Dr. KC Kelly, licensed psychotherapist…

Hi! I am KC Kelly, Ph.D., LMHC and I was invited to introduce myself here at one of my favorite alternative medicine and health care informational websites, Kitchen Table Medicine. I’d like to share with you what online counseling or psychotherapy (also called E-therapy) is all about and what I have to offer at DOCintheBiz.com.

Millions of people search the Internet every day for total health care information. Now, I have embarked on a whole new frontier of offering a single place to find a plethora of mental/emotional health information including depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, personality disorders, relationship issues, self esteem, stress management, time management, and so much more! I also offer online counseling or therapy! One click to DOCintheBiz.com takes you to a safe and comfortable place where all your mental/emotional health needs can be met!

Before you go there, please allow me to share with you, who I am and some facts about online counseling or therapy.

First of all, one of the most important factors to consider when entering into therapy or counseling is the relationship you have with your therapist. A special kind of trust and rapport needs to be present or the therapy will not be successful. Not every therapist is for every client and visa versa and that is why it is imperative that you “interview” or get to know your therapist before beginning a therapeutic relationship with him or her.

At DOCintheBiz.com, I give you the opportunity to read a multitude of articles that I have written on a vast amount of topics so that you can get to know me, how I write, and how I work with clients. I write one article/week (sometimes more) and try to write based on the information that people request. I encourage my readers to comment on all my articles and I answer each and every commentary. I invite you to visit my blog and see what you think at DOCintheBiz.com.

The next step is to understand that E-therapy directly addresses a major problem uncovered by the Surgeon General’s Report on Mental Health (1999) which stated that while one American in five has a diagnosable psychological problem, nearly two-thirds of them never seek treatment. Online therapy or counseling should be for mild to moderate concerns or issues you may be having. Online counseling or therapy is a great way to discuss issues, find solutions, and find ways to change your life for the better!

What Dr. KC’s online counseling or therapy DOES provide:

1. Therapeutic help from a professional, caring, compassionate, and understanding therapist who puts YOUR needs first without an ounce of judgment
2. The ability to get to core issues more quickly, sometimes in the first lines of an email
3. Complete confidentiality and ability to keep 100% anonymous (discussed in disclaimer)
4. Convenience of never needing to leave your home and reaching out when YOU want to
5. Affordable low cost services HIGHLY worth the small investment (it’s YOUR health!)
6. Quick, solid, informational, expert and thoughtful responses to your issues and questions

What Dr. KC’s online counseling or therapy DOES NOT provide:

1. Help for severe crisis situations- It is not that Dr. KC does not work with crisis situations (in person); however, when someone writes in online for help with a crisis, he/she is urged to please call 911 or a crisis hotline for IMMEDIATE help.

Thank you to Kitchen Table Medicine and your readers for giving me the opportunity to introduce myself and to share a brief understanding of what online counseling or therapy involves. I hope that you will visit me at DOCintheBiz.com for more detailed information.

If you are having concerns, it is OK if I’m not the one helping you; however, I do urge you to reach out and ask for assistance! Someone is there to take your hand and help guide you to a better, happier, and healthier life. YOU’RE WORTH IT!

~Dr. KC
www.DOCintheBiz.com
www.GLCzone.com

©KitchenTableMedicine.com, LLC ™