How It All Went Down...
I know, I know. “Jamie,” you say, “Where the hell did you go?” Actually, you probably forgot that The Axion Center even existed. I am continuously stunned and delighted by how many of you have asked over and over if I was ever coming out of my cave.
I had a rough couple of years, and I (sort of) want to tell you about it. If you’re not interested in reading the story of how I spent my “summer vacation” in HELL, just scroll down and we can get right to the point.
Here’s how it all went down:
March: I closed the physical location of the Axion Center. I wanted to take my classes online. I was inspired and motivated. (That didn’t last long.)
April: My husband was fired from his job. He quickly spiraled out of control, spent his days asleep, his nights watching anime. He got darker, and meaner, and more disconnected by the day.
April 29: A driver ran a red light, hit my Infiniti, moved the front end of my car about two feet to the left, and pretty severely damaged my brain. (Severe concussion, not like open-skull surgery or anything.)
May: I bought a Jaguar with the insurance money from my car accident. (In fact, the cost of the Jaguar was TO THE DOLLAR what the insurance check was.) His name is Galahad. I love him. I drove him for six months and the engine failed. He sat in my brother’s driveway for 9 months waiting for a metal heart transplant. I pined for my car.
Summer: I was useless. I couldn’t get my shit together. I couldn’t keep the house clean. I couldn’t write a coherent sentence. I lost whole chunks of data from my mind after the car accident and everything was so frustrating to me.
August: I started having problems with my hands. I had pain. I couldn’t hold on to stuff, or I would crush things suddenly.
September: I kicked my husband out of the house. I’d had enough. We divorced six months later (hence the new *old* last name.) It had to be done. Our relationship was sucking the life out of me, but it was absolutely, excruciatingly painful.
Fall: I couldn’t eat. I lost 30 lbs. My friends were freaking out, but eating felt so disgusting.
I could NOT seem to work on writing or producing classes. I could barely get my ass out of bed. I spent my days walking around my house, aimlessly.
People warned me over and over not to let the Axion Center “die on the vine.” It’s not like I wasn’t aware that I was ruining the business I spent two years nurturing and building. I knew it. I just couldn’t make myself do the work. I had one million fantastic ideas, and had no impetus. They were right. I murdered my business and watched it die.
October: I crashed my brother’s motorcycle. In the crash, I destroyed my right thumb. I mean, it looked like a cartoon exploding cigar, but bloodier. The bone was broken, the skin was split down both sides, and it immediately got infected. I had to have surgery to repair my thumb the day before my tribe’s big Halloween party. (“Or,” the doctor said, “You can come back the Monday after the party and have it amputated…”)
February: My best friend of 15 years and I had a crazy falling out. (There was no way I was going to let that stand. We put it back together. I love her SO much. Sometimes it still feels a little weird, but I’m invested in this one forever.)
March: I tried to fix my thumb with magic. My vibe was all fucked up. Instead of healing properly, my thumb grew A BRANCHED THUMB BONE. It hurt every time I picked up a pencil, tried to use a fork, touched a table top, tried to drink out of a glass, and pretty much any time I did anything. I had to have a second surgery to remove my freak extra thumb bone.
March (still): I got a real job. Now, let me just say that I love this job. I’m the General Manager for a non-profit that I love and believe in. I do, however, know I’m distracting myself from doing my work by getting a job. It’s a scant paycheck that keeps us above water. It’s a worthy cause, but it’s not my own work.
May: My son graduated from high school, moved out, and started college. All of this was fantastic (DEAN’S LIST, BABY!) but it was weird, and chaotic, and I just hoped impotently that he had the tools he needed. I didn’t have the time or money to help him the way I wanted to.
August: I turned 40.
Fall: My finances degraded to the point that I wasn’t sure if we were going to be able to make it. We got by on the generosity of my brother and my BFF. I sat awake thinking about money a lot.
January: I had a pain in my breast that resulted in a biopsy. The idea that I might have cancer scared the living shit out of me. I lost my mother to breast cancer, and she was diagnosed with it at 40, the same age I am. It was just a benign cyst, but I didn’t breathe for two weeks waiting for the test and then the results. I’m not sure I’d ever really felt fear for more than a couple of minutes at a time before this experience.
“The real difficulty in using the Method of Manifestation with purpose is the awareness that when you’re having a real wet-trash time of things, it’s by design. You created the circumstances you are experiencing, whatever they happen to be.”
Here’s the point of telling you all of this:
1) Pursuing your dream if you are out of alignment will ruin your life.
2) Your vibe is absolutely everything. You cannot work hard enough to overcome a shit vibration. (Don’t misunderstand me – I don’t mean you’re fucked if your current circumstance isn’t what you want. I mean no physical action can overcome a garbage vibration except changing the vibration deliberately.) You also can’t psyche out the Universe pretending that you feel good.
3) Allow me to be your cautionary tale. Please don’t burn your life to the ground unless you have to. Or want to.
4) I’m back, Mother Fuckers!
(I’m not calling you mother fuckers, obviously.)
The real difficulty in using the Method of Manifestation with purpose is the awareness that when you’re having a real wet-trash time of things, it’s by design. You created the circumstances you are experiencing, whatever they happen to be.
I loved working at the Axion Center when we had a store front. I HATED the building where we had our store front. I loved teaching classes. I hated promoting and marketing, and tracking stuff, and accounting. I worried constantly and tried to bargain with the Universe so we could just have a decent turnout for every single event. I was filled, nearly all the time, with tension and trepidation. I was actually scared most of the time. Beyond that, I was not having fun. (That’s a bad place for Jamie.)
The real crux of it, though, is that I felt like circumstances were out of my control, even though I knew I was manifesting everything I was experiencing. I couldn’t MAKE people attend our classes. I couldn’t GET people to open my emails, I had no control over the things that would grow our community. I was tired and stressed out and I felt lonely.
In hindsight, it’s no surprise that I manifested disaster after disaster, all seemingly out of my control. That car accident was not technically my fault. I couldn’t make my husband get out of bed or take care of himself. I mean, every circumstance on the list is a direct amplification of my helplessness, loneliness, and the feeling that I was flying blind every minute. I DID THIS.
“ If I had done my work from a vibration of abundance, peace, connectedness, and fun, I would have created circumstances to match.”
Here’s the lesson. (Start reading here if you’re tired of the “Autobiography of My Shit-Year.”)
You have to be ruthlessly focused on your vibration. Pursuing your dream with action that is out of alignment will light your life on fire and kick it out of a window. You absolutely must act from and within your ideal aligned vibe.
You will attract and create an amplification of your predominant vibration. By the time that vibration becomes corporeal, it will be in every pore, every bone, every cell of your life, and it will be an exact reflection of the feelings you have felt.
If I had done my work from a vibration of abundance, peace, connectedness, and fun, I would have created circumstances to match. I’ve done it a million times in my life. It works. My regret about my experience building the Axion Center the first time comes from knowing what to do, but feeling so afraid of failure that it overwhelmed my ability to focus on producing a beautiful and clear blueprint for the “thinking stuff” of the Universe to follow. I drew up shitty plans with my vibration and I produced a full on shit-show with pyrotechnics and a fucking marching band.
Axion Center is the work I was meant to do. I tried to retire it, and I couldn’t do it. I accept it now. This is my thing.
Here’s the upside: I can start again. And I have. This time, my alignment is the priority over everything else. I’m asking for help and choosing partners who support my vision and whom the vision serves. I urge you to do the same.
It’s a little bit ironic that focusing on feeling fantastic is such a chore. You have to make yourself do it every single day, sometimes multiple times. Parts of your mind are going to fight you the entire way to your goal. You have to realize that the ease of feeling bad is an illusion. Your self-doubt is lying to you! If you want success and happiness, you have to ignore the specters calling to you on your path. If you stray into the forest, all is lost. That got a little dark, but BEWARE! (I guess I’m going with it.)