My Inner Critic used to be a real B-I-T-C-H. I struggled with her big time, though you wouldn’t know it now, because I am a new woman.  At age 30 I died a ‘shamanic death,’ and flew to the Higher Dimensions.  When I came back down, I returned to the same body, but began a new life as a high priestess. After communing with the angels and my Higher Self and remembering who I am and that we’re all one, I suddenly didn’t care about impressing people anymore.

Yet straight after my shamanic death, I went through the most painful ego death. AKA a Dark Night of the Soul, and you know what I’m talking about if you’ve gone through one yourself. Not so pleasant! Many of my Twin Flame clients have gone through their Dark Night after having encountered a Twin Flame Counterfeit, a type of Karmic Soulmate who initiates them into Divine Love and then who suddenly disappears. It’s quite excruciating, ego-anhillating, and yet in the end, you come out cleaner, and stronger than ever.

Going through my shamanic death, my Inner Critic went down with my ego (which is still healthy and intact but not in the oppressive way it once was), and my Higher Self finally grounded into my body and 7-chakras so that I could channel the Higher Dimensional energies here into the Third Dimension, the dimension in which we live on Earth. We are currently collectively shifting into the Fourth Dimension and each of us are waking up to this Ascension together.

My Inner Critic no longer holds me back like it did, and I feel like I have a free pass towards shame, guilt, embarrassment and feeling like I’m good enough. I now I put myself out there, and let it all hang out. And I love it! Because I deeply love myself on a soul level. Now I actually enjoy baring my A$$ to the world in hopes that people will join me in the self-love revolution. It’s what High-Healed Priestesses do!

But ten years ago, or even three years ago, it wasn’t this way… I was an Inner Critic victimy mess. I pretty much had a love-hate relationship with myself on every level of my being:

• Body image (hated my body, my skin, my hair, and my breasts without a bra on)
• Food and binge eating issues (I was addicted to sugar and always roller-coastering back and forth between overeating and over exercising)
• Major poverty issues – my self worth in the money department was like a negative number on a scale of 1-10. I was making a 4-figure salary and had so much shame about it!
• I thought my boyfriend was better than me. He was 3 years older, a mechanical engineer, and an Italian stallion. Somehow I thought that this meant that he was wiser, hotter, smarter, and sexier than I, and that I had to work hard to keep up with him or I’d be unlovable.
• Location. I lived somewhere I dreaded and feared (China) because I followed the stallion to join him and his dream in Shanghai to help boost his career. I was the support role in his life, and meanwhile no one was taking care of me, and it was not an easy place to try to rescue someone! But boy did I love trying to rescue him, as I did with all my boyfriends and lovers in my 20s…

Circa 2004. So, here I am running around in Shanghai China 10 years ago. I used to work on the 35th floor of Jin Mao Tower, which at the time was this new hot icon of Shanghai, the tallest building in the world, at 88 stories (cool number, huh?).

My low-self esteem got me Shanghaied to Shanghai

Getting Shanghaied is a term they used back in the 20s. In San Francisco, they would get sailors drunk and put them on ships to Asia, and they’d arrive in Shanghai finding themselves sobered up by the fact that they had a new culture and country to call home. To this day, they supposedly have a few pubs in San Francisco on the water that have these special back doors that were the doors to Shanghai.

My Italian stallion tricked me too. He promised me that, like him, I’d have a secure $70K salaried job waiting for me there through his family connections. When I arrived with just $2K in savings, they told me to go find an English teaching job for $5/hour at a local elementary school. I’d already been teaching English to Italians for $25/hour a few days a week in Italy and was burnt out on it. In Shanghai, everyone told me I was crazy to come to China then, as the economic bubble had already burst a year beforehand for us foreigners with no tech skills or Mandarin language.

Determined not to starve to death, I networked my little fanny off and found a job through my brother’s Princeton alumni network because I have always been a savvy networker despite the fact that I didn’t really know how to make money off of it!

I worked at a prestigious American law firm as an editor, but really all I did was play around on the internet and get free lunch. So, I certified myself online as a personal trainer and nutrition consultant and at age 25, opened Spot Fitness my first business! I also became a well-known fitness and nutrition writer within the large expat community, and got to attend speaking gigs and taught group classes.

Yet when I left China at 25, I felt like a huge failure because I hadn’t become a financial success, and because my partner got that 70K salary as a mechanical engineer with family connections. Now I look back and I’m like Amanda, that’s amazing! You were 24, went to a country where you didn’t speak the language, and you carved out your own career and became known in your field within a year and a half!

I know you had a hard time in your life in your earlier years where you did the best you could, and you thought it wasn’t good enough. Where you were harsh and criticized parts of yourself that needed nurturing, encouragement, and love rather than the brutal beatings you gave yourself! I want you to go back to those memories and tell yourself how amazing you are. And I want you to forgive yourself for any shortcomings, any dreams that hadn’t come true yet. And now, I want you to live out those big dreams for the little parts of yourself that are insecure and need to be shown that they CAN do it! You can! It’s in you, but it had to come at the right timing, and through deep self-love. One of my favorite tools I teach women is the FUKKIT tool that helps you get over your perfectionism and resistance to getting boring tasks done:

[fvplayer src=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-toirX4QurU’]

 

Have you ever followed love and gotten lost? Like literally to the wrong side of the planet? I did.

This is a picture of ME circa 2004 AD in China, when I was a very lost goddess remembering who I was. I got “Shanghaied” (look it up) and taken by an Italian lover to Shanghai, China. I was lost and confused and hit all kinds of self-esteem and money issues, hoping that my beloved would save me. But I had to save myself in the end, and it was complicated!

Ironically, I found myself in a land where no one understood me, literally (that language is damn hard!). I was always running out of money and had no cash to get places and it was kinda scary. I once had to use sign language to ask where the lake was and caught a bus not knowing if it was really going to the lake or if I was going somewhere else in China. I set up my own business there, and there were a lot of good things, impressive ways I grew. Yet it was one of the hardest things I could have done at the ripe age of 23-25!

I highly suggest finding yourself first before following some beloved off to the depth of his/her universe. What is YOUR universe, why are you here? What is your soul’s calling? What do YOU desire? And create that.

My beloved ended up marrying his Twin Flame in China at the end, 3 months after I left him, and it was a bitter sweet result of our 2-year journey together. The life of a Twin Flame Matchmaker in her 20s!

When you lack self-esteem, you lead a life that reflects this lack. It can get you into big trouble. Slaying my Inner Critic and falling in love with myself as a High-Healed Priestess has reinvented my life. Now I love my body, live in community, travel where it blisses me, work with my Soulmate Clients, and make 6-figures following my passions, and so can you.