How to Follow Your Heart, Part I: Know the Truth of Who You Are

Currently, I am in the rolling hills of northern Greece.  I am staying in a lovely stone cottage overlooking a lush green landscape and I’m just a few kilometers from the Aegean Sea.  People ask me why I chose this small village, called Milies, and I tell them the truth— I have no idea.

Well, this is only a half truth.  My Higher Self, my Divine Light Energy, knows exactly why I am here.  It’s my egoic, logical mind that is clueless.  According to my ego, I should be tucked up at home in Zagreb, Croatia following the same old routine of work, work and more work.

Last year, in December, I was in Costa Rica (another heart-led adventure) and I got this burning desire to look for the spirit of Chiron, the precious centaur healer of ancient Greek mythology.  When I say, “burning desire,” I literally mean a crazy burning in my Solar Plexus.  I was sitting down studying some astrological aspects and then the centaur Chiron was dropped into my head.  The thought arose:  let’s go find Chiron.  My heart started beating rapidly, my Solar Plexus started burning, and I immediately booked a flight and an Airbnb that just happens to be about a mile and a half from Chiron’s epic dwelling place!  This was all done, by the way, without research… I was led by my impulses, which I view as my Spiritual Guidance.

And here I am, overlooking the hills, doing my thing.

My name is Crystal Lynn Bell and I am an expert at following my heart.  I was well trained by my Spiritual Life Coach, Faith Spina, and I in turn initiate others into this powerful lifestyle through my Spiritual Empowerment Coaching programs.  In this series of writings, How to Follow Your Heart, I am going to give you some tips to help you understand how you, too, can follow your heart and free yourself from the shackles of small-minded, limited thinking.  To get all the installments of this series delivered to your inbox, join my email list.

Know the Truth of Who You Are.

I need to tell you, very briefly, how I used to be.  I used to be someone who prided herself on her tough exterior, her cool headedness, her analytical abilities and her enormous ego.  Yep.  I was proud of my intuition-suppressing persona.  And while my hair was falling out, and I was enjoying the idiosyncrasies of loneliness, I was growing weary of being me.  I was always striving to accomplish things; always needing to be liked and appreciated by other people (even to my detriment) and keeping up the appearance of well being was more important than my authenticity.  The illusion of wellness was more important than the truth of the despair brewing inside me and I put more energy into maintaining the masks I wore than into healing what was broken inside me.  But hey, that’s why I came to Earth– to experience disconnection so that I could really come to appreciate the tremendous power of my heart, my Queen.  My reward for walking through the fire– true abundance, deep intimacy, profound friendship and the real trust that comes from having taken big risks and finding limitless support in the the Universe.  This all happened because I got out of my head and into my heart.

In my experience, the very first step in following your heart is getting to know the force that powers it.  The Divine Light Energy (DLE) at the center of your heart is the absolute Truth of who you are.  This is the guide you must follow. This force drives your creativity, your connection, your trust, your vision, and it is the key to manifestation.  Your heart is like 500 times more attractive than your brain.  It is your Divine Light Energy that calls your desires to you and it will make sure you are in the right place at the right time… if you let it.  If you’ll listen.  Explore this energy, Friend.  Get to know It.  Remember that your Divine Light Energy is the part of you that is directly connected to God/Goddess/Source of All.  It is infinite, always turned on, always connected, unconditionally loving, blissful, peaceful, and unconditionally present.  Your DLE is free of personality traits, limiting beliefs, negative thoughts, and guile.  It is eternal.  It might be difficult for you to understand your DLE with your lower mind. That’s okay!  You can attempt to learn it is a concept, but in order to truly grasp it, you actually have to stop thinking and start feeling.  The Higher Self, your DLE, is something that you can feel when you soften your mind and relax into PEACE.  Your DLE is creative, expansive, and connected to ALL.  You know that you are in your DLE when you let go and let God/Goddess.  There is no thinking, there is only being.

Now look, it is so danged easy to be in your DLE when you’re sitting in a stone cottage in the Greek mountains surrounded by lush green hills, singing birds , and a belly full of warm soup and toast with jam.  But this is not the measure of your work.  The challenge is to be in DLE when you are in an adverse situation.  When you are sitting in traffic, for example, and you’re 30 minutes away from an appointment that starts in five minutes. That’s how Spirit brings you the opportunity to REALLY exercise your power and deepen your trust in DLE and the Universe at large.  It is soooo easy to identify with ego and start telling yourself stories about how you’re late again and the traffic on the 405 is ridiculous and we’re all going to hell in a hand basket because there is so much traffic in L.A!  Oh, the anxiety, the frustration, the stories our ego tells us!  There is no room for Unconditional Love and a benevolent, magical Universe in this egoic perspective because ego limits and narrows and only sees its own way.  It cannot rise above and tune into the bigger picture like the DLE/Higher Self can.  YOU, my friend, have to pull yourself out of ego’s perspecitve and start telling yourself the Truth:  I AM that I AM.  The Higher Self knows that its timing is Divine.  30 minutes late?  Perfect.  There is an opportunity that is being created.  Use your expansive, Badass DLE to recognize it and put your mind (your servant) to work.  If your mind is running away with pessimistic non-Divine thoughts, then you know you need to do some work to learn how to master your mind because you should be running your mind, not your mind running you.  In order to follow your heart, you have to know the Truth of who You Are– the boss.  The Badass Butterfly.  The Higher Self.  The Divine Light Energy.

So there are MANY ways to learn the Truth of who You Are.  Meditation and contemplation are excellent ways to start the process.  How do you awaken in the morning?  What is the first thing you do?  Do you grab your phone and start checking email and Facebook?  Yeah?  Why?  Why would that be the first thing you do?  That’s not Badass.  That’s reactive.  That’s looking for drama.  First thing you do in the morning is pray or meditate or connect in some kind of way with your DLE/Higher Self.  Take some deep breaths and look around and appreciate what you have.  Say, “Thank you, Goddess, for awakening me to a warm bed and a glorious day ahead of me.”  Then you take some time and you fuel your body with clean air, maybe some lovely stretches, and you take a few moments to set an intention for the day.  Then you get outta bed and go deal with the kids, the husband… check and see what the president is Tweeting.  My point is, don’t let anything else but your Divinity be the first thing you focus on in the morning.  Claim the day.  Claim your body.  Take the Higher Self’s perspective FIRST THING and then go knock ’em dead, Killah!

Working with an excellent Spiritual Life Coach like me is super powerful and I totally recommend it when you are ready to truly transform.  If you have trouble getting clear about what you want, getting in touch with your DLE, and if you feel blocked by limiting beliefs, negative thoughts, fear, doubt, anxiety, or low self-esteem, then you definitely need to be working with me.  I have solutions for all that, my friend.  Seriously.  I’ll take you through Shadow Work to help you deal with your negative emotions.  I’ll take you through Light Work to manifest your heart’s desires, and I’ll take you through healing to help you clean those old wounds that are keeping you stuck in old patterns of behavior.  If you are seriously ready to pursue transformation, then book yourself in for a complimentary Emotional Wellness Strategizing Session.

My personal technique for following my heart and really this is the thing that helped me truly understand the difference between my egoic thoughts and my Higher Self… it’s Tarot.  Tarot cards are awesome because they always aim to align you with your Higher Self.  It is fascinating!  Time after time, reading after reading, these wonderful little cards will show you where you are aligned with your heart or your ego.  They will show you where you are thinking small, and limiting yourself and they acknowledge when you are pushing out of your comfort zone and experiencing breakthrough.

Tarot cards are a beautiful way to engage your Divine Light Energy.  The cards hold archetypal images that your mind understands both consciously and subconsciously and they combine spiritual concepts such as astrology, numerology, and the kabbalah to help you bring complex concepts into bite-sized pieces that the egoic mind can understand.  The thing is (and we’ll go into this in part II of this How to Follow Your Heart series) you have GOT to manage your ego in order to follow your heart.  An out of control ego that is running you is not letting your heart lead.  Tarot is a great way to get your ego to calm down and get into alignment with your heart and Divine Light Energy.

I’ve been reading cards for over 25 years and I’m teaching a class online.  It’s called Badass Butterfly’s Moonlight Tarot School and I would love it if you would join me because this class is going to kick ass!  Not only am I going to help you learn the meanings of the entire Tarot, but more importantly, I’m going to teach you how to use your intuition, so you really won’t even need the card meanings to know how to read them.  My system for teaching Tarot is so effective that I can actually teach my friends how to read right at the dinner table.  It’s SO EASY.  So in my class I teach you how to read AND I give you in-depth meaning of all the cards.  But for me, as I said, building your intuition is key.

Tarot cards are a tool and I always tune into my Divinity without any tools FIRST.  I tune into my Higher Self through my feeling nature.  I go on the journey within and I feel my way.  BUT I also LOVE to think.  Remember, I’m a thinker.  I like my mind!  But I don’t like being ruled by it, so it is part of the kingdom, but it no longer has the keys to the kingdom.  When my egoic mind is in charge it messes up everything.

My heart is the master.  BUT, as I said, I like thinking and Tarot helps he think straight.  My mind will take what my heart says and twist it around into something that it was never meant to be.  SO, I use Tarot cards to help my mind align with my Heart.  For example, over the last couple of days, I have been compulsively eating.  This is a tell-tale sign that there is a disturbance in my psyche.  I don’t need a year of compulsive eating.  I need just one day to get my attention.  So I wondered, what is going on?  When I tuned into my heart, I felt deep love and transformation.  My heart wass basically saying that I am moving into a more expansive way of being.  I am opening to more love, more opportunity, bigger ideas, more success, more money, and more romance.  My ego, was not liking this.  My ego felt afraid that I was going to fail. And it was afraid of the responsibility that goes along with being big and Badass. So ego had me compulsively eating (self-sabotaging) while it created fearful stories in my mind so that I got stuck and wouldn’t expand (except at my waistline!  Hahaha!.)  Ego feels like spiritual expansion means death– which it does… to the ego.  When I expand, my old way of being dies.  Ego hates this feeling.  It is so out of control!  And it means change and when I was a kid, change meant pain!  So ego interprets my growth as painful and yet, my heart is like, “C’mon!  Let’s do this! Everything is aligned and waiting for us.  Let’s go!”

So when I tune into my heart and feel the joyful expansion, I say “Yes,” to it first thing.  Then, I have to manage my ego.  Ego is doubtful and wants to feel like it has hold of something.  This is where the blessing of Tarot comes in.  Tarot is a tool to help me manage my ego!

A lot of people are intimidated by reading Tarot cards because they think it is difficult.  As I said, I can teach my friends how to read Tarot perfectly over dinner, and I will do the same for you!  I’ll make you a little video.  Just keep your eyes and ears open for a post.  Again, please sign up to have my posts delivered right to your inbox and you won’t miss any of my offerings. And, of course, you can learn how to read Tarot cards with me in depth in Badass Butterfly’s Moonlight Tarot School!  This program will help you choose the right Tarot deck and get you reading cards from the very first session.  Sign up and see for yourself how easy it is to get direct answers from your Higher Self and Divine Light Energy.

Okay.  Friend, this is enough information to get you started on understanding how to follow your heart.  Just remember that your first step is to know the Truth of who You Are— Divine Light Energy… your Higher Self.  Recognizing this energy and learning to identify with it at every moment— not just the easy moments… but especially the hard moments is key.  You can do it.  Start practicing now, and I’ll see you soon with the next installment!

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