Finding Your Inner Truth: Discovering Peace When Everything Changes

By Nicole Gabriel

Is something in your life shifting? Are you questioning its purpose and hoping that life’s difficulties will end in peace, happiness and understanding? 
 
When a chain of unexpected events occurred, beginning with the loss of her beloved Chinese Shar Pei, Tia, Nicole Gabriel felt her life was suddenly turned upside down. But as she overcame the hurdles of a career change, divorce, and the loss of many loved ones, she found her thoughts and perspective on life shifting into a new and amazing spiritual and psychic awareness. Now she shares her incredible journey for your benefit.
 
In Finding Your Inner Truth, Nicole takes you on a wild, mystical and soulful ride through the most traumatic and magical years of her life to share with you the confusion she felt, the questions she asked and the comforting answers she received. You will be surprised by what is in these pages—prepare yourself for explorations beyond our three-dimensional world, brushes with reincarnation, the foundational principles of shamanism, embracing yoga, engaging in alternative healing and following the loving guidance of her canine companions. But most of all, you’ll be surprised by what you learn about yourself.
 
Prepare to know that following your heart will always get you where you need to be and lead you toward your inner truth. And when you find it, like Nicole, you’ll realize that everything comes full circle, has a purpose and turns into love in the end. Let Nicole be your guide on this journey to finding your inner truth! SEEK. TRUST. BELIEVE. LOVE.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483527383

Book preview

LOVE.

INTRODUCTION

STARTING

Over

"If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the

end; if you look for comfort you will not get either

comfort or truth, only soft soap and wishful

thinking to begin, and in the end, despair."

— C. S. Lewis

You may be hurting inside but you do everything you can do to hide your pain. You are depressed (at times) but may write this off as the norm. Your relationships need work, but it seems like your partner is not a willing participant. You’ve been different your whole life but now are tired of trying to fit in. All of this has exhausted you but you are still searching for happiness, the real meaning of life and now perhaps your inner truth. You may even be struggling to calm your mind and heal your heart.

Somehow you picked up a copy of this book and are searching for answers. You may be tired of the challenges of day-to-day life, at the end of your rope and looking for solutions for your pain. Your timing couldn’t be better because this is where our experiences and stories intersect. It is my hope that, as a result of the many years of my pain and searching, together we can put your mind at ease and bring calmness to your chaos.

Together we will uncover your truth and provide the answers to what the subtitle of this book promises: Discovering Peace When Everything Changes.

So let me start by asking you a very important question: How are you going to spend this one unique and precious life you have been given? You may have no power over your circumstances, but you do have control over your mind and how you are going to taste life, enjoy it, and find out the truth about who you are.

What if you worked hard, overachieved to reach your goals, made a good income, loved your spouse and your life, were respected and loved by your family and friends—everything was as near to perfect as you could imagine it being, and then it was all suddenly stripped away? What if everything you ever knew was not what you thought it was? What if each person you knew turned out to be someone different than you thought him or her to be? What if everything you knew was no more? What if all your friends disappeared, you lost your job, lost those you loved the most, lost your home, lost your spouse, lost your career, and had to start all over again? How do you recreate your life (or some semblance of it), and why did it crumble if it was so perfect anyway? Does any of this sound familiar to you?

Imagine that you are pure of heart and seeking something greater than what you already knew to be pretty great. How do you compare? How do you redefine happiness when you thought you were the happiest you could be? Or better yet, how do you find happiness if you never truly knew it to begin with? Do you get caught up in life’s monotony, neglect to have moments of appreciation for what you have, and wish for something different? Are you a creature of habit at times—taking for granted the flow of your day, and instead of focusing on it, wandering off to dream—dream of another partner you feel would better complete your needs or harmonize with your life? Do you visualize yourself with a different financial status? How can you be sure, given the choice, that what you would choose would be any better than what you already have? And how do you know whether it is the best spiritual choice? Or do you even think about spiritual choices? Sure you find moments of pleasure and thankfulness regardless, but what if you are constantly revisiting the same ideas to better yourself? What if your partner, culture, or family isn’t along for the ride? What if you are on a path to better yourself when, suddenly, so much changes so quickly that you find yourself gripping at anything left that is familiar? Consider what might happen if, while you were trying to be a better person and connect to something with more meaning, that perfect spouse decided to have an affair, or the person you loved the most died, or that your perfect promotion interview turned into a down-sizing or job loss?

Our world is changing, and many of us have been left asking, Why? How? and Who? Life is sometimes not easy, and just getting through the mundane tasks of eating, paying bills, and caring for loved ones is more than enough to handle. But what if within all that, your spirit is calling? What if something within you says, This is not right, or This could be better? You are now being called to find your truth. The old systems are shutting down, forcing you to figure out your gifts and purpose here on earth. This process may be leading you to seek in ways that some might call spiritual in nature. You are being bombarded with feel good quotes on Facebook, new healing modalities, and motivational and spiritual technologies popping out of the woodwork. Which if any of these have you connected to? How is it impacting your life? Is it making you feel better or worse about yourself? Do you want to change?

Change happens constantly in life, whether you plan for it or not. And even when you make the effort to change, it can lead to additional changes you did not foresee or necessarily want. For example, divorce usually occurs when one person in the marriage seeks to grow and change while the other tries to hold on to old ways and patterns. Often, the result is pain as well as new growth for both individuals. Similarly, large corporations are failing, forcing you to find new ways to pay your bills. You can see this change as an opportunity that leads to your working in your true capacity to do what you were meant to on the planet. Are you sure you are doing what you are meant to do in this lifetime?

Maybe it took (or is taking) a great shake up for you to find your truth, or maybe you were one of the lucky ones and gracefully eased into it. When you have a great change occur in your life, it can often be hard to figure out where to start putting the pieces back together. A shift in consciousness is about to take place; you are now a part of what I call The Great Initiation. Did you know that in the shamanic traditions this great change can sometimes be considered a soul wound, and in other spiritual studies, it’s considered a karmic debt from previous lives and the lack of understanding you had then? Some traditions talk of the need to repeat your old stories time and time again in various lifetimes until you learn the lessons you wished for. Yes, the ones you wished for! I believe that one day before you were born and came to earth, you sat down with God and drew up your life’s master plan. You were smart and experienced. God called in all the ancient masters, prophets, angels, and guides, and He asked for them to assist you in what would be the greatest plan for this life’s experiences.

Because you are now reading this book, it’s clear to me that you are searching for a better understanding of the difficulties in your life, and I was included as part of that plan for you. Perhaps you have gone through more strenuous or trying times than I have, but for whatever reason, our master plans have been made to overlap. Now it’s my goal to share with you the spiritual and experiential wisdom I’ve gained along the way. I trust this wisdom will help guide you on your path into your own becoming.

It’s hard to imagine when a tragedy occurs that any kind of light at the end of the tunnel can exist. Maybe it’s taken you years to come to believe that the tragic incidents in your life were beneficial for your soul’s growth. I actually believed God hated me, wanted to see me suffer and was tempting me with my life. I was angry at God! But anger can serve you by causing you to push forward in ways you never dreamed of doing. What are you angry at, and how has your anger motivated you?

So, if you were at all like me and mad at the world (God in particular), imagine this: You’ve lost everything, and then you start to see and experience things of the most bizarre nature as you seek to find peace, answers, and truth on your newfound seeker’s path. What if you could draw aside the veil that separates our third-dimensional and heavy earth from all that is included in the universal truth, which may exceed the limits of human wisdom and knowing? Would you be okay with what you would see? I saw the most unimaginable things between the realms of what I knew and what I never could have imagined in my wildest dreams. Everything was a facade. How do you put pieces back together when nothing at all is familiar anymore? Nothing! Could you imagine the crumbling of it all would make you say, Thank you and I had no idea how much better it could be?

It’s taken me a while to understand the value of seeking between the realms on a spiritual path and how doing so can provide balance in life, but I have also learned it’s best to know what you are looking for and to develop tools to ground yourself to prepare for all the things you never imagined!

This book will share bizarre incidents and experiences that could not otherwise be had if too much time was spent growing a business, managing staff, raising family, being untruthful with myself, or not listening to that little voice saying, You must write even if it doesn’t make sense to you—it will to others. You may not have the luxury of stepping away from your daily responsibilities to take these kinds of journeys without sacrifice. In this book, I will share lessons learned following love most of all and also through experiencing death—leading to the path of Peruvian Shamanism—with journeys across Central and South America; the path of yoga (Kundalini in particular). I will also share powerful visual experiences, such as angel visitations, UFO phenomenon, portal openings, conversations, and healings with those who have passed over to the other side; the dances between light and dark and how they serve; depression over loss; visual experiences of the third kind; discussions on what it means to find your truth (and actually seeing lies); surviving the dark nights of the soul and coming out clean, grounded, and undisturbed. This book was written so I could share all these things with those beginning to awaken to truth for the benefit of the whole planet.

You may want to know a little more about me before we begin this journey together. I have a Certification in Transpersonal Psychology (at the Master’s level), an MBA in Technology Management, a Bachelor’s degree in Communications, and more than 500 hours in Kundalini yoga teacher training. I spent the first part of my career in the ’90s in advertising, web development, and information technology in executive management in the auto industry in Detroit, Michigan. When my career no longer satisfied my desire for personal growth, I left it to begin a new path opening multiple chiropractic offices with my former husband (a chiropractor). We successfully grew these businesses throughout the 2000s to more than $1 million per year in revenue. I then found that life changes—a divorce, a series of deaths, spiritual visions, and otherworldly experiences— found me seeking a new kind of quest that didn’t involve quotas or management of personnel, but instead, tugged at both my heart and sanity as a whirlwind of change turned my life upside-down and inside-out.

During my career and the growth of the offices, I overachieved to obtain all my goals, including attaining a six-figure income and an MBA by the time I was only twenty-six years old. But the new sandbox I was playing in left my truth in question, and when everyone else walked away, a pure and true relationship with the Divine, the companionship of my Chinese Shar Peis, and a lot of confusion was all I had left. There were no degrees attainable for this training and no measurables to determine how well I was doing at it. I had to learn to rely more on myself than ever before.

In my Kundalini yoga training, I had been taught that to master something was to teach it, and my previous path had been all about achieving mastery. After a series of events, I began to teach Kundalini yoga and Shamanic Healing at my twenty-five-acre retreat in Michigan from 2003-2012. The bizarre occult experiences in my life during those years were not completely new to me since I’d had many experiences as a young child that I had kept to myself my entire life. But this period seemed to be a time for me to experience and understand them more actively and vividly, although it became very hard for me to understand what was going on and to remain grounded. The lessons grew from anger (the death of many loved ones), to curiosity (being a seeker), to searching for something greater, finally calling the search spiritual, and reading, studying, and experiencing everything metaphysical, making sense of what was practical and useful, adopting concepts and systems that were whole and pure that could be revisited when the visions or outside forces got to be too much, and refresher courses when needed.

I stepped away from my teaching and focused on learning my lessons more internally in 2012 because it was time for more grounding and absorbing of them. In that process, I found great joy in my creative nature—rediscovered from long ago when as a young child I had visions and dreams of being a great artist in the advertising business. I am now ecstatic to be designing book covers, logos, images, and websites with my fiancé Patrick in Maui, Hawaii. I also am the owner of Vegan Dog Treats, a vegan treat business for owners looking for healthy, organic, and natural options for their dogs. This business was inspired by one of my true loves—Shiitake, a sassy, lavender Chinese Shar Pei.

I have a diverse background in both education and life experiences, so I understand if you are apprehensive about listening to someone who has taken this odd path, stepped away from her career, and gone an untraditional route. But I have learned over the years that the only thing I can truly offer to anyone is my truth. All of your truths are based on your experiences. What is true for you?

I have wanted to share my stories for many years, but I was worried about what people would think of me. But when I open myself to my truth, I understand I am not alone. There are so many ancient traditions holding universal truths; in fact, many cultures carved these stories onto cave walls so future generations would remember them. If you could carve your truths on a wall, what would they look like? What have you experienced that you are afraid to talk about? It can be scary to go against the way you are programmed and to act or behave in a certain way. But I believe we are so much more similar than we are different, and we are all seeking happiness, contentment, love, grace, and ease.... What are you hiding behind that is keeping you from your light—your truth?

I don’t want to tell you what to do, but I do want to show you how I have found my way through my stories and experiences so you can gleam some knowledge for your life’s journey. I want to help you step into your becoming and truth and to be your coach and mentor throughout this process. I want to serve you in this way because I believe that to be wounded is to be experienced and to be experienced is to be a great healer! If you change your perception about your experiences and see them as just simply experiences, you might be able to see them as intended life lessons and serve as a master of them who can teach and help others.

Are you ready to teach your mastery? Are you a Master of Divorce? A Master of Job Loss? A Master of the Paranormal? Please share with me all you have learned, and stop being afraid that you have done something wrong or are out-of-sync with the norm! Teach the world your skills! I can almost guarantee you that if you were to teach what you perceived as a wound, you would master that subject! Let’s heal this planet together by not being afraid to step out with our stories because they are our truth and our tools for growth, learning, and teaching for others.

Are you ready to step out of your box? To expand your comfort zone? Are you ready to be exposed to things you may not understand or that are different than your current belief systems? Are you ready to heal your grief of your loss? Are you ready to expand your mind, walk between the realms, and discover your inner truth that may have been eluding you for years? If you have answered Yes to any of these questions and promise to keep an open mind, then let’s begin this journey together!

I sincerely hope that by being open in these pages about my truths and experiences, I will inspire you to be true to you! I encourage you to seek the truth, trust in God, believe in yourself and love unconditionally.

Many blessings and much aloha!

Mahalo,

Nicole Gabriel

CHAPTER 1

IDENTIFYING THE

Catalyst of Change

"Let him that would move the world

first move himself."

— Socrates

Suppose we were smart enough to set up either obstacles to overcome or lessons to break through for our soul’s growth in this life’s incarnation. Suppose again that we are masters and creatively designed these challenges (catalysts) well before we came here. We designed the scenarios and all the key players with great thought as to how we would be challenged to respond. Maybe we even picked the timing of these great events and the exact sequences to occur. And maybe if we end up not walking the plan we set in place, we have little reminders pop in that say, Hey, you’re on the wrong path, or Try this one out. But until you go through many of these challenges and roadblocks, you may be unaware that the results they cause could possibly inflict so much pain...or cause so much growth. They continue to come, and you continue to find ways through them.

Your mind, body, spirit, and soul are going to be challenged to evoke great change. So, if you ask yourself, In what ways have I not been the same since...? you will likely find that juicy gift you can thank yourself for later...after you muddle through it. Or maybe you can shift your mind so you can view these catalysts or agents of change as simply experiences needed for your growth. This perspective does take a bit of the pressure off.

AWARENESS

When a loved one dies, the light of the angels fills my awareness. The light only becomes so bright when someone who has touched my soul deeply is passing over. The first time I saw the light of the angels, I was unaware that it would mean someone close to me would be carried over to the other side. The feeling is a bit unsettling—knowing that someone you love is leaving. But the angels do provide some comfort. As much as I have studied death over the last decade, I still cannot find complete peace with it. I know death means that someone I love is leaving and it will be some time before we come together in the physical again. I immediately try to feel whether I can determine who it is before the phone call comes. I know it is someone who has touched me and I have touched him or her. Several days may go by before I know who has passed away, making me think that maybe I have misread the message. Recently, I was out for a run when an email came through on my smartphone telling me that my ex mother-in-law had been carried away. I was touched that my divorce didn’t affect our connection, and I was thankful for the unbiased love. I cried the rest of my run home despite not having seen her in years, and I knew the angels had brought her comfort. I cried in happiness, knowing that her love (Joe) waited for her on the other side. I’d never met Joe, but I’d had many conversations with him in spirit. I went home, and with tears in my eyes, during my daily meditation, I prayed that her spirit be released fully to the hands of the angels.

COPING WITH DEATH

Death was never a subject that caught my interest in any way; nor was it a subject I was very familiar with prior to the experiences I’m about to explain, but death would be the largest catalyst of change to spur me on into a whole new way of being. In 2006, the death of my dog, Tia Maria, the one thing that meant the most in the whole world to me, would cause a severe jerk out of my old ways and cause me to reevaluate everything in my life. I would later learn that, in the shamanic traditions, death is known to be one of life’s greatest events that can cause a great shift to occur.

Before we go further, I want you to take a moment and think back to events in your life where you can say without a doubt I haven’t been the same since.... If you have studied shamanism, you will know that time of change is where something called a soul wound likely exists. A soul wound is a wound so deep it stays with you (in your soul’s blueprint) until you heal it. I’ll explain this a bit more in Chapter 2.

For me, the moment Tia died, my life changed forever. At this time, it was hard for me to understand why people couldn’t understand my loss the way I did—I was deeply wounded and shocked. I would later understand this was a programmed awakening that I must have previously put in place for this time in my life. Tia was only seven years old and passed away just ten days after she was tested for kidney failure. The day she died, our home was very silent and all the other animals were curled together on the floor in the family room, respecting a kind of mysterious death space created on the other side of the back door leading to the small maple tree under which she was breathing heavily in the backyard. I took notice of the other dogs and knew Tia was likely to pass that morning, but my heart wasn’t ready for her passing, and I grew confused when I approached her. I didn’t know what to do. She had been on subcutaneous fluids, so my instant reaction was that she needed another dose. As I proceeded to inject her back and squeeze the IV fluid in, I could see very quickly it was not going to help her and that I was invading the space the other animals so instinctively respected, but I didn’t know what else to do. In the place of not knowing, I became panicked and confused.

Have you ever experienced death? How did you handle it? How did you prepare for it? How did you walk through it? I had never before been so intimate with death, but now here it was in my face, and it felt like everything I did was a matter of life or death for Tia. I was losing my daughter (not my dog), and I was panicking in trying to figure out how I could save her. I was not prepared for kidney dysfunction to develop so quickly into death. I didn’t understand that she wouldn’t be with me forever. Despite all my best logical efforts to save her life, there was nothing I could do.

At this time in my life, I didn’t believe in God or prayer. I didn’t even know there was someone outside of myself or the veterinarian who could help her. I was angry that the veterinarian didn’t better prepare me for this moment and tell me what was to come. I was angry that my husband had left me to figure out what to do while he went off to work that morning, and I was just plain confused. The sun was very hot that sunny June day, and as it began to grow warmer, Tia’s breathing became more labored. I was so panicked and unable to handle it myself. I called my dad, and he took off work to drive all the way over to be with us. He told me that I could take her to his vet, and she would be put to sleep in the back of the car in her bed. I couldn’t even come to grips with the idea that she was leaving, let alone that I would make that choice for her. While I awaited his arrival, I couldn’t help but reflect back on my whole life and my time with her. As she faded in and out, I moved from one experience to another.

I would recall how she came into my life—a bit of a mystery really. I had contacted a woman breeder who appeared on the birth certificate of my other dog, Mai Tai. The breeder had acquired Tia as a pup in a trade (often done by breeders). The breeder had been moving and needed to find Tia a home. Now as Tia labored under the maple tree, I began to think of the day Mai Tai and I took that four-hour drive across Michigan to pick her up. When we arrived, dust was in the air from the dirt road under my little BMW convertible and a whole pack of dogs of various breeds greeted us. A woman yelled from a