I have a wonderful announcement to make! After having such a wonderful experience with September’s Podcast with Claudia and Tony Scimeca, we’ve decided to partner up and publish a one hour interview each month! I find I’m at my best when people ask me questions, and boy do Claudia and Tony ask questions! And really, really good ones. I’m so excited that I manifested such amazing people who are willing and able to help me benefit my Happy Shiny Puppies.  These “interviews” will be free-from, free-for-all, no holds barred conversations, where nothing is off limits. If this second talk is any indication, they’re just going to get better and better. Please feel free to tell me what you think in the comments below. I can’t wait to get your feedback! And of course, as always, if you have any questions of your own, don’t be afraid to submit them below. Yay!

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A glimpse of what we covered in the podcast

• Can life be joyous or do we have to suffer?
• How can we deal with our day to day fears?
• Why do we fear death?
• Can the fears that parents have be passed on to their children?
• Can we change the direction of our life or are we destined to live a certain way forever?
• Does pain and discomfort have to include suffering?
• Why are we born into certain vibrations and do we choose the vibration we are born into?
• Do the younger generations have more or less resistance than the older generations?
• Why do we seem to like our friends more than we like our family?
• Should we give our negative emotions a voice?
• What to do when you are feeling angry

Download the Audio:

Overcoming Fear and Suffering Podcast Audio

Transcript

[Special thanks to Lorraine Alexander, my Happy Shiny Content Manager, for transcribing this interview, as well as all my videos.]

Tony: Hi, welcome everybody, this is Tony from the “Going Home with Tony Show” and we have Claudia here, and the famous, “Citizen of the World….Melody Fletcher” flown in from Germany.  How are your arms by the way from all that flying?

Melody: So tired; so tired. Hehe!

Tony: So Claudia, just tell us a little bit about Melody that we don’t already know.

Claudia:  Ok. Melody Fletcher is an expert in the Law of Attraction, who doesn’t believe that Spirituality or Personal Development have to be so darn serious all the time. She helps people who are tired of not being happy to figure out what they truly want, why they haven’t gotten it so far, and teaches them what they actually need to do to realize their dreams. Her blog, a humorous, no holds barred, no B.S. look at how the Law of Attraction works, and how to actually apply it to real life situations, appeals to an audience of intellectuals, who don’t take life too seriously.

Tony: That leaves me out!

Claudia: (Oh, we’ll include you, because we love you!)….And who appreciate her direct honest approach, as well as her ability to generate rapid life changing results.

Melody is also the author of the fabulous book, Deliberate Receiving: Finally, the Universe Makes Some Freakin’ Sense!  And of course, you can read more about Melody on her website: www.deliberatereceiving.com

Tony: Melody, the last time we spoke, you told us that life is supposed to be joyous, not about suffering. Is that still the same, or have you changed your position?

Melody: Oh yes, I totally lied about that! Life is hard and horrible! No, that’s still very, very much true, and I think I will probably still be teaching that for many years to come – until everybody’s heard it!  Most of us, since we were children, have been taught by those that came before us, natives as I like to call them – they taught us what they had observed, and what they had learned from those that came before them, which is:  You get ahead by working really hard and by sacrificing and comprising. You go to school and you get a good job, you get married, have 2.5 kids, maybe a dog, lots of credit card debt, and then, maybe one day, you’ll be OK.

This model has served us to a degree in some way, but you have to look at the goal of that model and the goal is survival.  But, most of us aren’t really in survival mode anymore.  It’s not about surviving, it’s about thriving.  When you look at thriving and how to create a really happy existence, a passionate existence and an awesome life, then that model really, really breaks down and fails really quickly.  I think this is something that a lot of people are waking up to now, where they are realizing that they followed the “Rules”,they did everything right, they got their degree, they have their credit card debt, the house, got married… but they are NOT happy!  Then, they try to work harder to try to get happy, but you can’t hard work yourself into happiness, that’s not how that works.  A lot of people think when I say this that I mean just get happy, forget about all your toys and your house and your beautiful life that you’ve built up, and just go and live in the mountains somewhere with nothing.  That’s not what I’m talking about.  You can have all the stuff that you’ve acquired, you can have all the stuff that you want, AND you can be happy.   But, suffering isn’t going to get you there.

Tony: You know, it’s funny, when you talk about happiness as survival, I’ve just came back from a one week medical missionary trip to Haiti, with Claudia’s brother; he was the physician by the way.  The most I did was fit people with reading glasses! So now there’s a lot of Haitians bumping into things, hehe.  One of the things that I wanted to study, before I went there, was what the level of happiness is there, because they are people who live on about $1000 of US currency, a year.  I was so phonemically impressed with how happy they were.  They were so genuinely loving, embracing and they laughed a lot.  Everybody was on scooters, we were way out in the rural area, north of Port Au Prince, and everybody’s tooting their horns, waving their arms and high fiving each other, and they really are in survival mode. Women walk around with five gallon pales of water around their head.  You’ll never conserve water, until you have to haul it! There are water haulers all day long.  It was a remarkable, eye opening experience for me.

So, one of things that I want to go over with you this evening Melody Fletcher (Author of Deliberate Receiving: Finally, the Universe Makes Some Freakin’ Sense!) is, how do we live a life of joy, and here’s the big one, fearlessness.  How do we deal with that one common emotion that links all of us together?  Talk to us about fear and how we can scare the bejesus out of ourselves, and how do we take ourselves out of fear.

Melody: First, let’s talk about what fear is.  On an energetic level fear is essentially when energy is flowing, the energy of passion and joy is flowing, and it hits a wall of resistance, something that resists it, something that contradicts it. We talk about limiting beliefs, a limiting belief that contradicts it.  In this work we talk a lot about trust, and trust really fits in here because a lot of people ask me how they can learn to trust the good stuff, how do they learn to trust their life and themselves?  I always tell them you don’t need to learn to trust, you already trust; it’s about what you are trusting in.  Fear comes from trusting in the bad stuff, in the bad scenario.  Again, this is what we were taught.  We were taught to trust the bad stuff because if you trust the bad stuff, then you stay safe.  If you assume that there’s a Saber Tooth Tiger outside your cave, even if there isn’t one, then you’re still safe.  So, better to be afraid all the time; just in case.  Because fear and danger lurks everywhere.

Claudia: Is that the same as, if you expect the worst, then anything else is better?  Is that the kind of philosophy you’re talking about here?

Melody: Yes, exactly!  We are often afraid, just in case, because we’re afraid not to be afraid.  Fear keeps us safe in our weird, twisted belief system.  When you understand energy, and you understand the technology of reality, which is what I teach – for me its technology – then you understand there’s not some entity out there, judging us and deciding what we deserve or don’t deserve; it’s a computer; its technology; its input-output.  When you understand that the Universe is just a mirror and it’s mirroring back to you what you are doing with your energy at all the time, if you are putting fear out there, you are going to manifest things to be afraid of.  Your fear will be proven true to you; it will be proven right to you.

So, how do we overcome that fear?  First, we recognize what fear is.  This isn’t my saying, but I’m going to steal it.  Fear is: False evidence, appearing real. 

If you consider that everything is just a hologram anyway, then we are afraid of our own hologram, the hologram that we are creating. It’s ridiculous!

You can’t tell somebody to stop being afraid, that doesn’t work.  For example, someone is sitting in a dark room and they are imaging all the creatures that could be coming at them.  Telling them to stop being afraid won’t work; they can’t just shut it down like that.

There are a couple of ways to get rid of the fear.  The first one, obviously, is to turn on the light and start dragging the monsters out from under the bed.  Take a look at them and bring them into the light.  This is the work that I do. We actually take a look at those fears; we look at the beliefs.  If you are afraid of something happening, don’t push that fear away and refuse to look at it because that certain something might happen, and decide you are not going to act upon it.  For example, you want to start up your own business, but you are super afraid of doing that because something might go wrong.  I would say to you, take a look at the fear, what could go wrong, and really follow the fear all the way down to its ridiculous conclusion; and it will always be ridiculous, because you are just making shit up at this point!  You’re just telling a story; the worst possible story you can imagine.  If you follow the fear down, you will always find that point where you go, “I’m being utterly ridiculous right now! This is just stupid.”  You will make yourself laugh.

The other way to overcome fear is to do it incrementally, bit by bit.  You don’t jump into a shark invested tank and say, “I refuse to be afraid!” You probably aren’t going to refuse to be afraid, you’re probably going to be terrified.  You don’t need to hit it that head on.  Start with small challenges; look at fears that don’t shut you down; fears that are manageable and start clearing those.  You start pulling those into the light because people always think there’s this big monster in the dark, and it’s just growling and snarling and when you pull it out into the light, it turns out to be a stuffed animal with just a tiny little voice. Then you’ll say, “This is what I was afraid of? Seriously?” It’s never ever any bigger than that.  I have worked with thousands of people, personally, and it’s never been any bigger than that.

Claudia: Here’s a big fear that I think really creates a lot of the smaller fears in people’s lives, in my opinion.  What about the fear of death?

Melody: Well that is a really, really big one, and it’s one that I talk about a lot, because it’s something that bumps up against people, but there’s this huge paradox in the fear of death.  People, first of all, think that if you’re not afraid of death, then you’re going to live your life recklessly.  We always think of the people who go out there and do really extreme things, basically almost try and kill themselves because they are not afraid of death.  The paradox is that the people who are most afraid of death live the least.  Everything shuts them down; everything feels like it’s dangerous.  Even stuff that couldn’t kill you feels like it could kill you because you’ve got all that fear of death, an existential fear going on.

When you no longer fear death, you actually start to really live your life.  It sets you free.  That’s a huge paradox right there, and that’s why it’s a real stupid fear.  It’s also a stupid fear because there is no death.  I understand that this bumps up against people’s belief systems (you don’t have to take my word for it); you have to have experiences in your life, if you open yourself up to them, that prove this to you. I can’t prove it to anybody, but this may resonate with people as they hear it.  There really is no death.  This is a computer game!  It’s an awesome computer game, it’s an important computer game, but it is a computer game.  Let’s not take it quite so seriously, and who we really are, are the players, not the characters in the game.  And when we “Die”, all we are doing is removing our focus from this physical body back into who we really are, which is much, much bigger than that.  We don’t actually go anywhere.

I can tell you, I have had this proven to me, because I communicate with people who have transitioned into the non-physical.  They are not dead, they are around, they frequently come through. And yes the first time it happened to me a few years ago, it freaked me out a little bit, and I already didn’t believe in death. I couldn’t have a strong belief in death in order to attract that experience, but I do understand just telling that to somebody doesn’t provide much comfort.  You have to have experiences that prove that to you.  If you open yourself up to that experience, the people who have transitioned will communicate with you.  If you validate those experiences, you will start to see that and you will be able to gather that truth.

Tony: Told you so! So, all those voices I’ve been hearing are true!Ok Melody Fletcher, let me just throw this at you here.  I’ve been talking to several physicians and I asked them, “Can you will yourself sick?” They all agreed yes, no question about it.  I also asked, “Can you will yourself well from a terminal illness?”  That was a 50/50 split, but they all did agree, to some extent anyway, that a positive attitude is healing.

Melody: I find that so interesting that all of them agreed that you can will yourself sick, but only half of them said you can will yourself well!

Tony: Yes but that shows how we tend to go towards the negative, rather than the positive.

Claudia: It’s the safe way to think about it, when you don’t want to commit yourself!

Tony: It’s about the issues that people havewhen they start getting symptoms for an illness that they believe they have when they actually don’t.  Anyway, I digress.  Probably one of the most relevant issues that parents have is that they fear for their children, so my question here is: Could the negative energy that a parent projects to the Universe, could it actually become a self-fulfilling prophecy for the child?

Melody: Yes and No.  Let me explain that, because I don’t want parents to think that they are putting their children in danger, or it’s their fault if their child gets sick, because a lot of people end up going there and that’s not true. But, your children are not your children by coincidence.  It is possible for somebody who has a lot of fears to attract a child, a soul, who has come in and who is very willing to mirror those fears back to them.

These are phenomenally ambitious and brave souls who come in for the express purpose of mirroring these things back to not just the parents, but to everybody who is involved, including the doctors, the relatives and anybody who hears about it – family, friends, even people who hear about it on television.  People misinterpret the Law of Attraction by saying, “If we create and attract our own reality, if we receive our own reality (in my teachings), then did that little child who has leukemia do something wrong which caused him to have leukemia?”  No, of course not!  Nobody does anything wrong for them to have leukemia, or any other illness; that’s not how it happens.  You are not being punished; it is all a matter of energy.  You pick up the energy from your parents, from your culture, from your surroundings, from your timeline, in utero.  You soak it up like a sponge and your parents are there to pass on to you certain belief systems that you have come to clear or to mirror back.

You have to understand that when somebody has a great deal of fear, in order for that to manifest in their life, there have to be those that are willing to manifest that for them, to mirror that back to them.  If somebody has a victim vibration, there has to be somebody who is willing to play the perpetrator, the victimizer.

Claudia: So, children are born, they are supposed to be born to the parents that they went to because of their vibrational attraction; it’s a match.  Forgive me for my naive way of putting it.  They were joined with their parents because of the vibrational attraction; let’s say it’s one of a mirroring capacity, one where they are mirroring fears.  They are just a fearful person and as they are getting older, they don’t like that quality in themselves and they don’t want that in their life anymore.  Is it possible to make a life change if you are here in this lifetime because of the vibrational pull of fearful parents, and that was your mission in life?  Can you actually change the direction of your life so that it’s not a fear driven life?

Melody: Yes, and that’s true for everybody, but you have to remember that people think about destiny in terms of your life being planned out completely, and you’re destined to meet this person; you’re destined to do this and that.  That’s not how it actually works, because otherwise we wouldn’t have free will whatsoever.  We have free will and this is how it works:  You choose your starting point from the non-physical, the vibrational soup, if you will, that you are born into, and from there you always have the ability to surpass it.  Now, not everybody does and not everybody chooses to, because the journey continues in the non-physical where you are still very much interested in things; you just drop all your resistance when you “Die.”

When you create your avatar in the computer game, you don’t do that randomly; you do that by choice.  You put in what kind of vibrations you’re wanting to come into as a masterful, masterful being; we are all masters, everybody on this planet right now are masters.  This is the highest level of game that we can play.  We have taken this planet from the deepest, darkest depths of darkness and are bringing it all the way to the highest reaches of light.  That’s what we are doing here!

Tony: Why is it then that when we turn on the news, there’s just so much despair, pain and suffering? Is it all just a myth?

Melody: All vibrations are represented and no, pain and suffering isn’t a myth, because we obviously experience it.  It’s open to us – we can come into that but it’s not necessary; suffering isn’t necessary.  Here’s an analogy that shows that pain does not have to equal suffering.

If you wake up tomorrow and every bone and muscle in your body hurts, if you are in a great deal of pain and you don’t understand why, you are going to get very scared and you are going to suffer.  If you run a marathon today and you wake up tomorrow with every bone and muscle in your body hurting, you know why they hurt, it might even feel good to you. You’re thinking, “Yes, I worked out hard yesterday, feel all these sore muscles, I’m proud of myself; I know my muscles are growing.” It’s the same exact sensation, its discomfort, but one creates suffering and one does not.  So for me, understanding and clarity helps us to surpass suffering.

For most of us, particularly the people that I teach, like you said with that beautiful plug you gave me in the beginning about highly intellectual people, these are not people who just take things on faith.  These are the people who dissected their television when they were 12 years old because they wanted to know how it worked; they need to understand how the process works.  Once they do, they get that clarity and the fear diminishes, and then the suffering diminishes.  You do not have to experience discomfort as suffering.

To go back to the question that you asked before, can somebody change their life and surpass it (their starting vibration)?  Of course they can, they always can; that is true for everybody.

Tony: What’s it like when your clients have that “Aha” moment, the light bulb turns on and you see the transformation?

Melody: Oh, it’s awesome! It’s the reason I do this; it’s so much fun!

Tony: I’d like to talk about the thing that you said about brave souls that chose the parents to live their prophecy, whatever it may be.  So, even in dysfunctional families when there could be a dysfunctional parent, there comes a dysfunctional child.  Is it your belief that the child was really brave in choosing a hard life?

Melody: Well, the thing is, they didn’t see it as a hard life from the non-physical, because if you go with the video game analogy (I use it because it fits so well), if you are a really good gamer and at the top of your field, you don’t choose the easy level.  You want lots of monster bosses, lots of obstacles; you want lots of things to overcome because that’s fun.  The challenge is fun.  But how can you ever test your mastery more than to forget that you are a master?

Tony: Wow, it just really puts a different perspective on everything I had; everything is everything.  But the positive concept is that the ones we have labelled as dysfunctional, are really the most brave, and most challenged, and challenging.

Melody: Yes, they are our greatest teachers.  Your children are your teachers, and that is true 100% of the time.  It is often the children that clear patterns that have been in the family for generations.  It is in this time right now that we are seeing more and more of that than we ever have before.  It’s always been true, but now it’s more true than it’s ever been.  I talk to a lot of people who have cleared patterns in their family for generations and they finally break it.  The beautiful thing when that happens is that (I’ve certainly seen this in my own family when I’ve shifted energy), it creates a domino effect in shifting that energy in other members of the family, because we are all connected.  In my family, they found it easier to find that vibration to release that belief or whatever, as I had. Everything that you do is not only for yourself, but also for your family, your culture and the entire planet.  Every belief that you release, you help the planet release as well.

Claudia: I have a question about the people that you work with, those hundreds of people of varying ages, and you’ve done the research in your book, so you’re just brilliant in this.  In all of your experience in the time that you’ve been doing this, do you find that the generation now, the ones say in their 20’s, coming out of college with debt, who are supposed to be something in their life, the ones that have all this pressure that society has put on them, do you find that this generation are maybe more in need of you?  Conversely, are they having a harder time finding this happiness that we are talking about?  And, on the flip side of that, do you think that the generation of Tony and I, and your generation, you are much younger than us, where we had lived for a while first, one may say we have the wisdom of age a little bit under our belt (I’d like to think that anyway), that we are more open and have more understanding of what you are speaking of, and we can slide into that transition more easily?   Does that make the transition easier for our generations than for these young people who are coming into the adult world with mega stress that starts when they are in pre-school (when they are being registered for the top most pre-school), and then they are being put on track for the best college? When you meet them, does that make it difficult to help them to find the happiness as opposed to people who are a little bit older?

Melody: It’s hard to just generalize over generations, because every individual has their own choice and their own path.  But, if I am going to generalize, I would say it’s the complete opposite.  The younger generations are less resistant. Of course they are, because you have to understand the vibration on the globe is rising, rising, rising.  Every generation gets born into a less resistant energy; they pick up less of those beliefs and they pick them up with less intensity.  If you look at the little children now, they just will NOT be trained into conformity.  It is just so beautiful, they question everything, and they rebel.  A lot of kids are coming in with what we like to call Disorders like Autism – kids that you cannot yell at enough to get them to conform.  These are powerful, powerful teachers.

Kids in their teens are beautiful to work with because they get this so quickly.  People in their 20’s are picking it up because they still intuitively know more and they never picked it up to the degree of their parents.  But, having said that, I also work with a lot of people in their 40’s and 50’s who have done everything “right”, who are waking up now and going “Heck, I am not happy, what the hell happened here?  I’m supposed to have it all now, I’m supposed to be getting into an area of my life now where I should be able to take it easier, but nothing is the way that it’s supposed to be.  What is going on? I want some answers!”

This is where it comes down to the individual level as well, because people who are keeping themselves busy, busy, busy as workaholics, they have very little time for self-reflection. For anybody who has a little bit more time, and teenagers have time, people in their 20’s still have time, people who have retired have time, people who may have finally got that promotion where they don’t have to work 18 hours a day anymore, they have time, and that self-reflection is coming in.  Or, a catalyst happens that just shakes everything up.  They thought their marriage was fine, and suddenly their partner asks for a divorce, or there’s an accident, or a death in the family that really shakes them up and it gets them to look at their life.  For example, somebody might have an accident and they’re in the hospital for six weeks, and when they get home nothing is the same because they’ve just spent six weeks, for the first time in their lives, actually having time to reflect and to think.  It causes them to have all kinds of epiphanies.

This stuff is coming out, and it’s coming out fast, people are waking up and I would say that the younger someone is, the less resistance they have.

Tony: Good, that’s reassuring to hear.  Last night we had a couple of friends over for dinner and we started talking about family, and the relationships we have with parents and siblings.  It seemed the consensus was that we are born into these families that we may not choose as friends if we had the choice.  But, by the mere sake of DNA, we are related.  The friendships that we make in our adult life are so genuinely fulfilling, loving and rewarding that we look at our friendships as if they were our family.  How come we can’t be with our family in that loving and intimate way like we can be with our friends?

Melody: You can!

Tony: Tell us how! I’m waiting… I’m taking notes Melody! Hehe!

Melody: What happens is that our family obviously come from the same vibrational soup and beliefs can manifest in vastly different ways.  For example, if you have a sibling, they often have the same exact beliefs that you do, but they might manifest very differently.  They might present very differently or in opposite ways.  For example, you have two sisters that were sexually abused in a household, one might become sexually promiscuous, whilst the other one becomes completely frigid.  That’s a big drastic example, and that can play out in different ways. One person might become very fearful, and if they grew up in a house that was very poor, one might become very frugal about money and very miserly. The other person has no trouble making money but can’t hang onto it; they spend it, spend it, and spend it.  They live pay check to pay check, although they have a huge pay check each month.  So, these things can present in vastly different ways.

The reason that most of us cannot create a better relationship with our families is quite frankly because we don’t want to.  We resent the hell out of them for all of the things that they mirrored back to us so perfectly in our childhood, and we are not willing to let that go so that we can have that relationship.  We don’t have that kind of history with our friends.

Tony: So how do you let it go?

Melody: The short answer is you just do!  You choose to, but that’s the really unsatisfying answer, because until you are ready, until you have practiced letting go to the degree that you trust yourself to be able to do that, you just can’t do it. But you can get to the point where you do just let things go.

Tony: Have you let things go, for example with siblings?

Melody: Oh yes, I’ve let a lot go! With siblings and with pretty much everybody in my family. My relationships with my family have completely morphed over the last 20/30 years.

Tony: Did you ever find yourself not being who you truly were in the mist of certain family members?  You had to be who you thought they wanted you to be?

Melody: Yes, and that’s what actually helped me to clear those issues. I moved out very early, when I was 17 and started working and living on my own.  I left town when I was 19 and I would only come home for the holidays.  It wasn’t because my home life was so terrible or anything, I just had this drive to get out there very early, and to prove myself at the time.  I sort of ran away from home and went out into the world and I’d only come home for the holidays.  After a while I realized that I was really changing out in the world, because different people were coming into my life and I was becoming aware of more things.  I was not doing this work consciously at the time at all, but I was still changing.  Then when I went home, it was like a vibrational check-up. Particularly when I was doing this work more consciously, I really started to notice that in the face of other family members I would revert back to a 16 year old.  So, I’d go off by myself and say to myself “What was that about? Why did you react like that?”  I would dig into it and I would clear it.  I didn’t have the tools that I do now but I managed to do it, most of the time anyway.

One of the first things that I realized I could do was to pretend I was talking to a therapist! I’d just talk out loud and talk my way through it.  I still do that a lot!  If somebody just holds the energy for me, I will still talk my way through it in about 5/10 minutes, and clear it.  Now, I’ll just clear it on my own but if somebody holds the energy for me, it speeds it up.

Having that willingness to look at it instead of just pushing it away helps a lot.  So, when I started doing this consciously, I’d go and visit my family, and see what still triggered me, because nobody triggers you like your family. As I did that and cleared more and more, I noticed the people who had said I was so irresponsible because I didn’t live my life the way that they wanted me to and had been afraid for me, suddenly became my biggest fans and started asking me for advice.  They said that they always knew I was special, and my response was, “No you didn’t, you were my biggest critics!”

I didn’t have to fix the relationship with family members by sitting down with them, I shifted my energy and the issues went away.

Claudia: Even though, as you just said, you didn’t have to deal with the issues directly with them, just by you changing, by fixing your energy, are you saying they mirrored your changes in energy, and their response was totally different and they didn’t stay the same?

Melody: They didn’t stay the same in my presence.  For example, when they were in a horrible mood, they couldn’t get anywhere near me; they could only come around when they were in a better mood.  I’m not saying that they fundamentally changed, some people did, some people didn’t, but they changed around me.

Here’s a story that happened a couple of years ago that illustrates this.  I’m quite vibrationally stable, I have been for a number of years now, and one day I was visiting family and we’re sitting ready to have breakfast, and sitting with us is a family member, an older gentleman who has a lot of anger. He started becoming very angry about something that had happened, and he started taking it out on his wife who was sitting with us.  I thought, well I’m not going to watch this; this is not an energy that I want to partake in.  So, I very consciously poked him and I said something that got him to direct his anger straight at me.  I opened myself up and let the anger just flow through me and in about 10 seconds it was done but he was open to that.  He calmed right done and we had a very pleasant breakfast after that.

He had no idea what had just happened, but I did.  There was another family member sitting next to me, who knows and understands what I do, she looked at me and said, “What did you just do?”, because she knows him much better than I do. I said, “I’m not going to sit here and have this horrible breakfast; that’s not my style! I just don’t enjoy that.”  I was either going to leave (and I was very willing to leave), or I was going to change the dynamic. So I changed the dynamic.  It was because I did not resist his anger, I didn’t take it personally, it didn’t do anything to me, I didn’t hang on to it, it didn’t trigger me in any way, I didn’t fight back, I actually felt it go through me; it was a massive wave of anger, and then he was done.

Tony: What a great nugget of advice for the holidays because so many people have to travel home for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s.  That is probably, or can be, one of the most stressful times, typically for people who don’t live with their family, but for some reason they are guilted into going (nothing says the holidays like family), but they can’t wait to get the hell out of there.

Clauida: Right! They are already planning their trip back home.

Melody: The thing that you always want to remember, particularly as you are going into the holidays, is that you are not responsible for their behavior.  You did not manifest their behavior; you didn’t turn your uncle into an A-hole.  Your reaction is your responsibility.  You can’t just sit there and say, “Oh, well he’s angry and he’s an angry person and he needs to level up and he’ll figure it out.”  Or sit there and say, “OMG! I can’t believe he just said that to me! What an A-hole, this is horrible!”  If you let all that come up, that’s your shit.  Your reaction is your shit, and that is what you want to take a look at.  People think that they have to change the other person so that they can feel better, and that never ever works!  Nobody wants to be changed.  Take a look at yourself and let it go. Then, not only will you no longer be influenced by somebody’s behavior, but the chances are very good that their behavior may actually change in your presence.

Tony: I think there’s a lot of intimacy and anger, especially when you are in a family situation, Thanksgiving for example.  One of the greatest Thanksgiving disasters was Al Pacino in “Scent of a Woman” when he and Chris O’Donnell went to Al Pacino’s brother’s house for dinner on Thanksgiving, it was a total train wreck!  But there’s that certain intimacy that goes on when somebody invites you into the mosh pit for some mano-a-mano, and then, as in your situation, you just let it go through you; you didn’t take the bait.

Melody: No, because here’s the thing that you want to remember: everybody wants to be who they really are! They need to be given permission.  When you start to really get this and observe it, (I’m a really big observer of people and of energy, and I so enjoy it), what’s really interesting is when a member of your family lashes out or does so in passive aggressive ways, and it gets everybody’s goat up and gets everybody tense, the second before they lashed out, I promise you, they felt attacked by something.  It might not be anything that anybody else can see as an attack, but they did feel attacked by something, and now they’re defending themselves.  Other people might question why they felt attacked by that, because nobody meant it like that, but that’s other people’s perspective, and the person who felt attacked has their own perspective.

If they are coming from a victim mentality, which many people are, they are going to feel attacked by the most innate things.  When they need to defend themselves, they lash out because they are trying to say, “I’m ok, right? I’m not as bad as you are!  You are worse than me! Hahaha.”

It drives everybody crazy when people do it and everybody’s got a family member like that, but all they are really doing (it’s really quite sad), is defending themselves because they feel attacked all the time.  The beautiful thing is that when you become really authentic and stable, then around you (I’ve certainly seen it with people in my family), they then show you their authentic selves.  And that’s always beautiful.

Tony: You make it sound so damn easy, what are you doing on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s for the rest of your life!!

Melody: I’m leaving the country!!

Claudia:  To let you know, at this point, that Melody will be doing further talks with us on the second Thursday of each month and I will be interviewing Tony on Thursday November 19th about his recent trip to Haiti.  Further details can be found on: www.goinghomewithtony.com

Tony: Ok Melody Fletcher, how do you take yourself out of “breakdown” when you know you are not living your philosophy?

Melody: I’m not sure that I’m not ever not living my philosophy because my philosophy applies to everything.

Tony: When was the last time that you were pissed off and you just couldn’t get it together?

Melody: Just because I’m pissed off doesn’t mean that I’m not living the philosophy, so to speak.

Claudia: That’s true!

Melody: It includes the negative emotions and I’m actually a big supporter of negative emotions.  It’s part of what I teach and I think it’s something we shouldn’t avoid; we should allow them.  Obviously, I’m not always a happy shiny puppy, I have my moments when resistance comes up, and particularly when I level up (I think I said this in the last podcast), that when I level up, the difference between where I am and where I’m going can become so great that I experience quite a bit of negative emotion.

What’s different is that I have the understanding and the clarity that helps to surpass suffering, so I know what’s going on.  I don’t become despondent about it or afraid of it.  I have the negative emotion, and I have it fully, but I understand what’s going on, meaning I can be happily angry, or excited about being frustrated.

Claudia: That’s like Oxymorons!

Melody:  Exactly! I have that detachment; I say, “Ok, so I’m angry.” So I just allow myself to be angry; this is nothing to be afraid of.  Nothing has gone wrong.  Obviously, something is coming up to be released and that’s a good thing.  I want things to be released.

You always have a vibrational range and there’s always going to be something at the bottom of that range that wants to be released.  If you are going up in a hot-air balloon, there’s always going to be one sack of sand that’s at the bottom, the heaviest one.  You want to get rid of that to climb higher.

I have to say that over the last few years, I really haven’t had any moments where I went into disbelief, and I would have to go into complete disbelief, thinking that this isn’t real, or I’d have to go into real despondence.  I’ve had too many experiences now to go really into that.  So, I might bitch and complain, but I know I’m bitching and complaining.  I might get angry, but I know I’m getting angry and I know that I’m just releasing something.  That makes it a lot easier; it does make it a lot, lot easier.

I think that’s a really big important point. People should not run away from their negative emotions or their fears, because it makes them feel like they are failing and say, “Oh, I should be at the point by now, where I don’t have any negative emotion, because I’ve done all this work.  I must be failing.”  You are always going to have negative emotion, but it doesn’t have to be full of suffering.  That’s a completely different thing.

Claudia: I think that’s really important for people who are listening to understand, because what we are talking about together here, is about trying to manifest your own happiness and a good life for yourself.  That message can imply that you need to get rid of the negative crap in your life and that’s not possible.  I think the biggest lesson is to learn how to deal with the negative stuff that happens in your life, not to avoid it.  One of the things that you said earlier when we were talking about fear was to learn how to use fear to find the joy in life, which is an important thing.  Some of these negative things can actually lead you onto a trail of finding something really good out of it.

Melody: Yes, absolutely!  I don’t even look at the word negative in the same way anymore.  I look at the word negative in the same way that we look at a negative number. A minus one is not worse than a plus one.  It’s not a value judgement; it’s a connotation. These negative experiences don’t have to be devastating; they don’t have to be bad. “Negative emotions” are simply messengers telling you that you are focusing on an outcome that you don’t want to focus on.  You are telling yourself a fictitious story about the future, and it’s always a fictitious story, because you don’t know what’s going to happen. You are telling yourself a fictitious story that doesn’t feel good!  Tell a better damn story!

Tony: You know it’s funny, when you were speaking earlier about dollars to doughnuts, that when a person lashes out, right before that, the person felt that they were being attacked and no-one else in the room noticed it but for that person who felt they were being threatened.  When I was going through my practice marriage I quite often felt that I was being attacked, but I didn’t lash out. Instead I got really, really small, like I was invisible.  My feeling was if you can’t see me, you can’t hurt me.  It finally got to the point where it was intolerable and I had to get divorced.  So, good, bad, whatever, I met Claudia and I don’t feel that way anymore, but I didn’t deal with it. It’s like one of those things if you continually resist it, it’s going to persist. I even see today, just in my general work a day life that when I’m feeling I’m being attacked, I still get very small.  I don’t want to attack back but yet; I don’t like being attacked.

Melody: In that instance I would advise you to go off by yourself and then pretend that the person is standing in front of you and then say everything that you want to say.  That’s called a constructive anger release instead of a destructive anger release, which would be you ripping their face off.  It’s never about what they need to hear, it’s always about what you need to say.  You have to allow yourself to express what it is you are really feeling and say what it is you really what to say, for example saying, “F-you, you don’t get to talk to me like that…”  When are by yourself you can say whatever you want.  You can imagine beating them into the ground, flinging them across the city and giving yourself superpowers. It doesn’t matter; it’s about you stepping into your power, and as you do that there’s always a lot of clarity in an anger release.  You may even get to the bottom of it and see, hey, this is what this is really about.

I think movies do this so well sometimes, where you will see a character get really angry and some older gentleman will come up to a younger man and he’ll start teaching him how to box.  As he’s boxing and punching the bag he gets really mad, he’ll suddenly say, “I hate my father! Oh God, where the hell did that come from?”

Stuff comes out of you because it’s never about the person who triggered you, your boss or your colleague, or whoever.  It’s always about something deeper where you are feeling powerless in that moment.  You have to give voice to that part of yourself because that’s the part of you that’s feeling small, but also the part of you that’s suffering.  You have to let that speak and say what it is that you want to say.  “I honor you; I feel that you are important; I see you; I hear you.” If you don’t then you are not seeing yourself.

Tony: Yes, wiser words, seldom spoken!  You are such an old kindred spirit, Melody; you just have the wisdom of world.

Claudia: You are like the Guru at the top of the mountain that people climb the mountain to see!

Melody: Watch it with the “old” Tony; watch it with the “old”. Hehe!

Tony: You’re ok, Melody because there’s no such thing as death, so you’re covered!

Melody: And there’s no such thing as age. Hehe!

Tony: I’m looking at your picture right now, and you are doing good girl. Hehe!  Well, this has been a great hour Melody and for me to say that you are our favorite guest, that would be like a parent saying to one of their children, they are their favorite child, but we do love talking with you.   After an hour with you, I just feel that there’s so much more that I’m able to be, without the suffering that I’ve been used to.  That’s a gift that you give everybody Melody.

Claudia : I think our listeners will benefit from that and please before we leave, tell our listeners where and how they can get a hold of you and tell them a little bit about what you do in your work with clients because once they’ve listened to you, I know they will be interested.

Melody: They can find me at deliberatereceiving.com. I have a blog with over 500 full length articles, these are not tiny blog posts, they are around 2000/3000 words articles. I have a bunch of videos on You Tube that link through to there, that are on the blog as well.  They teach you all about the technology of reality.  I also have a book out, Deliberate Receiving: Finally, the Universe Makes Some Freakin’ Sense!, which you can get on Amazon, or places where books are sold.

I would advertise my coaching practice but I have to tell you that I have a waiting list, it’s very difficult to get on the phone with me, and so I don’t advertise that anymore.

Claudia : I don’t find that hard to believe!

Melody: But, I am in the process of creating an online product because I really don’t like the fact that there’s people waiting to talk to me who are never going to get on the phone with me. I want to be able to serve more people and the book was a way to do that, and this online product will take it to the next level.

I can say the temporary name; I don’t know if this is going to be the name of it, I’m calling it “The Happy Shiny Puppy Bootcamp.”  Everything’s a Bootcamp these days, right?  That will be an online program where people can really get group coaching calls with me so that you can have some access to me, even if you can’t get on the phone with me directly.

I’m really doing a lot to expand the business next year, so that I can serve more people, including bringing in other coaches to help give people that 1 on 1 experience and doing a lot more training of coaches with my techniques.  There’s a lot, a lot coming that I’m really excited about.

Tony: That sound really exciting! Melody Fletcher for President!

Melody: There’s a lot of free information that I’ve published and you can really glean a great deal from that or if you want the whole system in one place, just go get the book.  I don’t make a lot of money from the book but I do think it’s excellent.  I’m just smarmy, I channelled the book, I wrote it in a month, I don’t take credit for it for its brilliance but I am very proud of it.

Claudia : From a totally unbiased opinion, it is totally brilliant, it’s a fabulous book, easy to read and people who are listening to Melody talk now, her book is written exactly how she talks!  It’s like you are sitting with her!

Thank you Melody, it was a joy and remember listeners, Melody is going to be with us the second Thursday of December as well, and we will get more value from that hour, and November 19th I will be talking with Tony about Haiti.

Tony: Have a happy Thanksgiving and take Melody Fletcher’s advice, and I’m potentially going to invite all the family members I don’t want to be with and I’m going to try it out. Hehehe!

Thank you Melody. Bye, bye.

Melody: Thank you guys, it was an absolute pleasure. Bye.