the pull

My entire life I loved cutting images.

When I was younger I played with Barbies. My sisters and I each had one. My mom wasn't a big fan of toys so we had no clothes or furniture to play with. What we lacked in toys we made up for in imagination. We had an empty attic with empty closets and shelves so we would cut out furniture from the daily newspaper and turn the empty shelves into luxurious apartments with different floors.

When I was a teenager, I fell in love with magazines. I had this yellow school folder bursting with cut images of people, places and things that inspired me. I remember taking the folder to the gym and going through it while I rode the bike. One image I will always remember was of Justine Bateman in her cut out jeans and white t-shirt. It became my got-to uniform during those high school days..

I was also the kind of teenager who, instead of hanging up posters of the latest cute star or singer on the walls, would hang up the Guess ads. Do you remember those from the 90s? They were these voluptuous, beautiful women - images I aspired to that reminded me that beauty wasn't only for the stick thin.

My magazine obsession grew into my twenties. During these years I used cut images to create a journal of what I wanted my future to look like. I cut and pasted images of beautiful homes, a loving relationship, children, more women in fashion and eventually what I wanted for my wedding. The images continued to inspire me and as the years passed I read less of the articles and cut out more of the images.

In my thirties my vision board obsession started. The vision journals became vision boards that hung in my room. I hosted vision board parties and shared my love of cut images and manifestation. I still make them til this day.

By the time I hit my forties I began to wonder about my obsession. What was the point of buying all these magazines when I didn't read the articles anymore? Pinterest and blogs took over my visual fascination but I still felt compelled to subscribe to and buy magazines. As much as I tried to stop myself from accumulating magazines, I couldn't.

When I got to the second half of my forties I discovered SoulCollage®.

SoulCollage® is an intuitive collage process where you create a deck of collaged cards, each card representing an aspect of yourself. It was created by Seena Frost back in the early 2000's.

I tell you that in my wildest imagination, I could never have imagined that my magazine and cutting images obsession would have ever turned out to be so beautifully encompassed in this practice. Not only do I get to play with cut images, but SoulCollage® also holds within it's energy self-healing, spirituality and psychology - ALL THESE OTHER THINGS THAT I LOVE!!

As a SoulCollage® Facilitator I get to curate images for my workshop participants to use in their process.

I get to make money cutting images and making collages! I can't even say, "This is a dream come true" because, like I mentioned earlier, I couldn't even imagine this.

I call this a RED THREAD. The Red Thread pulls us. It tugs at us saying, "Come this way."

That is our intuition.

Our intuition is moving us toward something and we may never know what that something is.

We just need to trust the pull.

Can you think of a Red Thread that you have followed your whole life?

Once you recognize, acknowledge and accept your Red Threads, it will be easier for your children to follow theirs.

Just remember that we don't even need to know what our Red Threads are, we just need to trust that we are being pulled toward the people, places and things that are meant to be ours. All we need to do is follow it.

With Love,

Maria