"Let the sunshine in"
Summer Renewal and the “ABCs” of Spiritual Healing Part 1 by Susan Apollon

As the Earth renews itself, we long to do the same on a deep, soul level. Intuitive psychologist Susan Apollon explains how to sweep away old spiritual habits that are holding us back and replace them with healthy, joyful new ones.

Spring has come, summer is hot on its heels, and the Earth is bursting with new greenery, bright flowers, and baby animals. And with all the new life and sunshine outside, most of us long for similar renewal inside. Generally, we express that drive in external ways. We “spring clean” our homes with a frenzy. We plant our seeds and tend our gardens. We connect with friends and family through cookouts, pool parties, and June weddings. Intuitive psychologist Susan Apollon says our annual warm weather rituals are metaphors for what we need to be doing spiritually.

“Springtime, especially, but also on into the summer, is the perfect time for rebirth,” says Apollon, author of Touched by the Extraordinary, Book Two: Healing Stories of Love, Loss & Hope. “Most of us are in a mood to clean out clutter, to open up windows both literal and metaphorical and let the sunshine in, to celebrate life’s riches. That’s why this is a good time of year to renew your soul by replacing your old spiritual habits with new ones that lead to healing on every level.

But what, exactly, is spiritual healing? Apollon says it’s about bringing into harmony and balance our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and actions. It’s about becoming whole. Healing takes place when we reclaim our power, wisdom, or spirit, which we often bury during the process of life, and when we reconnect with our soul or Higher Self, as well as with the Universe or God.

On a more practical level, it means learning to live in such a way that you don’t spend all your time fretting about the future, worrying about your kids, or obsessing over health issues. And it means coming to a place where you refuse to settle for a job, a relationship, a lifestyle—a life—that doesn’t fulfill you.

“We are healing spiritually when we accept and align all parts of ourselves in a way that allows us to genuinely feel we are being true to ourselves, or whole, or complete,” Apollon says. “We get to feel an authentic connection with our higher self and lower self, a balance, which also enables us to feel more at peace, as well as more confident about who we are, our worth, and our wisdom. It is knowing that we are so much more powerful than who we always thought we were; it is knowing that we are connected with something much greater than ourselves.”

The Law of Attraction: Pathway to the Life You Want

Spiritual healing happens when we work with the Law of Attraction, which is basically an understanding that like energy attracts like energy. Apollon explains it this way: Given that everything is energy and vibrates, and given the Law of Attraction, wherever we are vibrationally, we attract to us experiences of a similar level of vibration. What we focus on (our thoughts, images) cause us to vibrate at a particular level, as well as create either good or not good feelings. Focusing on thoughts or images that cause us to feel relatively good or better will enable us to be at a higher level energetically and, consequently, will draw to us a higher level of vibrational experience.

In other words, when you worry about your job, your grades, your children, your health—and that is what you do most of the time—your dominant energetic level is quite low. Being in this state causes you to experience events and situations that are of equally low vibrations, such as the loss of your job, poor health, lower grades, and so forth.

“Everything we desire is available to us, if we can just get out of our own way,” asserts Apollon. “We put our own stumbling blocks in our own path, by way of our attachment to our negative or low energy thoughts, images, concerns, unresolved issues, our inability to forgive and release old feelings of anger, judgment, and pain, etc. Suggestions such as lighten up, let go and surrender, detach and move on all represent appropriate ways to energetically shift to a better place.”

The trick, of course, is to become conscious and aware of how we are feeling in order to allow ourselves to do the work of cleaning up (or out) our spiritual closets and bringing in what feels energetically better. This allows us to attract to us wonderful things and experiences that we want—our hopes and dreams—rather than those things and experiences we don’t want.

To do this we need to be really clear about our intentions, says Apollon. We need to decide what it is that we intend to do or make happen in our lives that will make us feel good or better (happy, satisfied, joyful, peaceful). Once we have our intentions in mind, we can give them power and help to create them by giving ourselves permission to really focus on them.

“There are several ways to accomplish this,” says Apollon. “You might choose to write about your dreams once a day in an intention journal. You might create a vision board: a bulletin board on which you place sayings, beautiful pictures from magazines and brochures, anything that energetically excites you and fills you with enthusiasm. Hang this in a place you will gaze at often. Every time you pass this board, look at it and fill with excitement as you imagine living your intention.

“Or just sit for a few moments every day and give yourself permission to envision yourself living your intention,” she suggests. “Create a virtual reality in which you are in a movie experiencing your dream. Allow every part of your being to feel the joy of this experience.”

About the Author: As a psychologist and an author, Susan Apollon empowers and heals the body, mind, and soul; as an educator, she informs; as a speaker, she inspires and touches the heart.

For more than twenty-five years, Susan has been in private practice in Yardley, PA, evaluating and counseling adults, families, and children who are dealing with difficult life situations similar to what she has personally experienced, researched, and written about, including cancer, other health issues, trauma, and grief.

She is an avid researcher of Mind, Consciousness, Intuition, Energy, Prayer, and Healing and brings this expertise to her three published books—Touched by the Extraordinary, Book Two: Healing Stories of Love, Loss & Hope; Touched by the Extraordinary: An Intuitive Psychologist Shares Insights, Lessons, and True Stories of Spirit and Love to Transform and Heal the Soul; and Intuition Is Easy and Fun: The Art and Practice of Developing Your Natural-Born Gift of Intuition (co-authored with Yanni Maniates)—as well as to her audio books, online course, CDs, and MP3s. Susan’s work is scientifically based and enhanced by her ability to trust her own intuitive wisdom.