Suzanne Ragan Lentz

December 16, 2012
by suzanne
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Broken Open

There are experiences that happen or situations lived through that have broken my being open and left me to stitch myself back together again. It could have been an emotional, spiritual, or physical break and it seems more and more that these are the essence of the human experience.

I am in the midst of stitching myself together now (from voluntary and involuntary experiences). This past summer I enrolled in Marie Forleo’s Rich, Hot and Happy B-School. Surrounded by the most amazingly supportive sorority in the world, it sounded like just the thing to jump-start my web presence and therefore increase clientele. And, whereas, I now have a lovely website (I do love it) – I have less clients now then when I started because I fell into the trap of overwhelm.

That which I completed of the course was amazing. But at the same time I added Sundays to my client schedule so that I was working my day job, completing B-School assignments, seeing energy work clients, or participating in an energy intuitive mentoring program pretty much every day of the week and, frankly, burned myself out utterly and completely. Four months later, I am still digging myself out; stitching myself together so that I can be of value to myself and others.

In the midst of this after four years of trying to conceive, I have realized that pregnancy is most likely just not in the cards this time around. This devastated me to the core of my being– the kind of devastation that includes “What is the point of living?”. Wherein those years of trying still held promise – this shift of perception tried to pull an iron curtain around my heart. It has been hard. But, thankfully, Return to Love by Marianne Williamson has been my book of choice this last few weeks as she has renewed my faith in looking for miracles. One miracle that happened just this past week was reading an article in The New Republic that bluntly speaks of the risks associated with having biological children at an older age. Aging and DNA damage is real. And somehow this quelled the emotional storm within hence it’s miracle status.

So we are moving on to other promises and hopes and dreams in this life. Last week this meant that I was in a copywriting retreat to re-establish my ground so I can help other women achieve their goals of conception and birthing healthy babies — most specifically by getting this blogging back on track.

What ways have you stitched yourself back together after overwhelm?

July 3, 2012
by suzanne
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Independence and gratitude

We attended the most beautiful wedding this past weekend in the California wine country and were gifted this amazing place to rest out head at night… a bed on a porch overlooking a pond under an old oak tree surrounded by vineyards. P awoke the first morning to a yearling buck walking past. And the sound of frogs and laughing friends lulled us to sleep at night.

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June 19, 2012
by suzanne
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When Irish Eyes Are Smiling

Recently, I was asked to expound upon the topic of “Why cancer has affected my dad’s side of the family described from an emotion perspective?” This came after I mentioned the following in response to the question “Have you noticed a common theme of a particular health problem in your family line? If so, explain your findings.” on the first quarter anatomy/physiology exam for my energy intuitive mentorship:

“My father’s mother’s side… my grandmother died of uterine cancer, her sister had skin cancer when young and died of complications to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in her 80s, their brother died of stomach cancer, their father lung or stomach cancer. They are Irish from immigrant families.”

Taking the idea that each of us is biochemically different due to our emotions and daily stresses, could it be that genetic mutations that are the underpinning of cancer could be caused by our emotional landscape?

Let’s say that it started with my great great grandfather and the emotional pain he experienced having to leave his homeland in order to find work and be able to feed and cloth himself. He could have left his love, his siblings, parents, all for promises of a new life, a better life. But America was not Ireland. America was dirty and labor hard and the air was nowhere as sweet as home. And his grief embedded itself in his body, in his cells. His grief blocked the flow of energy in his body and cells began to mutate.

My grandmother, Mag, it is said was afraid of doctors and because of this did not have surgery for what was to be known as uterine cancer until it was too late. But when she found out the end of this life was coming, she planned her great trip to Ireland. She had always been active in the Irish community in Baltimore, Maryland; even leading the St. Patrick’s Day parade with green hair (in the 1960s!). When she found out she was not long for this world, she went back to her homeland to touch the ground and breath the air – to know what her ancestors spoke of first hand.

When I moved to California in 1997, my grandmother’s sister, Aunt Cas, started writing me letters as she had lived in Colorado since 1958 moving there from the East Coast. We corresponded for almost a decade before I actually saw her for the second time (the first being on the East Coast when I was 12 or 13 or 14) after she had gone into remission for Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She was a spitfire; so spunky still even after the clinical trial put her disease into remission. And I brought photographs and she told me stories and passed down family recipes from her grandmother and said that my grandmother/her sister was there with us.

My third visit to Aunt Cas was not as jolly for she was in hospice, dying. I had found out that the cancer had returned and I had to see her before her passing. So I caught a flight and took a gift to her, one that I had gathered on my journey to Ireland; a trip she would be unable to take now. We had the most lovely visit as her mind was still clear as a bell even as her body betrayed her. And towards the end I gave her my gift; a gift of Irish soil in an Irish linen handkerchief tied with thread for it is said that an Irishman/woman must be buried with the soil of their homeland. Tears fell from her eyes as she grasped my hands as tears fall from my eyes recounting this story now. My dear Aunt Cas was cremated with that gift and for me, she lives on within the soil of Ireland.

June 5, 2012
by suzanne
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I come by this gift naturally

Just after I turned 11 years old, I dreamed that my maternal grandfather died the night he died. My dad woke me up the next morning to tell me what had occurred. But I already knew. His story was the same as my dream. And I felt discombobulated by Pop Kasin’s foretold death.

I find this fact interesting in the telling of my story because of a story my mom told me not too long ago when I first started seeing energy work clients.

She had packed a picnic with some friends as a girl of 6, 7, or 8 years old and they went to a nearby park that was boarder by a wooded area. She and her friends had put down a blanket and unpacked their picnic. My mother was facing the wooded area. A young man walked toward them and then into the woods where he turned to face them, unzipped his trousers and exposed himself to my mom and her friends. My mom stuffed her sandwich in her mouth and got up and ran away to see that her dad had just pulled up as he had a “feeling” that something bad was happening.

Her telling of this story was a great gift in that it gave me comfort, created a bond I thought had long disappeared, and made me feel not so alone within the confines of a sometimes still practicing Catholic extended family. I felt less in the ausländer role to which I’d grown accustomed.

My paternal grandfather dreamed numbers… lottery, horses, you name it. Dreams foretell the future. And my paternal grandmother died the year before my birth with my mom’s due date being the date of her death. Mag, as she was known, has always been with me from the moment of conception… watching, listening, loving, teaching. But even with her presence the knowledge of death coming has always been unsettling to me and is the reason I asked the premonitions to stop when I was 14 or 15 having just been seen the death of my beloved godmother. I did not know how to cope with the knowledge nor did I feel as though I had any one in which to confide.

In stepping into my calling as a seer of things, a channeler of energy, a grounding force, my psyche butts up against these bit of information I don’t want to have and invokes fear. And I keep trying to release the past, release the knowledge of the nasty bits but apparently that knowledge is a part of this path too.