In this feature MysticMag hears from Shirley Riga. Shirley has devoted her life to energy healing, psychic readings and mediumship along with her continued self-care and mastery of self-acceptance. Read on for insights to living the fulfilling life you wish to lead, overcoming obstacles and seeking soul purpose.
When did your passion for helping others begin and what inspired you to guide people in their life challenges?
I lived my life below the radar for years, married my high school sweetheart and had a daughter. I blended in because fear controlled me. I grew up in an alcoholic, tyrannical home. It wasn’t until my second daughter, born with two pediatric liver diseases, that I woke up to differences. Her liver diseases forced me to become her advocate, figure out what I needed to survive this life-long journey and feel my emotions long buried. I started therapy, discovered I had been sexually abused in my childhood, unbeknownst to me. I met others suffering with their sick children. I had to break open to face my challenges. After my daughter stabilized after 7 years of intense hospitalizations and medical management, I started a support group to support other parents and caregivers of chronically-ill and special needs children. A passion for helping was born, and this passion helped me rise above my personal challenges and gave me strength to continue.
What services do you offer?
It’s been 40 years since the onset of my daughter’s chronic illness. She lived until she was 32 years old before she made her transition. In that time, I grew into a strong, capable healer. I am a Spiritual Director who uses my abilities as a psychic medium to help guide me with inner wisdom and intuition. My Reiki skills legitimize me in public. Other healing modalities I use and have used include sound healing, pranic healing, and Psychosynthesis. I do healing work in hospice settings, in Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway workshops, and with private clients. I am an author, speaker, facilitator, and trance healer.
In your experience in working with people, what would you say is the number one thing that holds most people back from living the fulfilling life they would like to live?
Inner fear plays a major role in holding everyone back from their potential. We buy into scenarios played over and over in our imaginations that become a false reality to our inner critic. Uncovering our inner dialogue brings awareness to the stories we tell ourselves. Awareness is truly the key to our inner freedom for this voice keeps us in our smallness. Educating our minds that we do have a right to be important, be creative, be intelligent, be counted as a person with a right to be happy is also a key step. The first step, however, is awareness that we want more, we deserve more, and it’s available just by becoming aware. Finding someone who believes in you and helps with this first step is a way of granting ourselves our right to be happy.
Do you have any words of wisdom to share with our readers in overcoming obstacles in their lives?
I’m well into my 60’s at this point, and am finally realizing change will always happen, obstacles will always pop up, and life is about learning. As I’ve aged, I’ve witnessed patterns in my behavior that work out well, help me learn and grow, or I’ve witnessed patterns in my behavior that end up hurting me and others. I became my own advocate and trended towards the patterns that help me grow. This discovery helped me realize I really am my own advocate. What story or falsehood I feed myself becomes an inner doctrine. I started changing my inner talk and the rest followed. Life is like a slow-moving waterwheel. It takes time to make change happen, patience for the wheel to come around again, and it’s worth the effort because once the inner behavior changes, the outer world reframes itself.
Lastly, if someone was seeking their soul purpose, what advice do you have for them?
My most important piece of advice for finding one’s soul purpose is to set aside 5-10 minutes a day to be in silence, spend that time listening to inner thoughts, emotions and experience a self-reflecting time. There are no rules to this practice except patience and gentleness. How else can we really hear our soul? Sitting in silence is challenging, especially when the ego has been in charge for years. Energy work helps in getting in touch with the concept that our soul is there, beyond our emotional and intellectual energy bodies. Our soul has been with us since birth. Listen to it with respect and patience because our souls communicate with us all the time. We just don’t hear it because of busy lifestyles and our inability to make the choice to listen.
