By Sarah L. Blum
(Permission is given to print this essay free of charge in its entirety, including byline and tagline.)
When I was a little girl about 9 years old, I worked in my Aunt’s Super Market. 
I gave the money earned to my mother and saved out $5.00, which I took to the corner store and filled a box with comic books and candy bars. Then I would ride the Jitney bus to the crippled children’s home in Margate, N.J. and give out the candy bars, and read to the crippled children. I got to know them and the nurses and doctors. When I asked questions about the children’s conditions they would answer me and even started to let me use their library. At age ten I wrote my first paper on Muscular Dystrophy and was always interested in health and healing.
As I write this I am 73 years young and not only still work as an effective psychotherapist, but I go to the gym five days a week and do both a weight and aerobic workout, and I live a vibrant, active, healthy life, which I expect to continue for many years to come. I discovered the African Djembe in 1992 and have been drumming since then. The past nine years I have been part of an African Drum ensemble, drum weekly and play Balaphone, an African Xylophone.
In 2008 I passed my black belt test in Aikido and continue to learn and train twice a week in addition to teaching once a month. In winter I cross country ski at Winthrop, Washington and in the other seasons I like to row on the lake in my Sharrow rowing shell, which is 25 feet long, weighs 28 pounds and is only 10 ½ inches wide.
I live my life in an authentic, accountable and conscious way with passion and joy. Depth of being is very important to me. I did my own therapeutic work in order to be free a restricting beliefs and patterns so that my own soul would guide me always to my highest and best experiences. I listen deeply so that what I say and do comes from that deep pure divine place. I share who I AM in all the therapeutic work I do and with those who are close to me.
Love and loving is very important to me. I experience Divine Love all the time and express and share it as much as I am able. I believe the essence of each soul is Divine and the challenge of human life is to stay tuned in to that divinity and be guided by it. Most people are stuck in their human self, personality or ego self and from there believe they are apart from whatever their idea or perception of the Divine is. Much of my work as a psychotherapist is to help people not only deal with anxiety, fear, depression, relationships, ineffective and destructive patterns of behavior, but with who they are. We are all layered with beliefs and patterns that were learned unconsciously yet we have the power to look at each one and decide if it serves us, and if not to change it. That kind of change is not easy but the outcome is worth the output of time and energy to accomplish it.
Learning who you are and learning to love the depth of who you are, no matter what, is the essence of therapy. In the process people learn who they are not and learn what patterns express their highest and best self and adopt those, rather than behavior and forms of expression that are ineffective. I teach people to be powerful in themselves and their self-expression rather than give away their power to others. I encourage people to live their lives aware, autonomous, active, healthy and joyfully.
I became a writer in 2006 and authored my first book: Women Under Fire: Abuse in the Military in 2013 and I am working on the sequel Women Under Fire: PTSD and Healing and another I am calling: Be Happy Being You: Authentic, Bold and Conscious.
Sarah L. Blum ARNP
Dedicated to inspiring hope and positive change.