Happiness Breadcrumbs: My Breadcrumb Journey and the Role of Self-Awareness

It’s been my great privilege to accompany many people on their journey of self-discovery over the years. I started out doing so as a clairvoyant medium, then as an energy worker. Now I’m returning to mediumship, clairvoyance and channeling in an expanded capacity that the understanding and application of grounded and balanced energy now supports. It guided me through all of the usual growing pains that, used as learning opportunities, led me deeper into the understanding of the energetic nature of human consciousness and how it unfolds within the human body and psyche. Like the majority of the population who’ve lived a life rich in experience, I've had issues with health, loss, wonderful (and wonky) relationships - well, just life really. These are the rites of passage that our personalities go through as a way of hopefully maturing into emotionally intelligent and compassionate humans who manage to include a deeper spiritual sense of who we are and might potentially be. 

Words such as healthy boundaries, PTSD, higher self, trauma, triggers, wounds, inner child - so many more over the years, depending upon what was marketed as the most fashionable lingo of the day - all really spoke to the same thing, albeit on different levels: understanding those things which were driving our lives, and what needed to be done in order for that to change for the better. There we have it again; self awareness. As the old adage goes “You can’t get to a destination on a map unless you've identified your starting point”. 

© Sylvia Erlichman-Gross, 2024.

When I look at the themes in my life and the points where I’ve been the most fulfilled, it’s genuinely when I’ve been involved with people becoming aware of who they are, who they’d  like to be and discovering the personal power that already exists within them. And when I say ‘people’ I include myself in that because it’s never ‘done’. It’s a matter of always doing. But how can it be always doing without feeling like a never ending project that you grow to resent? I think it’s all in the attitude. Is it work or is it exploration and perhaps even adventure? All of that combines to create the capacity to transition into a life that is fulfilling and speaks to the deeper part of ourselves. The journey inward is always the most challenging and the most rewarding. Whatever I offer through these cards on this website or the YouTube channel, or whether it's just expanding on the many rich themes and tools that the cards give structure to, is coming from a culmination of years of studying and teaching, and following where my heart pulled me. Only by choosing to be self-aware was I able to learn and grow from my own ‘struggles’. It created a process of experimenting in a way that provided insights into my mind and how it was shaping my world. I was able to see what had been holding me back. As I shared these techniques with my clients and students it became clear that there was a foundational approach that was truly helpful. They worked. When I sat back and looked at the collection of work I’d assembled, I realized that one thing was key and it was this: when applied with kindness and love they were powerful. They allowed me, and all of us who used them to naturally lean in towards the next good thing - the next happiness breadcrumb - in a way that felt natural and ‘right’.

 How Did the Deck Fit Into That?

The Deck itself has gone through many incarnations, beginning in 2000 and having several edits and updates over the years. They initially began because I noticed that over the space of a month, the same themes were coming up with several clients and I found myself discussing the same concepts and offering similar exercises, although personally tailored. I heard myself think “Boy, I should just write this down on cards and hand them out.” From there the thought went to how I could create a system that would offer enough variety so that the cards would personalize it for the clients in the same manner that I would in being able to tailor the exercises according to the nuances specific to them. As I began thinking of the most helpful exercises I’d used over the years both for myself and my clients - and the shift in certain perceptions that resulted in making changes for the better, the list of cards I wanted to write grew. Some of them were just thoughts to consider but others were deliberately applied attitudes and exercises. I remembered how profoundly I was affected by actually applying the exercises I read in ‘A Course in Miracles’ and I thought it was important to give people the framework to apply the exercises I was suggesting.

Years back I’d been given a deck of cards as a gift. The Karma Cards is a deck created by an astrologer named Monty Farber. It had 3 packs (planets, signs, and houses). Each card had 6 different aspects that would fit with the other two card to create 6 possible sentences. The number of possible combinations was staggering. I’d been looking for a way to create a structure that would allow for the greatest opportunity of personalizing the spreads and one day, out of the blue, I remembered what Monte had done. Always thinking in 3’s (negative/positive/neutral, mind/body/soul, thought/emotion/action) it made sense to create individual packs that would address every level. The names for my packs dropped into my head and I created a handwritten prototype of a 100 card deck written in 3 separate but related packs. By using them in 3 pack/3card spread, the number of possible combinations was beyond my math capabilities, but I knew it was a lot and enough!

So What?

There is a brilliant astrologer who I’ve followed for several years and who I was lucky enough to have prepared my chart (see the resource page for reference to his free services Sirius Joy on YouTube). My chart indicated that I was a teacher, that I was in a state of constant channeling, and that my life experience was my own petri dish and the foundation for what I’d learn teach others. By this point I’d edited the deck twice and had tried to get it published at a time when most publishers didn’t even print cards. Life happened and I lost track. I kept trying at different time, but it just didn’t work and I’d keep losing track. That reading reawakened the dream. The cards were definitely shaped along those lines. He was right. Often it was shortly after I came to understand the nature of a self limiting restriction that someone would present with a very similar ‘story’ that was identifiable to me due to the similar ‘felt sense’ of what I’d discovered on my own path. Of course, they were never carbon copies of my experience, but the familiarity opened up my perception that allowed me to feel my way through the energetic nature of their experience and help them untangle it.  I understood how truly universal are our emotional experiences, and that there are many paths inward to understanding and resolution. And of course it was clear that we do have freedom to choose a new way of being based on what we truly want rather than on what our patterned behavior kept feeding us from an unconscious motivation. The cards were created to honor those many paths and offer some kind of adaptable structure to help people find what worked best for them, at any given time. 

How are Bread Crumbs a Good thing?

The concept that I was slowest to truly understand and the thing that changed my life the most, was grasping the true nature of self love and how to go about incorporating that as a deliberate act in my life. It totally changed my emotional and energetic landscape. It’s still changing; the capacity to love is constantly growing and changing. That’s part of the deal of being human, maybe the only deal if we want to get metaphysical about it - if we're curious and interested in understanding the mystery of life. This is how I see the ‘breadcrumbs’ really came into my life. I didn’t know I was going to end up here, living by the ocean, starting a website and YouTube channel. In retrospect, I had no idea at the age of 19 when I started meditating and studying esoteric ‘stuff’ that I’d end up doing any of the things I’ve done. When I look back though, I see that every time I made a pivotal choice that shaped me towards my innate gifts, my expansive heart and my deepest healing, it was by following those things that made me happy - or peaceful, or grateful, or delighted, or positive or inspired and hopeful. Those were my breadcrumbs that created the path, and nourished me along the way as I felt my way through the great and mysterious unknown. By letting myself move towards those things that were illogical, or misunderstood by friends or family, that were not cool or fashionable - but felt good and fed a happiness in me, I found my way. I ended up creating my own path by loving myself enough to act on what made me happy instead of what made other people comfortable. The mystery of life and love (or should I say Life and Love) is meant to be discovered gradually, maybe not always one bread crumb at a time. Maybe sometimes we get loafs. The beauty of it is, the more aware we become, the more the mystery reveals itself through our expanding consciousness, and it is magnificent. I think it’s something we ‘embody’ more than we can actually understand. This life is magnificent because of the mystery we have the great gift to be able to explore. My sense of sacred and yours may look different and may play out differently in our choices, but I bet the adjectives we’d use to describe that would fall along the same lines. In it there is peace and compassion, awe and wonder, gratitude and generosity. There is something beyond words, like the feeling that flows through you when you’re witnessing the majesty of nature, or a new birth, accompanying someone in their physical death. Maybe it’s just living the seasons of life, lived with presence and the awareness of the interconnections we feel in those moments - moments too full with a particular feeling to be able to describe it.

Increasing self-awareness, self-discovery, deepening and evolving my consciousness and seeing that process in other people, is exciting and thrilling and warms my heart and makes me love this life. This isn’t a breadcrumb anymore. This is now entire loaf. I’m happy to share whatever skills or experience I have and will have (cause it never really ends, it just gets smoother and brighter…even tastier breadcrumbs maybe?) with people who also wish to explore. I’ve experienced the personal truth that, self-awareness grounded in genuine self-love brings about well-being and expansion towards things that are joyful, kind, compassionate, beautiful and mystical. The happiness breadcrumbs? They’re the signposts and the sustenance along the way. Helping you find ways to notice your particular breadcrumbs is a great thing I’m grateful to be able to share!

Self-Awareness and Self-Loving, Not Selfish

I believe that the energetic resonance of people’s emotions combine to create a global energy, connecting us all through a unified field of consciousness. I believe that it ultimately affects our choices and actions which affect planetary environment, our governing policies as well as our own little universe of friends, family and community. In keeping with that then I refer back to the philosophy of the ancient mystics who advise that the greatest thing one can do for the world is to evolve one's own consciousness.These are the things that I love, that compel me and that I value. I suppose this is my own ‘lending a hand’ to the planet at large. It’s with great appreciation and gratitude that I've landed here, at a place within myself, that I finally feel able to offer it up. I know that I’ve created these cards, this website and my channel as much for myself as I have for any of you. Whatever it is for me, I hope it helps support you in noticing your happiness breadcrumbs and that they lead you somewhere wonder-full. Wonder-full people make a wonderful world.

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The Trifecta of Self-Awareness (and why we want it!)

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Fixing the “Fix Myself” Syndrome: A Prevalent Attitude