If you could, how would you change your life?
While bravely facing the motherlode of difficult life challenges, you never dreamt the result would be a soul-sucking, heart-crushing existence.
Although you try to ignore the emptiness, detachment, and feeling that you don’t belong, you rarely make changes. It just seems too impossible for so many reasons. Instead, you silenced your heart’s nagging with self-sacrifice, food stuffing, or by becoming a workaholic.
Contemplating ending her life, Jamie Saloff chose instead to hatch a new one. She knows how self-doubt and unworthiness can cloud our ability to move forward after the darkness of illness, grief, trauma, or tragedy – because she’s faced it too.
In Hatch – A Change Your Life Guide, Saloff walks readers through her step-by-step method to:
• Awaken your soul’s purpose by listening to your heart’s voice
• Find confidence in your next forward step by hearing your body speak
•See messages of guidance everywhere by learning where to look
• Uncover your future in your past by examining your ancestral heritage
• And much, much more…
“It’s a simple question “Do you wish you could change your life for the better” while the answer is an easy one – do you have any idea of how to accomplish the task? “Hatch – A Change Your Life Guide” gives you a systematic process that will take you on a journey of physical, emotional, and spiritual healing…I highly recommend this wonderful and enlightening book” – Yolanda Renee
I’ve always been a writer and interested in self-discovery, first and foremost. I claimed to write my first book at age three (it was unreadable). I always knew I would be writer, but it took time to figure out the what. Although my friends seemed to know I had gifts, I didn’t think of my experiences as something to use toward or in my writing since they were an innate part of who I am. However, my early attempts to write a book were about my experience with Hodgkins (cancer) at age twenty-five, and I wrote about some of the spiritual experiences I had at that time. My friends who read this naïve, hand-typed document (complete with typos and bad grammar) kept asking me about those experiences and wanted me to tell more about them. As the book evolved over the years, those experiences became a part of that story.
If you don't mind talking about it, what was one of your most challenging life challenges you had to face?
I’ve faced cancer twice. I lost 13 significant relatives before the age of thirty, not including a sister, a brother, and all four grandparents who passed before my birth. I gave birth to my second child thirty-one days early (along with the worries any mother experiences when her child is in the hospital). Both my son and husband have suffered life-altering back injuries requiring surgeries. My oldest son was a witness to a middle-school shooting at age fourteen (this was incredibly devastating and maybe second on the list). While all of these were hard, the worst ordeal I went through involved being thrown out of a group due to false accusations. I was young, naïve, and not yet hardened to the realities of life, which contributed to the subsequent depression I went through. Today, I’d probably laugh it off. But at that time in my life, that event had the most devastating effect on my life.
How did you find the confidence to take that next step forward?
Only a writer would understand how, after that event, I couldn’t write for forty-five days. Even writing a grocery list felt difficult. I went through the motions of life in shadow mode. I prayed to die. I didn’t want to go on anymore. Then, I had several eye-opening spiritual events that took place. I detail these in my book, the most profound being the appearance of a spiritual being that led me out of that dark place. From that point forward, my life took off and in a more positive direction.
In your book, you explain how to uncover your future in your past by examining your ancestral heritage. Would you care to expand on that?
I had believed for a long time that history repeats itself within families, though not always in the same set of circumstances. I like looking at how this plays out generation after generation. A simple example is that my great-great grandfather traveled around the country buying and selling wares (by horse and buggy during the Civil War). My great-grandfather didn’t travel as much, but lived in several different areas of the country working in a type of sales. My grandfather started out with a horse and buggy selling crackers for Nabisco and moved into the auto industry, at first traveling and selling. My father spent part of his career as a traveling salesman. My brother spent most of his career in the airlines, traveling, and, at one point, selling cars (we had car selling on both sides of the family). My niece has spent a lot of time traveling for work. . . thus the cycle goes on and on.
How do I see this helping me to foresee my future? Without going through all the research I’ve done on my family’s histories, I can tell you travel, sales, health, and more has played a role in who I am and who I came here to be. Sometimes we can look at our family’s skills and life circumstances and see a path where we can correct when they didn’t, or see a skill we have engrained in us that we are under-utilizing.
I also look at life circumstances, such as how family members dealt with relationships, money, health events, deaths, and more. This is one of the areas I most enjoy working through with clients, but only do so in my more intensive coaching at this point and time. I offer the basics of this in Hatch – A Change Your Life Guide, and plan an in-depth exploration of this topic in my book, Marvelous Messages from Your Ancestry and its coinciding card deck, which are to be released in 2024, if all goes well.
How can your book help us in these turbulent times?
Throughout history, no matter how far you go back, people and civilizations have gone through turbulent times. I think we first have to begin with ourselves, our personal circumstances, and the difficult situations we are facing. Almost no one escapes hard or troubled situations. These times shape us as individuals. My book doesn’t erase any bad. It’s not a magical fix. There are some things we can’t change. We can’t bring back the dead, erase a tragic situation, or replace a limb etc.
First of all, I feel my book helps us put our choices into perspective. Often times we know how to fix a problem and we don’t—either due to fear of the unknown or the fear of the expected repercussions (whether real or imagined). Secondly, the book teaches how to listen to your body and heart—which you may have been ignoring, and shows how to use that information as a means to take one step forward, and then another, and another.
There are two kinds of change, which I detail in my book. One is instantaneous—and isn’t that wonderful? Wow, a blink of an eye and “ta-da!” This type of change can happen when we suddenly have a new perception of a situation. But more often than not, it’s more like the butterfly emerging from its cocoon. It’s a process of evolving from where you are now to where you long to be.
I also believe that those deep longings, often times ones we are born with, are there to push us forward toward fulfilling them, and those longings wouldn’t be there if they weren’t possible to obtain them. This isn’t to say that they will always play out the way we think. For example, even as a little kid, I loved teaching and, for a while, thought I wanted to be a teacher. (Teachers abound in my ancestry!) That dream didn’t materialize—or did it? I teach every day in my books and in workshops I offer. I participated for years in an elementary school writing program (as its head volunteer) where I taught children how to write stories to be “published.” So, no, I didn’t become a “teacher” in the typical sense of the word. But I do teach.
What would you like to say to those who are critical of this way of thinking?
Don’t read my book! Seriously. I’m not in the business of convincing skeptics and there are plenty of other resources out there for every other way of being. So read someone else’s book. I’m not trying to convert anyone’s thinking. What I want to do is simply show people who are feeling stuck or unsure how to move forward from that situation. I want them to know that even if they feel stuck with no way out, there are ways to “Hatch” they might not yet have explored. It’s okay if my ways of thinking are not for you. It’s kind of like dieting. What works for one person may not for another. But maybe some tidbit in my book can be a necessary catalyst to lead someone forward and to their next step toward all they deeply desire.
What's next for you?
I am working on a gift book called Hatch-ette (or in other words, the mini version of Hatch), which I intend to give away. It will be a quick jumpstart for those who want to “hatch a life worth loving.” When that is done, I am working on my Marvelous Messages series of books. The next one to be launched is Marvelous Messages from Your Ancestry. I have a deck of cards that goes with that one. After that, I want to create a video course, a community where I can interact with others, and an incubator program where I can privately mentor others.
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