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Moods Are Like the Weather… Seasonal Affective Disorder

November 17, 2018 by Carol Leave a Comment

From a spiritual perspective, it’s been said, you are really the vast, deep, limitless sky, and your emotions are really just the clouds that come and go across that background. Sometimes they frame the sun and create a beautiful panorama, or a spectacular sunset. Sometimes they seem to block the sun and you can feel sad and gloomy. But then the wind blows, air currents shift and suddenly you are your true radiant self again…

As we move toward winter in the Northern hemisphere, we enter a time of challenging skies, often gray and cloudy, no longer balanced by the lush green of trees and plants. And many people find it difficult to remember the sun, remember the gentle air of spring, the brilliance of summer and most especially, their own inner light. They fall into seasonal sadness, also known as SAD or Seasonal Affective Disorder. And it gets really hard to maintain a spiritual view on it all…

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It’s What You do With It…

November 17, 2018 by Carol 1 Comment

When I was 13 years old, I went to a summer camp where I studied theater and dreamed of being an actress. It was my third and last year there, and the years before I had had some pretty good roles in small plays. That year they decided to produce The Wizard of Oz.

Given my experience, I thought I would be cast as one of the witches or some role with some significance. To my horror, I was cast as a munchkin! That whole month I felt humiliated and disappointed and like it was all a waste of my time. After the final performance for the families, kids signed each others’ programs, like a yearbook. The director, Mike Miller wrote on my program the words that became the guiding philosophy of my life, “it’s what you do with it…”

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Choices…

October 19, 2018 by Carol Leave a Comment

So many people seem to be stressed about making choices these days. Whether it is a major life change or decision – health issues or decisions about treatments, divorce or separation, career changes or simply the myriad of lifestyle choices we face on a daily basis – it is so common to feel unsettled and stressed and keep second guessing ourselves. When we make a choice, we want to feel a sense of peace and resolution.

But that’s not always easy… And the more distant or dis-connected we feel from our intuition and inner guidance the harder it is to be relaxed and at peace with our choices. Connecting with our deepest inner selves is often hardest at the times when we need it most.

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Ancestral patterns – what we take on that isn’t ours…

July 11, 2018 by Carol Leave a Comment

EFT Master Jaqui Crooks teaches some brilliant work on clearing ancestral energies – you know, the stuff we took on from our parents and their parents before them and on and on and on… I was privileged to study this work with her some years ago and have been using it more recently.

We learned a very elegant tapping technique to clear these energies, and restore ourselves to our original field. Sometimes these pre-verbal experiences are like computer viruses, contaminating our energy field and we need to clear them out. I am planning a workshop on clearing ancestral patterns for the fall, I look forward to sharing her powerful work with you.

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Transformation, Toxins and Butterflies

June 6, 2018 by Carol Leave a Comment

The milkweed plant is celebrated as the favorite food of the monarch butterfly caterpillar. It’s also quite toxic, and in munching its way through many leaves, the caterpillar stores enough toxins in its body to render it, and the resulting butterfly unattractive and dangerous to predators. We all absorb toxic experiences, relationships, patterns in our early life.How much do we hold onto as protection? As we transformed from children to adults and through the many stages of our lives, what do we hold on to? What do we let go of?

In EFT tapping, we start with tapping on the side of the hand, known as the karate chop point, a part of the small intestine meridian. The small intestine in our bodies is what controls what we absorb into our body as nutrition and what we eliminate. What do we take in, what do we release… And that becomes a lifelong process, with the experiences of our lives, and the memories, traumas, issues of our childhood… What do we keep, what do we let go of? What nourishes us, what needs to be eliminated?

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Letting Go of Our Old Stuff with Guided Imagery…

May 6, 2018 by Carol Leave a Comment

We talk about letting go in a lot of different contexts, but what does it really mean? We take stress and trauma into our body and energy field, and that’s fine, it is how we function as physical beings. Where it becomes a problem is when we keep it and carry it with us for the rest of our lives. Our traumas and experiences and beliefs – whether they are conscious, or buried deep in our unconscious – continually impact how we function in the present.

Tapping and imagery work give us simple and elegant tools to bring this stuff into our awareness and truly let it go. Not just mentally, by talking about and analyzing it, but by actually physically releasing it from our body and most importantly, from our energy field.

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Where Does the “Four Steps to Center” Meditation Come From?

February 16, 2018 by Carol Leave a Comment

People have asked me how I came up with the Four Steps to Center™ process that I use in many of my guided imagery meditation CDs and mp3s. It evolved out of my belief of who we really are; not just physical beings, but beings of multiple levels, of heart and mind and spirit as well as body. I try to incorporate this understanding into all aspects of my life and my work, though of course, like everyone else, I frequently forget!

I call my blog and my newsletter “Living in Your Body” because I think that’s what we are really here to do; to learn how – as limitless beings of spirit – to live in the confines and confusions and endless possibilities of a physical body. So I developed the Four Steps process as two things.

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The Gratitude is Greater Than the Grief…

December 14, 2017 by Carol 12 Comments

My beloved companion dog Satika died of a very aggressive cancer. We had 5 bittersweet weeks to enjoy together after he was diagnosed. I woke up each morning grateful for another chance to gaze into his dark soulful eyes and bask in the the calm joy and deep love that radiated from his whole being.

Dogs, like all animals, have a far more comfortable relationship to their bodies than we humans do. They appreciate them when they work, and they accept them when they fail. They know that they are not their bodies, that they only wear them. And they seem to understand without fear or complaint, that one day, they will step out of them and on to their next great adventure.

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Every problem has a gift for you in it’s hands…

October 17, 2017 by Carol Leave a Comment

Health and healing are like life – filled with mystery and complexity and change. It makes the whole question of analyzing symptoms, getting diagnoses, of fixing and curing things quite complicated.

Richard Bach wrote, in his remarkable book Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah “Every problem has a gift for you in its hands.” I add to that “and every illness and symptom has a lesson.”

So when we look at our health, what do we see? A bunch of random symptoms and complaints, sent by a random and perhaps not very kind Universe to bug us and make our lives more difficult?

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Being at peace with choices…

July 20, 2017 by Carol Leave a Comment

Many of my clients are dealing with a major life change or decision, such as serious health issues and decisions about treatments, divorce or separation, relationships and marriage, decisions about having children, abortion, or adoption. It is so common to experience many different and often conflicting feelings, like anxiety, fear, anger or guilt, as well as excitement, hope, joy, relief.

Acknowledging, validating and empowering all your feelings, your inner wisdom, and ultimately your choices, allows you to find peace and healing with your decisions and with your self. But that’s not always easy. In highly personal life choices, you may often feel unsupported or invalidated by those around you who have different perspectives, and may find it difficult to talk openly about your feelings. Guided imagery meditation can be a helpful tool to give you a safe space to experience the support and validation you need and deserve.

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