Consciousness & Spirituality

Finding Balance – EFT and the Bigger Picture

February 23, 2020 by Carol 1 Comment

We humans tend to focus on what’s wrong, and like a dog licking a sore paw, we go over and over our stuff. The Energy Psychology technique EFT tapping is one of my favorite techniques for clearing stuff and finding balance. It provides a unique way to expand your focus, to broaden your view and create some welcome space for healing.

In EFT, we use words to bring the issue, problem, trauma, whatever to our consciousness, and then tap on acupuncture meridian points (known as Meridian Tapping) to clear the energetic connection to the problem. We also expand our focus to find a place of balance. Even though I have this problem, I am also something greater than this problem; there is a larger reality, a bigger picture, a place of balance and peace.

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Changing Our Story – reality is relative…

February 16, 2020 by Carol Leave a Comment

We have experiences in our lives, and then we tell ourselves stories about what they mean, and then we live our life around the stories. So often the stories are not so happy, not so inspiring, and tend to leave us disempowered and upset. But if it’s my story, why can’t I just change it? The past shifts and changes anyway as our memories change or fade and come to resemble the story we’ve been telling more than what actually happened… So if you don’t like the story write a better one! I have been experimenting lately with changing some of my stories – re-framing and re-writing the stories I have been telling myself (and my friends!)

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the pursuit of the positive…

January 13, 2020 by Carol 8 Comments

Our brains are such busy little things, always looking for something to notice to comment on, to judge. When we think a lot about something, like “I don’t have enough money” “I don’t have enough time” “I’m lonely, I don’t like my body, I’m clumsy…” our brains start looking for things to notice so they can validate those thoughts. And we start seeing all kinds of things that seem to validate our belief.

So what if we flipped it around? What if we started telling ourselves that life is easy, there is always enough, I am beautiful just as I am… Suddenly, as if by magic we start seeing things that validate that new belief. Our brains start looking for proof of the positive; suddenly you notice a stranger is smiling, the client who’s late gives you time to take a deep breath and stretch, you walk past a window and see the beauty of the clouds instead of the cloudy sky, you find a quarter on the sidewalk…

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What Does it Mean to Be Centered?

July 22, 2019 by Carol 2 Comments

Being centered means having a reference point, a place to come back to when life and emotions and stress push you off balance. Think about those wobbly toys that kids play with; you knock them down and they bounce right back. They have the kind of balance that we wobbly humans often wish we possessed! They have such a strong sense of what their “center” is, that they effortlessly go right back to it, no matter how many times or which direction you push them.

Being ‘centered’ is that kind of dynamic balance point. It doesn’t mean we are always there, it means we always know where to go back to. Kind of like knowing where your home is. Meditation is one very effective way to get more familiar with your center. Regular meditation teaches you where it is, what it feels like and how to get back there when you get temporarily lost.

How else do you get centered?

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The Presence of Absence…

April 11, 2019 by Carol 2 Comments

When someone leaves your life, there is a space left behind, which we often perceive as absence. But is it really absence? My experience of that space is that it has a very palpable presence to it, it is something in it’s own right. When someone close close to me died recently, it left that kind of presence, that sense that this is not nothing, it is something. Something very new, very unknown, very mysterious, very profound… How am I present to this new reality? How is someone who left present in my life, not just in memories. What is the presence of absence?

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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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