spiritual healing

True Commitment

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There are the dabblers, the pretenders, the know-it-alls, those that skate on the surface of things, those afraid of commitment.

Before you appeared here in physical form, your spirit made a commitment to live on Earth in your particular body, through the joys and sorrows, the roller coaster ride of life here on this planet.

Witness true commitment. A tiny cottonwood seed settling in a patch of mud, sprouting when conditions allow, taking root, reaching heavenward. Growing in height and reach and circumference each year, standing through the extremes of weather, blizzards, tornadoes, lightning, high winds, standing her ground, claiming as her birthright a patch of earth and sun.

Grandmother Cottonwood

Now a magnificent tree, she is committed to living her span of time rooted and anchored firmly to this planet for 100 or more years.

Commitment means making a promise to yourself and keeping it. It means lining up body mind and spirit to a single purpose and doing what it takes to make it manifest in your life.

Commitment means reviewing and renewing the promises that still resonate with your wise spirit, creating new commitments as you grow in wisdom and age, dropping those no longer necessary or meaningful as you grow older.

Commitment means letting these vows to yourself create the foundation of your life. It means sticking to the promises you made to yourself when times are tough and your attention wavers.

Dear ones, if you feel a wavering in your commitment to be fully here in your body, if life seems difficult to endure, tune into your spirit and renew your commitment to live the fullness of life here and now.

More About the Season of Winter in Your Life

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When winter knocks on the door and you are snowed in, you can’t leave the house, can’t escape yourself. All human movement in the white world ceases for a time as the wind roars, snow swirls and drifts pile up against all obstacles.

Here you are in the house, cozy and warm, yet there remain many long weeks until the spring thaw comes. You will endure the cold, the wind. You will survive this harsh and bleak time of year when life seems to have abandoned the world.

Winter strips bare the bones of Mother Earth, lays the reality of the frozen world before you – the tree wraiths with their black branches dancing in the gusting wind that cuts like a knife.

Winter trees

Many compare winter to death. But, dear ones, life waits deep in the roots of the sleeping trees and grasses, Deep in the soil below the frost zone, beneath the blinding drifts of snow. Life bides her time, resting and waiting for the warm mild days to return, the bright spring sun that draws all life upward to his life giving light.

Spring tree

When winter overtakes your being, find time to rest and go inward. Connect with the spark of existence that is deep within your being and know that life will return once again when the season turns.

Ice and Water

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Dear beloved, do you exist in the manner of frozen ice, living in a perpetual winter, or do you live and breathe and move like flowing water? Have you known both ways of being?

All who walk this earth find themselves in the season of life called winter from time to time, a winter in the mind, in the emotions, a frozen heart, perhaps a time of grief.

GCW in snow

If you are stuck in the cold, you will find a way to cycle through the season of winter in your life and move on to the time of thaw and warming. This feels like spring with new life unfolding everywhere, giving way to the bank full flow in streams and rivers and the green leaves of summer.

When you are living in the seasons of spring and summer within your heart, your life flows effortlessly downstream finding the path of least resistance, moving forward with grace, moving toward the ocean with ease.

In summer, your life is like a river, refreshing all who drink of it, sustaining life along its course. The river of your life moves through the landscape, flowing easily around obstacles, even cutting through layers of stone over the course of centuries, to reach the goal.

Sunlit ripples, shallow creek

Then once again you may experience the biting winds and chilly air of autumn and into the frozen time of winter. All forward movement, all flow ceases when winter arrives, life goes underground and water freezes. Everything is stuck in place, frozen in time and space. As you have been here before, you know it is a temporary state. Do not lose heart, dear ones.

With time, patience, self awareness and self love, you can thaw the frozen and stuck places in your heart. Reach out for help if you need it. Your life can once again flow like water in midsummer.

Where there is forward movement and flow, there is life.

Let Your Love Flow

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It is never too late to learn more about love. Are you are alive? You have another chance.

As a child, your parents showed and defined love for you, nurturing or neglectful, one-sided, self centered or all inclusive, empathetic or abusive, somewhere in between, good enough. Loving and kind, or not so much.

Then on your next go-round in the school of life maybe your pairings and friendships and loves as a teenager and young adult mirrored your relationship with your first family. Maybe you got stuck in a hamster wheel of unhealthy patterns again and again.

Winter Nest

Know this! Throughout life you can learn more about love. You are never too old to realize you can get unstuck from old hurtful patterns you can learn to open your heart, trust your tender being to others you want to be closer to. Your heart can thaw.

You can learn to see and feel and know the light in others. You can learn to gently dismantle any walls or barriers you’ve placed between your heart and those others you want to be closer to.

You can learn new and safe ways of opening your heart, new ways of relating to others you trust if you desire it and practice with patience, compassion, and love for yourself.

Ask for help from a trusted therapist, healer or friend if you need it.

You can dam the river of your love, or you can let it flow. Your life and feelings of love can flow like a surging stream if you trust and allow it.

A Practice for Connecting with Your Inner Child

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In this practice, you will be going inward and meeting yourself as a newborn infant…

Find a quiet place where you can relax and just be for a little while. Tune into your breath and your heartbeat. Settle comfortably into your chair or cushion

Now with your inner vision, bring up a picture of yourself as you currently are, your fully grown self. Send yourself heartfelt love for the person you are and the person you are becoming, heartfelt empathy for the challenges you face, the mistakes you’ve made, and heartfelt acceptance for yourself, flaws and all.

Let go of your logical mind for a while and allow yourself to roll back in time to the day you were born.

Tiny baby

Now see your current self lovingly lift up and hold your newborn infant self, cradling him or her gently to your beating heart. You might imagine yourself rubbing their tiny back with the flat of your palm. Perhaps you can feel the velvety softness of the newborn’s skin and hair. Can you see and feel the perfection of ears, fingers and toes?

Smell their scent, Feel and see the perfection, the expansion of spirit in this completely unique, beautiful and tender being.

Do you sense your newborn’s complete trust in you and in the new life they’ve chosen? Can you allow your heart to open with love and tenderness for the tiny but mighty being you were?

As you hold your newborn self in this healing place inside yourself, consider what promises your current self will make to your infant self. What stories will you tell him or her about your life? What will you tell this precious being her about who he or she is. What qualities will you recognize in this beautiful infant? How will you care for and protect your tender inner child?

Spend the time you need reconnecting with yourself on the day you entered this life. When you are finished, put your infant back to sleep and return to the here and now. Tap your cheekbones and the center of your chest to ground yourself in the present. Take a few deep breaths. Notice how you feel now.

In the sacred place deep within your heart, you have the power to soothe and heal your inner child.

A New Day

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A new day lightens the sky in the east. This is life giving you another opportunity to start fresh. Life allows you the time to reevaluate and renew your life, to grow into the person your spirit calls you to become.

Nature’s rhythms show that you can begin again after setbacks and illness, after disappointments and sorrows. Spring follows winter without fail. The moon cycles through her phases each month. Storms roar through the valley pushing much old growth to the ground, leaving food and light for new life to reach to the sun.

A tree cut off at the ground will sent up suckers reaching for the light. Tender new grass appears after a prairie fire. Green shoots of crocus push through the melting snow in March. The world greens and leafs out finally after a hard winter softens into a joyful spring.

You too after the fires, storms or winters of life have passed may send forth green shoots, leaves, and blossoms and renew yourself. This may look and feel like new energy flowing through your veins, new ideas and creative projects, new vibrancy, a renewed sense of humor and playfulness…passion for life.

The sun will rise again and you will have another day to move toward becoming who you are at the level of your soul, to choose a new thought that supports you in place of the old stale thoughts, to choose a different pattern of being, to tune yourself to a more pleasant feeling, to take the first small step to realizing your dreams.

Of course, patience is your friend as these changes take time and attention and perseverance. Trust and give yourself the grace to accept yourself as you are while at the same time moving toward the new way of being that you desire.

Open your heart to this most amazing gift of a new day.

At the Heart of Your Spirit

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Dear friends, thank you for your patience while I paused my blog due to an illness in the family. My family member is doing well. We’re back now. Many blessings, Betty

Now, in the words of GCW:

If I could weep, I would not weep, for our Earth and her many inhabitants have survived upheaval, turmoil, danger, disease, war, plague, drought, famine, violence, death and destruction over the eons life on this planet has existed.

Beneath the fear, the terror, the hate and destruction seen in current events, beneath the profound deprivation visited upon so many families lies the spirit, untouched by death and destruction, enduring, gaining in wisdom from lifetime to lifetime. Unbreakable, unshakeable.

At the heart of your spirit lies peace.

GCW in Midwinter

At the heart of your spirit lies a loving and profound silence in which all things are possible.

At the heart of your spirit lies the unfolding of love, the love that carries us from lifetime to lifetime with joyful anticipation, that permeates the billions of living beings on Earth, that infuses the cells and DNA of all living things.

The very web of life is composed of the energy of this love. All spirits are joined as one in this magnificent web.

When times are difficult, when you feel fear, when all you’ve known is breaking apart, tune into your spirit for the wide angle view. Like a soaring bird, your spirit will help you rise up and see your life, your family, your community, the events of the day from 1000 feet up.

When you are able to gain this spirit perspective you can feel the temporariness of fearful and dangerous events, the immensity of peace and love surrounding and permeating this world, this universe.

Love endures. Spirit endures.

Ask for Help

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Dear reader, this post is from the archives of AskGCW.

Dear friends, I feel a great heaviness in this world right now.

I can feel the vibrations of your tension, the tightening of your shoulders and throat, the churning in your gut, the stress, the weight of worry many are feeling right now in this time of uncertainty.

For those who are worried, frightened – lean against me and those of my kind, the extended family of trees. Enter into our friendly energy, rest your weight on us, we will support and calm you, help you know what is real and solid and true.

Grandmother Cottonwood

Tune yourselves to our quiet and subtle frequency. Listen with your whole body and heart, your wise self.

We will help you know you are not alone, that life goes on, that you are safe in this moment.

Know this. All trees and the collective spirits of nature – animal and plant, insect, reptile, amphibian, all angelic beings, your human ancestors who have crossed to the light, all spirits or land air and sea, of heaven and Earth, of the Universe are with you always.

Male Cardinal in winter

Please call on us for advice, kindness, companionship, spiritual nourishment, comfort. You are not alone. You are surrounded by love.

Tune into our quiet and loving voices to steady and calm your anxious minds.

Come back to your roots

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When you come back to your roots, you rediscover your true self. The soul of you, the deep center of you that knows your purpose here, that knows and accepts the truth of you you are.

You were born with this wisdom, you knew your spiritual roots as a child. Can you remember?

When you live from your true self, your roots nourish you and connect you to the Earth, your home and your spirit. The roots of your true self are roots of integrity, of self respect, of knowing who you are.

Only humans can choose to appear as something they’re not, to misunderstand and cut off their connection to spirit, to disconnect from their true selves.

Then you are like a tree without roots, vulnerable to storms, high winds, and stress, weaker than you might be, disconnected from your strength and source of nourishment.

Uprooted Cottonwood tree

Dear ones, if you have become disconnected from your wise self, you can renew yourself and regain wholeness. The damage is not permanent, you can regenerate your life and regain your power.

You are flexible and resilient. You are a survivor! Send you roots deep and reach to the light!

Leadership

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Dear reader, this post is from the archives of AskGCW.

If your leaders guide you astray – away from what you know to be right and true and good, you must let your heart guide you instead. Trust yourself!

When your leaders are mistaken, misguided, ill informed, emotionally stunted, you yourself must step up and be a force for good in the world. You don’t have to shine on a national stage, run for elected office, or head a large corporation to make a positive difference in the web of all things.

Grandmother Cottonwood, winter afternoon

I ask you to allow yourself to become a force for good and kindness, guided by your heart and by Source in your own life, within your own sphere of influence.

If you feel alone in your beliefs and actions, hold fast! Do the right thing and you will respect yourself and gain confidence. Others of like mind will be drawn to you. And you will create ripples of compassion and loving kindness in the web of life.

The ripples you create flow from the center of your spirit and touch all things on the energetic level, the level of spirit. All creatures benefit from your heart’s wisdom and your wise and kind actions.

Let your guidance and leadership come from within, from the depths of your heart and spirit. Let Source be your partner, and you will make the world a kinder safer place.