calming tips

GCW’s Tips for Life

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Here are several humble and easy tips from GCW based on her tree wisdom and observations of humans during her long life.

Tip #1: Spend time in nature every day to renew your relationship with with the web of life. In nature, you can release human caused worries, tensions, anxieties and find the peace and calm at your center.

Here you can walk and move your body freely. You can swing your arms, you can run, you can sing to your heart’s content. You can catch a snowflake on your tongue. You can climb or lean against a friendly tree. You can sit on a rock and soak in the sun, observing the life surrounding you and the beating heart within you.

Everything you experience in nature can be seen as a mirror of your inner self and you can learn from this; the dark forests, rolling prairies, deeply rooted grasses, feathered creatures of the air and treetops, grazing animals, fur bearers, scampering tree dwellers, the moods of weather and sky, the quality of light, industrious insects, magnificent spreading trees, tangled undergrowth, flowing streams, silver ponds, changing seasons…

Nature places no demands on you, makes no judgments about you, has no agenda for you to follow. Here you can be yourself. Here you can reconnect with the carefree and happy child within you.

Grandmother Cottonwood, winter

Tip #2: Hug a tree now and then. If you are tuned into your body in a sensitive way, you will notice a change in your energy as you hug a tree. You might also notice the energy of the tree. It may feel loving, welcoming, vital, peaceful, calm, patient. As you hug one of our representatives, you connect to the grounded earthy energy of the tree, and that will energize you!

Tip #3: Root to the Earth. You’re in a body and thus you belong here. You are meant to live fully in your body, not spending the majority of your time in your mind. If you do, eventually you will crash like a weak rooted tree in a high wind. To root yourself, visualize sending your energetic roots deep into the earth so you are anchored to the soil and bedrock. Now you can pull Earth energy into your body through your roots and know that you belong here.

Tip #4: Reach to the Light. Take up your allotted space in the canopy, so to speak. Soak in life giving energy that is your birthright and grow toward the sunlight. A tree will never turn away from the light, but grow always toward it, reaching and reaching and soaking in as much as possible every day of the growing season.

Grandmother Cottonwood

If you are alive and reading this, you are in your growing season. Make the most of it! Claim the light that is yours without apology.

If others are overshadowing you, find safe ways to find the light that is yours. You might start small and build on your successes over time.

When you are rooted and reaching to the light, when you spend time in nature, when you hug a tree now and then, you fully alive in body, mind and spirit. You are free! You are participating in full spectrum of human possibilities from the earthy to the sublime.

In this way, you connect and know your oneness with the web of life.

Rediscover peace

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When fear in your body feels too much, when the voices of doom and gloom and ugly rants on the news on social media get you down, when you can’t settle, when your head is filled with anxiety, go outside if you can.

You will feel more clarity and greater calm when you go outside without your shiny device, your ear buds, your blinking object.

If it is not safe to go outside, to breathe the air, imagine yourself in your favorite spot in nature. Use your inner vision to go to a place you love and feel completely safe and comfortable.

Move in comforting ways, walk slow or fast, swing your arms, breathe in the fresh air, move through the shifting shade under old and friendly trees, notice the sights sound smells and the feel of your chosen place on this Earth.

Summer grasses

Let your awareness reside in your heart, your body, your senses. Let thoughts from your logical mind and the demands of your ego float in and out like clouds, knowing they are not reality. Do not give them any power by clutching or grasping onto them.

Notice the colors of your world, the flow of the creek or river, the animals and birds, the plant life, the clouds, sky patterns, tree growth, the blooming flowers.

Feel your feet meeting Mother Earth. Feel her support of you. Feel your lungs filling and emptying as your chest rises and falls. Feel the movement of your limbs swinging in rhythm.

Feel the energy of fear leaving your being with each out breath. Feel anxiety melting away as you hug and lean on a friendly tree, letting the tree with deep roots support your weight and connect your heart to the heart of the Earth.

GCW in fall

Let the weight of your worries drain away into the earth for this moment. Mother Earth will neutralize the energy of excess fear, anxiety, and dread.

You may be absorbing unpleasant emotional energy from the collective mind, from other people and groups. Let it go! Let it drain away into the Earth. It is not yours to carry.

When you can get out of your head and spend time in nature, you can rediscover peace.

Calming Through the Heart

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Do you feel stuck with no escape, ungrounded and flighty? Are old addictions coming back to haunt you during the pandemic and the times of social distancing and isolation?

I offer another way to calm and soothe yourself in times of high anxiety.

Find a quiet and calm space and get comfortable. Take a few deep breaths to settle yourself. Now bring your awareness from your monkey mind with its whirring machinery of worry and fear, its endless capacity for self argument, the unkind inner critic, the constant mindless chatter, the never ending ego complaints to the peace of your heart.

Tune into the gentle beat, the quiet rhythm. You might be able to feel your pulse by gently placing a hand on your neck right below where the ear and jaw meet.

Now hold your heart with both palms on the center of your chest. Imagine that you can breathe through your heart. Feel the exhalation, the emptying. Imagine the breath flowing from your heart, releasing the stale worries, the old thoughts that bring you down, spent energy you are ready to let go of.

Now as your lungs fill, know that you are bringing in fresh new air, new energy, new possibilities to your heart, the seat and center of your life.

Tune into the steadiness the cadence of your heartbeat that’s been with you since before your birth. Even before your heart began to beat, you knew your mother’s heartbeat, and before her birth she knew her mother’s heartbeat, the underlying rhythm, the legacy of life.

Trust that right now as your heart beats you are alive. You are safe. You belong here.

A Practice to Calm and Raise Your Vibrations

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Dear ones, as you try out this practice, set an intention to raise your vibrations and calm yourself during this time of great uncertainty.

Breathe in Earth energy, breathe out fear

Visualize beautiful deep roots like the roots of a large tree growing down into the Earth from your hips, legs, feet. Now breathe in through your roots and feet. As you inhale, allow your feet, legs, hips, abdomen and lower body to fill with Earth energy. This will anchor and connect you with Earth’s loving vibrations, the energy of home.

Take several deep breaths in and out through your feet and roots. On the out-breaths, let tension, stale energies, old emotions, fears, and worries you no longer need to carry within you drain into the Earth for energetic recycling. This will ground and clear you.

Connect to the Earth

Fill yourself with divine light and color

Visualize a beam of pure clear golden light filling you through the crown of your head. Allow it to pour down through your entire body, permeating every cell like liquid gold.

Imagine every hair follicle, skin cell, blood vessel, every nerve, all organ systems, every bone, connective tissue and tendon, all muscles, your immune system and glands, respiratory and circulatory systems, every energetic particle of your physical being filled with this sacred light, bringing all body systems and organs into balance and harmony, clarifying your aura.

Now, as you visualize this beautiful light, allow it to become any color in the spectrum, whatever vibration of color is needed in your body to bring wholeness, healing and well being. Let the colors change and flow and mix as needed.

No need to think too hard about it or consult a chart. Ask for the colors to be just right for your body’s needs. Allow yourself to sit with the healing colors and light as long as needed.

Yellow swallowtail butterfly on deep pink Zinnia

Create sound and connect with all that is.

Set an intention to use your voice to resonate those areas of your body that feel out of balance. You will fill them with the healing vibrations and loving waves of your voice. You do not have to be a good singer, the only requirement is that you can make sounds with your voice.

Begin by humming, then make vowel sounds. Change the pitch and sound you are making and feel the vibrations resonating in different parts of your body that need attention. Intend for the sounds you create with your voice to reweave and harmonize the subtle energy of your physical and spiritual being and fill your being with peace.

Flowing stream, light dancing on shallow water

Connect to the Earth through your roots, fill yourself with divine light and color, weave all together with sound. Experience the oneness of all creation.

Anxiety

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GCW speaks of anxiety

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

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Heavy cloud cover

Dear ones, we can feel that the energy you call anxiety is contagious. You feel it and pick it up from each other. It is in the air, so to speak. In the atmosphere around an anxious person.

Those on a similar wavelength tune in and the red frenetic energy you call anxiety spreads to the other like a virus. It is like what you call panic, and can spread like fire through a family or group of people.

This does not help anyone! It saps your strength and power, distracts you from your inner light, as you are felled by the churning in your gut, the tense neck, the heart that hurts, the throat that closes up…

My dears, you do not have to be imprisoned by these feelings of anxiety. Learn to breathe deeply from the belly. The heaviness you feel will clear like clouds before a breeze. Run, swim, walk, move. You are meant to move! Dance. You must move as much as you can, to be fully who you are meant to be. Your body is not designed to be still!

All feelings must move, all beings, all energies must move! If not, you become stagnant like the smelly water backed up in the creek on a hot summer day.

Surround yourselves with people who light you up! Hug a tree like me and imagine your roots growing deep in the earth as if pulled be a magnet to her core. Then feel the stability when the winds of emotion blow. You are anchored and nothing can knock you down.

Trees and rooted things do not know anxiety or worry,doubt or fear. We can be an example to you! Are you open to that?

Put your hands on your heart and breathe deeply. In this way you calm yourself and soothe yourself. Know that in this exact moment place and time you are safe.