daily practice

Lift Your Voice

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Here is a daily practice for connecting your purpose with the web of life.

Begin by sending your energetic roots deep into the earth and ground yourself. Bring your awareness to your heart, take a few deep breaths through the center of your chest, and reach your arms toward divine light.

Now, ask spirit what work is being called through you today. This will be your true work, not mundane tasks or chores on your to do list, but something deeper and more meaningful. This will be work that energizes you, satisfies your spirit, lifts you and others up.

Now, with your voice, using drums, rattles, bowls, or other sound instruments, describe the work you are called to do. Speak, sing, let your body and the space around you be filled with the vibrations of the sound your create as you lift your voice to the heavens.

Let the sound of your voice rise up and join with the web of life. You are sending the frequency of your wishes and dreams, your unique offerings into the universe.

The frequencies you create rise up and join with the web of life, affecting the vast network of energetic filaments in unique patterns and ripples. As you do this practice, you are creating and inviting new possibilities, healing rifts in the fabric of life, focusing your mind body spirit and emotions on the work that only you can offer, creating new connections in the web of life.

As you send your hopes intentions and dreams into the web of life and receive guidance from spirit, you strengthen build and rebuild the network connecting all living beings.

Connect to Earth

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Yes, dear ones, I return to a favorite theme. I speak of grounding once more because it is so vital to your well-being!

When your body and mind are exhausted, when you feel as though you can’t take another step, when you are depleted, shaky or frantic, recharge your power supply by reconnecting with Mother Earth.

Plug in and let her entrain your energy to her heartbeat, the rhythm of our planet, to the reality of her loving support.

When you are ungrounded you may seem to float away like an untethered space walker. Humans ungrounded deplete themselves and try to compensate for a lack of Earth energy, try to find a power supply elsewhere – food, drink, drugs…?

When you are grounded, you are filled with Earth energy pulled in from the chakras at the soles of your feet. This energy rises up within your body to anchor and root you to your home. This is mother Earth’s way of telling you – you belong here, this is your home.

Rediscover your power supply in the most simple and natural way.

Walk stand or sit with your bare feet on the earth, on grass a beach, in mud or soil. Lay under a tree. Hug a tree and lean there for a few moments. Visualize yourself as a tree and send your roots deep into the Earth. Gently massage your feet. Walk in nature. Rub the soles of your feet with a stainless steel spoon.

As you are here in a body, you are meant to live fully within the parameters and limitations, joys sorrows and challenges of this physical existence. Getting grounded will help you be here now and experience the fullness of life.

Practice simple grounding daily and recharge your batteries. Live in your body. Live more fully as you are meant to.

4 Ways to Raise Your Vibrations

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Dear Friends, to raise your thoughts and feelings from fear, anxiety, and worry to a calmer more peaceful place, a frequency of being that supports health and wholeness, raise your vibrations.

Some ideas to help you raise your vibrations in the time of the novel corona virus…

Reframe your thoughts

Tune your awareness to the content of your thoughts. If they are consistently negative anxious and worried, search for and find new thoughts that are a little more positive but that you can still believe. “I am safe in this moment.” “I will find a way to get through this”… “I am a survivor”…

Do this daily as you find yourself thinking thoughts that diminish and bring you down. Notice what you are thinking, then use your creative powers to put in place more loving and uplifting thoughts about the conditions of your life right now.

Release stuck emotions

Blocked emotions that can’t flow sit in your body mind and spirit like lead weights, holding you back. What feelings are you blocking from your awareness as you put one foot in front of the other to get through each day?

To clear the stuck emotions and raise your vibrations, you must tap into their powerful energy and let them flow. Yes, this can be scary. Yes, you will need a quiet time and space to do this. But you will be stronger for this practice and feel lighter.

Sit with the emotions that hold you back, feel them in your body. Let the tears flow, the sobs shake your body, whatever is needed to clear and release them. Experience the waves of feeling building, coming up and peaking, then changing and dissolving.

Let your emotions be what they are. As you feel and process them, the emotions will dissipate and you will feel lighter. If you hesitate, try to witness this release from the observer standpoint, as though you are sitting with and comforting a beloved friend .

Release tension in your body

Pay attention to sensations of your body in the here and now. Where do you carry tension? Where is your body relaxed? Do you notice pain, aches, tingling, lightness, heaviness? Pay attention to the sensations you feel with focus and compassion.

With pain or other sensations you want to escape from or block, try to focus on them until the feelings dissipate or change. Breathe deeply. Send love and compassion to those places in your body that need attention and care.

Tune into Spirit

Tap into your wise self, the larger part of you that knows the truth, lives in the moment, knows no fear, your indestructible spirit that transcends lifetimes, journeys with you through trials, times of danger, famine, disease, drought, that has been your guiding light from the beginning of time, that knows your purpose.

You can do this through intention or meditation, writing, creative projects, reading inspirational texts, doing shamanic journeys, praying, visualizing….

Gather your courage! Keep at your chosen practices with stamina and endurance. You are worth it! Try to do a little each day, a peeling back of inner layers of blocked energy and storm clouds that obscure your light and keep your vibrations low.

You can reclaim your inner light step by step, you can raise your vibrations and feel better.

A Practice to Energize You

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Drum! if you don’t have a drum get a wooden spoon and cooking pot lid, an old wooden box, a metal wastebasket…

You don’t need to be a student of percussion, you don’t need to have any practice or expertise, you don’t need to be good at it, you don’t need to perform for an audience.

Now begin! Match the rhythm of your heart as you beat your homemade drum. Now add your feet and get moving. Let your body sway and express what you are feeling. Let your whole self dance and move and twirl and stretch and twist and flow with the beat. You need this!

Try new patterns with your makeshift drum. Go slow then speed up, start with a simple pattern, moving into more tricky rhythms. Try multiple noise making objects that you can beat on shake or rattle without breaking or damaging them.

Now as you drum and move, let yourself vocalize and sing. Make beautiful sounds and not-so-beautiful sounds, let them express what you are feeling- joy, freedom, frustration, anger, fear, worry… happiness…

Try growling like a tiger, singing like an angel whooshing like the wind through an evergreen tree. Make up new words, create personal lyrics, specific to your life, or have no words, just the sounds of your voice.

Go high, go low, spin your voice like sugar, let it slide and play. Cut loose and let yourself be one with the sound that originates deep within you and continues outward into the web of life.

Celebrate your life with sound and drumming. Get your heart and body and voice activated. Energize yourself!

Raise up your deepest requests and desires on this wave of heartfelt sound and rhythm. Ask for the world you wish to see and for the life you wish to live. Ask for all the inhabitants of our dear planet, animal vegetable and mineral to prosper with full and robust health, for the web of life to be repaired.

Red winged blackbird

When you drum and sing with focus and heart and sincerity, the spirits cannot fail to hear you and be moved by your requests.

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.

Laughter

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Even though you can’t see touch, smell, or taste it, laughter bubbles up through your body, cleansing and clearing your energy and leaving you refreshed.  It can reset your mood, and lighten your day, connect you to higher vibrations.

Find reasons to laugh each day. OK, you don’t need a reason!   Kids have never needed a reason!  (If you do need a reason, do it because it feels good!)

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Happy kid!

Make laughter a daily practice to uplift your spirit and connect you to source, for contrary to majority opinion, source loves a good joke! 

The only rule, as always, is do not joke or laugh at the expense of another person or group of people.  Laugh to include, connect, and uplift not to exclude or put down.  Remember the golden rule…

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Laughing kid

When you laugh often with fun in mind, you will find your heart and spirit lighter, your mood happier, and your thinking with greater clarity and creativity.  You connect directly to the heart of source when you laugh!

Your sweet spot

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When you are energized, when you have no sense of time passing, when you are living in the moment, enthused, and inspired, you are centered in your sweet spot. Your physical body and spirit are aligned in harmony.

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Butterfly on elderberry bush

Do you spend most of your time in your sweet spot or do events, thoughts, and fears pull you off balance and out of true?

You work here is to do what needs to be done to line yourself up again and again with the amazing flow of energy, the inspiration, the delight and clarity of your sweet spot. This is where the things you care about get done! Effortlessly!

Can you catch yourself before you lean too far off center, before you get too far from your sweet spot? One way is to create a daily practice for yourself to keep yourself in balance.

Devise a ritual that helps you line up and place yourself fully in the center of your life, where your power lies, where you belong! You will be amazed!

Many humans are called at this time to step into their full power, to line up with their light and live fully in their sweet spot for the blessing of this earth. Will you?

Educational needs

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Remember at this time when your precious little ones go to school. They need so much more than food for thought, coloring within the lines, math worksheets and memorization drills.

Girl with fairy house

Girl and her fairy house

Within each child is a universe of emotion, feeling, and sensations. If you ignore their emotional literacy you ignore the greater, most powerful educational requirement in life!

I recommend a daily allowance of 5- 10 minutes for a feelings check in: How do you feel today? Where do you it in your body? Can you tune into that feeling and that place inside you and just listen feel and notice and breathe?

There is no right or wrong! No red pen writing comments, no colored star, no check marks, no frowny or smiley faces. Just feeling, knowing and accepting the inner truth.

Help your children learn the most important lesson of life as you learn it along with them. Do it together!

Grandmother Cottonwood’s prescription for all humans, especially children: Tune in to how you feel. Name the feelings. Notice your feelings and emotions in your body. Feel them. Pay attention!