healing practice

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.

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.

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 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.

A healing practice

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First, gently allow your body and mind to relax, breathing deeply, letting yourself sink comfortably into your chair or bed or mat…

Now, imagine the crown chakra at the top of your head, gently opening and beautiful liquid-like golden light from the divine pouring into and through you like water.

Grandmother Cottonwood

Feel it pouring down through the energy center, filling every cell of your body, every organ, every nerve and blood vessel, every bone and muscle, every ligament, every skin cell…every microscopic connection between cells… Imagine the beautiful light filling them all effortlessly with its cleansing healing power.

Imagine and see and know this amazing healing light filling you from head to toe displacing and sending all heavier energies away, letting them drain through your feet into the Earth for recycling.

Now when light reaches your feet, pause a moment to enjoy the feeling. Then let it begin to fill your aura from your feet to your head, permeating every particle of your energy with liquid golden light.

Allow this light to assist in weaving your aura together in a beautiful tapestry that draws in life affirming energies and filters out all incompatible energies and those that belong to others.

Now, sit with this light and let it circulate from your head to your toes slowly and thoroughly throughout your entire body, then from your feet to your crown through your aura.

This is the light of the divine. Feel it, know it, experience it. Let it heal you and bring you peace.

Grandmother Cottonwood, summer moss

When you feel complete with this practice, give thanks, then tap your cheekbones, the center of your chest and rub the bottom center of your feet near the big toe joint. Let yourself come back to the here and now.

Get to know your spirit

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Dear ones, no matter what happened to you in the past, what occurs in the present or future, your spirit is indestructible.

Your body may decline, your life may crumble around you, your possessions may be lost, your accounts drained of value, but at your core, the very heart of you, the deepest part of you, you are so more than all this. You are powerful, resilient, everlasting. You are spirit, living in a body!

Can you get in touch with your spirit, the foundation of your life? Your spirit predates your conception, your body, your life in this place and time. It is the part of you that came to this Earth with a purpose, a mission.

Robin in winter

Discovering who you are on a deep soul level is not a secret process. It is not difficult; it takes commitment, curiosity and perseverance.

(Logical thought won’t help you, for the spirit transcends linear thought. Using logic to prove or disprove the existence of God? You humans are too funny!)

Open your heart and mind to your deepest experience of oneness. Remember those times you felt transcendence and joy, for this is how spirit makes itself known to you. Suspend judgment and allow yourself to be without an agenda, without expectations. Ask for your spirit to become known to you.

Set a firm intention to get to know your spirit. Be open to the hints, dreams, visions, signs, intuitions, and wisdom that come your way. Pay attention, let your creative mind bring all these threads together and weave a beautiful tapestry that shows you who you really are at the deepest level.

Getting to know your spirit is a life-long process and, I hope, one that will bring you great joy and wisdom.

Always remember that you are spirit and body. You will endure and thrive!

GCW as healer: A Shamanic Practice

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Dear friends, rest here awhile in the shelter of roots at my base. Can you imagine yourself laying among my roots, on the cool Earth? What do you feel? What do you see, smell and hear as you take shelter with me?

Grandmother Cottonwood – winter afternoon

Feel the Earth energy permeate your body as my roots draw it upward from deep in the earth. My roots are deeper and wider than you can imagine!

Let yourself feel her energy, anchoring, filling, healing, and energizing you. Know the feeling of belonging, of home.

Gifts from Grandmother Cottonwood

Now as you soak in the energy of home, letting your mind rest and your body be one with the earth, let yourself feel the energy of sky and stars fill and permeate your being as I gather it in from my leaves, buds, twigs and branches, channeling it down through my trunk to fill you with light and life force.

Let the light that fills you be in the color most needed for you at this time. It may be any color of the rainbow, bright, clear, jewel-like. Become one with the gorgeous color. Allow yourself to dissolve into it. It might be a deep electric blue, the rosy pink of sunsets, or whatever color your spirit has chosen for you.

Now let the energies, the colors and vibrations of earth energy and heavenly energy fill every cell of your being, bless you, energize you, and heal you.

Rest here in this peaceful place as long as you wish, experiencing and bathing in the peaceful healing energy of earth and sky.

You can revisit my sheltering roots whenever you need peace and renewal.