on spiritual healing

Mainstream healing means going to your doc, telling her what's ailing you, and getting meds, tests, or procedures - all invasive, physically, biochemically and emotionally.  

At present, our understanding of the healing process is shifting because our grasp of consciousness is deepening.  So many people already resort to alternative therapies, either to compliment conventional treatment, because they are at the end of the rope and conventional treatment hasn't helped, or even exclusively because it's gentle, without side effects, non-invasive, and relatively inexpensive.

If spiritual is simply defined as nonphysical or of the mind, then spiritual healing is healing without physical implements or methods, only  using the mind or consciousness.  Hence acupuncture, homeopathy or healing with essential oils, while acting on the body's energetic system, would not be considered spiritual healing, while prayer or healing through intention would be.  Here is a website with a very helpful attempt at sorting out the different energy healing modalities.

 Last fall I had the opportunity to do some writing and coordination work for Dena Barnett for her upcoming documentary Spiritual Healing: A New Frontier, a film that explores this vast field, which is still as yet little understood scientifically within our contemporary context, although it is the oldest healing modality.  Spiritual healing, just like all the other energy healing modalities, can potentiate the healing process initiated by conventional medicine, it can also stand on its own as a treatment method. And sometimes it is more effective than conventional medicine in the many instances when Western medicine is unable to help.    The UK is on the forefront of accepting spiritual healing as a proper therapy, and it is available upon request and covered through their national healthcare system. Exciting times ahead!

smiling by myself

Do you ever catch yourself smiling spontaneously?  I don't mean in a social setting with people, but spontaneously, all by yourself?   

Earlier I saw our resident red cardinal in the shrub with his wife - cardinals are lifelong companions - and the sight brought a spontaneous smile to my face.  On a New Year's walk a few days ago, several beautiful nature sights made me break out spontaneously into a smile.  Earlier I went outside and the winter sun shone on my face.  I felt myself smiling - no one around.  And of course the many absolutely adorable animal video clips that abound on social media are guaranteed to elicit a curling up of the corners of my mouth.

Sarah Stevenson writes in her guest blog in Psychology Today about the endorphin feedback loop that happens when we smile in reaction to someone else’s smile, “…when I smile, the world smiles back.” Well, nature and animals don’t smile. Yet, my subconscious or my soul picks up the unconditional love of animals, or the unconditional beauty of nature, and spontaneously releases endorphins and elicits a smile just like in a social setting with a person.

Stuff for thought.

just a bit unexpected

The French canard, or duck, à l'orange is a classic, and we know how well pork pairs with apples or prunes. But you don't have to subscribe to meat to serve fruit the savory way.

In the wintertime an Italian inspired citrus salad is such a refreshing way to brighten up an otherwise perhaps heavy meal and add some sunshine.  Slice your citrus fruit and either red onions or shallots, add olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper - and voilà, a nice dose of vitamin C.

 Or roast some olive oil painted, halved pears in the oven, sprinkled with salt and pepper.  They keep for a week in the fridge and go well with cheese, meat, are wonderful as a side dish, and a great snack ( introduce your kids to some unexpected taste combinations).  

 My Misfits Market box contained two small papayas recently.  They were green and quite hard, so I looked up a recipe for the Filippino green papaya salad made with fish sauce, garlic and lime juice.  And even though the papayas ended up being slightly orange and sweet when I cut them open, i did not turn back and it ended up being a delicious flavor combination.

Why not think out of the box to get some fresh and fruity vitamins into your winter system?

who's the real culprit?

It seems like a gluten-free pantry is de rigueur in a lot of households these days.  But gluten-free cooking is a bit of a pain in the neck and a blanket reaction. Let's dig a bit deeper.

Several things happened over the past half century to produce more food and make it cheaper. One is agriculture on a humongous scale, the other is the industrialized manufacturing of food.  Both are machine and profit driven.  Any critter that comes in the way of the crop is a bother and threat to the bottom line, and shelf life is the consideration on the supermarket side.  Hence crops are being genetically modified and sprayed with pesticides, Monsanto's glyphosate in this case, and industrial scale recipes were devised to make boxed and packaged foods long lasting.  There is a price to pay for this. In addition, we have made eating more convenient by adding lots of wheat based baked goods for breakfast and snacks, and pizza and pasta for other meals.  Hence, researchers have also played with the wheat strains by modifying them and increasing gluten amounts.

Gluten-free products have become yet another money making addition to the food industry's portfolio, and the ingredients are often way more strange than if you bought a loaf of bread made of wheat and water and yeast. A different consideration is that refined white wheat flour has a very high glycemic index (the body reacts to it like it does to sugar), nothing necessarily to upset your stomach, but it drives your blood sugar up, and if you have diabetes it's best avoided to reduce your insulin intake.  

 Without digging deeper you don't know what your stomach actually reacts to - the glyphosate (a poison!), the gluten excess (sits heavy in the stomach), the strange new wheat strains the body is not used to, or the overall need of your body to eat less grain based foods and more greens and vegetables. Digging deeper entails a process of elimination, which you can start on either end.  Either going all out grain free and slowly adding items back in, or eliminating items out of your diet one by one.  

You might remove refined conventional white wheat flour and try organic white or whole wheat flour. Consider trying the older wheat strains like Einkorn, spelt, emmer, triticale, kamut,  or farro.  They have less gluten and have not been altered as much as the modern wheat types.  Organic is always preferable because it won't have the glyphosate in it, possibly the main culprit in this whole inquiry.  If all that doesn't make your stomach less irritated you can indeed resort to wheat free recipes.  But take a look at gluten-free supermarket products and be amazed at how many ingredients they actually have.  Instead, cook from scratch and use the many gluten free flours now available, coconut, chickpea, green banana, almond, or teff to name just a few. 

Over a year ago I tried the anti-inflammatory Gundry diet for a good three months, a diet that eliminates not only gluten-based products but also all foods with lectins (i.e. nightshades).  It did absolutely nothing for me other than costing more money and more headaches in the kitchen.  However, I had recommended it to someone, and her whole circle of friends adopted it and raves about it’s beneficial effects.  You have to experiment on yourself what works and doesn't work, what's worth the bother and expense, and what's not.  Every body is different!

an invitation

While New Year's resolutions usually don't stick - people have good intentions that they cannot sustain - it is nevertheless nice that we have divvied our time interpretation up into segments and get this feeling of closure at the end of each year, and with it the sense of a fresh start.  

 Not only has 2018 been a challenging year for me personally, for the world too it has been quite a perplexing one, making me sometimes wonder if we are retreating in our human consciousness evolution.  I thought we were doing quite nicely there, perhaps not as fast as I would like it from an environmental perspective, lagging in other areas too, but all in all improving the human condition generally and slowly it seemed.  

 I would like to end this year on a positive note, and set an optimistic tone for the next one. "To become more conscious is the greatest gift anyone can give to the world; moreover, in a ripple effect, the gift comes back to its source," David R. Hawkins, who I referred to elsewhere, wrote in his 1995 Power vs. Force: An Anatomy of Consciousness.  "And," he continues, "any individual increase also raises to some degree the consciousness of everyone on the planet."  It's not so much what others do and think (and getting upset over that), it's what you do and think.  "What matters is what calls you, and to do that," Charles Eisenstein said along the same line in June during the The Space Between Stories retreat I attended.  

 In that spirit I would like to invite you to be just a little bit more You this coming year, becoming more conscious of your emotional needs.  When your own emotional needs are more fulfilled and better met, you not only help yourself but everyone around you. It raises us all up a bit.  Happy New Year!

a little light

Our world in all of its myriad expressions, political, social, cultural, economic, and environmental, is in crisis and it is our own collective doing.  We are in it deeply.  But the bigger question is if, how, and when we can finally get around to doing something about it?  Can we surmount this hurdle collectively and initiate a turn for the better?  Can we as a species make it, and make it well?  Can we become more compassionate with each other, since we cannot exist in a vacuum, and with our planet Earth, without which we cannot not exist?

 While the winter solstice is the shortest day of the year, hence the darkest time, it is also the turning point as we all know.  From here on in the days become longer, and light increases gradually. Nothing very particular, about that, it happens every year.  But this year is special because the solstice coincides with the full moon tomorrow.  On top of that it coincides with the annual Ursid meteor shower.  And, last but not least, Christmas, the festival of love and joy, is just a few days away.  

 I like to see it as a wonderfully symbolic and fantastic concurrence.  I also like the idea of seeing parallels or synchronicities, it inspires hope.  So this year the darkest day falls together with the brightest night and the festival of love and joy.  Perhaps the Talmudic observation that "a little light chases away a lot of darkness" is worth pondering.   

Wishing you all so much light and love!

wow experience

A Wow Experience is when you are completely in the moment, enthralled, getting a sense that you're connected to something bigger, and experience utter joy and meaning.    Wow Experiences go hand in hand with synchronicity and serendipity (see an earlier post on that).  We have probably all had at last one Wow Experience, and all we want is more Wow Experiences. May I please have another one of those?

A few weeks ago I had a Wow Day.  The people I met that day, our mutual missions, what we did, our synergies and conversations  - all seemed to be in complete alignment with the universe and with me.  The energy that day was just flowing, everything seemed easy and joyful, and as if things were exactly how they were meant to be. I was on Cloud 9.  

When you're at a certain energetic or frequency level you tend to have more Wow Experiences and Wow Days because you tap into a higher consciousness and energetic level. Better yet, once you’ve had some Wow Experiences you are able to look beyond yourself and create a Wow Experience for someone else, or perhaps offer an act of random kindness.  You have probably heard it said that people get more out of helping others than helping themselves.

Have you had a Wow Experience or Wow Day lately?   Would you like one?         

embeddedness

It somehow hit me this morning how our children embed us in the fabric of life, nature and the cosmos. It's as if my energy got suspended in mid-air if I passed without having had children, because there would be no biological link extending into the future. The energy of my existence extends back in time via my ancestors.    But through my children and grandchildren my beingness, my imprint, my legacy, weaves itself into the cloth of life forward as well.  It's as if I was a pearl on an endless string that extends into the past and the future.

This interwovenness with all of life and all the people I spend this lifetime with, and possibly those with whom I've spent other lifetimes with, gives me a sense of belonging and of grounding.  I feel a connectedness, and that I'm part of something bigger.  Certainly, I'm not an island - see an earlier post on that.  

Spiritually or cosmologically or energetically, is there a difference between biological family ties and emotional friendship or spousal ties, or is that only a physical perception and interpretation?  If you believe in reincarnation, we are part of a group of souls who reincarnate together again and again, switching roles and genders around for the sake of this game.   My son might have been a good friend in another life, my best friend might have been my husband or wife in another life and so on.   Of course, if you don't believe in reincarnation this is all rubbish.

What's your take?

the bird tree

Because of the danger of bears we keep our garbage can strapped from March to November.  Once mid-November rolls around we can let go of the straps, and at the same time we go through the annual ritual of hanging the bird feeding paraphernalia back on the bird tree. 

The bird tree is a dead upside down cedar trunk, roots in the air as branched hanging device for bird feeders and suet cages, that my husband found in the woods a few years ago.  With great effort we had lugged it back through the woods and down the steep incline towards the house.  There we placed it in a planting bed exactly opposite the big window through which we look out into nature while we sip our morning tea. During the winter months, weekend paper reading goes hand in hand with bird watching, and while the rest of nature is gray-brown and dormant, our bird tree is alive and teeming with activity and color. 

Many years ago a bird lover friend talked passionately about Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers and Cedar Waxwings, names I found profoundly silly and contortedly long.  But here we are, trying to identify and name them, the Black-capped Chickadees, the Tufted Titmouse, the Downy and Red-bellied Woodpeckers, the huge Pileated Woodpeckers who make a rare appearance, the Mourning Doves, the big Blue Jays and of course the beautiful Northern Cardinals, males in bright red uniform, females with a red beak and only subtle wisps of red here and there on their tan plumage.  The squirrels have of course found the bird feeders and hang upside down in acrobatic postures from the bird tree to snatch some seeds.

Live entertainment, a true reality show.

food, glorious food

One of the many ways to elevate the frequency at which you vibrate (we live in an electro-magnetic universe and everything is made of energy whose quality is measured in frequency) is to improve the quality of the food you eat.  A healthy body vibrates at 62-68Hz, while frequencies below 58Hz weaken the immune system, and we die at around 25Hz.  

All sorts of negative frequencies assault us on a daily basis, from environmental factors and electro-magnetic frequencies (i.e. cellphones and wifis), to negative people and negative emotions (i.e. fear), to stress and dead foods (processed, canned, GMO) to name just a few.  

Hence elevating your frequency on an ongoing basis helps to maintain or even surpass your current level (surpassing is healing). There are many ways to do so with food being one of the really easy ones.  Fresh and organic foods have the highest frequencies, fresh organic herbs vibrate even higher, and alkaline foods are better than acidic foods (see an earlier post on this), hence in my opinion the trend to more vegetarianism and veganism as we evolve.  There are also many other ways to improve your inner vibration, such as using essential oils (rose oil has the highest frequency) or homeopathic remedies. Listening to higher frequency music (528Hz is the frequency that repairs DNA!) is another option, hence sounds baths and sound healing (here a post on that).  Being out in nature elevates your frequency as does laughing (see a post on laughter yoga) and meditation.

If you are aware  of how you feel and if you need a boost, it's really quite easy to build something into your life to rebalance yourself.