A Ball of Anger

“I saw my anger”. This is a comment I hope to hear from all of my clients. So it came as no surprise when I heard it from Joan.

“You don’t understand.” She continued, needing to share this powerful experience with someone who might understand. “I actually saw my anger as a ball of energy in front of my face.” Now she had my full attention.

“I recently realized that my husband was not to blame for my fears and anxiety. I blamed him so I did not have to take responsibility for my own feelings. This moment of realization enabled me to change my own thoughts and actions. I stopped blaming my husband and became truthful with myself and my children. I immediately began to speak from a place of my own needs. I felt a huge weight being lifted from me at that moment.

“Shortly thereafter, I felt this ball of energy inside my body. I focused on it trying to understand its meaning. I soon recognized it as my own anger demanding my attention. As I focused on this ball of energy, it began to move. It literally shot out of my body and settled itself in front of me - an angry swirling ball of madness. There it was - my own anger right in front of me where I was forced to look at it. It was an unsettling experience.

“My next thought was, ‘what do I do with this anger.’ And immediately I had the need to direct it at someone. It was such an enlightening moment. For the first time I actually saw my pattern of blame and what it really looked like. With this huge awakening, I was able to ask a different question, ‘why do I need to direct my anger at anyone?’

“In that moment, I allowed my anger to return to its place inside of me because truthfully it was mine to deal with. And now I understood that I could choose differently. I did not have to blame anyone for my own anger, nor did I have to choose to be angry with myself.”

The spiritual work Joan had been doing the past years came to fruition in that moment. She was ready to heal the pains of her past and come to peace with her present. She no longer needed the angry child that was protecting her all those years. She freed herself from old patterns of behavior. Joan now had the power within herself to fill the hole where anger had once been stored. I can only hope that Joan chooses to fill it with the love she has for her “self” and her family.

Joan’s story is an inspiration to me. I share it with you hoping that it inspires each one of us to feel the places within our selves where our pains are stored waiting for that moment when we too can make a different choice – a choice to love. For it is through love that we become who we came to be….

Avoiding the Flu Naturally...

Some of us will choose to be vaccinated and some of us will choose not to be. Either way is okay as long as we are all free to make the choice that makes us most happy and secure. In addition, I always choose to support my body’s own defenses to keep me safe and healthy. It has worked well for the past 35 years, so I am moving my own fears aside and continuing down the path I trust most.

Most importantly, whatever you choose for your body becomes your responsibility. No one will be responsible for any choice you make except you. I have learned to follow my heart’s desires. I trust the choices that “feel" true to me. It is important that your choices do the same for you.

What makes me most happy is practicing detaching from the fear, drama and chaos that surrounds us. It takes time and patience and I have come to realize that I have ample amounts of both. I try to use them wisely.

I use my gift of kinesiology to ask my divine self how I can keep my family safe and healthy in these times of fear. The answers to my questions are below. Feel free to use what feels good for you and leave the rest. Please understand that I am not advocating for anyone to do anything, I am simply sharing my own thoughts. What you choose is up to you and in order to work must “feel” safe for you at many levels.

WINTER FOODS FOR THE COLD AND DARK DAYS:

We know how important sunlight is for vitamin D. There are other important nutrients necessary to help our body maintain health during the cold, dark winter months. So our food choices during this time are extremely important.

There are certain vegetables that grow better in the cold months than others. These are the foods that will nourish our bodies at this time of year, one of which are the root vegetables. The root vegetables energetically connect us to the soil of the Earth during days of ice and snow. These vegetables include: beets, turnips, yams (not sweet potatoes), daikon, burdock, carrots, rutabagas, parsnips, onions, leeks, scallions and garlic.

In addition, the cold crop leafy green vegetables energetically connect us to the sky above. These vegetables include dandelion greens, beet greens, Swiss chard, romaine lettuce, broccoli rabe, arugula, baby greens, spinach, kale, mustard greens, parsley, and chives,

Organic is preferable to conventional when possible. Simply eating one root vegetable and one leafy green a day helps to enhance our immune systems.

SUPPLEMENTS TO HELP ENHANCE OUR IMMUNITY:

Herbs and vitamins play a role in keeping us healthy as well. The following program tests out best for those of us 10 years and older.

Astragulus is an immune boosting herb that I will take twice a day during the months of November, December and January. Tincture seems to test out best as it is more easily absorbed through the mucus membranes.

Vitamin C 1000 with bio-flavonoids also helps to spark our immune systems and one a day seems sufficient.

I invest wisely by purchasing products that I know use quality ingredients. If I want my herbs and vitamins to do what is expected of them, I have to make sure their ingredients are active.

A Vitamin D supplement never hurts when the sun does not want to cooperate in the dark of winter. So my program will include either a good multi vitamin with Vitamin D 400 added or I will add Vitamin D 400 separately. Either way should work. And I will remember to enjoy those sunny winter days that beckon me to play out of doors.

More importantly than anything else, I will avoid judgments, anger and fear toward those around me who are ill and instead treat them with love and compassion. In my experiences, it is through love and compassion that my immune system is most happy with me.

Vitamin D and Sunlight - A Most Important Resource

We know that sunlight is rich in Vitamin D. It gives life sustaining energy to every organism on Earth including every cell in our bodies. With the news that many children today are Vitamin D deficient, I decided to “test” what is important to know about Vitamin D. These are the answers I received:

Vitamin D is absorbed through the hair follicles especially at the back of the head near the base of the skull. Where there is no hair, there can be no absorption.

More interesting is the next tidbit of information that I received: Vitamin D is best absorbed through movement. Remembering my own childhood, we were sent out of doors to play from early morning until dinnertime, allowed to return indoors only for breakfast or lunch. And yet I have no memory of ever being sunburned.

I took this understanding to another level and asked, “Why are we designed to absorb best through movement?” My answer came quickly and clearly, “Because time is too precious to waste.” In other words, our bodies absorb best when used to create joy in life.

Even more information was revealed: The dark, cold winter months of November, December and January require less Vitamin D than our more active, warmer months of June, July and August. These cold, dark times are a time for self reflection. It is a time to slow our body movement which in turn, requires less Vitamin D. So think about how important it is to take advantage of a bright, sunny day during those long winter months. There is nothing healthier for our bodies at that time of year than a good snowball fight or a shovel full of snow!

A sunny winter day is a gift of Vitamin D, one we can easily all take advantage of.

Pain IS the Absence of Love

Sometimes it takes a smack in the head to get “it”… and even if we get it, will we practice it? I am learning to do both – First, to trust in what I know and more importantly, to practice what I know.

This past week, I was given two powerful, painful and loving experiences to bring me to my highest state of knowing that pain IS the absence of love, which has now become my truth.

Hollybeth and I often take our dog, Maggie, for walks in the woods. On the way back from our walk, our eyes were intent at avoiding the rocks along the path. And for some reason, we both looked up at the very same moment. And in that moment, right in front of her face was a dead tree branch hanging in our path about 3/4” in diameter. Neither of us had time to divert the outcome. It smacked Hollybeth right below her left eye as she walked directly into it. Ouch! That hurt. I know because I saw and heard it hit. Of course, Hollybeth felt the blow.. and it was instantly pain-ful!

Her immediate response from this pain was anger. And then, I remembered what I not only have learned but what I teach others. Don’t feed negativity with more negativity. Don’t feed pain with anger. Instead, heal pain with love.

I reminded her of this lesson and asked her to allow me to love her through her pain. She gratefully consented. I gently ran my fingers over the pain spot and talked lovingly to it. And for about 3 minutes, I continued this mantra… over and over and over. And then her moment of pain passed…she was no longer IN the pain, she had gone through the pain.

The next morning, I looked her in the eye and asked, “How does your eye feel?”

“There is nothing there mom… my eye is fine!” And sure enough, no swelling, no black and blue, just Hollybeth’s beautiful face.

Obviously, one pain experience was not enough to test my theory. A few days later, as I was driving my convertible (with the top down) along a beautiful country road, a nut from a tree overhead decided to drop its fruit. It hit me on the left side of my head at the hairline. The intensity of the fall and the size of the nut felt like a rock and the pain in my head took no time to begin to develop into a head “ache”. And for a second, my pain turned to anger, and then I remembered again that in order to avoid getting stuck in the pain I had to love myself through the pain.

As I did with Hollybeth, I did with myself. I gently rubbed my fingers over the pain and talked lovingly to it. I continued this mantra for about 3 minutes. Five minutes or so later, I felt a dull ache in that same spot. My “self” needed more of my own love. So I continued the rubbing and the love from me to me. All in all it took about 5 minutes of my time to give my “self” the loving attention I needed in that moment. And then it was gone. It was as if I had never been smacked in the head. No swelling and no black and blue spot!

I was grateful for that lesson. It awakened me to the reality that pain truly is the absence of love. If we can remember to replace our anger with our love of “self”, healing can flow quickly, easily and oh so enlightening!

Is There More To Food Poisoning Than The Food?

“Mom, I think I got food poisoning at a restaurant on Sunday.” It was now Tuesday morning and although Shan was back at work, she was still experiencing pain in her abdomen. I agreed with her that I thought the shrimp she ate was not quite right, but was there more to her pain than food?

“Why did you wait so long to call me?” My concerned mother’s voice asked.

“I guess I just need to suffer for a while.” She is my Agrimony child after all.

I immediately got to work testing to help her figure out exactly what she was doing to create the symptoms. It soon became clear that fear stood in the way of her ability to heal her stomach pain. I finally asked, “What are you worried about?” As we worked and talked together, it became very clear that she was concerned about money issues after the baby comes. (Yes, I will be a new grandmother in January – yay!) And of course, she would love to have me live closer to help with her first born child.

So we worked together to calm her fears by helping her focus on the joys of her present, knowing that her responsible Agrimony will come through in the end. I also assured her that this new grandmother could easily jump on a plane anytime we deemed it necessary to ensure that our new baby bonded with all of us.

By the end of our conversation, I knew she was feeling safer and more secure in this new endeavor she had undertaken. She felt comfortable knowing that my first priority would always be to spend as much time with our new baby as I possibly could. Denver was just a plane ride away.

I called the next morning to see how she was feeling. Her happy voice answered the phone. “The pain went away as soon as we hung up the phone yesterday mom.” I could not help but smile knowing that we can transform our pain just as fast as we can create it.

I helped Shan get in touch with the issue; she made a conscious choice to change where she was focusing her attention. Healing really can be that simple!

Healing the Cellular Memory

Mary and I have been working for almost 9 years. She told me today that her first appointment with me was in December of 1999. I felt my ego jump in and wonder, why so long? I then pushed my ego aside and learned that healing is not attached to time. Healing takes place when we are healthy in our thoughts, our words and our deeds. In simpler terms, healing takes place when we are healthy enough to allow our “self” to heal.

When I met Mary, she was very ill. Both her immune and energy systems were drained. She could no longer function. Her body had enough. As I watched Mary begin to heal, I saw an old pattern that Mary had not been able to connect to. She was compulsive. According to the dictionary compulsive means: “Somebody whose actions are driven by a usually irrational psychological force.”

Mary was driven; cooking was her drive. She cooked all day to fill a freezer that could never be full enough. When she shopped at the store, she bought six of this and five of that. She could never buy enough. Finally I asked her, who are you cooking for? In reality there was only her and her husband at home. She was taken aback by that question. She didn’t really have an answer.

When she realized her compulsion with cooking, she refocused her energy into making crafts. She loved to create. However, once she began she could not stop. She worked day and night; she could not make enough. Her room was so full of crafts of all shapes and sizes that she had to have a craft show.

We used the flower essence Vervain to help Mary begin to heal her compulsive behaviors. As we worked her Vervain issue, anger began to reveal itself in Mary’s body. Her intestines spoke loud and clear asking her to recognize her impatient personality. The flower essence “Impatiens” helped to slow her down so she could begin to see differently.

Next her resentment personality was free to show itself and sinus issues emerged. Chicory and Willow were introduced into her program.

As time went on, I listened to Mary’s resentment voice. I realized that Mary was incapable of hearing her own resentment because resentment had be-come her. I worked each layer to help Mary hear the language she was speaking; it was a language attached to resentment. And one day Mary was able to hear the resentment she was holding in her self. Now she could begin to heal it.

As her resentments healed, her body turned itself to the language of the bladder which holds disappointments. Mary had be-come a disappointment; she felt she could never do enough and her life was reflecting her belief. And so we worked on Mary’s bladder and for the past many layers, Mary was deep into her disappointment issues. She urinated constantly, keeping her awake at night. Cantharis and Nat Mur became her constant companions, and finally on her last layer, Impatiens was reintroduced which signaled to me that anger was an underlying factor in all these disappointments.

On that same layer, she was back to age 6. Again I asked, “What does age 6 mean to you?” Mary and I had been back to age 6 many times in the past; this time was different. In a moment, Mary remembered. She remembered a very traumatic event in first grade. She had wet her self. And instead of that small beautiful child being loved and nurtured through that experience, the teacher traumatized and punished her in front of her classmates.

That one experience, if handled differently, could have helped Mary come to a place of accepting her self; instead that one experience traumatized her to the point of such pain and embarrassment that she chose to hide from her self. Her body in return has been hiding that trauma all these years through compulsion, impatience, resentment and disappointment.

After our 9 years of working together, Mary has done a lot of healing. She was now healthy enough to heal her traumatic memory cell. She no longer had to hide from her self. Mary learned to love her self.

When I saw Mary today, she no longer needed Cantharis. So I had to ask, “How is your bladder issue?” Mary smiled and was proud to announce that it no longer had an effect on her. Her bladder was behaving just fine.

Today, Mary’s focus is no longer on cooking or crafts. She gave both of those compulsions up a while ago. Instead she has found gardening, not through compulsion but through love. Mary does not need to be compulsive to run from her pain because she has now healed her pain. Mary’s garden is filled with love. And from what I am told it has be-come a Garden of Eden which according to the dictionary is: “any place seen as being perfect, highly pleasing, or happy”. Mary’s garden is a reflection of Mary her self.

When God Speaks...

As a 5th chakra Beech personality, I love a great adventure. Buy me a ticket and I’ll go anywhere. So it came as no surprise when I found myself headed to hike the Inca Trail for 4 days to the lost city of Machu Picchu. It had always been on my dream list. I was living my dream.

When first asked to join in this adventure, I was not sure how I could afford it; however, money would not deter me. My healing experiences taught me to focus my energy on my desires instead of my fears. I clearly spoke, “I’m going!” And one day the money magically appeared before me. I asked, the universe provided and I graciously accepted

Ten women all over 50 and from all different backgrounds and beliefs set out together for the adventure of a lifetime. On the way to the airport, the group granted me a moment to set forth our intentions for the journey. It was simple: “Grant us a journey filled with joy, love and laughter; and allow us to follow divine guidance along the way.” And so it was done.

As we boarded the plane to Newark, I came upon my seat in the back of the airplane, a far distance from the rest of my group. I double checked my boarding pass as my seat was already occupied. “Excuse me, is this your seat?” I inquired. In a shy sort of way, he answered me with a simple no and nothing more.

I noticed a young lady sitting to his side and asked, “Is that your daughter?” And again his answer was a simple yes.

“Then you should sit with your daughter. I can sit in your seat. Where is it?”

He pointed to a center seat one row back, and although I preferred my aisle seat to his, I thought it a small price to pay to allow a dad to be with his daughter.

As I sat down, I realized the aisle seat next to me was still empty. I remembered that the stewardess told us the plane was sold out. Time passed and still the seat remained empty. I might get my aisle seat yet. However, just before the doors of the plane closed, a single heavy set gentleman came quickly down the aisle and plopped himself next to me.

He was quite talkative and very entertaining. I learned a lot about him during our 50 minute ride. He was on his way home from Florida to Newark. Originally he had a first class seat on another flight; however, he had a very long lay over and decided to go standby on this flight to try and get home four hours earlier. So here he was, traveling from Florida to Newark by way of Boston.

I also learned that he traveled a lot on business and was a wealth of travel information. Eventually he got to me and where I was going. I proudly answered, “I’m going to Peru to hike the Inca trail.”

“That’s a long trip,” was his reply. “What seats do you have?”

Taken aback by the question, I had to admit I had no idea. He waited patiently while I dug into my bags for my boarding passes. He quickly informed me that I had bad seats and before I knew what was happening, he had his blackberry out scanning for available exit seats on my next flight. “I can get you a much better seat by an exit window. It will give you a lot more leg room and because it’s in the middle of the plane, your seat will still recline.”

It sounded good to me, and with the click of a mouse, my seat was upgraded, maybe not quite as good as first class (okay, so nowhere near first class), but a big improvement none the less.

By now we were getting ready to land. As we shuffled for our carry on bags, the gentleman with his young daughter turned to me and said, “Here, I want to buy you lunch. I appreciate you giving up your seat so I could sit with my daughter.”

Again I was taken aback and quickly told him it was not necessary. He insisted and I took the $20.00.

God speaks to us in mysterious ways. And in that moment, I knew God had spoken to me not once but twice and my trip was barely off the ground! I graciously accepted my gifts and knew that I was being divinely guided. With a sense of knowing and a smile on my face, I consciously decided to allow this journey to unfold. All I had to do from here-on-end was love each step that was laid out before me. And so my journey began…