Dec 31, 2015 – Winter Blooms

Greeting the New Year Consciously

Please Note: Winter Blooms is an educational website in no way meant to replace building a relationship with a trained EFT practitioner, counselor, or therapist. To find an EFT Practitioner, visit the AAMET website, the ACEP website, the EFT Universe website, the Tapping Solution website, or contact Jane for EFT coaching support.

As the season explodes with the message to ‘Party, Party, Party,’ many of us are turning away from what Leonard Cohen calls the ‘hurly burly’ of daily life to attend instead to our inner guidance. When we turn inward at this time of year, we are creating the sacred space necessary for reflection about the year that is slipping away and about the year to come. New Year’s Eve is a potent time for those of us committed to living consciously, because it offers us a clear ending and a clear beginning in a single moment. As we light our candles, gather our thoughts, and open our hearts and our journals, we are consciously attending to where we have been physically, emotionally, and spiritually; when we complete these reflections, we then turn our attention to our aspirations and intentions for the year to come.

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Seasonal Blues – The Cultural Connection

This time of year, many of us feel the anguish of being alone, not because our solitude is painful or undesirable or the result of accident rather than choice, but because our materialistic, ad-driven culture emphasizes family connections in its hard-sell of goods that bespeak waste, environmental degradation, and the conflation of need and desire. Linking these goods to a return of Light is an irony hard to miss. The altruism of giving, something naturally linked to the celebratory feelings of Illumination and Rebirth, is nowhere more evident than it is at this time of year despite the commercialization of our lives. Tapping can help to calm our frustration and helplessness in the face of rampant consumerism and at the same time help us to feel connected to the energies of Regeneration that are so potent as we begin our slow journey into
Winter.

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A Winter Solstice Invitation

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, the Winter Solstice arrives on Monday, December 21, 2015. Most people recognize this date as the official first day of Winter. Others mark it as the return of the growing light, those longer days that makes Spring possible in only three short months.
But the Winter Solstice is more than the first day of winter and the promise of spring; it also offers us an invitation to cultivate deep contemplation regarding a whole new cycle of death, birth, fruition, decay, death, and rebirth. However you have marked this day in the past, may you find a meaningful, even ceremonial way of welcoming the Winter Solstice this season and the greater perspective it brings regarding the eternal round of life and death here on Planet Earth.

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When Our World Becomes Unsafe

The recent politically motivated San Bernardino shootings and the Paris terrorist acts present irrefutable proof that our ordinary, everyday world has become as unsafe as any war zone. Paralleling this terrorism, murders of children and adults in elementary schools, high schools, colleges, and movie theatres paint a grim picture of mental illness manifesting as hatred that is not politically motivated. How do we continue to go out into the world with enthusiasm and purpose when so many of our ordinary settings and activities seem increasingly precarious? There are no easy answers to quell our fear and foreboding, only vitally important conversations to be had. Tapping can help us to navigate these very troubled waters with one another.

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Partnership Culture – Part Two

in my last post I wrote about creating a partnership culture, beginning with the most important partnership, the one with the Self. Cultivating this primary relationship creates authenticity, a quality that makes living meaningful and, through meaning, helps us to develop the resilience we need to meet and integrate life’s inevitable tragedies. Unfortunately, not only do we lack training for creating a partnership with the self, we are taught to devalue this relationship and instead place our faith in superficial popular-culture values to create a happy life. Many learn, through the pain of addiction and depression, that the popular culture values driven by materialism cannot help us to craft meaningful, authentic lives; in fact, they can hurt us. What can help us to create the lives we want is to listen to the guidance we receive from our emotions, guidance that helps us to understand and embrace our needs, our strengths, and our values. Last week I wrote about using tapping to discover our needs and strengths. This week, I want to explore how tapping can help us to discover our values.

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