Depression – Winter Blooms

Weighting and Waiting (Part 2): Conversations with the Body

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 Gary Craig website, the EFT Universe website, the Tapping Solution website, or contact Jane for EFT coaching support.

Once we commit to making positive physical changes, several helpful concepts support our intentions. The first concept concerns respecting and communicating with each aspect of the body we are conscious of judging negatively. When we find ourselves grasping the flesh of the upper arm, or belly, or some other body area as we make a critical comment, it is helpful to think of this physical part as coming forward for peace making. I say this because every specific part we reject about our flesh serves in some way to increase feelings of safety. This may sound counter-intuitive, especially when we are convinced that it is wrong or bad to be “fat,” or “lazy,” or even ill. However, when we reject even the tiniest part of the Self, we are in some way doing our very best to prevent similar rejection from others. Many of us learn self criticism as young children and then make our way in the world repeating this criticism as a way of short circuiting those we feel might criticize us in similar fashion. Tapping can help us to resolve our fear of criticism from others and at the same time, support us in making the long and winding journey from head to heart.

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Seasonal Blues – The Cultural Connection

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.

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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Terrorism and Depression

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.

Since the terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday, November 13, 2015, I’ve spoken with many people whose immediate reaction has been to shut down. This is understandable. Unlike the earthquake that rocked Brazil earlier this fall, an event that brought together people from all over the world to help, the terrorist attacks have had a divisive influence on people everywhere. Depression is often our first response when faced with something we feel we have no control over, and escalating terrorist attacks are at this point beyond the control of most people. Consciously or unconsciously, we are drawn to think about the human condition and what appears to be a growing impulse to war and annihilation. “Appears to be” is the key phrase. While the Paris bombings attract global attention, simultaneously, in communities everywhere, people are doing the work of weaving the world together in lovingly creative ways. Tapping, especially daily, prayerful tapping, can help us to focus on the ways we can participate in a Culture of Love that unites people in mending our social and environmental fabric and in doing so, lift the depressive energies that plague us.

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Lifting Seasonal Affective Disorder

Now that winter is officially here in the Northern Hemisphere, many are beginning to feel a familiar depression, often bordering on hopelessness, identified with short, cloudy, days and seemingly endless nights. Called Winter Blues, Seasonal Depression, and, clinically, Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) this emotional distress is a potentially serious condition whose symptoms include anxiety, sleeplessness, food cravings and subsequent weight gain, and debilitating lethargy. Physicians treat SAD sufferers, who are mostly women, with a variety of pharmaceuticals that mask symptoms. There are, however, reliable remedies that actually help to shift the negative emotions associated with SAD, including EFT, aka Tapping.

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Holidays – Part One – Finding your Inner Pagan

Please Note: Winter Blooms is an educational website only and is in no way meant to replace experience with a trained EFT practitioner, counselor, or therapist. To find an EFT Practitioner, visit the AAMET website, the EFT Universe website, the Tapping Solution website, or contact Jane at 802-533-9277 or jane@winterblooms.net for EFT coaching support.

Holidays. For some people, this time of year is filled with the joy of anticipated reunions and the evolution of family and community traditions. For others, the official onset of the winter season heightens fear, loneliness, and lack of connection to our fellow human beings. We in the west have created the perfect conditions for situational depression through our emphasis on material gifts, an emphasis that eclipses the intangible joys the season brings. Finding our way into the spiritual heart of the Winter Solstice is challenging but it can be done, even as we feel ourselves slipping into despair over human excesses.

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Tapping and “Wrinkle Porn”

Recently one of our weekly Vermont papers ran a review of And So It Goes, a film about two people in their late sixties whose relationship evokes such scorn in the reviewer that he must coin a new phrase, “wrinkle porn”, to express his disgust with this film and others whose characters are beyond middle age and still interested in sex. I haven’t seen the film, not because of the review, but because it came and went in the blink of an eye while blockbusters showcasing ever more cleverly manufactured gory deaths, explosions, and earth ravaging have run at local theatres for weeks. This post, however, isn’t about film; it is about language that suggests we should be ashamed of our passions once we reach what our culture calls Old Age. Tapping helps us to claim our passion – for sex and for life – at any age; it also helps us to neutralize the negative effects of words used cleverly, if inaccurately, to describe the waters we navigate in our sixties, seventies, and beyond.

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Food, Celebrations, and EFT: Part Two / A Place at the Table

In this time of seasonal feasting, it is inevitable that we remember fondly those stories, many made into films, that take us to a place of reverent nostalgia regarding our own past ritual feasts. The Christmas Dinner in Little Women is always one of my favourites, along with a modern version of the crazy Christmas togetherness in The Family Stone. Every time I see Elf I laugh and cry because the naive, child-like part of me wishes every orphan could end up a loved and valued Elf in Santa’s workshop. Generosity, forgiveness, and love are always on the menu in our favourite stories, as well as a balancing portion of the kind of satire we find in Eating Raoul, Tampopo, and The Hunger Games. Recent food documentaries A Place at the Table, The Power of Community, and Food, Inc. help us to understand why we are so preoccupied with food in our culture, and the First Nations peoples’ experiences recorded in Standing Silent Nation let us know why we need satirists like Jon Stewart to rival Jonathan Swift and his “A Modest Proposal”. These films and many others illustrate how food brings us together and separates us but one stands above the rest because, while it is about food, it is also about the spiritual nature of life, even in the midst of great feasting.

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Grace, Depression, and EFT

People define Grace in many ways, often in relation to specific religions. The definition I like best is an inclusive one that captures the feeling of being in harmony with wherever I am and whatever I may be doing. For me, feeling a sense of unimpeded energy flow, of easy passage through Scylla and Charybdis should they suddenly appear, and of trust in the deep underlying intelligence and purposefulness of life on Earth puts me in the amazing zone of timeless perfection in which all things fit together in mysteriously beautiful ways. For me, this state describes bliss, the eternal now, and the peace beyond human understanding.

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