Category: Gratitude

Building Bridges Through Loss: Four/When Sadness Comes

While I have called this post “When Sadness Comes,” I might well have substituted the word Rage for Sadness.  In my experience, all feelings of anger and grief are inseparable although, depending upon care giver expectations, we may be unable to experience one or the other of these profoundly humanizing emotions.  Some of us are born into families who permit the expression of anger but deny any grief that may lie below this emotion.  And many are born into families where it is “safe” to express sadness, but absolutely forbidden to express any form of anger.  And some, of course, must pretend a kind of cheerful neutrality regardless of what emotional landmines are detonating throughout the days and nights of family life.

Our journeys to wholeness require that we acknowledge and experience the feelings our early care givers insisted we deny, and this requirement is often very challenging.  The reclamation of our forbidden feelings is a process similar to muscle building.  We go through an initial period of painful resistance that requires we choose to persevere.  Once we make this choice to reclaim our denied emotions, our new emotional breadth increases our emotional intelligence one hundred fold.  This reclamation process takes the time and patience any worthwhile undertaking requires.  Happily, energy tools, and specifically EFT, can be very helpful partners in improving our emotional literacy on the journey to wholeness.

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A Winter Solstice Invitation

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.

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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Discovering Wisdom After a Fall – Part Two

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.

Last week I began to describe a fall and its aftermath.  You can read the first part of Discovering Wisdom after a Fall at http://www.janebuchan.com/blog/posts/discovering-wisdom-after-a-fall/#more-1025.

Falling, it’s simply never on our agenda, and yet, like so many other surprising and unwanted events, it happens.  In its aftermath, we inevitably discover the beliefs, conscious and unconscious, we hold about ourselves and others.  What follows is an exploration of the beliefs that surfaced after a fall I experienced last August as well as a the tapping rounds that helped me to facilitate healing both my body and my spirit.

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Gratitude Tapping for Abundant Local Harvests

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.

Sunday, October 11, 2015, marks Thanksgiving Celebrations for many Canadians.  This year, with books and films like This Changes Everything ( see http://www.naomiklein.org/main) contributing to positive, community approaches to climate crises, supporting and celebrating our local organic food movement is more important than ever before.  When we buy from our local organic farmers and regional organic food growers, every meal we eat has the power to help restore the integrity of our physical geography as it strengthens individual health and builds community.  When I touch upon the relevance of local food systems to our current state of climate emergency, I’m sometimes met with belligerence born of fear.   “Nothing can be done,” often accompanies the outright refusal to shift from eating addictive, health sapping convenience foods because of very real time constrictions, perceived cost prohibitions, and the hopelessness and terror we feel when we think too much about super storms and the other signs of global warming.  Although the trauma of climate change is so potentially devastating that we often do all that we can to deny it or at least temporarily forget it, Tapping can help us calm our climate-change fears, neutralize our addiction cravings, and move forward to strengthen our community ties.

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Mother Earth Day

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 at 802-533-9277 or jane@winterblooms.net for EFT coaching support.

May 9, 2015 – Mothers Day

Here in the northern hemisphere, our world comes alive with all the colours of spring at this time of year.  After a winter of focus on human struggles that highlight human injustice and the many social issues we must address if we are to build nurturing communities, our Mother Earth puts on her spring attire and that place in our hearts that will always belong to Her begins to vibrate with hope.  Oh, yes, we tell ourselves.  The human story is not the only one.  There is this other story, this story of possibility, of seed bursting through soil, of bud blossoming, of leaf unfurling.  The harmonies of our Earth Garden Home are perennial works of art that teach balance and beauty while nourishing our bodies and refreshing our spirits.  If you doubt this, go for a walk in a nearby community garden,  park, or wood.  All around us the world is springing to life and encouraging us to do the same.

Yesterday, Wim Wenders film The Salt of the Earth, about Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado, reminded me of Earth’s regenerative powers.  After an hour of stills depicting the horrors of human suffering taken on what Wenders calls Salgado’s personal journeys into the heart of human darkness, journeys that ultimately leave him spent and despairing, the photographer makes his way back to the light through the renewal and regeneration of one small part of our shared Earth Mother.  Salgado’s family’s land, clear cut to send the children to university, is slowly brought back to life by the younger generation’s planting of a million trees.  By the time the film concludes, Salgado’s son, Juliano, shows us the sweep of rain forest that is his heritage.  In three generations we see paradise, paradise lost, and paradise regained.

This Mothers Day, may we all honour our First Mother, Earth.  May we thank her for the lessons of regeneration she offers when we do what we can to repair human exploitation.  May we say prayers of gratitude before the simple but deep pleasures of eating locally grown foods.  May we plant seeds and trees, abstain from using corporate poisons, and reclaim our own health by fostering Hers.  May we trade our guns and knives for garden tools.  May we become loving participants in the ongoing creation in which we are meant to thrive.  May we come to our senses and see who we truly are, Earthlings . . . , co-creators with all the beings that create and sustain this magnificent world.

Until next time

Jane

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Jane Buchan, MA, AAMET Advanced Practitioner, jane@winterblooms.net, 802-533-9277

Jane is a Learning Coach specializing in neutralizing trauma and cultural constructs to support learners of every age.  To engage her coaching services, please contact Jane by phone (802) 533-9277 or email, jane@winterblooms.net.  Be sure to put Coaching Query in the subject line.

 

Renewal through Seasonal Changes

Happy Spring Equinox . . . at least here in the Northern Hemisphere.  Down under folks are moving into autumn, this difference one of the many magical expressions of hemisphere diversity on our magnificent planet.  Looking out my window at the five-and-six-foot piles of snow our snow-plow Angel has created makes Spring seem unlikely, and yet the calendar tells us the Vernal Equinox officially arrived on March 20.  Sometimes, we have to take on faith the reality of something.

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