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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Voicelessness and Sexual Assault

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.

Last week, in the post on sexual assault’s afterlife, I touched on my grandmother’s vocal response to the event along with my own inability to make a sound during the assault.  It is easy to assume a four-year-old child is unable to confront a sexual predator, but this is not always the case.  Some children scream, cry, and fight physically, while others, like me, manifest sudden voicelessness and physical paralysis.  This is the manifestation of the Freeze aspect of the the Fight, Flight, or Freeze Stress Response.  During sudden trauma, we sometimes fight, we sometimes take flight, and, as happened to me, we sometimes freeze.  Daily tapping, along with healthy sleep habits, eating habits, thinking habits, physical movement habits, meditation habits, and social habits, can build resilience into our lives that helps the Stress Response do the work it is meant to do – protect us from actual danger.

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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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The Winter Solstice

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, on the shortest day and longest night of the year, we are invited to the hearth to reflect on our lives and the larger context in which they unfurl.   The Winter Solstice is a sight poem, one that marks the end of growing darkness and the beginning of growing light.  On the largest scale we know, at least with our physical senses, this moment in time helps us to understand that all the rhythms of our lives conform to the greater rhythm of expansion and contraction we see in the seasonal changes on Earth.

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