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.
With the triple threats of drastic weather, expanding wars, and bacterial and viral epidemics topping our news stories, it is easy to miss the beauty and harmony of each day. The sun rises here in north eastern Vermont to reveal a mist that hovers over harvested fields and only here and there reveals the blazing colour that is to come. In these woods, stillness reigns until a truck or school bus announce the business of the day. Wild turkeys, oblivious to human enterprise, move in stately dance across the stubbled fields, slow in their foraging and melodic in their conversations. Cities, too, offer their faces to the sun, dazzling early risers with astonishing light shows on the windows of high rise apartments and creating shadows that remind us of life’s ever-present mysteries. This ever-present beauty evokes awe and wonder and yet is so easily overlooked in our Type A, Do, Do, Do world here in the west. Tapping can help us to pause before beginning our day, to acknowledge what is beyond human doing, and to participate in the Great Being we call Life.
When we feel in danger of losing our sense of connection to the other-than-human harmonies of the world, set up statements such as the following help to initiate the rediscovery of our innate reverence for life:
“Even though I have lots to do today, I honour this moment with pure being. Even though I have several deadlines and am feeling stretched to the breaking point, I take time to honour myself as a strand in the great web of life. Even though I sometimes feel like a hamster on a wheel, destined to hurry and scurry yet remain in the same place, in this moment I create space to feel my unbreakable connection to the joy and beauty of life that exists beyond our human concerns.”
Because we have so recently been inspired by the massive New York City march calling for swift legislative responses to the multiple threats the human extractive economies pose to life on earth, more and more of us are changing our values and our habits regarding what constitutes the “good” life. As we reflect on the various negative consequences of ruthless, non-stop, exploitation, we realize the good life is not about taking it all to have it all but about participating in life in such a way as to create space for reverence. As we mourn lost species and habitats, increased human health threats, and frayed connections among social groups and nations, we feel the need for reverence more acutely than ever before. This reverence makes it impossible for us to use the world – including our neighbourhoods – as a dumping ground for fossil-fuel toxic waste, unnecessary packaging for unnecessary goods, and manufacturing pollution.
When I first began to ask myself about what I might do to lessen my personal carbon footprint, I decided that food would be the most important place for me to take a stand. At first my food concerns evolved in relation to colitis, an intestinal condition that in its severest form can lead to cancer. Research told me inflammatory foods were at the root of colitis. In the blink of an eye, I understood I would be healthier if I stopped eating meat. John Robbin’s Diet For a New America, published in 1987, launched an awareness movement regarding the great harm factory food industries cause to animals, humans, and our environment. This work confirmed what my body was telling me – choosing vegetarian foods grown close to home, without pesticides, helped me to feel better, not only physically, but psychologically as well. The cognitive dissonance I experienced when I ate foods that were created by unethical and unsustainable methods disappeared. I felt peaceful about what I was eating, and oh so grateful. But that was just the beginning of my journey.
After several years of vegetarian life and a set back with colitis, I began to look into the possibility of giving up dairy products. The life a typical dairy cow leads in our post-modern, industrialized food culture convinced me that not only was dairy aggravating my intestines, the relentless milking schedule of cows belonging to “milk producers” might be described as milking cows to death. At that point, given chicken factory farming and the anti-nutritional effects this cruel and unsustainable approach has to meat and egg “production,” it was easy for me to make the shift to a vegan diet. When I did, I found my gut was happy almost instantly. I also discovered a spiritual lightness and peace came with my new way of consciously eating a plant-based diet that created a much smaller carbon foot print.
Reverence may be arrived at on every Earth Stewardship path. Reusing goods, replacing what cannot be mended with goods produced in an environmentally sustainable way, choosing car sharing and fuel economizing cars, and participating in the democratic process to legislate environmental protection laws are all ways we can grow feelings of reverence in our lives. And, since food is something we require each day, choosing foods that help to protect and conserve water and land at home and around the globe means a huge boost for local and regional sustainable food systems that promote food sovereignty and safety. Eating a tomato grown in a garden or window box reminds us of the sacredness of summer; storing root vegetables in anticipation of a winter stew reminds us of the methods of conservation that are entirely sustainable; and, supporting those local farmers who do these miraculous growing acts for our communities tightens the community webs in which we thrive.
Reverence is at the heart of the good life. It fosters kindness, forgiveness, and deep understanding. However we choose to express our reverence for this magnificent web of interconnectedness we call life, let one of the ways be our prayers of gratitude as we tap. “Thank you for this new day. Thank you for bountiful sensory experiences. Thank you for meaningful work. Thank you for meaningful, loving connection to self and other. Thank you for opportunities to serve. Thank you for opportunities to grow. Thank you for rest and reflection. Thank you for this Great Being we call Life.”
Gratitude is one of the most powerful expressions of reverence we can practice. It spurs us to action as peaceful warriors taking our place in the web of life and it deepens the stillness upon which this action depends for its coherence and inspiration. Reverently, we move through life conscious of our part as co-creators of a better world. Cultivating our reverence for life, we bless each day with gratitude and joy.
Until next week
Jane
Jane Buchan, MA, AAMET Advanced Practitioner, jane@winterblooms.net, 802-533-9277