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Ten Truths About Life

Here is my “cut to the chase” list that my life has brought me to know and access, as the foundation by which I understand and respond in my life as I move ever-so-rapidly toward my 60th birthday.  I am moved in these intense, accelerated times to offer it as my summer gift to you at this halfway time through this pivotal year.  May it bring its own bright, unfolding light.

1.   There is no control – it is a delusional word that is a poor, infantile substitute for what is really worth devoting your life to attaining:

• personal power
• freedom to choose
• heightened awareness
• the ability to be freely, wholly present, and spiritually partner with your unfolding experience

2.   There are never, ever any guarantees – however, there is always available the opportunity to envision.

3.   Love is a given that can only enter a free, unencumbered space in which it can be present.

4.   We can only successfully partner with those with whom we are on a like-minded vibrational wavelength.

5.   Life requires that we live it on its terms, for it is greater than we are.

6.   The central requirement for mind-body healing is to stay fully, unconditionally present with your feelings.

7.  If you’re not equally letting go with whatever you’re keeping – holding on to – you cannot be in any core state of balance.

8.   We are all equal, with equal power.

9.   Throughout our life we are challenged to experience successive, progressive levels of expanding maturity.

10. When we feel stuck, it is a signal of incomplete grieving.

Technorati Tags: spirituality,Centering,Marjorie Baker Price,hypnosis,healing,mind-body

Hypnosis For Healing – Benefits and A How-to Guide

An Integrative and Multidimensional Healing Practice

Hypnosis is a wonderful integrative and multidimensional healing practice that supports physiological innate healing responses, relieves pain, boosts the immunological system, and improves circulation, oxygenation and elimination.  It supports better balancing of the metabolism and all aspects of the endocrine system, and profoundly de-stresses on all levels.

Therapeutically hypnosis is an empowering self-help practice.  We know how to hypnotize ourselves, and in fact, all hypnosis is self-hypnosis. 

Profoundly Therapeutic and Creative

Hypnosis supports and extends insight, relieves anxiety and depression, and heals emotional trauma.  It is a central practice of recovery from post-traumatic stress syndrome through regression.

It is wonderfully creative because it “floats” through opening our imaginative capacities, which allows us to transcend dis-ease.  Hypnosis builds inner strength and can deepen one’s own individual sense of spirituality and one’s own sense of one’s own unique spirit, which can “open the door” to miraculous healing responses.

A Mental, Emotional, Physical and Spiritual Regulator to Relax, Release, Recharge

Hypnosis is a primary mental, emotional, and physical regulator, and we experience its wonderful effects simply by settling back into a comfortable position, closing our eyes to remove external distractions, and allowing our breath to quite easily and naturally deepen.  There are no side effects from hypnosis. 

Hypnosis fully and extensively at a core level induces relaxation, which research tells us that fifteen minutes of a hypnosis treatment provides the equivalent of eight hours of restful sleep.  It also centers body, mind and spirit, so we feel we function at a higher, clearer and more energized level.

Five Simple Steps for Hypnosis for Healing

1.  Settle back into a comfortable position with your arms and legs uncrossed and your spine gently aligned, and imagine how easily you can allow your breath to deepen.

2.  Count to yourself five, full, deep, easy breaths, picturing your breath as an endless, rising and falling, even wave of healing, vitalizing energy washing over you – flowing everywhere throughout your mind, everywhere throughout your body.

3.  Imagine your endless, full, even breaths as an infinite ocean of body, mind and spiritual healing, enveloping you, lifting you up higher and higher; and for these next several breaths, each and every time you inhale, and each and every time you exhale, say the word healing to yourself.

4.  Now picture a peaceful, beautiful, healing place in as much detail as you can possibly imagine, and feel yourself fully drawn right into that picture – the place with you wonderfully experiencing it comes alive through seeing it, hearing the sounds, smelling it, tasting it and feeling it.

5.  Finally say to yourself, as you continue to be so relaxed and fully present in this healing universe that you have been so completely drawn into, I am healing . . . I am continuously, infinitely healing - and slowly imagine your endless, flowing breath, as you’re ready, returning you to full, waking consciousness, feeling relaxed, recharged, and released into a place of ease, rather than dis-ease. 

Assert and Accept in the Great Circle of Being – Finding An Authentic and Inalienable Space of True Belonging

Overcoming the Hard Core Foundation of Identity Crisis

I attended a planning committee for a local group of natural health practitioners over the weekend and once again reflected, after the off-agenda, extended discussion that ensued about what to name it, on how little-supported we are in our culture to be fully present and accepted in our own space of belonging.  We really don’t know who we are and what we are in our world, so it’s no wonder we don’t easily allow another the right we can’t give ourselves.

This can lay a pretty hard core foundation of identity crisis, which profoundly sets the stage for everything from violence to racism.  In my work I hear again and again clients’ complaints that they are hopelessly stuck with being unable to accept or even know who they are, blaming and feeling victimized,  experiencing unsolved challenges to forgive, and engaging in ongoing power struggles. 

How to Experience and Express Your Real Identity

Like the end of The Ugly Duckling  fairy tale, we do have our authentic and right identity, it is real and meant to reflect and shine to ourselves and the world who we are and what we are, and we perfectly “fit” in our great circle of belonging.  In that wonderful story by Hans Christian Anderson, the hero as the labeled “ugly duckling” struggles against a wrong label thrust upon him by the society he found himself in as an unrecognized swan.

Fortunately for the character, he is ultimately outcast from that blaming circle, which gives him the critical opportunity to surprisingly see who he really is and where he really belongs.  He and his newfound “mate” live happily ever after, supported, affirmed, asserting and accepting who they are and what they are in a fully reflecting and affirming universe.

You Have a Sacred Place of Being

There is a place for everyone.  Everyone is meant to be accepted and invited to share who they are and what they are in a greater circle of mutual respect and belonging.  What would the world be like if we could finally fit over our respective I’s/eyes clear, strong lenses that made sure we saw each other and affirmed each other in this way? 

We could not violate anyone in such a great circle of belonging, nor would we allow anyone to violate us, or tell us we were something we weren’t.  If such an attempt were made, we would easily and definitively assert ourselves, coming from a center of profound identity and self-acceptance.

Honor All Diversity as Expanding Perceptions

Prejudice, racism and denying in any way another’s innate, equal and common humanity would disappear like the dinosaurs.  Instead we would welcome and appreciate each other’s core beauty, equal power and unique and sharing gifts. 

Power struggles would disappear, and the world would bear its great fruit of welcoming the diverse and great gifts we all yearn and are meant to share for everyone’s betterment and well-being.  I imagine the phrase, “All for one”  as the new language of an endlessly loving, abundant universe – coming from a spiritual understanding that we are all unique and common expressions of the divine, that we are all part of the Source and can well and rightly express infinite power – and freely, wholly create with it from a center of loving to give to the common good.

Meet the Challenge to Trust Yourself and Act Accordingly

We can only assert ourselves when we know and affirm ourselves as spiritual beings of multidimensional, aware consciousness, who are well capable of expressing divine power because we identify ourselves as being able to take full responsibility for it, particularly its outcomes.   All that you yearn for regarding love represents your real challenge to assert and accept yourself, trusting (always the great recovery challenge) that your unknown vision will lead you into your great circle of inner belonging.

That is the magic, transformational portal that will offer enough power and courage to lead you to your corresponding outer circle of fulfillment, right relations, creative appreciation, abundance and true joy.  Higher, extended balance results and real miracles occur.  

Technorati Tags: empowerment,empowerment counseling,identity,identity counseling,self-identity

Top Ten Survival Tips to Sail Through a Crisis

Crises Leave Multiple Energetic Imprints

The Chinese translation means both “danger” and “opportunity”.  We live in a time of multiple global crises which can even more intensify individual crises. 

In the course of a well-lived lifetime one will experience serious, multiple crises.  The all leave their significant traumatic imprints in our psyches and, I believe, in our energetic fields. 

Top Ten Tips to Sail Through a Crisis

The clinical diagnoses for this is literally called post-traumatic stress syndrome, currently of pandemic proportions in returning military from combat zones.  Here are my top ten survival tips to sail through a crises:

1. Know how much sleep you need as a baseline foundation and prioritize getting it as an average – don’t shortchange yourself, because you are already at risk for illness, accidents and general decompensation.
2. Ditto eating nutritiously.  Try to keep the emotional eating of empty calories at a minimum. 
3. Make a “top ten list to nourish myself” with simple directives that are pleasing and soothing to you and that don’t require a whole lot from you if at all possible, meaning costing a lot of money, requiring complicated planning and time, or depend on multiple other elements, including people to carry out.  Two examples would be taking a bubble bath or calling up a friend who will listen lovingly and attentively to you without offering advice unless you specifically ask for it.
4. Drink a lot of water – being stressed out in a crisis creates subtle levels of dehydration.
5. If at all possible get outside every day, or as much as you can, and try to move while you’re out there – like walk, bike, swim, etc.  You will both energetically recharge and rebalance your body, mind and spirit, and discharge anxiety.
6. Journal if you’re at all willing to do so.  Simply write down your feelings for five minutes or less without analyzing yourself or trying to force any conclusions.
7. Get in a maximally objective and reflective space and consider what, if anything, about the crisis you’re experiencing that fundamentally threatens your survival.  Because experiencing crises throws us into a full-blown stress response, we go into “fight or flight” mode, which pushes us into assuming that our life is being threatened when that may not at all be the case. 
8. See if you can hear from a source who has experienced a good resolution from a similar or thematically similar crisis, whether this source is someone you know, or a famous person who has been interviewed or written a book to tell their story.  This can be practically helpful as well as offer you a central source of support and guidance.
9. Take some uninterrupted time – twenty minutes or more – and consider whether you have ever experienced a similar crisis or situation that seems to offer a similar thematic challenge to your current perceived crisis, and review the resolution that occurred.  This remembering typically stimulates more expansive brainstorming, and can inspire your intuition to offer excellent guidelines that frequently lead to real resolution.  It also  reminds you that  “this too shall pass”, and you will survive.
10. However you understand what 12-step programs call your “higher power”, once a day for a minute or longer settle back into a comfortable position, take three full, even, deep, cleansing breaths, and imagine you can contact this divine source – whereupon you turn your crisis over to it, asking your higher power to help move you to wherever real resolution exists.  Additionally imagine affirming you are open to any way this can occur through the direction of your higher guidance.  When you’ve finished this meditative exercise, imagine letting it all go to your higher power, and tell yourself this is all being most effectively, and on an ongoing basis, worked on.  Then focus on something mundane and completely unrelated to the crisis.

These top ten tips will highlight the “opportunity” part of the Chinese translation of the word “crisis”, and derail the “danger” part. 

Technorati Tags: meditation,relaxation,imagery,hypnosis,survival tips,crisis,crisis management,crises

Courage is the Key to Assertiveness

Courage and Cowardice

The key that unlocks the door to becoming assertive is courage.  Have you ever stopped to think about what that word really means?  How about it’s opposite – to be cowardly?

I always think of the Wizard of Oz, just finished playing in my hometown of Rochester, New York as part of a national touring company, to rave reviews.  Without courage we are reduced to cowardly behaviors which strips us of our rightful heritage and claim to be who we are and what we are.

We Can Recover Our Central Essence of Function

We might understandably think, before reading the story of  how Dorothy and her surprising companions managed to accomplish their seemingly impossible vision, that there can be no such thing as a cowardly lion.  Then he centrally appears, making us laugh at his completely out-of-character behavior. 

Then the lion seemingly transforms before our eyes, organically and in key increments, to become the “king of the forest”.   We are now able to realize this can only be possible from a central place of activated courage.

How can this transformation from being so traumatized that one loses one’s essential, central essence of function, to being fully actualized?  Every time we acknowledge our fear and successfully shift to being the visionary observer of our life, we regain, in mysterious and surprising ways, our innate courage.

The Truth About Fear and Functioning

Courage doesn’t exist without fear – in fact, fear catalyzes courage.  So does the desperation that comes from crisis.  As I’ve said a number of times in  earlier articles, the Chinese translation of crisis means both danger and opportunity.

Fear never stopped anyone from doing anything.  Only turning away from courageous choice-making stops us from being fully actualized.  Courage snaps us out of our “box” of ego-driven woundedness and correspondingly restricted, compromised problem-solving that always fundamentally interferes with real resolution.

Key Steps to Courageous Choice-Making

Becoming assertive create, builds and extends courage.  Here are my key recommendations to recover your essence courage and be assertive in any situation:

1.   When struggling about how to respond, begin by closing your eyes, taking several full, deep, cleansing breaths, and then imagine how you can ask your heart what it wants and needs to be set free.  Record your experience.

2.  Write down what in your heart of hearts you believe to be true about the concerning situation.  Then take a few moments to read over all that you have written, sit with it a bit, and then record whatever insights occur.

3.  In a deeper reflective state, ask yourself the following question:  What am I most afraid of here?  Stay as fully present as you can with whatever comes up inside you in response, and then record your experience, as well as whatever insights occur.

4.  Imagine you can view the whole experience from a detached, focused place.  As this occurs, ask yourself the following questions:  Who, What, Where, When, Why and How is this happening?  Record all your answers, and then read through everything and record any insights that occur.

5.  Read through all that you have recorded and use all of it to correspondingly list all possible courses of action in a brainstorming journaling exercise.

6.  Ask yourself, in reviewing the above possible choices of response, which one feels like the most courageous choice anyone facing this situation could make, and put an asterisk (*) next to it.

7.  As an experiment in assertiveness emerging from courageous choice-making, commit to carrying out that choice within a reasonable time frame, do it, and see what happens.  Keep notes on all that occurs.

8.  Congratulate yourself for having the courage to extend, in ways beyond your current level of functioning, your capacity to be present, empowered and fully assertive.

Keep me posted!

Rochester, New York Hypnotherapy Referrals

An Increasing Request for Services

I am getting more and more requests from people who are unfamiliar to my Centering practice for hypnosis, even requests to speak about hypnotherapy from area high schools, hospitals, and organized sports.  I continue, throughout the scope and now-22 years of my Centering practice, to expand and experiment with the power of hypnosis to transform lives. 

Major Rochester, New York health insurance providers still do not cover hypnotherapy, although when I present seminars to their staff, there is always a tremendously favorable response.  Flexible spending through employers, though, does cover hypnotherapy, and I feel the day is coming sooner rather than later when there will be baseline coverage of this powerful self-help, therapeutic and integrative healing practice.

There continue to be many misconceptions about hypnosis and hypnotherapy.  Here are the most common that I continue to hear about:

Top Four Misconceptions

1.  Hypnosis requires giving over control to the person hypnotizing you.

All hypnosis is self-hypnosis, and only happens through the direction of the person’s will who is experiencing the hypnosis.

2.  You will lose consciousness and not remember anything that happened.

Generally a person experiencing hypnotherapy will not lose consciousness and will remember everything that happened during the experience.  They will be in what is called a light trance, said to be the optimal state to experience the  greatest benefit of hypnotherapy, fully aware of their surroundings and what is happening, but remaining primarily focused on activating the hypnotherapist’s suggestions in a deeply relaxed state.

3.  I can’t be hypnotized.

Everyone can be hypnotized.  As we’re all individuals, the challenge for the hypnotherapist is to offer an individually-designed hypnosis exercise to fit the particular individual, requiring hearing from the client as to their wants, needs, goals, and visions.   

4.  Hypnosis is some goofy entertainment where people volunteer to go up on stage and are made to do equally goofy things such as barking like a dog, which they never remember.

Hypnosis is actually an old clinical practice for psychotherapy, extensively used by Freud, Jung and Erikson to effect core, integrative healing responses in patients.

Hypnosis Heals

Here are some of the significant results I have experienced through offering hypnotherapy to many hundreds of people in Rochester, New York through all the years of my Centering practice:

Stop smoking

Lose weight

Resolve phobias and compulsions

Heal anxiety

Erase pain

Heal significant childhood trauma including physical, mental, and sexual abuse

Achieve peak performance in sports

Jumpstart motivation

Lower blood pressure

Resolve migraines

Improve responses to many chronic illnesses including cancer, heart disease, arthritis, and depression

“Imagination is Everything” – Einstein

What we dream is what our deeper consciousness wants us to become.  When we create a compelling, deeply desired daydream in an equally deeply relaxed state we reseed the subconscious to become our most powerful ally in achieving our goals.

Insight improves and evolves, creativity and motivation accelerate, and we transcend whatever gets in our way or allows dis-ease to fundamentally balance and inspire us to wellness, empowerment and achievement from a new place of ease.

Technorati Tags: Rochester hypnosis,Rochester NY hypnosis,hypnotherapy Rochester NY,hypnotherapy

Key Assertiveness Tips to Empower Yourself

Before You Speak . . .

1.  Know how you  feel – which means, take the time to sit uninterrupted with yourself and ask yourself how you feel – then, spend at least five minutes journaling about it.

2. Be informed and objective:  write down the answers to the following questions as you consider the situation that challenges you to be assertive:  who, what, where, when, why and how is this going on?

3.  Then ask yourself the following question:  What choice could I make in responding that would feel like a courageous choice to me? – and record the response that comes up inside you.

4.  If you’re ready to blow up or in any way “lose it” you need to resolve your feelings before you attempt to speak – otherwise, it will be impossible to fairly assert yourself.

5.  Expect nothing when you formulate assertiveness goals – the true goal in being assertive is just that – nothing more.

Guidelines to Speaking Up

1.  Speak clearly in a normal tone of voice, maintaining good eye contact throughout the conversation.

2.  Focus on your present concerns and goals for yourself and nothing else – in other words, don’t complain about the past or predict the future, and don’t insult the other person.

3.  Be polite – remember, you are dealing with a fellow human being, like you – and we are all equally powerful no matter what anyone thinks or says.

4.  Continue to use the word I as in I think, I feel, I want, I need, versus You.

5.  Stay with the facts and your focus, which includes the facts during your conversation – refuse to allow yourself to be interrupted, derailed, treated rudely or abusively, and label these attempts if they occur.

The Wrap-Up

1.  “Win-lose” interpersonal power struggle games have nothing to do with assertiveness and everything to do with passive-aggressive behavior that only compounds the problem and makes it unsolvable – the stage is set for only more “rounds”.

2.  When you have politely, directly, and completely stated your concerns, your goals, and your assessment of the problem you have completed being assertive.

3.  A fully assertive conversation does well set the stage for real problem-solving and resolution, which can smoothly extend your discussion or be scheduled for a mutually agreed-upon time in the future as follow-up to occur after a reasonable interlude, with a mutually agreed-upon agenda for the upcoming discussion.

4.  It is okay to experience many feelings during the course of being assertive, including fear, sadness and anger – by the end of the discussion, you may also feel both more peaceful and energized.

5.  Being assertive changes you for the better inside, which makes it an empowerment and development exercise – sometimes it takes a while to become fully aware of this and other times you may feel strikingly transformed – that is the gift to congratulate yourself for – you earned it!        

Technorati Tags: assertiveness,assertive tips,being assertive,how to be assertive

continued website changes

This post is simply to inform everyone that maintenance on the website is continuing.  We are also trying out new themes and designs in an effort to increase the visibility of the website.  Please contact us here to tell us about any of the changes and if they were helpful or if you noticed a faster loading time. 

We will provide another update later today (Saturday) by 3pm

Website work today

The website may look odd or may even be down intermittently for the next few hours today (Thurs 5-7-09) The maintenance period will not last more than a few hours and updates will be provided here as more information is available.  The maintenance period is necessary to ensure that all of our viewers can properly view the website.  This is always tricky only because programming standards are not completely articulated yet and because users are viewing the website under significantly different software and hardware environments.

last updated: 3:32p Thurs May 5

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Assertiveness – Three Times the Charm

If At First You Don’t Succeed . . .

Try again – but not forever – just three times, total, to really be able to be assertive.  What do I mean by that?

Assertiveness is a developing skill that flies in the face of your resistive ego that only wants to keep running the same avoidant, victim-justifying inner tape inside you to be able to keep you from breaking loose and  becoming your own freer, greater, empowered self.

What Are the Three Essential Steps to Becoming Assertive

1.  Do something that will make you trust yourself.

2.  Choose a response in a situation that you find challenging that will cause you to feel proud of yourself.

3.  Ask yourself what is the most courageous choice I can make here – and do it.

Three Things That “Gum Up The Works”

1.  Anything that moves you to avoid and justify.

2.  Choosing from a sense of what you are afraid might happen rather than choosing from a sense of what in your heart of hearts feels like the right thing to do, or what you feel is best meant to happen in a challenging situation.

3.  Looking to please someone else – or get them to shut up.

So What Are the Three Successive Choices You Can Make to Develop Your Assertiveness?

1.  Be true to yourself.

2.  Be courageous.

3.  Release any agenda, expectation, desired or fear-based outcome – by that I mean, predetermined sense that “I must have this or I’ll die”, even if there is an implication, or flavor of that, without it being fully stated or something you’re even clearly aware of.

Here Are the Three Progressive Steps for You to Try to Become More Assertive

1.  Say briefly and simply how you feel.

2.  Say briefly and simply what you want.

3.  Say briefly and simply what you need.

STOP THERE.

LET GO.

SEE WHAT HAPPENS.

READY . . . SET . . . GO . . .

And please, keep me posted.  Happy experimenting – and remember, you’ve truly got nothing to lose – and a whole lot to gain – your greater, more empowered self!     

Technorati Tags: assertiveness,self-help,Rochester hypnosis

The Challenge Against Assertiveness

Failing to Be Assertive is What Fails and Loses Ourselves

We’re taught not to be assertive in our world.  This is the way it’s been for a very long time, certainly since we decided as humans creating societies to disempower women . . . say, beginning about 5,000 years ago.

We’ve all failed and lost our greater selves as a result.  Assertiveness is about both affirming and equalizing individual power.  No one is innately more powerful than anyone else.  Once we can fully understand and accept that within our own selves, we can revolutionize the world in which we live to become a world truly occupied by accepting, activated equals.

We Can Only Be Fully Responsible for Our Own Lives

What do I mean by that?  I mean when we really get that no one has power over us and that we don’t have power over anyone else, it frees us to become just responsible wholly for our lives and being able, then, to choose how we will live our lives, knowing we have to answer to ourselves for the choices we make and that the world will correspondingly hold us accountable for our related behaviors.

That is fair and, energetically, I would add, all that supports ongoing development and betterment for the whole human race.  It also sets the stage for corresponding mind-body healing to occur.

The Definition, and What It is Not

What is assertiveness?  It is one’s ability and willingness to present one’s whole, authentic self from a place of inherent integrity and understanding that, whatever the outcome, one stays true to oneself and, correspondingly respects and affirms that right for all others.

What isn’t it? 

1.  Assertiveness has no other agenda.

2.  It expects nothing.

3.  It does not look for any particular outcome.

4.  It understands there are no guarantees.

5.  It understands that nothing about the process involves any questions about survival.

6.  It affirms equality to all others.

7.  It always comes from a center of transcendent trust – by that I mean, trust that remains inviolate and never changes no matter what does, or what doesn’t happen afterward.

The Power of Seven to Express Spiritual Completion

Seven is a powerful number, a mystical number and, in numerology, which is a metaphysical explanation that all numbers have particular meaning, it is understood to be the number which expresses the vibration of spiritual completion.  Now let’s see what assertiveness is:

1.  It comes from unconditionally loving, and being willing to stand by, yourself as your greater self.

2.  It comes from your heart, which always exists in a place of courage, truth and integrity.

3.  It is how you can set yourself free, and transcend faulty belief systems and unhealed woundedness.

4.  It produces transcendence.

5.  It is an initiative act of intent to be free.

6.  It inspires others to be more correspondingly assertive – however, that can never be predetermined, dictated, or managed.

7.  It reflects and expresses your level of consciousness.

Assertiveness How-to’s

What are key how-to’s to expressing yourself assertively?

1.  Stick, as simply as possible, to review the present facts.

2.  Own what you say by using the word, “I” rather than “You” or They”.

3.  Come from a place of understanding and defining yourself at the core of your being as not being a victim.

4.  Express your true feelings without looking for the other person to have to do anything.

5.  Let go of any impulse to manage, fix or demand anyone having to do anything.

6.  Come from an inner center of knowing your survival is not at stake here.

7.  Speak about what you want and need, and what you correspondingly wish for.

How Will You Know When You Are Really Being Assertive Versus Passive-Aggressive?

1.  You will feel an out-of-context sense of rightness within yourself no matter what else is happening.

2.  You will feel an intuitive sense of comfort, release, and energy – uplifted.

3.  You will care less about what happens next.

4.  You will feel a greater sense of self.

5.  You will feel more detached.

6.  You may experience a sense of compassion that can extend to you and anyone else involved, and more removed from power struggles.

7.  You will feel more unconditionally in touch with your feelings.  

Some Additional Truths

1.  Assertiveness builds and recovers self-esteem.

2.  It legitimizes anger.

3.  It accesses hope.

4.   It requires responding to another as a whole, mature, integratively health human being, and thus is a very complementary and affirming, as well as healthy way to relate to anyone.

5.  It inspires personal development to everyone involved.

6.  It exponentially returns to you personal power and creativity.

7.  It always produces personal and spiritual transformation.

Check-points to Stay on the Assertiveness Track for All These Wonderful Results

1.  Ask yourself if whatever you’re inclined to do comes from a place of loving yourself or fearing a possible outcome to the situation that you think might destroy you, and listen and note all that correspondingly comes up inside you by way of response.

2.  Ask yourself what’s the worst thing that could happen if you risk responding assertively, and then ask yourself if, in your heart of hearts, that is real.

3.  Ask yourself if you didn’t care what happened, what you would do, and then challenge yourself to, from a place of equally considering yourself and whoever else is involved, correspondingly respond. 

4.  Imagine five years from now that you are completely moved past this situation, and, from that space of being, to evaluate how assertively or unassertively you responded – and carry out the most assertive response you see.

5.  Consider what you can do to best allow your greater self to emerge through this experience, and carry out that choice.

6.  Settle back, go into a deeper meditative space by deepening your breath, and then count to yourself five, full, deep, easy breath.  Then for your next several breaths, every time you breathe in say this phrase to yourself, Now my heart chooses, and every time you breathe out say this phrase to yourself,  I accept all outcomes from this.

7.  Continuing to stay in this deeper meditative space of greater breathing, greater spiritual space, say to yourself, I trust myself now, unconditionally. 

Recovering Trust Recovers Our Whole, Empowered Self.

Let the healing begin!

Move yourself to your center of personal power, and then, receive.

It Doesn’t Last Forever

Death is the Right Partner to Greatly Live Our Lives

Since my husband of 18 years died suddenly of undiagnosed coronary artery disease in 1989, I have felt death peering over my shoulder.  It feels quite right as a partner in how I choose to live my life, and oddly comforting, like a missing piece making a circle complete. 

That being said, when death literally comes knocking at the doorstep of my daily life, it remains profoundly rattling.  I have been close to death, dancing with death day by day these recent weeks through my extended family, doing energy work, both hands-on and telepathic to support and smooth the innate transition while riding the tidal emotional wave of my own intense grief and continuing to surprisingly live all the rest of my life in exquisite paradoxical order.

Only Love Matters

I am struck again how only love matters as I witness children, grandchildren, cousins, in-laws say their final good-byes and simply stay to be fully present to witness and support the life that is slipping away, moment by moment, day by day.  Of course, this is true for all our lives, subtly, relentlessly slipping away.  Only love lasts, unperturbed about physical endings and about the infinite void of sadness and fear surrounding them. 

When we’re really, really pushed, all we come to is our desire to share and express and be with love, to pass love on as the greatest of gifts, as all we have and are.  We are gentle, full of compassion and simplicity in these times, uncaring as to outcomes – they don’t matter – with no expectations.

You Can Release Attachment to More Greatly Be

We really do know how to live our lives and how to relate to each other.  We really do know how to be fully present in each and every moment, and to release attachment in order to more greatly be.

How can we stretch this greatest of gifts of awareness and spiritual power to most highly choose responses into the more mundane events of our lives?  We must create space to do this, and that requires spacing our lives, honoring our basic rhythm of participation, both within and outside of ourselves, and breathe.

Receive the Simple Gift of Transcending for Greater Wholeness

It is a simple gift and a simple answer to spend a brief time every day meditating to regain greater capacity to let go and let be, and access the miraculous power to transform our lives by being fully willing to be fully present.  Here is how I define meditating in this context:  Moving your full focus to letting go of external reality, synchronize completely with the open, flowing rhythm of your even, full breath, and being in the space of no-thing.

Give yourself a break from all that breaks up your ability to respond – “response-ability”.  Allow your body, mind and spirit to quite easily and naturally and integratively come together to support your greater emerging wholeness.  How else can you truly live your life?

Love Extends Its Own Shining Hand

It doesn’t last forever, but paradoxically, the love extends beyond and beyond.  It offers us its own shining hand so we can recover our great power to transcend and touch further than we are, in order to more greatly come together. 

So . . . breathe in, breathe out . .  Count five full, deep, easy breaths to yourself, and then say “receive . . . release . . . receive . . . release” to experience the gift of perfect balance and extend the high resurrected light wave of this Spring Equinox.

Centering Tools wins “Best of Rochester 2008”

I’m excited to announce that Centering© has won the US Local Business Association’s “Best of Rochester 2008” for the category of Holistic Practioners. Below is the picture reproducing the plaque that we were designed in recognition of this achievement, and a copy of the press release is included below. 

 

Thanks to all of our visitors! You made this possible, and we were admittedly happily surprised.

Technorati Tags: Rochester holistic healers,US Local Business,local business,web awards,Best of Rochester,Rochester

 

Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Centering Tools-Self-Healing Receives 2008 Best of Rochester Award

U.S. Local Business Association’s Award Plaque Honors the Achievement

WASHINGTON D.C., May 24, 2008 -- Centering Tools-Self-Healing has been selected for the 2008 Best of Rochester Award in the Holistic Practitioners category by the U.S. Local Business Association (USLBA).

The USLBA "Best of Local Business" Award Program recognizes outstanding local businesses throughout the country. Each year, the USLBA identifies companies that they believe have achieved exceptional marketing success in their local community and business category. These are local companies that enhance the positive image of small business through service to their customers and community.

Various sources of information were gathered and analyzed to choose the winners in each category. The 2008 USLBA Award Program focused on quality, not quantity. Winners are determined based on the information gathered both internally by the USLBA and data provided by third parties.

About U.S. Local Business Association (USLBA)

U.S. Local Business Association (USLBA) is a Washington D.C. based organization funded by local businesses operating in towns, large and small, across America. The purpose of USLBA is to promote local business through public relations, marketing and advertising.

The USLBA was established to recognize the best of local businesses in their community. Our organization works exclusively with local business owners, trade groups, professional associations, chambers of commerce and other business advertising and marketing groups. Our mission is to be an advocate for small and medium size businesses and business entrepreneurs across America.

SOURCE: U.S. Local Business Association

CONTACT:
U.S. Local Business Association
Email: PublicRelations@USLBA.net
URL: http://USLBA.net

###

Renewing Your Self

We Choose Our Lifetimes

Yes, it’s been awhile since my last blog entry.  A lot has happened (what else is new?) in my life, well synchronizing with all that is happening in the world.  And you?????

I think it’s a safe spiritual assumption that, as I believe we choose the date, time and place of our particular earthly incarnations to best meet our own particular choices for central healing and development through the course of a well-lived life, so have we all volunteered at a soul level to be present at this particular time of great shifting, challenges, and opportunities to restructure ourselves along better and higher lines on the earth plane now.

Renewal Through the Myth of the Phoenix

So we are correspondingly experiencing national and global crises.  How about personal ones?

I saw in the January 17-23, 2009 issue of The Economist, above President Obama’s face, the headline, “Renewing America”.  That headline for me described a personal vision that extended to a national one.  What about the personal translation of that, however meaningful to you, as “Renewing Yourself”?  Does that now resonate with you?

The spiritual vision of renewal is metaphorically presented through the flight and significant stages of the mythical bird, the phoenix, said to rise from the ashes of its own death for the purpose of renewal.  This theme figures prominently with the celebratory stories of Judeo-Christian holidays that, it is said, emerge from the roots of the Spring Equinox, the marking of perfect balance between light and dark in the world.  Both Passover, as the story of the emancipation of slavery and the return of they who were called by God as The Chosen Ones to the Promised Land, played out as well as The Last Supper; and Easter, as the story of the resurrection of God descended as man, who dies and reappears as the personal, perfect union with the divine, describe the availability to us of spiritual renewal. 

Ask Yourself These Questions

So in this season of renewal against the backdrop, like these two great spiritual myths, of current global crises, what is your unfolding path of renewal?  I’ll share mine.  It includes the impending death of my elderly aunt and the circle of unending love her four grown children, their spouses and her grandchildren so staunchly and unendingly continue to create, to sustain her and them through this profound rite of passage.  It includes the impending birth of my twin grandchildren against the backdrop of family crises, new faith, and taking each day as it comes.  And more, so much more, related stories . . .

Do you think this too is your time of renewal in this brilliant spring?  If you could ride the wave of birthing light as a metaphor for healing and development, how would you wish to experience this journey?  And to what end?

We Can Be Response-able in the Unfolding Present as Our Place of Personal Power

The great paradox is, of course, we really don’t know the end of our life’s journeys.  We really don’t even know what’s around the next bend.  But that doesn’t stop us from ascertaining our innate sense of how to respond – otherwise known as taking response-ability – in the unfolding present.  That is the only way we can access our spiritual power to create and well participate in the world in which we find ourselves.

Daring to express and, through expressing, more greatly know your feelings is the key to accessing this power.  So settle back, take several deep, cleansing breaths, and, as you so naturally and progressively enter this deeper meditative space you have now created for yourself, ask yourself how you feel.

Your Body Can Well Speak to You from Its Places of Great Wisdom

Imagine asking yourself how your heart feels?  As you listen and receive whatever comes up inside you by way of response, record it.

Then ask yourself how your stomach feels?  Listen, receive, and record as described and directed above.

Now note whatever your mind is saying in as much detail as you can.  Then read through all you have written. 

You Can Discover, as the Roots Reveal Themselves to You, Your Core Faulty Belief Systems

Consider whether it all “matches up”, or seems to integrate and well-synchronize together.  If it doesn’t, you have just revealed to yourself the script of faulty believe systems stemming from unhealed inner woundedness.

You have the power to free yourself from this place of resultant slavery, and then to return to the promised land of spiritual belonging, called in the Bible the “land of milk and honey”.  We can only experience abundance as an external reflection of the abundant, loving and safe space we can create for ourselves.

Returning to Our Center Becomes Our Space of Renewal

This is our space of renewal, our center.  It truly is but a breath or two away, fully available as we let go of whatever, for whatever reason, we have found ourselves attached to, dictated by core fears.

Core fears are in and of themselves delusional.  Because they are delusional, we don’t have the power, and it never works anyway, to argue ourselves out of our core fears.

These Guided of Self-Help and Rebirth

Courageously admitting our deepest fears to ourselves and describing them fully, including all related sensations to them, and most importantly, body sensations, moves us into a direct healing cycle.  If we can allow whatever is released to simply run its organic course and carry our consciousness right along with it, we will experience the healing gifts that are offered.

That is my heartfelt wish for you in this season of renewal.  It is most primarily and extensively what I focus on as I work with clients, offering the transformational self-help and healing tools of relaxation, meditation, visualization, guided meditation, hypnotherapy, regression, and journaling as caring, indestructible, self-renewing guides.

Valentine's Day Magic

How to Return to Love and Being Loved

We are only capable of truly loving when we unconditionally love ourselves and all others as being part of the same divine union.  On this Valentine’s Day 2009, when the world is full of peaking global crises, can we dare return to an inviolate space to love and be loved?

Love has to be balanced, which means giving and receiving.  Love can only be of itself as itself, which presents as a circle without end in which all things are equally held.

A Short List to Bring Love

Here are my top 10 keys to endlessly, magically returning yourself and your experience to a circle of love:

1.  Go to (in this weather, perhaps!) an indoor playground that appeals to you, and play there.

2.  (of course) Eat chocolate – anything.

3.  Write yourself a love letter.

4.  Write whoever you’ve loved in your life – pick one person, or see who comes to mind! – a love letter.

5.  Commune with your body for a few focused moments to communicate to any and all parts how much you love and appreciate it – remember, love is unconditional or it’s not love.

6.  Spend fifteen minutes fantasizing how it would be for you to exist without your ego, and record what happens.

7.  Spend fifteen minutes fantasizing picking three wishes that completely come true – then journal about how you more greatly come to love through experiencing each of these three wishes.

8.  Make a list of twenty things you have wanted to do for a long time but haven’t, and then pick one thing and make a plan to do that – AND DO IT.

9.  Go stuffed animal shopping and buy yourself your top pick – then sleep with it.

10. Spend a full twenty minutes listing everything you’ve ever had and experienced in your life that you’re grateful for, and another ten minutes slowly reading through and savoring the list – then say, “I received all of this, and much more”, to allow the universe to give you even more in the days ahead.

It Lasts Forever

Happy – lifelong – experimenting!  Remember, this list lasts forever, and can be endlessly worked and reworked, for more and greater results.

Valentine’s Day is the only real day we are meant to experience in reality, whether we call that perpetual day by that title or not, in which we can be fully present to love and be loved, as is our right and divine directive.  As spiritual beings of multidimensional consciousness, we open in that inviolate universe, spread our light wings and soar, free and whole again.

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