Centering Tools

The Real Power of Aggression for Healing and Transformation

Find the Ancient Spiritual Roots of Aggression to Separate Out Violation From Being More Able to Accomplish the Greater Good

Aggression is a most misunderstood word and practiced behavior.  It is associated with violation and other acting-out responses. 

However, in ancient spiritual practices aggression was understood to be a necessary dimension of key focus to achieve chosen intent.  I think “intent” becomes the tiebreaker, for whatever the real attitude is that fuels chosen intent is that which defines true purpose, and therefore, real outcome.

“Learn to Earn” Being “Response-Able” as The Key to Successful Assertiveness

Aggression that emerges from an attitude that mistakenly defines oneself as a victim well sets the stage for what, in clinical terms, is called passive-aggressive behavior.  A person caught in this developmentally-challenged trap (meaning what is really operating here is infantile behavior driven by a still-wounded ego), at a core level, refuses to express themselves as a whole adult person from a place of integrity and freedom.  Their only option, then, becomes a “swing-back” combination of passivity and aggression, which sets the stage for abuse involving self and others.

When one can earn, as an adult being able and willing to experience life’s challenges head-on, the wherewithal to find where the real resolution exists, one also earns the right to become response-able. 

True Spiritual Aggression Accomplishes Healing and Develops Personal Power

This means, of course, being able to fully respond from a place of awareness and acceptance of what’s going on, which are the core elements of accessing both personal and spiritual power.  Then one becomes empowered and free to assertively “push forward” to achieve new and higher goals. 

In my shamanic healing practice I use the badger medicine totem, or visionary animal who is the designated guide for healing and power indigenous to  my “neck of the woods”, to help clients use aggression to critically achieve their chosen transformation.  The key word for the badger totem, according to the book that has been popular for decades called Medicine Cards, by Jamie Sams, is aggressiveness.  It is interesting to note that in medical practice the phrase “aggressive healing” is used with the inference that, with healing crises, the required approach needs to be aggressive. 

A “Push Forward” Supports Innovative, Creative, Higher Level Solutions that Recover Freedom and One’s Greater Self

I also reflected on this after seeing the well-reviewed movie this weekend, Company Men.  It portrays three central characters’ unfolding responses to being fired by their company’s “downsizing”, with a lot of what these days can be described as “hot political” inference about how some heads of key financial and industrial institutions have criminally and greedily amassed great gains that have risked the potential destruction of national, even global economies through this practice, which correspondingly destroys employees’ lives.

We are in the midst of these great revolutions and the corresponding challenge to have to evolve and revolutionize our consciousness in order to survive and sustain ourselves, and this planet.  This transformational challenge well engages the real power of spiritual aggression to force us to become greater, able to transcend and “push forward”, as my working definition of aggression, to achieve higher results that support the creation of the greater good.  In the movie one character destroys himself; another character breaks out of his own “cushy” ego to do whatever is necessary, through developing personal integrity, to survive and rebirth his professional vision; and the third character affirms his own freedom and capability to start his own company, providing a better opportunity that from an integral center of caring and “win-win” focus in hiring back the employees that were fired.

So I ask you to reflect on your current challenges, especially considering areas in which you feel stuck and blocked, to better move forward.  Consider what is required of you to be able to best access the spiritual power of aggression to push yourself to whatever higher level is required to well accomplish your aims.  This always best supports and extends what you can offer to the world.               

How to Let Your Higher Self and Spirit Successfully Deal with Challenging Relationships

Relationships That Don’t Work Produce Destructive Results

Much of what moves people to seek my counseling services is feeling stuck and powerless to know how to deal with successfully challenging relationships.  Relationships can “get off track” for many reasons, all of which have to do with unacknowledged fears and wrongly assuming the only choice of response is to become a victim.

Adults are never victims, yet one can be horribly, extensively caught in this “web” of allowing oneself to be intimidated, and then deluding oneself into believing that one is powerless to freely respond.   A sense of being compromised, even trapped in ways that can fully blow real integrity can even more extensively fuel power struggles, infantile behavior, and a great deal of destructive outcomes that prevent healthy loving exchanges from occurring. 

You Can Find Your Way to Determine How to Support the Greater Good and Transcend Challenging Relationships

This brings its own “poison” that further entangles everyone drawn into these locked-in situations, making them much worse.  The solution is to feel desperate enough and courageous enough to decide to be assertive, understand and speak one’s truth, and refuse to be diverted from understanding where the real greater good exists.

As that is uncovered one is able to determine how to truly help create and support it.  Here are some key spiritual guidelines I’ve developed in counseling clients on how to find their real personal power, heighten their awareness, and release the stranglehold that only their egos have on them, to successfully deal with challenging relationships:

Ten Steps to Success and Resolution

1.   Become the unobstructed observer to answer the questions who, what, where, when, why and how is this happening?

2.   Release any impulse to sink into centrally focusing on personalities – who’s “good”, who’s “bad”,who’s “right”, who’s “wrong” – and stop associatively judging yourself and another.

3.   Similarly stop blaming individuals – relationship challenges are about what isn’t working between people that interferes with supporting the greater good; and “coming clear” with objectively, fully acknowledging that.

4.   Ask yourself where the blocks are for you – what isn’t working for you – and unconditionally affirm that, journaling in as complete and specific a way as possible in a reflective, self-observing space.

5.   Go deeper into that reflective space and imagine you are supported by the divine to rise higher and higher, letting go of whatever you feel you have been hopelessly attached to and entangled with as you rise – and then ask to be led to where your own higher self exists.

6.    Imagine you let your higher self handle and freely respond to the situation, closely observing what happens, and then journal completely about this unfolding vision.

7.    Now ask your higher self to speak to you and show you where there is a lack of love and higher power in this situation, and once more record all that is shown to you.

8.    Finally, ask your higher self to reveal the full, core depth of your innate integrity; and ask your integrity to rule your life and response in all relationships, especially the ones that aren’t working for you.

9.   Ask your higher self to reveal to you where there exists “the unforgiven”; and reflect and journal as deeply and extensively as you can on how these incomplete and disquieting spaces reveal what has not been accepted as simply having happened.

10.  Ask if you more greatly loved yourself and “the others”, how would you commit to responding – and begin to act in these ways.

Heal and Grow Through Confronting Relationship Challenges

Relationship challenges are our key way to truly grow and heal.  We are meant to experience these “rubbing” relationships that always offer core opportunities to evolve and more greatly love from a place of freedom, self-responsibility, spiritual/personal power, and developing integrity.

We are here to become and be greater; and to discover through relationship challenges what that really means to us and the place we rightly inhabit in a ricocheting, accelerating, crisis-ridden world.  These are all the ways our mind and hearts can establish sacred “breathing space” and the courage to do what our souls whisper to us is the right and truly best thing, without allowing external pressure to take this right away.

Establish Your Own Assertive Guidelines Through Respecting Yourself and All Others as Equals

Then we can inhabit our own divine space and “inspire” ourselves and others to do likewise.  Establishing our own assertive guidelines from a place of respect, honesty, caring, and without violation dismantles relationship challenges and restores peace without agenda or dictate.

Rebirth yourself, your life and your participation in your relationships in these integrative ways, and watch miracles happen in your life!  What more can you offer those who are most closely connected to you?  

Mandalas, Medicine Wheels and Meditation–An Empowerment Retreat to Create Your Own Sacred Circles for Healing, Protection and Power

***We exist in a great sacred circle, and in order to recover, empower and develop ourselves, we need to become our own light centers. 

***In this transformational workshop you will understand, experience and create your own sacred mandalas and medicine wheels as they have existed since ancient times. 

***These become your key tools to experience greater, higher and more accelerated shifts in your life.

Join me in this creative exploration of these sacred wheels of power to set your own light space this year for healing, protection and balance to: 

• Bring forth your unique sacred circles without beginning, without end to . . .
• Express all your dimensions and dreams to . . .
• Learn to meditate to manifest . . .
• Through heightened spiritual awareness . . .
• Your soul’s choices in these profoundly shifting and enlightening times.

When, Where, How and What

When:   Saturday, March 12, 2011 from 10 am-3 pm

Where:  Carmen Clark Lodge at the Brighton Town Park
                777 Westfall Road
                Rochester, New York 14620

How:      $50 includes materials, drinks, snacks (bring your own bag lunch).  MC/Visa/Discover also accepted.     

What:    Carmen Clark Lodge is a beautiful fully-equipped, rustic retreat on a small pond with woods and walkways – wonderful outdoor space to also explore!              

For Questions and To Register

Email marjorie@centeringtools.com or  phone/fax 585-244-62120.

Hope to see you there!  With love and light, Marjorie

The Key to Solving All Life’s Problems

We Can Only Solve Problems Through Finding the Real Resources for Resolution

As we get older, it seems we become more and more challenged by life’ problems.  The challenges of making it in an unsteady world with longstanding and newly-developing relationship  dysfunction, compounded work requirements, and a sense of not being able to “keep one’s soul” are what I continue to hear in my practice are the tough factors that prevent inner healing and outer success.

A dear family friend I admire tremendously told me she had spent some extended time recently looking back at her whole life – the amazing miracles, the terrible losses, and the many complicated situations she never thought she could get through.  She said she thought a lot about how she was able to keep going and “be better”; and said,  “I always wanted to become better than I was, and that’s how I got where I am today – and survived.  I feel my life is so much better because of that, and that’s the main reason I survived and became the person I always wanted to become.”

Where Are the Real Limits in Our Power to Successfully Act?

There is a lot we can’t do to solve our problems, based on what I call the nature of reality here on the earth plane.  We can’t fix ourselves or anyone else.  We can’t know our own or anyone else’s futures.

We can’t count on things staying the same.  We can’t expect anyone else nor ourselves will live forever.

How to Engage Your Tremendous Will for Greater Good

I thought a lot about what my longstanding friend said, and I think a core desire to become better is the only reason people ever can heal, develop, survive, and keep their souls, when all is said and done.  It is the only way we can use ourselves in a wise enough way to solve life’s problems.

Our will is tremendous.  When and where it engages, it finds our real higher power to want to learn, seek real help and support, and become fully responsible.  These three factors allow us to break open our wounded, conditioned egos and free ourselves from stress, release the past, and create our best futures.  We become our higher, greater selves; and open a tremendous door toward acceptance and unconditional love from a place of free awareness.

We All Have A Sacred, Indestructible Center Within No Matter What

I continue to be asked to present workshops to people in the midst of major crises – veterans returning from active duty, cancer survivors, abuse victims who desperately need help.  I continue to offer what I believe are the most important ways to go deep enough within,when all seems threatening to crash down around outside, to open our sacred center, as I call it; and set it free to become our very best resource. 

And when I offer these tools, people thankfully let go from an surprisingly indestructible safe inner space that seems to magically reveal itself to them in many unique ways.  They tell me they have found the creative strength to go on, feeling better about themselves – and somehow, that is enough to get them to wherever their real unfolding resolution to their problems exists.  

Become Your Best Source of Survival and Fulfillment

The primary tools to accomplish this amazing feat are our breath, our imagination, our desire to express ourselves – and most importantly, our Will.  So ask yourself what you really want most in life, when  all is said and done, to know, accept and honor within yourself – and to rely on as your best source of survival and fulfillment.

This is your real and truly indestructible power to solve life’s problems.  As you work with these sources of greater spiritual strength, so will you become greater.  As that occurs your awareness and insight will sharpen, your creative potential and ability will extend; and correspondingly, the universe will seem to shift in better ways and offer you the gifts you so deserve.

Trust and Faith Within Becomes Reliance and Solution

What would it take for you to want above all else to become better?  This desire is the only way we really can open ourselves to learn without fear, and to be able to heal and become whole.

We are not our problems, but our problems are ours to own and work with.  Recovering trust and faith in ourselves frees us to open ourselves to the greater space of real potential and caring – where the answers exist.     

Connect With Your Higher Self

Our Key to Self-Recovery is the World’s Key to Survival

So much is said in so many different contexts about our Higher Self.  In addictions’ recovery programs, being able to access your higher self is the fundamental path to healing and development.  Is this simply our key to self-recovery? 

Throughout all spiritual practices back to the very beginnings of our existence, we are challenged and urged to connect with our better, greater selves in order to become who we really are.  In addition, there are countless examples through myth and legend of humans accomplishing this feat in order to make their worlds better, even save them.

The Critical Step to Heal and Empower Yourself

What do these words, “Higher Self” mean to you?  How about the opposite, “lower self”? 

I feel finding and using your higher self is a critical step to tap into your best potential, transcend stress, and grow stronger to deal with life’s challenges.  From this higher center, you can more freely observe and accurately access opportunities in your life, and use your divine will to actualize them.

How to Find and Receive Guidance From Your Higher Self

I want to share some key excerpts from The Centering Journaling and Guided Meditation Workbook to Heal Yourself, Empower Your Life and Create Your Best Future from the chapter, “Connecting With Your Higher Self”:        

“When I think about the higher self, I think about the wise old woman or man that exists in each of us.  I think about the loving parent.  I think about our personal visions of God.  I think about that commonsensical self that speaks to us in what has been called a still small voice; not only in times of crisis, but also during trips to the supermarket, of doing the “right thi9ng”.  I also think about where each individual’s source of creative inspiration lies.  I think about times when we seem to be set off in quite a mysterious way to rise up out of ourselves, as a being ofr great courage, wisdom, knowledge, and strength.  We don’t know where any of these qualities come from, but they are there just the same.”

A Key Writing Exercise to Allow Your Higher Self to Release What is Lacking in Your Life

Here is a key writing exercise to connect with your higher self and understand the real power that holds:

Exercise VII

Think of your higher self as a cherished friend and mentor.  Do you have a space inside your consciousness for her?  If your mind constant6ly “chatters” with things to do, places to go, and worries, the space is probably used up.  If your mind is complexly connected to many external relationships in the physical world, includ8ing job, people, future and present oriented tasks, and recurrent unfinished business from the past, there is little room for the higher self to enter.  If there is no regular (daily) reflective time in your life, it is difficult for the higher self to enter.

The higher self connects to you through a pathway of unconditional love and acceptance.  And so you must reciprocate this trust, this belief.  At times of ciris our heart cries out for help from our5 higher self, and it answers the call.  The higher self cannot enter through a state of fear.  although fear can mocbilize body systems to signal pain, the higher self cannot enter thorugh this conditione3d response.  Or through judgment.  Or through demanding guarantees.

Life style powerfully affects the creation of a desirable field for the higher self to enter.  Any significant addictive patterns makes this almost impossible, until a crisis occurs.  A common example is, “hitting rock bottom” with alcoholism.  Over and over again, I have heard those who suffer from the terrible disease of alcoholism describe most painfully their downward slide of loss through this disease until, in a state of deep darkness and despair, they “hit bottom” only to find a light (of awareness and recognition of what is really happening for them) waiting for them. 

Moderate healthy lifestyle habits create a field in which the higher self can thrive.  There are choices like regular aerobic exercise, healthy eating, and a balanced lifestyle in which there is ample joy, personal security, inner peace, and open time on a daily basis to just be.

As I write this, a part of me laughs, for a typical American’s lifestyle is not strongly supportive of these habits.  However, we have the right to set these requirements as cornerstones of well-being for ourselves, even to insist on them.  We need love in our life, Self-love, and loving relationships with others.  We need creative fulfillment and opportunities to grow3 and stretch as evolving individuals.  We need beautiful, harmonious, peaceful living environments.  We need to know that we can provide for our basic living needs, and beyond that, to create comfort for ourselves.  These are inalienable rights.  The higher self starves without these supports, these anchors.

So, identify if there are any areas lacking which translate out to imbalances in your life.” 

Your Link to Greater Balance

Use your higher self to help you get rid of what is holding you down and preventing you from becoming your own spiritual creator.  This is the door to all that you can more greatly become and offer to the world.

Namaste (translation: “The divine in Me salutes the divine in You”),

Marjorie

Own and Create Your Future

Are We Afraid of Our Impending Future?

The future remains a mystery to us, and because of that essential fact, we can feel afraid of it.  When we ‘re very stressed we can even perceive the future as a threat to our survival – and yet, we have no real power to stop it.

Can we instead own and create our future?  Can we also learn to healthfully partner up with the world around us in order to best recognize and utilize opportunities to experience happier, more fulfilling lives?

Here Are Some Key Steps to Transform Your Life and Better Create Your Best Future

I have developed these transformational steps in the final chapter of The Centering Tools Journaling and Guided Meditation Workbook to Heal Yourself, Empower Your Life and Create Your Best Future. I want to share the following excerpts from this chapter with you, that have helped thousands of clients I’ve worked with over the years form a “soul plan” of action to profoundly better their lives.

The Excerpt of Explanation for Healing and Empowerment

“In order to paint a picture, one must have a clean, blank canvas, all the paints that one wishes to go into the creation, and a vision about what is to be created.  From there the picture has a life of its own, which seems to guide the artist rather than the reverse.  And so the canvas is filled beautifully, creatively one hopes, and the picture is complete.

This is exactly the way . . .  one creates one’s future . . . the clean blank canvas is created by the five previous steps outlined in their particular order in the other chapters of this book.

The first order of business is to release stress.  The second, at a deeper level, is to release the past.  The third is to connect with your higher self and guides, however your understanding of bringing in larger forces is.  The fourth is clearing blockages.  The fifth is the core connection to creation from which all else follows, loving and accepting yourself . . .

The only things that get in the way of your vision creating itself is fear, lack of faith in the Self, and stress.  Vision, when aligned with the higher self and power, is an unbeatable combination which ensures the success of your dream.  It is true that physical laws must be honored in order for one’s vision to become reality.  In other words, if I am pasty menopause, and I decide that I want to conceive children, this will not be possible for me to do because of the physical restrictions.  There would certainly be many other avenues in the physical world which would lead to my having children, but not this particular one.

Other than that there are no limits to creation.”

A Meditative and Journaling Exercise to Identify and Clear Any Blockages

Here is one key writing exercise to further identify and heal blockages to manifesting your vision from this same chapter:

“Exercise IV

Another critical factor is that one must be able and ready to participate and work a vision to have it.  If I desire a new foreign car, and I don’t know how to drive it or take care of it, I must wait and build my abilities.  Then it will become available to me.  So a question to ask yourself as you complete the description of your favorite dream is, “If I was given this, would I take it?”  And to sit with this question a bit.  Notice what comes up in the way of answers without any comment from your conscious mind.  The answers to this question might lead you back to some of the earlier steps in the creative process, for example, releasing the past, clearing blockages, or connecting with your higher self.  Sometimes we grow impatient with waiting for a desire future to occur.  This step might give us an acceptable explanation of the delay, as well as hasten the result we long for.”  

You are Your Own Potentially Best Resource of Creation

Your own best resource to create a better future is to heal, develop and empower your Greater Self.  Trust in your real potential to do this work, and commit to finding your best path to success through how better able you are to be your own best observer and envision and name what you really want.

I look forward to walking with you and support you in this great journey.  Be well . . .

Marjorie 

The Key to Releasing the Past

Our Unhealed Past Forces Us to Become the Victims of Our Lives

We cannot shake the past – it is part of who and what we are – and yet life conspires, I think, to inspire and even force us to always transcend and transform it.  When we can’t complete the past we have no “room” to freely and wholly move forward, which profoundly and multidimensionally hampers us.

A Native American saying roughly translates out as “When you travel, travel light.”  Carrying a dead and unhealed past around in the depths of our heads, hearts and guts amounts to an ongoing stress response just waiting to be “relit”.  When that happens, we can be quickly shot into “flight or fight”, and become the terrible victims of our own impossible lives.   

Are You Willing to Claim Your Inalienable Right to Let Go of Your Past?

The key to releasing our past is to come to such a great understanding of its challenges, themes and opportunities for growth that we can accept it.  As this occurs we recover our inalienable right to let it go and get on with the force of returning to being fully, completely and synchronistically present with our internal and external environment.

It is only then that we can create what we truly desire in our lives, and that we can really grow and extend ourselves to support the greater good.  Our past inspires us to own it, and then release its hold on us.

We Really Are Called Upon to Heal Our Conditioned Woundedness

Here is an excerpt from the chapter titled “Releasing the Past” from my Centering Tools Journaling and Guided Meditation Workbook:
”When I talk with clients about releasing the past I’m really asking them to release faulty conditioning patterns from old experiences of woundedness which frequently stem back to childhood.  These patterns condemn the individual to recreate round after round of experienced fear, hurt, and pain as the soul’s effort to heal and release.  It is these patterns which profoundly shape experienced reality and prevent one from seeing new opportunities, taking risks, and continuing to evolve.  I believe we have a great fear about releasing the past, due to a core fear that we must not erase where we came from or we might erase ourselves.”

When You Love Your Fear, You are Released

The key to releasing the past is to become aware of what in the past you are still afraid of, and release those fears.  Here is a journaling exercise in the same chapter to help you accomplish that, and transform yourself:

“It has been said that the only way to heal a fear is to love it.  In ancient times a healer would discover how to treat a disease by experiencing it, allowing his or her own body and mind to journey through the healing process as a critical working experiment.  Perhaps this is the reason we are drawn to repeat mistakes, knowing at ta deep level we are attempting to heal them.

Look at your list of fears (an earlier journaling exercise in the same chapter).  Taking each item on your list, write it down in the opposite way.  For example, if you wrote, “I am afraid of men”, write, I love men”, and so on.  Focus on loving this person, place or thing, rather than being afraid of it.  Now take a few moments to read this new list you have written, and record your feelings and insights.”

An Acknowledgment of Your Real Worth

We are meant to come to our own center of compassion, from which core healing of body, mind and spirit gently, overwhelmingly flows.  From there, we lovingly and consciously forgive ourselves and all that is connected to the wound, the fear, the related past.

Smiling, evolved, clear, we set ourselves free to be more greatly – and offer this hard-won gift to others for healing, empowerment and development.  The miracle is, it all becomes about acknowledging  worth.

Be Your Own Valentine

How Does the Meaning of February Holidays Bring Us to Our Own Self-Healing and Transformation?

Valentine’s Day has rolled around again.  I find it most enlightening to note which months holidays fall, particularly in view of ancient history; and see how the timing and the combined meaning can offer us greater opportunities for self-healing and development.

In February we celebrate our two most significant President’s birthdays, George Washington’s and Abraham Lincoln’s; and we also celebrate Groundhog’s Day, in addition to tomorrow’s holiday.  Considering the meaning of each in the order in which they actually occur, we begin on February 2 with searching for the groundhog’s shadow to determine when spring will arrive; then on February 1, honor the man who led our country to a new union and emancipation of slavery; and then express on February 14 our heartfelt love to whoever is nearest and dearest to us; finally ending on February 22 to celebrate the man who won us our national freedom and became our first national leader. 

This Is the Way to Create Your Own Inner Sacred Union

In ancient days when we worshipped a Goddess, what is now Groundhog’s Day was called Imbolc, or the time of Handfasting, when couples who decided to marry celebrated their sacred union.  The central part of the union involved the high priestess loosely binding a silken cord around each person’s arm.  If the time then came when they decided to separate, there would be another sacred ceremony of Unhandfasting, when the cord would be bound as before, and then would be unbound; and the union was thus formerly ended.

I wonder how we could celebrate for us, our unfolding souls, and our developing consciousness a Valentine’s Day that would combine all of these holidays.  To stick with the order in which they occur, we begin with finding the length and breadth of our shadows, answering the call to explore them without fear as the way to determine rebirth. 

Then we commit to rebirth our own complete inner union, determining what parts of us are enslaved; and willingly enter the struggle to free them all.  Next we bind these parts together in a sacred marriage of unconditional love and divine will. 

Trust in Your Power to Learn to Lovingly Lead Yourself 

Finally, we accept the challenge to be our own leader, successfully winning our self-determined revolution to support, in caring and through acknowledging what is right, our own – and our world’s – greater good.

I invite you to become your own valentine through taking yourself through these transformational steps.  Create your own sacred ceremony of magic and acknowledgment, and be grateful for who and what you are, willing to commit to raise yourself higher to become your own greatest vision. 

Journaling & Centering - Radio and Television Interviews

Below are a series of links for recent television and audio interviews. The video interview focus on a recently published book on journaling.

• Video Part 1
• Video Part 2

The program starts about 60 seconds into the audio recording. In the interview we explore a number of topics around centering.

• Through the Keyhole - Audio Interview

Feel free to listen in and watch. Don't forget to leave a comment!

Freedom from Stress

Stress Can Be A Killer

According to Hans Selye in his ground-breaking book, Stress and Distress, first published in the fifties, when we experience stress, we immediately go into “flight or fight”.  In other words, when we experience stress, we label that as a threat, and our “knee jerk” response is to jump to either escape from or destroy the perceived stressor.  The implication here is that stress profoundly entangles us, negatively affecting our bodes, minds and spirits.

It has even been said that stress can be a killer.  To think about the cost of being engulfed in a full-blown stress response even more increases the stress experienced! 

Can We Transform A Stress Response?

It compromises thinking, insight, energy, and inner space.  It wrecks havoc with all body systems and fuels anxiety, fear and depression.  It finally “keeps us down”, even frozen; and sets us up to react rather than choose, which turns us into victims rather than empowered and free human beings.

Can we free ourselves from stress?  Stress is part and parcel of life, but we have the wherewithal to de-press the “flight or fight” response  so that we can much better survive the whatever the real stressors are. 

This Is How We Heal and Transform Ourselves

Knowing what this is can easily get “lost in the shuffle” of “fight or flight”.  How can we accomplish this fundamental self-healing and transformation challenge, and bring ease rather than dis-ease into our lives?

I want to offer you a guided meditation excerpt from The Centering Tools Journaling and Guided Meditation Workbook to Heal Yourself, Empower Your Life and Create Your Best Future.  It is from the very first chapter, titled Freedom from Stress. 

I invite you to settle back and experience this deep relaxation and visualization exercise.  When you’ve finished, record your experience and whatever insights occur.

Freedom from Stress Guided Meditation Exercise

As you sit or lie comfortably, eyes closed, hands and legs uncrossed beside you, begin to take deep breaths.  Feel your rib cage expand, pushing up and out as you inhale deeply; and as you exhale all the air out of your body feel your rib cage contract back down toward your stomach.  Continue to take very slow, deep breaths throughout the relaxation and visualization exercise.

And now, as you continue to take very slow, deep breaths, mentally travel through all parts of your body, feeling how deeply relaxed they all are.  Feel your feet, your legs, your hips and buttocks, your stomach and solar plexus area, your chest, and lungs and back, your hands, arms, shoulders, neck, muscles of the face, forehead and head; all deeply relaxed.  Your body feels weightless – as if it melted into the chair on which you sit, the bed on which you lie, at ease, balanced.  Your mind feels very clear, very clam and quiet like the waters of a deep lake.

Body and mind balanced with themselves, with each other, deeper and deeper relaxed, more and more letting go.  It’s as if you ahd picked up a very clean, damp sponge in this deeply relaxed, clear state in which you now find yourself, and wiped the slat of your mind completely clean and free from worry, stress hurt, grief, anger, fear, resentment, from any sense that any person, place or thing outside of you has controlled you, has pushed your buttons.  step back now as far as you need to go to see this clean, damp, shining slate of your mind before you.

And so you begin to feel, now, a current flowing through you along with the breath that you continue to take in and out, in and out.  It seems that you can see and feel this current as light – white, brilliant light which begins in the pit of your stomach, your solar plexus area, and then grows and spreads and flows throughout your body and your mind wi9th every breath that you take.  You seem to feel every cell, pore, vein, artery, bone, muscle, all the connecting pathways of your brain being flooded with brilliant, white, energizing, healing light.  Light which brings you clarity, balance, and vision.  Light which protects you from any outside influence which causes you to release and let go of stress, to go deeper and deeper within to find your own center, your center of light, your center of peace and healing.

Feel yourself now as an oasis of peace, calm, clear, serene, released.  You can create this picture, this light, this ease and release from stress, this protection from stress, whenever you wish.  Feel the power that exists inside you, the ability that you have at the deepest level of your being to obtain clarity, strength, protection and vision to heal and take charge of yourself.  As  you realize this, you understand what is is to let go.

Know that these feelings of strength, clarity, wellness, healing, release, and vision will stay with you throughout the day; will change the way you respond to stress; will allow you to let go of stress and bring in clarity, peace, and well-being.  Remembering this, remembering the flow of your breath, the release of tension and stress, the endless light which always exists inside of your, slowly, very slowly now, come back into this room, this place, and open your eyes. 

Centering Tools Products: Hypnosis and Guided Meditation

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To purchase via US mail, please download the order form and fill-in all necessary information prior to mailing to Centering® PO Box

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Centering® Hypnosis Guided Meditation CD’s ($13.95 each + New York State tax/shipping)

• Accept and Love Yourself
• Become Your Higher Self
• Children’s “Wishfull”
• Clear Blockages
• Drivetime for Clearing and Centering
• Energetic Healing
• Feeling Good About Yourself
• Finding the Partner of Your Dreams
• Finding Your Spirit Guide
• Focus! Overcoming ADHD
• Forgiveness: Healing the Past
• Freedom From Drugs and Alcohol
• Freeing Yourself From An Addictive Relationship
• Get a Good Night’s Sleep
• Heal and Balance Body, Mind, and Spirit
• Intuition
• Lose the Weight
• Loving Your Unborn Child
• Past Life Regression
• Peak Performance For Success
• Recovering Your Inner Child
• Relax! Freedom From Stress
• Release Pain!
• Shamanism: Spiritual Journey of Empowerment
• Stop Smoking Forever!
• Success! Create Your Best Future

Centering ®  Product Sets

• Break Addictions
• Self-Healing and Recovery
• Relax, Recharge, and Balance
• Centering, Heal, and Empower Yourself
• Create Success

Balance and Healing is a Breath Away

Can We Simply and Profoundly Offset the Killing Effects of Stress in Our Lives?

Many times when I talk with clients who are very stressed and compromised in centering themselves (and for many compelling reasons!) about practicing relaxation and deep breathing exercises, they tell me they have tried it and it is too hard, they don’t have the time, and it doesn’t work anyways.  These common complaints of failure caused me to develop a very offhanded and profoundly simple way to achieve a core meditative state, which has proven very successful over a number of years now.

When we can’t “take a breath and a break” inside, whatever is stressing us out becomes much worse because we can’t settle ourselves and find the strength, endurance and insight to successfully come through life’s  challenges.  This also takes a major toll on us physically; and can, in subtle and even direct ways, make many of the symptoms of disease much worse.

Create Your Own Core Healing “Getaway”

In my amazing, and, for me, profoundly challenging life, I have experienced many tragedies, including the sudden death of my husband when my children were little; and serious family and financial crises.  Without question what I feel has kept me going and allowed me to take a critical “step away” to regroup, uplift and sustain myself with what truly is higher power, has been simple meditative practices. 

Not a day goes by when I don’t take a few minutes to settle back, close my eyes, count several deep, full breaths to myself – and allow myself to be carried “up and away” into this infinite, light rhythm.  The key, I’ve found, is to also completely let go of any expectation as to what is supposed to happen, and even thoughts of what I want or need for that moment, especially if I feel desperate for what I think I need in order to survive.  Instead I simply focus on my breath, stay in touch with what happens everywhere throughout my mind, heart and body when I let my essence breathing “take over”, and enjoy the unfolding “ride”.

Access the Major Physical, Emotional, Mental and Spiritual Benefits of Deep Relaxation

I have found a simple, repetitive “script” of orders to give myself to be enormously helpful in experiencing the major benefits that relaxation and deep breathing offers, which are:

*Increased oxygen to all organs and systems throughout the body

*Detaching from whatever keeps us in an anxious, depressed, and fearful state

*Significant, deep and complete release of the stress response, called “fight or flight”, mentally, emotionally and physically    

You Can Successfully Command Yourself to Detach, Uplift and Center

Here are my favorite “orders” I am happy to pass along for you to try:

1.  Count ten full, deep breaths to yourself – with the first several breaths, inhale so that you feel your rib cage lift up and out; and also exhale so that you feel your rib cage fall back down again toward your stomach.

2.  Then as you continue  to breathe, for the next several breaths, as you inhale tell yourself to receive higher power; and as you exhale tell yourself to release fear.

3.  For these next several breaths following, as you inhale say the phrase let be, and as you exhale say the phrase let go.  

4.  Imagine you are in a cocoon of infinite clearing, nurturing, freely flowing energy that is your endless breath, continuing to flow all around and through you now, surrounding and filling you up; and say to yourself, float higher and higher.

5.  When you feel complete with this meditative experience for now, and/or it is time to return, say to yourself, these connections stay, and I remember; and easily, gently imagine your endlessly flowing breath returns you to full, waking consciousness.

Become Your Own Source of Higher Power and Holistic Healing

Then open your eyes.  How do you feel?  How do you think you would feel and cope in your life if you practiced this for the next 45 days – long enough to form a healing habit?

We have amazing power to create miracles in our lives – my last command to you is stretch and develop yours!  Namaste, Marjorie 

The Simple Key to Transformation

You Can Profoundly Support Self-Healing Through Journaling

Take pen to paper, and start writing.  Writing your thoughts, feelings, hopes, fears, dreams, life record – any and all of the above – has been said to be the single act we can take to transform our lives.

Research shows that journaling promotes healing on all levels.  People suffering from chronic and life-threatening disease improve and better sustain themselves when they journal.

Strengthen and Evolve Yourself through Journaling

Journaling improves insight and self-esteem, opens the door to intuition, releases stress and “lifts you up” – in energetic terms, to a higher vibrational frequency – a place of empowerment and a place where you become more evolved.

Journaling allows you to become both the observer and, at a core level, to be ruthlessly, completely honest about what is going on for you; and see that you survive the “risk”.  Start this year with a lift at your core to transform yourself through creating your own heart-expressed record of who and what you are, to access higher vision and more greatly become.

Be Released, Centered and Enlightened

I work a great deal with therapeutic writing and spiritual journaling in my practice.  I always encourage clients to write – fortunately, a little daily writing goes a long way for self-healing and empowerment! 

I have seen clients slowly and permanently improve themselves and come to understand the divine in themselves, and how the spiritual universe works to always support them.  I have been journaling my entire life, and it has come to the point that I absolutely know that when I settle down and “free flow”, expressing myself in the moment, key insights rapidly emerge and I feel released, centered and enlightened.

Ten Tips for Successful Journaling

Here are my key guidelines for journaling:

1.  As an opening experiment, commit to journaling every day for 45 days, the time research says is required to break implement new habits.

2.  Use a notebook/journal that is convenient and easy for you to use. 

3.  Date your entries.

4.  Write for a minimum of ten minutes or as long as you like.  

5.  Don’t look for a conclusion or “answer” in your writings, which sets the stage for greatest insight and call to action to emerge through the unfolding process of your journaling.

6.  Share honestly with yourself “on all fronts”.

7.   As you write, answer the questions who, what, where, when, why and how to support your inner observer to fully emerge – this will profoundly open your intuition and understanding.

8.   As part of your journaling, at times record whatever you remember of your dreams.

9.   As part of your journaling, at times write in full description solely about your best dreams for yourself and your life.

10.  Always include how you feel, using feeling words, not thoughts – and refrain from conclusions as you express your feelings. 

Recommended Reading     

I always recommend The Artist’s Way by Julie Cameron, which recommends writing three “morning pages” every day for self-healing and transformation.  It offers wonderful guidelines and clear explanations about the power of journaling through a step-by-step creative process.

In 1995 I wrote a guide to empower yourself and create your dreams through journaling and guided meditation called The Centering Journaling and Guided Meditation Workbook to Heal Yourself, Empower Your Life, and Create Your Best Future, which you can order through my web site.  It is filled with specific writing exercises throughout six chapters, each of which has an extended guided meditation exercise, titled:

*Free Yourself from Stress

*Release the Past

*Connect With Your Higher Self

*Clear Blockages

*Accept and Love Yourself

*Create Your Own Future

On a Final Note

Let me know how you’re doing, and how I can support this compassionate and caring practice to be your own best self and live a free and fulfilled life.  You’re deserve it, and the benefits of this profoundly responsible, courageous and simple practice of inner reflective focus will extend its greater good throughout all others you touch in many wonderful ways!