Centering Tools

The Most Important Thing We Need to Transform . . .

. . . Is Space . . .

After days of rain and somewhat unseasonable chill, Sunday, the day before Halloween, dawned with radiant sunshine, no wind, and crisp but softly kissed, it seemed to me, with shining warmth.  I had time on my hands, as the saying goes, for a change – a great change, as I was to discover – and so I “set myself sail” in a quick five minutes to walk the Erie canal path from my door, most happily alone.

I was hit in the first few minutes as if by a lightning bolt with one of the simplest, clearest realizations of my life, which filled me with such ease, peace, clarity and happiness that I continued broadly smiling for the entire hour and a half I spent hiking.  Here it is:  all we and our indestructible spirits really need is space – enough breathing room – in our lives.

For All These Essence Reasons . . .

How interesting – how scary for real (not the fake fear we distract ourselves with, speaking of how we “celebrate” Halloween today, which barely touches on the ancient meaning of this holy day, when it was called Samhain, as the start of the new year and the understood and practiced energetic bridge to flow back and forth between the physical and spiritual realms) – it is that we live in a world when it seems not only the loss of prosperity but time itself steals our divine right to create and experience adequate space for ourselves . . .

*Space to breathe

*Space to create

*Space to heal

*Space to explore

*Space to be free

*Space to truly love

*Space to release

*Space to be at ease

*Space to be at peace

*Space to be fully present . . .

Sacred Needs Space to Exist and Offer Itself to You

Magic exists in space.  The sacred emerges in space . . . as I continue to call myself “a trekkie from way back”; protecting and nurturing our innate space really is the final frontier, and the matrix in which we truly can spread our wings and fly – expand, develop and support the development of our greater selves, greater outcomes, and greater offerings in our world. 

Take your space.  Cling to it for dear life – yours and all of ours – and be your best sacred witness in all our transformation, speaking of shapeshifting.

In great love, and honoring our right to our sacred lives, Marjorie

Change Your Story, Change Your Life

Can You Access the Power to Change and Create Your Soul Story?

What an amazing paradox we humans are!  What literally and in all other ways keeps us alive is our own indestructible soul/spirit, and we are always changing, shifting, becoming.

Native American tradition teaches that our story defines how we heal, develop, and more greatly become; and that we always have the power to change our story.  Through the intense and core work I do with clients I have come to view our power to envision as our power to become centrally connected with our “real story” and understand how it drives us in our lives – and to use that power as we Will to change that story to most directly improve our lives.

As We Heal and Develop, So Do Our Stories Change

The key way I have found to correspondingly transform is through first uncovering the core focus of our central story.  Then we are able to decide how to best change that focus to shift The Story.

It is important in this self-healing process to understand that as we heal and develop our central “stories”, as the thematic and dynamic descriptions we always return to about the course of our lives, correspondingly changes.  Realizing this fundamental truth allows us to easily transcend the constricting and delusional boundary our ego sets in its drive to shape our Story as its justification to perpetually “fight or flight” to insure what it thinks we need to survive.

Envision and Record Your Most Authentic Story

The best and most transformational question you can ask yourself to reshape your story, and be able to become your greater, more authentic self is through the following meditative and journaling exercise:

Settle back into a comfortable, supported, aligned position which relaxes your body and allows your deepening breath to naturally extend and regulate itself.

Review Your Major Crises to Discover Your Real Story

As this occurs allow your focus to casually review, within your flowing imagination, your entire life, asking to be shown five key crises you’ve experienced.

Then open your eyes and describe in one or two sentences as simply as possible each crisis.

Record Your Authentic Intuitive “Read” to Accelerate and Ignite Multidimensional Healing

Review what you have written, and with each description consider and record whatever feels like the most authentic intuitive response that occurs from the following question:

What did I learn from this?

The Real Shift to Higher Awareness and Personal Power

Read each “lesson”, considering what are the emerging themes – or there actually even be just one recurrent theme.  Describe it . . . and then use that as the foundation to then continue to describe what becomes your authentic transformational story to best support your greatest power for healing and development, peace and freedom.

In the unfolding radiance of the coming greater light, trust in your greater spiritual power to create corresponding new beginnings – Love always, Marjorie

All Centering Tools Products Available at Special Holiday Discounts Online OR Directly Purchase At My Meet and Greet at the Rochester, NY Twelve Corners Brighton Starbucks From Noon-Two PM On Saturday, November 12

My Special Holiday Gifts To You, With Deep Thanks

I'd love for you to join me then for Starbucks' always-special holiday goodies and my special 20% discount on all Centering Tools products and session gift certificates for your friends and loved ones.  Wrapping is included along with an"intuitive reading minute" for you as my loving gift of appreciation.

You can additionally order anything you want directly online at http://www.centeringtools.com/centering-productsfinal.html (copy and paste in your browser) at the same discount with a "sentence from spirit" specifically for you regarding whatever question you want me to intuitively answer; or email marjorie@centeringtools.com, or phone/fax 585-244-6210 anytime (and for questions) between October 25-January 1, 2012.  MasterCard, Visa and Discover also gladly accepted.

Remember To Allow Your Spirit To Gift Yourself

Tell all your friends about this special offer and sharing event - and remember to also gift yourself  to better celebrate and support yourself through this pivotal holiday season.

All my best wishes, Marjorie

Do You Really Know What Your Core Conflict Is?

You Can Discover Your Greater Self Through Uncovering Your Stuck Center

In the many years I’ve had the honor and privilege to work with clients, and support and facilitate their chosen paths for transformation, again and again the central part of their always amazing odysseys involves uncovering their core conflicts.  I see this as such a key piece today, not only for individuals but for the world at large.

We are challenged and always able to truly discover our greater selves through uncovering this usually well-disguised and stuck center.  Here are my top five tips for you to meditate on and journal about – not once, but as many times as you need to “dive in” to your core until you come to wherever your sense of intuitive resolution is as your fastest, safest road to unearth whatever is keeping you from your greater good:

Five Key Ways to Uncover Core Conflict . . .

1.  Ask yourself what you’re most afraid of and record whatever responses seem to intuitively come up from your heart and your gut without any additional explanation attached.

2.  Reflect in a deeper meditative space on whatever you sense keeps you in one or more separate, seemingly compartmentalized spaces now, and record your experience.

3.  Assess on a scale of 1 to 10 – 1 being least and 10 being most – how abandoned you feel in what seems to be the deepest place inside you; and in the same manner, how intruded upon you feel.

4.  Make as complete a list as you can of all the “good” and “bad” aspects of your life.

5.  Complete the following sentence in as many ways that seem true to you as honestly as possible without additional explanation:  If only . . . then I would/could . . . 

. . . And Five Corresponding Paths to Healing, Development and Resolution

Now it’s time to use this multidimensional crescendo of peaking and revealed core conflict to freely move into its real resulting path of resolution, healing and development through these corresponding five tips:

1.  Settle back and take several deep, cleansing breaths; and then say to yourself as you inhale, LET BE; and as you exhale, LET GO; until you experience and imagine being completely moved beyond whatever your core conflict is.

2.  This is the space of both being and becoming that I call the sacred observer, where your spirit naturally and fully emerges; and your intuition clearly and lovingly speaks to you.

3.  In this observer space, read through all you have written through the exercises above, and record whatever insights then occur.

4.  Consider these insights as the order of steps to access your present path of self-healing, development and true resolution through your courage and willingness to face and, through facing, have the real capacity to more greatly identify and understand your core conflict; allowing that conflict in turn to draw you through it; and then be able to complete its real directive, which is your soul’s chosen lesson for your determined growth and greater completion.

5.  Ask your unleashed loving and infinite spirit to guide you to wherever it knows the real resolution exists, to complete this challenge and erase the core conflict; and affirm to your spirit your unconditional commitment to walk that path to its end.

Your Revealed Plan of Action

Thank and honor yourself for your transformational work that in turn best supports the better world the universe so keenly supports in these greatly changing and pivotal times for all our peace and freedom.  As we can face and support all dimensions and places of ourselves, so are we meant to accept and affirm all our greater good for truly “win-win”as the only real re-solutions.

Namaste, Marjorie

The Best Thing You Can Do to Protect Your Health and Happiness

Truth Expresses Feelings That Become Healing

The best thing you can do to protect your health and happiness is to tell the truth.  It doesn’t matter if you think you don’t know “the whole truth” – who does?

It doesn’t matter how or what you feel, and yet how and what you feel helps greatly define what the truth really is.  How or what you feel also blows open the door to greater insight and spiritual connectedness – in other words, it is our direct “ticket” to the divine.

Telling the Truth Supports Wellness

Mind-body healing says when we fully face and truthfully express our feelings, and admit to ourselves and others that what we feel to be true keeps us healthy. This profoundly, centrally links to all corresponding healing.

There are a lot of things truth telling isn’t.  It doesn’t guarantee anything, or what you most want to have happen.

It Keeps You in the Power of What’s Real

It doesn’t make anyone else feel or do better, or solve any problems.  It won’t necessarily produce “happy ever after endings” or any resolution in and of itself.

It does name what’s real, so you stay real – and present –as well as reality-based.  That means you stay connected to your only and real source of power.

Become Your Divine Observer to Tell the Truth

It keeps you in the role of detached observer.  This effectively shuts down “fight or flight”, thereby allowing you to access, within your innate balance and flowing rhythm of multidimensional consciousness, your full creative and divine capacity to come to wherever the real resolution exists.

Telling the truth is a most courageous act, especially considering the at times seemingly impossible and complicated challenges involving dismantling faulty belief systems, cultural conditioning, completing unfinished therapeutic business and its residual core trauma from the past; and plain not knowing what all is going to happen.  It is an act of  spiritual faith that restores heroism as our best and highest way of functioning, which then becomes doing – which then becomes being.

Meditation Reveals What’s True

Completing what I call “observer questions” keenly and profoundly guide us to successfully “make the leap” to tell the truth.  So if you feel stuck, stressed, scared, and scattered, dare to ask yourself who, what, where, when, how and why is this happening?

Better yet, ask after you’ve first settled back in a comfortable, supported space, eyes closed, making sure you’ll not be interrupted.  Take several deep, regular, cleansing breaths; and as you feel yourself quite easily and naturally falling into a deeper meditative state, imagine these questions like gentle rain falling deep and deeper still into the very core of your heart.

These are the Steps to Restore Personal Power and Effect Mind-Body Healing

Listen to whatever comes up by way of answers, and then, continuing to feel very open, very much at ease, record them.  Then ask yourself how you feel, once again listening; and then similarly record whatever happens.

You’ve just taken yourself through the steps involved to fully access and express your inner truth.  You’ve just taken yourself through the steps involved to fully access and express your infinite source of power and healing.

The Simplest Way to Clear Ourselves

How Can We Go From Ungrounded to Grounded?

A fellow holistic practitioner who is Native American told me they say if we don’t spend at least an hour a day outdoors we can’t ground ourselves.  I thought about what “grounding ourselves” means.

I relate most to  a pretty literal interpretation of a flowing current that can be our sustainable “juice” as long as there is an uninterrupted and “closed circuit” connection that “fits” all the way around.  I know what it is to feel grounded and I know what it is to feel ungrounded.

Does Being Clear Reground You?

A client told me recently, “When I’m clear, I’m grounded”.  I wouldn’t have particularly associated being clear with grounding, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made to me.

I hike just about every day for an hour to an hour and a half in most kinds of weather other than thunder and lightning, and blizzards .  Fortunately I live literally a five minute non-hurried walk from the Erie Canal, so this is a pretty easy and sweet set-up for me.

How Close Are you to Your Own Radiant and Grounding Paradise?

When I have enough time to drive no more than an hour to an hour and a half I have my pick of state parks, with lakes, waterfalls, hills, forests – my own radiant paradises to be completely enveloped in . . . and clear.

I don’t need anything once I’m there than sneakers with some tread, comfortable clothes for the weather and my willingness to surrender to the vast transformational healing power of nature by literally putting one foot in front of the other.  I walk in all kinds of “inner weather” as well – this time with no exception – the worst turmoil, the greatest joy, seemingly endless fatigue, and just being pretty much a “blank slate”.

The Real Definition of Clearing and Grounding

Its amazingly wonderful to disappear here, understanding that disappearing really means merging, belonging, returning to who and what I am both physically and spiritually.  Interestingly enough I gradually become greater and more accepting, understanding my place.

Is that the real definition of clearing and grounding?  That makes nature and our need and calling to move with the earth our greatest centering source.

What Do You Do With “50/50”?

The Swing Between Going and Not Going

My daughter was unusually pushy this evening to have me accompany her to see the new movie 50/50, telling me it was based on a true story about the person who played the part of the best friend of a young man who was diagnosed with a rare from of cancer, sarcoma, in his spine.  Following babysitting and then celebrating my oldest grandson’s fourth birthday party, despite feeling tired and very cognizant about the upcoming fundraiser tomorrow of my not-for-profit organization, Centering for Wellness, followed by a choir rehearsal, I went.

“I think you’ll really like it”, my daughter said, “I really want to see it – it’s supposed to be good.”  I did like it a lot, which of course didn’t come close to how much as I’ve liked, in this last year she’ll be home as the last of my four children to “fly the coop”, being with her.

Cancer as an Odyssey of Transformation, Ambiguity and the Ongoing Challenge of Healing

It well depicted what I have viewed as the amazing, transformational, inspiring and terrible healing odyssey of so many who have had cancer, of all ages, who I’ve had the honor to work with as a nurse clinician and holistic practitioner.  And then there are my personal connections – and who doesn’t have them regarding cancer? 

My amazing soul mate who died at 31 of sarcoma.  My caring aunt who died in her eighties of metastatic brain cancer after having overcome breast cancer, as these twisted courses can go, decades earlier.  Her courageous husband, my father’s brother, who was just about the age I am now when he died of metastatic colon cancer.

Does Life Balance Truly Mean 50/50?

Here’s what struck me most about this movie, even beyond the keenly-played stages of grief; the transformation and development of the young man with cancer in his twenties suddenly, through experiencing this pivotal life-threatening challenge, wholly coming of age; and the “crossover” relationship he experienced with his inexperienced therapist – my line of work, of course: the title of the film. 

We hear so much about the need for lifestyle balance.  In this call for balance, is the real message here that our lives, if we can view them with a large and realistic enough vision, are “just 50/50”? 

The Truth About Acceptance

Does that blow holes in all the striving to be completely happy, completely cared for, completely fulfilled, or completely anything?  Have we been baying after the moon with what may actually be  such delusional efforts?  And do we have the wherewithal to come to terms – ACCEPT – that 50/50 is enough?

How many times have you heard the saying, “you can say the cup is half empty or half full”?  Do we have the power to develop enough, expand enough to simply say, IT’S BOTH . . . and let it go at that?

A Surprising Path to Ease Rather Than Dis-Ease

Would you change . . . would your life change if you understood this duality as a more accurate expression of the greater whole?  I don’t think this is meant to deny your heart or your soul, your motivation or your effort.

Maybe it’s meant to take the pressure off and allow us to be even more greatly present and come to even higher, clearer resolution.  I like to continue to recommend to clients and quite keenly to myself to view life as multi-dimensional experiments. 

A Revolutionary Experiment of Empowerment

Try this view on for its size “experiment”, and see if you move more from dis-ease to ease, anxiety to comfort, helplessness to centrally-placed personal power.  We don’t really ever have more than our true selves and our true vision to be able to greatly participate in the amazing flow of our own lives. 

Maybe “50/50” is the best, most well-hidden (until now!) real deal we really float with.   

Accepting the Unacceptable

The Challenge Now to Transform to Survive

It is easy to accept what makes sense to us and seems to better support us fairly comfortably living our lives.  It is difficult if not impossible to accept what doesn’t make sense to us and makes our life worse or even seems to threaten our survival.

We are greatly challenged in these unstable and critical times to fundamentally and miraculously transform to become our higher, greater selves.  Accepting the unacceptable is a key foundation to open the door to transformational wellness.

Access Your Spiritual Power to Accept

In a recent seminar I presented I asked participants to consider the word Accept, the final stage of grief.  When I reflected, in a deeper meditative state, on each letter in ACCEPT, intuiting one word for each letter, I came up with the following:

A – Affirm

C – Complete

C – Caring

E – Extends

P – Peace

T – Truth

Then I put the words together in the above order, forming the following sentence:  Affirm and complete caring that extends peace and truth.

A 45 Day Experiment in Profound Healing

I asked the participants to consider how this sentence can be a spiritual guide to accept the unacceptable, and be led to where the real resolution is in completing grief.  I invite you to do the same by entering your own reflective, deeper meditative inner space and then say the sentence to yourself, experiencing whatever happens inside you by way of response.

Now consider the many ways you can choose and commit today, and every day going forward, as a 45 day experiment, to affirm and complete caring that extends peace and truth in your life.  Keep a record of what you do and what happens.

How to Transcend Struggle and Freely Create

When we accept the unacceptable we transcend struggle to become greater and higher in the space of our lives – and heal.  We understand the source of our power and free ourselves from irresolvable conflict.

When we set ourselves free we can become present to create fluidly and powerfully in our lives.  Trust is recovered, and we a-c-c-e-p-t and honor our divine right to become.