Centering Tools

How Does Healing Really Work?

We Remain Centrally Confused About How Healing Occurs

We are confused in our shifting world about how healing really works.  I work with clients ongoing through all the years of my Centering Tools practice on exploring, facilitating, and experiencing healing.

We continue to question how healing occurs.  Here is my understanding that I want to share and offer for your consideration and practice within the scope of my experience, and in response to the outpouring of sharing from Centering Tools newsletter subscribers in response to the recent survey asking about current concerns for healing:

Ten Healing Portals to Explore and Experience

1.   Healing is a mystery.

2.   Healing occurs through multiple related dimensions.

3.   Healing occurs as a higher restorative and greater balance that better sustains the whole being.

4.   Healing is fundamentally transformative.

5.   Healing involves a core shift at an energetic level.

6.   Healing is synchronistic and responsive to both inner and outer environmental shifts.

7.   All  healing is self-healing and profoundly impacts relationships throughout one’s world.

8.   We are “wired” to heal – what doesn’t heal sets up a pattern of ongoing and compounded resistance that correspondingly affects life and function.

9.   Healing occurs in unconditionally free space.

10. Healing is an unfolding process.

I invite you to reflect, meditate, consider and journal about any/all of these above ten “portals to healing responses”, and see where you go and where you come to.  Please keep me posted . . .  All the best . . . in love and light . . . Marjorie

How Can You Navigate Your Way Through Major Transformation?

A Check-in for Your Year

2012 has been described as the year of planetary change.  How is your year going so far?

In Rochester, NY we have no winter – at least, not the winters we’ve been used to since weather was recorded.  It has snowed a handful of times, and it all “goes away” pretty much of tis own accord within a corresponding handful of days.

Navigate Change Successfully

Times are different, systems are crumbling and/or under siege, and grassroots initiatives continue along with more and more flamboyant power initiatives through currently dominant and entrenched forces.  This seems to be the most common theme presented by clients this year, through many different circumstances and individual challenges: How can I successfully navigate through these times of major transformation?

Here are some keys in my current work I’ve uncovered:

A Trinity of Tips for Top Transformation

1.  Create and Nurture Inner and Outer Space – We can’t navigate without room, we can’t greatly think without everything “settling” and freely arising the clear, empty, reflective observer within.  Nature truly is nurture here, both in experiencing the restorative beauty outside; and through the profound and elegant innate rhythms of your breath, your being, allowed to open and flow.  As this occurs, you create healthy distance from external and internal challenges and reestablish core boundaries and your sacred inner center of power and choice.

2.  Identify and suspend core faulty conditioned belief systems – Dare to live your life in your time – our time – of major transformation without judgment, conclusion, advanced dictate.  These are all worthless and keenly inappropriate when fundamental change is occurring through all connected dimensions.  We need more than anything in these times to be as fully present as possible to be able to best respond and choose, allowing what is taking shape to do so without former threads of attachment that aren’t fundamentally part of it.

3.  Determine what you really can trust within your own innate spiritual understanding and sense of being – This is an ongoing process that is centrally intuitive, through which the inner observer can freely analyze who, what, where, when, why and how by simply noting what is real.  Inner trust is the key to personal transformation.  It fuels insight, profound creativity, courage, and rebuilds personal power to sustain the Self throughout transformation.

The Truth About What Does (And Doesn’t) Change

We come through these times greatly changed . . . and yet (here’s the usual paradox!) . . . with a core sense that at long last, who we’ve really been and dreamed about being all along can at last surface and fully be in a new world.

Namaste (I honor the divine in You), Marjorie

Experience the Power of Energy Healing

The Core Way to De-Stress and Center

Energy healing is more and more talked about, researched, and sought after as a way to release stress, improve all healing responses, explore alternative consciousness, and experience greater centering.  The National Institute of Health Department of Complementary and Alternative Medicine is obtaining more and more funding to support these initiatives.

Recent quantum physics research reports that thoughts and feelings transmit energetically, and affect energetic fields.  Energy healing includes thought transmission as well as hands-on healing.

Energy Healing Balances and Integrates You

Within the scope of my Centering Tools practice I offer a number of energy healing modalities including channeling, Reiki, therapeutic touch, hypnotherapy and meditation.  Other examples of energy healing are acupuncture, acupressure, shiatsu and reflexology.

All modalities are integrative and complementary in that they can “mix” well with any other wellness and health care practice.  The understanding is that healing can occur through many dimensions, and involves greater balance, holism and body-mind-spirit alignment.

A Simple Exercise to Experience Energy Healing

Here is a simple exercise I’ve created for you to experience energetic healing, that combines chosen intent with deep relaxation and hands-on healing:

Settle back into a comfortable, supported, aligned position with arms and legs uncrossed, eyes closed.  Imagine your breath quite easily and naturally deepens.

Count to five full, deep breaths to yourself, noticing how regular and full, then how automatic your breath becomes.  For the next several breaths you take, as you inhale say to yourself this phrase, let be; and as you exhale say to yourself this phrase, let go.

Imagine your breath is endless, a sea of infinitely flowing energy; and you float, light as a feather, effortlessly held and supported by these waves.  Consider that your hands can transmit this infinitely flowing energy.

Place one hand over the center of your stomach and the other hand over the center of your chest.  Imagine the infinite, endlessly flowing energy moves through your hands, deep and deeper still, everywhere throughout your stomach, everywhere throughout your chest; and extends in an ellipse between your hands, round and round through your stomach, into your chest and back again in a circle without beginning, without end; that continues to build and build, filling you up, clearing, and more and more greatly nurturing and balancing you.

Allow Yourself to Come to Your Own Completion

Observe your sensations, as you continue to be in this experience, for as long as you wish, until you come to a place that feels like a place of completion for you.  When you’re ready, imagine your endlessly flowing breath so lightly and freely brings you full circle, back and back, until you once more return to full waking consciousness, and open your eyes.

How do you feel?  Take some additional time if you wish and record your experience in energy healing, and Be In Touch . . . Marjorie

Stop Having to Get Permission to Act

A Central Empowerment Challenge

The single greatest empowerment challenge clients present in their work with me is coming to realize, and act accordingly, that it is not necessary to get permission outside themselves.  Women continue in many undeveloped (truly!) parts of the world to have to get permission to do just about anything; and certainly historically we emerge from a great patriarchal holdover of gender dominance and related abuse that is still working itself out.

I also see clients coming to realize that as grown-ups they no longer need to get permission to do anything; and that reflects our inalienable right to choose and to exist.  This becomes a maturational adult challenge which can peak at almost any age in response to life crises.

Key Symptoms of Dependence

Feeling one has to get permission is not only infantile, then, it comes from a delusion of dependence which puts one at risk as well as prevents healing, empowerment and growth.  Key symptoms of seeking permission include:

* feeling afraid to singularly make decisions

* feeling the need to justify or rationalize your actions

* presenting yourself solely as a victim

* saying phrases like “if only”, or “I’d better not . . . or else”

* saying someone or something else prevents you from doing what you want

The Best Way to Transform and Inspire

When we stop seeking permission to not only do, but at even deeper levels, be, we become more greatly caring not only to ourselves but each other.  We inspire others to grow up and trust in their capacity to be truly responsible by accepting the power to choose freely with the understanding that this extends to an unconditional willingness to accept consequences.

We become more of who we really are, both stronger and more flexible; and realize we really are our own best heroes and heroines.  This restores our power to love ourselves and each other as a right balance which can bring miraculous outcomes to in turn restore real loving and peace in the world. 

How to Break the Bonds of Love

The Real Truth About Love

Love, it has been said, is a great mystery filled with surprises.  Today is the holiday that celebrates love.

How do you feel about love?  What have you learned about love in your life?

Do You Know How to Accept Love?

Have you ever felt at the same time in opposite places when loving – scared and shy, bold and tremendously forthcoming?  Have you ever felt trapped by love and longed to break free?

Here are the ten paradoxical truths, each with their “pair of opposites” that I want to share with you to break the bonds of love in order to more greatly love, speaking of paradoxes!  I thank countless clients for discovering and sharing these, as they’ve benefitted so greatly in their transformational journeys, through our work in the 25 years of Centering Tools, about the real nature of love:

Ten Ways to Transform Through Real Loving

1.  Love does not change reality – it profoundly changes those who love.

2.  There are no guarantees in love – what can become unshakeable is love’s power.

3.  Love can’t be dictated – it challenges deeply what really matters to us and we take stands we would never have guessed we were capable of taking.

4.  Love brings forth what otherwise wouldn’t be there – it preserves and protects our essence.

5.  We feel safer when we truly experience love – we take risks that we wouldn’t feel capable of taking.

6.  Love does not tolerate excuses – it is unconditional.

7.  Love knows no bounds – whatever violates destroys love.

8.  Love builds slowly – it comes as a sudden great surprise.

9.  We can’t love what we can’t love within ourselves – love moves us beyond ourselves to wholly sacrifice.

10.  Love is deeply quiet – love blasts forth through overwhelming passion.

Love brings it own healing transformative power through its own divine direction.  As we correspondingly experience its great touch, so do we come to flower, to radiate.

How Much Power Do You Really Have?

The Only Way We Can Truly Heal and Become

This central question is really the key to self-healing, creating, awareness, the freedom to choose well, and relationship.  It is the central reported struggle, whether it is described in this way or not, with pretty much all of my clients.

I see it as a recovery struggle to regain wholeness and become fully integrated, both within and without.  I see us all understandably challenged, as we live in a world that says a lot to us about how much power we do and don’t have – and  judges it all – that in and of itself sets the stage for multiple, complicated and escalating power struggles.

Loss of Power Profoundly Damages

Power struggles are immensely damaging.  They create horrific stress and dysfunction; destroy self-esteem; fuel hopelessness and victimization; and set the stage for all kinds of violation and acting-out behaviors.

Fundamentally the power of our breath, translated as spirit from the original Hebrew, Latin and Greek roots, is our source of power.  Our breath – and ourselves – need to be free-flowing to sustain us and our lives.

The World’s and Our Beliefs Can Destroy Power

Whatever truly limits our source of power, which always involves physical, emotional, mental and spiritual expression and balance, stops us from becoming whole and who we were really meant to be.  Our world tries to “sell us a bill of goods” by attempting to legitimize in all kinds of ways sources that actually limit personal power. 

In addition, our own faulty belief systems, created from unhealed traumas rooted in our early past, profoundly limits our personal power.

A Journaling Exercise to Recover Personal Power

I invite you to settle back, take several deep, cleansing breaths, and consider whatever you think and feel in this moment limits your power.  Start making this list, taking as much time as you need to complete it.

When you’ve finished, make another list, with each item you now describe as being the exact opposite of your first list.  For example, if you wrote on your first list, “I don’t have the money to pay all my bills”, on the second list write, “I have the money to pay all my bills”.

We Have the Power to Transform

When you’ve finished, title each list My Beliefs.  Then read through everything you’ve written and record any insights which occur.

Now how do you feel?  Here’s the real kicker:  Feelings are the inner key to personal power.

Power is Infinite, and Everywhere

They don’t lie, and we can only create in physical reality, as can the spiritual universe partnering up with us, what is true.  Power through all ancient spiritual traditions was understood to be the source of life, infinite, and everywhere.

The phrase universal life force energy continues to be described around the world as chi, ki, prana, great spirit, and in the current resurrection in pop culture of the smash hits of the seventies and eighties, the force.  Power is the generative as well as the creative center of our being, and our source of balance and transformation.

How to Restore and Expand Your Infinite Power

In other words, we can’t live well – achieve wellbeing – without it.  When we heal, develop and compassionately create, our power exponentially increases.

This is our true birthright and our core challenge to “put right” for ourselves and our world.  Namaste, Marjorie

How To Let Someone In To Your Heart

Where We Love Is Where Our Heart Opens

The biggest challenge clients bring to me is the challenge to trust and feel emotionally safe.  In this upcoming celebration Feb 14 of “Heart’s Day”, who has not had the experience, now or in the past, of whether or not to open your heart to let someone – even if you haven’t even met them yet -  into your heart?

Valentine’s Day is not only a celebration of romance, but a central celebration of love.  This weekend I also bought cards for my three grandchildren, my daughters, my son-in-law, and my father to share in that spirit.  (Speaking of successful marketing, I couldn’t resist buying a card “from my cat” to my youngest daughter, a love relationship with him that means the world to her – and me!)

A Brief Meditative And Journaling Exercise to Trust And Feel Safe “From The Bottom of Your Heart”: 

Close your eyes and settle back into a comfortable, relaxed position.  Take several deep, even breaths. 

As you continue to breathe in, say to yourself the phrase “I receive love”. As you breathe out, say to yourself the phrase “I release love”.

Now imagine you are your own best observer.  What do you seem to observe as you “tune in” to your heart?

Does your heart feel open or closed?  Continue breathing deeply and easily, imagining somehow your breath now opens your heart to its greatest extent.

Then repeat the two phrases, “I receive love” and “I release love” as you inhale and exhale respectively.  How do you feel?

When you feel complete with this inner journey, open your eyes and take a few minutes to record what happened, particularly noting your feelings throughout.  The key to having a healthy relationship is to open your heart and trust, ongoing.

Trust the Power of Your Own Open Heart

Love is unconditional.  It exists in a foundation of conscious acceptance and understanding, in a place of letting be and letting go.

Most importantly, this Valentine’s Day look to open your heart unconditionally and with conscious love to more greatly understand and accept yourself.  These are the keys to trust from your core.

Beyond that, listen to your heart regarding how to explore, initiate and maintain loving and healthy relationships with others.  May all your loving journeys reveal and sustain the infinite force of your own true spirit for wellbeing and fulfillment.