Posted by Kimberly Rex
Finding Serenity in the Midst of Challenges and Change
Finding serenity in the midst of challenges and change, well, is challenging. Serenity is defined as the state of being calm, peaceful, and untroubled. In these times when challenging events continue to escalate, serenity would certainly be a welcome guest. The Serenity Prayer, written by Reinhold Niebuhr, is well-known in 12 Step Groups for this reason. It addresses acceptance, empowerment, and faith to face each moment and day with a greater sense of balance and fortitude. This article will give you ideas about how it can benefit you, and your relationships to change your experience in the world in the midst of these challenges.
Serenity to Accept The Things You Cannot Change
Living in a world where there are overwhelming simultaneous events that signal the need for change, this prayer is especially helpful. It is as if all of the material below the surface is coming up into our view at the same time. This material begs the question: “How deeply are we able to address the muck or sewage coming up everywhere?“
In your personal life and relationships, the invitation is to look at where we are pointing our fingers. We are part of a larger collective. Our blame and anger buried into the numbness within the chaos create alienation from our needs for safety, nurture, kindness, respect, sharing, and focus. These are essentials to creating a life that is not only sustainable for ourselves but for all of us.
When you believe that you have control over everything in your life, this ironically can lead to feeling completely out of control. This can lead to sometimes carrying burdens that are not yours to carry. You cannot change other people by carrying their responsibilities or burdens in life.
In a Resonance Repatterning® session, the process works with your inner limiting beliefs, thoughts attitudes, and orientation to life. These are all influenced by your history and the underlying material. When we ask someone else to change to meet our needs, we are reliving patterns that ask for inner change. Blame is often a resonance with something within us that signals agitation or charge with the energetics of the material we dislike. In some repatterning sessions, we look at how the blame of another is a component of ourselves asking to be healed. If I believe that someone is dishonest, we look at how the charge and energy devoted to this are within us. We check for “I am dishonest.” In whatever way this energy is playing out within yourself it is projected into your field and into the world of relationships.
In fact, this dance of dishonesty between you and others might be one that has been going on for generational family patterns. Whether you have a charge around someone else being dishonest or are truly angry about the issue of dishonesty, it originates within you. How is dishonesty affecting your thoughts, feelings, and body sensations?
Here are some questions you might work with related to this topic, “ How am I being dishonest with myself? What truth am I not living? Where am I not completely ready or yet able to confront my fears or need for more truth about something?”
Accepting people where they are in their lives is a way of giving them respect and dignity. It allows you to give responsibility to others and authorship back to yourself.
Empowering Statements for Greater Serenity
- “If someone’s behavior is unacceptable to me, I cannot change it, but I change my interactions with that person.”
- “it’s no one else’s job to meet my needs. I am responsible for taking care of myself. This is a good thing because it gives my power back.”
- “It’s not my job to control other people, however, I am in control of my reaction to them.
Serenity to Change the Things You Can Control
.Feeling like you cannot change anything can stem from blaming yourself even when there is nothing you can do about a situation, or you resonate with having absolutely no control over anything in your life. This happens when you believe that you do not have the ability or power to make a difference. In other words, the situation or person has power over you. The inability to start or create can result from an unresolved traumatic experience where you are stuck in freeze mode. You might find yourself procrastinating or feel a lack of authority or power due to abuse, chronic stress, grief or overwhelm. Resentment, depression, anger, and fear over time can create a feeling of disconnection from yourself. This means that you are unable to use your body sensations, and your ability to respond to what is happening around you in a life-energizing way with self-care. This impacts your ability to pace yourself or conserve your own life energy for your own benefit.
Empowering Statements for Creating Greater Serenity
- “My past does not define me, I am always able to make decisions for how I will think and behave today, and into the future.”
- “Being perfect or having no flaws would not solve all of my problems, make everyone approve of me, or make it certain that I always get what I want.”
- “It is inevitable that not everyone is going to like, agree with or approve of me all of the time. It is more important for me to be authentic and approve of myself than it is to try to please others to earn their approval.“
Everything comes to us that belongs to us if we create the capacity to receive it. ~Rabindranath Tagore
Serenity to Know the Difference
Either an excessive state of having to control everything or resonating with having no control is extreme. Being able to acknowledge these states creates a realistic way of accessing what you truly do have power over. Having unconditional love for yourself, others, and the circumstances that surround you lessens the struggle to accept life as it is in the moment even if it isn’t what you desire or even demand. This means that you can then begin to gauge what is in your sphere of influence and what is not.
Some great examples might be the following: While you cannot control the economy or politicians, you can control how you spend or save your money, and how you vote at the ballot box.
You might not be able to control another person, however, you can choose how you respond to them. You can choose to respond coherently in a way that promotes your greater peace. You have choices about how to think about the situation. You do have influence over how you feel and respond.
This also applies to your beliefs and thoughts about yourself. Shifting limiting beliefs about yourself goes a long way to transform underlying material so they can be woven into new possibilities for seeing and experiencing the world anew.
In the transformation process of creating greater serenity, some belief statements might include:
- “No matter what is happening around me or in the world, I always have a choice about what I focus on, how I judge the situation, and how I react or respond to it.”
- “No matter what happens in life, I know I am capable of finding a solution and that everything works out in the end.”
- “Sometimes life’s disappointments and challenges can lead to wonderful new possibilities that I never would have known I wanted.”
Serenity arises when you embrace the messages, lessons, and opportunities that the challenge presents to you. Getting to have choices with the material that the upheaval brings into focus is a wonderful reason to work with what feels unfamiliar, unsettling, and upsetting. It signals the potential for your readiness for substantial change in your life. By doing so, you give serenity and peace a chance!
Kimberly Rex, MS is an Advanced Resonance Repatterning®practitioner, Person-Centered Expressive Therapist, and Wellness and Well-being Life Coach. She works with people all over the world via Skype, phone, and proxy.
Find out how Resonance Repatterning benefits your life. Set up a personal session or sign up for a free monthly newsletter with articles, natural healing modalities, and exclusive group sessions here.
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Posted by Kimberly Rex
Finding Gratitude and Appreciation in Your Life
Finding gratitude and appreciation in your life can change how you feel and respond to what is happening in front of you. It can change your perceptions, and your physical responses and impact your thoughts. This can change your sense of boredom, apathy, or displeasure with life.
You can change how you see yourself and the world around you by choosing to find reasons to appreciate your life, who you are, and what you have right now. Even if you have felt isolated these past few years, find yourself trying to find calm in all of the changes taking place, or wish you were someplace else, there is the potential for choosing to find what is life-energizing. This has a positive effect on your health, relationships, and outlook on life. It can happen with simple gratitude and appreciation.
By creating a Gratitude and Appreciation Practice for yourself you can build a presence that feeds your body-mind-spirit system daily. This can contribute to your satisfaction with life. Physically, you might express appreciation and gratitude by acknowledging the wonder of your body and how it carries you from moment to moment, day by day. By doing so you reduce stress and calm internal conflicts. Your relationships can also improve through gratitude and appreciation to become more constructive with actions and interactions.
Finding Gratitude and Appreciation Right in Front of You
It is easy to get so lost in daily routine and automatic responses to life that you take for granted or become blind to all the nurture and support that is right in front of you. To make the shift, you first notice and allow your senses to take in your surroundings. Start by getting in touch with your breath. Then allow your eyes to scan and rest on the contents of the space you are in, your home, the sky, plants, flowers, and trees outside. Rest your awareness on the significance of each particular place you rest your eyes or what you notice. This can be a vase of flowers, a bud on a tree, or the sound or color of a bird.
You don’t have to look or travel far to give to find beauty or something that brings you pleasure. You live in your body 24/7 and on the Earth 24/7. Take it in what is right in front of you with appreciation. By doing so you create positive benefits for your wellness and well-being.
“Upon awakening, let the words “Thank You” flow from your lips, for this will remind you to begin your day with gratitude and compassion.”~Wayne Dyer
Start where you are, literally. Appreciate your body and what you wear on your body each day. This includes the vibrancy of colors, the patterns, and the texture of the cloth, warmth, fun, comfort, and joy you have experienced from your choices. What meaning and energy do these colors and feelings are you experiencing when you wear these clothes?
As the weather is changing and there is more opportunity to get out into nature or to safely attend gatherings to connect, I have opened my closet to what seems like a brand new wardrobe! Putting on earrings, and wearing a scarf or sweater I haven’t worn in a few years, is an absolute joy! And, I experience appreciation for these new opportunities.
Since the pandemic, I have limited the amount of clothing I cycle through weekly. I have also donated clothing with the thought in mind that someone else can also appreciate the items that no longer fit or have a place in my clothing choices. And, this makes me smile with the thought that paying it forward can multiply appreciation.
How about applying appreciation to the foods that come from the Earth to nourish your body? These foods come to your table from a wide diversity of places. Appreciate the soil, seeding, farmers and workers, and the growth process each of the foods you eat has taken, and how this, in turn, energizes your body. Appreciate the color, texture, and flavor of your food.
Acknowledge how food has created a story and connection with your family and friends. Perhaps there are favorite dishes, a particular holiday, or a ritual that has made your food story a special memory or has an emotional positive meaning for you. Bring this appreciation practice into your selection of foods and preparation as well.
Cook with love and with the intention of nourishment and well-being. Become aware and discerning of what foods are energizing to you and bring them into your kitchen to combine in creative ways for health and well-being. As you do so, you can also consciously become aware of foods that are not energizing to your body-mind system. And, express internal conscious choice to create even greater potential for your life energy, your moods, and well-being to appreciate.
Finding Joy and Appreciation for the Small Things in Life
It is often the small things that change your perceptions. A smile from someone, the laughter of children, a word of encouragement, a favorite song, someone holding the door open, a beautiful sunset, or appreciation for truly being seen and heard can mean the most.
Allow appreciation to take in the people in your life who have been there at a special time, made you laugh, consoled, or listened when you needed it most and who you learned from as you shared time with them. Appreciate the ups and downs of your own life as they have created who you are today. Notice and appreciate what is happening and speaking in your body-mind-spirit system today.
It might sound like a small thing, however, throughout the pandemic, my mother and I, both isolated, have had a daily appreciation and gratitude exchange close to sunset. She has a view of the bay in the West while I live in a circle of cedar trees. She sees the sky light up as it moves into twilight each day. Each evening by phone, she describes the colors of the sky and the shapes of the clouds to me. By doing so, we each experience the expansive qualities of the beauty unfolding through our senses and imagination.
“Let the gratefulness overflow into blessing all around you. Then it will really be a good day.” ~David Steindl-Rast
Finding Gratitude and Appreciation for Others
By making appreciation a practice, include words, prayer, affirmation, journaling, drawings, movement, making music, toning, or spending time in places locally that you love or might not yet know. Your gratitude and appreciation meditation might become a walk or even a wake-up or calm-down around your sleep routine. No matter what you choose, this practice can easily become your daily experience as you recognize the value of life and its gifts each day.
In the same way, be sure to use appreciation with others. Everyone needs to feel they are appreciated and have a purpose. This can be done when you express gratitude for something or to someone in your life by including the reasons you appreciate an action or presence. This contributes to the health of your relationships and also supports creating greater motivation and life energy whether in personal or business relationships.
Research shows that gratitude and appreciation stimulate oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin neurotransmitters and hormones to build pathways within your body-mind system to create a sense of calm, satisfaction, safety, love, joy, trust, and bonding. This happens for both the giver and the person who receives it.
I am reminded of a recent experience running around doing errands while in the parking lot of Trader Joe’s in my town. As I pulled into the parking lot, I could hear the sound of singing and Native Drum. There was a Native American man with a sign next to him asking for support for his situation as his house flooded in the recent storms in this area. Instantly, I was taken into the space I have experienced in sweat lodge rituals, and when parked, I sat for a few moments with my eyes closed just to listen. I was brought back into my center and relaxed. I remembered the connection to the Earth and to each person in the lodge and with all my relations. And, although I only had a few dollars cash on me, I walked over to him and said, “I’m sorry, this is all I have.” He took my hand between his two hands and smiled deeply. The gratitude exchange between us was enormous and made something seemingly small more than enough.
With practice and over time you can see how small steps in the direction towards creating an internal and external environment for gratitude and appreciation to thrive that you will begin to experience greater integrity in your wellness and well-being.
Making a daily appointment and commitment to create new neurotransmitters that communicate life-energizing vitality to your body-mind-spirit system can also expose or illuminate negative patterns and beliefs. By consciously choosing new ways of seeing and experiencing life, you actually gain more confidence and motivation for the process as your internal barometer begins to change. So the takeaway message is to start the process and keep coming back to find gratitude and appreciation with conscious choice.
Kimberly Rex, MS is an Advanced Resonance Repatterning® practitioner, Person-Centered Expressive Therapist, and Wellness and Well-being Life Coach. She works with people all over the world by Skype, phone, and proxy.
Find out how Resonance Repatterning benefits your life. Set up a personal session or sign up for a free monthly newsletter with articles, natural healing modalities, and exclusive group sessions here.
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Posted by Kimberly Rex
The Impact of Intergenerational Trauma
The impact of intergenerational trauma is a topic that has come to the fore as we process what is happening with families, refugees, and soldiers in Ukraine with the devastating images alive in the news we receive from another part of the world. First, there is the question of how this traumatic experience will affect each person experiencing this directly. Second, how will the aftershocks affect each person in the future in the generations after this war?
We can see through the history of Europe that the residue still lingers from previous wars and traumatic experiences. This is true in the United States as well as in the trauma endured by Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanic Americans. Historically, immigrants fleeing from other parts of the world over time bring their own trauma history into the mix in the repetition of the victim-perpetrator cycles. It is this intergenerational trauma that continues to impact life on the emotional, physical, mental, and spirit levels.
Impact of Intergenerational Trauma on the Emotional Level
Adverse Childhood Experiences are sources and evidence of intergenerational experiences. The overlapping correlation with traumatic events with health, wellness, learning, and well-being becomes more apparent when looking directly at the roots.
Intergenerational Trauma can be expressed through fear, depression, hyper-vigilance, worry, PTSD, codependency, anger, inability to attend or focus, and memory issues. It can also result in pervasive social anxiety with an inability to engage with others in a way that nourishes your needs for safety and trust. Addressing the roots of these de-energizing reactions needs compassion, safety, and trust to heal these wounds at their source.
Impact of Intergenerational Trauma on the Physical Level
Intergenerational trauma physical manifestations can be expressed through loyalty to your Family System as well as mobilized energy blocked in your body can show up as eating disorders, addiction, a lack of vitality, pain, heart disease, diabetes, or cancer. The energy of a traumatic experience through unresolved epigenetic memory creates continuing stress behaviors that impact descendants from your ancestors to your parents, and then to you. These behaviors influence gene expression as a response to the stress in your environment.
Impact of Intergenerational Trauma on the Mental Level
Bruce Lipton, the author of The Biology of Belief, proved through his research on stem cells that genetic expression is managed by epigenetic (above the genes) factors related to your environment. The expression of the genes is impacted by stress, blockages, and interruption of energy flow within your body-mind-spirit system. The good news is that you have the power to change your environment and your perception of your environment now. This change happens when you change your resonance with beliefs and attitudes about life created by negative earlier experiences and generational patterns stored within your system. This has a rippling effect on righting your ability to turn towards nurture and support with your thoughts, your communication, and your relationships.
Impact of Intergenerational Trauma on the Spirit Level
Find out how Resonance Repatterning benefits your life. Set up a personal session or sign up for a free monthly newsletter with articles, natural healing modalities, and exclusive group sessions here.
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Posted by Kimberly Rex
Updating Your Mothering and Fathering Aspects
Resonance Repatterning® works with updating your mothering and fathering aspects in your life today by repatterning your life to experience greater integrity in your wellness and wellbeing. The process gives you a way to access energetic material from your pre-natal, pre-verbal, and early experiences as well as ancestral patterns through your DNA.
What are Your Mothering and Fathering Aspects?
As you move through life the quality of the relationship you had with your mother and father impacts the mothering and fathering aspects of yourself, in how you respond to life and take care of your needs as an adult based on your early experiences. This includes both the positive and limiting qualities you took in through growing up in your family related to the qualities of absence or presence, criticism or nurture, suppression or expression of emotions, neglect or positive attention, neglect or encouragement, danger or safety, lack of safety, or the building of trust and protection.
Your mothering aspect is translated into your life today through how you experience nourishment and support. This is reflected in your ability to feel at home in your own body and in the world around you. The ability to feel stable, grounded, and imaginative while being about to digest and integrate experiences in your life create greater experiences of harmony and balance.
Your fathering aspect is related to your ability to move out into the world in an assertive way. In Chinese Medicine particularly related to Father is Metal Element. This element relates to your values, the Divine Masculine, your ability to draw upon your own truth, money values, your self-worth, inspiration, and letting go and connecting to your inner brilliance.
This also rolls out into what you observed as a child related to the conflict styles of both parents. According to the Gottmans, it is not so much that children experience conflict, as much as how children observe conflict resolution or the lack thereof in their family that determines personal conflict responses and attraction to partners with similar compensation, resistance, or conflict styles as their own parents.
Updating Your Mothering and Fathering Aspects
In Twelve Step programs, the importance related to mothering yourself is vital. The work of accessing your inner child with your adult self is essential in that you are invited to nurture and support the earlier parts of yourself by updating your mothering and fathering aspects.
To survive early on, you might have had to compensate for your basic needs being met by your parents These early patterns became wired into your developing survival and emotional brain as implicit memory imprints in your unconscious. It is then no coincidence that your association with survival and bonding continues into relationships in your life as an adult.
If your body-mind-spirit system experienced significant fight or flight experiences early on, you are wired for that frequency and continue to activate those neural, biochemical, and thought pathways related to those limiting beliefs about who or what is safe or dangerous.
This creates repetitive interactions and situations that replicate your early learning as it is familiar. You are actually matching up conflict styles, and stressful frequencies while en-training with another through your own Nervous System.
Becoming aware of these internal patterns is actually the first step to moving more into your ability to self-nurture through moving into the safe zone with self-regulation. In fact, the more you can see of yourself equals your ability to see more of another by expanding your ability to calm, nourish and support your decisions, values, and mental health.
By doing so, your mothering aspect becomes more aligned with your unmet needs from your earlier experiences. This means where there was neglect, you give yourself time and space for self-care. Where there was abuse, trauma, or chaos, you offer yourself the warmth, compassion, safety, and care your need. Where you felt unsafe being in your body and trust your intuition, you begin to check in with what your body is telling you and follow through with self-care.
Polyvagal Theory offers an avenue to bring your body back into the safe zone for healthy social engagement that allows you to move back into a greater sense of calm, relaxation, grounding, and stabilization. Acquainting your body with this information, interoception and neuroception give you the opportunity to learn how to identify the triggers that have served as gateways to the states of fight-flight or freeze.
“Trauma is chronic disruption of connectedness.”~Stephen Porges
This also gives you an opportunity to work with returning to natural states of safety that create calm, expanded awareness, and ease. By doing so you add your body’s memory bank to be able to resonate with greater choice, discernment, values, and direction. This leads to your ability to attune your body-mind-spirit system to safety, nurture, and support within and with others. This changes the internal biofeedback of your experience related to the dynamics at work in your relationships.
Your Mothering and Fathering Aspects: Self-Regulation to Co-Regulation
Through the lens of your social engagement system from your earlier experiences, you interpret other people’s facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice, and words. These interpretations are orchestrated through your Nervous System. Some feedback might be comforting while other states feel destabilized or uncomfortable based on past experiences leading to misinterpretation.
When you identify and work with the root of limiting earlier experiences that shaped your social engagement responses, you can then feel more at home in your own body and can begin to recognize and discern your own internal biofeedback, attention, and focus in the present. This then creates a new connection within and updated reading of another person through your energy exchange.
The possibility of registering your experience while with others leads to your ability to choose relationships that contribute more to your safety and calm. This translates into creating more co-regulation in relationships that are built on safety, trust, curiosity, and mutual choice.
Through updating your mothering and fathering aspects, you create greater integrity in your body-mind-spirit system that results in better health, less stress, and more appreciation for your own choices with your ability to experience a more fulfilled life.
Kimberly Rex, MS is an Advanced Resonance Repatterning® practitioner, Person-Centered Expressive Therapist, and Wellness and Well-being Life Coach. She works with people all over the world via Skype, phone, and proxy.
Find out how Resonance Repatterning benefits your life. Set up a personal session or sign up for a free monthly newsletter with articles, natural healing modalities, and exclusive group sessions here.
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Posted by Kimberly Rex
Listen to the Guidance Within
“Listen to the inner light, it will guide you. Listen to the inner peace, it will feed you. Listen to the inner Love, it will transform you.”~Sri Chinmoy
In the process of working with Resonance Repatterning sessions, you start to listen to the guidance within. Your inner light, peace, and love grow as you begin to take the time and space to access what is healthy, energizing, and life-enhancing for your life.
These three aspects of inner guidance allow you to work with what is coming up in your life from your core essence instead of being driven by unconscious patterns from your personal and Family Systems material when you resonate and are oriented to your inner light, peace, and love.
Through accessing and listening to your inner guidance, energy shifts from a Resonance Repatterning® session with follow-up Positive Actions continue to update your body-mind-spirit system.
Listen to the Inner Light
Light is a nutrient to your body-mind system. It supports cellular communication. In fact, according to Dr. Fritz-Albert Popp, a German Biophysicist, our entire metabolism depends on light. This speaks to the importance of the frequencies of light you take in through your eyes, skin, and food you eat. The translation of photons into bio-chemical communication within your body-mind-spirit system is dependent on this nurture. By using light and color purposefully in your life, you also positively affect our mood, well-being, and health. Your diet, the colors you wear, the color you take in from your environment, and what you wear makes a difference.
When you are disconnected from your inner light, you might feel depressed, have less energy, movement, and motivation. What you feed yourself in the way of food, your beliefs, thoughts, and responses to life either enhance the circulation of light within or depletes this vital force. This is one of the reasons that transforming limitations from unconscious negative habits, thoughts and beliefs make such a significant positive difference.
Accessing and listening to the guidance from your inner light comes through your body sensations, your state of mind, posture, movement, and levels of energy. Connecting to this feedback truly benefits your ability to monitor where you are and spotlight where you need clarity, relaxation, encouragement, support, and greater confidence. Your inner light can be accessed through mindful movement practices to ground and integrate your positive goals and life purpose as a resource for vitality, motivation, and perseverance.
Listen to the Inner Peace
Inner peace evolves from differences, and sometimes conflict. Finding the path to neutral from the Violence Cycles of life is a process. Putting down the criticism of self and blame of others so that the victim-perpetrator-rescuer cycles begin to cease is the road to non-violence.
This does not mean that getting or being hurt is not a valid place to process. It means that what you do with your inner communication, your actions and reactions are what leads either to more conflict or greater peace. Listening to inner peace speak is much more likely to come from your heart than your head. Limiting thoughts and beliefs can rule like a hammer that fragments your attention and dulls your ability to be present.
Spending time in your heart is a beautiful way to bring peace to your entire being. Getting in touch with your breath to bring your attention back to your center allows you to return to peace. Staying with the sensations in your heart and listening to your heart’s wisdom brings guidance that restores balance and harmony throughout your entire system.
“The only way we have of influencing the future is to own the present, however we find it.”
~ Jon Kabat-Zinn
Acknowledging the need for peace within softens the intensity of conflict by creating space for being able to see all of yourself more clearly. This means your feelings, your thoughts, and what is triggering you possibly from an earlier experience. This calms your entire body-mind-spirit system. It benefits your ability to widen the lens of your vision so you can then see more of your own needs and consider those of another person as well. At the same time, this can connect you directly to your unmet needs for greater compassion for all of your own life.
In the process, listening to the guidance of inner peace allows you to also forgive parts of yourself, and then consider divergent perspectives based on the fact that each person has their own history of pain and family systems mechanics that contribute to the situation. Seeing and listening to each person as a peer in their own power to take care of themselves with their own set of rules for the journey of life frees you to live your own life.
“Your presence is the most precious gift you can give to another human being.”
~Marshall Rosenberg
Listen to the Inner Love
Inner love can be defined as self-care. This love allows you to include all of your experiences with struggles, grief, fear, challenges, seeming errors and successes from your past experiences, all of your body, and every part of yourself unconscious or conscious in the process of your spiritual journey.
Listening to all of these aspects supplies you with all the inner software and information you need to move toward what is life-enhancing. The unconditional love of the universe works with you to co-create, transform and support you in your journey. In taking the time to connect with love within and listening to its guidance you are better able to integrate those places within yourself that feel pain, trauma, or lack of connection. Through making time for self-care, comfort, connection, and support from within, you are better able to both discern and connect to others in more authentic bonding and nurturing ways.
Listening to inner love can also be about setting boundaries, realizing what needs to change, what feels uncomfortable, or what no longer fits into your life in a healthy way.
This means choosing situations, work, and communications that are based on trust, safety, and empowerment. It also means allowing yourself to experience life’s beauty, truth, wisdom, pleasure, joy, and curiosity. By doing so there is a greater balance and harmony in giving and receiving, nurture and support, all with permission to be LOVE, and who you truly are.
Kimberly Rex, MS is an Advanced Resonance Repatterning practitioner, Person-Centered Expressive Therapist, and Wellness and Well-being Life Coach. She works with people all over the world by Skype, phone, and proxy.
Find out how Resonance Repatterning benefits your life. Set up a personal session or sign up for a free monthly newsletter with articles, natural healing modalities, and exclusive group sessions here.
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Posted by Kimberly Rex
As the Light Returns
As the light returns in the Northern Hemisphere after the Winter Solstice, the daylight hours are slowly increasing over time toward spring. Even though I consciously know this is true, the expansion of darkness that has grown over time from fall has sometimes made it more difficult to resonate with the light and focus only on the dark.
This natural occurrence that takes place each year is expected, however, it still comes as a surprise to my awareness in that I begin to dwell on the darkness.
My attitude about this natural cycle and the presence of more darkness with the cooling temperatures and movement indoors changes my stress-avoidance actions and words. Instead of resonating with underlying potential benefits of the season of oncoming winter, I find myself complaining more about what has been lost more than what I might gain.
So what changed that? My attitude, responses to the situation, and my relationship with time are what changed. I am beginning to resonate with the return of light over the dark and cold of winter. I am now beginning to orient to the journey through winter to spring as we near the solstice time signaling the start of winter.
Winter is a time of introspection and depth. There are clear benefits of going inward, slowing down to harvest lessons and awareness, putting my energy into my roots the way plants do in the cold months so they can take the nurture of the Earth as she moves around the sun.
On the Winter Solstice, the change began with only a few seconds of the length of time, similar to that of the day before the solstice. Yet, it is likely that my mindset will be especially focused more on the return of light. This is because this 3-month timeframe leads to greater light and warmth in spring. The takeaway is that it is all about perception and that the journeys we take in our lives need to be appreciated as the process unfolds even when a goal might seem to be a distance and time away.
As the Light Returns Quantum Change Happens
This starts with an invitation to celebrate along the pathway towards your goals and positive intentions instead of waiting for a date 3 months away to realize the subtleties in shifts that occur in small increments transforming each and every day.
Those small increments and connections to stillness and presence create wisdom, nurture, and new possibilities. This is where things really happen. Winter is a good time to release fears by connecting to the still-point, to the Universe, and to cultivating unconditional love through your cultivating presence on the physical, emotional, mental, and core essence levels.
At the Still Point by T.S. Eliot
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance
Working with 8 Treasures as the Light Returns
Chinese Medicine acknowledges the aspects of cultivating vital life energy over time. The reminder in winter along the path is to work with what is called the 8 Treasures. A reminder of this ability to thrive even during the cold months is illustrated by the cherry blossoms that bloom during winter even in the snow!
The 8 Treasures for cultivation includes 81 days of getting in sync with nature as it presents itself in the journey toward spring. This time is also used to connect to and cultivate inner peace, happiness, smooth transitions, health, wealth, longevity, luck/fortune, and fulfillment.
To connect with the energetics of the 8 Treasures within, the process begins with eating or drinking an 8 Treasure congee stew or tea.
The idea is to work with the first 9 days starting with the solstice in the journey through winter continuing into spring by drinking a little 8 Treasure congee or tea for the 1st 9 days. The fluid with the combination of glutenous rice, beans, nuts, grains, fruit, and sometimes meat, or the flower and fruit tea brings a deep acknowledgment and nourishment for the process.
Here is an article on ingredients you can find in 8 Treasure Soup: https://omnivorescookbook.com/eight-treasure-congee/
You can order 8 Treasure teas on Amazon.com.
The journey continues with intervals of 9 days with a focus on one of the 8 Treasures.
This beautiful process was taught to me by Master Liu He with a painting or drawing of a branch to hold 9 cherry blossoms, one drawn every 9 days. Each petal represents the completion of each 9-day segment and one aspect of the 8 Treasures. For every nine-day period between the beginning of winter and spring, you work with a new attribute. You then paint or draw one more blossom on the branch until it contains the nine cherry blossoms of your journey. What an acknowledgment and celebration of each part of the path that buds and flowers as you take care of your vital essence through the winter!
Smooth Transitions as the Light Returns
Of course, you can create your own way of processing gradual change as the light returns with a focus on the 8 Treasures through drawing, journaling, or dancing the attribute of each one over the timeframe of 81 days. It could be useful to draw one cherry blossom with one of the attributes in each petal. Then you might work with meditation questions about the particular aspect such as this example. “What do I need to know to cultivate inner peace?” “What resources do I need to create more peace in my life?” “What do I need to let go of to experience peace more fully?” Listen for guidance and trust the wisdom of your heart to tell you what you need at this time in your life or access more guidance to build wisdom from a teacher, book, or course.
It could be that you use movement including Qigong, Tai Chi, ice skating, skiing, or even snowshoeing to feel physically feel smooth transitions. You can tap into our own creative expression to explore each attribute. This is a time to get more in sync with nature by creating light within through illumination for your life. It is also worth your time to be in natural light by being out noticing what is happening in nature, enjoying yourself by looking at streams, rivers, mountains, watching the birds, or noticing activity in trees and plants as we move closer to spring. This keeps the focus on being present at the still point while moving forward at the same time (the dance).
So I invite you to consider taking this time to nourish and root yourself so that you can meet each day throughout the winter in ways that you know will benefit your attitudes, responses, and beliefs about your life. It is a great way to nourish your roots, collect seeds of vital energy within and honor your part in the wisdom of the Earth’s process. The light is returning. In fact, it is always there feeding your roots, establishing nourishment for growth towards budding, and flowering into new possibilities.
Kimberly Rex, MS is an Advanced Resonance Repatterning® practitioner, Person-Centered Expressive Therapist, and Wellness and Well-being Life Coach. She works with people all over the world via Skype, phone, and proxy.
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