As the Chinese New Year begins, it’s important to plant theseeds of joy within your perspective to build integrity in your wellness and well-beingfor the year. According to Chinese medicine, this time of year is about creating the blueprint for the rest of the seasonal year. By doing so, you align more with nature within allowing you to re-source the seeds within your own experience of life to take on this journey.
You carry in your soul every ingredient necessary to turn your experience to joy. All you have to do is mix the ingredients. ~Hafiz
The Chinese Five Element Wheel creates support for each of its other parts. This cycle is called the Shen Cycle. This means that when you create coherence in one element, you then nourish the coherent capacity of the next element and season. By mixing them together you create energy for the process that will create greater integrity in your wellness and well-being.
The following article contains a number of ways to seed your spring garden of life by syncing with natural cycles. Bookmark this article or revisit it through the year as a blueprint or planting guide to create greater integrity in your wellness and well-being in your life.
Starting with Wood Element or Spring: The Chinese New Year literally speaks to the beginning process of spring. Planting seeds of nurture, love, and joy is a beautiful way to create a harvest of benefits for your physical, emotional, mental, and spirit levels aspects of your throughout the year If you look at what is happening in nature as spring begins you will see the gentle new growth and beginning foundation for creating a sustainable new life that builds sustainable harvest over time.
Plant Seeds of Joy on the Physical Level
When you look at a garden at the beginning of spring, you will see the beginnings of buds and bulb sprouts that are responding to the increasing light and warmth of the Earth itself in its relationship with the sun. New growth is often light green as it starts its movement toward more vivid colors. It is this optimism and sense of what will come that creates the first steps in the process.
Get into the Sun: In the same way, you, too, can take benefit from getting more light during the day. Make daily time to be in nature, or out in the sunlight.
Movement Forms such as Pilates, Qi Gong, and Tai Chi are wonderful to build your strength and flexibility. You experience a sense of joy and resilience by turning on inspiring or energizing music to dance to benefit your body’s need to relax, restore energy and release stress.
Katsugen: Tune into your body when you feel tense or stressed. Allow your body to move in whatever way it needs. You may find that your breathing changes or a sound come that allows you to release any place in your body that feels support or need for release.
Savor What You Eat: Be sure to nourish yourself with whole foods and colorful vegetables to build your energy. Put down distractions such as cell phones, computer tasks, or other multi-task activities while you eat so your body can devote itself to digestion, discernment, and circulation of energy. For more:The Nurture of Color for Your Wellness and Well-Being
Plant Seeds of Joy on the Emotional Level
Create an Anchor Image: To build your capacity to take in nourishment through the year, call upon times in your life when you have experienced joy or love, and bring them into your memory. Tune into these experiences when you need to recharge with a smile on your face and in your heart.
Create Joy with Activities You Know You Love: Build your emotional bank account by doing things that energize you whether it be reading, watching the sunset, or playing with your pet. baking, artwork, dancing, playing music, or writing. By doing so you nourish your inner blueprint that builds the creative potential for new possibilities and perspectives from the inside out.
Build Oxytocin, the bonding hormone that creates neurotransmitters that allow for long-term bonding, with hugs, positive touch, and a sense of presence with safety and trust. Whether you have a partner or not, you can still spend time with others, dance, slow down in your activities for conversation to listen, prepare a meal together, get a massage, or make soft eye contact and smile to activate this positive neurotransmitter effect within.
Plant Seeds of Joy on the Mental Level
Take inventory of your Self Talk and statements or beliefs you find yourself repeating. Tune into the amount of time you spend on worry, anger, resentment, and thoughts that spiral you into de-energizing habits. It is important to take the message from these beliefs and thoughts to process, to work with them, and if need be, find the underlying seed or need to be expressed. The following articles will give you some ways to start this process of looking within from a place of beginning to resolve and grow with new possibilities: 3 Ways to Create Positive Self-Talk
Create a Menu of Stress-reducing Activities to Pace Yourself that you can use instead of current compensation reactive responses. It’s About Pacing Yourself over Time
Plant Seeds of Joy on the Spirit Level
Meditate: Meditation is a process that allows you to both cleanse and renew. Creating a menu of self-care related to this quiet time can be both creative and productive based on your schedule and personal needs. Know that when you meditate, you are tuning in to the deep web of your being. Beginning to form questions of wonder about your process with wonder about emotions, thoughts, and beliefs that come up will allow you to re-energize while restoring your inner garden. Your meditation or self-care practice can be as simple as a walk in nature, drawing, dancing, journaling, or breathing practice. Now is the time to start making it a routine. https://www.windowstotheheart.net/self-love-5-messages-from-your-heart/
Get in touch with How Far You Have Come: When you feel as though you are going through a rough patch, get in touch with a challenge in your life that you handled over time, and felt as though you were able to get through with an inner strength or quality that made it possible. Call upon this inner positive quality and reservoir of strength you have in the present.
Experience gratitude: Expressing gratitude is beneficial to your heart and mind. When you begin to focus on the “little” things that bring you a sense of nurture and joy, your way of looking at the world will change. This allows you to feel energized more than depleted, and by doing so, even with an appreciation for a smile, you are building the inner resources for connection, inspiration, and well-being that builds momentum for experiencing positive change. Look at Your Life through the Lens of Gratitude
Deepen your Practice of Forgiveness: In the Buddhist Forgiveness in 3 Directions Meditation, the quality you bring to each direction: for self, toward others, and others toward self is a process that is founded on a sense of mercy and compassion. This process is done in small steps, gently nourished by the compassion and warmth you bring to it over time. By doing so, you create openings and space for new possibilities in your own life.
Get in Touch with Your Why: Your life experience, talents as well as what you ENJOY give you insight and inspiration to continue in your spiritual journey with a life purpose. Whether your life vision or purpose is volunteering, being an activist, parent, or a special field of work, finding your inner passion, connect to this message to continue growing in beautiful ways while energizing yourself in the process.
This is your personal invitation to explore how Resonance Repatterning® benefits your life to create greater integrity in your wellness and well-being. At this time of year, it is a wonderful time to plan for new possibilities and strengthen your physical vision, as well as your vision for life.Resonance Repatterning works at the cellular level to create positive change. Experience a session by phone, Skype, or in-person with Windows to the Heart Repatterning.
Expressing gratitude and appreciation for life may seem as though it is easy, however, the process of experiencing these feelings within your body-mind system is often underestimated for their beneficial effects for naturally creating health, more pleasant relationships, and greater learning.
The research is out: Spending time with gratitude internally benefits your body-mind system including your brain and your heart. To invite gratitude in as a steady companion for your wellness and well-being, a shift in awareness and attention is necessary to assert itself into the hard wiring of human neuro-chemistry. This takes practice and diligence so that gratitude and appreciation for life create new neural pathways as alternatives to long-standing bias for automatic survival mode.
The brain has a negativity bias, which is like Velcro for bad experiences, but Teflon for positive ones. ~from Buddha’s Brain
Buddha’s Brain, a book written by Rick Hanson, Ph.D. and Richard Mendius, MD, details the practical neuroscience of happiness, love, and wisdom. The evolution of the brain’s need for fight or flight in the face of danger over thousands of years of reinforcement is an important reason for the brain’s tendency to suspect the worst and remember difficulties long after the danger or situation has occurred. This pattern affects internal self-talk, relationship patterns, learning capacity, and even world politics.
The book continues to build upon the research that, indeed, the opportunity to transform the patterns of negative thinking is within each person’s reach today. The shift in consciousness to benefiting more from positive experiences leads to greater inner peace, self-esteem, heart health, and resilience on a day-to-day basis. By doing so, it is like building an emotional bank account that helps you through days that are more challenging personally and in your relationships.
In order to build the capacity to experience more beauty, joy, grace, and ease within, it’s important to appreciate all the aspects of yourself as they come up. When you feel as though you’ve made an error, or fixate on a problem in your life, take the opportunity to notice something around you that is fortunate, happy or supportive in your life. This allows the brain to associate more than just the issue or problem in your awareness. It starts to build new neural pathways with less stress attached. This is self-compassion in action, and this also does your heart good. When the heart is in a state of appreciation, gratitude, love or joy it functions better expanding the electromagnetic field surrounding it, and this then expands the function of the brain. This helps the brain’s capacity to work with not just the survival or feeling brain. It activates the thinking and problem-solving brain that takes intention into action based on heart wisdom.
To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wildflower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour. ~William Blake
InJust One Thing, Rick Hanson, Ph.D. suggests that one simple practice at a time builds new neural pathways with neurotransmitters that support better memory, sense of happiness, and outlook on life-based on truly experiencing what is positive in your life.
Here are a few ideas from the book, as well as some from my own practices.
1) Begin with Intention: Start the day with the intention to notice what is different about your experience or day. This can be done for a short amount of time, perhaps during a meal or in a transition time.
2) Change Your Awareness: Start by simply focusing on something that draws your attention visually to a sense of awe, pleasure, or beauty. This can also be done by closing your eyes by focusing on one sound and then changing your focus with the intention to a different sound in your environment you experience. Notice what is different. Choose sounds and sights that bring calm and joy to your heart. By doing so, you create the opportunity for new awareness and create a more optimal flow of energy in your body-mind system to filter your choices.
3) Dine on Gratitude: Bring Thanksgiving into a meal each day, savor the colors and tastes of what you eat. Appreciate what has gone into creating the food you are eating including the sun, the earth, water, people and cook who has prepared this nourishing energy for your body-mind system.
4) Appreciation is In Your Hands: Look at your hands. They are the sub-chakras of your heart. Appreciate all the things you do with them throughout the day and through the years that have been beneficial to you and to others in the world.
5) Drizzle with Honey: To gain the full effect of these practices, allow the experience to stay with you, and fully saturate your experience. Visualize or feel this experience as if honey were being poured through you. Take your time. Make the space for this to stay in your heart by imagining that you are breathing the feeling directly into your heart space.
6) More than Just “Thank you:” Share what you appreciate specifically when you speak to another person and yourself. For example, “ I appreciated the fact that you did all the shopping for the party. It really helped me feel like I’d have more time to get ready and to relax.” OR “ I did my best on that test, and I give myself credit for giving myself positive feedback while I kept working.”
I’d like to invite you to continue on the path with monthly healing modalities and repatterning events from Windows to the Heart Repatterning.
Kimberly Rex, MS is an Advanced Resonance Repatterning practitioner, Master Wellness and Well-being Life Coach, and Person-Centered Expressive Therapist.
