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I appreciated these from an acquaintance's site. He's at davidengel.biz.
It is always fair sailing when you escape evil.
Sophocles (497-406/5 B.C.)
The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea.
Isak Dinesen (1885-1962)
For whatever we lose (like a you or a me) it’s always ourselves we find in the sea.”
E. E. Cummings
Posted at 04:17 PM in Quotations | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
A While ago I ran across Julia Rogers Hamrick. When I first found her it was through her site: http://www.iliveineasyworld.com/
I'm getting onto a call of hers tonight called Being of Authentic Spiritual Help to Others. We'll see how it goes. I appreciate her desire to help people like myself, people in the healing/health professions, to get a better grip on our place in this world, and our role in other people's lives. Having been a massage therapist for 16 years, and now a counselor/life coach, I have on countless occasions come up against situations that have left me wondering things like, "Does this person really want any help or support? Is it possible to really help anyone? How much of an effect do I really have on someone else's well-being? And how should I ideally behave and act in order to have the most significant effect on someone else's growth?
Today I journeyed from one of her sites to another, and found this article (it's actually the introduction to her book). I like how she describes why it is that we feel 'addicted' to the variety of things that compel us. Here are a couple paragraphs from it:
Why do we crave intimacy and closeness? Because at our core, we know what real oneness is and we are programmed to seek it. Why do we strive for money and status? And why do we steal from others in large ways and in small, or dis-empower others with our thoughts, words and deeds? Because we yearn to feel truly empowered and have forgotten where true power comes from and how to receive it. Why do we seek to get high from drugs? Because we know deep down what true ecstasy is and we’re trying to achieve it—but in a fashion that will never provide it for us in any authentic or sustainable way. Why do we try to escape from stress by numbing ourselves with alcohol or food or television? Because we were not designed to live in stress and we are trying to recreate the state of no pain and no stress we are so desperately missing. Why are we lazy—or tempted to be—expecting something for nothing? Because we know at a very deep level that we are, simply by the fact of our existence, supposed to be perfectly provided for without struggle the way we were in the Garden and we have forgotten how that really works.
We have forgotten that we can only experience what we are truly longing for by aligning ourselves with Source the way we were designed to be, and were in the beginning, so that we can have it all. Continue reading....
From Recreating Eden: The exquisitely simple, divinely ordained plan for transforming your life and your planet by Julia Rogers Hamrick
©2004 New Realities Publishing
To read the whole introduction go Julia Rogers Hamrick's site at: http://www.juliarogershamrick.com/RecreatingEdenIntroduction.html
Posted at 05:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Currently I am completing a Master’s program in Spiritual Psychology. They have a site you can look at. The curriculum for this program was developed and refined over the years by Drs. Mary and Ron Hulnick. One of the main tenants of the program involves the idea that we can heal our past, and that we do so by, as they say, by “bringing love and healing to the places inside of us that hurt.” They have developed a step-by-step process that one follows when he/she wants to attend to a certain memory or relationship that they have found, or are currently finding, upsetting. When a student is going through this step-by-step process, we say that she is ‘working her process.’
One of the steps in this process involves Compassionate Self-Forgiveness of Judgments. The theory goes, I believe, that we maintain or hold onto our pains from the past because we are somehow still judging ourselves in some way now in relationship to that situation or relationship. After doing this work for 1½ years, I’ve found that this theory definitely holds true for me. Whenever I have ‘worked my process’ around anything at all, I have eventually found feelings and beliefs that are somehow judgmental of myself. Until we uncover and acknowledge those judgments, there will be something still holding us there in the past. Another way of saying this is: As long as we don’t acknowledge what’s really still there in our consciousness around the situation, then we are somewhat in the dark in our attempts to heal and let go and move on.
I continue to appreciate how EFT fits in so well with this whole idea of Self-Forgiveness. Roger Callahan and Gary Craig, the originators of EFT, knew that an integral part of any true healing involves an acknowledgment of WHAT IS TRULY THERE FOR YOU, RIGHT NOW.
Because of the whole movement towards ‘thinking positively’, many of us have come to believe that we are supposed to bypass our actual painful feelings or blocks, and somehow magically rise above them. Well, although I believe that the positive effects of EFT often appear almost magical or miraculous, those effects generally only occur after the person has done the first step of truly acknowledging that painful place inside of themselves.
In fact, the quickest resolution to any problem, EFT-style, is always arrived at by first really stating out loud those feelings, beliefs or blocks that the person is experiencing right now, at the beginning of the session. From there the practitioner and the client create The Set-up Statement. We can create an example of a Set-Up Statement right now.
Let’s say that a person is going through a divorce and is feeling very distraught about it. Upon further conversation we find that she knows that the divorce is the best choice for her based on the circumstances, but that she still “can’t help feeling that I have failed at something important.” We would begin with the Set-Up Statement first, which would be something like:
“Even though I feel that I have failed at something important, I deeply and completely love and accept myself.”
Within the EFT protocol, she would be either rubbing the ‘sore spot’ (as it is often called) or she would be tapping the ‘karate chop’ point AT THE SAME TIME as she is saying the above Set-Up Statement. And she would say that statement three times while doing the physical rubbing or tapping.
In the EFT Protocol there are steps that follow this one, but at the moment I am focusing solely on this one in the hopes of really impressing upon you that this step is not only effective, but also very meaningful and relevant to a larger idea that I believe is an integral part of all healing, no matter what path you take to achieve it.
The Set-Up Statement is a way to say once and for all to yourself, YES, THIS HAPPENED AND I AM OKAY WITH IT.
And it is also a way to say to yourself, “Yes, this is the way I feel and it’s okay that I feel this way, and in fact, I am lovable and and perfect RIGHT NOW.”
It is a forgiving of oneself. It is a releasing of the past.
We so often think things like:
“If I didn’t feel this way then my day would be better.”
“If I didn’t have this problem, then I would be okay.”
“If I made more money, then I would feel good about myself.”
“If I didn’t have this disease, then I would feel healthy.”
“If I hadn’t made that mistake, then things would be okay now and I would be happy with myself.”
These are all conditional statements. If we have thoughts like these in our head, then we are not actually caring for ourselves in the way that we really deserve. If we have thoughts like this in our minds, then we are waiting for some future time before we will let ourselves feel good about ourselves.
The practice of EFT allows a person to discover, and ACCEPT, exactly where he is RIGHT NOW. And not only does he discover and accept, he actually even goes so far as to LOVE HIMSELF in the process of what he sees as his living an imperfect existence.
No experience is a mistake. Nobody deserves to suffer, no matter what. Even if someone has done something ‘terrible’, if you really look at it, and you really allow yourself to see the reality of that person’s situation, you will recognize that that person was already suffering when they committed that crime or did that thing that hurt someone else. Their own self-doubt, self-hatred, or simple lack of acceptance for themselves caused them to be in a state of mind that allowed them to hurt someone else without remorse, or at least without the ability to stop themselves from doing so.
I pose the idea that it is only when we are not forgiving ourselves, do we not forgive others. And that, when we don’t forgive others then we remain disconnected from them. But the disconnection starts with ourselves. And until we allow ourselves to forgive ourselves for our pasts, and forgive ourselves for having judgments against ourselves in the present, there will always be something in the way of us experiencing the kind of bliss that’s actually available to us.
Let’s finally give ourselves a break and move on and into the kind of lifestyle where we worry about nothing, feel badly about nothing in the past, and experience the present with a kind of healthy openness that it, and WE, deserve!
Posted at 03:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
The EFT SETUP Phrases for this topic are as follows:
While tapping the karate chop spot on either hand, repeat these phrases out loud, (or change the words to fit your exact situation).
"Even though I'm in a bad mood and feel upset right now, I can choose to start over whenever I feel like it."
Then tap on the following phrases as you complete one more round:
Posted at 09:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
