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March 13, 2010 | Winter's Light Dawning a New Spring
Without Darkness, there is No Light Apologies for my silence for over a year! It was a wonderful year, which I spent landscaping my garden, learning to be more discerning on all levels of life (including when not to write newsletters!), teaching Sekhem, enjoying entering my 40s, and laying the foundation for some creative projects that are becoming a reality in 2010. I continue to work as a Quantum Biofeedback practitioner, and encouraging people to create their personal portrait - a jigsaw puzzle of their health - continues to be one of the loves of my working life. I am looking forward to the new INDIGO system arriving any day now. This is an exciting new technology that will replace my existing SCIO system and promises better interface with my clients, and a great new learning curve for me! A new focus is coming into my life, or perhaps I should say an old focus with a new confidence: allowing my voice to be heard as a singer. I have started within my trained comfort zone of classical music, with a richer and less 'boy soprano' timbre. Perhaps this is because I am a richer, more mature woman, or maybe it is just the true voice that was waiting to burst forth when the time was right. Anyway - it's high time and fun! And who knows where this voice will take me; I am enjoying the current path, and looking forward to going into a recording studio in April...more on that later. Meanwhile, I thought I would start the newsletter with an overview of some of my writings from the RedTent women's group I had the pleasure of organising in 2009. It provides a background timeline for some of the changes that many people are noticing and experiencing around the world these days - as we become even more of a mirror for our planet and home. I feel there is no coincidence to the lunar connections of the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile - January's New Moon of Reality, and February's Full Moon of Authenticity and Purification. Given the lamentation of the March New Moon energy, coming in as I type, I feel we must join with our planet in purging our deep rooted griefs, fears and other destructive emotional patterns. Whether this will manifest with another giant birth contraction in some part of the world, or in some other way, I do not want to predict. I know, for my part, spending the last two months rehearsing for last week's performance of Couperin's 'Lecons des Tenebre' has been a sublime synchronicity and infinitely useful for my own psyche. This has included the sudden awareness of insight that by rejecting humanity, I reject myself; and by rejecting myself, I reject humanity. So this month, I intend to purge my grief relating to rejection. The Tenebrae, for those aligned with the Christian church calendar, or the Lamentations, for those more familiar with the Torah, is in its essence an outpouring of grief for the destruction and rejection of a once strong civilisation - in the Jewish context, Jerusalem at the time of the exile to Babylon, converted in the Christian context to the destruction and rejection of the 'Light of the World', Jesus Christ; in any event, applicable to the state of our civilisation today. What should we do with all this grief? Be like the rain, the snow, the rivers, streams and oceans. Flow. Allow the emotion to pour out without hindrance - not necessarily gently, but always seeping away to quench the thirst in some part of your life. Support the earth by hearing her needs, as well as the needs of those caught in her purging. Allow the emotion to convert into a tide of compassion, furthering our positive global consciousness. Take baby steps at home. Focus on what is going on in your own backyard, and allow little joys and the smaller positive changes you make within it, to ripple outwards, joining with others around the world on an energetic level. If this seems too esoteric to you - what I mean is focus on the small things in life that give you the greatest pleasure - your grandchild's or lover's eyes, the sound of laughter, the first hummingbird or bumblebee of the year, the flight of a bird way up in a blue blue sky, the first blade of grass seen through snow, the first cherry blossom, the shell that catches your eye on the beach... let these things find your eye and rejoice in them daily. By doing this, you give back - to yourself and to the world around you. So here we go! HOUSEKEEPING THERAPY BOOKINGS Salt Spring Island, BC By appointment - email or phone Victoria and Southern Vancouver Island I come over to Victoria regularly, and can provide a session in the comfort of your own home. I am seeking vibrant clinics to work from in Victoria, Duncan and Nanaimo - possibly Courteney and other areas as well. I am pleased to announce that I am going to be working out of a new clinic in Ladysmith called The Medicine Garden Wellness Centre. I am taking bookings from May 5th. UK and elsewhere Sessions available by subspace. See Book an Appointment Page. OTHER EVENTS RED TENT Monthly women's circle to share songs, stories, ritual, life's joys and grief. Now on Facebook! Red Tent Cyberspace WINTER'S LIGHT - A Celebration in Song Exciting news! I am heading into the studio to record a CD, featuring 15 songs and carols from the medieval and renaissance period. The CD should be available for purchase towards the end of the summer. I am also accepting presales payments to support the fundraising of this venture. More information can be found at Winter's Light CD SEKHEM Please check the 'Workshop' page on my website for updates to schedules for Salt Spring Island. Bookings are being taken for groups wanting to learn Sekhem Living Light Energy elsewhere in North America. My Qualifications
Phone: (250) 931 2269
Real Time: January 2010 We are now a 'real time' mirror for our landscape. Witness the amount of heavy rainfall, cleansing our land; witness the earthquakes erupting like expellent pimples or labour pains with a positive side effect of raising compassion levels once again around the earth. Witness the snowfall across Europe - blanketing, protecting and quieting a frenetic EU community. Real time - we are part of our landscape. We affect it, it affects us. We need to tune in and ask what we need to do for ourselves to be a better partner to our environment. On the global front - this moon is bringing in some of the energy that has been talked about confirming predictions that the outdated, corrupt, old and ungainly will be overthrown, thrown out or upmoded. The Haitian earthquake may be a model for this - the Royal Palace was not spared by the uprising. This may be out there - but my feeling is that the hurricane, a few years back, was the wake up call - which was ignored. The earthquake is the second red flag. The world is coming out in droves to help the poor and exploited people of Haiti...now is the time for the government there to be cleaned up or thrown out. And this will only be the start - governments all over the world need to get their houses in order. On the personal front - this moon is a grounded foundation to create on! "Capricorn is hard-working, responsible, purposeful, and methodical. And it certainly expects to be recognized and rewarded for all its efforts. Ambitions involve a huge commitment of vision, resources, and energy as well as a steady hand at the helm and the ability to make hard choices at critical moments. Capricorn constructs tangible, real things that are meant to last. All the work of new creation up to this point, has been done in order to achieve this final, secure, indisputably authentic manifestation of what now exists." Rebecca Brent I wish you focus in your creative endeavours, grounding in the attainment of your goals, and a firm stable foundation from which to enjoy the beauty in the day to day world around you, so you can see the chaos in the bigger picture in a 'REAL' and objective manner. Entering Stillpoint: December 2009 This moon in December is about looking within and centering ourselves. By finding our inner stillpoint we can calm personal inner conflicts and channel our creative energy better. Rooting to Reach the Heights: September 2009 We can use our roots and traditions to help stabilise us and protect us on our journey to reach the heights of our goals and conscious awareness. We honour, recognise and preserve personal and family traditions to bring comfort into our lives and a firm base for future growth. It is important to remember where we have come from, so that we may take the skills and creative energy to develop in the future and have a sense of ourselves in the Now. By being self aware, we are stronger, less vulnerable and protected from conditioning, influences and destabilising forces in our life environments. Shining Your Inner Light: August 2009 Happy 40th to me! We will do a ceremony at my medicine wheel before the sun goes down, so please feel free to bring any rock or crystal that resonates peace or inner light for you, and as I open the doorway to that intention for myself, so your ability to access both will also be powered up, and rippled out into our Mama Earth. Visioning a World of Love and Peace: July 2009 There is a miraculous moment coming towards us, an opening so great that it has the potential to completely transform the crisis we face as a human family. This will be the longest solar eclipse of the 21st Century. This is an extraordinary moment for humanity to collectively co-create through meditation, intention, and visioning, a world of love, peace, harmony and equality for all. This is a time of shadows being lit up, untruths brought to the surface and accelerated awakening coming to fruition. The solar eclipse has the potential to foster the liberation of all voices; voices of women, voices of indigenous brothers and sisters, and voices of all oppressed peoples. It is an auspicious time for these voices of wisdom and truth to be fully heard. Love Conquers All: June 2009 The new moon in Cancer is about home, security, nurturing, maternity, caring, growth and development. Cancer, as a water sign, rules feelings and moods. The Cancer moon is about achieving intimacy with self as well as with others. Connecting our sacral to our heart so that we can reconnect our creativity and manifest the love that we deserve. REBIRTHING THE EARTH Following on from the overview, let's look at the new moon in March 2010. This moon gives us the power and ability to purge destructive emotions so we may create a life full of positive energy and joy. We are encouraged to take the time to explore the inner terrain of our being to discover and purge any lingering dark emotions and thoughts that are preventing us from creating the life that we deserve to live. This is the time to listen to our shadow shelves and see the mirroring light. In our planetary aspect we are asked to witness the destructive power of nature, as Mother Earth cleanses and prepares to rebirth. You may be interested in this newsletter. I especially appreciated Aluna mentioning my old Orca friend, Tillicum, whom I visited regularly at the local aquarium in the 1980s...Sentient Cetaceans are so important for our world, and it is heartbreaking that Tillicum, as a wild creature, cannot survive in the wild because of his many years of humanisation. The whales are tuned into the earth's vibrations in a way that we need to learn. In fact, we need to pay attention to the actions of all the wildlife in our own geographic zones - our backyards - to truly understand how we should be living in relationship with our planet. As a friend suggested - these earthquakes feel like labour pains, and the stronger they get, the more our world's axis-cervix shifts to open for a birthing. And as the analogy suggests, the Earth is very 'hormonal', hence the grief and emotional turmoil. Our fragile humanity will react to this on the neural level - I encourage you all to read an article published this month (March) in Scientific American, about research into the extremely important Dark Energy of the Brain. Brain Default Mode Network I found it very illuminating, particularly in relation to the potential reasons why this heavy energy would make our DMN centres become darker and more fragile. It occurs in the frontal and parietal cortex areas where introspection, self-referential thought (read self worth), daydreaming, future visioning, gauging other people's perspective (read worrying about what other's think of us) and memory retrieval occur whenever we are not focused on a specific goal or task. While this is also the region where creativity bursts forth, it is more likely that most of us suffer from excess anxiety that causes the seeds of creativity to be lost, and the DMN area to fluctuate against us. Another scientific paper highlighted that the DMN activity is also key for people who suffer chronic physical pain - it disrupts the ability to focus on even the simplest goal oriented tasks, again causing fluctuations in the proper function of the DMN. I would like to suggest that this would be the same in people experiencing severe emotional pain, which may explain the links to schizophrenia. What does this mean for us? As active human beings, living in the high pressure society that we have created, we actually need a regular impetus of the other part of the brain - the task positive network (TPN) to positively thrive. TPN allows us to get our mind off our problems, work through pain and emotional turmoil, focus on goals; when the balance of the two is achieved, our creative aspirations can become reality. At the moment however, the statistics show increased deaths and suicides. We are witnessing increased levels of Alzheimers and dementia. We need to prepare for increasing PTSD and psychotic breaks in the general populace. Rather than becoming melancholy and stuck in our own DMN gloom, we need to raise our compassion levels and be out there doing stuff for our own, as well as other's good. The way to prevent us from joining them? Meditation, deep restful and re-charging sleep, focused-intentional-mindful-creative activity, and joyful pursuits. All of these reduce anxiety and stress, and stimulate our life enhancing Alpha and Delta waves. So take the opportunity of all this wetness and the Piscean time of March to detox, cleanse and let the emotions/memories we no longer need flow away, while planning and setting goals for the things you wish or need to accomplish this year. Make the goals (even the chores) fun. Laugh while working. Find joy in the simple things, no matter how insignificant. My motto for this year: baby steps and keepin' it real! LEARNING FROM OUR ANCESTORS Although it may seem to each generation that they have to reinvent the wheel, we are in fact, living as part of a series of cycles - cosmic, geological, societal, individual. Perhaps because the Winter Olympics were held in BC last month, and so many of the native chiefs and elders were invited to be part of the ceremony; or perhaps because there is more media interest in learning from the indigenous cultures at the moment; or perhaps because I am singing a lot more these days, I have been inspired by some of the lyrics of the songs I am learning. The two verses I am passing on are both enjoying anniversaries in 2010 - 155th and 20th, and encourage us to become aware of the relationship we have with our planet. The words to 'This We Know' were written by Chief Seattle. He was nearly 70 years old in 1855, when he signed a treaty that stripped his people of their ancestral home. His tribe were a peaceful people with a rich culture tied closely to plants and animals, the air, water and land that surrounded them. He said "my people flee the white man, as morning mist flees the rising sun." After putting his name to the document, Chief Seattle rose to address the crowd. His simple, eloquent statement about the interdependence of all life includes the following text: This we know. In 1990, Dakota Butterfield arrived in Arizona for a conference on Feminism and Non Violence. She went walking in the moonlight and this song came to her. She said "This song was very much a gift: I felt close to the raw beauty of the Earth in her stripped clean, bare essence. The song for me is about that power, and being touched by the deepest rooted energy of the Earth." The words are simple: The Earth is a woman and she will rise. We must become at one with our landscape and the other inhabitants of it. We will not live on Earth much longer...unless we learn to live IN her. A reading from the North American Tarot: Initiation originates with purification. We need to silence our hearts and minds so we can communicate with the Divine. Recognise the power and obey. Tobacco, maize, squash and the bean are the four sacred plants of the Navajo, connected to the four spirits of thunder and the four cardinal points. This reminds us to reconnect to our natural world, especially plants, in order to repel and protect, and procure the love of our planet. Be prepared for a period of marvelous power surge, intense and dangerous. The subtle energy that permeates all beings is undergoing its periodic period of renewal. Have strength, dig deep and ride the vibrations into the new.
This is the time of year for steamed nettles, nettle soup and nettle spanakopita, but in the spirit of connecting with the Bean and the dark side, here is a favourite from the kitchen of Darra Goldstein, and her Russian Jewish cookbook - 'A Vegetarian Hearth' Black Bean Chili 1 pound dried black beans 1. Soak the beans in water to cover overnight Serves 6-8 POEM Daffodils - William Wordsworth Hailed as a doctrine of a simple-hearted harmony with rural nature. I wandered lonely as a cloud Continuous as the stars that shine The waves beside them danced; but they For oft, when on my couch I lie
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