Humming is an excellent practice to still a busy mind so you can respond to life’s challenges from a place of calm and connection rather then stress-mode. The beauty of humming is that it silences the excess mental noise long enough for you to hear yourself think. In other words, the INNER LISTENING that allows you to discern the whisper of your Heart for guidance.
The thing to understand about maximising the creative potential of Spring’s abundant energies is this: You need to be able to hold or contain this potent energy for new life and channel this creative power selectively. Think about the way a tree grows in Spring. Its energy branches up and out in all directions. In the same way, under the influence of the Wood Element you may find that you are multi-passionate, wanting to shoot branches in all directions, filled with creative enthusiasm for all you want to do.
One of the most common words I’ve heard women use to describe their first experience of Empress Yoga is ‘confronting’.
This isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s kind of the point. The purpose of this style of yoga is to invite you to explore aspects of being a woman you may not have explored before. These practices confront because they ask you to connect to what it means to be a woman, in order to heal, love and celebrate your body and feminine nature. It can be like shining a light on places you may not have even realised were there.
I’ve always thought of gratitude as a practice of counting your blessings in order to receive more blessings. You know, the whole Law of Attraction thing.
And yes, this is part of it.
But I’m going to admit to being a little superficial and entitled here, because now I’m starting to see gratitude in a whole new light.
The power of gratitude isn’t limited to appreciating how good you’ve got it when life is going well. There’s also something here in the practice of gratitude that offers a light or a torch to navigate those darkest of times when you’d think gratitude would be the last thing you’d turn to.
From this perspective, the moment you try and fit Chinese Medicine into the parameters of evidence-based medicine, you’re no longer practicing Chinese Medicine. This is such an important distinction and I hope more Australian Chinese Medicine practitioners recognise that the push to ‘legitimise’ Chinese Medicine using scientific standards of evidence-based medicine actually threatens the holistic integrity of Chinese Medicine and all it stands for.
This is different to staying stuck in your feelings and going in a downward spiral of negative emotion and getting lost there. This is a process of building emotional and mental resilience through times of crisis by consciously working with what you hold in your energetic bodies that you experience as ‘pain’ or ‘suffering’ in order to transform this to ‘power’ or ‘love’ or ‘wisdom’. This is the healing path known as Inner Alchemy.
From this perspective, the current culture of segregation may be perceived as trauma to the Shen. To be faced with discrimination, division and other control measures goes against the Heart and the core of our humanity. The flame the resides at the centre of your Heart seeks connection, much like the way people come together around a campfire. The Heart is strengthened through connections to others, strengthening the field of love which is the glue that holds it all together. Without love, the Shen fly home to the stars and eventually the flame of the will to live dies out.
It doesn’t matter whether its the small things at the individual level, such as filling your body with junk food or neglecting your body’s need for rest or exercise OR if it’s on a global scale such as modifying crops or altering genetics or even changing the weather patterns. There’s ALWAYS a price to pay. This is simply Natural Law. Nature will always seek to restore balance because it’s the perfection of Nature’s Design that holds the whole thing together.
Yes, humanity has free will but just because we can doesn’t mean we should. The capacity to know the difference is called WISDOM.
Anger is then used to ‘blow off steam’ and to attack which may provide a false sense of feeling powerful (and temporarily relieve the frustration), but actually stems from underlying feelings of vulnerability and powerless-ness.
If any of this sounds familiar, the thing to understand about your Liver Qi is that this energy is meant to provide you with the MOTIVE FORCE to create the change you want to see in the world. So it’s learning how to harness this motive force and use it to affect positive change.
There are so many parallels that can be drawn between our birthing culture and the spiralling cascade of interventions that we’ve all experienced as part of the panicdemic these past 18+ months.
It’s time to question our mainstream medical culture that OBJECTIFIES the body and focuses on ‘saving lives’ without recognition for the WHOLE of what it means to be human. Its time mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing be given equal consideration, if not priority.
