The Energy Healing Blog

Kindling Hope: Another Essential Life Skill

--by Nancy Hausauer

Hope is indispensable nourishment for the spirit. Even science now affirms that hope helps us heal. So here's a roundup of quotes from a range of wise teachers, to help you keep hope alive. It's a fundamental skill for living.

Deep trust in life is not a feeling but a stance that you deliberately take. It is the attitude we call courage.

-- Brother David Steindl-Rast

What if everything is interconnected? What if … there's an intimate connection between what happens inside and what happens outside? What if we're part of a living universe?

If we are, then despair is illogical. That doesn't mean we suddenly, magically have a plan to stop deforestation in the Amazon, but we can follow a plan beyond our conceiving as each step is offered us. That seeing is a heart function. When the mind doesn't know how to get from Point A to Point B, at least we can recognize the next step toward a destination that the heart knows exists. . . . . The mind says, "How could we ever get there? Look at all of the obstacles! . . . It's impractical, naïve, unrealistic." And that is simply because the mind (if you grew up in modern society) has been immersed in a logic of separation.

-- Charles Eisenstein, The Amazon: How Do We Heal A Burning Heart?

When it is raining, we think there is no sunshine. But if we fly in an airplane and go through the clouds, we rediscover the sunshine. We see that the sunshine is always there. In a time of anger or despair, our love is still there also. Our capacity to communicate, forgive, be compassionate is still there.

-- Thich Nhat Hanh

What we have before us are some breathtaking opportunities disguised as insoluble problems.

--John W. Gardner

In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again.

--- Barbara Kingsolver, High Tide in Tucson

But hope is not about what we expect. It is an embrace of the essential unknowability of the world, of the breaks with the present, the surprises. Or perhaps studying the record more carefully leads us to expect miracles -- not when and where we expect them, but to expect to be astonished, . . . And this is grounds to act."

― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

Wishing you hope -- Nancy

Ways To Incorporate More Gratitude And Appreciation Into Your Life

--by Nancy Hausauer

If you're in the U.S., you'll be celebrating Thanksgiving on Thursday. Whether or not Thursday's an official holiday in your country, counting your blessings is a reliable way to elevate your energy and your life.

A sense of gratitude generates positive energy. You can literally see someone's energy change when they shift from negative thoughts to gratitude or appreciation. (Try it!) Thankfulness clears and expands your energy, redirects your consciousness, builds your light body, and strengthens your connection to the rest of Being.

It's a basic tenet of energy healing that "energy flows where attention goes." So when you focus on negatives, you feed THAT with your energy. When you redirect your attention to what you're grateful for and what's going right, you feed THAT with your energy.

With that in mind, I want to share with you an on-line resource I love and use frequently, Gratefulness.org.

I wish all of us a warm home, enough to eat, health, peace, safety, the love of family and friends—and the blessing of a grateful heart. -- Nancy

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There Is An Evolutionary Force In Everything

There is an evolutionary force in everything. Tap into it and you will find your life transformed.

Self-Liking As A Fundamental Art Of Living

--by Nancy Hausauer

In our culture, it seems like most of us are awash in self-judgment and self-criticism most of the time. There's a lot of talk about self-love, but many of us don't even appear to LIKE ourselves much. Which is absurd, because there is so much to like--and love--about most people.

The self-dislike has huge implications, both for our own lives and our sense of ease and happiness in them, as well as for our relationships with others. That's because we often transfer our self-criticism and judgment to others. This is true even (especially?) with the people we love. Our energy gets intertwined with theirs, and so the energy of our self-judgment gets transferred to them as well.

An Exercise To Nurture Self-Liking

• Sit quietly for a few moments, following your breath. Let your thoughts even out and let calm start to enter your body.

• When you feel calm and settled, think of a person you really, really like. (It can be easier to choose someone not in your closest circle of friends and loved ones, for the aforementioned reasons about our self-judgment rubbing off onto them.) This should be someone who makes you feel warm and smiley when you think of them.

• Get an image of them in your mind and allow the warm, smiley energy of liking to grow and spread to your entire body, and then out into your energy field. Don't overthink this; however you do it is fine.

• Then, allow the image of your person to fade. Often this happens on its own. Let their image fade away so that your mind's eye is empty. However, let the feeling of liking and appreciation to remain.

• Just allow yourself to sit in this warm, smiley feeling of liking, without an object. Enjoy it. It feels good!

• What you are doing is sitting with yourself in a state of liking and positive regard. This is a new feeling for many of us! And it is very, very healing.

• Try to do this for a few minutes every day. Notice if it affects the quality of your life and relationships.

Wishing you unconditional positive self-regard,

Nancy

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More Ways To Manage Stress

--by Nancy Hausauer

Stress is inevitable in life, and in the short term, it isn't particularly harmful to you. What's bad is getting stuck in a chronic state of stress.

Sadly, chronic stress is practically a fact of life in our world. And it will slowly suck the joy out of you. More than that, it will slowly kill you.

Emily Nagoski, Ph.D., and Amelia Nagoski, DMA, in their useful book Burnout, define stress as "the neurological and physiological shift that happens in your body when you encounter a threat." Threats can be tangible and short-term, like a barely avoided car accident. Or they can be external and longer-term, such as worries about money. And then, there are internal stressors such as perfectionism and self-criticism.

Prolonged stress makes you vulnerable to illness and accelerates aging. It can contribute to high blood pressure, heart disease, ulcers, autoimmune diseases, cancer, anxiety, insomnia, and depression.

On an energetic level, stress blocks and unbalances our energy, making the field less smooth and fluid. The energy field might seem jagged, discordant, spiky, or like static. You might feel areas where the energy doesn't seem to be flowing or even. If you touch the physical body, you may notice these energetic disturbances manifested in clenched, compacted muscles.

Signs of Chronic Stress

• You're sick a lot
• You have chronic pain, injuries that don't heal, inflammation, chronic fatigue
• You're having a hard time getting a full breath, insomnia, digestive upsets
• You're isolating yourself, hiding from your life
• You're exhibiting self-destructive behaviors
• You're doing something repeatedly, even though it's pointless (e.g., checking your phone, having obsessive thoughts, unconsciously fiddling with your body )
• You're losing a sense of perspective about problems
• You're having brain fog
• You're losing emotional resiliency, short-tempered, tearful a lot
• You feel a sense of futility or helplessness that won't go away.

Ways To Move Stress Through And Out Of Your Body And Energy Field

You have to move the stress energy, as well as its physical hormones, through and out of your system. This completes the cycle. We need to do this at least once a day.

Burnout offers ideas for doing this, based on current research:

• Physical activity (the very best way to move the stress out of your body and energy field).
• A six-second kiss
• A twenty-second hug
• Robust laughter or crying
• Creative self-expression (writing, drawing, singing, dancing, painting, etc.)
• Meditation
• Belly breathing .

Other research-backed ways to help with chronic stress:

• Engage with something larger than yourself
• Make realistic, incremental goals that are near-term, concrete, specific, under your control and feel good
• Hang out with positive people who deal with stress well and in general, have low-drama lives.

However you choose to deal with stress, make it a priority. Your health and your happiness depend on it.

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An Energetic Journey For Healing The Heart Chakra

--by Nancy Hausauer

Oh, the heart chakra. So beautiful, so tender, so pure.

So not alone. But sometimes this primal truth can be hard to remember. And then our heart can ache with the feeling of isolation, or the feeling of carrying too much of the burden of our own and other people's suffering--which is also a feeling of separateness, because the burden is only too much if we are trying to carry it alone.

So here's a meditation for anyone whose heart is aching. Try to keep your mind out of it. Mental "efforting" gets in the way.

Guided Meditation For Heart Chakra Healing

• Sit in a comfortable, quiet place where you won't be disturbed.
• Notice your breath. Take some time with this. Allow your breath to become more even, more regular.
• Let your mind clear, and allow yourself to know this intuitively: Love is everything. Love is all around you and within you. Your heart chakra is an esoteric organ that allows this all-encompassing energy of love to move, to flow, to be expressed.
• Breathe into your heart chakra, in the center of your chest. Breathe in and out through it.
• Breathe the love that is everywhere, everything, into your heart chakra. Feel love flowing through your heart.
• Now, know--without thinking about it--that your heart chakra is the center of the universe, the center of the web of all being. Imagine or experience your heart (or heart chakra), deep in space, held within a vast, love-filled peace. From this place, you are connected to everything.
• Know also that everyone's heart is at the center of the universe. Each of our hearts is the One Heart, and we are all connected through our collective Heart.
• From this peaceful, central, unified place in the universe, continue to feel your heart chakra filled with love. Feel love and oneness flowing in and out through it. You don't have to do anything, it happens on its own, so allow your heart to rest in this flow.
• This beautiful love is a universal love. It connects you to everyone and everything, but it doesn't depend on anyone in particular, and so is always, eternally accessible.
• Notice how this feels so you can remember it. When your heart hurts, when you feel alone, go back to this place, this feeling, this central, universal love. Rest in it.
• Allow yourself to be in this state for as long as you like. Return to your ordinary surroundings slowly and tenderly, and give yourself all the time and space you need before returning to your daily activities.

With love, Nancy

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Energy Healing Can Help Us Build The More Beautiful World We Long For

Energy healing is holistic, humane, open-minded and deeply respectful. It can help us build the kinder, more conscious world we all long for.

Cry It Out: Why Tears Are Necessary And Good

--by Nancy Hausauer

In my energy healing practice, it's not uncommon for people to cry. Sometimes a single teardrop, sometimes a flood of water-borne emotion.

I see it as a good thing. It's energy, emotional energy, in motion. Healthy energy is supposed to move. Healthy emotions are supposed to move--through us and out. Tears are a literal embodiment of the flow of emotional energy.

So when people cry, it's healthy. It clears the energy field, removes blockages and frees the energy to circulate. It releases emotions so that they don't crystallize in the body, showing up as illness, pain, depression or chronic stress. Think about it. Don't you usually feel lighter and clearer after a good cry?

When people cry on my treatment table, I usually try to offer muted, low-key reassurance that it's OK, even good, and that it's completely appropriate. I watch their breath. If they're holding it, I remind them to breathe. Other than that, I try as much as possible not to intervene. Even kindly intended comments or words of comfort can cut the process short.

But, especially for new healers, people's tears can be unsettling. So I want to offer you some more information about tears to help you realize how totally awesome they are.

Tears: Not Just Salty Water

In this article for Psychology Today, Judith Orloff, M.D. discusses some of the benefits of tears. Tears:

• excrete stress hormones
• stimulate production of endorphins
• contain antibodies that fight pathogenic microbes
• improve vision by lubricating your eyes and removing irritants,
• decrease breathing and heart rate, increasing calm (typically)
• elevate mood.

Pretty awesome, right?

I'll close with a beautiful quote from this article, "The Topography of Tears." I recommend reading the whole article if you have time.

"Tears are the medium of our most primal language in moments as unrelenting as death, as basic as hunger, and as complex as rites of passage. They are the evidence of our inner life overflowing its boundaries, spilling over into consciousness. Tears spontaneously release us to the possibility of realignment, reunion, catharsis, intractable resistance short-circuited… It's as though each one of our tears carries a microcosm of the collective human experience, like one drop of an ocean."

I wish you the ability to cry freely whenever you need to --Nancy

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Using Ceremony in Environmental Healing: An Essay By Charles Eisenstein

I can't think of anything I'd rather share with you right now than this beautiful essay.

It is about "a reunion of the ceremonial with the pragmatic built upon a profoundly different way of seeing the world." About healing places on the earth where the earth and/or creatures (including human animals) have been traumatized. Wow. Here are some quotes from it. which I hope will tempt you to read the whole essay:

Here are some quotes from it. which I hope will tempt you to read the whole essay:

"The mindset that calls us to ceremony is the same mindset that calls us to ask, "What does the land want? What does the river want? What does the wolf want? What does the forest want?" and then pays close attention to the clues."

"What works for most of us is to establish one oasis of perfection – the ceremony – as best we are able, and then to allow it to ripple out across our lifescape, progressively bringing more attention, beauty, and power into every act. To make every act a ceremony begins with making one act a ceremony."

"A shrine connects us with the sacred that transcends any shrine and includes every shrine. A ceremony can make a place into a shrine, offering a lifeline to a reality in which everything is sacred; it is the outpost of that reality or that world-story. In the same way, a healed piece of ground is an outpost of those remaining oases of Earth's original vitality, such as the Amazon, the Congo, and a scattering of undisturbed coral reefs, mangrove swamps, and so on... Each place of earth healing also feeds the Amazon and draws us nearer to a world in which it remains intact. And, strengthening our relationship to such places, we call upon unknowable powers to fortify our resolve and coordinate our alliances."

Again, the link: https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/ceremony/

Wishing you love, light and ceremony, Nancy

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Energy Healers Receive An Extraordinary Gift

Energy healing can give us the extraordinary gift of witnessing people as they expand spiritually and step more fully into their highest potential.