The Energy Healing Blog

Share Your Light

Spiritual light isn't diminished by sharing. Give it away. It'll only grow brighter.

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Happiness Hacks

--by Nancy Hausauer

Energetically, happiness is a very light, buoyant manifestation of energy. Think of a helium balloon.

As the saying goes, happiness is an inside job. It's generated from within, not triggered by external events that we deem favorable. Still, there are some things we can do to get the happiness-energy going when it's lagging. Here are three extremely accessible and reliable ways to kickstart your internal happiness engine.

1. Be genuinely happy about other people's happiness and good fortune. The nice thing about this way of generating happiness for yourself is that, even though it's technically an external trigger, it's an inexhaustible resource. Even if it's not your nearest and dearest, there's always going to be someone, somewhere, who is experiencing joy and positive things. You can join them in the privacy of your own heart or even let them know that you're glad for them. You'll never run out of opportunities to feel happy for others.

2. Make someone else happy. Pick people who are pretty easy to make happy. Read to a little kid, take them to the zoo or get down on the floor and play with them. Walk your dog, or borrow one if you're without. Visit your great-aunt. Volunteering for a charity is good too, especially if you're doing concrete, directly helpful work. Happiness seems to be contagious, so in the process of lifting someone else's spirits, it's almost inevitable that you'll feel happier, too.

3. Make something. A cake, a picture, a poem, a bouquet, new shelves for your garage. It doesn't matter what you make; there's just something about "making" that's mood-lifting.

I also suggest you visit the website "Happify," which gives us science-backed information and skills to increase our proficiency. For starters, check out this article, The Five Skills That Will Increase Your Happiness.

The five skills are:

• savor
• thank
• aspire
• give
• empathize

Cheers! --Nancy

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The Healing Power of Joy: What Early Summer Has to Teach Us

--by Nancy Hausauer

Western culture is, for the most part, waaaaaaay too joy-deprived. I don't mean thrill-deprived. Cheap thrills are a dime a dozen. I mean genuine, deep-seated, heart-centered joy.

To me, this is a culture-wide second chakra deficiency. We tend to work too hard, minimize the need for pleasure and fun, and trivialize or even demonize what I would call simple, animal joy -- the joy of being alive, the joy of just being.

That's why I love the Celtic holiday of Beltane. Coming on May 1, it marks the beginning of the beginning of summer. A fertility holiday, it was traditionally celebrated with bonfires. Farm animals were decorated and blessed. Rituals to promote fertility (life force and creativity) were observed.

In the Pacific Northwest where I live, this season is glorious. The leaves on the trees have come back all fresh and green, the rhododendrons and azaleas are ablaze with color, the air is sweet with perfume from all the "green people."

For me, it's a yearly call to be joyful, a reminder that joy is more than a luxury. For those of us who tend to be over-serious and fun-challenged, it's a medicine. For energy healers, it's especially important to cultivate joy. We need to feed and balance our energy so we can keep doing the work we do without depleting ourselves.

How about you? Are you fun-deprived? Has it been too long since you felt joyful just to be alive?

Here are some ideas for "joy medicine":

• Make a list of things that give you joy, and DO THEM! (Here are more detailed instructions for making your personal "Joyful Life Map.")
• Learn more about your second chakra and how to support and nourish it.
• Taking a cue from the Beltane bonfires, ask yourself, "What 'lights my fire'?" Journal about it. Pick one or two things that stand out and do them.
• Take a break from your responsibilities and do something purely for pleasure and fun.
• Stop and breathe in the energy of the season.
• Celebrate your own beauty.
• Feed all five senses with beauty and pleasure.
• If you have small children or an animal companion, let them show you how to find joy in simple things.
• Create something. Creation is an expression of life force, and it feeds both the second chakra and our joy in being alive.

Have fun! -- Nancy

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Subtle Results Can Be More Far-Reaching
Than Dramatic Ones

Energy healing can happen on any level – body, mind, emotions or spirit. While we all love dramatic results, more subtle energetic shifts such as new insights or greater clarity can be more far-reaching than immediate physical outcomes.

Why Relaxation Is A Meaningful Goal For Energy Healing

--by Nancy Hausauer

Ours is a driven society. We idealize hard work and demonize "laziness." As a culture, we're not big on relaxing.

But relaxation is powerful medicine. It's the state in which our bodies take care of business, including the business of healing. On a physical level, it feels great and allows our bodies' natural self-healing and restoration processes to work like they're supposed to. On an energetic level, being relaxed allows our energy fields to shift more easily to a state of healthy balance and flow. 

Stress

Good stress like this is temporary and manageable.

The bad kind of stress feels overwhelming and/or doesn't let up for days, weeks, months, even years. This ongoing, heavy tension is a contributor to many kinds of illness and disease, not to mention mental suffering. Prolonged stress makes you vulnerable to illness and accelerates aging. Over time the stress response can contribute to high blood pressure, heart disease, ulcers, autoimmune diseases, cancer, anxiety, insomnia and depression.

The Relaxation Response: A Prescription for Health And Wellness

• Slows heart rate
• Normalizes blood pressure
• Slows breathing rate
• Allows oxygen to be used more efficiently
• Decreases adrenal gland production of stress hormones
• Increases production of growth and sex hormones
• Improves immune system health
• Increases blood flow to major muscles
• Reduces muscle tension
• Helps relieve aches and pains
• Helps you handle negative emotions such as anger and frustration
• Promotes energy
• Improves concentration and creativity
• Improves ability to handle problems.

Energy Healing Promotes Relaxation

Sessions in which dramatic insights or shifts happen are exciting and rewarding. But if relaxation is "all" that obviously happens in a session, believe me, you've done good work.

It means you've helped your client's energy field become more fluid, smoother, more harmonious, more flowing. It means you've helped them get into a state where they can heal themselves. And that is ultimately what we are trying to do.

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Chronic Pain Self-Care: New Page On The Energy Healing Site

Chronic pain relief can be elusive to scientists and sufferers alike. I think it's because they're looking for solutions in the wrong place—in the physical body.

Author/teacher Esther Hicks says: "Your body is a pure reflection of the balance of the thoughts that you think."

In my practice, I find this is often true. Take the example of someone with chronic muscle pain from an injury that happened years ago.

In one year, nearly every molecule of that person's body has been replaced by different molecules. In other words, the matter part of his body is not the same matter. So how can the chronic physical pain be residing in the PHYSICAL matter of his body?

It has to be something else that creates and/or holds that discomfort or dysfunction in place. At this point, we can't know for sure exactly what that underlying force is: science can't measure it yet. However, from my experience, I believe that the real source of the suffering is energetic — a disturbance in the energy field held there by thoughts and emotions from that long-ago physical or emotional injury.

So to deal with chronic physical suffering, it may not be enough to work on a physical level (although that can be a necessary part of the puzzle, of course). For lasting resolution, you may also have to take a more holistic approach.

Continue reading here for some ideas that may help provide relief, including

• exploring your life's alignment with your higher self
• using the power of your consciousness (or mindfulness, if you prefer that term)
• working with energy
• and mobilizing the astonishing potential of your breath.

These are all wonderful holistic medicine tools for family health care.

Again, you'll find all this on this page on The Energy Healing Site.

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Reframing Illness As An Opportunity For Greater Wholeness

--by Nancy Hausauer

Physical and mental/emotional symptoms of distress are -- distressing.

Illness, pain, anxiety, depression. When we have them, we want to fix them, fast. We don't normally stop to think about their "value." That's natural, a biological instinct.

But sometimes we're called to take a deeper look.

Maybe it's because we're in a profession that deals with other peoples' symptoms of distress, day in and day out.

Or maybe it's because we ourselves have to deal with a chronic ailment -- our own suffering or that of someone we love.

In any case, sometimes circumstances push us into questioning the deeper WHY of physical/emotional ailments, turning our usual approach on its head and looking for possible usefulness or value in them.

Along that line of thinking, I love this quote by Dr. Martin Rossman, M.D., an expert in mind-body medicine:

...The symptoms of illness often can be seen as signals for attention or ways of making us aware of needs that are not being met. Thus if we learn to pay attention to our body's signals or symptoms in a certain way, we can actually learn something from an illness that helps to bring us back into alignment with our potential for wellness.

For we are always trying to maintain our alignment, balance, and growth in accordance with our purpose in life, whether we are fully conscious of that purpose or not. And there is a way of seeing and relating to symptoms that can actually help us to align the flow of energy in accordance with that purpose -- a way that allows us to see illness as an opportunity. . . [emphasis mine]

--from "Illness As An Opportunity for Healing," Healers on Healing

Viewing illness as opportunity to realign with our purpose in life, our life-path -- that's so much more empowering than the conventional medical model's approach.

Of course, we don't want to court illness or suffering as a source of wisdom, and of course we do want to use what conventional medicine has to offer.

But if life presents us with a potential path back to wholeness and balance -- why on earth not take it? Why would we NOT explore an opportunity to "realign with the flow of energy in accordance with our purpose"?

If you can find Healers on Healing, by the way, it's a great book. (Published by Tarcher/Putnam in 1989. Don't know if it's still in print.)

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Break Out!

Energy healing can help us break out of the too-small energetic containers that most of us confine ourselves in. Then we can bring our unique gifts more completely into the world.

Letting Your Highest Self Bloom: An Equinox Contemplation

--by Nancy Hausauer

March 20 is the Equinox, Spring in the Northern Hemisphere and Fall in the Southern. On the Equinoxes, day and night, light and dark, are equal. They're moments of balance. I like to imagine them as single instants when we're poised, motionless, in absolute peace.

As with each of the great annual solar events, the equinoxes offer us wisdom and an opportunity for healing. In particular, they are celestial reminders to pause in our lives and take time for reflection.

This Vernal Equinox, I offer the following as something to reflect upon.

A Self-Discovery Exercise

1. Get two sheets of paper and a pencil. On one page, list 10 people you admire, heroes living or dead, people famous or familiar. Leave some space under each name.
2. Under each person, List 5 or 6 (or more) traits or qualities that you especially admire or honor about them. Really give your best effort to articulating particular characteristics you admire about them. It's OK if there's repetition; you don't have to list unique traits for each one.
3. When you're done, read through all the traits of all the people. Adjust as needed. Then circle any characteristics that show up more than once on the page.
4. Now take the second piece of paper. Draw a heavy line three inches down from the top. Below this line, list all the characteristics/traits you circled.

   

5. OK, got all that? When you're completely done, in bold letters, write above the heavy line at the top of the page:

   THIS IS WHO I TRULY AM. THIS IS WHAT I CAME HERE TO EMBODY.

   Re-read the traits/characteristics you've listed there. Re-read several times. Let them sink in. This is you.

6. This exercise works because you admire traits in other people that resonate with you. They resonate with you because you already possess those traits. It's like a tuning fork.

7. Remember: This is a portrait of you. Sit with it for a while. Absorb it. Contemplate it. Breathe it in. Accept it.

   It can be hard to believe that you are all that. But it's true. You really are all that.

Happy Equinox! --Nancy

Not A Happy Topic, But Important

--by Nancy Hausauer

As an energy healer, it's likely that you will see people who are suffering from depression. It's one of those difficult, stubborn issues that can sometimes be hard for conventional treatments to address--so some sufferers start looking for alternatives, including energy healing.

While often depression is mild, when it's major it's a serious illness that can have life-threatening consequences. It can affect health in lots of ways, including driving people to attempt suicide. And sadly, suicide is on the rise in the U.S., as reported in this article from the Washington Post.

It's important for anyone who may be in a helping role for people who are depressed to know the hallmarks of depression and the signs that someone may be at risk for suicide.

Here's a link to an NIMH page that summarizes the symptoms of major depression.

Here you'll find signs that signal that someone may be intending suicide.

Beyond knowing these signs and symptoms, if you deal with people who are depressed, you'll need an action plan, including a list of local mental health referrals. Our role as energy healers should be to complement and support the work of trained psychological professionals. Make sure depressed clients are working with appropriate, qualified mental health professionals.

You should also have the (nation-wide) Suicide Hotline number handy. It is: 1-800-273-8255 (You can also call this number for advice on how to proceed.) Here's the website, too: https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/

Some more resources:

** things NOT to say to people suffering from depression.

** 5 Action Steps For Helping Someone In Emotional Pain

** and a link to a useful PDF that summarizes a lot of this.

I know this isn't a fun topic, but sometimes we energy healers do deal with serious illnesses, and we need to be responsible by being informed, prepared and staying within our scope of practice.

--Nancy

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