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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in positivity

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Lavender Love Moonday Spell

To prepare for the week, you must first establish a self-care zone filled with loving energy not only toward yourself but others in your life. You only have room for the very best energy, so banish anything that can get in the way of the flow of positive energy. Try this herbal energy magic:

Steep lavender in hot water. Once the infusion has cooled to room temperature, dip your fingertips in the herbal tincture and anoint your temples and base of your throat, then sprinkle tiny droplets in your bedroom while intoning:

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Dis-Spelling All Fear: Full Moon Rite

For overcoming panic, anxiety or your innermost fears, you can turn to your banishing block touchstone. You probably already have a crystal you turn to, but if not, allow me to recommend the rose-red marvel known as Rhodochrosite. This striking stone is also invaluable for overcoming fear and paranoia (mental unease). Rhodochrosite abets a more positive worldview. One of the simplest and best aspects of this crystal is that it will help you to sleep more peacefully, shoving apprehension, worry, and woe out of your mind so you can heal body and soul. Your dreams will be positive, too. This is a remarkable stone for affirming the self, allowing for absolute self-acceptance and self-forgiveness. Rhodochrosite brings together the spiritual plane and the material place. This crystal is important because it permits the heart to feel hurt and pain deeply, and this processing of emotions nurtures growth.

Sit on the floor, legs crossed, and breathe deeply nine times. Take the touchstone into your hands and chant:

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Rose-Colored Glass: Energy Boosters

If you want to jump-start your life and bring about positive change, tap into the power of the rose and red stones. Stones of this color spectrum contain life’s energy and can help you become more motivated, energetic and vibrant. Wear this list of rosy and red stones or place them on your desk and throughout your home for an instant boost: alexandrite, carnelian, garnet, red coral, red jasper, rhyolite, rose jasper, and ruby. The new moon phase is an excellent time to introduce this vibrancy into your life, but you should also rock them anytime you need a boost.

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Inspiration Infusion: Spell in a Cup

Your morning pot of tea can be a daily ritual you use according to your needs. If, upon rising, you feel a bit blue, brew up some bergamot. As you sip the soothing libration, you will feel your spirits lift and you can greet the day stronger and infused with this simple and true magic. Along with healing and energizing properties, herbal teas can aid the mind. Try the following blends:

  • Bergamot dissipates negativity and uplifts.

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Instead of harsh or self-punishing resolutions, why not just clear the way and create the space for the Divine to flow? This video offers inspiration and suggestions for how to do just that, and to make this your best and most magical year yet.

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10 Ways to Transform Drudgery into Positivity and Magic

When you're a kid, being a grownup seems very glamorous. But after the 400th toilet scrub and 7th trip to the DMV, things can start to seem a little less magical and a little more like drudgery.

...UNLESS you're proactive about it. And here are 10 ways to be just that.

1. When you're brushing your teeth, consider what a gift you're giving yourself. Think of freshly growing mint, and shimmery pearls. Remember that the mouth, in Chinese face reading, symbolizes the place where blessings and abundance enter your life, and clear the way for goodness.

2. When you're waiting in line at the bank, consider the rapid and immense flow of money that surrounds you. Soak it in and feel your energy field being drenched in the energy of affluence. Bless the money in your own account, and give thanks for it, seeing this gratitude naturally multiply it in your mind's eye.

3. When you're driving, trip out on this: you're maneuvering a huge, horseless carriage wherever you want to go. How powerful are you, sliding around paved roads at this super human speed?! It's like you're an astronaut. It's like you're living in a sci-fi novel.

4. When you're folding clothes, unabashedly inhale their freshness like a lady in a detergent commercial. Congratulate yourself for your cleaning efforts and feel that wherever you go, you are spreading fresh, sparkly light throughout your home. Fold light and love into the clothes so that whomever wears them (even if it's you) feels this glowing energy of love.

5. When you're working, no matter what type of work you are doing, remember that you can change lives and spread love simply by the energy you exude. Something as simple as an authentic smile or compliment, fueled by love and acceptance, can create lifelong, extremely positive changes within a customer or coworker that ripple out everywhere, forever.

6. When you're preparing food, think about all the glowing sunlight, fertile earth, and flowing water that went into these ingredients being here now in your kitchen. Then think about all the helpful people that contributed to harvesting, packaging, transporting, and making it available in the store. Oh, and the precious pollinators! Truly: what a miracle, this food. What an invaluable, delicious miracle.

7. When you're grocery shopping, think of a cave man or woman. Then notice that from their perspective, the grocery store is a most magical, glowing forest of edibles, all safe to eat and ripe for the picking. What an amazing, luxurious thing humans have created, this grocery store! And what a gift to be able to shop in it!

8. When you're taking a shower, remind yourself that you are in an in-between time. When you're in the shower, you can't check your email, tone your glutes, make financial decisions, or advance your career. So give up on worrying about all that stuff, and just enjoy the feeling of the water and all those negative ions literally bathing you in positive energy. Let yourself revel in the sensual pleasure of it all. After all, there's nothing else to do!

9. When you're vacuuming, aren't you in luck! What a wonderful invention, this broom that powerfully sucks everything up into a bag, making a clear and sparkling floor where before there was dust. If you have a carpet, what could be better than those lines the vacuum makes? It's like raking the sand in the Zen garden that is your home.

10. When you're sweeping your doorstep, clear the way for blessings. According to feng shui wisdom, the entrance of your home is the place where you define what type of energy enters your home. So clear the decks, sparkle it up, and let that sparkling energy flow in.

image: flickr.com/AlicePopkorn

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Posted by on in SageWoman Blogs

b2ap3_thumbnail_grateful-car-sm.pngYou know how action movies usually include some kind of chase? Usually it's one car chasing another through tight alleys or the turns of a parking garage. Depending on the period, the chase might launch itself on foot, on horseback, or through interstellar space by starship.

One of my yet-to-be-finished screenplays lays out a skateboard-and-bicycle chase.

Yesterday, my spiritual journey (and my career as Belly Queen) took on the flavor of an action film: Driving my red Honda Element, I chased a white Ford Explorer through the streets of Asheville.

I was on my way home when I noticed, and deciphered, the license plate on this vehicle in front of me. I so wanted to get a picture of it. One hand on the wheel, one hand rummaging in my purse for my smart phone, I more or less kept my eyes on the road. The Explorer kept pulling ahead and out of camera range. I passed the turn off that would have taken me home and kept going, praying the traffic light at the top of the hill would be red.

The light was red, but the Explorer was turning right on the green arrow. I followed, hoping the next traffic light would be red. It was. I whipped out my camera and clicked just as the light turned green and the Explorer veered left onto the interstate. I followed, not sure that the snapshot I'd taken through my windshield had captured the plate.

Once on the interstate, the Explorer pulled out of sight. I took the next exit and went home.

b2ap3_thumbnail_grateful-car-inset.pngChecking the photo on my phone, there it was: IMGR8FLL

Thank you, synchronicity. Thank you, bestower of grace. Thank you, personalized alert system that messages me however it can.

Yes, gratitude. Yes, I'm grateful.

I'm currently in love with Barbara Fredrickson's book Positivity (Random House, 2009). Gratitude is one of ten positive emotions she champions. Along with joy, hope, interest, pride, serenity, amusement, awe, inspiration and love, the felt sense of gratitude leads to human flourishing — feeling "more alive, creative, and resilient" as she says.

The key to flourishing is embodying these positive emotions three times more frequently than negative emotions, which she identifies as various shades of anger, fear, contempt, and shame.

What do positive and negative emotions have to do with belly wisdom? How do positive emotions such as gratitude relate to deepening breath and awareness into our body's center and energizing our hara?

My friend and Integral Bodywork originator Everett Ogawa says that, for him, lowering the breath into his body's center leads him into a bigger circle of understanding. He recognizes how life is so much larger than any human can comprehend. In the presence of such enormity he's thankful for whatever may be the span of his life, his tiny place in the great scheme of things. And he's moved by compassion to devote his time to helping others. Deepening his breath, gratitude becomes a whole-being experience, a felt sense of the precious gift that is the body, that is life itself.

Witness Everett's expression not only of gratitude but also of awe, inspiration, interest, serenity, and hope.

These and the other positive emotions that Fredrickson names are forces of attraction, connection, and bonding, linking us with others and with our essential selves.

In contrast, her roster of negative emotions are forces of separation, distancing us from others and from our essential selves. (James Joyce describes one of his characters: "Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.")

My hunch: If we need to get all bioscience about it (and I'm not sure we do), the negative, separating emotions follow from the cranial brain's capacity for analytical thinking — a.k.a. sequential sorting and ranking and judging. The positive, unifying emotions follow from the gut brain's capacity for simultaneous synthesizing and encompassing.

With all of psychology's current fascination with neuroscience, the goings-on between the cranial brain and the rest of the body, I'm waiting for the day when these investigations expand to include the gut brain, the enteric nervous system.

[Be forewarned, this paragraph gets technical.] Cranial brain and gut brain communicate with each other through the tenth cranial nerve, the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve also connects cranial brain and heart. Current fascination with neuroscience includes detailing the vagus nerve's role in, for example, heart health and social engagement. Fredrickson's research suggests that positive emotions increase a person's perception of social connection, which in turn increases vagal tone, an indicator of physical health.

Energetically, emotions such as joy, serenity, and love reflect a state of being in which a person's life force (prana, chi, ki) is flowing fully and freely. Emotions such as anger and fear reflect a situation in which life energy is stuck and unbalanced — too much in one place, not enough in another.

Deepening awareness into the belly, energizing the body's center with movement and breath, activates the hara as our central powerhouse. Our body's center serves us as a dynamo, generously pulsing vitality through our whole body and being.

With our hara-powered life force flowing fully and freely, we're susceptible to feeling all kinds of positive emotions. Chances are that we and our lives will flourish.

For that, for the dynamo of life energy centered in our bellies, I'm grateful.

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