Quickening: Rhythms of Change

"Quickening: Rhythms of Change," is a monthly newsletter. In each issue, a regular feature will support the vision of the Energetic Connection to quicken and open the body to spirit. By offering an idea or model, as well as a personal and physical experience of the links between physiology and its spiritual counterparts, the information here will help you de-stress and guide you toward the discovery of your own path through the wonder-filled-bramble of life.

In this we will honor the transformative qualities of wild-crafted herbs, supplements and other natural and organic products designed to enhance consciousness. Some of these are edible organic skin care and cosmetics, some are food and supplements. Side bars will offer both an energetic exercise to do at home for help with stress (anything that creates reactivity in you on any level), and experiential workshops to aid you in connecting the physical to subtle bodies. Keep in mind that while chaos might be uncomfortable, it isn't always stressful nor does it promote reactivity every time. It's all in the way you transmute it.

As with everything else, energetic connections remain the primary focus here. This newsletter reports on methods that encourage opening the body to spirit through energy mastery in the midst of very chaotic times. It also impresses the importance of balancing the right with the left and a practical intention to help people in sustaining high levels of responsibility and enthusiasm for life.

My sincere intention is that these chronicles give you tools to transform your experience in whatever way you'd like to do so. If these articles and stories stimulate you to go a just a little bit deeper into your own journey, yet also to a more practical place of self-understanding and mastery, they will have served a purpose. I want you to become both self-realized and, more importantly, self-actualized. We are in this together, all of us are filled with intelligence and the ability to expand. Let us together embrace and incorporate this capacity for alchemy on all levels.

Truly blessed we are that "...our spiritual consciousness unconsciously plumbs its own depths by exposing itself to situations that alter its inner structure," Holgar Kalweit, from Tom Cowan's "Fire in the Head."


Fuel for the Fire

Here we stir the cauldron of Earthly elements, meeting and mixing them with the rain, the wind, the Sun and the soils inside the lives we've conjured. Always our constant muse, we fuel the fires of internal awareness in both a blog and podcast series.

Originally slated as a series of interviews to build a book about menopausal enlightenment, Fuel for the Fire has evolved to cover many topics in the realm of spirituality and self-mastery for women and men both.

At the blog you can read expanded personal stories about the road to consciousness and the nuances of personal growth; book reviews; health and the vibration of foods; tools for self-empowerment; and of course, a lot about the divine feminine and how menopausal women are managing their journey toward enlightenment, healing themselves and the planet. It's all a very personal journey, yet one that may just resonate with your own.

There are two podcasts, Fuel for the Fire and Spiritual Freedom, which include breath and visualization practices; movements to balance and awaken chakra centers; seasonal invocations from the Celtic Wheel of the Year; and interviews with shamans, spiritual teachers and healers, writers and artists, stargazers and the Queens of Fire themselves.


Workshops

Opening to Spirit
Experience the emergence of human form and core essence. This expression of receptivity brings heaven to earth in your body, opening you to spirit. Explore your inner workings, walking the road to self-mastery. As you listen more intently and your inner voice speaks louder, your intuition is heightened. You know yourself as a divine vessel, a physical form in which you see and experience the link between Earth & Sky, God & Goddess.

With sound, breath, visualization and gentle movement, you transmute emotional, physical & mental stress. Invoking feminine archetypes stimulates cellular memory of your connection to the Earth's rhythms. These simple tools help you to open a conversation between body and spirit, healing yourself from within.

This program is a combination of two short introductory online workshops: 1) Exploring Ceremony, Healing & Intuition; 2) Balancing Fire & Water, Sun & Moon; and a one-year program called Rhythms of Change which is based on the Celtic Wheel of the Year. With a focus on the Divine Feminine, these courses incorporate visualization and breath; practical tools for self mastery; movement fundamentals and lots of creative work to inspire your inner muse. Finding your muse is an internal exploration...the muse is inside you...and is often triggered by an experience or outside event of some sort. Without the inner point of origin though, the outer stimulus is just not as a-musing. These online mini-workshops will take you on a personal journey, evoking your muse from within.

In the year-long course we will also cover the elements and directions, ceremony and the Celtic Wheel of the Year; links between energy and physiology; methods to create a higher level of body to spirit communication; Universal Law and the balance between male and female energies; feminine archetypes; and brain integration. All of this will gently move you deeper into the place where you speak more directly with your inner voice, exploring pictures and releasing old patterns. You will create a permanent foundation for intuitive expression from your heart into your hands and out into the world.

Price: Each introductory six-week workshop is $69; the optional accompanying audio files are $11 for each introductory course. Purchase this workshop now. The year-long course is $528 and is divided into eight seasons and cross quarters which encompass approximately 6-7 weeks during each season. An optional audio file accompanies each season's work; the additional cost is $11 per audio file per season. Here is more information on these courses.


Articles and Books

Like some other writers, I've spent more time looking for experiences that amuse me than I do actually writing, and have worked in my easier, second choice career field most of my life.

Writing is always a personal encounter, and those times when I open enough to write from my heart, I protect myself and my work. No matter how long I have been writing, I am still filled with a strange remorse each time I show my work to someone else or send it off to a publisher as query or manuscript. Even though I've written freelance and on staff for many publications along the way (about 37 years now, as I began at 16 writing for the local newspaper in town), I am no professional.

Settling into my 50's now, I re-evaluate, rejuvenate, rebirth and re-establish myself as a person more internally confident, more emotional and much more willing to both expose and embrace that part of me. This maturity helps me to be more vulnerable and able to express myself through my heart as opposed to my head. It's a good combination of elements for a writer. Just a little off center at times, yet that state of being provokes much.

By the way, it has been a great life so far!

And even though my books are still locked inside my computer, in these pages you will find excerpts from books to come, articles I write and for now, a link to my newsletter, "Quickening: Rhythms of Change".

Its topic matter is self-mastery, the first step toward which is our ability to know we exist and to laugh at ourselves. The last step is to recognize that no one exists, remaining amused and enthused about being human! Oh yeah, I forgot one thing. The middle part is all about heartfelt relationships and unconditional compassion. Is that a koan?


Links to Articles and Clips

How Reflexology Can Supercharge Your Pilates Routine - Pilates Style, 2004

Gyrotonics - Holistic Health Journal, 1998

Betty Boop to the Rescue - Ski Times, 1991

A Tahoma Neighbor - Tahoe World, 1990

Victor Hernandez Fights Fires, Helps Kids - Tahoe World, 1990

Big Boats Meet on San Francisco Bay - Longitude 122, 1988