Crystal Healing and Ritual of Thankfulness

Namaste

The past few weeks have been quite a whirlwind emotionally and spiritually. Even physically, my body has, through naturally connection, been affected by emotional plunges and soaring highs. The past few days have been especially difficult, and so, I've been doing a lot of self-healing, and quite a bit of self-energising with crystals, to prevent me from curling up miserably on the bed and going to sleep all day...possibly all week. 

My body does need rest, I will not ignore or neglect what my body is telling me - I am loyal to my inner guru, but it's such a busy time right now that, quite simply, rest needs to be adequate and not excessive.

Crystal healing is helping me right now to navigate, with more confidence and strength, the eternal interaction of light and dark, soul work, shadow work... life... in all it's beauty and chaos (which are not mutually exclusive). Basically, the crystals are giving me a big 'oomph'! :)

By trying to focus on all the goodness that can be found within me, and in my life, I am feeling extremely blessed. Even in the situations that aren't all rosey and peachy-pie, there are still positive things to be recognised and to be grateful for; doing so helps me to navigate life's challenges and problems. Does a focus on gratitude help you to do so?

I am feeling particularly grateful for the abundance in my life. I was gifted some ASTOUNDINGLY beautiful and healing crystals by my anamchara at a moment in time when I really needed some extra TLC and affection. His choice of crystals was intuitively spot on, and they worked wonders on my mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health! The mystic dark green swirls and circles of the kambaba jasper were hypnotising; this stone brought so much peace and tranquility. I held it close to me during a meditation and I could feel it's energy radiating around and through me, soothing me, and restoring balance to my mind, body, and spirit. I have a smaller one, which I keep in a box, that I now need to cleanse and re-energise as I feel this is definitely a protective and balancing stone I need to carry around with me!

With this powerful feeling of gratitude for my anamchara, my family, my friends, and so much more, I decided to do a ritual of thankfulness to shift any lingering, stagnant, etheric pollution affecting me into vibrations of love and rejuvenated energy.

Here is a short gratitude ritual that I practise and want to share with you. Please use it however you feel you want to, as a way of expressing your own thankfulness.

- Take a moment to ground yourself. Breathe deeply and allow higher energies to flow through you. Om…

- Cast your circle if this forms part of your tradition. If it is within your tradition, you may humbly invoke a particularly God or Goddess associated with gratitude and invite this deity into your circle. If this does not form part of your practise, then focus your expression of gratitude to the Universe.

- As you begin, take a moment to reflect on the abundance in your life. Abundance comes in many forms, big and small, from the financial and material to the love of our family and friends, the rewards in our careers and studies, the kindness of strangers, the guidance and support from Mother Earth…

- Focus on the things for which you feel your heart swell with thankfulness. With these things in your mind, anoint your candle and light it.

- Focusing on each item on your altar which represents abundance, you may hold the object or photo in your hand, say aloud what you are thankful for. For example:

I am thankful for my health. I feel healthy, happy, and bright.

I am thankful for my anamchara. I am blessed by our sacred soul connection.

I am thankful for my family. I am loved and cared for.

I am thankful for my job. I love what I do/I am able to support myself.

I am thankful for my garden. I am soothed by the vibrations of my flowers and plants.

I am thankful for my dog. I am uplifted by his loyalty and loving protection.  

- Express your gratitude for everything in your life which comes to your mind. Also, take some time to peacefully reflect on the people in your life who are grateful towards you.

- Take a few more minutes to meditate on the candle flame, focusing on the feeling of abundance within you and your life. Recognizing our blessings is an important thing to do, because it reminds us of how truly fortunate we are.

- If it is within your tradition to do so, give thanks to the Great Spirit and the deity/ies which you humbly invoked into your circle. You may instead express your thanks to the Universe. Then, open your circle.

Aho…

Just a thought to end this post: How can we each increase our appreciation of the big and small things in our lives? How can we inspire others, attract similar energies, and manifest more thankfulness in the world?

x love & light x

Amazonite

Namaste

Amazonite is such a powerful and sacred stone for me and my Anamchara* – the one who is beyond my soul friend; the one who is my Soul. This stone was symbolically so important for us in our private Anamchara ritual and helped us to connect in deeper, more meaningful ways that nurtured our relationship. Amazonite was a key element in our ritual and was integrated thanks to lots of shared synchronistic events and experiences.

*Anamchara means “Soul Friend.” Anam is the Gaelic word for soul and Cara is the word for friend. With an anamchara you can reveal your innermost self to share the hidden intimacies of your life, your mind, and your heart – it is a relationship that honours and nurtures the life of the soul, kindling the divine fire within, and is marked by a deeply respectful intimacy and vulnerability.

Amazonite is a beautiful balancing and harmonising stone that soothes and aligns the chakras, the Heart and Throat chakras especially. It’s a stone for tempering anger, filtering out stress, healing traumas, enhancing loving communication and compassion, manifesting and retaining Universal love, balancing one’s feminine/masculine energies, and helping to develop empathy. It also blocks geopathic stress and protects against electromagnetic pollution. As well as this, amazonite kindles the harmonious interaction between the intellect and intuition, carrying spiritual energies of personal truth. Everyone needs some amazonite in their life! Seriously!

x love & light x

Crystals

Namaste 

So, I have a thing for crystals. I love crystals – they’re aesthetically beautiful (even the geode shapes and unpolished ones are a little weird looking) and the resonating energies they emit are so powerful! I’ll be doing several posts about crystals, most likely, many...many posts 😊

I started my fascination with crystals when I was a young teenager and came across an Amethyst in a spiritual shop; the first every crystal I had seen in ‘real’ life. It was stunning and I stared at it for what felt like hours, enthralled by the way the light bounced off the glimmering edges of the geode and finding myself travelling through iridescent purple galaxies in a few short seconds. I bought myself a little Amethyst bracelet that day, it was all I could afford and I wore it every morning and laid it on my bedside table every night.  I have a very close relationship with Amethyst; as I do with Turquoise, Carnelian, and Rose Quartz (Ooooh, I get all excited just remembering the beautiful experiences I’ve had getting to know my stones and familiarizing ourselves with each other!)

But at that young age, my true creative authenticity was somewhat dormant (due to a number of factors that are all quite satisfied to remain in the past). I gave in to a slow wash of apathy... and then other things came along, and my curiosity to learn more about crystals was pushed further and further down on my list of priorities. Until a few years ago, when this hungering inquisitiveness came galloping back suddenly and with full-force. And with it, I quickly amassed a considerable (though still small) collection – thanks to my Anamachara, who has generously and lovingly gifted me so many – which I regularly connect with during my spiritual practices, meditations, and for crystal healing.

The etymology of the word ‘crystal’ comes from the ancient Greek word ‘krystallos’ meaning ‘ice’, as they believed rock crystal was water that had so completely frozen up it could never melt again. Though ice is the crystal form of water, rock crystal is not what the ancient Greeks believed. Crystals are organised repeating patterns of atoms, known as crystal lattices, which form when superheated gases and mineral-rich solutions from deep within Mother Earth’s crust find their way along cracks and fissures in the Earth to reach the surface, where they are exposed to different temperatures and pressure. 

“The structure of the Earth is continually changing, but the essential quality of all crystals is their very stable atomic structure. Whatever the outside force – whether heat, pressure, electricity, or life – crystals always make minute adjustments to restore their internal stability and lattice form. [...] Crystals are known to be the most orderly matter in the universe. [...]... with its locked-in power of ancient fire and unique purity of form, [crystals] may help us reinstate our own balance and harmony.” (Lilly, S., 2014, Healing with Crystals. Anness: London)

Is there any crystal which you share a very close relationship with?

x love and light x

Full Moon Energies - Names and Dates for 2017

I am already feeling the full moon energies this month! It’s really quite something – embracing, supporting, and being proactive with change. I am feeling transmutational and transformational energies very strongly. And so, feeling in a strange mood today, somewhat sad and more apathetic than usual (destabilizing comfort zones perhaps), I thought it’d be nice to create something to share!

Here is a list of full moon names and dates for 2017. The names are said to be rooted in Native American traditions, reflecting monthly and seasonal events and changes (with the theme of February being all about change!); and in turn, the names and energies of these timely shifts serve to help us do some reflection on ourselves and our lives.

Thank you for checking it out! 

x love and light x

The Woods

“And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.”

We went in to the forest – happy, calm, and playful. We walked and grew hot and tired. We rested under the gentle shade of a large tree; the sunlight filtering through the leaves to shine on our faces when the breeze blew strong. The mosquitoes had a feast!

Resting, we felt the stillness of nature. Mother Earth speaking to us through woodnotes – the singing birds (and the presence of a very rare bird, the magnificent pink pigeon, who granted us its brief and beautiful company), the rustling canopy, the trickling stream, the humming rocks, the buzzing insects, the music of the roots beneath us. There is nothing more grounding than to be out in the woods. There is an indescribable feeling of being nurtured when you spend time with nature in the forest.

The practice of forest bathing, popular in Japan, is a large part of preventative healing in Japanese medicine for a reason. Nature holds many cures and treatments for many illnesses; for example, walking barefoot in the soil is a form of Earthing – absorbing the earth’s free flowing electrons through the soles of the feet, which is beneficial physically and psychologically. Just spending some peaceful time out in the woods, breathing in the rich air, forgetting about daily routines, just sitting and observing the trees, the plants, the flowers, the birds, and bugs, and beasts... it has a very calming effect on the mind, it reduces stress hormones, the world slows down just a little and nature inspires us to feel a sense of wonder for the landscape that surrounds us.

There is something about being still, blissfully still, in the woods that gives me a clearer vision of the magic of the Universe. I feel my energies are replenished; I feel deeply, powerfully, connected to the Great Spirit and my soul is in better rhythm with the beating heart of the cosmos. And, to experience such things with loved ones, a sacred love, that is an added blessing for which I am ever grateful.

I urge you my friends, take a little wander into the woods; don’t underestimate nature’s healing powers. Sit in the deep still silence and feel our Great Mother’s beating heart; listen to, and learn from, the magical whispers of ancient trees; connect with the vibrations of Shakti seeping through the soil and flowing into us - filling us with unique sensations of healing, empowerment, and energetic rejuvenation.

Here is an affirmation that I like to say aloud and upon which I meditate when I am out forest bathing J

How to Love – by Thich Nhat Hanh

Art by Susa Talan

Possibly the greatest mystery of human experience is love – love in all its forms and manifestations.

Love is a force so crucial to, and for, each of us and our lives. How to Love is a book I was gifted for Christmas 2016 (along with the other book photographed) and is written by legendary Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, teacher, and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh. His core teaching is the idea that “understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand, you can’t love” and to truly love someone means to understand that person’s suffering.

He also argues that in order for us to understand another’s suffering, we must first understand our own – “When we learn to love and understand ourselves and have true compassion for ourselves, then we can truly love and understand another person.”

I feel it is a lesson I am constantly learning; just when I think I have understood myself better and so I am able to love others better, I realise there is so much more I have yet to understand and so much more love within me that I can give.

For the longest time in my life, maybe even all my life (until last year), I didn’t know how to love without fear and without expectations. I had completely lost all conscious, and perhaps even unconscious, connection with my inner power (my subconscious on the other hand, was on over-drive most of the time, but that should be a whole other blog entry!). 

I naively, and occasionally painfully, gave my power away to others, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that I allowed people to take my power away from me.  I suppressed so much of myself that I was drifting, directionless, though life – miserable, frustrated, listless... I was suffering. I was also utterly oblivious to the possible suffering of those around me as I was too often absorbing, and passive-aggressively accepting, the direct and oblique emotional attacks that were inflicted on me by what I now realise to be other people’s “pain-bodies” (Eckhart Tolle).

Then, in the middle of 2016, after a difficult year in which simply breathing each day was an arduous task... Love awoke, rejuvenated, renewed, and replenished inside of me like a spark that set ablaze the lingering embers of fire in my heart, a flame and fresh breeze coursing through my veins; a thunderous vibrating of my soul (re)ignited in recognition of its own sacredness, a soothing balm of tenderness and peace embracing me; and a light erupting from within me in an infinite stream of joy, gratitude, and strength, that enveloped me in a magical glow.

Therefore, with this love permeating my very being and infused in each and every day, it is no coincidence that this little book has come into my life for a purpose. I feel it’s purpose is to help me continue learning about love and move ever closer to unconditional love for myself (a personally challenging art of practising self-compassion and building a home within myself), and my absolute fullest capacity to truly love another from the depth of my soul.

I also feel the book is an excellent source of ideas for regular, if not daily, contemplation and questioning that we could all use in our lives to open our hearts, bring us home to ourselves, and to nourish as well as nurture our loving relationships with others. Here are some questions that I have been asking myself daily since I started reading the book. I think of them as helpful reflection-points to transform our practises of how to love and understand, as well as how to embrace the world, and the environments around us.

·         Am I being gentle with myself?

·         How am I feeding and supporting my own happiness?

·         In what ways am I nourishing my ability to love and understand?

·         How am I fostering the four elements of true love (loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity)?

·         Am I confidently placing my trust in the Great Spirit?

·         Have I looked at myself and my loved ones at least one today to appreciate that we are made of stars and each carries eternity inside?

·         Have I practised hugging meditation at least once, regardless of how brief?

·         Was I able to practise conscious breathing today?

·         Have I been listening deeply with all my heart?

·         Have I generated a feeling of joy for myself and offered things to others to make them happy?

These are the questions that I have noted down since I started to read the book, and I am only half way through so there will be more questions to add; I’m sure of it!  

Art by Susa Talan

I’ll end this blog entry with a quote from the book which particularly resonates with me and the sacred magic I am currently experiencing as I walk my path to more authentic living and loving without fear. I hope it speaks to the hearts of those of you reading it...

“In a deep relationship, there’s no longer a boundary between you and the other person. You are her and she is you. Your suffering is her suffering. Your understanding of your own suffering helps your loved one to suffer less. Suffering and happiness are no longer individual matters. What happens to your loved one happens to you. What happens to you happens to your loved one. […] In true love, there’s no more separation or discrimination. His happiness is your happiness. Your suffering is his suffering.”

The beautiful and joyful artwork of Susa Talan can be found at www.susatalan.com 

Roadside Views – Appreciating Simple Pleasures

The day these photos were taken was a beautiful, beautiful day. The weather was fantastic and I was with the very best company I could ever imagine.

It was a day where my thoughts were very much in the present moment and not distracted by the past or future (which is a rare thing, I must admit, often easier said than done). Everything seemed especially bright, luscious, and captivating. Even the balmy stickiness of summer was enjoyable; with its humidity invoking a heavy laziness in our movements that meant all we could really do all day was just rest and appreciate the little things, the simple extraordinary things that far too often we do not give enough attention to.

Considering that we all live busy lives, always moving and on the go, constantly engaged in multiple tasks, occupied with different activities, or distracted by the torrent of things that yell out for our attention; we rarely stop to take in the pleasure of the present moment and enjoy the simple things in life that make the present moment so unique.

Usually when travelling around the island, I tune out most of my surroundings because it’s often just noise, very noisy noise from traffic, people talking, or a radio blaring loudly. I don’t have any particular thoughts and I just let the world go past me in an unmindful blur. However, on this particular day, everything seemed to gently vibrate with a soft rhythmic glow and there was something fragrant in the air. I especially appreciated the roadside views and how nice this moment was, just travelling along with such special company. I couldn’t stop staring out of the car window at all the magnificent colours and how nature seemed to be alive in song and dance. The landscape in Mauritius is often breathtaking and these are just some photos I managed to take on that day.

Appreciating the simple things in life is so important and yet many of us go through whole days, even weeks, not noticing the beauty all around us and not giving enough attention to these things. When I saw these views – the vibrancy of the flowers, the majesty of the trees, the elegance of the light dancing off the water, I felt a sense of awe and wonder. I felt stillness inside me and my mind was silent, even if it was only an ephemeral feeling. It’s a truly magical experience of soaking in the present moment and just feeling deeply happy.

Take a brief moment each day, however many minutes you are able to give to yourself (like a gift!) to appreciate the present moment and the simple things around you – it makes every day so much more pleasant. For example, savour the taste of your morning coffee; close your eyes in the shower and revel in the sensation of the water cascading on your skin; walk a little slower to be more aware of the environment you’re in rather than thinking about the destination. Even bustling city streets have their own beauty if you look for it, like a flower finding its way through a crack in the pavement, or words/a picture scribbled or sprayed onto a wall, a bird sitting in a tree as the sunlight pours through the branches. 

If you’re really lucky and live somewhere that grants you opportunities to watch the myriad of hues splash across the sky as the sun sets or gaze up at the twinkling stars embellishing the night sky, take a moment to breathe deeply and enjoy the view!

When I give my attention wholeheartedly to these things in the present moment, however briefly it may be, I feel a sense of immense gratitude and how great life can be. So, what are the simple pleasures that you appreciate?

P.S. This is my very first blog post for 2017! A great way to start the year ;)