With Gratitude for Healers

As we discussed last month, I was very fortunate to receive healing services from a Naturopath and her team, who also offered guidance on living in our fast-paced world. Since this time of year offers an opportunity to rethink, reframe and reboot our lives, I’d like to share some thoughts.

In Naturopathic medicine, a person is considered a human being and the whole presence is considered (mind, body, spirit and emotion), which is called Integrative Medicine. In today’s everyday chaos, however, as a society we are no longer going toward integration. With so many interjections to our day, we are, instead, experiencing scattered thinking and frustration, which causes our body to become off kilter and disjointed – we are always on. When our lives are so scattered, our brain waves are actually in what’s termed chaos, which means our left and right brain are not working together well. Being constantly on, trying to meet all the demands, impacts our health down to the cellular level and has caused people to no longer experience REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, so vital to our health and wellbeing. The good news is, studies done on people who meditate show their brain waves are coherent, the state of being synchronized on both sides.

Meditation can take us to a place within where there is a sense of wholeness with access to love, wisdom and inner strength. I consider this my soul – a place of peace and harmony. As humans, we have a deep, inner longing for wholeness. When we are pulled in so many directions, we become fractured and have to actively cultivate wholeness. Think of your soul as a circle of total pureness, with an outer circle containing the stuff we experience in life (frustrations, fears); tiny fissures break into the outer ring of our being, which causes us to experience confusion or the feeling of being lost or disconnected. In this state, it is very hard to hear or feel our intuition.

Meditation helps us to cultivate wholeness by creating an awareness of our self and our environment; it develops patience and opens us to all of life’s offerings instead of only those blaring at us through technology. Our body, at any given second, is responding to our every need; the more we live in a fractured environment, the more we waste needed energy. Meditation helps us to meet chaos with calm; it helps us to find clarity in situations, instead of responding with knee-jerk reactions. Meditation also brings acceptance of our self and others. This does not mean we have to agree with everyone, nor do we have to condone everything; acceptance allows us to just let it be.

Remember to honor the being in you; take really good care of you and find healing through meditation.

I wish to acknowledge Dr. Susan Godman, Dr. Cheryl Kasdorf and Ms. Paula Zuccarello of

Partners in Health Care, Naturally, Prescott, Arizona

"In Mind-Body Integrative Medicine, we listen to the symptoms and to the story behind them as our guide to treat the cell and the self. We work to cure the biology as we simultaneously heal the biography. Only when both the cell and the self are tended to, can we find authentic, deep healing." Dr. Paul Epstein

With Gratitude for Health

I am truly excited about 2016! This past year has been quite an experience for me. Early last year, I began to have bouts of lightheadedness, like my blood sugar was dropping. Just prior to that, as I’d go about town, I kept passing a Naturopath’s office – my gaze was always drawn to her signage: Partners in Health Care, Naturally. One day, as I saw the doctor entering her office, she turned, looked up at the sky and gave a really big smile – I knew that was a sign, so I made an appointment.

Dr. Godman was able to determine immediately that I was in severe adrenal fatigue. She explained that there were too many “big” life stressors that had occurred in my life without any respite in between (I moved and then lost my mother and my twin brother, all back to back). When I asked her how she knew so quickly, she told me “I see this all the time – it’s also due to the society we live in.”

The adrenal fatigue I experienced was so severe that I often felt like I was going to drop on the floor and that was going to be the end of me. I literally felt very close to death; after researching this, I realized I had been very near death. My body was literally depleted. What I needed was protein and lots of it, every hour or so. I hardly left my home for the first four months – a two-minute phone call swallowed up my energy, as did a 15-minute trip to the grocery store. In order to make the trip to the store, I had to eat 60 grams of protein; once in the store, I typically felt like I was going to drop on the floor. I always had almonds with me – that was what the doctor recommended – and I kept a bag of almonds next to my bed. It took everything in me to fix a breakfast of eggs and veggies, which was what was recommended, because eggs seem to be what our body processes most quickly to replenish us.

I’m writing this because adrenal fatigue is becoming very prevalent in our society.  We’ve all heard of the “fight or flight” mode of stress. If we have a near-miss accident or we have to run quickly to get out of the way of an oncoming vehicle, our fight or flight response kicks in. Our body was designed to give us an adrenaline rush in order to meet the demand of what used to be a fight-or-flight situation (an animal chasing us). Today, due to such a fast pace and the constancy of everything, so many things demand our attention that our body is always “on.” Believe it or not – one day, we just run out. I didn’t feel any advanced notice until I began to feel lightheaded. I had no idea it was related to stress. Our body is so amazing that it keeps putting out until it has no more to give. When Dr. Godman told me “Your body is trying to keep you alive,” I realized how serious this was.

Having to experience such limitations gave me an opportunity to reflect – I had always gone at warp speed all my life and expected a great deal from my body. Amazingly though, when my body was at such a low point, I was able to experience a moment with my twin brother and my mom, a closure. I’ve also felt strongly that God “reset my defaults!” My pace in life has been a survival pace, always worrying about how I was going to support myself. I truly feel God has given me this beautiful chance to rebuild myself and to start anew. This new life requires leaning on faith and trust as opposed to allowing the ego to worry all the time! Now it is time to seek joy and wonderment, to relax and play!

So, please remember to pace yourself, eat well, sleep well, exercise, create quiet time, pay attention to how you’re expending energy – let go of any worries or grudges – reach deeply inside to find your connection to Spirit where faith, trust and God’s deepest love exists.

I wish you a beautiful 2016 filled with vibrancy and good health, peace and tranquility!

The Grace of Redemption

We all have a story – a story that entails sweet and loving moments and possibly harsh or heart-breaking ones. Still, it is our story. In the last post, I spoke of Gerald Sittser and the extreme loss he experienced in his life. I mentioned that he included some other life stories in his book, as well. I’d like to share a portion of one story that was truly amazing:

There was a drug bust and a shooting and a young police officer was shot. For a short period, he lay brain-dead in a hospital, then his life supports were removed and he took his last breath. Several years passed, when his sister, Sunday, realized she had forgiven Fred, the accused murderer. She stated “While life was going on around me, God worked on my bruised and broken heart and made me aware of just how much He loves me.” One day, she received a very clear message from God saying He wanted her to go see Fred and He gave her this message: “Tell Fred that I love him. Tell him that I love him so much that I sent my only Son, Jesus, to die for his sins.” Then He said: “Tell Fred that it is not too late to become the man that I designed him to be.” Sunday went right to work on this, did research to locate Fred, wrote to him to ask permission to visit him and requested visitation rights, then met with him face to face. They spoke for quite a while; during that time she shared God’s message with Fred. Before her eyes, Fred committed his life to Jesus Christ; Sunday felt she witnessed a miracle. Sunday and Fred continue to communicate and have created a warm friendship. Amazing Grace.

Gerald Sittser speaks of how our story fits into God’s bigger story and talks of redemption being a paradox: “…we become who we already are in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is redemption; Jesus Christ is also the one who works redemption.” This brought to mind a couple passages from the Bible. In Isaiah 64:8 “But, now, O Lord, You are our Father; we are the clay, and You our potter; and all we are the work of Your hand.” And in Zechariah 13:9 “I will bring the one-third through the fire, will refine them as silver is refined, and test them as gold is tested.”

From an article called The Refiner’s Touch, I learned that while a few women were studying the Bible, they decided to research how a silversmith refines silver: “…one needed to hold the silver in the middle of the fire where the flames were hottest so as to burn away all the impurities,” said the silversmith. He further explained: “he had to keep his eyes on the silver the entire time it was in the fire; if the silver was left even a moment too long in the flames, it would be destroyed.” The women asked how he knew when the silver was fully refined. His response: “Oh that’s the easy part – when I see my image reflected in it.” As it was further expressed in Isaiah 48:10 “Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver; I have tested you in the furnace of affliction.”

Gerald Sittser feels redemption has become “significant” in his life and for “very personal reasons;” however, he feels the term redemption can be “alien and even intimidating to us.” In his book, A Grace Revealed, he wants to “reclaim the word and make it understandable, useful, and meaningful for ordinary life.” He states: “Redemption is the work of Jesus Christ applied to the unfolding story of life, your life and my life.” And while “story” is the theme of his book, he stresses: “God has written and played the key role in the story of salvation, which promises to redeem our stories – mending what is broken, healing what is sick, making right what has gone so wrong…a gift of pure grace.”

Being tested in the “furnace of affliction” conjures up painful experiences of life; when we reframe the sadness and difficult times, we create space to know and trust we are being “tested” in the furnace of affliction in order to be honed until God’s image is finally reflected. This is the gift of grace revealed.

The Grace of Our Story

In the early 2000s when I began to research Grace, I came across a book called: A Grace Disguised: How the soul grows through loss (1996). I was so touched by the book, I wrote the author, Gerald L. Sittser (presently a professor of Theology at Whitworth College in Spokane, WA), to express my appreciation for sharing his story. Sittser’s story involved his wife and four small children and his mother, named Grace. As they set out on a weekend journey in the Cascade Mountains some 20-plus years ago now, they were hit by a drunken driver – at that moment, he lost three generations of women – “my mother, my wife, and my daughter.” He and his remaining three children also sustained multiple injuries.

What I remember most from his book was what he called the “existential darkness” that came upon him when he saw the three open coffins at the funeral home and how he found himself in a “waking dream” – running after the setting sun, becoming exhausted, realizing the sun was out of his grasp; looking back eastward, seeing only a “vast darkness closing in.” When he shared his dream with others, his sister told him: “the quickest way for anyone to reach the sun and the light of day is not to run west, chasing after the setting sun, but to head east, plunging into the darkness, until one comes to the sunrise.”

Ironically, while I was reading this book, I was also reading the Bible from cover to cover for the first time. After reading the Book of Job, I remember thinking to myself I don’t get it. Within a couple days, as I was reading Sittser’s book, he explained how two Biblical stories helped him through his ordeal, the story of Joseph and the story of Job. He fully explained the Book of Job! What a gift of grace.

Now, fast forward to the present when I learned Gerald Sittser has since written a number of books, one entitled: A Grace Revealed: How God redeems the story of your life (2012). In this book, he asks: “How can we trust God is involved in our story when our circumstances seem to say He isn’t?” He then explains how his family’s story is brought “full circle, revealing God’s redeeming work in the midst of circumstances that could easily have destroyed them.” He also shared other life stories in his book and showed how God redeemed those stories. He invites us to read this book with our own story in mind.

There are so many poignant moments in his book. Sittser and his children love the outdoors and he speaks of how they hike in the Canadian Rockies and note the many pine trees along the way and remark about the beauty of their stature: “not beautiful like a child’s innocent and delicate face, but beautiful like the carved and aged face of a lifelong fisherman or farmer…full of character.” He also spoke of how it was his tradition to find a new calendar each year with pictures of beauty and nature on them and how this calendar hung on the pantry door in their kitchen – a place of gathering and a place where all could keep their plans written together. One picture truly caught their attention, so they eventually set out to find it along the California coast – he expressed how the beauty of the actual site was “so much better” than the picture they so loved. Sittser has recently married, his children are now grown and married and he has a grandchild and two stepdaughters. His story is carved deeply with loss and grief, with beauty, love and grace, A Grace Revealed.

Sittser sees those trees he referred to as symbolizing what God wants for us. “He wants to use the harsh conditions of life to shape us – and eventually the whole world – into something extraordinarily beautiful. Once broken, we become whole again; once selfish and insecure, we become stately and serene and self-giving….”

With Gratitude for Pope Francis

“I believe the excitement around your visit, Holy Father, must be attributed not only to your role as Pope but to your unique qualities as a person, in your humility, your embrace of simplicity, in the gentleness of your words, in the generosity of your spirit. We see a living example of Jesus’ teachings – a leader whose moral authority comes not just through words but also through deeds.”

(An excerpt: President Obama’s Welcome Address to Pope Francis, September 23, 2015)

Pope Francis’ Mother wanted him to become a doctor, so she bought him medical books. However, when she learned he was reading books on theology instead, he told her he was learning how to heal souls. What a gift this special man is to the world!

While speaking to the Joint Session of Congress, Pope Francis noted the image of Moses on the wall and reminded everyone to keep alive their sense of unity by means of just legislation and of the transcendent dignity of the human being.

Pope Francis then broadened his reach by speaking to the United Nations General Assembly where he expressed: reform and adaptation to the times is always necessary in the pursuit of the ultimate goal of granting all countries, without exception, a share in, and a genuine and equitable influence on, decision-making processes.

Throughout his visit, he repeatedly stressed the importance of acknowledging that we are human beings deserving of respect and dignity - everyone - and as an extension, our planet, without which we cannot survive. He called upon everyone and asked that there be: no apathy, no stagnancy and no numbness. He spoke often of inclusiveness and compassion - not superiority.

With regard to the violence in the world today, he reminded us: We know that in the attempt to be freed of the enemy without, we can be tempted to feed the enemy within. To imitate the hatred and violence of tyrants and murderers is the best way to take their place. He understands human nature – not only the good and the evil that exists but the marginalization and polarization that is present.

I don’t know how he kept up with the pace of his journey. Each day, he went nonstop from morning until evening, speaking, touching souls and acknowledging throngs of people. He lunched with homeless people and comforted prisoners by reminding them: [Jesus] doesn’t ask us where we have been, he doesn’t question us about what we have done…Jesus comes to meet us, so that He can restore our dignity as children of God. He wants to help us to set out again, to resume our journey, to recover our hope, to restore our faith and trust. He wants us to keep walking along the paths of life, to realize we have a mission, and that confinement is not the same thing as exclusion.

Finally, he asked that we move forward with dignity together, as one, in a renewed spirit of fraternity and solidarity, cooperating generously for the common good.

Thank you, Pope Francis, for your energy and your inspiration!

I ask God’s blessings upon you and pray you come back soon!

With Gratitude for Words of Inspiration

For many years I collected inspirational phrases and kept a cork board of them in my office. When people needed a boost, they stopped by to search for words to inspire them. It was amazing how inspiring words changed their outlook. I am so grateful to all those who have inspired me with their words all my life. Here are some of my favorites:

Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness.

Kindness in giving creates love. Lao Tzu

I am determined to speak truthfully with words that inspire self-confidence, joy and hope.

Thich Nhat Hanh

He who finds his life will lose it and he who loses his life for My sake will find it. Jesus

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self. May Sarton

Give thanks for unknown blessings already on their way. Native American Wisdom

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched –

they must be felt with the heart. Helen Keller

Your talent is God’s gift to you. What you do with it is your gift back to God. Leo Buscaglia

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. Socrates

More often than not, the things we detest and judge in others are a reflection of the things we cannot accept about ourselves. Iyanla Vanzant

Since you get more joy out of giving joy to others, you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness you are able to give. Eleanor Roosevelt

He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the

images imprisoned within you. Rainer Maria Rilke

If you get, give. If you learn, teach. Maya Angelou

If you are really paying attention and really ready to heal, the day will come when you recognize that forgiveness is the only way back to the center of your innocence.

Iyanla Vanzant

The soul is here for its own joy. Rumi

I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world – present and in awe. Anne Lamott

Wherever your heart is, that is where you’ll find your treasure. Paulo Coelho

Sometimes I need to stand only where I am to be blessed. Mary Oliver

Nature is a haunted house but Art is a house that tries to be haunted. Emily Dickinson

What you tolerate, you cannot change. Joel Osteen

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long

to play with your hair. Kahlil Gibran

Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.

Albert Einstein

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours. Wayne Dyer

Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath. Eckhart Tolle

When we observe things calmly, we notice that all things have their fulfillment. Basho

The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches but to reveal to him his own. Benjamin Disraeli

You cannot do a kindness too soon; you never know how soon it will be too late.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Your task is not to seek for love but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. Rumi

And what does the Lord require from you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6:8)

The best use of imagination is creativity; the worst use of imagination is anxiety.

Deepak Chopra

The Grace of Inspiration

Did you know, the word inspiration dates back to the 13^th Century and initially meant “immediate influence of God.” In Latin it means to be “in spirit.” I love being inspired!

Having worked in human resources and public service roles, I have been inspired by many people. One story has remained with me ever since I heard a young man speak at Arizona State University. Our Human Resources team attended a dinner where corporations could meet newly graduated engineers. A young man gave a speech that evening that left everyone in awe. He was raised by his Mother in Cabrini-Green in Chicago. His Mother promised him she was going to get him out of that environment. She did and that evening, we got to meet him and his Mom (who was about to finish her degree, also). After his speech, there was not a dry eye in the room. I’ve often wondered where he’s at today.

I can also think of a woman I worked with in behavioral health who was debilitated by depression. Her role in society was to prepare people for natural disasters; she set up role plays for numerous employees from the state/local governments. She had done this so intimately that after they played out their roles, she suffered from what would most likely today be deemed post-traumatic stress disorder. I was inspired by her courage as she took steps to climb up and out of the rubble of this non-reality nightmare. I also admired the tremendous effort she made on behalf of our community.

When I worked with students who were blind or visually impaired, I was inspired by their immense courage – learning to get from a dorm room to a class was a huge feat. One day, I came across a student who had lost her way. As she felt the ground with her cane, it didn’t appear that she realized she was standing at the precipice of about 20 steps leading downward to the campus Library. With her back to the steps, I knew I needed to get to her quickly so she wouldn’t take a step backward but was hesitant to yell to her for fear she’d step backward toward my voice. I was grateful to reach her in time. The courage, stamina and will it must have taken for these students to meet each day totally inspired me.

While working with high school special needs students, I was inspired by one of our students who had a learning disability. He played the cymbals in the band and always marched next to a drummer who cued him when to clap his cymbals! During high school, he got a job at our local theater greeting people and taking tickets. No matter who he met, you would think he had known them for life. One day, I chaperoned him to a skiing outing with his physical education class. As we waited to get on the ski lift, he began to chat with a man ahead of us. He held such a beautiful conversation, I figured he knew him, so I asked him. He said “No, I just wanted to wish him a good day on the slopes!”

I have a cousin, Lisa Marie, who has always inspired me, too. She also has a learning disability; however, she has always found work and is always very excited to meet new people. She greets her neighbors and knows every bus driver and mail carrier. She enjoys being a “social butterfly” and most every Friday attends a group session where she and her friends enjoy a meal or dance or do creative projects. She continues to keep a very busy schedule and exudes love and care wherever she goes!

These beautiful souls of inspiration light our world each day with bravery, courage, love and amazement. I liken them to butterflies in our society – they gently and quietly spread their love and beauty throughout our world each day to provide joy wherever they light.

When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy. (Rumi)

Looking out my kitchen window!