Simple Pleasures

As part of my Christmas, I was happy to receive plenty of tea- Chai Spice, Pomegrante and Orange Spice Infusers along with loose tea called Tali's Masala Chai from the World Tea House in Halifax, Prana Perfect from The Annex Book/gift store in Tantallon, and from The Tea Brewer(Mahone Bay)Lemon Lust Rooibos, Monk's Blend, Cream Earl Grey and Japanese Sencha. It feels heart-warming to sit with my special tea cups and specialty teas while reading from my current book, Courageous Dreaming, and watch the snow fall on the lake.

I think of it as one of the ways in which I care for myself.

Heart-Math and the researchers with the Global Coherence Initiative tell us how much more powerful our feelings are than our thoughts. In addition, our emotional energy resides in our hormonal system, heart, brain and immune system. The energy of our feeling registers and transmits faster than the speed of thought.

This is important because our feelings may be negative as in anxiety, sadness, anger and these feelings trigger chemicals that affect our health negatively. Increased and repeated adrenalin in our body can cause our blood pressure to rise and cortisol to affect our bone density and increase our rate of aging.

They offer techniques to immediately lower our stress level. One technique is to put your hand over your heart and visualize your incoming breath passing through your hand directly into your heart. and your exhale doing the same. As we do this, our heart begins to beat more rhythmically and the DHEA (the good/healing hormone) begins to be released. They also tell us that we can learn to manage and control our feelings just by paying attention to them and doing other simple techniques that are similar to the one I mentioned.

If you would like to know more about tuning into your heart and what that can do for your body and the collective consciousness, google HeartMath and CGI.

A New Year, A New Decade

Even though I like to think that I live more and more in each moment, at the turn of a year, I often ask myself:

• Where have I been this past year?
• Did I savour each moment?
• Was I present and listening?
• Did I move closer to my essence?
• Was I more in my head space than my heart center?

I received seven new books at Christmas and contacted about the same number of people. Yes, I am still in my head a lot.

I'm making plans to connect to my heart and to my feelings in a deeper way: to practice more forgiveness of myself and others, to identify and overcome my fears that are a barrier to loving more fully and to be more aware of my feelings. Dean Shrock, PhD. in Why Love Heals says that the key to accessing ones True Essence is to learn to love and accept yourself.

Our feelings are the language of the zero point field, the divine matrix, the morphogenic field. Our feeling is our message ... our prayer, our intention, or whatever it is that we want to manifest in our lives. We are told from many sources that we need to 'feel' the essence of what it is we want to have in our lives, as though we already have it. I'm working on it! What about you?

I would love to hear your stories of how your feelings and thoughts have manifested in your life? For example, if you thought about a person, did he/she call you or did you see them? It happened to me last week and also to my daughter.

This is a good time to assess where we have been and where we want to be. Have we spent time giving ourselves the joy of doing the things we love to do, on a regular basis, even if we are not able to do them every day?

Spending time doing what we love, along with good nutrition and exercise are very significant factors in preventing illness, says Dr. Dean Shrock.

Dr. Candace Pert concludes in her book, Everything You Need to Know to Feel Go(o)d, that if you want to feel good (and healthy),"Just love."

Have a healthy and joy-filled new year.