Something Wicked this Way Comes: 13 Points About the Evil Eye

ear Miracles: The “evil eye” or mal ojo as we call it here in San Antonio, is a pan-cultural idea that encompasses a host of beliefs regarding negativity, bad luck, and misfortune. Quite a few scholarly articles have been written on the evil eye but here is the low down information you absolutely need to know.

The first thing to recognize about mal ojo in our current time is that we can carry it with us, in us, and not even know it. Anytime we are seeing incorrectly — with envy or pride or lust or selfishness we could rightly be said to be suffering from the evil eye –our eyes are literally being taken over by an evil force, call it energy, call it spirit, or simply bad will.

In traditional spiritual work the best cure for one who has the evil eye put on them is a limpias — a spiritual bath, and that is the best way to cure oneself of incorrect seeing too — it is a time of cleansing and reconciliation to the self and your true purpose, it can be a time of recommitting to the work you have to do in the world. May it be so. With that said, here are other facets of this idea which may be of use.

1.) The evil eye is everywhere. In every culture that is. The belief that people can intentionally or unintentionally wish you ill or harm is found throughout the world and throughout time. Usually people focus on the beliefs surrounding the evil eye found in Judaism, the Mediterranean countries, and Middle Eastern countries like Turkey or Iran, but plenty of beliefs about the evil eye can be found in Western European, Central and South American, and African countries too.

2.) Most often the evil eye is believed to be given to someone unintentionally. There are plenty of cases of people feeling that someone has deliberately decided to try to ruin their life through negative thoughts, malevolent prayers, or outright destructive workings. More frequent, however, is the belief that someone called down the evil eye through their own jealousy and was not really trying to harm the object of their attentions.

3.) Symptoms of the evil eye vary from time to time and place to place–but many of them include a general idea of “drying out.” Water is generally associated with life and life giving forces. When we are too dry we are not as generative, fertile, prosperous, or healthy.

4.) Children and older people are traditionally believed to be the most vulnerable to the evil eye as are women who have just given birth.

5.) Salt is a world wide curative for the evil eye and is also seen as protective against it. So are the colors blue (featured in many of the apotropaic charms we find for the evil eye today) and red–which is favored as a cure and protective color against the evil eye in parts of Africa, Italy, and the UK.

6.) Sugar is second only to salt in its curative abilities as the evil eye is believed to make someone’s life bitter as well as dry. Sugar brings moisture and sweetness to the situation.

7.) Along with sugar and salt, Spiritual Cleansing, is seen as another essential step in both warding off and combating conditions resulting from the evil eye.

8.) The evil eye does not necessarily only come from other people. Many traditions believe that it can be cast on a person by spirits who are displeased or offended for whatever reason.

9.) Rue is the herb most popularly called on to address and combat cases of the evil eye–perhaps because of it’s tiny eye-shaped leaves.

10.) Blessed water/Holy Water can be used to wash someone down who is believed to be afflicted with the evil eye. Start at the head and work down to the feet then dispose of the water at a four way crossroads.

11.) Gold jewelry is a potent ward against the evil eye in many countries.

12.) Conditions brought about by the evil eye can be chronic/repetitive or acute and isolated events.

13.) In Western Europe one old and favored trick to use, is to immediately turn your clothes inside out and walk backwards or in a widdershins (counter clockwise) circle.

magic, miracles: receive my lunar letters

ARRIVING on full moons each month.

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Many Branches–Talking to Angels with Amy Oscar

Learning and Community

ear Miracles,

My longtime readers know that I am typically the kind of gal who rolls her eyes when someone describes themselves as an angel talker or lightworker — not because I don’t believe that those abilities are real, but because I do and I think many people take advantage of the terms. How refreshing it was then for me to “meet” with Amy Oscar and feel into her wise and profound perspective on both the celestial and terrestrial realms. Amy truly is a lightworker — she is grounded and full of gleaming wisdom and sharp discernment. Her mission is service pure and simple and I know that she herself is an angel incarnate for so many men and women-I count myself among them and I count myself blessed by her presence and devotion.

In her own words:

It is been my honor to have guided hundreds of women (and men) through The Soul Caller Training – a five-week paradigm shift from stress, fear, and suffering to ease, beauty and love. Read their comments here. My books, Sea of Miracles and, My Guardian Angel, co-authored with Doreen Virtue, invite you into my story, and your direct, personal relationship with the Divine. I hope that you’ll join me on Twitter for #SoulCall, a free, open and trending! Sunday morning conversation about living a spiritual life in a material world. Sundays at 10 am/ET

Connect with Amy
Twitter
Facebook

One of the terms you use to describe yourself is a Soul Caller-would you share with us what a Soul Caller is? What does she do?

A Soul Caller is a human being who lives in an awakened relationship with the divine and with the world. She (or he) is aware that her thoughts are energy and that this energy has an impact on her life and on the world around her.

She feels, senses and knows that she exists in a living and flexible ‘call and response relationship’ with the universe; on a living planet that seems (that is) designed to respond to her. When she is fully in the flow of this, she has the direct experience of this response. Her prayers are answered – in delightful and surprising ways. Her needs are met, her thirsts quenched. She feels safe and supported.

However. Every Soul Caller I’ve ever met has experienced, first, a deep sense of loss and disorientation. A kind of pre-awakening in which she (or he) realizes that the world is not what it seems, what it seemed only days earlier. There is often a sudden sense of being shaken awake – where she feels as if she’s lifted up above her own story and is able to see herself going through the motions, through a kind of dance of patterns, which no longer makes sense.

She says things like: “I no longer fit here,” or “I feel like a stranger to myself.” She says, “I suddenly realized that I no longer wanted to do this work (or be in this relationship (or this church or this town)).

This disorientation is coupled with fierce certainty. She says things like, “I don’t know where I’m going but it’s not this – not here. Not anymore.”

As the illusions peel away, she may experience feelings of deep sadness, a kind of grief for the world itself, she may feel stuck and then suddenly, incredibly free – as alternating currents of energy begin coursing through her life. She arrives in my classroom not knowing what she wants, asking: Who am I? while also, on a deeper level, the answer to her own question is emerging.

My work is to help her to hear what is bubbling up, what is calling. My work is to midwife what has already begun.

One of the parts of your work that really comes through for me is the communication you have with, and guidance you receive from Angels-can you talk a little more about this aspect of your work, when did you first start communicating with angels and how has their message transformed your life?

Well, actually, the angels started communicating with me! In 2004, while working as a magazine editor, I was asked to launch a new column featuring readers’ stories of real-life encounters with angels. I was delighted by the project – though, at the time, I didn’t believe in angels.

Looking back now, I laugh. The Angels drafted me – and almost immediately, they made their presence known. They’d leave a feather on my keyboard, send a vivid dream or somehow, arrange an encounter with just the person I needed to meet. They guided me to choices that shifted every part of my life – from my health and weight to my marriage and work.

Now that I’m aware of the angels, it’s clear that I’d been communicating with them all of my life. I just didn’t call them angels. My family wasn’t religious – my dad was a social worker/psychotherapist, my mom was a poet and painter – they wouldn’t have talked about the things I was experiencing in that way.

Yet ever since I was a little child, I had a strong sense that I was guided – that we all were. I’d lie in bed talking out loud to the presence that I sensed was listening with affection and interest to what I had to say.

As I got older and began to fill notebook after notebook with feelings (and boy did I have feelings!!) and ideas (big ones!) and stories, I sensed this same presence still there, still listening. I dreamed in technicolor – vivid and elaborate imagery with set changes and wise teachers showing up to tell me things. I lived embedded in nature, in my mother’s lush one-acre garden, and in summer camp, where my dad was the director, where I’d spend all day talking with the trees and animals and even, the rocks and the clear water of the lake.

When I got older, that presence was always with me. When I took foolish risks in high school and college. And later, when I longed to be a mother, guiding me strongly – through dreams and synchronicity and very strong clairsentience – to the doctors (and the psychic) that would help us conceive our son and then our daughter.

This presence was always there – and I was never confused about it – it wasn’t an imaginary friend and it wasn’t just my own intuition. This was a responsive, engaged someone. No one taught me to engage with it – I seemed to arrive knowing that when I lost something – a school book or set of keys – all I had to do was ask out loud, “Please bring it back to me,” and I’d feel a kind of inner tug which would lead me straight to my lost item. Later, after college, when a friend let me play with her tarot cards, something I’d never heard of before, I simply ‘knew’ how to use them.

This never seemed unusual to me. What struck me as strange was when people couldn’t do this. And I began to see that I could help them. And when I did, they’d learn quickly and easily.

Because EVERYONE can talk with this presence, which some people know as angels, and others, like me, know and perceive as a shimmering non-physical support system, Everyone.

In fact, you’re already interacting with it all the time. It’s just so much a part of our nature, a built-in and organic part of being human that we don’t notice we’re doing it.

Even those with no sense of God or any other spiritual entity will reach out to this something, this someone when strong emotion overcomes them.

I believe the heart is born connected to this something, and that the heart knows senses that it’s there.

One of the quotes on your site is…”You can change. Everything can change.” I think this is so refreshing in a sea of–it’s not going to ever change, he won’t change, you can’t change-how does change figure into the work you do with groups and individuals?

We are constantly changing – as are all things. Even the stones are changing – they are doing it very slowly, so we don’t notice it. But over time, as weather wears the stone to sand or pressure compresses it to crystal – all things are constantly flowing into and out of form.

That said, sometimes people just feel stuck. Completely. Profoundly. Stuck. But even then, as they become more and more uncomfortable with that stuckness, things are shifting. The discomfort itself is a shift – from boredom, from inertia, into suffering. And from suffering, we always reach for relief. The more uncomfortable we get – with the boring job, the stale relationship, the unhealthy lifestyle – the more we start looking for something else.

Discomfort is guidance – it calls us to shift toward something new, something more.

No one is stuck beyond change. Even my father, 86 years old, confined to a wheelchair and able to move only one hand, changes. Every time I see him, he talks about what’s new; he tells me what he’s thinking about. He says, “There’s always something interesting going on,” he tells me. “There is always hope. You can’t give up.”

One of your offerings is the Soul Caller Training-can you tell us a little about this, where the idea came from and what the program entails?

The Soul Caller Training is the result of my own 30-year journey as a workshop junkie, systems analyst, magazine editor and more recently, spiritual counselor. The program arrived as I woke from a dream about two years ago – it was a complete ‘download’ – composed of mental imagery and streams of words which I scribbled down as if taking dictation.

Since then, it’s evolved quite a bit but the basic program is there. It’s a five-week, online training (plus a lifetime membership in our Soul Caller Circle, after graduation). It’s designed to shift your perception of the world and your place in it. No one comes away unchanged. Once you see the truth and beauty of who you are – and what the world is, you can never go back.

If you could give one piece of wisdom to my readers today, what would it be?

Find the place inside of your own heart that knows what is right and what is wrong. The part of you that simply knows – without effort or mental gymnastics – what it feels like when you are centered, safe, whole, engaged and alive. That’s the compass. Align with it. Let it guide you. It’s your inner star – your connection to the divine and to everything that matters to you. Another, simpler way of saying this is: choose toward love – no matter what There is always a choice toward love – including the choice to love yourself.

magic, miracles: receive my lunar letters

ARRIVING on full moons each month.

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Many Branches–Creating a Radiant Life with Heidi

Learning and Community

ear Miracles,

Heidi Rose Robbins is one of the few folks that make the stars come alive for me. I have always been interested in astrology but got easily bored with the point of view that only considers astrology useful in so far as it can predict various life events –Heidi Rose changed that. She reminded me how much more astrology could be — how the stars have formed a unique map to the highest and grandest expressions of who we are and what we might accomplish in this sweet world. Her use of poetry and story in talking about her work and art consistently uplift and inspire and her knowledge is deep-drink it up!

In her own words:

Heidi Rose Robbins has been a professional astrologer for over 15 years. In fact, she grew up learning the zodiac with her alphabet. She has a practical, sensitive (and inspiring) approach to astrology and has a thriving world-wide practice. She also offers powerful, transformative Radiant Life Retreats for women twice a year in Ojai, California. She is also the founder and driving force behind the Hello Love Experiment, a worldwide effort to encourage people to meet the world and one another, first and foremost, with love. It is her passion and commitment to speak of the depth of who we are and to grow into the next outrageous blossoming of our true selves. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their two children.

Connect with Heidi
Twitter
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Youtube

Your home on the web is Heidi Rose Robbins-Astrology for a Radiant Life-tell us about your business-the vision and the mission!

Astrology for a Radiant Life is dedicated to a fuller expression of our deepest Soul purpose and our heart’s unfolding. In my one-on-one practice, I love to help people identify their greatest gifts and encourage the fullest offering of those gifts. We address obstacles along the way, shed a few tears, laugh at our stubbornness and generally move towards our next concrete step in living more radiant lives.

You have so many wonderful offerings for your clients-one of the things you do that I really love are the Radiant Life retreats. So what does going on retreat with astrology look and feel like and where did the idea to work with clients in this way come from?

I’ve always loved the idea of EMBODIMENT– not just talking or thinking about something– but really living it. My education is in the expressive arts and my father is an astrologer. So, in a way, it was a no-brainer for these two worlds to intersect. But what happens when they do? I needed a way for people to come together and really investigate ON THEIR FEET what it means, for example, to be a Leo with Scorpio rising. How does that feel? What is possible with that combination?

Also, I’ve always loved poetry and sharing it aloud. I think of it as a heightened language that can pierce our hearts when the language of the day to day cannot reach. I love feeling how a poem lands in a group and opens up space for deeper truth-telling.

The retreats came out of a desire to teach in an experiential way and to feel the goodness and healing that can emerge when we gather with an intention of living our most radiant life as a gift for others.

One of the quotes on your site is…”I love the territory where the most VAST meets the most concrete.” I LOVE this and am nodding my head, yes! yes! Can you talk a little about how this territory informs your work and how astrology can help us explore that territory?

Well, this is the juicy stuff. How does the vastness of our heart meet the morning rush getting the kids ready for school? How does our soul purpose meeting the daily grind? How do the most heightened experiences of our lives breathe into our day to day tasks and imbue them with light and love? I love to LIVE in these questions.

I love to practice feeling my own closure, my own self-imposed confinement and then remembering the BILLIONS of others on the planet who are each wrestling their way into the light. Every time I feel sad or heavy or creaky or cranky, I try to take one breath into something much larger than myself. I try to remember the love of the sky or the breath of a valley.

One of the reasons I love poetry so much is I think it is a VAST language and yet can touch us at the most immediate level.

The feeling I get from much of your work is that you fuse your astrology skills with self-improvement, development, and empowerment. Can you talk about how astrology helps us with these goals?

Astrology is a tool to help us see who we truly are. It gives us a glimpse of a QUALITY that we can embody that could be a gift for all. I like to think of myself as an 80-year-old woman and I like to imagine a young person coming to sit with me in silence for a time. And I like to imagine the GIFT that I might embody to such an extent that that young person couldn’t help but leave imbued with that quality.

Astrology is deeply inspiring because it reminds us of who we can become. It is the LANGUAGE of becoming.

If you could give one piece of wisdom to my readers today, what would it be?

Just for one moment today…

Let your heart be drawn to something or someone beautiful. Breathe in that beauty. Just for one minute. Breathe in that beauty.

And then too…just for one moment today,

Bless someone. Let your whole heart usher forth goodness and inspiration for another. Send a stream of silent blessing.

Life begins to vibrate with a kind of sweetness and peace when we manage to do those two things daily.

Big love to you all!

magic, miracles: receive my lunar letters

ARRIVING on full moons each month.

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Many Branches–Getting Courageous with Kate

Learning and Community

ear Miracles: I am so delighted to present the first installment in an ongoing series, Many Branches. Many Branches is a monthly guest post written by some of the brightest folks I know. They may or may not work in the world of Sacred Arts, but they always have wisdom and insight that applies to all of us!

Getting Kate Courageous from Bri Saussy on Vimeo.

For the first Many Branches profile I sat down with the remarkable Kate Courageous from Your Courageous Life.

We riffed on why fear can be a great teacher, how reality is limited (and limiting), and the good, bad, and ugly sides of manifestation among other things. I hope you enjoy it and I hope you learn something!

magic, miracles: receive my lunar letters

ARRIVING on full moons each month.

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Love and Prayer

Prayer and Blessing

ear Miracles,
We have all experienced them. Those days. Those crappy days where almost as soon as you wake up you know, you just know, that it’s going to be a rough one. You stub your toe on the way to the bathroom. The bowl of cheerios tips over — after you had added in the milk of course. You open your inbox to a cruel client complaint. The bank account is not where it should be, coffee scorches your freshly pressed white shirt, your cell phone is low on batteries, you are low on batteries, and your supervisor springs a last minute mandatory after work meeting and so you have to call your mom and ask her to pick up the kids from school…again.

Yup. Those days where nothing goes right and the only law that seems to hold is Murphy’s. Or maybe it is more subtle. Maybe sales this month haven’t been where they should be and you are feeling…pinched, pale, listless, desperate, and cheap all at the same time And you catch yourself in the mirror, stepping into the shower, walking in the front door thinking…why me? Why now? Why can’t it be easier? Why the crappy luck/day/week/year/life?

There is a magic formula to make moments like this disappear in the proverbial poof! I am going to give it to you…are you ready?

Stand In Love and Start with Prayer.

Make this your priority. When we stand in love we stop the blame game. When we stand in love we press pause on the inner conflict of the hour. When we stand in love we stop asking what can I GET and we start considering what we can GIVE. Standing in love allows us to possess, for a moment, the aerial bird’s eye view. In this way of seeing our problems are not insignificant but they are put into their proper context — and they almost always appear much smaller than what we initially thought.

And then there is prayer. Five minutes. Thirty minutes. Om Shanti Om. The Shema. Lord hear our prayer. We all come from the Goddess. Silence. Or one of my personal faves — told to me by a doctor whose good friend was diagnosed with terminal cancer…Dear God, what the hell? Don’t wait until it is the right time/vibe/moment because if you do you will wait forever. Most mornings at my house involve a cup of coffee on the swing, keeping one eye on the kiddo and one eye on the sky as I sing out my prayers and praise — it doesn’t look “spiritual” but that does not matter. I can tell you with 100% assurance that the days I pray are better, brighter, and flow with more grace than the days I don’t. Is everything perfect on those days? Hardly. Does it make a difference? Oh yes.

Prayer is an offering. You lay yourself out, warts and all, before your understanding/vision of the divine. You step into time out of time, into a numinous space where wholeness and holiness become one.

Prayer is a habit. You have to do it repeatedly, just like a sitting meditation. Some days you will feel it move through you enlightening and enlivening your being and other days it will feel like rote words falling from your lips. Get up the next day and do it again. Praying gives you a discreet opportunity to whisper or heap blessings onto those you love, those you are related to, your friends, and yes, even perfect strangers. Blessings sent equal blessings received. Prayer inspires generosity. It takes us out of our ego selves for a moment and reminds us that we are connected, dependent, divine, so very small, and so very full of life. It re-acquaints us with all that we do have, possess, can do and points out that others would give anything to walk in our shoes. It encourages us to be generous with others, and you know what happens then? We are generous with ourselves and those around us, those we love. Art helps! There are many beautiful images that you can focus on to help yourself get into a prayerful state of mind. The orthodox understanding of an icon is a sacred image which can create a window or a doorway to the divine — so allow yourself to consider what images do that for you.

Don’t know how to start? Sit quietly. Sway to your own heart beat, or stand and dance before the Lord like King David. Circle with three friends or let your cat sleep on your lap while you stroke her head. Pray out loud, quietly, or sit in silence. There is no wrong way to pray.

magic, miracles: receive my lunar letters

ARRIVING on full moons each month.

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Tarot

Scars are Sacred

Foundations

dore_donkey4 — This is an illustration by Gustave Dore for the fairy tale Donkeyskin — a wonderful tale about the sacredness of scars.

ear Miracles: I was talking with a dear one this weekend about issues — you know, mom issues, dad issues, high school issues, personality issues — all of the difficulties that the self-help industry encourages us to address, all of the problems we carry around while promising ourselves that we are going to deal with them and heal at some vague point in the future.

And then a thought occurred to me, as it would anyone who cares to look into it. What if we are really okay, just as we are? Perfect in our imperfections, and beautiful in whatever brokenness we carry?

I know it might sound too easy. There’s likely a bumper sticker somewhere that says something to this effect. I don’t mean that we don’t, all of us, have things to work on — of course we do. But what I do mean is that the standards of measurement for what is and is not normal or acceptable might be missing the mark. What are the origins of those standards? Are they not, for the most part, developed by clinicians and in clinical settings, and then adapted for easy consumption by mass markets?

Anyone who has spent some quality time in a clinic can tell you that the conditions there – and the systems developed under these conditions – do not fit with and account for our actual experience in every day life, not to mention our inner worlds. Not by a long shot. There are indeed certain solutions or treatments that can and should help remedy certain serious psychological ailments. Yet for the rest of us – we should wonder why we accept their derivative products ‘hook, line and sinker’ as the ‘go-to’ solution to our general life problems.

I see that many of us carry around a sense of all the things we are not, can’t do, or have not accomplished — our cultural thinking has reached a point where too many of us feel irredeemable and would not know where to look for redemption or reconciliation even if they were concepts we accepted. Even though a lot of lip-service is paid to it, we do not really focus on what our unique talents, abilities, dreams, pleasures, and joys really are. Instead we engage in the never-ending cycle of self improvement and self-depredation.

Now, I definitely possess a can-do attitude, and I am a problem solver by nature and affinity. I don’t think that there is enlightenment to be found in chosen or created suffering. In short I do not advocate anyone staying in a place of victim-hood or reveling in the wounds that we all of us have experienced. But I also suggest we be honest and kinder to ourselves. We are all flawed, all scarred.

Flaws are interesting. They are salt in the proverbial stew. They create breadth and depth where before there was narrow shallowness. Scars – those points of maximum vulnerability in body and memory – become the toughest most essential and irreducible parts of ourselves. They can become ornaments that express the energy of who we are, or where we have been. This is why it seems to me that scars are sacred – they point to or signify our essential nature, mark us out as one, unique and whole being.

What would happen to us if we stopped trying to find a quick fix and improve ourselves according to the artificial categories and plans set forth by clinicians and their derivative practitioners in the consumer industry? We shall always aspire and strive to become better and live more whole and more meaningful lives. But what would that look like without ten step plans? Would we actually start playing more? Stepping off the track, would we start enjoying life right now a little more, just as it is?

magic, miracles: receive my lunar letters

ARRIVING on full moons each month.

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Tarot

Make Space to Shine

Prayer and Blessing

ear Miracles: Happy New Year. I DO have a New Year’s Eve wish for you all… Make space to shine. I have heard a lot of intriguing ideas this New Years: there are the resolutions, anti-resolutions, and rituals floating out there in the ether to help you ring in 2012. And though I am a bit late in on the game, when I sat down and journaled and thought about what word or practice could be my mantra for 2012 I drew a blank.

It could be because my family was rocked with the news that late on 12/31 my paternal grandfather, fondly known as grandpa, passed away–ending a year in which we lost: a close family friend, aunt, grandmother, grandfather, and other grandfather. At the same time I was blessed with the most amazing child ever, my sister moved back home, my husband and I bought a house and turned it into a home, and business exploded (in a really good way). Gain. Loss. Life, death, and life again. Para Vida! To life! So much has happened in 2011 and I realized that before launching into 2012 I needed to recapitulate what 2011 meant for me. For me the phrase for 2011 was: be grateful.

Grateful for food brought to me for the first week after giving birth, for all of the help from all of the quarters so that I could continue my work and not simply survive but thrive. Be grateful that I had these amazing people in my life, that I got to speak with them, kiss them, laugh with them, and love them for as many years as I did. Grateful to my family that sees me through each and every day, to my husband who stands by my side as the most solid and loving support ever. Grateful to girlfriends who call me and leave me long, winding, love-filled giggly voicemails, or emails that say “I’ve had enough! I’m coming to see you and we are drinking margaritas!” Grateful to teachers, mentors, and creatives who inspire and intrigue. To advisors that teach me to craft my work and to allow it to craft me, to clients that teach me to give, give, give, and when you think you are tapped out give some more, give better, give brighter.

I am grateful. Thank you-each and every one of you.

And as I finished those thoughts I made ready to enter into 2012 with this one: make space to shine. It came to me, as so many thoughts do, in yoga class. I showed up with my mat and a baggy top because let me tell you–it has been awhile–and went into the first asana, creaking, bending, popping. Stayed there in the pose, stretching, breathing, sweating, and then finally-back to center. And what did I feel? Space…a little bit more space, a little bit more room for those tired and cramped muscles. And filling that space was light…whirling, swirling, hot energy that shouted with jubilant affirmation-I am here! I am a leg! I can walk and run, and hold a child on me, and twine myself around my beloved. I can do all of these things! Look just look! And so it hit me that my mantra for 2012 is: make space to shine.

For me this means:

not overbooking myself and giving each client I encounter PLENTY of room.

Creating routines that sustain me *and* my business and ditching anything that is “for the business” without taking my needs into account (read: regularly scheduled yoga classes are a GO!)

Forging alliances with friends/family members/and like-minded businesses that nourish me and my work.

Carving out time, like on the calendar, for finishing up some of the projects that have been simmering on the back burner and making room for new opportunities that send a tingle up my spine!

And in case you are interested, I started the process off really practically by cleaning out my closet and all of my clothes drawers–the difference is HUGE.

So…what resolutions, words, or practices are you bringing into 2012?

magic, miracles: receive my lunar letters

ARRIVING on full moons each month.

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Tarot