by Marjorie Baker Price, RN, Psychiatric Nurse Clinician Level III, Certified Hypnotherapist, Reiki Master, Certified Medium, Shamanic Healer, founder of Centering Tools
We live in breakthrough times that I believe push us more and more to return to deeper levels of awareness to uncover and recover our inner authentic selves – and take creative charge of restoring and extending self-care, empowerment and development. I would invite you to consider all these words as defining holistic health.
We are never satisfied – nor should we be – with ourselves and our lives. This fact is not meant to push us into self-criticism. It is meant to more greatly and freely align us with an unfolding, unknown, expanding present – and challenge and invite us to newly create and further expand our capacity to become greater.
In these ways we further support the greater good without exception – especially by more allowing and better providing for ourselves. We become more responsible and freer, more trusting of ourselves and more willing to share from a place of greater detachment and astute observation to more clearly choose what feels right for us in present moments.
These are new philosophies that form the foundation for holistic health and healing. Here are 4 key ways to restore and create this foundation:
- Accept yourself as you are.
- Write your creative, imaginative sense of this as a journaling exercise.
- Settle back into a deeper reflective state for a few minutes, close your eyes and imagine you can contact your authentic self – and ask that Self to show you who you really are. Record and draw your impressions!
2. Ground yourself in a nature bath
Spend an hour in the woods. Sit several times, wander, hike – make sure you hug a few trees longer than 10 seconds – sketch, take some pictures, record your impressions and any unfolding insights.
Take another hour and sit comfortably close to a large body of
water. See how you can tune in to the rhythm of the waves. Then gradually sense your own rhythms as a state of flow and play with how you can merge your rhythms – your breath with your sense of the flow of the water – and see if you can be in that focus for at least 15 minutes. Imagine you both give yourself away to the body of water and the body of water envelops and becomes your renewed, open, free sense of yourself!
3. Imagine for 10 minutes, closing your eyes and settling into a comfortable relaxed position – that you are infinite – endlessly flowing and open to receive all that can produce central wellbeing in many, many new ways. Afterwards under the title “I am open to receive … ” list your ideas.
- Once a day, read your list out loud for a month. After each idea write a simple plan as an experiment to carry out every day for a week, and record your observations as results. At the end of the month decide what makes sense to you to carry out as daily self-care – and incorporate!
4. Spend an hour uninterrupted in a place that feels safe, peaceful and nurturing for you, very honestly reflecting on what you feel challenged to forgive.
List all of these under 2 separate titles:
- What I haven’t forgiven involving others and life
- What I haven’t forgiven in myself
- Spend 15-30 minutes imagining yourself in the future somehow forgiving all that you’ve listed, one at a time
- Journal for 5-15 minutes focusing on what happened
Know you are so worthy of healing, health and opportunity! We have, through these recommended practices, extended recovering and regenerating holistic health practices into profound personal growth and recovery of self-love.