Oct 15 2012

World Menopause Day–Seriously…

October 18th, 2012 has been declared World Menopause Day by the International Menopause Society.  I must have been inspired to write about menopause from the cosmic group consciousness going on.

World CongressLast night I attended a fundraiser dinner for our local symphony. As often happens when women-of-a-certain age gather around a table, the subject of hot flashes and menopause came up. The conversation went something like this:

50-something woman–“These hot flashes are driving me crazy. Guess it’s just part of life now. My mother still has them and she’s in her 80’s.”

70-something woman–“Mine started when I was 45 and I’ve been having them ever since.”

There was a lot of nodding and commiseration as everyone seemed to simply accept the inevitable discomforts of feminine aging.  I wanted to yell, “You don’t have to take it! Menopause is a passage, not a curse. You can take charge of your health.”

Of course it was neither the time nor the place to get on my health-conscious soap box. That place would be here…

THE CHANGE

The Change doesn’t necessarily mean you turn into a Werewolf. Change can be a good thing, too. As the body shifts its chemistry, women need to focus on finding a new way to bring balance and harmony to their systems. Hot flashes, night sweats, insomnia, and weight gain do not need to be your Next Chapter.

When I turned about 50, I experienced a few classic menopausal symptoms. I believe my symptoms were less severe than most American women largely because I have been ingesting the Quinary Formula of Chinese Herbs from Sunrider International for about twenty years.  This formulation of over 50 herbs to balance the five basic systems of the body is the biggest bang for your buck for over-all health–in my opinion.

However, after one particularly powerful, nauseating midday hot flash, I hied myself over to my favorite Korean Herbalist/Health Food Store Owner, Lady M. She is a porcelein-skinned healer in La Habra, California. We did some muscle-testing with a row of female formulas and settled on one called Transitions from Pure Essence Labs.

Pure Essence Labs Transitions, 60 VegicapTransitions contains black cohash, dong quai and other herbs known to bring relief to menopausal symptoms. I stayed on the product for a couple of years and found it very beneficial. The hot flashes and increased appetite disappeared. There is no one-pill-fits-all, but there are many formulas to try. Working with a skilled diagnostition can help you find  the right product for you.

PROGESTERONE CONNECTION

What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About(TM): Menopause: The Breakthrough Book on Natural Progesterone (What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About...)Dr. John Lee wrote the now classic What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Menopause. He writes persuasively about how the estrogen-rich plastics and oil-based products in modern society are throwing our bodies out of balance. He touts progesterone as a way to restore balance. There are now many progesterone creams on the market. They are not all equal. Personally, the ones I tried made me too “hot,” until I started using the Young Living Essential Oil version.

progessence plusToday, Young Living has a new generation answer to the progesterone product in a serum called PROGESSENCE PLUS.  Information about this product can be found at:

Young Living PDF

Dr. Dan Purser FAQ on Progessence Plus

If you want to order a bottle, you can use my membership number–57763.

BE PRO-ACTIVE

The point is, if you are not functioning at optimum health–DO something about it. If you’re in hormone hell, educate yourself about what is happening to your body and then take action to alleviate your symptoms. You should be able to enjoy life at every stage. Take the misery out of menopause.

Celebrate World Menopause Day!

Dana Taylor

Reiki Therapist, Author of Ever-Flowing Streams

Oct 1 2012

Explaining Healing Energy

Last week my client, Joan, ask me, “How do I explain what you do? It looks like all you do is stand there and wave your hands over me.” She’s been trying to tell her friends about her healing energy experience, but it’s a challenge to describe.

Consider electricity. We were all taught that Benjamin Franklin “discovered” electricity by flying a kite in a lightning storm. (Kite, rain, wind, a metal key.)  It took another hundred years for electricity to be harnessed for light bulbs, street cars, and cattle prods. Yet, the power was always there, untapped.

Take cell phones signals. Billions of frequencies are zooming through the atmosphere. All you need is a little hand-held device to pick up a unique signal. The amount of information that can be downloaded instantaneously is mind-boggling.

Healing energy is very similar. There are frequencies all around us—you just need to know how to receive them and utilize them. Humans are the receivers, instead of little hand-held devices. The healing facilitator becomes the conductor.

The one thing that has to be added into understanding healing energy beyond raw electricity and cell phone transmission is Intelligence. The healing energies carry information and appear to be connected to an Intelligence Source. That’s where the mystery begins and sometimes people get “freaked out.”

Dr. Eric Pearl, author of The Reconnection, admits that working with healing energy ultimately requires the response, “I don’t know how it works.” Yet, experience is proving time and again that healing energy does work.

For myself, it’s taken about thirty years of practice. Like playing the piano, you go from chopsticks to concertos if you practice. I believe we’re seeing more people being born with  evolved brains that can tap into these frequencies. Adam MacLeod, known as the DreamHealer was a healing child prodigy. Now he’s a modern scientist changing the healing landscape.

The books of Gregg Braden, (The Divine Matrix), tackle some of these questions and offer a whole new way to look at life on Planet Earth.

Healing energy? It’s everywhere—like intelligent electricity waiting to be turned on.

Sep 28 2012

From the Reiki Room

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a new blog. My day-to-day life has gotten so interesting, I haven’t had time to write about it. The first major change is being suddenly cast in the role of President of the La Mirada Symphony Association. That’s a whole new learning curve, but is a good fit for someone who appreciates the fine arts and is a natural schmoozer such as myself.

Secondly,  turning my spare bedroom into a Reiki Room became my personal Field of Dreams — “build it and they will come.” Word-of-mouth has brought new people into my life and onto my Reiki table.

Take Joan, for instance.

SESSION ONE: She called me saying she’d heard I was an “awesome healer,” which made me uncomfortable. Jesus was an “awesome healer,” I’m just a healing facilitator, allowing myself to be a conduit for the cosmic energies. At any rate, Joan came over and we hit it off immediately. She is a bright lawyer, trained with an analytical mind and gifted with intellectual curiosity.

I told her not to tell me why she was coming for a treatment. It’s easier to get into the healing mode without my mind having preconceived ideas of what to expect. In that first session, her neck and shoulder area buzzed the strongest under my hands. I felt led to apply the area with the Young Living Essential Oil blend, Valor (sometimes called a chiropractor in a bottle).

As I worked that area, Joan said, “Okay, I’m a believer.”

It turned out she was there primarily for the pain from a car accident that has returned. She was able to swivel her neck better after the treatment. Her neck seemed out of alignment and she followed up with a chiropractic treatment.

SESSION TWO: Her neck seemed much better. I moved around her body and suddenly felt intense cramping in my digestive tract. Joan had mentioned that for the past fifteen years she has suffered from extreme food reactions. She has become a vegan, eating mainly rice and vegetables, out of necessity, not because she’s a health-nut.

The session took on a life of its own as I worked and pulled on the energy patterns over her pelvic region. “Ow,” I said. “This hurts. Is this the way you live all the time?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, laughing a little. “I ate a piece of bread.”

“Bread makes you feel like this?” I knew my pains were just ghostly reflections of what she must experience. After fifteen years, it had become her “normal.” I worked the area a few more minutes and then sent her on her way thinking, “Well, that was interesting!”

The next day Joan sent me an email:

I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. I was going to call you, but I thought I wouldn’t be a “crazy patient”.  That digestion thing that you fixed…I’ve been living with that for over 15 years.  I am in shock because I went and ate sushi TWICE and nothing happened!  I ate salmon which usually sets me off. You have no idea how strange that is to me right now to feel fine.  My skin has cleared up considerably too, just in the past few days.  Normally if I had sushi, I would not feel good and I would get some really bad cystic acne that hurts for a week and then takes another couple of months to heal. I told some people at work who know of my issues and told them how I got healed.
 
Joan has been indulging in the joys of junk food for two weeks now.
I wonder what will happen next in the Reiki Room? I’ll keep you posted!
Dana Taylor
                                                                               ********
For more information on Reiki and healing energy, read EVER-FLOWING STREAMS
Sep 5 2012

Messages from The Ancient Ones by Stacey Stephens

Messages From The Ancient Ones: Year One (Messages From The Ancient Ones - Spirituality, Consciousness, Self Help & Personal Growth (Akin to: Esther Hicks & Eckhart Tolle)If you’re a fan of the Abraham/Esther Hicks channeled books, you might enjoy Messages from the Ancient Ones by Stacey Stephens. Well organized by topics such as Compassion, Empowerment, Relationships, Integrity, etc., the ideas presented are upbeat and almost uptopian. If everyone took the advice to live by the ideals in this book, it would be a better place indeed.

I used the chapters as a daily devotional in the mornings. There are pictures to set the tone for each chapter, which is a creative way to utilize the new freedoms of digital publishing. The messages are reminiscent of A Course in Miracles talking about ego-based thinking and urging readers to breakthrough to an era of Divinity.

This book is part of the New Thought movement of spirituality. For those of us well-versed in this type of philosophy, it doesn’t break new ground. However, it is a good presentation of the ideas and presents a hopeful image of what the human experience can be.

Dana Taylor

Aug 31 2012

Cancer and Reiki

1st Place Spirituality & Religion–E Festival of Books Awards 2012

The Supernal Friends have found themselves surrounded by cancer patients over the past months. Cancer used to be a disease of “old” people. Today it cuts a swath across all age groups. It touches everyone. You probably know several people dealing with it.

As an energy worker, I sometimes feel overwhelmed when faced with these extremes of thinking:

  • Going “all natural”—Sometimes people walk completely away from medical doctors and begin a desperate search for health with supplements, strange diets, gurus, and begging me to send them healing energy.
  • Last resort—After all the surgeries, chemo and radiation have been tried, then people are looking for a miracle worker and I get a call.

In my experience, neither one of these scenarios are optimum for healing. Reiki and most natural methods of dealing with a health crisis are best utilized for accelerating healing and establishing better lifestyles. They work in conjunction with an overall game plan for better health.

Best Case Scenario

I’ve been working woman who has had breast cancer and has recently finished up all the surgery, chemo and radiation treatments.  Her prognosis is good, but she has been seeking a boost back to wellness. She had a wound that would not heal for months. After one Reiki treatment, there was enough improvement, her doctor told her, “I don’t know what you’ve done, but keep doing it.”

Reiki energy treatments are ideal in this situation. After cancer treatments, the body is impaired and out of balance. It is full of toxicity. The patient feels exhausted all the time. Reiki serves as an infusion of healing energy. It draws on the Ever-Flowing Streams of light and color and envelopes the patient in these unseen, but very real energies.

As a Reiki therapist, I can “read” a body.  As my hands travel over the head, trunk, arms & legs, I literally feel the hot spots. I know where there are problems. Like little Geiger Counters, my palms buzz over trouble areas.  Often, I’ll get an image of an organ in my mind’s eye and work the area as I feel led.  This is an intuitive way of tapping into information available in the patient’s energy field.

Sometimes I draw out the blockages to improve the energy flow.  Occasionally I lay my hands on the area and concentrate on sending energy into the person. It’s certainly not an exact science, but then neither is traditional medicine.

A Reiki therapist works on the whole person. Even with a repeating client, each session can be vastly different. Emotions may be more at issue one week and I’ll suddenly “know” about a situation that needs to be addressed. Mind and body are so intertwined.

Cancer is so much more than a physical disease. It is a huge emotional experience. It’s a catastrophic event.  People go from being themselves to being a Cancer Patient.

Energy treatments go through all the layers of imbalance and distress, both physical and mental to help people get to a better place.

Despite the pain of hearing about a teenager struck down by leukemia or the dear friend with a deadly tumor, my Reiki work is my way of making a positive difference. A half hour on my Reiki table is an oasis of peace and healing for my clients. That is their time to rest in the Ever-Flowing Streams. Sometimes they cry; occasionally they sleep; their pain is usually alleviated.

Healing is a process. Reiki helps.

Aug 20 2012

Visionary Fiction Leader, Jacob Nordby

The Divine Arsonist: A Tale of AwakeningOne of the more interesting, creative genres emerging in the writing world is being labeled “Visionary Fiction.” Jacob Nordby is part of the vanguard of authors presenting New Thought philosophy in the fictional fashion.  The Divine Arsonist : A Tale of Awakening is a sort of modern Pilgram’s Progress, featuring an American business man, Jacob, and his spiritual journey.

Jacob is a hard-driving type-A personality, reaching for the American Dream. He has it all–the growing business, the pretty wife, two great kids, a few extra pounds, and a growing sense of dissatisfaction. Enter Lucius, a mysterious messenger, challenging Jacob to meet him next week at his Idaho cabin. His life will be irrevocably changed. The choice is his.

Driven by inner guidance and a need to find Who You Really Are, Jacob takes the challenge. What unfolds is a mystical journey that strips him bare, literally and figuratively. His metaphysical experiences are the stuff dreams are made of. The guides he meets all have lessons to teach. He emerges from the harrowing, sometimes blissful, experience transformed.

Jacob Nordby is a gifted writer. He tackles difficult scenes–dream sequences, pedantic conversations, revelations–with a deft touch. He is especially adroit  at description. He uses fresh analogies. The hills of Idaho come alive. Astral projection, doomsday visions, and other-worldly adventures are easily imagined. Even though much of the journey is supernatural, his main character remains very human.

The reader senses the real story is about to unfold as the new Jacob re-enters society with a greater awareness of what is really important in life. What sort of impact will the enlightened Jacob have on the people and planet? Perhaps, in a few years another installment of Jacob’s life will make for fascinating reading.

As value systems change and global awareness increases in the area of spirituality without religion, books like The Divine Arsonist will influence the world, one reader at a time. If there is hope for the world, it is in young people with vision, like Jacob Nordby.

Read more about Jacob Nordby at Your Awakened Self.

___________________________________________

 1st Place Winner E-Festival of Words

Religion & Spiritualitiy