Hello Friends, my December wish to you is simple:

May Peace prevail, Love conquer, Tranquility and Success follow, and Unity and Compassion for Mankind bloom and spread like wildflowers all over the world!

Namaste!

Please enjoy the articles below:

How Shifting Your Energy Can Transform Your Life

By Parita Shah, Reiki Practitioner and Energy Healer

While reframing your thoughts and thinking more positively helps with negative thoughts and feelings, coupled with energy healing you can get to the root of your thought patterns, safely and gently release them, and imprint positivity. Here’s how.

If you were ever inspired by The Secret or stumbled upon an Abraham Hicks video, you know that your thoughts create your reality. What you think, leads to your feelings, habits, and reality. You may also realize that reframing your thoughts, and simply thinking positive is incredibly challenging. It is also an ineffective way of manifesting when done by itself. True reconditioning comes from shifting your energy.

What Is Energy Healing?

The human body is a complete energy system, and any imbalance in the body would create an obstruction in the flow of energy, which can result in illness or negative thoughts and feelings. Energy healing is a method to ensure that the energy flow within your body moves unobstructed. Energy healing modalities also take you to the root of your thought pattern, help you safely and gently release it, and imprint positivity. This process creates healing on the physical and spiritual layers as well as the mental and emotional ones.

Here are five reasons why the key to changing your thoughts is shifting your energy field.

1. The Building Block for Your Thoughts Is Energy

Every notion and belief that you’ve ever held onto is stored as energy in your chakras. Everything that you have experienced, whether you processed it or not, is recorded in the auric field.

By balancing the chakras, releasing stagnant energy, and integrating life-force back into the subtle body, you give yourself new information to base new perspectives with. While repeating affirmations is a part of that new conditioning, energy healing modalities such as Reiki, Integrated Energy Therapy, or Psych-K can support manifestation by connecting to your chakras, subconscious, and cellular memory.

2. Thinking Positively About Someone Won’t Heal the Karmic Tie

People can unconsciously create energetic cords of attachment that drain your energy. As long as the cord is attached to you, you aren’t fully in your power.

If you can’t stop thinking about someone, feeling depleted, or simply feeling easily triggered in the presence of someone, consider practicing a cord-cutting meditation for at least 21 days. Cord-cutting is a practice in which you call back all of your power through time and space, and release any energy that isn’t yours.

Once you try it, notice if your energy field strengthens. Observe how the people who once triggered you cannot penetrate your peace. While reframing your perspective about this person can help you develop emotional intelligence, energy healing compliments this transformation by tending to the physical, emotional, and spiritual bodies.

 

3. Energy Healing Takes the Pressure Off of You and Calls in a Higher Power

Energy healing is based on the idea that there is Divinity within you that brings everyone together. Divinity supports you in your path and guides you to exactly what you need.

In crystal healing, you call in the energy of Mother Earth. In Reiki, you call upon your guides, teachers, and ancestors. Let go of the need to rely on your own strength. Take the pressure off of yourself to manifest your dreams and desires and tap into a higher power.

4. Energy Healing Takes You to the Root of the Issue

Perhaps you’re trying to feel more supported by your loved ones, but you’re ruminating beliefs such as “I’m not lovable” or “I’m not worthy of their time and money.” Some reflection can surface whether the idea stemmed from an experience such as the time your loved ones accidentally lost you at the mall or the time they chose their job over your soccer game.

Energy healing transports you to the time when you first picked up on a limiting idea and uncovers societal and cultural programming, ancestral trauma, or past life trauma. From there, you acknowledge how that mindset no longer fits your needs. Awareness of the experiences and memories that snowballed your limiting ideas is essential to transforming your thoughts. If you’re working through challenging thoughts, energy healing techniques such as hypnosis or Reiki can reveal the true source of suffering. While affirmations and journaling exercises help you to witness your shadow and reprogram the conscious mind, they can be coupled with energy healing modalities to connect you with deeper layers of your consciousness.

5. Elevated Frequencies Keep You Aligned

When you are operating on a lower frequency due to old perspectives or disturbing experiences, it’s difficult for you to think positively, release the past, and feel empowered. You then manifest more people and situations from that lower frequency.

Through energy healing modalities, you can break the energetic patterns that have been holding you back. Energy healers repair tears, seal leaks in the aura, and fill the aura with life-force. As your frequency is raised, reaching for more positive thoughts and belief systems becomes easier. You can become centered in your own energy field, rather than other people, places, and events. With that, you feel more creative, inspired, and aware.

If you’ve been battling self-sabotaging thoughts, you may have started an affirmation journal, talk therapy, or simply committed to thinking positive thoughts. While these are incredibly commendable efforts that do work, consider supplementing your practice with an energy healing modality such as Reiki, Chakra Balancing, hypnosis, or Psych-K. Take the pressure off of yourself to cure your thought patterns and welcome in support.

3 Mindfulness Practices to Improve Decision-Making Skills

By Karson McGinley, Yoga Teacher and Life Coach

You may think that making a decision starts the moment you are faced with one, but it starts earlier. Practice mindfulness to ensure your mind is clear and still—then you’ll be ready for any decision that comes your way.

In his book, The Way of Zen, Alan Watts famously wrote, “Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.” Continuing to shake a jar full of water and dirt will only make the water cloudier; the only way to find clarity is by letting the jar sit and settle.

So, too, does the mind need stillness for clarity, yet people resist mindfulness and meditation in favor of engaging the mind. People spend a lot of time lost in thought and don’t realize the consequences it can have on good decision-making. What happens then, when the thinking gets you nowhere? What happens when the thoughts get so jumbled, you can hardly see your way out? When you are faced with an issue, what if you stop shaking your jar, and instead, try letting it settle? If you give it a chance, clarity will naturally present itself, offering solutions.

What Is Mindfulness?

How much of your day is spent in mindless rumination? Especially when you are making choices, weighing options, brainstorming, and trying to be productive, an overwhelmed mind can easily pull your focus away from the moment at hand. Mindfulness, however, calms and focuses the mind by asking for full awareness with all the senses.

Anytime you are actively engaged in the moment you are in, you are practicing mindfulness. By being aware of your feelings, thoughts, and physical sensations, you wrangle your mind toward a single-pointed focus. Mindfulness also integrates a sense of acceptance for your current situation—without resistance. So even if you recognize that your mind is spinning and you have not paid attention to what your coworker just said, in that moment you are actually demonstrating mindfulness. There is no judgment in this mental process; it is simply the art of paying attention. And you can use that mindfulness as a way of improving decision-making skills.

Any list of tips for decision-making should start with backing up a step to employ mindfulness before you make important choices.

What Does Mindfulness Do for Your Brain?

Many areas of the brain are affected by mindfulness training. Studies show that the part of the brain that governs emotional regulation is affected when that person practices mindfulness, suggesting that mindfulness can help you be more resilient when things get tough.

Mindfulness also affects the frontal lobe, which governs future planning. The prefrontal cortex actually gets thicker when practicing mindfulness, which means that effective decision-making gets easier and more efficient.

MRI scans also show that mindfulness appears to shrink the amygdala, which is the brain’s fight-or-flight center that governs stress and anxiety. Practicing mindfulness helps practitioners to be less reactive, less panicked, and less overwhelmed by having to make decisions and engage with the major factors in their life.

Generally speaking, mindfulness trains the brain to rely on the higher centers rather than the lower ones. Mindfulness helps people see a situation more clearly and less reactively. It strengthens your ability to respond with calm and alert presence, rather than with mindless haste.

Benefits of Mindfulness

The American Psychological Association defines mindfulness as “moment-to-moment awareness of one’s experience without judgment.” As you contemplate committing to a more dedicated practice, consider the following benefits.

People who practice mindfulness experience:

• Decreased reactivity
• Increased empathy
• Decreased stress and anxiety
• Greater compassion
• Decreased negativity and depression
• Improved memory
• Increased focus
• Increased satisfaction in their relationships

Though it might seem too good (and easy) to be true, simply by being aware of the here and now, you have the potential to impact from these profound effects.

Ready to try integrating a more mindful approach to your life and develop your decision-making process? Here are a few effective practices that can help you see through the cloudiness of mental overwhelm and improve your decision-making skills and learn how to best achieve your goals.

 

1. Five Senses Practice

This practice can be done anywhere, at any time. Simply stop what you are doing and dedicate five minutes to reset your energy.

• Begin by closing your eyes and taking a few deep breaths. Just breathing calms your nervous system tremendously, setting the stage for greater clarity and focus.
• Let the weight of your seat feel heavy and notice the texture of whatever it is you are touching. Notice any bodily sensations of your body parts connecting with external items (like the chair, your clothing, or your feet in your shoes), and also any internal sensations (like your heart beating, your muscles twitching, or your belly rumbling). Use your intuition and decide what is going on without judgment.
• Then, as you open your eyes, look around as if it were your first time in this space. If you are at your desk or in your living room, let your eyes scan your environment to orient yourself and notice where you are in space.
• Then, close your eyes again, and listen for 30–60 seconds. What do you hear? Inner sounds? Outer sounds? Are the sounds nearby or far away? Try to notice the sounds without judging or labeling them. Simply acknowledge them as a part of the moment you are living in right now.
• As you breathe through your nose, can you identify any smells? Can you feel the temperature of the air as it hits your nostrils? What about any tastes in your mouth? Just keep scanning your senses to help anchor you in the moment.

After about five minutes, check back in with your bodily sensations, and evaluate if you feel more grounded and clear.

2. Simple Walking Meditation

When your mind is stuck on a hamster wheel, try taking a short walk in the name of mindfulness. This walk is not about getting anywhere, it is about moving your body and being aware of the movement itself. You can walk inside or outside, but give yourself the time and space to go slowly.

• With your hands comfortably behind your back, patiently walk with your eyes cast downward.
• Step with the heel of your first foot, then shift the weight into the ball of your foot, and push off of your toes to the next step.
• Keep going for a few minutes, either in a straight line or in a circle.

In this simple process, you are rewiring your system to slow down, pace yourself, and embody the journey. You are shifting the flighty energy in your mind down into your body and your senses. This helps to clear your mind to make room for fresh, rational ideas.

3. Body Scan

To do a body scan, sit or lay down comfortably.

• Close your eyes, and starting from the tips of your toes, notice the sensation of each of your body parts.
• Move from the toes to the ankles, up your legs, and so on, until you reach the crown of your head with your awareness.

Where there is tension or pain, simply become aware. Where there is spaciousness and freedom, identify those factors too. Notice even if you can’t feel a specific area of your body—like your elbow, for example. By moving your mental focus to the different areas of your body, you not only root your attention out to the mind and into the body, but you also dissipate the stress that can accumulate in your mind when trying to make rational decisions. Be in your body, and you will notice your energy start to ground down. The more grounded you are, the more able you will be to develop a prime mental capacity.

The benefits of mindfulness increase the more you practice; however, any amount of mindfulness will still improve your life. To return to the muddy water analogy, the busier you are, the more “dirt” is in your water. Shaking the jar more (read: doing more) will only add to more cloudiness. Remember to let the jar settle regularly, and you will be able to see beyond the mud with clarity and focus.

Healthy Holiday Cookies

By SIDNEY FRY, MS, RD

Once you taste these gloriously nutty and just-sweet-enough holiday cookies, with their fluffy middles and golden-crisp edges, you’ll never go back to the original. Whole-wheat flour adds a layer of complexity that the bland, all-purpose version just can’t achieve; the wheatiness of the whole-grain actually enhances the flavor of the butter, vanilla, and oven-toasted goodness. Unlike classic royal icing, which starts with a pound of powdered sugar, we use just half a cup and thicken it with a dollop of Greek yogurt. Looking for festive red and green colors without the chemicals? Try naturally colored sparkling sugars (such as those from India Tree), which use colorants derived from edible plants.

Ingredients

COOKIES:

• 9 ounces whole-wheat flour (about 2 cups)
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
• 10 tablespoon butter, softened
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1 ounce 1/3-less-fat cream cheese, softened
• 1 large egg

• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

ICING:

• 1/2 cup powdered sugar
• 2 tablespoons plain 2% reduced-fat Greek yogurt
• 1/4 teaspoon grated lemon rind

• Naturally colored sparkling sugar (optional)

HOW TO MAKE IT

Step 1

To prepare cookies, weigh or lightly spoon flour into dry measuring cups; level with a knife. Whisk together flour, salt, and baking powder in a medium bowl. Beat butter, granulated sugar, and cream cheese in a large bowl with an electric mixer on high speed until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add egg; beat until well blended. Add vanilla; beat until blended. Reduce mixer speed to low. Gradually add flour mixture to butter mixture; beat just until combined.

Step 2

Flatten dough into a 6-inch disk; wrap with plastic wrap. Chill 1 hour.

Step 3

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Step 4

Roll dough to 1/4-inch thickness on a lightly floured surface. Cut out 32 cookies, using a 2- or 3-inch cutter, rerolling scraps as necessary. Place cookies 1 inch apart on baking sheets lined with parchment paper. Bake 12 minutes or until lightly browned around edges. Cool.

Step 5

To prepare icing, whisk together powdered sugar, yogurt, and rind; drizzle over cookies. Sprinkle with sparkling sugar, if desired. Let stand on a wire rack until icing is set, about 15 minutes.