Member Blog – BalAnce Well-Being Centre Inc.

Medicine Drum Ceremony By Rochelle McFarlane

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WE are all Energetic Beings no matter what we look like on the outside.
There’s a common thread all beings have, it’s the first sound we heard within our Mother’s Womb; her heart beat. Drumming takes us back to this sound so we can unlock pieces of our innate healing abilities. It has been used all around the world, by many cultures. Creating with your own hands something that you can use for many health related benefits. The sound can support coordination in the body and soothe the nervous system.

Attending a medicine drum ceremony can help one to ground into the flow of it all and witness how everything is connected no matter our individual experiences.
This ceremony is a personal self based care class that supports the process to create your own Elk Hide hand drum. Something magical happens when we make our own drum, it can be a catalyst for our healing journey.

We connect to where death was and where rebirth can take place within the hide itself and how this relates to our whole-beingness.

As we lace the hide onto the frame is this a lesson of how we need tension in our life in order to fully connect our experiences. Tension can help us grow just like it gives the hide life around to make sounds for our healing path.

The drum honours the water element in the quadrant of the West inside the medicine wheel. This is the space where we can witness our emotions, water in the body, the shadow self, connect to the physical body, where endings and death happen.

Gathering with others to birth their sacred medicine drum is such an honour to nurture. We understand what it feels like to be called to create this healing tool. Please reach out to schedule your ceremony.

Great medicine for clearing and creating with the Elk happens. This is helping us to slow down, feel, release and relax knowing we are entering into the present with fresh eyes and clarity for what we are doing. We can connect to our authentic self and vision. The drum shows us the cycle of life itself, this ceremony is about healing all the layers within our self. The drum will show us things we have yet to see.

This process is magical and nourishing beyond any other ceremony, for our drums will lead us to more each time we play them. Creating our own songs and rythms is powerful!

Thinking Into Results For Leaders by Tara Pilling

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Thinking Into Results For Leaders

The ability to feel is often seen as a burden combined with a blessing.

It is not only one of the essential mediums that you use to navigate life and the world, it is the point where your greatest joys begin and your deepest sorrows take root.

Heartache and happiness exist on different ends of the same spectrum of feeling. How you react to what you feel is often your greatest source of dissatisfaction and stress.

More so, your past and present manifest themselves through your ability to feel. Your conditioning is not just something that is intellectual, it is also experienced through the sensations you feel in your body.

The Time is Now by Mimi Thorp

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When taking my first BodyTalk class, I happened to be brought to Loesje Jacob’s magical place in Armstrong: Eagle’s Eye Ranch

When observing one mind-blowing session after another in her BodyTalk for Humans and Animals classes, it quickly dawned on me that while the protocols and procedures of BodyTalk were fascinating and chock full of incredible knowledge, something else kept drawing me in and catching my attention: the involvement of the animals in each process. The more I observed, the more I saw and the more I wanted to see.

While forever grateful for the solid foundation the BodyTalk system gave me in my praxis, it’s the heart-based connection with the animals and process of neutral observation that Loesje’s Linking Awareness Journey offers that sets my heart on fire.

I would find any chance and excuse I could to join classes not just in Armstrong but all the way in Indonesia, as I never tired of observing this pure magic that takes place when we sit in stillness, deeply connected to our own hearts and in zero point neutrality with the animals and all of nature.

From horses knowing exactly the site of an injury, over elephants connecting with humans that have a similar trauma or story, to cicadas changing their song as the frequency of our process suddenly changes noticeably… the list of examples is infinite.

What may seem like a vast amount of coincidences at the beginning, it so quickly becomes clear are neverending observable synchronicities orchestrated by falling into alignment with the universe around us. And the more you observe these synchronicities, the more they are happening all around you. ALL THE TIME!

“Key’s Keys” Tips and Tools for Modern Consciousness – Keyla Sereen Ohs

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Thank you for reading this little heart nugget of mine, I really appreciate it, and you.

This newsletter was created to share the things I am personally using to assist me on my own spiritual path. I share them with you in hopes they will have the same profound effect on your life as they have on mine. May you find solace in them and may they be received with the loving support I hold for you always, in All Ways.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Holotropic Breathwork Sessions

Please join us for an evening of transformational breathwork to connect your mind, body, and spirit. These events consist of 3 parts:
1) intention setting
2) breathwork (80 min)
3) Reflection/ sharing in sacred circle
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Sitting in the Fire of Attachment By Bonita Kay Summers

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From the moment we are born, we suffer from attachment. We are born into hunger and a yearning for a comforting touch. As infants, we cry when we feel discomfort, helpless and hoping someone will come to our rescue. As toddlers, we wail or have tantrums when things aren’t going our way, or we’re just too tired and overwhelmed to process what’s happening around us.

This basic instinct to claw toward our comfort zone informs our adult experiences as well. We feel anger, resentment, fear and grief when we experience loss, disappointment, or deprivation of the things we desire or feel we need.

When we are suffering, it seems counterintuitive to sit still and sink more deeply into those uncomfortable feelings, yet therein we find the crucible that contains the fire to transform our angst into acceptance and ultimate joy.

In recent years, we in modern society have experienced deprivation unlike any we had known before, and at a time when many of us had become used to everything we needed being on tap. We live in a world of instant gratification. Food can be prepared with the push of a button, entertainment and connection with others sit in the palm of our hands, and, until recently, travel and the acquirement of goods operated with relative ease and speed.

Stay Positive, Stay Asleep By Bonita Kay Summers

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As you’re scrolling through your social media, how often do you come across profiles full of quotes on staying positive? There can be the temptation to “keep our head above water and paddle like mad” rather than allowing ourselves to feel the full extent of our emotional range. Thinking that being positive is a better choice can give us the idea that it’s somehow a failing if we don’t eschew the uncomfortable emotions for staying in our “happy place”. Happiness and optimism have their place in our lives, but we lose a great deal of our self-awareness if we exercise too much control over our emotions, preferring one feeling over another.

I often think about my 10-day stay at a Vipassana retreat in 2014, where we were encouraged to feel everything with “equanimity”. That meant accepting ALL the feelings, including rage, grief, fear, boredom, and every little spinal ache and muscle pain from sitting for prolonged periods while practicing Adhiṭṭhāna (determined sitting). This involved not moving a muscle while I observed the intense emotions that such stillness was bound to bring to the surface.

When movement does not disperse the energy, all kinds of feelings and sensations arise. The point is to not attach to the pleasant feelings or fight against the unpleasant ones, with the understanding that all suffering occurs as a result of attachment and aversion. When you can feel all your feelings with equanimity, you are free from the addiction to any particular feeling and the adverse reactions to uncomfortable ones.

According to vipassana, one cannot be addicted to a substance or behaviour, but the feeling that it gives us. In other words, if we cannot accept uncomfortable feelings, we will do whatever it takes to generate and cling to the feelings we want to have.

This is why I see “positive thinking” as merely another way of attaching to a particular type of feeling and suppressing the ones we’ve been conditioned not to tolerate. Eventually, we have to pull up the rug and look at what we’ve hidden underneath it due to whatever conditioning we received from early childhood (example, the grief suppressed from being shamed for crying).

The Hidden Price of Forcing Family Time with Your Teen by Aly Pain

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This is a critical issue and fine line to walk.

You know you have a limited number of days before your teen leaves home so you’re trying to maintain some family structure and quality time while you have it. You’ve read the studies showing the more connected teens are the less likely they are to participate in risky behaviours so family time is happening no matter how much huffing, puffing, and eye-rolling your teen does.

You’re lucky if you get ‘Hello’.

Your teen’s brain is growing new hardware and developing new software all the same time, necessary to become a successful, independent adult. This starts 2 key processes:

Aren’t you tired of waiting for work to get better? By Barri Harris

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Belittlement and beratement are not forms of motivation

When do we hit the tipping point that makes toxic workplaces obsolete?

For a while, it has felt like toxic cultures and toxic leadership would never improve. Until now. In the last few years, I’ve been
starting to feel a shift. People all over the globe are saying, “I won’t work like this anymore”. “I deserve better.” Workers everywhere
are taking positive action for better work and workplace environments.

When you fall sick, you are told that getting better takes time, but you have a role to play in your healing. You can’t just sit around
and wait to heal; sometimes, you need to take positive action to support your healing and hasten your recovery.

So, being miserable is going out of style by Tara Pilling

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Healing is a space that more people are entering because they are tired of carrying the weight of the past and are ready to unbind old conditioning that places limits on their happiness.  

People all over the world are actively finding ways to heal themselves in much greater numbers than in past generations.

  The work of letting go does not feel as mysterious as it used to, because therapists and meditation techniques can now clearly walk you through the process.  

We have much further to go in regard to accessibility, but it is undeniable that healing tools are now available to greater numbers of people.  

Why Do I Feel Like Crap? By Courtney Kafka

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As a Bowen Therapist I hear this a lot. Why do I feel like crap? Why am I in such pain? Why do I hurt so much
I can’t give you a definitive answer, but I can point you in the right direction.

There are several reasons for you feeling like crap.

Your nervous system is overwhelmed with stress! We are tied to our phones, computers, the radio, the news, work and life. If you aren’t turning these stimulus off and finding a calming, grounding activity to do the stress will just cause the same issues.
You don’t really sleep, and when you do its not very restful.
Your gut health isn’t very good which means you crave sugar and carbs, which in turn makes you feel worse.
Your inflamed which means puffiness, bloat and feeling like your clothes are too tight.
You have headaches everyday, feel like yuck and you just can’t seem to really breath. When you do try to breath deeply, things feel sticky. And why can’t you get rid of that darn cough?