In our bodies, in this moment, there live the seed impulses of the change and spiritual growth we seek, and to awaken them we must bring our awareness into the body, into the here and now.

--Pat Ogden 

Blessing Space by Madisyn Taylor 

We can bless each space we enter leaving a sweet energetic footprint behind.

Physical space acts like a sponge, absorbing the radiance of all who pass through it. And, more likely than not, the spaces we move through each day have seen many people come and go. We have no way of knowing whether the energy footprints left behind by those who preceded us will invigorate us or drain us. Yet we can control the energy footprint we leave behind for others. In blessing each space we enter, we orchestrate a subtle energy shift that affects not only our own experiences in that space but also the experiences of the individuals who will enter the space after us. While we may never see the effects our blessing has had, we can take comfort in the fact that we have provided grace for those that follow after us.

When you bless a room or an entire building, you leave a powerful message of love and light for all those who will come after you. Your blessings thus have myriad effects on the environments through which you pass. Old, stagnant energy is cleared, creating a vacuum into which fresh and invigorating energy can freely flow. The space is thus rendered harmonious and nourishing, and it becomes a hub from which positive feelings are transmitted. Intent is the key component of the blessings you leave in your physical wake. If your intent involves using your own consciousness as a tool for selflessly spreading grace, your blessings will never go awry. Whether you feel more comfortable performing a solo blessing or prefer to call upon your spirit guides for assistance, visualize each space you enter becoming free of toxins, chaos, and negativity as you speak your blessing. Then imagine the resultant emptiness being replaced by pure, healing white light and loving energy. Even a quick mindful thought of love can bless a space.

This type of blessing is cumulative and will grow each time you bestow it. Try blessing every home, business, and office you visit for an entire week and observing the effects of your goodwill. Your affirmative energy footprint will help brighten your day as you contemplate your blessing's future impact on your siblings in humanity and your environment.

If ever. If ever there were a time - a springtime, a sacred time- that my body is budding with YES, it is now. And a shyness unfurls as I write these words for though I've danced and acted and given birth and nursed and made love and tended and been tended, there is an insistent YES that can only presence itself now - a YES that strangely can only come as my body begins to unfurl its ailments, its secrets, its small complaints, its changes, its age. 

It's a YES that comes from a body that has been inhabited now for some good time...with goodness. It pays off. This loving. This desire to love and open and learn and unpeel and unfurl. The YES of my body is crying out these days in joy, in exultation, in wonder because some very old sheaths are falling away and some raw pink baby newness buried for years is investigating the world again.

It's a mystery really - how one day or through a series of weeks- there is an invitation, a willingness to change, to experiment, to slow down, to make love in the afternoon, to eat all things sweet, to watch Mad Men in the middle of the day, to sprawl on a Sunday... to fall in love again with a very simple life.

It's a mystery because it can actually happen amidst imperfection. That is, the sweetness, the YES doesn't mean I'm not still making lunches too early in the morning. It doesn't mean it wouldn't be wonderful if money were flowing just a bit more freely. It doesn't mean I don't creak or that I'm not gloomy at least once a day. It just means my body is willing to take it all in. I've begun to live in a big YES of a body that also has her preferences, her discriminations, her yearnings and her wants - but is willing to hold it all in a big goddess belly. It's a body that is willing to choose pleasure and not accomplishment every time, willing to sleep 12 hours without guilt. It's a body that should be walking in the french countryside on the way to drink wine and eat baguettes and fall in love again and again and again. But she's walking here, now, in Glendale, California with a french countryside inside her - with a smile for all imperfections, with a blazing curiosity for what's possible when she really just starts to allow herself not to run the show, but let the SHOW dance through her.

To read Heidi's other writings, visit her website at: http://heidirose.com/

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1. Give up your need to always be right. There are so many of us who can't stand the idea of being wrong - wanting to always be right - even at the risk of ending great relationships or causing a great deal of stress and pain, for us and for others. It's just not worth it. Whenever you feel the 'urgent' need to jump into a fight over who is right and who is wrong, ask yourself this question: "Would I rather be right, or would I rather be kind?" Wayne Dyer. What difference will that make? Is your ego really that big?

2. Give up your need for control. Be willing to give up your need to always control everything that happens to you and around you - situations, events, people, etc. Whether they are loved ones, coworkers, or just strangers you meet on the street - just allow them to be. Allow everything and everyone to be just as they are and you will see how much better will that make you feel.

"By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond winning." --Lao Tzu

3. Give up on blame. Give up on your need to blame others for what you have or don't have, for what you feel or don't feel. Stop giving your power away and start taking responsibility for your life. No more victim, just speak up and be what you know you can be.

4. Give up your self-defeating self-talk. Oh my. How many people are hurting themselves because of their negative, polluted and repetitive self-defeating mindset? Don't believe everything that your mind is telling you - especially if it's negative and self-defeating. You are better than that.

"The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive." 

5. Give up your limiting beliefs about what you can or cannot do, about what is possible or impossible. From now on, you are no longer going to allow your limiting beliefs to keep you stuck in the wrong place. Spread your wings and fly!

"A belief is not an idea held by the mind, it is an idea that holds the mind"

6. Give up complaining. Give up your constant need to complain about those many, many, many things - people, situations, events that make you unhappy, sad and depressed. Nobody can make you unhappy, no situation can make you sad or miserable unless you allow it to. It's not the situation that triggers those feelings in you, but how you choose to look at it. Never underestimate the power of positive thinking.

7. Give up the luxury of criticism. Give up your need to criticize things, events or people that are different than you. We are all different, yet we are all the same. We all want to be happy, we all want to love and be loved and we all want to be understood. We all want something, and something is wished by us all.

8. Give up your need to impress others. Stop trying so hard to be something that you're not just to make others like you. It doesn't work this way. The moment you stop trying so hard to be something that you're not, the moment you take of all your masks, the moment you accept and embrace the real you, you will find people will be drawn to you, effortlessly.

9. Give up your resistance to change. Change is good. Change will help you move from A to B. Change will help you make improvements in your life and also the lives of those around you. Follow your bliss, embrace change - don't resist it.

"Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls"

10. Give up labels. Stop labeling those things, people or events that you don't understand as being weird or different and try opening your mind, little by little. Minds only work when open. 

"The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don't know anything about."

11. Give up on your fears. Fear is just an illusion, it doesn't exist - you created it. It's all in your mind. Correct the inside and the outside will fall into place.

"The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself."  

--Franklin D. Roosevelt

12. Give up your excuses. Send them packing and tell them they're fired. You no longer need them. A lot of times we limit ourselves because of the many excuses we use. Instead of growing and working on improving ourselves and our lives, we get stuck, lying to ourselves, using all kind of excuses - excuses that 99.9% of the time are not even real.

13. Give up the past. I know, I know. It's hard. Especially when the past looks so much better than the present and the future looks so frightening, but you have to take into consideration the fact that the present moment is all you have and all you will ever have. The past you are now longing for - the past that you are now dreaming about - was ignored by you when it was present. Stop deluding yourself. Be present in everything you do and enjoy life. After all life is a journey not a destination. Have a clear vision for the future, prepare yourself, but always be present in the now.

14. Give up attachment. This is a concept that, for most of us is so hard to grasp and I have to tell you that it was for me too, (it still is) but it's not something impossible. You get better and better at with time and practice. The moment you detach yourself from all things, (and that doesn't mean you give up your love for them - because love and attachment have nothing to do with one another,  attachment comes from a place of fear, while love... well, real love is pure, kind, and self less, where there is love there can't be fear, and because of that, attachment and love cannot coexist) you become so peaceful, so tolerant, so kind, and so serene. You will get to a place where you will be able to understand all things without even trying. A state beyond words.

15. Give up living your life to other people's expectations. Way too many people are living a life that is not theirs to live. They live their lives according to what others think is best for them, they live their lives according to what their parents think is best for them, to what their friends, their enemies and their teachers, their government and the media think is best for them. They ignore their inner voice, that inner calling. They are so busy with pleasing everybody, with living up to other people's expectations, that they lose control over their lives. They forget what makes them happy, what they want, what they need....and eventually they forget about themselves.  You have one life - this one right now - you must live it, own it, and especially don't let other people's opinions distract you from your path.

From the Purpose Fairy at:

http://www.purposefairy.com/3308/15-things-you-should-gi p-in-order-to-be-happy/ 

I see a lot of clients and people at large living mostly outside their bodies. And it might not just be pain that is causing you to check out of your body...boredom is also a common culprit (look at any teenager in a classroom). You may recognize this feeling as not being aware of the sensation in your feet, not remembering how you arrived at a certain location even though you were the one driving, or forgetting large swathes of your life.

Instead of an ascetic tradition of removing ourselves from the physical senses and material world, there is a way to reach states of transcendence through more fully embodying the senses. To start with, we have to be in the body. In this article, "What's so Great About Being in Your Body" you'll find the practical benefits of being in the present as well as how pleasure is not only your birthright, it is an essential part of your health and vitality.

So that said, "What is So Great About Being in Your Body", you ask?

#1 Forget Out of Body Experience, how about an Embodied Experience?

Have you ever seen a person walking down the street talking to themselves? Some people will say that these people have lost their minds, I'd say they are simply "lost in their minds". To tell you the truth, visit the financial district of Anytown, USA and you may have seen a whole flock of these folk during lunch hour although they are not speaking out loud...they are still "lost in their minds" or half out of their body.

#2 You get to expand time

Have you ever heard the expression, "and time stood still?" Most often this is reserved for intense and rare moments of life like near death experiences, winning a hard fought battle, verdict, or race. But if life is measured by the richness of experience, then wouldn't it behoove us to have more of these moments?

And luckily for us, these are available to us all the time, as long as we are present!

I recently was at the River Street Cafe and sampled a piece of their vintage Gouda cheese. Butterscotch in color, the moment I put it into my mouth, time suddenly slowed to a crawl. The intensity of the flavor spread through my mouth, I suddenly took a deep breath, the aroma of coffee intensified, even the color of the tulips in the flower shop across the street became Technicolor pink. I became fully present because the taste pulled me into my body, away from thoughts of the day.

And think of it this way, if time slows to a crawl, you've technically just expanded your life!

#3 You get to remember things

Have you ever spoken to a friend and couldn't remember a part of even most of what happened in your day? It's probably because you spent most of the day out of your body...either racing ahead into the future or revisiting the past... which makes it really difficult to listen to your intuition, or notice the flirty gaze from a cutie at the Farmer's Market. When you are fully in your body, you'll also be able to truly listen to others which may better your chances at having a relationship.

Ways to be in your body more wholly: 

1. Exercise (not while zoning out to a tv show) preferably something where balance and focus are required: yoga, golf, aerial dancing, walking... you get the picture

2. Slow practice (it's exactly what it sounds like)

3. Focus on your senses, savor food, music, color.

4. Noticing the Beauty in people

5. Hang out and play with children (they are masters at being in the present)

6. Walk out of the door with an agenda-less day letting only the question of "what would be more fun" guide you!

7. Do a last breath meditation (take a breath as if it were the last...this brings piercing awareness of the exquisiteness of being alive)

8. Bringing attention to your toes

9. Be Creative: Paint, make music, journal, write, cook, clean, garden.

10. Experiencing pleasure as a birthright!

11. Play: Sing, dance, boat, sight-see, spend time with good friends, travel.

The sweeter part of this is- I am not returning as I left. I've spent the last 3 weeks returning to the HOME of my SELF and I return now quieter, more aware, at peace, curious and sensually alive.

When we are at HOME in our bodies, instead of alienating ourselves from the very FORM that carries us through our journey, we land very much at the center of our experience. I feel at HOME now because while I was away:

I slowed down and let go. I let go of my agenda. I let go of the effort of accomplishment. I showed up in the classroom and gave everything I had to learn something new. And in between, I walked slowly, read, wrote and ate good food.

I spoke up. I wanted to learn. I wanted to ask questions. I didn't allow my usually mute student self to win the day. I wanted to be in the classroom fully engaged and wrestling with the material.

I didn't sleep much. The first night there is was HOT and there were a ton of bugs. I also had a roommate (who I loved) in a very tiny room. We were lodged far away from all the others in the silence of the New Mexican desert and had to walk some distance away to the nearest bathroom. All my comforts were unavailable. I was thrown into a rhythm other than the one I knew so well. My usual life was unsettled and this was good. I could experience everything afresh.

I moved my body and discovered a rich and subtle inner landscape. I am always moved by what I learn simply by BEING a body- instead of a walking brain. I felt such freedom and flow and a sense of curiosity and not knowing. Being a body allows me to take my next steps with grace and intuition.

I breathed in the SKY. Every night as I drove back to my mother's house in Santa Fe, I celebrated the incredible vastness of the land. I had a panoramic view of the sky. Every night, it was wildly different-Sun sets mixed with the threat of rain, heat lightning, clouds and light dancing. Breathing in the sky gives a ton of perspective.

I recognized the gift I had given myself. I have two little kids and a husband that already does a ton for me. I knew it would be a sacrifice on his part and on the part of my mother (who lives in Santa Fe) who would both be doing a ton of child care while I got to go to a great retreat. I am so deeply grateful to them and I am so deeply grateful that I gave myself this opportunity. I am grateful that I recognized that I would THRIVE in so doing. I am grateful that creative solutions can always be found when we want something deeply enough. I am grateful for the freedom to grow with the tremendous support of a loving family. It's sometimes the MOST difficult to give ourselves permission to break out of a traditional form with our family and I am so happy I said YES.

So, here's to returning home and RETURNING HOME. May we all be blessed on our journeys to return HOME again and again and soak in the aliveness of that experience. 

Access Heidi's other writings and services at: http://heidirose.com/

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