It is mid May here in Ojai and all the flowers are in full bloom and the enchanting scents of orange and lemon trees are everywhere.
Since our last newsletter, a lot of changes have happened as I am familiarizing to a new phase of my life, in a different climate zone and new community. As every transition, it is on the edge of unknown territory. I feel held and supported by old and new friends.
In this transition, I am inspired to complete my book, which I started in Indianola, WA, one and a half year ago. In April, I sent it off to a wonderful editor and I am excited to get it back soon with her comments. After working 30 years as a holistic healer I put my understanding, approach and experiences into a guide and workbook for self-help and healing. It is full of supportive information, exercises, meditations and basic nutritional information. A core message in the book is that disease and suffering are a call to awakening. It can be an enriching initiation path for more self-love and learning, enhancing our spiritual dimension into wholeness. I show an expanded perspective on disease to help you shift fear into a self-empowered healing process. I believe that what we have created, we can newly re-create.
To heal means to become whole again.
Healing is remembering who you really are!
In my work with clients I am always interested to inquire and explore the deeper cause of symptoms or disease in addition to the support of healing modalities. I look at the main three causes of disease as they can block our own healing forces and clearly accumulate when all three are out of balance:
1. Deficient nutrition:
- Refined processed products: e.g. white sugar & white flour
- Low-quality fats
- High consumption of animal proteins
2. Life-related disease: How we respond to life based on blocked emotions and thought patterns as well as unhealed trauma e.g.
3. Toxins: environmental poisons, pollution, radiation, chemicals, heavy metals, pesticides and herbicides, drugs, food additives, household and industrial cleaners, …
The life-related diseases have the strongest influence on our well-being. They are the manifestation of our un- consciousness, and the body is expressing a truth we might be not able to articulate. There is sufficient data that our reaction, response to life and our interventions lead to stress and other health changes. The body speaks truthfully and has a natural feedback system which most of us misinterpret. Many people perceive acute or chronic symptoms and diseases as a nuisance and it creates much fear, threat and worry. The most typical healing approach is to fix the symptoms, which from my experience misdirects its purpose, why it disturbed in the first place. This leads to more acute and chronic conditions, which we obviously see in the increase of chronic disease and the spiraling upward increasing health care costs. Our western culture is leading the world with patient cases of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer in epidemic proportions. Our world is in a health care crisis despite of all its talents, resources and high tech apparatuses. My book gives the reader a deeper understanding about disease and your true spiritual nature.
I’ll let you know when it is published.
Spring & Awakening, Growth, Change and Expansion
The inspiration for this time of the year is next growth and new beginning. Spring is a surge of rising energy, an expression of life at its strongest. The seedling is bursting from it’s casing, pushing through the earth to reach the light. Some plants, like the dandelion can even burst through concrete. This growth process is sometimes with ease and joy, and other times with growing pains, stretching us beyond the comfort zone. Spring represents an outward movement from within into the outer world.
Spring is a call to renew, clear, regenerate, grow anew and to get ready for the next evolutionary step. Look ahead, make plans, formulate new ideas, make deci- sions, determine your direction, and start to take ac- tion.
Questions in this season are:
• What contribution do you want to make to yourself, your family, and the world?
• What seeds (intentions) do you want to plant?
• What is your vision?
• What do you want to harvest?
• What are your gifts/talents that you want to bring into this year?
• What are your concrete steps and plans to make it so?
Physical correspondence: Springtime is associated with liver and gallbladder. The liver is the strategic planner of your direction and vision, and the gallbladder helps you to make decisions and gives wise direction. If there is imbalance, your vision might be stifled and blocked, you might feel anger, frustration, restlessness, or passive aggression. It will be hard for you to experience growth, rebirth and your springtime within. When your liver and gallbladder systems are strong, you are able to re-adjust and create new visions easily.
If you don’t have visions and plans, you might experience confusion about where to go and why. You might also have difficulties to access your creativity and joy.
The physical manifestation of an imbalance and a sluggish liver can result in many ailments. The liver is one of the most active organs and a powerhouse with its detoxification functions. A malfunction can lead to serious fatigue, weight gain, water retention, gallstones, poor fat metabolism, poor detoxification, headaches, tightness in the shoulders and upper back, sides of the body, sides of the legs, pain in the hips, allergies, stiff groin, and digestive issues.
An emotional imbalance can show up as anger, frustration, feeling ‘stuck’, and depression.
Inspiration:
• Feel sunshine pulling you up and out, like everything in nature.
• Feel the life force within you thrust you out of darkness into light and into new possibilities like a seed sprouting creating a new beginning.
• Start new things, reinvent yourself at home and in your work. Be creative, make things, do things, be the creator of your life.
• Visualize your intentional harvest. Use spring’s bountiful energy wisely, so that the crops you sow in yourself, in your work, and in your life are those you wish to harvest.
• Do a detoxification and cleansing program with teas, fasting, or increased raw foods.
Diet Tips for Spring
March, April, and May are the perfect months for spring cleansing as a preventative medicinal approach. You might eat less or fast. The spring diet should be the lightest of the year. Green is the color of the season and you want to include it as much as possible to supercharge your cleansing diet. Utilize ‘Viriditas’, the greening power of nature, as the 12th century mystic, healer and philosopher Hildegard von Bingen pointed out. The green in nature has a soothing, relaxing, strengthening effect on body, mind and soul.
Vegetables: dark green leafy young vegetables, sprouts, young beets and carrots, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, kale, onion, artichoke, sauerkraut, spinach, asparagus, Swiss chard
Fruits: strawberry, sour cherry, gooseberry, rhubarb, lemon, lime, papaya, green apple, grapefruit, mango, avocado, quince
Herbs: garlic, dandelion leaf or flower, cayenne, ginger, turmeric, parsley, fennel, cilantro, sorrel, red clover flower, burdock root.
Grain: Spelt, wheat, flax seeds
Legumes: mung beans, lima, green lentils
HEALING PLANTS
HEATHER (Calluna Vulgaris)
The Identity Flower – From a Needy Child to an Understanding Adult
Key Questions:
• Are you totally self-absorbed, concerned only about yourself and your problems and ailments?
• Do you dislike being alone, always seeking the companionship of others?
• Do you talk incessantly, not interested in what anyone else has to say?
Heather is for you, when you are obsessed with yourself . You might be very much involved in your own troubles and experiences and have a huge need talking about it. It might happen that other people begin to avoid you as they are overwhelmed by your needs, which might bring up the fear of being alone.
Heather is called the ‘needy inner child’, which shows the origin in early childhood. You might have been unwanted, neglected, not accepted, abandoned or emotionally malnourished. As a result, you still feel undernourished and in need of recognition from those around you. You might experience a strong desire to be listened to and to be taken seriously. Deep within, you have lost the trust, feeling of connectedness and oneness with people and the world.
Heather is also helpful when you were alone too long and/or when you were not nurtured enough in your family, work or social life. Your mind might be filled with thoughts and you desperately seek others to share those thoughts with.
Behavior Pattern in the Blocked State can be:
• Your thoughts are entirely centered on personal prob- lems
• You take yourself too seriously
• You are driven to talk to everyone about yourself
• You’re unable to be alone, feeling somehow lost
when you are solitary
• You tend to exaggerate emotionally, making mountains out of molehills
• You find it difficult to listen to others
• You are absorbed completely in yourself and therefore have not awareness of others’ concerns
• You try to appear stronger and more competent than you really are, and as a result you don’t get the sym-
pathy you want
• You take over social conversation and immediately turn them to yourself
Healing path
When looking at the Heather plant it symbolizes two aspects: it can survive the loneliness and yet it prevents other plants from living near to it. Heather grows in the wilderness and is mostly found in mountains and moorland. It likes acidity and tolerates both wet, boggy ground and dry sandy heaths. They thrive where only few other plants can. In a lifetime of twenty to thirty years the low bush will smother all other plants and poison the soil with acidity.
The healing properties of the Heather essence are to integrate both sides. Be aware of the great strength to survive by yourself and that you can find in yourselves what we seek from others. At the same time give space and respect to those around you that they can also grow and fulfill their purpose.
In a balanced state, a Heather person takes care for his or her own needs and is a good listener full of empathy and compassion.
• You are a sympathetic adult with a great capacity for empathy
• You create an atmosphere of trust and comfort
• You know you’ll receive everything necessary for your personal development
Empowering Statements for Heather are:
• I feel safe
• I receive all that I need
• I nurture others
If you would like my service as a health counselor and teacher/coach for yourself, school or in your clinic, please let me know: lisa@bermanhealingarts.com or call 805-804-7665. I also offer phone and Skype appointments.
My heartfelt wishes and greetings, Lisa