How can we develop healthy humility?
Passionate curiosity is a start.

In the asking, we engage the other and the ego is checked.

Service is a good middle.

How does it feel when we volunteer our best hours of the week, donate our most valuable items or fund a heart felt cause?

In the end, seek original origins.

Humilis is the Latin root meaning low.

By our own choice, consequence, or chance, true humility is often the outcome of experiencing great depth, deep troubles or profound sorrows.

Water, the element of winter, teaches us how to serve all, go underground and spring up when necessary, go deep and take many forms.

The water element paired organs that peak in winter are the Bladder and Kidney (plus adrenals).

The bladder meridian travels from the inner canthus of the eye across the head down the back side of the entire body exiting out the little toe. It traverses all of us.

Many of the point names indicate their function: bright eyes, supporting yang, supporting middle, celestial pillar, soul door, spirit hall, spiritual celestial connection, soul gate.

Acupuncture treats all levels of the human – mind, body, spirit.

Treating the bladder points can not only treat our organs like the bladder or the eyes, but it can also treat our spiritual sickness. It can help us see through the eyes of spirit. The dark clouds of our emotions and thinking can be cleared to see the bright blue skies of divine perfection.

Winter is Dreamtime.

Make the connection to your internal visionary this winter.

Dream it.

Envision it.

The kidneys store jing – our primal energy.

This essence is to be guarded, protected, treasured not squandered or frittered away.

It determines our fertility, growth, development, vitality and longevity.

It is one of the three treasures: jing, qi and shen.

The kidneys are the expression of the water element in our bodies.

Their energy peaks in winter offering harmonious opportunities for winter support and healing.

Fulfilling our destiny is healing.

The way of this deep healing summons and joins celestial jing with our terrestrial jing.

In other words, jing is our DNA. In this is all the knowing, the unfolding, the potential manifesting, the blueprint. It is our lifetime’s greatest job to connect with heavenly order.

Jing is the seed and the wellspring.

For 73 days of winter support, musings, inquiries, instructions purchase a winter/water element wisdom card deck.

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The critical first step in healing is accepting things as they actual are.

We live in a world where there is plenty that requires our resistance.

However, healing requires courageous honesty about ourself, our perceptions, our motivations, our circumstances and their cause.

I have doubled down on my commitment to live a life in alignment with my core values and the elemental.

My winter healing so far has looked like:

Living without liquid stress.
I had habituated a high quality jasmine green tea morning ritual. I would make one small pot of green tea then refresh the same leaves until noon. Occasionally, I would have one cup of coffee on special or social times. Even this small amount of caffeine masked my ability to feel my natural response of stress (cortisol surge) or ease (endorphin release).

Now I can actually feel my body’s feedback system and dig deeper into the root causes. From this understanding, I make better choices.

Living for today.
The last few years turned many of our lives upside down. I made plans from a place of fear. These plans are falling apart. I accepted a graduate teaching position with unethically low wages and promises of great job to come. I also spent a huge amount of time, energy and resources developing online classes that would bring in a consistent stream of income and continuity of care for patients and the opportunity to meet new ones -that project never gained traction. I have released these plans.

I have come back round to the real. I am offering real Wellness gatherings & Nature connects in real time during 2023.

Plans made in reaction to scary and unsettling situations are suspect. Maybe we just don’t know what is coming and can learn how to be okay with that.

I am living in winter. Studying how water moves, how it changes forms.

#water #winter #fear #healing #5elements

Mink Creek at Alberta Orchard Wellness

Winter, according to the wisdom of the elements, is about dreaming, resting, relaxing, restoring, recharging and germinating seeds which will break through the thawing frozen ground of winter come spring when energy naturally moves upward and outward.  Plans made and action taken in harmony with the greater cycles of the cosmos, are much more likely to come to fruition. Over the last few years, I have been observing, studying and syncing myself with the elemental cycles as practiced by the ancients. I often call it ‘re-wilding’ myself. I started with Seasonal Wellness classes in 2015. In 2019 I printed 5 seasonal Element Wisdom Decks – 73 cards for each season totaling 365 days of clinical pearls, lifestyle tips, jedi mind tricks and some deeper dives into traditional medicine, physchology and spirit.

Nourish the water element during the winter season:

•  Go to sleep early and rise with or just before the sun rises. I use an alarm clock only when I have an important appointment.  Natural light awakens me if my internal clock has not.  I am learning to trust this more and more each season.

• Unplug: allow yourself to disconnect from all technology when the sun sets.  Yes, you read that right: read a book, light a fire, make a cup of tea, color, paint, play board games, take a long bath, make music, make love.  Do nothing. Need convincing? Check the research:
  •  
  • Technology, sleep & children
  • Sleep complaints & technology

• Watch every sunrise and sunset possible. Everything has a beginning, middle and end.  Watching the sun rising and setting reminds us as does observing our breath:  the beginning of the inhale, the middle of the inhale, the end of the inhale, a gap or turning, the beginning of the exhale, the middle of the exhale, the end of the exhale, a gap or turning and so it goes.  The most blissful moments as well as the most awkward or difficult days have a beginning, middle and end.  Our breath is like the incoming and outgoing tide of our life’s ocean. Following these cycles develops equanimity; equanimity undoes suffering.

• Be with water as often as possible:  the ocean, rivers, creeks, waterfalls, springs water sound machines, aquariums, you tube water videos. Last winter, I planted 90 ferns in the creek that runs under the screened porch of my off grid tiny house (check back for that blog post).

• Observe how water moves and flows around obstacles. How can we be more like water in our movement in our inner and outer worlds?

• Replace one of your bathroom lights with a red light, so as not to wake your adrenals into a cortisol rise if you need to get up during the night.

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Wolf Bay Sunset, Alabama Gulf Coast

Divine Feminine Divine Masculine: Guest Blog Post by Teresa Cribelli, PhD, Eminent Reiki Master

Reiki is a, gentle, compassionate method for bringing energetic balance and clearing on the physical, emotional, and mental levels. Because Reiki is about balance, it can be especially helpful at the changing of seasons.  All versions of Reiki are compassionate and loving with the capacity to bring deep peace and healing, while Eminent Reiki^TM focuses on balancing the feminine and masculine energies we all carry within us. Fall and winter, seasons that are energetically feminine, provide us opportunities to focus on our inner world.  In traditional societies located in parts of the world with changing seasons, the winter was a time of quiet and reflection (not inaction, but a turning to the inner forces that nourish and revitalize us).  It was a period of stored seeds and pickled vegetables and preserved fruits, of relying on the resources harvested and built up during the bright spring and summer months.  Winter shifts us from the outward, masculine seasons (yang) to the inner, feminine seasons (yin).

Murmurmation (Yin). collage. Teresa Cribelli

Reiki energy can help us calibrate our physical bodies with these seasonal energetic shifts.  During winter the focus may be on the feminine, but that does not mean the masculine goes away.  Rather, the changing seasons can be seen as a pendulum that moves between the inner and the outer, the revitalizing feminine and the energizing masculine.  Winter is in balance with summer; the two are part of the whole, and when they operate in equilibrium, each supports the other – the masculine and feminine in balance.  There is the very old Greek story of the goddess of the harvest, Demeter.  When her daughter, Persephone, is kidnapped by Hades and taken to the Underworld, Demeter falls into a deep depression and winter remains well into the time of spring and summer.  The world withers into dust and grey skies and people cannot grow their seeds.  The feminine out of balance leads to inertia.  In another Greek myth, Helios the sun god, in the form of a charioteer drives his team of horses across the sky each day, bringing warmth and energizing light to the world.  When his son, Phaethon, steals the chariot one morning and loses control of the horses, the day lasts for weeks, and all of the plants on earth catch fire and burn. The people are thirsty and hot and again have no food. Too much yin and the earth stagnates, too much yang and it burns.

Divine Yang. collage. Teresa Cribelli

As we move from summer into fall, we can look at this as rebalancing on the macro and the micro levels – the masculine seasons moving into the feminine seasons both within and without.  While the seasons lean toward the feminine or the masculine, over the course of the year, they are in balance. 

This is a useful way to think about Eminent Reiki^TM; bringing balance to the feminine and the masculine energies so that we are nourished and energized year round.

Reiki Description

The practice of Reiki is an ancient healing art, one that is the energy of love and compassion. It supports us through clearing and balancing the energies of the systems and bodies, creating opportunity for health and wellbeing on all levels. Reiki can be received with the practitioner’s hands on or off of the body. The client simply relaxes and receives as the practitioner senses where clearing is needed and allows the Reiki energy to flow to the source of pain. Reiki energy can only be used for positive outcomes.  An all-purpose tool that introduces ease and grace into the lives of those who receive and practice it, Reiki is a cherished method of thousands. There are many types of Reiki practiced on Earth at this time; each variation is an expression of love and support.

Eminent Reiki^{TM is} a new approach to Reiki with a special male/female component unique to the Eminent Reiki^TM process. Not only are the male and female used together to create a special healing experience, they are specifically blended together into a new energy that is part of the Eminent Reiki^TM attunement.  A key component of healing is balancing the male and female within and Eminent Reiki^TM addresses this need specifically in the energy and approach to healing.

For more information, visit the Eminent Reiki^TM website:

http://www.eminentreiki.com and check these research links below:

Effect of Reiki Therapy on Pain and Anxiety in Adults: An In-Depth Literature Review of Randomized Trials with Effect Size Calculations

Reiki Is Better Than Placebo and Has Broad Potential as a Complementary Health Therapy

Reiki Reduces Burnout Among Community Mental Health Clinicians

River City Mural, collage. Temerson Square. Tuscaloosa, AL

Click here for the UA annoucement and more about Teresa’s  Ephemeral River City Mural Project. Catch it while you can! (east side of Coppertop Bar y’all)

What got you interested in Reiki?  What training have you received?

My pathway to practicing Reiki began with acupuncture.  About 20 years ago I consulted an acupuncturist for a chronic pain condition (an MD recommended I try acupuncture – traditional western medical treatments had not been effective for managing my pain).  I began to feel much better after two weeks of acupuncture treatments, and I found that when the pain returned at night (I had been having trouble sleeping) I could make it go away by meditating on the acupuncture points used in my sessions.  Through visualizing the acupuncture points I could attain the same level of relaxation I experienced when I was being treated.  It was an accidental discovery that ended up being life changing.  

In a sense, acupuncture taught me how to meditate and relax, but at that point I still saw moving energy as something outside of myself, I needed a third party to help make the shift.  About ten years later my sister became a Reiki practitioner and gave me a session after I suffered a painful miscarriage.  Her hands became hot during that session and it felt so healing – relaxing and calming on both a physical and emotional level – that I knew I wanted to learn how to do it too.  From there I took the Eminent Reiki^TMclasses in Colorado and received my attunements.  This past summer I received my level three Master Practitioner attunement in Eminent Reiki^TM, a version of Reiki that focuses on balancing the masculine and feminine energies we all carry within us.  My original intent when I first started practicing Reiki was to help relax and heal physical ailments, but in my self-practice I have found I focus more on emotional healing.  Reiki can be a wonderful method for letting go of worries and anxieties from the past.

What got you interested in collage?

I love illustrations and images – it is has been something I have been attracted to my entire life. When I was five I ripped all the horse pictures out of a hand-me-down set of story books.  I could not read yet, and I wanted to free the illustrations from the books.  I had so much fun arranging and re-arranging those horse illustrations before I realized with a shock that books were not supposed to be torn apart.  Nonetheless, I kept coming back to making collages.  I used to shellac images of animals from Ranger Rick magazine onto scraps from my father’s woodpile, and I still have a collage I made in second grade art class.  It contains an image of a plastic horse and cowgirl from a toy catalog, a sewing machine, some aluminum foil, and a photo of Evonne Goolagong,the tennis player.  I have no idea why I put those subjects together at the age of seven, but they illustrate the thrill and power of collage – juxtaposing seemingly unrelated images together in interesting ways.  For me it is a form of meditation.  It is a way of expressing my inner world, an aspect of myself that does not manifest in a linear way. 

How do Reiki and/or collage change your day to day experience of the world?

Both are a form of meditation, of accessing the calm center that is inside all of us. Reiki helps relax and release in the realm of energy, while collage facilitates self-expression.  Both help bring to consciousness what needs to be healed or understood or joyfully expressed.  It is a way to practice self-love.  As physical objects collages also become a meditation  – for me and the people who view them.  By contemplating the juxtaposition of images, we can, to quote the photographer Minor White, “[learn] to make chance moments occur by looking at anything until [we see] what else it is.”  This shift in perspective can facilitate healing and true self expression.

Teresa offers Reiki sessions at Alberta Orchard Wellness. Please utilize our online booking 2 step process or contact our office for pre-payment and scheduling: 

Click to pre-pay.reiki-treatment 

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