5 Simple ways to cleanse negative energy in 5 minutes

Post holiday functions with family can leave us feeling a little discombobulated. Maybe memories arise on a cellular level and we are left remembering things we thought we had let go of.

Or maybe the holidays brought change like a break up and partner moved out of a joint home.

Or maybe you want to leave behind many things in 2012 that were tough and transition into 2013 feeling lighter.

Simple rituals can be an excellent way to set a clear intention with ourselves and the universe that we intend to shed things we don't need anymore or to remove memories or energies from our home or work environments.

Whether any of the things I'm suggesting work in any real way is irrelevant. The intention and desire we put behind our behaviours are what is truly important. By taking time to engage in a structured activity that sets our intentions in motions helps convince us that our intentions will be the truth.

Burning Sage:

Often times people walk into Urbanfitt wondering if someone has been smoking herb but, in fact, it's just the smell of burnt sage. Sage is my go to cleansing tool for work and home. As I burn it I got through all corners of my space and hold positive energy and thoughts in my mind and heart. You can buy sage sticks or loose sage at most health food stores! I love it's earthy smell!

Singing Bowl:

My partner just bought me a stunning singing bowl for Christmas. I've used it at the beginning or end of a meditation or at the end of a training or Reiki session with clients in the past few days and love how the purity of the sound resonates through my own body. When I've used it at home, I feel like the vibration of the sound is kind of like a reboot for the space as well. Not to mention the beauty of the sound making me feel so at peace in the moment.

Crank Hard Core Music

A Shiatsu therapist shared this technique with me. If you just crank heavy metal hard core music, the sound will shake the energy up in a space. Again, like a reboot with sound waves but a bit more aggressive than a singing bowl! I like Rage Against the Machine for this! Add a little crazy dancing around and you have a space filled with new energy! And you have a little fun and get your heart rate up too :)

Repressed Anger workout

Sometimes we are the thing carrying negative energy around. Check out my blog post "Exercising Anger Out of the Body". Taking a slam ball or a set of heavy ropes and pounding them can help release negative energy into the earth and help you let it out of the body!

Epsom salts bath

We can unconsciously absorb other people's shit without even knowing we did until a moment of stillness and we wonder why we aren't feeling that great after spending time with someone. A great way to cleanse toxicity that we hold onto physically on a cellular level in our tissues is the good old Epsom salts bath. Although this isn't my cleansing method of choice, many people swear by this technique and even just 5 minutes can help!

"In hydrotherapy, a hot Epsom Salts Bath is called a Cleansing Bath because it assists in speeding the removal of waste products from the soft tissues and cleanses the tissues of these irritants. It is a rather simple process, whereby the Epsom Salts make the water hypertonic - that is to say, there is a greater concentration of solute in the bath water than in your body. When you soak in this bath, it has the effect of drawing the waste products out of your tissues - it speeds the removal of irritating waste products from your body. Essentially, it makes you sweat , and sweating is one of the main ways the body gets rid of waste products."

Read more.

Just remember, our intentions hold more power than anything and cementing our intentions with some type of action or ritual is very powerful regardless of your spirituality or belief system! All the best for starting 2013 with more light and peace. Happy 2013!

Rehab for people who rush

This holiday season I ran into a couple people I hadn't seen in a while. My
interactions with them reminded me of how far I've come to rehabbing my rushing around do do do mentality. One person had mentioned how I hadn't been around as much, out and about (insert Canadain accent). She chalked it up to me being in a new relationship the past 18 months.

And I realized that me not being out and about as much had to do much more with me learning to spend more time slowing down. I think I CREATED this on-the-go reality so that I could avoid a deeper more quiet part of myself where I can observe my thoughts, attitudes and things that might be keeping me stuck. I know that I was overly busy in the past because I wanted to avoid a painful sense of loneliness when my daughter was with her dad. Or avoid the fear of being without family in a big city with no safety net to catch me if I fell as a business owner. I also didn't like spending too much time alone at home with a child and to get her out with other people socializing. I was afraid I wasn't really enough for her.

Now, I stay in when I'm tired. I cook more meals at home and actually enjoy doing so. I don't over schedule myself socially. I'm scheduling fewer clients in and letting go of work commitments that under pay me or aren't aligned with my core values.

But this change is in sharp contrast to the way I've been living my life for years. In fact, I still fight with sometimes nagging guilt that I should be doing more, find ways to be more productive or even keep trying to grow my vision for a bigger business. I think I might be fighting the fear that my world will fall apart if I'm not doing a lot to make sure everything will keep being ok.

I can tell you that now that I've slowed down a bit with much more to shift in this direction, I have a lot of rehabbing my body and mind. Old habits die hard. I can feel that my body needs time to restore it's energetic stores, that I need to learn to take on less emotionally from other people and that I'm actually a way more chilled out person than I used to believe.

Last night, I cooked a turkey dinner for 12 and it was awesome or so they all said :). I prepped a lot the day before so that I wouldn't have to be stressed the day so that all the dishes were timed just right and all the food was hot when placed on the table and not overcooked etc.

It's come to be my understanding that the more gaps I leave in my schedule, the more I have time to prep for things coming instead of always trying to catch up. I realized that to live a life that doesn't require a lot of rushing around, it takes time. We have to prepare for living life this way. Sound contradictory? I don't think so. I'm just getting better at not expecting so much of myself all the time. Sometimes people don't really get how to interface with this newish attitude.

We live in a world where the current to always be 'doing' something can sweep us up and take us away further from our true natures.
Now when I spend time with loved ones who are still caught up in rushing through life and aren't desirous of a different way of being that is more present, it's starting to feel incongruous.

“Becoming conscious is of course a sacrilege against nature; it is as though you had robbed the unconscious of something.” – Carl G. Jung

What's the right type of exercise for you?

Very simply, the right type of exercise for you is the type that you want to repeat.

People spend a lot of time talking about the new hottest fitness trend that is the newest best way to get fit fast.

But the reality is that trends don't really matter in the big picture because people are most likely to repeat something they enjoy either during or after.

We all have very different reasons for liking different types of exercise and no one can really tell you what's best for you.

I can advise clients as to what type of exercise is most likely to help them achieve their goals. Achieving goals can be very motivating for sure. But unless you get more from your exercise than just fitness, then you aren't likely to stick with it.

When I work with clients, I always try to make a compromise between what people like and what I think is best for their bodies. Most of the time, these two things intersect!

Whatever brings you joy and peace during or after a workout is normally an excellent sign that you're on the right track. Sometimes even just an environment can be the determinant of this joy and peace.

So follow your inner guru and do what you love to do because you're most likely to feel great and get fit repeating repeating repeating and staying consistent with some type of movement.

Possible reasons why you can't get 'unstuck'

We teach what we need to learn. So this post comes from a humble place of knowing how hard it can be to get unstuck in different areas in our lives. My work has been about helping people get unstuck when it comes to exercise and self-care. My personal work has been about learning to let go of the past and replace negative coping strategies with more positive ones that are true to who I truly am.

Today in my master level of Reiki training, we talked a bit about why some people can make shifts when we work on them and why others can't. Some people seem more stuck then others. And in some areas of my own life, I feel more stuck then others.

But what I realize is that when we get so focused on our struggles and less focused on building a true sense of who we really are, we can start BECOMING our struggles. Our identities become intertwined with what our struggles have been.

We can become a number of things that we can confuse with our true essence. Our pain and our struggles are NOT who we are. They are what have shaped us, helped us grow or made us feel pain and suffering but they are not who we truly are. We each have our unique essence and gifts we come into this world with that will always be a part of us. And we can use the things that have happened in our lives to either break us and define us or to help us learn about who we really are: our strengths, our ability to overcome, our ability to love and feel compassion for self and others.

We can start to refer to ourselves with labels that can confuse this fact. I know all too well!

We can start defining ourselves by what we have survived instead. We can let our suffering start to become our identity instead of experiences we have gone through.

In doing so, we don't stay open to the possibilities that something is truly behind us. We keep ourselves stuck in defining our identity based on these struggles. We are so much more than that, each of us. We are capable of so much love and the human spirit is so strong that we don't need these experiences to become who we are. I don't negate the need to heal from these experiences and to face them head on, but I think it's important to let go when it's time to let go.

THE TRICKY PART IS THAT IF WE'VE LET OUR SELF IDENTITY BECOME WHAT OUR TRAUMA OR STRUGGLES HAVE BEEN, THEN WE CAN UNCONSCIOUSLY FEAR THAT WE WILL BE LEFT WITH NO SELF IDENTITY AT ALL. WITHOUT OUR STRUGGLES FILLING THE SPACE WHERE A TRUE SELF IDENTITY SHOULD BE, WE MIGHT BE AFRAID OF BEING LEFT NOT KNOWING HOW TO DEFINE OURSELVES.

If you are stuck thinking you are someone who struggles with weight and always has, you might be locking yourself into the belief that this is indeed who you are instead of realizing that the experiences that drove you to overeat no longer exist.

If you are stuck thinking that you are a workaholic that can't find time to take care of yourself, then this will always be the truth until you realize that this has just been a coping strategy or unhealthy choice that is not you, but merely a behaviour.

If you believe you are damaged from your inadequate parenting or from suffering abuse, you don't leave the possibility that this is what happened to you and that you are not in fact doomed to be damaged the rest of your life.

I could go on and on.

Peace to everyone who needs help letting go and getting unstuck. I'm sure everyone can relate to this feeling. Believe you are more than what has happened to you!

The sure fire way to gain weight over the holidays

I would say that manifesting something we really don't want in our lives is really about becoming unconscious, falling asleep at the wheel, dialing down our self-awareness and letting negative coping behaviours replace healthier ones.

Gaining weight over the holidays isn't really about how much food there is around. It's about using the holidays as an excuse to throw self-care out the window. Often times, people drop any fitness routines they might have in place and sometimes even overeat to the point of self-disgust.

Why?

Yes it's a busier time of year for many people but that would imply we have less time to put stuff in our mouths. The real issue is that we have been programmed to think the holidays are a beautiful time filled with joy, abundance, meaningful time with family and friends. And when we are faced with the truth that the holidays can often be a complicated or mixed emotional time for anyone with inadequate parenting or living in complicated family make ups or even with teenagers in the house, we reach for some type of comfort.

I'm not saying this is the case for everyone but I've generally found that people who turn to food for comfort are using food as a tool to repress something. For those who had wonderful childhoods and just like to overeat over the holidays, this blog post might not be for you. Unless of course, you haven't embraced the fact that no one's life is without struggle and no childhood is 'perfect'.

Like many of you, I have very mixed memories of Christmas. Some wonderful and some not so wonderful. I remember noticing that my parents became particularly more stressed over the holidays and there were more emotional outbursts which I didn't really 'get' as a child. It's like Christmas can bring back to life these times in my childhood.

When routines are thrown out the window, it can be more difficult trying to stay on track with what is truly important to us like perhaps not gaining weight again over the holidays.

But I do think we can practice getting better at taking really good care of ourselves despite the holidays!

We can enjoy treats but not to excess. We can rejoice in the abundance of food and drink but we need to know when we start using these two things like any other addictive substance.

So if you don't want to gain weight over the holidays, try to stay wide awake! In so doing, we can enjoy the joyful moment more fully and let those emotions fill us up and we can also face any memories that need a more objective view, from a place of self-compassion and love.

Maybe this is the time in your life you can start with those few minutes of daily meditation you've been meaning to do. Those few minutes can go a long way into keeping you conscious!