February 2021 Newsletter

by | February 2021

Self Love

February 2021 Newsletter

Happy Month of Love (and chocolate and flowers!)   This is a great time of year to celebrate the warmth of an open heart, and the joys of flowers and chocolate! There was a time in my life when I made all of my cards for all Holidays and Birthdays but those days are long over. Now I admit to relaxing into ecards and not too many of them either! What has happened to that young woman who was so excited about Holidays and creating special cards for everyone on her list?!!!!  

Well, time has a way of molding us and shaping us as we move through it. I look back on who I used to be and wonder who was that young woman? I have all sorts of emotions about her: I am proud of her, I am mystified by her, I shake my head over some of her not so wise decisions, I applaud her audacity to live outside the box at times, and I feel sorry for some of her missteps. I wonder how much of her is still with me, and how much of her I left behind. I see sparks of her and other parts seem so foreign to me.  

Perhaps it is my crone stage of life where, as my Mother used to say, all my future is behind me. I don’t quite believe it is that grim, but I HAVE reached a point where most of my years ARE behind me. I rarely think of life like that but in this moment of reaching back in the past to revisit who I used to be I am stunned by how many years through which I have to weave my way backwards!  

There are a few fun facts that I bet even my children don’t know about that younger me:  

I was the first person on campus to wear knee high boots at a time when everyone was still wearing ankle boots. It wasn’t long before people began to copy me, not because it was cool but because where I went to college the winters were fierce, the snow deep, and the winds unyielding.  
I was also the first woman to take Naval Orientation and came out with the highest grade in the class. Now to be honest, I was not in the ROTC program and was a senior about to get married to her Navy Officer fiance. The rest of the class were freshmen men and they had better things to do than sit home and study on a Saturday night while my Navy officer was off on his ship. Honestly, if I hadn’t come out with the highest grade it would have been embarrassing!  

I was runner up for Freshman Carnival Princess, my highest claim to fame ever in the “beauty” game. I could claim the race was fixed but alas, the woman who won really deserved it!  

So that is my early on experience in adulthood. A few outside the box experiences wedged in with one very mainstream experience. And so life has gone on like that. I am often floating in that mainstream but so often find myself swimming upstream in a current all its own. Wondering what on earth I am doing in that odd stream, doing things others never think of!

Imagine how my family reacted to me studying feng shui, color therapy, Akashic Readings when no one else they knew of was doing so. None of those things was ever spoken of at the time I delved into them, from the mid 1980’s on. People thought I had lost it. One of my family members even suggested to my husband that I be put on some sort of drug to turn me into a calm and well behaved woman!  

It’s been hard to break through into a place where people trust you and don’t treat you like a pariah for being “different”. Most of my friends are used to this by now and my family certainly is, thank goodness. But it’s not easy living outside the box.   I know there are some of you readers who are experiencing this exact same challenge so for you I say keep going! Your life will be a challenge but living a unique life will fill your soul. For those of you who live a more main stream safe existence I say, do what makes you feel like you. Don’t try to step outside the box if that is not who you are. We are not all meant to do life that way. And to those of you who like me step in and out of said box, I say, enjoy the variety!

The purpose of life is to enjoy the journey. And for me I also have to feel I have contributed something, have given back. Not all of us do, by the way, and that is just fine. You don’t have to in order to make an impact or live a good life.   So in this month that celebrates love, I celebrate all the selves I have been, and all the selves you have been. The journey is challenging and often so dark we can’t see where it is leading. So it is indeed a good thing to stop during the month of February and celebrate the fact we have come so far and experienced so much and have learned and cried and laughed and feared and braved and experienced so much of life. And still we love. We dare to love ourselves. ALL of the versions of self. ALL the years of self.   Give your self flowers or chocolate or a nice dinner or whatever makes you smile.

And celebrate Valentines as a celebration of you and ALL versions of you!    


“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” – Dr. Seuss “Wooden Hearts”


Guest post: This month I want to introduce Julie to you. I met Julie a year ago when I embarked on a new (for me) course of study, Emotional Freedom Technique. Julie was my “buddy” and we practiced together weekly as well as with others. Julie is, in a word, extraordinary. She is a natural at EFT and her work is transformative. Briefly, EFT can help you shift your thoughts and feelings about things and change your life in a way you might never expect. For example, I originally started this program to help with weight loss but what I got was so much more encompassing than that and went ever so much more deeply that I am basically much different than I was a year ago. I attribute this shift to Julie’s expertise with EFT. And of course to my own willingness to take on the tough stuff and overcome it once and for all. Please welcome Julie to our newsletter and listen to her wisdom.

  EMOTIONAL FREEDOM TECHNIQUE
“In every culture and in every medical tradition before ours, healing was accomplished by moving energy.” – Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Biochemist and Nobel Prize Winner.  

Hi, I’m Julie, and I’m an emotional freedom technique coach. I specialize in using emotional freedom technique, or EFT, to help people heal their relationship with food. EFT is also known as “tapping,” and it is practiced by tapping with your fingertips on specific acupoints along the meridians in your body, which function like an energetic distribution network.

These meridians transport energy throughout the body and are the channels through which that energy flows. Emotional trauma can cause stagnation in our energy pathways, and our overall existence is affected by this energy flow. My goal as an EFT coach is to help you identify and overcome the places you are blocked by framing past traumas in the context of self-acceptance. Combining acupoint stimulation with elements of cognitive restructuring, exposure techniques, and neuro-linguistic programming is what makes EFT effective.

Many of us have buried our past traumas, unmet needs, and suppressed emotions under a painful struggle with weight loss and emotional eating. Unprocessed events from the past that have left you feeling devalued and dismissed can cause pervasive feelings of worthlessness and rage.When we use our relationship with food as the doorway to access these past emotional traumas and heal them with EFT, self-sabotage and unhealthy eating patterns can finally fall away. Instead of using willpower to stop eating beyond fullness, you’ll be able to intuitively feel satisfied with less food. Foods you used to crave and feel compelled to eat will no longer have the same power over you once the emotional charge is gone. Because your experience with tapping is subjective, you’ll be able to feel for yourself if it’s working for you, and EFT is a self-help method that you can practice on yourself anytime. 



“The most terrifying thing is accepting oneself completely.” Carl Jung


The colors of love could be any of these depending on how you use them. I recommend pink for unifying group energies and to create an atmosphere of unconditional love in a space. Red for passionate love. Green for infusing heart energy into an environment, and purple for a more spiritual type of love. Magenta is love of beauty and can be used to infuse “love from above”. http://www.lifepotentials.net/shop/

“As I began to love myself I freed myself of anything that is no good for my health – food, people, things, situations, and everything that drew me down and away from myself. At first I called this attitude a healthy egoism. Today I know it is “LOVE OF ONESELF”.
Charlie Chaplin

This is the Table of Contents for Simply Color for Everyday Living, the latest book in the Simiply Color series. It was written by 25 professionals plus myself and covers all these ways to use color. Dr. Quaranto describes it as a “combination of self developement, feng shui,” and “tons of ideas.” The book is a great gift item, as well as a wonderful book for your own library and reference http://www.lifepotentials.net/media/books

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” – Oscar Wilde

Happy Valentine’s Day. Until next month…..
Namaste….xo


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February: The Month of Love

by | March 2018

It’s the month of love, hearts and valentines. The colors that come to mind are red, pink, a touch of green, and in some areas, a bit of purple appears. We express our love to our sweethearts, our dearest friends, and our beloved family members. We don colors associated with love and we search for the perfect card or gift for our own Valentines.

But how many of you think of sending love to yourselves?  Personally, I am so terribly guilty of being hard on myself and having such high expectations of myself that I often forget to be kind to me, to be thoughtful of ME, to treat myself as I would any other person I love.

When I was in high school I read Erich Fromm’s book, The Art of Loving. He discussed the many aspects of love including the notion of self love but I was being raised in a family in which we were being taught that loving oneself was conceited, selfish, even unGodly. We were to be humble, to think of everyone else as better than we were, to “not be above yourself”.

Indeed, at the tender age of 8, I had discovered Greek and Roman Mythology and loved reading the stories. Imagine how excited I was to discover my name was a variation of the goddess Diana. Now these were the days when you could go into any drug store or tourist stop and find tons of items with individual’s names on them. I never could find my own name anywhere which caused me to despair that my name was so odd, I must be too. Even worse, maybe I did not have the right to exist. But here in the book of myths was the name Diana and I was so excited I jumped up and down on my bed exclaiming that I was actually a goddess! I was THRILLED~until my Grandmother grabbed my arm, pulled me off that bed and told me in no uncertain terms that I was a sinner for sure, talking like that. That was the end of my goddess identification for about 40 years! And it took me about that long to believe in my worth again.

So back to high school: when I read in Fromm’s book that self love was necessary in order to really love others I thought it was a very radical, even sinful, thought. I was scared to believe in this. I tried to push the thought away, even though it stayed with me and in some very real way I knew it to be true. It was such a struggle to try to rectify the teachings of my parents and grandparents with my own inner knowing.

Which is a long winded way of getting to my point: don’t be late in coming to the conclusion that you are worth loving. God does not create anyone who is not worthy of love. There are people who do bad things, and people who go down the wrong paths, but they are misguided and misled. Their being is still of the Light. They just don’t remember that, and have allowed the Darkness to gain a foothold in their souls. But at their core, they too, like the rest of us, not only come from Love and Light, but still have a spark of that inside.

But I am talking to those of you who, like me, put themselves last over and over to their own detriment. I wish that you could see yourselves as the Light and Beauty that others see in you. One of my own challenges is in being so tuned into a person’s true essence that I forget they also have a personality and that personality may not be at that higher level I can see. I’ve been hurt deeply throughout the years by this inability to discern between a person’s  true nature and their earthly veneer. But I would certainly rather that than not being able to see a person’s goodness.

The good news is that with a lot of work, and the support of so many wonderful friends and family, I have come to see my own Light. Not in that conceited way my parents feared, but from a state of gratitude to God for creating me from star dust and LIght and the vibration of Love.

So this Valentine’s day honor your loved ones, but take some time to honor your SELF. You are one of a kind, a unique being, who is loved so deeply. Happy Valentine’s Day to you each day of the year!

I Love Me, I Love Me Not…..A Valentine to My Self

by | February 2017

As I write this month’s newsletter, I find I am in the middle of a miracle. We have all experienced miracle in our lives whether or not we have recognized and/or acknowledged it. Perhaps it is the birth of a child, for others it’s passing a class when we know in our hearts it is a gift that we did pass, for others it might be getting to a loved one’s side just before they transition giving us time to say good bye. For me, today, it is the miracle of accepting, truly accepting, my earthly body just as it is, which is the missing piece for me with the idea of self-love. Self-love, in the midst of this month of love, is finally becoming a reality.

What has shifted? This is not an overnight wonder believe me. I’ve spent at least 65 years searching for a form of self-acceptance, especially acceptance of the body I have been gifted with. My body is sturdy (a nice way of describing a short, stocky physique!), strong, healthy and has taken me all over the globe. It has given us three amazing children, allowed me to enjoy great cuisine, laugh, swim, play with grandchildren, talk and share with friends. It is this wonderful, amazing body that has allowed me to experience this life with you, and that has carried me many a mile along the path of life.

I have just taken an amazing course with Pippa Merivale (www.metatronic-life.com) who works with the energies of Metatron. In this course, Physical Vitality, I became keenly aware of the miracle of the body. Each system is so precise, so wonderfully perfect in its functioning. Yes, we each have our physical challenges. Maybe our ears don’t hear well enough, or our eyes don’t see well, and for some of us we have great challenges such as auto-immune diseases, mental challenges, and other debilitating issues.

But the body, as it is designed to be when all is working as it should, is brilliant in its design and function. Wow. Think of it. Think of all the things our bodies do for us: our hearts beat without our thinking of it. Our livers and kidneys, pancreas and reproductive systems, nervous and digestive systems, endocrine system and brain, …all go about their business 24/7 without a vacation, a break, or a rest.

In the class I took with Pippa, (Physical Vitality) she examined our body’s systems and created a meditation of sorts that explained how complex and miraculous each system is. I particularly loved her description of the digestive system when she explained that light is absorbed by our foods and then we eat the foods, effectively ingesting the light! Imagine, then, the light flowing from our foods into our cells and blood, into our organs, the brain, and throughout the entire physical container that we are. Isn’t that just a miracle? We eat light and it then spreads throughout us. It takes my breath away to imagine that.

This Valentine’s Day I will be celebrating a new love: my body. I have ignored it, abused it, hated it, yelled at it, despaired of it, cried over it, said hateful things to it and hidden from it. And it has been nothing but loyal to me. It has served me for 70 years. It has never asked anything more than that I consider treating it as well as I can.

So now when I exercise and when I eat consciously, both of which I have been doing for a long, long time, I will do them with more love, more awareness, more prayerful thought. I will tune into my body more, honor it more, and listen to its needs. My head will not be separate anymore from the rest of me. I will be incorporated into one, into one amazing miracle.

How about you? Are you loving your self, your body, you as much as you can? This is what I wish for you on this day of love: that you look in the mirror and say truthfully, “I love you.”

“The Universe is not outside of you. Look inside of yourself, everything that you want you already are.”  Rumi

“It is not love that should be depicted as blind, but self-love.” Voltaire

“I think the most important thing in life is self-love, because if you don’t have respect for everything about your own body, your own soul, your own capsule, then how can you have an authentic relationship with anyone else?” Shailene Woodley