February 2021 Newsletter
![]() ![]() 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 ![]() 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 ![]() “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 ![]() “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” – Oscar Wilde Happy Valentine’s Day. Until next month….. Namaste….xo ![]() Copyright © 2021 Life Potentials All rights reserved. Our mailing address is: 6001 Hwy A1A, PMB 8212 Vero Beach, FL. 32963 Want to change how you receive these emails? 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