Nancy Lankston
Celtic Blessings to You
Deep peace of the running wave to you.
Deep peace of the flowing air to you.
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you.
Deep peace of the shining stars to you.
Deep peace of the infinite spirit to you.
✧ ✧ ✧
May your holiday be filled with laughter, love and joy.
What is Healing?
The word healing comes from the Anglo-Saxon word “haelen”, which means to be or become whole. Balance, resonate and heal are all words for the same concept.
To heal and to cure are not the same thing. You can cure or “fix” the physical body, but total healing involves the entire person – not just their physical body. Healing involves balancing and integrating a person’s thoughts, emotions, beliefs and spirit. In practice, the only difference between cure and heal may be about intent; does your doctor, healer, sage, or therapist intend to heal body, mind, heart and spirit? Or just fix your body’s symptoms?
I believe that healing involves reconnecting with what is amazing about ourselves. So I don’t focus on just stopping some symptom or pain in my Elemental Flow sessions. Flow healing is about transformation; it’s about digging in, and bringing joy and passion up to the surface . And it’s about learning how to live authentically from a space of joy. My goal is to blaze a new trail that cuts through the craziness of the world, and helps each of us find our way home.
Flow
“Healthy tissue flows with juice. A healthy person flows with joy.
And a healthy life flows from one adventure to the next.
Flow is at the heart of all healing and transformation.”
~Nancy Lankston
The Poetry of Pain
Many times, pain is the only way that your body has been able to get your attention. Believe it or not, those physical and emotional pains that you are experiencing are actually your body’s way of trying to help you find your way home.
I find that at the heart of most chronic struggles, pains and illness, lies an emotional or spiritual issue that you have been ignoring or avoiding. Those issues that are too painful to face have a direct link to the chronic pains you experience in your body. As Wilhelm Reich, psychoanalyst turned bodyworker, described it, “our issues are in our tissues.” When you uncover the underlying issue or emotion and deal with it, then your symptoms will resolve.
After 25+ years in the “healing” profession, I continued to be stunned and awed by the miraculous workings of the human body. It is as though our bodies hold all the knowledge of the world’s most gifted sages and healers. The wisdom of the ages is held there within our cells. The trick is to figure out how to access all that knowledge; to decipher our body’s language.
Bodies never lie and they always know what the real problem is. The trick is to learn how to reconnect with your body’s natural language. Bodies speak in metaphor and poetry. And your body poem will be uniquely your own. Learning to read your signs is key. Chronic migraines, back pain, that trick knee; learn to listen to your body closely and you will uncover what your body is really upset about.
The Power of Belief
What you personally believe about yourself and your world dramatically influences the way you feel and how you heal. If you believe that you need surgery to repair the herniated disc in your back, then you will need surgery before your back will get better. If you believe your colds always turn into sinus infections unless you take an antibiotic, then guess what? Your next cold is quite likely to turn into a sinus infection! And if you believe that you can’t get a more fulfilling job, then you probably never will. Cling to the belief that your life can never improve and it won’t.
Rigid rules and strongly held beliefs have a huge impact on your physical health; those thoughts of “I have to do it this way”, “things won’t ever change” and “I’m not allowed to do that” actually create tense, tight places in your body where healing flow is not allowed to go. Learning to change your mind and drop rigid rules and judgmental thinking will help you heal and transform your life.
Soul Food
Your physical body needs food to survive. And your soul needs quiet contemplation or prayer. Feed your soul regularly. Your heart requires regular loving connection with other beings; human, spiritual and animal beings. Never underestimate the healing power of a friend just sitting and listening to you – or an animal cuddling with you. And don’t discount the value of playing in the grass or communing with an old tree. Healing comes in all shapes and sizes; use them all!
Follow your heart and feed your Soul regularly. And remember to feed your mind with hopeful, uplifting ideas and images. If you want to be truly happy and healthy, present your mind with joyful words and images. Perhaps watching the Kardashian sisters fight again isn’t always the best entertainment choice. 🙂
Today’s choices create tomorrow’s reality.
It’s an Inside Job
No one can change your life or your health except you. There may be a drug, a doctor, a shaman, a sound, an herb, or a specific therapy that helps you heal or shift in some way. But all healing and transformation ultimately comes from within you. Don’t expect any drug or any person to “fix” you. Find therapists and teachers who help you uncover your own sense of knowing, your own sense of yourself. And in the process, you will uncover how to heal yourself. Your path of healing and transformation will be as unique as your fingerprints. Honor yourself and follow the path that feels right to you.
Nancy Lankston – Flow Heal Bloom
You are elemental flowing energy. No particle in the Universe stays static for long – and you are no exception! Your body is constantly flowing and vibrating at the elemental level. Your tissues are created from elemental carbon, hydrogen, magnesium, oxygen, potassium, nitrogen, etc. You are actually made from billions of tiny elemental forms dancing and oscillating in space.
Each atomic element has a signature vibration. And each type of tissue within your body has its own unique vibrational pattern: lung tissue vibrates in a distinct way. And the vibrational dance of liver is also unique. Bone vibration is different from brain vibration. And blood and lymph each create a unique dance of their own. Each tissue has its own dance. And when a tissue is hurt, diseased or in some way unhealthy, its vibrational dance shifts into an out of balance dissonant state. True healing is all about coaxing your diseased, injured tissues to shift back into a balanced vibratory state where your physical body can dance and flow again.
“You are a watery creature living on a watery planet.
Your optimal state of being is flow.”
~Nancy Lankston
☾ ☽
Pause Open Flow
Today I’m grateful for sun, blue sky, mountains in the distance and snow on the horizon…
Spirit dances with Fire, Air, Earth and Water and somehow the amazing alchemy of Life flows forth Today I’m grateful for the dance of elemental Fire, Air, Earth and Water all around me. What a beautiful dance it is!
Last week I went for a walk in the woods. There is a path near my house that I love. It winds through the woods next to an untamed year-round creek. I’m wandering down the creek path and I know a big thunderstorm is coming. I saw the storm brewing before I left home, but I love my time on this trail, so I risk a walk in the woods anyway.
I am walking and keeping an eye on the storm clouds that are rapidly building in the north sky. But I’m enjoying my walk so much that I extend it a bit, and then a bit more. I get cocky and misjudge how fast the storm is rolling in. And for my cockiness I ended up getting rained on. Not drenched, just a little damp. Just a gentle schooling from Mother Nature, thank God!
That’s how I hope to weather all the storms in my life; maybe just a little damp but not drenched and no permanent structural damage. I don’t want to end up in chaos at the epicenter of any storm – I have no desire to end up like those Japanese fishermen downwind from a broken nuclear power plant, or those folks in Joplin with no basements where the tornados decided to touch down a few weeks ago. Most of us really cannot handle being at the epicenter, can we? Most of us have no urge to fly right through the eye of the hurricane in a small metal plane. Oh yes, the epicenter is exciting and enticing. Some people love hanging out there. It whispers a siren song that I definitely hear. I’m the one walking in the woods with a thunderstorm brewing on the horizon.
This is one lesson that I have learned the hard way when doing energetic healing work. How close do I want to be to the center of the action, the center of the storm? Through years of trial and error, I have learned that I cannot stay healthy and alive if I hang out in the epicenter of a client’s healing storm. My job is to be an anchor point of calm, on the edge of the action rather than trying to ride the wild energies at the epicenter. I stay healthy and my clients do amazing healing work when I anchor and hold the edges of their dance floor. A client who is emotionally or mentally thrashing through a traumatic release or change needs a calm, deep anchor NOT a dance partner. I picture a giant old sycamore tree anchored in the earth next to this path I love. She’s a calm anchor!
I go visit Grandma Sycamore every time I walk the Mill Creek path. She’s a very cool tree. But on this particular walk, on this particular day, I notice a big chunk of bark lying behind her trunk. When I stop to examine the trunk, I see that the core of Grandma Sycamore is now decaying, rotting away. She has a huge hole at her center. Her time is almost finished here at the edge of the path. Soon she will fall and make way for new trees. I am sad to see this – I have grown to love this tree – I will miss her. She had many years here; wide and tall, majestically anchoring this piece of earth. Now her time is ending.
The same organic cycle of birth, growth and decay happens with everything in Nature. EVERY living thing – including the civilizations that man builds – springs up from the decaying earth left behind from those who came before. We are born, we grow and flourish, then decay and die out. Life on Earth is all about cycles.
Change is inevitable. And change can be very scary, like a huge thunderstorm brewing on the horizon. But If I get still and watch and listen – if I use my senses to really observe, I begin to notice that change is coming before it gets here and I can protect myself. When I slow down and look, I notice that the core of the tree is rotting long before it gets so unstable that it falls on me. In stillness I can see the change coming just like a big storm building on the horizon.
I see a storm coming for my country. I am troubled by the chaos that the US seems to be spiraling into. A US dollar with no gold behind it, massive debt, medical treatments that make people poorer and sicker, grocery stores full of food that isn’t really food, politicians that pontificate and never really change anything – it is so easy to turn into a completely paranoid pessimist. Yet even my more rational optimistic self cannot deny the growing rot at the core of our economy, of our food supply, of our healthcare and our political structures. Beautiful proud strong Grandma Sycamore weakens with age and eventually rots at the core and falls to make way for new life. And our proud beautiful strong US culture seems ready to do the same just like the Mayans and the Romans and the European empires of earlier times. I try to remember that it’s not a good thing or a bad thing, it just is; cultures grow and flourish and then die out just like trees.
I stop and look around and see a world that has swung so far into the yang, active, doing energies. We are too active, too busy, too focused on owning and controlling everything we see. America has spent so much energy trying to conquer and master everything. Straightening rivers, digging holes in the earth to pull out energy to burn, building more and more of the biggest vehicles and buildings in the world even though they consume energy like some giant ravenous beasts, processing the fruits of nature until they don’t even resemble fruit anymore… I could rant on and on. This country is so deep in Yang energy, it cannot seem to stop to even catch a breath!
US cities like Chicago and LA and New York feel like Yang energy on steroids to me; busy little ant humans running here and there on foot – or even more Yang yet, zooming from place to place in little metal cars and big metal planes. We get instant news and entertainment 24/7 on our TV’s and computers and iPod’s and Blackberries. Could we be less still, less receptive??
It is the nature of all organic systems to pendulum back and forth between yin and yang states, constantly seeking a balance point somewhere in the middle. And Western civilization is an organic system; civilizations seek balance and homeostasis just like our own body systems do. So a pendulum shift in this country away from yang seems obvious and inevitable to me. The obvious correction for this organic system is to pendulum back toward yin receptive quiet energies, qualities or ways of being. And the pendulum swing is inevitable; ALL organic systems do it. So I look around and know a shift is coming our way. And I also sense that this cultural shift could get quite chaotic and messy. I want to spiritually embrace and encourage this worldwide natural shift back into receptive mother yin energy. And I also want to protect my family in what could be a wild chaotic storm.
So I close with the questions that my husband and I find ourselves wrestling with this year; What can I do to help my family prepare for this storm? What can I do NOW, before the storm gets here, so that my family can emerge from storm just a little damp? How do I best help my friends and neighbors do the same?
And just as important to me; what do I want to shift towards? Even in the worst storm I have choices about what’s best for me, my family, my country. What is the new vision I want to anchor in and hold for my family, for everyone I love, for America? What seeds can I plant now so that they will sprout into life and flourish after this storm passes?