At Roots & Wings, the Tea Room has become a place to share personal musings, wisdom, stories, jokes, and even chocolate. We wish you all could be in the room with us so that is why we decided to create this blog, which we are calling Tea Room Conversations. The concept of Tea Room Conversations practically developed itself.
Please note: these are views of the author.
The Extraordinary Within The Ordinary
Author: Martha Fagan
Moments matter. Life is made up of moments—tasks needing our attention, duties, commitments, expectations and work to be done. Most days consist of these ordinary moments strung together into hours, days, weeks, months and years. The fabric of life is a weaving together of these small, simple moments, not the big life changing moments—though it is the big ones we tend to remember. Making the ordinary moments matter is our challenge and, ultimately, our rich reward.
How often do we replay and ruminate about the past or anxiously anticipate our unknown future? Our preoccupation with times other than now cost us dearly—on two levels—we miss the present moment and miss the memory to reflect on that moment. How often have we arrived at a destination without any recollection of the journey that brought us there? Or, finished a meal without really tasting the food?
We say, “Be present!” and, laughably, the reality is there is nowhere else we can be…now is the only time and place. Our choice lies in how we choose to be present in the simple, often mundane moment of now.
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Interview with Melissa Fountain, RYT, CSYT 700 hours
by RW intern Joanna Goldenberg
What is your area of specialty?
Svaroopa® Yoga, it’s a style of hatha yoga, that focuses on Core Opening and quieting the mind. It’s a variation on traditional Hatha Yoga poses, using precise alignments and propping for the spine. My other areas of specialty are: personal one on one Yoga therapy, meditation classes and offering ½ day and full yoga weekends.
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Interview with Acupuncturist Geralyn Kruger, Lic. Ac., MAOM
by Sophia Romeri, Interview date: 10/16/14
A main theory in Chinese medicine is nourishing the root of the person. Much like the plants in a garden, it is important to have strong healthy roots. If there is a strong foundation, then everything can grow and heal from that strength. It’s a perfect analogy, really. I always must ask: “What is the root of this symptom?” Whether someone has headaches, back pain, or allergies, it’s a different approach from other medicine. For example, someone can take an over the counter medication for a headache and the pain may temporarily be relieved. But Acupuncture asks why the person is getting headaches in the first place. It does not seek only to stop the pain in the moment, but stimulates the body to heal in order to not have headaches in the future. The goal is long term healing.
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What Kind of Flu Is It? A Homeopathic Perspective
Author: Vera Volfson
Flu season is upon us. It is this time of the year again when leaves are turning into beautiful colors making New England scenery a spectacular view. But with all that beauty come colder days, and colds and flu become frequent companions. What should we do to protect ourselves or get better fast if we do get flu or a cold?
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Healing From the Core: Full Body Presence, Grounding and Healthy Boundaries
Author: Angela Stevens
Do you walk through life feeling a sense of connection or disconnection? Or do you feel overwhelmed by life because you feel you are not capable of keeping up with the pace with which life is moving? Or perhaps you feel out of touch with everything you are experiencing as you move through each day? Do you feel exhausted at the end of the day and you do not understand why? Are you sensitive to and affected by the emotions, attitudes, and energy of the people you interact with?
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Healthcare Designed by Your Body
Author: Kristin Lewis
There are many ways to get at the roots of issues or ailments, whether they are a common cold, migraines, a simple backache or stress. BodyTalk is a broad and effective holistic healthcare system that uses your unique bodymind complex as the guide to healing. Using muscle checking to identify, on all levels, what is getting in the way of your wellbeing, each BodyTalk session brings you more into alignment with your body’s natural state of healing and wellbeing.
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What's YOUR Perception?
Author: Christine Conway
Take responsibility for all your decisions and choices in life. Show the universe that you are ready and willing to look at life with a positive attitude.
One of the first steps to enhance your life and really begin to shift your energy and your thoughts is through the use of the ancient Chinese practice known as Feng Shui. Feng Shui totally changed my life from a single, corporate, not loving myself woman to a married, self-employed and tons of love for myself, woman.
I’m sharing with you in the Tea Room conversation today a few feng shui tips that are simple changes that you can begin to make, that will help you to change your perception. No matter where you are in life, we all want to make it to the next step. If we don’t progress in life, than we regress. Feng Shui has proven to be a great way to support yourself to get you to that next positive level.
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Felden-WHAT? How One Feldenkrais® Class Changed My Life
Author: Marcia Giudice
About twenty years ago, I asked a podiatrist why I had a slight limp in my walk. He said, “I can’t help you, but I can tell you who can.” He referred me to a Feldenkrais Practitioner who offered group classes called Awareness Through Movement®. The experience of my first class forever changed concepts I held about myself, stretching, and movement. And, I immediately found myself on a journey to learn more… a journey that continues to this day. Exploring the Feldenkrais Method® not only helped me improve my walking, but continues to help me cultivate body-mind awareness, improve my posture, reduce my aches and pains, move better, and feel younger.
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The Medicine of the Future
- in your hands -
Author: Mare Tomaski
In the future (or right now if you choose it) every-day medicine may not include a trip to the doctor or pharmacy. Instead each of us will be endowed with all the information we need to not only eradicate many common illnesses but if they should arise, we will know just what to do to bring ourselves back to health, sans the doctor or pharmacist.
In the past decade we've seen a steep rise in conditions that I'd like to call 'Lifestyle Disease'. Lifestyle Disease could be categorized as any condition that is brought on through repeated habits over time that alter the healthy function of the body. Illnesses like diabetes, heart disease, indigestion, gout, obesity, vascular disease and many more, could become rare if we heed the influx of scientific research and good old common-sense currently making its way through our information highways.
The exploration of an intriguing discovery in human gene expression called Epigenetics has researchers and yes even some doctors realizing what our grandmothers and hippie friends have known for decades. You are what you eat, quite literally. I would also add, you are what you think, you are what you feel and you most surely are the result of what you do repeatedly over your life time. If you change your habits you change your cells, rapidly.
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Reflexology with ADD/ADHD Syndrome
Author: Iris Ahronovich
A couple of years ago, a specialist who works with ADD/ADHD, Dr. Lampit Meir, asked me to work in his institution to research the effects of Reflexology on kids and adults with ADD or ADHD.
During the 1.5 years I worked for Dr. Lampit Meir I used multiple techniques to assist the clients. Every client received a session where all reflexes were attended to with additional support on the Endocrine and Central Nervous systems. With that being said, each session was also customized to meet the person’s needs based on the feedback from the week prior. Since everyone is different it is important that their sessions be specific to their needs. Communication with both the children and adults was crucial, too. It was important to understand how the ADD/ADHD was affecting their learning, relationships, etc.
The changes were amazing!! Dr. Lampit Meir was seeing the results and began to believe more and more in Reflexology. He shared the results of his “little research” project comparing those on medication and those without.
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POWER P.L.A.Y. for Your Ultimate Life Blueprint
Author: Ombassa Sophera
Every day we all get an awesome opportunity to wake up -- I mean really wake up. Wake up to ask new questions; to have a chance to be transformed by choosing to renew our minds, which comes through changing to thoughts that feel good. This in turn influences how we feel, which then directs our minds to begin to produce more life-giving, more nourishing thoughts.
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Surprising Outcomes
Author: Cathy Corcoran
Much of my life has been spent in search of answers. Rushing from place to place, seeking outside myself for the answers to questions I had not yet asked. What is meaningful? What is of value? In the midst of the quandary, I lost the process, the experience of life just for the wonder of it.
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Unique Loss & Grief—Parent Loss for Adults
Author: Judith Chaloux
The loss of a parent, whether the first or our surviving parent, is heightened during the upcoming hallmark months of May and June. What most people are not aware of is that the celebration of Mother’s Day originated back in 1905 by Anna Jarvis as she experienced deep grief for her mother Anna Reeves Jarvis. A persistent rumor at that time was that Anna’s grief was intensified because she and her mother quarreled and her mother died before they could reconcile. Many years later, inspired by Ms. Jarvis’s struggle to promote Mother’s Day, Sonora Dodd, who lost her own mother at 16, wanted to honor her beloved father for the enduring care he had given her. As noted in the American tradition, these events birthed Father’s Day that was first celebrated on June 19, 1910. The loss of our parents through death is a unique loss for an adult as he/she becomes what is termed an adult orphan.
On Healing, Creativity and Community
Author: Willie Sordillo, three-time Boston Music Award winner, writer, and alto saxophonist playing at the 3/15/13 Roots & Wings Branching Out Benefit
I read an article recently which talked about a study in which people (in this case, all of them male) were asked to place an arm in a tank of ice water until they reached the highest pain threshold they could stand. Their pain responses were then measured. When music was introduced to the subjects, particularly music of their choice, their pain response decreased dramatically. Which is to say, here’s the science to back up what we already knew: Music is a healing art. But the news is even better than that, and I’ll venture this with a high degree of certainty even without running a science experiment that deliberately inflicts pain on its subjects: The healing which music induces benefits both the listener and the practitioner in equal measure. For this, as a practicing musician and sometime music teacher, I am grateful; and I believe that gratitude is also a source of health and well-being. To take it one step further, I believe that creativity, contrary to popular conception, is a communal act, one which may demand many hours of isolated work and practice, but which is ultimately realized in a public setting.
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Stepping Stones: finding your path, with the help of Reiki
Author: Susan Clark
Use the Stepping Stones of Reiki to create your dreams and to help you along your soul's journey, offering you the opportunity to continue reaching for your ever-changing goals and dreams. With these Stepping Stones: balance, meditation, health & wellness, and personal & spiritual growth, the simple but powerful tool of Reiki has the flexibility and strength to build a foundation for your optimal health and well being.
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Beyond Getting to the Gym: Mastering the Art of Self Care-an Invitation to Your Soul’s Journey
Author: Penny Rosenzweig
As much as I love celebrating the New Year and the potential for new beginnings and new growth, I find myself cringing around our cultural ritual of making “New Year’s Resolutions”. Not that there’s anything wrong with taking stock of our lives and setting new intentions for how we can make things better for ourselves and others. But for some reason in our popular culture this notion of “resolving” to do something -even if it would benefit us-carries with it this energy of efforting and drudgery. Especially when it comes to taking better care of the body (our most popular form of “resolutions) these resolutions to “lose weight”, “exercise more”, “eat healthier”, or “reduce stress” become just more things we feel we have to add to our dreaded “to do list”. Once this happens, at least for me, it’s like the kiss of death and a set up for failure and self-judgment. After all, there’s nothing nurturing about having to check things off a “to do list!”
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How To Quit Worrying And Have More Energy
Author: Jacqueline Brodnitzki
Worrying seems to be the number one cause of stress and the reason so many people feel exhausted. Most of our worry is for not. How often does the event you worried about really happen in the same way you worried about it? Worry saps your time and energy. It also decreases your happiness and resiliency. Here are three strategies you can use to blast away worry and catapult your energy.
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Choosing to Be Queen: The Emerging Leadership of Women’s Power and Compassion
Author: JaiKaur LeBlanc
The healing of our world begins with the healing of women and their relationship with their power and their compassion. Knowledge alone is no longer sufficient for living a happy and healthy life; women now require a dynamic relationship with the guidance, support, and strength of their divinity and destiny. As women transform their patterns of pain and anger into once again remembering they are Queen, they can then heal themselves and their relationships.
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Can you really fake it 'til you make it?
Author: Ann Ide
“Can you really fake it ‘til you make it?” There’s a BIG IF that will determine how well this imagining or acting "as if," or mental rehearsal will work for you. Find out more in this article about making sure that your beliefs will support you in what you desire and how to shift them if they’re not.
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Taking Your Power Back!
Author: Judy Giovangelo
Using the seven principles of R.E.S.P.E.C.T., your children, they will discover that “power” comes from within; and, when we are empowered from the inside, our outside world will meet us there.
In order to teach this way of being to our children, we must first practice it ourselves and become a model to them. In other words, “be the change” you want to see in the world around you. When we R.E.S.P.E.C.T. and honor ourselves, the world around us will meet us where we are. This is the law of attraction.
R esponsiblity – Take responsibility for your thoughts, words, feelings and actions and recognize that you are the creator of your own experience. E ffort -
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Tea Room Conversation 8:
Why Angels?
Author: Elvia Nina Roe
Why would anyone in their right mind communicate with the angels? What is there to gain when it seems there may be so much to lose? On the surface, it appears the best possible outcome is that no one will figure out that you’re “touched” and you can live a quiet existence hiding your secret relationship with the winged ones from your sister, best friend and most certainly, your partner. The worst possible outcome is that your loved ones find out that you DO talk to the angels and actually listen to their guidance.
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Tea Room Conversation 7:
Where do you find your peace?
Author: Annette Bongiorno, CSYT
Think of where you attempt to find peace now. Is it at the bottom of a Ben & Jerry's ice cream container? Are your attempts to find peace successful? Are they long lasting?
Where I have found my peace has changed over the years. When I was younger I didn’t recognize that I craved a place where I could be peaceful, calm, quiet and dare I say blissful. I would often sit under a tree in the middle of a huge field surrounded by woods. No one would know I was there. I often did not know why I was there, but it was comforting.
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Tea Room Conversation 6:
Who Drives Your Child to a Place of Calm?
Author: Elizabeth Goranson, M.Ed.
Think about you and your child...who is in the driver's seat when she becomes overwhelmed, stressed out, angry? If you answered, "you", than you can assume that your child is not clear on where to go when she is trying to get to a place of calm. Eventually your child may begin to assume that she needs you for directions because you have not shown that you trust her to get herself to the destination safely.
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Tea Room Conversation 5:
Back to School Stress Busters
Author: Marci Zieff
As the hazy days of summer come to a close and fall begins it can be both exciting and stressful. Entering a new school year, making new friends, going into a different classroom and trying new activities can bring about an array of feelings. The busy-ness of the fall can be a shock to the system. Here are some simple yet very effective ways to alleviate stress for the whole family!
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Tea Room Conversation 4:
The Benefits of Svaroopa® Yoga
Author: Andrea Wasserman, CSYT, RYT500
Are you Stressed? Have Pain? Trouble sleeping? A busy mind? Do you want a deeper experience? Svaroopa® yoga can help your tensions unravel and your stress melt away.
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Tea Room Conversation 3:
Would you love to do what you love?
Author: Jessica Sweet, Life Coach & Clinical Social Worker
The case for doing what you love has been made over and over again, by authors, philosophers, poets, - even by Steve Jobs. I’ll assume you don’t need convincing that a happier life is better than an unhappy one, and that doing something you love is a key component of having a life you love. But how do you get there? How can you begin to understand what will make you happy and fulfilled?
In this article, I’ll share one tool with you that will help get you started on your journey to doing what you love. This is a formula that will take into account all the components – or elements – you need to consider to find what you love. To be clear, when I talk about doing what you love, I’m talking about nothing less than finding a calling.
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Tea Room Conversation 2:
Sugar Blues
Author: Geri Segel
Creative yet simple meal planning can help you to feel satisfied with the foods that you eat, but without all of the added sugar. Your sweet tooth can be satisfied and your belly full while you reduce your risk of heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, etc.
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Tea Room Conversation 1:
Navigating What We Don’t Know —
With All That We Do Know
Author: Sandy Corcoran, M.Ed
We asked Sandy Corcoran to share her thoughts on several questions we are often asked: What might 2012 bring? What may 2012 ask us to be aware of? And how can we best respond?
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Does Love Exist?
Author: Ann Ide
I want to offer a subtle, yet powerfully useful distinction about love.
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Doorway to Experiencing the "Self"
Author: Melissa Fountain, CSYT
Walking without tightening means SLOWING down, and staying present in your own body and Self.
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