11 JANUARY 2018 NEWSLETTER

Dear Reader,

I had an interesting conversation with one of my teachers the other day and thought I would share it with you, along with the resulting realization…

Greatest Blessing and Challenge

“What is your greatest blessing?” my teacher asked.

“This moment.” I answered.

“What is your greatest challenge?”

“Accepting and relaxing into the moment.”

I surprised myself when I said this.

It was a spontaneous response… and it rang so true, though I didn’t know it at the time.

This is a dilemma I face as a person recovering from trauma and chronic pain…
I’m learning to trust the Universe.

Completely.

I am making progress in breaking up the regularity and strength of this pattern.

Boy, do I have a part of me that is completely resistant to this idea of trusting what is here.

So much so, that I as I do the work to heal, I notice more and more often how much tension I hold just as a habit…
tension that is not required to handle whatever I am doing…
just tension.

It’s as if I am trying to somehow push the moment,
control the outcome.

Well, there’s the master addiction, right?

Control.

Or buying into the illusion that I have control.

That’s what we do as people experiencing pain chronically — we try and change the moment into something more comfortable.

We try and escape the moment.

I hear this so often from people who live with chronic pain or are in recovery from it.

For me, I have an old belief that still lives strongly enough in me to color the moment.

It tells me that I’m not safe, that I should hide, or contract.

It tells me whatever I am doing is not enough.

This resistance — it is an old pattern running under a story,
a belief that what is showing up in the moment isn’t enough.

Well who am I to tell the Universe how to show up?

Maybe It’s trying to get my attention.

Maybe there is a lesson to learn here.

Maybe this moment will continue so long as I try and dodge the lesson sitting right here.

I’m not saying don’t take a stand for or against an issue or to become a doormat.

I’m saying accept as reality what is happening without a denial or a dodge.
… and move from there.

Pain is the medium of transformation.

It’s what we do with it that makes all the difference.

Unleash your healing power… let go.

Trust the moment.

Accept what is showing up.

Gently in light and love,

Elizabeth

Sparkler for the day

When you think about it, we are all walking illusions. We are made up of atoms. A 150 pound person is made up of somewhere around 7x10 to the 27th power (that’s seven billion billion billion) atoms. And atoms are made up of over 90% space.

So we are creatures that are mostly space. Yet when we look, we see all but the empty space. We miss the empty space altogether. That says a lot about the forces holding us together into a cohesive bundle. That says a lot about our perceptions, too. Yep, walking illusions all right... a great example of life being an illusion.

Report from the Back 40 — American Kestrel

I saw a flash of slate blue and reddish-brown feathers in flight today. The colors caught my eye, of course. Then the owner of this fab affair stopped and perched in an oak at the northwest edge of The Back 40. To my complete amazement, I realized I was looking at a kestrel. I could see its multi-colored feathers shining in the sun: blues, reds, browns, black, and white. It really took my breath away since, although the American Kestrel is found throughout the U.S., I have never seen one in all my days. What a beauty this bird was sitting atop the tree surveying the field to the west! I may have missed being able to identify it altogether if it had not been for the sun shining just the way it was on the feathers and the bird being close enough for me to get such a good look.

It’s especially wonderful to me to see this species, as its numbers have been reported to be in steep decline in the last decades. The American Kestrel, commonly known as the sparrowhawk, is the smallest of the Falcon genus, but has plenty of fierceness and ingenuity of spirit. They hunt insects, and other live prey such as frogs, I suspect mostly of the tree frog variety, rodents, and snakes. The thing about kestrels and snakes – well that works both ways. The kestrel feeds on small snakes, but the larger snakes feed on the kestrel.

The kestrel’s relatively small size makes it fair game for other birds of prey to hunt it, so it is a nimble, fast flyer and I imagine it is good at hiding, and quickly if need be. They tend to hang out near human developments, so they benefit greatly when we provide them with nesting boxes. (Go here to make your own kestrel nest box.)

Sports fans may have seen them hunting moths and other insects attracted to the light of high-powered stadium lights. Keep your eyes out for them in your local park land, too.

The Kestrel as a spirit animal has similar powers to that of the hawk, such as swiftness, agility, getting a larger perspective on life, and a better overview of the world. For the kestrel, as with other falcons, add in decisiveness in action and fierce commitment. Having reviewed the behaviors of the kestrel, I would add here ingenuity and adaptation, since they hide their uneaten kills in grass mounds away from the view of other such predators and they eat so many different other critters.

The power of kestrel medicine includes living life to the fullest, flexibility — that being able to change-on-a-dime kind of living, and grace.

I am in awe of this beautiful bird, who has eluded me for so long. I feel honored that the two of us crossed paths today.

What’s up in your neck of the woods?

How Did We Get Here? The Chronic Pain & Addiction Epidemic

"The drive to rule over our environment reaped many benefits, but it also exacted a high price. Let’s see how this played out in America after World War II.

America enjoyed the benefits of great technological advances as World War II came to an end. Jobs were plentiful as the economy grew. The great American Dream blossomed. With it came the want for more. In fact, wanting more was inherent in the original term ‘American dream’ by James Truslow Adams in 1931: "life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement" regardless of social class or circumstances of one’s birth. We enjoyed more opportunity, more goods, more land, higher wages, and a higher standard of living, to name a few. America rose out of the Great Depression and went on to put a man on the moon by 1969.

The wheels of society turned even faster as technology continued to advance. Our want for more and our penchant for control stayed right with it. Our population grew. Population growth put pressure on the food supply. Advances in agribusiness brought breeding programs, pesticides, and quick-injection fertilizers enabling farmers to produce more per acre. Ultimately, these practices depleted soils of precious nutrients.

So, as the soil suffered, the plants themselves became nutrient deficient. The need for more and more fertilizer and pesticides was justified as the weakened crops became more susceptible to infestation by opportunistic predators, such as insects, fungi, and bacteria. Humans eating this nutrient depleted food, already stressed from the uptick in the pace of their schedules, became more susceptible to disease.

Fast foods doubled down on this. As McDonald’s and its competitors sprouted up across the land, people gravitated to them as a response to an easy and quick way to eat. I didn’t say healthy. The sugars, fats, and salts in these carbohydrate-rich foods further fed the want for more (as they are addictive) and served to deplete people’s bodies of nutrients.

Furthermore, as more and more jobs moved to the cities, agribusiness blossomed a long with technological advances and the Farm Bill of 1933, renewed every five years by the U.S. Congress, many people left the family farm. In leaving the land, people lost a basic and profound connection to nature and a concrete sense of a Higher Power.

So, we had these advances, and life improved in many ways. However, these changes did not serve people and the land in a healthy way. They provided a quick and seemingly easy solution to a faster and faster paced life, but were feeding a darker and more insidious problem. What was supposed to serve the people trying to live the great American Dream ended up robbing the people of their health and vitality. It also robbed the land to the point where it became harder and harder to serve the people using it. Agribusiness became as addicted to this new chemical way of farming as the people did on fast foods and sugar.

Concurrent with advances in agribusiness were the strides made in pharmaceuticals. Wonder drugs — antibiotics and other drugs — were developed that put a virtual end to many infectious diseases. Western medicine became incredibly adept at handling acute illness and traumatic injuries. Many of these advances grew out of the ingenuity of doctors in field hospitals during World War II and the Korean War. Americans got used to taking a pill whenever they contracted an illness.

Amid so many successes in acute care, somewhere medication became the answer to longer chronic pain.

The answer to chronic pain from the medical community, now supported by the pharmaceutical industry, became more and more medication. Medication for chronic pain numbed the patient, but did not heal the patient.

We experienced more stress, and it was combined with more depletion. How could our health not be negatively affected? All these factors — blossoming technology and its increased stress on us, a drop in the quality of our food, and a ‘take a pill for what ails you’ mentality — all contributed to a downward negative spiral that has burgeoned into epidemic levels that we see today.

On top of all of this, inject the influences of the health insurance industry and political power into the system. Health insurance companies want to minimize payouts to their customers. Doctors want to optimize the number of patients they see. Politicians are lobbied by big business. The patients get squeezed in the middle of these forces.

When we see the increasing numbers chronic pain and addiction considering this historical perspective, the only possible outcome of this perfect storm of events is the one we are experiencing today — one in four Americans and one in six people across the planet living in chronic pain, with concurrent high rates of addiction."

—Excerpt from Chapter 2: The Scope of the Problem from the upcoming book "The Way Through ~ Crack the Code to Chronic Pain & Discover a Thriving Life"

About Elizabeth

Elizabeth Kipp is a long time seeker of truths with one foot each in the spiritual and scientific worlds. She specializes in working with others in the areas of chronic pain, stress management, recovery, and emotional freedom. She is a health facilitator, kundalini yoga teacher, ancestral clearing practitioner and legacy transformation coach, best-selling author and prolific writer, with an powerful personal story of recovery. She has created a community to share experience, strength, and hope in coping with and healing from chronic pain in order to find a way to a life free from suffering. Find many more resources and learn how you can work with her at her website: www.elizabeth-kipp.com