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Shirley Lynn Martin, Elmira, ON (2026)

12/30/2025

Happy Tuesday!

I'm sure that for many there have been moments of beauty, moments of tragedy, moments of healing and laughter, moments of connection and maybe even moments of loneliness. Nature is about flow. And there are two major flows we often refer to as Yin and Yang. Or we might experience them as ebb and flow. There are the thermals and there is gravity. Where one energy force flows in a direction it will inevitably meet its counterforce. Eventually there is an up to the down, the in to the out, right to the left.

So this year is likely filled with memories that have left their mark, or a scar or a joyous internal feel good movie. We cannot change that these opposing forces occur, not can we control or stop them. Perhaps the best we can do is surrender to these flows, accept them and decide what wisdom we will gain from it all. That pain and love are part of life does not prevent us from being purpose oriented people. Sometimes, living our life as best as we can in the midst of pain, sorrow and loss is our purpose....to love life enough to breathe in and stay another day, to wake up and thank the morning sun and the light of the moon that stays constant to us in the midst of pain and loss.

We may also have memories of new connections, of births and old relationships that have sustained us. We may have tried something we have never done before, or said yes to an adventure that grew us in a way we never imagined. For all what you have lived, for all of life that you have breathed in and let go, for all the memories and heartache that you carry within you, remember that you are alive, you are still given life and so you still have a purpose here. There is still something more. Healing and growing will unfold your life and meet these life-forces in unimaginable ways. Say yes to it. Give thanks for this year. Carry forward all the wisdom you have earned. Your wisdom can shape a different kind of 2026, a different choice in your heart. Peace.

12/29/2025

Happy Monday!

I try to live by a phrase a mentor of mine once shared with me. It's okay to have goals, to have plans, he said. Just hold them lightly. You can't control life, he said. So hold your plans lightly. Make sure there is room for Spirit to come and make changes, to bring in the unexpected and ask you to let go of what isn't yours to hold onto. It is the same with children, with our partners, family and friends. Cherish them and hold them lightly in your heart. Let your bonds be real and true. Let your goals be real and true. Just remember that life flows in the way it will and so don't hold on too tightly what may not be able to be, or to stay in its current form.

As we approach another year, we will say goodbye to 2025 in a couple of days; so remind yourself of your goals going forward that align with brings true meaning. Remind yourself of what you cherish. Be grateful for the wonder of the special bonds you create and the goals you can accomplish.

And if something needs to be released, do it gently. Release it kindly. Whatever it was, there was a reason that made sense to you for a time.

As you plan for what's next, make sure there is oxygen in your goals; make sure you are holding them lightly so you can adjust as you go. Make them worthy of your time and investment. And remember, your goals are only as good as your relationships around you that support you to bring them to fruition. Live well today. Love the ones you are with and live lightly. Peace.

I cherish the medicine of these beautiful eagles seen in the distance and their teachings about having vision and holding to truth.

12/28/2025

Happy Sunday! Care for self today….

Take this day to replenish your heart, your soul, your mind and body.
if you need to rest, rest.
If you need to play, play.
If you need to connect, connect.
If you need to pray and meditate, then pray and meditate
If you need to dream and envision, dream and envision
If you need to laugh, laugh.
If you to be quiet and still, be quiet and still.
If you need to run and jump, run and jump.
If you need to sing, sing.
If you need to create, create.
If you need to weep, weep.
If you need to read a great story that inspires, read a great story that inspires.

There are countless ways to replenish your being. Do what is necessary today to step into 2026 with a healthy soul. Peace.

River having a good sleep after good long plays with friends in the bush.

12/27/2025

Happy Saturday !

Did you experience the quietness, or love, or joy, or blessing of the season so far? Then don't end the spirit of love and generosity that you opened your heart to this past week. Keep it flowing from you and round again! Peace to you.

12/26/2025

Happy Friday! Happy Boxing Day, our 2nd Christmas! Another day to celebrate the season of new hope and light! I share a beautiful parable, an invitation to be a voice of peace in 2024.

Two Birds

“Tell me the weight of a snowflake,” a coal-mouse asked a wild dove.
“Nothing more than nothing,” was the answer.
“In that case, I must tell you a marvellous story,” the coal-mouse said.
“I sat on the branch of a fir, close to its trunk, when it began to snow–not heavily, not in a raging blizzard–no just like in a dream, without a wound and without any violence. Since I did not have anything better to do, I counted the snowflakes settling on the twigs and needles of my branch. Their number was exactly 3,741,952. When the 3,741,953rd dropped onto the branch, nothing more than nothing, as you say, the branch broke off.”
Having said that, the coal-mouse flew away.
The dove, since Noah’s time an authority on the matter, thought about the story for awhile, and finally said to herself, “Perhaps there is only one person’s voice lacking for peace to come to the world.”

This story concludes Joseph Jaworski’s book Synchronicity

12/25/2025

Merry Christmas!

Amazing Peace:
A Christmas Poem by Maya Angelou

"Thunder rumbles in the mountain passes
And lightning rattles the eaves of our houses.
Flood waters await us in our avenues.

Snow falls upon snow, falls upon snow to avalanche. Over unprotected villages.
The sky slips low and grey and threatening.

We question ourselves.
What have we done to so affront nature?
We worry God.
Are you there? Are you there really?
Does the covenant you made with us still hold?

Into this climate of fear and apprehension, Christmas enters,
Streaming lights of joy, ringing bells of hope
And singing carols of forgiveness high up in the bright air.
The world is encouraged to come away from rancor,
Come the way of friendship.

It is the Glad Season.
Thunder ebbs to silence and lightning sleeps quietly in the corner.

Flood waters recede into memory.
Snow becomes a yielding cushion to aid us. As we make our way to higher ground.

Hope is born again in the faces of children
It rides on the shoulders of our aged as they walk into their sunsets.
Hope spreads around the earth. Brightening all things,
Even hate which crouches breeding in dark corridors.

In our joy, we think we hear a whisper.
At first it is too soft. Then only half heard.
We listen carefully as it gathers strength.
We hear a sweetness.
The word is Peace.
It is loud now. It is louder.
Louder than the explosion of bombs.

We tremble at the sound. We are thrilled by its presence.
It is what we have hungered for.
Not just the absence of war. But, true Peace.
A harmony of spirit, a comfort of courtesies.
Security for our beloveds and their beloveds.

We clap hands and welcome the Peace of Christmas.
We beckon this good season to wait a while with us.
We, Baptist and Buddhist, Methodist and Muslim, say come.
Peace.

Come and fill us and our world with your majesty. We, the Jew and the Jainist, the Catholic and the Confucian,
Implore you, to stay a while with us.
So we may learn by your shimmering light
How to look beyond complexion and see community.

It is Christmas time, a halting of hate time.
On this platform of peace, we can create a language
To translate ourselves to ourselves and to each other.

At this Holy Instant, we celebrate the Birth of Jesus Christ
Into the great religions of the world.
We jubilate the precious advent of trust.
We shout with glorious tongues at the coming of hope.
All the earth’s tribes loosen their voices
To celebrate the promise of Peace.

We, Angels and Mortal’s, Believers and Non-Believers,
Look heavenward and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at our world and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at each other, then into ourselves
And we say without shyness or apology or hesitation.

Peace, My Brother.
Peace, My Sister.
Peace, My Soul."

May Peace fill all of our hearts during this blessed season where our ancients roots -- the original not often recognized pagan celebration by the Celts/Druids which was the very basis for the timing of the Christian adaptation into our holy Christmas and the strength into glory of the Jewish Peoples during *Chanukah/
Hanukkah now overlap in one season and even over one day, a special and rare event of great significance.

Holy of Holies in all ways filled with Blessings for All - all colors, all races, all religions, all belief systems. A time for peace and acceptance and joy in all that makes us alike, and not different.

The light casts out the darkness of all of the projected shadows that seem to overwhelm our world right now. We must always keep in mind - that is what projections are. The deepest and darkest parts of each of our collective selves being brought forward for acknowledgement, transformation and atonement or at its truest "at-one-ment".

The light casts them out and ushers in glory and goodness and love. For whatsoever you do to one you do to all of our brothers, our sisters, you do to

**There's no single "correct" spelling for Hanukkah in English, but Hanukkah are widely considered to be the two most common and accepted variations.

https://www.with-heart-and-hands.com/2016/12/amazing-peace-christmas-poem-by-maya.html

12/24/2025

Happy Wednesday!

Happy Christmas Eve! This is my wish for all of you who come and share moments with me here on my page. I am so grateful for each of you.

A Friendship Blessing

May you be blessed with good friends.

May you learn to be a good friend to yourself.

May you be able to journey to that place in your soul where there is great love, warmth,

feeling, and forgiveness.

May this change you.

May it transfigure that which is negative, distant, or cold in you.

May you be brought into the real passion, kinship, and affinity of belonging.

May you treasure your friends.

May you be good to them and may you be there for them; may they bring you all the

blessings, challenges, truth, and light that you need for your journey.

May you never be isolated.

May you always be in the gentle nest of belonging with your anam ċara (soul friend).

John O’Donohue, “A Book of Celtic Wisdom”

12/23/2025

Happy Tuesday!

“One Christmas when I was 6 or 7 years old, my sister, who is a year older than me, got a bike. I was very excited for her but disappointed for myself because I didn’t get a bike.

“Don’t worry”, my sister told me, “You will get yours next year!” Of course that made sense, she was a year older than me so I would be due to get a bike next year when I was her age.

Well, you can guess the next part of the story...

That’s right, the next Christmas rolled around and there was no bike for me.

To say I was disappointed is an understatement. Neither of us considered that our parents might not play according to the script since it made so much sense to us. Of course, we hadn’t informed our parents about the plan so there was no chance for them to go along with it or let us know why that wouldn’t be possible.

Back then, this experience was high on the list of my life’s greatest disappointments. But now with the benefit of age and perspective (and tapping!) I know that my parents weren’t to blame because they simply had no idea. And my sister wasn’t to blame either as she was simply trying to placate her younger brother.

None of them really caused the suffering. What caused the suffering was attaching emotionally to the expectation.

I wasn’t wrong either, to attach to this expectation. It’s very easy for kids to come up with and attach to perfect positive fantasies, as their brains aren’t sufficiently developed to understand all of the real-world ramifications, such as financial difficulties and other things that get in the way of their parents and the world playing along with their perfect positive fantasies.

You would think that as adults we would have overcome this tendency to create perfect positive fantasies that our parents and the world either cannot or will not fulfill.

Hell, no!

Every year at this time people try to get together with family members and hold out expectations for how they should behave – and they don’t! What’s more, a lot of these expectations and “rules” and “shoulds” are not even communicated, everyone just expects that others are going to play along. And they don’t.

This is a recipe for disappointment, angst, even conflict.

Everybody else is not going to play by your rules of how you think they should behave, and it’s quite likely that you don’t want to play by the rules of how others want you to behave too!

What compounds things is that society has fed our expectations of how perfect things should be at this time with images of perfect positive family gatherings that are almost impossible to meet.

Mo Gawdat says happiness is greater than or equal to your perception of the events in your life minus your expectations of how life should be.

And Christmas / the holidays is a time of high expectations. Which is why so many people are disappointed and unhappy at this time.

Would you like to be happier this year?

Can you release your emotional attachments to your expectations just a little?

If you can, you will free up room for more happiness and acceptance, and … well, peace.

Here are just a few tapping intentions that might help:

I release all my emotional attachments to the super positive projection of how Christmas should be.

I release all my emotional attachments to how X, Y and Z should behave.

I release all my emotional attachments to my / others’ expectations of how I should behave.

Can you release your emotional attachments enough to how people should be that you are able to let people be who they are and simply expect them to be who they are? “
Warmly,
Steve Wells

“PS. As this is traditionally a time for family to get together, it is also a reminder of those who are no longer with us.

My Dad died on Christmas Day 20 years ago, so Christmas is also a reminder of his passing for me and my family.

I’ve written before about how important tapping was when my dad passed away, to help me to process my grief. “

https://www.eftdownunder.com/how-tapping-on-my-christmas-grief-brought-insights-and-peace/

12/22/2025

Happy Monday!

“As the longest night folds the Northern hemisphere into quiet and stillness, and the South unfurls in radiant return, Earth turns. Slowly; patiently; remembering.

And us? Many of us are out of breath. Sprinting toward something unnamed, tethered to the illusion of urgency while held inside infinity.

Modernity has flattened us. Flattened our hearts into consumers, our minds into processors, our relationships into transactions. We've let algorithms mediate what we touch, see, and taste. We are forgetting our sensual, intimate relationship to the living world, which has become "the environment", something outside us, something to manage and fix rather than belong to. We were taught we could extract meaning, manufacture connection, and solve loneliness with speed.

Now we're feeling it. The unraveling. The hollow ache of disconnection.

Not just “out there,” in melting glaciers or burning forests, but in here, in the nervous system, in the grief that won’t metabolize, in the not-knowing where and how to belong.

And yet, another pulse is beating. An ancient rhythm. One that still knows stillness. One akin to prayer. One that holds us gently enough to remember: We belong to the mystery; to the sacredness of all life; to each other.

We do not try to escape the darkness. We learn to sit with it; to meet the grief and its gifts; to remember the ancestral wisdom living not just in distant others, but in the quiet folds of our own psyches.”

Zaya and Maurizio
Science and Nonduality

12/22/2025

Happy Solstice!

Breathe. Let yourself have quiet and feel the joy softly flowing in Nature. Breathe and be still. Rest. Cradle yourself in this peace this sacred day! Let yourself be moved to face toward the coming light, the new year, with good medicine, with a renewed heart. Peace.

12/21/2025

Happy Sunday!a beautiful poem for Winter Solstice!

THE WINTER OF LISTENING

No one but me by the fire,
my hands burning
red in the palms while
the night wind carries
everything away outside.

All this petty worry
while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark
and intense
round every living thing.

All this trying
to know
who we are
and all this
wanting to know
exactly
what we must do.

What is precious
inside us does not
care to be known
by the mind
in ways that diminish
its presence.

What we strive for
in perfection
is not what turns us
to the lit angel
we desire.

What disturbs
and then nourishes
has everything
we need.

What we hate
in ourselves
is what we cannot know
in ourselves but
what is true
to the pattern
does not need
to be explained.

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.

And
here
in the tumult
of the night
I hear the walnut
above the child’s swing
swaying
its dark limbs
in the wind
and the snow now
come to
beat against my window
and somewhere
in this cold night
of wind and stars
the first whispered
opening of
those hidden
and invisible springs
that uncoil
in the still summer air
each yet
to be imagined
rose...
A solstice poem for turning toward the light in a very dark winter indeed. Besides our present collective traumas, It is also painful to think how much individual loneliness permeates our societies at the best of times and all the more of a heartache to think of those whose loneliness is magnified by isolation during times when others are able to celebrate together. One third of all adults in western societies now live alone. In Japan the percentage is even higher. Though in this poem, aloneness is celebrated as a blessing of the contemplative life, if we are able to feel beauty in our solitariness it is good to remember at this time of gatherings that others may actually suffer through it, and to reach out to them. A holiday blessing then, whether in joy and difficulty; may we take the time to reach out to one another, and perhaps even find that shout of joy, waiting in the springtime in all of us. DW

From ‘The Winter of Listening’
David Whyte : Essentials
Many Rivers Press 2019

12/20/2025

Happy Saturday! Today is a beautiful day, a powerful one that portends the gift and joy of new beginnings, new cycles, new seasons, and new changes. And these beginnings start in darkness. New moon, Winter Solstice are all celebrations of the potential of creation born out of darkness and stillness. Even water ceremony this morning was with dark skies and the stillness of cold.

For all this darkness, a small light radiating from a candle, the sprinkling of stars in the cloud covered skies, a fire crackling in its containing space reminds us that light is the promise of the dark and the dark is the resting place for light. Each feeds the other.

At this time of many celebrations that honour the relationship of light and dark and the LOvE that unites them together, I look forward to the space that darkness and stillness brings. I welcome the restoration and the stillness. I welcome the deep stirring of my inner wisdom and soul to imagine and dream anew.

May this season of ritual, ceremony and celebration bring you peace and true joy. May it awaken the light of real hope and faith that our compassion and kindness will again move in people’s hearts. May our care and respect for the Earth, for each other and all our relations be rekindled and imagined anew. Peace.

Shirley Lynn Martin

12/30/2025

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