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Shirley Lynn Martin

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Shirley Lynn Martin

Helping you discover the inner way to your peace and joy in your life and relationships, even after grief and trauma. Find your Wisdom's Way to Peace.

Learn to listen to your soul and discover the love of life. http://shirleylynnmartin.com The Wisdom’s Way to Peace system is a holistic mind, body, and spirit process that allows each of us to identify and free ourselves from our innermost barriers to achieving peace, serenity and spiritual fulfillment in our relationships, life and work.

11/23/2025

Happy Sunday! Your weekly poem.....

The Radish and the Universe

Late last night, while preparing
the next day’s lunch boxes,
I saw the moon’s face slip across
the cutting board and whisper to me,
come outside!

Its milk-tooth grin bathed the
radish in my hand in a lunar veneer
and for a moment, I was compelled
to leave and take to the hill where
one who is free of domestication
can view the night sky, succulent
and wild in its pip.

And I would feel that tender awe,
I always do when I take
the time to be alone
and gaze up at that spangled
rug to which Mystery’s feet walk upon.

But as I peel and spread and boil
and skin, I wonder, if that sky were to be
taken away, would I not too, disappear?

And if the radish sits plump in its crimson skin
because every element in the solar system
gathered to make it what it is,
then where does the radish end
and the universe begin?

Where does the universe end
and I begin? Are we not extensions
of each other?

And am I not too planted here, have I not too
grown from all that is: sun, moon, stars, and rain -
not one would I survive the absence of.

And so, contented, I continue to sliver the
root, watching its wafer-thin pith
blush pink with fractals,
and I wash the fruit in sunshine,
and close containers
with planets and shooting stars that
will become my children the next day.

And I recognize my own hands
as those of creation, and my heartbeat
as that of cosmic pulse, stellar thought
and black matter live inside me,
and the moon is love
being wiped clean so it
can start again in the morning.

Swear fealty to the Mystery of what you are because what you are cannot be separated from the most remarkable mystery of all; Life.

You are an extension of all that is and all that has ever been. Nothing in this moment, even a deep suffering, can exist alone or be isolated from the totality of such a loving creation.

What mundane activities remind you of your place in the greater Mystery of existence?

SEZ KRISTIANSEN

11/22/2025

Happy Saturday!

I can feel the Winter Solstice energy coming. I can feel the movement towards hibernation and deep contemplation. I can feel the pull to align with the inner light and allow the visions and goals to arise out of a deep love for life.

“Understanding Winter in Traditional Chinese Medicine

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), winter is governed by the Water element, symbolising a time of rest, reflection, and conservation of energy. As winter beckons, Yang begins its decline, yielding to the growing strength of Yin. The sun sets earlier and rises gently, casting a soft, diffused light over a landscape which becomes quieter. Nature turns inward, embracing a stillness as all living things conserve their essence. The silence of winter invites us to pause, reflect, and gather our energy, mirroring a deep rest that the season embodies. During this time, it is crucial to align with these natural rhythms to maintain harmony and health, and prepare for a new energy during spring.

Yang Sheng Principles in Winter: Preserving Health and Longevity

Yang Sheng, translated as “nourishing life,” represents the principles of cultivating and nurturing life, protecting physical health and living in harmony with the natural rhythms of nature, as well as our own inner nature. During winter, the importance of Yang Sheng is particularly emphasised, as this season is dominated by the Water element and characterised by the natural decline in Yang Qi, the vital life-force associated with life, warmth, activity, and vitality. By aligning with the season’s natural rhythms and focusing on the preservation of Yang Qi, we can support our body’s energy reserves, enhance resilience, and lay a strong foundation for health and vitality in the coming year.

Kidneys, Bladder, and the Emotion of Fear

In TCM, Winter is associated with the Kidneys and Bladder, organs that store and regulate our vital essence, or Jing. The Kidneys are considered the root of life, responsible for growth, development, and reproduction. They also play a crucial role in water metabolism and maintaining the body’s Yin and Yang balance. The Bladder, paired with the Kidneys, is responsible for storing and excreting urine, thus playing a key role in maintaining fluid balance.

Winter in TCM
Emotionally, the Water element is linked to fear. In Winter, unresolved fears and anxieties may surface, indicating an imbalance in the Kidney energy. Practices that support Kidney health, such as meditation, acupuncture, and herbal therapies, can help alleviate these emotional imbalances.”

Fraser Cobham

https://ancientwatersacupuncture.com.au/winter-in-chinese-medicine-the-water-element/

11/21/2025

Happy Friday!

“If you miss the present moment, you miss your appointment with life. It’s so clear. Mindfulness is the energy and practice that helps you go back to the here and now so that you encounter life....
“When you hold the hand of a child, invest one hundred percent of yourself in the act of holding her hand. When you hug your partner, do the same. Forget everything else. Be totally present, totally alive in the act of hugging.
This is the opposite of the way we’ve been trained to lead our lives and run our businesses. We’ve been taught to do many things at once. We answer an e-mail while we talk on the phone; while in a meeting for one project, we work on our notes for another project.
Every new technology promises to help us do more things at once. Now we can send e-mail while listening to music, talking on the phone, and taking a picture, all with the same device. With your energy that dispersed, where is your power?”

― Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Power

Picture: from Perth, Western Australia.

11/20/2025

Happy Thursday!

“There is a beauty in the fragility of life, a sweetness to be savored in its fleeting moments of joy. For it is in the rawness of our experiences, both the joyful and the sorrowful, that we truly come alive. We are not meant to shield ourselves from the pain of life, but to embrace it fully, to let it shape us, to teach us, to make us more human.

So do not be afraid to love, to open your heart to the world, even if it means risking heartbreak. For the sweetness of love far outweighs the bitterness of loss. And when the inevitable pain comes, find solace in the beauty of the world around you, in the simple pleasures of life, in the memories of love and laughter. For even in the midst of sorrow, there is still beauty to be found.
~Louise Erdrich

(Book: The Painted Drum)

This picture is in honour of my trip to Albany, Western Australia, a couple of years ago, a memory of beauty and healing.

11/19/2025

Happy Wednesday! Let the light of your soul pierce through the crack of your ego defences and identifications that can no longer be of service to you and the path you seek to walk .

“The soul is the experimental, playful inquiry of the universe itself, longing for other ways to be alive. It's not what we have. It's being spirited away."

Bayo Akomolafé
PhD.

11/18/2025

Happy Tuesday! Awaken to your soul’s greatness, its sacredness !

TAO TE CHING CHAPTER 25
The Mother of All Things

Something that contains everything,
Quiet and still, pure and deep;
Here before heaven and earth,
Alone and unchanging
Like a mother bringing up her children
Formless, it completes all things.

Not knowing its real name,
We call it the Way.
Not knowing how to describe it,
We call it sacred.
Sacred means always and never changing.
Always changing means indefinable.
Not defining means returning to this.

So the Way is sacred -
Heaven, Earth, and Humankind - all sacred.
Humankind imitates Earth,
Earth imitates Heaven,
Heaven imitates the Way,
And the Way follows what is
As the mother of all things.

11/17/2025

Happy Monday!

"CHASING PARADISE✨
It’s taken years but I’m beginning to understand that chasing Paradise keeps us from living here in paradise. It’s the journey and process that matter, not where we’re going or where we think we’re going.
Initially, we’re pulled into life, drawn into a thoroughness that brings us alive. But once in the thick of it, we get tangled in the details and start to map and manage life instead of living it. When encumbered this way, life seems to be other than where we are. Or so we think. Until some shock of love or suffering jars us into a state of thoroughness that brings us back alive.
Because nothing stands still, not us or the Universe we wake in. Everything is
shifting—breaking through, growing, blossoming, shedding, turning to mulch, and breaking ground again. We can only know life by living it.
We are constantly challenged to drop below our own story in order to understand and feel the Whole of Life that is always beyond our own particular map. Otherwise, we make everything conform to our biased view of life, and we remain trapped in our own web of assumptions and conclusions and never grow.
Beneath our inevitable entanglements in the details of life, each of us carries a
portion of the Universal Spirit that lives in all of us. That portion of Spirit is ours to
carry in this incarnation is very personal, though the Spirit our soul is made of is
Universal.
As we breathe, we take in Spirit from the Universe until it fills our individual soul. Once inside us, it’s impossible to discern what part of the vastness of Spirit is yours or mine and what part came from the timeless reservoir of Spirit.
When we can live our stories and not be ruled by them, we love ourselves into
being. There is a Spanish saying, Se tu vida, which means “Be your life.” This is all that is asked of us. And yet, in doing so, we can get lost in all that living engenders.
No one can determine what it means for you to be your life. We simply need to be
who we are everywhere. Every time we manage to do this, it adds to our strength and view of the Whole and empowers others to be who they are everywhere. In this way, we water the seeds of decency, always in our care."

Mark Nepo

11/16/2025

Happy Sunday!

As we head towards the last part of the year, and the wind blows, the leaves have fallen and the November skies become grey, maybe you can hear your soul ask these questions:

What still moves me?
What would I do if I no longer had to please anyone?
What part of me remains untouched by others expectations?
What has become a burden that needs to be set down?
What joy is needing attention and nourishment?

Let yourself have the space to reflect upon these questions this week.

11/13/2025

Happy Thursday! As I start teaching Gendai Reiki one today, I know this inner experience of Reiki will be one of gratitude and awe.

11/11/2025

Happy Tuesday!

On this Remembrance Day/Veteran's Day where the sacrifices that were made are honoured and those who were sacrificed remain cherished. In our gratitude, we must gain from the lessons of war. We must be grateful for the efforts toward democratic societies. What we take for granted, we will loose. Perhaps we have not really ever learned from the past; have made it irrelevant because it is not of our time. We look at the past like we do our Elders. We push it aside, retire it to the margins of society, rendering its wisdom antiquated and useless. But to do so makes us weak for we cut off the stream of love and strength of understanding of the pain that has been endured. If we excuse ourselves from listening to that which gave us life, we miss the gift of true transformation for our time. Remember well. Remember and give thanks.

11/10/2025

Happy Monday! A story that challenges our search for completeness….

“Once upon a time, an old man called for his son from the city…
He was frail and weak. He was dying. The time had come to say goodbye, to rekindle memories, to furnish the village with the proper rites of passage, to mark the spot in the ground where he was to return to the goddess Ala. “Let us do one last…thing together,” he said into the phone, coughing and wheezing as he did.

In two days, the son arrived, a bit disgruntled. He had been busy, you see. Most people in the city are too busy for the inconsequential ramblings of their elders in the villages.

Nevertheless, the old man blessed and welcomed his son, fed him, asked him about his progress, and then took him a few feet away from the mud hut he had known as home for unspeakable years. “We will build another one, here – both of us – no one else,” the father announced to his suited, ill-prepared son.

They got right to it – offering prayers and libations and kolanut to the ancestors; slicing up the grass, cutting down four palm trees, gathering the debris; burning up the weeds. Soon a princely clearing slowly emerged, ready to be host to the hut to come. And over many weeks, filled with sweat, bloodied hands, and great toil, another home grew from the clearing.

By this time, the father was a quarter to midnight, one gentle stroke away from being carried by Ala to cavernous depths. His city son carried on. He eventually finished the work and – in a moment of unbridled joy – rushed to his father’s side to announce the moment.

“It is finished! It is done! We did it, Papa. Both of us! We did it!”
“Are you…sure it is…done?” the old man asked his quizzical son. But an answer had barely left his lips when the old man – with an occultic display of strength that shocked his son senseless – jumped out of bed, pulled out a mallet, and shuffled towards the newly minted hut. Surveying the structure, he lifted his weapon and struck the side of the building, creating an ugly hole in the wall.

“Now it is done,” the old man said.

“Why did you do that? If you didn’t like the way that I handled it, you could have told me”, said the son, tears gathering to his eyes.

“My son,” the old man called to him, smiling as he approached him, mallet abandoned. “Nothing is done that does not have a hole in it. Nothing is so complete that it does not yearn to be something else. Now this gift of a hole is in the wall. When Emeka is going to the market and notices this ‘accident,’ he will tell all the others. Emeka has a big mouth, I know!” He chuckled, coughed, and continued. “It is the same thing with Mama Uche, the elders, the young bachelors, and those noisy girls that come to fetch water by the river yonder. When they see this hole, they’ll come up to you. Serve them palm wine while they greet you. Offer them kolanut. Make sure to speak a proverb or two.”

He turned from the ponderous face of his son to greet the hole in the wall once again. A morsel of wind rolled by, singing the night sky in the wake of its passing: “It is the wound that makes us. It is our shared pain that is the cord of our belonging. In the city, you were complete, whole. I offer this last gift, my son – a reminder that the wound is the way worlds gather. People who are complete don’t need each other.”

As told by Professor Bayo Akomolafe

11/09/2025

Happy Sunday! Your weekly poem..... another way to live your self confidence and self esteem.

"Your power is in your loving.
Not in your brute strength.
Nor in your bank balance
or your ever-changing reputation.
Nor in your incredible tales
of conquest and gain.
Nor even in your intellect, your brilliant mind.
But in your willingness to let your heart break today.
In your courage to let another in, let them matter.
To feel what they feel.
To feel joy, or sorrow, or the most delicious doubting.
To stand with them, but not try to fix them.
To be the room for all this… emergence.
That is your power -
your ability to provide sanctuary,
to let life nestle in your giant heart.
To hold the powerless and the helpless.
To breathe into your belly, your chest,
your head, your tense shoulders.
To stand victorious there -
holding all of yourself
in a light yet powerful embrace.
Saying to yourself:
Sweetheart, I am here.
I am here at last."
--Jeff Foster

picture by Scott Morton-Ninomiya of child's wet footprint on a rock during water ceremony. "sweetheart, I am here."

Address

Elmira, ON

Opening Hours

Monday	9am - 6pm
Tuesday	9am - 4pm
Wednesday	9am - 6pm
Thursday	11am - 5pm

Telephone

+15198866732

Website

http://shirleylynnmartin.com/

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