Juanita Lepage MSW, RSW, BHP

Counselling & Energy Healing (289) 812-8089 Hamilton, Ontario

energy healing

Intentional Gratitude: Helpful Or Over-Rated?

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I’ve had a touch and go relationship with gratitude over the years. Growing up in a Christian community, we practised gratitude mostly through prayer and giving to those who needed money or connection. As I’ve shifted to becoming less religious and more spiritual, the messages I get are often about the importance of having an energetic vibration akin to joy and peace.

I love how gratitude can translate to noticing the bright moments even on those days that seem challenging. I love how gratitude can translate to generosity of spirit.

My struggle with gratitude is when it’s used as a mask or method to deny or minimize pain. I often hear from people, “My life is good – I have so many great things going on in my life – (insert: money, home, health, family etc) and I still feel horrible”.

If you’re a person who minimizes your pain, my challenge today is for you to really look at why having food, clothing, home etc means that you shouldn’t feel pain.

So often gratitude is used to minimize the pain of ourselves or others – “at least you’ve got (insert blank)”, “everything happens for a reason” or “others have it worse than I do, so I shouldn’t complain”.

When you minimize your pain, notice what happens in your body. For me, I can physically start to feel tense inside the core of my body. Scan your body and notice where you hold your tension or pain. Emotionally I can shift to numbness (chakras closing) and sometimes I will disconnect from my body all together. You may notice similar things or you may notice your emotions such as anxiety & anger intensify.

What if you acknowledged both your privilege and your pain?

“I’m really hurting right now”. “I feel incredibly sad and overwhelmed”. “What I’m going through is challenging in so many ways – it makes a lot of sense that I feel what I’m feeling”.

We often find it easier to do this when we have an obvious trauma that happens, for example the loss of family member or dear friend. We’d never say – “Sorry about the loss of your parent, but at least you have a nice house”.

This can be more challenging when it’s difficult to put your finger on exactly what is bothering you right now. Maybe it’s stress, maybe it’s overwhelm and you’re judging yourself because other people don’t seem to be overwhelmed by the same things you are. Many times it’s a subconscious pattern of disregarding our own needs or even acknowledging our own needs leaving us with a feeling of anxiety or anger. Sometimes emotional pain exhibits as physical/somatic pain in your body.

If you don’t know why you’re feeling what you’re feeling, I encourage you to try and simply it acknowledge it without rationalizing it. “I’m feeling like crap today, and I don’t know why”. Imagine giving this place a little room to breathe for 5 minutes or more.

My experience with myself and in helping others, is that allowing space for pain allows it to expand and then release. Allowing pain doesn’t have to deny the capacity for gratitude.

Sometimes there are fears that arise around feeling pain – “What if it overwhelms me? What if it takes over and I never feel joy?” With psychotherapy we can explore what your fears are about feeling your pain and take a path that allows you to experience your pain at a pace that’s respectful to you. Energy healing too can help a person ground and reconnect with one’s body and emotions.

So What About Gratitude?

Gratitude has its place in all of this, and my encouragement is to see if you can BOTH acknowledge those areas of gratitude and also those areas of pain and shift away from an either/or attitude.

I’ve found that starting my day with 3 things I’m grateful for can be a beautiful way to shift my energy to be more connected with the present. Or even the intention of doing one thing that I enjoy today and being specific about it – play a game on my phone, go for a walk, eat something delicious, read a chapter of good book. Genuine gratitude feels really good. It has also helped me look beyond myself and give to others – whether that be a family member or friend or a charity.

I’ve found that seeing a therapist has been a great way for me to acknowledge my pain. I grew up learning to be at adept at disregarding my own needs and it took me a good while to really acknowledge and be present with my own pain. As I practice intentionally allowing my pain & struggles, I’ve found more peace and connection with myself & others. When I allow my pain, it often passes a lot more quickly than I had anticipated.

What are your rituals to feel your gratitude, and how do you give yourself space to feel your pain?

The Art of Letting Shit Go

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I’ve been rereading Michael Singer’s book, The Untethered Soul. I love the simplicity and clarity of this book and I’ve also been frustrated with the simplicity too. After his recommended step of opening one’s heart chakra no matter the circumstance, he then writes about “letting stuff go”.

I have struggled with this recommendation for years. God, wouldn’t you just love to let shit go? Set your intention to “let go” and voila! When I hear this phrase I think of someone coming over and just turning a switch off on me. “Here Juanita, You’ll never have to feel that emotional about that situation again, I found the let go switch!”. Well, wouldn’t that be nice? It’s never been that easy for me and I’m guessing it hasn’t for you either.

Through conversations with others I found that “letting go” actually means being fully present with whatever emotions are present and even embracing them. When I’m fully present with uncomfortable emotions, the intensity of them lessens and then I get closer to that feeling of letting something go.

For some triggers in my life, I find it impossible to fully let it go, because these reactions were learned early in childhood. And just when I think I have let it go, a situation arises and I realize that there’s another layer of emotion that needs my presence.

In the meditation world, this presence is often given to oneself by cultivating the witness/observer part of your Self as you feel an emotion and want to react to it. Meditation can teach us to watch ourselves instead of react. Sometimes we can see an emotion rise and fall if we sit with it long enough and our minds don’t take over.

In the counselling world, there are many psychotherapeutic techniques that can help a person cultivate the wise self watching all the emotions and other parts of themselves engage with the world. But perhaps the most helpful things psychotherapy can offer is the act of presence with another as they feel their uncomfortable emotions. It can be very powerful to have another person anchoring & present as feel the depths of our pains & struggles.

I’ve often found that the only way I can be present with certain uncomfortable emotions is with my own therapist. I’ve paid that person to be with me for an hour and while I could end the session early, I won’t because I’ve paid and that often helps me commit to the act of fully being present with my emotions and even embracing them. This process is closest one I’ve found to actually letting shit go.

With energy healing, presence is also a valuable gift to give to others and to ourselves - fully being present as a chakra opens or shifts. Energy healing also offers techniques to help clear the blockages in our chakras which lessens the emotional intensity. Often an integrated session of both psychotherapy & energy healing can help you integrate and process things with more ease.

What things have you found to be helpful or unhelpful as you try and let go of things?

New Hamilton Location

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It is always bittersweet to change locations. I have enjoyed my time at 16McMurray street in Dundas, and I will especially miss the fish tank and the Dundas locale. That being said, I am excited to share my new location as of June 17 at 430 York Blvd in Hamilton at the Hamilton Centre for Personal Development. It is a beautiful space that I’m looking forward to sharing with you.

I will be keeping my Thursday Burlington location for now.

The new space is located at the corner of Locke street and York Blvd in Hamilton. The parking entrance is off of Locke Street, and there is free street parking too.  It has easy access to the 403, being just minutes away.

The building is shared with De La Sol Yoga Studio, Studio Zee Pilates, and so much more. My entrance is located on the York Blvd side. Just go up the one set of stairs and I’m there. If you need wheelchair accessibility, please let me know and I will share the details.

I will continue to be available Mondays and Wednesdays. See the link for hours and details.

Hamilton Centre for Personal Development Open House

If you want to see the new space or anything else that is offered in the building, there will be an open house on June 14 from 6-9pm called the Night of Light.

3 Books To Explore Real Magic

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A few years ago one of my sons awoke after having a nightmare that I was drowning.  I comforted him that I was indeed okay.  His shouts had awoken me from my own dream where a giant wave had covered me and I was floating underwater.  You can imagine my surprise that my son was having the same dream as I was, but a different experience of the dream – almost like he was on the shore watching. I did not experience my dream of being underwater as fearful because I knew I wasn’t drowning in my dream.

So is that experience coincidence? Or how is it possible that we could have the same dream at the same time?

I think everyone has a story about something that has happened to them that is unexplainable by the boundaries of science.  It’s not to say that science couldn’t explain these things in the future, but currently there are many limitations in what can be measured and validated.

3 great books that explore mystical or magical experiences more in depth are Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson, Real Magic by Dean Radfield, and The Power of Eight by Lynne McTaggart.

Men Who Stare at Goats

This book is written by a journalist who meets some interesting characters who have worked for the U.S. government to study if “magical” methods can be used in the armed forces.  There is a movie loosely based on the book with George Clooney & Ewan McGregor.  Individuals were taught the skill of remote viewing in which they go into a meditative state to gather sensitive information from other countries or armies. Both the book and the movie do a good job of letting the reader/viewer decide what they want to interpret as truth or fiction.

Real Magic

Dean Radin recently outed himself as scientist who studies magic.  In actuality he has studied magic for decades, but used to call it the studying of psi or parapsychological phenomenon. In reality, magic could be anything that happens in our world that cannot be explained by science.  He gives many illustrations of documented experiences, his own experience with intention & synchronicity, and of course science to explain some of this phenomena.

If you’re more of a science-minded person, this a great book because he explores the stigma of studying paranormal phenonmena in the realm of science.  He explores scientists firmly-rooted fears and experiences of losing credibility when they share scientific research that states the opposite of what they’ve been taught as true.  Science can become dogmatic, and Dean shares his own experience of being in the situation where scientists reject facts because it doesn’t fit with their personal beliefs.

Dean’s list of evidence-based articles

The Power of Eight

Lynne McTaggart is a journalist who is an expert on the research of the “science of spirituality”.  She is best known for her book The Field.  Her newest book, The Power of Eight, chronicles the science of what happens when a group of people focus their intention on healing a person.  She is hard-wired for scientific explanations, yet finds herself experiencing miracles in her workshops when small groups of 8 focus their intention on healing a person.  She documents her journey and her more empirical work starting out with plants and then working more broadly.  If you belong to a prayer group, this all may come as no surprise to you, and for the non-spiritual person this will give some credibility to this practice.

What kind of experiences have you had that you’ve brushed off as coincidence or maybe have had others brush off as nonsense?  Once you open the door to exploring these elements of life, it’s likely that your lens of the world will start to shift dramatically.

Want some free online resources about the science of energy healing?  Check out my other blog post, Must-read sites about the science of energy healing (that are free too).

Introducing Energy Healing At Home

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After a few months of simmering with this idea, I finally got creative and made a few videos for those interested in learning a few methods of energy healing to do at home.

If your energy field is healthy and strong, this positively impacts your physical, emotional, & spiritual well-being too.

In each video I explain the benefits of each exercise and give you a video demonstration of how to do them.  They are easy exercises to add to the start of your day or at a moment when you need to connect with yourself and centre.

Go to www.JuanitaLepage.com and sign-up to learn more.

 

Christianity And Energy Healing: A Book Review

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I was excited to buy a copy of the newly released book Blessed with Energy: The Mystery of Energy Medicine Explained Through Science and Scripture by Marcy Meyers.  I attended the Barbara Brennan School of Healing with Marcy for a couple of years.  During our final year, she gave an excellent presentation about Christianity and Energy Healing.  Like myself, she offers counselling and energy healing, but with her own blend of skills.  I was curious to learn more about her knowledge and experience.

This book is written for a few different audiences:

  1. Christians who are receiving or contemplating energy healing and are unclear about whether it fits with their beliefs.
  2. Individuals who want to learn more about how energy healing works from a scientific lens
  3. Individuals who are at a roadblock on their healing journey

She starts by giving an overview of the science of energy healing and exploring its relationship to sound and the electromagnetic field.  She explains complex things in a reader-friendly way.

She also writes about her own health issues and struggles with medical doctors who couldn’t help her heal from infertility and few other physical ailments.  As many people do in this situation, she started to explore complementary healthcare for healing. She had success in healing her infertility using energy healing along with breathwork, good eating, counselling and more.

Alongside the exploration of energy healing in the book she inserts scripture passages that have helped her as a Christian support the concepts of chakras, auras, and hands on healing in general. She has shifted from being fearful of energy healing to embracing it as a gift from God.  She masterfully writes without the intention of trying to convince the reader.  She provides scriptures passages for the readers to contemplate for themselves.

“Miracles do not happen in contradiction to nature, but only in contradiction to what is known about nature” St. Augustine.

Perhaps my favourite part of the book is the selection of resources she shares.  From diet, sound therapy, protection against electromagnetic fields (EMFs), breathwork and more.

If you’re a Christian, you may be a little unsure of this book by looking at the cover.  It’s beautiful cover, but a little intense and a bit “new agey”.  Try not to let that deter you.  If you can keep an open mind, it will be to your benefit to explore whether her interpretation of the Bible fits with your interpretation.  Broadening the conversation is the goal.

Whether you’re a Christian or not, if you’re interested in learning more about the science of energy healing as an avenue to healing, this is an excellent book to explore.