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May 23 through May 29, 2022

Mars and Venus make sign changes this week, both moving into signs they rule, Aries and Taurus respectively. The Moon will travel through Pisces on Monday and Tuesday, making it difficult to get anything tangible done, so if you find yourself fighting windmills and nothing seems to move, just bide your time until Wednesday. Mars will move into Aries on Tuesday, pulling out of ethereal Pisces and into high energy and action mode! For the next six weeks, we'll have the power to make things happen! This assertive planet and creative sign combination will allow us to move confidently into new adventures and enterprises. Once the Moon goes into Aries on Wednesday and Thursday and then moves into Taurus Friday and Saturday, we'll be able to accomplish twice what's on our lists and experience tangible progress. Venus will move into Taurus on Saturday, casting a more comfortable and joyful tone around our movements and perspectives for the next four weeks. Sunday's Gemini Moon will bring out our social sides, whether we're immersed in social media activities or out meeting friends for a long-overdue visit.

How to Use Tapping to Ease Stress, Pain, and Grief, by Kathilyn Solomon

(Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal.)

Jane couldn't control her cravings for sweets. A certain type of donut was her downfall, and she would often eat two or more at a time, though she wasn't hungry. Although she was beautiful, intelligent, successful, and had many friends, she believed she was fat, a fraud, and would always be alone.

Jane and I used EFT tapping on the feelings, sensations, details, bad memories, and negative thinking and beliefs that had Jane caught in this awful cycle. Within a short time, the cravings were gone. She realized that she was beautiful and lovable just as she was. She left her unhealthy relationship and shortly thereafter met the partner of her dreams.

Doug would feel the butterflies in his stomach, his throat tighten, and start to sweat just passing by his work's group conference room and when he even thought about attending a meeting at work. This top-level executive stuttered, and would go into panic mode when asked to speak in public. His brain turned to mush around strangers.

The tapping led us to clear the surprising root causes of his anxiety, which were about specific memories stemming from when he was a child. These days he runs a talk-show podcast and has definitely come out of his shell.

Many personal success stories are shared in Tapping Into Wellness: Using EFT to Clear Emotional and Physical Pain and Illness. This book is a comprehensive, easy entrée into the world of tapping that shows you how to tap for yourself, how to uncover what to tap on, and how to get results. It also contains more than thirty simple step-by-step tapping exercises that will give you the structure as well as specific tapping protocols and a game plan to reference. It is the only book available that details Gold Standard EFT™, the latest evolved form of tapping. It can be used as a reference guide to keep handy and return to time and again.

What Is EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques)?
Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), or tapping, is a simple technique to release your stress and overwhelm, emotional pain and bad memories, limiting beliefs and unhelpful ways of thinking, and challenging behaviors. It is also regularly used to address physical and emotional issues as well as performance challenges. It is energy psychology and not talk therapy. It encompasses the body and the mind, as well as the body's energy system. It's quick, it's easy, it's free, and anyone can use it, even toddlers.

People are often surprised at how quickly the process works, and how much lighter, more optimistic and energized they feel after tapping on just one minor target. One round of tapping takes about thirty to sixty seconds.

How Do You Do EFT?
To perform EFT, you tap on nine body-calming points on the hands, face, and upper torso while thinking about a specific problem (the tapping target). The tapping points are acupuncture points located along the energy pathways of the body. Tapping on these points activates the body's energy, allowing it to freely flow throughout the body-mind system. The body can then naturally heal from physical and emotional hurts.

The EFT process, consisting of thinking about a specific problem, expressing an affirmation, and tapping, helps a person, either consciously or subconsciously, to remember the moment when the upset initially occurred. The tapping allows the release of the upsetting emotions and then restores the energy system to balance.

Can Tapping Solve My Problems?
Tapping won't stop the divorce, suddenly fill the bank account, or bring a loved one back from the dead. However, tapping offers a way to safely feel what's going on inside without becoming overwhelmed. Performed correctly, it gives you a different perspective and helps you resolve the emotional upset that may be getting in the way of your ability to think clearly and come up with a better solution for your problem. The late Albert Einstein said, "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." Tapping offers a way to shift your thinking and way of experiencing an issue, and when that happens, the whole world changes–but really, it's only your perspective that has changed.

Perhaps most importantly, tapping can access the core events, the patterns of thinking and beliefs that often lay the groundwork for the issues that a person faces in his or her present-life. That is why EFT tapping is so effective with sabotage issues such as clutter, procrastination, and the like. You know, the kind of behaviors that a person keeps repeating despite repeated resolutions to change.

Often a problem you face in your present-day that seems like a "stand-alone" problem is actually resting on a foundation of similar types of challenges going all the way back to childhood. Tapping has a way of helping to unravel a problem at its roots.

Can Tapping Heal Illness?
While tapping makes no claims to heal illness, it is used to address and collapse the emotional components and layers that contribute to an illness and to the layers of stress relating to an illness, from the common cold to a serious auto-immune illness. In thousands of documented cases, tapping has shown complete resolution of physical symptoms. The process also works to resolve day-to-day pain and symptoms from typical bumps, bruises, and burns.

A simple example is a recent time when I used tapping as an acute first-aid responder after I dropped a pan of boiling water on my foot. Instead of the ER, I tapped and the pain and any scald marks disappeared within twenty minutes. A growing number of clinical studies have also indicated that tapping lowers the body's blood levels of cortisol, the hormone related to stress response. When the mind changes, the body follows.

Auto-Immune Illness and EFT Tapping
I learned EFT at a time when my life had fallen apart and I had no idea how to pick up the pieces: I had recently divorced, suffered with fibromyalgia and depression, was parenting a toddler, and had made a difficult move from New York City back to my hometown Minneapolis, where I couldn't find a place to live. I discovered EFT, and immediately started to feel much better. The tapping gave me extra coping skills, a different understanding of my situation, and much more than hope. I used EFT to clear my negative and repetitive thoughts, upsetting memories, and other issues "driving" my auto-immune illness, and the fibromyalgia healed. I like to call this the gift that I gave away because I no longer needed it. And that's how I became an EFT practitioner.

EFT Facilitates Breakthroughs in Key Life Areas
You don't have to be in dire straits to experience the benefits of EFT. It can be used as a positive force for change. People regularly tap on themselves or with a practitioner to create breakthroughs and achieve peak performance in any area of life, including money, key relationships, self esteem, health, sex, and athletics. Some people even tap on the tapping points while talking or thinking about the people and places and things in their life for which they are grateful.

Tap on Petty Upsets: Tapping on Creating a Great Day
Tapping Into Wellness shows you how to easily integrate tapping into the routine of your daily life. You will learn ways to tap for daily bumps and grinds, including petty annoyances. Imagine being able to stay calm when the barking dogs woke you up again, your husband left a mess on the table, your colleague won't stop talking, you can't find your keys, and the train door just closed in your face and you're going to be late.

For these mini-challenges, maybe one or a few rounds (about thirty seconds to a minute each) is enough to clear the thought clutter right out of your system. Yes, you really don't have to get so bent out of shape each time these things happen. Promise! Wouldn't that feel great?

Really, just because you get up on the wrong side of the bed, doesn't mean that you need to have a down day anymore. Tapping on the "wrong side of the bed feeling" regularly puts people in a position to embrace life and have a great day.

How Come We Need Tapping? Looking At Trauma
Research appears to indicate that trauma happens not because of what we actually experience, but rather, it's how we perceive the experience that determines whether we experience the event as a trauma. Trauma occurs when we experience or witness an event in which we feel helpless, powerless, and alone. We then experience an adrenalized, life-death or survival state, otherwise known as a fight-or-flight response. And it is here that the experience and the feelings relating to it get stuck. Dr. Robert Scaer, MD, (author of The Body Bears the Burden: Trauma, Dissociation, and Disease and Trauma Spectrum: Hidden Wounds and Human Healing) calls this a trauma capsule. Other medical professionals and researchers have concurred with the definition of trauma.

In EFT terminology, this moment can be likened to an "energy disruption." When the person perceives a threat to his or her existence, there is an energy disruption in the person's energy system, and this is what causes the negative emotions. The person is no longer in the rational, reasonable, expansive part of his or her brain, the neo-cortex, but rather is experiencing through the limbic reptilian (primitive) survival brain.

The problem could be as simple as a one-year-old baby left all alone and crying in the crib; a toddler watching his parents leave and not knowing whether they are ever coming back; or overhearing family members arguing. For the child who can't reason, it's a question of existential survival. Then there are the more obvious types of experiences that may lead to trauma at any age, such as a car crash, rape, war, the sudden loss of a loved one, or natural disaster.

We will create a pattern of avoiding experiences that remind of this time, until finally the issue spills over in a way that causes us trouble in our lives. EFT has a way of tracking back to the problem's source. That is the case until we integrate that particular isolated experience into the whole of our lives.

This idea reinforces the wisdom of the inventor of logotherapy, the late Dr. Viktor Frankl, neurologist and psychiatrist, whose pioneering work was in part shaped by his holocaust prisoner experience. He said that suffering without meaning equals despair. Experiencing understanding and forgiveness is inherent in the EFT process.

What If You Can't Identify the Source of Your Problem or Name the Feelings?
All you really need to know is that something is off or that there is something that you want to change right now. If you are suddenly compelled to act in a certain way that you cannot control, or if you are sabotaging yourself by procrastinating or making the same mistakes over and over again, EFT is a doorway into change. If there's a problem area in your life that you believe is just the way you are and will always be, but, sigh, wish it were different, these are all opportunities where you could explore tapping.

You can also use your body sensations as a rich resource with tapping, too. EFT does not necessarily differentiate between an emotional feeling and a physical sensation. Scientists have demonstrated that what we think we will correspondingly feel or experience in our bodies. Doctors say that mental stress is a major contributor in most serious illness. And in my clinical experience, I have seen that for most every feeling or thought, there is a corresponding body sensation. Thankfully, the body doesn't lie, and is eager and ready to reveal its secrets if we listen, which we do in EFT. And then a symptom becomes a breadcrumb on the road to acceptance of yourself just as you are, and ultimately to wholesome relief, forgiveness, compassion, joy, peace, and wellbeing.

Tapping on Training Wheels
An easy way to start tapping is a technique I developed called Tapping on Training Wheels. You simply start with one point, the collarbone point. You can find this point by putting your finger just at the bony U or V, where your left and right collarbones join together. Now, move your finger an inch to the right or left of this bony point, and an inch down on either side. This is the collarbone point. Tap with two fingers gently on this point about five to seven times, for practice.

• Identify a Minor Upset or Physical Pain. Now, go ahead and think of a minor thought, feeling, upset, or physical ache that is bothering you.
• Rate How Much You're Bothered. How much does the upset or pain bother you? Use the 0 to 10 EFT ratings scale, with 10 being, "It's absolutely unbearable," while 0 is, "I'm not bothered at all."
• Focus Attention on the Problem and Tap. Focus attention on the upset or pain as you tap on the collarbone point for thirty seconds to a minute or more.
• Stop and take several deep breaths.
• Identify a Positive Memory when you felt loved, safe, supported, open-hearted, and happy. Examples might be the puppy you saw this morning, or the wonderful time you had dancing with your spouse, or that amazing experience in nature.
• Tap the Collarbone Point for Thirty–Sixty seconds while re-experiencing that positive memory.
• Re-Rate the Original Upset or Physical Pain. Re-rerate the initial tapping target. Notice if the intensity on the 0 to 10 scale has decreased. If it is 0, you are done.
• Tap Collarbone Point for Thirty–Sixty Seconds. You can continue to perform this exercise until the upset or pain has decreased to 0. If it has stayed the same, repeat the exercise again, or obtain Tapping Into Wellness to learn how to tap Gold Standard EFT style.

Tapping Into Wellness shows readers how to employ the various EFT Gold Standard techniques, and it also addresses chapters that include:

• How to get specific to get results
• Looking at the origins of problems
• Tapping to relieve stress and overwhelm
• Overcoming Self Sabotage, including resistance to tapping
• Using EFT to resolve cravings and experience body confidence
• Clearing phobias with EFT
• Tapping on the physical
• Using EFT to address grief and loss

We are evolving as a human species, thankfully. The old models and structures for society have been crumbling for a good while, and their transformation will be the saving grace of people, planet, and all sentient beings upon this earth. The qualities of emotional connection, community, compassion, unity, respectful communication, loving-kindness, joy, and care are becoming increasingly important and valued over no-longer-working or viable paradigms, such as societal institutions and models that rely on authority, hierarchy, and a "power over" approach.

It is an exciting time within which to live and prosper, and tapping and other modalities that embrace and restore feelings to their rightful place will be playing a role in the coming years as we shift into a more sustainable, lighter, more peaceful, optimistic world culture.

Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal. Copyright Llewellyn Worldwide, 2015. All rights reserved.

My name is Donna. I was born 8/18/63. I lost my Mom on 6/15/11. I took care of her for 18 months before she died. I've had seven dreams of her, all very nice ones. Since her passing, I find dimes all over my house. I will also find one dime and one penny - 11 cents. I keep them in the room where I find them. Do you think this is a sign from her? If so, what does it mean? I visit her at the cemetery several times a month and feel her presence around me all the time.

Donna

Susyn:

How lovely that you are able to sense the spirit of your mother and interact with her in so many ways. The coins she leaves around for you to find are indeed very specific signs from her.

Much has been written about dime-dropping ghosts. (You might want to Google this phenomenon to learn more.) It seems it is pretty common for spirits to use these specific coins to get our attention.

The number 10 represents a conclusion; when considered numerologically, it breaks down to a one. One is the beginning and 10 is the completion, so this coin represents the never-ending circle of life. When people die, they are simply reborn into the spirit world; because dimes are circular, they are perfect symbols for the unending cycle of existence. In numerology, the number 11 is believed to carry a very spiritual vibration. It is the number of angels and can indicate a message from the other side.

You didn't mention if this number held any special meaning for you or your mother, so I am assuming that this is just her special way of touching base with you. Because 11 considered a master number of the spiritually advanced, it suggests that your mother has reached a higher level of wisdom and spiritual understanding since her passing.

Astrologically, the number 11 represents Aquarius, a sign known for innovative thought and communication. It carries a reputation for defying the conventional and unifying the realms of spirit and humanity. Its ultimate purpose is to bring peace. With that in mind, I believe your mother is telling you that she is at peace and wants you to feel the same. Your mother can also send you signs of her presence and well-being through animals, birds and insects; by way of unexplained aromas you might encounter; and via television or radio, so keep an eye out for those as well.

Though it's not necessary to go to her gravesite to feel her presence, she does appreciate your visits and the attention you give to her resting place. She might also like it if you plant her favorite flowers in your garden or create a special memory table with her pictures and other keepsakes on it.

The experiences you are having suggest that you have a highly developed intuition and psychic side. I expect that in the future, you and your mother will be able to share even more profound interactions. If it hasn't happened already, you should begin to hear her voice or receive direct messages from her more each day. By spending regular time in meditation, you can increase your ability to converse with her directly.

*****

Oceania:

What a blessing to feel such inner peace about your relationship with your mother. You do not seem to be burdened by regrets, resentments or remorse over her passing.

While anything is possible in this miraculous universe, I tend to think these are not dimes and pennies from heaven; instead, I think your unconscious mind or inner wisdom has determined that these coins are significant, and because of that, you're now noticing them. In the past, you would have overlooked them or plopped them into your purse without giving them a second thought.

One of the things human beings do best is create meaning and impose a sense of purpose on the events around us, so don't hesitate to draw upon your imagination and interpret these events in a way that empowers and/or delights you. Maybe you will deem them a special reminder of your mother, and for the rest of your life, whenever you stumble upon a dime, you will smile and remember her. I like the idea of a dime as a symbol for her because the two middle letters are I M, which you could read as a message from her: I am.

My mother grew up during the Depression. Because she'd get so excited whenever she found a coin, a visiting friend from out of town once hid pennies throughout my mom's house so my mom would have moments of delight for years to come and also fondly remember her friend with each discovery.

When a particular number keeps jumping out at us and tugging at our attention, it's worth examining our associations with that number. For you, the number is ten, for a dime is one-tenth of a dollar and a penny is one-tenth of a dime.

Does the number ten hold special meaning for you? Did something memorable happen between you and your mom when you were ten years old? Does the month of October stand out? In tarot, 1 represents Humanity and 0 represents Spirit, so 10 represents partnership between humanity and spirit. In your case, this would be you and your mom.

Perhaps your mom is drawing your attention to the coins for some reason. Did coins hold special meaning for her? What do coins represent to YOU? Although money symbolizes financial security, these coins are of little value, so they might point to simple pleasures rather than material wealth. Perhaps the message from your mom is to stop and smell the roses, or that little things add up!

You might start putting your found coins in a special jar or piggy bank, and when the dimes add up to dollars, buy yourself a special gift in your mother's memory, or perhaps donate the dollars to a charity in her name.

Astrea:

Many times in life we hear, "You will always have what you NEED, but not necessarily what you WANT." Your spirit must have needed to experience the feeling of leaving your human body, and the suggestion in the next chapter of Sylvia Brown's book was all it took to get you there.

Even though you hadn't read it yet, your SOUL recognized the title of that chapter as something it had been seeking, and your soul, knowing that you had that reference to read after your experience, got with it and out you went!

While I don't usually recommend her books, Sylvia Brown has a wide reaching and powerful effect on lots of people. A Gemini like you would be able to relate easily to her writing and put it to good use. Synchronicity - you gotta love it!

I like your description of "getting caught." That's exactly what it feels like, isn't it? One minute you're free and hovering above the room, and the next minute, ZAP! back down into your corporeal form you go!

As a little kid, I loved that "feeling of return." With practice, most of the time we can control that event, but sometimes, when our physical ears hear a distracting noise or something else occurs to knock us back into reality, back we go. With practice you will be able to control your return better.

I find it interesting that you were visiting your mother-in-law and not someone in your own genetic family. Evidently, you and your husband got married for reasons that are even deeper than love. His family's interest in "psychic stuff" will nurture your children in such matters and help them to grow into their own abilities.

You'll never have to be concerned that when your daughter visits them, she'll be discouraged from exploring her own psychic life and power. My parents encouraged me to develop my psychic senses in a time when it wasn't nice to even discuss such things in public. Heck, it's STILL not considered a great topic at the dinner table in some families!

Your kids will get to talk about it ALL and ask questions and read and study. This is going to give them such an edge in life! Talk with your husband about how you want to present this to your kiddos, so that you are united in your approach and ready to tell them their experiences are all natural and okay.

A word or two of warning: Geminis often have difficulty staying grounded in REAL LIFE. Don't get so strung out on your ASTRAL life that you neglect what you're doing here on Earth.

You are at the beginning of a long journey to learn where your power really lies. Try to be patient with this process and take your time.