The Psoas Muscle and Releasing Worry and Fear

English: Anterior Hip Muscles (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A Facebook friend posted a link to this very informative article about the psoas muscle and the very important role it plays in physical, emotional and spiritual well-being. The psoas connects the legs to the spine and is responsible for holding us upright and enabling a person to lift their legs in order to walk. It provides a strong stable base for our lower bodies. Kept flexible it literally and metaphysically allows us to move through life with stability and grace.

Strong mental and emotional patterns tell the psoas to open and relax or, conversely, tighten in order to prepare for battle or flee. And that's where my flower essence remedies for Releasing Worry and Fear can come in handy.

If you live in the United States you've probably heard the term "tight ass" to refer to someone who is overly fearful and controlled.  A tight psoas can pull the whole lower pelvic region out of place causing tight and painful glutes (buttock muscles), upper legs, and lower back. And according to Liz Koch, the yoga teacher quoted in the article linked above, fearful beliefs and thought patterns are what tell the psoas to constrict.

As usual I found this information at a time when I needed it for myself. I've been using my Releasing Worry and Fear remedy quite successfully on my glutes and legs for three days but I didn't stop to investigate the role the psoas might play. I'll be adding some hip-opening yoga stretches into my routine today!

My First Flower Essence Formula for Pets! Mama Love for Healthy Bonding

Calochortus luteus Yellow Mariposa Lily (Photo credit: davidhofmann08)

There's a field across from our apartment with a walking trail awash with Spring wildflowers. Every couple of days we walk there and find new flowers in bloom— Chamomile, Red Clover, Lupine, a purple flower that reminds me of Garlic, many others. Yesterday we were surprised to find several yellow flowers we had not noticed before— Yellow Mariposa Lily (Calochortus luteus).

They particularly caught my attention not only because of their beauty but because of my relationship with white Mariposa Lily, the flower essence that remarkably healed my cat Chloe when I first brought her home from the animal shelter and cemented my relationship with flower essences as a healing modality from that time since. You see, I had not been convinced of their usefulness before that. How would a person be able to determine the subtle effects of typical flower essence formulas from a placebo? But with a cat there could no placebo effect. She didn't know what the remedy was supposed to be for! But it immediately transformed her from a cat who was terrified of touch to one who could allow it to one who initiated cuddling on her own within the course of a week!

Chloe is very sick right now and is not having a hard time accepting healing. She sits in Paul's lap for hours soaking up healing attention and cuddles up to me as well, sometimes going from him to me and back again in order to feel connected with both of us. She doesn't need Mariposa Lily anymore at all! But seeing the flowers in the field reminded me that Chloe is responsible for me having a flower essence business so I decided to honor her role by getting started on a line of unscented pet formulas I've been thinking about.

You can find the first of these formulas — Mama Love for Healthy Bonding — on my website today.

Unscented Flower Essence Spray for Letting Go of Workaholism

A lot of us work hard from time to time but when the “need” to work too much transforms your life into constant trudging through the snow, doing what “needs” to be done, day in and day out with no let up it’s time to let other people in. Seriously! I know it’s hard to believe that anyone else can get this all done. In fact, no one else may be able to. But a significant time out can help you reassess what really needs to be done, what can be delegated, what might not even be useful anymore. (Is your hard work for naught? How can you know unless you step away far enough to get a more objective perspective?) This formula is designed to help you relax, recuperate, be with yourself and your loved ones, just be. Afraid of that? What might come up? Your fears of defeat, the challenges you’re working so hard to overcome without a break, your fear of being yourself, just being alive after so much heartache (past history or present)? Let go, let God a little while. Play a bit and come back to the job renewed.

The Flower Essences in this Reiki-infused formula include Zinnia, Star Tulip, Yellow Star Tulip and Yerba Santa. Use it to help lighten up, be in the present, able to be present for yourself and for how your excessive isolating affects you and others. It helps sadness, loss and fear to be released and transformed instead of avoided so you can focus what DOES need to be done in the best ways possible!

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Sagebrush on the Easel and in One's Life (From a Flower Essence Point of View)

Here's what's on the easel right now. I haven't been able to get a photo that really captures the colors accurately. I guess that's an artist task I'm going to need to continue to figure out how to master.

This is a mixed media piece using pastel, acrylic and oil pastel on top of a digital photographic print. Most of the photograph is completely obliterated but it peeks through in the manner of an underpainting here and there. I've coated it with several layers of acrylic gel medium and it looks like I won't need to frame this under glass. I worked hard on figuring that out and I had some mishaps on this I won't repeat but also a fair bit of success. The main thing I want to keep in mind with pastels used in this fashion is to keep using lots of casein fixative and skip the Senneliers. They react too inconsistently with the gel medium. Some colors hold up, some get dark, and some (the reds) practically disappeared! The Nupastels and pastel pencils I worked with were really consistent and behaved the way I expected. The good news is that Sennelier oil pastels over the gel medium worked pretty well so I was able to touch up most of what I didn't like and used a bit of red and black acrylic where needed to touch up the rest.

The inspiration is a patch of sagebrush and wild grass in the desert close to where we lived in Arizona. We walked by this area quite a bit. It's a pretty devastated place where the ranchers dragged a big heavy chain between two tractors to rip the Juniper trees out and left the tree carcasses to rot everywhere. They do this because the cattle like to sleep in the shade under the trees but the branches are too low for the cowboys to round them up on horseback easily. So the cows and everyone else have no shade and the area gets overgrazed and practically bare. The sagebrush is only 2 feet high and are the tallest things around. They provide habitat for tiny animals and snakes, provide shade for the grasses, and hardly grow anywhere else in the area. Where the Juniper is left standing you rarely see them.

In Flower Essence Therapy Sagebrush is useful for healing from devastating life situations where a person winds up stripped bare of possessions or life situations they used to use to define their existence. The plant creates an empty space at its center where animals find shelter. Metaphysically Sagebrush allows a person to detach from their old ways and find that peaceful state of empty consciousness at the core of their being from which to renew.

Related article about Sagebrush Flower Essence: http://healingcommunication.blogspot.com/2010/02/sagebrush-flower-essence-for-when-life.html

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New Unscented Flower Essence Sprays

Something new from Mama Love! The same Mama Love flower essence formulas, organic, Reiki-infused, safe and effective, without essential oils. For most people essential oils are a great way to shift how you feel but some people are sensitive to scents or want to be considerate to someone else who is. Not to mention that some people (guys? people who don't like the scent) don't want to wind up smelling like a rose, jasmine or patchouli! Now you can use Mama Love to shift your energy or the feeling in an environment without adding a perfumey scent. Check out the bottom of my products page for more details.