Essential oils are natural aromatic compounds found in the seeds, bark, stems, roots, flowers, and other parts of plants. They can be both beautifully and powerfully fragrant. If you have ever enjoyed the gift of a rose, a walk by a field of lavender, or the smell of fresh cut mint, you have experienced the aromatic qualities of essential oils. Essential oils can lift the mood, calm the senses, and elicit powerful emotional responses. Yet the use of essential oils goes well beyond their fragrant appeal. Essential oils have been used throughout history in many cultures for their medicinal and therapeutic benefits. Modern trends towards more holistic approaches to self care and growing scientific validation of alternative health practices are driving a rediscovery of the profound health benefits of essential oils. Many have powerful cleansing properties and are naturally antimicrobial. Their unique chemical structure allows them to pass directly through the skin for immediate systemic response to topical application. And certain oils may be used as dietary aids to promote vitality and well being. 

Essential oils are used for a very wide range of emotional and physical wellness applications from boosting energy levels and reducing fatigue, to immune boosting, natural first aid, digestive and hormonal support, muscle soreness, stress reduction, improving sleep and as a natural toxin free alternative to self care and cleaning. 

Essential oils are usually administered by one of three methods: diffused aromatically, applied topically to the skin, or taken internally as dietary supplements. Using essential oils can be both profoundly simple and life changing at the same time. Essential oils are naturally safe and have few, if any, undesirable side effects when used as directed. 

EssentiallyShine use doTERRA’s Certified Pure Therapeutic Grade™ (CPTG™) essential oils as they are 100% pure natural aromatic compounds carefully extracted from plants. They do not contain fillers or artificial ingredients that would dilute their active qualities and are free of contaminants such as pesticides or other chemical residues. As important as it is to keep contaminants out of our oils, assuring the presence of their active compounds, at the right levels, is necessary to guarantee safety and effectiveness. doTERRA’s Certified Pure Therapeutic Grade™ essential oils are cross tested to ensure both extract purity and composition potency of each batch. 

doTERRA works closely with a global network of leading essential oil chemists and growers to select botanicals of the correct species, grown in the ideal environments, and carefully harvested at the right time. The aromatic compounds of the plants are skillfully extracted by experienced distillers and subjected to chemical analysis to ensure purity and composition. doTERRA’s Certified Pure Therapeutic Grade™ essential oils represent the safest and most beneficial oils available in the world today. Each doTERRA product is guaranteed to exceed customer satisfaction and performance expectations.

Using essentials oils is simple and highly satisfying. However, with the many oils available with their countless combinations and wellness applications it can feel a bit overwhelming to know how to use them best. So.....
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​Come along to our Introduction to Essential Oils Workshop at Burwood RSL  on Sunday 8th July, to learn all about doTERRA’s Essential Oils and how you too can support your health and wellness naturally with these beautiful oils.

Meditation has become popular because it promotes optimal health, gives the body a profound rest, dissipates stress, sifts through your mind traffic, helps you to think ahead and keeps you organised.

Meditation looks after your body: Every cell in your body has a certain vibrational frequency for good health and vitality. Fear, anger, hostility, etc can cause the vibrational energy in your body to alter - to move toward disharmony or dis-ease. Meditation helps you to return to the vibrational frequencies of harmony and health. The daily practice of meditation will move you away from the harsher emotions of hate, bitterness, spite, and frustration and towards the more gentler emotions of love, compassion, and kindness.

Meditation can help you to unravel problems and find solutions by accessing your creative and/or intuitive self. Meditation can bring you a new level of living and a new experience of your own power; meditation can awaken a series of unexpected abilities to bring happiness and well-being into your life. The continual practice of meditation on a daily basis will bring peace and tranquillity into your life. When you are at peace with yourself and those around you then the world is a much happier place for everyone and goodwill towards all people becomes the logical result. When you reach a deep level of meditation you will begin to experience a deep calm, extraordinary personal power. It is a feeling of absolute peace, feeling centred, focused and clear with an ever deepening expression of strengthening self-love.

The experience of meditation varies with each person depending on their beliefs and attitudes. It must be remembered that if you were brought up in a happy environment that it will be easier for you to enter into a meditative state, but if you were brought up in a fearful environment it may take you longer, people who are fearful / critical are often cautious and therefore are not as willing to let go deeply. To meditate deeply you must let go of the need to analyse and question your experiences in meditation. If you analyse your meditation moment to moment, you will not drop into a deep meditative state. It is imperative that you let go of your need to control the process of meditation.

Meditation should be fun and effortless, look forward to your meditations as you would look forward to meeting an old friend. Let go of the need to control your meditation and allow yourself to just experience it moment to moment. Meditation begins by seeking refuge from stress and tension and ends with feelings of renewed strength, confidence and tranquillity. There are many forms of meditation, this is perhaps the simplest one for the novice.

Breath Meditation

​Breath meditation is a very simple meditation that you can practice almost anywhere. Sit down in a comfortable position in your favourite armchair. Close your eyes and roll your shoulders backwards to open up your chest cavity. As you breathe in, imagine that you are breathing all the way down to just below your navel. As you breathe, your abdomen will start to expand and contract. If you find that your shoulders are rising and falling, put your hands on your navel and push your abdomen out and in with each breath, to get you into the habit of breathing deeply into your lungs. You may like to imagine, as you breathe in, an arrow pointing downwards until it reaches below your navel, and then turning around for its return journey, as you breathe out. Practice this breathing for twenty minutes a day to develop your meditation skills. Use the first ten minutes to write down your mind traffic and the second ten minutes to focus on your breathing and having a quiet mind. To release your mind traffic, have a pen and paper beside you and when a thought comes into your mind, write it down on the paper. If you need something to focus on, you can use the word calm or relax or let go on your outgoing breath. To finish your meditation, imagine that you are awakening from a wonderful sleep. Wriggle your toes, stretch, open your eyes and then return to your usual activities.

Having worked in the Personal Development field for over twenty years, Cheryl Cattarin has taught thousands of people the skills to improve their lives. Her latest book "From Crappy to Happy" teaches how to transform thoughts from negative to positive and remove self-sabotaging patterns that hinder success.  

See Cheryl at Connection Fairs - From Crappy To Happy Books available at the front desk

See Cheryl in the Workshop Room at 5pm at Sutherland Club on East, 20th August. Cheryl will be facilitating a Meditation on The Crystal Castle Ascension Meditaiton (from her book From Crappy to Happy).

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​You cannot heal what you hate. You cannot transform what you hate. The hatred becomes a consuming force – like a cancer - and consumes the energy to gather more of the same – becoming like a beast or monster inside you – feeding you emotions and thoughts that just keep on growing the thing.
In my studies in Psychophonetics (thanks to Yehuda Tagar, and Rudolph Steiner) – we learnt about the 3 beasts – of self-hatred, doubt and fear.

These things really are like beasts in that they are hideous, and scary and feed off our negativity.
To work with these beasties – you have to transform them and tame them. Often inside you will find a scared child, or a misunderstood aspect of yourself. Other times you find this is just old programming that you picked up as you were growing up and then brought into it and started to feed it, eventually believing that it was true.

Any story you tell yourself often enough becomes a truth. If you invest energy and time into it and focus on it – you will distort everything that comes your way in an effort to prove its validity and its truth… so no matter what someone tells you – you will turn that around and force it into fit your version of reality – your truth… and it will become very true and real for you.

Life is a series of stories that we tell ourselves… then we invest in them – we nurture them and grow them, and water them with more stories to form them into a reality…. But – this is what they are … a reality – not THE reality… they are a version of reality viewed through the filters of the stories we tell ourselves. Do any of us even know what THE reality is?  Is there one? Or is reality whatever we make of it through our own thoughts, feelings and beliefs?

So, if you are hating some aspect of yourself… what you are doing is feeding this beast called hatred. It’s a very strong emotion. If you continue to hate – you cannot heal. You have to transform this hatred into something else… you have to put your attend and your focus on other things until this energy is drained from the hatred.

Write down what it is you hate, or dislike about yourself. Let’s say, for example, its your weight.
The more you hate it – the more energy you give it – the more it grows – so no matter how many diets you try and potions you use – while you hate it – you are feeding the very thing you hate.
You will then not be able to shift the weight. Hatred is a very toxic emotion and toxicity gets sored in fat – so you can hate yourself into weight gain. Those very fat cells that you hate so much are saving your life by storing those very toxic emotions. Start to think about them differently… they are life savers… they are keeping you functioning until they can slowly release their toxic load, and then when no longer needed – they will dissipate. If they dumped their load all at once you would be very ill indeed. Thank you, fat cells, for keeping me alive and functioning!! Now let them get on and do their job and start to focus instead on things that you do like about yourself… you might have great eyes, or lovely feet. Your mind may be incredibly sharp, or you could be loving and a great friend.

List all the things about yourself which are good. Really take your time to appreciate these things.
Once you are feeling better about yourself – start to imagine the life you want to lead? Perhaps its about being fitter? So, take the attention away from the weight and rather into fitness. Feed your attention there instead. How will I feel when I am fitter? What will I be doing? Really go for it with your imagination – creating this idea of a different reality… see yourself perhaps going for daily walks, and feeling good as you do so… and while you are walking paying attention to the beauty around you and how that makes you feel. Now you are feeding a better version of yourself which serves you far more than beating yourself up. This will lead you to other things you want to do and can do – and it will result in a healthier happier you – which will also eventually result in weight loss – without that having been the primary intention any more.
You can do this same thing with anything else in life that you hate. Change your focus to what is working… build your energy up until you feel better about life in general… and keep it general…and then start asking yourself how you want things to be – getting a better vision… picking one aspect of that to start working towards... and naturally action will result that will lead you to this better space.

In some cases, you will find yourself being able to look deeper inside to the one who is hurting, and giving that self what he or she needs. Meet the unmet needs of this one and your problems will dissolve.
In other cases, you will realise that these feelings are based on judgements from others that you have brought into. In our world we are bombarded by profits and sales – so get told constantly that we are not good enough – and that to be loved and approved we need to wear certain things, look in specific ways etc etc... Here we are feeding the bank accounts of people who want to get rich on our insecurities!! There are some wonderful movements out there now exposing all of these things. Get inspired by them... look on you tube for inspiration and upliftment… open your eyes and check out – to whose standards am I judging myself by? Is this an advertising campaign? Is this the belief I want to pass onto my children? What is my own truth? There are counties in this world where woman are only viewed as beautiful if they are fat – and so the girls are sent to fat farms to fatten up so that they can become beautiful. Again – what are these ideas based on, and do we want to buy into them??

It’s always an investment, of energy, of money, of time etc. What you invest in – you get more of… so what do you want to get more of? If it makes you really feel good…not just on the surface, but deep inside – then chances are you are onto a good investment… but if not… then change your investment. Investment can be seen as focus. What you focus on – you get more of.

It comes down to this… if you want more of something – then focus and invest your attention onto it – however – if you don’t like it... then stop it. Just stop… look around for what you do like... and go in that direction. In the process of doing this you will automatically clean up your act and sort out what needs to be sorted out to get to where you really want to be… which for most of us… is happiness and love.


See Arleen Hanks at Connections Fairs.. or find her here  

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What are Spirit Guides?
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Spirit guides are spiritual beings that are assigned to us before we are born that help nudge and guide us through life. They’re responsible for helping us fulfill the spiritual contract we make with ourselves before we incarnate. Your higher self helps select these guides, who help us while we are living out our incarnation.

Who are these guides?

Some guides will stay with you throughout your entire life, and others will pop in every now and again to help you with specific areas of your life or goals you are trying to achieve. These guides are at varying levels of consciousness themselves. Some may be highly ascended masters and others might be your average spirit who just happens to be a master in a certain area. They may appear to have a male or female energy, though in reality they are just energy. They may be spirits who have had physical incarnations, or they might be spirits who have never taken human form. Followers believe one spirit guide remains with a person throughout his entire life, while others come and go on special occasions to teach, to protect, to drive away negative energies or to bring joy. They might be deceased relatives, but that is less likely. When it’s time for your spirit guides to help you, they tune in to your energy and help direct you to fulfill your earthly mission.

Here are the 7 most common type of spirit guides we may meet in our lifetime or the next.

Gatekeeper Guide

The Gatekeeper Guide, sometimes called the Master Teacher Guide or Doorkeeper, is with a human being from birth to death. This guide inspires a person to help others and to keep on track toward personal life goals with pure and beneficial guidance.

This guide stands constantly at the energy gates of a person as protection against the negativity of the universe.

As main guide, the Gatekeeper Guide controls and monitors the other spirit guides who wish to work with a person. At the same time this spirit aids the individual to remain focused and grounded when working with other spirit guides.

Teacher Guide

A Teacher Guide inspires a person only at brief intervals during life. Guidance is given according to need regarding growth and spiritual development.

One Teacher Guide may work with the Gatekeeper Guides of many individuals, helping these people to develop compassion and moral sensitivity. Conversely, many Teacher Guides may help one person throughout life, each helping a person with a different aspect of her life.

Protector Guide

The job of a Protector Guide is to protect a human being whenever that person is in danger. This spirit guide is usually a large spirit with great strength and energy and always works in harmony with the Gatekeeper Guide.

Runner Guide

The Runner Guide is the spirit who connects human beings in dreams and at certain passionate moments with loved ones and missing items that are precious emotionally to the person.

This spirit guide comes and goes quickly, and can appear in visions or dreams. The appearance of this guide in dreams can be human in form, but this guide is most often clothed in the form of a spirit animal. It is this guide which presents itself during a session with a medium.

Helper Guide

The Helper Guide is present only in the direst moments in the life of a person. This guide is the medicine man or shaman, and his help and guidance are directed at the great stresses in a person’s life or with serious health problems.

Warrior Guide

The Warrior Guide is a warring guide whose role is to help a human being master fear and weakness. If a battle in any area of a person’s life needs to be fought, this guide will help.

Contrary to the other spirit guides, this one can lead a person into trouble and unnecessary battles. This guide must be followed with prudence and careful thought to ascertain whether the guidance is helpful.

Joy Guide

The job of the Joy Guide is to bring joy and happiness to a person at various times in her life, and to uplift s person's spirits when they sag.

See Kerrie in the auditorium at Connections Fairs
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