Health and Healing

Excerpt:
“When I was a child, I prayed in church on Sundays, asking for things I wanted. Head down, eyes shut, kneeling with hands folded in a state of chronic guilt, I tried to hook up with God. I look back now at all those children and adults in church, apparently deep in prayer, and wonder: did others, like me, wonder if God was really there?”

Ann Kreilkamp

Health and Healing

Excerpt:
“What we call “discipline” is, in truth, a form of denial. We deny the natural flow of our own energy; we damn it up. This is not love, this is fear. The more we deny it, the stronger it gets, the more energy it takes to continue the denial. Our energy, which would naturally be used to express ourselves creatively in the world, splits in two, part of it damming up, the remainder used against itself.”

Ann Kreilkamp

Health and Healing

Excerpt:
“Looking back on my life from this vantage point of 50 years, I realize that I have been obeying one primary directive, ever since I woke up in a Boston hospital bed when I was 26 years old: I have been following the guidance of an inner voice. This guidance has been the source of (what I would call) the primary relationship in my life: between my outer personality and my inner self, or soul. My outer personality interacts with the world; my inner Self guides my choices in both determining which experiences I shall have and what meaning I give to those experiences.”

Ann Kreilkamp

Health and Healing

Excerpt:
“We are all creators. We all breathe the same air. Our hearts beat to a universal biological rhythm, a rhythm entrained with other more subtle rhythms, all of them in concert as the universal harmony, the music of the spheres, the song of ourself. We are one. We are many. We are the one in the many. All polarities dissolve in the swelling sea of infinite space.”

Ann Kreilkamp

Health and Healing

Excerpt:
“Yet the year-long release of cigarettes was just the beginning. I knew I would need to begin to uncover the emotional roots that had crystallized into the physical addiction. And in order to do that, I would have to go back to the beginning, and begin again. I would have to do that “inner child” work mentioned above, to “face, embrace and erase” the deep emotional patterns that had structured my so-called life into a tight little locked box with no key.”

Ann Kreilkamp

Health and Healing

Excerpt:
“As a freedom-loving Sagitarian, my understanding and practice of simplicity trails in the wake of transformations in my understanding and practice of freedom.”

Ann Kreilkamp

Health and Healing

Excerpt:
“In 1974 I married for the second time. Dick had been my high school boyfriend, and finally, in our early 30s, our dream came true. I was so in love that I even moved back home to marry him. And while our inner life filled my parched heart with joy . . . (being) the newspaper editor’s “wife” in that small town sent my feminist system into shock.”

Ann Kreilkamp

Health and Healing

Excerpt:
“When I was a young girl, I was lucky. I knew what the Truth was. The Truth was Roman Catholicism. Actually, I *needed *my religion to be “true.” Without my religion I would have nothing to stand on, no place to call home.”

Ann Kreilkamp

Health and Healing

Excerpt:
“As a professional astrologer, I would ask depressed clients about their exercise patterns, and advocate walking. I would tell them, “walking is my shrink.” They would laugh. “But I’m serious!” I would say. “Because I walk every single day, my energy does

Ann Kreilkamp

Health and Healing

Excerpt:
I used to rail against these nightly interruptions, my resistance fueling the frustration of being unable to sleep. Identifying with my nerve-wracked state, left-brained mind would, just as in the daytime, instantly concoct an overlay of “reasons” why I felt that way. Like a wild horse, mind would rear up and gallop off, flinty hoofs sparking ideas one after another, and another, and yet another — endless causal chains of ideas, for or against, this or that.

Ann Kreilkamp