Making Malas: Companion Episode
Tatiana was my second guest as a launched my Abundant Parent workshops. (Catch my other blog post with her workshop and links!) Knowing how much every child I’ve ever met LOVES stones, I knew I wanted to host a workshop discussing the meaning and healing behind all these stones. I had met Tatiana by chance a year earlier and we connected immediately with our similar trips to Napal and Tibet and the ignition of a spiritual path. But she also funded her trip to Nepal by tying mala!
Mala is a beautiful craft meditative in both creating the stones beads into necklaces (or mala) but then also in their use to bring meditative rhythm to our thoughts and practices. Tatiana used her incredible knowledge to help make a workshop that would bring stones, chakras and meditation all together in a basic understanding in how Mala can benefit families… all that, and she also showed us how to tie mala!!!
Catch the Companion Podcast Here:
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When All Else Fails, We Turn to Faith and Trust
So why was I so passionate about stones? It began in childhood. Like all children, I was drawn to them. But when my mom was diagnosed with cancer when I was 7, I saw a shift in her. She began to have faith in things she hadn’t prior. While she was not anticipated to live, she also wasn’t giving up, and when friends would suggest strange mushroom and herb teas, acupuncture and crystals, she said “why not!” It was definitely a point in her journey where she figured it couldn’t hurt, and in the practice of applying these tools to her life along side saying affirmations, she also began to trust that they might actually be helping too.
After having her initial mastectomy, and while undergoing chemotherapy and radiation, my mom would take on the new habits her western doctors recommended through diet and pharmaceutical treatment, but also some energetic habits. She would lay on our sofa with a big beautiful clear crystal quarts in her hands and hold it against her chest while saying “I do not have cancer, nor will I ever have it again.” Chanting, crying, breathing, whispering, begging… and in time, believing.
Forces Out of Our Control
Needless to say, this was a very impressionable age for me. At a newly arrived age of reason where I was beginning to understand things more clearly outside of myself and with a bigger whole world picture, having hope in these energetic and non-traditional tools seemed safe given the effects this disease was having on my mom’s physical body. And part of this understanding was, that there are forces out of our control, bigger than us, and capable of impacting us in big and small ways.
Faith is powerful. Faith can impact our lives is both powerful and discouraging ways. It all comes down to mindset. For what we believe with our mind we will create in our experiences. Not dissimilarly, what we believe will not work, won’t. But when you open up your consciousness, allow yourself to connect with the energy all around you, you find it isn’t as hard to find as you once thought. It can even be in the tiny stone you keep in your pocket.
These days I use my kids as an excuse to indulge in stones. They love them and I can’t ignore that the stones they are most drawn to naturally, are actually what they most needed when I later look up the stones and their benefits. We have stones we sleep with, stones we keep in the four corners of our home, stones that protect us as we make our way in the world, and stones we bring out special when we intentionally celebrate our power to create during the lunar cycles. To us they are magical. And so they are.
About Leah:
Author of “Where the Light Is… A Parent’s Guide,” and best selling author Leah Recor is a mother of two young girls, driven by a holistic path to help parents heal their stories and connect with and empower their children. Leah is also a Co-Founder of a nonprofit mentoring children facing life-altering conditions with creative writing.
Leah is available for onsite presentations of The Abundant Parent to organizations and corporate entities.
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