By KaRa Maria Ananda, Hoop Alchemista

Hooping is a modern movement art that combines the arts of dance, yoga, meditation, fitness, play, bodywork, and sacred geometry. Hooping is a popular movement art across the globe with classes, workshops, retreats, hoop gatherings, hoop jams, and in countries all across the planet.

The spiraling movement of the hoop massages your body as the pressure point of contact with the hoop cycles around the core. The dynamic movement of rocking the core creates fluid undulation the spine. The rhythmic and spiraling movements generated by the spine to keep the hoop going facilitate the natural movements of the healthy spine.

Spin + E(energy) = Spine

Our spines are happy and healthy when we are spinning the hoop and moving the energy in our bodies!

The rocking motion of the sacrum (the tailbone - the name sacrum is derived from sacred) stimulates the sacral plexus, a large mass of nerves stemming from the spinal cord to enervate the pelvis. This rocking stimulates a full-body relaxation, release of endorphins, calming of the nervous system, increases circulation to the pelvis, pumps the craniosacral fluid, and clears the energy centers of the body.

Moving and stretching with the hoop is a holistic workout for the integration of the body, mind, heart, and spirit. Hoop yoga fusion flows are wonderful ways to energize your yoga practice.

The hoop is an ancient tool for movement play. Art from over 4,000 years ago in Ancient Egypt depicts a man with a hoop. People have crafted hoops from bamboo, rattan, stiff grass, and reeds for thousands of years. Native Americans have used rolling hoops for target practice and hunting games. Today Native American Hoop Dance is a beautiful and elaborate expression of the story of creation through intricate combining and dancing with multiple small hoops.

Hoops are also key tools in the Olympic sport of rhythmic gymnastics. Hoops are also a symbol of the Olympics as the logo in made from five hoops. Vancouver sold out of hula-hoops during the last Winter Olympics as people rushed to make hoop logos in the snow in front of their houses and businesses.

Hooping was a popular sport in England in the 1800's. People spun hoops around their bodies as well as rolling hoops with sticks. In the 1950's, the inventors of the modern plastic hula-hoop traveled to Australia and saw school children using wooden hoops in gymnastics class. Thus the idea for the toy hula-hoop was launched by Wham-O.

The release of the hula-hoop toy in 1957 spread the hoop craze across the planet, becoming the first global fad and spawning the word fad itself. There is something universally compelling about the hoop.

Sales of the hula-hoop astonished the world. Japan even banned the hula-hoop for a while, because of the concern over suggestive pelvic gyrations in public. However now Japan has a thriving modern hooping culture, classes, and an annual hoop conference.

Today's modern hoopers prefer custom handmade hoops with heavier and stronger tubing spiraling with colorful and sparkling tapes for grip, friction, and beauty. Hooping is about enjoying the flow of being in the spiral. Hoopers may use one, two, three, or even four hoops, but it's not about how many hoops can you spin or how long can you keep it going.

Hooping is about flow and being present in the whirl. It is an enjoyable energizing and balancing activity that is great for personal health, fitness, and fun, as well as getting together with groups of friends and community to hoop, dance, and play.

Dance and play with the hoop mimics the spiraling motions of all the dynamics of life, from the cells within our body, our DNA spirals, and the motions of the planets, galaxies, and universe. Spiraling and flowing is also the motion of water, and we energize the water that is 70% of our bodies by vortexing it while dancing in the hoop.

Hooping activates our bodies, massaging our muscles and stimulating our meridians, energy centers, and acupressure points. The spiraling energy clears and charges our chakras. Through conscious hoop dance we can step into the flow of the universal dance, strengthen our core, and find peace in the whirling world.

For more information see our Hoop Alchemy page!

by KaRa Maria Ananda

What is your vision for your best life? What is your dream for the ideal future of the world? There is great power in our visions and dreams. All ideas come from a beginning, a vision, a seeding of the concept. First it is a thought, an image, or a vague construct, but the more we imagine it the more clear it becomes. Visualization and articulation of our dreams and hopes for the future is a powerful tool for manifesting opportunities in our daily life.

Affirmations, intentions, prayers, and declarations of your desires, dreams, and hopes to the Universe are powerful. However, the combination of words and images creates a synergy that amplifies the magnetism of intentions and accelerates the manifestation of your goals.

Utilizing positive words of intention will focus your mind upon your goals and help actualize them. Yet, if you have deeper emotional belief systems that are programmed with a belief in lack or impossibility than your words can only work so well.

Our limbic system, the emotional center of our brain, was programmed with our emotional responses to the world between our prenatal life and age 3. This was a time of pre-verbal communication, and thus the limbic system is coded in imagery.

The only way to reprogram our limbic systems (which have a built-in ability to be recoded) is through the conscious use of imagery. We must re-imagine and re-birth our world view from a mature experienced perspective. What was right for us to believe and how we should emotionally respond as a baby is not how we should necessarily respond now to the world.

Conscious Visioning through art in its many forms, including collage, digital art, video, drawing, painting, and more are catalysts for the creative process. Images create emotional responses, thus overwriting pre-existing limbic coding, and enlist the powerful energy of the heart. The heart is the strongest electromagnetic generator in the body - stronger than the brain's electromagnetic energy output by 5000%, according to research by the HeartMath Institute.

I have discovered over years of visioning and collage creations that the images used are very potent and powerful in magnetizing those experiences into our lives. The images we choose are also revelatory in assisting you to discern what it is that you desire in your life at that moment. I find conscious visioning art to be an effective tool for calm focusing of intention during times of rapid growth and transition in one's life.

It has been astonishing how rapidly many of the images that I have chosen in my collages over the last few years have materialized in my life. A series of collages I created about 2-3 years ago were filled with imagery of Sedona, Red Rocks, and Mountains (evoking the feelings of Mount Shasta). Along with images of community, vibrant foods, and activational words and geometry.

My life's journey brought me to visit Mount Shasta last summer, where I met Jahsah, and we lived on the mountain together for 9 months, and celebrated our wedding there this summer on the June Full Moon & Grand Cross. Now we are living in Sedona, where he has lived for 5 years prior to leaving for his travels that took him around the world and back, and to Mount Shasta for our convergence. I look back through my visioning collages of the past years and see how I visioned my life manifesting in the most divine wonderful way.

This past May, after returning from the Epic Eden Hot Springs Retreat in Eden, Arizona we decided to move from Shasta to Sedona after our wedding. Sedona has a gorgeous landscape, warm weather - but not as hot as Phoenix or Tuscon, fabulous community, conscious entrepreneurs, delicious food culture, and great friends. Jahsah redesigned the banner for our Circles of Alchemy website and incorporated the image of Sedona's stunning Cathedral Rock glowing in the sunset into the digital alchemy, as you can see above.

It was only after we signed the lease on our new home in Sedona in July that we realized the view from the road that leads to our house is the same view as the image in our banner, consciously visioned two months prior in Mount Shasta. Which also happens to be one of the most beautiful drives in all of Arizona.

This is the power of incorporating imagery into our spiritual and creative intentions. It really will manifest in your life - and synchronicities will appear to remind you to recognize and honor the divine creative impulse of our artistic expressions. Be careful what images you choose to envision in your life, they will manifest!

In honor of this past Full Moon in August, Jahsah and I created an alchemical collage, now hanging above our desk to clarify our vision for our healing arts facilitation at this time. The act of moving the images around and unifying them together is calming, focusing, and meditative, it was a powerful practice for collectively visioning our mission and I love looking at it.

You can see the collage below, it is a fusion of powerful and beautiful images from magazines, last year's Mayan Calendar artwork - including some of Aya's Starwheel mandalas, Sedona photography, Sacred G, and our digital alchemy of words and photos from our Healing Arts card.

What is the ultimate vision you have for your life? How does it make your feel to imagine your dream home, work, community, health, family, and activities? What is your most powerful vision for the world? Find your personal creative medium and create the images that you would like to see in the world.

Create the art that expresses your inner visions and evokes feelings of inspiration, happiness, peace, clarity, and joy. Let us co-create the vision of a new paradigm and activate the manifestation of our dreams, then delight in the synchronicities of life's unfolding and our creative visualization.

Tools and Practices for Spiritual Expansion:

• Hoop in Peace - Every spiritual warrior needs a Sacred Hoop. The spiraling motion of the hoop taps you into the primal rhythms of the universe and centers your mind and emotions. The dynamic movements of the hoop energize your body, stimulate your meridians and acupressure points, stimulates your lymphatic system, and clears your thoughts, emotions, and energy. The hoop is a fabulous healing tool to inspire a daily fun dance and yoga practice.
  
• Balance Your Body - Treat yourself to transformational bodywork regularly to treat old traumas, recover from injury, balance the body, and train the body to THRIVE. We practice Integrative Bodywork, Energy Healing, Sound Healing, Crystal Healing, Craniosacral, and Aqua Alchemy to provide full-spectrum powerful Vibrational Alchemy Healing Arts.
  
• Seek Support - Talking to someone about your personal experiences is a valuable and important practice in times of stress. We offer support for Healing, Transformation, Rites of Passage, Spiritual Growth, and Conscious Living. Through Vibrational Healing Arts, Spiritual Counseling, and Empowering Resources we offer tools for evolutionary support for all the cycles of life.
  
• Find Your Tribe - Coming together with friends and community is an essential practice for thriving in life. Gather with friends, family, and like-minded individuals. Reach out and meet new people. Are you looking for a place to meet more amazing people who are interested in healing arts, conscious living, sacred music, movement, dance, yoga, high vibration foods, living water, hot springs, and having fun? Come to the Epic Eden Hot Springs Retreat this October in Eden, Arizona.
  
• Listen to Healing Music - Music and sound is a powerful tool for healing the body, transforming emotions, and raising vibration. Try toning or singing at home, listen to Healing Music, experience a Sacred Sound Journey. 
• Surround Yourself with Sacred Art - Fill your home and life with Sacred Art that integrates Sacred Geometry, inspirational imagery, universal messages of love, peace, and transformation. Surrounding yourself with art and beauty will inspire your heart and soul. Having Sacred Geometry images and art around you increases your bodies resonance with the natural fractal geometry patterns within all life, thus increasing flow, synchronicity, and health in your life.
  
• Love Deeply - Let yourself love, express love, trust love. Love yourself first, and then you will be able to receive the love of others, and share love with others freely. Listen to your Divine Guidance and your Heart. When you find love, honor it, and celebrate it. 
• Support the New Children to be Born in Peace - Many children are coming into the world today to assist in the Shift and are wanting to be born consciously. Learn about Conscious Birth and Peaceful Parenting and how to support the Children of the New Consciousness who are emerging now to assist the Planetary Shift.
  

Enjoy the ride as we surf the Galactic Shift! We've made it, let's now BE the New Earth Community. Let's utilize the tools for transformation we have, and change the way we live, love, and thrive!

We are living in a great time. We are experiencing the shift to a new world age. Many people are feeling increased stress during the current times. Changes in the global magnetic energy, climate, and solar radiation are effecting human energy levels and creating physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual manifestations during the process. As the Earth upgrades to a new consciousness, so too is humankind shifting and upgrading our mental and emotional belief systems and cellular DNA. Changes in the Earth's energy fields and planetary grids may be felt by sensitive individuals in their emotional, mental, and physical bodies, and increasing amounts of individuals are awakening to higher sensitivity.

This is an incredible and exciting time to be alive. We are here now to activate the keys to spiritual expansion. We are lightworkers holding the frequencies of love, gratitude, peace, and balance for the birth of the New Earth. We are spiritual midwives to assist the Earth's emergence of a Unified Consciousness. We are to synchronize with the Heart of the Earth: the Core of the Crystalline Consciousness Grid of Gaia, and hold the space of love during this Galactic Rite of Passage.

There are many simple tools that can be utilized to assist integration during the Shift, and many healing practices that can assist in integration and increase energy, performance, and spiritual transformation. Spiritual expansion takes place as your electromagnetic energy field and nervous system increase in sensitivity and capacity to support a higher vibrational frequency of consciousness. Sometimes people have physical pains, headaches, and dizziness, or sometimes it's lucid dreams, kundalini flashes, and physic phenomena. To integrate shifts in your consciousness, and integrate your body, heart, mind, and soul try connecting with Nature, being outside on the Earth, getting exercise - especially through dance and yoga, and seeking support through community, spiritual consultations, and healing arts.

Here's a simple meditation you can practice anytime to align your body with the planetary and galactic bodies, thus facilitating integration, balance, and peace. Simply slow down your breathing, focus upon your heart, and imagine breathing in and out through the heart. Now imagine a golden cord spiraling down from your heart to the very core of the Earth, the heart of Gaia. Now connected to the Heart of Gaia, ask yourself what support and resources you need to thrive during this AMAZING SHIFT to the New Conscious Paradigm on Earth. As we align with the Heart of Gaia, the Earth aligns with the Hunab Ku, the black-hole center of our Milky Way Galaxy - the Galactic Heart.

The Shift has happened. It's time to get connected, upgrade our inner programming, and synchronize for Galactic Consciousness. Are you ready? Know that you are fully supported on all levels, the whole universe in conspiring to support you through your expansion process.

Blessings,
KaRa Maria Ananda

Imagine that you are looking at the world through Rainbow Colored Glasses.

When I was young, I had a children's book called "The Rose Colored Glasses". In this story, a young girl finds a rose-colored stone in the woods and upon looking through it is able to see the fairies and devic spirits of the woods. When she sees and acknowledges them, she can talk, listen, learn from them, help them, and make friends. The fairies take her stone and make it into a pair of rose-colored glasses she can put on whenever she wants.

Have you ever tried on a pair of holographic glasses, popular around holiday time so you can look at winter lights and see each light as a sparkling rainbow or star?

Imagine that you have a pair of holographic Rainbow Colored glasses like these. When you put them on, you notice that not only are lights radiating rainbows, but everything is bathed in encircling spheres of rainbow light. The light radiates out from the heart of each person, living thing, and object. Each tree, stone, flower, and cloud radiates as much light as a person. With this magic pair of rainbow glasses, the light within each thing is enhanced and illuminated.

You can always imagine these glasses and turn on your inner sight. We all have this ability to grow in sensitivity to the subtle frequencies of light.

All life manifests in the natural patterns of our fractal universe. As all the galaxies in the universe are spiraling in a fractal patterning, all the trees and plants on our Earth grow in a fractal patterning from seed, to sprouting, to creating leaves, flowers, and seeds again. Humans are fractals, as physicist Nassim Haramein humorously says in his DVD's Crossing the Event Horizon, "People come out of other people!".

Our consciousness is fractal too. Our thoughts grow forth from the seeds of inception. What we imagine and seed into our consciousness will grow. We can imagine how the seed will sprout, becoming larger, spreading wider, spiraling each branch outward, growing leaves, blossoms, and more seeds...

What are you allowing to take seed in your consciousness right now? We are in a powerful doorway of time, where we can consciously create our own vision of the future. Know that what you imagine takes root in your heart and becomes a flower of fractal consciousness.

Your heart creates a radiating torus shaped field of fractal energy waves around your body. The electromagnetic field of the heart has been extensively studied by the HeartMath Institute and shown to be the strongest electromagnetic field in our bodies. This torus field is a donut shaped fractal geometry, creating spherical waves of energy radiating out from the heart up to eight-feet from the body. The heart field is 5000 times stronger than the electromagnetic field of energy generated by the brain.

Your heart energy is strong, balanced, and synchronized when you are experiencing positive feelings of love, appreciation, and gratitude. When you feel confused, angry, or sad, your heart creates incoherent irregular wavelengths. When we focus upon feeling positive while imagining in our inner vision what we desire the most we activate the keys to manifestation. 

Our feelings are largely controlled by our emotional center of the limbic system, which is programmed in early childhood from our experiences preconception to age 3. This is a time of pre-verbal consciousness, when images and feelings shape our consciousness. However, as we grow, we need to learn to activate new codes within our limbic system to override old emotional patterns in our lives that we have outgrown. The limbic system can be reprogrammed through conscious imagery and emotional patterning. This creates new fractal seeds of consciousness that are to bloom forth.

Focusing upon your heart, imagine the seeds that you are planting in your life. Now is the time to walk through the doorway of new consciousness and activate new codes of conscious creation within your heart, brain, and the whole of the fractal universe. See what is before you. Put on a pair of Rainbow Colored Glasses today!

- KaRa Maria Ananda

You already know that gentle birth creates the foundation for the physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual health of the child throughout their life. We have access to more research on the wisdom of natural birth and parenting practices than ever before. There have been thousands of birth practitioners, teachers, and activists to lead the way to the new paradigm of birth. Yet we have immense work to do to shift the culture of birth both in our own communities and across the globe. What can we learn from the Birth Visionaries who have led the way toward natural birthing practices?

I am collecting the wisdom of Birth Visionaries, Midwives, Teachers, Doctors, Mothers, Fathers, Activists, and YOU to inspire the next generation of Conscious Birth advocates. Your wisdom may be included in an article and shared in circles and workshops.

Please share your #1 golden nugget of wisdom for the Birth Visionaries of the future...

• What is the most important words of advice you can share with the upcoming birth advocates?
• What do you wish you were told when you started along the path of supporting natural birth and parenting?
• What do you see has the most potential to shift the global culture of birth?
• How can young birth advocates succeed in creating powerful changes in their community and the world?

Please share your words of advice in one or two sentences. Feel free to add your website and any links to top resources you recommend.

Gratitude, thanks, and respect to the Birth Visionaries who have paved the way for peace in birth and peace on Earth! We love you!

Eternal Gratitude,
KaRa Ananda

www.circlesofalchemy.org

Conscious Birthing Ambassador
Author of Birth's Evolution
Creator of the Online Conscious Birthing Class &
The Conscious Birth Ambassador Training

You are being called to Sedona to activate your light codes for the evolution of human consciousness. Join with our network of Magi's and Priestesses of the Eternal Heart to clear the maya of human cultural conditioning. Learn the galactic language of Divine Love. Your soul family is gathering for the creation of a tribe of Lightworkers in service to the heart of Gaia. Now is the Sacred Time to activate your vibration of light in service to the the Conscious Evolution. Sedona is a vibrational center for the heart of America, where healing and connection to one's soul are amplified by the vibrational frequency of the crystalline red rocks. Activate your soul's mission to the next level in Sedona to share the light of your Eternal Heart with the world as a Lightworker of Gaia. 

Do you hear the call?

Mother Earth is in labor. She is birthing a new consciousness, a new future for humanity. She moans, shakes, and feels the intensity of her labor pains. She is in deep work, bringing forth a new way of life for our planet, a new child of the universe.

Mother Earth is having a hard labor. Earthquakes, volcanoes, hotflashes, and hurricanes of emotion all rumble through her body. Her amniotic sack has become artificially ruptured leaking her precious inner fluids into the ocean. The environment is polluted and smoggy, thus making it hard for her to breathe ample fresh oxygen for her baby.

Mother Earth is pregnant with the seeds of life from Father Sky. The whole universal family is circling the Earth. sending love and energy for a gentle and sacred birth. The emergence of the new consciousness of Earth is anticipated by life everywhere.

Earth family can support Mother Earth through her labor by utilizing the ancient practices of Shamanic Midwifery. Through sending healing love, energy, and holding space through meditation, visualization, ceremony, sacred circles, drumming, and toning we can send Earth Mother love and ease her labor pains.

The most ancient and powerful technology of Shamanic Midwifery is the Sacred Birth Circle. In this way, the spiritual community supports the mother in labor through holding a Sacred Birth Circle. The Birth Circle creates a sacred space for ceremony, to send the family love, energy, healing, and strength for Conscious Birth.

Together as Earth Family we are being called to remember the sacred art of circle making. To gather together with family, friends, and community to create Sacred Circles to pray, vision, heal, love, build energy, tone, sing, drum, dance, and make music for the Mother Earth. So she can gently, easily, and ecstatically give birth to the New Earth Consciousness.

Conscious creation is the alchemy of Nature and Spirit. As we connect with the Earth and her elements and rejuvenate the sacred arts of ceremony, ritual, and the Sacred Circle we become the midwives, the guardians, and the vision keepers for the new paradigm. We welcome the new consciousness of heart-centered living on Earth. We give birth to peace on Earth.

- KaRa Maria Ananda

Do you think giving birth is like being on Fear Factor or worse? If all you ever heard was negative birth stories, or watched Murphy Brown give birth on television, than I wouldn't be surprised! It seems that women who have unsatisfactory birthing experiences are more than willing to share, even to pregnant strangers they don't know in the grocery store. However, women with positive birth experiences are often more shy to share, because they don't want to make others feel bad who did not have such an empowering birth, or they don't want to be perceived as judgemental or opinionated. I also notice that women with negative births are more in need of talking about their experience to process their emotions, while women with happy experiences are satisfied and do not have such a compelling need to discuss. Positive birth stories are potent medicine for the mother's soul, and can shift a pregnant woman's birth experience to the better.

The sharing of positive birth stories is essential for the parents of the future to hear to enter the childbearing years with faith and security in one's body's ability to give birth - joyfully and even ecstatically. It's a simple equation, fear leads to tension which leads to pain. Without the fear, a mother is relaxed, happy, and dramatically more comfortable during pregnancy and birth. I think that over 95% of US women are terrified of birth. No wonder with the drama being portrayed on cable "reality" birth television, movies, and the scary birth stories that get gossiped about among girlfriends and families.

Now it is time to speak up for ecstatic birth! Share your positive birth stories with young women and expecting parents. In my Online Conscious Birthing Class for expecting parents, I have a collection of positive birth stories from mothers who gave birth at home, birth centers, and in hospitals. I feel that positive stories are essential for pregnant women to hear and read. If you would like to share your story in the Positive Birth Story Library in the Online Conscious Birth Class, than please send it along - I'd love to share and will offer you a free copy of my e-book Birth's Evolution: Natural Wisdom for Conscious Birthing, in exchange for publishing your story in the online class. You can also read the story of my son's homebirth in the online class and e-book, but you can also read a shorter version at CNN iReports, "Homebirth in Seattle".

Let's spread the word about how wonderful, ecstatic, empowering, peaceful, gentle, and sweet birth can be when we release our fears and have faith in our bodies intrinsic ability to grow, heal, birth, and love.

P.S. Email your positive birth story and photos of you and your family to circlesofalchemy@gmail.com soon - because I can't wait to read and share it!

A Call to Conscious Birth Ambassadors:

We call for a unification of people dedicated to supporting, honoring, and uplifting the field of Conscious Birthing for the health of babies, mothers, families, communities, the planet, and the future of humanity.

We hold it to be true that the primal period from preconception to age 3 is a critical time in the emerging life of a human for the blueprint for lifelong physical, emotional, psychology, and spiritual health to be established. The gentle and loving nurturing of a new life during the primal period establishes the human's ability to receive and express love throughout their life, to relieve stress, and to bond deeply with family, friends, loved ones, and nature.

Furthermore, the consciously received baby grows up to have the deeply creative resources within to find conscious solutions for the growing issues of the modern world. It is our imperative to nurture conscious children, for they are the peacemakers for our planet, essential for the longevity and vitality of the continuation of the human race and all life on our Mother Earth. They are our hope for a world of peace and love for the generations to come.

You are invited to be a Conscious Birth Ambassador and join KaRa and Jahsah Ananda in beautiful Sedona, Arizona for workshops enhancing your mission, passion, and service as a guardian of Conscious Birth. Do you hear the calling?

Find our more about the: Conscious Birth Ambassador Programs and support mothers, babies, and families today!

Upcoming workshops:
Level 1 - October 22-24, 2010
Level 1 - February 11-13, 2011
Level 2 - April 8-10, 2011