Tag Archive for: mind-body

Single-Hood Suddenly Feels Like a Life Sentence!

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But, it just as suddenly can change.

My first weeks in isolation were uncharacteristic and dark. I mean, typically I’ve liked alone time.

Thoughts about how long it would be before being touched, or touching another human being, cut like a knife. Hopeless loneliness creeped into every moment.

My body was, and continues to be, starved for touch. But it’s changed.

Being single had been a choice to immerse myself in creating my dreams. But suddenly, single-hood felt like a life sentence.

I’m not single because of Coronavirus. I’m single because I cherish me-time. Coronavirus just took away my buffer. Dance and therapeutic touch satisfied the sensual grace physical connection inspires. But this artistry has distracted me, to the point of replacing, a deeper want for an intimate we.

Isolation brought me face to face with my want, and a face off in the mirror.

As I looked myself in the eye, first the right eye then the left, (Does that have some significance?) I recognized that my ambivalence about relationships has always circled around the same theme: they take more than they give. It’s not worth the effort. I’ve got more important plans!

To no surprise, my history is riddled with touch taking—stealing—what was creative in me. From childhood sexual abuse to nursing a brain-injured lover. My time and body were exhausted by their needs.

I’ve been self-isolating, limiting touch, for years.

Now I’m yearning for it!

The CoronaCrisis has cracked me open. Something in me has shifted.

At first it felt sad. I wanted to punish myself for lost time. But then something wonderful happened.

I realized something when I took in my reflection. I wasn’t running away from my past, I was running toward my future. I HAVE made an effort to be in relationship. With myself. And I’m a good partner.

I’ve given myself quiet space to create in. Uninterrupted time to dream in. Aloneness to explore in. I have given myself time to explore what is important to me. And I have successes to show for it.

My fierce love for me has protected what I’ve cherished in me—my body and creative life force—this alliance is what I live and die for. Single-hood has taught me to be a thoughtful, intuitive and independent partner.

Single-hood is a partnership between the inner and outer worlds of a self. This relationship is a gift, not lost time.

Rather than focusing on wanting touch, now I focus on how I’m available for touch. My chest is relaxed wide open, my arms and palms rotate outward in readiness, and my pelvis feels anchored under me. My availability for touch is settling into my body’s posture. Rooting it’s permission in my expression.

I am finally present with an unfulfilled want. No running away or chasing. Just in its majesty.

For today, I am touched by being open to receive.

It is worth the effort. Relationships are worth your effort, be they inward or outward.

Want can be uncomfortable, but it guides you to your next step in living free and whole. Stay awake in these times and learn what you’re yearning for.

Workout Warriors Take Warning

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Motivation Question

7AM fitness clients are high achievers! We’re warming up in the dark and seeing our day take shape before the sun comes up.

Holiday socializing may have overflowed into the work week and made these early workouts painful. One of my high achiever’s responded to feeling over-done by over-doing some more!

Did she believe that overriding her body’s exhaustion would make her stronger?

As her trainer, I had to help her decelerate and work with willingness rather than will. The willingness to listen rather than demand; and recognize that muscle failure is not the same thing as physical exhaustion. Muscle failure challenges a restored muscle to full capacity—till it fails. Physical exhaustion is an unrestored muscle.

Fitness resolutions need to abide by the same willingness; listen and discern between physical exhaustion and muscle failure!

Meet limitations anew each day by being present. Presence offers truth to your strength training that is both empowering and humbling.

Empowering because you experience your limitations from a place of respect. Meeting your limits, not beating your last performance, is the definition of self-love. Overriding your limits is the definition of self-betrayal.

Humbling because it’s a “real” exchange. Not with what you can and can’t do, but with what you’re willing or not willing to do.

My client was willing to exhaust herself further, escalate her body’s tension and beat up her self-worth over how heavy a dumbbell was and how hard she could drive herself. The question becomes, are you willing to sacrifice yourself—your wellbeing—to feed what you think “should be” versus what actually is.

Stop thinking and feel! Train for relaxed strength, and leave the tension of self-betrayal in 2019!

The Foundation for Focussed Strength Dive Deeper Into The Art of Strength: Preview Chapters 3 & 4 of My First Book

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The BodyLogos Philosophy: Now In Book/Video Form!

Whether you’re a visual, aural or verbal learner, you’ll discover how to

release tension and build strength.

Order your copy of The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind, a pioneering book/3D video learning system today!

The Foundation for Focussed Strength

Dive Deeper Into The Art of Strength: Preview Chapters 3 & 4 of My First Book

I’ve got a question for you: How’s your relationship with gravity?

Well, we’re pretty close, Tammy. After all, I’m tethered to the ground at this moment, not floating around in the atmosphere, you might think with a chuckle, humoring my query.

I ask because building a healthy relationship with this powerful force takes much more than just passively carrying your weight around. It involves active engagement with your presence on this Earth and recognizing the Divine arrangement of it all.

Chapters 3 and 4 of my brand-new book, The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind, help you explore our vital connection to gravity so that you can approach any physical or mental challenge that comes your way from, you guessed it, a place of strength.

Here’s a quick anatomy lesson. Your Central Plumb Line vertically aligns your body with the Earth’s gravitational pull—think of it as your personal axis, connecting your North Pole (your crown) to your South (the bottoms of your feet); this is why I also often refer to it as your Vertical Plumb Line. When this line is out of whack, it’s fighting gravity. The negative effects of that battle are both mental and physical: a distorted spine and constricted central nervous system, along with a feeling that your drive to do and be your best is being crushed.

But when it’s in Neutral Alignment, all is well. Then, your relationship with gravity puts your energy, bones, and muscles in their optimal positions. You have a solid foundation for physical strength and focused attention.

So how do you navigate this neutrality? Achieve such alignment?

By getting to know the five Energy Centers that make up your Vertical Plumb Line and the corresponding Alignment Stabilizers that horizontally straddle each Energy Center, you can effectively fine-tune your alignment.

In chapters 3 and 4, I share simple yet profound exercises that help you:
The book gives you exclusive access to videos that help visually guide you through these exercises.

  • Find Neutral Alignment by feeling into each of the five Energy Centers and relating them to one another
  • Access your Alignment Stabilizers to quickly and easily adjust your Energy Centers to form your Central Plumb Line
  • Experience your bones separate from your muscles. Connecting to your bones’ weight keeps your relationship with gravity relaxed; connecting to their stillness keeps you relating to your Spirit Self
  • Go beyond Neutral Alignment to discover Essential Alignment, which stretches your Central Plumb Line and you to connect with life in a vibrant new way
  • And so much more…

With your energy centers and bones aligned, you can move fluidly to meet with outside resistance—physically, mentally, and emotionally.

You learn that alignment isn’t static—it’s constantly in flow. In fact, the difference between tension and strength is that tension is static while strength is fluid. Your alignment liberates you to stretch and move.

By aligning your physical, mental, and spiritual dimensions, you’re free—free to express yourself and live in your truth and in your power.

Get your copy of The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind today!

Balboa Publishing
with a 5% gift to Safe Horizons

Amazon

A Sneak Peek Into My First Book–Chapter 1 & 2 of The Art of Strength

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The BodyLogos Philosophy: Now In Book/Video Form!

Whether you’re a visual, aural or verbal learner, you’ll discover how to

release tension and build strength.

Order your copy of The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind, a pioneering book/3D video learning system today!

Where to start, where to start, where to start:

A Sneak Peek Into My First Book–Chapter 1 & 2 of The Art of Strength

That’s what was looping through my head as I sat down to begin the oh-so-exciting yet equally intimidating task of writing my first book about the BodyLogos philosophy and program.

AVAILABLE NOW!

My approach combines meditation and strength training, joins the best of Eastern and Western fitness, to help create real and lasting strength. It’s about integrating our emotional and spiritual selves into our workouts to become totally aligned. And therein was my answer…

The practice and, thus, my book start with a focus on how our minds and emotions intersect in the body. Its first chapter aims to set you on a path to recognize this intersection and connect you with your Spirit Self.

Tao thought says, your Spirit Self is a “pregnant void” needing only direction.

These pages help you intend a direction to create the life you desire and set you up to live that life from a place of true strength.

You see, a meditation practice properly informs your exercise practice. Perhaps surprisingly, the goal with each is not to focus on the end result, as our culture tells us to do—to see meditation as solely a way to de-stress or exercise as only a way to look good. (aka better than you do as you are.)

Rather, the secret is simply to focus on the journey itself; and meditation is the perfect tool to learn how to do just that. A BodyLogos workout gives both your mind and the emotions that are stored in your body a chance to take a timeout from self-criticism, and instead employ and embrace self-acknowledgment–the act of listening inwardly..

I call this focus on the journey “meditative fitness.”

Meditation is key to ensuring that your strength training does more than align your body, or your human self. When you learn to incorporate meditation into your exercise practice, you create the foundation for being your authentic, integrated, vulnerable, and bright Spirit Self in the world. If that isn’t the definition of strength, I don’t know what is!

In chapters 1 you’ll find:

  • Step-by-step instructions that guide you through a traditional Tao Active Meditation, that reorganizes the body, and BodyLogos Active Meditations, that neutralize your mind.
  • An introduction to the BodyLogos Psyche-Muscular Blueprint. Every muscle group corresponds to an aspect of your Self; when isolated in a strength-training workout, that emotion is stimulated.
  • An overview of posture analysis and ways to help you discern the meaning of your body’s messages.
  • Meditations on the five elements of Tao: fear, anger, joy, reflection, sorrow.
  • And much more, including links to video tutorials for guidance.

For centuries, Taoists have believed that our ability to listen to the body is as valuable as listening to the mind. As this chapter illustrates, they’re inextricably connected.

Using active meditation and the BodyLogos approach to posture, you can pinpoint the root cause of emotional tension in your body. Then, through precise mindful adjustments in skeletal alignment and muscular balance, you challenge your body to integrate those adjustments using strength-training exercises, which the book covers in great detail in later chapters.

BodyLogos helps you stretch away from what you think about yourself and toward what is less familiar in the world—it awakens your innate trust in the Universal Spirit.

Get started on your journey to strength and  well-being!

Get your copy of The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind today!

Balboa Publishing
with a 5% gift to Safe Horizons

Amazon

Feeling the Pinch of the Holidays?

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Let It Direct Your New Year’s Resolution

The NYC craft fairs are an art-filled, outdoor, community experience that gets everyone in the holiday spirit. It is a unique and wonderful holiday shopping frenzy. I find myself dashing through them between clients, at the end of my work days, or over the weekend to get all my holiday needs in order. It’s all consuming and I love it!!

The holidays, however, can make us dizzy with fatigue, unsettled by the all-consuming whirlwind, and overwhelmed with what it will take to recover our best selves to kickstart 2019!

This mayhem is the perfect setting to recognize the root of our year-round triggers.
Yes, there is an intrinsic message in our tensions expression!

When overwhelm turns into physical pain our body is trying to tell us something.

The body uses location and pain as its sentence structure to communicate. While your brain remembers an event, it’s your body that harbors the emotions that accompanied an event. Emotional tension patterns settle in the areas of the body that animate the emotion. And it can carry these emotional tension patterns around indefinitely if you don’t listen to its cry.

Unresolved emotions create tension that distort your posture. That tension then gets triggered into reactive expressions when under pressure. The emotional outbursts, physical pain, even sickness that interferes with your joy for living is actually a low-grade drain that is always under the surface!

Locations of emotional expression commonly agitated over the holidays:

  • Shoulders form the widest part of your skeletal frame, their muscles shape your posture’s horizontal integrity. For this reason, shoulders carry emotions regarding your integrity––what you value, as well as, your sense of personal value.
  • Low back muscles protect the kidneys, which from an Eastern perspective carry your fear. Their muscles tighten and surrender to the same degree your fear rises and falls.
  • Hip flexors/Iliopsoas muscles balance your torso over your legs. Too often however, they are used to power your legs direction. This overuse of a relatively small muscle is over controlling the larger leg muscle groups. Control is carried in the iliopsoas muscles and its grip is felt in the fold or the center of the hip joints.

Emotional anguish around social pressures and family gatherings at holiday time are undeniable. It’s important to remember that the emotions that surface under pressure are always lying under our smiles of pleasantry. And their low-grade energy consumption can draw us further and further away from our smiles of truth.

Resolve your body’s cry in 2019! Correct your posture and consider your emotional misalignments.

  • For shoulder pain keep them physically positioned on the coronal plane––the plane between front and back planes of the body––and emotionally explore your relationship to your own value or the values you are surrounded by. Create a suitable active meditation, like: My value is always in my being.

  • For low back pain keep your low abdominal muscles supporting its physical curve and explore the emotions creating your fears. Create a suitable active meditation, like: My fears are not facts.

  • For iliopsoas pain keep your hip bones forward enough to rock your weight onto the balls of your feet and explore your emotional relationship with being controlling or controlled. Create a suitable active meditation, like: I can have control without being controlling.


High pressure holiday situations that escalate your tension into tantrum and spasm excavates the work that needs to be addressed in your life’s story. Recognize the root of your tension so you can weed them out in 2019.

Have a liberating new year!

The BodyLogos Practice helps you understand where specific emotions get trapped in your bodies’ soft tissue. Developed by me––Tammy Wise––B’way dancer turned Tao Minister. I use the emotional intelligence of posture to transform tension into strength.

In my new book/3D-video learning system, The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the mind. I walk you through mind-body techniques that will help you release tension and build strength simultaneously.

Learn more…

Inner Space––The New Frontier

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Carol Burnett as Miss. Wiggins

Empower the Space in your Pelvis  

 

Remember Carol Burnett’s secretary character, Wanda Wiggins, played opposite Tim Conway?

She was a constant distraction to her boss, Mr. Tudball. In addition to having an exceptionally low IQ, her blonde curls, fitted skirt, baby-doll sway back and turned in legs left Mr.Tudball persistently bewildered and distracted.

It was as if she never fully stood up from her chair before she would shuffle across the floor in her black pumps, cowishly chewing her gum, readying herself to take notations perched beside the bosses desk. We would all giggle at the obliviousness of her presence.

Her posture told her story. She clearly had no interest in asserting herself physically or mentally, and though she had a nice enough hair-do, manicure and outfit, she had no real objectives beyond that.

Perhaps we were all giggling at our own propensity to embody the same unexceptional disimpassioned attitude. Don’t we all fantasize about how much easier life would be if we just didn’t care so much about being outstanding?  

 

If you’re over forty, you can (occasionally) relate to Miss. Wiggins’ squatty posture when you try to stand up after sitting too long at your desk. In the last two inches of getting to your feet your body creaks in retaliation before allowing a fully upright stance. If you’re over fifty you may not even make it to fully upright!

It’s as if the space in your hips and lower back silently shrunk while you were busying yourself in your seat, right?

This shortening of the iliopsoas muscle––which travels through the hip joints from inner thighs to lower back­­––can lead to the downward spiral of our fitness. Age and job demands can cause us to shadow Miss. Wiggins or it can be the agitant we need to lengthen the Iliopsoas into an upward spiral.

Sitting encourages tension in your iliopsoas muscles because the muscles become shortened, differing from its elongated standing state. The iliopsoas muscles also collect tension from their responsibility to direct your movement––physically, mentally or emotionally––and they become over-controlling when compressed inward for too long.

Balanced muscle use inspires purposeful alignment and attention.

Sitting tasks need standing time-outs to restore the space in your pelvis. When you fully elongate your iliopsoas muscles you place your torso precisely atop your pelvis. In that moment you are absolutely present in time and space––an opportunity for mental discernment and spiritual awakening. You are standing in your strength.

 

In the Tao te Ching it states:

The Master does his job and then stops.
He understands that the universe is forever out of control,
And that trying to dominate events
Goes against the current of things (Tao).

 

Many of us, unlike Miss. Wiggins, do pass through this aligned state, often unconsciously, and experience a sense of self and purpose in the world when doing so. To support this aligned state consciously unite the core trilogy of your physicality: abdominals, inner thighs and buttock muscles.

You may, or may not, meet tension in your iliopsoas muscles when standing up out of a chair (yet!). But by following these simple steps you will ward off thwarting their upstanding value. This is how you know your iliopsoas muscles are in their fully elongated uprightness:
·      Ground through your heels to stand up, lean your torso onto your abdominal muscles and keep it there as your pelvis travels forward.
·      To adjust your pelvis forward press your hip bones forward until you feel your buttock muscles naturally engage.
·      When your buttocks naturally engage stop the forward press, and gently rotate your inner thighs toward your central plumb line to replace the iliopsoas muscles’ compressed grip.

When your core trilogy is united experience the silence of the moment. Recognize the inner space you have created in your center and the renewed vitality you instantly possess. This space is the Creator in you––your Spirit Self.

 

The Tao te Ching continues:

Tao in the world is like a river flowing home to the sea.

 

Making decisions from this silent space is making choices from the inherent wisdom you were born with, combined with the gathered information you studied to possess. The intelligence that lives in your body and your mind are united for your greatest good. You are living in your strength.

 

To learn how to release tension in minutes check out this FREE video!

Sob Your Head Off It’s Good For You

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Human face cloaked in mesh

Human face under a cloak of confusion

Expand your capacity to love!

You know those moments where no words can express or console your feelings; a deep guttural cry is the only way to pacify the hurt. It offers complete submersion into your feelings–separate from thinking–bringing solace to heartache. It’s as if, physically shedding tears makes room for mental resolution. And it is actually true–sobbing is a physical exorcism.

The deep muscular heave of a sob loosens the emotional grip of deep-seated beliefs trapped in your soft tissues. Beliefs misaligned with the present situation; beliefs that make you question love. (Yes, the body feels! The mind thinks.)

Even tears motivated by happiness, such as your daughter’s wedding day, there is a misaligned undercurrent belief causing the tears: you may have worried that she would not find a partner and be lonely her whole life; or on a more personal note, you may believe you’ll never attract the bliss of new love again in your life. Underlying beliefs are not always conscious.

The emotional undercurrent of mental beliefs runs through your body like a current that tumbles gracefully down the river. Misaligned beliefs create tensions that interfere with this emotional current, like a bend or jutting rock in the riverbed that creates a whirlpool. Physical holding patterns develop into pockets of tension that I refer to as psyche-muscular holding patterns. To release the pattern adjust your belief.

Easy right… just change your mind!

Not quite. First you need to release the physical tension holding the pattern in place!

Sobbing naturally creates that opportunity.

To create new beliefs, old beliefs need to first be released. A deep cry makes room for underlying feelings to surface, feelings you couldn’t access while holding yourself together. You begin to let go of the protective reason of thinking–the defensive self-talk that distances you from feeling love or loved. Your body’s feeling sense takes over and your mind is in a position to listen. This is a role reversal from how most of us operate in the world.

Think of it like this, attention is finite.

When your attention particles are all filled to the brim with excess thinking because nothing is making sense: life is overwhelmed with worry and doubt, or pent up fears are dominating your experience, there is nothing you can do but un-fill, undo, unwind–sob your head off! Thinking turns to feeling and you have a chance to consider if what you believe is actually so?

Keep this in mind the next time you’re sobbing your head off:

  •      Direct your attention to the essence of your feelings rather than the other person or your present situation.
  •      Allow your body to fully experience the physical wail–reclaim the child in you–and let go of needing to know all the answers.
  •      Keep it real–synthesize the heart’s joy and the lung’s sadness–allow them to coexist.

The hardwiring of beliefs around love comes down to the antagonistic emotional relationship between the heart and lungs. (Like people, every organ has its own personality!) Eastern healing principles recognize sobbing as an expression of sadness that lives in your lungs and the upheaval of joy that lives in your heart. What happens when we hold these emotions in is, we compress the chest muscles–the blanket that expresses the emotional condition of our heart and lungs. For this reason I call the chest muscles your Smile of Truth.

Signs that your Smile of Truth is becoming compromised:

  •      Concave chest & shallow breathing
  •      Protruding chest & rapid breathing
  •      Insecure sense of self

The release of tension that a good cry, meditation, stretching and relaxation all offer creates an “I don’t know” internal space where the certainty of our worries, doubts and fears once lived. Free attention can feel restorative or lonely and scary. Since tension is by nature character divulging, letting it go feels like letting a bit of you go. You revert to the innocence of your inner child and feel dependent on someone else’s wisdom to fill the “I don’t know” void. But that’s the great thing about being an adult. You have the wisdom to navigate through the “I don’t know” abyss. One thing is for sure, when you feel “I don’t know,” you can bet that you are in the midst of creating positive change.

You’ll Never Look at a Pregnant Woman the Same Again

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Losing one’s center of gravity is a lost and found phenomenon.

There she is walking ahead of you, legs slightly spread causing her whole body to waddle side to side. She looks like she’s steadying herself on a sailboat but, even from behind, you know she is pregnant. You can’t help but marvel at the miracle of childbirth and the mystery of the female form, but have you ever considered her instability as Creation’s stability?

Pregnancy is an energetic phenomenon. Her mind body connection must navigate through an interruption of being, what she has come to know as, herself. A foreign state of instability overrides everything; she has no control over what is happening to her! How does this instability serve her as a mother to be? (Yikes, it’s enough to scare the rest of us off!)

When talking to my neighbor, Lorelei, mother of one and soon to be two, she said, “Being pregnant is hard, but it teaches me a lot about myself. I can give more than I realized!” She explains how being pregnant stretches her beyond what she knew of herself in every way!

But she had to lose herself to find herself.

Lorelei’s first experience of feeling lost was impressed acutely in her memory. The moment she couldn’t get out of the car on her own volition she exclaimed, “Oh My God, this is really happening!” When we looked deeper into that moment she said, “It’s a foreign state that is one sided. It affects mom not baby.”

My holistic interpretation of this lost while pregnant is:
•    Her center of gravity–the Dan Tien Energy Center–is engulfed upon.
•    The sense of self that comes from knowing her center is growing increasingly distant.
•   The abdominal muscles have split centrally to permit the fetus to grow, leaving her detached from her core strength.
Up until now, her energy and strength have been devoted to her independent desires. Now they are devoted to keeping an embryonic life incubated and emerging. Her autonomy is gradually disappearing. (This might be a good time to say, I love you mom!)

How does this instability sure up the future for nurturing a new life?

Stripped of independence, completely exposed to the world, overwhelmed with fatigue, empathy turns to sympathy toward herself. She is solely responsible for another life form, afraid of unexpected pregnancy conditions (breech, cerclage, preeclampsia), as well as the common cold. She believes that the baby isn’t fully hers to safeguard until it is born.

I liken this unstable state to jibbing, a sailing maneuver that turns the stern of the boat, so that the wind changes from one side of the sail to the other. There is a moment in the maneuver that the sail is completely disconnected from the wind, directionless, powerless; but to navigate through life changes one must jib, let go of the control, to transform values and align with new circumstances. This applies no matter what you are birthing in life!

In this personal maneuver she transforms. She cries a lot. She is no longer embarrassed to feel; she has no physical shame left! In this loss of autonomy an internal spark chases her into action. The urgency to nest has her spouting demands, and expecting others to jump. Her mind becomes insightful, sensitive to the single life force she is sharing with her baby, knowing (not guessing) what they need.

In this lost state she finds her direction. A direction that can only go forward; there is no turning back. She has jibbed successfully!

All of this to say, once the baby is born she will need to jib back into the wind to re-find her independence. And when she does she will become acutely aware of the split down her body’s center, where her baby once lived. Alone in herself again, she is forever changed. Lorelei remembers from her first pregnancy, “I felt like I was missing a body part. It took me nearly 3-years to actually be able to own my new self. It was a weird identity crisis.” She recalls that trying to go back was the wrong focus. Trying to be healthy and embody a better newfound sexy–mature, accepting, soft woman–is what completed her experience of being a human incubator. To create a stable internal environment her external standards had to weather physical and emotional instability, but as Lorelei says, “Life is more than appearances. I can’t imagine life without children.”

Entitlement isn’t to be judged in new mothers. It is founded in the fact that she is a spirited and devoted incubator for the human race. As fellow human beings we are obliged to help her! Help support the journey back to herself.