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December arrives quietly, carrying a mystery older than religion itself—the mystery of incarnation. In the Christian tradition, Advent is a time of waiting. But beneath the familiar story of an infant in a manger lives a deeper truth that speaks directly to our wounded world today: God enters the body. God is not above us, not separate from us. But within flesh, breath, heartbeat, skin, and bone.


And yet, for so many of us, the body became the first place where separation took root. We learned—often very early—that our bodies were unsafe. The cause of our falling. Too much. Too feeling. Too alive. And little by little, we learned to reject and leave it. We learned to survive by leaving our bodies, numbing our emotions, tightening around our sensations, and living mostly in our minds.

This is where many of our relational wounds truly begin. When we are not fully inhabiting ourselves, it becomes impossible to feel whole and live fully.


The Original Separation

The deepest separation did not happen between people. It happened within us.

We separated from:

  • Our bodies

  • Our emotional truth

  • Our instinctual wisdom

  • Our natural rhythms

  • Our sacred aliveness


And when that split happened inside, it echoed outward into our relationships—with partners, with family, with community, and even with the Earth itself. We learned to love conditionally. We learned to relate from protection instead of presence. We learned to seek God outside of ourselves instead of within our own living breath.


Advent as a Time of Re-Union

Advent invites us back—not into perfection, but into presence.

It whispers: You do not have to leave your body to be holy. You do not have to abandon your feelings to be worthy. You do not have to silence your longing to belong.

God chose a body. So the body is not the problem.

God chose feeling. So emotions are not obstacles.

God chose incarnation. So aliveness itself is sacred.

To prepare for incarnation is to prepare to come home to the body. Not as an object to control. Not as a burden to manage. But as a holy vessel where life chooses to live again and again.


Healing Relationships Begins With Safety in the Body

At Love Into Wholeness™, healing relationships always begin within.


When the body does not feel safe:

  • We overgive or withdraw

  • We cling or disappear

  • We control or collapse

  • We confuse intensity with intimacy

  • We settle for survival instead of connection

But when the body begins to feel safe again:

  • The heart softens

  • Boundaries become clear

  • Desire becomes truthful

  • Love becomes grounded

  • Presence becomes possible


Advent is not only about waiting for God. It is about making the inner space safe enough for God to be felt within.


Embodiment Is a Spiritual Act

To come back into the body is not only therapeutic. It is devotional.

It is saying: “I am willing to be here.” “I am willing to feel." “I am willing to live in the place where God chose to arrive.”

Your breath becomes prayer. Your sensations become guidance. Your emotions become communion with life itself.

True relationship begins not when we fix ourselves, but when we finally arrive inside ourselves.


A Gentle Invitation for This Season

Instead of striving to be more loving, more spiritual, or more healed this December, you may simply ask:

  • Do I feel safe in my body right now?

  • What does my emotional body need today?

  • Where have I learned to leave myself in order to belong?

  • What would it feel like to let life inhabit me more fully?

Advent teaches us that what is sacred arrives when the space is ready, not when we push.


From Separation to Wholeness


Healing relationships—with yourself, with others, and with the world—does not begin with fixing behavior. It begins with restoring presence. This is the great healing of our time: Not becoming something new—but remembering that we were never meant to be divided. This is the heart of incarnation. This is the medicine of Advent. And this is the doorway back into wholeness.


A Sacred Invitation to Prepare Together


Advent is a time of preparation—not only to witness Divine incarnation in the world, but to feel and embody the Divine incarnating as you, and to begin seeing the Divine incarnated in all.


To support this sacred preparation, I am offering a model of three private one-hour sessions during this season. These sessions are devoted to:

  • Restoring safety in the body

  • Softening the separation between spirit and flesh

  • Reconnecting with your emotional and sensual aliveness

  • Learning to perceive Divine presence within yourself and all around you

These are not sessions of fixing. They are sessions of arriving, listening, softening and remembering.


If you feel this invitation in your body and heart, you are warmly invited to reach out to me directly:

Together, we will prepare the inner space where the Sacred longs to arrive.

 
 

Love has a mysterious way of inviting us deeper into ourselves. It is both the sweetest grace and the most revealing teacher.


Our ideas about love—spoken and unspoken—shape the way we give, receive, and even withhold it. And sometimes, it is through the ache of love that we discover what it truly asks of us.


One of my greatest lessons in love did not come through harmony, but through heartache—through the questions that arise when love itself seems to hurt.

An Unexpected Awakening

When I moved from New York to North Carolina, I lived for a time with my brother and his teenage children. They opened their home and hearts to me with warmth and generosity. Still, something inside me was unsettled.


There was no conflict directed at me, yet I felt uneasy—hesitant to speak, afraid to disturb the peace, shrinking quietly into myself. A familiar heaviness began to take hold: the sense of being unseen, unheard, unsure of my place.


At the same time, I could feel the tension in their home, the deep love between father and children, intertwined with the misunderstandings that often arise between generations. I watched moments of closeness dissolve into hurt, and my heart ached for them. They loved each other so much, and yet their love seemed to wound them.

At first, I thought my sadness belonged to them. But something deeper was stirring. I was moved to tears without understanding why.


A Prayer from the Heart

One afternoon, unable to hold the weight of confusion any longer, I sat in the center of my medicine wheel and prayed: “Great Spirit, how can this be? After all the healing, after all the work—why does this pain still rise within me? There is love here, real love. So why does it still hurt so much? What is love—real love?”


What came to me was not an answer in words, but a vision—an opening of the heart that would become one of the greatest teachings of my life.


What the Medicine Wheels Revealed

In that sacred stillness, two great mirrors appeared before me.


The first mirror was the Medicine Wheel of Loving—eight radiant qualities that express the essence of true love: love that honors the soul, liberates the spirit, and nourishes connection without losing self.


Then came the mirror’s reflection, the Medicine Wheel of the Shadow of Loving—eight distortions born of fear, shame, abandonment, and guilt. These show how love can become twisted when shaped by old wounds or unmet needs.


I began to work with these Wheels, letting them guide my awareness.I asked myself:

  • Which of these qualities—light or shadow—are present in the relationships I’m witnessing?

  • How do they live within me?

  • Am I showing up with presence, compassion, and self-responsibility?

  • Or am I silencing my truth, abandoning myself, or smothering my own needs in the name of love?


These questions became a doorway, a map that led me inward, to the real source of my discomfort.


The Hidden Mirror Within

Through the wisdom of the Wheels, I began to see what was hidden

 

The pain I was feeling did not belong to the present moment—it was an echo from the past.

The tension between my brother and his children had touched something ancient in me. Without realizing it, I had stepped back into the emotional landscape of my own childhood, a place where love and fear coexisted, where I learned to quiet my voice and make myself small in order to belong.


I was not only witnessing their struggle; I was reliving my own.

This is how we become entangled: when our unhealed wounds recognize themselves in another’s story. The past overlays the present, and we mistake the two as one.


The Turning Point

Once I recognized this, something profound began to shift. I understood that it was my own wounds that were calling for my care. The healing was not about changing anyone else, it was about tending to the younger parts of myself that still longed for safety, understanding, and love.


As I softened inwardly, my outer world softened too. I found the strength to speak with kindness and clarity, to listen without judgment, and to honor the place my brother and his children were each in—their love, their struggle, and their right to grow in their own way.


The energy in our home changed. Conversations opened. Tenderness replaced tension. And as my relationship with myself healed, so did the relationships around me.


Today, my brother and I share a deeper, more peaceful connection, one that extends to the next generation—his beautiful children—who now grow within a gentler, more conscious field of love.


The Living Map of Love

As I spent more time with them, the Medicine Wheels of Loving and Shadow of Loving became for me a living map, a way to understand how love can express itself in balance or become distorted when fear takes the lead.


Each direction on the wheel represents what we will call an archetype, a pattern of relationship that shows us where love flows freely and where it becomes tangled. Some of the archetypes reveal our gifts; others illuminate the wounds still asking for healing.


This living map—the two medicine wheels—has evolved into the Unlock the Mystery of Your Love Patterns Quiz. The quiz is a doorway to help you explore your own archetypes and see how the qualities of love move through your relationships.


Why This Quiz Matters

This is not a test to find what is wrong with you.It is an invitation to understand your patterns, the ways you learned to give and receive love, and how those patterns may still shape your life.


When you take the quiz, you will begin to see:

  • Which qualities of the Loving side or the Shadow side of yourself are most active within you.

  • Where your relationships feel balanced, and where they may have drifted off-center.

  • Which of your wounds may still be seeking your awareness and care.

  • How you can begin to offer yourself the healing you most need.


What You Will Gain

By taking the Unlock the Mystery of Your Love Patterns quiz, you will receive:

  • Insight into the deeper patterns influencing your relationships.

  • Confidence to create connections with yourself and others that are freer, more authentic, and kind.

  • Direction for the steps that bring you healing and balance.

  • Self-awareness that helps you see both your strengths and your tender edges with compassion.

  • Reassurance that there is nothing wrong with you, that all you will be doing is understanding the patterns within yourself and then transforming them.


Take the Quiz and Uncover Your Love Archetypes

Awareness is the first step toward transformation. The moment you begin to see a pattern, you have already begun to change it.

Let this be your invitation to a new way of loving, one that begins within and radiates outward, touching every relationship in your life.


Take the Quiz and Uncover Your Love Archetypes   https://www.loveintowholeness.com/quiz

 
 

There was a time when our ancestors lived in rhythm with the natural world. They looked to the cycles of the moon, the turning of the seasons, the migration of animals, and the flowering of plants to guide their lives. Ceremony was the language through which they honored these changes — gathering together to reflect, to release, to celebrate, and to dream.


Over generations, much of this way of living has been forgotten. We have drifted from the circle, from communal witnessing and participation, from the joy of shared celebration. Yet, the call of ancestral wisdom has never gone silent. The Earth continues to whisper to us through the wind, the rivers, and the cycles of growth and decay: Return. Remember. Live as ceremony once again.


The Wisdom of the Harvest

Autumn is a season of reckoning. It is the time when what was planted reveals itself in the harvest. Each fruit, each grain, each vine carries the story of choices made and care (or neglect) given. In our own lives, we too are harvesting. What surrounds us now — in our relationships, our work, our inner state — is the visible result of seeds we planted earlier in the year.


The harvest asks us to pause and reflect:

  • What is nourishing and sustaining in my life right now?

  • What has grown in ways that I did not expect?

  • What no longer serves me and must be released back to the Earth?


This reflection is not only about letting go, but also about gratitude. We bow to the fruits that nourish us and thank them for their gift. We release with tenderness what is not meant to be carried forward. And in the emptying, we create space to dream the seeds of the next season.


Living as Ceremony

When we align ourselves with the cycles of nature, our lives become ceremonial. Each season invites us into reflection, intention, and transformation. Autumn is the teacher of gratitude and release. It shows us that letting go is not an end, but a necessary part of renewal.


To live in this way is to embrace indigenous wisdom: to see life not as a straight line, but as a circle. A circle where planting, growing, harvesting, and resting are all sacred movements in the dance of creation.


Returning to the Ancient Ways

We are being called back to these ways — not as a return to the past, but as a renewal of what has always been within us. Ceremony offers us a path to reconnect with ourselves, with one another, and with the Earth. Through communal witnessing, reflection, and celebration, we remember our role as co-creators of life.


This autumn, may you take time to sit with your harvest. Notice what you have grown. Offer gratitude for the lessons, release what weighs you down, and begin dreaming of the seeds you will plant in the season to come.

The Earth is calling us home. The ancestors are waiting at the firelight. And in answering that call, we step once more into the circle of sacred living.


Invitation to Ceremony: Cycles of Becoming – Autumn Harvest

If these words stir something within you, I warmly invite you to join us in sacred space:


Cycles of Becoming: Sacred Circle of Self-Love & RenewalAutumn Ceremony: The Harvest of the Heart

Friday, September 19, 2025 | 5:00–8:00 PM

Sacred land near Greensboro, NC (address provided at registration)


Together, we will gather the fruits of this year’s harvest—the pleasant, the painful, and the unexpected—and honor them as teachers. Through guided practices, self-forgiveness rituals, and shared circle, you will come home to the truth that every harvest holds wisdom.


This season invites us to:

·          Bless what has nourished us

·          Make peace with what has challenged us

·          Prepare our hearts with clarity for the descent into winter

You will leave with deeper compassion, a renewed sense of wholeness, and seeds of intention for the cycle to come.


Contribution: $20Facilitated by: Elizabeth Alanis, LCSW – Psychotherapist, Shamanic Healer, and founder of Love Into Wholeness™

To reserve your place: loveintowholeness@gmail.com

 
 
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