Ascentuals

12/06/2025

ANAM CARA

In the Celtic tradition, there is a beautiful understanding of love and friendship. One of the fascinating ideas here is the idea of soul-love; the old Gaelic term for this is anam cara. Anam is the Gaelic word for soul and cara is the word for friend. So anam cara in the Celtic world was the "soul friend."

In everyone's life, there is a great need for an anam cara, a soul friend. In this love, you are understood as you are without mask or pretension. The superficial and functional lies and half-truths of social acquaintance fall away, you can be as you really are. Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious. Where you are understood, you are at home.

The anam cara experience opens a friendship that is not wounded or limited by separation or distance. Such friendship can remain alive even when the friends live far away from each other. Because they have broken through the barriers of persona and egoism to the soul level, the unity of their souls is not easily severed. When the soul is awakened, physical space is transfigured. Even across the distance, two friends can stay attuned to each other and continue to sense the flow of each other's lives. With your anam cara you awaken the eternal.

JOHN O'DONOHUE

Excerpt from his book, Anam Cara,
25th Anniversary Edition, with commentary from John's close circle of friends.
Ordering Info: https://johnodonohue.com/anam-cara

Fanore Beach, County Clare, Ireland
Photo: © Ann Cahill

12/05/2025

“It’s way past time that this beautiful flower is called by its Nahuatl name: Cuetlaxochitl. Just as many of us are reclaiming our ancestral Native connections, names, and customs perhaps our plant relatives too long to hear us call them by their true name," says Maestra Grace Sesma

A few years ago, the people of Taxco, Guerrero, Mexico proclaimed December 7th as the day to honor the beautiful flower that today many people associate with Christmas and is known in the United States as poinsettia.

Along with tamales, buñuelos, and champurrado for many of us bringing the beauty of the elegant Flor de Noche Buena into our home signals the beginning of the holiday season. What many people don’t know is its origins and meaning.

The red flame-like cuetlaxochitl (Nahuatl) blooms during the winter solstice and signals the start of a new cycle of life. Its name translates into "mortal flower that perishes and withers like all that is pure."

Dr. Joel Roberts Poinsett (first U.S. ambassador to Mexico, 1825-1829) saw the cuetlaxochitl for the first time when he paid a visit to a church in Taxco and noticed that the Franciscan monks had decorated the nativity scene with beautiful and exotic red flowers. Dr. Poinsett later brought the cueitlaxochitl to the United States and raised it in his greenhouses in Charleston, South Carolina. It was (re) named poinsettia in his honor in 1836, in the U.S. Since then it started being known as the Flower of Christmas Eve, La Flor de Noche Buena. But, it has a much earlier history.

The cuetlaxochitl was honored as a divine gift in acknowledgement that it had been given to humanity to help re-birth the light on Mother Earth. Temples were adorned with this elegant and dignified plant as its flowering coincided with the date of the birth of Huitzilopochtli, Left-Handed Hummingbird, representative of the sacred power related to the sun, whose red leaves symbolized the sacred energy of the life force of blood. It also represented the blood of warriors killed in battle and heralded the return of those warriors to this world as hummingbirds, returning to release the honey from the flowers (honey being associated with light). Flowers being among one of the important spiritual symbols for the Soul.

According to oral tradition there is an even earlier story. It is said that the flower was initially white in color but that after the killing of the people of Taxco by the Mexika, the leaves of the cuetlaxochitl, at their next blooming, turned red.

Traditional knowledge has many medicinal uses for the cuextlaxochitl: as a tea it increases the amount of breast milk of nursing mothers; combined with other plants it is an important and well-guarded woman's medicine, the milky sap of the plant is used to prepare poultices to treat skin diseases, and a red dye made from the leaves is used to color textiles and crafts. (It is important to note that as with many medicinal plants if it is not used correctly it can be poisonous to humans as well as toxic to some animals.)

In the seventeenth century, botanist Juan Balme described the beautiful Cuetlaxochtil: "The flower is tiny, like the bougainvillea, but is surrounded by bracts that appear to shield or shields to protect it, with big green leaves turning red are to those of blood, of which the Indians obtained by grinding, cooking and filtration, especially heated dye, which stained purple amaranth and cotton fibers. The aqueous juice of the plant, like milk, drew healing substances in preparations for fever cleverly designed.”

May it bring light, healing, and peace to your heart and to your home this holiday season.

Grace Alvarez Sesma
Curanderismo, the Healing Art of Mexico

Artist: Cuetlaxochitl by Jose Gonzalez, https://www.facebook.com/josebilingue?hc_location=ufi

Learn more about the history of the Cuetlaxochitl:
https://www.curanderismo.org/post/cuetlaxochitl-poinsettia-a-gift-of-rebirth-and-light-from-mexico?fbclid=IwAR1bgrQ3uPXFht_76zGIcbKpXyGcVaEf7y_TUxV_b_q3BrBPwJlwCh0DHow

Other stories:
https://threesonorans.com/2012/12/23/poinsettia-la-cuetlaxochitl/
http://www.aaaim.com/echo/v2n4/WhatsThePoinsettia.htm
http://www.taxcolandia.com/leyendas_de_taxco/flor_cuetlaxochitl.php

́chitloaxochitl

04/11/2022

As COVID once again makes the rounds, I will again start a mandated masking in the office during treatments.

As most of my clients are aware, we are being flexible with masking when the risk goes down, and also responsive by masking again when the risk increases.

COVID is again on the increase in Philadelphia, Bucks, and Montgomery Counties.

Be safe, be smart, and may you all be healthy.

02/22/2021

Even Bernie is waiting for his massage to be rescheduled!

Thank you ALL for your patience and wonderful support during this challenging time. For all of my distance healing people, I'll be available this Thur and Fri. I'm permitted to return to massage work this weekend, so I will be in touch with everyone to get you in the book!

Looking forward to seeing everyone very soon.

Blessings, and much love,
Alyce 🙏💖💆‍♀️

02/08/2021

♡

12/21/2020

It's easy to predict the end. It's easy to give up, and walk away from taking personal responsibility for all our actions in the world. What's not easy is the living. The continued, required, on-going messy loving, watching loved ones struggle, and still feeling such radiating love within your heart that you do your best to reach out a hand to help, and arms to enfold the suffering. Being able to walk in this world, completely present, *not* knowing an outcome with hope and love in your heart is the true task. One day at a time, one step, one commitment to Being. Blessings of the Solstice to all my friends, family, brothers and sisters on the path. May the returning light bring warmth to your hearth, love to your heart, and grace to your life. 💝

10/30/2020

The Cailleach knows the Truth of this world;
All things must die.
And what she cannot teach through love,
will be learned through fear.

There is no difference save what we create. ~Invoking the Cailleach, A.M. Walker

10/10/2020

If we lack the courage to carry a torch into the heart of our own fear, to face the illumination of our deepest fears, we have no business calling ourselves 'lightkeepers.' We are being called to open to all that we are, and birth ourselves through the womb of our own darkness. -- Reconnection teaching, Sanctuary of the Divine Feminine, 10.10.12

09/26/2020

Some wisdom (re)shared from this day in 2012.

"If you have a form of spiritual or religious belief, practice or way of walking in the world that cannot be questioned or challenged, then it hasn't passed the test of humanity. Embracing the immortal spirit while leaving the mortal to languish, unacknowledged except for eating and sh****ng isn't really being fully present. If we move away from community, relationship and connection with the vibrant, living world around us because it is too overwhelming to deal with our humanity and all the messy, beautiful, loving, horrible and gut-wrenching emotional states that come from being vibrantly and fully connected through the mortal coil, then we are hiding from ourselves. And that is not being alive, that's just going through the motions."
AMW

09/18/2020

If we allow ourselves to be aware of the truth within our cellular structure, it will teach us things that we cannot learn in any other way. The spirit aspect of us is no more or less powerfully present than the density of what we determine to be physically 'solid', and is interwoven on all levels of our being. This may include things about our animal nature we don't wish to acknowledge, and speaks not only of ourselves, but all that surrounds us. Knowing, in this way provides divine support from within, and requires no need for outer protection or a masking of self. Our body and blood hold the keys to unlock ourselves and heal our ancestry back to the first; back to source. Freedom begins within. ~AMW 9/18/12

09/01/2020

An excellent article on why many of us are exhausted, and how we can better cope.
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"While the phrase “adjusting to the new normal” has been repeated endlessly since March, it’s easier said than done. How do you adjust to an ever-changing situation where the “new normal” is indefinite uncertainty?

“This is an unprecedented disaster for most of us that is profound in its impact on our daily lives,” says Masten. But it’s different from a hurricane or tornado where you can look outside and see the damage. The destruction is, for most people, invisible and ongoing. So many systems aren’t working as they normally do right now, which means radical shifts in work, school, and home life that almost none of us have experience with. Even those who have worked in disaster recovery or served in the military are facing a different kind of uncertainty right now.

“I think we maybe underestimate how severe the adversity is and that people may be experiencing a normal reaction to a pretty severe and ongoing, unfolding, cascading disaster,” Masten says. “It’s important to recognize that it’s normal in a situation of great uncertainty and chronic stress to get exhausted and to feel ups and downs, to feel like you’re depleted or experience periods of burnout.”

Research on disaster and trauma focuses primarily on what’s helpful for people during the recovery period, but we’re not close to recovery yet. People can use their surge capacity for acute periods, but when dire circumstances drag on, Masten says, “you have to adopt a different style of coping.”

Here’s how to pull yourself out of despair and live your life