Vol.II 2021
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resources for inner peace, health and healing
staff essential wellness digital magazine
Vol.II 2021
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4 New owners of The Edge Magazine, Kelly and Steve Wagner, now at the rein
Twin Cities Wellness aka Essential Wellness 4270 Honey Tree Pass Danbury, WI 54830 PUBLISHERS Dee & Lynn LaFroth ADVERTISING Dee LaFroth sales@esswellness.com 715.259.3047 EDITOR Lynn LaFroth lynnlafroth@icloud.com ART DIRECTION Soleil Graphics RECEIVE ESSENTIAL WELLNESS BY EMAIL Send us your email to receive twice-monthly Celebrate Wellness e-news and quarterly digital Essential Wellness info@esswellness.com
6 Tap into Transformative Power Available to You By Carl Greer, PhD, PsyD
8 Affirmations of the Light in Times of Darkness By Laura Aversano
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New owners of The Edge Magazine, Kelly & Steve Wagner, now at the rein Lifelong Twin Cities residents, Kelly and Steve Wagner have purchased The Edge Magazine and will return the publication to digital and print Summer 2021.
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The couple brings over 25 years of experience to The Edge in sales, marketing, business advising, graphic design and web design. They have worked in companies of all sizes, from start-ups to private equity firms and Fortune 100 companies. They are among 13 founding members of the Community for Higher Consciousness (communityforhighercon sciousness.com), a site designed to bring mind, body and spirit-oriented practitioners together on a central platform to share their services, products and visions. Through the years, the Wagner’s have utilized a variety of metaphysical practices, including Reiki, feng shui, guided imagery, ancestral & other lifetimes clearings and hypnotherapy to improve their lives. “The Edge,” Kelly said, “is the ideal opportunity to reach a larger pool of open-minded people who are also searching to energetically heal themselves and, in turn, humanity, on the path to higher consciousness. “The Edge Magazine has always been a gem of goodness for us. It’s a special place to find out what is happening 4 www.esswellness.com
in our community. A place for thought leaders to share insight. A place to learn and explore modalities ‘outside of the box’. A place to dive deeper into the mystical unknown, with guides and seekers alike, asking questions and searching for answers. “We are committed to the success and abundance of sharing The Edge to our ever-growing community. We are united in continuing the creation of a safe, trusted space to have dialogue, ask questions, seek guidance and explore modalities new and old with those curious to explore them.” Former publishers of The Edge, Tim Miejan and Cathy Jacobsen, announced last fall that they were retiring and hoped new owners would bring a renewed vigor to the publication. For almost 30 years, The Edge has been a trusted source at the forefront of a vibrant holistic health and metaphysical community in the Twin Cities and Upper Midwest. “This will not change,” Kelly said. “We intend to go back into print this summer. We will complement and expand the current offerings to our community with podcasts, social media, digital marketing, community memberships, engaging events and retreats. We will also expand our resources and reach by tapping into
a larger community of like-minded people. The pivot due to the pandemic has created the ability to connect with our like-minded neighbors who live down the street or thousands of miles away.” Kelly and Steve Wagner met in high school and started dating while they attended the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. They were married by a Hawaiian shaman on the island of Maui in 1999 and have two children. Steve is an intuitive designer and illustrator with more than 20 years of graphic arts, web design and multimedia experience. He loves to make life beautiful. During the 15 years he worked for a St. Paul interactive education agency, he had the rare opportunity to partner with amazing institutions, most notably the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts and multiple projects for the Smithsonian and National Air & Space Museum. Steve is the owner of The Vibekitchen Designs (www.thevibekitchen. com) and will be the “Wizard of Oz” for The Edge, bringing to life the magazine and website (and whatever else crosses his path). Visit www.linkedin.com/in/steve-wagner/ Kelly is a mystic, a curious seeker, and a master connector. Trained in different modalities, she celebrates people’s different approach to living life. She will spearhead sales and marketing, social media, and other business operations. She is excited to explore, unify and celebrate with The Edge readers while exploring the abundant gifts, abilities, and talents available to us here, there and everywhere. Visit www.linkedin.com/in/kelly-wagner-256299b/
Kelly and Steve Wagner The Edge debuted in the Upper Midwest as a free, tabloid newspaper in August 1992 to promote the holistic community and explore the evolution of consciousness. It has been a monthly publication since February 1993 and went online in 1998. The publication was sold by Gary and Insiah Beckman to Tim Miejan and Cathy Jacobsen in January 2009. Tim edited and produced the magazine and website, and Cathy served as business manager and sales and marketing manager. For more information, kelly@edgemagazine.net or visit www.edgemagazine.net
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Tap into Transformative Power Available to You By Carl Greer, PhD, PsyD
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Many people put aside their dreams and set new priorities that are out of synch with their authentic selves in order to be practical and gain approval from others. In midlife or during crises such as experiencing health problems or losses (jobs, loved ones, marriages, and so on), we often will awaken to how much we have constricted ourselves and compromised our values. Exploring themes of authenticity and transformation can make us feel frightened as we face truths about ourselves that we have tried to ignore. Yet, these themes can also lead us to breakthroughs and positive changes.
life, you might want to reflect on the compromises you have made. You can start by working with your unconscious and what it knows, making it conscious so that you can be honest with yourself about choices you have made and why. This work can be unsettling yet rewarding. Doing dreamwork, Jungian sand tray work, and taking shamanic journeys that allow you to access your unconscious and its beneficial insights and energies can bring into your awareness the answers to questions such as:
I was able to reclaim my mythopoetic self—my spiritual nature—and gain greater satisfaction as a result of doing inner work: I saw how I had repressed my desire to explore the realm of psychology and how the mind works. By tapping into transformative power available
What compromises have I made that I regret? What are my deepest desires? How could I live more authentically, in sync with those desires? What do I need to let go of? What do I need to bring in? I once undertook a shamanic journey to engage the energy of jaguar, an archetypal energy that Andean shamans recognize as a powerful ally for transformation. I and a shaman I know who was doing the work with me entered non-ordinary reality, and as everyday awareness gave way, I entered a realm beyond
to me, I became able to live more authentically. If you are thinking about making changes in your
the limitations of my senses. In my hand was a jaguar stone that the shaman had given me—a stone said to
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hold jaguar energy and carved with the face of this feline that roams the rainforest. Suddenly, the stone began to pulse and throb as if it were breathing. “It’s alive! It’s alive!” I shouted to the shaman. “Feed it! Feed it! Before it feeds on you!” he exclaimed Quickly, he pressed into my other hand my bottle filled with Florida water, used for blessings, ceremonies, and cleansings. “Feed it! Hurry!” he cried. Knowing what he meant, I took some of the liquid into my mouth and sprayed it out in a mist toward the jaguar before it could devour me. Instinctively, I knew the beast hungered for me just as I had hungered for its essence—the alchemical potential I had yearned for as far back as I could remember. I waited, transfixed. Had my offering been accepted? Then, the jaguar’s threat lifted like a fog and floated away into the night air. I felt the wet stone in my palm, sinister no more yet still alive, warm, and breathing. My heart still pounded, but I realized the danger had passed. Feed it. So simple. My soul had craved nourishment, yet I had denied it again and again in the interests of practicality. Life was hard work and responsibility, not a poem or a mystery—that’s what I’d learned from my family and the midwestern culture in which I’d been raised. Conforming to these values, I suppressed my yearnings for many years.
to feed my soul before my longing for nourishment ate away at me, making me even more restless than I had been already and perhaps even causing me to develop an illness or disease. I believe this experience also offered me the elixir of jaguar energy that fueled actual changes I made in my everyday life, changes that set me on a new, rewarding path to becoming a shamanic practitioner, integrating shamanism into my everyday life and work, and eventually, becoming an author and philanthropist. As an ally to me, the Jaguar has helped me to change the story of my life to be more satisfying—but it took quieting the activity of my conscious mind and engaging my unconscious to access this source of transformative power. What might you be able to change in your life if you were to tap into your unconscious and explore the wisdom and energies for change available to you there? You might be underestimating the transformative power available to you and the insights available in your unconscious. Carl Greer, PhD, PsyD, is a retired clinical psychologist and Jungian analyst, a businessman, and a shamanic practitioner, author, and philanthropist, funding over 60 charities and more than 600 Greer scholars. He has taught at the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago and been on staff at the Replogle Center for Counseling and Well-Being.
To learn more: www.CarlGreer.com
My experience with the shaman and the jaguar did not just offer me the insight that now was the time Vol. II 2021
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Affirmations of the Light in Times of Darkness By Laura Aversano
In this excerpt, author Laura Aversano writes about her first awareness of her gifts and how she learned to “hold space” and affirm the divine. PREFACE
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I was born in a lineage of seers and what I call spiritwalkers. Transcending time and space while interacting within the spirit world and unconscious states of humanity seemed like my birthright from the moment I came into this world. When I was little, I would play in the alcove atop my bedroom closet. I often used to think that I was dreaming while awake, since I would see and speak with people that no one else in the house seemed to notice. Alternate realities, various lifetimes and prior incarnations became my vocabulary, my blueprint for existing as a child so young. I remember telling my mom about my special friends who would visit and play with me. By the time I was six or seven, I had developed a keen interest in the afterlife and in souls 8 www.esswellness.com
who could speak and connect with us from beyond the veil. I remembered lives I’d lived before, and told my mom how I’d died in some of them, and I how I persevered in others. Names from history would cross my lips when I was still learning how to read. My curiosity about ESP was strong and I hungered to know more about crossing the veil, time travel, and how to move to and from dimensions. I became fascinated with mysticism even though I didn’t refer to it in the appropriate vernacular. I was raised Catholic and was very keen on understanding the healing abilities of Christ and the Saints. I thought my interests were the same as my friends but realized very quickly in second grade when I began speaking of such things that perhaps I should keep quiet. My mother became my guide in this world. She held space for my growing abilities, sometimes conscious and sometimes not. She later shared stories with me how she would protect me from spirits that she felt came to bring harm to one so innocently young. My mother was raised in Sicily. Her maiden name translated from Latin means ‘one star’.
She as well was born a vessel for healing through her ability to see beyond the present. As a young child, she would awaken in the middle of the night to see the Holy Mother standing at the foot of her bed. Most of the time she thought she was dreaming. Her visitations became my visitations. She remembers traversing the streets of Sicily praying, and sometimes, people would follow. There is even a story that my mother appeared to have ‘died’. She collapsed with no apparent heartbeat and was prepared in burial clothes and placed in the middle of her childhood home for visitors to come and pay their respects. Some time had passed and she woke up as people were praying over her body to the shock of onlookers and family. Stories like this run in my family. Mysterious illnesses brought on by spiritual manifestations, many of which have impacted my own physicality at various points in my life. Thus my path seemed to be destined for me as a spaceholder in my lineage. One who would continue where my ancestors left off. I have spent many years through both traditional academic settings along with mystical encounters trying to understand the dynamics of good and evil in both this world and beyond the veil. What I have come to realize is the ability for me to hold space in any realm affords me the blessing of Presence, the blessing of the Divine. Holding space has become a discipline for me and for my writing. And that is what I hope to achieve when you read my words. The ability to hold space in both the darkness and the light for us to heal individually and collectively.
Selections from “Light Calling from the Abyss” The sun never realized the light of its own being until it paused one day to see all that had blossomed in its path. There are days I want to be a solitary raindrop amidst the impending storm whose power and might lie within its intrepid stillness. Your path has been witnessed already. By those who have met God. CONTINUED PAGE 12...
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Honor the unknown.
Be at ease with what you think is lost, for all your memories are held by the holiest of friends above.
Your life needs you. Your story will always be sacred. An act of mercy can humble any darkness. Piece by piece, you gather yourself gently until your life story becomes one that you are no longer afraid to tell.
Your footprints will tell the truth of your story long after you are gone even when the words you speak in this lifetime cannot.
We may not always get the chance to write our own story, but we have the power to choose how to tell it.
If you can’t change your story, change how you see yourself in it.
There will come a time when you lose interest in telling your story from that familiar wounded place. You will lose interest in those perceptions which keep you shackled from living an authentic life. You will lose interest in repeating words which dampen your spirit and continue to hold you accountable for pain which no longer serves you. There will come a time when your spirit wants to soar with reckless abandon in the creation of a new story. The images might be the same, the words might be familiar. The wound will still be present. Your story will become more powerful than the wound because you have finally allowed it to be. The images and words will finally be given the space to find sanctity so that your story is not only birthed anew but made holy for all eternity. A story once told is never forgotten. Even when the mind forgets, the wind remembers, the stars reminisce, the moon smiles, and the heavens share your story with all creation.
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Laura Aversano is a medical and spiritual intuitive, an ancestral empath, and a spiritwalker. Descended from an ancient lineage of Sicilian adepts, seers, and witches, she has been communicating with the spirit world since childhood. She is trained in the divine mysteries of esoteric Christianity, in plant medicine and shamanism by Native Americans, and in many modes of hands-on therapy. She lives in the Bronx, New York.
Affirmations of the Light in Times of Darkness by Laura Aversano © 2021 Inner Traditions. Printed with permission from the publisher Inner Traditions International. www.InnerTraditions.com
To learn more: www.InnerTraditions.com
Live Well.