For a while I’ve been feeling like it’s time to get back on a more consistent path with some of my spiritual practices. You know, after all the deaths and the grieving and the moving and the surgeries…
So I was really pleased when I saw a local kirtan leader whom I follow has a practice group on Facebook and does 108 day challenges. She’s also a yoga teacher and a lot of folks are doing yoga but she said you can choose any practice. Regular yoga practice is one thing that has never been an issue for me since I began in 1986.
But there are lots of other practices I’ve done for long periods then wandered away from. Lately I’ve been feeling I should return to my practice of chanting Jack Kornfield’s lovingkindness chant from Path With Heart for 10 minutes plus singing a 10 minute version of the Gayatri I like. So I picked that one.
The lovingkindness chant has been an on and off staple for me for many years, the Gayatri is more recent. I made up this 20 minute practice of the two early in the first term of the orange monstrosity and it served me SO well for staying more calm and at peace. But I got into Steve Nobel’s meditations on YouTube and eventually moved into doing those instead of the chants (still doing).
Now, of course, I’m also thinking about how I dropped my 5 Tibetan Rite practice and how much I love ho’oponopono but don’t remember to do it… How I keep picking yoga nidra back up and then wandering off. Questioning if I picked the right one.
I’m about 8 months in on a giant effort to change my schedule fairly dramatically from the night owl pattern I’ve had my whole life to an earlier one. It’s shaken everything up including, it turns out, trying to fit a practice back in when the schedule in general has never completely settled down.
But I’m doing it. Often I’m doing it lying down and yawning the whole way through, but I’m doing it. And it feels as good as it always did. I wanted something to calm down some of the anger I keep feeling at current events and it’s working beautifully.
I love the calm and peace it leaves throughout my body. I can always feel heart chakra expanding and energized by the end. And yet I’m dragging my feet sometimes. It’s day 19 and today it feels like an endless time till day 108.
Which is why I’m really glad I decided to take this challenge. It isn’t always easy to commit to practice and in unsettled spells in life it’s harder to do. I hold on to knowing I feel better from the chants as support for my commitment to 108 days. Right now I have no idea whether the practice will stick after 108 days or fade away or change. The yoga nidra I’ve been loving lately is a 20 minute one so I’m wondering about alternating the two after the challenge.
I love this eclectic spiritual path I’ve wandered. I’m also aware many times the picking up and putting down of various practices is part of a flow for me. Sometimes it’s the moment for a shift to something different. In this case thoughts of going back to this practice had been popping up for a while so it feels like a flow into something I was being nudged by my inner voice to do.
I know many people pick one path and are faithful from then on to those practices only. It’s possible one day I’ll arrive at something that feels like “the one” but it’s hard to imagine. Right now I’m just pleased to revisit a practice I’ve loved.
Ellen, my Fisher Hoffman facilitator, talked a lot about how old beliefs and issues operate in complex daisy chains. Sometimes an admonition we follow unconsciously in one area of life is ignored in other areas and connects with other admonitions/behaviors in three other places, etc.
Lately I’m aware there’s a set for me with two sides toeing a fine line when it comes to deciding “am I just following the old pattern?” My maternal grandmother was born in the late Victorian era and definitely learned some of the hand-to-forehead, fainting couch type stuff. To be fair, she (and much of the family) had severe migraines, but she spent an awful lot of time lying down. My mother also tended to go “have a lie down” often, so I had plenty of role modeling about just heading off to bed.
My dad, on the other hand, was a go getter type, always busy, hard working and radiating nervous energy. My mom’s sister was also hard working (the first woman turf reporter in the world) and contemptuous of the die-away tendencies of her mother and sister.
I’ve been realizing I wound up with an odd mixture of the two. I wrote a post long ago in which I noted I wound up often feeling paralyzed amongst the many conflicting viewpoints about me held by the most influential adults (my aunt never had children so her efforts at molding someone were aimed at me). Winding up with chronic fatigue & fibromyalgia seemed unsurprising with “paralysis” as a central mode; ailments that just stop you in your tracks.
My new exploration of the push forward vs fainting couch influences has me seeing some other aspects. To the outside world through the years of zero energy, I appeared to do very little (and many people made sure I knew how lazy they thought I was). But as I struggled through the fatigue, I often pushed really hard to keep working, to keep the house clean, to keep socializing etc. Even though I did all those things far less than previously, the advice for my issues was to rest more and all the pushing, I now see, prolonged the chronic health problems.
In the last few years, juggling grieving, moving, surgeries, etc. I’m seeing I’ve been executing quite a dance around the dueling issues of pushing vs resting. Some of the time I’ve just been either in so much pain or so exhausted — often both — that pushing has been impossible. And yet the tendency to push is there. Because pushing too much and resting/avoiding too much are both patterns for me, it’s a struggle to decide which pattern I might be falling into — and to what extent has all the personal growth work moved me into a different place regarding both?
Being single and living alone gets into the mix too. If I want to eat and live in a reasonably clean house, there’s grocery shopping, cooking, dish washing, etc. And I’m fostering a cat who needs to be fed and have his box kept clean every day. Living in a condo with a small stacked washer/dryer set means more small loads to run so there’s rarely a day when I don’t need to run a load.
I listen to various married friends complain about their husbands who only do these 2 things or that 2 things and imagine how my life would change if ANYONE but me did those 2 things… or anything around the house. Even a decision to take a day of rest still involves a couple hours worth of cooking, cleaning dishes, cat care, etc.
I’m trying to handle decisions about doing versus time off with a lot of checking inward. It definitely helps and there are more and more days when I think I’m going in one direction and a check-in leads in another. But because those are deeply entwined issues for me the mindfulness required to always sense into the push vs rest question can be elusive.
Plenty of times along this journey it’s been easy to see the daisy chain of one issue/behavior leading to another but this is a new one for me to ponder a place where two opposing tendencies meet on the chain but also have their own spots.
A couple of friends have been seeing an EMDR therapist and mentioned the impact of the music, which you listen to with headphones. I have zero expertise, all I know is the music works with bilateral brain stimulation and can reset the nervous system.
People who are using it in conjunction with therapy are digging deep into old issues and the music is part of an accompanying reset of the nervous system. Since I’ve been doing deep digging off and on for years I don’t feel a strong need to see a therapist but I’m also aware nothing I’ve done has ever involved resetting the nervous system so I was interested.
I am aware, because of multitudes of deep muscle issues I’ve dealt with for years, sometimes emotional release is enough to also release patterns in muscles. But there are also times when the reptilian brain continues to hold the muscles in whatever pattern has been the norm in spite of releasing the emotions held in it and it takes something more. I’m now watching some shifting in my body which suggests the nerves can be similarly held in old patterns. And affecting the muscles.
I’ve been using the EMDR music for about a week, so I don’t have any massive change to report but it’s had a surprising impact even in so short a time. Initially I didn’t have headphones but listened anyway to get a sense of it and found it very relaxing. I also felt like I slept more deeply.
Then I got some cheap headphones & started using those. I could instantly feel how much more reaction there was throughout my body. The one I’ve embedded above for the vagus nerve actually led to a bunch of muscle releases. It takes the headphones to get the back and forth stimulation on both sides of the brain.
I knew tight muscles could squeeze off nerves and cause numbness and opening muscles could release the nerves. It hadn’t occurred to me the nerves could also be holding the muscles. This work on resetting has triggered some really interesting opening, often happening long after I’ve listened to the music.
For instance, there’s been a pattern where ankle muscles meet the lower ends of muscles in the calf/shin area for ages. It’s a hard area to catch with exercise; the ones I know that work with some of those muscles have not been helping, not even the ankle releases from the Robert Masters work. But suddenly a few days in on working with EMDR a big piece on the right ankle popped open.
I’ll report more as this moves along but I have to say I’m really impressed so far with the impacts of this music. And there’s so much available on YouTube (haven’t checked Vimeo but I’m guessing there too), it’s an easy thing to try.
For my whole life New Year’s has been a moment when one “must” make a list of resolutions for the coming year. Not a practice I’ve ever been into; I think some part of me resisted being tied to a list & another part knew life throws too many curves to make a plan for a year. In recent years, as I’ve come to understand how our corporate culture has molded a grind culture mentality, I see those resolutions as further invitations to the grind — another to-do list adding more time to the constant activity roster.
It took me a LOT of years on the spiritual path to finally, a few years ago, start seeing how affected I am by grind culture and a lot of American ideas about what counts as a life worth living. And then to see how the goals of being in the moment and following an inner flow are direct contradictions of the demands of grind culture.
If I were to make a resolution now (and probably for every year to come) there would be two interrelated ones: stay in the moment and stay tuned in to follow the flow. I’ve been really working these last few years at doing both. I’m a long way from being sufficiently mindful to hold myself in the moment or to stay always in the flow. But I have reached a point where I stop and tune in often during the day to decide which of several (or multitudes of) actions all clamoring in my head to be done is the best choice in the moment — or whether there is another choice I’m not hearing because of the mental noise.
My days often feel much more smooth and satisfying and I often get more done while draining less energy by listening to inner wisdom about the next moment instead of laying out a plan. An early change involved a daily check in I’ve been doing for years with a friend of mine. We started because of a blog post suggesting it as a daily text activity, checking in on how you’re feeling, what you intend to do & what you’re grateful for.
We changed it to an e-mail and have turned it into a much longer check-in than the quick few words intended by the post that inspired us. A few years ago as we both leaned in to trying to follow the flow more of the time we decided that calling one section “intentions” was too grind culture and put on too much pressure to feel like we must accomplish the list. We changed it to “flow wishes” and we’ve both been much happier with that much less judgmental & demanding title. We both often find the flow leads to something other than the plan being the thing that feels right to do. Life also often throws a curve into the plan and “flow wishes” makes that much more okay.
As New Year came and went this time I really thought about the resolutions requirement and I really didn’t want to make one. I did participate in a spiritual exercise that asked me to go deeply inward and name some words about a few aspects of the coming year and I did though I have some questions about whether I even want a word for the year that asks me to follow it instead of my inner guidance (it was a lovely inward journey anyway).
Staying in the moment and being always tuned in to the flow are such foreign concepts in our culture and time, I feel like an annual resolution to work on those — and maybe eventually to keep living with those — will be a long journey. So far it’s a slow process to keep my thoughts in the moment and my being tuned in to the flow and I’m okay with re-learning those culturally ingrained habits in baby steps.
One of the most enormous transformational journeys in my life involved going through the Fisher-Hoffman process in the 1990’s, then continuing for approximately 10 years to “process” every deep issue I could identify and release. At the end of the 9-month Fisher-Hoffman class* the facilitator warned us to be careful, once finished, about jumping too fast into things.
The release of a big block of old stuff for most leaves a sense of a hole that needs to be filled, she told us, and if you anxiously leap into filling the space immediately you’re most likely to re-build the familiar old stuff. I took it to heart and kept it in mind as I continued marching down the “release the old” path.
Eventually I reached a point where I felt as if I no longer had a strong sense of who I was. Here in the U.S. where “being yourself” is endlessly celebrated along with a strong moral certainty that having goals and working hard to reach them is the only way to be worthwhile, such a journey has been an interesting challenge.
It’s been 20+ years since I reached that moment and I have to tell you the ongoing journey of transformation has mostly just increased the sense of not knowing. All those old issues, auto-programmed reactions, etc defined so much about how I operated in the world that without them, I’m not sure. I pick up, look at and drop various “goals” and longings-to-be of different stages of life and find they no longer appeal. At the same time I don’t have a strong sense of “what’s next”.
A lot of health issues created a strong sense that healing had to be the primary objective and, of course, it has included more digging into the depths of consciousness as well as following a lot of alternative therapies to heal the physical aspects. Mostly I keep moving through what seems to be in front of me.
The Buddhist concept of “no self” has helped me negotiate through these years. Not that I have any illusion I’ve achieved that ultimate space of the Buddhist path, but I think stripping away a lot of old touchstones and auto-behaviors has brought me closer to that space and farther from the American ideal of deciding who you are and insisting upon sticking to every aspect of that.
To me life seems far more flexible and shifting and my goal has more to do with always tuning in to “hear” the inner sense of the right next thing to do in this moment. I watch people from many spiritual traditions, including the more “New Age” type spirituality paths, insist that having a plan, deciding on steps and “doing things” is a MUST and at this point I mostly shrug and think to myself it’s a deeply held American belief that needs to be culled out of the collective consciousness.
I’m not unaffected by the overwhelming majority view. In fact it leaves me uncomfortably questioning whether I’m doing something “wrong” by not having a plan and a destination more often than I’d like. But I always wind up tuning in, breathing deep and throwing off the “do, do, do” dictates in favor of listening and being…
I wrote a longer piece discussing this a while back but it’s on my mind again as I contemplate how this all applies to political activism. Stay tuned for that post 🙂
* If taken via the Hoffman Institute, the course is much shorter (a residential week or two?). Ellen had facilitated there for some years and evolved the process into a longer and, to me, much more in-depth one. Instead of being residential, hers was a weekly class with assignments to do in between, some gatherings to help one another on release work, etc. and spread over a period long enough to let everyone have time to delve into many issues. Unfortunately she died some years ago and as far as I’m aware no one else teaches the method as she transformed it.
My physical, emotional & spiritual healing journey stretches at this point over decades. And for much of it I was only in shape to work part time, if at all. Because of the physical aspect, it was obvious to me I really needed to address the healing because being out in the world in any normal way was impossible given the constant levels of fatigue and pain.
Having embarked on a spiritual journey almost simultaneously with discovering I had some big physical issues, it didn’t take long to connect those two, nor to realize emotional issues intertwined with both. Working on all three levels is time-consuming and takes a lot of commitment to healing on every level. If the issues are numerous and deeply imbedded, it is also a long process. I was lucky I had few commitments to stand in the way of my journey so I could devote lots of time over many years. Plenty of people heal in many ways and still do other things; I’m not saying the way I did it is in any way a must, it was just the way I had to do it.
Through the journey, on many levels I’ve understood healing is really important — and the impact of healing spreads out into the web of all life. At the same time, living in grind culture, I’ve encountered many moments when I questioned the contribution and import of healing as a basic life direction — and, surrounded by grind culture, plenty of other people made sure I knew they disapproved of a life devoted to healing rather than working hard at earning money.
I can’t tell you I’m never affected by the grind culture mentality; it’s so deeply ingrained in our culture that I struggle to free myself of it and can’t always remain immune to other people’s immersion in it. But overall I’ve long believed in the central importance of understanding ourselves as beings of energy who exist as part of an interconnected web of all living beings’ energy. As part of a web, each one of us who heals the wounds and traumas of the past contributes healing to the web.
All this healing, releasing, clearing, transforming, etc. doesn’t pay a dime. In fact, a lot of it has been expensive, especially the alternative healers who have been vital to the physical recovery piece of the journey. In the eyes of our society, the lack of monetary return means the journey is useless, without value.
The deeper I move into this journey –with the clearing away of false layers, the slow unveiling of my essential self, the growing connection to higher consciousness — the more I sense it not only has more value to me than a well-paid career but that it also adds plenty of value to society and the web of life. Not all things of value equate to sums of money.
In spite of the lack of a “normal” career or means of earning, my financial circumstances have actually grown slowly better and I attribute it to having cleared away a lot of blocks and old beliefs about money. So, an interesting side note about the value of the healing journey is it may attract abundance to you without the usual grinding claptrap.
I’m not sure what it would take for our culture to shift into a space of appreciating how key to our collective well-being it is to have increasing numbers of people keeping their physical bodies as healthy as possible, healing themselves of old traumas, beliefs, issues, and stepping forward into their essential selves. But I hope all of you who have been traveling down a path of physical, emotional and/or spiritual healing pat yourselves on the back for the great value you are adding to the world.
Over the many years I’ve travelled on a spiritual path, I’ve run into discussions of “life’s purpose” SO many times. It’s especially common among New Age/New Thought teachers, but pops up in many places. The idea is each of us came to earth to fulfill a purpose. It’s our job to figure out the purpose and make sure we accomplish it.
I’ve struggled quite a bit over the years with both the notion of that purpose and wondering what mine might be. So I was very pleased during a recent Ahava Center for Spiritual Living service when the guest speaker told us our purpose is just to be here alive. Not to work a particular job or create a particular gallery of accomplishments or to found an earth-changing association. The purpose is to be here, being ourselves (around 39 minutes into the video below if you want to skip to this piece).
Besides the personal sense of relief that brought me, it also struck me the usual discussion of “life’s purpose” as something to do with a career or accomplishments is a total outgrowth of the grind culture. The capitalist push for ordinary people to feel they must work harder and then harder and somehow prove their worth by grinding themselves beyond endurance, shows up, I believe, in a lot of spiritual talk, especially from American New Age “gurus”.
They tell you you need to “do something” to manifest a vision instead of understanding if you’ve cleared your inner-belief-obstacles, established your connection to your divine Self and created a vision in which you truly believe, that can be enough. It’s worked for me many times. There’s virtually a whole industry of books and workshops for helping you to discern your “purpose”, always with a clear assumption said purpose will involve doing things, creating things, accomplishing things… Both of these assume a need to work and do and have a list of achievements — right in step with grind culture.
I’m not sure I ever had an absolute sense of life’s purpose. If I ever did, it was in childhood and adolescence, when my dream was for a career in music. I took lessons and daydreamed and assumed it would be my path. But when it was time to apply for college and I created a list of music conservatories, my family put the kibosh on that one. I wasn’t the kind of kid to buck their dictates, so I started out as an ed major.
By the time I finished college I was looking in other directions and wound up going to law school in hopes I could work on environmental issues. It didn’t take long to figure out law wasn’t for me and during the last couple of years I practiced, I’d found my way to New Age studies, yoga, meditation, etc. I really disliked practicing law and really loved the spiritual path I’d begun so I quit practicing and entered into many years of bumbling from teaching stress management workshops to copy editing to teaching yoga and workshops on journeying to peace, etc.
Health issues had shown up in law school and I was already using various alternative medicine therapies before I quit practicing. The path to heal from chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia wound up being entirely intertwined with the spiritual path. Eventually I realized I wrote all the emotional dramas and traumas of my life on my body and the way to health had to involve not just medicine, but inner work and personal growth etc.
That path led to going through the Fisher Hoffman method as facilitated by my friend and mentor, the late Ellen Margron. We dug deeper and released more “beliefs and admonitions” than anything I’ve ever done. At the end she warned us to be careful about jumping onto a new path or direction too fast because the tendency would be to recreate a path out of the old familiar stuff instead of forging something new. We needed to spend some time “empty” and allow the shifting to lead us to the next place.
I really took in that message. And I continued to use the “Fisher Hoffman process” to dig through beliefs and conditioning from the past, constantly letting go of more and then more. I lost most interest in the musical and public interest law paths of the past but had no sense of what was next other than a very clear pull to continue going deeper on the spiritual path and, especially, to complete the process of healing my weary body.
Periodically through the years I’ve worried a bit about the life’s purpose issue. Should I be figuring it out? Was now even the time? The overall feeling always came down to the sense of being still in progress and not wanting to make the mistake against which Ellen warned, recreating old structures out of anxiety to have something rather than nothing happening. And the draw toward healing the past and moving ever onward on a deepening spiritual path was irresistible.
For the most part I’ve been content to spend a few decades on a spiritual journey in which there’s no sense of purpose other than being on the journey. In some traditions like Buddhism and Hinduism there’s a lot of support for the idea of living in the moment and just feeling into the next step and the next, so the path I pursued felt like it followed a well-established route.
Still, the idea we each have a purpose and that our great spiritual goal must be to find it kept popping up, leaving me occasionally feeling uneasy about whether I should be figuring “it” out. Some inner searching always led to the conclusion that I was still transitioning out of the past, with no clear sign of who or what I am meant to be and/or do in the future. And I often wondered why there needed to be a particular career or set of achievements.
While I’ve lived somewhere near the idea Rev. Alexander expressed in her talk, it was such a moment for me when she announced we’re part of nature and nature’s purpose is to be alive. That’s it. Just be alive and do what you need to to maintain that. Whew. Done. I don’t have to dig and grind and make sure I do enough. I AM enough. And so it is.
I’ve complained a lot in the last few years about pain in my left hip/low back area. Having just hit a breakthrough, it seems like a good moment to tell a bit about the journey.
I’ve had problems there for decades but a combo of excellent bodyworkers and routine practice of poses and exercises for the area kept it at bay. Then my mom landed in the hospital and suddenly I was spending hours on uncomfortable chairs, followed by having to support her weight much more often. My exercise routine wound up often being less than usual. Didn’t take long to find myself limping around in pain.
I exercised that round of pain away over the course of a year and instantly she was back in the hospital. When she came home I was on 24/7 caretaker duty with many more times I had to support her weight. Then she passed away at the onset of a completely new ailment and suddenly I had to move. So my hip was already killing me and I spent the next 5 months on first clearing our home and packing up my stuff then moving to a condo I inherited from my dad and both unpacking my stuff and feverishly working to get his out.
Ultimately, while moving a chair I threw the whole low back/hip area out of whack so badly I stopped all efforts to move anything in or out and have concentrated ever since on figuring out the hip. A referral to PT came attached with copays that were too high for me, so I began hunting on the internet for PT exercises. I’ll be writing a series with lots of videos and info about what I found, but for this post, I’ll just mention the biggest challenge for me was that pretty much every muscle and every muscle group in the entire low back-pelvis-hip-groin area was totally out of whack.
To work on an area with issues that complex the order in which you work is important but I had no way to know where I needed to start. So I just found tons of exercises for many specific muscles and areas and began working my way slowly around. For a long time it actually got worse, though there were days when a particular set would bring relief for a while.
Eventually I was exercising 2 different times/day and then 3 in order to make my way through more than one area and also to do some things like my exercise pedaler just to keep in general shape. From PT type exercises to isometrics and continuing on with the yoga and Robert Masters work I’ve done for years, I moved slowly through each sore piece. By this last March I’d finally narrowed in more on which areas to work on, one at a time, and unlocked enough tight stuff to feel like the small amount I could afford for massage might be enough to move it along faster.
I did some research to find someone with the kind of credentials I wanted. One fab thing about the Upledger Institute (home of craniosacral therapy studies) is that their “find a practitioner” pages include info on all the certifications the person has from Upledger. I wanted someone with at least 4 levels of craniosacral, 1 or 2 from their visceral manipulation or lymph drainage therapy and to have massage certification as well (not listed on Upledger).
I found Jennifer, with 4 levels of craniosacral, both visceral manipulation and lymph drainage, 4 kinds of massage certifications and more! She’s been amazing. I’ve had 6 appointments so far and so much has improved in such a short time. Thanks to all the opening through her work the exercises I’m doing are going deeper and helping even more.
She mentioned scar tissue several times and that the cerebellum will move bones and muscles away from pressing on scar tissue. She pretty quickly realized the top of my left femur is rotated. Finally on the 5th appointment while talking about it she mentioned that just a minor fall can create scar tissue. As she spoke she circled her hand around the central area of her lower left back — basically the pelvis/piriformis area and emphasized how scar tissue there could affect the femur.
Later that evening as I reflected on the appointment a lightbulb went on: when I was maybe 8 or 9, at a riding lesson where we’d gone outside late in a droughty summer, my horse took off and I wound up flying off, landing on exactly that area on the left side. My parents took me to the family doctor who didn’t bother to take an x-ray. There was a giant BLACK bruise over that area for the next couple of months but no treatment ever.
Suddenly, an explanation for the many decades of issues with that hip and low back area! Jennifer did a bunch of work on the next appointment to break up the scar tissue (calcium deposits) and it’s already made quite a difference.
Bringing up the memory has me thinking about a lot of the issues swirling around that incident and the messages I took in. The riding master’s first reaction was “Who told you you could get off the horse?” along with a command to get right back up. The doctor’s attitude was that it was just a bruise and to buck up. The overwhelming message I received was to pretend nothing had happened, that it didn’t hurt and that somehow maintaining a perception of stoicism and gung-ho “keeping on” was more important than any wound I’d received.
Stoicism and “keeping on” fit right in with the “grind culture” I’ve been arguing against for a while. Those notions go deep in American culture and when they have a personal drama driving them deeper, it’s a long journey of spiraling up through the many levels where it holds and moving beyond…
I’m so incredibly grateful this round of journeying with that area going out again has finally led to figuring out the key issue and how well the healing is progressing.
Every now and then the Universe hands me a series of synchronous events that point me to a new insight or direction. Recently, after a long hiatus from practicing ho’oponopono several taps on the shoulder turned me back to it.
My ho’oponopono story started with my recently-departed friend, Gay Luce. During a conversation in which I told her that I’d come to believe the biggest changes/impacts we can have on the world are those we make in ourselves to release negative issues/beliefs and also to raise our vibration regarding peace, love, compassion, etc. I was looking for a teacher or teachings to help me practice from that understanding. She asked me if I’d seen the work of Hew Len, master teacher of ho’oponopono, because she felt it would dovetail very well.
I never got a chance to study with Hew Len (and he passed away last year…), but I found some videos on YouTube on which he talked about it and found some teachings online via Joe Vitale and some of Hew Len’s students. It gave me enough to begin doing the ho’oponopono prayer and for some years I practiced it regularly, then, five or six years ago, drifted away.
Jump to this summer. Not long after Gay’s death in June, I got on a Zoom service from Camp Chesterfield (spiritual center) guest-led by Rev AdaRA Walton, whose Wednesday night meditation I’d been attending via zoom for a while. For one portion of the service, she did readings of people on the zoom, during which she called my name and gave me a strong message to re-connect with a kind of healing I’d stopped doing.
Over the years I’ve been trained in lots of types of healing and there are many I don’t do anymore, so I had to do some inward journeying to interpret her insight. The very strong message I received was to go back to ho’oponopono.
A couple of weeks later as I went through my Facebook feed, there was a big ad from Joe Vitale (whom I do not follow) offering the first level ho’oponopono practitioner training for a hugely discounted price. I instantly knew I needed to take the class and signed up.
Once I started watching videos (I’m making my way through VERY slowly), I was delighted to realize that almost all the teaching is from Hew Len. The class is a set of videos from a workshop some years ago brought by Joe Vitale, who also taught a bit, but mainly featuring Hew Len. So at last I get to “study with” him. And the timing, so soon after Gay’s death, leaves me feeling my dear friend has a hand in this.
I have no idea how the ho’oponopono practitioner status will fit into my life. Is it just to uplift my personal path and being and to help me clear issues and thereby help to clear issues all around? Or will I go on to take the other levels and start a practice? Right now it’s fine with me that I don’t know. Taking the class feels right and I’m content to let it flow wherever it’s meant to flow.
In the meantime, it IS helping me personally as I navigate through lots of angry moments as I watch the news and the hateful, misogynistic, racist, authoritarian, murderous right wing that is threatening democracy. Next post will talk about how ho’oponopono is helping with that and helping me see what in me hooks into all that.
The topic this month at the spiritual center I attend (via YouTube) is self care. This reading from last Sunday’s service is such a nice adjunct to the post I published yesterday, I couldn’t resist putting it up here.
For the last several years I’ve been dealing with increasingly painful and bothersome issues in my left hip/pelvis/low back/groin. That hip has a long history of trouble and I’d injured the psoas a few years before, with little success at healing it. So I carried on as best I could under a lot of tough circumstances, doing the yoga and Robert Masters exercises I’d used for years.
But the problem wasn’t going away and I started to look into other solutions, which led to realizing a series of issues in that area have come together and, as far as I can tell, impacted every muscle, ligament and tendon in the area. A combination of injuries, repetitive motion, and much-reduced exercise schedule created an area-wide problem.
It took quite a while to realize the many threads that brought me to this point. It happens more than people realize with muscles and western medicine is lousy at coping with muscle issues, so most people don’t know how easily one problem can become two and then five, so I thought I’d give some info on this particular journey.
I was born with my left leg twisted so muscles on that side were out of place and pulling on others from the beginning. Years later a car accident created a bit more of a twist and my left hip started going out of joint all the time. The pain from that led to sitting with more weight on the other side while squeezing the muscles on the left hip as tight as possible to numb the pain. That created one hip being quite a bit higher than the other.
There were already profoundly twisted back muscles extending into that area and the psoas was so tightly wound many practitioners commented about never having seen one so bad… They’re all in the same area so the patterns interacted. A great deal of that has been dealt with and as far as multi-patterns everywhere else, most of my body is holding the releases.
With years of yoga and concentrating a lot on hip and psoas stretches as well as the usual forward bends for back, a lot improved and I could mostly control the hip issue though it was never gone. Bodyworkers made big strides into all of it as well and when I added regular practice of the Robert Masters’ triggers of release, everything worked pretty well. Though the worst of the muscle patterns were still there, they improved enough to keep pain largely at bay.
Then I injured the psoas in a too-long hold on a yoga posture and struggled to get it to heal. Because the psoas is so central to movement, the pain meant my years-long habit of walking went by the wayside. A lot of other exercises and poses became tough to do so a lot of postures I normally rotated through went off the roster.
In the meantime, difficulty keeping my hip from going out when sitting in any chairs led to creating a set-up on the floor where my hips could be held firmly in balance. But floor sitting generally means bending the low back. It took years, but the position slowly took a number of muscles out of alignment and left the sacroiliac area locked tight.
All of that was still going on when my mom fell and broke her hip. Hours in some NOT ergonomic hospital chairs brought the hip issue back, worse than it had ever been because of interaction with the psoas and sacroiliac issues. Covid hit and the extra hours it took to take care of groceries, the caretaking for my mother, etc. left me struggling about exercise.
With less time to spend and pain dictating what I could do, my practice dwindled to mainly doing postures/triggers that directly impacted the areas of pain plus riding an exercise bike several times a week. Through that time to now, Mom wound up in and out of the hospital several times with a couple of skilled nursing stays as well and my dad died, so many more things filled my schedule and reduced time spent on yoga, etc.
The forced move after my mother’s death added more layers of issues as I heaved boxes, moved furniture, etc. Then the exercise bike was too big for my condo, so it didn’t get moved and yet another many-years-regular exercise fell away. All of these things combined to mean these first 5 months in my new locale have been riddled with pain issues.
Regular practice of the hip/psoas poses and releases meant I could keep reducing the pain but every time I try to go back to finishing the process of clearing my dad’s stuff from the condo and unpacking mine it goes out again. It’s not crazy about long grocery shopping trips, vigorous cleaning or cooking that involves a lot of standing either.
The Universe popped a video by chiropractor Dr. Rowe (see top video) for opening the sacroiliac joint into my path and it was a game changer. He has dozens of videos on YouTube and I’ve been making my way through all the ones that relate to muscles in the hip, pelvis, low back, groin region. Some of them overlap and some exercises that help several muscles in the area show up on numerous videos so it becomes easy to memorize a few and start integrating into your routine without having to watch a video every day.
As far as I can tell pretty much every muscle in there is either twisted up or weak from underuse and/or connected to one or more of the painful patterns operating in there. Plus on the “good” side, some muscles are over-strong because they’re doing most of the work for both sides. I’m particularly focused on the piriformis, iliotibial band and psoas/hip flexors on the bad side. If you spend a lot of time sitting, you should probably be doing something for those muscles too.
I’ve also been working with some of the online videos provided on the Silver Sneakers site. There’s a Restorative Yoga one up right now (they rotate) which, while unlike any other RY I’ve done, happens to concentrate a number of nice easy long holds on muscles in the area I’m addressing and it has REALLY helped.
Since I’ve been watching/doing a lot of videos for this area, naturally the internet is constantly showing me more, which is how I found this gem, with exercises quite different than the others I’m doing and very helpful. The final two for psoas are really making some inroads on the psoas issue.
A lot of people don’t realize the degree to which muscles can go off slowly and over time nor how much they interact with each other. When someone says an exercise could cause an injury, in many cases it’s not that something so dramatic will happen that you’re off to the ER the first time you do it wrong.
Generally it’s means you’re using a muscle or impacting a joint in a way that slowly over time will cause muscles to tighten or the joint to become sore. You might not know you have a problem until several years after you quit doing the exercise. And by that time the impacted muscle(s) will have pulled off some others.
As I’ve noted before, Western medicine is remarkably obtuse/uneducated in muscles, how they work, and how central they are to so much in our lives. And when a muscle is sore they’re more likely to prescribe a pain killer than point you toward something that would actually heal the muscle.
So if you are in an accident or have a fall, etc. it’s up to you to either demand a referral for massage therapy and/or chiropractic adjustments and/or physical therapy and really up to you to look into exercises YOU can do on your own to keep the muscles from freezing in the pained position caused by the accident.
In this case, a perfect storm of injuries, interconnected patterns, reduction of movement/exercise work and straining the area all came together over the course of a few years and threw the whole area out of whack. I’m aware enough of how muscles work to realize it was starting to pull nearby muscles in my leg and back out too. Fortunately the yoga and Robert Masters work I’ve done throughout prevented those areas from staying twisted.
The exercises are making inroads. The main things I’m noticing are that my posture is generally better because it’s easier to hold the low back in proper position and I’m also more able to sit in a healthier position. The worst of the painful muscles are still pretty painful though the exercises are giving me periods of relief.
I’m still working out a rotation, trying to do one or two of the new exercises every day, feeling into which I should do more often and trying to make sure my regular yoga practice, which I designed to cover a lot of basics, stays in the mix. I’ve also added several new exercises from the Restorative Yoga video and several of Dr. Rowe’s into my regular routine.
No idea how long it will take. And that’s another thing western medicine doesn’t prepare you for. Actually healing issues instead of throwing some pills at it that eliminate symptoms while doing nothing to heal, isn’t really part of their practice. And healing takes time.
Last week I had my second cataract surgery. The surgery has taken me from a lifetime of near-sightedness to being very far-sighted now. Doctors talked about the likelihood of that but failed to mention how disorienting and discombobulating that can be.
The first vision therapist I saw long ago worked a lot with the emotional connections associated with eyes. One of the things he talked about was how near-sightedness is caused by emotional trauma and tightening the muscles around the optic nerve. It’s a way, he said, of blurring the edges of a world found too harsh. Seeing more clearly close in also tends to pair with being more inward and introverted.
Far-sightedness, on the other hand, involves being more out there in the world. Many athletes are far-sighted — that ability to see sharply at a distance serves well in many sports. Because closer in sight is not so good, they also often have a tough time in school unless someone realizes they need assistance to see for reading, etc. They are usually more extroverted.
I have an interesting relationship with both sides. Both of my vision therapists commented that the shape of my eyes was far-sighted so being near-sighted was imposed on my natural state by early emotional trauma. I lived very much in tune with the characteristic introvertedness, being almost pathologically shy until I knew people well.
The dichotomy appeared again when I worked with the Enneagram in the ’90’s. Initially I– and everyone around me who knew the Enneagram — assumed I was a 5, which is on the introvert side of the Enneagram and one of the most inward, introverted numbers on the diagram. However I also always felt uncomfortable with the 7 wing and the two places 5s move on the diagram in certain circumstances as I did not relate at all to those characteristics being me..
Later, as I went through the Fisher-Hoffman process I began to look at the Enneagram again and the F-H facilitator and I realized I’m actually a 4, which is on the extrovert side of the diagram, but lived my life almost entirely in its 5 wing. The wings and the 2 places of movement all match for me. And how interesting how that fits with the far-sighted/near-sighted eyes piece. Since then I’ve periodically noted my transformational journey has been moving me ever more outward in the world. Over the years I’ve become far more outgoing and comfortable giving talks, etc.
However, my sight stayed “near” and a lifetime of preferring solitude and quiet still impacts many choices in my life. So, the almost turn-on-a-dime switch from near- to far-sightedness has left me feeling disoriented. Digging out an old pair of reading glasses from contacts days and suddenly having to put them on every time I read anything or even to watch something on my small Fire tablet, feels weird and I’m struggling to adjust.
Even though my journey has been moving me toward this place of clear vision and moving outward in the world, I’m finding my eyes moved a little faster than my emotions were prepared for. Though I realize I’m more attuned to these kinds of emotional-physical connections than most Americans are, I’m still a little surprised that this disorienting change is so little discussed by eye doctors or others who’ve had the surgery.
Fascinating to experience this unfolding. Intrigued to see how long it will take and where it all leads.
For a while now I’ve been strongly sensing that the physical healing portion of my journey is drawing to a close and an as-yet-unknown something is coming into being. Other than a few vague insights, I don’t know exactly what the new phase will be and have been pretty content to allow it to unfold. [Apologies for the odd formatting — got this as desired in Word and nothing I can do here will keep the formatting or allow me to replicate it…]
Lately I’ve been getting a lot of signposts about what’s coming, like opening Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Coming to our Senses and finding this quote from Wendell Berry:
“It may be when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey”
Kabat-Zinn, Jon, Coming to Our Senses, p. 1
Or doing a past/present/future reading of the Crystal Mandala Oracle cards and drawing “Ascended Master Yogananda” which reads, in part:
It is your time to assume your place in the world, at the table of the masters, who serve the loving hand of the Divine. You have been asking for your purpose to be more clearly unveiled and manifested in the world. You have endured lessons of patience. You have learned that spiritual progress can be made even without results being immediately obvious. You have learned trust and a willingness to surrender your personal desires into a larger plan. We know that of which you are capable, and we now invite you to step into the next level of empowered service available to your soul in service to the greater plan of divine love unfolding.
Fairchild, Alana, Crystal Mandala Oracle, p. 121
This week I added some odd pointers back to the beginning of my journey. I’ve attended a couple of “zoom” healing services via the Sarasota Center of Light and been really impressed by Rev. AdaRA Walton, who led both. I looked her up and noted she mentioned being attuned to “Amanohuna”. My early teacher, Arthur Cataldo, “received” the info on Amanohuna and how to attune people back in the mid-80’s and I received 2 levels of attunement in approximately 1989. I got in touch with her and found out that yes, she also had been a student of his.
Then I attended a zoom women’s group meeting where the leader for that day had just made a first encounter with Carolyn Myss and started a discussion based on her book, Anatomyof the Spirit. I never studied with Carolyn Myss and I’m not sure whether I ever read more than excerpts of some of her early work, but she was around in the late 80’s and I knew people who worked with her at the time, so I realized as my friend described the book that I was fairly familiar with Myss’s work even though I did not ever study it. But they represent a bunch of healing energy stuff I’ve done off and on starting back then.
I’ve also watched a couple of online Sarasota Center of Light services, which seem to always include a portion during which a medium does some readings. This again hearkens back to the late 80’s for me, when I was fairly new to the path. The channeled Seth materials were among the first spiritual books I encountered and in those days I also read things by Lazarus, Ramtha, etc. Arthur Cataldo’s now-late wife, Anne, was a channeler I consulted, and I attended quite a few events led by Chicago-area medium Ruth Berger.
The Cataldos pointed me to Gay Luce and Nine Gates Mystery School. I was very taken with the ancient traditions, having already been practicing yoga for several years. I went on to study further with these Nine Gates teachers:
Ellen Margron, who taught for 3d Chakra, a Fischer=Hoffman facilitator who’d taken the F-H “process” to greater depths and also created her own work called “Emotional Mastery”
Serge King, who taught Hawiian Huna for the 6th chakra
Paul Ray, who taught Sufi for the heart chakra
Other connections led me into vipassana and studying with a Hopi elder. As I moved through these other studies I lost interest in mediums, channeling, etc. Not that I don’t still believe in those things, just lost interest.
I’m finding it pretty intriguing that I’m suddenly face-to-face with several reminders of those early steps on the path. Not sure at this point whether this is just another moment of the Universe presenting things to release or a nudge to turn back to areas of the path that interested me long ago.
My inclination is still to avoid sitting around trying to reason out what “it” is I’m moving into. I’m excited so many strong portents are popping up. It’s helping me feel my sense of the journey moving on to a new phase is accurate and I’m prepared to let it unfold without trying to push or prod or shape it…
Having been guided for a while toward info on various healing pads, I finally purchased the one pictured above, a HealthyLine Far Infrared Heating Pad with jade and tourmaline. But I wandered through some other choices with a huge price tag range and different healing qualities and thought I’d share a bit of what I found. All seem to have claims about helping pain and circulation issues.
It began with a couple of people I know mentioning occasionally how much benefit they get from their Bemer devices. I looked up Bemer and the $4-5,000 price tag deterred me from looking farther. It’s a PEMF, or pulsed electro magnetic field, therapy.
The devices help open circulation/open the body and are being studied for multiple healing effects. Some therapists have Bemer pads in their offices and offer treatments so rather than purchasing you can just pay for an occasional treatment. Not widely available, but you can look up availability here.
Another friend recently purchased one and raved to me about the results for both her and her husband, who has multiple awful symptoms from years of battling cancer. As we talked, though, about the prohibitive price and its benefits, she commented that she credited it mainly with opening the body/energy flow up and said she thought my 36+ years of yoga plus working with Robert Masters’ Psychophysical technique probably meant it would have a less dramatic impact for me.
Then she also mentioned she’d done some research for another mutual friend and came up with the HealthyLine Platinum Mat, which is half the price and has both PEMF and infrared therapy. That’s still way out of my price range so I found it intriguing but not for me. The review article she found: https://www.well-beingsecrets.com/best-pemf-mats-reviews/
Next another friend, who’s also been my frequent bodywork/healing practitioner, brought up her PhyMat Far Infrared Amethyst Heating Pad and how much she loved it. When I mentioned the PEMF pads, she agreed that I’m probably already opened up enough not to need that and felt the somewhat more metaphysical and subtle benefits of the crystals added to these infrared pads (which the HealthyLIne PEMF above also has) would be more for me, added to the pain-relief capability, especially for my ongoing hip issues. This pad brings the price down to $330, so much more in the right ballpark for me.
I’m an inveterate researcher, though, so I started hunting for info on infrared heating pads with crystals. That led me to this review and the HealthyLine Far Infrared pad I wound up choosing. It’s the same company as the PEMF pad my friend came up with and I noted also that customer reviews raved about how great the customer service is, which is something I value. Also $100 less than the PhyMat. So I wound up with a price point much more in line with my budget.
The jade and amethyst in both pads are listed as mainly being there for their calming/relaxing benefits, so the trade to jade felt equal. Then the tourmaline adds some detox and energizing benefits and I really liked the idea of including those. Several friends have since mentioned experiencing the amethyst pads and really loving them, so sounds like that’s a great choice too.
The mat is a new arrival so I’ll wait to review other than to tell you the first thing I noticed was how much energy I felt from the crystals while the mat was still in its plastic wrapper. The recommendation is to use it initially only for short spells and on a pretty low setting. My first round felt good, definitely got into my muscles (an impact that kept unfolding for some hours after) and left my energy really buzzed. I’m looking forward to reaching the point of using it at higher temps and, at least occasionally, longer times.
Since Mom’s death, several people have asked me about my new “freedom” of schedule now that I don’t have all the caretaking duties. From my perspective I just traded one set of time-dictating “musts” for another. And it has me contemplating how we all so often set up our days by the “musts”.
Losing my mother set off an emotional roller coaster of its own and on top of losing her, because of a lot of not very smart decisions she made years ago, instead of inheriting the house in which I’ve lived for 24 years and a sizeable trust fund, materially I’ve inherited nothing from her but a giant hoarder’s mess to clean up and the need to move with great speed to pack up and move to the condo in Florida my dad’s more careful ways left me.
Some of the time I’m pretty angry and put upon. Until I remember the privilege that means I have a condo to move into and enough money to scrape by for a while.
The last months of her life, taken up with hospitals, nursing homes, diapers, wheelchair, etc. were exhausting and the second she died I had to begin the even more tiring task of clearing out her unbelievable piles of crap and trying to separate out and pack up my own stuff for the move. So no, at the moment I don’t feel free.
And Salty apparently decided to help me see it. He’s very old and frail and really upset by all that’s changing around him, from the absence of Mom to furniture and items disappearing and moving around, etc. He climbed on my lap a while ago for a snooze. I had a packing schedule in mind and the snooze was interfering.
I sat for a couple of minutes, tense and worrying about being late already at starting. He gently snoozed, his head tucked under my chin. I tuned in and noted the tenseness and chose to relax into the lovely moment with my fur baby. I’m not sure he’s going to live through all this and I’d rather drink in his sweetness while I can than be sorry later that I was too busy packing to enjoy him.
I’ve also been thinking about how nice it will be once I get to FL and at least largely unpacked. No caretaking. No clearing and sorting after I finish getting the dad/stepmom stuff I don’t want out of the condo and my stuff put in place. Ah, but then I remembered, in order to survive, I have to re-start yoga teaching, figure out doing classes on line, etc. Or get a job. How long can I float and relax, schedule-free, before I must get moving again?
Which then started me thinking about how many days when I have nothing on the schedule like an appointment or a lunch, etc. I still feel I “must” go to the grocery, do a load of laundry, make a new batch of granola or cashew creamer. How free is my schedule ever? And don’t most of us have these daily “musts”? Actual days of floating along, doing nothing are pretty hard to come by unless you have the money to pay someone else to fix your meals, including getting the provisions, or to take spa vacations.
Now I’m contemplating how little activity still leaves me feeling my day is “free” and mine. Much relies on perception and how I choose to feel about what I need to do. My mother resented pretty much all domestic tasks (she grew up in a household with a housekeeper and a cook) and I realized years ago that I internalized that dislike.
I have to actively shift my emotions just to get to neutral. Thanks to how much I love the smell of Mrs. Meyers cleaning products and love a clean floor, I’ve come to enjoy mopping and ignore the twinging back that results, which leads me to believe I can manage to shift the “ugh” feeling about other chores 🙂
I figure the whole schedule thing is mostly a question of staying in tune with how I feel about all the aspects of my day and choosing the feeling tone that leaves me also feeling free. But I’m not sure I’m gonna get there about clearing 30 years of clutter or packing for a move…
Not Just Sassy on the Inside 
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