Tag Archives: New Age

I took on a 108 day practice challenge

Posted in Being Peace, Healing Journey, Personal, Spiritual Journey, Uncategorized by

Yikes???

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.

Knots on the daisy chain of beliefs?

Posted in Healing Journey, Personal, Personal Growth, Spiritual Journey, Uncategorized by

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.

Resolutions and Grind Culture

Posted in Healing Journey, New Age, Personal, Spiritual Journey, Spirituality, Uncategorized by

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.

On “being” and “doing” in “must do” U.S.

Posted in Being Peace, Collective Consciousness, Healing Journey, Personal Growth, Uncategorized by

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.

The healing journey and value

Posted in Change the World, Healing Journey, Uncategorized by

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.

The “life’s purpose” game

Posted in Being Peace, Healing Journey, New Age, Personal Growth, Uncategorized by

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.

Scar tissue from the past

Posted in Healing Journey, Personal Growth, Uncategorized by

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.

How we dread change

Posted in Being Peace, Healing Journey, Personal by

I’ve been listening a lot to a local Sarasota FM station that plays rock music from just my era and pretty much all stuff I love. At the same time a friend has recommended Radio Paradise and I’ve been trying to get myself to tune in.

Much like WXRT in Chicago, it plays rock from a number of eras but curated to be all stuff that kind of goes well together, a flow of sounds through decades. Sometimes on RP I hit a nice mix of old stuff I know and love and new things I don’t know.

One day recently I put it on and found myself in a long stretch of music I’d never heard before and I wasn’t really loving any of it. Nothing bad, just not grabbing either. Not one song I’d pick up the tablet and write down info to find it again. I longed for the FM but I was all comfy with my book and the FM station takes the old stereo setup in another room.

As I thought about how much I love almost every song on the FM station and wished the streaming app would play something I loved, it struck me that a certain measure of disliking change lived somewhere in those feelings of discomfort with the new stuff. Not anything huge, but once the thought crept in, I flowed on to a sudden distinct sense about how much of our current upheaval and conflict in the world reflects the fears of lots of people who are faced with a changing world they really hope to keep the same.

And in my moment of discomfort about my favorite old rock choices, I felt a tiny tug of greater understanding about how afraid they are. Not enough to sympathize with the hateful choices many are making, but enough to see more about how much humans generally like things to stay the same.

Fear of change is behind so much of what goes wrong in the world and how unhappy people who want their lives to be the same tomorrow as yesterday wind up ramped into constant anger. As I sat and willed myself to just let the unfamiliar music flow and enjoy having the musical background to my novel, I had no insight on how to help those “stay-the-same” folks reconcile with change.

I learned how to move into the flow by purposefully pursuing a spiritual path including practices to develop just that skill. But you can’t make other people do it, it’s definitely something that must be chosen. So no answers from my moment of insight. Just a flash of recognition about the deep discomfort many are feeling…

Books not written…

Posted in Personal, Spiritual Journey, Uncategorized by

In my last post, I said the next one would discuss my journey with ho’oponopono and anger, but I received word yesterday that my dear friend Gay‘s husband, David, died yesterday and changed the plan.

The Nine Gates memorial service for Gay is being held Monday, which would have been her 93d birthday. David had hoped to go but his health has been bad since her death; now the memorial will be for him too.

The eighth death in 3 years among my friends (and let’s not forget both my parents too) kind of slammed me. And right now I’m in a stage of melancholy and wishful thinking.

Both Gay and David were working on books for pretty much all the time I knew them. Gay, who actually wrote several well-received books in an earlier stage of her life, wanted to write one to explain the ideas behind her creation of Nine Gates Mystery School.

I write too, and while I was living in the apartment on her property, I worked as a copy editor and proofreader so we talked here and there about collaborating, with her providing the content and me helping with organization, proofing, editing, etc. And probably some cheerleading.

I really hoped with me or without me that the project would happen as her work was so brilliant, especially her concept of playing all the notes of our beingness.

David was a Druid. His family was from the Isle of Iona and David was the one son to whom his father passed the family’s generations of knowledge. David was also a scholar, so he added copious research to the practical basics. He was going to write a book about the practices, especially covering his extensive work on the oghams. (I’m going to hunt through some of my files for material; I loved working with oghams but remember very little of the specifics and David’s teaching was a little different from the few other sources).

I especially loved his deep info on the labyrinth, or Dromenon as he called it. For my session of Nine Gates in 1990 he presented a huge piece on the chakras and the labyrinth, which he apparently didn’t teach at any other session. I adored it but there was so much material I came away really only with the memory that at every turn in the labyrinth you are either turning inward or outward in one of the chakras.

When you reach the end, you’ve done a complete inner and outer journey through the chakras. His teaching was to pause at each turn to acknowledge the inward or outward movement. I never know which chakra I’m in as I move through each turn, but just the pause and acknowledgement always adds great depth. I looked forward to his book and my hope was that it would have a complete chart of how we move through the chakras.

For many reasons, neither of them ever finished writing their respective books and I’m not sure if either had enough written on some retrievable device or notebook that someone else could finish the project and publish. So two amazing teachers, with unique and illuminating understanding of spiritual life have died and so much knowledge is lost.

On another front, I really thought for many years that I would get back to California and be available to help the two of them as they got older. My mother was not only older but in way worse health than either of them, so I assumed she would pass away while they were still functioning pretty independently and I’d be available when they needed more help.

But in the way the Universe has of orchestrating from a different consciousness, my mother wound up living to be much older than anyone (including her) expected and about the time she went into a downward spiral, so did David and Gay. And I lost all 3 in the space of 15 months.

I won’t wallow in this space of “what ifs” and wishes for different outcomes, but I wanted to mark this moment and the thoughts jumbling through… Today it is what is for me.

When the mirror is great

Posted in Change the World, New Age, Personal by

I’ve worked with the concept of other people or their issues being mirrors, reflecting back something about or from within me a lot over the years. Usually it’s been a tool for ferreting out negative aspects, old issues, things to release, etc. My friendship with Gay Luce has always provided a different sort of mirror and until now, one I’ve kind of sidestepped around.

A number of teachers I worked with knew both of us and more than one mentioned how much they saw Gay and I as mirrors, always in the context of trying to get me to see how similar I am in energy and capacity to teach, etc. To me, Gay’s abilities were and always have been way beyond what I’ve achieved.

I understood their point and I knew Gay and I were so close in part because of how we saw and worked with energy but felt, at the same time, that realistically I had not raised my energy or capacity to work out of my third eye to the same level.

Through most of my spiritual journey I’ve been aware of the dance between facing into the dark side and holding space for the light. My journey began with a lot of “create your own reality” teachings. After concertedly trying to hold only positive thoughts for some years, my segue into doing the Fisher-Hoffman process led me to see the importance of looking deep within at issues and unconsciously held beliefs. And to see that insistently trying to express only positive thoughts while ignoring all darkness is a path to failure.

Many years of digging through my sub/un-conscious levels led to comprehending that it’s easy to start seeing yourself as fundamentally flawed, with always another issue to dig up, another behavior to change, etc. I’ve leaned a little that way and have to stay aware. A friend’s beautifully nuanced right listening conversation with me guided me gently in the 2000’s to see how much negativity I held onto. The Secret, at her suggestion, became a first step toward finding a better balance between deep-diving into the shadows and holding affirmative thoughts about life and direction.

A lot of years of seeing Gay much less and no longer having mutual acquaintance teachers pointing out our similar energies meant really not examining the mirror idea in relation to our friendship. News of Gay’s impending death leaves me reflecting deeply on the years when we were most entwined.

And the bulb finally went off. The clear realization that when the amazing, high vibrational space she occupied moves to the other side, the world needs people to step into holding that space. And that, as her mirror, it’s time for me to see how I reflect her energy and presence. Time to step up, drop fears of my own power and take up the mantle of unconditional love she has lived so beautifully. Because she has been the mirror of the best of me.

Playing all our notes

Posted in New Age, Spiritual Journey, Uncategorized by

Even before I received the news that Nine Gates Mystery School founder Gay Luce is in the process of dying, I’ve had Nine Gates on my mind. Thinking a lot about Gay, though, I’ve really been reflecting on her creation and the amazing ideas at the core of its structure. Although there are many layers to Nine Gates, the central theme is that we are like flutes with many notes possible but most of us only play one or two all the time. Each chakra has its own tone, its own characteristics, vibration, etc.

When you really learn to tune into each chakra and understand the uses and purposes of each, you can move at will from the energy of one to the energy of another, shifting energy to suit circumstances. As you proceed through the 2-part workshop, you spend 2 days on each of 9 energy centers. There’s a master teacher for each who teaches practices from his or her tradition or specialty that use that chakra and help you build energy there.

The teachers have changed many times over the 30+ years since I attended, but just as examples, for my sessions we had:

  • David Patton, Celtic tradition with the Dromenon, or labyrinth, as the central focus for the bubbling spring chakra in the feet
  • Gay Luce, who trained extensively with Tarthang Tulku and Claudio Naranjo, teaching practices about birth and beginnings for 1st chakra
  • a teacher from Mantak Chia’s school teaching the Taoist practices of the Inner Smile and the Microcosmic Orbit for second chakra
  • Ellen Margron, longtime facilitator of the Fisher Hoffman method teaching techniques of discovering locked in emotions and releasing them for third chakra
  • Angeles Arrien teaching practices based on her Basque background for moving from third to fourth (heart) space
  • Paul Ray, Sufi master, teaching chants and breathing practices to hold heart space
  • Gay Luce teaching Right Speech and Right Listening for the fifth chakra
  • Serge King teaching Huna practices for sixth chakra
  • Gay Luce leading death and dying practices for seventh chakra
  • Gay Luce teaching about connection to higher realms for the transpersonal chakra

There was always a large staff composed of Mystery School graduates. Behind the scenes, they helped elevate the energy of each chakra by resonating together before each class session (3x a day) into the energy of whichever chakra was being addressed and then dispersing around the room amongst the students and holding that energy space.

As a student, I was way too wowed by all of it to realize what the staff was doing aside from also mentoring all of us, being there to help if we struggled with a practice, etc. And it took a couple of times serving on staff for me to really comprehend how much it added to the power of living in each chakra to have the staff holding the energy space.

The sessions are designed with three classes a day, one filling the morning (and for those who want it there are exercises before breakfast), one the afternoon and one the evening. There are also some amazing rituals thrown in. It’s an immersion experience. For some people, the teachers are exciting, the multitudes of new practices they learn almost come too quickly to take everything in and they come away with more enthusiasm about all that than understanding about “playing the flute”.

Many of us also went on to study more with some of the teachers. I did a lot of emotional work with groups facilitated by Ellen Margron, read a lot of Serge King’s books and went to one of his workshops, attended various Sufi events, practiced Right Speech and eventually taught it, etc. Many people who were taken with some of the Buddhist practices Gay taught went on to join Spirit Rock. After Baba Harihar Ram began teaching a lot of people joined his Sonoma Ashram. You get the idea. So many ways to get a LOT out of Nine Gates.

Throughout all of it, though, there are lessons to be learned about moving among the chakras. At feet, for instance, so many useful things about grounding are part of it. If you’re in high anxiety, really worrying about something, all your energy has moved up to your head. If you put your attention into your feet and hold it, the energy will flow downward and it will help calm and ground you.

One of my fave stories was about a grad who was in NYC one day when a storm created winds so strong at rush hour that people were blown down if they tried to go outside, so thousands of people were caught in their buildings. She really wanted to get to the subway and on to an appointment. So she put her energy in her feet, imagined her feet having tentacles into the ground and walked across the plaza to the subway.

Many times when I’ve been on my way to an interview or a meeting about which I was nervous and for which I wanted to be in my power, I’ve quietly done the microcosmic orbit while riding along on the bus or up in the elevator, bringing energy into the power space of second chakra. A grad who worked as an exec for a big company would make sure he entered meeting rooms first and would move into heart energy, working to fill the room with it and hold that energy space during the meeting.

These are just some examples of the ways in which we can play much more complex music in our lives than the repetitive couple of notes we usually stay stuck in.

My spirituality centers around my belief that everything is energy, so learning how to work with energy for me is the goal. And hanging around with a teacher whose core teaching and way of living were so totally immersed in energy practice was such a gift!

From near-sighted to far–what a journey

Posted in Healing Journey, Personal by

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.

Interesting signposts

Posted in Healing Journey, Personal by

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, Anatomy of 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…

:

Unwinding update

Posted in Healing Journey, Health, Personal by

It’s been a while since I’ve given an update on the unwinding muscles in my face and head. The process has been relentless for most of the last year, without regard to how many other things claimed time and attention (like my mother’s hospital and nursing home stays, etc.). And it’s been down at the core for so long I’ve regularly thought I’d be able to start posting the “Unwound” series I’ve long been planning.

But it’s still going. And it’s been more debilitatingly constant since my mother’s death than ever. It’s become so rare to sleep for an entire night, I can’t actually tell you the last time I did. The awe-inspiring part is feeling these granite-like ropes of muscle open and how blood and prana begin to flow in places where nothing has gone through for decades. Or looking across at a bookshelf or objects on the counter and realizing I’m seeing them more clearly at the distance I’m standing than ever.

The more the energy opens up, the more I’m connecting with the “inner voice” that I’ve blocked so long. The opening is also restoring a lot of energy flow. I’ve noted before how very much energy it takes both to hold onto those tight knots and twists and for blood, oxygen, prana, etc. to fight to find pathways through your body. So the more open I become the better I feel — especially helpful since I’m not getting nearly enough sleep.

Not surprising, all this shifting in my physical body, which has always related to both personal and ancestral issues, is creating some shifts in my life. And it feels like a big one is looming. Not just the fact that I’m moving to another state, something else feels large and near.

Such mixed feelings keep flowing through about leaving this town that’s not only been home longer than any other place I’ve lived, but has such deep ancestral roots for me. For a while I got strong messages indicating it’s time to let go and it may be better to live some place where I don’t have so many nostalgic childhood associations. Then a friend who has amazing abilities to tune in psychically said I’m corded here and I just need to let go of the cord. As soon as we hung up I threw up, accompanied by a strong sensation of letting go.

One of the teachings in the Fisher-Hoffman process I went through long ago is that the final piece of letting go of Mother is literally “throwing up mother”. I also felt strongly a letting go re: mom in that moment and that the cord my friend saw included her.

In the meantime I’m down to about 3 weeks before I’m aiming to move and I’m caught in the house with a ton of Mom’s stuff still here, estate sale places telling me nothing has enough value for them to do a sale, working madly to sort, dump, shred decades of paperwork she left behind, extract the belongings I want to take with me and get them packed, figure out handling the reverse mortgage people, choosing between U-Haul and moving company… and doing it all on way too little sleep accompanied by lots of buzzy, weird feelings and nausea and headaches all due to the wild unwinding muscles.

Fun times. Not…

The upside is through all of it I feel all of this transition from the loss of my mother to the loss of my home to starting over in a new place to finally reaching the end of an unbelievably long healing journey with my muscles is leading to the massively transformed life I’ve worked, shifted, transitioned toward for 37 years.

A Week of Chanting

Posted in Meditation, Personal, Spirituality, Uncategorized by

The first week of January turned into a week of chanting and chanting for me, not entirely by design, but a delightful accumulation of events. I signed up for “Ecstatic Chant” a six-day workshop featuring Deva Premal & Miten, Jai Uttal and Krishna Das, not having noted that Deva and Miten were also doing the second annual New Year’s week daily 108 round Gayatri and not assuming Krishna Das would also do his regular Thursday satsang. But all were happening and I really worked at keeping up.

Managed to do every day of the 108 round Gayatri, which I find incredibly powerful. This time it also became more of an exercise in mindfulness than usual, which I’ll discuss more below. Also got to tune in for the satsang. The workshop I fit in around the other things (plus, you know, I have a life) as best I could — still have some to watch so very grateful they’re giving us a month to see the videos.

I’m not sure I have adequate words to describe how it felt by the end of the week to spend that many hours a day chanting and/or listening to chant. Extraordinary. Uplifting. Pulsating. All are true and yet don’t quite say how amazing it was. Really loved it!

The first day of the Gayatri there were either transmission problems or my YouTube was acting up — they often have trouble with signals in Costa Rica and YouTube has been screwing up for me a LOT — but the Gayatri was stopping and starting, stopping and starting. I was using my mala beads but I kept singing on into dead spaces and then picking up again with them when the stream re-started. Soon I was struggling to decide where I was on the beads and realizing the struggle was moving me out of connection with the mantra.

Thus the chant became a challenge for staying mindful. Only at the end did I laugh as I realized I could have just put the beads down… Meanwhile I considered the challenge well met when I wound up in the right place with the beads while keeping attention on the mantra. Afterwards I realized the starting and stopping and beads distraction had kept me from feeling thrown by the super fast guitar playing that goes on in sections of the 108 round version.

The next day the transmission was fine and when the –to-me– frantic guitar playing started my heart started pounding and my stomach tightened up as usual. Then I remember how the distractions the day before had kept me from reacting and concentrated on the lyrics to move me into the chant and out of noticing. Good reminder that I can mindfully make choices about how to react and what to notice, etc.

I thoroughly enjoyed the workshop sessions viewed so far and Krishna Das’ Thursday evening satsangs are always good. I will say as far as the workshop, not much was done kirtan style and many chants were new to me so while I loved every minute, listening was not as spiritually expansive for me as it is to chant the Gayatri with the Global Gayatri Sangha — often thousands of us at a time from around the world.

The overall experience of spending hours and hours in one week chanting was divine. In a future post I’ll talk about how my slow, tentative launch onto a path of chanting is contributing to the “sparkles” I discussed in the last post.