Tag Archives: spirituality

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 “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.

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.

Guided to Ho’oponopono

Posted in Healing Journey, Personal by

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.

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!

Gay Luce, friend and mentor, on her way to the other side

Posted in New Age, Personal by

I received word that my dear friend Gay Luce, whose health has been failing rapidly the last couple of years, is in transition, expected to die at any time. She’s been so important in my life, I can’t quite grasp the idea of a world without her in it.

As has been true of a number of big changes that turned out great, meeting Gay was a fluke. I’d been taking some classes with spiritual teachers Arthur and Ann Cataldo. They met and liked Gay so much they helped sponsor a workshop in Chicago. Since they lived in FL and I lived in suburban Evanston at the time, they asked me to help field phone calls about the workshop in exchange for a free ticket.

I was happy to help but the workshop was a long haul from where I lived and I wasn’t sure I’d go. Literally up until getting up that morning and driving, I was never sure I’d attend. I felt uncomfortable in the crowd of people I didn’t know and wondered if I could slip out at a break when Gay walked in the room and the light around her drew me in. She hadn’t talked much about Nine Gates Mystery School before I knew I had to sign up.

The tuition for Nine Gates, which is a residential program that takes place over 2 9-day sessions, is high and it took a lot of questioning and negotiating to finally wind up with a time-payment plan and to head off in the winter of 1990 to Westerbeke Ranch in Sonoma for the first session. See here for more info on the workshop.

Not only did the workshop completely blow me away–life changing, really–but I met fantastic people, many of whom lived out there. My life was in transition anyway and after the 1st session I started wondering about moving out there so I could immerse myself more deeply. With that in mind I drove out to Joshua Tree for session 2 and after went up to the Bay Area to look around. By the end of the trip I’d decided to move.

It took quite a while to sell my house, but in spring of 1991 I headed to San Francisco. A horrible roommate left me soon looking for new digs and it happened that Gay had just evicted the tenant in the apartment attached to her house. So, suddenly I was living at the home of my revered teacher. Initially I felt some trepidation, but it didn’t take long for Gay, her husband, David, and I to become a family. We wandered in and out of each others’ homes and our pets felt equally free to hang out anywhere.

They were already talking about selling the 2-acre place in Corte Madera; that didn’t happen until 27 years later, but every time they brought up the possibility, they also told me they were looking for something that would have space for me too and it’s hard to tell you how deeply that moved me. Eventually, due to the high cost of living and having a lot of senior relatives in Kentucky, I was the one who wound up moving away…

The property had been and continued to be the scene of many rituals and spiritual gatherings and it’s hard to describe the magical energy of this land in the hills near Mount Tamalpais. Amazing teachers came through all the time. Constant heady discussions of deep metaphysical topics and learning insights became my norm.

Perhaps the most life-impacting aspect of time with Gay was, for me, experiencing absolute love and acceptance for the first time ever. There was no potential career path or odd plan I could come up with that Gay didn’t meet with absolute enthusiasm and expressing her certainty that I would be good at it. Being more accustomed to being discouraged from following the paths that most interested me, it took a while to understand what a gift it was to be so totally supported.

For many years after I moved to Kentucky we talked often and I went out to house and cat sit while they went to sessions of Nine Gates many times but in recent years between more on my plate with “Mom care” and Gay’s increasing problems with aphasia along with their move away from the home I’d shared meant contact decreased.

This is not the first time I’ve felt terrible at the end that my contacts with someone had not been as frequent as I felt they should have been, but I’ve also realized life just works that way sometimes. In the meantime, I’m gratefully running thousands of images of our years of laughter, shared meals, amazing conversations and adventures through my mind. As far as a positive and major transformational influence on my life, I think Gay had more impact than any other. I also know we closed every conversation with “I love you” so that’s the last thing I said to her…

May her journey into the light be joyful and easy.

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…

:

The in between place

Posted in Personal, Spiritual Journey, Uncategorized by

I’ve reached the point of settling in where clearing Dad’s stuff, unpacking my stuff, moving things around, etc. has slowed down. With that slowing, in moments of sitting back, I realize I feel incredibly “in between”.

I can barely take in that I’m now living in this condo. Incredibly thankful my parents bought it 40+ years ago and that my dad kept it in the divorce so the home at least is deeply familiar. Because I never spent large amounts of time here, I don’t know my way around town well and feel as if I’ve landed in foreign territory when I leave home.

The car navigation system is a must for almost every venture out though I finally have been to a couple of places enough I can just drive to them. Other than chatting a bit with neighbors and cashiers, I’ve not met anyone, don’t have friends here… I miss my fave restaurants in Lexington and am struggling to find places here.

I’m still on zoom for regular happenings at the spiritual center I attended in Lexington and my attempt to reach out to a place here has landed no answer, adding to the feeling of being more connected there than here. Once in a while when out driving in territory I really don’t know I feel untethered, lost on another planet.

And deep within the actual physical relocation and sense of being lost in a strange land, I’m at last at the end of the long healing journey and finished with the caretaker role I’ve held for a long time with my mother. I’ve seen those endings coming for some time and realized nothing loomed to be the next phase and I still have no idea what I want to do next.

My main gratitude, as in so many things, is for the many years of meditation, yoga, emotional clearing, etc. that are allowing me to hold a calm space in the face of this uncertain in between place. When the last of the clearing, unpacking, etc. is done I’m hoping for a quiet spell to contemplate, to let the flow of normal life move me in a new direction…

The energy of stuff

Posted in Healing Journey, New Age, Personal by

In the last 4 months I’ve had an almost non-stop immersion in the practice of letting go of stuff. Some days so much stuff has been emptied that I was literally buzzing and off balance from the energy shift created.

My mom was a hoarder. Never quite got to the level of whole house piled with pathways through, mostly because of her social sensitivity, me insisting periodically on some clearing and the fact it was a big house, so she could pile a couple rooms and the basement and leave some spaces presentable-ish. Most of that, of course, didn’t belong to me, so when Mom died, going through it was a part of my job.

I was also moving to a furnished condo, so even my things needed to be culled, as well as extracted from the midst of Mom’s piles. Among the challenges Mom left, were years and years and years of bags of bills/statements, etc., many of which involved still existent accounts and I had filing cabinets with tons of out-of-date files so there was also a LOT of shredding and a lot of bags of paper recycling.

Then I got to Florida and needed to clear a ton of stuff still in condo from my Dad and his late, second wife. The amount that a combo of junk haulers, me and a guy I hired moved out in 4 days literally left me reeling with the energy shift.

I kind of got used to the oppressive amount of stuff in Mom’s house though I was sometimes aware of the weight of it. Clearing giant amounts at a time, however, really brought home how much energy all that stuff sucked from us. And every time an extraordinary amount exited in a day, whether auction place taking a ton or friends helping me do some clearing, it was startling how palpable the change in the air became.

I’ve known for years that everything has and is energy, but I hadn’t quite taken in the power of energy contained in “stuff”. The process leaves me so much more thoughtful about what’s in my space and how I want to move forward from here.