Tag Archives: Transition

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.

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.

Oy the energy… the transition… the cranky

Posted in Personal, Spirituality, Uncategorized by

 

Energetically speaking, for me there’s so much going on these days I have trouble deciding: which kind of energy, what started it, whether it’s me or some cosmic shift…  The unwinding is opening nadis and letting prana flow and grow.  Kundalini seems to be back (or maybe never went away…).  Supposedly cosmic forces are moving us along and flooding us with energy big time.

Besides being “buzzy” with gigantic amounts of energy running through me, lately I’ve been noticing a certain cranky factor.  It shows up just in certain situations and the rest of the time isn’t apparent.  It particularly shows up when I’m watching TV and some type of character I don’t like is a major part of the story.  Types whom I’ve always found mildly irritating are suddenly launching me into fury.

For instance, on NCIS LA, one of the two new characters this season I just never much liked (the other I adored though according to the cliffhanger she may not be back next season).  Most of the season I just kind of ignored her.  But in the finale she played a big part and every officious, obnoxious character trait (not to mention her whistling S’s) seemed exaggerated and especially annoying.

I spent the whole episode waving my fists and shouting, “would somebody just please shoot her (the character, not the actress) and put us all out of our misery???!!!”  “Or at least put tape over her mouth so we don’t have to listen to her?”  Now, it wouldn’t have been all that unusual for me to roll my eyes, grunt, and fast forward every time she showed up.  But shouting and shaking fists, that’s a bit unusual.  And as a basic pacifist, pretty odd for me to want somebody shot…

This total impatience for characters who offend me — and officiousness, which has been a very popular character trait the last couple of years, is something that really bugs me — accompanied by a sense of fury, is kind of new.  I’m aware of the spike in emotion every time it happens.

And then there’s #45.  I didn’t like him long before he ran for President and I’ve certainly been annoyed by plenty since his election.  But now when he shows up on my TV screen, I start gagging and crossing my fingers in the sign to ward off evil.  Again, some unpleasant muttering and eye rolling wouldn’t have been unusual in the past.  On my good days followed by saying the lovingkindness chant.  But now I feel like I’m erupting.

I’m trying to decide whether these sudden flares of temper are reflecting something in me that’s clearing.  Or, since I’m inclined to pick up on others’ energy, am I picking up on the general atmosphere of discord and working it out through my reactions to what I see on screen?  Or are some of these cosmic energies that are supposedly flooding us these days creating bigger emotional reactions than usual?  Is the constant big flow of energy creating irritation?  All of the above?

It’s been going on at least a couple of months so I know most things about alignments of stars, etc. have shifted more than once while this has been going on which has me I’m assuming it’s not about the movement of planets and such.

Since lots of you in this community are following all this stuff about this time of transition and are sensitive to energy, I’m curious whether anyone else is experiencing weird stuff like this?  Or are aware of info about the transition that would explain any of this.  Or just, you know, have any thoughts?

The time between

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

Kentucky River by Hall's 4

As my head opens up and my ancestral issues fade, I’ve been noticing how much more I’m both hearing from and paying attention to my intuition and how much I’m changing as the muscles change.  But mostly I’m still at a place of waiting… and coming to understand the importance of transitions.

With much more frequency than previously I’m being tapped on the shoulder  about a wide array of things from Vitamin D’s relation to aching backs to, lately, a lot of messages about both waiting and going with the flow as change arrives.

For instance, I just finished Elizabeth Berg’s lovely novel Tapestry of Fortunes, which I chose just because I’d not read it yet (love her), and it turned out to be another fun message on the going-with-the-flow theme.  The novel kind of glossed over the transition phase but was a lovely meander through a woman’s decision to change everything and doing it by  saying yes to each new thing that comes along.

I’ve been saying for a while I just want to let this final stage of healing unfold and see where I am and which way things are flowing.  I don’t have a plan. There are a few projects I hope to undertake, but I’m getting big internal “wait” messages.  At this stage I’m curious whether I’ll even be interested in those projects when the unwinding muscles saga concludes.

As my head becomes more and more free I feel more free and… different.  Right now it’s more a sense of becoming than anything I can name, but I’m feeling new.

I’ve been struggling for a description of what’s happening emotionally as my face relaxes into healthy patterns.  For a long time I’ve felt those grooves didn’t just come from repressed emotions but that those patterns began overlaying certain feeling tones on me regardless of how I felt aside from the muscles.

As the patterns in my head let go, I’m experiencing less and less of those sensations of anger, anxiety, irritability, etc. mingling with my general feeling of calm and serenity.  With the combo of muscle releases and ancestral issues clearing, I’m finally seeing an impact from all the years of spiritual practices playing out naturally in every day life.  I’m experiencing all these nuances in part because I HAVE slowed down and honored this transition phase.

As this unfolds, I continue haphazardly with my try/do new small stuff project, which is adding (1) to the sense of unfurling new petals and (2) to the effort to move out of the cocoon in which I’ve been wrapped during the long difficult process with my muscles. The key for me is to choose new things as the thought arises or a possibility appears instead of making a plan.

The next book I chose after the Elizabeth Berg novel was The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George. I didn’t know much about it but it turned out to be another novel about someone coming out of a rut and making big life changes.  🙂  I had to laugh when I got to this passage:

`Do you know there’s a halfway world between each ending and each new beginning?   It’s called the hurting time…  Don’t underestimate the transition … between farewell and new departure. …

Since then I have often thought about … the threshold  that you have to cross between farewell and new departure.  The Little Paris Bookshop (Crown Publishing, New York, 2015), p. 301.

I wouldn’t describe my experience as a “hurting time” so much, though I did go through a grieving period earlier in the year.  But the sense that there’s a transition phase which needs to be honored fits beautifully not only with all the “wait” messages I keep getting but also with my own sense of being in a place “between”.

While the muscles continue unwinding I’m still having trouble sleeping enough and with being tired from the constant reorganizing of my body.  The “wait” message often includes a side note about completing the healing and then resting.  Part of me feels the societal pressure to be out there doing.  But by and large the waiting feels right for the transition time.

As I become acquainted with aspects of myself whom I’ve never met, I feel not just content to allow the transition to unfold but also determined to let the new me be revealed and find out what she wants to do.  Any plan I might make now feels as if it would impose old me on new me.  I seriously don’t want to re-bind myself in the shackles that have confined most of my life.

During my journey I’ve mostly ignored these transition moments and just kept pushing.  I’ve noticed many spiritual journeys wind up being so goal-oriented in this hurry-up world that seekers frequently skip sitting still for the transition moments.

As I sit quietly in this slow transit from past me to the next me, I’m feeling how important it is to stop the headlong motion and honor the transition.  To grieve what’s being left.  To integrate new lessons.  To allow the emerging new pattern time to gestate.

So here I am.  Just waiting…  (not even thinking Godot might show up…)

 

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