Healing Journey Monday: gratitude

Yard here—where it meets the park

As I took my walk this evening, I was, as always enchanted. The vistas as I wander up and down the hills are breathtaking. I especially love the plants and trees, the softness of the air, and, this time of year the way jasmine and other luscious scents of spring mix with the ever present scent of eucalyptus. I fill with gratitude every time I’m here, every time I walk around the yard or the neighborhood – even when I lived here I held a space of awed thankfulness that I got to stay in this place. So I started mulling the times when gratitude is harder. It occurred to me that I haven’t so far talked about the part of my journey that encompasses gratitude for being ill.

In keeping with my lazy vacationer status, I seem to be able only to create a list, not to elaborate. So here are some of the reasons I’m grateful for the long years of illness:

1. I don’t think I’d have stayed on this path nor gone so deeply had it not been for the illness.
2. I would have continued to be numb to my body. Instead I have an increasingly finely tuned sense of my physical being.
3. The long slow process of healing gave me a lot of understanding about limitations and pain and long-term illness and that helps me to be a more compassionate and better teacher.
4. I invented a movement process in order to heal my own muscles and now I’m helping other people find ease and freedom from pain and stiffness.
5. I learned how to fight for myself; when doctors and practitioners didn’t have answers I found my own and that has made me stronger.
6. I learned how to slow down and appreciate the small things; I don’t need excitement and fireworks to make me feel alive.
7. I learned a lot about living a healthy life – not just getting better but staying better.
8. In the course of lots of bodywork I learned how to receive caring touch and let that warmth flow through me.
9. I met a lot of great practitioners and learned to distinguish technicians from healers and to walk away from those who can’t listen or lack true compassion.
10. I learned that feeling gratitude heals.

Thank you God – and so it is.

Related articles

• Why GRATITUDE? (lindalouisereiki.wordpress.com)
• Gratitude Journal Experiment: Day 10- Gratitude Journaling Results (blissybliss.wordpress.com)

A second view of chilling in Marin

They have a lovely temple/meditation space in the back yard…

Note: Part of the lazy… I really posted this on my Sassy blog… You just get a different picture.

I’m beginning my second week in beautiful Marin. Time here always seems to fly by far too quickly. This place where I house sit is on a spectacular property that’s almost two acres, some of it wooded and adjoined to a county park on one side. Hills, greenery, flowers, the sweet scent of jasmine floating through the gentle air… What’s not to love?

My soul, besides feeding on the landscape, is being nourished by visits with loving friends and two new acquaintances I hope to see every time I return. For those of you who also read Amrita Blaine’s Heart of the Matter blog, I had a lovely lunch with her and so deeply appreciate that the blogging world has proved to be such an amazing network of great people.

My laptop is here and I’m trying to keep up with all the blogging—both reading and writing—but the friends and the walks and the lying in the grass to drink in the energy keep calling to me. I’ve already missed AlphabeThursday and Saturday Centus and my reading is sporadic. I hope you’ll forgive my lapses… my soul is busy being renewed. I know, I know, lesson to be learned: nourish soul wherever I am…

What Nourishes Your Soul?

Reblogged from Artist of the Everyday:

When you recover or discover something that nourishes your soul and brings you joy, care enough about yourself to make room for it in your life.

~Jean Shinoda Bolen~

Pondering my philosophy

A while back I wrote a post in which I discussed the many variations in spiritual paths and concluded that it’s a good idea to decide what principles you believe, especially if you’ve chosen to follow more than one path. At the time I was becoming aware that my eclectic path—from New Age to Huna to Buddhism to Hopi with a big vein of yoga and dollops of Sufi, Taoism and more—had left me confused and that the choice I advocated was one I needed to make.

More recently it came into clearer focus. I realized that in a lot of ways I’ve been just been spinning in place since I started studying Buddhism 14 years ago. Up until then I followed the New Age philosophy that “you create your own reality” and then I became interested in Huna, which, on the surface, is probably the closest tradition to New Age—at least as taught by the few teachers who write about Huna. The core belief that what you think (believe) creates reality means that if you change your thoughts you change your life. Currently this idea is discussed more as the Law of Attraction.

Teachings on this path encourage you to create and affirm visions of what you want in order to have the life you wish. Buddhism (among others) advises that you should not want anything—or that’s how it always seems to me. Desires and attachments, according to this thinking, lead to suffering and the way to end suffering is to end desire and attachment. I know lots of people think that all paths are the same, but, while I see that they all lead to the same place, I find they are often contradictory in their theories of how to get there.

I have long thought that the main thing about any path that leads to success in connecting with your divine nature is the depth of your belief in that path. Because I believe that thoughts create reality, I also think that sincere belief in any path and its precepts leads to God. But following two paths with contradictory beliefs left me without one coherent framework to follow. Hence the spinning.

When I first saw that I’d been going in circles around these conflicting ideas I started trying to resolve it. But for a long time I just alternated between creating a vision of the reality I want and then beating myself up for wanting anything. In the meantime I kept up with practices from meditation to pranayama to chi gung and let my mind contemplate the various principles in the background.

I have a mind that naturally synthesizes so I decided to let it all whirl gently without worrying about it. In recent weeks it’s finally coming together—that’s its own post. If you, like many of us, are dabbling among paths—some Eckhart Tolle here, some Thich Nhat Hanh there, a little Native American saging and weekly yoga classes for instance—you may have some log jams of thinking. It’s worth separating out the various logs to make sure you don’t have opposing concepts running in the background. If your subconscious is confused in the midst of conflicting principles then your practices may not succeed. Personally I think the hardest part is creating your own blend in a way that’s consistent.

Posted for ABC Wednesday – today it’s “P”.

Healing journey Monday: the restful effect of yoga nidra

I’m a little tired of writing about my head (so I can only imagine how tired everyone else is…) so, in vacation mode, I’m going to go in a different direction. I’ve mentioned yoga nidra in another post, but for me there is a healing connection as well as the spiritual.

When I first encountered yoga nidra and saw it billed as “sleep” yoga with the claim that 15 minutes of yoga nidra equals two hours of sleep*, I was really more intrigued with the possibility that I could improve my situation with chronic fatigue than I was with the spiritual benefits that I quickly recognized (see other post). So many years, so much exhaustion… If a 45 minute yoga tape could give me the equivalent of six more hours of sleep I figured that could only be a good thing.

I could never really decide whether I thought it replaced that much sleep, but boy I sure felt better. And after a while the daily practice left me feeling so much better than I had to quit doing it after 5 pm because then I’d be so full of energy and so wide awake that I couldn’t get to sleep.

By the time the year was up my overall energy level was much improved. I eventually shifted the yoga nidra time to practicing the Eight Key Breaths, the Five Tibetan Rites and Flying Crane Chi Gung (see previous post for discussion) and they kept that energy level up. When I come out here to California and see old friends I get comments like, “you’ve never had so much chi since I’ve known you,” and “you’re really well now, aren’t you?”  I can’t claim that it only came from yoga nidra but when I really decided to take healing into my own hands that practice had a big impact.

There are a lot of things you can do to build energy but if you have any issues of exhaustion, whether from an illness like chronic fatigue or just from not enough sleep, I highly recommend yoga nidra. There are lots of variations and many tapes don’t have the complete yoga nidra. I have a few of those but I don’t find that they’re as effective. The one I use is Swami Janakananda’s recording. There’s a 45 minute version –which I think takes you much deeper and gives your body more rest– and a 20 minute version that is a nice break if you have a short amount of time. Give yourself a little rest.

*There seem to be many variations – another says 30 minutes equals 3 hours and there are more.

Related articles

• My year with yoga nidra (bluegrassnotes.wordpress.com)
• Yoga Nidra (mindfullyhealthy.wordpress.com)
• Yogic Sleep? (elephantjournal.com)

Traveling

Saturday I crossed the country to house sit at the place where I used to live in Marin.  Still readjusting to time zone change but so grateful to be here.  It’s been gorgeous and so much warmer than the unseasonably cold weather we’ve been having in Kentucky.  Blogging has been on hiatus the last couple of days but I plan to get back to it while here – in between all the lovely lunches and dinners with dear friends….

So much of my journey is related to this place I feel myself expand just to be here.  Life is good.

Was that me in the mirror?

A few weeks ago I got an e-mail with one of those questionnaires that asks you to name friends and songs and colors and each one gets put in a numbered slot and you scroll down to a numbered list that tells you something about the place the person, song, etc. holds in your life. I get a kick out of those so I followed all the instructions, never imagining that I would have an epiphany from playing this little game.

One piece asked you to write down the names of two men you know. For some reason the two who popped into my head were old friends of mine. One, whom I’ll call X (I’m pretty sure I’ve never known an Xavier or a Xerxes so should be safely anonymous) was an old college friend (who’s of course not actually OLD, no no no!) who’s passed in and out of my life in several phases.

I was always crazy about him and thought he was very attractive but even though I felt sometimes that I SHOULD be interested in romance, I just wasn’t. And I think our friendship has always been kind of easy because the lack of chemistry goes both ways. X is one of very few people I’ve ever known who’s just naturally centered. He moves through the world with no apparent doubts about himself –particularly in the professional realm—and whatever direction he decides to apply his considerable talents to leads to success. I loved to be in his presence because he had so much about him that I wanted to be.

By the second phase of our friendship I was taking the first steps of my spiritual journey and I soon thought of X as a role model. I wanted to find that confidence, that ability to define my bliss and move forward with it. When I moved to San Francisco we lost touch but as I studied and practiced and went through the Fischer-Hoffman work, I’d remember X every now and then and realize he still held the space of role model for me.

So when I wrote down X’s name and the position it turned out to be in was “he’s a mirror for you”, I just thought it was nice at first. But it stuck with me and I kept turning it around in my head. “Well, since he’s my role model he must reflect something about the part of me that aspires to some of the same characteristics.” I guess it says a lot about how deeply buried some issues are and/or how cloudy my vision is that it took me a couple of weeks to get to “Whoa. What if I always was that? What if he was always a mirror of who I am and I just couldn’t see it?”

Now the actual following of my bliss is relatively recent and the success so far not so apparent, but coming together, so I get that it’s not an exact reflection. But I can finally see that all along I had X’s qualities lurking somewhere in me and my self doubt loomed so large that I couldn’t see around it to the real me. Work in progress on that.

Who are the mirrors around you? Can you see yourself in the people you most admire?  Can you see your friend’s success as reflecting something that’s growing in you?

This is my post for Jenny Matlock’s AlphabeThursday, which is “W” — a slim link in the title, I know, but this was what I wanted to write…

Opening to sight: the shaman, the witch and the ancestors

Around ten years ago I started going to a chiropractor who’d also spent some years studying with a Peruvian shaman so he added a whole lot of other healing modes and insights. The first time I saw him he went into an intuitive reading mode at one point and eventually said, “You have a major issue in the maternal line that goes back seven generations.” He felt that it was a big factor in my health problems.

He suggested a shamanic journey to look into it but I didn’t have the spare cash so I decided to use some of the tools I knew. In meditation I asked to be taken back to the ancestor in the maternal line who’d created the issue he saw. I had to really go deep to get there but eventually I came to a witch who was burned at the stake and that our line of women had “the sight”. And then I came to her daughter, who was so distraught by her mother’s fate that she shut down the sight not only for herself but for all who came after.

Of course I don’t have proof – and so far my research on family history hasn’t gotten that many generations back on my mother’s line, but a whole lot of things made sense. It explained some memories about my mother, my aunt and my grandmother. I realized that even though books and teachings about Wicca had come up fairly often, it was the only tradition I’d encountered that I’d also completely ignored. And though I began on a very New Age path I pretty much avoided anything about developing psychic senses or reading auras, opening the third eye, etc. I didn’t overtly feel fear or aversion, I just stayed away. When I understood the history of my line, all that side-stepping of info and training on all those subjects made sense.*

The pineal gland, in spiritual terms, is associated with the third eye, which is traditionally the “eye” that sees beyond our dimension, the psychic connection. Now that I realize that one of the biggest factors in my health issues is the sphenoid tilted into the pineal gland so that it’s malfunctioning, I see how the ancestral story has woven itself into my body. I could draw out a few more connections to health but you get the idea.

Now I realize this particular story requires a leap of faith about whether I tracked back to “the truth” but regardless of whether you can take that leap, it’s a good example of the way certain issues weave themselves into your story on many levels and affect many aspects of your life.** Do you think you might have any hidden history or memories that explain your current circumstances?

This post is for ABC Wednesday.

* The story of what I’ve done with this info will be another post one day.

** It also seemed like a natural companion to the last post.

Related articles

• Healing Journey Monday: Pineal Gland and Sphenoid Issues (bluegrassnotes.wordpress.com)
• The Pineal Gland: Pinnacle of Yoga. ~ Simon Hollington (elephantjournal.com)

Healing Journey Monday: Pineal Gland and Sphenoid Issues

A piece of the puzzle that has fallen into place relatively recently regards the relationship between my sphenoid and my pineal gland (for the scientific definition click here and for the more spiritual one click here). More than one practitioner over the years noted that my sphenoid was/is tilted and rattled off probable impacts on my muscles. Kreig Cremeans, the creator of Bodypatterning, was the first to mention that the tilt has been pressing my pineal gland into the on position, causing a constant flood of hormones followed by spells of exhaustion while the hormone supply rebuilds.

A whole lot of things suddenly made sense. One acupuncturist after another treated me incessantly for various issues with the endocrine system. I rotated among treatments and supplements for pituitary, thyroid, kidney and adrenals for nearly 20 years, but although there were increments of improvement and sometimes short term leaps, they were never restored to healthy function. Once I knew that my whole endocrine system was compromised by the tilted sphenoid I could see why nothing anyone ever did resolved the weak functioning of all those glands (there’s another issue that relates and will be another post).

Both pineal gland issues and a tilted sphenoid can cause problems with sleep. My sleep cycles over the last decade have gone increasingly off kilter and now I can see why. A lot of the fatigue issues I have currently come more from sleep deprivation than having chronic fatigue so I’m pleased to have an answer for this one (I have none of the tension, worry issues normally associated with insomnia* – except by 5:00 a.m. I’m feeling worried about not being asleep yet…).

In the case of these problems I can’t tell you I have resolution or a giant change. In recent weeks the muscles in my head are finally loose enough that Kreig’s been able to get my sphenoid to move but it isn’t holding the adjustments yet. But after years of feeling like I was swimming against the current I think we finally have found the real source of these problems. So after years of traveling along a dark tunnel toward the tiniest glimmer of light I can finally see the sun shining brightly and I’m confident that when the unwinding head saga concludes a whole lot of other problems will end.

If you have TMJ or a tight neck that’s resistant to release there’s a chance you have a tilted sphenoid. Check with a cranio-sacral or Bodypatterning practitioner.

* When I was younger I had that kind of insomnia so trust me I know the difference.

Related articles

• The unwinding head saga (bluegrassnotes.wordpress.com)
• Did you know our pineal gland used to be our third eye? (fodder4thinking.wordpress.com)

More awards — wow!

I’m blown away that these awards keep coming. I’ve just been awarded the Beautiful Blogger award by Yamyah at Into the Heart (you should check her out)  Thanks so much Yamyah.

Here is the skinny on what you need to do if you accept the Beautiful Blogger award:

• Thank the person who nominated you and provide a link back to their blog.
• Share the love by passing the award along to six other bloggers you adore.
• Keep writing, inspiring, loving and living in joy and beauty!

This is the first one I’ve seen where the rules for it vary all over the place if you research it but I’m sticking with the rules with which I was presented!

I’ve also been presented the Kreativ Blogger award by Whispers of the Heart.  Thank you — I’m really honored. This one requires that you thank the one who gave it to you and link back to that blog, share 7 things about yourself and pass the award on to 5-10 other bloggers.  I’ve already listed quite a few bloggers on other awards and I don’t have enough other bloggers to give sixteen more so I’m going to stay with five for this one and the lists are below.

As far as seven things about me, when I started making a list and went back to look at the Versatile blogger post I realized I was making the same list:

• I took music lessons for many years
• I don’t read anything serious any more – three degrees wore me out on serious
• I’m a major francophile – since I was 10; think it must have been a past life…
• Though it’s hard to make room for more than France, I fell in love with Italy some years ago
• I’m a really mean, cranky driver; I might be the only person who knows how to drive :>)
• Writing fiction was like breathing for me as a child.

My nominations for the Beautiful Blogger award (nominated=winner):

• Bagni di Lucca and Beyond-wonderful pictures and tales from Tuscany
• Fierce Buddhist
• Make Believe Boutique
• Julia’s Place
• be.love.live.
• Momentum of Joy

My nominations for the Kreativ Blogger Award:

• Jenny Matlock
• Amy Keast, Intuitive
• A Sacred Journey
• Heroes Not Zombies
• Cheryl’s Yoga Shanti