Marin and More Healing…

I’m in the countdown toward another Marin house/cat sit, for which I head off on April 23.  And I just had my appointment with Hanna and her DNA clearing friend, Larry.  So a happy week!

It’s been a couple of years since I last did the house sitting gig.  All the earlier times I sat for Moti, the kitty I helped raise when I still lived there.  Moti died  a year after my last visit so I wasn’t needed so much and didn’t push to take any of the annual gigs.

Now there are two new kitties and I’m looking forward to meeting them.  Curious how it will be since I’ve not met them before — unlike Moti, who spent his first year living more in my apartment than in the main house…

In the meantime, I had the appointment Hanna suggested last time, wherein she did Body Patterning, Reiki and general energy work while her friend Larry did an array of healing techniques.  I felt glad I’ve been around alternative healing and New Age stuff for a long time (30 years!) because the array included crystal surgery, drumming, some kind of sound vibration (I didn’t catch the whole list he rattled off and my eyes were closed during the treatment), crystals and/or stones placed on me, etc.  Seemed normal to me 🙂

They both felt the last piece– the one related to the ancestor witch, bad past lives as a healer/seer/shaman, and shutting down my third eye — clear completely.  And reminded me that I will have a choice occasionally about whether to stay cleared or go back to the familiar shut down.

There hasn’t been a magical opening in which every remaining muscle knot sprang open.  But the muscles are unwinding like crazy and I no longer feel them pulling against a steely core that won’t let go.  A big place of holding was in the solar plexus — an area that has received a lot of work and attention in the past as well — and that cleared too.  Again, I feel like a core of strong holding is no longer there, but the muscles in that area are in process.

Hanna said it would probably take about a week for the process to finish, which fits with past experience.  I love the timing because it means I’ll be at the end of this process and the new beginning when I head off to Marin.  I can’t think of a better place to hang out letting this settle, while I rest, drink in the beauty, meditate and converse deeply with long time friends.

Bay area Word Press friends:  I won’t have a car but if anyone would like to have a cuppa and hang out, I’d love to meet my blogging pals in person, so if you have transportation to me in Corte Madera and would like to visit, let me know.  yogaleigh at earthlink dot net

A new perspective on purpose

In the flow… Kentucky River by Leigh

Some days ago, Nadine Marie put up a post on Aligning with Truth about purpose in which she explored new ways of thinking about it.  I’ve been thinking about purpose and how it relates to me, and whether I know what mine is, etc. for a while so this was timely and I’ve been pondering ever since.  As I pondered, some things came together for me.

The process of healing in recent years has kept me living pretty far outside the norm and a life that doesn’t look much like most people of my age expect.  So much change has been moving through I’ve let go of many thoughts I had about what my purpose may be or even what I most wanted to do.

In the U.S. (other places, your two cents about your country are welcome and encouraged) there’s a lot of pressure to have a purpose and a plan and there always seems to be an underlying assumptions that purpose must involve either some great act of charity or — more often — something to do with earning a living or having a career.

Since those things aren’t happening for me, I’ve struggled occasionally with feeling inadequate.  The pressure to have a life that suits the norm surrounds me and you might be amazed how frequently other people have made it clear that they consider me lazy or useless because they disapprove of anyone living a life that doesn’t meet their standards.

My health struggles have been going on long enough that I learned long ago to shrug off those opinions though I won’t say I don’t still have moments when their contempt or disapproval hurts my feelings.  For most of the early years of illness I struggled to keep up with the norm and juggled part-time jobs with many failed business attempts.

Finally, however, I realized that my energy vibration was so faint and weak  I could never succeed at jobs or businesses without getting healthy (need to match the vibration) … and also that I didn’t really have the stamina for even the part-time jobs or the attempts at self-employment/business.  Something like five years ago I realized my health had to become the priority.

I’d been going to alternative practitioners, practicing yoga and other healing modalities, doing emotional work, taking supplements, etc. for many years, always with small, steady amounts of progress but I finally got it that this had to be the focus.  Other than teaching some yoga (which for me is very healing) and writing a couple of books (which I can do on whatever schedule I’m up to), I’ve done nothing but work at healing, exploring my inner landscape for answers, etc.

Until recently I’ve tended to think of it as a time spent living outside the world and figured I’d get around to a new purpose and its implementation after becoming healthy again.  Recently, though, as I’ve worked with Hanna on finishing out some of the ancestral issues that have anchored my muscle issues, I’m looking at it all differently.  I’m particularly affected by realizing how much all of this ancestral healing is healing everyone in my extended family tree on some level.

Sparked by Nadine’s post, I’ve now moved to a new view of purpose.  These years of healing WERE/ARE MY PURPOSE!  Not necessarily the only one — as she notes, I think there can be more than one purpose in a lifetime — but a huge part of why I’m here on earth.  Healing myself.  Healing my ancestors.  Learning to be a voice of healing.

As I move toward the end of the healing journey, I’m still in limbo about what’s next and what I think my next purpose may be.  As I just posted on the Scribblings blog (including the above photo), I’m seeing myself as part of a flow and trying to stay out of the way and allow the current to take me to the next destination my higher self has determined.

Off the normal path, in solitude and quiet, I’ve been living a purpose that doesn’t look anything like expectations about purpose held by the mainstream in my country.  But I believe it’s a purpose that’s at least equally important to all that stuff  “out there”  considered to be the meaning of purpose.  I’m even at the point of questioning the usual idea of purpose and whether a lot of these plans made by minds instead of hearts or intuitions are really the raison d’etre for many of those who believe they’re living their purpose…

I’m even pondering many side trips people I’ve known have been led to make and wondering if purpose may often be more about what we learn and how we change from the challenges that blow up our plans than about the outer world and the careers and the normal stuff of “purpose”???  Are attributes like kindness and compassion and healing and nurturing possibly more central to “purpose” than most people think? I’m very interested to hear the thoughts of others…

Addicted to Your Story….

Very insightful thoughts about how easy it is to become invested in the story of illness. Make sure you click through to read the whole post!

Muscles: 4 Steps Forward, 2 Steps Back… Forever?

Helen yoga (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Trying to post the last couple of weeks has been an interesting process.  In this time of transition I have SO many ideas swirling through my head, so many realizations arising; much of it is interconnected.  Right now I’m struggling to sort my way through it all and my mind doesn’t seem to have its usual organizational abilities to sort through it all and create posts.  Not to mention that much of it is still in process…

I will get back to J2P Monday again, but right now the one arena where I seem to have some coherent thoughts is about muscles.

Last time, I talked about how muscles intertwine, squeeze off energy and can take a long time unwinding.  This time the exploration moves to the up and down process of healing muscles.

You see, no matter how much body work you get or how many muscle-healing exercises you’re doing, life is still going on.  You sit with your head twisted to the side watching television and that’s twisting the muscles in your neck.  You hit your head on a cupboard door and tighten a bunch of muscles in your jaw, neck and shoulders.  Your boss goes on a rampage and you tighten your whole body.  If you have really tight muscles, the tight ones are pulling the healed pieces back into tightness.

For a long time I found that at every massage appointment the first half — at least — was spent getting out the kinks that settled back in between appointments.  Increasingly I tried to make sure to do yoga and/or soak in a hot bath before an appointment so I could work some of the kinks out on my own.

When I created my movement work, it was just for me and I practiced numerous times in between appointments, often achieving more releases.  Sometimes my practitioners said I came back in even better shape than I’d been in at the end of the last appointment.

At this point I generally make appointments at a time when I can spend at least an hour-and-a-half beforehand on doing the release movements and yoga and then soaking at least 20 minutes in a hot bath.  Very little time is wasted in my appointments on retrieving lost ground and the fact that I’m looser and in balance makes it easier to achieve some deep releases.

Even with these efforts, there were times when I fell or slept in an awkward position and lost some ground.  With TMJ, even though the muscles in my face and jaw were unwinding, I clenched in the night and tightened it back up.  Sometimes I had stellar spells when the movement seemed only forward.  But most of the time the process of healing my muscles moved more like four steps forward, two steps back.  Always getting better, but an up and down process…

The healing moved much more quickly when I developed the exercise sets that so deeply trigger releases in the muscles but still it has been kind of four steps forward, one step back.  Always up and down.

When I say I’m almost done, I’m referring to the patterns of muscles currently in my head.  There are still a few other places that haven’t let go.  And I’m always aware, body work and doing my exercises is a life-time commitment because as long as I’m alive my muscles will ever be subject to sitting “funny”, bumping into things, tension, etc.

There is no such thing as DONE with muscles.  If you want muscles that are relaxed, strong and healthy, it’s a lifetime commitment to taking care of them.  Even when you’ve solved any specific issues you may have, you still have to work at keeping them healthy.