Part of one of this week’s assignments in the Harmony and Co-Humanity class I’m taking was to watch this video. Meghan grew up in a right wing church that basically operated as a hate group, and did a complete 180 turn.
Her story is moving and her advice on bridging divides with considered dialogue are worth watching. Only 15 minutes:
Twilight, Ashland walled garden
I’ve not meant to be so sporadic about posting. Lots of yanking around the eyes and sleepless nights contribute to lack of brain power for writing. But I’m also realizing I’ve been in a time of gestation about writing and what I am or am not meant to do with it.
It’s part of an ongoing inner shift and debate I’ve been exploring for some years (including in previous posts). When I first started on this spiritual journey I was sure writing novels was my path. A great deal of my early work centered on removing blocks, rediscovering childhood creativity and generally trying to awaken my inner writer.
One novel and several novel attempts later I began to question whether fiction is even my genre. And when my guidance nudged me to blog, I wondered if this was my path. Eventually I came to treasure the community of friends I’ve made through blogging but to question whether my writing here serves any purpose as a life path.
And of course there’s the general questioning as I’ve released and transformed and shifted my way from neurotic, negative Nancy (my real first name) to level and lighter Leigh (my more-beloved middle name). I’ve let go of so much in the last 25 or so years, I’m sometimes not sure who I am and less sure of what I’m here to do.
Eventually, as the regular crowd here knows, I decided a big piece of my purpose is this long, convoluted journey of healing on every level. The yanking lately is showing me clearly the muscles in my face have just about finished unwinding (as always with the caveat these last pieces are the very tightest so slow going…) and a new chapter is dawning.
I’m still very unclear as to what the new chapter is or looks like but lately more and more signs and portents have been pointing a way. Next post I’ll explore this more, but let’s just say I’m sensing strongly that coming back to blogging about peace is the next direction. Or I’m heading back to an old direction? 🙂
A couple of friends recently commented on my ability to tune into patterns opening in my body. It’s always nice to hear, but initially I didn’t give it much thought. Last night, however, I was reflecting on this long healing process in light of their thoughts and noticed how I’ve mostly considered it and written about it as torture. Now, I often look for the up side and I’ve written posts indicating some positive thoughts, but over all I must admit the general misery and discomfort of unwinding muscles and sleepless nights for the most part fill my focus.
Suddenly I could see more blessing in it. Not only that the process has forced me to pay more attention to my body than I ever would have given it. Not only that I have been able to mark progress on many fronts even while many people don’t quite believe healing in this form is happening. But also a blessing because I seem to be on a very unusual path in this whole unwinding/healing muscle thing and I’m seeing that I’m in the privileged position of being a path finder.
When I first began complaining of fatigue and issues with my muscles, western medicine was swearing up one side and down the other that neither chronic fatigue nor fibromyalgia existed so their diagnosis was that I should see a shrink. Period. Alternative practitioners began providing answers and naming the two major issues they found [fyi: when western medicine acknowledged fibromyalgia they also defined it so my symptoms didn’t seem to fit although alternative therapists have often felt my muscles and said I have it…].
According to my first serious therapeutic massage specialist every muscle in my body was wound up like a steel cord, all the muscles in every muscle group were glued together and the groups were also glued to my bones. Eventually, after many of the larger and surface muscles were in much better shape and most unstuck from the bones, another practitioner saw and helped me realize the underlying intertwining and complex patterns remaining in the smaller and connective muscles.
I’ve been at it for three decades. Some practitioners have been dismissive of what has gone before because they felt it should have all been resolved quickly – and then they failed to resolve it. I had to accept a long time ago that my muscles were in trouble at a level that was way beyond most practitioners and too complicated to resolve speedily.
It has taken many types of body work, inventing my own exercise program (combining the Psychophysical Method with yoga), emotional release work, past life work, ancestral healing work and more to reach a point where I can see the light at the end of the tunnel pretty brightly. The process has taken me deep within, led to multiple transformative experiences, taught me a huge amount about how we hold onto the past – not only our own but our past life and ancestral pasts as well – and changed the trajectory of my life dramatically and overall I would say for the better.
After a few decades of being told by one practitioner after another they’ve never seen this, that, or the other thing as bad as my… psoas, neck, hip, whatever, I know most people don’t have physical issues of the same magnitude. I also know from learning to move and to observe how others move, that millions of people walk around with tight muscle patterns interfering with their movement, their ability to process emotions, their capacity to feel energy, etc. And I feel as though talking about my journey and process might help some of those people to open some channels and pathways for their own lives to receive more healing. In fact, I hear every now and then from someone who says it has helped them take better care; what a great feeling.
As I survey this history, I feel this glow of blessing. For once, instead of viewing it only as a burden I have unfairly had to bear, I can see the Universe entrusted me with an unusual but important journey and what a gift it is that I have been able to explore all these nuances and share my experience. Which is not to say I won’t be back whining about my uncomfortable muscles or being kept up all night 😊 But more than ever I also feel gratitude for being sent on this journey of healing.
Robin in our back yard 2017
Muscles in my face are still going nuts and when they’re not I can’t seem to stop sleeping (possibly something to do with thousand of hours of sleep deprivation — and yup, I figured that out with all kinds of math formulas … not 🙂 ) so I have posts floating in the recesses of my mind but haven’t been able to sit down and focus enough to write them.
I’ve still been trying to keep up the regular chanting practice (lovingkindness chant + Gayatri Mantra + Om Shanti Shanti) yet also work my way through the practices in Life Loves You. Also weaving some of the kundalini yoga sets I used to do regularly back into my practice schedule along with the yoga/Robert Masters/exercise bike routines I’ve been doing and trying to hit the Eight Key Breaths, and Five Tibetan Rites as well.
Sometimes I feel like I know so many practices and exercises that I could get up in the morning and start doing them and just keep going all day long if I wanted to hit everything faithfully… So many different ones serve different purposes in energy or muscles or feeling tones. Right now I’m just juggling in a “go-with-the-flow” kind of thing, seeing what feels right each day during the time set aside.
Wanted to also mention a couple of new things I’ve run into that I think would be of interest to some of the regulars around here. Belinda Witzenhausen has started a blog hop thingy devoted to promoting stories of love and positivity. You can sign up on a linky page to participate and the first posts are to go up on March 31.
I’ve also signed up for a class offered through Daily OM called Release Yourself from Family Karma. As you know, I’ve been working on clearing ancestral issues for some time now and this class looks like a good opportunity to identify and clear some remaining issues. And they nicely allow you to choose your payment on a sliding scale of $10.00, $25.00 or $40.00 (the default seems to be $25 but if you click on that it opens up to a menu with the three options).
And my time to chant is calling now… Peace, out…
What the Bleep Do We Know!? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Mental attitude has a huge impact on your life and what you draw into your life. If you want to be an emissary of peace your thoughts need to be peaceful. Most of us have a lot of negative tapes playing in our heads, beliefs and ideas planted in early childhood and running on endless loops in the background. This piece of the series explores some of the things you can do to “change your mind”.
It is tough to break this down into separate parts because all our “parts” are so integrated, but I do think there are practices for each aspect of being and it helps to work on all levels. Still, it’s been a struggle to separate this piece.
The mental body winds up ruled much of the time by unconscious issues and beliefs held in the emotional body, for instance, so it helps to dig into what lies beneath. But that’s for the emotional body piece…
When I began this journey affirmations, visualizations and general positive thinking were front and center in the New Age movement and many of us thought we’d spout affirmations for a few months and our lives would be forever changed. The choice to move in that direction probably did change our lives but we found it takes more and longer for most people.
While I’ve always had some degree of success with visualizing and/or affirming something and creating that reality, this has really been one of the toughest aspects of the journey for me — the “simple” act of changing my mind. Oh, I thought I’d done it. Become Miss Positivity. I was 20 years down the road before I really “got” how many negative tapes looped through my head all day every day.
If you spend 10 or 20 minutes a day purposefully repeating some positive affirmations/statements and then the other 23 hours and 40 minutes running negative tapes, guess which wins? When negative issues and beliefs are running the show from the unconscious, I think affirmations are kind of like dripping water onto a mountain and waiting for erosion to take it down…
By the time I realized how negative my thinking really was, I’d done a LOT of emotional release work. Once I began concentrating on positive thinking I could see how much more impact it had than before all that clearing.
Some of the things I’ve used:
If anything inside you is clinging to some other belief, repeating affirmations may bring it to the surface. I’ve been chanting regularly ever since the election and I’m both feeling positive effects and changes and suffering frequent bouts of major crabbiness — which tells me I’m bringing some anger issues to the surface.
I still have some negative thinking to work on, but by and large several years of concerted effort have shifted a lot of old negative patterns into positive patterns — and it’s clearly favorably impacting my health issues.
Chapman Dr, Corte Madera
As I mentioned in the last post, my practices have been a little hit and miss lately as I wade through another round of unwinding and not sleeping. The on and off of it is giving me a chance to observe the doing and not doing and the way I feel about both.
Some years ago I realized I often sabotaged my progress by not doing my practices. I’d start one up or get back to an old friend and do it faithfully for a few days or a week or two and then I’d start “forgetting” (helped along by often feeling too crappy to do anything). More and more days would pass between practices until I’d finally realize I couldn’t remember the last time I meditated or performed a round of chi gung.
Once it sank in I asked myself some deep questions about why I sabotaged myself. Then I set up a “watcher” to help me keep track of consistency and give me a nudge so I could put myself back on track. Ever since I’ve been much better. Not that I don’t miss days and even occasionally several in a row, but I’ve gotten pretty good at keeping track and at pushing myself to get back to it if I’ve let it go
It’s rare now for an entire week to go by without at least one session of whatever practice or set of practices I’m doing and most weeks I manage at least three or four days. The great weeks I get in six (I always allow for a day off as I feel even the good stuff needs a break). But I still have spells when it’s less rather than more.
There’s a kind of push pull at work here. At the moment it’s the chanting and some movement practices that feel so good they constantly pull me back on track. But both things raise energy, open stuck places, and thereby set the stage for more unwinding. Any time I practice 6-7 days a week during a week or two when I’m sleeping well and feeling good, the practices inevitably help to set off another round of unwinding.
While I want the unwinding to finish so you’d think I’d welcome each round, I’m pretty miserable when it goes crazy, especially from the lack of sleep it creates. I’m regularly confronting the up and the down side of regular practice. It works. And in this case that’s both great and not so great… I haven’t quite decided how many skips at this point arise from an unconscious dread of the down side…
A deep spiritual journey often has these up and down moments. Sometimes the same practice contains elements of both the up and the down. Sometimes a practice leads you into painful places or opens something that hurts for a while before it gets better. I harp on this one a bit, but I run into so many people who don’t know this spiritual road curves into shadows and down into valleys of dark nights as well as giving you peace and balance and higher consciousness, an occasional reminder seems good 🙂
Bucket lists seem to have become a big priority in this country; I’m hazy about whether it started with the movie or whether the movie arose from a growing preoccupation… Since it keeps coming up, I find myself periodically wondering whether I have one. At one point I wrote a post about not wanting one.
Pretty much all the bucket lists I’ve encountered are long to-do lists of activities. Whether it’s a catalog of places to visit or exploits or career accomplishments they’re all about external pursuits. Underlying the lists is an obsession with living a life that’s packed with doing and the corollary notion that your life won’t have value (or you’ll have regrets when you die) unless you’ve done as much as possible. At least that’s my take.
Looking at these lists reminds how definitively I “march to my own drum”. Because I pretty much don’t want to do any of that stuff and I can’t imagine lying on my death bed feeling sad because I never saw St. Emilion or jumped off a bridge while attached to a cord. I would like to see St. Emilion but I don’t feel the value of my life will be determined by whether I have or haven’t. Now the bungee cord thing… that would go on a growing list of things I don’t EVER want to do before I die 🙂
Another blogger (so sorry, I’ve lost track of which) recently posted about Myers Briggs. I decided to finally look into it. My initial guess was INFP (introverted, intuitive, feeling, perceiving) and then I took several different tests, each of which confirmed it. We’re somewhere from 1-4% of the population (different sources give different %), which kind of fits with my sense of being out of step.
When I made this discovery, I’d been working on and off on the idea that maybe my bucket list is just different. I can see how mine fits with being an INFP. It’s a work in progress (even though I memorialized it on the picture above):
I suspect it’s a list for several lifetimes. And most of the items will, by their nature, be works in progress rather than things I can check off the list. I gather most people would feel antsy at the lack of stuff “to do” and scratch off…
But it’s my list and I like it. And I feel so much less out of step now that I have one 🙂
