Note To Self: Transform Your Life

I had a bit of a revelation the other week when I was pulling my cards. Every day I pull a card from 4 decks as a way to help me focus on a particular aspect of my life for that day. While I was shuffling my Tarot deck, 2 cards popped out. This was the Universe telling me that these two were the cards I needed. One was The Magician, upright and the other was Judgement, also upright. Two heavy hitters and this just days after I pulled the Tower card!

For those unfamiliar with the Tarot, I will explain. According to the book I use to interpret the Tarot, The Magician is about “pioneering, initiating change, communicating persuasively, consciously creating your reality...working wonders.” Okay. I’ll just put that right on my To Do list. Today: work wonders.

But wait, there’s more!

Judgement. It sounds a bit aggressive, but according to my book, it is about “awakening to your purpose”. “Judgement, the archetype of callings, the summons to a new life.” That’s handy as the other one seems to have crashed and burned. (Tower) It is “...the finding of a more authentic way of being.”

This is about transformation. Somehow, I am supposed to magically transform my life. It’s not like I had anything better to do.

Now, how much would you pay??

Transformation. It’s a big word. Has lots of letters. But where do you start?  And what happens once you have transformed your life? Is that it? Do you just hang around in your transformed state being an example to others and waving good will to one and all, as if you were the Queen? How am I supposed to dramatically change my life when I have already changed it beyond all recognition?

Then it hit me, as most revelations do, quiet-like. It was like looking at the Rubin vase and suddenly seeing two people facing each other. I’ve already done this. 14 years ago I was living in England, working as a database manager, I had 1 massage in my life, had no idea anything called energy work existed and had just started taking yoga.

How the heck did I get from there to living in the US owning my own body and energy work practice, teaching people Reiki and Intuition?

“...finding a more authentic way of being.”

I thought about the events that lead me here and a pattern emerged. They all had one thing in common: my passion for learning and growth. Every time I put myself in the path of learning something new, an opportunity would pop up to make my life even fuller.

What can I say? I’m a nerd.

The great thing was that I didn’t actually have to change who I am. I just had to do what I loved and was passionate about. In a weird kind of way, the more I transformed, the more I stayed the same. I just started becoming a bigger version of the real me. A bit like the Russian dolls, but in reverse. 

The other thing I realized was that transformation doesn’t necessarily mean dramatic change for a couple of reasons. First, not all dramatic changes are created equal. Second, transformation is an ongoing process that never really stops.

Two events in that time stick out in my mind as transformational. One was my choice to attend the Mind Body Spirit Expo in London with a friend one fine spring day, and the other was to move back to the States after about 10 years of living abroad. On the face of it, moving back to the States seems like a much larger, far-reaching, terrifying and, let’s face it, dramatic event than attending an Expo for a day.

However, it wasn’t the move that started me going in a completely different direction than I had been going. The Expo opened me up to the wonderful world of complementary and alternative therapies, some of which I had no idea existed. It was where I first got the idea about going back to school to refresh my anatomy and physiology and possibly learn massage. (Here’s that passion for learning.) A big leap, but at the time it appeared quite small.

Once I was introduced to the idea of seeing my life through a very different lens, seeing all sorts of new possibilities, I then needed to act on them. I needed to take the classes, (my way of going into strange territory because I love to learn) practicing what I learned, and meet mentors and teachers that helped me to become more self aware. (More learning! Yay!) This allowed me to see that I needed to start a new phase of my life that was going to take place back in my original country. The move itself, although transformational, was the culmination of the choices I made as a direct or indirect result of going to the Expo, and may have never happened otherwise.

If you do a side by side comparison of then and now, sure, it looks like I underwent some sort of personality transplant. The reality is that it took me about 14 years to do it. Not exactly overnight. What seems like a dramatic change in the last 14 years was actually a series of events that look both dramatic and really quite innocuous.

So, here I am, back to magically transforming my life. The good news is, I don’t necessarily have to do anything drastically different. It may be just seeing what I am already doing in a different way. A bit like taking a small turn to the left rather than an about face. That doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t turn my life upside down again.

Well, I guess I better follow my nose and see what interesting opportunities for learning come my way. Oh look. I pulled another Tower card. Magnificent!

What do you love to do? What are you passionate about? You never know. You might just start transforming your life.

Show Don’t Tell

I’m going to meta blog for a moment. (Just for all you meta physical people out there.) Actually, it’s probably more like a meta rant.  I have been perusing various blogs about consciousness, spirituality, self help and the like to see if there are any I would like to follow. From what I can see, the blogs that are followed by the most people are ones that tell you how you need to be. That if you want to become a more enlightened person, these are the concepts or truths you need to understand and embrace. That’s fantastic. That may even be true, but there seems to be something missing. How do these truths make sense to me in my own life? What examples can you give that can guide me in a more concrete way towards my own personal enlightenment? I kept hearing the phrase my high school Creative Writing teacher kept repeating: show, don’t tell.

Let me explain.

If you are someone who would like to become more consciously aware of what you are doing in your everyday life, there are concepts or understandings that can help you. Let’s look at a perennial favorite of the consciousness field: that your reality is created by your perceptions. I can fully understand this at a conceptual level.  And I bet I’m not the only one. It has been said in so many different ways, in the scientific as well as the spiritual world, that if you are above the age of 18, you have probably heard this. I also happen to agree with it. However, if you can’t give examples, possibly even anecdotes from your own life that helped you crystalize your understanding of that, how can others do the same for themselves? How can I, translate that into my own life so that I can take a concept that is ephemeral with no personal meaning and make it a part of me?

Let me give an example, and I will try to apply that principle to a real life situation of mine.

About a year ago, I was in a quandary about what to call myself as a professional. I felt that I had grown my skill set and general understanding of consciousness, and I wanted my title to reflect that. Should I call myself a Massage Therapist, bodyworker/energy worker, healer or some other combination? For a few weeks I felt annoyed by all of them. I couldn’t get any one of them to fit. I did more than massage, but was I really a healer? Was that label really appropriate? Did I even want it? What does “healer” really mean anyway? Well, it took me awhile, but I came to the conclusion that the reason I couldn’t stomach any of them, was that I didn’t want to be confined by other people’s perceptions about what the labels meant. So I chose no title.

But that’s not the whole story.

A few months later, a light went on and I realized that I was basing my choice of not having a professional title on how others interpreted those labels or, what I believed were their perceptions. I didn’t want anyone getting the wrong idea, so their opinions of what those words meant was what I was basing my choice around.

Okay, so how does that relate to my perceptions creating my reality?

It wasn’t about what everyone else thought. It was how I perceived what everyone else thought. Because I perceived that as “real” it was real for me and I made it my reality (choosing no title at all) and then projected that onto everyone else (blamed my inability to choose on other people’s perceptions). My reality was determined completely  by what was going on in my own head and, looking back, had no basis in fact (science) or truth (spirit).

It wasn’t really other peoples’s perceptions about what the labels meant that was stopping me from choosing my title, but mine in two ways: one, that what I perceived was what they perceived, (not true) and two, that what they perceived was important to me (hmm...I’ll keep working on this one).

I have found that having concrete examples about how these high level concepts of consciousness mean in real life terms is much more helpful in trying to understand them. Showing rather than telling does a couple of things. First, it shows how we can make our own deep and lasting connections that make sense to us on a very personal level, allowing us to integrate all this important information. Second, by sharing our challenges as well as successes, we show that we are all just as human as each other, and everyone’s experiences are valid and can help bring insight to others. 

P.S. I’m still looking for some good blogs to follow, so if anyone out there knows of any that they perceive to be good, give me a shout!

Word Of The Day

I just wanted to share this. 

It started in the early hours of last Wednesday morning, around 2:30 am. I woke up because my right arm, from my shoulder to my fingers, was in a fair amount of pain. I couldn’t find any position that would ease it, as moving it one way would bother my shoulder and it moving another way would pain my elbow or triceps. It was awful. I eventually had to take some ibuprofen so I could at least get some sleep.

I can’t say I was entirely surprised my arm was sore because I had spent about 5 hours on the Tuesday afternoon/evening sanding and compounding one of the rooms in my house. I didn’t take many breaks, maybe two, because I had a goal: I wanted to get it all sanded and re-compounded by 6 pm . I had no idea why I chose that time frame as it wasn’t very urgent. It was a completely arbitrary goal, but I did it, and felt like I had accomplished something. Until the crippling pain. What made it worse was knowing that my arms and hands are how I earn my living, and I had treatments booked for the next day.

After getting my Other Half to roll out my arm then do a few stretches on Wednesday morning, I did my usual choose my cards for the day. I generally pull 4 cards from 4 different divination decks: Tarot, Animal Totems, Archetypes and a Goddess deck. Well, the card from the Goddess deck said: “There is no need to hurry or force things to happen. Everything is occurring in perfect timing.” I’m really not a Type A personality, but I play one on t.v., and I interpreted this to mean that the bigger goals I am working on didn’t need my whip that day. Yeah, right. Like that’s going to happen! I have a business plan to write, emails to catch up on, marketing to do...easy does it ain’t goin’ to get it done.

I finished my morning routine and started on my way to work. While driving in, I noticed a car coming the other way with a license plate that wasn’t standard. I always like trying to figure out what the cryptic lettering is meant to say. It read “RUKIND”. Exactly like that. I thought that was great! I even had a generalized thought about how important it is to be kind. When I got to work, I started checking my email. Among them was an update from Spirit of Change that had some wisdom from the Dalai Lama. I could always use his wisdom, so I had a look. “Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.”

As someone who lectures and teaches about intuition, this is the equivalent of a slap upside the head.

I thought, “Okay, I’m missing something here. What is the message I’m supposed to be receiving?”

Ask, and you shall receive...

Then it occurred to me. What does being kind really mean? To me, it seems it is another platitude that gets bandied about as if everyone understands what it means, but not how it plays out in their lives. So, what does it mean to me? My first thoughts were around acts of kindness, or doing things for others, usually with no thought of reciprocity. (Think Mother Theresa.) It didn’t feel wrong, it just didn’t feel complete. More like just scratching the surface, but knowing there is a deeper, more complete understanding.

Go deeper...

I think I had a bit of a moment at that point. It’s hard to tell because a thousand moments cascaded through my mind. It seemed I could sense every time in my life I set unreasonable goals for myself, beat myself up either mentally or physically to accomplish them, then beat myself up mentally if I couldn’t reach them. Up to and including Tuesday when I actually felt good about reaching an arbitrary goal that I couldn’t even pat myself on the back for because I had crippled myself in the process. I saw how I focussed on kindness as being an outward act for others, but how many of us do unkind things like this to ourselves? And then the real kicker, how often do we beat ourselves up for beating ourselves up?

I’m starting to see that kindness is much more than an outward act reserved only for others. Kindness is about allowing and not forcing, compassion and non judgement. Kindness to others is an extension of kindness to the self. If I can see that my own struggles with the difficulties of life in Earth’s classroom are a mirror of the struggles of every other person I meet, I can connect to others by offering myself the kindness of compassion, understanding and acceptance that I would like to have for others.

What is kindness to you?

Meditation And Cheesy Workarounds

I have been getting a lot of comments and questions around meditation recently. I’m usually asked if I meditate (yes), how often (daily), how long (varies, but usually not less than 15 minutes and sometimes as much as 30+) and how (I sit).  But what I hear the most of is a variation on “I’ve been wanting to meditate because I know how important it is, but I can’t seem to keep the thoughts out, so I get frustrated and stop. How do you do it?”

The short answer is:  Cheesy workarounds and sticking to it.

In my house, cheesy workarounds usually happen when we are doing some sort of construction. We have been “blessed” with a completely non standard house, so when we want to make improvements, we find out (usually long after we have started) that it is completely impossible to accomplish the task the way we are “supposed” to. So we get creative. Cheesy workarounds are a kind of Do I Yourself meets imagination when you have an issue in front of you.

It turns out that I apply this philosophy to more than just construction.

I have been meditating on and off since 2006. Between 2006 and 2008, more off than on, from 2008 to 4 months ago, more on than off, and for the last 4 months, daily.

Between 2006 and 2007, I would periodically attempt to meditate, fail miserably and give up in frustration. At that time, the only instructions I had were to sit with my eyes closed and concentrate on my breathing, and if any thoughts came in, just let them go. So I set aside 10 minutes and tried to focus on my breathing. What happened looked a bit like this...

Breathe in...feel the breath down my throat...my nose itches, I don’t think I’m supposed to scratch it...I’ve got a lot of homework to do...I think I should finish doing my flash cards today because I’ll have time to study with them tomorrow...My back hurts...I don’t think I’m sitting up straight...A car is driving by...I need to get my oil changed...

This happened for the whole 10 minutes! I got maybe 2 seconds into a meditation before my thoughts hijacked me.  And you could forget about me being able to ‘just let the thoughts go’ because I didn’t even notice I was having any until the 10 minutes were up!

It became clear to me that sitting meditation was not an option. Luckily, my Chinese herbalist at the time suggested I try Yoga Nidra, a guided meditation to help calm the mind. The idea behind Yoga Nidra is to follow the instructions without trying, and to get very relaxed, so you are essentially asleep but with a slight trace of awareness. Generally, I fell full asleep during the meditation, but there were some times I got to a fully relaxed state without sleeping!

At about the same time, I was in the process of ‘fixing’ the way I walked. I tended to walk on the outside of my right foot which was throwing my gait off and putting a lot of extra strain on my right knee, IT Band and hip. So, during my walks, I would focus on how my right hip and knee were moving in relation to my foot and carefully placing my foot down more in the middle rather than rolling to the outside. Step after step after step. For 3 or 4 miles. I had never heard of a thing called Walking Meditation, but I was (unknowingly) doing my version of it.

In 2008, I took a Psychic class, and at each session, we went through several guided meditations. By this time, I had been doing Yoga Nidra and my “Walking Meditation” for about a year and a half, on and off, but this was more like sitting meditation so I was a bit nervous. What happened? I was able to meditate for more than a few seconds at a time!

I was so excited, I bought a meditation CD!  Complete with different ways to sit and how to count my breaths! 2 years later, and I was back where I started, sitting and breathing. Only this time, I was aware of when thoughts came in and was able to let them go. 

My current meditation practice did not come overnight or by a traditional route. I have always had a mind that was constantly full of a million thoughts going at the speed of light, and balanced it out by being a physically active person. So, initially, just sitting quietly to meditate did not calm me down, but made me jumpier. The only way that I had a hope of calming down my brain was through some sort of physical activity, or giving it something to do in a walking meditation or relaxing it with Yoga Nidra. Nor was this process obvious to me at the time. I just stuck to it and kept trying different things to see what fit best for me with the ultimate goal of quietening the mind. What I didn’t see at the time was that I needed to learn to sleep before I could walk, and walk before I could sit!

Going With The Flow

I have recently had an amazing opportunity to learn something about myself.  Yes, I know, opportunities to learn about myself happen all the time, but in this case, I couldn’t avoid it.

There is this beautiful place called Cane Bay, St. Croix in the Caribbean.  It has a coral reef that begins almost immediately off the shore and extends out about 220 yards to 

The Wall, or the 6,000 foot drop off the Continental Shelf.  (For the purposes of being a bit more accurate, it also stretches along the beach a ways, but you don’t need to know that for the story.)

To do any snorkeling or scuba diving, there is a very particular area on the beach that has a natural break in the coral so you can actually get in and swim over it without killing the coral and getting ripped to shreds.  Unfortunately, this particular set up means that as the water flows back after a wave comes in, it is funneled through this channel, almost producing the force of a wave going out to sea.  This isn’t a bit deal going out, but can present a challenge when you are coming back in.

My instructions to get back in were:  pretend you are body surfing.  Ride the wave in and when the water starts pushing you back out, swim against the current to maintain your position until the next wave.  Great.  No problem.  How hard could it be?

The first day out snorkeling the water was like glass, not a wave in sight.  Snorkeling was effortless.  I was so enchanted by everything we saw, including a sea turtle out near The Wall, that I forgot about the challenge of the re entry point.  Because there was pretty much no surf at all, getting back in was not difficult.  In fact, I was able to notice how close you get to the coral as you come in to shore.  It was probably no more than a foot beneath me and the water depth was probably only about three feet, maybe less.  How cool!

This calm state of affairs did not continue.  Neptune had other plans for me. 

The next time we went out, the sea had kicked up quite a few notches and the waves came fast and furious.  I was so worried that the waves would fill my breathing tube, I spent a lot of time and effort fighting against them.  The others I was snorkeling with were much calmer about it.  “If the water comes in, just force it out with a big breath.”  Sure.  What happens if I am breathing IN at the time??  “The gag reflex kicks in, it’ll be fine.”  Perfect.

I wasn’t able to master this nonchalance about what I perceived to be a shocking lack of self preservation, and soon got tired and had to go in.  Steve, my Other Half, was getting cold, so he offered to come with me.  

As we neared the re entry point, I could see the waves crashing in, spraying water all over the place.  Then I could feel that I was being pushed back out to sea, and it was not a gentle push.  I started kicking as instructed and waited for a wave, all the while trying to prevent the water from filling up my breathing tube, (by lifting my face out of the water), and not touching the coral which was only a foot away from me.  I was able to catch a wave and ride in a little ways, but was pushed right back out again.  This happened a few more times and I could feel myself going from tired to exhausted and from concern to panic.  The coral beneath me prevented me from using more of my legs and arms and some part of my mind prevented me from going with the flow and trusting that I would get to shore okay.

I looked up and saw that Steve had made it in just fine.  I decided that I had enough.  I called out “Help” In a feeble, waterlogged voice, and he grabbed my arm and dragged me in.

What I learned about myself has a couple of layers to it.  It isn’t just that I have a hard time trusting and going with the flow.  It is a bit more subtle than that.  I saw how easy it was to go with the flow when the going was easy.  I found that it was a HECK of a lot more difficult to trust and go with the flow when it wasn’t comfortable or going in the direction I thought it should.  The very idea that the Universe should do what I want it to do is a bizarre belief in itself.  I also learned how flipping exhausting it is to fight it!  How ridiculous is it to believe fighting against the Universe would somehow be easier than trusting, and flowing with it?

As lessons go, it’s a biggie!  Let’s hope I learned it this time, because I’m looking forward to going back to Cane Bay and I don’t know if I have the stamina to go a few more rounds with Neptune! 

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog!  After months of thinking about it, reading information on blogs, reading other blogs, wondering what my blog would look like or what I wanted to talk about, I have finally decided to just go ahead and write it.

Some kidding aside, I did get a bit stuck about what I would write about.  After years of being in my own head, I kind of lost touch with what other people think about or what they think is important in their own lives.  What, when you get right down to it, do I have to offer that is relevant to others?  All I have is an increasingly circuitous personal journey of trying to connect my mind and body, a variety of one liners, and a million ideas that drive me crazy.  Hmm.

So, I think I will start with my personal soap box...

The Mind-Body Connection - What’s the Big Idea?

The importance of the mind-body connection is a recent discovery of mine.  Before 5 years ago, if you even said the phrase “mind-body connection” I would have given you a perplexed expression.  My mind was how I figured everything out and my body was something I lugged around.  My body got fed, rested and exercised, but was essentially on its own because there was nothing it could help me with.  I was so detached from my body, if someone asked me how I felt, I would tell them what I thought. 

So what’s so bad about that?  I didn’t have to feel physical pain because there were plenty of pain killers around.  If something did happen, there were plenty of tests that I could take to tell me what the problems were as well as if the treatments were working.  Heck, there were so many screenings, tests and procedures available to see what was going on inside my body that I didn’t even have to think about what was going on in my body.  All I had to do was make various appointments with different professionals and get the tests done.  If the tests showed that I needed a particular type of treatment, medication or surgery, the system would go into gear and more appointments would be made, prescriptions written or surgeries and rehabilitation organized.  I could exist without having to connect with my body at all.  All I had to do was follow instructions.

So why wasn’t that enough?  Why did I think that there was something missing?  It wasn’t a clear cut thing or something that I could verbalize at the time.  I didn’t wake up one day and announce, “This isn’t everything there is, I’m more than just a collection of thoughts or DNA.”  It was more of a nagging feeling (there goes that body again) that I was missing something, something very big.  And try as I might, I couldn’t for the life of me think what it was!  

There started a journey of finding out what was really important.  It took several years of working with my mind and body separately (the connection really didn’t start happening until fairly recently) that I started to realize something.  That of all the big, important decisions I have made in my life, the one’s I made purely with my mind never made me happy or feel empowered.  I made decisions based on logic, or what I was supposed to do as a good Catholic (even though I didn’t practice) and I could rationalize all of them, but they generally had nothing to do with what I truly wanted or needed for me as an individual. The ones I made listening to what my body had to say (see above nagging feeling) made me MUCH happier.  It may not have been an immediate happier.  In many cases I put myself in very challenging situations initially, but they all ended with me being in a much better place feeling WAY more empowered.  I felt that I was really living my life rather than just existing, thinking that I am at the mercy of whatever happens to my body.  

Just to go a bit existential for a moment, if your mind is pure thought and thoughts never die, were they ever really alive?  And if you only identify with thought, are you really alive or are you merely existing?  Something to ponder? (Or, as the case may be, not to ponder :)!

Now my body is my ally.  It’s going to let me know when I’m not making the best choices for myself (put that Whoopee Pie down, Martha!) and when I am (rent that room at the Natural Wellness Clinic full time, Martha, even though you don’t have a client base, or any money!).  It hasn’t steered me wrong yet.

So, what’s your body telling you?  Are you listening?