Winter, January 1981, Boston - Lennon is Dead

The harsh winter winds whipped through an icy city that I had decided was the epicenter of the universe.

Anything.

Anything was better than home. John Lennon had just died and his music suddenly gripped me like the warm clutch of a lover's promise that first winter in Boston. He, and Bowie, and all that New Wave music sang to me of a life worth living . . . far from the one I left behind in my little lobster fishing town on Cape Cod.

Promises to his baby, promises to Yoko . . . these were all foreign things to someone who had never known love.

But still they pulled me. Called to me from radio airwaves and created cravings of . . . what? I didn't even know. But I felt embraced. Heard. Loved.

Of all the times to move to a new home . . . dead of winter. The worst one Boston had seen in years. I couldn't even afford the warmth of boots to cover my frozen feet as I waited for the T that was on strike and took hours to show up in absolutely frostbitten weather. Something pushed me beyond my comfort level.

I knew there was warmth and love and a life worth living there.

I stayed for ten years.

Inner Slate

Lately I find myself journaling virtually, within the matrix of my body.

Pen to paper feels too removed from felt experience.

The story unspools, with iPod set to shuffle . . . as unpredictable as life.

Each song, each asana, triggers an inner scribing of sadness, wonder and joy on an internal slate.

Shaken clean by savasana.

Zen and the Art of Merkaba Maintenance

As we surf these Maverick waves of bliss that are arriving to carry us forward (and that I have been feeling since July 2009), know that our "family" is also alongside us on similar waves, as we all steer our cosmic surf boards towards cocreating our own Heaven on Earth . . .

I like the alliteration of Merkaba Maintenance, but maybe I should backtrack so I don't lose people! The Merkaba is an energetic "ascension vehicle" that goes back to the Egyptian Mysteries.

The expercises do with participants at my Creating Sacred Space Within workshop start slow, and gradually build to expanding and enhancing our personal and group energy fields. Such a field, when it is built properly and set in motion, becomes an "ascension vehicle" or a "stairway to heaven" (as my teacher Juan Nunez del Prado jokingly calls it--he being a former flower-power child [as HE describes it!]). Just one of many ways to expand our awareness and state, and push the evolution of our consciousness . . . with my own personal spin on the process.

Hello 2012!

Anger

Sometimes when people feel strong feelings, they might choose to react with anger—the easiest , seemingly face-saving, seemingly justifiable reaction. Sadly, there’s usually an unmet need behind most bad behavior. Just under the anger might be a whole lot of sadness, or disappointment, or some other issue that keeps coming up in their lives. Allowing themselves to feel what might be under the anger makes them feel vulnerable. So, in a nanosecond, mind diverts them from feeling that pain.

It takes a pause to consider what they’re feeling and consider the range of reactions they might choose. So, especially if alcohol is involved, they reach for the lowest vibrating energy, like a weapon; not thinking it through that this won’t get their very vulnerable, human needs met in the long run. But reacting in anger only hurts everyone involved. There’s always a better choice.

More and more I’m trying to be the observer of my journey through humanness, and trying for more compassion and understanding of myself and others . . . a work in progress! (And sometimes, it’s entirely right to release someone from our lives, when they are repeatedly disrespectful.)

I am the lightning's hand. Sacred/Profane.

The opposite of sacred is not mundane, but profane. How do we craft our lives to embrace more sacredness? And less profanity to our soul?

An HSP (Highly Sensitive Person) living in LA, I've been wanting to read the book on how to navigate the electric currents here without short-circuiting. An urban shaman (ha!), I seek the still point within, so that I can do the work I moved here to do.

I realize my either/or thinking is at work here, and that we live in a world colored by shades of gray. But when do we give ourselves permission to relax into our vastness? (Not often enough!)

Perhaps one must be the observer. This highly charged field enhances journeying and shamanic work exponentially. Isn't the wild ride amazing? Spirit wanted to soar Saturday, and look where the magic carpet took us, during the soul retrieval. It's powerful. It's frightening. It didn't let up for hours. Perhaps Kundalini was awakening? We are so far beyond the days of drawing fire up from the core of the earth and being scared to death of what to do with it. We know what to do with fire now. Playing with it. Using it as a tool. Letting the fire mold, meld, and rework us into exquisite tools of transformation, to share with those who wish to take our hand, this little gift, this little assist.

Be the lightning's hand.

Balance

Tight left hammie running this morning, from intense, but amazing Power Yoga with Anaswara last night. It reminded me of the tight (read nonexistent) amount of time I have for being creative these days, as I spend 40 hours a week in a gray cube. Not a complaint, just a Vipassana observation. I wonder if we are ever truly in balance as humans for more than just a heartbeat. Or if the point of it all is to savor those times when we ARE in balance (or maybe one aspect of our life is REALLY working), give thanks, then just let go. Because being human seems to be about being in motion more often than stillness (for me lately, at least). About moving through change and growth, experience after experience, and not taking anything for granted anymore.

Stoplight Journaling

The stories I pass, each run on the bluff, speak volumes with their body language. My undefended heart faces them as I pass. Open to the homeless, the hopeless, the humanity through whose bedroom I guiltily tread, light as I can, so as not to wake them.

The abuella who I passed on my last two runs, who had sat on the same bench at the end of Idaho, overlooking the Pacific, head in hands—today she is reading a tiny book. A bible? I feel hope for her.

MJ’s Earth Song crashes through my head just as the ceiba tree in his music video crashes to the ground. Axis Mundi. Beloved magical tree. And then lifts back up, as tearful Aymara faces break into huge smiles. That’s how I feel lately. A lifting, a reversing . . . lightningbolt glimpses of recovery. Of me, of the Earth, of all of us.

This was the right time to move here. I couldn’t have experienced this expansiveness earlier in my life.

What a far cry from when I first lived in Boston in the bitter winter of 1981, where I stepped over frozen, homeless bodies in the Combat Zone on my walk to work in the morning. I’d never even seen homelessness before. Much less death. My heart shrunk into a tiny fist in that setting at that time. The armor began forming. I thought that by separating myself from the suffering of the world, I would be safe.

Safety only exists in opening to the Mystery. Can our pure essence truly be hurt?