Author Archives: MaryAnn Reynolds

About MaryAnn Reynolds

I practice advanced bodywork in Austin, TX, specializing in Craniosacral Biodynamics and TMJ Relief.

The Egg, a story by Andy Weir

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I’m sharing a story that I came across on Facebook and then googled to find the original source. Please skip if you’ve read it.

I like this story for the way it reframes everything about who we really are and why we’re here. If you read this and behave as if it were true, what will that do for you? What will that do for others you encounter on your life’s journey?

I invite you to try it on, and if you don’t like it or it’s not useful, go back to your old beliefs!

Thank you, Andy Weir, for writing and sharing this story.

The Egg

By: Andy Weir

 

You were on your way home when you died.

It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.

And that’s when you met me.

“What…what happened?” You asked. “Where am I?”

“You died,” I said, matter-of-factly. No point in mincing words.

“There was a…a truck and it was skidding…”

“Yup,” I said.

“I…I died?”

“Yup. But don’t feel bad about it. Everyone dies,” I said.

You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. “What is this place?” you asked. “Is this the afterlife?”

“More or less,” I said.

“Are you God?” you asked.

“Yup,” I replied. “I’m God.”

“My kids…my wife,” you said.

“What about them?”

“Will they be all right?”

“That’s what I like to see,” I said. “You just died and your main concern is for your family. That’s good stuff right there.”

You looked at me with fascination. To you, I didn’t look like God. I just looked like some man. Or possibly a woman. Some vague authority figure, maybe. More of a grammar school teacher than the Almighty.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’ll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn’t have time to grow contempt for you. Your wife will cry on the outside but will be secretly relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If it’s any consolation, she’ll feel very guilty for feeling relieved.”

“Oh,” you said. “So what happens now? Do I go to heaven or hell or something?”

“Neither,” I said. “You’ll be reincarnated.”

“Ah,” you said. “So the Hindus were right,”

“All religions are right in their own way,” I said. “Walk with me.”

You followed along as we strode through the void. “Where are we going?”

“Nowhere in particular,” I said. “It’s just nice to walk while we talk.”

“So what’s the point, then?” you asked. “When I get reborn, I’ll just be a blank slate, right? A baby. So all my experiences and everything I did in this life won’t matter.”

“Not so!” I said. “You have within you all the knowledge and experiences of all your past lives. You just don’t remember them right now.”

I stopped walking and took you by the shoulders. “Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It’s like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if it’s hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you’ve gained all the experiences it had.

“You’ve been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven’t stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you’d start remembering everything. But there’s no point to doing that between each life.”

“How many times have I been reincarnated, then?”

“Oh, lots. Lots and lots. And into lots of different lives.” I said. “This time around, you’ll be a Chinese peasant girl in 540 AD.”

“Wait, what?” You stammered. “You’re sending me back in time?”

“Well, I guess technically. Time, as you know it, only exists in your universe. Things are different where I come from.”

“Where you come from?” you said.

“Oh sure,” I explained “I come from somewhere. Somewhere else. And there are others like me. I know you’ll want to know what it’s like there, but honestly, you wouldn’t understand.”

“Oh,” you said, a little let down. “But wait. If I get reincarnated to other places in time, I could have interacted with myself at some point.”

“Sure. Happens all the time. And with both lives only aware of their own lifespan you don’t even know it’s happening.”

“So what’s the point of it all?”

“Seriously?” I asked. “Seriously? You’re asking me for the meaning of life? Isn’t that a little stereotypical?”

“Well, it’s a reasonable question,” you persisted.

I looked you in the eye. “The meaning of life, the reason I made this whole universe, is for you to mature.”

“You mean mankind? You want us to mature?”

“No, just you. I made this whole universe for you. With each new life you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect.”

“Just me? What about everyone else?”

“There is no one else,” I said. “In this universe, there’s just you and me.”

You stared blankly at me. “But all the people on earth…”

“All you. Different incarnations of you.”

“Wait. I’m everyone!?”

“Now you’re getting it,” I said, with a congratulatory slap on the back.

“I’m every human being who ever lived?”

“Or who will ever live, yes.”

“I’m Abraham Lincoln?”

“And you’re John Wilkes Booth, too,” I added.

“I’m Hitler?” you said, appalled.

“And you’re the millions he killed.”

“I’m Jesus?”

“And you’re everyone who followed him.”

You fell silent.

“Every time you victimized someone,” I said, “you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you.”

You thought for a long time.

“Why?” you asked me. “Why do all this?”

“Because someday, you will become like me. Because that’s what you are. You’re one of my kind. You’re my child.”

“Whoa,” you said, incredulous. “You mean I’m a god?”

“No. Not yet. You’re a fetus. You’re still growing. Once you’ve lived every human life throughout all time, you will have grown enough to be born.”

“So the whole universe,” you said, “it’s just…”

“An egg.” I answered. “Now it’s time for you to move on to your next life.”

And I sent you on your way.

 

About Effortless Wellbeing

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Note: Earlier this post mistakenly called this book Effortless Meditation. The actual name of the book is Effortless Wellbeing.

Elephantjournal.com posted this article a day or two ago. Being someone who appreciates simplicity and elegance, I found it very worth sharing. Read the article here.

A man named Evan Finer has written a little book called Effortless Wellbeing. The author of the post, Bob Weisenberg, writes that in his effort to boil meditation down to its essentials, Finer came up with three key skills:

  1. Relaxing the body.
  2. Learning to breathe smoothly and naturally.
  3. Calming the mind by learning to focus.

Notice you don’t have to be sitting on a zafu with your eyes closed to use these skills!

Weisenberg states,

…there are few things in life which cannot be enhanced by relaxing your body, breathing more naturally, and gently focusing your mind.

Weisenberg goes on to list nine techniques for focusing the mind.

Body awareness is one of them, although it doesn’t mention whole body awareness. I really enjoyed getting perspective about my meditation technique, that it’s one of nine ways to focus the mind. Whole body awareness, preceded by a body scan, is working for me very well.

Comments?

Good news for the brain

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Good news for brain health! Neurofeedback is growing in popularity — an estimated 100,000 Americans have tried it over the past decade.

The National Institute of Mental Health just sponsored its first study, on ADHD, with results to be announced later this month. The study’s director noted improvement in many of the children’s behavior.

Some so-called authorities still think of it as crackpot science.

It seems to me more like physical therapy: you have an injury or an imbalance, and you do exercises targeted to gain functionality.

Neurofeedback practitioners say people have problems when their brain wave frequencies aren’t suited for the task at hand, or when parts of the brain aren’t communicating adequately with other parts. These issues, they say, can be represented on a “brain map,” the initial EEG readings that serve as a guide for treatment. Subsequently, a clinician will help a patient learn to slow down or speed up those brain waves, through a process known as operant conditioning.

The article mentions companies offering it, and the lack of regulation. It advises choosing a practitioner carefully.

I’d love to hear first-hand accounts of people who’ve used neurofeedback to improve brain functioning in Austin, Texas.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/health/05neurofeedback.html?src=me&ref=health

Trauma release heavy heart

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Someone found this blog using those search words.

No doubt they found my post on trauma releasing exercises, from David Berceli’s book The Revolutionary Trauma Release Process. That post did not specifically address a heavy heart. I’m not sure if the exercises would help. They are designed more to help you heal from a terrifying fight-flight-or-freeze situation, and from chronic stress and deep patterns of holding tension in the body. But I don’t know.

If you find me again, this is for you. Heartbreak can feel traumatic. I know. I’ve been there several times.

In my experience, heavy hearts take time to heal. Give yourself time and be as kind to yourself as possible. Let trusted others know your heart feels heavy and allow them to be kind to you too.

A heavy heart led me to meditation. I tried to avoid the pain. It didn’t work. What was left was facing it. Because when your heart is really heavy, you want to feel some emotional movement. Heaviness has tremendous gravity. You don’t want to feel stuck with a heavy heart.

I don’t know, but I suspect you will move through this. You are resourceful enough to be looking for help, looking for change.

When I sat with my heavy heart and just faced it — noticed where in my body I felt it, qualities of the feeling, finding words to describe it — I noticed there was more to me than just my heavy heart. That lightened the load, began to put some space around my heavy heart.

Here are some other suggestions:

You can be just a little bit grateful that you are feeling this because it means you have an active, alive heart center. Some people don’t. You are responsive to life, which is sometimes heartbreaking.

You are also not alone. At any given moment, a million people and more in this world have heavy hearts. Even if every single one of them has retreated into their bedroom, you have a lot of company! Connect with them psychically. Be curious about them.

You can google and learn how to do EFT. You can take the homeopathic remedy Ignatia Amara. You can watch sad movies and cry, or just cry — tears are healing.

There is no instant cure. It takes time.

You can make a plan to do one kind thing for another person. Help a single mom have some private time by taking the kids out to a park. Help a homebound senior with groceries or cooking. There are thousands of nonprofits who need volunteers — in prisons, homeless shelters, food banks, children — there is simply no end to it, unfortunately.

And I don’t think it would hurt to do the trauma releasing exercises.

Cleansing the colon, liver, and gallbladder

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I’m in the last week of a 27-day colon/parasite cleanse, which I do spring and fall. My dear acupuncturist tells me that it’s not a question of whether you have parasites, it’s what to do about them.

This cleanse isn’t difficult. Morning and night mix 2 T of psyllium husks and 1/2 t. of bentonite clay into a half cup of water or fruit juice/water mix, stir well, and throw it down the hatch. You must follow with a large glass of water. Do this every day for the entire 27 days.

Mid-morning and mid-afternoon, take 3 capsules of Paratosin from Premier Research Labs (a herbal blend that will have you burping cloves) on an empty stomach.

Do this every day until the whole bottle of Paratosin is gone (10 days). Continue to take the psyllium and bentonite twice daily but take no Paratosin for 7 days.

On day 18, start taking a second bottle of Paratosin as directed above to rid yourself of any parasites that have hatched since the first bottle.

After 27 days, your gastrointestinal system (especially your colon walls) will be cleaned out by the psyllium husks, toxins pulled from the walls by the bentonite clay, and your liver, gallbladder, spleen, and pancreas will be clear of parasites for a while (you can get them from drinking tap water) — and then you repeat in the spring, or the next fall.

I follow this cleanse with a liver/gallbladder flush, which is much more involved. I’ve done the cleanse and the flush back to back in the spring and fall for the past three years, and I believe they play an important role in my vitality and well-being.

I’m not going to include directions here because I don’t know the contraindications — i.e., when someone shouldn’t do this. I’m just a blogger sharing a personal health practice. If you’re interested, please consult your alternative medical practitioner first.

You can also find instructions in Jack Tips’ book, The Healing Triad: Your Liver…Your Lifeline. Tips says this flush has been done since antiquity, with variations. Basically you consume certain foods to cause the liver and gallbladder to empty their contents for elimination. This flush rids both these organs of old, hardened bile pieces. They look like green stones when you pass them but float because they are made of fat.

Compared to the colon/parasite cleanse, this flush involves more prep work (eating more veggies and using pH test strips to be sure you’re alkaline, and consuming apples or apple juice or malic acid to soften the hardened bile). It’s also trickier. There may be some discomfort involved, but it is only temporary. I’ve felt great afterwards.

(By the way, anything fried in cooked vegetable seed oils contributes to the formation of hardened bile. Now, I love chips and salsa and fried okra. It’s my birthright as a Texan! Doing this flush twice a year helps me stay healthy.)

You may be wondering why anyone would want to do this. Well, to keep your organs healthy! We often have an attitude of denial in this culture about our internal organs until something goes wrong. They have vital functions that contribute to our health. Taking good care of one’s organs translates into better functioning of your body — which of course cannot be isolated from the mind, heart, and spirit.

The large intestine, liver, and gallbladder have associated meridians in traditional Chinese medicine. That means these organs have energies associated with them. The colon is associated with the emotion of grief. The liver and gallbladder are associated with the emotion of anger.

Flushing them can result in a surge of positive energy — more happiness. Can you use some of that? I sure can!

Blogging update, moving into last quarter

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We’re heading into the home stretch of 2010, the last three months of this year of daily sitting and blogging about it. I’m posting my blog stats so that if you’re thinking about starting a blog, you can read a first-hand report.

Plus, I appreciate your support and interest.

My first post was Dec. 30, 2009. And then on February 3, I got 89 views! I’m not sure why. Maybe WordPress featured my blog that day. That’s still the one-day record for views. By Feb. 8, I had had 181 views.

I started out blogging once a day, occasionally twice, almost every day. I kept this up until mid-March, when I started feeling life crowding in on me.

After that, I experimented to find a more natural rhythm for me. That has turned out to be about every 2-3 days. Even better, each post feels more worthwhile to write and contribute, and I hope more worthwhile for you to read.

By April 22, this blog had had 827 views.

In May I skipped a couple of weeks due to no internet access at home. (Tree fell on cable line, yada yada.) May wasn’t a good month for blogging. For January through April, the monthly total for views was roughly 200. In May I had 121 views.

Lesson learned: you have to keep it up to keep your readers!

Halfway through the year, on July 1, I had had 1,233 views and 52 comments. I hit 1,500 views on July 26 and 2,000 views on August 31, a month and a day ago.

As I write this, the view count is up to 2,316. I’ve had over 300 views for each of the past three months. I’ve posted 200 times (201 with this one) and have received 83 comments.

I truly love hearing from you. I get a lot of spam that I delete (which WordPress filters nicely), and genuine comments from people who have actually read a post and have something to say about it are heavenly. I love your input, feedback, additions, stories, and responses. Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who has commented (and thanks in advance to everyone who will comment but hasn’t yet).

I’ve made this blog easy for people to find, through Twitter, Facebook, NetworkedBlogs, and subscriptions. Most of you come through Facebook. Friend me if that works easier for you. I’m probably the only Mary Ann Reynolds in Austin, TX.

The most popular search term used to find this blog is “trauma releasing exercises.” I’m glad to be spreading David Berceli’s wonderful work — a set of exercises that release trauma (tension, stress) from the body. I do them a couple of times a month and find them valuable.

Most of us aren’t familiar enough with the state of being deeply relaxed yet alert. TRE is well worth including in your pursuit of being a fully alive and awake human being, in my opinion.

Plus, you never know when you might need to tell or teach someone who needs these exercises more than you do. I am very happy to know that through my sharing, this book has spread to an Army captain in Iraq as well as to someone in the Acupuncturists Without Borders organization. It’s going where it’s needed.

My most viewed post is also Trauma releasing exercises.

My next most popular post is Cranio-sacral therapy, brain waves. It has a lot of brain geek information in it.

A more recent post, Pain and pleasure, pleasure and pain — side effects of living, has become increasingly popular, ranking third in number of views, excluding a couple of poems. Boy, that title says it all, doesn’t it? It’s probably my longest title.

I like that one. Instead of the more typical attraction to pleasure, avoidance of pain pattern, which keeps us moving back and forth, there’s another possibility of being more centered and knowing that both pleasure and pain are nervous system experiences! You have a nervous system, you’re alive, and pleasure and pain are part of life, in other words.

What I get from this analysis is that you guys, my readers, are curious about body/mind/emotions/spirit connections. You want to read about discovering/returning to some kind of integrated state of healthiness and wholeness. You’re interested in ways to frame experience, to give it context and perspective. And reading about geeky brain wave states does not put you off!

You know what? I love you guys. You’re my kind of people! Maybe you’re even trying some of the things I’m trying! If that is so, I’d love to hear about it.

Thanks for stopping by. Come again soon!

Oh, yeah, one more skill!

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In my post yesterday about the skill developed for/during meditation, I forgot to mention the skill of returning! This is used when my monkey mind starts thinking, “Hmm, I’ll need to leave work early to get there on time tonight… I wonder if I’ll have time to change clothes… I can wear my new top… Who’s going to be there? I need to go to the grocery store too…” in the middle of meditation. I need to return my attention to the present moment, to my teacher’s directive, whole body awareness.

I have done this so often that I found tremendous value in putting my intent into words when I first sit down to meditate. Then when my mind strays, I bring it back to that anchored intent:

May my mind become steady with whole body awareness.

By the way, that act of gently and lovingly returning one’s wandering mind back to the present moment and to whole body awareness activates a small area between the limbic mid-brain and the frontal cortex called the anterior cingulate cortex, the ACC for short.

The ACC has to do with regulating emotions and behavior, as you might have guessed from its location. It appears that activating the ACC results in lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, and lower levels of anxiety, depression, anger, fatigue, and pain sensitivity. In other words, more calm, happiness, acceptance, alertness, and pleasure!

And who doesn’t want that?

You may be wondering how I get my monkey mind to cooperate. I tell it that later it can think and wander all it wants to, but right now during meditation is not the time. Notice I don’t tell monkey mind that it’s bad for interrupting. It’s like a two-year-old sometimes! Redirect, redirect, redirect!!!

Article: Becoming a yoga teacher

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I really liked this article, from Elephantjournal.com, by a yoga teacher about being a yoga teacher.

http://www.elephantjournal.com/2010/09/becoming-a-yoga-teacher/

Developing the skills of meditation

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I was thinking today, three-quarters through my year of daily sitting, about skills that I have developed so far.

It took about three months for me to be able to sit for 30 minutes without spending a good chunk of that time being aware of some pain somewhere in my body. Usually it wasn’t major pain, though, but sometimes the pain seemed to accumulate during a session, and right before the timer would go off, I’d start feeling like I couldn’t stand it any more.

That probably doesn’t count as a real skill. It’s more like acclimating the body to the practice. It felt like grace when the pain (mostly) went away.

Most of the pain was around my sacrum and left sacroiliac joint, where I’ve had injury. Whatever. Do not let this stop you from meditating. You will not experience pain like I did. Yours will be different. And you will learn from it. Unjudged, pain is sensation, pure and simple.

It also takes core strength to be able to keep my spine erect for 30 minutes while unsupported. I had this ability before I started sitting, developed from both yoga and sitting on an exercise ball with my back unsupported at my job.

If you’re thinking of starting a sitting practice, it’s a good idea to work on your core strength.

Another skill for physically sitting is knowing that your knees should be lower than your pelvis. I have used a round zafu, a crescent zafu, folded yoga blankets, and a yoga bolster to create this posture.

The physical skills of a sitting practice are far easier to describe than the awareness skills.

I’ve posted quite a bit about how I’ve been given the instruction “whole body awareness” by my Zen meditation teacher, and my various explorations of how to do that. It’s been a koan — something you try to “figure out” but can’t, and meanwhile you pay of attention to your actual experience.

One of the things I’m recognizing now is that being able to shift between what’s in the foreground of my attention (hearing a siren outside) to what’s in the background (hearing everything I can hear — the siren, traffic sounds, a helicopter, birds, squirrels, conversations, my refrigerator, my breathing, my cat purring, my tinnitus) is a skill developed in meditation.

Hearing everything I hear without labeling it: another skill to practice. Let it all in and be unnamed!

To further develop meditation skill, you can take that ability to move from narrow to wide from one sense (hearing) and include another sense, such as touch.

Expand to include your other senses: what you see (even with your eyes closed, unless you are sitting in pitch darkness, some light comes through your closed eyelids, smell, and taste.

Include your thoughts and your emotional state.

Let your senses blend with each other. Let them merge. Keep moving between the foreground and background, from narrow to broad awareness.

Another skill of meditation has to do with size or location, perspective or point of view. This is the hardest thing for me to write about right now, because I’m exploring a new edge of my sitting experience.

When I first started trying to become aware of my whole body after months of my attention being drawn to body parts that either hurt or felt good, I had to learn how to “back off”.

To become aware of my whole body, I had to somehow enlarge my awareness.

Now, that’s not something you hear often. “Hey, you, enlarge your awareness!”

At first I though this meant taking in less detail to get a bigger “picture”. It’s not that the detail goes away. I can zoom back in, so to speak. And it’s not visual, and not like a camera. Those are metaphors.

Here lately, I have experienced backing off even further, to where I experience whole awareness — aware of my body as an just another artifact of my nervous system, not really “my body”. Meanwhile, my nervous system is taking in everything.

There is not a clear way for me to tell you how to “back off” in meditation. It’s like I stumbled upon it by accident, and at this point, I don’t quite know what I did, but I do know that I experienced an interesting shift.

Maybe by the end of this year, I can be more clear. I appreciate you readers who bear with me in this exploration. I think we are getting some nuggets out of it.

And when you can let all of your awareness of the background become the foreg

Parking tickets and bad yoga

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YogaDork has a fantastic yoga blog. Check it out at http://www.yogadork.com/.

The post that most recently caught my attention is about how Cambridge, MA, police now give out parking tickets with yoga poses printed on the back! This is not a bad idea, in my opinion. However, the execution could have been better.

Amazingly, YogaDork has managed to get a photo of a ticket with the poses! Go here for a look: http://www.yogadork.com/2010/09/21/parking-tickets-now-with-yoga-instructions/.

The image is blurry, but it appears to show a figure doing sukhasana (easy cross-legged pose), a modification of lunge, and a variation of Warrior 1 with an extremely arched back.

Warning: The last pose shows someone with an extremely flexible spine doing a yoga pose. Please do not try this at home unless you’re an experienced yogi! Otherwise you could hurt your back.