Category Archives: heart

Yoga update

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Cross-posted on the Yoga Classes page of this blog…

Unwinding, a restorative yoga class, meets Sundays from 5:30-7 pm at Oak Hill Oriental Medicine, 7413 Old Bee Caves Road. We warm up with Sun Salutations, do asanas for low back and neck issues, and move into deeply relaxing, melt-into-the-floor poses, using a variety of props. Your body and soul will love it! $15. For more information, call 512-775-3053 (clinic) or email me at the address on the Contact page of this blog.

The series Beginner’s Yoga, Beginner’s Mind continues for another 12 weeks starting December 1. You can join us any time. We meet on Wednesdays, 7:30-8:30 pm, in a private home in Wells Branch. $10. Please call for more information as space is limited. 512-507-4184.

Contact me if you’re interested in co-creating any of the following classes:

  • Non-Sweaty Office Yoga. I teach a mixed level class at your workplace over the lunch hour. We do deep stretching and strength-building without much sweat, ending with deep relaxation. Includes special poses to counteract heavy computer use, increase energy, and refresh well-being. $10.
  • Yoga for Kids. I teach a 30-minute class for children ages 8 and up. We learn belly breathing and asanas and end with 5 minutes of sitting in silence, which most of them love. I come to your home, classroom, or gathering place. No props used in this class. Rates highly negotiable!
  • Beginner’s Yoga, Beginner’s Mind. I teach yoga to novices. If you find yoga attractive but don’t feel comfortable in a studio or gym, this may be the class for you. We start with what you can do now and build on that. This class helps you gain strength, flexibility, alignment, body and mind awareness, and respect for your body. I come to your home and help you prepare for (or enhance) a home yoga practice or a beginner class at a studio, and I can offer personal attention and adjustments you may not find in a crowded studio or gym yoga class. 12 week minimum, up to 6 students.
  • Unwinding. I teach restorative yoga — passive poses held long, using props for deep stretches and relaxation — in your home or office. Gather family, friends, and neighbors for an evening session in your living room. You supply the mats, I bring the props, we move the furniture. Get rid of unwanted stress and tension you didn’t even know you had! Experience more spaciousness and freedom in your body! Find relief from low back and neck issues as well! 90-minute classes, weekly.

To request a class, ask questions, and/or make a proposal, please call me at 507-4184.

Article: This Is Your Brain on Metaphors

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I found this article in the New York Times fascinating, particularly the information about how the brain confuses the literal and figurative.

Consider an animal (including a human) that has started eating some rotten, fetid, disgusting food. As a result, neurons in an area of the brain called the insula will activate. Gustatory disgust. Smell the same awful food, and the insula activates as well. Think about what might count as a disgusting food (say, taking a bite out of a struggling cockroach). Same thing.

Now read in the newspaper about a saintly old widow who had her home foreclosed by a sleazy mortgage company, her medical insurance canceled on flimsy grounds, and got a lousy, exploitative offer at the pawn shop where she tried to hock her kidney dialysis machine. You sit there thinking, those bastards, those people are scum, they’re worse than maggots, they make me want to puke … and your insula activates. Think about something shameful and rotten that you once did … same thing. Not only does the insula “do” sensory disgust; it does moral disgust as well. Because the two are so viscerally similar. When we evolved the capacity to be disgusted by moral failures, we didn’t evolve a new brain region to handle it. Instead, the insula expanded its portfolio.

Not only does the brain fail to distinguish rotten food from rotten behavior, it also fails to distinguish between being in need of a bath and dirty doings:

Another truly interesting domain in which the brain confuses the literal and metaphorical is cleanliness. In a remarkable study, Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto and Katie Liljenquist of Northwestern University demonstrated how the brain has trouble distinguishing between being a dirty scoundrel and being in need of a bath. Volunteers were asked to recall either a moral or immoral act in their past. Afterward, as a token of appreciation, Zhong and Liljenquist offered the volunteers a choice between the gift of a pencil or of a package of antiseptic wipes. And the folks who had just wallowed in their ethical failures were more likely to go for the wipes. In the next study, volunteers were told to recall an immoral act of theirs. Afterward, subjects either did or did not have the opportunity to clean their hands. Those who were able to wash were less likely to respond to a request for help (that the experimenters had set up) that came shortly afterward. Apparently, Lady Macbeth and Pontius Pilate weren’t the only ones to metaphorically absolve their sins by washing their hands.

And — get this — holding a warm drink affects judging personalities as warmer!

Another example of how the brain links the literal and the metaphorical comes from a study by Lawrence Williams of the University of Colorado and John Bargh of Yale. Volunteers would meet one of the experimenters, believing that they would be starting the experiment shortly. In reality, the experiment began when the experimenter, seemingly struggling with an armful of folders, asks the volunteer to briefly hold their coffee. As the key experimental manipulation, the coffee was either hot or iced. Subjects then read a description of some individual, and those who had held the warmer cup tended to rate the individual as having a warmer personality, with no change in ratings of other attributes.

The author goes on to talk about what really ends bloodshed and creates peace. Highly recommended reading!

3,000 views! Thank you, readers!

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Just a quick note to share my gratitude with you, the readers of my blog. Today my odometer rolled over, so to speak, and I have reached the milestone of 3,000 views!

Last summer, after a jump in readers, the number 3,000 came to mind as a goal I hoped to reach by the end of this year.  Now I’ve reached it a month and a half early. That means the rest of this year is pure lagniappe! Or icing on the cake, or gravy, if you prefer those metaphors.

Thank you for stopping by.

The number doesn’t really tell me much. It’s just the number of people who have viewed my blog.

It doesn’t tell me which posts and topics you like most or which titles whet your curiosity. I do know that a few of you are subscribers, some are occasional readers via Facebook and Twitter (@zafu_report), and some find my blog by accident, searching for information on, say, trauma releasing exercises or brain waves.

I posted an analysis on October 1st, and the way I put it all together bears repeating:

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!

The brain geeks among you have something to look forward to. I’ve been experimenting with theta waves and will post about it before too long.

Writing and reading are a reciprocal exchange. All I can ask is that you come back, enjoy yourself, and please do not hesitate to give me feedback and comments!

Again, thank you for stopping by.

Bumping into a former yoga teacher, dancing in Whole Foods

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Today I had a gratifying day. It is the first day of the East Austin Studio Tour (E.A.S.T.), and I live in East Austin. Many people come through the neighborhood to check out artists and studios.

I walked from my house to a studio two blocks away, and there, sitting at the kitchen table, was a former yoga teacher of mine. I spotted her beautiful, completely white hair, and then her twinkly blue eyes and lovely face clicked with me, and we had a little reunion.

I hadn’t seen Sandra Gregor in several years. I attended her twice-weekly yoga classes when I worked at Vignette for two and a half years, 2000-2002.

Doing yoga with Sandra that regularly back then helped me become yoga. The renowned teacher Shiva Rea says you don’t do yoga, you are yoga. Yoga gets into your body and saturates your being with well-being. With time and dedicated practice, you become yoga.

I loved that yoga break in the middle of the day. Sandra brought a CD player and had a way of teaching yoga that was calming and relaxing, especially needed in a competitive environment like Vignette. By the time we got to savasana at the end of each class, it was like being in kindergarten again with the best kindergarten teacher in the world and having nap time.

Sandra’s serenity and kindness made a lasting impression on me.

She is in my lineage of yoga teachers. I believe she once told me that her background was in Integral yoga, with some Sivananda experience. So much of my experience has been in Iyengar yoga. I’m grateful to have some breadth.

Later I learned that she is well-known in the art community as an art consultant, having been hired to select the artwork for The Crossings and for the Dell Children’s Hospital.

She is still teaching yoga and looking as radiant as ever, as if she had not changed a bit in 10 years.

I connected with another friend, Nicky Jeffords, at her studio, and she told me about a workshop that sounds like a must do event for me. I will write about it later. Nicky is someone who discovered her artistic talents in mid-life, not having a clue that she would become a quite gifted portrait painter.

Later I went to Whole Foods and had a fun and lovely Saturday night dance with chiropractor and human being extraordinaire Bo Boatright, right there in the essential oils aisle, dancing to the background music that Whole Foods plays.

Saturday night seems to be R&B night. We danced to Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, and The Supremes as people walked by and smiled.

We put smiles on lots and lots of faces tonight.

The joy of being a Five

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I finally figured something out, something that has been fishy for a long time where I work, that no one will speak openly about, like a shameful family secret.

I have wracked my brain trying to figure out what makes sense about this situation, which has been rather crazy-making.

I went into a theta state listening to a new CD, and I got an image of being in a rowboat out on the water, and the large and long arms of a woman who remained submerged reached up and grabbed control of the boat.

Oh, and when the other chief instigator of crazy-making, the one who is not submerged but deeply connected with long-armed woman’s energy, came into my office to say hello, I just happened to be watching this hilarious video.

The image and that “coincidence” tell me a story about what’s really going on.

I’m going to use this blog post to address this shadowy, long-armed woman. Everyone else who reads it, please pray for the most wounded of the two women to find peace. We will work on the other one later.

I know who you are, and it is time for you to completely let go. Way past time. This is no way to be living your life, through someone else.

I am sorry that you are in so much emotional pain and carry such a great need to control things. There must be a great well of tender vulnerability underneath that furious need to control others.

Your path to true happiness — and it is as available to you as to anyone else — lies in fully acknowledging your vulnerability and your fear.

Life is short, time passes quickly, and with it our only chance. Soften.

Let go of the need to control, let down your guard, and heal your heart.

By doing this, amazingly, you become able to lovingly protect yourself, tend to your own life, and become the magnanimous, self-surrendering, courageous, forgiving person that you really are.

You can find the help you need.

Best wishes to you. Now go your own way.

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.

 

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!

“Dear God, I’m in trouble” moments

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I’m remembering this scene from the movie Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Spoiler alert: If you haven’t seen/read it yet and want to preserve your innocence, stop reading now.

It came at a point when the main character — Julia Roberts playing Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote the book the film was based on — was recognizing that she wasn’t happy in her marriage and in her life. She looked around and felt like she had no reason to be unhappy — she had it made by certain standards. A nice cushy life, a good man for a husband, friends, professional success, a nice home.

The fact remained — she was unhappy. Unlike her friends blissing out about the arrival of their long-desired baby, she didn’t dream of having a family. She kept a folder of travel destinations.

Then Liz/Julia has her “dear God, I’m in trouble” scene. It is the middle of the night. Her husband is asleep in another room. She’s as alone as she has ever been. She may have been crying.

She kneels, tentatively places her hands in prayer position, and whispers that line to a God she has neglected and disregarded. “Dear God, I’m in big trouble.”

At least that’s how I remember the scene. I thought it was well-played. How often do we get to witness these moments in others’ lives?

Dear God, I’m in big trouble. That thought surfaced into my conscious mind during a time of too-much-busyness several years ago. An inkling that I wasn’t happy managed to get through during a brief pause. Something was wrong, or maybe not wrong, just not right.

I had no idea what to do with that piece of information. I also became aware that I was exhausted.

I had what I believed was a good relationship with a good man. I had a good steady job, volunteered with a nonprofit helping women in prison, and was also was editing an anthology of women’s writing. I owned a charming vintage house close to downtown in an up-and-coming creative Austin neighborhood. I had spent a couple of years processing my major childhood trauma and felt most of it was behind me.

In some ways, I thought I had (finally) arrived.

Yet here was news of difference, an inner voice (was it me?) whispering to God: I’m in trouble. This isn’t my right life.

Did I have any idea what my right life was? No! It was just not the life I was living. Did I do anything about it? No. I had no clue what to do.

And shortly after that, the shit hit the fan in my relationship, I resigned from my volunteer work, and I hunkered down, feeling like a mess.

The Universe did for me what I couldn’t do for myself.

I withdrew more and more from the world and started meditating. I discovered that although I was in emotional pain, I was bigger than that. Much bigger.

That was my India.

It became clear that I needed to focus on taking care of my health. I got tested for food sensitivities and learned not only that I had too much candida, but also that I was sensitive to wheat, among a dozen other things.

I cleared the excess candida by rigorously following the prescribed diet. I learned to avoid wheat, and I felt so damn much better getting it out of my diet. (In hindsight, it was probably from glyphosate that had been sprayed on non-organic wheat. I was not sensitive to gluten.)

That was my Rome. Instead of stuffing my face and having to buy bigger jeans, I lost weight, but I felt so much better.

I have spent time on Maui twice since then, so maybe Maui is my Bali. II have plenty of shamans available, thank you very much. I’m still waiting for my Javier Bardem to appear.

All of that started several years ago, in 2007.

In hindsight, I recognize that overworking, overdoing, is one of the ways I have distracted myself from talking to God, higher power, Spirit, Source.

I recognize that that voice that talks to God is full of innocence and beauty and should never be ignored.

I recognize that when I am stuck, the Universe shifts to unstick me…and I don’t always have to wait for the Universe — I can create shifts myself, or at least the shifts I think I need…and find out later if they took me closer to God and “my right life.”

in a way, it’s like sailing, which is constant course-correcting.

I recognize that one of the ways to hear that voice more often, to get more familiar with it, to converse with it, is to make a habit of sitting in silence every day so I can hear it. Even if it’s just 10 minutes, that is time well spent, because it could be all that helps me be more centered in my authentic life.

Update: It’s 2023. I went through another big shift in late 2010, which led to me selling my house and starting career change from technical writer to bodyworker, and although there have been a few bumps in the road since then, I’m doing my right livelihood.

I’m aware that another shift is underway. It’s not exactly clear yet, but daily sitting in silence as well as asking for help from my higher self and feeling gratitude for all that is right in my life are walking me through this part of my journey.