Category Archives: mind

The Egg, a story by Andy Weir

Posted on by
Reply

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.

 

The unperversion of time

Posted on by
Reply

If stress is the perversion of time, as the late poet John O’Donohue said, how do we unpervert time? This is how I do it: I love downtime and require it in my life in order to function at my best.

By downtime, I mean free time, unplanned time alone, or in silence if others are around. Sundays are very good for downtime. So are early mornings.

I’ve experienced periods in my life with little or no downtime. I’m particularly recalling several crazy years when I was working full-time, going to graduate school part-time, and raising a child as a single mother.

What was I thinking?

I’ve filled my life up with so much busy-ness (often wonderful busy-ness) that I had no time left for myself. I mean, life does have a lot to offer. There’s so much to learn and do, so many ways to be useful and helpful and engaged.

I don’t mean to put down living a disciplined life. I do live a disciplined life, structured by commitments such as yoga, meditation, my job, my family and friends, my other interests.

Yet I have learned that I function best when I have at least an hour of unstructured alone time every day. I’ve heard that that was also one of the Buddha’s requirements. Love that man! I feel I’m in good company on this.

My daily hour of downtime hasn’t always been workable, but it is workable now, and I’m enjoying the heck out of it.

Most of my days start off with downtime. I set the alarm for early, and then take my sweet time waking up. I’m talking 45 minutes or an hour here. If I need a little more sleep, I hit the snooze alarm and doze back off, repeating as needed.

Often I let my mind wander and see what’s up with that. What is my mind drawn toward? I tell you, often it’s goofy! That early, sometimes I imagine morphing dreamlike combinations of images that are completely unrealistic in “the real world”. The oddest random things — memories, questions, images, words — come to mind. It’s fascinating and amusing.

I check in with my body. I notice where I feel tight, when the energy isn’t flowing well, and I move to open myself up. Sometimes I do some tapping, a simple version of EFT without words just to get my energy flowing well. I roll my eyes and blink. I notice my breathing. I stretch. Oh, do I stretch!

And then at some point without much thought I’m ready to roll out of bed and onto my feet, and move on to what’s next: pee, feed cat, do yoga, sit.

This is so much more enjoyable than the grind of slamming the alarm off and hitting the ground running, which I have done more than enough of.

This feels like an utter luxury, yet it’s something money can’t buy. You have to arrange your life to be able to do this. You go to bed early enough to have an hour to yourself in the morning. You make this a priority and let other things drop.

You know, I wonder if I’m overcompensating for being out of balance for years. Oh well, that’s for someone else to say. This just feels so right. This is part of living my right life.

I hope you can join us, the Buddha and me, and begin to revel in each awakening to a new day.

“Dear God, I’m in trouble” moments

Posted on by
2

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.

Hey, ma’am, this yoga feels good!

Posted on by
Reply

I taught yoga yesterday morning and yesterday evening. Two classes in a day! I feel lucky to be able to do this.

The morning class was to 5th graders at my granddaughter’s school. At back to school night a couple of weeks, the 5th grade teachers said this year they would focus on fitness. They have arranged for the kids to get outside for 15 minutes a day, and they were seeking volunteers to help with healthy snacks and fitness activities.

When I was in grade school so many years ago, we got about 30 minutes outside every day. If it was rainy or snowy, we went to the gym. Sometimes our physical activity was organized into team sports, track and field, or games (remember Red Rover?), and sometimes it was just plain old free play on the playground — jungle gym, merry-go-round, slide, swings. It was active. It was fun. I loved it.

Last year my granddaughter’s class did not get to go outside except on rare occasions. They have PE (often in the gym) every third day, rotating with art and music.

Spending time outside every day is important, in my opinion. We need the sunshine, fresh air, and trees and sky to look at. Even if we’re not consciously aware of it, exposure to nature suffuses us with more well-being. Fifteen minutes a day is a big deal.

With so many kids being obese these days, with the decline in school lunches and physical activity, I wanted to support their focus on fitness and volunteered to teach Hannah’s class some yoga. I won’t be able to sustain it all year, but I can spare 30 minutes one morning a week for a couple of months to teach them some yoga.

In fact, it just occurred to me that I can teach a few of them to lead the class after I stop teaching!

(And of course, it’s asana practice, not really yoga. We don’t get into philosophy — but yesterday I did include breath awareness and coordinating it with asanas, and I taught them that namaste means “I honor you”.)

About half the kids had done yoga or were at least familiar with it, and half were new to it. I cherish one little boy saying, when I had them do a seated side bend, “Hey, ma’am! This feels good!”

They were full of giggles and chatter, and I didn’t make any corrections. Let it be fun for them. Let them moo and meow in cat-cow.

I completely improvised. We were crowded onto a rug, limited to seated and standing poses that didn’t take up much room, and tabletop/dog. The first thing I taught was belly breathing. I crammed a lot of asanas into 30 minutes.

At the end we sat cross-legged with our backs straight and closed our eyes and paid attention to our breathing for one minute. During that minute, I heard a few whispers and giggles, and then … about 10 seconds of pure silence.

That silence was so powerful to me! I don’t think they get much of that.

I’ll return next week to teach yoga again. I will also teach them an NLP technique, Circle of Excellence, that they and their teacher will find useful this year, and for the rest of their lives.

In the evening, my Beginner’s Yoga, Beginner’s Mind class picked up again. We did four weeks together, had a week off, and are continuing for eight more weeks. These are adults, most of whom are really new to yoga. We meet in a home, moving the furniture aside.

What a joy it is to hear about them having more body awareness, noticing new strength, having more stamina!

I don’t improvise much in this class. Because of various students’ health issues, we take it slowly. We use props. I want them to feel safe and be safe. No yoga injuries! Taking yoga teacher training from a highly experienced Iyengar-certified teacher has given me the confidence I can do this. We are gradually building strength and flexibility.

We did a nice long savasana, and I got to use some NLP trancework, addressing the healing part within, asking it to communicate clearly to the conscious mind any new information about healing it would like to share.

What is your water? A fish story

Posted on by
Reply

This is one of my favorite teaching stories.

Once upon a time, a fish wandered outside his school. He was near the shore, and he heard voices talking. They kept mentioning the word “water”.

The fish had never heard this word before. Wah-ter. Water. He didn’t know what it meant.

He returned to his school and began asking the other fish, “Do you know what ‘water’ is?” No one knew.

The fish just couldn’t let it go. Surely someone must know. When his school encountered other schools, he asked the other school’s fish if they knew what ‘water’ is.

No one knew.

The fish grew up and realized his mission in life was to find out about ‘water’. He left home and swam far and wide, asking the many creatures he encountered what they knew about ‘water’.

In old age, with a long fishy beard and glasses, the fish returned to the school of his origin. A couple of other old fish noticed him and asked, “Say, aren’t you the fish who left in search of something called ‘water’?”

“Yes, I am,” the old fish replied.

“Well, tell us! Did you ever find out what ‘water’ is?” they asked.

“Yes, I did,” the old fish responded.

“Well, what is it? What is this ‘water’?” the fish eagerly asked.

The old fish looked at them and answered, “If I told you what water is, you simply wouldn’t believe it.”

Water. Love. Abundance. Presence. Peace. Wholeness. Flow.

What is your water? What have you been searching for that is there all along?

The interesting thing is, we need news of difference to notice anything. News of difference can come as something “new” that we haven’t encountered before, or it can come from refining our ability to notice — notice what’s already there that you didn’t notice before. Notice what’s always been there that you never noticed before.

Meditation — seeking the silence and space and presence within — is a path to noticing what you didn’t notice before. Shedding light on darkness. Enlightening.

So, what do you blame your good fortune on?

Posted on by
Reply

My friend Katie has been playing with the concept, “What’s your excuse?” using her big mind. She asks:

What’s your “excuse” for making real the compassionate/wildly loving/identity changing/unrealistically abundant goals and dreams you have?

It seems we can all easily access lots of excuses for why we are the way we are (poor me), why others are the way they are (poor them), why we failed at something, why we’re not living at our full potential and capacity. Bad parents, childhood trauma, family history, DNA, born that way, hard-wired, didn’t know any better, lacking something.

Not that those experiences have no consequence, but how far is that bad parents excuse going to take you? How long will it last? What will it take for you to stop making it?

What if those bad parents provided exactly the life experience you needed to discern parenting skill levels in others and perhaps even become an awesome parent yourself?

What if your childhood trauma provided you with the exact amount of suffering you needed to develop a highly compassionate heart?

What if that trauma prompted you later to try to find out who you would have been had that trauma not occurred?

What if you realized the trauma had moved you in a direction you would not otherwise have taken, and the full glory of your existence included trauma and recovery?

What are your excuses for your misfortunes and for your good fortunes?

Katie responded to her own question thusly:

 Here are some of my excuses for greatness/expansion: Having the three best parents imaginable, seeing the green flash on the ocean as a teenager, my best friends, standing on top of Haleakala at sunrise and sunset 3 days in a row, the existence of the book The Structure of Delight, Spider Joe’s celestial spider pictures, the fact that I could go on and on 🙂

We have a mutual friend who “blames” her wonderfulness on the fact that she was energetically zapped by 12 Peruvian shamans! I like that one a lot.

I enjoy believing that all of you wonderful friends (and friends I haven’t met yet) have created a wonderful world just for me to live in and appreciate.

In fact, there’s so much to appreciate, I currently narrow it down to just the miraculous blue sky of this planet, and all the wonders it holds — stars, constellations, meteor showers, the Milky Way, cloudscapes, thunderstorms, lightning, sunrises and sunsets, moonrises and moonsets, rainbows, green flashes, oh yeah. And space, spaciousness, the spaces between things.

Thank you, my friends, for showing this to me, for creating it, for letting me play.

Here’s an experiment. Every time you notice yourself blaming something or someone and feel the contractiveness associated with that activity, pause. Take a moment. Breathe. Tell yourself:

This is a story I made up.

Then find a more creative story, a funnier story, a fresher story.

No one owns “the truth,” but you own your truth. Life is more delicious with really good stories.

Absorbing a loss

Posted on by
Reply

Last Monday I went into work, and my boss came around, closed the door, and told me she had some sad news: my colleague Val had passed away on Sunday.

Val dead? I could not imagine those two words used in the same sentence. It was truly a shock.

This past week has been a tough week, absorbing the loss of someone I saw often over the past 6 years, someone I liked and admired. During this week, I witnessed my denial and acceptance dancing together, sometimes one leading, sometimes the other.

Val was one of my favorite people in the office where I work. All we had been told was that Val was out on “temporary but indefinite” leave. Somehow I had the impression that he was taking care of a seriously ill loved one.

I couldn’t imagine Val sick. When I was walking on the Town Lake trail regularly on weekends, I’d nearly always see Val running. He and his girlfriend took wonderful vacations — hiking on the Olympia peninsula, scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef, a camel ride to the Great Pyramids.

My boss told me Val learned he had lung cancer in May and took leave, that he’d been on chemo, that he’d come through the first round with encouraging signs of improvement, that he’d been in a lot of pain on Friday, had a good day on Saturday, and died Sunday due to a problem with his stent (where they put the chemo drugs in). He was 50.

I found some old emails from Val with links to his vacation photos. I found one of him in Olympic National Park, wearing a floppy hat, smiling hugely. I printed that photo and taped it to the now-closed door of his office. It  just felt right. I wanted to remember him happy.

A director later sent an email about Val’s passing and used the phrase “absorbing this loss.” I like that. Absorbing a loss is a gradual process, like a sponge soaking up water.

We bring our losses into our memories, and they become part of who we are.

I went to bed that night vividly remembering Val — the way he teased me after seeing me out on a date — how I was so wrapped up in the conversation, I didn’t notice him (Val) trying to get my attention. Seeing him running on the trail on Saturday mornings. How he laughed when I demonstrated lion pose in yoga class last spring. That was the last time I remember seeing him laugh.

I remembered many smaller moments, of passing him in the hallway, a conversation in the kitchen or across his desk, being in a meeting with him. These memories were more about remembering his physical presence.

Tuesday morning when I arrived at work, I immediately noticed a new sound, a cricket. It was in the kitchen, not visible but very audible.

For a split second, I felt annoyed, and then that feeling dropped completely, replaced by happiness that this cricket had decided to visit and hang out in our kitchen and serenade us.

On Wednesday, someone told me that more photos had been added to Val’s door. By Thursday there were maybe a dozen photos of Val. His door had become a shrine.

On Friday my acupuncturist noticed my grief. It manifests on the lung meridian. She helped me with talk and bodywork, but some part just did not want to give it up yet. It was about more than just Val’s death. It was about change: accepting change and making changes.

I took a solitary walk Friday night, reconciling, integrating, absorbing. I needed that.

I remembered seeing Val before he went on leave and noticing that he seemed stressed, tense. I thought it was about a project he was working on.

With hindsight, I know that he was feeling physical discomfort. Pain from lung cancer.

Friday night I had a dream in which a helicopter crashed in front of me. Usually that means dropping denial.

Val must have gotten so fragile in those 10 weeks of battling cancer.

Saturday I attended a celebration of Val’s life at the Umlauf Sculpture Garden. His large family and many people from work came.

Words were said, smiles and hugs shared, tears shed, photos and mementoes displayed, poems read, songs sung, and hands held, under the trees and the big Texas sky.

I am grateful for having lived through this difficult, emotional, contractive and expansive week. I am grateful to Val for sharing my path a little way.

It seems that with every death, we process every previous death and every future death, including our inevitable own. We are more fragile than we like to believe, held together by an arrangement of chemicals and electrical currents, and when our life force moves outside that narrow range, we dissolve and disperse.

I’m so sorry about you losing your health, Val. You are free of pain and suffering now, and for that I am happy for you. I am grateful that you lived a good life, of work and love and adventure, and that I knew you. Thank you for sharing your many gifts.

I am getting out on the river today, doing some paddle-boarding, and doing it for me, doing it because of the model Val provided.

You never know what the future holds.

Is pain necessary for growth?

Posted on by
3

The reason I bring this question up is that today, my left leg hurts, and I have a story about it.

The story starts small. My left leg hurts. Specifically it hurts above my knee and on my inner shin and on my outer calf. It’s a dull achiness that comes and goes.

The story gets bigger. I attribute this pain to adhesions in the fascia between muscles in my leg, and I attribute these adhesions to misalignments in my body’s structure. I’ve already straightened my spine with NUCCA. Working with my AK chiropractor to align my body is going well, but my leg is where the twist is showing up now that my pelvis is getting more aligned. My leg needs to unwind. And it’s Saturday.

(By the way, it feels true to me that the musculo-skeletal system is arranged in spirals. I dreamt a couple of months ago of seeing my left leg skinless, bloodless, with all the muscles showing individually and the bones visible. Then I went to the Our Body exhibit and saw a body with a leg just like in my dream.)

Here the story grows. My pelvis and spine have been twisted due to several factors. A car wreck in 1996 created much soft tissue injury around my sacrum and sacroiliac joints. Long before that, I experienced a severe shock to my system in my childhood, a sudden violent death of a family member. Trauma has deep and sometimes unpredictable affects on the human energy field.

And now the story gets even bigger. I was born prematurely, and it seems that I had an injury to a nerve going from my sacrum down my left leg from the time I was born, or before I was born, or shortly after I was born. I don’t remember, and my parents are gone. I do not know what happened or why I entered my lifetime with this nerve shut down.

I’m aware that some people claim to know all about past lives and karma and would probably be more than happy to tell me in a way that would alienate me from them. (You know what I mean: “I was just being honest, trying to be helpful.” I’ve done that kind of thing myself, and it’s usually deeply out of rapport with the recipient. You may be right, but you’re an asshole.)

The good news is, the nerve can come back alive. It’s not dead, it’s just been dormant. How much of our potential is like that?

Pain is a teacher, a signal that something is out of congruence, out of alignment, misfunctioning. And it is instinctive to want to avoid it. That’s why it’s such a good teacher. Pain is a kind of feedback that’s hard to ignore.

Pain is not bad. It’s just pain. It’s the nervous system doing its job. Pain feels yucky, but it has some positive points to it.

Pain motivates change. Pain motivates me to do something different, to learn something new. My specific SI joint-spine-leg pain has motivated me to do yoga, to get rolfed, to go to chiropractors, to work with Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais practitioners, to experience an array of alternative healing methods.

It’s motivated me to hang upside down and surrender to gravity pulling my body from the other direction. It’s motivated me to learn the trauma releasing exercises, and it’s drawn me to work with Patrice, my acupuncturist, who first told me to hang like a bat and to hold pigeon pose twice as long on the left side and who does myofascial release on me. (And who I can’t get hold of now either.)

I think I’ll go hang, do pigeon, and do the trauma releasing exercises.  Pain provides contrast. How would you know how good you felt if you didn’t have anything to compare it to?

Future home of the International Dream Center

Posted on by
Reply

It’s Monday night. Went back to work today after 4 days off for a trip to west Texas. Got home late last night, up early this morning. Right now I’m sensing some space to reflect and write, so here I am.

This travel was full of good memories, of exploring the new-to-me southern route from San Antonio to Fort Davis on US 90 with my friend and travel companion Linaka.

Out in the middle of nowhere we saw an interesting sign: Future Home of the International Dream Center. That in many ways was the theme for the trip, since it seems we all dream ourselves into being, dream the lives we live. We did some great dreaming out there in the Davis Mountains.

Big skies and long views were companions on this trip, so refreshing after the closeness of the city. The drier air and cooler temperatures were welcome too.

Thursday night we spread a tarp on the ground in the driveway of the Chihuahuan Desert Research Institute and faced an impossibly starry sky, with the glowing Milky Way bisecting the ethereal dome. Our friends Keith and Merrie found us there and joined us in screams and laughter every time a meteor blazed across the sky. Friend Vee joined us in our accommodations later, having driven out from Dallas.

Balancing activity with leisure is the art of vacations. We created a picnic and attended a Star Party at McDonald Observatory. That outdoor amphitheater for star-gazing near a mountaintop has got to be one of the great spots in Texas. We also sat around the pool at our “tourist camp” and conversed for hours.

Saturday night, I finally saw the mysterious Marfa lights, on my third attempt. Again, the sky treated us to a great show–not just the mystery lights appearing, disappearing, moving, but also a setting crescent moon turning orange, Mars, Venus, far-off lightning, and again, that Milky Way.

I must not forget to mention I got in a swim in Balmorhea State Park.

On the drive back, Keith and I stopped at Sonora Caverns for a trip 155 feet deep into Pacha Mama, past pristine cave formations.

And yes, I did some sitting! Even dropped in on a yoga class that was a bit more intense than my usual classes. I felt challenged and liked it. Even held bakasana (crane pose), an arm balance, for longer than I ever have before. I shower Linaka with gratitude for being a beginner yogi and taking the class with me.

I feel so blessed to have these friends, this time, this setting, these memories.

The Journey to Wild Divine

Posted on by
Reply

The Journey to Wild Divine is a computer video game. The game basically takes you on the hero’s journey.  Ho hum, right? I’m not much of a video game player.

The novelty of this game, thought, is that it comes with three devices you clip onto the fingertips of your non-mouse hand. The devices read your heartbeat and galvanic skin response (bioelectricity), and you progress through the game by changing your state.

If nothing else, I can learn how to change my state more easily. It promises to make that fun.

http://www.wilddivine.com/servlet/-strse-72/The-Passage-OEM/Detail

I installed it last night. There’s a screen where you can see its readings of your heartbeat. My skin was a little dry. After putting hand lotion on those fingertips and replacing the devices, I got a strong reading.

I started to play the game but got an error, and it was bedtime. Will debug when I have time.

Getting it was a lot of fun! The NLP meetup was Tuesday at Unity Center on Dessau Rd. Unity Center has been sold and will be taken over by a bunch of labyrinth-loving Baptists in September. The bookstore there, Sacred Shelf, is going out of business. The game, which sells for $300, had a sticker for $160. I’d checked my bank balance earlier that day and had the money, so I decided to buy it. It’s been on my wish list for at least a year.

Then I learned at the register that it was marked down 50%, so I got it for $80. I love bargains!

It felt like it was meant to be, me and The Journey to Wild Divine.