poem: For Freedom

i felt resonant especially with the third verse after our tree meditations at the nightwalking workshop.

click the title of this post to see it on the web, with photo and music.

m

For Freedom

As a bird soars high
In the free holding of the wind,
Clear of the certainty of ground,
Opening the imagination of wings
Into the grace of emptiness
To fulfill new voyagings,
May your life awaken
To the call of its freedom.

As the ocean absolves itself
Of the expectation of land,
Approaching only
In the form of waves
That fill and pleat and fall
With such gradual elegance
As to make of the limit
A sonorous threshold
Whose music echoes back among
The give and strain of memory,
Thus may your heart know the patience
That can draw infinity from limitation.

As the embrace of the earth
Welcomes all we call death,
Taking deep into itself
The right solitude of a seed,
Allowing it time
To shed the grip of former form
And give way to a deeper generosity
That will one day send it forth,
A tree into springtime,
May all that holds you
Fall from its hungry ledge
Into the fecund surge of your heart.

~ John O'Donohue ~

(To Bless the Space Between Us)

blind leading blind

yesterday morning i was driving to work, late already, stopped at the red light at the northbound i-35 access road and 15th street, cars in front of me, behind me, and to the sides.

i noticed a young black man with a white cane trying to--i couldn't tell if he was trying to cross the access road or 14th street. he wasn't in the right place to do either and was wandering into a lane of traffic. he'd go back and try again, facing a different direction.

i rolled down my passenger window and yelled, "what are you trying to do?" he came over and said he couldn't understand me, so i rephrased my question, "where are you trying to go?"

he said he was trying to get to the school for the blind. that's on 45th, quite a distance.

"hop in," i said, mindful of cars waiting behind me and the green light and a long difficult journey for him ahead.

tried to call my boss and tell her i'd be late, but my cell phone had run down. oh, well, nothing is pressing.

nathaniel was his name, and he was from up north by his speech, not a texas accent. indiana, he said.

he said he had lost his cane, and sure enough, i noticed he was using a length of white PVC pipe as a cane. he said he'd been up all night. he said he got disability payments but had to have an annual review, and his check was being held until the paperwork on that was completed. sounded plausible.

he had green eyes that either looked straight ahead or were closed.

he was going to the school for the blind to get a new cane and also see if he could get a few bucks until his check came through. he lived in an eastside rooming house that cost $12 per night, and he had no money. he was hungry and tired.

with a reframe of the problem, i ended up giving him $15, telling him it was a ten and 5 ones. he asked me not to give him the money in front of people near his rooming house. he asked which bill was on top.

he asked me to take him back to his rooming house. he said he could call the school for the blind and they'd mail him a cane, which would arrive tomorrow. he told me to turn on MLK, which we were approaching.

i asked him how he'd gotten in this situation. he repeated the story about the disability check being late. i meant in a broader sense... and then we got to 13th and chicon where he had asked me to take him. another young black man was there who spoke to him after he got out of the car. it's a "hangout" area, the core of the old black community in austin.

so my $15 got him a place to stay for 2 nights and $3 to eat with. he could sleep, eat, and solve the other immediate problem, the cane.

OR...(and this has happened before with "out-of-place people" on the east side with fantastic stories all ending with a desire for me to give them money) i got scammed.

if the latter, he went to a lot of trouble, and i'm a fool.

i decided i'd rather be a fool than ignore a blind person wandering through traffic.

when i let him out, he said he'd see me again in heaven.

lizard liberation

i got a couple of bags of charcoal out of my shed and put them in my car trunk to take with me to the nightwalking workshop at buescher s.p. this past weekend.

i unloaded them but ended up not using them.

when i was loading my trunk for the journey home, i saw a lizard in my trunk. it looked like the lizards that live in my shed--mottled, textured, reddish brown, slow moving. it hid from me and the light.

i worried that it might not come out, that it might die in my trunk.

when i got home and unloaded my trunk, i saw it scurry out of the trunk and disappear and felt relieved.

no pain

i woke up monday morning with no pain, stiffness, or tightness anywhere in my body.

that was pretty amazing and unusual.

i attribute it to several things:

--sunday morning, waking up in mini-cabin #3 in buescher state park, i felt sore and stiff all over, so i did yoga. for about an hour. i mostly did the sun salutation, doing each small move slowly, over and over and over, until i felt complete with it.

--wearing my keen crocs on sunday all day. these shoes conform to my soles well, and i can feel the ground through them. oh, for some winter shoes with the same qualities!

--paying attention to my footstrike, particularly to spreading my weight evenly on 3 points: ball of big toe, ball of little toe, and center of heel. rising on toes to get those pads even, and then lowering my heels.

--peripheral walking, both day and night. the eye position somehow lowers the center of gravity into the pelvic bowl. the theory is that it activates the parasympathetic nervous system.

--and of course, all the body work i do--the regular yoga practice and working with patrice who does acupuncture and myofascial release work, the hanging upside down, foot stretches, knee circles and so forth that she has taught me.

may such days come with more frequency, so i may be healed of scoliosis.

feet

Tias Little, yoga teacher and anatomist, writes about the importance of the feet. This in-depth article includes practices you can do that increase awareness. You don't have to be a yogi to benefit.

Walking on uneven surfaces is good for your whole body. Walking on concrete doesn't activate all the little muscles used to keep balance on uneven terrain. These little muscles help keep the whole body pliable and flexible, able to accommodate variations, from the ground up. And what a metaphor that is for life skills!

poem: What's in the Temple?

What's In The Temple?

In the quiet spaces of my mind a thought lies still, but ready to spring.
It begs me to open the door so it can walk about.
The poets speak in obscure terms pointing madly at the unsayable.
The sages say nothing, but walk ahead patting their thigh calling for us to follow.
The monk sits pen in hand poised to explain the cloud of unknowing.
The seeker seeks, just around the corner from the truth.
If she stands still it will catch up with her.
Pause with us here a while.
Put your ear to the wall of your heart.
Listen for the whisper of knowing there.
Love will touch you if you are very still.

If I say the word God, people run away.
They've been frightened--sat on 'till the spirit cried "uncle."
Now they play hide and seek with somebody they can't name.
They know he's out there looking for them, and they want to be found,
But there is all this stuff in the way.

I can't talk about God and make any sense,
And I can't not talk about God and make any sense.
So we talk about the weather, and we are talking about God.

I miss the old temples where you could hang out with God.
Still, we have pet pounds where you can feel love draped in warm fur,
And sense the whole tragedy of life and death.
You see there the consequences of carelessness,
And you feel there the yapping urgency of life that wants to be lived.
The only things lacking are the frankincense and myrrh.

We don't build many temples anymore.
Maybe we learned that the sacred can't be contained.
Or maybe it can't be sustained inside a building.
Buildings crumble.
It's the spirit that lives on.

If you had a temple in the secret spaces of your heart,
What would you worship there?
What would you bring to sacrifice?
What would be behind the curtain in the holy of holies?

Go there now.

~ Tom Barrett ~


(Keeping in Touch)

click the title to see it on panhala.net with photo and music

book review: The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe

I recently finished reading The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe. As promised, here is my take on it. Click the title of this post to order the book from amazon.com.

Author Lynne McTaggart is an investigative journalist. Her mission here was to examine the cutting edge of science, quantum physics specifically, by reading studies, interviewing scientists, and translating scientific findings into a layperson's language while maintaining as much accuracy as possible.

She got interested in this topic when she kept bumping into hard scientific evidence about methods of healing that went against the prevailing ideas about human biology, including studies validating homeopathy, acupuncture, and spiritual healing.

Now some of you may think, what's the big deal? Everybody knows they work, even if science doesn't know how. Well, the answer to that is that science is a prevailing paradigm in Western culture,and science is on the verge of a revolution that goes far beyond alternative medicine. McTaggart says that scientific stories create our perception of the universe and how it operates, and from this we shape our social structures.

What McTaggart discovered is that a small number of scientists have been working on the fringe of science (although their work is slowly becoming more and more acceptable to the mainstream), using the scientific method to prove things that fly in the face of the scientific belief system. These scientists were often at risk of ostracism from the main scientific community, yet they kept at their research because like true explorers, they knew they were on to something new, and that's what is exciting about science--discovery of the new. These men and women are the revolutionaries of the scientific community.

McTaggart interviewed scientists from around the world, adding personal information about their appearance, background, and so forth to humanize them. She stuck with scientists with solid credentials--some at prestigious universities like Princeton and Stanford--and limited her reporting to studies using rigorous scientific criteria, such as the double blind study design with a control group. The bulk of the book is about their studies.

She interviewed 22 scientists, some up to 20 times, basically translating their findings into metaphors that you and I can understand, in the process receiving an education in quantum physics, statistics, brain neuroscience, and other hard sciences.

Very few of these scientists would discuss the metaphysical implications of their work. McTaggart herself says that although her sympathies lie with alternative medicine, she still demands scientific proof. "There is little of the woo-woo about me," she writes.

The prevailing scientific paradigm is based on Isaac Newton's work in the 1600s. Remember the apple falling on Newton's head and his "discovery" of gravity? Newton basically saw the universe as a machine that follows laws and behaves predictably, independent of human observation.

Then came quantum physics in the early part of the 20th century. The smallest bits of matter were not set things. They were mutable, often many possible things all at the same time, and had no meaning in isolation but only in relationship to everything else. Subatomic particles existed in all possible states until disturbed by us--our observation influenced them to settle down. Time and space did not exist except as arbitrary constructs.

Most scientists assumed the strange quantum world only existed in the world of dead matter, or that one set of laws (Newtonian) applied to the visible world and another to subatomic particles (quantum). It was all so counter-intuitive to their belief system.

Reading her stories about the studies was a good experience. Some were pretty amazing. I especially liked the studies where scientists worked with psychics--who could see inside machinery (influencing it at the same time) and also describe remote locations they'd never been to and only had geographic coordinates for. Even in Russia. (Hint: The NSA gets involved.)

In a nutshell, some of the findings are:
--Human beings and all living things are a coalescence of energy in a field of energy connected to every other thing in the world. There is no duality to our bodies in relation to the universe. There is one field that underlies everything, us included.

--"Nothing" does not exist. Even in absolute zero degrees (the closest we can get to a vacuum), things are happening. There is a field of energy, called the Zero Point Field.

--The field is a recording medium for everything, the means by which everything communicates with everything else. It holds the memories of everything that ever happened. The brain is a receiver.
[define coherence and resonance]

--Perfect coherence is an optimum state just between chaos and order.

--Health is a state of perfect subatomic communication.

--Each molecule in the universe has a unique frequency, and the language it uses to communicate is a resonating wave. Molecules "speak" to each other, regardless of distance, virtually instantaneously.

--We perceive objects by resonating with them--perception occurs by tuning in to the field.

--Consciousness is a global phenomenon that occurs everywhere in the body, not just in the brain. (Perhaps it occurs everywhere, not just in the body. Perhaps consciousness IS the field.)

--Observation puts a halt to randomness and creates order.

--Intent can change the physical world, even the past.

--Pairs of people of the opposite sex have more power to influence outcomes, and bonded couples have even more power, than individuals.

--Women produce better results at influencing outcomes when multitasking; men when concentrating on the task at hand.

--Consciousness results when individual quantum particles lose their individuality and begin acting as a single unit.

--Coherence of consciousness is the greatest form of order known to nature.

--Wishing or intending makes our own coherence infectious.

--People can influence their body functions by directing their attention.

--Other people can have almost the same mind-body effect on you that you can have on yourself.

--Influence increases depending on how much it matters to the influencer or how much he/she can relate to the influencee.

--The greatest effect is when influencees really needed influence. Needing something such as calming down or focusing attention makes people more receptive to influence.

--Humans have a latent ability to see anywhere across any distance. Even those skeptical of this idea can be primed and do this after a little practice.

--The important ingredient in remote viewing is being in a relaxed, even playful, atmosphere that avoids causing anxiety or nervous anticipation in the viewer.

--The information often comes across as if in a dream state. Interpreting or analyzing it colors impressions as the information is still coming through and makes it less accurate.

--People can remotely view the past and the future. It's as if the field is just NOW and all points in space and time exist in a single instant.

--People can influence the future. Using a random click generator, they could influence the output of the machine before it generated clicks. Present or future intentions act on initial probabilities and determine what events actually come into being.

--It is important for the influencer to be the first observer. Others observing first make the machine less susceptible to later influence. So focused attention freezes the system.

--Theoretically everything in the future exists in the ralm of pure potential, and in seeing into the future or past, we help shape it and bring it into being.

--Theretically, the bottom level of the Zero Point Field is not electromagnetic. The secondary fields (scalar waves) travel far faster than the speed of light and provide the ultimate holographic blueprint of the world for all time.

--To remove time, remove separateness. Pure energy at the quantum levelexissts as a vast continuum of fluctuating charge. We create time and space, and therefore we create our own separateness.

--On a subconscious physiological level, we have an inkling when we are about to receive bad news or when bad things are going to happen to us.

--People communicate and respond to remote attention, although unaware of it.

--When the left brain is quiet and the right brain predominates, ordinary people have access to telepathy.

--You can block or prevent influences you don't want by visualizing a protective shield.

--The more organized a sender's consciousness, the more ordering influence on a less-organized recipient. The most ordered brain pattern always prevails.

--The capacity of our brains to receive information from the field is limited in ordinary consciousness; states of altered consciousness such as meditation and relaxation loosen this constraint.

--Children under five permanently function in the alpha state.

--Gentle wishing works better rather than intense willing when using intentions to achieve certain outcomes.

--Plants have empathy for each other. They respond when a neighboring plant is injured or dies.

--Death is a disturbance in the field.

--Human intention can be used as an extraordinarily potent healing force. We can establish greater 'order' in another person.

--Distant healing works. All kinds of healing were tested. Conventionally religious Christians, evangelicals, kabbalists, Buddhists, and healers from the Barbara Brennan School of Healing Light, those changing colors/vibrations in patients' auras, using contemplative healing and visualizations, working with tones and singing or bells, a Lakota Sioux pipe ceremony with drumming and chanting, a qi gong master.

---The main commonality of successful distant healing was healers being able to put out their intention for the patients' health and then surrender to some kind of healing force.

--Asking for help was more effective than not. Whether it was Jesus, Spider Woman, or a healing energy was irrelevant. Help came in the form of energy.

--Experienced healers have abnormally high electric field patterns during healing sessions. This may be a sign of greater coherence.

--Intention on its own heals, and healing is a collective force. There may be a collective memory of healing spirit.

--Illness may be isolation, from oneself, community, and spirituality, rather than physical conditions.

--Experiments suggested individual consciousness doesn't die. Death may be a decoupling of our frequency from the matter of our cells. It may be simply returning to the field.

And there's more. I'm getting tired of summarizing; maybe you are getting tired of reading this very long post too.

One more point sticks out. McTaggart actually says, on page 159, "the left brain is the enemy of The Field."

NLPers, does this ring a lot of bells for you, about congruence, rapport, maps/territories?

Hypnotists, are you inspired to bring the implications of quantum physics into your trances?

McTaggart's next book is about Intent, inspired by what she learned in writing this book. I intend to get it!

2012

my daughter told me that about once a year, she has a dream about the end of the world. this month she dreamed about 2012, that portentous year in which the aztecs predicted a momentous shift of some sort would occur. it's interpreted as a major change in world order, an apocalypse, an asteroid crashing into earth, aliens taking earthlings aboard their spaceship, a great shift in consciousness, spirituality, psychic connection. (from wikipedia)

lela dreamed that it was winter solstice, 2012, and the earth changed the direction of her rotation. it took a couple of hours. some people were not affected, some got dizzy, some passed out.

the earth's axis also changed, resulting in a shift in seasons. winter became summer, summer became winter. this wreaked havoc on agriculture. people in developed countries managed to survive with processed food. people in poor countries were devastated. it took about a year to adjust, in lela's dream.

whatever it is, i believe it could be metaphoric for a shift in consciousness.

i've been reading The Field. one of the key points is that in western culture, we still believe and behave for the most part with the principles of newtonian physics. yet quantum physics has gone way beyond. everything is connected to everything, intent can influence outcomes and even the past, group energy is powerful, distant healing works, the more coherent influences the less coherent to become more coherent, et cetera.

when i finish reading this book, i intend to post its key points here. look for it!

i joined facebook a few days ago, and the connectivity is pretty amazing. you can see what your friends have posted, who became their friends, their posts and their friends' posts, etc. it's a big network, and every interactive.

maybe this is the paradigm shift occurring now, and the peak will occur in 2012. maybe it's a critical mass of people understanding that we are all connected that will really change the world. 2012 will be an election year; obama will be finishing his first term as president.

2012 could also be the year the earth reaches her "tipping point" and responds violently to the changes humans have wrought. air-water-soil pollution, mining and drilling, managing the oceans badly, chemical and fossil-fuel based agriculture, chemical and fossil-fuel based lifestyles, deforestation...

and maybe 2012 will bring both a shift in consciousness and the earth "talking back".

we shall see.

gratitude

i am so grateful for so much. for my dreams and for all the uncertainty that precedes the significant ones that represent shifts. for my 19-year-old cat, sitting next to my computer as i type this. she often visits me when i go to sleep and when i wake. i am grateful for her long years of companionship.

i am deeply grateful for my daughter lela and my granddaughter hannah. words just cannot express how much i love and care about and enjoy them.

i am grateful that i am able to choose good food and to recognize when i eat something not so good for my body, like the yummy strawberry cheesecake i had today for dmitry's birthday.

i am grateful for co-workers willing to swap being on call on weekends so that i can work this weekend and have the following weekend, the weekend of nightwalking, off.

i am grateful for naropa university for existing. looking through their graduate programs is like christmas morning.

i am grateful for my brothers and their wives and children, frank, bill, kathy, helen, grace, and sam. i think about all of them often with much affection.

i'm grateful for my friends, for kathleen, fantasia, peggy, colleen, linda, sarah, marco, keith and katie, jaime and kathleen, my NLP community, my shamanic community. and i'm grateful for all the friends i haven't met yet or befriended yet.

i'm even grateful for some of the rougher parts in my life--the loss of my sister, my father's asperger syndrome. they have been part of this experience, and i savor the contrast of when life and relationships are going well. they also keep me humble.

i'm grateful i have a good job with a good salary, a good hybrid car, a house that's homey, a yard with a garden and now a firepit.

i'm grateful for my health, awareness, heart, mind, body. i'm grateful that eleanor stretches me in yoga and that i have improved so much over the last 3 years, able to do poses i wouldn't have imagined i could do.

i'm grateful for patrice and all her experience, knowledge, and wisdom. and for active life chiropractic and for nina davis, my cranio-sacral therapist. together we are getting me healthy, in a way i wouldn't have believed possible a few years ago.

i'm very grateful for this incredible planet--its sky, winds, weather, soil, rock, rivers, oceans, islands, mountains, its incredible range of geography and beauty, for sunrises and sunsets, plants, animals, cities, deserts, poles.

meerkats

i took my granddaughter hannah, age 8, to wheatsville co-op wednesday to pick up a few things. i pick her up on wednesdays when lela has her intro to nursing lab.

there's a very small toy section there. she picked out a small stuffed animal, a tawny meerkat with huge eyes and a long tail that hooked at the end.

hannah told me that meerkats have such tails so they can hang on things and look into meers.

dream: i see the bigger picture

this morning i shut off the alarm thinking i'd get up, but then went back to sleep, unusual for me.

in my dream, kathleen and i are traveling together. we are at a college campus that reminds me a bit of oklahoma state university's campus, the first college i attended. we have been doing a workshop there, and soon it will be time to leave.

we've been boarding with some cool people, very open and generous. it's morning, and i'm getting my breakfast together. a plate has been set out, but i put it back and get a green cut-glass bowl down from a cupboard. then i start looking for something to eat. i open cabinets and the fridge, selecting and rejecting and tasting various foods. i assemble something that is something like a granola with honey and yogurt and dried fruit on it, and i eat it.

i go outside. i somehow gain height--and perspective. i see that the town is on a gentle slope down toward a valley with a river, and across the valley in the distance is a range of mountains.

this isn't an ordinary range of mountains. they are of a fairly uniform height, and they are fairly evenly spaced. each mountain top is snowcapped. they look like they are in a fantasy landscape, almost as if painted, almost as if in a children's book/film like narnia. there is something special about them.

the view is breathtakingly beautiful. i want to go into those mountains.

i come back down and find kathleen and tell her about it. she's excited too. we decide that's where we'll go next.

i remember that i have an office job that i've taken time off from to do this workshop. i consider the consequences of not going back: people will be inconvenienced, and i will be abandoning my personal items in that office, photos, etc. i know they will send my check to me; it'll be in the mailbox when i get home.

that job now seems so tiny, distant, and irrelevant. the mountains, and adventure, call.

i wake up.

===

associations:
my roommate kathleen is leaving this morning for a one-day seminar on getting set up as a clean space practitioner in san francisco. i am with her in spirit.

my job now is definitely not a throw-away job like my job in the dream.

boulder, and naropa university, are in the mountains.

feeling thrilled and excited is thrilling and exciting!

life often spirals with time, allowing us to re-experience aspects differently, from who we are NOW.

i've been afraid to really go for a dream. i've held back, discounted, repressed. now it's time to face, cultivate, play.

follow your bliss.

marianne williamson on the election

click the title to read her interpretation of the meaning of this election. she sees it as a fulfillment of the promise of the 1960s, that we were too immature and angry to make manifest.

she says bobby kennedy and martin luther king jr. can now rest in peace.

thinking

this morning i woke up, and my monkey mind jumped right into high gear. "remember this!" "don't forget that!" "oh, yeah, and what about that?"

the sweet thing is knowing there's an alternative.

monkey mind takes itself so seriously. even when it's amused at everything. it likes attention. it likes to be the center of attention. "ta da! look at me! i'm THINKING! woo! listen to THIS..."

it actually likes to believe it runs my life.

so i let it believe that and do its thing. it's just that my awareness has become bigger. there's more.

thinking isn't bad. some teachers would have you believe that, i've read and heard.

what would happen if there was no thinking, if thinking ended forever? i don't know. it's hard to imagine (a form of thinking, as are planning and remembering). imagine not imagining, planning, or remembering.

could the human race survive? could you? could i?

mind does what mind does. thinking helps create order, and it helps us survive. it's nice to get perspective on that.

it doesn't matter what it's about

last night i climbed into bed to read a little before sleep came.

i noticed tension in my chest. not even muscle tension really, but some kind of energetic contraction centering around my heart chakra. the closest emotion i could relate it to was mild fear.

it was fairly subtle, but i picked up on it. it was not a pleasant sensation. it didn't seem connected to anything occurring in the here and now.

i didn't like it. i wanted it to go away.

as soon as those thoughts came into my mind, the unpleasant sensation left. it dissolved, released, vanished.

i felt relaxed and peaceful.

who knows where it came from? i imagine it's old armor, an old defense pattern, unconscious habit. something that no longer serves me.

who knows what triggered it? i didn't notice it start, what was happening then, how long it had been there.

the point is, you don't have to know anything about it, just that it's there, you don't like it, and you want it to go away!

with my thoughts, i intended it away. the intending was a cooperation between auditory internal narrow and kinesthetic internal narrow. once it left, i felt peaceful, which was kinesthetic internal broad.

i read for a bit and went to sleep!

the earth does not belong to us. we belong to the earth.

“The Schumann resonance is a unique electromagnetic phenomenon created by the sum of lightning activity around the world. Electromagnetic pulses from lightning travel around the earth, bouncing back and forth between the ionosphere and the earth’s surface. At any given point on the earth, the Schumann resonance shows up as electrical and magnetic micropulsations in the range of 1-40 Hz.” (Oschman, 99)

There is evidence (though controversial) that geomagnetic rhythms serve as a cue for physiological rhythms. “There is evidence that geomagnetic pulsations strongly entrain brain waves during meditation and other practices in which one ‘quiets the mind’ to allow the ‘free-run’ periods to be dominated by geophysical rhythms.” (Oschman, 102)

Oschman hypothesizes that “if the therapist relaxes into the state of consciousness typical of those who practice meditation, therapeutic touch and QiGong… it is likely that his or her brain waves will, from time to time, become entrained with the micropulsations of the earth’s field. If the patient is also relaxed, both therapist and patient may become entrained with the earth’s field.” (Oschman, 107)

click the title of this post to go to a website on energy medicine. fascinating.

congratulations, lela!

i want to congratulate my daughter lela for being accepted into nursing school at ACC. she's worked long and hard for this, taking a lot of rigorous courses like biology, anatomy, physiology, chemistry, etc., all while working and mothering hannah, taking care of their needs, paying her bills, and managing to have fun and maintain a relationship.

she's quite a woman for managing all that.

she will start in the spring.

she plans to focus for the next two years on her nursing studies. she'll get a 3-year RN degree, which she can later turn into a BS in nursing at UT/Austin if she chooses.

lela, i'm so proud of you!

blog analytics for october and september

according to the report, in october 2008, i had 58 visits (excluding myself) and 33 unique visitors, 120 page views, 2.07 pages viewed on average per visit, average time on site 3 minutes 15 seconds, 44.83% new visits.

52 visits were from the US, with single visits from turkey, slovenia, ireland, greece, portugal, and spain.

not bad, considering i was in maui for two weeks and not posting.

in september, when i posted a lot on the 12 states of attention and gave a talk about them, i had 113 visits and 55 unique visitors, 244 page views, 2.16 pages viewed per visit, 5:13 average length per visit, and 42.48 new visits.

in september, there were 109 visitors from the US, 2 from canada, and 1 each from vietnam and israel.

thank you, thank you, thank you for visiting my blog! i feel happy that i'm reaching people!

piko-piko and embryo rising

i went to my monthly cranio-sacral therapy appointment this morning. my therapist, nina davis, has a marvelously refined sense of touch and a deep understanding of the body's rhythms and processes.

i told her about piko-piko breathing, the huna technique that has many variations, but which i primarily use in this way: i breathe in through the crown of my head and fill my body with energy, and breathe that out through the soles of my feet into the earth. then i inhale through my soles, fill my body with energy, and breathe out through the crown into the cosmos. i repeat this cycle many times, not every day, but several times a week.

somewhere in my NLP/shamanic wanderings, i encountered the q'ero belief that breathing in from the crown and out through the feet cleanses the human body of "hucha", heavy energy from being imbalanced with nature that only human beings accumulate.

from what i remember, the q'ero also believe that each of us is energetically connected to the "center of the cosmos", which i can't really imagine, so i interpret it as "the source of being". for some reason, i associate this with individuation.

to breathe from crown to sole is to release what really doesn't belong in our energy bodies into the earth, which neutralizes hucha.

to breathe in from the soles to the crown is to incorporate energy that develops the self and connects us to the source.

so anyway, i was telling nina about this, and then doing it in silence as she was working with my energy. (i should mention that mostly she works with my energy from the head down my spine.)

a little while later, she mentioned becoming aware of a body rhythm she hadn't perceived before in my body. she related it to a "white streak" in a developing embryo, which later becomes the heart and the spine. the rhythm is called "embryo rising" or something like that, and it moves from the base of the spine upwards. and we always have this as one of our subtle rhythms.

it's kinda cool to get an external affirmation of a natural energy flow in the human body (so ignored by western medicine and science) that pertains to the shamanic teachings of indigenous cultures.

she also mentioned getting a stronger impression of my mid-line, mid-tide, and images of the eyes moving from the side of the head to the front in embryo development, while working on me.

it's all fascinating!

RFK predicted this election outcome

On Meet the Press in 1968, Bobby Kennedy predicted that someone like Obama would emerge.

"Despite what is going on in the country, particularly in Alabama, things are moving so fast in race relations a Negro could be president in 40 years," he declared. He thought such an eventuality inevitable, just as the election of his brother, a Roman Catholic, had been inevitable.

"In the next 40 years," he went on, "a Negro can achieve the same position that my brother has...prejudice exists and probably will continue to...but we have tried to make progress and we are making progress. We are not going to accept the status quo."

His prescient words can be found in Excerpts in Rights for Americans: The Speeches of Robert F. Kennedy.

morning in america

i believe ronald reagan used that phrase many years ago. well, i'm stealing it to describe how i feel this morning after america elected barack obama as its next president.

i'm proud to be an american today:

proud that americans used their votes to change the direction of the country.

proud that we elected someone we can be proud of instead of ashamed.

proud that a country that once enslaved black people, whose history is so entwined with racial issues, has elected a black man president. what must it feel like to be a black american today? is martin luther king's dream coming true, that people are being judged on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin?

proud of barack obama for having the vision, intelligence, and temperament to put himself forward as a candidate, assemble a great team to run a great campaign, and inspire the majority of americans to vote for him. i mean, this man has l-o-n-g vision. he walks the hero's journey.

proud to have a president-elect who uses the english language so eloquently.

proud to have a president-elect who can go to second position (put himself in others' shoes) so well.

proud of obama's team--david axelrod (chief strategist) and david plouffe (campaign manager) especially--for their consistent message of change, their constant focus on what matters most now, their ability to get america comfortable with the ideas of a black family in the white house and of barack obama being the man we need to lead us forward.

proud that obama's campaign was about as clean as you can get on the national political stage while in no way being wimpy.

proud of obama's fortitude. it's been two years and a lot of tough battles and demanding schedules.

proud of john mccain's incredibly gracious concession speech and urging his supporters not just to accept obama as president but to support him.

i'm glad the election is over and happy with its outcome. the real work begins now.

maui slideshow available below

new feature on blogger. scroll down to view. if you click or double-click the photo, blogger goes to picasa, where you can view the slideshow full size.

here's a link to katie and keith's maui photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/katieraver/Maui2008#

here's a link to tom and bobbi's photos: http://www.nlpoptions.com/awakening_the_rainbow_dream/

here's a link to miki's photos. one is a short movie! http://picasaweb.google.com/mikifarrin

vee's photos are on facebook. you have to join, then look up virginia brodie. vee is a superb photographer! you'll really enjoy these.

i'll post links to other maui photos as i receive them.

odds and ends

new month. hope you enjoyed halloween/samhain/all souls/day of the dead.

weekend highlights: meeting a friend for dinner on friday, gorgeous sunset from mount bonnell on saturday, setting up a gypsy camp in the backyard and attending the austin celtic festival with my granddaughter on sunday. she loved the viking camp, the dogs and horses, and getting her hair braided.

i just finished the third book in the "his dark materials" trilogy, which starts with "the golden compass," moves to "the subtle knife," and ends with "the amber spyglass." the author is philip pullman.

i enjoyed these books a lot. although considered children's books, they contain plenty for adults to enjoy--speculation about good versus evil, freedom versus security, what dark matter (the 96% of the universe that scientists currently can't identify) consists of, and how to live a good life. the main characters are well drawn and vivid.

i liked them better than the harry potter books. the author cites major influences as milton's paradise lost and the poetry of william blake. damn fine work for an english major!

welcome back from maui, katie and keith!