Fable

I find I often talk at length of how we must find meaning and purpose in our experiences. I try to practice this mindfulness in my daily life, and to reflect on past experiences to soak up as much education as I can from them. Sometimes I reflect on things that happened many years ago, but sometimes I am open and able enough to get a massive dose of education immediately, sometimes even as the situation is happening, which is what occurred for me this morning.

This morning started out as most mornings do here in the Cottage. Cell phones play their alarms and we push the sleep button and snuggle down into our cozy sleeping nest and ask for five more minutes. Eventually we get moving, one of us makes coffee, one of us makes lunch, sometimes one person does both. We look for his misplaced this or that until we find it in some absurd place and laugh and kiss each other good bye with well wishing for the day. I check my email and facebook and connect with friends and family while figuring out what my schedule is for the day which today included a job interview at 12:30. Then in comes the wrench!

My phone rings and it's the potential employer I am meeting with at 12:30, I was sure it was 12:30, I'd said 12:30 three times to various people who asked me when the meeting was. 12:30, 12:30, 12:30. But no, it's 10. I am supposed to meet with her at 10, and it's now 10:15. I look at my iCal, it says 10! How did this happen! I apologize profusely and we agree that I'll be there as soon as possible. I throw on clothes, brush my teeth, wish there were time to eat something to temper the coffee I had been sipping leisurely not two minutes ago, run out of the house to my car and immediately realize something is not right. Another wrench!

My car is trashed, the contents of the glove compartment and back seat pockets is strewn about, I have no idea what's missing, I immediately feel angry and scared and violated, I notice the windows aren't broken and the radio is fine and remember I brought the faceplate in last night as I always do, and then I realize I'd left my wonderful black velvet jacket in the car and it's GONE. I am so upset. I call him freaking out, push the stuff out of the way and screech off to my interview that I'm now 30 minutes late to, crying and yelling on the phone about all of it and how some #$%&!@ has my jacket which was the only thing I really loved that was in the car in the first place and blah blah blah. He calms me, in the magical way only he can do, rational, good advice, making me sturdy and strong, bolstering me with support, reminding me that I'm Emily Taylor and I will go in there and somehow the situation will work out wonderfully. I feel the anger starting to melt from me, not fully, but it's melting. There's a goofy recumbent bicycle behind me with the silly flag. We always joke about me having a recumbent bicycle, we call it a Cumby. I laugh and he laughs and I take a few wrong turns but I make it to the interview and I'm feeling okay though humiliated.

I walk in and immediately they are warm and kind and open and I am honest and apologetic and trying not to let the drama get to me. And suddenly it all flows, all of the experiences of the last few days start to line up in this perfect synchronicity. I remember being at a funeral two days ago listening to the minister saying "We may pray for a calm sea when the sea is stormy, but those with faith are like a sailor on a stormy sea who has faith in his captain." I relate that story to them and say that often I want to calm the sea myself, or at least be the person at the helm, but that I think my faith is more about maintaining a calm sea within. We have a pleasant conversation about how to ride a stormy sea and I instantly feel a sense of kinship and home that I never would have experienced had the events of the morning not occurred. They remark at how centered I seem considering all that had happened that morning and the past few days, so they got to experience me at my worst, but still maintaining my calm sea. Something every employer wants. Something they would not have seen in action had life not thrown me a few wrenches.

I drive home, feeling pretty good about myself that I had managed to handle that situation, but still upset about my beautiful velvet jacket and then I drive up my street and see it laying there on the sidewalk. I pick it up and it is unharmed and warm from the October sun.

I put it on, feel warm, and call the potential employer and we both share a moment of glee to hear the happy ending to our fable.

And the moral of this story is: Maybe the Universe works in ways that aren't as mysterious as we think. Maybe we just have to learn how to speak it's language.

Loving the Scientist

I am in love. I am in love with a person who is very different from me. He believes that there are many things he can't explain in this world, but he believes in science instead of god. He can't relate to a lot of the things I do, or the things I feel, but he respects me enough to not mock me for them. He says he loves the spiritual part of me, that he sees the benefit I get from it, and how I help others with it. He is in grad school right now getting a PhD in Environmental Engineering. He is on a very linear, intellectual path. My path wanders and weaves as it always has, and often I can't see the path in front of me. It's foggy in Berkeley you see.

At times I wish he were more like me. I wish that we were on more similar paths, but then I think about what that would really mean. Would we constantly be comparing ourselves to each other? Would it get confusing who's path belongs to who? Would we have to explain it all to each other as we go? That sounds like a lot of work. Distracting work. I sort of like that I get to have my path all to myself. He can't relate to most of it, just as I can't understand the math scribbled on his white board, but I know that math means that one day he'll be helping people get clean water and he knows one day I'll be using my own math to guide people along their spiritual paths. We might not understand how the other one does it, but we appreciate that they do.

Occasionally we have intense debates about spirituality vs science. Both of us end up learning something from it. In general though we let each other have our own gods. This suits me fine. I have always felt that spirituality is a personal relationship you have with yourself and whatever universal consciousness or spiritual path you choose as your own. There have been relationships of mine where the other person got immeshed in my spirituality or mine in theirs or both, and it seems like in those sorts of situations things can get messy very quickly. Sometimes people start to create myths around the other person, believing them to be more than human, and although in theory it's lovely to believe that your lover is a deity, in practice you find you're always disappointed when you figure out they're just a human being like you.

I love my scientist. He keeps me grounded. I never have to question whether he's working a magic spell on me or if he meditated more than me this week. When I have a nightmare he wakes me up and he says "there there... it's just a dream" and I can trust him because he doesn't believe that nightmares can come true. When he's away from me the spirits bother me while I sleep, but when he's here his wall of disbelief creates a lovely little bubble around me. He's got his math and I have my math and never the twain shall meet.

How To Be Happy

Someone taught me a secret once. How to laugh at myself and make fun of myself and not take myself so seriously. To look at these crazy hurdles life puts in front of you and see them as funny little toadstools that you can just hop right over and if you land on your ass on the other side, then maybe that's HILARIOUS, maybe it doesn't have to be painful and terrible. I am forever grateful to that person. That was the first step in becoming a happy person. Learning how to laugh at myself, especially at the worst of times.

I remember the day I decided to be happy. Somehow it finally got through to me that whenever sadness and sorrow came knocking on my door, I had to tell myself I had a choice. I could either choose to feel the sorrow, and sink into the swamp where it was comfortable, where I knew how things went and how to be, where I could blame everyone else for my problems, where I could feel bad for myself and be lazy and boring and eat mac n cheese and watch a full season of Sex In The City in one day. Or I could challenge myself to feel something different. To try something more difficult. To pull my feet out of the swamp and maybe walk on some granite for a while. To go to a yoga class, or to Hawaii, or even enroll in a massage therapy program.

Some days I could do it, some days I couldn't.
But eventually the days where I could outnumbered the days where I couldn't.

I'd say it took me about three years total to become a person who is happy most of the time. Three years might seem like forever, but in the grand scheme of life, three years is not a long time to spend on figuring out how to be happy and live a happy life. Three years is how long most people spend getting a master's degree. Instead of getting a master's in physics or art, I decided to get master's degree in happiness. I can say that for me it was probably more difficult than a master's in physics, but at least it wasn't as expensive.

Someday I wish I could teach this method to others, but it won't work for everyone.
Everyone has their own secret. You can steal mine though if you want to. ;)

Eat Pray Love

My neighbor gave me Eat Pray Love to borrow to soldier me up a bit in regards to my own crazy journey. She's also taking me to see Elizabeth Gilbert speak on Thursday evening over in Marin. I have an awesome neighbor. ;)

I’ve come to believe that there exists in the universe something I call “The Physics of The Quest” – a force of nature governed by laws as real as the laws gravity or momentum. And the rule of Quest Physics maybe goes like this: “If you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting (which can be anything from your house to your bitter old resentments) and set out on a truth-seeking journey (either externally or internally), and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher, and if you are prepared – most of all – to face (and forgive) some very difficult realities about yourself….then truth will not be withheld from you.” Or so I’ve come to believe. I can’t help but believe it, given my experience. - Elizabeth Gilbert

http://www.elizabethgilbert.com

Piedmont Spa

Happy news to share!

I was hired this week by Omar at Piedmont Spa (http://piedmontspa.com/) in North Oakland. I will be working Fridays from 11-6 to start and will hopefully be expanding my hours from there. I am quite pleased!

It's more of a massage practice than a real Spa but the business has been there for so long that when the practice was started the landlord asked that they not use the word "massage" in any of the signage due to the vast majority of massage "parlors" actually being brothels.

The practice itself reminds me a lot of Massage Therapy Works back in Somerville. Lots of great practitioners with much to offer. I am really excited to meet everyone and get to work!

This is a dream I had the first week I moved into my little cottage here in Berkeley. When I woke up I was wishing that I was really good at animation because I'd love to see this made into a little animated short film.

I dreamt about this bug that was really beautiful, it had sort of a beetle body, with crazy antenna that were hot pink and feathered in tendrils like a moth's would be. It had an iridescent purple exoskeleton with green and orange metallic tones in it that changed as the light moved along it's body. when I touched the bug, it transformed into a lotus flower, with pink petals, and when I opened the petals I saw that inside was a small pool of water with smooth stones on the bottom. I could hear the sound of echoing water dripping in a cave and it was very soothing.

Then the bug closed up and flew and landed on my shoulder where it transformed itself into a long purple twig with hot pink and orange flowers that kind of looked like plumeria flowers. They smelled amazing. But the bug was tickling some nerve in my neck and so I flicked it off of me. It landed on a small boy and the bug turned into a long green twig with bright orange and yellow flowers. It seemed like it was sort of reading each person's energy and changing it's camouflage to suit each person. So cool!

Anyhow when I woke up I was wishing I could share it with someone who does animation, and then I met a girl who does. I bought some furniture from her since she's moving back to Canada. Anyhow it was a nice sort of synchronicity. :)

Hi Natacha! www.nataschaevans.com

Strangely enough my dream this morning was all about Mt. Rushmore.

I was canoeing under what used to be Mt. Rushmore and saw pieces of the presidential faces fallen in chunks on the gravel of this shallow river. Someone had blasted them off and replaced them with statues of the figureheads of all the world's religions. Inside the mountain they had carved out an interfaith temple for worship. It probably could have been creepy but it wasn't, it was a symbol of peace. That all people were free to worship whatever they pleased, and that the wars had stopped.

The funny part was that the only presidential face that was intact was Lincoln's and the statues on the mountain were asking him questions like "can you see anything from down there?" and he answered that he could see a bit of Teddy Roosevelt's nose and that it was more dignified than he'd thought.

The museum was amazing yesterday. I quite enjoy experiencing places like that all by myself. I get to meander all I please and take my time or hurry up depending on what I feel. The Thinker was actually larger than I had expected and quite striking as it dominated the courtyard of the museum. Here are some images:

Free Museum Tuesday

Today many museums around the Bay Area are free. Since I am currently seeking employment I have free time on my hands to do things, but not that much money to spend on them, hence the FREE part being especially attractive to me at this time.

Today I think I'll check out the Legion of Honor and SOMA. I'm particularly interested in seeing Rodin's The Thinker in person. I have seen it replicated and made a farce of so many times in cartoons and advertisements. I wonder if it will have the same effect on me that seeing Mt. Rushmore did. I laughed out loud when I saw those faces in the mountain side. I had for so long associated it with playful jokes and satire, that seeing the real thing was quite funny at first. After about five minutes of being there, I was swept up by the nature of the place and the challenge of carving it in the first place, and was nearly tearful in my reverence. Quite the range of emotions!

Dreams

I dream best in the early morning hours, usually between 3am-8am. In my dream this morning I was doing my best to protect a small bearded child. He was a child of prophecy, supposed to overthrow the dictatorship of his country and start a revolution! We were scurrying from place to place just staying on the move trying to keep him hidden. At one point we were standing in a boat and I saw scuba divers leaving the underside of the boat. Dark figures swimming away quickly. A very mysterious dream, though ultimately it seemed to be a successful dream too. I hope he is able to start the revolution when he grows up.

I also dreamed that I had parked my car somewhere and it wasn't where I had left it, so I got angry and scared and thought perhaps it was stolen when really I had only been confused and had actually left it on a different corner. One thing that had been stolen was my large pink bag, but I saw a funny old trickster woman carrying it and was able to retrieve it from her.

I often dream of being betrayed or having things stolen from me when I'm feeling down or anxious about something in waking life. Sometimes I think it's just the way my subconscious deals with feeling slightly helpless or useless. It gives me drama and then provides me with resolution. A beginning, middle, and end! I think because our waking lives are subject to the laws of time (or at least that we allow them to be), we don't get nice clean circles like in dreams. Our time lines keep moving forward and often we aren't provided the benefit of closure.

Dreams can be wonderful spaces to explore different decisions and outcomes without having to accept them as final. I wonder what work we can do in our waking lives to provide ourselves with a similar sense of freedom?

Abundance & Blessings!

Yay!

We made it to California a week ago and have accomplished quite a bit! We found a new home, a cozy little cottage on the North Berkeley & Albany line in the Westbrae area. It's nestled into an old garden planted in the 30s with a tangerine tree, sweet grapes, night blooming jasmine, roses, a pond with water plants and a fabulous little area for me to plant my own garden.

It is absolutely the home I dreamed I would live in when I moved to Berkeley and I know my guides were at work directing us to it. Abundance!!!

Not only is the location fabulous for being a short bike ride away from just about everything we need, but it's within walking distance of Berkeley Integrative Healing Clinic!

http://berkeleyihc.com/

I met with Dr. Andre this morning and it seems promising that I could develop my Berkeley practice in this new location! Sooooo that means that very soon you'll be able to book bodywork treatments with me once again. Hooorah! Blessings!

More updates soon...

I had a dream last night that I was a lesbian and in love with an obese woman who I was taking to a ball. She was all dressed up in a beautiful cream colored ball gown and looked like a big dollup of whipped cream and I was SO in love with her I thought she was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen.

When we got to the ball, we met a couple and they both started making fun of her weight, saying cruel things and finally breaking open a Sharpie Marker and spraying her lovely creamy silk gown with black ink. I flipped out and starting bashing the boy with a folding chair all EXTREME style and then I painted both of their faces black with the ink from the Sharpie. then I sort of HULK SMASHED the whole place saying "Don't you talk about my fat girlfriend that way!!! I love my fat girlfriend!!!!"

it was awesome.

I think the dream was me taking ownership of my internal fat girlfriend and loving her in spite of what other people say or think and defending her tooth and nail. I think we need to be more loving of our bodies and defend our love for them in the face of what fashion magazines and hollywood tells us. It's beautiful to be curvy and have stretch marks and wrinkles. They are maps of where we have been and what we have accomplished in this life.

LOVE YOUR BODY!!!!

Teaching Ka

I am slowly but surely getting through the required reading for my Lomi Lomi workshop the first weekend in May. It's called Urban Shaman, A Handbook for Personal and Planetary Transformation Based on The Hawaiian Way of the Adventurer by Serge Kahili King, PH.D. (Whew!) Today in my reading I am learning about the Hawaiian concept of the Ku, which is basically what we would call "muscle memory". King discusses emotions in the context that they are actually just memories. Either genetic memories passed to us from our genetic ancestors, or experiential memories that we pick up over time. We learn that when someone hits us, we feel emotions about it, anger, fear, shame, etc. We learn that when someone hugs us, we feel emotions about that too, support, love, joy. We learn a great deal of these emotions quite young, they stick with us and later in life the emotions we experience in familiar situations, good or bad, are triggered by memories of how we learned to react the first time we experienced them.

I found these two paragraphs particularly moving today:

"No one walks around full of anger. But people do walk around dwelling on memories that keep re-stimulating anger, or with muscle tension that suppresses memories which would release anger if they were brought to conscious awareness."

"...if emotions are generated by memories of how to react in given situations, then one way to indirectly control emotions is by changing the memories."

This makes a lot of sense to me, observing how my work effects others and receiving massage myself. I also have to recognize what a strong personal effect memory has had on my life, and that in the last few years I have done a lot of work with my own memories of situations, trying to transition certain memories that have a very strong physical effect on me, to ones that are less potent, with a good amount of success. I can't say exactly how I did it, though it has a lot to do with repeated reflection on the positive aspects of my memories and replacing past memories with new ones that are similar in nature but have positive emotions associated with them. In other words, recycling the memory by experiencing similar enough situations that have many positive emotional qualities to them. I am interested to see how this method compares with the technique taught in further chapters of this book.

Cognitive behavioral therapy much!!??! ha!

Happy Accident

Someone said something to me the other day that has been slowly sinking into meaning. She said "I just treat it like everything is an accident and then I can't really get angry about it."

This was in reference to a person who is difficult and highly irritating at times. I kind of like that approach in a way, because there are a huge host of reasons why is person is the way they are and many of the challenging situations they create are an accident. They don't set out with an intention to be irritating and difficult, things just sort of turn out that way.

Then again, a lot of us have done a great amount of personal work to be the sort of people who don't create this sort of energy around us anymore. I used to be the sort of person who people would have to treat like the above person, but I just worked very hard and decided to be a person who is responsible for their own emotional state and looks out for others as well. Not that I always succeed mind you! But I don't think people could say about me "oh just treat her like everything she does is an accident so you don't have to get mad" anymore.

Anyhow, so there's a part of me that's like "Hey! We did all this work! You have to do it too!!!" But that's not true. There isn't, unfortunately maybe, a rule that says everyone has to be honest and responsible and compassionate and empathetic and listen to others and help others and all that stuff. We aren't forced to get therapy and do self work by the government, and hey, the free will thing? I kind of like that. So I wouldn't trade it.

I do wish that people would be self-observant rather than self-absorbed. I'd like it if people would actually listen to what others are saying instead of just hearing what they want to hear, or what they need to hear in order to maintain their skewed perception of life as it doesn't do anyone any favors. It'd be pretty great if people would be as interested in others as they are in themselves. As defensive and aware of others and their emotions as they are of themselves and their own.

I had a dream Sunday night that I was visiting and assisting this amazing Hawaiian shaman. He was BIG and Polynesian looking and wearing this lovely aloha print sarong and beads and flowers in his hair. We were talking in Hawaiian to each other and doing some crazy witch doctor type stuff to this man who had come for healing. Like mixing red clay in spring water and smearing it on his forehead and spitting rum at him and brushing his skin with feathers. It was very odd, but I had a cheerful sort of laugh going on about it.

Maybe the Hawaiian shaman is an ancestor coming to help me take my lomi lomi workshop in May. That'd be fun! Nice to know I have good souls supporting me on this. He was so jolly and kind of menacingly cheerful, but in a tricky, playful sort of coyote/Loki way. figures. ;)

I've always had a fondness for trickster gods.

Strangely enough yesterday I went to the bookshop to pick up my required reading for the workshop, a book called Urban Shaman by Serge Kahlili King, and the subtitle is "A handbook for personal and planetary transformation based on the Hawaiian way of the adventurer."

See, back when I started researching lomi lomi when I was in massage school I knew that I would someday study it and that it would mean a lot, but the time wasn't right yet. Now is the right time. I wanted there to be a workshop, so I tracked down Suzanne Blackburn online, took me a while, and contacted her and she set one up! Then I was researching where to stay in Yarmouth Maine since that's where the workshop is, and my mom's good friend lives in Yarmouth and is putting me up for all four nights for free! It is all falling into place, as it always does when I'm on the right path. And, now I have my guide too. :)

Thank you crazy lovely Hawaiian dream shaman!

Funkytimes

I think I kind of WANT to be in a funk right now.

There are about 3000 things I could do to cheer up and have more energy, but there's something in me that is kind of enjoying feeling grumpy and tired and bored.

I think it's just the end of winter blues. I'm actually pretty okay with it. Yesterday I was in such a state that I played video games for like 4 hours. I wanted to feel guilty about wasting that time, but I didn't. I think it's okay to let yourself just feel grumpy and bored and unmotivated every now and then. I'll get sick of it by next week and be back to my old self. The upcoming weekend off will be good, as will a good visit home, Grandma, and my parents.

Happiness is a daily choice and seems like lately I just want to choose BLAH. I'm okay with that, for now. ;)

The Inch Between You and I

I feel life very keenly right now.
It's that feeling that used to be so overwhelming for me. Feeling like I am absurdly connected to everyone around me. Like there is no difference between their body and my body. That am at once purely me and purely them.

I love this feeling. It reminds me of my grandfather. He wrote to me "the mind is singulare tantum, a thing of which only one exists in the universe".

I miss him, but I never feel without him. We are the same mind. You are my mind and I am your mind. Just like Spock. And because of this truth, I can share this feeling with you. At least I'd like to, if that's what you're into. ;)

News!

I am now practicing at OM (Oriental Medicine) in Cambridge every Wednesday from 2-8pm. :)

It's a soothing space right near Mount Auburn Cemetery and a cute little bakery/cafe called Sofra.

Contact me to make an appointment: emily@mindbodyintuition.com

Visit these sites for more info:
www.omedicine.net
www.mountauburn.org
www.sofrabakery.com

"I DESERVE It!"

I think we all need to throw out any sort of attachment to the idea of deserving things.

It's all about power and ownership. We walk around talking about what we deserve and what we don't as if there's some bank we pay into with our good deeds and then take loans out of when we are feeling emotionally lazy.

"I do good things, I'm a good person so I deserve better."

Why? Why do you deserve better? Do you do good things so you can receive good things? I hope not. I hope you just do them to do them. I hope you do them because you know the truth is that it is the best way to be, to be fair, to be honest, generous, kind, compassionate. I hope we are good people just to be good people.

So why suddenly when things don't go our way do we scream up to the heavens about how we don't deserve it because we've been paying in? It takes power away from us to do that. It makes us seem like we are just these hopeless flailing victims at the mercy of god and life and whatever. We say "how could this happen, I don't deserve this!!!" and it gives power to the obstacles we face. We are saying "I am helpless against this" when we allow ourselves to believe that we deserve this or that. It works both ways with a victim state. It's either "I deserved that because I am bad in these ways" or "I don't deserve that because I am good in these ways". They are both victim states, do you see?

Take your power back. Take ownership of your obstacles & failures the same way you would take ownership of your triumphs. Instead of saying "Why me?" say "What now?". Instead of saying "I don't deserve this" say "This happened to me and it is awful and now what." I think it's okay to feel frustrated and overwhelmed and angry, but don't for a second allow these things to have power over you by thinking that you are owed good or bad things from the universe.

Let's stop believing there is a karmic bank with a karmic accountant keeping track of our deposits and withdrawals and deciding whether or not we get to have a loan. Let's stop believing in the law of "good person = good stuff". Let's stop allowing ourselves to believe that we are victims of fate or that we have to be victims of circumstance, or victims at all. Let's start believing that it's better for everyone to do right by each other, not because we want right done to us in return, but because ultimately it makes everyone's lives better.

Welcome!

Hey there,

Welcome to my Intuition Blog for mindbodyintuition.com. I hope that this blog can be a space for me to share thoughts regarding massage, bodywork, intuition, and emotional, physical & spiritual health.

enjoy!