11.29.15 I love the common sense that

if we wish to grow it, comes and blossoms, with age. Spreads across the field of our lives, rich and colorful with a splendid scent. 

I love how, if we truly want to live in balance and stability, we learn just how much distressing focus we can endure. What the market can bear. Before we spin out and harm ourselves with our distress. 

I love how intricate the inner perception is, giving feedback all the time, so that if we really do our work settling our past horrors and bad news, it all quiets down enough, the noisy festering past, a bit more healed and soothed, so that we can actually perceive that deep wise self within, who then sends out the flares when we've gone too far, ventured too much, and our insides are reeling, feeling as if something old and long ago is happening now. 

Learning to settle and digest the past only offers such increased ease, in this day we have here, so that we can go focus on wrongdoing, on those who have done terrible wrongs, on internal feelings of fear or as if everything is not ok at all at all. 

We can use the resourceful tools we determinedly learn, be they in a remarkable 12 step meeting or mindfulness or DBT or EFT or making pies while just focusing on our very hands. Rebuilding a carburator. 

Cleaning out a chicken coop. 

So many normal everyday acts are capable of such grand healing.

 

P.S. This is someone's beautiful painting. I have loved it for years. I don't know whose it is. It just fills me with pleasure.

11.29.15 Funny

I don't know if I've ever had a dog before with a sense of humor. Seven dogs over 44 years. Dante does.

 He plays his little joke very politely, when you're lying in bed, and you wake up in the morning. 

Then, instead of carefully coming up on the high bed, and curling himself slowly around you to sleep, as he does in the night, he leaps up, walks all over you with this huge grin on his face, and then sits on you, turning with tongue out, body wiggling, doing his dog laugh. 

He think's he's so funny when he does this, that I began telling him 'Funny!", so that now, when I say the word, he looks to see if I'm actually on the bed, and the games can begin.

 

11.29.15 A contemplation on aging

Oliver Sacks- a wonderful contemplation on growing older:
 "My father, who lived to 94, often said that the 80s had been one of the most enjoyable decades of his life. He felt, as I begin to feel, not a shrinking but an enlargement of mental life and perspective. One has had a long experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others’, too. One has seen triumphs and tragedies, booms and busts, revolutions and wars, great achievements and deep ambiguities, too. One has seen grand theories rise, only to be toppled by stubborn facts. One is more conscious of transience and, perhaps, of beauty. At 80, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age. I can imagine, feel in my bones, what a century is like, which I could not do when I was 40 or 60. I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together."

11.28.15 It's actually not in your head.

     Yesterday I was thinking about how confused we become, when our biology or structural pain or brain chemistry is tweaked a bit off , and we interpret it emotionally . How it's often hard for people to realize that something is happening in their BODY. Feeling off. Not good . 
     That they're actually getting a communiqué. 
     And now , an important message, from your body . 
     Something to listen to. And to learn how to investigate... learn how to respond to and remedy.
     In my practice , I saw the results of Western Medicine slowly but thoroughly debunking each individual's sense of themselves . 
     Of their health. 
     When something small or large and vital was happening. 
     People had been conditioned over generations to feel embarrassed or simplistic or silly or stupidly self- important , for daring to share with a           DOCTOR their own sense of their health .
     Think about it. It's improving a bit. 
     But 10 years ago, the best way to be intimidated or ridiculed by a doctor was to suggest that you knew anything at all about your health .
     In fact, 50 years ago, there were no second opinions to go get. Few doctors would do that, so closed and insecure and insular the medical establishment was . 
     A second opinion was an insult to the poor precarious first opinion doctor .
     In fact, 50 years ago, often if you had a serious condition , or were DYING, doctors would not TELL you . 
     And they would order your family not to tell you . Think about that for a second. 
     In my practice, most people had a sense of what was wrong with them. Or at least that something was wrong. Often if you are a Health Practitioner, people come see you when the available medical tests are unable to detect what is up with you , or the available medical txs are unable to address it. Course , often enough if a medical test cannot detect it, it is the tendency of even the best doctors to assert that nothing must be wrong.
     But while you sit here, your body and your brain actually know what your cells are doing all over your body . There are no mysteries of information . You know .
     And of course , it's not easy to interpret or perceive this intellectually .
So it goes to show that often enough when something is off physically , we both feel off emotionally, and we do the simplistic thing we know how to do... we interpret the problem as an emotional one, at a loss for other viable options.
     Course , this too has been hammered into us for generations. If the medical tests cannot perceive it, it doesn't exist. Which is why escaping our cultural hobby of historical amnesia is so important .
     Remember, Asthma used to be 'psychosomatic '. That's right . All in your head, you sicko. ALS. Psychosomatic . Think about it. 
Wouldn't it seem best to say
" As of now , we are unable to test or evaluate the condition you have . I'm so sorry." 
     Instead of dismissing the person as being mentally ill and causing their own illness . Shame . The list of conditions that were deemed psychosomatic us huge.
     This includes every single female illness, which was characterized as Hysteria or psychosomatic ( Second Sex, unimportant , so no money spent on research , until women were allowed to spend more money and have more power).
     It's vital that we don't dismiss the value of our own perceptions , however inconclusive they may initially be. 
     That we learn that we may have quite an emotional response to a quite physical real problem . 
     That a very real physical problem begins to significantly impact many ado extra of our brain chemistry and profound depletion .
     That whenever we are significantly depleted. , why, of COURSE we will tend to feel despair . Hopelessness. 
     In fact, in acupressure , when you begin building people up , both their generalized strength , their savings accounts of organs , and individual conditions , you both generate energy , and reallocate their daily allowance , so they have less to play with each day- because it's being spent on the new project - of the rebuilding of the lungs or heart or spine .      When you do this, you warn the client that they may feel despair or low or hopeless the few days after the session. You tell them why. You give them the good news. So that as they go off, they can speculatively see their low low feeling about life in that context.
     When my brother began working in my husband after a very serious diagnosis. , he took ALL the energy and rerouted it to addressing the condition . My husband became absolutely exhausted. Because we were moving every single ball to the 'get well' basket .
     When I used to see pregnant women. , who said they "Felt great. !" I'd say "Great! But I want to reroute half of that to storage. So it goes to your baby. And to your long term health . Ok?". And then , no, not lots of fun available energy to burn. Yes, powerfully strong healthy baby. Yes, profoundly stringer maternal strength for the coming time. 
     So it makes sense, that our systems send out distress signals , when our digestion or our cardiovascular system or our lower back disc or our liver is becoming quite challenged .
     Try to keep in mind that your body is remarkable . Someone you need to listen to, respond to , and get to know. 
     That sometimes you will feel one off, because an organ or system is expressing its distress. 
     Not every communiqué means something dire . Better to listen and modify or improve your self care if you can. And keep being kind to yourself . And keep listening . Fear doesn't help. Ignoring your needs or health does nothing helpful . 
     Being responsive as you are able does . It will not be a magic wand . But it will point you in a better direction .

11.28.15 I was born without the shopping gene. Actually, without the folding, finances, and cooking genes too.

No offense to anyone at all, really. Because each of us is unique. But , coming up in miserable, yet well off circumstances, growing up with siblings and Shepherds in a Pine Forest, I never understood shopping as an activity in and of itself . A sport. 

Deciding to go out shopping for things you might not know you needed, or wanted. To be itchy or tired or bored or upset, and go get stuff. 

Think about it. Our history. Growing and making our own things . Or paying or owning others, and making them go create the things we needed or wanted.

Imagine living anywhere at all , after the industrial revolution , when consumerism began to take off for real. 

When people began to have 'jobs' as opposed to a way if life. So they had to leave their babies and kids and homes and each other and go to a big place someone else owned . And work by that persons rules. 

And 12 hours later, went home . Got paid. Went and bought stuff they needed. Stuff that was suddenly being produced in mass amounts and sent all over the place to be bought .

New big time accumulation of wealth . Or big time dispossessed working poor. 

People's needs being postponed or disregarded due to no longer being in neighborhood or raising their own food or working at their own craft. 

Feeling lost and out of control and controlled by others more powerful , purchasing things to feel better.

That's how it looks to me. The shopping .

Course , I was born without the shopping gene, I suppose. The gene that makes you yearn for more new better different stuff.
And once in my own , I wasn't that interested in that. More interested in going places and doing things. Same when I had my kids. 

Our culture here is such a powerful odd duck of an individualistic self-absorbed, each- person- for- themselves -am- I- good- enough- yet amalgam. 

Talking with my niece who lives in Paris, at Thanksgiving, was fascinating. Because it's only then, or if can travel to other lands , that you can see your own culture , or the tiny bit you are familiar with ( not all the cultures of thus huge country ) in stark revealing relief. Our ambient defensive insistence upon being best ( like any uncertain scared insecure five-year- old ). 

Our love of 'stuff' which is not unique certainly to the US.
Which seems fine . Just tweaked a bit far, til it becomes the competitive satisfaction , derived of getting your hands on that good deal, instead of the next person getting it . Phew. 

Distracting us in a serious daily manner, from settling down into what might nourish and satisfy and settle us most.

11.27.15 No theme music from some nascent Disney movie

     I continue being surprised by the way we forget that with most challenging situations , we are going to have a learning curve. Each and every time I watch ,as I tumble in , with no recollection of past or the inevitable

process , only to slowly come to. And recall how it invariably goes.
     One of the magnificent aspects of being alive, whether we are algae , Oak, any or bear or human , is that we adapt . We learn. 
     So when something tough happens ,we respond to the moment thinking " Oh no ! It's like this !"
Until we do that several times, and slowly climb out of that amnesia . Remembering that actually ? It's always like this.
     We struggle one way, then assume Oh no ! Another way. Then we keep adapting and changing and fine tuning til we are watching ourselves evolve before our very eyes, in response to the tough time.
     Til we see how gloriously we become clear . Cleared .
This of course does not mean 'All better!'
     Or signal the theme music for some nascent Disney movie. It doesn't mean tragedy or mean hard times never come round , or move in, or stay.
     What it does mean is that as long as circumstances or our response do not nudge up against the insurmountable , we living beings, with some remarkable inexplicable bordering-on-magical survival instinct, somehow find a way to keep going on .
Sometimes with a raging tenacious fantastical courage no one knows about , but us.