Black Animals

Came to me in a dream up in Grand Lake over this year’s 4th of July weekend. I had spent a lot of time getting angry at my husband, and I practiced transforming those raw feelings into love. Engaging my will as to how I was going to be in the situation.

The dream was in a rather pastoral setting. There were two or three dogcows there, climbing in the hills. I remember a close-up shot of a black dog, with a big, bulging utter.

The interpretation I gave it I found quite interesting. The black dog represents the great adversayry: the devil himself to some Muslims. However, this dream showed that this entity also brought fertility and abundance.

This rings true when applied to adversarial situations. They are fertile moments ripe with potential for growth. Read the rest of this entry »

Dreams | 5.08.2011 14:16 | No Comments

Spiritual Sweetness Food Meditation

There can be no doubt my troubles with food have been related to mother energy. As I try to recover from the loss of my mother, I try to recover my mother from her loss. I am recovering a loss of sweetness in my life through baked goods. For me, on my specific carbohydrate diet, this has been in the form of almond meal and honey variations. Great ingredients: almonds, eggs, olive oil, (two out of three alkalizing ingredients thus far) baking soda and salt, and then honey, and whatever fruit or poppyseed flavor of the week. But the kicker is: too much honey does not work for me, causing abdominal pain, gas and diarrhea. And then the catch 22: any honey I eat makes me want more. The trouble is, I just have not wanted to give it up. It is SWEETNESS, after all. A dear, cherished friend, loved as fiercely as I loved (love) my mother. The universe took her from me at age 19 with a stark, indisputable finality. However, I have been able to access her in dreams, in feelings of her in the mountains or traveling sometimes, things she loved doing. Sometimes I feel LIKE her, myself. Thus I know she was not gone completely. Just gone from this day-to-day, waking world of physical beings. She lives on in my smile, in my Love. She is not lost. Read the rest of this entry »

Journal, Psychology | 20.06.2011 13:20 | No Comments

Challenges on the Healing Diet: Is Meditation the Answer?

My healing Crohn’s disease comes through coming back into harmony with nature, as its ecology plays out in my body. An alkalizing diet combined with the Specific Carbohydrate Diet has been the way for me, but not without posing a great challenge. Read the rest of this entry »

Health | 16.06.2011 12:34 | No Comments

Yoga and Balancing the Opposites

The practice of hatha yoga show you where you are unconscious, and can help illuminate what is there.

Yoga is observing the body and noticing any differences side to side. This way one notices where one is off-kilter, stuck, tight, closed, or weak. Yoga asks us to correct any imbalances. We ask the body to work in certain areas and to release in others. This opens us up, balances us, and aligns our bodies, like an iron smoothing out the wrinkles from freshly washed linen pants.

During this process we may recall events from the past: accidents, injuries, or traumas. We discover parts of ourselves from which we have gone, places from where we have checked out, perhaps to avoid pain, or because of inertia. This is reflected in our postures, in our ways of holding ourselves. Our body is a record of our response to life, to the inevitable bumps in the road. It is easy to close our hears, to withdraw, to get tense, crooked, lazy, or downtrodden.

Through yoga we learn what we don’t know about our bodies, and thus see what we don’t know about ourselves, by bringing the light of consciousness into matter, and working with the unconscious by working with the body itself. It is a nonverbal process, a mindfulness, a remembering. It is accessing the body-memory, the memory that resides in the body.

The unconscious areas are very dense. Practicing yoga, there is an unraveling that happens as the body aligns, a becoming of sacred geometry. By taking the pose and holding yoga asanas for extended periods of time, these dense areas unwind, as one relaxes, comes back to self, and comes back to center.

Yoga teaches us to stay, that it’s ok, that it’s all connected, that it’s ALL ONE THING.

Things That Make Life Better, Yoga | 10.06.2011 6:50 | No Comments

Lesson Learned: In the Trenches of Substitute Teaching

My conflict-ridden day was totally of my own making.

I was pleasant going in, all smiles I took attendance. But, thinking I had to immediately harness their chaotic, rambunctious, pubescent energy, I was all business, diving straight away into their reading assignment in language arts. And the horrible attitudes of certain individuals began before I could hardly blink an eye. And I reverted back to the dualistic, me versus them, dominance/submission paradigm. A recipe for conflict, not transformation of energy. I squashed them. Tried to silence them. Maybe I should have done “Good Things,” where a few people share a good thing, even though they are horrible listeners to each other and disrespect the speaker. They are thirteen and fourteen years old. I could have asked about what they were working on in language arts, what if they liked the story, what they thought about it, how they felt about it. I could have engaged them in dialogue. But instead, I was trying to light the fire of learning on dark coals.

Some of these kids are under the thumb of authoritarian dictators at home. They certainly don’t need another one at school. No wonder they are fomenting with unrest. They need a vehicle of expression. Language Arts may importantly teach the story of Anne Frank, but what about the secrets these kids themselves are hiding, that drive negative behaviors and derail intellectual pursuits?

Journal | 7.05.2011 8:11 | No Comments