DatingGod

Wax On, Wax Off

What happens when a life doesn't get talked about? What happens when life's stories don't get told? Is it enough to simply witness our own life? What if we stop looking to others for a mirror reflection of our living? What if we stop explaining, editorializing, rehashing, reframing our past? What happens if we live, and then let it go?

All of my life I've been a storyteller, as an actress, a writer, a talker, a speaker, a watcher and collector of other people's stories. But now I feel my way through Holding, not suppressing, not expressing, simply Holding, letting my story unfold with as little input from me as possible. I watch for clear indications to take an action, then make it. I watch things "fall through", feel gratitude to Life for taking care of something that I can't see right now, and then see the thing that seemed negative, a failing, turn into positive, a lifting up, a freeing. 

Astounding.

It really is All Yes.

And I've noticed that not just talking, but my writing can muck up the clear, clean process. If I try and interpret things before full understanding, it creates some sort of funk, another aspect of trying to put a hot little hand of my graspy self back onto the tiller, and that just feels so dang crappy. 

So until writing again is indicated, I won't be doing much. I'll just be over here in this little corner of Life, running the scales that are the song of a life lived closer to that Yes that lives at the center . . . 

 

Doing

Utterly consumed with practical things . . . 

Clutter cleaning every single drawer, closet, shelf, cupboard, surface in the apartment. Boxes and boxes of former belongings, things I've been carting around for years, get thrown out with the trash, or passed on to someone else, or donated to a shelter.

Thanks to my "digestive illness" I'm down 13 pounds. For the past decade I simply haven't had the willpower to stop using my food lust as a way to cope with emotional distress, and so Life helpfully gave me two choices: utter agony or eat simply and cleanly. Of course it took me three weeks to settle in to choosing the latter . . .

I live on grains, beans/legumes, vegetables, and fruit. Twice a week or so I have some sort of animal protein, like an egg or some plain whole milk yogurt, but other than that, no animal fat of any kind (except for about a half tablespoon of butter I sometimes put in my morning hot cereal). I no longer eat dinner, but instead, depending on what my body tells me it wants, I make miso soup with seaweed and kale and gomasio, or I drink a quart of fresh juiced apples. 

I eat a lot of digestive enzymes, hydrochloric acid, niacin, ground flax seed, colon cleansing herbs. I drink a gallon of water a day. 

Sundays find me cleaning my home, making food for the upcoming week's lunches. I saute an enormous bunch of greens in water, add some balsamic vinegar, gomasio, sometimes a little hot sauce. I roast broccoli, beets, yams. I make brown rice with curry and raisins and almonds. Or quinoa, fluffy, simple, plain. I simmer a pot full of onions for three hours and make "onion butter", which gives lunches an extra hit of umami. I make daikon pickles with umeboshi plum paste and rice vinegar that I eat like candy through the week. 

I'm lifting weights again. When Calhoon got sick, I simply didn't have the fight in me any longer to keep pushing myself to exercise. All violence in the form of force, as in using my willpower like a sledgehammer to shove me through a bike ride, a weightlifting session, is gone. What's left is a desire to get my body moving again, squeeze out the kinks. I'm dancing again too, but now without any wine or self-consciousness or belief that someone is watching, or that it means anything other than the moment.  

I send out resumes, go on interviews. Another one five hours away. One two hours away. Several more set up over the next few weeks. I've put my landlords on notice that I'll be moving out in the next month or two. 

I work five days in cubicleland, or work four days in cubicleland and spend the fifth going on an interview. I work one day a week doing holistic work. On Sunday, I rest, and cook, and snuggle kitties, and dance, and feel the sun on my face. Evenings are spent with hulu.com, and The Dollhouse, and Fringe, and Lie To Me, and Kings, and 24, and Southland, and Rescue Me. Baby Wallace passes out in my arms, doing that purr of his that is really just heavy breathing, with the tiniest of sounds. Jacinta comes around to park her sweet self on my legs, or in my lap wedged up by Wallace, or on the window sill by the barcalounger where she can watch the birds as Baby Wallace and I watch tv.  

Slowly, slowly, I do another edit of the novel. I entered a writing contest on a whim, two days before the deadline for it, and sent in the first 20 or so pages. It made it to the finals in the "paranormal" category. The judge for the paranormal category is a big deal editor at one of the big publishing houses. The winners will be announced sometime at the end of this month. 

I don't care about "enlightenment" or "waking up". There is only the next thing to do, then the next. I'm not lonely or in pain or in drama or fighting my circumstances. If any of it arises, it passes, and then it's back into the practical. 

What I can say, without doubt, is that the seeds of whatever liberation I'm in right now are a direct result of turning, finally turning, and facing the things I was most afraid of. Then embracing them, bringing them close. All the while letting go of the old, the dead, and looking inside for where the energy wanted next to move. 

It's a tricky thing to distinguish between what is really going on and what the mind thinks is going on, what it's convincing you of. But to see the difference between the two, and to go with what is genuinely occurring, changes everything.

Who knows what tomorrow brings? Right now, some rice, a dvd, and perhaps some kitty snuggles.

Onward . . . 

Flight and Heavy Baggage

After over twenty years of doing this waking up thing, I finally get the hang of how it works. 

First there is enormous pressure- emotional, physical, mental, spiritual. I feel as if I'm dying. That my skin is being peeled off. And that I've been abandoned. The chasm between where I am and where I wish I were, where I need to be next, seems to be impossible to cross. It's as if I'm being digested in the belly of some horrific, dispassionate beast, utterly without empathy, perfectly fine with my destruction. I spend a lot of time lying on the couch, or the floor, or in bed, crying, wailing, sobbing, scared out of my wits, lost in some hideous emotional slide. 

For so many years I thought these spans of awful time were about depression, proof of terrible mental illness like a pox on my soul, something dire that I needed to be saved from by beings much more perfect than myself. And when in those crushing spaces, I'd seek out help, from professionals - in the psychology or spiritual fields, and I'd do what they told me to do, diet changes and thought changes and spiritual practices, and I'd feel better after a while. Or I'd talk myself half to death with friends, for hours and hours and hours, and that too would make me feel better. 

This ongoing digestion of "me" is what drove me to do theater, then on to acting conservatories. It led me to work in a naturopathic physician's office, to live in an ashram, to spend a decade in NYC, to read everything I could get my hands on about things spiritual, psychological, out of the mainstream flow of normalcy. It led me to study feng shui, meditation, yoga, qi gong, shamanism, reflexology, herbs, diet, weight lifting, tarot, kinesiology, pranayama, and a dozen different kinds of energywork. It prompted me to sign up for a BA in Holisitic Health and got halfway to an ND before switching over to a BA in Psych and a masters in Public Health. It inspired me to write two books, a half dozen booklets. And to become an holisitic practitioner myself, teaching hundreds and hundreds of classes, giving lectures, doing sessions with thousands of people over the past fifteen years. 

For so incredibly long, I thought that there was something wrong with me, that each time I'd move forward a little bit, then fall back into the slide, the awful belly of the beast, meant that I'd failed, yet again. Now I understand what's happening. It's so clear I can even describe the mechanics of it.

First comes the pressure, then the slide into the beast's belly, the awful swamp surrounding heart and mind. Then a span of time passes where something is wrestled with - some concept or feeling or belief. Things change, shift in heart or mind, as some belief is carefully, meticulously shown to be utterly bullshitty, totally without merit or worth a poot in a whirlwind's hope of longevity. Or a memory is revealed to be an overlay for a deeper truth. Or a feeling is shown to be a passing vapor, a veil rent with time, something that rises and burns off like morning fog. 

After that comes the blessed release, where I literally feel as if I have lost weight, the dense baggage pitched overboard after being revealed as ballast, the ballast that is no longer needed. I feel myself float thru life effortlessly, understand that I am completely safe, taken care of. There is a sense that I'm glowing, radiant, and people and animals are drawn to hang out around me.  

Then, I feel the slowdown. As if I were an airplane, a dozen feet above the runway, but now gently, slowly, coming back to land. A period of integration follows where I then learn to live with the changes, operate without the belief or thought or whatever it was that just got purged. 

After which, after another span of time, it all happens again, but about something new, or a new layer of an old issue, or a test drive to see if the last go around really, genuinely took.

What I've understood this last go around, is how quickly I forget what just happened. What caused me excruciating pain just a few weeks, months ago, is no longer even an issue. Which is the point: the lesson comes, is learned, is incorporated in, and becomes the new normal. 

This last go around had a few different components, but all related to the same quality of energy. It's been building strength and mass for several years, but culminated with Calhoon's death. At that point, the last mainstays of emotional and mental connections with beings outside of myself were sliced away. At that point, I could begin to finally fully realize that God/Love/Source lived only inside of me, even though his/her reflection might be everywhere around me. At that point, I began to stop talking about myself, expressing myself, telling my story (except for the purposes of this blog, which is for another post, oh yeah). I let go of connections, which in fact had been straining to be released for years now, but which I only recently had the courage to let go of. 

And then that phase began to slow down. A month or so ago, I felt the airplane slowly, slowly begin to touch down again, a couple of weeks of incorporation, and the next "faux" began to be revealed. This one is about practical matters like how large my ass has gotten, and how it is finally time for me to have a job with health insurance and enough money so that I can begin to pay off the truly awe inspiring debt I took on to put myself through school. And a few other components that I'm just sussing out.

I also can't help but see that what I've gone through, what I'm going through, isn't special or unique, though maybe I go about it in a way that is perhaps a little louder, with more neon, than how others may choose to do it. I'm pretty sure this is what evolution is, how the circuitry in our heads, our bodies turns on, gets its groove on, sets the stage for the next unfolding of Life's Further that lives on through all organic beings in this place called Earth and World. 

I do know one thing for sure. The hidden must be brought into the light. And no amount of whining, crying, blaming, or kvetching can alter that fact (although with enough cupcakes it can be held at bay for many, many years). 

So it goes. On and on. Expand, contract. Up, down. In, out. Yes, then no, then yes again. 

Mostly, in this moment, what I get is how glad I am for kitties and computers and the bright coastal sunshine, for rice cakes with almond butter, for this body that feels lighter and cleaner with each passing day. And the reason I feel so glad, so grateful, is that I know that everything passes, that things change, beings die, meals are eaten, the sun goes behind the clouds, the body will continue to age and then finally die. But that here, in this moment, the sun shines, the kitties squeak, the almond butter is creamy and delicious, and that, yes that, is just so dang lovely . . .