Unconscious... really means NOT conscious

This weekend I supported one of my favorite teachers in a weekend of Abdominal Meridian Massage. When in the role of supporter I setup the room, hold energy, demonstrate and help people find specific meridians and points when asked, and am a participating person when necessary (if the class is an un-even number). This weekend worked out that I actually gave and received this amazing work. One of the "head trips" about being a healer or in a healing field FOR ME (notice that is capitalized... I am not sure if it is this way for everyone so I don't want to lump us all together) is that I often am in the role of teacher or therapist and forget to be the student. AND I sometimes forget for myself (even though I remind my clients often) that healing happens and things arise when we are completely ready. AND often times it happens in layers. SO, this weekend was my (smack my forehead make a duh sound) reminder... While doing Abdominal Meridian Massage we contact the organs in the abdomen, the QI corresponding to that organ system and all that is "attached" to the physical area of the body that is READY to be "heard". As many of my friends know, I was in a serious auto accident in 2001. In that accident I broke my pelvis in 3 places and had to have a bone graft from my left hip to re-attach my arm by putting a plate wrapped around the bone chips from the hip and then screwing said plate to my sternum and humorous. As you may well imagine, I have done TONS and TONS of my own healing work in both areas, have been receiving work from other healers, get regular massage and energy work, and am gentle are loving to those areas of my body... So this weekend when my partner was working in the lower left quadrant of my abdomen and connecting to the energy of the large intestine (METAL ELEMENT) and stomach (EARTH ELEMENT), I was SHOCKED to feel once again the pain in my shoulder and hip. I felt the connections of those areas and thought I had already done all the work necessary to release the event and the pain... On a conscious level I have not had pain the those areas. I have been completely unaware that the energy was still speaking to me. Then in the afternoon session as my partner was working the areas again I was very "in my head" and logically telling myself what she was working on reminding myself that I had done the work, and so on and so on... Then all of a sudden I had an epiphany... It was one word. One simple word. SAFE. This may not mean much to someone who is unaware of meridians and their associations... BUT the EARTH element's meridians are stomach and spleen. AND the energy of the EARTH element is FEELING SAFE. WOW WOW WOW And then I began to laugh. Huge laughter. At myself. At taking myself so seriously. At thinking THINKING THINKING that the work was done. HA. The work is NEVER DONE. We get reprieves and times of still waters, and then when we are in the perfect moment in time, with the perfect experience available for feeling and "hearing" the body speaks. It reminded me that Unconscious really means we just don't know. We may make lists of all of our unconscious habits or patterns or whatever. And then we think we know. BUT we really don't know until we DO know. So, on that note I remind myself and EVERYONE else that UNCONSCIOUS means we don't know. It means that for everyone. And so when we remember that things will arises because we've made an inquiry to our QI (or whatever word you use to describe creation and energy and the vast mystery of all), and it may not be today or tomorrow. AND it may require us to continue to ask, and to be curious, and to wonder and to be open and to be gentle with ourselves for NOT knowing something or seeing something or understand something until years later. And also to always CONTINUE to ASK. Energy responds to all inquiries. And our body is the vessel in which it often reveals its answer. Love, Janet

Age

Today we celebrated my Mothers 80th birthday. Things that I learned today (or at least was reminded of today): *Aging well means eating well, loving well, moving as well as you can, having a positive attitude, believing in something bigger than yourself and asking for help when necessary. *Family hold patterns of behavior and response, no matter what age. *My Dad, although quite an amazing human being, has an interesting pattern of relationship with my Mother. *My siblings continue to "pick" on me, no matter what age I am, and I continue to want acceptance from them and my parents. *Even though they (my family) are all "proud" of me for my accomplishments, I (and that is a capital) am the one who sometimes see's the relationship from a past point of view. *High school friendships that were based on commonalities like music and drama and theatre, last a life time! With all the celebrating that was happening, I decided this weekend I was going to lovingly observe my own patterns. To witness the energy interactions between myself, my children, my parents, my siblings, and my/their friends; To listen to the stories we all tell and to weed out the personal perceptions from the "facts". Wow, was that fun. I learned so much about myself. I really got to witness my children interacting as adults with family and friends, to listen to them share their lives, to see them open their hearts and participate! AND my son said to me just a little while ago as we are ending this day... Mom, you did a great job. You really ARE the best Mom anyone could ever wish for. Now, I know that this truly stroked my ego, but ya know what... It felt good, and it felt like the perfect time for him to share, and it helped me as a Mother to let go of my OWN perceived perceptions of the job I did (or didn't do sometimes). Today, we celebrated my Mothers 80th birthday, and I am looking forward to celebrating many many MANY more!! Happy Sunday, xo Janet

Forgiveness

Forgiveness is one of the primary mantras preached by the ungrounded spirituality movement. This is not to say that forgiveness is a bad thing, but it is not the first place to go after an abusive relationship or traumatic experience. Healing is. Putting our focus on forgiving a wrongdoer before we have actually worked through our anger and our pain is another way the new age movement sidesteps their own unresolved shadow and the principles of accountability. I knew someone who had been stabbed by a lunatic and while they were bleeding, they were doing a forgiveness mantra for the stabber. Good thing someone else called an ambulance, or they would have died. When it comes down to it, healing and forgiving ourselves is the important step. If forgiveness of other arises organically, so be it. If it doesn’t, it’s not important. We are not responsible for those who wound us. They can take that up with God. ~ Jeff Brown This is a statement that I am going to tape on my refrigerator. When I read it I had a HUGE AHA moment... And amazingly I let go of a big thing that I have been "working on" forgiving... WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THOSE WHO WOUND US! AMEN. Stay safe, look for goodness, feel joy, recognize dangerous situations, AND do not engage with those who are not kind to you or who bully or manipulate you! The best way to make this more real is by looking at your own internal landscape. Do QiGong, practice meditation, find a breathing exercise that you enjoy, read books that uplift you, LOVE LOVE LOVE yourself enough to heal, move on, and let go!! Happy Thursday folks!!

Why Sacred Waters School of Integrative Energy Medicine

For the last two years I have been hearing I should be teaching... After applying to a local massage school, I was told that NYS now requires all massage teachers to hold a BS or Masters Degree. So I was graciously turned away... When I shared this with a dear friend, who also happens to be someone I think of as a mentor, she said... Well start your own damn school. And so, the adventure of creating a school for Integrative Energy Medicine began. There is a lot to do when starting a school. I got an LLC, am updated my website, updating my logo, writing curriculum, marketing, sharing, and BREATHING! While creating the new school brochure I had to write a little "blurb" about myself (as the "big shot founder" lol)and about about why attend this school... And this is what came forth: "I began my adventure in the healing world due to my own health issues and a desire to be more self aware of health options for myself and my family. As is the case for many who feel a calling to heal, I began to feel, hear and see things in my body and in the Natural world around me that made me question the current paradigm, the current accepted practices in western medicine. To answer my own questions I educated myself, worked towards many certifications and practiced paying attention to when I felt good and when I didn’t. After gathering lots of personal experiences in my own body, and tracking clients feedback I decided that it was time to shift that paradigm that so many had become “comfortable” with! At Sacred Waters you will learn tools to recognize the correlation between body, thoughts and feelings, the seasons and nature and your energy level, how your relationship to self and others plays a part in your health, how it feels when energy needs to be nurtured because it is depleted, and how to move it to create balance, you will learn practices that you can use for self and others to live a life with less “dis-ease” and more joy. You will learn the framework to be able to understand and share in a more specific way what the energy body is and how to decipher its messages. You will learn to trust your own intuition! Our Energy Body is brilliant. It holds all the answers we need to live a happy, healthy, peaceful, abundant life. Energy medicine has been used for thousands of years by our ancestors. We CAN manifest the life we truly desire. It IS possible to have a fluent “conversation” with our bodies, our intuition, and the Natural world that surrounds and supports us all. And We CAN help others to do the same. Now, don't YOU want to enroll?? Looking forward to sharing as this dream unfolds and would love it if you share this exciting new adventure that I am embarking on with anyone you know who has or wants to experience themselves as Energy!! xo, Janet

How did we get so far away?

Hot water with a slice of lemon. I feel this tonic sloshing in my belly as I gulp the sweet tart medicine of Grandmas secret tonic. She had a "fix" for all ailments, whether woes of the body or woes of the spirit, Grandma could tell you a remedy. Oatmeal, cooked for a long time with a spoonful of honey, a dash of wheatgerm, and a full handful of dried cranberries dates or chopped prunes. She said this would "keep you regular". No need for anything over the counter or prescribed by the "white coats" for her family. Warmed blackberry brandy for the occasional sore throat or sore mind from too much thinking. Elderberry syrup was another favorite. Gathering much to make little, no need for gluttony here. And ONLY LOCAL honey! Grandmas would sing to the bees, she told the bee keeper neighbors that it made her feel as if she was helping to keep their bees healthy and happy! I still feel like singing when I take a spoonful of honey warmed with fresh lemon juice and ginger for an achy chest or grizzly scratchy throat. And I wonder to this day, how did "WE" lose the wisdom of our ancestors?? Ponder that. xo

August: Osage County, and other thoughts about vibrations

Tonight I saw the movie August: Osage County. It was truly a heavy HEAVY movie. But the good thing about movies like that are that they cause the viewer to ponder, well ok, they cause THIS viewer to ponder. And while pondering, I ponder about not only this movie, but about my own patterns. Family patterns. And when we think we are doing better for our kids than our parents did for us, seeing that we all just did our best. Our best, which sometimes can be seen by others as not good enough... And then I ponder about how the Universe gives us snippets and thoughts and songs and books and movies and stories that help us see our own stuff. The stuff that we just don't see until we see it... So after the movie, my love and I were talking about patterns. Patterns of our selves, generational patterns going back through our families, patterns of our parenting, patterns of our relationships (current and past) and patterns of the future. We talked about cellular patterns, and how we "pass things down" from generation to generation. How we tell ourselves that we are different from those before us, and how we then go on to choose similar situations to learn from, just with different people... It is such a HUGE and fascinating topic. And one that if you are going to explore it is best to be gentle in the exploration with ourselves and others. To look at things from a lovingly detached perspective, like a witness, rather than the star of the show... With that being said, here is a story that came to me just a day ago. A story that started this whole thought thread... Grandma Marey: Marey with an E. My Grandma, who I saw not enough, but who left a lasting impression. I often wondered how she did it. Always smiling. She always had really good "spreads" of homegrown foods and soups when we visited. While Mom and Grandma talked we would run around and play, exploring the underground magic of the old house's front porch where she lived. The porch was falling apart, but it wrapped around the entire house and there were cool things, tools that we had never seen, and old furniture to be fixed, all stored underneath it. My younger brother James and I would play mostly, while my older sister read or played the piano, and for some reason I don't have any memory of my older brother Jeff playing with us at all. But what we would do all together was color. Grandma Marey with an E had a whole cabinet of crayons and coloring books, different kinds of papers, glue, sparkles, and different pieces of fabric for cool art projects. Grandma Marey with an E, who was taken from her Mother by the Sisters. Grandma Marey with an E, who was taught how to be a proper girl, who learned about Sunday school and pergatory. Grandma Marey with an E... E for everygreen, extraodinary, enriched, elated, eradicate, elusive, elective and exist. That E. As a kid I would make up stories about her life. She never talked about the past. Mom said it was because she didn't remember. She had had an "accident". And that was always the end of it. We always loved the crayons and paper best. Grandma Marey with an E encouraged us to draw or write about something we remembered from the time in between our visits. She would display our "creations" all over her house. Taped to the walls, magneted to the frig or metal file cabinet, or just laying out on her coffee table. I think after we all left she would go through them an piece together our lives, our joys, our traumas, or triumphs and it made her very happy. Grandma Marey with an E grew up in an orphanage. Not because she was orphaned, but because of her Mother's lineage. Grandma Marey's father had died early and her mother was deemed "not capable" to raise Christian children, and so the Sisters came, and her mother stayed, and there wasn't much discussion about how long, or why or when she would return. But Grandma Marey with an E went. She obeyed. She knew the "sin" of her mother. Grandmother Marey, not Mary like the Mother who was pure and holy, began forgetting who she was. She erased (an E word) herself. She did not exist, but to serve others. And she taught my mother how not to exist, and my mother taught me. And she didn't exist unless it was through others. She loved us so. She enticed us into telling her our dreams. Dreams, she said, was where we all could exist. Dreams were real. I will come to you in your dreams, hold onto your dreams, Be who you want to be in your dreams. And at the end of the day we would all pile into the station wagon and go home. And we would dream outloud, very noisy, lots of singing, lots of stories, lots of teasing... And the car ride seemed to make my Mom really quiet. Which I never really understood. But at Grandma Marey with an E's funeral I understood. We were part Indian. We were sinners. We did not exist. But I changed that pattern. I named my baby girl (who was born shorly after my Grandmothers death) Sara MAREY (with an E), and she exists, she excels, she enlivens, she excites, she has an E! And, to bring this whole story back around, my Grandmothers patterns were passed down to my me. And I chose many of the same lessons, and I also changed many of the lessons learned. And I am sure I taught my children things that I am not even aware of because we share energy. And energy is stored in cells. And we share cells. And we share cellular memory of a lineage that is filled with ceremony, and the earth, and beleifs that are far different than westerners, and a lineage that is filled with pain. Ancestral pain. May it rest in peace and transform with this generation. Namaste

I've been doing much pondering about life today. And one of the things that keeps coming up for me is "how do I create support and acceptance in my personal life, and my community. How can I raise my own vibration of joy and abundance, while being part of a community who does that too." These questions reminded me that... Everything in the Universe springs from the Source (which has many different names depending upon where you live and what your belief system is). The Source is undifferentiated energy. From the Source springs Yin and Yang and all of the "ten thousand things". I know that in order to be physical, we must posses the energy of Yin and Yang. When these two energies separate, we cease to be physical, and we return to Source. Manifest things we can see, feel and identify are condensed energy (which is tangible). The energy around us is usually intangible, finer, clearer, more energetic, less material, and often times not obvious to our senses. I KNOW that with practice we begin to sense the difference between these energies and we learn the language of the Self (capital S). I KNOW the continuum of energy to matter starts with an idea. An idea has a frequency. An energetic vibration. What we think and feel, we create. We create it to validate a belief, as either true or false to us, which either works to bring us joy or works to create suffering. I KNOW by learning to quiet the mind, and sense the body, we learn to tune into our own truth, the knowing we came here with, which is different for all beings... I KNOW this takes practice. I KNOW it is easier to stay committed to a practice when we have others participating with us on a regular basis. With that said, I am wondering if there are those "out there" who might want to join a gathering to learn and experience ways to sense energy, to find our authentic self, to make time to be quiet, and to learn how to be gentle with ourselves on this journey called LIFE. AND to be clear... exploring our internal landscape may not always be pretty; looking at the parts of ourself that the world may see as unacceptable can be scary and difficult. AND Recognizing those places within ourselves does not mean we need to respond from those places. Everything we hold is ours. We get to choose in every moment what works and what doesn’t. Question what doesn’t feel good. Celebrate what does feel good. Aim for balance of Yin and Yang. Learn to breathe deeply. If you are interested in being part of a gathering that will meet, celebrate, encourage, and raise each other up, please contact me. If there are at least 4 others, I would love to host the gathering. We can make it anything we want. We can incorporate food, We can incorporate wine (not too much...), we can (depending upon the size of our gathering) meet at different locations. Looking forward to it all!!!