Posts

Cycles of Remembering

Image
  How do you remember? What do you remember?  This past Sunday, before Memorial Day, I e-hosted in the Elevation Church chat on Youtube. This is my service. I volunteer, enjoying the experience of “walking people to their seats” online, welcoming them with the appropriate links/ information to support their experience, and prayer.  This Sunday while volunteering, someone placed a prayer request in the chat. It was for their elderly friend who has Dementia, who is struggling to remember. It was the woman’s birthday. I thought about this for a while. How much we take our ability to remember for granted. How, in some cases, we go out of our way to try to forget.  Today, Memorial Day, I offered a Memorial Meditation through Revolution Yoga. We used the Kirtan Kriya in which you chant Sa Ta Na Ma in a loud voice, then in a whisper and then silently to yourself and Infinity, while moving your fingers into various mudras. This is a meditation that has been scientifically studied and offered

All The People Pleasers Stand Up

Image
This blog is for you if you have ever tried to do something so someone else would love you, like you, approve of you, affirm you... This blog is for you if you realized or are realizing that it does not work. I'm with you.  If you are still reading, we are both standing right now. Not to shame ourselves, but to set things right, to set ourselves free.  We are standing on our own two feet right now. And in order for us to be doing so, our muscles and bones and mind have to be working in accord. No one else can do that for us.  So, fellow person who feels like someone else's happiness is more important, I'd like to ask you: Is that person helping you to stand, literally? If not, I want to inquire of us here, then, how could they be more important to the function of our lives? How can their internal guidance system, that is designed for them, be more important than our own? It's not!    What we think, do, and feel comes from us, individually.  No one else knows what you ne

Learn the Lesson and Then Teach What You Know

Image
  Revisiting some old blogs recently to celebrate my time as a blogger, I have been able to see so much of my history and growth. I've been able to see all the times that I put myself out there. Love is like that. We just keep offering ourselves to It.  In February 2016, I wrote a blog:  Intuitive Coaching for a Bread Crumb . I invite you to read it. Then, I was offering intuitive coaching for free for the month of February. I was thinking, how can I help someone put together the breadcrumbs, so they can have a whole piece of toast, a whole experience of their life. I remember thinking, just put yourself out there. You can show up and carry some of the load for someone in need, be some of their glue, stand in the gap; you can listen.  People were already calling on me to do this. And I was willing and wanting to help. In most causes not for free but on this given February, I was willing to offer. I was going all out.  But thinking back to it now, having five years maturation, at th

The Wrong-Right Client Syndrome

Image
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that we all have had the experience of offering our services to someone who was not receptive, someone who we assumed, after the fact, was just the wrong client, the wrong recipient. We have all at one time or another offered thousands of dollars in energy or time to people who would not catch the ball. But rather, they stood and watched with their arms by their sides as the ball was thrown to them. They are those who let the ball bounce right off their body while they complained that the ball was never being thrown at all. Think back to a time when you offered something free in which the invitation was unaccepted, or when you, yourself, did not pick up what was freely given to you by another, something you knew could have been potentially helpful to you. What was holding them back? What was holding you back? We probably have more than one long list of reasons why we did not or do not respond or show up. I am too busy. I am not ready. I am af

A Couple Thoughts on Grief

Image
I am not the only one who knows about grief.  In 2021, we all do-- whether we admit it or not.  We know that it feels like our heart is sore right in our chest as it beats.  We know we want to hide and eat and scream and [fill in the blank with your thing ] till it stops.  Grief is like that.  We can not run from our grief.   The things we do to pacify ourselves don't really take it away.  Grief is a process that we must go through no matter the challenge it presents. We will go now to bear our cross, or we will go later kicking and screaming. Why, it is from within this space that new pathways are made, new ideas are birthed, new structures, atoms are split...evolution takes place.  And, it hurts. I can not lie to you. We will hurt.  But nothing is purified, transformed, even transmuted, without pressure.  And while we feel our grief, we must do just that.  Even if we have a friend to hold our hands, we will feel our grief with them there, but all alone. It will be nice to have a

Serving Others is Serving Yourself

Image
What makes someone offer their time and attention to someone else? Do we feel love? Obligation? Both? Some would say: even an apology, meant for someone else's ears, in for the giver. To give means to receive. I believe this. This truth was made more clear a couple weeks ago when I went to go enjoy a massage from my favorite therapist at Osmosis Day Spa. The trip to this venue is long (though beautiful) and the treatment though always beneficial is expensive. I try to treat myself to this every so often as it is a healing modality that truly eases me on many levels.  This day, unbeknownst to me, I had received calls while I was teaching my Zoom classes. Osmosis had called. My appointment was cancelled! So, needless to say, after driving in traffic for over an hour to get to my appointment, I was disappointed when I reached the doors for this news.  Walking toward the door, I noticed a black woman putting on her shoes to leave. Since there are so few black woman in this area of Cali

Being Soft Used to Be for Suckers

Image
Our lives are calling us to action, but we can not create lasting change without the feminine, nurturing aspects of ourselves. For too long we have overlooked the benefit of our feminine power. We have misunderstood its importance, its strength. So, I am spending time exploring the idea of softening. This idea is not for suckers, the way it was once imagined to be. When I was younger, if you were soft, people would walk all over you. Or so it seemed. However, what I have come to realize now is the illusion: Being soft is not for suckers. It takes real strength to live softly. The illusion to dispel is within the opposition: hard, cold.. so for this let's consider the word "fight." To shift our thinking about softening, we must reconsider what fighting looks like. When we are younger, fighting is physical. Then, we develop words, and fighting can become more involved. There comes a time when we all will fight in our truth and for our truth. But as we become more w