Slapped Down by the Universe

Embarrassed over my "Durrrr" answer to my five-year plan for money making, I sat down this week and spent several hours processing everything I needed to process in order to get over the hurdle and actually commit and get started to growing my energy healing practice. I spent several nights working on a website (which is almost ready to go live), I wrote campy ads for coffee shop bulletin boards, I developed a marketing plan (for better or worse).

I have spent 6 months kind of dithering instead of seizing my opportunity here, but I finally decided to get going and really commit. And then, after the first week of my being willing to go forth and make it happen, I find out that my opportunity is going away (probably). Due to a ridiculous situation and injustice being done to my generous friend the massage therapist, I am guessing there is about an 80% chance of no longer being able to use the office that I have been using for one week a month for the last several months. The reasons why the situation is changing has nothing to do with me, but it definitely impacts me.

My first reaction was to feel slapped down by the Universe. It has now been over 2 years since I left my "real job" to pursue other projects, and I have pursued a lot of them. I have directed/produced three plays, written several novels, done some community organizing and activism, experimented with various crafts with the potential for profitable sales, worked on community building, sent out feelers about various pagan ambitions and how might they be accomplished, and embroiled myself in a few possible entrepreneurial endeavors. And all this in addition to spending most of 2009 in bed while my spine realigned itself.

And yet, despite a constant churning and ambitious drive, I feel like the Universe has not reflected back the YES I have been looking for. I have tried so many things, put energy in so many different directions, looking for the one that is Right, knowing that when things are Right, I take one step and God'dess takes the next two for me, but it has not happened. Everything has been harder than I would have thought.

In the end, I called Dad. My father is a very practical, logical man who leads a faith based life. When we were building the nonprofit together, we really explored the ins and outs of living on faith together, and though our faiths are different, the process is the same. He was able to listen as I laid out my frustration, and then talk me through the various factors until I got to some clarity.

I have a plan now. But I will say, it has been a rocky last few days. I thank God'dess for my support network and all the people who love me.

My Own Rubric of Success: Play With It!

I have continued to ponder the cause of my deep embarrassment over not having any kind of coherent 5 year plan for my energy healing, as I posted about here. I quickly deduced that I did not have a 5 year plan because I felt lukewarm about my practice. I had several layers of self-judgment over the whole thing, including laziness, inability to think of it with right and left brains, being a dreamer instead of a planner, and fear-of-failure induced self-sabotage.

Delving beneath all that, I found two things that were really holding me up: I didn't know what the standard of success was, and I am good at energy healing without being passionate or fulfilled by it.

I am good at a lot of things, but I am really only passionate and fulfilled by pagan spaces and lifestyles, hence the goal of living in pagan community in the woods and being involved with projects that promote interconnection, sustainability, co-creation, and sacred pleasure. However, I do not have a coherent plan for making an income off my pagan pursuits any time soon; it seems like stretching to just acquire the land I dream about. A stop-gap or contingency will have to be applied in the meantime.

Of my current income opportunities, I can either choose to work on growing the highly-flexible pursuits I currently have in the works, including my energy healing practice, or I can drop them and get a regular job like waiting tables or working for a nonprofit. Neither option is one that will fill me with passion and fulfillment. That decided, it makes sense to pursue the one that offers the most flexibility and best pay, which is the energy healing.

As for the standard of success, I get to determine that for myself. Having come up through a rigidly structured educational system that I happened to excel at, I have been so accustomed to having an external authority define the rubric of success that lack of one has undermined me without my realizing it. I have now sat down and written my own goals and plan to define success within my practice, and that simple act has lifted a heavy weight off my subconscious.

I have now decided to cease being lukewarm and instead to play with growing my practice. I am not a professional; never have been. I'm not sure it is in my personality to work at being serious and impressive. Instead, I will be a free spirit who writes campy ads posted on coffee shop bulletin boards and uses a blogger webpage because it is the best I know how to manage. Who knows, I may even decorate my xeroxed ads with crayon!

I Don't Know How to Be a Spiritual Professional

In a business meeting this week, my friend asked me to describe my vision of my energy healing practice. She is a successful massage therapist and asked some very pointed questions about what I am doing to grow my own clientele. My answers were vague at best. I share her office, using the space for 5 days at the beginning of the month while she is at Chinese medicine school.

She asked where I saw myself in 5 years, and I, the obsessive planner, realized that I am more of an obsessive dreamer than planner. I have been checking off the marriage, babies, homestead list, but as far as my practice, I am a bit lukewarm about it for a variety of reasons.

When I first began energy work, I saw it as my gift from God'dess to the world, and I was reluctant to profit from it. I started giving it away, and then doing it for donations and trade. After a few years, I began to feel like the scales were unbalanced and started feeling okay asking for more in exchange. I eventually got to a place where I am completely okay with making a decent amount of money in exchange for my work; I have other gifts as well, and if this one funds my ability to build with the others, that works for me.

When I do the work that I do, I go into a deep spiritual state, not quite a trance, maybe more of a fugue. I open my intuitive and visionary senses wide and all kinds of knowledge, insight, and imagery comes through. I am very good at what I do, but really, it is not me. It is God'dess (or the Divine, for my non-pagan clients) who works through me, I am but a sensor at the other end taking note of the flow of information. Because it is not me, it is hard to connect doing that work with something as left brained as selling, promoting, and making a living from that work.

When I think of myself in five years, I will probably be doing energy work in some form, and it makes logical sense to have a decently thriving practice. But I somehow have trouble seeing it as central to my passions. It is more like something I do on demand, almost instinctively, like breathing or talking with God'dess. It is too much a part of me to think of it as a product to be sold.

I am not sure how best to strike a balance with all of this. I think I will prescribe for myself an abundant and fulfilling clientele ritual and then some basic advertising and the set up of trades with other healers. I'll let it flow from there while I continue to ponder.

Reviewing Transition

I recently got an email restarting the Transition process and looking into Steering Committee type stuff in town, asking for all those still interested to reply. And I hesitated. I still have not replied.

I was excited about it several months ago, but I feel a little sour about it now. I wonder if perhaps our conflict of vision is what caused us all to walk away/take a break for these several months. I think I was one of the main conflict headers. I think that Transition is cool stuff, is necessary, is win-win, and I want to see it succeed. I wonder if my participation would hamstring it, because I would always be questioning some of the paradigm that seems to get a lot of people really fired up about it. I have seen a tendency for those excited about Transition to be folks who believe in the Peak Oil Apocalypse and the Enlightened Few versus the Ignorant Masses, and those are both Mytho-Realities that I actively question and choose not to live.

With my questioning, I do not want to sabotage the very fervor that would lead to Transition success. Or, as the voice of an old friend and activist whispers to me, perhaps they need my voice questioning those paradigms that keep them limited, so that Transition can be successful. My friend would tell me that my input is highly valuable and I would be an asset to the committee instead of a hindrance. I admit to having a little less confidence than that.

Relatedly, I find that my focus of what I want to work on is changing. My projects seem to be contracting into the personal: baby-making, alternate streams of income via drums, growing my healing practice, and acquiring land to raise our family on. On the one hand, I absolutely believe in the bigger picture and its relevance to all our lives. On the other hand, my kids and partner come first. I am conflicted about it a little, but then again, I can feel myself relaxing into my own advice to other friends who became parents before me: You are doing what you can right now, and that is enough. There is a reason most activists are the young and old. They have the time and energy to work on the bigger picture, while the parents are raising the next generation.

I'll have to keep pondering the Transition question. I think I will call a friend who is still involved and see what she thinks about my contributions and how they will play out in the politics of the thing.

Breathing Wrong

I went for my first ever Breathwork session today with a woman who has been doing this for years. She had contacted me about a trade of energy work for breathwork, and I thought it would be a good idea. I have known for a while that breathwork would be good for me because I have trouble interfacing with the physical world. When under stress or pressure especially, I jump up a bit out of my body and groundedness and then find things like laundry and dishes overwhelmingly difficult. Breath keeps spirit and physical balanced. 

I felt nervous when I got to her place for the session, and so was breathing shallowly. She didn't tell me in time and so I wore my shoes into her session room. Her chairs were white and I was afraid I might get them dirty somehow. I was afraid I had parked in the wrong spot and when I asked her if it was okay, her response was less reassuring as of-course-why-wouldn't-it-be. 

She told me a little about breathwork, we chatted for a little while so she could get a read on where I am, and then she recommended that we work on the physical mechanics of breathing. She told me I am doing it wrong and probably always have. (This is, generally speaking, a bad way to approach me, I am an overachiever who hates to be told flat-out that I am doing something wrong, especially as a diagnosis by an expert.) I have done yoga for years, my initial instructions were very breath-based, and when I meditate I do a good bit of breathing exercises as well. That all is apparently rather irrelevant. 

She worked with me a bit, had me try some things, notice and share my noticing about some things, and I began to realize that my scoliosis really affects the mechanics of my breathing. Even in its much improved state, the closer I got to how I am "supposed" to breathe, the more uncomfortable I became in my spinal musculature and therefore spinal alignment. These noticings were not within her area of expertise, I think. On top of that, I really had trouble isolating my diaphram, probably because so many other muscle groups have learned to compensate for it due to my spinal curvature, and that got frustrating. She seemed a little impatient with my difficulty, or maybe that was just me being overly self-conscious. I found it very hard not to be self-conscious since it is not like I can stop breathing in between lesson points and she was watching and evaluating the rise and fall of various parts of my body as I breathed. 

So in the end, I don't think we will be seeing each other again. Our energies don't really click. I have learned that breath exercises will help to release areas of my spinal musculature that really don't want to release (structural muscles are like that), but I am enjoying my improved energy and functionality now that things have restabilized, so I think I will be shelving this knowledge for a few years until it is time to work on it again.

All About the Body Today

I am running hot, energetically. Part of that is some of the amazingly effective body work I have received in the last couple of weeks, which has cleared out energetic pathways, meridians, and most importantly to this moment, my lymphs. 


I got off the massage table yesterday feeling like I just needed to keep moving. I puttered around for five or six hours, until finally my back seized up and I had to lay down, I had no other choice. I have been in a quandary all day today, where part of me really wants to move, to do, to not be still, and the other part of me wants to hunker down in bed with a flat spine and stay there. 


It is the tension of lymph vs. musculature. My lymphs are cleansing and so need green food and movement. My spinal musculature is adjusting/shifting and so needs stillness with gentle stretches. I have done some for each and tried to balance myself, but really I end up doing one thing until the other protests loudly enough to switch me over to taking care of it. 


I did have an energy session yesterday, and that got interesting. I was running so hot it was like flood levels, most of it from Source, and my client was in a very deep, cool, quiet space so it took me a few moments to even find where his energy was. It was a good session, but again I felt great for being on my feet and useful, and then I had to go take a several hour nap. 


I have a push-me-pull-you body. I will take another "space for physical healing" day today and then hope that I can head to the drum circle with enough energy to dance tomorrow.

Describing Energy Work

I have trouble describing my energy work. More specifically, I have trouble describing it without sounding like I practice quackery. Trying to describe the energetic dynamics, what moves what, how, and why, is jabberwoky-ish because it comes from Dreamscape: the land of symbols, imagination, and thought.


We all have an energetic field around our bodies; we are electro-magnetic beings, among other things. This field is called an aura, an energy body, and auric field, etc. I can use my energy body to move other people's energy bodies in helpful and effective ways. To make other people feel like I am doing something and to keep my feet from getting tired of standing still, I move around and wave my hands as if they are directing the energy, though really I can just stand there and do just as much (with energetic body parts that are much more deft than my hands, but going into that detail really gets into the quackery). 


What I am seeing/sensing is quite different from what is happening in 5 senses-world. I sense colors, textures, imbalances, unhealth, health, the chakra system (which is like the organs of the energy body), other beings present in the room, the fabric-like textures of probabilities and possibilities of life-paths, images of metaphors to explain any and all kinds of on-going dynamics and processes, how to help, move, redirect, rebalance, adjust and attune all of this, and more.  


Basically, because energy follows thought and the energetic world is part of what I call Dreamscape, if I can imagine looking for it, I can find it, and if I can imagine a question about it, I can find an answer, and all of it comes through in exquisite detail. 


Afterward, I talk with clients about what information has come through. I do not/ cannot go against their will, and so moving energetic realities that they chose to put in place is not something I can do, but something for them to do. For example, if someone felt really unsafe, they may have put leaden shields around themselves to deaden all energy that comes their way. I cannot remove the lead. I can attempt to transform it, put the energetic forms of that transformation in place, and then explain all the imagery and why one way serves the client better than other and how to perform the transformation themselves, being careful to include that it is THEIR CHOICE. Pagans are quite receptive to it. Others, I have to go slower and start with the energetic basics of Ground, Center, Shield. But everyone starts where they start, whatever. 


It is really something experienced better than described, and the more specific someone is about what they would like help and support for, the more effective I am. I can do general tune-ups, but specificity adds a lot. 


I need to be able to blurb it in order to sell it, and in order for the massage therapist friend who is supporting me so generously to describe it to her clients, but I am still at a loss. Because so much happens in the Dreamscape, it comes across as rather nonsensical in 5-senses World. (Literally.)

I Couldn't Make It Up If I Wanted To

I often worry about my energy work. So much information comes through, images, stories, details of how energy is moving in each chakra and what would improve the situation, etc. Every session is different, and yet I have also noticed that certain themes will run through a day's worth of sessions where an insight that applied to one person applies to another in a slightly different way. I worry that part of me is just making it up, that it doesn't really help, that I will tell a client what I have sensed and they will tell me I am just flat out wrong and it was a terrible experience. 

I have evidence and testimonials to the contrary, but that doesn't really mitigate the nervousness that comes with each new client as I try to explain what happens, how, why, what to expect, etc. Describing what I do on the energetic level sounds like pure quackery even to my own ears, and yet it is incredibly powerful and accurate. I have been able to do some very deep, necessary, difficult work with certain clients and have witnessed how their health and lives have changed because of it. And yet, the concern remains. 

Since I saw so many clients last week and really am putting some energy into a regular energy healing practice, I decided to get professional and start making session notes so that I can review where we were last time for when they come back. After writing about 10 sets of notes, I was somewhat reassured. I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried. I have to be a little careful/tactful about how I present the insights that come through, but everyone has nodded in (sometimes surprised) agreement. Everything makes sense in and of itself and is accurate to context and appropriate for the individual's ability to process the input. I couldn't do that on my own, just out of my own head and imagination. 

I really and truly could not make this stuff up. That's reassuring, but also rather weird. I have to be somewhat careful not to look at this with my mundane senses, or to think about it the way my Dad would think about it. It only makes sense in the Dreamworld/Shamanic Realm/Energetic Plane/New Age/Whatever. And yet, really, it is only in that Dreamworld et. al. that anything truly makes sense anyway.

Aiming the Fire Hose

I've been working on my energy healing practice this week. I do some financial organization and consulting for a friend of mine who is a massage therapist, and she has started going to Chinese medicine school one week a month. She wanted someone to rent her office for that vacant week, but also wanted to make sure that whoever came in was of the same caliber healer as she is. No one really took her up on her offer, so I suggested the crazy idea of me going in instead. I told her I would have to pay her a percentage until I could build a practice, but she really believes in the healing work I do and was excited to do it. 

It has taken us a few months to get everything together, and so this week has been the first GO week. I was a little nervous about working out of her office at a professional level (where do I have people do what, where do I find everything I need, etc.), and so wanted to get some longstanding occasional clients in so that I could practice working in that space. I have a pool of friends who have all come to see me at some point or another over the last five years, so I sent out an email. 

I offered a "help me with my energy work" special of Slide your own Scale, $20-75. I think that the $20 is really too low to be sustainable (I will probably keep offering a friends and family slide of $40-75), but I also know that many of my friends really do not have a whole lot of cash flow. It is one of the main reasons I have not been able to successfully build a practice thus far: the people who come to me can't afford to pay me what I need to make it sustainable for me. So I chose to go low for this practice week. 

My week hath exploded. As of tonight, the 3rd night of my 6 days in the office, I have 15 sessions firmly scheduled over the week and one pending. I had a decently long day today and it will be much longer tomorrow. I am tired. Doing energy work is like holding a fire hose: the water is not mine (I pull energy from Source), but it takes a lot to direct and aim the flow. 

It is good, though. This is a phenomenal start to what could become a sustainable income flow. Once I am well-rested, I will do my visioning work to see what comes next.

TED: Mirror Neurons Make the World Make More Sense

VS Ramachandran: The neurons that shaped civilization (7:44)

I often watch TED talks because I find them absolutely fascinating and uplifting. This one, however, did what the best of TED talks do, and blew my mind. He talks about mirror neurons in the brain, and how they enable us to see someone do something and learn it ourselves. If we see someone else being touched, a percentage of the neurons that would fire if it were happening to us fire anyway. The way we know it is not happening to us is because the messages from our skin and body are not correlating the message. If that part of our body is numbed, however, we think we actually ARE feeling it.

He even says at the end that this works for people who have phantom limb syndrome. If they are in pain in their phantom limb, they can watch that same body part being massaged on someone else and it eases their pain! This is incredible!

The healing potentials of this are mind-blowing. We could watch other people receiving massage and feel relaxed ourselves. I wonder if the efficacy is reduced when we watch a recording of it, or if it works equally well in person or on tape. It makes me wonder if all the images of violence that saturate our media get mirrored into our own bodies. I would not be surprised if that were the case. Watch enough murder-crime shows, and perhaps our body begins to mirror that death.

On the other side of things, though, being around affectionate people gives us affection, too. I clearly remember my parents often being physically affectionate toward each other throughout my childhood, and I wonder if that is one of the reasons I feel so well loved deep down in the core of me.

I also know that my Mom once told me about how as a kid she watched others diving off the diving board, and once she had watched enough, she went up and was able to do it the first time without anyone actually telling her how. I have noticed that I can learn physical actions the same way, specifically with dance or sports. If I see it enough, then my body and my muscles know how to do it. I thought it was an inherited ability, and perhaps the degree of it is, but now I know the neuroscience behind it and that all our brains are wired for that kind of mirroring.

So if I watch someone pound a beat on a drum, part of me is beating that drum. If I watch someone dancing around a fire, part of me is dancing around that fire. This helps explain why I feel so good after a drum circle even if my health did not allow me to participate directly.

Suddenly, the fandom around professional sports makes a little more sense, too.

New focus

I have deleted my previous posts (which no one ever read anyway) and am repurposing this blog to something hopefully a bit more sustainable. This will now be an account of what I am working on and how it is moving along, any issues I have stumbled into, thoughts and reflections on it, etc.

I am a busy, busy person with several projects set to hit as of the new year. The agenda as it stands now, just before we move into 2010:

NEW PROJECTS:

• build consensus for a time bank in the local pagan community
  
• initiate first discussions about the potential uses and benefits of incorporating a pagan church in the community. I think a Grove Temple to serve as an umbrella for the local Circles and Solitaries would be good, but we shall see how the discussions go.
  
• I have volunteered for the Steering Committee of the local Transition group, which should be interesting. It is not 100% core to my values, but is close enough to be worth pursuing and see how it works out. I am concerned that the Transition movement is too focused on evangelizing people to the cult of the Peak Oil Apocalypse when really the solutions that come out of the Transition process are all win-wins that should be easy to sell, but it may just be a generational bias on my part.
  
• Help plan our pagan wedding this May
• Work on the whole baby-making process (I want a sign for the bedroom door: Making Babies, Do Not Disturb).
  
• Move to and set up a new community household, this one being more baby focused/centered and probably a good bit more cooperative, especially regarding finances.

CONTINUING PROCESSES

• Continue to build my Energy Healing Practice
• Continue in my Dark Moon Circle
• Continue to hold celebrations of the Full Moons
• Continue to make space for my physical healing
  

POSSIBILITIES (given time, space, spoons, and inspiration)

• Revive Red Tent events/Pleasure work
• Co-teach the updated Cakes for the Queen of Heaven Curriculum
• Co-Host and plan Open Space Event/Crossroads Gathering

I think that is enough, honestly. Feels like a lot. It also feels like not enough, but I am highly prone to overambition. I can admit this.