Birthday Month

The month of March is my birthday month. Last year I celebrated my birthday for a week. I did something nice for myself every day. It was so much fun that this year I decided to celebrate for the entire month of March. Every day I plan at least one thing that feels nurturing in either body mind or spirit or some combination. For instance, I have practiced one hundred breaths of joy every day this month. Each day, usually in the morning I breathe 100 deep breaths through my mouth, imagining my breath beginning at the base of my spine and moving up to the crown of my head. In the beginning I would lose count and space out and it took a really long time. After a month of daily practice I can stay focused and it takes about 7 minutes. I feel energized and awake and yes, quite joyful. Some of my other treats to myself are a delicious bodywork session with singing bowls, a walk in the park, sculpting, lying on my living room floor with my face in the sun, laughing, and hanging out with dear friends. My favorite was having my daughter and son-in-law cook Gary and I a birthday meal at our house. Monnya is an inspired cook who makes gormet food that avoids all the many foods I am allergic to. I felt so loved.
I chose to spend the actual day of my birthday alone with no plans allowing myself to do whatever I wanted to all day. My intention was to be kind to myself about my choices. At one point I put my latest sculpture piece, the laughing woman, in the oven to soften her up and went to put some recycling outside and got distracted. When I came back in her arms had melted into the oven floor and there was smoke all over the kitchen. I spent almost an hour cleaning up the oven and I was able to be kind to myself. After a while it was even amusing and I was able to laugh. I became the laughing woman cleaning up the laughing woman. Hohohohohohohohohoho...
Afterwards I sculpted for two hours and felt very satisfied. I am learning to take care of myself better and be in a relationship. I have begun scultping again after almost six years of hiatus. On the day of my birthday I also did yoga, meditated and went for a lovely walk. In the evening I had planned to meet Gary and two close friends at Eldorado Yoga ashram for a yoga class and a chanting kirtan. I appreciated the opportunity to do something different than go out to dinner and to share that with people I care about so much. Gary was really sweet and made me a card and bought a cool balloon and flowers. I have been feeling moments of a heart full of gratefulness all month. In addition all of this love has brought up what isn't love and I have also felt angry and sad and scared. It seems most of my fears and doubts focus around Gary and sometimes I get very stuck. It takes a while to recognize that I have shut my heart down and need my own attention. It is so easy to get lost in the story that this relationship isn't what I want, even in my birthday month. I am getting more skillful at bringing myself back to the present moment in my circle and asking myself what I need. I know I need kindness, compassion and patience. For my birthday month I have practiced showing up for all of what I am feeling as skillfully or as unskillfully as I do.
So, would you like to adopt my practice? I encourage you to do nice things for yourself for whatever reason you come up with, or even better just because you are you. Happy birthday to me. Happy Birthday to you whenever it may be. I'm glad we were all born and get to spend this lifetime together learning and growing, crying and laughing. Love to all of you, Andrea.

authenticity

My mother has been at Anum Chara Home in Boulder since April. I brought her to Boulder because I wanted to be closer to her in the last phase of her life. Although the caregivers were mostly very caring, I was dissatisfied with the care she was receiving at the locked alzheimer's facility in New Mexico where my sister lives. I appreciated the holistic philosophy of anam chara and their committment to respecting elders. Anum chara means soul friend and that is the intent of the staff there. I also felt that my mom was overmedicated with anti-psychotics and I began the eight month collaboration with her Doctor and the staff at anum chara to slowly ease my Mom off of seroquil. She made the transition beautifully. For a period of about two months she became more and more alert and conscious. I even got to paint with her twice with the help of the caring art therapist. She smiled more and had more words. She recognized me and Gary and a longtime family friend. I could read to her and she could make comments about what I was reading. I spent many hours with her and felt more connected and closer than I had in years. This was intermittent of course. Sometimes she would be far away in her own world. I gave myself permission to stay a short time if I wanted to and began to be less attached to her condition when I arrived. All of my life I have wanted my mom to show up for me in a certain way. I wanted her to see me as I am and be willing to talk about feelings. She was much more into discussing the details of her daily life and was very clear with me that I was too intense and expected too much out of life. I always knew she loved me and I didn't feel like she knew me. She was there for me in many ways. She taught me the value of meaningful work and the importance of exercise. She instilled in me her strong value of helping other people. We didn't make the transition to an adult friendship that would have required us to move out of our mother-daughter roles and be real with each other. During the last eight months I have begun to realize how much I still wanted her to validate me. Even in her advanced stage of dementia when she was not at all capable of approving of me I still wanted approval. This has been a long grieving process: letting go of the mom that she was and embracing the sweeter older woman with dementia. In the process of accepting who she is now I have come to greater acceptance of who I am now. I have learned how dependant I am on outside validation to know that I am ok. I have become aware of how easy it is for me to pretzel myself into what I think others want of me. Out of being kind to myself about my habitual approval seeking patterns I have learned to rely more and more on my authentic self. The more I authentically express who I am the more OK I feel. As a child I learned to pretend to be someone I was not in order to get approval in my family. The more I pretended the less OK I felt. When we get the idea that being ourselves is threatening to others and squish all of who we are our authenticity becomes threatening to us. It becomes scary to be emotionally vulnerable because we are afraid we will be abandoned. Our ego or personality strategy tells us that if we are genuine we will get rejected. We learn to shut up and get back in the box. Listening to my intuition about what feels right to me has helped me to recognize and disengage from my personality strategy of judging and criticizing myself for being who I am. The idea that there is something wrong with me was a way to suppress my aliveness when my survival seemed to depend on suppressing. Now that my life is more about thriving than surviving it is time to let my light out in all of its glory. Being authentic is the antidote to pretense. Being willing to be present with all of who I am helps the little girl inside me to open her mouth wide and sing from her heart- letting go of whether she is too much for anyone else. How can you practice authenticity? What is a small step you could take to come out of the closet about who you are? The more you do the more ok you will feel. See what you think. Let me know what you notice. More on my mom's latest stage later. Thanks for listening.
Love to all of you,
Andrea

slow down be still love yourself

This weekend I was privileged to attend a yin yoga teacher training. Yin yoga is a system to bypass the muscles taking stress and bring gentle stress to the connective tissue. The idea is to surrender deeply into mostly lying down poses for five minutes at a time. I found it to be so relaxing and nourishing. All weekend I stretched into relaxing my body. It is challenging for me to just hang out with nothing to do but breathe and be there. This is yoga for graceful aging. By the end of the weekend I felt a deep sense of peace and the sound of my soul singing Yes.
I made up this little song the words of which are slow down be still love yourself .The song is the theme song for yin yoga and has contributed to joy and stillness in my life. One of the women in the workshop said that her body can't get enough yin yoga and now I understand. My mind on the other hand, is very challenged by hanging out in a pose for five minutes doing nothing. I can think of many reasons why doing a myriad of other things would be way more productive, useful and helpful to myself and to others. Practicing yin yoga puts me up against all of my conditioning to move quickly and get the job done now. The sense of urgency I feel manifests in my body as anxiety. The internal message is, I don't have time for this! If I allow the message and the anxiety to be there and breathe into it I can feel all the times I rushed myself or was rushed by another. I was toilet trained at age one so I even rush myself on the toilet. Yin yoga has made it more obvious to me how much I push myself to have a different quicker pace than I actually want. The belief that I don't have time for this comes from the belief, there isn't enough time for me. When I act on that belief I forget things, trip over things and miss exits. Stress makes my breathing shallow and choppy and my reasoning brain is less accessable.
In the last few days being present with the urgency and bringing compassion for myself with it allows a space for stillness. Being kind to myself about rushing and giving myself permission to be with what is, allows space for slowing down. Bringing love to myself when I am anxious is a very comforting experience. I just took a break to work with a lovely client. I was writing so intently I didn't stop until the doorbell rang. I love when the creative process takes me up its its wings and flies with me. I feel so blessed in this moment. My world is so filled with love. Even though valentine's day is a hallmark holiday people are being more loving with each other. That feeds the flow of love that surrounds us, that holds us, that we are.
Happy Valentines Day. Slow down Be still Love yourself

Your name as a verb

Last night our chanting group Spiritsong met at my house. It is a blissful combination of shared food, deep sharing and singing. We have been meeting for several years and now meet once a season.
During the sharing one person was talking about her challenges with her adult son. I'll call him Dennis. The word that came into my mind was Dennising. What if everyone's name was a verb that meant we were being ourselves? What if all of my wonderful and horrible qualities could be expressed as Andreaing? What if all of your lovely and not so lovely qualities could be expressed as Janeing or Bobing or Harolding depending on your name. I have been using this and sharing it since last night. It takes the edge off of judgement and supports the truth that we are all just doing the best we can and just being who we are. All of it-(insert your own name as a verb where mine is) The fear, anger and grief- Andreaing. The joy, playfulness and detachment-Andreaing. The guilt,shame and envy-Andreaing. The self-love, self-acceptance and compassion-Andreaing.
What if it was all there to tteach us that it is possible to love ourselves with all of it? What if our unskillful behavior is a call for compassion? What if we have to be unskillful to activate compassion for ourselves. If we were always perfect how would we learn compassion? What if judgement is a call to come back into our circle and be with whatever is going on? So I am really getting that loving myself unconditionally means allowing myself to feel the felt sensation of whatever is going on inside me so it can be integrated. As I integrate more and more of my past unintegrated pain I experience more present moment awareness. Such a deal!
Sometimes the best teachers are the people we have the most difficulty with. I have a very difficult time with my sister. We have chosen very different defensive strategies to deal with the pain of growing up in our family. My sister chose aggression, I chose withdrawl. When I am around her aggression I shut my heart down and get small. My mother also did aggression so when my sister puffs up I regress to about four years old. I have been practicing showing up for myself in her presence. I have learned to keep my heart open and to protect myself from being emotionally vulnerable. Sometimes I am obsessively going over and over one of our interactions trying to figure out what I could have said to get her to soften and understand me. I also get very attached to being right. I am learning to pull my mind back to the present and experience the felt sensation of being misunderstood. It takes me back to being small and sad and scared. My world wasn't safe. It was hard to know when my mother would be kind and attentive and when she would be angry and mean and slapping me. It makes it hard to relax around other people. I often worry that I will do something wrong and piss them off. Lately in connecting with Andie, the little girl inside me, I am learning to be the source of my own safety. I can feel the felt sensation of being safe inside now. I am so grateful to know that safety is self-generated and no amount of outside approval or understanding will create it authentically. That doesn't mean I need to push support away. When I know I am the source of my own safety I'm not dependant on others to feel OK so it is easier to ask for help and let it in.
So my sister is the messenger of being afraid of aggresion and integrating my childhood fear. I can get the message and use our interactions to open to loving all of myself even the parts I find unacceptable. I can also create clear boundaries which I am learning to do. I can see my sister's aggression as Cyndeing. I can see her love for my Mom as Cyndeing. I can see her mastery of the material world as Cyndeing. I can see her defensiveness as Cyndeing. I can see her bossiness as Cyndeing. I can see her devotion to her dogs as Cyndeing. I can see her competence as Cyndeing. I can see that when Andreaing and Cyndeing get together sometimes it isn't pretty. And sometimes it is. Experiment with using your name as a verb and see what you notice.

Dismiss the messenger

Happy New Year. What a really mean is mad sad glad scared new year. Let's also throw in some acceptance of all there is and a little fun. My presence process statement this week is I integrate charged emotions. What that means is I have been commiting to the process of doing three steps when I am upset. The first is to dismiss the messenger. That means that instead of focusing on blaming the person who looks like the cause of my upset, I set blame aside and turn my attention instead to my own learning. At the start of my week off from work in Boulder I was very upset. I had the expectation that Gary was going to spend a lot of time with me even though I knew he was working. What I didn't count on was he had really bad headaches and when he was done working really wasn't up for playing with me. For the first three days I was frustrated and impatient and critical, blaming him for my not enjoying my vacation. By the fourth day I was ready to dismiss the messenger. I am slow with this process and it is challenging for me to let go of being right even when I am miserable because of it. Blaming Gary was getting me no where and was creating separation and ill will between us. In dismissing the messenger I opened to how I was creating my own frustration and dissatisfaction. It's funny how being willing to take responsibility for my own bad time opened up the space. It was as if I took a step out of being underneath a dark cloud and realized the sun had been shining all along just a few feet away. The next step is: get the message. The message is I'm not enjoying myself. The next step is feel unconditionally. I took some time to be quiet and to breathe into what was going on with me. I went back to being a little girl and waiting all afternoon for my father to come back from work. I would excitedly meet him at the door and my mom would say Don't bother your father yet. He is tired. Give him a little time to rest. After what seemed like hours my father would appear in the living room with his newspaper and would listen to me for a few moments until the newspaper would gradually start to inch up in front of his eyes. Soon all of his attention went to that newspaper. I felt like my father didn't care and that I wasn't important to him. I decided that there must be something wrong with me that the newspaper was more interesting than I was. I went off to stuff peanut butter into my mouth by sneaking up to the cupboard where it was stored and sticking my fingers and fist in the jar. In the present I showed up for that little girl who so craved her dad's attention and let her know that she mattered to me and it was all right to be sad. I told her that I wanted to hang out with her. I held her and suggested we go out and go for a walk. I let her know that even if Gary didn't have energy to play with us in the way we wanted, we could create our own vacation adventure. I began to make plans to do what I wanted to do being as active as I wanted to. We went to a differerent yoga class each day and made plans with a friend. I went to challenging yoga classes and really did the poses consciously, pushing beyond just going through the motions. I am passionate about yoga and it was fun! After doing all my active things during the day I came back to spend the evenings with Gary. He had energy to do quiet stuff together. We listened to relationship tapes, watched House, and read and talked a lot. I found my compassion for his headaches and we enjoyed each other. On New Years we went to a dancing party with a midnight clearing ritual and really had fun together. In taking charge of my vacation and really showing up for myself I came into the new year feeling strong and hopeful. That's what I wish for you. When it seems like someone else is really pissing you off take a moment to pause and ask yourself, What do I really need right now? Let go of trying to get the other person to make you feel better and focus on attuning to what you want in the moment. Dismiss the messenger, Get the message, feel unconditionally.
I am having such a growthful experience with The Presence Process this time. I highly recommend you check it out. It is written by Michael Brown. Be sure to get the revised edition which is more heartful than the first. If you do, feel free to let me know what your experience is.
Love to you, Andrea

Opening to Grace

I am in the middle of a yoga workshop with John Friend. He is the founder of Anusara yoga, a worldwide yoga practice whose first principal is opening to grace. I had an experience of opening to grace today. There are over 100 students in the training. Weeks ago I e-mailed the workshop logistics guy Roger about my hearing challenges and asked him if John Friend could use my special microphone which sends the speaker's voice directly into my hearing aids. He said he would work with me and even asked me for the name of the company who makes the microphone and called them.
I got to the workshop very early to work out the details and Roger put the microphone on John Friend's shirt. I was so excited anticipating being able to hear clearly without straining or trying to do what the person next to me does. My microphone placed where it was got deactivated by John's other microphone to amplify his voice to the group and wouldn't work. I kept thinking I was doing something wrong and urgently adjusting the devise I wear around my neck that streams the microphone into my hearing aids. Nothing I did made any difference. For two hours I strained to hear and was always one step behind except when John came in front of the group and I could read his lips. Mostly he walked around the room and didn't demonstrate the poses. All sorts of thoughts ran through my mind. What was I thinking signing up for an eight hour training when I didn't know for sure if it would work for me? I felt so sad and discouraged and disabled. I made it through the two hours and in shivasana or relaxation pose I remembered my present moment activating statement from this week of the presence process. I feel unconditionally. I lay there with tears streaming down my cheeks feeling my sadness and anger.
I became aware of the tight place around my heart where I hold all of my evidence that there is something wrong with me. I held myself in love and cried. I could see that my hearing loss or tight hips or difficulty getting jokes do not make me a defective human being. There is nothing wrong with me. I could just accept that this training was possibly going to be very challenging for me to hear and that it would be a loss to miss John Friend's sweetly spiritual and funny comments and wise yoga cues. Even with all of my feelings I would be OK. When we were done Roger said he was so sorry it didn't work and that he was willing to try again after the break.
I spent my break with my two friends Linza and Eric. I was able to be honest with them about my disappointment and get loving support. We had fun at lunch and then went for a walk around the lake at City park. It was a cold crisp walk and the gorgeous mountain view, clear blue sky and the warmth of the sun brought forth my gratitude for being alive.
We returned to the afternoon training and I decided to sit in meditation and ask for help from all of my spiritual support to have things work out and to be able to meet whatever happened
with grace or at least some level of acceptance of all of my feelings. I asked for guidance and help and I could feel my breath slow down and deepen and the anxiety and shame of the morning dissolve even more. Roger found me and put the microphone on John in a different way and it worked perfectly. I was able to hear every word. I felt so much joy in my soaring heart. I could feel the part of me that is afraid to trust that things work out well and is always waiting for the other shoe to drop. I gave that space too, feeling it unconditioinally and it stepped into the backgroud like an understudy in a play. The rest of the afternoon was filled with hard practice that didn't seem hard because I was so happy to be able to hear well enough to do it. It was a pleasure to learn from someone who has been teaching for 31 years and knows so much about how bodies work and how minds and spirits work with them. His passion for teaching and yoga was so inspiring and fueled my desire to continue to practice and to grow as a student and a teacher. I am so grateful to have opened to grace. ( I just realized as I am writing that opening to grace means opening to Grace which is the name of one of my spirit guides. Thank you Grace.)
In the relaxation pose at the end of the day I felt such a sense of the blessings in my life. I get to have experiences that stretch me and allow me to let go of my beliefs in my own unworthiness and embrace all of who I am. This is what I also wish for you.
Many blessings to you all at this holiday season. May you all continue to stretch and grow and open to all of who you are in all of your beauty. Andrea

We grow

Now I am used to writing in plain black. I remember when my blog settings changed for no reason I could figure out and I couldn't write in color anymore. I was so upset and felt like there was something wrong with me for not being able to be tech-savy enough to figure it out. That has been a good teaching for me because now it doesn't matter. Maybe part of progress is that things that used to be upsetting and that I reacted to strongly no longer are triggers. Being willing to get underneath the story of my inadequacy to the felt sensation in my body allows the spaciousness to integrate formerly upsetting things.
I am now doing the Presence Process for the third time. I love Michael Brown and I wish I could sit at his feet drink in his wisdom which thankfully he would hate. He is so committed to people learning to increase present moment awareness by practicing it themselves that he put his message in a book rather than training facilitators to teach his process. It all feels new to me as if I had never heard a lot of what he is saying before. I think that is because I am in a different place and can absorb and integrate differently. Last week I walked around saying, " this moment matters" whenever I thought of it. It was a powerful way to bring myself out of my thoughts into my body. Doing the fifteen minutes twice a day of connected breathing gives me a structure that I appreciate. The last two times I went through the Presence Process I struggled with doing the evening breathing meditation and this time it is easier. Even if I am tired I do my connected breathing and not in my bed. When I let myself do my breathing session in my bed at night I usually fell asleep. I am being kinder to myself this time and more realistic about honoring my limitations.
I never pushed the right button to publish this blog and the other two thirds got erased somehow. Of course I have no idea what I wrote about nor what I want to write about now. If I use this moment to be with what is I notice tension in my shoulders and a too full feeling in my belly. That moment of stillness brought back to me what I had written about. I wrote about the very difficult time Gary and I had reconnecting. We had a values conflict to work out and my world was shaken for more than two weeks. It's so interesting to me that all of my angst didn't get saved and the whole blog didn't get published. I had the sense as I was writing that I needed to continue to work this out with Gary rather than blogging about it. Tonight I had the intuition to re read the blog because I couldn't remember what I wrote about. I discovered most of it had disappeared into thin air a week ago.
We are past our conflict now and I got a chance to soothe myself when I was in a very threatened place, reach out for support and clarify my boundaries. Gary got a chance to look at what was important to him in a deeper way. Together we grew closer. I am grateful that we do repair work so well even if it isn't pretty. In relationships there is harmony and disharmony. What determins the health of any relationship is how well repair work is done to bring disharmony back to harmony. Gary and I are committed to repair and that's the main thing I love about our relationship. On our first date we agreed to support each other in our spiritual growth no matter what. That is the definition of a spiritual partnership. That may even mean agreeing to change the form of the relationship if that is what best supports the spiritual development of both people. I am glad that the romantic partnership we are in now is the one that best supports both of us. A spiritual partnership embodies the conscious knowledge that we each trigger each other so we have the opportunity to heal. In the middle of being triggered it is hard to remember this and even harder to see beyond the messenger to the message. The definition of a trigger is something that reminds us of unresolved pain from the past. It's a challenge to stop and breathe and own the past pain. It's easier to blame the other guy and go for the jugular.
Out of this conflict that Gary and I faced he got to look at his tendency toward craving and I got to look at my tendency toward aversion. Both of them come from our attempts to protect ourselves from painful experiences in the past. I think this past two weeks has enabled both of us to peel away layers of the painbody and to trust each other in a deeper way. I am grateful. I'd like to paraphrase the words of Rumi, Beyond craving and aversion there is a field. I will meet you there. We are all spiritual beings in human bodies making mistakes and deserving of forgiveness both our own and each other's. Out of acknowledging each others' humanity and forgiving mistakes, we grow.