IT ALL POINTS TO SELF LOVE

The lessons of the week all seem to center around one theme this week. Or is there only one theme?  Self love. 

It began on Monday. I attended a Meditation and Dharma talk on gratitude. Ok I thought , that is easy. I am constantly grateful for the town I live in, my family and friends, my health, What is not to be grateful for? 
 But the talk centers around the gratitude we can choose to feel  for all the difficult people and circumstances we encounter in our lives. For it is those things and people that bring us the greatest catalysts for our own growth. I get the concept. Yes, I have worked through some major forgiveness relationships and consider myself "doing well"on that front. 
In my reading during the week I encounter a lovely transcript of a channeling session by St Germaine http://joyandclarity.blogspot.com/   titled: THE TRUTH ABOUT YOU. I copy some of the more profound ideas into my journal. "By engaging the truth of your true identity at the fundamental level ( the truth being that you are god/goddess/all that is in human form) you will begin to disentangle yourself from the complications of living in the world. You will find that the challenges you face are only imaginary, they only reflect the energy YOU were expending by keeping your masks in place."

 It goes on to say, "rest comfortably in the remembrance of your divinity, Rest in the knowledge of  WHO YOU ARE.."

A facebook friend posts a video of a unknown, to me, channel. His channeling centers on claiming your true identity as well, and that is the identity of the divine nature that sustains your life.

"When you focus on only this aspect you life will change forever."

Then there is my old youtube friend Mooji, the Jamaican guru who spontaneously lost his connection to his ego self. He comments that all the stories we create about ourselves keep us in a state of duality and separation. The beliefs fed us by society, parents and religion all keep us from the truth. There is only one consciousness (the ocean) that we are all expressing. The "outside" aspects only reflecting what we belief to be true about ourselves.  
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6t2XVQSZaII&feature=fvwrel

This is the end of that week.  After claiming these truths all week I have just finished reading an email from a woman , whose house I stayed in, claiming I had committed an unforgivable act by throwing out 6 small dried chili peppers that were in her million dollar perfect home. She was demanding an explanation and hopes that she would find no more of these unforgivable surprises. 
As I read it, my heart pounded with anger and the sheer stupidity of it. I wanted to respond - GET A F**KING LIFE LADY!!!
How myopic can anyone be.

But then the dharma teaching came to mind. Gratitude. Now here was the gift. The answer to my weeks outpouring . I was claiming my divinity and all the beliefs in opposition to that belief were being invited to show up in any form. I want to love and respect who I am and all that is not in accordance with that INSIDE me must be reflected so that I can see it. How can I feel like the goddess incarnate and allow it all to fly out the window when some woman who does not know anything about me claims I am unforgivable. 
My choice : feel guilty . Shame. Anger. or  see the gift of choice.

This woman was EVERY thought I have had of my imperfection, All the thousands of little things I accused myself of that were unforgivable. All that ridiculous self criticism . It is easy to say I love myself when there is no reflection of the "other" in my face.


Now  I actually feel the gratitude as I confirm over and over. 
I know who I am .
I know what I am
I know how I serve in the greater plan

I breath and release "her".

 I breath and recognize ME

What is unforgivable is my lack of recognition of my essence.
What is unforgivable is my ever giving power to anyone "outside" of me to remove the truth of my real nature.

I breath 
I know who I am 
I know What I am 
I know how I serve the greater plan

Thank you!

Hard Times Require Furious Dancing

For months I have attended belly dance classes, training my body in very precise isolations of  muscle sets, fine motor skills, hip lifts, and shimmies. I do not know why but there is a moment I know that I must leave these classes. There is some  drama happening that is draining my awareness and my offering of my dance to the Goddess. Yes, but it is more. When I first moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico I had attended a free form dance on Sunday mornings called Dance from the Soul.

 The music was of many different rhythms and attitudes. The dancers were the same.I had stopped going for so long, telling myself that I needed more discipline, a deeper practice. Now as I fly around the room expressing movement to the eclectic beats I realize how much my body has missed the variety of attitudes and the mixture of people. I know this feels right. I am glad I trusted my feelings and had the courage to leave my safe woman's group. Danza de Alma lets me sweat my prayers. I am able to push as hard as I want and use any part of my body to move any way that feels good.. The mental attitude is one of freedom.

Hard Times Require Furious Dancing.

This particular session ended with a song called ONE LOVE . And that is was.

ASPECTS OF SHE: Mittie Babette Roger

ASPECTS OF HER: I am SHE

 In my life I have known many aspects of the Goddess embodied in the women around my life. The aspects have ranged from women I love and admire to those I have found extremely challenging, like my mother.  And yet, all have shown me that they are SHE. 

Is the drop of the ocean anything other than the ocean?

On this blog, I would like to tell stories of some of these aspects of the SHE, including at some point my own mother.

Each of these women have impacted my life in deep ways and through them I have grown to love and respect more parts of myself. 

I first Mittie, a beautiful young bubbly woman I took to be in her mid  20's, in a belly dance class. Mittie has a beautiful body well suited to showing off the midriff area . I could tell she had worked hard on dance of all kinds. She introduces herself after my first class, " hi , I am Mittie," and she points to her middle as a visual que for her name. I can tell she loves to help people learn.

I always wonder how young people like her can make a living here in Mexico. She tells me she is a teacher. I suspect she is a good one. She teaches English to young students in a school. In two years she has also become fluent in Spanish. Her story includes her father and his wife living also in San Miguel de Allende .They had been "wiped out" in the hurricane Katrina that hit the New Orleans area. In a leap of faith they relocated to Mexico and he started a tequila business and she, a high end resale business. Mittie had come to visit and fell in love- not only with San Miguel and Mexico but a handsome young Mexican artist. They moved into together.

She had danced in many forms over most of her life. And on a creative level the artist seemed like a good match for her. I watched as Mittie over the next year in class develop into the embodiment of the Goddess through tribal style belly dance.

 She had quit teaching and now was traveling  to promote her father's tequila business in the US.  I would say she had the perfect personality to be in sales, bubbly , warm, confident, and above all genuine.

Genuine and authentic rank high on my attractive womanly attributes list. 

I strive for the high road myself. Not always achieving it but always looking for it. So I admire those on the same path. Mittie jokingly asked me one time where I ranked her on the my scale and I told her that she was a 10, jokingly of course.

But on the serious side, there really was not anything I did not like about Mittie.

She is kind, respectful, and funny. In class she treated me like everyone else. Women my age in the US are often marginalized and invisible to the young. I had experienced this once or twice in a Waldorf school town with lots of young,hip, "in" parents.  Mittie on the other hand, went out of her way to help me through my directionally challenged brain. In class I was often extending the wrong arm up or out, starting on the wrong leg ect.  Mittie would smile and either mirror to me the posture or physically move me into the correct posture.

A true pinnacle in Mittie's life arrived about 1 1/2 years after I met her. She and and another young woman studying belly dance were given major roles in a dance and drum show. Wearing a borrowed golden outfit, she had a six minute solo and a number that included balancing a sword on her head. It was breathtakingly beautiful. She had truly become the Goddess. 

Her artist partner was in the audience that night. After, I smiled and told him how wonderful it was. He smiled

back but did not seem to me  to be glowing with pride. Had he just seen too much belly dance?? I suspected more was going on.

Within 6 months of her stunning performance she would be moving on. He had asked her to stop dancing and traveling. While his artistic endeavors were never in question. 

Mittie moved on well.

She still respects her past partner and acknowledges his gifts to her life.

She moved on with pride and self respect because she recognizes on some level that she is SHE and can not be disrespected or put down. It is time. Time for the Goddess to stand forth. Be all that she is here to be.

She not only shows this respect for herself but for all of us. 

She is SHE.

( This gorgeous photo by our friend SEAN REAGAN)

THE SAND WOMAN

I don't know why I was so called to this ritual. The river and its many sand bars were a big part of my life for 20 years. I spent quiet summer afternoons with friends,swimming, talking and  picnicing.

 I spent solitary time dancing on sand bars.

When my son was young, we spent hot days diving off sand bars, into unusually deep waters surrounding them.





 I played Frisbee and catch the ball with dogs that I dog sat for. I ate watermelon, and watched late night bonfires with friends. Yes, the sand was an integral part of my experience.
A moment came when I began to envision a uniquely personal ritual.
At a Christmas party  we were discussing an enchanting movie called, Calendar Girls, a true story about how a few middle aged women posed nude for a calendar, to raise funds for a friend who has cancer. 

We all laughed and hypothesized about our own ability to do such a thing. Most said they could never do it for any reason.  But a few brave souls said yes . There was a photographer present and he suggested that he would love a project like that and offered to do the photos for free. That seemed to be the end of that.


As summer approached I began to mildly contemplate what month I wanted to be in the calendar and just what my project would be.Instantly, the sand came to mind. 
Symbolically, sand speaks of change and impermanence.  I remembered watching the Tibetan monk, who once lived next door to me, create a magnificent sand mandala. Each grain of colored sand is laid down gently to create an exquisite, intricate ancient design that is almost unimaginable. I asked the Lama why did his culture do such a laborious, tedious  and labor intensive art form in sand??? He said, " we use sand as a sacred  teaching tool of impermanence." When the mandala is completed after many weeks of work it is simply swept up and the sand is set free in the flowing waters of a near by river. It is symbolic of the constant shifting of forms. No matter how hard we strive for stability and the safety of permanence it is not the true nature of existence.



It made sense to me. After leaving the stability of a 15 year marriage, my life was in a constant state of change. The more I allowed and embraced these shifts the easier they became. The meaning of my life began to coalesce  around the ability to shift gracefully. 
I wanted my photo to represent that. What began as a humorous idea was to become a deep personal ritual.

On the day of the shoot I kayaked out to a sandbar alone. I spent the afternoon in silence, just allowing ideas to come to the surface of my consciousness. It began by my dripping sand until it built up, by scooping the sand with lots of water and allowing it to slowly funnel out of my cupped hands. I began to build a tail all the way down the length of the small sand island I had chosen.I dug a huge hole in front of the tail where I could kneel waited deep. This way my hidden legs would allow the tail to appear as though it was attached to my waist. It took the entire afternoon to build the layers of wet sand high and long enough to match the proportions of my upper body. Like the Tibetan monk had described to me, a meditation. My thoughts did not wander aimlessly but kept to the task at hand. I was a meditation of new forms I would be creating in my life. No part of me would remain. In the late afternoon the light of the setting sun would be perfect  My closest friend, Cecilia, and Dick, the photographer, would kayak out to my island. When they arrived we worked quickly to catch just the right moment. I stripped and put hair gel in my hair to facilitate sand adhesion. I settled into the hole while Cecilia buried my legs and brushed away all the footprints around the shot. Earlier I had created a partial clay woman and I now rolled her into the sand so that she appeared to be made of sand as well.I held her high and looked up. Dick shot from all angles and within a few minutes had 130 exposures. As the sun set, there is an indelible delicious mental picture in my mind of the three of us kayaking down the river into the setting sun to have a celebratory dinner together.

 I was deeply moved by Dick and Cecilia's experience of what I considered MY ritual.  They also had had personal epiphanies. And each of us had allowed the river to help us on our personal journey of change.

 Knowing that night the river would take the remains of my sand creation along with it on its journey I smiled and felt a sense of empowerment . The idea of ritual as a tool became real for me. And I like to think that my ritual was for all of us.