The COVID Split

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My Heart Split OPEN with LOVE

COVID split my heart in half when my sister died of it 3-months ago. It felt as if I couldn’t hold my heart together. But 1-year ago today, my heart was also cracked open, allowing love to flow into it so freely and fully. It felt then as well that I couldn’t hold it together.

I wonder how loss and love can feel so similar?

This second year of COVID has been much different from the first year. In fact, the years propelled me in opposite directions. The first year I aligned inwardly; then, in year two, I was pushed to stretch outwardly.

I started the pandemic single in a home/work virtual environment. I was alone most of the time. I worked with clients through an iPad and created videos building a mind body strength training App I entitled: The Mind Body Adventure.

I was beginning to wonder if I was turning into a crazy cat-lady?! (Only kidding)

I connected with my self. Designing ways to explore the relationship within me to find peace and companionship. Although I imagined connecting with people through my work’s message, it was ultimately to connect deeper within me.

Then things took an abrupt change.

Remember when the original COVID strand was dying down. We thought we were on the other side of a 1-year plague. We had a few weeks, maybe a month, before the new strands started showing up, extending the plague to now 2-years.

In that magical month, as spring awakened, I ran into a man I had met just before the COVID shutdown. We met unexpectedly over and over again! Our sidewalk encounters were so frequent he soon asked me to dinner.

Though still leary to override COVID protocol, I said yes to a house party for two.

A connection with a real, not imagined, person enticed me to stretch outwardly, seemingly away from the trust I had built inwardly. To stretch again toward a trust that the outside world was for me not against me.

For the past year I have continued to stretch into the most fun-loving, nurturing, impassioned love fest I’ve ever known.

As I reclaimed the permission to touch and be touched, breath each other’s air, and abandon caution to fall in love, my heart felt more and more intact. What at first felt like a breaking open became a surrendering. I felt safe with my feelings and with him.

When my sister died, and the split in my heart again overwhelmed me, I thought it was because I was losing someone I love. But what I realized was, I again reclaimed the permission to love her, absent of our vaccination differences which had began to silence our love. I felt safe with my feelings and with her again.

When your heart splits open it brings you in relationship with your deepest feelings, surrendering you to love’s depths. If your relationship with yourself is aligned when this split happens, you feel safe with your feelings and with the depth of love’s roots.

COVID brought me closer to me, to my sister Sherry, and to my lover Anthony. COVID gave me the time and pressure to learn of this vastness of love. COVID has plagued us with suffering, but within all suffering may be a gift.

To heal is to find the gift.

 

Share your Covid gift.

Do You Manage or Resolve Your Pain?

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We all cringe when assaulted with hurtful words.

Angry daggers spew from desperate mouths in an effort to pacify their underlying fears. These sharp daggers puncture holes in relationships; and, they bury the respect and care that once created unity.

A silent scream contracts my neck as I sleep. I wake up to the physical pain of emotional struggle brought on by those daggers, my own and of those closest to my recently buried sister.

They accuse me of making their life harder than it already is. A series of insults are screamed at me, followed by a phone receiver’s click. None of their angry rants express a rational violation, so I’m left bewildered.

Another interaction isn’t an interaction at all. I’m dismissed and ignored. My bewilderment turns to belittle-ment.

Then in their final act, I’m told that they’re sorry for the last text or call, and that they still love me, BUT…. and again and again, the cycle goes round.

While I understand they’re in pain. I don’t understand the BUT!
BUT WHAT? What have I done?

Perhaps this is where I get off track. Am I asking the wrong question?
Perhaps the right question is: What have they done?

They claim to love; yet, their accusations are far-fetched assumptions mixed with complete untruths. The story being told is false and the love they profess is feeble.

What I know is: until we own our stories, our stories own us.
What I’ve learned here is: until I own my story AND love myself, my story is written by others.

To resolve the fight rather than manage the pain, in my neck and my heart, I have to surrender my defenses. I have to fully appreciate all that I AM and fall in love. Accept myself. Show up for myself. Love myself unconditionally. And stand relaxed and strong in ownership of who and what I am.

Only then can I live in peace, no matter the circumstances.
And, align in my power, to change my circumstances.
And live in love.

I am not to blame for my sister’s death, nor do I need to defend my love for her.

Defending oneself or blaming others protects the dagger throwing beast that perpetuates pain. A beast that would rather be angry at life, than vulnerable in it. A beast that will sacrifice everything to be right.

Instead, can we surrender into the underlying fear, sadness and hurt. Empathize with what’s under our rage and learn to love.

May we have the courage to meet the beast within our own stories and tame it.

Grieving to Healing

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Fire burns the darkness away.

It’s the morning after my sister’s funeral and I’m relieved I took the day off.

Exhaustion plagues my body and I’m keenly aware of a black hole in my gut. It’s a deep chasm of sadness and heartache. To be expected, I thought. This must be what grieving feels like.

Days passed. Everyday I had to crawl myself out of this chasm of darkness and find my light again and again. It was exhausting. It was getting scary.

But, I also felt aligned and beautifully connected with my sister spiritually. In some ways I felt closer to her than ever before!

I began to wonder if this internal darkness was something other than grieving?

The two-months leading up to her COVID death I was the easy one to hate by her husband and youngest son. I was vaccinated, and they and my sister were not. It created separation. I was attacked with mean words, hung up on, and completely disregarded.

Maybe the black hole was a pocket of hate that I absorbed?

I knew it was possible from my experience with Inca medicine. So, I returned to the native way of healing… FIRE!

With a Shaman’s support, I spent 3-days burning hate away, theirs and mine.

Each day I made an urban fire and surrounded it with five tea candles. Each one representing a different direction. I’d burn a stick, wrapped with the hate, and explore all the ways I had created separation. Both personally and worldly.

Fears and injustices, pain and trauma, ignorance and indifference were all covered. With each story of despair I spoke the words: “I forgive me and I forgive you, because I love me and I love you.”

It would take 6-hours for the fire and candles to burn out each day. And each day I experienced a different kind of exhaustion, coupled with emotional tears and physical pain. But the black hole is now gone!

What is left is a constant and everlasting love between sister’s.

The onus is on each one of us to live in our own light. No matter what happens around us, we decide to be happy or despairing.

There are so many ways to support personal alignment. There will be times when your daily disciplines fall short and additional support is needed. I share this story to share a way that helped me pass through a dark and lonely choice I was making.

When I made a new choice to stand in my light, to shed the darkness that I perpetuated, the hole inside of me filled with love. The love my sister and I share.

Decide to be happy, no matter what!

Urban Fire Recipe: metal bowl, epsom salts, ethyl alcohol and a match.
Shaman Contact: [email protected] / www.roseinfire.com

My Sister’s Scheduled Death

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As I float on a train through backyards filled with yesterday’s snow, I prepare myself for my sister’s 6pm death. The creep-factor of the extended days on a ventilator are pacified by her healthy organs being paired for donation. She will die a hero.

I wonder… when a ventilator keeps a body alive does our Spirit body stick around?
Am I going to visit a heaving corpse?

When I get there, I witness mechanized breathing with perfect rhythm. Her body is like a self-driving Tesla with all the sound effects. She’s expressionless, motionless and powerless, except for her heaving chest.

Days before I was in Vieques, a small island off of Puerto Rico with wild horses, roosters, pigs and peacocks wondering about minding their own business. An albino horse pranced up to me on the beach (an unusual behavior for a wild horse). We frolicked around and she let me pet her angelic white mane for as long as I liked.

As I walked away I was sure that that was my sister saying goodbye. She used to own a black horse named Raven’s Wing. She loved horses and we shared this affection.

When I returned to my resident friend down the beach and shared my experience he said, “That was a ghost horse. I’m sure it was your sister!”

But here I am today, looking at her alive… sort of.?! How could she be here and there?

After watching her for hours, it was time to say my final goodbye. I spoke of how our parents had not said I Love You when we were kids. But that, at some point in her adulthood, she started to say I Love You to me. While at first it felt like koodies; I told her that after years of her saying it, I started to consider the possibility of Love being a kind, caring and forgiving thing.

Just as I said, “Thank you for helping me feel Love as goodness,” she started to gag.

I ran to the nurses desk, “HELP, my sister’s in distress!”

As they attended to her, I felt certain her spirit was here in her mechanized body. She heard me and responded to my heartfelt story of how her Love healed my cautious heart.

As I journeyed back home in the dark, I meditate on how the veil between our earth-walk and spirit-walk is not a straight line. We evolve and grow through physical, mental and spiritual planes at different speeds, times and levels of consciousness.

We’re multidimensional mortals. We’re spiritual beings borrowing physical and mental bodies.

My sister was becoming immortal. I’m witness to her spirit body dominating her other bodies. In Tao they say, Transformed Immortals can walk in both worlds and Love is their guiding force.

I believe my sister frolicked as a horse, gagged on her ventilator, and continues to say I Love You to me. I believe she is free to walk in either world to help human’s Love.

I Love You sis.

Please Breathe

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As my sister remains hooked up to oxygen day after day, week after week, with Covid double pneumonia, I realize the richness of each breath I take.

My sister is instructed to lye on her stomach with the oxygen mask adhered to her face to give her lungs the freedom to inflate. In tandem, bent over our legs in daily hamstrings stretches I instruct my clients to take a full expansive breath into their lungs.

With each inflation my back muscles yawn a release of tension; with each depression I relax in the trust that a next breath will follow. I feel a relaxed strength that I experience as freedom.

Each breath puts me in the moment, reminds me that I’m OK, and readies me for the next moment. I breath in and breath out, I move from one moment to the next, I feel nature’s grace.

How easy is it to forget to breathe deeply? To be fooled into thinking the stresses of our days are more important than the riches of each breath. We hold our breath, breath shallow, and breath quietly as not to disturb others.

Breathe. Please breathe deeply and fully, awake to the grace of you.

Every waking moment my sister thinks about breathing. Eating little and talking less, she focuses on the mechanics of each breath.

Be reminded every day, with every breath, that your life is only as deep as your breath.

Breathe deeply. There is nothing more important. 🧡

 

In Limbo for the Holidays

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Five days before leaving on our holiday journey my boyfriend tests positive for COVID.

I get the more trusted PCR 24-hour test to reassure myself that I can follow through with the holiday solo. 24-hours turns to 48-hours, and I’m now into the 72-hour stint awaiting test results.

So many people are in the same boat. Getting exposed and getting tested. Results are backed up and tension is rising.

The fall out…
I’m dis-invited to the 2-day solstice event that was to kick off my holiday journey.
Even if I test negative, another friend doesn’t want me to deliver her gift.
And, on top of this, it’s now too late to cancel my rent-a-car!

I’m in limbo for the holiday.

I can’t make plans or cancel them.

While I understand the fear of COVID. Right now, everyone’s afraid of ME by association. I represent both the fear of being exposed to COVID and having COVID (even if not confirmed yet). I’m understandably outcast.

Am I holding onto Christmas too tight? Or, am I just hungry for some kindness?

I believe: be the world you want to live in.

So, I try to keep Christmas alive with kindness. I deliver a holiday gift and supplies to my boyfriend daily, and drop off gifts to the friends who will accept them.

But the negativity of COVID repeatedly shadows my Christmas efforts. My light is dimming.

Being in limbo is being neither sick or healthy; neither wanted or unwanted. Although “limbo” reflects being out on a limb, it feels like the middle of a circle… trapped in emptiness.

I dutifully call the car garage to change my reservation.

Here’s where my story shifts…
She recognized me and thanked me for being a loyal customer. She took $100 off the new pick up date and said, “Let’s not do a down payment, so if you get a positive test result you can cancel without losing anything.”

Someone, I barely knew, said thank you and actively showed their gratitude to me in the midst of my crashing spirits!

Fear, disappointment, and uncertainty can cause us all to forget the power of active gratitude. Feeling gratitude isn’t enough. Saying thank you isn’t always enough. Live, act on, and share gratitude, especially with those who give the most!

Before that call to the car garage I felt very alone for the holiday. But, now I’m in the middle of the same circle of disappointments feeling celebrated.

Merry Christmas to everyone and may the spirit of your holiday shine light on the love you have for each other.

YOU Are The One You’ve Been Waiting For Your Whole Life.

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Finding the light in the dark.

~ A Stream of Consciousness ~

Every certification or degree earned, book read or letter written, friend made or lost, you get closer to YOU.

Every compliment made, insult received, or opinion shared, beckons YOU into focus.

Every boundary passed and challenge met births you more and more into YOU.

Life shines through you like rays of light keeping you on a path to YOU.
If this ray of light is Source, then you are its flame.
If this light is love, then you are its muse.

This light is what illuminates LOVE as life’s most powerful source of healing, growing and manifesting.

When your peace is disturbed, quiet your mind and feel where it lives in your body. Feel it fully through the light of love. Breathe love into what aches, until you are once again at peace with you.

The darkness of blame and judgment, anger and fear, will interfere with your life for a little-time or a life-time. To resist or reject what feels real and just is to abandon a piece of YOU. Instead, double up on your love and be with your dark feelings.

Experience your darkness with the same love as you experience your light.

Love all of you to heal all of you.

You are what you are looking for. Every experience is for you to find YOU and align with YOU.

So be it, and so it is.

Love Hurts… but always serves

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Love can turn bad or grow strong. They both hurt.

Heart wrenching moments happen when you question someone’s alignment with you or yours with them. But the first question, that we sometimes neglect when in love is, am I aligned with myself?

The hurt of love is a deep sword. It asks you to soul-search, with an unspoken promise of self-aligned positive change.

This kind of change asks you to dig beneath the intellect to raw emotions.

Recently, in an emotional conflict with someone I love, I realized that when experiencing my heart’s ache I was judging both of us. I wanted both of our stances to change, so the conflict would disappear.

I felt like an ostrich with my head in the sand, unable to see my way out.

Then a friend pointed to the judgment, “that’s right-wrong thinking.” As she put it, “can you both be right?”

I recognized that making us wrong was, very effectively, distracting me from feeling unchecked, unwanted emotions. And I know, you can’t think your way out of heartache, you feel your way out.

What feeling was I avoiding?

I revisited the emotions of the conflict and surrendered into the heart of it. I tracked where it lived in my body, stayed with it, and listen. (The Peace Process)

What I heard through my fear of losing alliance with someone I love was: I’m not allowed to feel this way. I was hating myself for feeling my own truth. Because it was interfering with, what I perceived, theirs.

What if, I allowed myself to feel this way? And loved myself for being truthful.
What if, I gave myself permission to love what matters to me.

Suddenly, the fist in my heart released its grip. A surge of “I matter” cursed through me. Tears flooded my cheeks. I’m not insignificant or broken. What I feel matters!

The question always exits: How will differences effect relationships? But exploring the options in an environment that is loving rather than judging feels hopeful.

First step is, love yourself. Second step is, share that love with another.

Own Your Beauty

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Photographer: Charlie Chessler

Most people I know question their beauty and judge their body.

So they hide it with baggy clothes, beat it with fitness, or starve it with diets. But, even if you change your body’s appearance to what you deem preferable, the only thing that can change your relationship with it is trust.

Trusting that your body is an expression of beautiful.
Trusting that your beauty is an expression of love.

Trust goes beyond looking beautiful, to being beauty.

Your body is a bridge. It brings face-to-face what the mind deems important and where Spirit wants to take you.

I was recently asked to participate in a Body Positive photo expose’. It was explained that all the women involved would pose nude, and write an essay to accompany the photo about their relationship with their body and the project.

I accepted.

Women from different cultures, ages and sizes were asked to sit in the same position for the photo. Nineteen women had gone before me, so I was able to see the ensemble of photos chosen before taking my clothes off.

They were all so different. Beautiful in unique ways. They adorned themselves with tattoos, hair-styles, make-up, hats, jewellery and nothingness. I enjoyed the creativity and sensuality we all shared.

Most of all, the grace in our willingness to be wholly seen took my breath away.

I was about to join these women in a trust.

A trust that physical beauty is something we each have.
A trust that beauty has the wisdom of diversity.

And, what I learned was, beauty needs our permission to be experienced and shared.

Without giving beauty permission to exist, it stays trapped inside the body unable to shine. And our expectations and uncertainties overcast the body’s wisdom causing us to fear ourselves.

But when you trust you are beautiful, an inherent wisdom outshines your fear of being you.

Before this photo shoot I was terrified of a camera lens. Would it see me as ugly, afraid or lacking? I was afraid to really see me.

But something about the willingness to be seen wholly, mixed with the integrity of the shoot, I felt relaxed in my imperfections. I felt free!

Suddenly I was more curious than judgmental. The lens was a place I could learn about myself and everything I could-be.

Everything I thought I should-be, by comparison, seemed unimportant.

Is your relationship with your body based in judgments or love?

This photo shoot was an extension of my work. A place where mind body alignment dissolves the judgments that shadow love.

To be curious about what judgments cause you to not trust yourself, keep talking to your body’s pain and discomfort, adjust your stance, and breath a new alignment into being, until all that remains is a recognition of the beauty that is you.

Please comment with how you experience beauty or this story.

Choose YOU

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We all want to be chosen, but choosing ourselves can be riddled with judgment and uncertainty.

We get a break from this internal scrutiny when someone else approves of us. This distraction offers belonging… but WITH CONDITIONS.

How do you know when self-love overrides the habit of satisfying outside expectations to get love from others?

You feel Peaceful belonging.

From the start, I was a bouncy baby. I found being in my body’s movement and strength a refuge. It was a place where I felt like my own person; and a place I could improve myself with practice and discipline. So, what I didn’t have yet, I could develop. Dance and athletics offered me peaceful belonging WITHOUT CONDITIONS.

How does peaceful belonging show up in your life naturally?
Infuse that place into other aspects of living and you up-level your life!

I didn’t experience delight in belonging with family relationships or any intellectual study, until I was introduced to Tao Philosophy. So, it was clear that, peaceful belonging came from a small niche of interests.

Later in life, when the tension of competing for Broadway dance jobs started to put CONDITIONS on my physical refuge, and I let the FEAR of not being good enough chip away at trusting my personal safe place, I entered Tao seminary for 4-years.

What I learned there was, delight is a discipline; and self-love is choosing delight. The discipline of delight leads to self-love.

That understanding continues to inspire me to share my BodyLogos Method as the mind body strength training practice that helps you let go of needing outside validation and open up to loving yourself.

Tao see’s our Original Natures––essential selves––as Nature’s way to establish wholeness. Each of us is appreciated as a spoke in the wheel of life. What delight’s you in you, is what makes you love you, because it’s what the world needs from you to flourish.

There are 3 requirements to activate self-love:

  • Exercise your mind toward who you want to be.
  • Become aware of your emotions with curiosity, not judgement.
  • And, energize your body’s strength.

Exploring what delights you in these daily practices will reclaim the self-love you were born with. And, they’re all integrated in the BodyLogos Practice.

Self-Love is: a self that has the courage to see and appreciate all parts of you; and, a love that trusts the being-to-becoming journey as a magical journey that insists on self-mastery.

To belong to your Original Nature is to invest in your purpose.

A baby’s gaze reminds you of your Original Nature’s peaceful belonging, but with NO AWARENESS. And that Original Nature is what you are learning to reclaim as an adult, WITH AWARENESS.

This is life. Self-love is a way of life. Having the discipline to follow delight toward self-love is the way to choose you. And in that choice, you experience belonging for the world… NO CONDITIONS.

Please share a comment about your Original Nature.