2013, the year of dancing
All things 2013…fresh starts, new ideas, the beginnings of manifestations and dreams. Many of them not to be realized, as action most often does not follow idea for most of us, but the possibilities are all there. It’s a frenetic and scary time of the year. Do we move into the light as winter solstice has encouraged us to do or so we remain stuck and inflexible. It’s a time for forgiveness for amends and for action.
I started the year dancing. Free form, booty shaking, breakdance dance-off, clear the dance floor worming dancing. I show up to parties most often hesitant and anxious. I still mourn the loss of my life long friend alcohol in party moments. I’m still a toddler in social situations. But as I said good-bye to 2012 and awaited all things 2013 it looked like this.
The coffee tables get moved and couches are pushed back. I begin to embrace the internal stirrings of movement and music and baselines. I awkwardly start to shimmy. “Do I look stupid? Fat? Is it obviously that I feel uncomfortable?” I notice that others look silly dancing too, and their freedom makes me let go even more. Soon enough I am dancing like an 9-year-old spinning, gyrating, blue-steel face making. And I am surrounded by people who are comfortable, free, supportive of my dancing freak flag flying. The thought of a drink doesn’t cross my mind for hours. It’s all action, all movement, being propelled into greatness, all things 2013.
I almost didn’t go. I almost stayed home to continue building my monstrous Ikea bed that I am convinced will catapult me into being a real live adult as opposed to the poser who still lays their mattress directly on the floor and has to kick it back in place every morning, just like the drunk addict hippy loser I used to be. I started building it at 5:00pm claiming I could build the bitch in 2.5 hours, full well knowing it would be more like 5 and partially knowing that it could be my excuse to not make it to the party. I borrowed tools from my friends Stephen and Kathryn in the beginning. They asked if I was coming to the party. I said yes, unless the bed building got in the way. Did I tell them as a way to get out of the party? In hopes they would beg me to come? I don’t know. They know I can’t drink and I’ve shared how much party going can be a struggle for me. I then got this text 20 minutes later from Stephen, delicately and thoughtfully crafted with guidance from Kathryn:
“I forgot to tell you: we’re all so happy that you’re coming to the party tonight. You’ll make it a better and more complete celebration, and a more appropriate way to start 2013, which I predict will be an especially rad year. (So don’t try to get out of it.) “
So I feel loved. And surrounded by greatness in friends. And I have faith for a great partner to come and even greater adventures. And I will remember that dancing is a direct lifeline to greatness in action and freedom from self. 2013 will be a year of all kinds of dancing.
loving relationship with food
For the first day in weeks I woke up without the need of a alarm clock before 10am. Granted I was cat attacked by Izzy which comes in the form of lots of kisses and walking on me, but usually I can roll right back to sleep. It often worries me that I don’t have a regular sleep schedule and it is in the not too far distance that I used to suffer from excruciating insomnia. Its only been when I’ve visited Tulum Mexico over the past three years that I go to sleep by 11 and rise with the sun to walk the beach. Today I realized that I woke up because of my diet, the foods that I have chosen to eat the past 5 days, that has started to restore some homeostasis to my system. So simple, yet so wild to me that its that easy. But for me its not easy, its a daily challenge.
Since I can recall I have always struggled to have what I would consider a loving relationship with food. The memories are all wrapped in some sense of pain, guilt, shame, self loathing, anger. No matter what I intellectually understand I have always felt helpless to eat what makes me feel well versus “good”. The “good” feeling is always fleeting and then washed away with horrible feelings. Feeling well is different. When I feel well it allows me to escape from the prison of food. When I eat for life I feel in rhythm with the universe and ready to interact. When I eat what I think makes me feel “good” I can’t stop and my body feels bad. I am not the norm. I have diseased thinking when it comes to food and that is ok. It simply means that I need to treat the disease in order to get better and I feel blessed to have a spiritual solution and path that I am beginning to embark upon again. I feel a sense of hope and for just today I feel well in my body. And because of that I was able to wake up this morning not feeling achy, bloated or sad. AMAZING. This is just for today.
Other then the 12 step material of Overeaters Anonymous, I highly recommend this book The Slow Down Diet by David Marc. While I am not a fan of the word diet in the way that we understand it or the words weight loss in the title, I find that it is a true book about loving relationships and food, and not about the weight loss. Its quite beautiful.
Family
It’s been a while. My family has grown. My roost at home now includes two cats. Jackson the newest addition to the family, who is a little special and slow on the uptake and this makes him a super bright angel kitty of 18 lbs. We love him, or at least i do, Izzy not so much. She more so tolerates him and I choose to believe actually likes knowing he is around when I am gone all day or on trips.
My family of acupuncture patients also has grown. It ebbs and flows and the further down this path I travel the more I see people coming to simply visit and then be on their way. And others have stayed, for now. And as I step back to observe I can see that as a whole it grows, mostly because I trust that I don’t need to tightly hold onto people but simply be present if they want to stay. Its not about me, and whether I am liked. Its about holding a space for people to join me if so inclined and work on our collective spiritual progression through acupuncture. For some its simply to alleviate a symptom and I feel blessed to be of service and for others its a place to expand in healing all levels of being.
I have spoken with a few psychics/tarot readers over the years. I struggle to trust that they see things. They all tell me that I am supposed to “write write write”. That I am going to publish a book and teach. So I am going to recommit to writing here. To sharing, to hopefully being heard. I love revisiting my days and thoughts here. I have a blessed life and to put pen to paper reminds me to be mindful of my blessings. So heres to another posting tomorrow.
xoxo
It’s Never Too Late For Giving Thanks
It may be almost a week since Thanksgiving day, but over the last few years I have been writing gratitude lists on a fairly regular basis as part of my spiritual practice. It keeps me out of Ego and shifts me into a place of service. It’s a tool that shifts perspective and its a way to give thanks to the universe. So today I am grateful for:
Acupuncture and the unwavering passion I have for it as a giver receiver and student
Coffee even though it makes me freak out sometimes
Izzy, my sweet complusive kitty who reminds me that love conquers all
Spirituality and that it has no definition for me, it simply is
Forgiveness in all its forms
Abundance in all its forms
Patients who share their well-being journeys with me
LOVE
Pimped Out Yurting
I’ll be here this weekend. Pimped out yurting in the catskills. Maybe blogging, maybe not 😉
Sweet Silence
Today I took time to relish how lucky I am. On Wednesdays I work in a space where silence doesn’t reign, yet patients still feel right at home passing out amidst the chatter and banter. 5th Street Clinic’s open clinic space means we as practitioners are sharing ideas, inspiring each other and humbly asking for help when needed. Clients benefit and feed off of the communal healing energy and know that we all consider them 5th street family.
I listen, always. I learned quickly once I began apprenticing with Tom that I gained more by listening and gathering information rather than asking lots of “why?” questions. I preferred sitting with my questions and sometimes, but not usually posing questions to him later down the line. Perhaps I didn’t want to ask stupid questions out of potential embarrassment, but I prefer to believe I valued what Tom had to share so much that I didn’t want to interrupt his thoughts or practice patterns. He has always been very generous with sharing his knowledge and beyond gracious. I see something different each time I work with him. I get to see deeper into the layers of the body and rejoice when I have those AHA moments and know that my patience has paid off. More has always been revealed.
A few years have passed, and I have begun to start asking his advice in terms of my patients or for him to elaborate on his shared thoughts, but beyond that I still remain quiet. It’s a good practice for me. It’s a challenging practice for me. And believe me there are people firing questions at him all day, so I get to absorb more than I can fit. But having unanswered questions floating in my mind challenges me to come up with my own best conclusions first and to pick up books and fall asleep dreaming about solutions. Many times I do stumble across an explanation from Tom and I am all the more rich for the process involved in getting there.
A little mystery keeps things interesting.
You’re Totally Awesome
I am surprised at how often patients blame themselves for their reported sufferings, challenges and failures. We are taught as acupuncturists to ask what one’s “complaints” are, setting up the patients expectation that what they are sharing are things wrong with them. There is so much negative connotations involved. Perhaps if we can shift the thinking just slightly, or perhaps turn it upside down on its head or look into a whole new dimension, we can begin to see that we show up each and everyday perfect, exactly as we are supposed to be. Opportunities are presented when we feel physical shifts, emotional shifts, and when things don’t happen as expected.
Patients ‘confess’ to me that they know they should be doing this or need to stop doing that, but I am quick to question those notions of guilt and shame. Perhaps they should be doing exactly what they are doing or not doing for that matter. Acceptance is a practice long forgotten in our culture. We are always striving and comparing, when we are always perfectly enough on any given day.
Let’s start loving ourselves again, asking for help, questioning the status quo on “healthy”, and forgiving ourselves for non-existent faults. You are already whole and healthy and radiant.
This is not to say don’t be good to yourself. We can and should still take actions to transform and grow and love ourselves by caring for ourselves, but if we attach guilt and shame and self-hatred to those actions and choices we are not giving ourself a chance to love ourself fully. Let go of that stuff and take it easy!
lots of love,
Beth
Autumn Wishes
Welcoming fall in is like everything, a time of transition. We have reaped our “harvests” and are now starting to internally slow down and hunker down for the winter. But culturally here in the States and especially in New York City, we are asked to gear up again in so many aspects of our life. The workplace, school, and social gatherings surrounding the holidays start to pull at us from all directions; asking us to show up with our “a” game. We often feel overwhelmed, stressed and sacrifice our own self-care rituals. This is the time to honor ourselves by taking time for self to ensure that we are able to be of service in the ways that we are asked. And sometimes that means simply taking a moment to be still, sleep an extra twenty minutes, not say yes to that invitation. And it also means communing with friends to eat warm fresh foods, receive your acupuncture treatments and take that restorative yoga classes you’ve always said you were going to give a shot. Try adding some simple routine into your day. Maybe it’s a qi-gong practice of 10 minutes a day, perhaps simply listening to just one song from your i-tunes library and dancing in your apartment, or smiling at at least one stranger a day even if it feels weird. These routines can keep us afloat in the present during this time of going inward and allow the process to happen while preventing us from getting stuck and sinking. It’s a common saying that Change is the only Constant, but how often do we feel stuck in our life? Acupuncture is a practice of freeing up the flow of energy along meridian pathways and kindly nudging the body, spirit, and mind closer to a harmonious rhythm. If you feel yourself getting stuck, make an appointment or do something that you know gets you out of “you” and reconnected to the larger universal flow. There are so many of us out here to help. Asking for help is a character attribute.
Love and light,
Beth
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