Heightened sensitivities and 2011

2011 has brought in lots of gifts and challenges . I know that I am stating the obvious but sometimes we need a bit of a poke to realize that.There are so many  people  talking about heightened sensitivities to smells, dreams,  spirits, feelings, visions etc. These awarenesses   can often  feel more like an annoyance than a gift.  I talked to someone today, who was very unhappy with her ability  to  smell everything so clearly, from flowers to garbage. She stated that she  had smells that connected her to family members  that had passed on many years ago. I looked up the meaning of   unusual ability and  it " is known as the gift of clairalience, or as ‘clairolfaction’ or ‘clairescence’. These interchangeable terms all mean the same thing, namely ‘clear smelling’."  This perosn  was not picking up a real odor but  rather a communication from another dimension, place or time.
She and I talked about  noticing the connections and spending time through meditation or quiet sitting focusing  upon   possible meanings. For this person, the smell was associated with her Grandmother and she realized that she had never said good bye to her. This awareness brought her peace and a focus for using her gifts. Like the turtle , we need to smell the flowers while looking upward for meaning.

These are my two nine year old golden retrievers , Roxie and pixie (left to right) Roxie was from a breeder and she was a very active puppy. In fact she was so active and so lonely as an only dog, we had to bring in another dog. We went through a golden retriever rescue org. in Pa. They have been best friends for seven years except for the food fights that they have.
Pixie has a fairly large mast cell tumor and she is really slowing down. It is hard to see and often wonder what they are thinking about. I do have an animal communicator, named Whitney Taylor, that I will talk to every three months or so. I have gotten some great perspectives on my dogs. I definitely get that they are very sensitive beings and often are much more aware of what is going on around them than the non dogs around them. In the past, they have thanked us for paying the mortgage so that they could play in a big yard. They have also alerted us when one of us is sick and may need medical care. And they have told us about their own aches and pains but usually they are just happy to talk and make us laugh.

Snowy Saturday and fairies

Fairy Tale by Signe Pike


Last May, I was visiting Omega for a week long class that I talked about in an earlier post. I love walking around the campus at night and enjoying the beautiful landscaping, the lake front and the night sky. It happened that one of the nights that I was there, there was a full moon. So instead of attending a program on classical Indian music, I decided to walk to the lake. True confession is that I have been asking to see fairies for a very long time and I am always on the look out for them . It is known that there are special places that fairies tend to hang out more frequently, ie. by shore lines, in deep woods and in and by trees. I took several photos of the moon light in the lake and noticed a rather large reflection of the moon in my camera. After I got back to my cabin, I realized that it was a fairy orb. You can make out the outline of a fairy inside the large orb. I was thrilled. So when I found the book, The Fairy Tale by Signe Pike, I was immediately attracted to her journey. She takes three months and follows the recommendations of the book "The Travellers Guide to Fairy Sites" written in 2004. It is a lovely dream that she made come true and then wrote about it. Maybe someday soon.......

finally, I found my blog again!

I hate to admit this but I have a hard time finding my blog at times. Sometimes, I feel like there is a black hole on the internet and I simply lose things. Since, I have an hard enough time with technology, I just don't deal with it. As you can see I have ignored the blog writing since May and the groundhog eating the poppy event.
That was spring, and here it is winter. It is snowy and cold and the groundhog has been sleeping underground for quite awhile.
I have made myself a promise that I will blog daily so that I can overcome my fear of blogging. What do I fear? Well I fear talking about myself out loud. I fear that I do not have enough to say although that is truthfully ridiculous. I have a lot to say when I am interested. I have a fear that I will talk about crazy things that no one else is interested in. But that also has not been proven true yet.
So I will push through my fears and beginning writing. Tomorrow, I will talk about a new book that I was given by my Friend Jane, called Faery Tale by Signe Pike. It is delightful and chronicles one woman's search for magic and fairies. I dream about making a similar journey to fairy land.

My mother

I recently attended a week long workshop entitled," This Beautiful Wound" presented by Mirabai Starr at Omega, in Rhinebeck ,NY. The workshop description stated that grief and loss can be a spiritual blessings and a loving way to know God. Mirabai has herself known exquisite loss and created a sanctuary for eight women to heal and sit with very deep grief. I learned so many things about death , loss , courage , tears and transformation during that week.
Although, I have grieved my entire life, I don't think that I really understood it until now.
I began grieving the year before I was born since my Mother lost her only brother in a training mission during that time. Bobby was 21 and always wanted to be a pilot. During WWII, he was training as a bombadier navigator on a flight that left North Carolina and headed to the Bahamas. He never made it and the plane went down in the Bermuda triangle. My mother was devastated by this loss and lived with parents who would not then nor ever speak about his tragic death.
She has four children, three marriages, plays fabulous piano music, plays tennis three times a week, swims in the lake 2 miles at a time. She has lots of friends and is socially active, believing in justice and equality at all levels. She has always been open minded about all kinds of life styles and has never shown prejudice to my knowledge.
With all of this, she has lived with heart breaking depression through out her life. Pema Chodren says that the most courageous person is the person with the most fears. My mother has so many fears and she keeps living everyday . It is often very hard to see our mothers clearly. We usually think that they are so much better or worse than they really are. With this workshop, maturity and my own compassion, I can see my Mom as a tremendously courageous woman who always wanted to do the right thing but often could not. My mother is 84 and I honor her life and the sacrifices that she has made to love and keep my siblings and myself safe.
I love you Mom.

meditations on spring

I am sitting ,like many others, in great anticipation of spring. I am so looking forward to our world warming up and seeing the changes that transform our corner of the world. IT is beautiful in New Jersey in the spring. We go through so many layers of change, We begin with the crocuses and snow drops that break through the chilled earth. Then we see the daffodils in so hues of yellows and whites. As I walk along the D & R canal, I start seeing the turtles coming out on warm days. They quit their hibernation and seek the sun on rocks and branches in the water. I love seeing them come out of the murky depths and begin to dry out .
So this year, a lovely meditation would be to notice the changes that you have made since last year as you are noticing the changes in nature around you. The changes could be seen , both internalyl and externally, ie changing jobs , relationships, eating habits, kinder conversations with health insurance representatives and politicians , and kinder conversations with yourself about your own progress. Truthfully, I am proud that I am kinder to health insurance representatives even thought it is really really hard to do.

Enjoy the first breaths of spring and new life. We will never see this spring again!

Beginnings of my call to healing

As the oldest child in the family, ,my mother would ask me to tell her what I thought about different things. I felt very grown up and wise that she asked me for my opinions . I would consider them carefully and then offer her what I felt to be true. As is often the case, she did not listen to me but it started the process of offering counsel.
Friends continued to do that with me as well and often I would get into trouble because they did not want to hear what I offered. We almost never do when we ask for help.
When I was in school in the 60's, there were very few career opportunities open to women so I picked elementary education and psychology. Truthfully, I was not very good at teaching and gave that up after a couple of tries. Then, I had a significant life event happen. I was living in Berkeley, California and started taking classes in all kinds of healing modalities. In the seventies, the really interesting class notices were stapled on telephone poles. I loved these classes in yoga, transcendental meditation, jin shin jytsu and polarity therapy.One day, I took an evening class in polarity therapy,which was a form of healing using proper diet and breathing, and specific sequences of acupressure points. I came out of the workshop and said," I did not know that you could turn physical pain into pleasure". I was 28 and it was the first time in my life that I understood that we could heal ourselves. It was an awesome revelation and I began my journey as a healer!!
PS This is a photograph of a tree on a lake at Omega Institute, Rhinebeck, NY. If you look really closely you will see fairies in the tree. I truly feel like the angels and fairies help me to do my healing work and I have the utmost gratitude for them.