ripening into harvest’s fullness

Our bodysouls are always doing their best to move toward their fullest, wholeness in any moment.

Even when we get pneumonia unexpectedly, when our bodies have pain we don’t understand, when we feel exhausted…

In the Diamond Approach, we call this the optimization of Being–Being is always moving to evolve, to be as fully expressed as possible through us, through these fragile, earthly, human bodysouls.

We can choose how much to participate in this flow, in this optimization, by how we live our lives.

Call it life force, kundalini, chi, ki, spirit, shakti, or prana,
it is the unimpeded circulation of energy that gives us
health and satisfaction…Life [Being] is generous;
it wants to flow through us amply and freely.
~ Maurine & Roche, in Meditation Secrets for Women, p. 91

So, how do we allow and cooperate with this natural, ample, free-flowing movement of life?

It’s about more than physical movement. Yes, finding enjoyable movement that strengthens, aligns, and creates flexibility and resilience in your physical body is important.

And, it’s about more than what and how we eat, though being aware that EVERYTHING you put in your mouth becomes your bodysoul–your tissues, bones, blood, emotions, and thoughts–might help you to choose food that supports your wholeness.

It also includes your psycho-spiritual practices–how you are in relationship with your bodysoul: sensations, emotions, thoughts, and soul.

  • Full expression of the pulsing movement of life includes listening to and responding to the body’s sensations.
  • Free-flowing optimization means paying attention to and working with ALL emotions to undo blocked energy (stuck patterns) from your history and personality.
  • Natural, free circulation means mindfulness of the monkey mind and learning not to believe everything you think.
  • And all of this affects the wholeness and ripening of your soul.

The secret is to cooperate with the process and provide
the right environment. Staying physically and emotionally
fluid is key, and awareness is the magic ingredient.
~ Maurine & Roche, Meditation Secrets for Women, p. 92

And it includes being curious and open to exploring our edges so we don’t simply stay in our comfortable, cozy nest where we don’t need to challenge our way of being, but rather ripen into our fullest harvest of wholeness.

The way I’ve been doing this recently is by
exploring my voice!

Even though I’ve always sung and have learned to love my pretty, pure tone, in the last few years, it’s become clear how attached I’ve been to singing in this one way. My voice–sung and spoken–has been another way of keeping me in a familiar, comfortable way of being, in my Enneagram type One personality.

In January 2017, I started exploring how to reclaim more of my voice–originally due to a really difficult situation I was going through (read more). I didn’t know that I would be challenging my tried and true way of singing, too! This journey continues to be an amazing one, opening me to not only fuller range in my singing and speaking, but also in my whole bodysoul.

Because I’ve been loving the work so much, I’m training to include Full Voice Coaching as part of my coaching work–so I can share this beautiful, life-transforming, ripening-into-fullness work with others.

the time of interim

Autumn Equinox, Saturday the 22nd at 8:54 pm CT.

We are in a time of interim.

Between Summer and Fall.

Summer’s waning light. Fall’s bright, crisp color not yet arriving.

You are in this time of interim
where everything seems withheld.*

I am here again. This time with learning how to listen more deeply with my body as I continue to learn the lessons pneumonia brought this summer.

Dave and I are here, too, with our planned move to Port Townsend, Washington next year, and all the things to take care of, understand, and prepare for.

Clients and friends are here.

  • Finding a new way to be living with alcoholism.
  • Recommitting to a path of practice when busy life keeps overwhelming.
  • Searching for a way to break up old patterns that just keep pulling back to “happy” oblivion.


The old is not old enough to have died away;
The new is still too young to be born.

This is a difficult place to be.

Our bodysouls know there is another way, and yet “the way forward is still concealed.”

In each moment, we must choose, without seeing the way forward, to stay devotedly, steadfastly turned toward our new life.

We must drop deeper than egomind, into an alive body and heart, connecting to the intelligence of life living in / through / as us.

Even though the old has not yet died away and the egomind will constantly try to pull us back into our old ways, we choose to practice presence–to come back to the Truth of this moment.

There are so many paths for getting under the chattering monkey mind and for cultivating presence: meditation, conscious movement, Course in Miracles, the Diamond Approach, the Work of Byron Katie, The Embodied Presence Process, Circlework, women’s work, the Enneagram, voice work, yoga, zikr, mantra, dance, prayer–to only name a few that have graced my path!

It’s all about coming into Presence NOW, under the mind chatter, to whatever needs to be experienced in the moment–often revealed quite unexpectedly in body and/or heart.

“We soften our focus, remain alert, and drop deep into ourselves.” (Anne Hillman in Awakening the Energies of Love, p. 295)

We make a conscious choice to shift our attention.

Everyone else has lost sight of your heart
And you can see nowhere to put your trust;
You know you have to make your own way through.

As far as you can, hold your confidence.
Do not allow your confusion to squander
This call which is loosening
Your roots in false ground,
That you might come free
From all you have outgrown.

What is being transfigured here is your mind,
And it is difficult and slow to become new.
The more faithfully you can endure here,
The more refined your heart will become
For your arrival in the new dawn.

Can we let the coming of Fall–of beautiful and then falling leaves, nature’s interim–support us in not knowing how?

Can we simply do our practices and face forward toward the unknown newness we yearn for in our bodysouls and trust the process?

Can we faithfully endure so that our hearts are prepared for our “arrival in the new dawn”?

How are you abiding in your interim?

What is supporting you?

* Unless otherwise noted, all quotes from John O’Donohue’s blessing For the Interim Time, from To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings.

Scribing the Sacred

I’m thinking of all the ways
we scribe the sacred into our lives.*

Surely, when I write prayers into my dedicated prayer notebook, praying them as I do, I am scribing the sacred.

And when I lie down on the floor to listen, move around, and rise back up in my movement practice, I am scribing the sacred into my body.

When I start the day listening to the birds and the neighborhood sounds, singing myself into the day, I am scribing the sacred into my hearing.

Choosing my food with care, savoring it, and letting it nourish and heal me from the inside out literally scribes the sacred into my flesh and bones.

Speaking words of understanding and compassion, cultivating conscious relationship with all those I interact with scribes the sacred into my mind and heart.

Meeting my reactive heart-mind with compassion, with a practice for relief—meditation, yoga nidra, journaling, any practice for releasing tension and stress to encourage opening—this, too, scribes the sacred into my bodysoul.

Sipping tea—the comforting, warm aroma and flavor suffusing my senses, bringing me here, now—this is scribing the sacred into my presence.

Greeting the day by reading poetry, receiving the beauty, inspiration, and delight, scribes the sacred into my heart.

How do you scribe the sacred into your life?

*This blog was inspired by this blogpost about a spiritual practice of copying the spiritual words of others in a sacred manner.

there always, something sings

“…in the muck, in the scum of things, there always, something sings.”

~ Michelle Isaac from her song Something Sings

I spent July 15th – 20th in the hospital in Ithaca, New York.

A monthlong on-again, off-again headcold was brewing into pneumonia unbeknownst to me, and the pleurisy that abruptly awakened me at 5:30 am on Sunday the 15th was so painful and gripping my left upper chest and back that I feared I was having a heart attack. Various complications, including fevers spiking daily, kept me in the hospital longer than usual for pneumonia…

After the initial fear for my life–not a heart attack, not a clot on my lung, and later, not MRSA…, I found myself settling into an amazing experience of holy refuge and practical, hands-on love everywhere–through the ongoing expressions of support, care, blessing, and prayer from facebook when I posted to my friends that I was in need, and through the daily, attuned attention and ministrations of the nurses, aides, and doctors on 4 North, where I was convalescing.

the singing

I felt so much gratitude and appreciation for all the care I was receiving. Even in the depth of pain on every breath, even in the fear of the unknown, even in the sadness of this happening–without any effort on my part, love brimmed over like a waterfall from my heart, flowing over me and over others.

Why not see the good in everyone and be kind? I was feeling so supported, so I kept letting people know how much I appreciated their kindness. This created a beautiful reciprocity of kindness meeting kindness.

After many meals, I spontaneously wrote a thank you note on the slip of paper that had my order on it. Each day, I got a menu to choose from for the next day, and on the back was the typical “My Plate” diagram from the US government about healthy meal proportions. One day, I wrote a note and drew an arrow to the “My Plate” and said I wasn’t able to fulfill my need for vegetables at breakfast. Within a half an hour of taking my tray, someone from the kitchen came up and asked me what I’d like and from then on, I had a salad with every breakfast! Kindness meets kindness.

I was able to truly receive the care offered to me–-all the little things that the nursing staff did as a matter of course to care for me, and all the things I asked for. I let them care for me in ways that in the past I would have apologized for. I would have maybe not even asked for fear of being needy. But by asking, I got to receive their care and love.

Food is healing! As I ate my very simple, mostly protein- and veggie-based meals, I felt their life-giving power. How chewing made the vitality of the food accessible to my body. How eating slowly and reverently helped me receive the bounty of each bite. How I never felt like I had to be a “clean-plate clubber” and eat it all, so I could listen to what was the perfect amount in the moment for my healing.

The view of the lake. I was so lucky to get a room that had a view of the lake and to be in the bed by the window so I could see it! As soon as I could, I asked my care team to turn my bed so that, instead of the TV, I had a view of Lake Cayuga. The “leaping greenly spirit of trees and the blue true dream of sky” along with the water saved me (e.e. cummings)! I could feel their life force blessing and healing me. It was so odd–they said no-one had ever asked for this before!

Grief. Yes, grief is part of the gift, too. Since I was sick in my lungs, I realized grief might be a component. In addition to grieving being so sick, and missing not only my family gathered for the wedding, but also the concert I was supposed to sing and all my friends I was going to see that week in the Hudson River Valley, I found a well of grief that still needed to be felt about losing my brother in 2016. I let myself grieve his loss–that we could not save him, that he was so unhappy, that this was how turned out. The tears, the deep feelings helped me release another layer of this painful loss.

People, relationships, connections matter more than work! Joy matters! Singing! Laughter! Time for pleasure! Work is not the most important thing to prioritize in the day. This was so evident while I was lying around healing, receiving all the love from facebook friends, from the Unit, from my family and friends. It’s the heart-full connections that were healing. I barely touched the book I had with me that was related to work. I instinctively reached for the connection… 

Asking sincere questions creates real connection. I loved learning about the lives of my caregivers–the nurses, aides, and Brendalee, who was in charge of the meals and kept coming to check in with me.

I found out Brendalee keeps chickens, pigs, and rabbits for her grandchildren so they will have a chance to have animals in their lives. In her home, there’s a basket by the door and everyone puts their cell phone in when they enter in order to have a chance at real contact. Her love of cooking is passed along to her 4 yro granddaughter through cooking together in the kitchen and through her service at the hospital. What a gift to feel the heart connection of so many common values and desire to be of service under our very different exteriors. We both felt filled by this connection.

Spaciousness around everything. Nowhere to go. “Nothing to do or undo, nothing to force, nothing to want, nothing is missing” (Venerable Lama Gendun Rinpoche). There was so much time for rest. I saw how all the things I love and all the ways I want to live create stuff to do and track and manage–they take up time. I want time in my life–to rest, to connect with friends, to sit with tea and take in beauty, to sing, to pray, to heal, to journal… to be. And NOT just in the hospital! 🙂

Singing gives me life. Even when I was sick, in pain, and had almost no breath from the pneumonia, humming or lightly singing a healing song carried me. The tune and words lifted me, bringing conscious intention for my mind, attuned contact with my heart–whether grief or joy or longing, and holy vibration to my body. Singing accompanied, companioned, and inspired me, surrounded me with the healing life force of my bodysoul. The primary song I sang as I did my “rounds,” (walking around the unit) was originally a birthing song, and I changed some words to birth my healing:

I am trusting my body to carry me through carrying you to me, I am trusting.
My body wide open, the veil lifts, my heart is filled, my mind it empties.
Wide open, I am wide open.
Welcome breath into my lungs, welcome flow into my muscles, welcome joy into my organs, welcome qi into my cells.

Click the link below for the song.
It is meant to be sung as a round.
Listen below for the separate parts I sang to save my life.

I Am Trusting My Body

(A birthing song, learned from Kathar Grant, who learned it at the gathering, Singing Alive. I changed the words to make it a birthing-my-healing song while in the hospital with pneumonia.)

Presence Including

Inhale. Sense of self.

Exhale. Compassion.

~ Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening, p. 198

Inhaling, feeling the back of my heart, my root, my feet, my sense of self.

Exhaling, allowing my heart to soften and open, to include others in a wide, compassionate embrace.

This is one of the conundrums of the spiritual path.

How do I stay connected to an inner, deeper sense of self–to the me that got hidden under the surface-layer facade of acceptability:

  • who got shut down when she was too loud
  • who held her tongue when she wanted to speak her truth
  • who said yes when she meant no
  • who yearned for loving contact with her parents and friends and lovers so desperately that she covered up her own needs and her own inner self to be acceptable and loved, to survive…

How do I do this AND open, mindfully,
safely, curiously to include you–
without losing me?

Because, if contact with my inner self is lost, there is no-one home to be in contact with you.

There are so many practices that can support this beautiful, meaningful work of coming home to ourselves and opening to others. For today, let’s keep it simple and try breathing together.

the heart doesn’t try

I’ve been a practicer all my life…

I’ve always been aware of how much there is to learn, to know, to grow into, to embody.

And I’ve felt that if I just…

  • learn how to listen more openly,
  • or understand the relationship between my inner child and my inner rebel more deeply,
  • or up my game with my exercise,
  • or get better at remembering to ask for what I need in the moment,

… then all will be well.

As if there is some happy ending—and I will finally get there through all my practice.

I’m finding that while it’s true that learning new, skillful ways of using my mind, heart, and body have opened me to more happiness, there is no ultimate happiness out there somewhere, that I can land in, stay in, and own.

I heard Terry Patten speak on a Shift Network interview the other day and he said something that is still unfurling inside me:

“The Heart doesn’t try.
It is what it is.”

“The Heart doesn’t try.”

A friend on facebook said she was looking for a reorientation to her spiritual practice this summer, wanting it to be “easy breezy.” I bet the Heart knows how to do this.

Just be.

Easy.

Let the breeze blow, touch us, affect us.

Feel.

“It is what it is.”

Terry went on further to say something like, as we attune to the Heart, we relax fully into the moment and are OK with what is.

Even in the midst of our practicing, there is a place for rest and relaxation.

For being with what is.

For being OK with what is right here, right now.

This gives us a sense
of wholeness, of beingness,
right in the middle of life.

Any time we are able to simply be, with feeling-sensing-consciousness, we are reaping the benefits of our practice, simply receiving the grace of life.

This Heart knowing comes forward to meet us without our striving, efforting, or interference.

When I redid my logo, I tried to capture this by adding the tag line, practice presence for life.

Let’s remember that in all of our practicing, we need to also make time to drop the effort and be. To allow ourselves to sense and feel and be with life as it is unfolding in and through and as us.

God is now
Where your soul belongs, too.

~ Gunilla Norris

the feast in everything

The heart at rest sees a feast in everything. ~ Hindu Proverb

Do you see the feast in this video?

Cherry blossoms releasing from the tree in the wind.

A flower blessing.

An unexpected shower of beauty.

A fragrant and soft caress.

Or perhaps you experience the other side?

The tree losing its blossoms.

The loss of beauty.

The petals sticking to face, hair, patio furniture…

When the heart is at rest,
the mind, too, can be at rest,
and open our perception
to the truth of what is.

Now you’re probably expecting me to say it’s better to see the lovely things related to the loss of the blossoms, but I’ve had to learn the hard way that

all of it is true.

When we focus on only one side—the “blessing” or the “curse”—we miss the preciousness of the moment.

We miss the fullness of life, right here, right now.

We miss being at rest with what is.

What if we just stopped struggling? 

The rest of the words to that song by Kaitie Ty Warren include: “What if I let it go?” “Can I surrender?”

What would happen if we stopped struggling with what life brings us? What if we met it just as it is, felt any pain, and opened to the beauty and blessing, too?

What might change in your life?

Whenever you need a shift, watch that video, sing those words, ask that question, and see what arises… (you can learn the whole, beautiful song, “Surrender,” here.)

Weed or Wild Nourishment?

I’ve spent a lot of time pulling weeds.

Starting with the most common ones—Creeping Charlie taking over the whole backyard when I first moved in with Dave, grass growing in garden beds, plantain, dandelions, and here in Minnesota, those purple bellflowers that seem to spread everywhere…

Other weeds that have caught my attention include all the ways my Enneagram type One personality judges that I (or others) need weeding. Over the years, I’ve dug out my messy emotions, pulled up my gut instincts, rooted out my raw and uncontrollable sexuality, and excavated all the wild impulses that might lead me astray.

“Got a dirty eye, see a dirty world.”
~ Mark Nepo, in The Book of Awakening

I think we all have dirty eyes—in the sense that our vision is clouded from seeing life as it is. Perhaps it’s Enneagram type that clouds, or maybe it’s family upbringing, or maybe it’s trauma, or our culture or religion…and most likely a combination of all of the above.

This clouding keeps us stuck in one way of seeing.

Plant—Weed.
Healthy—Unhealthy.
Clean—Messy.
Civilized—Wild.
Heaven—Earth.

But what if that plant, instead of being a weed, is Wild Nourishment?

Over the years, as I started realizing there was such a thing as wild nourishment…

I dug up the dandelion from my yard, ate some, and transplanted the rest into its own bed in my backyard. I enjoy eating it all summer, but especially when it’s tender in the spring (now!).

I pulled out the plantain and dried it for use in tea and herbal salves. (Internally for indigestion, externally for skin ailments.)

The grass spreading into flower and veggie gardens I still weed out—and the Creeping Charlie, too!

I gave up on weeding out the purple bellflowers—I still manage them in some places, but in others, I let them be a lovely, green ground cover, and on our front stairs, their purple bell flower welcomes people to our home. (Dave’s youngest helped me get this—I was madly ripping them out one summer when he said how he missed the greenery and flowers on the bare concrete stairs, and I realized I did, too. It has saved me a lot of work over the years!)

And my own inner weeding?

I am finding the gifts of wild nourishment of my fuller self—

How my unedited emotions, my instinctual-knowing, my juicy sexuality, and my spontaneous impulses don’t lead me astray, but nourish and bring more wholeness to my life.

I feel more alive, more embodied, more present on this earth when I embrace all of me in this way.

How about you?

Are there ways you see through dirty eyes and try to weed out parts of yourself that are unacceptable? Or the world around you? How could those parts you are pulling out be important to your growth into the fully alive human being you are?

Grounding–yin or yang?

Exploring and deepening my connection to the earth has been a big part of my journey over the years.

I’ve always felt grounded. People have commented on my solidity, my steadiness, my ease with the physical world. Partners have found my presence stabilizing and gravitated toward me for this. Clients, too.

And I have always felt relatively steady under stress.

I get stressed like anyone else, but it doesn’t usually unground me in the same way—I don’t get flighty, distracted, or visibly anxious. I tend to just buckle down and take care of business, perhaps clenching my teeth a bit or tightening up my jaw and shoulders…

My feet are very wide and ground into the earth. I go barefoot a lot in all seasons but winter.

I love the feeling of my feet and my hands in the earth.

I’ve always been more in touch with the physicality of living—with wood and stone, food and drink, paper and pencil—than with feeling energy or stepping out of my body. I haven’t wanted to. I like being in earth in my body. I feel real.

Nonetheless, I seem to have been invited to a next round of grounding exploration, to a deepening of my embodied presence.

And I’m trying to understand how it relates to my inner experience of already feeling grounded.

I’m wondering if there are two types of feeling grounded—a more yin and a more yang grounding.

If I think of it this way, then what I am cultivating is yin grounding.

I know how to be steady, solid, and stable in my doing and support of others. What I don’t know how to do very well is to release, sink, surrender, drop into the ground, and just be.

For the first time in 30+ years, I was drawn last year to engage in some vocal coaching, in order to access more of my voice, in particular, the more earthy qualities.

As I explore what it means to bring more grounded presence to my voice, I find it is the yin ground that is missing. I can’t open the low part of my range without relaxing and releasing. The vocal folds need to, literally, be more relaxed to vibrate more slowly and access the lower tones!

My body has also let me know, through a series of aches, pains, and minor ailments, that I need to learn to find yin ground in my pelvis as well. I am learning to sink, to drop down, to release held tension in the exercises my PT gives me and in the holistic pelvic care I have recently embarked on. It seems I need to learn more about presence here, too, in order to release pelvic tension and realign my pelvis and keep my pelvic floor healthy, flexible, and resilient.

Unfortunately, I can’t make yin ground happen. Heaven knows, I’ve tried!!

And it seems my yang ground
can’t create yin ground.

So, I practice.

Exhaling to release held tension in pelvis, pelvic floor, hips, throat, shoulders, voice…

Dropping my awareness into pelvis, legs, feet, fully supported by the earth, so that I can release the tensions that hold my pelvis and vocal folds in a certain configuration.

Consciously relaxing my jaw and my pelvic floor at the same time. (Bodymind psychotherapist Susan Aposhyan says there is a vital connection between pelvic floor and mouth—they are the two ends of the alimentary canal. Explore moving your lips and/or jaw gently open and closed and see if you can feel your pelvic floor, including your genitals and anus, respond.)

Squatting, lying, resting on the earth, surrendering my body to her holding.

Creating soulcollage cards with images to accompany and guide my bodysoul transforming (like those in this post).

Receiving massage, bodywork, and coaching.

And in all my practice, letting it be simple, a return, a non-efforting, a non-striving, a letting be and letting go.

This is the yin ground
I am learning to cultivate.

I’m struck with how both the voice work and my holistic pelvic care refer to presence. Cultivating yin ground enhances my vocal presence and my pelvic presence, both of which make me more complete and whole, more present as a human being.

Do you see a difference between yin and yang grounding in your life?

What is your relationship with your vocal and pelvic presence?