Everything You Feel Will Find It’s Own Form… Jack Kerouac

It is not an easy time. It is not a bad time, nor a hard time. just not an easy time.

I am slip-sliding up a hill, getting a toehold and then sliding back down again. I think I know where I’m headed and then the road I’m traveling on simply disappears.

I keep knowing, absolutely, how to move forward with my work, and then just as surely I know that that way isn’t right either. So I stopped writing here. I stopped doing pretty much everything but sitting with my life and thinking. And then the computer went crazy and I got sick and then workmen arrived to finish tearing out the carpet to put down laminate floor so we can be clean clean clean.

It feels good to be clean, free of carpet, and yet without the carpet the sound reverberates in this place. The parrots are absolutely deafening when they get going, which fortunately is not often. Sunrise and sunset, the time to call in the flock in the wild is the time the parrots call out too, for their absent comrades. At least here there are other parrots, five in all.

And the wild birds. I now have 4 good sized feeders on my deck just outside my studio windows and I have spent a good part of each day meditating and watching the unbelievable numbers of wild birds landing to eat just feet away from me on the other side of the window. I sit mesmerized.

The best news. After these long months of being so brokenhearted I have barely been able to breathe after the loss of my precious tiny pug Penny in April on the operating table, a new tiny girl will arrive here Sunday. I am adopting a wee girl who is 5 years old, very frightened, and she will come into my heart and arms and will snuggle here in my lap as I work just as Penny used to. This little girl just had to have 6 teeth removed yesterday and the rest of them are not in good shape, cracked, from stress and fear. I will hold her close. My pugs are my most powerful healers. I will heal her and she will heal me. This is a place where magic happens.

But what can I do for you?

My work keeps shape-shifting and slipping through my fingers, but I remember what Jack Kerouac wrote. Everything you feel will find its own form. And so it shall. I just have to step back and let it rise to the surface, stay out of the way. It’s coming. I feel the contractions in my belly. Some of them are so intense they take my breath away and I am doubled over. It’s coming.

And there has been a big shift. Last Monday night I had my first EFT session. Emotional Freedom Technique. Perhaps you’ve heard of “tapping?” It is absolutely mind-blowing. I am working with a woman I have known for over a decade online and love dearly. Someone whose paintings I have been purchasing for the last few years because they are so healing for me. Her name is Lucie Walker and you can find out more about her work by clicking on the EFT link above.

The thing is that Lucie and I never met face to face. I absolutely trusted her and knew she was excellent at what she does but I was so afraid. I felt so vulnerable, fragile, the little girl who was never good enough for anyone is now 59, overweight, with a lopsided, half paralyzed face and I was so terrified. People think they know me because I have been online writing and creating, teaching and doing my art for so very long, and they love what I do, and they have seen pictures of me (Not smiling so you don’t see the lopsidedness of my face.) but I was about to meet someone I loved and cared about for the very first time. I cried all day long. I was sure I would disappoint. I could barely breathe. I told Lucie ahead of time. “I will absolutely be there but this is how I am feeling… I am afraid, so afraid, I am afraid, afraid, afraid…” She lovingly talked me through it. She was so gentle with me, and I am, if nothing else, absolutely reliable. I would show up no matter how afraid I was. And I did. And she said she loved me, just as I was, more than she ever had, that I was beautiful, just as I am, and I cried through so much of that session. And the EFT is something unimaginably powerful, and Lucie is so good at what she does there just are no words, and by the end of our time together I was in a whole different place. I felt loved. I felt okay. I felt such joy…

And then Wednesday I had my session with my wonderful teacher/mentor/coach Dr. Rachna Jain. Oh, she is just so incredible, and gentle and kind and wise. And we mapped out a strategy for the time ahead. And it felt good. But then the hours passed and 2 days later something wasn’t right. EFT broke open so many levels and layers of vulnerability inside of me I was naked, raw, wide open, and this is good. And then I knew that what I had planned still wasn’t right. I have to support myself. I want a beautiful flowing source of abundance from work that I do that helps others and then enables me, financially, to support the causes I believe in. A beautiful flowing stream. But it has to come deep from within my heart and soul, not just creating something because I can do it, but because it is so meaningful that I can open so wide to another person and make them feel so loved, can help them move through so many layers that need healing, fathoms deep, that there is a rainbow explosion  of love and joy and healing. This is not too much to ask and it is in me to do, but I haven’t discovered the path just yet.

And then… then I was guided, once again, as I have been many times over the last year or so, to the incredible work of Vivienne McMaster and I signed up for her course Be Your Own Beloved. It will be a month long course in November, and I bought another one of her ecourses as well. It is about coming to love yourself, accept and have compassion for yourself, through photography, through self portraits, and I knew that was right. And I wept. I cried so hard. And the point is not just that I will be doing this incredible work with this incredible woman, but that I want, I need, I will only embrace, work that is so powerful that it makes me weep to think of it because it is all that I have to offer in this life. The deepest work that I can do. I want to laugh with you, cry with you, hold you while you weep and at the same time push you to be the very best that you can be. I only want to work with people who are willing to make the commitment and do the work. I would love to take 1o people on a year-long journey and commit to them deeply. I want to do this every year for the rest of my life. I don’t know what form or shape this will take but I can promise you it will be transformative.

I sat, years ago, before my teacher. I knelt before him and he put his hands on my shoulders. He said “Your life has not been easy. It was not meant to be easy. But you have entered this life to walk the Shaman’s path. You have ways of seeing and ways of knowing. You will know what I mean when the time is right. Follow the stream child, there are souls waiting for you.”

I was thirty years old at that time. I had just given birth to my third baby a year before. Now, I am in my 60th year. I have many gifts and talents. I am a healer and a teacher. I know that I was put here to use those gifts, and I know that I can change lives but coming into your power is a terrifying thing. Tears are streaming down my cheeks as I write this.

People think that when they find the answers they will find relief. No, one answer is just the key that unlocks the next door. There are no ultimate answers that answer the final question. We won’t know that in this lifetime.

I will take 10 people only in a year long journey. As I write this I know that this is the thing I am meant to do. But I can’t, in this moment, share with you how that will be. It will be different with every person I work with. Spirit will guide me, and the powerful gifts that God has given me, many I have never shared, will be the tools that I use.

I have not yet told Rachna, my mentor and guide into the practical realms of all of this, but I have written to her that this was coming. She is amazing and I can’t do this without her. But this is beyond her, and it is beyond even me. I sat down, in the fire of prayer, and in the mists of meditation, and I asked for the answer, and I got it. And I will put this key in the lock before me, and continue on.

I love you. More than you know…