Practice, Practice, Practice

I had a particularly stinging disappoint, nay rejection, this week that bruised my ego like a truck's wheel over a tomato. The worst of it was that this rejection was not even on my radar. I was so certain of a successful outcome that I had ceased to worry about it even. That'll show me. Needless to say, I have been hitting the meditation videos and inspirational cards hardcore these past few days to get over it. And it has helped, dulled the sting and I imagine maybe sometime in the near future, I might even forget about it. I hate the ways these things cycle back into your consciousness when you think you have moved past them. I went to the gym and stairmasted, swimmed and sweated my way into oblivion. That also helped. Exercise as mediation. The lesson I take away from this particular rejection is to be humble, is to truly believe that I am not seeking outside approval for what I know to be true. I can either listen to my heart or I can listen to the world.

I remember watching Marian Williamson give a talk in Los Angeles in 2008 and she was talking about her eternal search for inner peace. After waiting a long time to see one particular guru, she asked him for his answer and he said, "Meditate, meditate, meditate." The point being that until we quiet the mind, we will be anxious. Spiritual peace is not a logical quest no matter from what tradition you approach it and yet, it seems to be a necessary one to retain our equilibrium as we slalom through life.

So prayer, meditation, mental rest is the answer. I believe this, I know this, and yet I only dance around it. But I am trying. I am practicing.

In the morning, I have been meditating by listening to or watching various guided meditations online. I did a guided chakra meditation this morning which I really enjoyed. I like to imagine the lighting up of my chakras, envisioning myself bathed in golden light with my Hora line extending from the heavens through my body deep into the earth. I have been working on the tapping, which no longer makes me quite so queasy. Also there are fantastic meditation videos on line via Youtube. I love this zen video here.

Another issue, I have been struggling with is night time relaxation. I am trying to focus on the present moment and be in the world, keep myself pure and open to the best of life's experiences. To that end, I am trying to avoid ending my day by drinking alcohol or over eating food. I am by nature a hedonist, and moderation is not a skill I have yet to develop. So, I prefer to refrain rather than moderate. But I so look forward to relaxing at the end of the day in some way. I am looking to create an evening ritual that is joyous and relaxing and differentiates from whatever goes on during the day.

I found this list online of what to do to unwind without drugs or alcohol. Dance, yoga, mediation, music were suggestions that resonated with me. (Back to meditation again.) Its like the newage version of the Christian phrase, "Put it in the hands of the Lord." What was really bugging me about the Lord's hand this week was how it did not bend to my will, and my careful planning, and hard work, I might add, seemed to have no effect.

Last night, my little boy was having a waking nightmare and couldn't sleep. He couldn't get an image of an evil mouse that kept growing larger and larger out of his mind. It reminded me of how vibrant nightmares are in children and how frightening they are. It's like their visual manifestations of our anxiety. We worry about what we think are real problems, they imagine being attacked by monsters from under the bed, or a giant growing mouse. His description sounded like the rat king from The Nutcracker. But both anxieties, adults and child's, are unreal in the sense that if we are not fighting the mouse with a sword in this realm right now, no point in pretending that we are, of living in the anxiety of that fight when actually something very different is going on.

We actually had the sweetest loveliest talk about it and then I suggested we do something I absolutely hate doing to take our minds off his worry which was to do a giant 100 piece dinosaur puzzle. We worked on it for a while and then his mouse went away and he was able to go to bed but we stayed up a little longer because I couldn't let the fucking puzzle go, I had to finish it which I did minus the two pieces we had lost. It is a good meditation techique puzzles, I still dont like them but its easier than zen meditation I think.

Anyway, send me your suggestions on how to relax joyously without drugs or alcohol at the end of a long day and I'll send you mine.

Rebirth and Renewal: Rites of Spring

The round eggs of Spring, unbroken spheres with no beginning or end were everywhere this week. Last Sunday, we made felt birds nest and filled them with colored eggs with our friends Mara and Orelia in Queens. We have been making nests and eggs, all year, as my boy is obsessed with dinosaurs and their habitats. We have paper maiche eggs and hollowed out ostrich eggs as our everyday decor. Feathers decorate the dust bunnies that hide under our couch.

For me, the religious holidays that happen around this time herald the beginning of spring when we begin to emerge from our winter wool and face the world with a new excitement for living and sharing our ideas. I recently finished two big projects and took part in a healing circle with 7 other women artists, so I have been really enjoying the pause between seasons, between projects, the gestating of new idea eggs to come.

Our school vacation week began and ended with a spiritual ceremony. On Monday, we joined friends for their Passover Seder. A seder is a beautiful ritual that takes place around a dinner table where food, wine and storytelling are in abundance. A religious or cultural ceremony that promotes individual and community storytelling is so important to spiritual and creative development and deepens an individual's sense of identity. Each family has their own ways of marking this celebration of Jewishness and of freedom, from retelling family tales of survival while recounting epic biblical feats as well as advocating ways to combat injustice in our world today. When I told my four year old about the plagues reigned down upon the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh who would not free his slaves, he was rapt at the gory violence of it all - the river of blood! the boils! the lice! the locusts! Passover had extra resonance this season considering the recent uprising in Cairo and throughout the Muslim world which has the potential to create a new world order in the Middle East once again.

During our week off, Easter gifts arrived daily in the mail from relatives on both coasts. We met friends and visited several museums, another sort of church for sure. We checked out the Met and drew dinosaurs in our sketchbook surrounded as we were by Greek gods and then went to the Guggenheim where we noticed our favorite Chagall painting had the initials AAB on it, which are the initials of our own patriarch in residence. The next day, we visited The Intrepid Museum, a museum of the great machines of war, a battleship filled with fighter planes and helicopters. In a way, it is an anti-museum, a temple to destruction, instead of creation, a tribute to the military industrial complex and all of its dark gray and black monster machines. The day before Easter inspired by all the works of art we had seen all week, we had a beautiful morning, painting and crayoning on a tarp on the floor.

For Easter breakfast, we cracked eggs and made spinach and dill omelets, followed by a dessert of a beautiful chocolate Jaques Torres egg. At 2pm we attended The Sacred Center in New York City on the Upper West Side. It is a new thought interfaith center which means it takes from many different ancient philosophies and promotes the divinity in all human beings. The gospel choir was amazing and the ministers often spoke the words of the song with the singers behind them, a truly theatrical and engaging performance the underscored the idea of song as prayer. The congregants were dancing and swaying in our seats which definitely raised the joy level in the room. There was also a ten minute meditation in the middle of the service which was really powerful as well. Mannix painted yet another egg with the other kids and brought it home.

In her Easter sermon, the Reverend Jane Galloway spoke about channeling and the thin veil that exists between this world and the next during moments of crisis or major life moments such as birth and death. She mentioned that we are all channelers to the level that we accept the belief of the gift that comes with it. The Sacred Center is a community of artists and she spoke about the channeling that happens when we are in a creative zone working on a project and time just disappears. I recently watched a great TED talk by Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert in which she spoke about channeling through writing allowing her co-creators, her spiritual daemons to speak through her.

We shared the service with our friend, Marie-Louise, a musician who travels with a magic fiddle that has been in her family for centuries, and hung out at Riverside Park afterward. All in all, it was the nicest Easter-Passover Holy Week, filled with new experiences, family, friends, good conversations, thoughtful moments, and a general sense of peace and joie de vivre.

Create A Spiritual Practice

I am looking for ideas, suggestions and inspirations as I work on creating my own spiritual practice that affirms and celebrates a beautiful world and a beautiful life. Today, I woke at six and did 20 minutes of a guided body scan meditation where you sit in a meditative pose and go over every inch of your body. I chose it because it was the first in a list of guided meditations provided free from Audio Dharma.

I have been wanting to learn how to meditate for many years. The best meditative experience I had recently was in Los Angeles with my friend Johnny at Agape Church. It was a group mediation of a half hour with several hundred people before a sermon by Marianne Williamson whose book A Return to Love, allowed me to look at my own Catholic background with less anger. Previously, during a religious spell as a teenager in Catholic School, I use to get to a focused and ecstatic state by praying three rosaries first thing in the morning. After I decided in college that I could no longer associate with an organized religion that oppressed women and children with the result of facilitating institutionalized pedophilia, I was never able to find a substitute for the mental focus the three rosaries gave me and in truth, I didn't try to find such a thing until now, fifteen years or more later.

Yesterday, in preparation for a long distance healing session with Viki, an amazing, gifted healer who has brought such lightness into my daily life and helped me release a tremendous amount of physical and emotional pain, I wrote down a list of gratitudes and prayers. The main spiritual practice, we have in my family of 3 is to say a daily list of gratitudes. I also wrote down what I was hoping to bring into my life and three versions of what my perfect day would look like. So today on Viki's suggestion, I spent 8 minutes listening and imitating a Brad Yates tapping video about manifesting what you want in your life by dispelling your doubts and fears about what you deserve. I had tried to tap once before, and it makes me feel instantaneously dizzy and shivery. Maybe this is an indication of the potential power of this technique. I did get through the 8 minute session, stopping several times and I will continue to try it. Not least because I am so curious about the physical reaction it immediately calls up, almost like vertigo.

For the past few months, I have been dreaming about creating an illuminated hand made book of prayers. I have this image of a white haired shaman leafing through a magical book of spells that resonates within me as something I experienced many hundreds of years ago. I would love any prayer suggestions you might have. Here is my retelling of the Hail Mary, the most said prayer of The Rosary:

HAIL MOTHERS

Hail Mothers, Full of Grace,

The Universe is within us,

Blessed are we among people,

and blessed are the fruit of our wombs,

our children.

Holy Mothers,

Mothers for all of us,

Pray for us children,

now and at every moment of our lives, amen.