Everyday Bliss For Women In Leadership

I was on a little trip today from San Jose up to Berkeley. It had been several years since I’d done this trip and by heck, the traffic was something else again! Tons worse than the last time I drove this stretch of 880. After three sudden stops necessitated by unaware drivers bulling ahead as if they were the only car on the road, I began chatting up a non-stop stream to myself about it: "Lookit that guy, willya? I mean just LOOK! What an idiot! What a moron! You’d have to be a total dipshit to do a stupid thing like that! He almost killed that whole van full of cub scouts!" ad nauseum. As I fumed I began tapping - after all, I was stuck at a dead stop in traffic. And then I remembered the Coolest Spell of All ™ - guaranteed to bust through any block you have, including the 880-580 interchange sea of idling autos.

I’ve been re-reading Wayne Dyer’s Your Sacred Self: Making the Decision To Be Free and doing meditations on the Dalai Lama’s May, 2001 talk on Bodhicitta. Both suggest that to achieve greater spiritual awareness and development, you wish the absolute best of things and a release of suffering for others, as you also wish for yourself (release of menopausal symptoms for myself and all my friends and clients, thank you Universe!). This has a round-about boomerang effect of getting you what you want and helping out the planet and its sentient life as a whole. Wish happiness for the whole world AND the jerk - oops, I mean the blessed being who just cut you off in traffic (he needs blessings more than most - so do I also, need blessings, so it is) - and happiness will be yours. The specific Buddhist saying is from a beautiful poem by Shantideva that says in part:

Enthused by compassion and wisdom Today in Buddha’s presence I generate the mind of compassion For the benefit of all sentient beings.

For as long as space remains And as long as sentient beings remain Until then may I too remain To dispel the suffering of all beings.

I wasn’t entirely sure I bought into this at first, but as I’ve meditated on it over the years, I’ve seen that it’s a powerful piece of magic that does indeed work. It’s the Karmic Law of Three: what you send out returns to you threefold. If you send out hate, distrust and bitterness, that’s what you’ll receive in return, from every possible source around you. The worse your life gets, the more you complain bitterly about it, and the worse your life gets… 

I blogged on this a few weeks ago . I made conscious a decision to start working from the mind of compassion, or at least to aspire to *have* a mind of compassion, and to use as a test-case, The Road. So instead of my usual Road Rant persona, I’m practicing blessing instead of cursing-at, and wishing the best possible outcomes for all beings - especially while on the road. I’m not perfect at it, but goodness me, what a change I’m noticing already! As per Wayne Dyer’s commentary about things which happen when you start freeing yourself, the coincidences are coming thicker and faster than ever before. One of those coincidences happened on the road to Berkeley tonight…read on if you’d like an EFT recipe that really works!

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Hyatt St. Claire mural in the bathroom of our top-floor room. From here we have a marvellous view of the Marriott across the way and can log into their free wireless. <*grin*> We are staying in a hotel in the town we live in, as tomorrow is a kickin’ Juneteenth celebration out by the Poopsnake (aka, San Jose’s answer to the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, that the artist interpreted as a giant coiled pile of…you guessed it) in Plaza de Cesar Chavez.

On Tuesday, this most ancient of hotels in this city is to be sold and for all the citizens know, its Romantic era carved, inlaid, marbled and ornately embellished furnishings may well be scrapped. Including the hand-painted murals in every room and the marvellous marble fireplaces like the one in the room we’re staying in. We thought we’d get our kicks for our first and last time before the debacle. We dine at the hotel restaurant Il Fornaio on a regular basis, but have never stayed here. When you live in the town, why would you?

A night away from the crazy kids (for which read: crack-smokin’ kitties…well they *act* like they smoke crack sometimes!) and a homebase for the morrow’s celebration. We’re enjoying our weekend - and hope you enjoy yours…

Just a note for those kind souls who read this blog regularly: We sold our house! Yep, it looks like it’s really going through this time. This is the third buyer we’ve had. Looked like it had gone twice before but capriciousness and just plain dirty dealings characterized those broken contracts. Yikes! I had no idea people were willing to behave so dishonorably in what should be simple transactions. Both previous buyers signed contracts with us only to break them giving flimsy excuses. We later found out that both of these parties kept looking for properties after they’d signed contracts with us and the one party it turns out, had signed contracts with TWO other home-sellers! (and they talk about the sellers being dishonest!) How nasty is that?

Either you like the house, buy it and keep to the deal, or you don’t make a bid in the first place. People make plans on the strength of such contracts. We did, and had looked feverishly for houses to rent. Thank goodness both ersatz buyers backed out before we had signed a rental contracts. Our third and hopefully final buyer loves the house, is delighted with what I did with the gardens (an English country manor paradise complete with an herb corner, thirteen fruit trees and eleven different rose varietals) and is very eager to move in. Escrow closes soon, very soon. Thank goodness.

So we are in this very interesting place where we are looking, looking, looking for the right place to rent for awhile. Impossible to think of buying given only 15 days to find a place, but have a line on several good looking properties…if we can only get there before they’re snatched up! It’s being made doubly hard by having to do this during Easter week (Happy Easter to all those who celebrate it, and Happy Ostara and Vernal Equinox to those who celebrate those holidays!) when people are traditionally out of town and otherwise engaged at the weekend.

Given the above, and the fact that I can now only find my computer through a maze of boxes-in-process-of-being-packed, I thought I should serve a reminder of why posts at this blog have been a bit thin in the last month and for the next couple of weeks. I’ll post when I can, but it’s not going to be a priority.

Wish us luck, folks! And I’ll be back when I’m back…

Much Love and Many Blessings, Maryam

The pictures are now available from our Point Reyes weekend. J. Random Wonderbear and I escaped the city and two lengthy open houses (at our house, during which we have to be….elsewhere) last weekend to head north to the tiny seaside town of Inverness, in the Point Reyes State Park. Migrating pregnant whales, enough sea air to run the fustiness out of your head and gentle quiet mornings surrounded by the greenwood. The cottage we rented had an excellent bed which I would return for alone. It was in addition spacious and had beautiful double decking. The picture above is of The J. and a friend he picked up on Drake’s Beach. The surf was very spanky and several surfers actually made an afternoon of  it. You can see a wave rolling in at right with the fingerlet of Drake’s Estero jutting into the sea on the left. The best oysters come from this sheltered estuary, or so we’re told.

Lionized…

On an afternoon’s jaunt into Point Reyes Station’s only bookseller, I found a basket of intriguing blank journals made from the covers of old books whose pages had fallen into disrepair. The covers, all from the early 1900’s, were spiral-bound with new blank paper. I was about to leave when I spotted "Success…" by one Lion Feuchtwanger, which I purchased. I had no idea who Lion Feuchtwanger was but being a success-oriented life coach, I was intrigued. This is what I wrote on the first few pages:

"I don’t know who you are Lion Feuchtwanger, but thanks and blessings to you for volunteering to be one of the patron saints of my Success."

Now I find that Feuchtwanger was an influential Jewish writer and "a distinguished member of the post-World War I German literary scene, lived and wrote in political exile for the last quarter-century of his life. His masterwork, Success, is one of the great novels of the 20th century." (source: Bookrags) What better a spirit mentor could a writer choose than the writer of a great novel? I am ordering the English translation of Erfolg, or Success and will read with interest this "thinly veiled potshot at the Nazi war machine".

J-Bear kindly bought me a lovely book on women pioneers, both European and minority, that you can also see in this picture and the local grocery store, always a plethora of rich, healthy and healthfood-type goodies, yielded up Jungle Chocolate, which is cacao bean with honey and nothing else. Vended in tobaccolike shreds, this particular package also included macadamia nut bits. If you’re avoiding chocolate due to all the additives, try Jungle Chocolate, "the world’s purest chocolate from pod to package". Its taste is both simple and suprisingly elegant.

I went out on the wonderful second-story deck of our vacation cottage to bask in  the gentle sun under the madrone, oak and ash trees and read. I took The J’s mp3 player with me, Mr. Lion, a wonderful mug of pure Kona coffee and wrote…

"I have imbibed the nectar of treesilence here, and witnessed mistressful feats of weaving - silks so fine only faeries could set the warp and weft, spun by invisible fiber-witches, each with eight spindles… The speech of trees is slow, silent, soft and sibilant with whispered secrets. We’ve seen hares, thrush, Reynard-the-fox, finches, grackles, buzzards, ravens, eagles, 2 Pepe Le Pew’s - one’s signature tail spotted, the second’s calling card briefly - pungently - detected upon an evening’s soft zephyr. Small, soft eyed, green-and-yellow striped newts and other small creatures appear when humans are silent and respectful in the wild."

The shy Tule elk didn’t look up as we passed on our way back from the beach. We took in favorite Drake’s Beach around the headland from the estero (whence JBear’s yummy oysters came, on our first night here), and wilder, gritter North Beach, much more to my taste. North Beach had a sharp drop-off in the sand just prior to the waveline. We sat on this as a mini-cliff and watched the water come in under our dangling feet. I built an Incan sunwheel in the sand, crowned with a dried jellyfish fin flag on a driftwood pole, and we watched with delight a dragon kite breasting the wild winds and tearing through them to harry passing gulls with gusto.

All in all, it was one of those perfect weekends destined to go down in family history as "them was the days". I am profoundly glad and grateful that we are able to do such things, to take ourselves away when the stress of our living/house selling conditions become unpleasant. Here, there is such beauty, such silence, the sounds only natural ones that caress and please the ear, in sharp contrast to the din of the city. In our house, we must spray artificial freshener whenever potential buyers come to view the place, lest a stray improper scent (we have kitties) put them off the idea. The scents here in the wild are of pine, madrone, sea and fresh air. A balm to the spirit.

Standing on the headland, with bay on my left hand and open sea on my right, breathing deeply of the wild and deeply invigorating air, I ask myself - what better gift than this could one have?

I’m visiting Dallas and hubby Jason, who has been on the road with work for weeks upgrading servers at exotic foreign outposts. I have kindly been gifted both ticket and hotel accomodations courtesy of his company as it’s hard to be away from your sweetie this close to Valentine’s Day. (isn’t it just!) Anyway, if you wanted to see what our Certified Energy Coach Program’s on-the-road "corporate headquarters" looks like, you’ve only to gaze at the moblogged pic here. It took a laptop, two telephones, a hotel ethernet/modem converter, my trusty Olympus digital recorder (we record all classes for student reference) and its associated Radio Shack record-from-phone dongle, but we got the thing done in the end. And what with me calling into the bridgeline from my cellphone, that’s three phones in all. Amazing what technology can do!

The CEC Program Manual PDF is visible on laptop screen with the section about the magic of Beliefs, which I was reviewing after class had ended. Speaking of which, we have a magical group of Energy Coaches in the Program plus are fortunate enough to have several of our grads returning for a refresher. What a wonderful mix - it’s such a pleasure to be able to be with these wonderful people. I feel greatly blessed in my chosen profession to work with some of the sharpest, most compassionate and intelligent coaches and healers in the land. Each day brings wonderful new suprises from each person and in my own practice as well. Can’t say better than this, it’s a wonderful life!

Of Dallas I have seen little as yet. The Beltway, the Galleria for dinner and the Concierge Lounge in the hotel for brunch. We intend to go museum hopping tomorrow and Friday, perchance to ride an antique train. But not today. It was a joy just to relax in the room until Jason came back from a day of fixing server bumbles. And so nice not to have anything to do for a change. Having said that, I surveyed the mess of our room after flinging bags and clothing hither and yon, and not being able to help myself, flew around cleaning it up for a pleasant hour or so.

I actually typed "pleasant". I’m turning into a regular hausfrau. Every time I exit our on-the-market house, I have felt I must clean it down to the last little bit of ‘Noushka fluff and leave it spotless as a museum. A girlfriend who is selling up herself reflected that it took a lot of energy just to live in such spotless splendour. She’s right. I don’t know how my mother, bless her, managed for so long. I can remember her complaining about the (invisible to my teenage eyes) mess in every room, and dusting with a ferocity rivalled only by her zeal at beating the living daylights out of our few scatter rugs and carpets. Now I fret over the anguish of an abandoned sock, veggie peelings casually littering the sink, the kitties flagrant indiscretions with their bits of fur, discarded whiskers and occasional claw casings.

"And ‘oo’s left to clean it up? Me, THAT’S ‘oo!" to mangle a quote of Hermione Baddeley’s in Mary Poppins. Me indeed. Cleaning is good for the soul as my mother used to say, but too much clean is just as bad for it. While I love sitting in a freshly cleansed living room and thrill to the sight of spotless Corian, I ache just to put things down as I wish and not take them up again until I need to. Family photos too have been banned, and I miss those dear, familiar faces peering out of their dated frames. I long for some of my own artwork on the walls instead of the bland, banality of "decorator" designs. Too soon this will all change though.

The one thing that can be counted on is change. I was reminded of this at the recent MSOCI conference by one of the speakers who noted that from time immemorial the sages of our world have spoken of the immutability of change. As I packed my office to go on the road, I marvelled at the ability to do a thing that twenty years ago, would have kept me chained to a desk and not allowed me to work so wonderfully free from constraint. That I was able to book a ticket and fly here in but a few hours to stay a few days was something we just wouldn’t have done a quarter century ago. That one can take what in 1980 was an entire roomfull of machines, squash them into a box the size of a highschool yearbook and furthermore, connect to the entire rest of the world via the Internet is nothing short of astounding. But only one thing could bring us to this place - Change.

In fretting over the dropping of a sock or random scut of cat fur, I realized I was desperately desirous of casting a spell to freeze time and not allowing Change to occur. Or rather, not allowing myself to flow with the Change that with or without me, is going to occur anyway. A lot of energy was trapped there, frantic, nervous energy such as I witnessed in my mother when her precious homegrounds were besmirched. I decided that I could let this go.

In the night before I left for Dallas, Anoushka blanketed the carpet in the living room with half the fur on her little body, and managed this without even breaking a sweat. Toshkit industriously pulled a claw casing off of each and every claw, and strewed them around the coffee table. The bathroom floor was grubby from kitties playing on wet tiles with dirty paws fresh from the garden. Crumbs littered the wood floor around the kitchen carpet. These were also all nearly invisible to the untrained eye…but *I* saw them and was on the verge of freaking out, when I decided to say "the heck with this noise!" And with seven house showings by various agents plus two open houses scheduled, I kissed the kitties goodbye (leaving them in the competent hands of Uncle Max) picked up my bag and headed out into the pre-dawn fog and my waiting taxi. It felt very, very good.

How do you seek to block or avoid Change in your life? How much energy do you have tied up in resisting Change? What would happen if you surrendered to the inevitability of Change? Would you be willing to? And when?

Well, well, well, it certainly has been an exciting time around the Garden lately. I have been off for the past week or so to the Association of Comprehensive Energy Psychology (ACEP) conference in Phoenix, AZ where among other things, I was appointed ACEP Regional Coordinator for California and Hawai’i. It should be fun! (Anyone reading this who is an ACEP member in these states, we’ll be in touch soon with new changes that are taking place)

I also had the fun and privilege of meeting so many people that I have had rich email correspondence with but never had met in person! My beautiful sister-friend Tapas Fleming and I had a glorious reunion (though we’d never met in the flesh!) and glorious communion throughout the week. I got to meet Dr. Larry Nims of BSFF and Don Elium of iST (who looks just like his picture online) and was invited to be in a DVD Larry is making of the BSFF “art of delivery”. What fun! I took Carol Look’s weightloss with EFT class and though I use her manual for both myself and all my weightloss clients, am even more impressed with her caring, professionalism and genuine sweetness of spirit. Yet another lady to know.

I took a GREAT pre-conference workshop on the diagnosis and treatment of multiply traumatized clients with Mary Sise, now current president of ACEP and it was wonderful. It was a tossup between several workshops but Mary’s info was timely and very well presented. And such a dynamic lady! She wil be a very good president for ACEP and has already proved herself an able and caring leader. Our National Networking Coordinator Pat Koestner was additionally so helpful to me as a new Regional Coordinator - and her workshop on Indigenous Healing Practices was brilliant! Look for it and others at the ACEP website as soon as conference CD’s become available.

Dr. Eric Perl, DC wowed the crowd Friday night with “The Reconnection” work and was such a comedian he had us all in stitches every few minutes. In addition to the levity, he proved the power of the Reconnection work by unkinking the arthritic fingers of a male audience member to the amazement of all who witnessed it. Powerful stuff!

In the merchanting and exhibition area I met many beautiful people, all dedictated to healing. I received an auric cleansing and photo, pranic healing, Finger-Hand therapy, a Journey to the Wild Divine (an interactive biofeedback computer game with gorgeous graphics that I bought for the J-Bear. Look for the Bear-ish Review, upcoming!) and a RET eye movement demo - all wonderful each in their own way. Wonderful stuff!!!

Last night I had to euthanize my oldest and dearest friend, my 16 year old female brown classic Maine Coon kitty “The Biscuit”. I find it strange yet perfectly fitting that she should choose to exit on the last day of February in a leap year. She had been born in a leap year too - 1988. A beautiful, magickal, wonderful kitty. After a mercifully short illness that began on Friday afternoon and came to a close Sunday at 7pm, her kidneys went into terminal failure. I tried to make her comfortable at home with a heating pad and her favorite red blanket from my childhood home in the big armchair where she held court. It was no good though, she hadn’t eaten or eliminated in 24 hours - we had to take her to the vet. I made the carrier as cushy as I could with a double foam pad topped by the pink flannel blanket that comforted my mother in her last days. J-Bear held her inside the carrier, covered the sides with a thick towel to keep drafts off of her, and placed it gently inside the car. Driving up to Adobe Animal Hospital in Los Altos, the sun shone warm upon her face and her beautiful amber eyes closed with pleasure in a last, brief respite from her pain.

The Bix had a long and mostly good life. My ex and I rescued her from a bad situation with an abusive neighbor across the street from us thirteen years ago. From that period she retained a suspicion of strangers, but once she knew a person, would love and trust them unreservedly. When my ex and I parted ways and I remarried, The Biscuit came to live in a new house with two new kitties she was pleased as punch to queen over, and together they formed a loose but distantly affectionate little tribe. She was infected with FIV (the kitty version of HIV) but was never sick from it. A bite from the neighborhood bullycat that gave her the disease was deep in her right thigh though, and she never quite recovered good usage of that hip. It contributed to her having arthritis that increased with time until her entire hindquarters were a hotbed of sensitivity and pain in the last couple of years. Only Reiki and surrogate EFT were helpful, and not that much in the end.

Dr. Peter Hill was the kindest, sweetest person to have oversee this difficult time. His eyes were nearly as red as ours and he was having equal difficulty speaking as we were. He and other doctors at Adobe had treated The Biscuit since she lived across the way from my ex and I. Dr. Hill in particular loved her and it grieved him to see her in pain as much it did us. He outlined the whole procedure for us every step of the way and gave us time to get adjusted to each step before he went ahead. He must have apologised for how difficult this was being on us at least three times. Like it was his fault. But he calmly and bravely administered The Biscuit’s deliverance from pain and this life. Little was said, except by me, to The Biscuit. She was alert though drowsy during the procedure, we had adequate time to say all there was to say, to pet and love her, and the euthanasia took only seconds, for which I am intensely grateful. She simply went to sleep for the very last time as I skritched the sweet spot behind her ears and told her what a good and sweet girl she was and how very much we loved her. Through tears. Mine and the Bear’s…who was every bit as cut up as I was…

:::more:::
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The Gamut Point of Fashion < -- click here for a thought provoking photo of differences in Iraqi fashion

Anyone who has fixed ideas about the state of hijab (veiling, hair and body covering) in Iraq needs to get themselves on over to Iraqi dentist Zeyad's awesome “Healing Iraq” blog for consistently provocative, informative content and check out his photo blogs, one of which is of a several radical Women’s Groups holding events in Fardus Square, Baghdad where the photo above was taken. This particular photo shows a stunningly attractive, fashionably dressed young Iraqi woman in spangled high heels looking at the camera from a crowd scene. She is wearing a chic burgundy blouse-set and black trousers. Her makeup is flawless, her nails manicured. She wears a golden ring, silver watch and necklace and her hair is loose, bound only by sunglasses perched atop her head. She could have stepped off the corner at Hollywood and Vine. Her look is bold, challenging. She is nobody’s fool, slave or property. Standing in front of her with her face turned in profile from the camera is another woman, perhaps in her mid-40’s wearing a dark but fashionable pants suit, with a sage green flowing scarf wrapped securely around her head. The front of her hairline shows by a few inches. She’s modern, but not taking any chances (like many of my Muslim girlfriends who lived overseas). The aura about her speaks of quiet certainty, she is intent upon a speaker, or a scene in front of her. She appears to know exactly what she’s doing and where she’s going.

Or how about this one, my favorite picture of all. I love the grey haired lady shouting into the microphone. I don’t know what this is all about, but she’s giving some issue the what-for alright. Man, what a granny she must be! What a mom, what a daughter, what a leader…
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