Throat Chakra

Our restorative yoga class today focused on the throat chakra. A little over a year ago, Khris gave me a stone that he picked for me and it was supposed to be helpful in balancing and opening the throat chakra.

At that time, I thought it was to help me open up and speak up more. I looked for signs about that in the last year. But I was looking for the wrong signs. I had the idea that the throat chakra was about speaking. Unconsciously, subconsciously or somewhere in me I was looking to open up in the wrong way.

When we think about using our voice more there is a misconception about getting louder. Telling people what we really think. Telling people off. Getting things off our chests. Not taking any shit. But that's not using our voice. That's misusing our voice.

If people used their voice like that with us, it wouldn't help us. We wouldn't understand them any better. We wouldn't want to listen to them. It wouldn't open communication.

We have to use our voice the way we would want to receive someone else's voice. With compassion. With love. With clarity.

Opening the throat chakra comes with breath. Breathing and speaking come from the same place. They help each other. Slow your breath and your speech slows as well. Your thoughts slow. Your heart and mind have time to express what you really want to express. Not what your emotions are tricking you into expressing to cloak your body for the moment.

Let the throat chakra remind me to breathe before I speak. To remember that the mind, the voice and the body all speak to me with words and without words. I need to listen. To listen to myself with compassion first and always speak to others the way I would want them to speak to me.

Slowing Down

I've had signs coming at me from everywhere lately telling me I need to slow down. Slow down? You don't do shit, Susie! No, no, no! That's not what slowing down means!!

I've been listening to the signs and slowing down and I am feeling the benefits!

As the song from the 70s said, sign, sign everywhere a sign!! (that song had a different meaning about the signs, but I'm choosing my meaning!)

I've been slowing down. Getting back to routine. Training in the morning. Going to bed a little earlier. Making my bed. Doing restorative yoga. Reading. Noticing. Pausing.

Slowing down is not just in actions, it's in reactions. It's in the in between. It's in the mundane. The routine. The daily life. Slowing down isn't for vacation. It's for pacing.

It's like Curly from City Slickers said....you spend 50 weeks getting knots in your rope and then you expect two weeks up here will untie them. Slowing down unties the knots as you make them. I've seen how knotted rope has hurt me in my past--growing up, as a teacher and even now.

Most importantly, slowing down has helped me reflect and feel gratitude for the ability to be able to keep a routine that will help me.

My routine is much slower than what is normal for most people and what is culturally acceptable and valuable. But I am in a place where I can thrive with it and even move into a new and exciting life with it.

I can slow down for huge gains in mind, body and soul. Thank you for all the signs!

Simple or Profound? Change Your Mindset!

I've been thinking a lot about the simplicity of some sayings and some things I've read and how they seem so simple. Keep calm. Don't take yourself so seriously. Laugh more. Pause. Breathe. Change your mindset.

Ironically, I applied the simple mantra of my trainer to think about it: Change your mindset.

It's all about mindset. Is it simple so it's cliche and irrelevant? Or is it simple so that it's profound and highly relevant? That's up to you. I've read reviews of books that say things like...good book, but nothing new here just the same stuff. I understand that, but sometimes the same stuff is what we need.

The same stuff at a different time in our lives so it sinks in differently because we can receive it differently. The same stuff as a reminder. The same stuff that we can interpret with new eyes. The same stuff that we can peel off another layer of what we never realized had layers in the first place.

Something as simple as Khris's change your mindset has taken on so many layers over time. I just realized this morning as I was thinking about things that back when I was teaching, I used change your mindset without naming it that every summer when I examined all of my teaching strategies and attitudes to try to improve things.

Something as simple as if I was going to give students pens or pencils if they forgot them was a matter of mindset. I thought about all of those things beforehand. Some teachers were of the mindset that they needed to teach students responsibility and never gave students pens or pencils. They even went so far as to have certain punishments attached to forgetting them.

I decided that my mindset about that particular issue was that I loved my students and that everyone forgets things. I remember how I felt as a student when I would be in class and I had no pencil. I would feel panic. I didn't want my students to feel that. I didn't want to add to that feeling by punishing them. So I always had pencils in my drawer for them. I went so far as to give them a pencil with a smile and sharpen it for them if they asked for one.

I didn't leave a cup of pencils out on the shelf. I tried that one year and they just disappeared and I was constantly replenishing them. But when I kept them in my drawer and they had to ask me for one and I said, sure and handed them one with a smile, I felt a connection to the kid. I made them feel like they could be safe at school even if they made a mistake. And I didn't care if they forgot to give it back. Usually I told them to keep it for their other classes.

That mindset made things so much nicer for me and for my students.

Things we learn in meditation and yoga and in lots of the books related to those types of things seem simple. But are they just simple or are they profound as well? When I have read the same quotes or books at different times in my life, I have understood them in different ways.

I may have been in a different emotional state or I may have revealed or uncovered an additional meaning to it.

Recently in a yoga class, the teacher was talking about the mantras and about breathing and she gave us the mantra of inhale let, exhale go. She kept talking about the mind wandering and all the stuff that yoga teachers always talk about with meditation and at some point she said something like the idea is to bring yourself back to the breath or whatever keeps you grounded in reality.

Grounded in reality. That hit me like a yoga brick! Nobody every said it like that. Or I never heard it like that before. It's not about clearing your mind and letting go so much that everything is gone. You're clearing your mind and letting go so that you're HERE!!! You only focus on the breath and the mantra to be here NOW! IN YOUR BODY!

When Khris talks about emotion and logic, I think we can have both if we are in our body. If we stay calm and feel. When I let my emotion take me out of my body and do and say things that I don't have control over is when I get in trouble. I'm not grounded.

When I recently read to pause and feel what your body is telling you, that is a way to ground yourself. You are in your body. Listening to your body. You being here now. Experiencing the emotion or feeling and letting your body tell you things.

But you are also letting your mind (logic) work. You are bringing yourself back to reality. Calming yourself. Not letting those crazy wandering thoughts (emotions) take over.

Logic and emotion are living together. One is not taking over so the other doesn't exist. They are existing together so that logic helps you understand what your emotion is telling you or how it is fooling you or protecting you, so that you can feel it and use it and respond to it or not respond to it yet.

It's a meditation of sorts. It's simple and profound. It's not just simply pause. There's work to do. Just like with my pencils. I had to decide to give pencils to my students with love. But that wasn't the end of it. I had to do that every time.

I couldn't get frustrated if 7 people asked for a pencil during one class. Or if the same kid asked for a pencil day after day.  I had to smile every time. I couldn't slip and give a mini-lecture and say, try to remember your pencil tomorrow. I had to smile and give it with love. EVERY TIME!

Simple isn't always easy. Profound is deep for a reason. Change your mindset!

Don't worry. The simple lessons will keep showing up and giving you more chances to dig deeper!

P.S. When you dig deep in the mud, you just dig farther. The mud is still mud. You just keep digging. So when people say something is deep, people expect the lesson to be different somehow the more you dig. But it's not, it's the same mud or dirt. You're just digging deeper. So don't always look for something new when you're looking for a deep concept. It's just mud. You just need to keep at it and dig more. It's more beautiful mud. Not necessarily different mud.

Signs

I've been doing some interesting things lately. Zen tarot card readings, New Moon Astrology reading, Ayurvedic medicine reading. It all sounds like stuff many people would say is crazy stuff that is just made up. For the purpose of what I'm writing about it's irrelevant if it's real or made up. It's helpful to take the signs you get and work with them.

In Ayurvedic medicine, I am Pitta dosha and I had read about that idea years ago and about the foods I should eat and avoid, etc. to balance that dosha. But I only just recently understood some things that can really help me to use that concept to help me practically in my life.

I was told by someone whom I just met that I was wearing a bracelet that had lava stones and I should be careful with that because I was already a fiery person. I had never thought of myself as fiery. It seems such a negative thing. But I am. I only got the lava stones because they are porous and I could put essential oils in them. She told me to get watery stones like pearls to balance my fire.

When you read about the doshas, your qualities can seem negative. But that's not the point. The negatives are only when your dosha is out of balance. If you avoid some of the foods and try to do some of the things that it recommends, you are in balance and it's not a bad thing.

For me, I think I've always naturally balanced my diet by avoiding spicy foods because my stomach can't handle them. But my digestive problems came from other things like greasy, heavy foods that put me out of balance.

Something I found in my most recent search about Pitta dosha is routine. I've found that when I don't have a good routine, especially for long periods of time, the fire comes out. I get crabby and irritable and emotional and exhausted. When I think about my childhood, I was fire then, too. I was a stomper. I stomped up the stairs all the time. I was probably overstimulated and exhausted.

In a moon energy astrology article, it talked about things happening in January having an effect on what's going on now. I looked back at my January blog and I wrote about craving routine and needing to focus on the process and living in the present again.

It talked about events from mid April to mid-may being important. That was a huge time of turmoil for me. I'm still dealing with the aftermath of that and figuring things out. Now I'm not saying that as a way to "prove" that it's correct. We can always fit our lives into the astrology. I'm saying who cares if it's correct or not. Why not use it to help us organize and determine ways to help ourselves?

Why not let the signs we find in the world around us help us use our own intuition to take steps to take care of ourselves in the ways we know we need to in order to best honor ourselves so we can experience more joy and gratitude and take more action to be more compassionate with ourselves and others.

Why fight everything? Why not balance it instead? I am fire! There's nothing wrong with fire. I just need lots of water to balance me. Fire is beautiful and so is water. I need to embrace them both. Find the balance so I don't burn up or drown. That's all.

Emotional Intelligence

Khris and I have had many conversations about emotion and logic. We agree and disagree about a lot of it. In general we agree about some things but use different words to express it so it seems like we disagree. In English sometimes we have too many words with many different connotations. In the case of the words emotion and logic, I think we have too few and therein lies some of the problems when discussing this topic.

The Buddhists tell us that compassionate listening is meant to help us understand people so we can help them suffer less.

Emotions and logic. Why does it have to be one or the other? Why can't it be both? I think it can. That is emotional intelligence. That's where feeling comes in. That's where thinking comes in. That's where Buddhist philosophy comes in.

Emotions exist. If we didn't have them at all, we would be robots. We wouldn't need compassion.

But it's true, emotions can get us into a lot of trouble. People use emotions to manipulate. People get manipulated by emotions.

Emotions can lead to poor decision making. We can make decisions when we're in highly emotional states, either positive or negative. We can make rash decisions when we're excited or not take chances when our confidence is low.

We can bury our own emotions and not face them. Those emotions won't go away. They will get ugly. They will come out in ways sometimes where we don't even know what's happening. Emotions affect our health as well.

If we don't use our intelligence to face our own emotions and take care of ourselves, we will be less and less able to be compassionate with others. We will be less and less able to express gratitude. To share joy.

If we want to understand others, we need to understand ourselves. Empathy requires that we use our own experiences to imagine the experiences of others and how they must feel.

Emotions teach us things. They also allow us to feel things. I want to experience joy and gratitude and love and peace. There is suffering and injustice in the world. I will experience sadness and loneliness and anger and frustration.

I've learned recently, that I can pause and breathe and that my body will tell me what I'm feeling. What my emotion is teaching me. What is under that emotion.

Instead of lashing out or talking fast or pacing or whatever my body wanted to do, I need to pause. I need to breathe.

What is my body telling me? Can I listen to it with compassion? Am I afraid? Am I tired? Am I angry? Why am I angry? What am I afraid of? What's going on?

Breathe! Breathe! Breathe! My body will tell me what that emotion is all about. What am I protecting myself from by reacting so quickly? That anger is processing to protect me from something. That's combining logic and emotions to become feelings. I can express my feelings intelligently. Calmly.

I hope to remember to use more logic and intelligence to temper my emotions so they can become the way I feel and not act on them in ways that hurt me or others. That way I can listen to myself and others more compassionately to help us suffer less.

Becoming the Buddha

Thich Nhat Hanh says that "Becoming a buddha is not so difficult. A buddha is someone who is enlightened, capable of loving and forgiving You know at times you're like that. So enjoy being a buddha. If you don't become a buddha, who will? 

When I had my first card reading from Yolanda, my 10th card was consciousness and Yolanda said to me, You are the fucking Buddha! 

Yolanda

I met Yolanda at our sound healing event at KBuddah. I was not in a great mood that night and I didn't really relax or connect with her at that event.

She was very nice and lovely, but I didn't really want to be there in the emotional place I was in. I just wanted it to be over so I could go home. I was crabby.

But once she started chanting, I started to cry. And then when she played a certain bowl, I cried. Then during certain lighter instruments, I was relaxed and okay. Then during the heavy bowl, I'd cry again. I was releasing something.

I had been crying a lot during the weeks around then because we had been doing a lot of recovery muscle work with foam rollers and golf balls and it was painful and I had been releasing a lot of old tension and emotions were coming along with it.

Everyone else loved it and hugged her and talked to her a lot at the event, but I just tried to be invisible and take pictures for the KBuddah social media and just get the night over with.

On the topic of social media, everyone was connecting with her on Facebook after that night. I tagged her professional page for our posts, but they all became friends with her on her personal page.

About a week later, I got a friend request from her on Facebook. Then when I posted about going to see Rocketman, she asked if she could join me. I was not expecting that at all

After we saw Rocketman, I met her the next day at the river in Geneva for a reading. It was quite illuminating and fun. I just went back today for a second reading. I am going to go to a sound healing next week to experience it in a better mindset. And I know we are going to have her back at KBuddah for more sound healings in the future.

Here are the highlights of my two readings:

Reading One

The issue that came up to work on in my first reading was abundance. The card was cool looking. He was a fat hippie with a lotus and a book and she talked about how I was creative and my issue was opening up to living a life of abundance and receiving.

My next card that was needed for my issue was change. Huge change is what's happening for abundance and creativity to manifest. I have to face my shit and pause and go through the change. Learn from it.

One of the biggest things I'm learning is pausing and breathing and not forcing the changes. I have to go through the turmoil. Letting go is going through, not going around. When you slow down and take a breath sometimes you can let go so much easier.

I've had that happen in my dreams. Sometimes I know I'm dreaming and I get uncomfortable in my dreams and I want to wake myself up. I used to yell at myself to wake up. I'd yell, wake up!!! Eventually I taught myself in my dreams to take a deep breath and slowly open my eyes and then I'd be awake in real life.

I need to do that in my waking life. When I get uncomfortable, I need to slow myself down instead of yelling at myself or yelling at other people or doing dramatic things as a way of trying to protect myself.

My next cards were all about not giving away my power, trusting myself, and not worrying about the past or reverting to old patterns.

Reading Two 

My issue was past lives or past issues. Letting go of the past.  One of my last cards was courage!! I can do this! I don't need to think about my past or things that I used to do or cling to past patterns. I can move forward.

I got a card that was ripeness, meaning now is the time. I don't want to wait until the fruit is rotten. I want to do my work now. I got the card of slowing down to enhance the issue. Which to me means exactly what my first reading told me and the signs that I've been getting from everywhere. 

I need to slow down. I need to listen to my body and myself more. I can't worry that other people think I need to push myself more. I know what's best for me.

I know that after months of pushing myself this winter,  I paid for it. It didn't help me; it hurt me.

I got the inner voice card. I know I need to listen to my inner voice more.

My attraction card was rebirth. This was my favorite card visually. It was dark clouds at the bottom with a lion coming out of it roaring and then a little joyful angel playing the flute coming out of that.

Yolanda said it was pain and darkness at the bottom and then you have to roar and get mad to come out of the dark place to be able to get to the joy. 

I feel like more rebirth is coming. It's unfortunate that the roaring and anger has to come to pull you out of the pain and darkness to get to the joy. But next time I need to come out of the darkness, I know I can roar and use my anger in a more productive way to get to the joy. 

I got the We are the World card, which she said is my way of using my creativity in service to others as part of my joy. 

My outcome of the issue was burden. This was fascinating to me. The outcome of past lives is burden. If I can let go of worrying about the past, I can let go of so much burden. That's so much of what I've been doing in my work with Khris in training. How so much of an entire level of my pain was able to disappear so quickly.  Pain that had been trapped in my muscles and had been a burden to me for so long.

The burden card pictured burden on top of burden on top of burden. Layers and layers of burden. 

Fibromyalgia is like the rebirth card. It's the dark place of pain and depression and fatigue and tightness and all of that. The anger is the work.  You do the work and roar with your training and crying and release of your pain in order to let that pain and anger roar out of your muscles and your body to get to the joy and release a layer of burden. And then you do it all over again. 

And you love and forgive! Again and again. Because you are the fucking buddha!~