Where Did You Get That Pimple? From your Grandmother?

25 Oct 2011 2 Comments

by Eva the Dragon in Healing - Self and the Earth Tags: , , , , ,

Happy Birthday!

My birthday was celebrated in great style.  Greetings from my family and friends, a massage, facial, presents, cake, flower bouquets and Dom Perignon.  But to ensure that it was not 100% perfect, a tremendous pimple popped up in the middle of my cheek.

At dinner last night when we were discussing the twin’s birthday, Mark my son, turned to me and asked “What are you getting me, a facial and a pimple?”

I was happy to see him in a good mood.  Since the twins birth, Mark is easily upset compared to Ace who is like Teflon.  Mark’s general grumpiness made me tell Mojo when he was two years old, “There is something wrong with him.  I don’t know why he is so upset.   Perhaps he needs to see a psychiatrist.”

I thought the twins would be great birthday presents.   But they missed sharing my birthday by 2 hours and 20 minutes.

The last month of my pregnancy, I was on labor prevention drugs so I had some control when I went into labor. On October 24th I was at 37 and a half weeks and I decided to stop taking the medication in the morning.  By 7pm the contractions were strong enough to send me to the hospital.  And there I waited and waited.  I was disappointed when the clock hit midnight.  Obviously my sons were not meant to be born October 24th.

Instead they shared their October 25 birthday with my grandmother Naomi.  Naomi died relatively young of a brain tumor which I believed stemmed from a deep hurt.  I loved Naomi but I would not want my sons to harbor her deep resentment.

Years later while reading through the family genealogy chart, I realized the boys also shared their birthday with my great grandfather Oscar.  I found it to be an unusual coincidence.  Oscar died before I was born but he suffered from mental illness, again something I hoped the boys would not share.

Oscar’s wife, my great grandmother, was the daughter of twin sisters.  These twin sisters lived to be in their 90s and remained close all their lives.  Hmmm, a set of twins in the family, another small link to the past.

The twin sisters were fifteen years old when they, their aged mother and 4 brothers migrated from Sweden in 1871.  Two of the brothers, Andrew and John, changed their last name from Samuelson to Lindquist.  Why didn’t they want to be known as Samuel’s son?  No one had an answer.

But I found another coincidence –  Andrew Lindquist made it three ancestors who shared the October 25thbirthday.

The Japanese believe if a soul suffered a trauma it develops a pimple.  If a child is unhappy, then the Japanese say he has a pimple on his soul.

Was the October 25th birthday the sign of a pimple?  Was Mark’s unhappiness a trauma or a negative energy passed down through the family?

Over the past two years I sought help from energy healers and I learned Reiki.  Using Reiki, a Japanese healing system, the easiest way to deal with soul pimples is to find where the pain is because that is where the pimple is.  I treated the entire family and kept asking Mark where is your pain?

Of all three children Mark asked for Reiki the most.  And I think today he is a happier child.

He is lighter, less prone to anger.  He has gained confidence and has taken initiative in several areas of his life.  He demonstrates a lot of kindness towards his sister.  I see a change in him.  Is it just maturity?  I can’t say.  But I have learned healing takes time and whether another person is healed has nothing to do with me.  I can only heal myself.

So on my perfect birthday, to get a blemish and then have Mark comment on it seems to me to be a sign.  There must be a pimple on my soul that needs healing.

My birthday present to myself is the gift of knowing the years are passing and deciding it is time to re-energize myself and live more joyfully.  I need to let go of any hidden past within me.  I am a bit unsure what exactly needs healing but if I keep asking myself where is the pain? I am certain I will find out.

Queen Victoria sends Birthday Greetings

24 Oct 2011 4 Comments

by Eva the Dragon in Healing - Self and the Earth, The Most Interesting Roosters - People Tags: , , , ,

My Birthday Card from Queen Victoria

Next to my coffee cup this morning was a card from Queen Victoria wishing me a very happy birthday.

Queen Victoria runs the castle for me and makes sure the food is on the table.  I have never been very domestic and if it wasn’t for her, we would live on peanut butter sandwiches.

She wasn’t always known as Queen Victoria.  When she came to work for us I told Susan her name was Maria Victoria and since my kids go to a British school I added, “You know – like Queen Victoria.”

“Hello Queen Victoria.  I’m Susan,” said Susan.  And from that moment the tone was set.

Queen Victoria calls Susan “Princess” and Susan secretly tells me “I’d rather be called rock star.”

Queen Victoria is one of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of mothers who leave their children to find paid work overseas.  Like her namesake, she is a widow.  She supports her four children who are making their way through school.

On the one hand I think she’s lucky to be a widow because when she sends money home it is going towards her children.  All the other women who have worked for me have sent their hard earned money back to their country.  When they returned home, the house was empty, the money was completely spent on drink and other woman and their mothers were taking care of the children.  Penniless, again they leave to work far away from their families in a country where they don’t speak the language and have few, if any, rights.

Queen Victoria, the Empress of India, also felt “sick at heart” to see her 17 year old daughter leave England for Germany to marry Prince Friedrich Wilhelm.  “It really makes me shudder”, she wrote to Princess Victoria “when I look round to all your sweet, happy, unconscious sisters, and think I must give them up too – one by one.”

The word Courage conjures up images of soldiers fighting in battle.  But whether villagers or royalty, throughout history women have had the Courage to leave everything they know to go live under the roof of a man whose control over their lives is extensive.  And every day, even today, women around the world do this.   Yet their courage is hardly written about.

So receiving these birthday blessings from my Queen Victoria makes me pause.

I wrote about the Graeaes for the first time in Preparing Ourselves for Perseus’ Visit.  And two days later I am given this card.  The picture alludes to the original description of the Graeae.  As members of the Phorcys family they were marine divinities, emerging as the white foam seen on the waves of the sea.

Perhaps Queen Victoria is a messenger for the Graeae who are telling me women don’t need to wait until God or someone else gives us wings to fly.  All the courage we need is already within us.

And if I am ever afraid to follow my dreams all I have to do is glance across the kitchen at Queen Victoria who sings as she cuts vegetables.

Preparing Ourselves for Perseus’ Visit

21 Oct 2011 Leave a comment

by Eva the Dragon in Healing - Self and the Earth Tags: , , , , , , ,

Reimagined Graeae 1995 Unknown Artist

There once were three old women, who were blind to the gray world about them, save that they shared a single eye between them through which to see the world.

In order to see, each blind crone would take turns looking through the shared eye.  They spent their days passing the eye from woman to woman. As each took her turn she would describe the world she saw in living color to the other two.  It was as if each could see clearly through the seer’s eye. 

It never occurred to any one of the three to keep the eye for herself.  The world was full of possibilities for each of the women because of the collective vision and perspectives they shared.  

Poem from Images of Liberating Action: Opening a Collective Eye, Susan M. Maloney, 1995

Reviewing my IHCC days for the Anita Caspary piece I came across this drawing and poem in my files.

Part of the point in studying feminist spirituality is for women to learn to take God back in their hearts not as the authoritative father or his benevolent son but as the Mother/ Goddess/ Creator.  This means reexamining all the stories, rituals, symbols and prayers we used and asking ourselves does this include me and my experience as a woman.

Take for instance the story of Perseus who killed Medusa.  My sons, Ace and Mark, LOVE LOVE LOVE Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series.  I am very pleased because reading his books they have learned all about the Greek Gods and can tell their teachers who each one was and what they did.  Of course we recently watched the “Clash of the Titans” with Sam Worthington.  I enjoyed the movie as much as they did.

In this 2010 remake, Perseus has to find the Stygian Witches to ask them how to kill the Kraken coming to annihilate humanity.  The Stygian Witches were grey, frightening old crones who shared one eye between them.  After learning he needed to kill Medusa (the witches’ sister by the way) Perseus harassed the old women by tossing their eye out of their reach and making them scramble on hands and knees to find it.

In Greek and Roman mythology, the Stygian Witches were also called the Graeae who shared a single eye and a single tooth.  The Graeae were a primitive concept of the Triple Goddess “who was three in one and one in three”.  Throughout the pre-Christian world, you find Triple Goddess in her hundreds of forms as Creator/Preserver/Destroyer, Virgin/Mother/Crone, Past/Present/Future or Sun/Moon/Star.   The Graeae manifestation of the Triple Goddess was passed down through the play Phorcydes by Aeschylus, part of the dramatist’s trilogy on the life of Perseus.   In the early 7BC versions, the Graeae were young, beautiful and shaped like swans.  By 2010 they have become groveling sorceresses.

This poem is asking us, women, to re-imagine the Graeae, the Triple Goddess within us.  As we are now wiser, older, our hair has become grey but so has Greece and Rome.  And from where I stand the sky has also turned grey, filled with the pollution of man, the Kraken of our time.

Just like Rick Riordan who took an ancient play and 8 millennium later got it placed back on the bestsellers list, we can reframe the old stories.  The poem is asking us to work together, to share the seer’s eye that sees the possibilities, the future, and by describing our vision in living color, bring it to life.  Not for us but for our children, the next generation of Perseuses  who will eventually come to us and ask us how to annihilate the remade Kraken.

Transforming 1 Ton of Plastic into a Wheelchair

18 Oct 2011 4 Comments

by Eva the Dragon in Healing - Self and the Earth, Island Tales - Expatriate Living Tags: , , , , , ,

Alaia's collected 2,444 plastic bottles in one week.

Yeah to Alaia and her schoolmates for attempting to collect 10 tonnes of plastic bottles to buy ten wheelchairs.  The 120 students turned in over 20,196 plastic bottles to the recycler.

But – my heart was broken by the piles of plastic bottles around her.

Alaia alone collected 2,444 water bottles in one week.  If this is a fraction of the bottles generated weekly in this country of 1.2 million, then how many water bottles are opened and tossed out daily worldwide?

As a comparison, once I supplied bottles of water for the 20 students in our Reiki class.  At the end of the day, 16 bottles from the case of 24 were opened, sipped from and left nearly full as trash under the chairs.  This was a group of adult healers working to raise their consciousness.

I remember listening to a NPR interview with Dr. Jeffrey Meikle.  He had written a book celebrating plastics on its 100th anniversary.  Dr. Meikle rhapsodized over the thousands of plastic innovations.  When Norris, the interviewer, pressed him about the environmental concerns, Dr. Meikle pulled out the patriot card saying plastics were democratic because it allowed millions of people to buy cheap things they could not normally afford.   Norris pressed him again.

NORRIS:  But Professor Meikle, there’s no denying that tons and tons of these products remain in landfills all over the world.

Dr. MEIKLE:  That’s right. And they will remain there, basically, forever. I suppose that it’s very similar to what you do with nuclear waste. What do you do with plastics? We are creating things that we will never be able to get rid of. And I suspect that that is the major problem with plastics.

The flaw in his comparing nuclear waste and plastic is that millions of people don’t have access to cheap nuclear energy like they do to cheap plastic consumer products.  Secondly because plastics are so cheap, we simply discard them when we are done and buy another.

Every year it takes a day to repack all of my Christmas ornaments.  My Filipino helper asked me, “Why don’t you just buy new decorations?  In my country, we throw out our tree and decorations and buy new ones the next year.”  I was shocked because this was coming from someone who, relative to us, made very little money.  Her point was these things are so cheap why save them?

Each of us must take responsibility for our plastic bottle usage.

1)      Bring your own re-useable bottles.

2)      Return to the old practice of filling IGLOOs with ice and water and supplying paper cups at parties, meetings and sporting events.

3)      When you buy think QUALITY, not quantity.

My mother used to tell me it was better to save your money to buy something of quality.  You might have fewer things, but the things you have will last longer and you will appreciate them more because you had to wait for them.

Each of us needs to reduce our plastic usage so Alaia has to figure out a different way to buy a wheelchair.

Note From Self

13 Oct 2011 Leave a comment

by Eva the Dragon in Healing - Self and the Earth, Note to Self - Lessons Tags: , , , , ,

My Self

Only 10 blogs written and now I’ve gone and done it.  I transformed into the snarly blogger I swore I would not.  In My Mojo Floweth Over I called the man who made fun of Cher an “ugly, chubby man”.

Late during the night my Self who looked amazing like Jiminy Cricket woke me up to point out my error.

“Eva – why was it necessary to send that man negative energy” asked my Self/Jiminy.

I reminded Jiminy that I am a Scorpion who is known for its vengeful tail.  And occasionally my shadow side flares up.

Jiminy said “And I am a cricket known for not being defeated by a whale’s tail.  Did you think you could not be a real Blogger without acting like the other donkeys?”

Good point.

As I wrote in About Eva I desire to have the joy of a life lived well.  And I hope that makes me happy.  But happiness alone is not the same thing as happiness shared.

Martin Seligman, Director of the Positive Psychology Center, wrote “The single most effective way to turbocharge your joy is to make a gratitude visit.  That means writing a testimonial thanking anyone to whom you owe a debt of gratitude and then visit that person to read him or her the letter of appreciation.”  This is why I am blogging.  I am writing my public letter of gratitude, thanking LIFE.

Happiness Love Company

I share my happiness because “Happiness is also a collective phenomenon that spreads through social networks like an emotional contagion.”  In 2008, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler published a study showing “One person’s happiness triggers a chain reaction that benefits not only his friends, but his friends’ friends and his friends’ friends’ friends’.”

Happiness extends outward to 3 degrees of separation whereas sadness does not spread the same way.  “Someone you don’t know and have never met – the friend of a friend of a friend – can have a greater influence than hundreds of bills in your pocket,” wrote Fowler.

By celebrating Life and knowing Mojo I figure happiness will spread.

My Grateful Self

It doesn’t excuse my writing but only demonstrates that every day I must recommit to happiness and gratitude.

I Really Want To Go To The Party, But I Have To Study For My Breast Exam

05 Oct 2011 1 Comment

by Eva the Dragon in Healing - Self and the Earth Tags: , , ,

Think Pink

Think Pink

I don’t know why we women must wait all year to pay special attention to our breasts.  Men view them positively 365 days a year.  Regardless of the size or shape, breasts still rate above ass and legs as men’s favorite body part.  Why don’t we give them the same love?

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.  Everywhere campaigns are reminding us to check our breasts to identify a pea-sized c before it becomes THE Big C.

Energetically, breasts represent mothering, nurturing and nourishment says Louise Hay in her classic book You Can Heal Your Life.  Cancers stem from our deep hurts and longstanding resentments.  If you combine the two, then breast cancer might be the manifestation of the anger we feel towards ourselves for our lack of self care and for always putting others’ needs before our own.

I prefer to “Think Pink” rather than focus my attention on Breast Cancer,  to move away from the idea of breast EXAMS.  None of us want to fail and no one, including our breasts, likes taking a test .  Change the thought from “I’d better examine my breasts in case I have cancer” to an attitude of “let me take five minutes to care for myself.”

THINK PINK – HEALING RITUAL

This is not the doctor’s office – enjoy the experience.  The privacy of your bath or shower is as a good of place as any to begin your monthly ritual.  Choose a scented soap or a lovely oil and hold it in your hands.  Palms upwards, imagine you are holding a ball of pink light.  When the light is very strong, cup your hand over your breast and see the pink light covering your breast.

Say one of Louise Hay’s affirmations (here’s where you may have to study a bit but it’s not hard)

“I am important.  I count.  I now care for and nourish myself with love and with joy.  I allow others the freedom to be who they are.  We are all safe and free.”

OR

“I lovingly forgive and release all of the past.  I choose to fill my world with joy.  I love and approve of myself.”

In a circular motion, using your fingertips, carefully and gently spread the loving energy.  Continue saying your affirmation as you massage the pink light into every cell and every gland in your entire breast.  When finished, allow yourself to feel the pink light to spread throughout your body.  Say thank you to your self.

If you happen to find a hard spot, your body is sending you a wake up call. Listen and take care of yourself immediately.

Quit looking for Trouble.  Breast awareness means becoming aware of our needs.  Approach your breasts with love and they will respond positively.

And tell your loved one how great your breasts are.  I am certain he or she will be more than happy to help you nurture your joy 365 days AND nights a year.

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