Ananda Blog

The local alternative newspaper The Hook has published a piece on Ananda. Here’s the link

Check it out!

My experience with most psychics over the past 25 years is that they haven’t been worth the time or money–well meaning people, with some vague intuition, but too generalized to create real meaning or lasting change. This has changed: The intuitives I’ve worked with recently have been a different category altogether. They are the real deal, directly hooked into a powerful spiritual source of knowledge. Michele Bigness, Paul Jones, another local woman. They are tapped into Source and you can feel the difference in what they say and how you respond.

Michele came to Ananda yesterday to do discounted readings to benefit the store. It was a powerful day–it always is when she does readings, but the energy was even more profound yesterday. She read for her clients, she read for people who walked in to shop, she read for my friends, and everyone received something valuable and healing. She gifted us, and I think the Universe gifted her back.

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s spectacular public meltdown has gotten me thinking about this whole concept of soul mates. Basically, there are two schools of thoughts here. One, the High Romance version, loosely bastardized from Plato, says that for each of us there is one perfect person, the romance that, in the words of (fictional) Jerry Maguire will “complete me.” Our romantic life is a search for this person and, once we find him or her, bliss will ensue.

I don’t buy this. For one reason, the practical: what if we don’t meet this person? What if we do, and then he or she dies? What if s/he is married to someone else? Is it at all logical to think that in a world of 6,706,993,152 (July 2008 est.) population, only one of them is our romantic fit? I hope not.

A Course In Miracles is particularly harsh on this train of thought, calling it the “illusion of the special relationship,” which is no more than the “ego’s chief weapon for keeping you from Heaven” (341) because of the value you place on this relationship, and your Self in it, to the exculsion of ultimate Reality. I’m not a Course in Miracles teacher, expert or even more than a curious reader, so if this intrigues you, turn to other teachers such as Marianne Williamson or Gary Renard for more explication.

The other definition of a soul mate that I’ve come across is that the Soul Mate is a person who indeed carries part of your Soul Group and because of this, you remind each other of the places in your lives where you are disconnected from your highest self and your destiny and tasks in this human lifetime. That is, a soul mate enters your life, completely disrupts it, usually through heartbreak, in the course of which you are set you back on the path you need to be on. Then the soul mate leaves your life. It’s not pretty, frequently deeply painful and rarely results in lifelong bliss and contentment. However, when you are able to surrender to the experience (that is, among other things, not fight to keep it going once its time has ended), you will come out of it a more authentic person, more likely to find happiness and love with a different partner.

Under this definition, Mark Sanford most definitely met his Soul Mate in his Argentinian Maria. Look at how his cool professional demeanor utterly cracked as he wept at his press conference. His marriage is probably ending: His complulsion to continually deconstruct this relationship in public, while perfectly familiar to us high obsessive types, is not a move that will endear him to the wife (Relationship tip: if you want to reconcile with someone, best not to announce to the Associated Press that your lover was your soul mate but you are going to “try” to learn to love your wife again). His career as he had projected it is almost certainly over.

He is becoming a much more interesting, and, I imagine, authentic person. His pain is forcing him to a level of grief, self-examination and public humiliation that is fascinating to watch. Where he goes with this is up to him, but at the moment, his naked humanity is utterly revealing. He’s a mess. We’ve all been there.

Here’s the thing: we never really know why someone enters our life and why that person leaves. Romantic love is a shapshifter, sometimes granting us our deepest longings, sometimes showing us illusions we need to give up.

We had a great Grand Opening day. Thanks to Michele Bigness, Cheryl Hopkins and Cindy Bowen for spending part of the day with us (all of the day for Michele). Cheryl’s presentation Your Money and The Economy: An Astrological Perspective was packed. Interesting and fun and really enjoyable. Michele’s readings were such a hit that she’ll be back again in July. She’s already got a waiting list.

For me, the best part was watching my vision for Ananda enact itself. Exchanges of information, healings, deep connections between people and ideas, and people with themselves. I loved it. Thanks also to my friends Jeanne and John who each drove in from out of town to spend part of the day here.

I gave a Reiki session today. As always, 2 distinct forces playing out in my awareness. The first force, utter knowing about the power of Reiki, actually began earlier this aftenoon, long before the client showed up, when I was looking through a Reiki book for other information and saw a symbol that I hadn’t used for awhile. I knew that I needed to use this on the client and I kept drawing it on myself and in the Treatment room all day. Something–the energy, the guides, the client’s own self–called me before the session began to make sure that the right tools were available. Then, when the session started, it was absolutely clear to me that not only was Reiki going through me, but that the client’s guides and angels were in the room with us, directing and managing the flow of energy. It was utterly clear and profound that we were surrounded by Divine Energies and all I had to do was get out of the way and let the energy work, hold my hands and make the movements they guided me to. Their presence was as real to me as the massage table the client lay on.

The other part of me was in the room thinking, ‘this is insane. This person is paying me to wave my hands around her body and I’ve hypnotized myself into thinking something is happening.” That same questioning voice also doubted me,’who are you Abby to think you can do this; other people can do Reiki, not you.” And so on. I had to quite consciously remind myself of other feedback I’ve gotten, other times when I’ve known the energy to be on. I was so distrustful, dis-believing of the entire experience.

It showed me, again, the difference between knowing and believng. There is a part of me that knows Reiki works, that knows when guides and angels are present, that knows that what is happening in a Reiki treatment is far more than me waving my hands in the air, that it is an act of healing.

Then there is the part of me that believes in Reiki. That belief can be shaken, manipulated, put at the mercy of my Critic or into the service of my ego. It quite frequently thinks that Reiki is magic. I have learned not to pay any attention to my beliefs about Reiki, to let the voices talk and ignore them. Belief is too often no more than an act of will, how we hypnotize ourselves into thinking the world is what we see. How many times have you, or me, or someone we know said, “I do (or don’t) believe in that,” as if their (our) beliefs on anything–suntanning, Christianity, capitalism, psychic readings, taking vitamins–are what make those things true or false, as if they only come into or out of existence through our attention and the quality of our certainty.

One of the reasons I love Reiki is because it does allow me to sidestep my beliefs, my ego self that has decided that the things of the world have certain meanings, some true, others false. With Reiki, when I’m practicing it, I get to put down my control freak nature and let Spirit work through me. I get to actively–and yet passively–participate in mystery.

And, I get to know, with utter clarity, that angels and guides are present in our lives. Maybe one day I’ll even start believing it.

It did help that the client loved the session, felt the energy moving immediately, and scheduled a follow up appointment for next Monday. Belief loves worldly reinforcement.

I’m reading Elizabeth Lesser’s wonderful book Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow. Lesser is one of the co-founders of Omega Institute, the model for the place I want Ananda to become, on a smaller scale.

Here’s what she has to say about the choice we all must make, repeatedly, in our lives:

To be human is to be lost in the woods. None of us arrives here with clear directions on how to get from point A to point B without stumbling into the forest of confusion or catastrophe or wrongdoing. Although they are dark and dangerous, it is in the woods that we discover our strengths. We all know people who say their cancer or divorce or bankruptcy was the greatest gift of a lifetime…But we also know people who did not turn their misfortune into insight, or their grief into joy. Instead, they became more bitter, more reactive, more cynical. They shut down. They went back to sleep…I am fascinated by what it takes to stay awake in difficult times.

And she quotes lines from Rumi:
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.

I love this. I also think about the challenge in thinking you are responding to difficulty by growing, but in reality you are deluding yourself, the ways we convince ourselves we are right and what we are doing is the best thing, when what we’re really doing is running away and shutting down. And the courage it takes to really face yourself so you know the difference.

If this entry seems kind of woozy, it’s because I most assuredly am. I just had a great massage. And, cheers, Kate White, the massage therapist, is coming to work at Ananda. I’d been waiting to announce massage until I’d found the right person, and she is it.

Kate practices a multi-faceted massage, just the kind I wanted at Ananda. Lots of spas make you select your type of massage when you book: do you want hot stone or deep tissue or traditional? I don’t want to force clients into that choice and have been looking for therapists who respond to what the client, not the administration, needs.

Kate combines all these modalities, along with cranial-sacral therapy and a choice of aromatherapy oils, to give you the massage your body needs right now. For me today, traditional, hot stones, both to massage with and left on my stressed out shoulders, carrying the burden of all my responsibilities, deep tissue where I needed it, gentle where that helped, she really pinpointed my spots, and then finished with cranial sacral that helped to deepen the release and opened energy back up. I feel so good right now.
Kate is now, officially, my personal massage therapist. She rocks. She’s been practicing massage for 15 years and cranial sacral for 10; she also teaches a variety of classes for prenatal moms which hopefully she’ll do here in the fall. I am so glad she wants to work here, she’s the kind of practitioner I recommend, want, have been waiting for.

Happiness moment: there is a photography festival going on in Charlottesville, both exhibitors and classes. Lots of people wandering around taking pictures. A Buddhist monk, complete in saffron and scarlet robes, just put down his cup of Mudhouse coffee (or herbal tea or whatever) and took a picture of my sign.

In my current state of all Elizabeth Gilbert, all the time, I tracked down the web version of her initial Oprah visit after the book came out. Besides checking out the picture of her and Felipe on their wedding day–he’s so cute!–I was most struck with what she described as her useful daily practice (and no, it’s not meditation).
1) Every morning, write down what you really, really, really want for the day (she was most insistent on the 3 reallys).
2) Every night write down what made you happy that day, in a special happiness journal.
3)”Refine your mantra.” To paraphrase–we all have a mantra we chant continuously. Occasionally it might be Om Shanti, but for most of us it’s more like “I’m so fat,” “I wish I had more money,” “Why won’t she love me,” etc. Gilbert suggests becoming attuned to the mantra we recite, and, if it’s not working for us, if it’s not what we want in our lives, change it.

These are the basic principles of manifestation, by the way. Visualize it clearly, be grateful and appreciative, take control of your thoughts. The last one is tricky–we might think that ‘I wish I had more money” sends out the manifestation of getting money, but actually it sends out more manifesting of the lack of money. Same with “I wish X loved me” doesn’t attract love to us, it attracts the absence of X, etc. Instead, to reframe these things that feel like lack, you might say “I am prosperous in all I do,” “I have abundance and joy in my life,” “I am loved”, or something similar.

And for those of you who are resistant to the whole idea of affirmations, like I was for so much of my life, my favorite affirmation of all, taken from Frederic Lehrman’s Prosperity Consciousness CD (track it down, it rocks): Affirmations work for me whether I believe they do or not.

Affirmations aren’t the beginning or the end of manifestation and living a happier life, they aren’t a quick fix, they are definitely not magic. But what they are very helpful for is helping us regain mastery over our compulsive thoughts, the ones we think without being aware of what we’re doing. The background noise/soundrack to our day. Changing these debilitating, compulsive thoughts are essential to living a happier life.

We recieved a new shipment of books, and while I was putting them on the shelf I got distracted by Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love, one of my favorite books ever, which I hadn’t read since Jeanne and I went to Kelea Surf spa for women in Costa Rica (one of my best vacations ever). Read this quote from page 260, which I loved so much I have to post:

“People tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you’re fortunate enough. But that’s not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don’t, you will leak away your innate contentment. It’s easy enough to pray when you’re in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.”

This morning I cast the I-Ching, asking for guidance in next step for bringing prosperity to Ananda. Usually when I do the I-Ching I get an answer something like “the horse carries a basket, it is favorable to cross the river,” and not being an I-Ching master I muddle through with a metaphorical interpretation the best I can. Occasionally, however, it is crystal clear and today was one of those days. Here is part of the interpretation:
Know What You Want
Know What Makes You Feel Good About Yourself
Know What Brings You In Harmony With Other People
Anything else is an obstacle that needs to be removed cleanly, by biting through and tossing it aside.

Such good advice I thought I would post it.