Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Creativity and Renewal

Perhaps you have Nextdoor in your community.  Mine can be a source of anger and humor as one side of an issue of which there are many attacks another, but yesterday was a post that was brilliant.

The suggestion is that people go outside and howl at 8:00 at night.

This Shelter in Place is tough. We need a release. Join your neighbors outside at 8pm every night until this madness ends for a 5 minute howl.

Howl to let others know you are in this with them. How to support our health care workers and first responders. Howl just because it feels good. Howl with your kids before bedtime so they can unwind.

Just don’t touch your face!😘

I admit I fell asleep and missed the howling but the report is that it was quite successful.  Here is a place the country can unite.

Howl at 8:00 each night. The country will transform on the release, sound, vibration, connectivity, and fun.  It’s good for all ages from the elderly to the young.

And on this subject of the elderly, not only does my local grocery store offer an early morning hour for the elderly to shop alone and without those who might push them out of the way but now I learn that Cost-Co opens at 8:00 on Tuesday and Thursday for the elderly.

My book group discussed this yesterday, online, of course.  We are becoming technology wizards. I read that tech stocks will soar when this is over since they’ve been a lifeline.  The point is we in our little group see ourselves as young, and now we are in a category of special care and treatment because we are at risk.  It’s an adjustment.

We also understand that if a choice must be made between two people as to who gets the ventilator, it won’t be us, and that is how it should be. Of course, we give way to the young. We honor renewal and transformation as we place our wisdom in a campfire of flames that when it comes to embers is perfect for roasting marshmallows, melting connection for s-mores.

Evening Sky


My heart flames

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Good Morning

I go to bed early and wake up early.  This morning when I woke I felt how my home currently contains two people and two cats.  No one can enter but the four of us and yet flowers are opening right now, showing us how to open the bud we are, and offer petals for bees, birds, and friends.  

We do it differently now; we connect online.  A friend’s workplace has orchestrated a virtual happy hour.  My book group meets online. Other groups I’m in have been doing this for years, but now these meetings offer a more intense and valued lifeline. 

Nothing is taken for granted these days, not even a roll of toilet paper. Like that, change, and yet, there is a place of stability within, and gravity is here, as support and friend.  Like trees, we deepen and spread our roots, and rise. We share the passage of water, tranquility, ease, and air.

Years ago I participated in a three month workshop called Eyes of the Beholder.  The intention was to lead us in knowing that how we perceive ourselves is how we perceive the world.  We each earned a name. Mine was Play Pal. My parents raised my brother and me to play, to view life as play.  I center there now, in their view.

After going through chemotherapy and radiation, I participated in Equine Therapy. The intention was to re-empower us as we left the assembly line of medical care. I saw one horse, Challenger, as gentle, tender, and sweet. I fell into his huge eyes and lungs. My heart matched his beat. Another woman fled from the same horse. She saw him as huge and threatening. We have choice right now, choice as to how and what we perceive.

Our political leadership is scanty right now, self-absorbed, and often not appearing to understand we’re in this as a whole.  Perhaps it’s too much for them to absorb, but as Thich Nhat Hanh writes and speaks each of us in this lifeboat we share can bring calm.  That can be our responsibility and response. Calm, and trust, trust in the Beings we are.

In 1957, Dag Hammarskjold, a Swedish economist and diplomat who served as the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, wrote in his private journal Markings:  

“Each day the first day.  Each day a life. Each morning we must hold out the chalice of our being to receive, to carry, and give back.  It must be held out empty – for the past must only be reflected in its polish, its shape, its capacity.”  

This is the day for each of us to “hold out the chalice of our being to receive, to carry, and give back”.  We’re in this together, a collective of hearts, reaching out our arms as we hold and embrace in a virtual hug that stirs and replenishes the one cauldron, lifeboat, and planet we share.

Heart Roots in Sky

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Every Moment Is A Moment

We still “shelter in place” though this morning I rose early and walked around my neighborhood.  No one was out; all are tucked.

I wonder if there is a collective fear I feel since all in my realm are fine, even though we are all separately tucked.  

My mantra continues to be the words of Charlotte Selver, my teacher of Sensory Awareness.  I first met Charlotte in 1993. Over and over again, she said, “Every moment is a moment.” “Every moment can be cherished.”

Sensory Awareness carried me through chemotherapy and radiation. I return again and again to her words.

“What we allow of sensitivity is closely associated with love and innocence. A person who is self-conscious cannot allow.”  

I wonder if the banding together that is now required as we figure out how to share and function as a community is allowing us to return to love and innocence.  We don’t know what’s coming but we do know we’re in this together. I isolate to protect others, to allow the pandemic to come to calm.  I’m not alone in this. I have my place to stand and rest, my place to cultivate peace.

Charlotte continues, “It must come out of the direct contact of our real inner connection.”

I continue to reach within, to feel and allow. I trust what’s there to come forth in support.

Yesterday on the Sensory Awareness call, Stefan Laeng played the songs of blackbirds he’d recorded. I felt my heart sing in response.

Charlotte said: “There is a certain relationship which I have to have with my inner functioning – that of respect and that of wonder.”

I marvel at the functioning of the natural world, the world within me, and the world of which I’m part.  Birds are singing and I hear their wings pulse as they fly. They are supported by the weight of movement and space in their structure. We share the air.

Jasmine climbs the fence, jubilantly luxurious in answering the call and thrust of Spring

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

More on Sensory Awareness

In my last post I wrote about Sensory Awareness and an experiment where one feels what happens when making a fist and letting it go.

Here is more explanation of what it can mean in one’s life. It comes from Lee Klinger Lesser’s website in the section on the History of Sensory Awareness.

http://www.returntooursenses.com

Living with Fear – Surviving the Nazis

The impact of this work was far reaching. Gindler continued to teach in Berlin throughout World War II. She hid Jewish people in her studio and worked in subtle and powerful ways to help her students endure and meet what they were facing. One of her students, who was Jewish, Johanna Kulbach, describes her experience:

“The effect of the work was that I lost the fear. I was very much afraid. They were terrible times; we had bomb attacks and besides that we never knew when we were going to be put in a concentration camp – you never knew. I learned instead of staying in fear, to live in spite of it. That’s what I learned. So I got stronger and healthier, instead of really ill, as so many people did. I remember one time we experimented in making a fist and feeling out what it did to us. It was not only the fist that was tight; my stomach was in knots, my breathing was tight – it was total tightness. If you hold this for a while and are aware how tight you are, you yearn for letting go. Gindler kept us at this until I had a good sensation of what it is to be tight. Then slowly, slowly, the fist came open, and I tried to feel what changes happened. For the first time I experienced what it means to change after being afraid. . . That is what the work is: that you learn to sense where you hold, where living processes are not permitted to function. And when you are aware of the holding – where you are not allowing yourself to function – then it’s possible to let it go. But you have to sense it…”
(Kulbach, 1978, p.15).

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Tender Touch

My Sensory Awareness Leader’s Group met this morning on Zoom.  There were 41 of us from five countries: the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Germany and Spain.

Coming together in this way, I felt as if each of us was holding a ribbon on a Maypole. We were circling with our ribbons, as we spun round and round.  Near the end of the over three hours, I felt the Maypole with its spinning ribbons and people attached center in my heart, and there was room for more, for the whole earth and even more in the widening center of my heart.  

Terry Ray began leading us to feel, sense, and ground.  I felt my shoulders were ten feet across, ready to hold the weight of the world. My pelvis felt tiny, squeezed small and rigid. The inside of my mouth was small and tight, a cave.  When I pressed my lips together, pursed them, I felt that press in my heart.  All of this changed with noticing and allowing, simply allowing what was needed to change.

Stefan Laeng led us to differentiate thinking and sensing.  When I let go of thinking, when I came into and dropped into my body, I felt fear, and as I stayed with the fear, I released into being breathed,  so simple, simply being breathed, no effort at all.

Lee Lesser led the third hour with a return to the mouth.  She continued to lead us in exploring and sensing, and then she read us something Elsa Gindler had done with her students during WWII in Berlin as she hid Jewish students from the Nazis. 

Experiment with it now. Make a fist. How does it feel to make and hold a fist? What happens, is happening? How is it then to slowly release the fist, to slowly open the hand? What happens to the breath, the feet, the heart?

You can check out the Sensory Awareness Foundation and the three leaders at the website: https://SensoryAwareness.org.

It’s time to come together and swing around the pole of connection, and come into tender touch with ourselves, and through that, touch with others, and the world.

Embrace the possibilities unfolding in and around us now.

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Embrace

On day 4 of “shelter in place”, the sun is shining, birds are singing, and flowers and leaves are rumbling and tumbling forth.

A friend points out this is not social distancing.  It’s physical distancing and social solidarity.  I like it!

Today, our neighbor hangs a fresh homemade sourdough mini loaf on our fence. 

Another friend suggests I read the book, Death: The End of Self-Improvement by Joan Tolifson.  Intrigued by the title, I open to the first page, words on the practice of meditation by Zoketsu Norman Fischer.

“Practice is not about overcoming human problems. It’s not about becoming serene and transcendent.”  (Oh, well, that was my hope.)

“It’s about embracing our lives as they really are, and understanding at every point how deep and profound and gorgeous everything is – even the suffering, even the difficulty. So we forgive ourselves for our limitations, and we forgive this world for its pain. We don’t say, “That’s not pain.”  It is pain.  You don’t say, “It’s not difficulty.” It is difficult. But when we embrace the difficulty … we see this is exactly the difficulty we need, and this difficulty is the most beautiful and poignant thing in this world.”

I pause knowing he wrote these words before this difficulty we are now in, and yet, I understand, of course, yes.

Rumi speaks on the next page of the book.

Don’t grieve.

Anything you lose comes round

in another form …. 

God’s joy moves from unmarked box

to unmarked box, from cell to cell.

As rainwater, down into flower bed.

As roses, up from ground.

Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,

now a cliff covered with vines,

now a horse being saddled.

It hides within these, till one day

it cracks them open.

Buddha Cat

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Tranquility

The news is sobering.  My son knows my love of Jellies, not Jellyfish, because they are not fish.  He sends me this offering by the Monterey Bay Aquarium, a beautiful way to float on waves of tranquility and peace. And now a little bird sits outside my window and chirps.

Breathe Ease

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Flopping All About

When a friend sent me the six ways people were coping with “shelter in place”, I realized why my blog posts have been all over the map.  I’ve been flopping between all six things, more unsettled than ever.  

  1. I’m sleeping more.
  2. Sometimes I feel out of body and I’m not even sure what space is.
  3. I’m pacing.
  4. I’m keeping things clean though not redecorating.
  5. I’m creatively cooking, going through recipes and what’s on my shelves, figuring this is a time to return to favorite dishes and ignore the calorie count.  
  6. For some, who’ve always been at home, there is no change.  Though I thought I was mainly at home, this has allowed me to see I’m out and about more than I knew.  It shows me if I am to experience the deep sink this unexpected retreat is meant to bring, I have a ways to go. Evolved, I am not.

Today, Aurelia Priotto St. John, a friend and colleague who lives in Italy, sent this to the Rosen Method Bodywork and Movement community.  She said I could share it if I thought it would help people. Since it helped me, I’m sharing it with you. For me, it was helpful to know I wasn’t the only one struggling to understand what was happening.  I couldn’t take it in, and now slowly the seep is anchoring roots.

Aurelia: 

Yesterday I wrote a letter to my Movement students and also to my Bodywork clients. “yesterday”, I say, because it took time these last 2 weeks to realize what was happening, to let us be touched by a different kind of reality that our country was entering.

Personally, I felt the need to stop and to let this fact impact me. An unknown silence had suddenly filled up our squares and streets, NO movement of people, busses, cars, No sounds in the air.

Something very deep and strong was passing, is passing and touching our beings.

It became so clear there was, there is nothing I could “fix” — a deep feeling of respect, something beyond what I can “know” and that a pause was so needed for me to, little by little, grasp what was going on, to be informed by this event.

It took awhile to take in what was and is happening. It took a while to allow this change to penetrate the awareness and wake up new questions and meanings for our life.

Little by little this penetration has had time to enter us and to connect us to a deeper level.

Aurelia suggests we listen to music, a “Sacred Hymn in C Minor”, allow it to enter and lead us, allow our body to find its way to respond, like a “moving prayer”.  Move as a child would, “free from judgment and expectations”.

I’ve been at my computer more than usual which is saying a great deal, but I see how many are reaching to connect with meditation and a need to talk. We, as intelligent organisms respond, and create new ways to stay in touch and evolve.

Meanwhile, honor the flop as you adjust moment by moment to new and trusting ways of being.  We’re in this together – one planet – one scent – one breath.

Jasmine in my yard continues to open and bloom offering a sweet and pungent scent

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Switching Gears

This morning I’m with the words of John Donne written 400 years ago when he was ill in 1623.

No man is an island,

entire of itself;

every man is a piece of the continent,

a part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less,

as well as if a promontory were.

as well as if a manor of thy friend’s

or of thine own were.

Any man’s death diminishes me,

because I am involved in mankind;

and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

it tolls for thee.

Since we’re isolated in our home because of our age, our neighbor leaves gifts of food on our fence.  Today is strawberries from the Farmer’s Market, the most beautiful strawberries ever seen. They are bright red and juicy.  I think of all that is involved in getting them to me, and then there is the thoughtful wrapping of placing them in a bag, and tying the bag to our fence, so we can go outside and retrieve.  Each berry, the greatest gift, and then, there is this time of isolation, each moment, a church, temple, mosque, monument, tree, all nourished in fluidity.  

I felt a shift in my being when I read about the Italian family in New Jersey who loved to gather and feast.  The matriarch was a regular at church, and yet now not only has she died from the virus but her oldest son and daughter have passed away too.   Four of her children are hospitalized; three are in critical condition.

I don’t know where to put this other than to open and open and open.  How much can I embrace, embrace and release, an island in the sea?

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Trust

This morning I enjoyed an early morning walk along Monterey Bay. I’m one who picks up pennies for good luck. Today I found a five dollar bill in the sand. A super good luck day! The tide was low and I saw mussels, anemone, limpets, and a jellyfish. Beauty abounds.

Harbor Seals