After confessing my new year overwhelm I felt like a bit of a loser. I know, the point was not to feel that way but still, I did. And it was a good thing. It made me step back and see that I've really been sliding into the gloom since the snow melted and I lost the big buzz I was undoubtedly getting from the bouncing light.
I have a serotonin issue. I know this and should be prepared. Migraine, PMS, seasonal depression..all serotonin stuff. I take a daily dose of an SSRI to help with that but at this time of year I need to either up my dose (and I don't want to do that) or take other action. So I decided, I may not be able to plan for a year but I can certainly come up with some ideas for the next month.
Step one was to procure a lightbox. I didn't plan ahead and get one in October but that doesn't mean that the next two months have to be utter misery. Lightbox rental is an awesome option and hopefully mine will arrive tomorrow. Not as pretty or as natural as snow, but hey, way more practical.
Step two is already underway and I'm doing daily Reiki meditations and self-treatment.
Step three involves a hoop and finding somewhere to practice indoors because it's bloody cold outside. In our cottage the rooms are v. tiny and the ceilings v. low but I think I can do some basic hooping in the kitchen.
Step four is making use of guided meditations. I have this book by Steven Farmer and really like the first two on the CD. For Reiki people, the Reiki Evolution meditations are very good.
Step five is to cut back on the coffee. I'm going to try to limit my intake to two a day and the rest of the time I'll stick to redbush or - an old favourite from years back - white tea.
So nothing earth-shaking but strong, positive things that will help me move forward. I also really need to get this back on track because a barrel of personal issues and, dur, the lack of light in which to run around here in the Winter (we don't do streetlights out here) either before or after work, meant I completely missed my target. I was so very grateful for the donations made towards my fundraising for BCDH and I'm ready to gently get back to meeting my challenge.
I think that will do for now. I have something quite exciting lined up for March but I know anything could happen between then and now so I'll keep it under my woolly hat.
I should be outside and I will be outside but before I go, some things I want to spill onto the page:
The thing I demonstrated in the vlog is for scattered energies. When you're overwhelmed and can't get a straight thought out of your head. Do it 2-3 times a day and feel everything click back into order. Seriously. I have another for you too. Which means..uh oh...another vlog on the horizon. I might brush my hair this time.
I fought a migraine for three days and won. Sleep, sleep and more sleep.
I dug out an old sketch pad and drew. And didn't judge the results.
I took my camera out at 10pm with my dogs and took some beautiful photographs.
I picked up my hoop last night for the first time in a very long week. I needed to feel good and it never fails me. I side-stepped (or rather didn't, heh, hooping joke) the walking spin and tried something else. I span the hoop on my hand above my head (Wild West) and then I dropped it down over my shoulders onto my waist and kept it going (Float Down). I KNOW! I did the same from an overhead spin on both hands at once and it felt amazing. I also learned how to spin the hoop on my neck. This morning I ache like f*** and have bruises all over my hands and can't wait to get started again. Except this time I'll try not to bash myself on the nose with a 44" hoop.
At some point yesterday I was thinking about wildness and how when I was younger my wild side was in her element when she was leaping about to very loud music. Namely the music that she felt in her bones. Namely the guitar sound of The Edge. And then overnight the Universe did something amazing and Tor tweeted about it and I cried happy tears and it was awesome.
And Tracie mentioned she'd been listening to Black Prairie and I loved them too. Perfect summer night listening (apart from Edge and Muse, natch).
Also, I read this:
Wolves never look more funny than when they have lost the scent and scrabble to find it again: they hop in the air; they run in circles; they plow up the ground with their noses; they scratch the ground, then run ahead, then back, then stand stock-still. They look as if they have lost their wits. But what they are really doing is picking up all the clues they can find. They're biting them down out of the air, they're filling up their lungs with the smells at ground level and at shoulder level, they are tasting the air to see who has passed through it recently, their ears rotating like satellite dishes, picking up transmissions from afar. Once they have all these clues in one place, they know what to do next.
- Clarissa Pinkola Estes
This has been my weekend. I hope yours is/was as fulfilling.
I'm going to keep the hooping stuff a little separate so I don't bore you all silly with it. If you're interested then just follow the link up there to Hoop.
Yesterday it was hard to wipe the smile off my face and of course, as the world spins, so does life.
The person who wanted to be my first client, cancelled. But at least it showed me how excited I got over it and now I have to replace her. HAVE to.
My big plans to beautify my home in time for weekend visitors (families with girls from Evie's orphanage) aren't getting off the ground. I can't be bothered. And, to be honest, I'm secretly quite proud of that fact. not long ago I'd've been up all night scrubbing skirting boards and repainting walls. No really. I am slightly irked that the kitchen garden looks like no one's lived here for years (and it really does) but hey, it's been raining. I can't mow grass and weed weeds in the rain. Well I could...but I'm not gonna.
I'll give the kitchen, bathroom and Evie's room (NO! DON'T MAKE ME! MY EYES!!!) a once-over tomorrow. Lick a tissue and give the dogs' faces a quick clean. I know, I know...I'm a domestic goddess.
I ate half a bag of jelly beans and now I feel like slipping into a coma. But at least I don't have a headache today and no those two things aren't correlated.
AND! My new 44" hoop arrived today and although it's only 4" wider than the one I made, it's a lot easier to spin. And thanks to HoopGirl I can just about recover a plummeting hoop before it cracks my ankles. Again.
AND.2! Someone I know and love (and who is a born hooper in my amateur opinion) met HoopGirl at the weekend and tells me she's wonderful. I feel like a teenager - two degrees of separation!
Now look. I've only gone and got all smiley again. And I haven't even started writing about my hair colour removal adventure yet.
No housework for me, I'll just point them at the view through our front door.
It struck me today that Style Statement works. Remember mine? Sacred Natural. And this week it seems I'm closer to living that than ever. It feels good.
I'm writing this as part of my 800 words for Bindu and shall be following up with some Legs Up The Wall. I know it's an easy yoga option but I'm clear about my needs at the moment and they include some rest.
I'm reading about ways to raise my spirited child and discovering that life is much easier and nicer for us now I've acknowledged the clash between her extravert nature and my introversion. If I take time to make sure both of us get what we need in terms of company and intense communication for Evie and quiet and alone time for me, then she is able to spend time alone while I do, and my brain doesn't meltdown while I play many, many games of ninja turtles or dog rescue centres (what? she's my daughter) with her.
Of course there's hooping - my newest love. It was Sara (yes she of the wonderful dreads) whose newest blog showed me the way and already I'm falling asleep visualising myself hooping. Have you seen what she can already do after SIX WEEKS??? Now I'm waiting for this to arrive tomorrow, watching the lovely AHni and Beth and knowing you don't get much more Sacred Natural than that. You know I'm going to be practising a few spins before I hit the yoga wall.
I'm still working through what happened with LK, the creative kinesiologist and things I'd long forgotten are floating to the surface. I'm drinking a lot of water and doing my energy unscrambling exercise (that I forgot to blog about but yeah). I'm doing reiki self-treatments and sifting away the crud with some cool drumming from Fabeku.
I've got some mind-blowing business advice from the former Ms Style Statement herself, now giving the world her White Hot Truth in the Firestarter Sessions, Danielle LaPorte. All thanks to my sweet Kiwi sister, Sas (watch out for her, she's about to start some big old fires of her own).
And as if to prove that all this good stuff is bringing me home, today I got my first client for Wag Bark Love. He's 14 weeks old, his name is JJ and he looks remarkably like this.
It's a dirty, sacred, natural job...but someone's gotta do it.
During a recent trip to our local town of Bradford-on-Avon I picked up a pile of leaflets from some of the people advertising therapies in the area. B-on-A is a bit of a hub for That Kind Of Thing; one of the reasons I love it.
One leaflet was for a woman who offers hypnotism and various other things, including creative kinesiology. It got left in a pile on the coffee table. Somehow, that particular leaflet ended up on top of another pile in Charlie's office and he thought it was me dropping a not too subtle hint, because we'd been talking about him getting hypnotism to help with the vestiges of a stammer he has from his schooldays (it wasn't). So he called and made an appointment.
And it was astounding. Not just because a day later, he didn't stammer once during the type of phone call that would usually have found him completely locked on a consonant, but because it also opened up memories that his mind thought it had forgotten. His body hadn't.
So I decided the time was right for me to address my emotional eating issues before my poor old bones crumpled under the 30 pounds of extra weight I'm carrying. Or my body became so toxic that it fell into serious illness. Or my exhaustion got so extreme it tipped into CFS or something. Or my head exploded. I made the appointment.
The first one is 90 minutes - 30 minutes consultation over a long questionnaire you've already filled in and 60 minutes of treatment. I'd thought hypno was the way we'd go but the kinesiology just took off so we went with it.
In brief, my energy, immune system and strength/resources are all running at about 50%. I thought this was great - way better than I'd imagined - LK did not. She was pretty horrified.
She was more horrified by my confession that I don't really drink water. And I don't get thirsty. She muscle-tested me with water (I held a glass of water in my right hand, against my stomach, while she tested my resistance with my left arm) and - as my arm repeatedly flopped like a limp lettuce - said,"That? Is not right."
My body rejected the water as an unknown substance. Which meant something on a meridian somewhere was broken. She worked on a couple of points (think acupressure) and tested me again. Loving that water. Arm as strong as an ox.
She muscle-tested me while asking my body how much water it needs a day and it said 2.1 litres. So that's what I'm drinking. Minimum. And for once it's actually easy. I want it. I feel thirsty.
We did some other minor adjustments and then got onto the eating stuff. She took me back (asked my body what age it wanted to return to) to when I was about 5. We talked and tested over an issue that I had at that time that has stayed with me as deep shame. I was horribly affected by the birth of my second brother at that age and my jealousy was HUGE. I so wanted to take it out on him (I didn't) and we talked through those feelings. Where in my body I was feeling them, what words were coming up in my head, anything I was feeling. I felt it in my arms as an almost overpowering urge to push, reject and shove and had interpreted those feelings as being how I felt about my brother (whom I've always adored btw).
Cut to the chase, through various tests and acupressure and sitting with my feelings and just spilling what was coming to the surface, I came to see that my issue was not over the jealousy - I was FIVE and my Dad had a new favourite, how else was I going to feel? - but over the depth of my feelings. ANY feelings. Because I am someone who feels things BIG and my family liked to feel things small. Big feelings are undesirable. Inappropriate. Unlikeable. Wrong. Inconvenient. Not welcome. Not nice.
Hi, I'm British.
And so I learnt that I needed to suppress those feelings by hook or by crook. I had to be good. And in the past I've used nicotine and running away to deal with them but now that neither of those options are available to me, I eat. I literally push down those feelings with food. I swallow them up.
I also learnt, throught the consultation part, that I'm a textbook kinesthetic learner which makes perfect sense to me and puts a lot of things I already knew into a nice tidy package that I can refer to.
So that was the first session. It rocked. I have another booked for later in the month. We have no idea what will happen then. More of the same or something else to look at? We'll see.
Weirdest thing? I've had chronic knee pain now for a couple of months. Very bad. Almost unable to drive bad. It's gone. I haven't had it since I walked out of LK's therapy room and yet we did nothing to directly address physical problems.
We talked about my (recent) inability to commit to regular exercise. What could I do that would stick? In my childhood and teens I was a ballet dancer. In my 20s I was a farm-hand, a waitress and later an aerobics queen. In my 30s I taught various kinds of fitness. In my 40s I got a desk job and 30 pounds of extra body.
I'm over aerobics and its many cousins. I like the idea of running but not the reality. The gym bores me silly and my schedule is a mess so it's easy for me to skive. Money and childcare keep me from regular classes of any kind and yes, I'm great at making up excuses.
After my appointment the internets brought me to Bindu Wiles's brilliant 21.5.800 for which I duly signed up. And then yesterday, freewheeling through blogs, years after it was actually cool, I discovered hooping. And fell in LOVE. Within a couple of hours I'd been shopping and bought the makings of a hoop for me and a hoop for Evie. I'd watched numerous hooping videos on youTube and subscribed to some hoopy blogs.
This morning, at about 7.30, while Evie and her cousin (who had a sleepover last night minus the sleep.) played in her room, I was in the garden with the chickens. Trying out m'hoop. It's a humbling experience when you realise you've lost all co-ordination and can't spin a hoop for more than four spins without it knocking seven shades out of your anklebones. I persevered and pretty soon had it up to 17. Which probably sounds a bit crap but it made me skip around the garden punching the air.
So, kinesiology, water, yoga, writing and a big old hoop. It's feeling good.
