Hucha Clearing

The response (both on and off this site) to the simple clearing technique provided in my last post has prompted me to offer a couple of other hucha clearing techniques for those who would like them. 

Regular readers of this blog might recall that I offered a centering and grounding technique in a January, 2009 post. I suggest that you revisit that post and follow the centering/grounding steps before you try these techniques. You really need to be centered and grounded to do them. 

Both of the techniques I’m presenting are adapted from (not precisely the same as) those discussed by Joan Parisi Wilcox in her magnificent book, Masters of the Living Energy. 

Releasing Hucha, Practice 1 

• Get centered and grounded.
• Turn your attention to your energy body, the bubble of energy that both surrounds and is a part of your physical body, called the poq’po (POKE-po) in Quechua.
• Notice any areas of heavy energy. These may seem dark, heavy, muddy, or otherwise less than light and clear.
• Imagine your accumulated hucha traveling downward through your energy body and out, through either your feet or your root chakra, and into Mother Earth (Pachamama), knowing that she can use this heavy energy as “food” and will transmute it into light energy (sami).
• As you release hucha to Pachamama, open your crown chakra and allow a beautiful flow of sami to flow into you from Source.
• Thank Mother Earth and Source for their assistance and return to your centering/grounding awareness when you are ready to end the session. Then gently return your awareness to your everyday life. 

Releasing Hucha, Practice 2 

Note: You may find this second practice to be noticeably more profound than the first one.

• Get centered and grounded.
• Turn your attention to your energy body, the bubble of energy that both surrounds and is a part of your physical body, called the poq’po (POKE-po) in Quechua. As before, notice any areas of heavy energy.
• This time, send the heavy energy to the area of your energy body that is roughly two inches below your navel, sometimes referred to as the dan tien or chi in Eastern practices and referred to as the qosqo (KOS-ko) in Quechua. The qosqo is considered the primary energy center of the body by many energy workers.
• Ask your qosqo to “digest” the heavy energy (hucha), extracting sami from it as it does so, sending the hucha down to Mother Earth and sending the sami up through your energy body to your crown chakra.
• Notice the double flow of energy—hucha traveling down and out; sami traveling up through the body—both flows happening simultaneously.
• Thank Mother Earth and Source for their assistance and return to your centering/grounding awareness when you are ready to end the session. Then gently return your awareness to your everyday life. 

These are powerful clearing techniques that will help you clear hucha and enhance the flow of sami on an ongoing basis. I have been practicing and teaching techniques very similar to these for many years, but without the framework of Incan cosmology. It is always fascinating to me to note just how similar practices around the world are. Shamans (and others) throughout the world seem to tap into the same stream of higher understanding.

 As promised, I will talk more about sami in my next post.

 I would love to hear your experiences as you practices these techniques.

©2010 by Melanie Mulhall

Sami, Hucha, and Clearing

Jorge Luis Delgado is a practical man. He is a chacaruna, a bridge builder, in many senses of the word. Does he bridge the worlds of ordinary and nonordinary reality? Yes, of course. Is he a bridge between Father Sun and Mother Earth? Again, yes. But he is also a bridge to healing for those experiencing disharmony and a bridge to understanding for those who sense that something is afoot on planet Earth, but cannot quite put their finger on it.

As a shaman, I sense and explain the world around me as energy. In the Incan tradition of Jorge Luis Delgado, the life force energy that animates everything is called kawsay (COW-sigh) and it has two forms: sami (SAHM-ee) and hucha (WHO-cha). Sami is considered “light” energy, while hucha is considered “heavy” energy. It would be a mistake to translate that as “good” energy and “bad” energy and Jorge is very clear about this. Hucha is simply heavy, dense energy. Humans (but not plants or other animals) create and accumulate hucha in our energy bodies, called poq’po (POKE-po) in Quechua and hucha is problematic because it is incompatible with the optimal functioning of the energy body. 

A part of Jorge’s work, and that of other chacarunas, is to move hucha so that it can be cleared from the energy body. But his work also consists of educating people on the nature of both sami and hucha and how to foster the former, avoid the latter, and clear hucha when it accumulates. 

From my own perspective as a shaman and energy “reader,” I can say that as long as we are in human form (at least in the present version of human form we are experiencing at the moment), we will accumulate hucha. We are humans—not Ascended Masters—and while we are both thoroughly human and completely divine, enfleshment in human form carries with it some obstacles and those obstacles impact our vulnerability to hucha. 

Jorge would say that while we are children of the sun, we don’t shine like Father Sun because we are carrying hucha, accumulated during this age of darkness and more specifically, accumulated from early childhood on. This heavy energy affects the ego but it is not who we are. Within Incan cosmology, it can be said that we each have an “inner sun” that is, in essence, our inner integrity, our love—or what I would consider (with apologies to don Jorge if my assessment is off) our enduring spirit, that which connects us with and is a part of the divine Oneness. The inner sun endures. It is who we are. It is Truth and, as Jorge says, “Truth is forever, while the lies disappear after a time.” 

Our movement into the cycle of light will help with that. But we needn’t wait. We can clear hucha now, on an ongoing basis as we accumulate it. One can, of course, go to a chacaruna (like Jorge) who will help you clear your hucha. I have observed don Jorge performing a healing and if you have the opportunity to receive one, you will likely find it extremely helpful. But not everyone in the U.S. has the opportunity to work with a Peruvian chacaruna. Heck, few do!

Some of the shamanic work I do with people clears hucha, as can Reiki and other forms of energy healing. Jorge teaches a simple way of clearing hucha, one he developed. Stand with your arms outstretched to your sides (facing East if you wish). Then place your right hand over your heart (heart chakra) and your left hand over your solar plexus (solar plexus chakra). As you do this, know that your right hand is taking in love and sending it down to the solar plexus, helping to clear the heavy energy there. Now sweep your left hand down and away from your body, releasing the the hucha down to Mother Earth, who will transform it into sami and make good use of it. 

That’s it. It is a simple but powerful method of self care. Can you remove hucha in another? Jorge counsels against this. Instead, if you wish to help another, plant a seed of light within them. That will help get things moving so that they can release their own dark energy. Good advice for all of us, but particularly for those who are tempted to try to “save” others from themselves. In fact, Jorge does not talk about “removing” hucha in others during his healing sessions. Rather, he speaks of “moving” energy. 

But what of sami and of facilitating the movement into the light cycle? That will be the topic of the next post.

Copyright 2010 by Melanie Mulhall

Delgado, Braden, and 2012

Want to start a conversation that will make some people roll their eyes and others engage with passion, one that will incite controversy and maybe even heated discussion? Just say, “2012,” and see what happens. Some believe that 2012 is the “end times,” others believe that it ushers in a new age, and still others just think it is another year on the calendar. Among those believers are those who will argue their belief, those who await 2012 with curiosity, and those who plan to have a cup of tea and take a nap when the time comes. Shamans, mystics, religious zealots, spiritual seekers, and even scientists have something to say about 2012. 

I was interested in what Gregg Braden had to say about it, so I attended a conference last May to hear him (along with Alberto Villaldo and Bruce Lipton) speak on what he considers to be a powerful moment in time. Braden isn’t just another wild-eyed purveyor of New Age gobbledygook, he’s taken the time to develop some serious spiritual muscles and he has both a scientific background and scientific mind set.           

And among the things he had to say about 2012 (in the simplest of terms and my own words) were the following:

• 2012 represents the end of one 5125-year cycle (which is, itself, part of a larger cycle) and the beginning of another;
• These 5125-year cycles can be further sub-divided;
• Akin to fractals, there are repeating patterns within these cycles;
• By knowing what the conditions were during one point in a cycle, we can predict the return of those conditions at another point within the cycle.
• Some moments in time hold powerful opportunities to impact, by belief and intent, the outcomes impacted by these predictable conditions.
• We are in such a moment in time right now, during the period of transition from one world age to another! 

Interestingly, Braden’s take on 2012 meshes nicely with the Incan perspective, as explained by Peruvian chacaruna Jorge Luis Delgado. In the Incan cosmology, time is broken down into one thousand-year cycles, each divided in half with one five hundred-year period being the “dark cycle” and the other being the “light cycle.” We are nearing the end of a dark cycle. When does the cycle turn? Yep, 2012. 

But what does “dark cycle” and “light cycle” mean? According to don Jorge, the dark cycle is the time of the night. During this period, we are confused. Conversely, the light cycle is a time when we are clear, when we are filled with light. And this time is a powerful time of transition from one “age” to another. This is the time of the new pachacuti, the return of the light, and a time when a new vibrational frequency is possible on Earth and both personal and group consciousness can be raised. 

Between now and December of 2012, it is important for us to remember who we are and be clear about what we believe about ourselves. Who are we? We are children of the sun. We are the sun. We are its rays. As we remember that we are children of the sun, children of the light, we will come to understand—viscerally—that what is important is inside each of us. 

Father Sun is a portal . . . and so are we. Life force energy flows from Father Sun. So, too, it flows from us—as love (munay), service (llancay), and service (yachay). 

This is a powerful time to clear heavy energy within ourselves and welcome in the light. But what do I mean by “heavy energy” and how to we clear it? That will be the subject of my next post.

Copyright 2009 by Melanie Mulhall

Meeting Jorge

If you ask Jorge Luis Delgado what is life is about, he will likely answer, without hesitation, “Love, service, and wisdom,” or munay, llancay, and yachay in the Quechua language. 

In North America, Jorge would be called a shaman. But Jorge is Peruvian of Incan ancestry, born and raised near Lake Titicaca.  He refers to himself a chacaruna, a “bridge person.” A bridge person is one who helps others navigate from one state of consciousness to another (an apt description of what shamans around the world do). The bridge that Jorge provides has been forged by years of service, a loving and humble heart, and wisdom that comes from communion and respect for both Mother Earth and Father Sun. And those journeying across that bridge come to a state of consciousness in which they recognize that they are, and always have been, enlightened—they just have been resistant to embrace it. 

I first heard of Jorge when a close friend of mine met him while on a tour of Machu Picchu. There seem to be shamans behind every bush in South America and I am always a bit skeptical when Americans return from trips to the southern hemisphere with stories about the power people they have met there. It isn’t that I doubt that there are powerful shamans in South America. There are. My skepticism is of the same variety as that I have when people tell me they have crowded into a sweat lodge with forty other people to participate in ceremony led by someone whose background they have only sketchy information about. It’s the same skepticism I have of those who call themselves shamans but cannot quite explain their path to the work, apart from a couple of classes in shamanism and a interior pull. There are many seekers of mystical experience and, it seems, just as many purveyors of that experience who are selling mysticism as if the experience could be pasteurized and bottled for easy consumption. Motor oil passed off as snake oil passed off as enlightenment. Altered states for those who want to be able to TiVo it. 

So I didn’t really give the fact that my friend had spent time with a Peruvian shaman much thought—until she called one day to tell me that the same shaman was hosting a gathering of elders at Lake Titicaca to activate the Solar Disc in the lake, and that those who wanted to lend their energy to the process were being invited to join in. I knew at once that I was supposed to be there. 

It was the same kind of knowing I’d had many years ago when I asked a shaman if I could work one-on-one with him and he replied with a question, “Journey work, or do you want to be an apprentice?” At the time, I had no conscious thought of becoming apprenticed to a shaman, but my brain was bypassed by the part of me that knew it was time to step into my destiny and I answered, without thought, “Apprentice.”

Now I had the same kind of visceral knowing about Lake Titicaca and the activation of the Solar Disc. It was as if I’d finally received an invitation sent out before I’d ever stepped into this body in this life—and I’d sent myself that invitation, as part of an agreement made between many souls to be at an appointed place at an appointed time. Somehow, the fact that I have a husband with cancer and limited income were irrelevant. I’d agreed to be there long ago and I was going to fulfill that promise.           

The name Jorge Luis Delgado came into focus the instant I answered that invitation saying, “I’ll be there.” 

As luck would have it, Jorge was going to be in the United States some months after I made that commitment and I set about to help my friend (and others) publicize this first visit to and workshop in Denver. I wanted to meet the man whose interior ley lines seemed to be intersecting and activating my own. 

What I encountered in that meeting was a man of humility and humor, of wisdom and wit. A practical man, Jorge seems to see love as a verb and practices the active side of love without stress or pressure . . . but also with the unsettling ability to see right into the core of a person. The man is no tourist shaman. He’s the real deal.

There is a great deal to say about Jorge, the Incan cosmology, and the new Pachacuti—the return of the light—and it cannot all be said in one blog post. But Mother Earth and Father Sun have been waiting patiently for the end of the age of darkness, so I’m hoping my readers can apply just a bit of patience, too, for the next post.

 Copyright 2009 by Melanie Mulhall

Becoming a Crazy Old Lady

It was my friend and colleague Cindy Morris who provided the news.

Cindy graduated from Cornell University’s agriculture program enough years ago that the professors have all probably changed a time or two since and she once owned the European Flower Shop in Boulder, Colorado. Like me, she has fairy in her blood and holds court with the plant people on a regular basis. We were chatting over the telephone and I reported having brought in about thirty-five geraniums to overwinter in my house. Summer had given way to fall and the nights were getting cold enough to make the geraniums shiver. It was time for them to come in.

“I’m not exactly one of those crazy old ladies . . . yet . . . but I know that some people would find bringing in thrity-five geraniums to join all of my other indoor plants to be, well, a little excessive,” I said.

Cindy’s reply was immediate.

“Don’t kid yourself. You and I are those crazy old ladies.”

Then she laughed that deep, throaty laugh of hers that I love. It always suggests a knowing that might be hers alone or might be shared. In this case, she intended for it to be shared, whether or not I was ready for it.  It was the same kind of matter of fact comment coupled with a knowing laugh that I imagine Carl Jung making in a private conversation with Freud. “You know, you’re crazy as a loon. But, then, so am I. In fact, since we’re all just drifting through the dream, we might as well make the best of it.” Like that.

When I first commented that I hadn’t yet become a crazy old lady, I was thinking of the woman who lived across the street when I was growing up. She often took her meals on her tiny front porch, scooping food into her mouth and, without seeming to think anything strange to it, putting the plate down for her cats to join in, then taking it back for another bite. Her house consisted of narrow aisles winding among stacks of newspapers and assorted objects de debris. 

Surely I hadn’t yet become her. Had I? And how old was she, anyway, when I was ten or twelve? Surely she was truly a crone and not sixty, like me. Or was she younger than I now make her? It’s hard to tell. Everyone seems old when you’re ten or twelve.

I began thinking about what a ten or twelve-year-old girl might think of me. Would I appear to be a crazy old lady? Okay, okay, some people assume I qualify without giving it another thought because I’m a practicing shaman. But that’s just small-mindedness. Okay, I also have a penchant for herbs, some of them odd little varieties like mugwort. A few centuries ago they burned women like me at the stake. Some people I’ve met appear to still prefer that as a valid way to dispose of shamans and herb lovers. What else? As far as I’m concerned, fairies are real, trees have a lot to say to us if we will but listen, and the energy of things can be seen and felt. Maybe a ten or twelve-year-old would think me crazy. And maybe a four-year-old would agree with my model of the world because she wouldn’t yet have been socialized out of the knowledge that the world in which we live is truly magic.

What else might make me a crazy old lady? Well, some adults would say I’m crazy because I left a perfectly rational life in corporate America to be an entrepreneur and, with that, came to value happiness over cash. I might be seen as crazy, too, because I sometimes choose to dress age-inappropriately, say exactly what is on my mind, and believe that love trumps just about everything. Can’t help it. It’s who I am.

I’m embracing cray old ladyhood and thank you, my dear friend, Cindy Morris, for bringing it to my attention. Somehow it’s a relief to be a crazy old lady.

But now I’m wondering what other women think qualifies them as crazy old ladies.  If you think you’re one (or even a crazy young lady), I’d love to hear from you.

 

copyright 2009 by Melanie Mulhall (aka crazy old lady)

Giving our Gifts

When Norman Borlaug died on September 12, 2009, both his death and his life were news to me. I’m sorry for that and I’m not sure how he managed to have escaped my radar screen until he died. Sadly, I know that many others also first learned of him as he passed, like some beautiful but obscure comet, here for a moment and then only a bit of space dust to remind us of the passing.

Borglaug was a Nobel Peace Prize winner and is widely credited with being one of the founders of the Green Movement. That would be impressive enough, but his contributions to the world, in the form of an impressive body of work in agronomy, are thought to have saved over a billion lives. That one person could make such a contribution on the planet and not be a household name is a bit distressing.

Pop vocal artists die and get months of press. Politicians do illegal and/or immoral things and are the subject of dinner table conversation for an entire season or more. Stop a young person on the street and he is likely to know the local NBA star by name, and maybe by stats. How is it that Norman Borlaug traveled under the radar screen for so many of us all of his life?

The answer to that question may be important. As a culture, we Americans seem impressed with glitz and money more than contribution to humanity or planet Earth. I’m not going to harp on this, just connect it to the process of giving our gifts to the world.

When Norman Borlaug died, my mind went to a conversation I’d had a few weeks earlier with a client friend. She has some important things to say and a book that needs to be written, but she’s danced around it for at least a couple of years.

Now, I will be the first to admit that books take time (for most of us). And I have experience with needing to add a few chapters to my own learning before my book chapters could line themselves up. But I suspected that my dear friend was suffering from expert-itis. She just felt she didn’t yet have the credentials to write about what she was already teaching with great skill.

I encouraged her to get on with it and while I encouraged her, I gave myself the same pep talk. We women–more than men, I think–seem to believe that we must have our own equivalent of Norman Borlaug’s many awards (the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, the Padma Vibhushan, and the Nobel Peace Prize among them) before we are qualified to give our gifts to the world. What a waste.

I would like to think that this has nothing to do with that American cultural tendency to be enthralled by glitz and money. I don’t see it on the surface for my client friend and I can’t seem to find it in the inner recesses of my own mind when I go excavating, but I do think that my friend and I have both been subjected to enough cultural influence that we each have at least some bit of an interior three-act play going on in which we achieve modest fame and fortune. If not household names, well maybe our names will become nationally known and respected in one little subgroup of one modest category of our areas of expertise. In other words, we’re not immune.

We might not be immune, but I have met would-be writers who refuse to begin the books they have in mind until they can get a nice advance from a New York publishing house. (Never mind how fantastical that notion is these days.) And I have known other writers who have meaningful things to say but who shelac them over with what they think the public wants to read because they want to be rich and famous more than they want to say something genuine and authentic. In some quarters (fortunately not those in which I am invited often), having fifteen minutes of fame is seen as more important than giving one’s gifts to the world, even if those fifteen minutes are achieved by doing something nefarious.

If only a few more of us went about our lives doing the kind of good that Norman Borlaug did (without his awards but with a similar lack of household name recognition), if we just gave our gifts today and tomorrow and next week without wondering what the payoff would be–or if there even would be a payoff at all–how much Norman Borlaugesque good to the planet and other human beings would result?

I can’t imagine . . . but I think I’d better get on with my shamanic work, get on with that book I keep telling myself I don’t have time to write, and get on with my mentoring of other writers.

How about you?

 

copyright 2009 by Melanie Mulhall

Like, You Know What I Mean?

She was using the word, “like,” like a machete hacking its way through a jungle tangled with subjects and predicates. If verbs were the equivalent of jaguars stalking her and nouns the equivalent of screeching birds, it could be said that she was slicing her way through that jungle with heart pounding, trying to make her way to safety as quickly as she could.

Unfortunately her machete was as dull as the typical answer to the social media question, “What are you doing right now?” Why? Because the word, “like,” is little more than a substitute for, ”Uhm,” when used multiple times in a sentence–every sentence–on and on and on until the listener just might hope that the jaguar gets her.

In her defense, I suspect that the woman I overheard chattering away at the gym was a young mother who probably spends the bulk of her day interacting with small children with vocabularies that total about fifty words. She might simply need a regular dose of adult conversation to reclaim the English language. Or not. I found myself contemplating how the next generation will use the English language if what they are getting from their mothers is a daily dose of “like” that is enough to give them verbal diabetes.

Of course, “like” is not the only word that is abused in the English language. “Awesome” is another. The view from the top of a fourteen thousand foot mountain is definitely awesome. Heroic acts can be. So can sunsets and mystical insights. But whether we like it or not, everything is not awesome. Has the overuse of the word come from the practice of trying to level the playing field for humans so much that every child gets a prize after the competition is over (whether or not her team has actually won) and every handcrafted item is called “art” (whether the crafter has talent or not)? Or is “awesome” just another machete hacking its way through the English language.

When it was suggested that there was “trouble in River City,” the culpret was identified as that deadly destroyer of morals . . . pool. The anidote offered was the musical instrument.  Is telvision the new pool? If so, what is the antidote? Books? And can life really be reduced in this way? I think not.

On the other hand, I have had to turn off the television more than once to save it from the hatchet when I heard one more basketball player utter, “Know what I’m sayin’?” or “Duhyuh know what I mean?” When I began to hear those phrases coming out of the mouth of my youngest sister (who rightfully could be considered the woman on the street, though I, of course, think she’s special), I knew things were seriously out of hand.

When I heard “like” coming out of my own mouth a bit too often, I knew it was even worse than that.

I’m a professional writer and editor. Words are important to me. Words strung together in sentences that make sense and paragraphs that ring true are more tastey to me than anything the finest Denver or Boulder restaurant might provide. And sometimes a book is, indeed, awesome. I want my own spoken language to have some merit because I know that the words falling from the fingertips become compromised when the spoken language gets sloppy. I also know that when I am inundated by sloppy spoken language, it seeps into me like ground water making its way through the cracks in my foundation of words.

I’m not willing to sequester myself because I have to interact with the world to spark my internal writing mechanisms. What is a writer to do? I’m not sure. But this little post is a plea sent out as a request for mercy. Sharpen your machete and I promise to sharpen mine.

 

Copyright 2009 by Melanie Mulhall

Advice to a Ten-Year-Old

When he asked me what I would say to my ten-year-old self, I was taken aback for a moment. Not only did I not have an immediate answer, I also felt it was too personal to talk about.

It was a strange reaction because the person who had posed the question was my husband. We had finished dinner and were still sitting at table, under the shelter of a small tree. We had too little of this quiet, intimate time together, time to spend in the intimate sort of conversation that only true intimates can have. And here I was, unable and unwilling to say anything.

I know I must have disappointed him when I said, “I don’t know. I’d have to think about it.” It was true enough, but it wasn’t the complete truth. I didn’t tell him that the question seemed to pierce some very private place in me that I was not yet ready to visit.

But the question stalked me for a couple of months and I found myself wondering what I would say to my ten-year-old self.

She was in the throws of change at ten. She had just moved from the only place she had ever really known, thus far, in her young life. That it was the only place she’d known does not mean that it knew her. She couldn’t have voiced it then, but if she could have, she probably would have said that she was not at all certain that any place could know her.

Her body was changing, too. She was getting taller–an odd experience for one who had always been among the smallest in her age group. Her body was also changing in other ways. Hair was sprouting where it had never been and little nubs of breasts were appearing on her chest. She was a bit gangly and awkward. She rode her bicycle around and around the area of a few blocks that summer, in the new town, in the new neighborhood–where she knew no one.

So what would I, a sixty-year-old woman, tell that girl of ten? What would fifty years have done to inform me in a way that would be remotely understandable to, let alone useful to, that girl? I was sitting on the deck of a client friend’s mountain home, early on a Saturday morning, when I asked myself those questions. I had been invited for the weekend and I was sharing that weekend with my client friend, her brother, and another woman, also a client friend. It was glorious to have a weekend to relax in the mountains. Lake Granby was within view, the air was crisp, and my guard against whatever it was that had stopped me cold on the question was down.

But now I was curious. It wasn’t just the advice I might give to my ten-year-old self that interested me, I wanted to know what the others with whom I was sharing this cabin would say to their ten-year-old selves.

Tim was the only one up as early as me, so I wandered indoors and posed the question. I wasn’t at all sure he would be willing to answer it. After all, he might find it as personal as I had or be as stumped for an answer as I had initially been. He wasn’t, on either account. Debbie joined us when we were thick in conversation. Then our host, Peggy, ambled down from her bedroom and joined in.

Here is what my three companions told me they would tell their ten-year-old selves. I won’t attribute any one comment to any one of them, just to keep it interesting and give them a bit of privacy:

• Stay yourself.
• Don’t compare yourself with everyone else.
• Don’t try to figure it all out now.
• The priests, the teachers, and the ones in charge are not always right. But keep it to yourself until you can do something about it.
• Be gentle with yourself.
• You’re amazing! You’re going to be and do so many things that are going to leave an imprint.
• You have no idea how much potential you have, but you’ll figure it out.
• Everything is going to be okay.

This last one pretty much says it all for me. But I might add a few of my own:

• You won’t know it for some time, but this move you’ve just made–the one you didn’t want to make, the one you fought–is actually a turning point that will change the direction of your life for the better.
• You can be known by places, but you must open yourself to them and let yourself be known.
• This small corner of your life is a wonderful start, but your life can and will be so much bigger. Take a deep breath and take a running jump right off that cliff. Keep doing it. Live life without a net. You’ll know what that means in a few years, but begin to think about it now.
•  Yes, you did choose your parents and in a few years, you are going to see what a great choice it was. For now, know that angels are watching over you and that you are being guided. Pay attention. Be open to the guidance.
• By the way, everyone else has angels watching over them, too, and everyone else is also being guided. Curiously, many people don’t know that.

Well, now that I’ve gotten started, I can see that I could keep going. But I won’t. I’d like to know what advice you would give your ten-year-old self.

 

Copyright 2009 by Melanie Mulhall

Letting Go

I had just taken out a couple of dying elderberry bushes when I injured my knee for the second time in two months. I had tripped on a limb y-joint and I heard the “pop” when  my knee corkscrewed as I went down. For a split second, I was afraid I’d seriously damaged it this time. But when I tested it, limping to the house for an ice bag, it didn’t seem quite so bad as that nauseating popping sound might have suggested.

Still, I realized I needed to take a moment to contemplate what was going on. So I sat on a step with the pack on my knee and did just that. I immediately connected the injury to the telephone conversation I’d had right before going out to do the pruning. My longtime astrologer and dear friend, Sally McDonald, had called to give me details about the cancer she was having surgery for in a few days. The cancer had been a surprise to her. She was still in shock. So was I. And I was afraid for my friend.

Sally was not the first among those dear to me to be dealing with life threatening illness. My husband had been managing life with metastasized prostate cancer for two and a half years. My youngest sister’s hepatitis C had reactivated six months earlier, after a six-year remission following the birth of her son and a liver transplant. While I was ridiculously healthy, those around me were not, and when friends asked me how I seemed to be managing so well, I talked about how I  didn’t believe in death, how grateful I was for every day with my loved ones . . . and how living with their illnesses was a little like living with a persistent and constant slight fever.

I hobbled inside to see what Louise Hay had to say about knee problems. I had a good deal of faith in my own ability to sort out the energetic reasons for problems, but Louise Hay was always a good place to start when it came to physical maladies. Louise related knee problems to fear, inflexibility, stubborn ego and pride. Fear? You bet. Inflexibility? Stubborn ego and pride? Those three were, no doubt, there. I was human, after all. But I wanted to dig deeper.

So I thought about the elderberry bushes. We had been living in our beautiful home for eighteen years and the elderberry bushes had already been mature when we moved in. I had planned to do just a bit of pruning that day, but there was so much dead wood in two or three of them that I ended up removing those completely. It was time to let them go. I knew I needed to do the same thing with one of the lilac bushes. The blue spruce next to it and lilac bush in front of it had edged it right into oblivion.  And a year earlier, I’d hired a friend to take down two trees that were struggling. While there was so much vibrant life in my yard, not everything was making it. Like all mature yards, some things were past their prime and dying.

I realized that a part of me was resisting it. I was resisting the departure of bushes and trees that had been friends for years and I was also resisting the illnesses of those I loved, fearing that they might depart, too. I was trying to hold back time and change. That was where the inflexibility was coming in. Despite my deep spiritual understanding that everything and everyone survives what we think of as death, a part of me was stubbornly hanging on to some point in time in the past, a point in time when bushes and people were younger and healthier.

Of course, at some level, I was clinging to some past version of myself, too. At sixty, I found it curious that I was now likely in the last quarter of my life–if I was lucky. How could so much time have passed? There was so much left for me to be and do.

I realized I needed to let go at a deeper and more profound level than I ever had. I knew that love lived on, that it was the most enduring thing in the universe, that one instant of love for anyone or anything reverberated on and on into infinity. I’d experienced it and I needed to trust it now. And while I’d practiced and taught the art of making death the aly for many years, I needed to trust the very cycle of life and death at a more profound level, too. There comes a time when life and death look back at you when you look in the mirror each morning and I had come around to that very point in this life–as I, no doubt, had come around in life after life before this one. 

Ice, elevation, ibupropin–and a great massage therapist–got the knee back on track. I got my mind, spirit, and emotions back on track, too. I contemplated the divine paradox: none of us are getting out of here alive and all of us are getting out of here alive. I might as well let go and ride the wave of this life.

Three weeks passed. And then I was in a thrift store and came upon a set of gorgeous, never used, Mikasa china: eight plates, twelve bowls, and twelve bread plates. I gaped. And I thought about the china I was using every day at home. My grandmother had purchased it as a wedding present–forty-one years ago. I had left the troubled marriage in 1979. How I had managed to end up with the china, when so much else had been lost, was a long standing mystery. My second husband had been cheerfully eating off that china our entire marriage. It was time to let it go.

As I loaded my cart with the treasure, it occurred to me that this find might not have come to me if I hadn’t heeded the message about letting go and trusting the cycle of life and death. I had wanted to divest myself of that china from another life for some time and my opportunity to do so was presenting itself almost effortlessly.  As soon as I had gotten the message in more profound areas of my life, I was open to it in other, more mundane areas.

Apparently, all I’d had to do was let go.

 

Copyright 2009 by Melanie Mulhall

My Father’s Daughter

I sit at my computer, staring at the blank Word document, the nascent rumblings of an idea beginning to spark along the neural pathways of my body–beginning not at the brain and moving outward, but at the heart. By the time the idea actually hits the brain, my fingers are already moving on the keyboard. This isn’t exactly the way my father said it would be, but on a good day, this is how it works.

It’s not that I have no familiarity with what spills out onto the computer screen.  Whatever is spilling out has often been forming somewhere inside of me for days, weeks, or months. I have a flickering thought and seem to work with it, deep within my body, for a time. But I’m less like a brood hen, sitting on her eggs, giving them the heat of her body and the time needed to hatch, than like a monk going about his daily chores and somehow meditating at the same time. 

Sometimes I’m in the shower when the flicker of an idea comes wandering into my consciousness. Or driving my car. Or meditating. Some inspiration–that is, some drawing into the body of an idea–begins the internal process that, in turn, gives rise to what spills out from my fingers and onto the keyboard. When the words come, when they hit like raindrops onto the screen, they seem to pouring from my heart.

Heart to brain, back to heart, and then back to brain. Is that how it works? Or is it 8th chakra (the one outside the body) to brain to body to heart to brain? I’m not sure. But I know that however it works, my father never described it to me.

I’m sorry for that. We talked about books and writing when I was growing up. He was, himself, a writer. Something of a frustrated writer, because he was never published, but a writer, none the less. I think it must have pleased him when I learned to read and the first little sparks of interest in the written word quickly blossomed into a nice campfire, then a conflagration.

Writing is like fire (at least as much as it is like rain). We’re consumed by the flames that come from our pens and keyboards in a conflagration of the spirit.

I’d like to think it was that way for my father and I believe it was. He wrote at night, when most of the family was asleep. He sat at his desk (an arts and crafts dark oak one when I was small, then an industrial gray metal one later on), chain smoked cigarettes, drank beer, and sat in what appeared to the observer to be a meditative state–or at least a pensive one–for long periods of time. The quintessetial brooding Irishman. Of course, that “observer” was likely to be nothing more than a mouse, out from hiding in the quiet of the night, or me, back from a date or out of my room to get a glass of water during a late night of study.

He wrote thoughts and observations on scraps of paper and advised me to do the same. “When you get an idea for a story or anything you might want to write on later, put it down in writing, right then,” he told me when I was still a teen. “Even if it is just one good sentence . . . or two good words . . . write it down.”

It would be years before I understood, through my own experience, how important that advice was. Ideas are sometimes like dreams–ephemeral, disappearing as soon as you turn your head if you are not careful. It is important to capture them, like dream butterflies, in the net that is the pen or keyboard. Beautiful sentences are that way, too. I have lost many a beautiful phrase, sentence, and paragraph because I failed to stop whatever I was doing (that seemed more important at the time) and write it down.

I have, actually, pulled over to the side of the road to write something that would not wait. I have also rummaged in the nightstand for scraps of paper and scribbled something that nagged at me enough to prevent sleep. And I have captured my thoughts on paper when I was supposed to be attending to a meeting. It’s glorious when it happens like that, but it doesn’t happen that way as often as I would like. Still, I imagine my father smiling on the other side when it does happen.

My father tapped out his stories on a little Royal typewriter. I used that typewriter when I first cranked out papers in college and I inherited it from him. It gathers dust in my office closet but I couldn’t give it up any more than I could give up the old LP of Bing Crosby singing George Gershwin. He loved them both and so do I.

If my father were alive today, he would love tapping out his thoughts on a computer and he would marvel at the mystery of the machine. He would love its efficiency and he would love that delete key. He didn’t live to see a personal computer, let alone long enough to see his daughter’s name on a book cover, but I felt him behind my left shoulder (along with St. Germain) when I wrote my first book. And even though it was nonfiction, instead of the fiction he dearly loved, if he had lived long enough to see it, he would have surely claimed me as my father’s daughter . . . and I would have shook my head in agreement and whispered that it was also probably that brooding Irish anscestry.

copyright 2009 by Melanie Mulhall