Doctortayria's Blog

I’m well into my month-long detox, having to stay focused on what is going into my body and look right past items in my cabinet or refrigerator that are not for now. It helped yesterday to have a friend with me who put her hands on my back and pushed me out of the store where they were serving free tastings of specialty wines. Friend support can be necessary.

I have been noticing while I am having to stay alert and pay attention to the physical aspect of the detox that my toxic thinking is also standing out to me more. Old habits of self-doubt, discouragement, focusing too much on what isn’t working or what I am not accomplishing rather than what I am – so many of these trends in thought seem to be also highlighted during this process. Just don’t go there my mind seems to say, just like you’re not having that coffee, or sugar, or cheese or wine. Think the thoughts that are encouraging and optimistic.

After this period I will return to some of the foods, hopefully with more awareness and moderation. But I sure hope that the detoxification of negative thinking and feeling will become permanent. It makes life so much better!

Matter, earth, body are considered to be unconscious, and in Jungian thought represent the realm of the unconscious. Matter is the dark stuff, vibrating at a denser level.  As I now begin a process of interrupting familiar eating and drinking habits in order to clear and cleanse my body, my matter is stirred and voices arise. I am listening.  Their normal soothers or silencers aren’t showing up so they are fussy and want to talk. These parts are not conscious though. I listen intently for clues to help them find their voice and make their way to consciousness. Doing this cleanse promises to be interesting.

Matter is mater, mother. Earth, the soil, is the womb that births us and the breast that feeds us every day.

In a recent dream I was riding along the earth on my belly, like a snake does. I propelled my way to a Zen master who was waiting for me. There was delicious energy in him. He sent me a transmission of some sort. I moved along my way after that. The dream may have been premonitory of my working with matter and earth more closely in this way.

I have a deck of beautiful cards with images of various goddesses from many cultures on them, with information about each on the other side. I drew a card last night asking which goddess will be guiding me as I go on this adventure. Eve came up. My friend who started the cleanse too and will be working with me developing how to offer this to others, asking the same question, drew Gaia. Ah.

In some interpretations of Eve’s story she ate from the tree of knowledge. This caused humans to leave the the garden of Eden, a symbol of unconsciousness, and sent us on a journey to become conscious. Eve listened to snake, which this card says is “a potent symbol of the vital life force found in every living being, representing rebirth and regeneration.” What a powerful, primal feminine deity to be working with now.

I’m listening.

My friend Maureen McDonnell is an R.N. who is passionate about healing through food and herbs, getting proper nutrients to the cells and the brain to resolve all manner of physical and psychological conditions. Her specialty is working with autism through nutrition, but I have seen her work miracles with people dealing with all manner of complications. Two people close to me have had magical results from consulting with her.

Maureen and her daughter Erin, who was in the middle of a detoxifying cleanse, visited me on the mountain recently. Talking over the cleanse we suddenly had a brainstorm. Detoxifying retreats!

Think about it. Bad habits of eating and drinking are often developed as a means of stuffing emotions and issues we prefer not to deal with. The route to changing these habits and confronting the issues is often a very lonely journey. What if we bring people together to begin their cleanse? Maureen will provide superb nutritional information and counseling, and I will help the group support each other in the psychological, emotional and spiritual issues related to the process.

We will offer the first retreat in late June. In the meantime Maureen and I spent the day today discussing plans and started a 28-day detoxifying cleanse. We want to walk this path together first as much as possible, to work on the physical and psychological issues that come up for each of us, preparing ourselves internally to bring as much wisdom and experience as possible to what we will be making available. I am very excited about this. After a few days of no sugar, dairy, gluten, caffeine or alcohol I might be singing a different tune, but for now I’m feeling motivated and full of purposeful intent.

Interestingly to me, and possibly to those of you who read this blog often, my 40-day Dancing with Will ritual ended just yesterday. I deconstructed the altar last night. By “coincidence” (something I don’t believe in really) this new journey of dancing with will began today, the first day Maureen and I could schedule the time together.

Ah, the perfection of the universe. I marvel and adore.

Every year the Oscars show is like the Super Bowl for me as one who follows actors, directors, script writers, move-maker/story-tellers. My sense is that a movie is a collective dream, demonstrated as a shamanic necessity and gift by those who participate in them no matter how aware they are or aren’t of their role at that level. I very much respect the people who bring our deep stories to awareness in such ways. Persons in the movie industry are often rightfully accused of vanity and profiteering, but I say also look closer. Passion is deep for those who persist, and most know that their life is one of sacrifice for their art and intention more than for profit.

In days before we had our current access to media, acting out dreams of people in the village was a regular and revered ritual. Later came theatre – travelling troupes who told the stories. Then came the printing press and the radio. Now we have films. The absolute necessity and desire for someone to tell our stories is as old as time.

Highlight moments from tonight’s awards are individual and I look forward to hearing the stories. My favorite moments include: Kirk Douglas, even after his stroke, being loved and adored by the community when he gave an award; Christian Bale, who I fell in love with as a person and an actor almost 20 years ago  finally getting acknowledged, and turning over that acknowledgement to bring attention to the many films and performances that don’t have the backing, attention and representation that create an Oscar’s moment; Randy Newman getting best song after 20 nominations this year and decades of inspiring us with his music; the guy who got the film editing award who told his daughter to follow what she loves doing – but a persons like David Fincher are also essential; Gywneth Paltrow’s brave singing performance; Tom Hooper who told the story that his mother recommended he look at the script for The King’s Speech which made him an Oscar winner; Natalie Portman for being so talented and authentic, winning hand’s down the best actress Oscar; Annette Bening for being such a consistently great actress and icon, and for losing again with joy and dignity; and finally for the kids from Staten Island who came to sing Somewhere Over the Rainbow to close the show; for their leader who taught them to sing, the Academy for caring for the children’s passionate talent, and the airlines and travel people that made their visit possible. I know I sound like a commercial, but jeez, sometimes people do us proud!

Tonight all of that love was served personally to me in my little mountain living room, as it is all through the year as I hear the stories through films. I feel grateful and proud to be human tonight, and want to give homage.

I just watched a movie by this title directed by Davis Guggenheim who also made An Incovenient Truth. This film is a profile of three electric guitarists – The Edge of U2, Jimmy Page from Led Zepplin and Jack White of The White Stripes. The movie is not as much about these three guitarists as it is about music itself. And not so much about music but about a calling. Feeling. Vocation. About finding your truest self expression. About listening profoundly with heart and soul. About beauty, growth, nature, purity, truth, simplicity. And mostly about the love of and commitment to what is in our core.

I LOVED this movie.

Life is so full of metaphor and mystery. I am remembering a conference that I went to many years ago on Whidbey Island in Washington State. It was a gathering of people who had been on cultural exchanges to Kenya with Wangari Maathai, recent Nobel Peace Prize winner. I had been on such a trip, and had come to the island to hear her and others. Speaker after speaker talked about the economics of Kenya, the cultural and social problems, various proposals and ideas for how to address such concerns from our distance. I will never forget some of the things Wangari said on this occasion, they are indelibly imprinted on my heart, but most of the rest of what was said there was forgettable for me.

However, there was a Nigerian man named Eze Anamalechi who had been hired to help create ritual space. He created portals for us to walk through, put ash on our heads, and did drumming on the breaks. This guy, this spirit, this ethos, that is what I wanted. That, more than lectures, is what I had come for. So at breaks I would go sit near him to watch and feel the drumming. At first he seemed to be curious, possibly annoyed, like what is this white lady doing here like that? Why isn’t she socializing with everyone? I wasn’t deterred from embarrassing myself in this way, however. I was consistently drawn to go sit close to him when he drummed.

Finally he stopped and asked me if I wanted to try the drum. “No, thank you.” “Try it.” So I did. I don’t know when I have ever felt so awkwardly, stiffly white. He seemed to be completely fluid, like there was liquid in every joint as he played it. I felt all elbows and wrists and knuckles and not one portion of me felt fluid. Ow! Eze worked patiently and respectfully with me, and went back to drumming. From then on, before and after sessions and during breaks began to go similarly.

Finally on the last day Eze told me that he had been watching me throughout the conference, how I went and took care of the babies while their mothers spoke, or got someone something to drink, or helped sweep the floors after, cleaned up empty cups and such. He said, “You are like the African women. You are always helping and watching and walking around the edges of everything with an eye to it all. But,” he said firmly, “you should not be on the edges,” he declared as he tapped his fingers on the edges of the drum, emitting the soft sound that comes from those tight, wooden areas. He said boldly, “You should be HERE.” And he banged the center of the drum head making a loud, powerfully resonant sound. Booooooommmmmmmmm. He was admonishing me for holding myself back. I think he could see through me all the way to my core.

I later worked with Eze for about 9 months in a very intense initiation process, flying between Los Angeles and Seattle several times, and applying myself regularly to tasks and assignments he gave me in between times, one of which was to shave my head. I said to him, “Ok, I’ll do it, but I’m going to go into the woods and stay there alone on a vision quest for 10 days right after I do it so that I know who I am and why I am doing this.” I was then teaching in a college and at a graduate school, so the shaved head idea was hugely challenging. I did the 10-day vision quest, and survived baldness.

Last December a friend came to my retreat here on the mountain. He noticed behind my couch a little drum that I had bought in Africa when I was 19 years old. The skin on the drum was cracked through, and I had been told a new head could not be put on it. So it sat, like a sad but loved artifact, behind my couch next to other fancier, usable drums.

My friend took that drum with him when he left, for some reason drawn to it and saying “Sure it can be fixed!” This fellow doesn’t understand the word “can’t” anyway. Just a couple of days ago I got a package in the mail – my little drum, the little drum that thought it couldn’t  – with a gorgeous new goat skin head on it. It’s sound is divine.

Today I finally began again on a book that I had completed the first draft of in 2003 which has been sitting for years on a shelf because I didn’t think I knew how to proceed with it. Something didn’t feel right about it and I could not seem to figure out what or why or how to think about it. Today suddenly I see it. I wrote a new introduction, and miraculously feel like I know where to go from here.

I’m thinking of Eze. That boom on the drum. His admonishment to me for staying on the edges. He urgency that I make my music. My friend who fixed the drum has admonished me similarly. Now he has given me this drum. And soon after my book began again. I can’t help but feel the metaphor.

Boom. Here I come. Have drum will write.

I am just this moment reminded of a big dream I had maybe 30 years ago that foretells this – with a drum and a writing instrument. I will save that story for another day.

I have these words on my refrigerator, a quotation I once wrote down:

There is no duty so underrated as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.                                                        -Robert Louis Stevenson

I appreciate his notion of happiness as duty. I believe in welcoming every emotion and feeling that passes through for the truth, strength, information and diversity of experience it offers, but I do think we have an obligation to bring our equilibrium back to a state of simple happiness for the privilege and joy that it is just to be alive. As much as possible, to fulfill this responsibility to ourselves and to support every other in finding that place is a purpose for existence. Happiness is simple.

True confession: watching American Idol made me happy tonight. Oh, the talent in those kids and the sweet hearts in the judges! I’m a total sucker for this. Sitting on my porch reveling in a wind storm today brought me intense joy, but so did seeing these kids sing their hearts out.

Happiness is always close at hand if we allow it. It is a duty, I think, as our great American author wisely states.

Last night I did a little ritual I learned some time ago for dream incubation. I went to bed asking for a dream. This is what I got. It has caused a little laugh going off in me all day long.

In the first part of the dream I am at a University that is at the bottom of the ocean. I am amazed that we are able to breathe down there, but somehow we are getting oxygen into our blood streams without air. I am going around to different laboratories, witnessing much of what is being taught and experimented upon, and finding the observation rooms.

Then I am in a living room in the upper world again, with air and sunlight. A man known as Crazy Lloyd comes in accompanied by a couple of nurses; he is regarded by the larger world as a  nut case. I sit with him and we talk. In an instant I see that Lloyd is not crazy one bit, that he is in fact a master, like a laughing Buddha kind of guy, with a twinkle in his eye and a sense of irony in everything we talk about. He tells me his beloved wife died, which has obviously broken his heart badly, and he is raising their two kids on his own. But as he continues with a string of stories a half laugh is felt through everything he is saying, the humor of life is never lost on him and he infuses his narratives richly with it.

Then the nurses come back to get him. Lloyd leaves me to go with them, and they head into the back of a huge auditorium of people. He looks back at me with a twinkle in his eye, seeming to say this is his way this crazy routine;, he is an undercover agent of sorts, and keeps himself from being noticed by this. I really love Lloyd in the dream, and see that his nurses do too. They are in on it I think.

I remember years ago reading and loving the writings of Ramakrishna, Vivekananda’s teacher in India. Ramakrishna had many of his disciples convinced that he was crazy even as he was their spiritual master. He would jump into a tree and behave like a monkey. It was part of the ruse of the master, he explained, to mess with the minds of his students in such ways so they did not fixate upon him, but turned inward to their own processes.

I think Lloyd was a great psychological figure for me to meet – someone who seems nuts to the world, but definitely knows exactly what he is doing and why. He is healthy, happy, responsible and aware.

There is surely something going on in the depths of the human unconscious right now, a whole field of activity at the bottom of the ocean. With dictators currently being torn down in countries the world over, Lloyd might have a point staying hidden. A different kind of wisdom might be emergent but can’t be known quite yet. It’s coming in the back door, under cover, yet unnoticed for the most part. Let’s see what Lloyd has up his sleeve. I’m thinking it will be interesting.