Walking This Way 25 June 2008
As I learn the hard way to walk the small steps, here’s my Divine Covenant that maps where I want to go: 
I’ve got to “make it work” in time for my art exhibit on Saturday so am channeling Tim Gunn tonight. Send me good photographic vibes, please, & here’s to getting better all the time.
I Am So Blessed 19 June 2008
Despite some early a.m. dental work, today turned out to be a big winner. Here’s why:
- Two Pixie-perfect pairs of summer shoes on clearance, Clarence, between the dentist’s office & mine. Oh how I heart NY!
- The talented, motivated & bright-shining peeps I work away the day with on W. 30th. They don’t make ‘em much better than that!
- The happy accidents I got when my dinner plans changed: The best chicken Tikka Masala I’ve had in ages & the company to go with it (see #2 above)
- The magic A train that came the second I reached the platform. You rock my world.
- The Jersey Boys soundtrack – today, yesterday & tomorrow. It never gets old to me!
So, dear reader, as they say at Fred Meyer, “What’s on your list today?”
My Chopra Center 17 June 2008
What Tim Russert Taught 14 June 2008
Like many, I am shocked and saddened by Tim Russert’s sudden passing yesterday. I watched the open and emotional tribute that the MSNBC staff gave him last night. Here’s what I took from it as Tim’s legacy to us all:
- Be the best you that you can be
- Serve the truth and advocate for everyone
- Work hard but have fun along the way
- Impeccable integrity speaks for itself
- Do your homework and be prepared
- Go far but never forget where you came from
- Be a mentor, cheerleader and player-coach for your entire team
- Ask for what you need to do the job you know you can do
- Being articulate’s important but sometimes, you gotta keep it simple: “Florida, Florida, Florida”
- We’re all accountable to God, country and every man we meet
And finally, as Tim’s long-time physician and friend, Dr. Michael A. Newman, put it best,
- Appreciate the uncertainty of our life
Is Obama An Enlightened Being? 8 June 2008
Thanks to moviebuddy for sending this one by Mark Morford. In his article, the SF Gate Columnist asks,”Is Obama an enlightened being? Spiritual wise ones say: This sure ain’t no ordinary politician. You buying it?” I invite you to read for yourself and opine away:
“I find I’m having this discussion, this weird little debate, more and
more, with colleagues, with readers, with liberals and moderates and
miserable, deeply depressed Republicans and spiritually amped persons of
all shapes and stripes and I’m having it in particular with those who seem
confused, angry, unsure, thoroughly nonplussed, as they all ask me the
same thing: What the hell’s the big deal about Obama?
I, of course, have an answer. Sort of.
Warning: If you are a rigid pragmatist/literalist, itchingly evangelical,
a scowler, a doubter, a burned-out former ’60s radical with no hope left,
or are otherwise unable or unwilling to parse alternative New Age speak,
click away right now, because you ain’t gonna like this one little bit.
Ready? It goes likes this:
Barack Obama isn’t really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway.
This is what I find myself offering up more and more in response to the
whiners and the frowners and to those with broken or sadly dysfunctional
karmic antennae – or no antennae at all – to all those who just don’t
understand and maybe even actively recoil against all this chatter about
Obama’s aura and feel and MLK/JFK-like vibe.
To them I say, all right, you want to know what it is? The appeal, the
pull, the ethereal and magical thing that seems to enthrall millions of
people from all over the world, that keeps opening up and firing into new
channels of the culture normally completely unaffected by politics?
No, it’s not merely his youthful vigor, or handsomeness, or even inspiring
rhetoric. It is not fresh ideas or cool charisma or the fact that a black
president will be historic and revolutionary in about a thousand different
ways. It is something more. Even Bill Clinton, with all his effortless,
winking charm, didn’t have what Obama has, which is a sort of powerful
luminosity, a unique high-vibration integrity.
Dismiss it all you like, but I’ve heard from far too many enormously
smart, wise, spiritually attuned people who’ve been intuitively blown away
by Obama’s presence – not speeches, not policies, but sheer presence – to
say it’s just a clever marketing ploy, a slick gambit carefully
orchestrated by hotshot campaign organizers who, once Obama gets into
office, will suddenly turn from perky optimists to vile soul-sucking
lobbyist whores, with Obama as their suddenly evil, cackling overlord.
Here’s where it gets gooey. Many spiritually advanced people I know (not
coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a
Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead
us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but
who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of
relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment.
These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and
peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or
emotion, but to the soul.
The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a
brutal, spiritually demeaning stage as national politics. This is why
Obama is so rare. And this why he is so often compared to Kennedy and
Martin Luther King Jr., to those leaders in our culture whose stirring
vibrations still resonate throughout our short history.
Are you rolling your eyes and scoffing? Fine by me. But you gotta wonder,
why has, say, the JFK legacy lasted so long, is so vital to our national
identity? Yes, the assassination canonized his legend. The Kennedy family
is our version of royalty. But there’s something more. Those attuned to
energies beyond the literal meanings of things, these people say JFK
wasn’t assassinated for any typical reason you can name. It’s because he
was just this kind of high-vibration being, a peacemaker, at odds with the
war machine, the CIA, the dark side. And it killed him.
Now, Obama. The next step. Another try. And perhaps, as Bush laid waste to
the land and embarrassed the country and pummeled our national spirit into
disenchanted pulp and yet ironically, in so doing has helped set the stage
for an even larger and more fascinating evolutionary burp, we are finally
truly ready for another Lightworker to step up.
Let me be completely clear: I’m not arguing some sort of utopian
revolution, a big global group hug with Obama as some sort of happy hippie
camp counselor. I’m not saying the man’s going to swoop in like a
superhero messiah and stop all wars and make the flowers grow and birds
sing and solve world hunger and bring puppies to schoolchildren.
Please. I’m also certainly not saying he’s perfect, that his presidency
will be free of compromise, or slimy insiders, or great heaps of
politics-as-usual. While Obama’s certainly an entire universe away from
George W. Bush in terms of quality, integrity, intelligence and overall
inspirational energy, well, so is your dog. Hell, it isn’t hard to stand
far above and beyond the worst president in American history.
But there simply is no denying that extra kick. As one reader put it to
me, in a way, it’s not even about Obama, per se. There’s a vast amount of
positive energy swirling about that’s been held back by the armies of
BushCo darkness, and this energy has now found a conduit, a lightning rod,
is now effortlessly self-organizing around Obama’s candidacy. People and
emotions and ideas of high and positive vibration are automatically drawn
to him. It’s exactly like how Bush was a magnet for the low vibrational
energies of fear and war and oppression and aggression, but, you know,
completely reversed. And different. And far, far better.
Don’t buy any of it? Think that’s all a bunch of tofu-sucking New Agey
bulls– and Obama is really a dangerously elitist political salesman whose
inexperience will lead us further into darkness because, when you’re
talking national politics, nothing, really, ever changes? I understand. I
get it. I often believe it myself.
Not this time.”
Me either, Mark, me either!
Gia Knows Best 7 June 2008
After a rare, wild night on the New York town, I’m home this hot one nursing a hangover. The nausea that pizza and Coke kick back for a few hours at a time isn’t something I miss very much. Don’t get me wrong, I had a fabulous time of it, especially making moves to the Latin grooves at Son Cubano. The recovery, though, has given me a glimpse into some interesting emotions that only such a day can deliver.
I’ve had Angelina Jolie’s Gia on my list for a longtime; the Netflix gods knew I needed to see it today. Making progress with my own cancer memoir-to-be and what I want to say is not easy for me. Gia knew much when she wrote this:
“Life and death, energy and peace. If I stop today it was still worth it. Even the terrible mistakes that I made and would have unmade if I could. The pains that have burned me and scarred my soul, it was worth it, for having been allowed to walk where I’ve walked, which was to hell on earth, heaven on earth, back again, into, under, far in between, through it, in it, and above.”
I crawled back into bed at the end of the movie, grateful for where my story stops for now. I might feel like crap today but,
“This is life, not heaven. You don’t have to be perfect…” – Francesco
The Courage to Connect 4 June 2008
I’m not sure where to begin. As I consider the flashback, Mike’s words echo in my ear, “Can you just get me from point A to point B? Is that so hard?” This year’s Oscar noms were not his cup of tea.
I’ll start at the beginning, a very good place to start. In October, 2004, I participated in “Courage Night” at the Betsey Johnson store in Seattle. I was in my eighth month of treatment for breast cancer, receiving radiation at the time. For my part of the program, I read an excerpt from Geralyn Lucas’ book Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy ; And promised to pen one of my own.
I moved to New York in May of 2006. Shortly thereafter, I passed Betsey Johnson walking alone on the Upper Eastside. I said nothing to her. Later, I wondered where my courage was when I missed that moment.
On April 12th, 2008, I went to meet friends at the Murakami exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Given my preference for train-free Saturdays, subway construction schedules and the size of the schlep, this was a big deal for me. I sported my favorite vintage coat for the occasion – black with big buttons – and wore a smile to match. Once en route, I got caught on the #2, circumnavigating the right stop. I could not seem to sort myself out.
Well into the second hour, lost and laughing about it, a woman across from me asked where I was going, or trying to go. Then she, Leslie, her man, Kamau, and his son escorted me straight to the museum. It just so happened they were headed there too. We exchanged stories, cards and compliments as we walked; I recall she mentioned my big buttons. Leslie and Kamau went inside to find their friends while I sat outside, awaiting mine.
I found them and we took in some art but the place was too packed. Exhausted, my friends and I planned our escape from the mad-house museum. As we debated what to do, there were Leslie and Kamau. He called a local restaurant to secure real estate for “Miss Pixie” and her pals. A little later, he texted me to make sure we found the place. I knew by the end of the night that these two were keepers.
We’ve emailed in the time since and have tried to reunite. All busy bees, it’s not been easy. But last week, something told me to ask Leslie and Kamau if they wanted to see Stevie Wonder in Atlantic City. Within a few hours, they replied that they were up for the adventure. The three of us arranged to meet this past Monday night for the Stevie pre-planning and some post-work fun. While we initially decided on a bar, Leslie asked, instead, if we could make it coffee. Kamau suggested Pret A Manger on 42nd to add to my Bryant Park idea.
Despite a few spills, we reconnected over coffee. Leslie and Kamau are the kind of couple I want to be around: incredibly artistic, they are open and excited about life and their dreams, both individual and collective. He’s a photographer, event producer and soon-to-be-big-time-blogger. She creatively consults, sews and just launched her own spring collection! What a crafty cookie, eh? And they like me. They really like me!
When the Pret A Manger crew burned something, we headed outside. We noticed a crowd forming as we crossed to Bryant Park. It was a gala of some sort. While Kamau stopped to snap shots, Leslie and I scanned the crowd. And there, emerging from a sea of pretty people, was Betsey Johnson herself. I told Kamau and Leslie how I’d seen her before but been too afraid to say something. At that moment, Kamau pushed my back gently in her direction. The rest they say, is herstory:
I told Betsey I was a survivor, too, and had done Courage Night at her store. She asked me how many years it had been for me. As I said, “4,” she said “10,” and flashed me the tattoo blazed across her left chest. “I hardly think about it anymore, honey,” she shared. “Me either,” I replied, “me either.” I asked Betsey for her autograph and we went our separate ways.
All a-twitter, Kamau, Leslie and I resumed our evening. We hatched our Atlantic City plan and came up with big ideas – for business and pleasure – in the green New York grass. Kamau shot more celebs and we peed at the Cellar inside the adjacent hotel. Twice.
It was a night of connection and courage, nudge needed and all. I’m grateful for the divine timing of my do-over with Betsey Johnson. But more than anything, I’m glad Leslie and Kamau were happy to help me that night in Brooklyn and become my friends. Something tells me we’ve only just begun…
The Optimist Creed 3 June 2008
I got this one today from Paul G., Law of Attraction workshop leader, & loved it:
Promise Yourself:
To be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind.
To talk health, happiness, and prosperity to every person you meet.
To make all your friends feel that there is something worthwhile in them.
To look at the sunny side of everything and make your optimism come true.
To think only of the best, to work only for the best and to expect only the best.
To be just as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own.
To forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future.
To wear a cheerful expression at all times and give a smile to every living creature you meet.
To give so much time to improving yourself that you have no time to criticize others.
To be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear, and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.
To think well of yourself and to proclaim this fact to the world, not in loud word, but in great deeds.
To live in the faith that the whole world is on your side, so long as you are true to the best that is in you.
I’m ready to say it loud & proud. Are you?
A Superhighway to Bliss 28 May 2008
Thanks to moviebuddy for the below NYTimes piece. Hitting the mainstream media, Jill Bolte Taylor’s unusual enlightenment is sweeping the nation:
Jill Bolte Taylor was a neuroscientist working at Harvard’s brain research center when she experienced nirvana.
Dr. Taylor says the right, creative lobe can be used to foster contentment.
But she did it by having a stroke.
On Dec. 10, 1996, Dr. Taylor, then 37, woke up in her apartment near Boston with a piercing pain behind her eye. A blood vessel in her brain had popped. Within minutes, her left lobe — the source of ego, analysis, judgment and context — began to fail her. Oddly, it felt great.
The incessant chatter that normally filled her mind disappeared. Her everyday worries — about a brother with schizophrenia and her high-powered job — untethered themselves from her and slid away.
Her perceptions changed, too. She could see that the atoms and molecules making up her body blended with the space around her; the whole world and the creatures in it were all part of the same magnificent field of shimmering energy.
“My perception of physical boundaries was no longer limited to where my skin met air,” she has written in her memoir, “My Stroke of Insight,” which was just published by Viking.
After experiencing intense pain, she said, her body disconnected from her mind. “I felt like a genie liberated from its bottle,” she wrote in her book. “The energy of my spirit seemed to flow like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria.”
While her spirit soared, her body struggled to live. She had a clot the size of a golf ball in her head, and without the use of her left hemisphere she lost basic analytical functions like her ability to speak, to understand numbers or letters, and even, at first, to recognize her mother. A friend took her to the hospital. Surgery and eight years of recovery followed.
Her desire to teach others about nirvana, Dr. Taylor said, strongly motivated her to squeeze her spirit back into her body and to get well.
This story is not typical of stroke victims. Left-brain injuries don’t necessarily lead to blissful enlightenment; people sometimes sink into a helplessly moody state: their emotions run riot. Dr. Taylor was also helped because her left hemisphere was not destroyed, and that probably explains how she was able to recover fully.
Today, she says, she is a new person, one who “can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere” on command and be “one with all that is.”
To her it is not faith, but science. She brings a deep personal understanding to something she long studied: that the two lobes of the brain have very different personalities. Generally, the left brain gives us context, ego, time, logic. The right brain gives us creativity and empathy. For most English-speakers, the left brain, which processes language, is dominant. Dr. Taylor’s insight is that it doesn’t have to be so.
Her message, that people can choose to live a more peaceful, spiritual life by sidestepping their left brain, has resonated widely.
In February, Dr. Taylor spoke at the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference (known as TED), the annual forum for presenting innovative scientific ideas. The result was electric. After her 18-minute address was posted as a video on TED’s Web site, she become a mini-celebrity. More than two million viewers have watched her talk, and about 20,000 more a day continue to do so. An interview with her was also posted on Oprah Winfrey’s Web site, and she was chosen as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world for 2008.
She also receives more than 100 e-mail messages a day from fans. Some are brain scientists, who are fascinated that one of their own has had a stroke and can now come back and translate the experience in terms they can use. Some are stroke victims or their caregivers who want to share their stories and thank her for her openness.
But many reaching out are spiritual seekers, particularly Buddhists and meditation practitioners, who say her experience confirms their belief that there is an attainable state of joy.
“People are so taken with it,” said Sharon Salzberg, a founder of the Insight Mediation Society in Barre, Mass. “I keep getting that video in e-mail. I must have 100 copies.”
She is excited by Dr. Taylor’s speech because it uses the language of science to describe an occurrence that is normally ethereal. Dr. Taylor shows the less mystically inclined, she said, that this experience of deep contentment “is part of the capacity of the human mind.”
Since the stroke, Dr. Taylor has moved to Bloomington, Ind., an hour from where she was raised in Terre Haute and where her mother, Gladys Gillman Taylor, who nursed her back to health, still lives.
Originally, Dr. Taylor became a brain scientist — she has a Ph.D. in life sciences with a specialty in neuroanatomy — because she has a mentally ill brother who suffers from delusions that he is in direct contact with Jesus. And for her old research lab at Harvard, she continues to speak on behalf of the mentally ill.
But otherwise, she has dialed back her once loaded work schedule. Her house is on a leafy cul-de-sac minutes from Indiana University, which she attended as an undergraduate and where she now teaches at the medical school.
Her foyer is painted a vibrant purple. She greets a stranger at the door with a warm hug. When she talks, her pale blue eyes make extended contact.
Never married, she lives with her dog and two cats. She unselfconsciously calls her mother, 82, her best friend.
She seems bemused but not at all put off by the hundreds who have reached out to her on a spiritual level. Religious ecstatics who claim to see angels have asked her to appear on their radio and television programs.
She has declined these offers. Although her father is an Episcopal minister and she was raised in his church, she cannot be counted among the traditionally faithful. “Religion is a story that the left brain tells the right brain,” she said.
Still, Dr. Taylor says, “nirvana exists right now.”
“There is no doubt that it is a beautiful state and that we can get there,” she said.
That belief has certainly sparked debate. On Web sites like evolvingbeings.com and in Eckhart Tolle discussion groups, people debate whether she is truly enlightened or just physically damaged and confused.
Even her own scientific brethren have wondered.
“When I saw her on the TED video, at first I thought, Oh my god, is she losing it,” said Dr. Francine M. Benes, director of the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center, where Dr. Taylor once worked.
Dr. Benes makes clear that she still thinks Dr. Taylor is an extraordinary and competent woman. “It is just that the mystical side was not apparent when she was at Harvard,” Dr. Benes said.
Dr. Taylor makes no excuses or apologies, or even explanations. She says instead that she continues to battle her left brain for the better. She gently offers tips on how it might be done.
“As the child of divorced parents and a mentally ill brother, I was angry,” she said. Now when she feels anger rising, she trumps it with a thought of a person or activity that brings her pleasure. No meditation necessary, she says, just the belief that the left brain can be tamed.
Her newfound connection to other living beings means that she is no longer interested in performing experiments on live rat brains, which she did as a researcher.
She is committed to making time for passions — physical and visual — that she believes exercise her right brain, including water-skiing, guitar playing and stained-glass making. A picture of one of her intricate stained-glass pieces — of a brain — graces the cover of her book.
Karen Armstrong, a religious historian who has written several popular books including one on the Buddha, says there are odd parallels between his story and Dr. Taylor’s.
“Like this lady, he was reluctant to return to this world,” she said. “He wanted to luxuriate in the sense of enlightenment.”
But, she said, “the dynamic of the religious required that he go out into the world and share his sense of compassion.”
And in the end, compassion is why Dr. Taylor says she wrote her memoir. She thinks there is much to be mined from her experience on how brain-trauma patients might best recover and, in fact, she hopes to open a center in Indiana to treat such patients based on those principles.
And then there is the question of world peace. No, Dr. Taylor doesn’t know how to attain that, but she does think the right hemisphere could help. Or as she told the TED conference:
“I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be.”
It almost seems like science.
Here’s Taylor’s video, “My Stroke of Insight,” from a previous Pixie-post. What do you think?
