Feel so Different?

Yesterday was 3 weeks since I have been meditating daily.  It started when work got even more incredibly brutal than it had been previously.... so bad, in fact, that I considered quitting and getting a job transcribing from home, temping...doing whatever I could to pay my bills.  I was willing to get rid of my Dish TV, pay the bare minimum on the credit cards that have continued to plague me since my mom died,  eat lentils every day, quit my wine club....whatever. Just keep me away from that toxic place.

Then I started meditating.  It had worked before to keep me from doing something insanely self-defeating which I have a history of doing.  It would help me tame that Leo ego.

Sleepsonic

Last week I ordered a small little pillow called the Sleepsonic Sherpa.  It has speakers inside of it and acts as headphones only without the discomfort of having a foreign object in your ear.

I emailed Brain Sync to see if I would still get the benefits of the Universal Mind Meditation if I listened to it on a surround sound system.  They said that I wouldn't.  You needed headphones.  So I resumed listening to the meditation with headphones but it's very uncomfortable.   My ears are actually sore from sleeping with them in. I read about other options for listening to binaural beats horizontally and I discovered the Sleepsonic pillow.  Can't wait to see if it delivers.  Regardless of the ear pain, I have still been listening to the Universal Mind Meditation before sleep and I do notice a difference....

I'm not so agitated.  I'm not freaking out at the fact that I have not received one call from any of the  jobs I have submitted my resume for.  A recruiter I interviewed with last week by phone was supposed to call me this week so we could meet in person.  It's regarding a well-paying (WE'RE TALKING TWICE OF WHAT I'M MAKING NOW) job in Marin county.  Then this weekend, I reviewed all the online entities I would be marketing and emailed him some ideas and I have yet to hear back from him.  He seemed so enthusiastic last week about meeting me.  Did I not impress him or is he just busy?  It really sucks being this insecure. Then there's that other recruiter...

Mercury is in retrograde.

Rage Against The Machine

Every so often I feel possessed.  It's like everything that comes in my path best get out of the way or else...  Usually this happens around a certain time of the month.  I must be there now.  In spite of all the meditating I've been doing, I started feeling very angry about two hours before I left the office... The ride home was grueling and now, I'm just plain old pissed.

It is a challenge to go to my job everyday and deal with the toxic bullshit that permeates the air of that place. I really don't want to dwell on it but it is a very uncomfortable place to work.  Right now, I just need to vent. 

My job makes me feel like Sisyphus.  I'm rolling that boulder up the hill and when I get to the top.  I say to my twenty-something year old co-workers, "Hey, I got this boulder all the way up here.  But I'm stuck because of this here hole in the ground.  Can you guys help me get it out?".  My coworkers, all younger than I and so very lazy, just stare at me while smoking their cigarettes, not saying anything.  Then bossman comes over and they complain to him that I'm bothering them.   My boss will then scream, "Why are you bothering them, can't you see they have their own work to do?"

The Universal Mind Meditation

I was first introduced to this guided meditation a few months before my mom died.   My knowledge of kundalini meditation via Rama brought me to Brain Sync's (Kelly Howell) Awakening Kundalini recorded meditation.  From there, I started listening to other meditations from Kelly Howell... The Universal Mind Meditation definitely resonated with me the most.  I felt like it did make a difference in my overall demeanor.

I had been taking care of my mom, arguing with my siblings and feeling so discouraged.  While those problems didn't mysteriously disappear, my outlook changed.  It didn't all feel so dire.  Even my mom said she could see a difference in me and she frowned on anything non-Christian. She did, though, tell me a few times towards the end of her life, that she wanted me to have some spiritual path in my life, even if it wasn't Christianity.

When my mom fell, was admitted to the hospital and I was told that she was ready for hospice, I couldn't focus.  I tried meditating from the hospital but it was distracting and I felt this deep, burning sensation in my gut.  The only thing that made it subside was xanax.  So, I took a lot of xanax.  I found a bottle of my mom's Lorazapam so I took that too.  And then a friend of mine came to the hospital and brought me a bottle of valium.  He didn't know I had the xanax and lorazapam.  I didn't tell him.  I gratefully accepted the valium.

And these three things got me through losing my mom and the first few months following.  When I found myself in Northern California staying with a friend of my mom's who had the tendency to be a bit sadistic at times, I became hopeless and desperate.   Thoughts of driving to the Golden Gate Bridge filled my mind more and more frequently. This would all end... and I would see my mom again.  Instead, though. I started meditating.  The Universal Mind Meditation was just one of the guided meditations I listened to but I listened to it every single night as I fell asleep...

Night Practice

When reading this Awakening the Third Eye book by Samuel Sagan, I read about something called Night Practice which is a technique that helps one induce themselves into a state of "Psychic Sleep".  According to Sagan, a human being is comprised of four parts:  1) The Physical Body; 2) An Ethereal Body which is the basic life force (or prana, as my yoga teacher calls it); 3) The astral body; and 4) The Ego or Higher Self. The Ego and Astral Body are linked and they form the "upper complex" while the physical body and ethereal body are linked which form the "lower complex".  Sagan claims that the physical and ethereal bodies never separate except in death.

When one sleeps, the upper complex separates from the lower complex and astrally travels and explores spiritual realms.  Psychic sleep is becoming aware of the upper complex while you sleep and using it for self-transformation.  The book includes a script and suggests that someone read it to whomever is experiencing the night practice.  The night practice can be done during the day or at night before sleep.  I guess it's called night practice because it's done laying down.

The night practice consists of many phases starting with a circulation of awareness for each body part.  The circulation starts with the vertex and continues while both the right side and left side of each body part are an area of focus.  One goes through this 3 times, each time becoming more and more aware. By the third circulation, one is supposed to be "seeing" the body part.  Sagan uses the term "seeingness" a lot.

Dreaming is Free

I have read a lot about people's experience with a kundalini awakening or a third eye opening and there's a lot of fear out there. If you google "kundalini awakening", you will read everything from people swearing they saw God to people claiming they had a psychotic breakdown to your typical Jesus freaks screeching that you're playing with the hell fire!

I read a book called The Kundalini Experience: Psychosis or Transcendence. It was written by a psychiatrist who believes that many people are falsely diagnosed as psychotic when, in fact, it's a kundalini awakening. It's the fear and not knowing what's happening that causes people to go mad. I took comfort in knowing the writer is in San Francisco so if I am ever in the midst of a kundalini awakening and am misdiagnosed as being psychotic, I can give this guy a jingle.

The Lamb's Book of Life

Mom and Little Adam

Today is Thurday, March 8, 2012.  It has been 3 years, 3 months and 22 days since my mother died.   I was with her when her life on this earth ended.  My siblings were not present.  I took care of my mom for a year and a half.  Our relationship suffered as a result of that experience and the animosity I felt towards my siblings who refused to pitch in.  It seemed only right that they weren't there when my mother's spirit left her body.  It was personal and it was something that only my mom and I shared.  Nobody can take that away from me.  I was the last face my mom saw and I was the last hand that she held.  Perhaps I will go deeper into that experience another day. Right now, I just can't.

Lately, I have been meditating on my third eye.  Prior to this I had been meditating intermittently and focusing mostly on my 7 chakras.  I used a CD called Chakra Dhyana.  Each track focuses on a chakra starting with the mooladhara which is Sanskrit for the root chakra.  While I wanted to do this daily, I found that it started to feel like a chore and I would do it only occasionally on the weekend.  I started to feel tempted by the wine country culture and found myself preferring to relax on the couch and watch Netflix while sipping a glass of good red wine instead of sitting in the lotus position focusing on my chakras.

Reach Out in the Darkness

Ironically enough, after being divorced for twenty something years, my parents ended up living together as roommates the last few years of their lives.  My dad, I guess, felt bad for being such a shit when they were married.  He had a nice pension while my mom had a pathetic little social security check.  His pension paid the rent.  Mom's social security bought groceries. Mom cooked and cleaned.  They had separate rooms and fought about as much as they did when they were married only my dad was too decrepit to beat her like he did back then.

Years of smoking 2 and a half packs of Marlboros a day had made a weary old man of my dad.  He was on oxygen and had so many things wrong with him, we all knew that, in spite of my mom's cancer, Dad would probably go first.  He did.  And when he did, mom didn't have a place to live since Dad's pension was gone.  Suddenly, mom needed help and I guess my brother didn't 't feel like helping much.  He was still with the same partner who I had decided was an even bigger asshole than my brother.

I don't want this blog to turn into a bitchfest about my family, my job, my finances.... I want it to be about my journey.  That's going to be tough because I'm in my 40s and certain patterns that have been engrained in me my whole life need to be broken---patterns that I believe I developed as a child as a result of my mom's own struggles and loneliness.  Being the youngest, she often turned to me for support...and to vent.  As a result, we became very close. While we did have our issues along the way, mom and I were friends and my siblings constantly criticized our relationship---saying we were "too close", it was "unhealthy".  My brother even referred to it as "sick".  

Suffice it to say that both my siblings lived in Florida yet neither lifted a pinky to help our mother.  My mom was desperate for a relationship with them.  I was resentful. She insisted that she loved all three of her children the same which infuriated me.  How could she not love me more?  I left California for her while my siblings, who lived only miles from her, let her rot.  This dynamic caused tension between my mother and I.  As a result, our relationship changed over the course of the year and a half that I cared for her.

West and Back Again....

A couple of years after I graduated from NYU, I moved to LA.  It's actually kind of funny because I recall telling many of my friends that I was a New York City girl and I would never, ever leave.  A friend and I would watch Melrose Place together and we would laugh, both professing that we would never go out to pretentious, shallow Los Angeles.  We were New Yorkers.  Yes, we were.

Not quite sure what happened.  It's almost like I went into a coma and, when I woke up, tada!  I'm in LA. And that friend who I used to watch Melrose Place with?  He ended up going out there too, but we won't talk about him.  Our friendship did not end well.

It started with a call from my long, lost brother.  I swear, I almost forgot I had one.  We were really close when I was a little girl.  Then he discovered Jesus.  It was the late 70's.

It started with his sudden rejection of what he loved the most:  Music... and Middle Earth.  He destroyed his JRR Tolkien collection.  I remember driving out into an undeveloped area of Palm Harbor in Florida with him.  He opened up his trunk and we proceeded to smash his records on the concrete in a cul de sac.  Super rare vinyl like the original It's a Beautiful Day album and the limited Heart Magazine album and some Todd Rundgren record.  It was all sinful he told me.  He, the brother who would sit in his car and read Salem's Lot to me while we waited for our laundry.

I remember one night my sister was watching Three's Company.  My melodramatic brother screeched, "Demon's are dancing around her in there!".  "Really?" I thought.  Wow.  Jesus was even stricter than the principal at my school.  Life wasn't going to be any fun with Jesus in it.  Oh well.  At least I was going to heaven and I wouldn't burn into an eternal lake of hellfire like my sister and Jack Tripper and Janet and Krissy.

In the Beginning there was Rama

I was introduced to meditation about 20 years ago.   My dorm mate at NYU and her boyfriend would go to these weekly meditation sessions at a space near Washington Square Park.  One day, they invited me.  It was one of the few Saturdays that I wasn't hungover so I agreed.  And so it began...

I started going to these session every week.  Some days I was hungover, other days I was not.  I stuck with it and I'm not quite sure why, given my priority was not spiritual progression but, rather, getting as wasted as I could while still maintaining a somewhat decent GPA.  I was in New York City, by golly!

Fascination, maybe?  My mom converted to Christianity when I was 10 and, as the years rolled by, she became more and more of a fanatic.  I wanted to believe in a higher power but, unlike my mom, I wasn't getting it from JC.  These classes were interesting and, if anything, an hour of meditating on my chakras was a great cure for a night of tequila shots.

My NYU Dorm at 3rd Avenue & 11st

We would focus on the seven chakras while meditating over the course of an hour.  Our teacher (her name escapes me) had a teacher.  Rama was his name (AKA Dr. Frederick Lenz).  She invited us to go to these group meditations at SUNY Purchase and even picked us all up from our dorm in a black stretch limousine.  It was the first time I had ever been in a limo and I got to ride in it all the way from the East Village to Westchester.  This meditation thing was cool!

And I never spent a penny... on the classes, on the limo rides and on the meditation cassettes they gave me.