Buffalo Woman

Self-Study on a Tuesday Night

Throwing Off the Kings

another morning
as a daughter of athena.

three inch jack hammer heels?
check.
red lipstick?
check?
accouterments and accessories?
check. check.

sigh.
another day with the boys.

we civilization build
and play war.
we smoke stogies
in crowded boardrooms
and watch mortals crumble like ash.
we guffaw. it is good to be king.

until.
shit.

i notice a run in my pantyhose.
milk from a lactating breast.
cramped feet.
hairspray malfunction.

i don't want to play anymore.

i take off my shoes
and use them to propel me
into the soil of my ancestors.

i move through hell
towards gaia and
the half buried pieces of myself.

i find inanna,
my sister in the dark,
and press these pieces into her hands,
asking her to breathe
prana into the fragments
and build wholeness.

Playing with the Universe -- Step One in Freeing your Mind

As a martial artist, I have learned how to harness my body's energy to perform feats my mind thought were impossible. Stretch my leg how? For how long? Balance on one finger? Spin that fast? Move my sword where? I credit much of my ability to overcoming my mind to a very good teacher who trained us in a traditional style. For example, in my first Kumdo class, I spent one hour doing nothing but learning how to move with my practice sword. Until I could master that, I was not allowed to move on.

My teacher was a gifted man who understood that by learning to control and overcome the mind, the impossible became possible. Every class began and ended in meditation -- that was his method and it worked for me. His rationale was that if I could see myself doing an impossible feat in my mind, I could do so in real life. He was right. By working with him and with other teachers, I learned that my energy could do all sorts of things, even manifest 100 dollars in the mail by the afternoon, if I focused on it. The trick, in order to achieve this and other things, was to remove my mind's block against such an act and to believe it was already in the process of happening.

I like movies like "The Matrix" and "Star Wars" for this very reason. They show us how to stretch our minds to dare to do the impossible. Click here and here and here for a few movie bytes on the topic!

Okay, so how to do this -- I'm certainly not special when it comes to these abilities...we ALL have them! (I'll share here my personal method and you're welcome to it if it makes sense for you; however, don't be surprised if you end up adapting these techniques to what works best for you. Let your intuition guide you as you begin and stretch.) It has been my experience that the best way to begin freeing your mind is to adopt a playful attitude. Become like the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland who always did 6 impossible things before breakfast. The mind likes routine but I like to shake things up by suggesting other neural routes for activity. Here's a few ways to get started:

1. Name your Mind.

Makes you kind of want to giggle, right? Go ahead...join me...it's pretty silly! But the way I see it, if I'm going to work with an energy that likes to control and censor and naysay, it should at least have a name. It knows my name. I just want an even playing field. Martha Beck writes in Steering by Starlight that she got the idea to give her inner naysayer a name one day and spends time in the book describing the experience. I took her idea and ran with it, learning that my inner naysayer's name is Zed. Click here to read a poem I wrote about him. My point? Make it silly. Make it fun. You'll know you're on the right track when you smile or, even better, GIGGLE.

2. Change how you start.

A lot of us get jolted out of bed on a daily basis by an alarm and begin rushing around to get to wherever we need to be. Ugh. How does that feel? Better still, how's that working for you? Rush, rush, rush. Even writing the words make me cringe. Try this instead: when you wake up, instead of leaping out of bed first thing, why not allow yourself to linger in that yummy somehow always perfect bed temperature for a few minutes. Ask yourself if you remember any bits of your dreams. If so, write them down immediately before getting out of bed. (I'll return to the topic of dreams in Part II). There could be clues there. Consider it a cosmic game of fetch, except this time, you're the retriever. Now, allow yourself to visualize how you want your day to go from start to finish. My feeling is this: why should you let other forces or personalities carve out your day for you? Be you own day's creator and have fun with it! Lay out your day and pepper it with spontaneous fun. For example, sometimes I'll build in an out-of-the-blue giggle fest or will build in seeing a pink car on the way to work or other random things. Why not?! Dr. Joe Dispenza--featured in "What the Bleep Do We Know?"--is a great example of how to go about creating your day. Here is his method:

3. Change how you see.

How do you know that what you see at any given moment is really what you're seeing? Kind of blows your feathers off to consider it, huh? Here's another whopper: what if this universe of ours had a sense of humor and wanted a playmate? Would you play? If you're up for a little adventure and want to start shaking your inner naysayer who booms that things aren't possible and magic really doesn't exist, try this strategy.

Adopt an open attitude and decide you're going to play. Give your inner naysayer the day off. Open yourself up to wild possibilities. You could take a walk. You could walk down your street. Walk around in a mall. Hop into a bookstore. Take a drive. Hop on a bus. Doesn't matter what you do...just adopt the right attitude.

Then, ask the universe a question and see what you get. What shows up on the next billboard? What does the next personalized license plate say? How about that guy's Tshirt? Does the symbol or quote or logo mean anything? Go into a bookstore. Head towards whatever section is calling you. Choose a book. Randomly open a page. Does its contents give you your answer?

Here's how I play. When I hop in the car for a long trip, I don't tune myself out. Instead, I ask the universe a question like "What country will I next visit?" And then I wait to see what the next personalized license plate says. Alternatively, I may pose a question and see what happens when I turn on the radio. About 99% of the time, the song's title, band name or lyrics give me subtle (or not so subtle) guidance for how to solve my problem/answer my question.

Or, if you like to just chill out at home, find a deck of cards and practice visualizing the color of the next card before you turn it over. As you advance in skill, you can move from colors to suits to numbers and then to combining all of them!

Practice these techniques for a bit and be open to the adventure! Don't be discouraged if things don't happen straight away or even consistently for a while. Just keep showing up. Eventually, your energy will line up to the right frequency and things will begin to happen. And the point here is really just to present the mind with events that it is not expecting so that it may learn to expect them. I'll say more about that in Part II.

Until the next -- have fun!

Taking a Breath and Diving into Dreams

I've been sitting in silence the last few weeks. Absorbing. Listening. Learning. It's a humbling process and human mechanical time feels so insufficient to absorb it all. Maybe that's why we return again and again.

And yet, it is good to be still. It is good to become available to yourself and to your soul. It is good to be quiet. It is very good to listen -- to others, to yourself, to the wisdom of your dreams. It is good to unplug and to hear the songs of the planets and those of the spring peepers.

There is a theory that argues that we self-sabotage and actively work to ignore our intuition because we fear its wisdom and what it would tell us. We are afraid to know our inner voice and to let it speak its truths. For some, it is much easier to self-silence and to adopt the voices of others. And I've wondered lately who is speaking when I speak? Is it my soul? Society? Religion? Family? Why are we content to parrot?

"And a man said, 'Speak to us of Self-Knowledge'
and he answered, saying:
Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.
But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart's knowledge.
You would know in words that which you have always known in thought.
You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams."
~ Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Silence--the absence of talk--allows you to tune into your own voice. In the absence of noise, one finds truth. It is so good to sit and be still with this and to meet oneself again and again.

To say: "I see you. I hear you. I honor you."

It is a lovely place to begin.