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After waiting for 8 hours in the airport in Chicago, I caught my flight without any problems, and was received after claiming my luggage by a woman holding a sign with my name on it.  I just love it when that happens.  She took me to the van where Alberto was waiting for me.  Alberto drove quickly and efficiently to the bus station, used my quetzales to purchase my bus fare, and carried and checked my bags.  On the bus, I sat with an American from Washington State.  We were good traveling buddies.  No energy was spent on formalities, or idle chatter.  We left without exchanging names, but he checked out my Rough Guide to Guatemala, and let me sleep and ask intermittent questions about his work, his plans, and his experiences (all in English).

In Quetzaltenango, or Xela, as they call it here, I was helped to find a taxi, and without too much trouble or expense, I found the school.  Actually, I recognized it before the taxi driver did, from the pictures I saw on the Internet.  The school is in the second floor of a huge building that used to be a station for horses and buggies.  Or so I’m told.  I’ve taken quite a few pictures with my phone, so if I can, I’ll figure out how to upload these pictures and share them with you.  I also have pictures from the bus ride.  I’m afraid these pictures won’t be of the best quality, but they will give you an idea of what it looks like here.

Once I arrived at the school, staff members here explained a little about the setup, and who my host family and teacher would be.  He called the host family, who sent someone to come get me and my bags.  Alejandro, a social and energetic 17-year old came to get me.  He asked me questions, and initiated dialogue while we left the school and walked along irregular sidewalks, around corners, through traffic, to his house.  I learned that he is in culinary school and in massage school simultaneously.  I conjured all the Spanish I could to explain to him my raw food preferences, and other dietary tendencies, since I had a feeling he would help me get my food needs met.  He was just great, teaching me where light switches at the house were, quizzing me after showing me how to get into the house, how to use a key to lock and unlock my bedroom door.  By now, it was Monday, about noon.   In short, it was a lot of information to absorb in a very short time.  And I was still feeling like I had not quite slept since Saturday night, in the very comfortable bed at Trina’s house in Columbia.

I think I took a half hour nap, because Claudia, Alejandro’s mother was not yet home.  Somebody came to get me when it was time to eat.  I ate at the table with places set for the family.  Everyone was out, but I was beginning to learn who the family was by the rooms in the house, and their places at the table.  There is Clauda and Cesar (Mom and Dad), There is Alejandro (17) and Andrea (16), and finally, there is Irene (8).  They have a dog named Wolfie (1).  Allegedly, he eats things, and so I should probably make sure and lock my door.

Alejandro had cooked me a vegetarian meal with carrots and tofu and onions, some seared green onions, guacamole, something rather like gazpacho, that he had intended to be a sauce, but I ate it with the guacamole and it was delightful.  He also made potatoes with basil, and I ate that with the guacamole too.  A very wonderful meal.  Then I met Claudia and Andrea, and finally Irene, and it was time for me to go to the school.  I wasn’t sure I could remember how to get back to the school, but it seemed that Alejandro was pretty sure I could easily do it. So after a little direction, I set off.  After walking pretty hard for about 15 minutes, I realized that I was not going to be able to find the school without help, so I returned the way I had come.  Once more, Alejandro took me to the school, where I was about an hour late to my first lesson.  I met my teacher, who is Pati.  I love her.  She is a social work student (or the equivalent of social work), but rather than finish her program, she has decided to take a job, working with a foreign agency here in Xela, working with women.  Her disposition is great for me.  I don’t feel a bit uncomfortable experimenting with speaking.  She offers lots of encouragement, and she is good at what she does.  I had been working for about an hour and a half, and was feeling myself pushing hard to stay engaged, and she said, “okay, let’s work for 10 more minutes, and they we can take a break, Okay?”  That’s the kind of encouragement I needed.  I don’t think she realized at that point that I was operating at somewhat of a disadvantage.  I hope to give her a little more energy today.  At any rate, I feel like all the hard work I have invested in building vocabulary and learning Spanish in the past is actually paying off.  I think she is impressed.  My Spanish is definitely better than her English, and that is a perfect thing in this learning situation.

I am having a great time, and am working hard.  I hope the same is true for you.

Chicago O’Hare International Airport.  It’s Sunday, June 30 at 11:19 pm, and my connecting flight doesn’t leave until Monday, July 1 at 3:00 am.  For some reason I thought it left at 1:00 am.  But, sure enough, I check the itinerary, and it says 3:05 am.  On the way back it will be 1:00 am.  Good enough.  Since arriving in Chicago, I’ve had a fabulous Greek salad, and some Godiva chocolate (dark chocolate covered almonds and dark chocolate with raspberries).  Yummy.  Thank you, Tracy, for helping me get online here in the airport.  I also want to express my gratitude for all the support I feel, from the grace, ease, and magic I’ve felt pretty much every step of the way, to the people who have been there to share their ideas, their listening, and their enthusiasm and faith with me, to the people who have so generously hosted and fed me since I turned my Bluff Dale house over to its new inhabitants, Chris, Ashley, Sophie, Oliver, and Louis.  And my daughters, who continue to offer their love and support, through this crazy, cockamamie transition I’m going through.  I feel so much love, and so much appreciation for you all.  I know that I am not alone, and that is so valuable to me.

I’ll get to Guatemala City at 6:25 am, in time to catch a bus to Quetzaltenango, where my language school is.  That will be a 4-hour ride.  What I am most excited about is meeting my host family and my teacher, and beginning the hard work of language acquisition.  It also occurred to me that, for years, I have been asking for a work situation that funds my travel.  I wonder if I am moving into a phase of my career where that will be the case.  If so, then I won’t need to figure out how to earn the money to cover airfare.  Now I’m imagining a conversation with a friend in Bangladesh who is a professor at University of Dhaka, who is keen on me coming to Dhaka to provide supervision for therapists who are learning to practice EMDR.  How cool would it be if I could provide supervision and/or therapy to clinicians in Dhaka.  Three months of the year in Dhaka sounds ideal to me.  That would give me a chance to connect with and support up-and-coming therapists, and reconnect with old friends, and explore that country in a way I was not able to when I lived there before.

I’ll also be checking out healing centers in Guatemala, which is a neighbor to El Salvador, toward which I’ve felt an affinity for years.   I am envisioning meeting exactly the people I need to meet to make such an exchange possible: organizations that have the resources to transport and house an international staff member/consultant, and a need for the skills and expertise I have.  Thirdly, my sister, Tracy, who lives in Guadalajara, has been mentioning friends there in Mexico who are involved in developing a healing center in her general neighborhood.  These friends seem to have a unique set of offerings uncannily aligned with mine.  Who knows what is in store for me?  I am open.  I am willing.  I feel your prayers and your support.  And I am expecting the very best.

Just wanted to let you know that I am officially finished with what you may have known as my private practice.  I just chased down my last unpaid claim, filed my last official document, and heaved a huge, delighted sigh of relief.  Don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely loved this past chapter of my life – and would not trade it for anything in the world.  My clients, it is you I have to thank.  You have healed me.  Through your courage and relentless work, your tenacity, and generosity, I am a different person now than I was six and a half years ago when I declared myself a therapist.  And now I am ready to go out and reinvent myself.  I’m not promising anybody anything today except that I will continue to be a creative being.  Not sure what it’s going to look like in a week or a year, but I have a feeling it will include travel, language (written and spoken), healing, and magic.  I will want to share it with you, and you are welcome to follow me here, ask me questions, or just pop in to say hi!  I can’t promise that I’ll always respond right away, as I may not have access to Internet, but I will do my best.  I love you all!

Finished a lovely book by Iyanla Vanzant.  Here’s just a paragraph from her book, In the Meantime: Finding Yourself and the Love You Want:

pg 276: Someplace in the back of our minds, we believe if there is someone else out there like me, that means I can’t be all that bad.  Without realizing it, we go out looking for ourselves, believing that if we can find ourselves we will be happy.  The thing is, we don’t always like who we are because we have forgotten the truth.  We think we need to be fixed — not healed, but fixed.  There is a big difference.  Consequently, when we see ourselves in other people, in our partners, in our family members, in our friends, we get busy fixing them rather than healing ourselves.

If you want to read the rest of my gleanings, go to In the Meantime

Still snuggled in my bed this morning, listening to the sound of a soft gentle rain, reading Melody Beattie’s

The New Codependency: Help and Guidance for Today’s Generation

Here is part of a chapter called Catch And Release: It’s Only a Feeling.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

pg 231-235: Here are a few ideas that make feeling emotions easier.  The way to get feelings out is to catch and release.  When we used to go fishing, we pulled every fish we caught out of the water and took it home even if we weren’t going to eat it.  Then we realized fish were living creatures.  We shouldn’t kill them unless we intended to eat them.  It wasted Life.  We developed a new way to fish called “catch and release.”  We caught the fish, tagged it to prove the big one didn’t get away, then we set the fish free.  That’s all we need to do with feelings.  We can deal with a feeling in less than a minute (although many take longer), once we learn the trick.  We release the feeling and old belief, and Life teaches us something new.  Then along comes another emotion, another belief, and a new lesson  It’s a natural, organic process called spiritual and emotional growth.  We don’t control the process.  Life grows us.

Resistance, judging feelings as positive or negative, and talking about feelings endlessly will often turn emotions into a bigger ordeal than necessary.  I spent ten years grieving the loss of my son.  But grief isn’t one feeling.  It’s thousands of emotions–one after another along with many lessons about life, living, and death.  The process for feeling any emotion of the hundreds that exist is almost exactly the same.  We’re aware and quiet long enough to identify and feel the emotion.  We connect with the original emotional energy.  Let the emotion be what it is.  Sink into it.  Don’t resist, push, or try to force it.  Don’t pretend or act as if.  Give in.  Surrender.  Honor, acknowledge it, whatever words we want to use.  We connect with the feeling.  We completely feel it.  It has to be a perfect fit–like trying on the right pair of jeans.

Resistance to and judgments about emotions can make them unpleasant and hurt more.  The more skilled we become at surrendering to the feeling–the quicker we tag the fish and get it back into the water–the easier feeling emotions becomes.  Nonresistance helps neutralize pain.  The second we stop caring what feeling is in us, the problems from feeling the feeling are eliminated.  Whether it’s anger, confusion, hatred, or fear, we pull that fish in and tag it.  It’s ours.  We become one with the feeling.  Then we breathe it out.  Let it swim away into the ocean to wherever felt feelings go.

Judging emotions as positive or negative, good or bad, also makes feeling them more complicated.  We judge some emotions as “bad, negative” feelings.  Then we call others “good, positive” feelings.  But the truth is, they’re all the same.  They’re feelings.  There isn’t any difference between feeling sad and happy–except the judgment we make in our minds.  The second we stop judging the emotions, surrender to whatever it is, then breathe it out, it’s gone.  It doesn’t matter what the feeling is.  Think of the most brilliant symphonies ever created.  It’s the range of moods that make them so stunning–the deep, moody emotions compared to the light trilling.  There’s as much difference between angry and excited as there is between purple and green.  They’re both colors.  Different, but the same.  We might have personal preferences, but they’re all feelings on the color wheel.

The one exception to this is sometimes feelings we call premonitions, or warning feelings.  Those may stay with us, like a flashing yellow light, until we see the caution signal flashing.

We need feelings in the world.  They help us create great music, because we’re emotionally alive.  They help guide us.  They tell us when we hate the situation we’re in or whether or not we love what we’re doing and who we’re with.  they put life in what we do; they show us what interests us.  They’re the color, passion, and spice of life.

I can’t teach you how to catch and release, but you can learn it.  You probably won’t be able to do a feeling in thirty seconds in the beginning, any more than you could tag a fish that quickly the first time you went fishing.  But you can get better and faster each time.  Don’t make it a contest.  Take as much time as you need to connect with and feel each feeling.  We’re not going to blow through all feelings quickly, but some we can.  The most innocuous activities can help bring up and release an emotion–watching movies, laughing, exercising.  Our intuition will guide us into doing what we need to trigger emotions.  We’ll get an idea.  If we don’t ignore it, we’ll do the next thing, feel, learn our lesson, and grow.  Obvious activities can trigger emotions: attending family reunions, the death of someone we love, losing a job, or getting a promotion or raise.  Events trigger emotions, and so do people’s actions.

Contrary to what we were first taught, we don’t have to tell everyone each feeling we have, even if it’s connected to them.  The person was the trigger; the emotion belongs to us.  We need to make one person aware of what we’re feeling: ourselves.  How do we know when we have to talk to a person about a feeling?  After we release the emotion, we’ll be clear.  We’ll know what to do.  We’ll naturally do it.  We’ll trust ourselves.  We won’t have to think about it.  When we stop trying to figure out life and intellectualize everything, when we begin to feel and release our feelings, we start to live organically.  Naturally.  We do the next thing.  We’re not living emotionally driven lives or being controlled by our feelings.  We’re living from our center.  There are times we need to talk to a person about a feeling.  But do it after we’ve released the emotion.  We’ll be more powerful. People mistakenly think the way to express anger is scream, holler, or argue when we’re angry.  All that does is cause a fight or allow anger to control us. It weakens us.  the most powerful expressions of anger are after we’ve released it.  The most effective person in a crisis is the person not acting out of fear.  Catch and release is the secret to mastering emotions.  We feel each emotion by becoming one with it for a moment.  We let it have its way with us.  Then we breathe it out–like stale air.  Then we ask what we’re supposed to learn–if anything–from the emotion we felt.  Or we don’t have to ask–Life will show us.  Learning the lesson will occur naturally, by itself.

Sometimes we feel more than one emotion at once; a current feeling and similar past emotions.  We can usually tell when this happens because our reaction will be more intense than the situation calls for.  If something happens and we overreact, it’s usually because we’re feeling the current emotion along with an emotion (or four) that are similar that we have repressed and have kept living inside us for years.  How do we deal with those situations? Catch and release.  Intense emotional growth occurs when this happens.  Usually our lessons are like courses: We’ll have an introduction, then beginning lessons.  We’ll get into the heart of the course, have pop quizzes and tests.  Then we’ll finish the class.  Emotions will be part of the entire process, but so will letting go of old, limiting beliefs, and letting Life teach us new, healthier ones so we can become more enlightened or “lighter” as we go through Life.

I’ve also found that feelings often come in layers of threes, such as fear, shame, and guilt.  Or anger, sadness, and fear.  It can be any combination of emotions.  But our lessons are leading us to the same place–our Oneness with God, Life, others, and ourselves.

…There isn’t one feeling that can’t be handled using this technique other than an occasional premonition.  But catch and release takes practice.  I’ve been working on it for years.  We’ll each get the help teacher, triggers, and support we need when the time is right, if we’re open and willing to learn.  It doesn’t matter where we live or how much money we have.  The process will find us.  The important idea is the same as when we’re fishing: we have to get the hook in the fish’s mouth.  With emotions, we have to completely surrender to and connect with the way the feeling feels.  Don’t be scared.  It’s only a feeling–emotional energy.  It won’t hurt that much, especially if you don’t resist and judge.

Remember, I’m your travel guide.  I’ve walked this path.  If I can do it, you can too.  Keep it simple.  Feel whatever we feel.

 

Did you ever have a moment when you were struck by a truth that was so profound that you simply knew it would change your life forever?  And then you remembered learning this profound truth at some chapter of your life seemingly ages ago?

I am struck by such a knowing this morning, and it goes like this:

I HAVE NEEDS, AND I AM WORTHY OF HAVING THEM MET.

The emphasis this time around is on all the reasons, subconsciously held, that have somehow made us feel like needs were something that other people had and got met — not us.  Now, as I feel myself launching into a new phase of my life, I am forced to examine my life to identify those things that I want to be sure to include — those things that make me feel whole, safe, and comfortable.

As I ponder this truth and how it has presented over time, I wonder if one of my most persistent needs is the rhythm of attuning and re-attuning to myself.  And the building of trust in myself — the trust that I can be counted upon to reliably do this, in any situation I might find myself in.

Right now, one of the things I ache for is adventure.  Drilling down into this ache, more specifically, it is perhaps novelty that I desire.  More specifically still, a new territory to explore — more specifically, being in a place where I have an opportunity to use my five senses and something more to locate and attain material things, rhythms and systems that I need to feel whole, safe, and comfortable.  This journey — this process — is what I seem to be seeking.

And now that the empty nest looms large, my primary responsibility will be to myself.  There will be no real reason to postpone my pursuit of my personal needs — extravagant as that sounds as I think it.  Not that my children were ever a real reason for me to postpone my needs, though there might have been moments when that seemed true.

The people who have shared with me their stories and thoughts of late have helped me identify unconscious conclusions that I had drawn along life’s journey that (until challenged) stood in the way of self-attunement, and a healthy and balanced life.  These include, maybe I’m not worthy of having my needs met because:

• I did something wrong.
• my needs are unreasonable.
• my needs are an inconvenience to myself or others.
• I am somehow flawed.
• I’m lazy, disorganized, imperfect.
• my needs are just too much to deal with.
• my needs are a threat to others.

And now, as I lay the foundation for my new life, I use these little gifts — shaping them into another form that sustains, supports, and nurtures:

• I love and accept myself with all my needs, desires, and imperfections.
• Regardless of anything I do or am, I have needs and they are normal.
• It is safe to explore my needs and desires.
• It is okay to reach for what I want.
• It is okay to want more.
• I am willing to do what it takes to care for myself.
• Doing what I need to do to care for myself benefits everyone.

And so it is.