Category: Peaceful living

On Gratitude & Being Yourself

Posted on by rootsmassage@gmail.com

ON GRATITUDE & BEING YOURSELF 

In this time of the year close to Halloween and Day of the Dead, it is said that the veil is thin. The boundary between the living and the dead is blurred. Our own family takes this time each year to honor my son’s father and our ancestors, telling stories and bringing our own remembering rituals into this sacred time. Since he has been on my mind and since we are also approaching this season of gratitude, I would love to share this story I wrote about Felipe last year. I hope you enjoy! 

Felipe

A story of gratitude and being yourself

This year on Thanksgiving, I was remembering my late husband, Felipe, and how as a family, we got really into the art of blessing our food. Taking a moment to be present and reflect on our gratitudes before our meals. It felt really spacious and lovely. We’d take our time, sometimes sitting with a group of friends, everyone slowly soaking up the silence and depth of the moment in communion, thinking of all the people who brought the food to our table and how grateful we felt for such richness in our lives.

So Felipe was known for often being the weirdest guy in the room, delightfully so. He truly didn’t care what anyone else thought about him, in all the best ways. He’d take this depth of our blessings everywhere he went, taking long silent pauses in restaurants or anywhere he ate, just eyes closed, going deep into his still moment of gratitude. It was always a beat too long for me–slightly uncomfortable–but where I might feel self-conscious, I could take his lead and just try to go inside for that pause.

Many years ago at my cousin’s wedding, I remember a huge group of my mostly Catholic extended family all sat down with full plates, in all of our fancy clothes and excitement ready to dig in. Felipe offered that we do a small prayer and everyone seemed delighted for the reminder of that ritual. I’m sure everyone was expecting a short and formal, tidy Catholic prayer and then to move along with the meal.

But Felipe had everyone hold hands, close their eyes and he guided us into a meandering blessing touching on the blessings of our family and the gathering, the wedding, the food, and then all of the things that helped to bring the food to our table, nature, the weather, farmworkers, life.  I looked up to see my family starting to squirm after the first twenty seconds and continued to delight in how uncomfortable things got deep into minutes one and two. I met my brothers snickering eyes and saw people looking at each other, shifting in their chairs like schoolchildren. They couldn’t escape this blessing, it was surrender to it or wait it out. This was a glorious Felipe moment, totally unphasable as he did his Felipe thing right there.

He finished the blessing, opened his eyes just totally zen and full of gratitude as my family gathered their wits about them and everyone dug in. I’m SURE totally tuned in to this moment in a different way.

So just be weird and be so you, right?! Say the blessing or don’t but I love that we have these moments to connect with ourselves and what’s important to us. These are the things we remember about life, the deep stuff, the touching stuff, the funny times we tried and flopped or triumphed but were just totally ourselves. We have to try, we have to step up and dig in. And these are the moments that people remember about us after we’re gone.

❤️

Routines & The Fall

Posted on by rootsmassage@gmail.com

Routines & The Fall

It’s almost fall. What a beautiful time to sink in and create routines and rituals in your life where you put you in there. How will you carve out that space for your own nurturing, creativity and peace? Don’t just take the scraps of what’s left at the end of every full week ahead. You can intentionally carve out something for you to fuel your every day. What can this look like?

I love this excerpt from Jacqueline Siskin from her course on Commune, her daily ideal, a working poem on how she would design her ideal day.

What inspires the poetry of your ideal day?

How Do You Want to Feel?

Posted on by rootsmassage@gmail.com

How Do You Want to Feel?

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately feeling into what it means to love my body, to truly love it, all of it.
I am familiar with the resistance I feel to this, to loving all of me. The wrinkles and the curves and the parts that don’t fit like they used to.
The pressure to be different.

But how do I want to live?
What’s on the other side of fully embracing this gorgeous miracle of life that exists within and without this body?
Wouldn’t I rather see what’s on the other side of holding judgetments and pain and self-loathing?
Wouldn’t it be cool to see if there is more freedom, lightness and joy just on the other side of this baggage I’m bringing to my mirror?

I find so much love for my body when I feel into what does feel good.
I find so much compassion for my body when I see how solidly I am built and how well my body adapts and restores itself.
My body is strong, able and alive.
My body loves to move, to move gently, to move regularly and to play.

What do you want to do today, body?
How do you want to feel?

The body speaks and I listen,
I can feel the relationship of being in my body and connecting back into my self.
Gentle, witnessing awareness.

Thank you, body.
Thank you for your patience as I learn to love all the parts of you!

Wonderful, mysterious life

Posted on by rootsmassage@gmail.com

 

peaceful-sunset-1920x1080-1207058

Looking back at my last blog entry it was really an eternity ago, May 2013. I remember thinking about how important it was to get that blog post up, a mix of stress and need to feel productive and pride and passion. A few days later my husband passed away suddenly on his way home from work, heart failure at the age of 37. I was standing there with our one-year-old son on the sidewalk waiting for him to come home and his car stopped in the middle of the street only a few blocks away when he died. So, just like that, just as Feilpe’s entire life stopped mid-breath, my world came down around me almost three years ago now. I look at something like this marker of time and how my world was before this and now after and… it just takes my breath away, really. It makes me stop. Three years later (forever and ever ago and just a blink of the eye ago) and I am a totally different person.

 

Sometimes I ramp back up to put just as much importance on a blog post as I could on spending time with my precious son because I know it’s our natural tendency to not be in the wonderment of the mystery of life all day.  We would just all be floating around all day in awe. At the same time, I see life in a totally different way now as I do live the day to day. I had about a good year after Felipe died of living in the deepest mystery of what life is, why we are here, what is important, really getting my mind blown with one revelatory realization after the next. I just let it happen. I let all of the illusions of my life from before my husband passed just drop away around me; dreams that I thought would happen, the way that I thought anything would happen, my identity as a wife, a two-parent family, financial securtiy of a partnership, everything that I thought was real that in the moment that Feilpe passed, I was shown were total illusions. I had to grieve each of those layers as they were revealed to me one by one, like: “Oh, I thought this was true about my life that I would grow old with this person and we would live here and there and would play tennis together, and go on these trips and have this house.” We walk around thinking that our world is a certain way but really, in a moment all of that can change. We walk around in our stories and give a LOT of importance to those stories of who we are and what value we place on certain things, positive and negative. The truth is, all that we can ever hold onto is our PRESENT MOMENT. There is really nothing else that we can work from but our now. We have a choice to be completely present right now and feel as much ease, peace, joy and harmony as we want.

 

I challenge you to notice what you hold as true, fixed, permanent in your life. Where could you benefit from detaching a bit from certain things like feeling frustrated that this one thing is like this. Maybe if you looked at it through a different filter, it could be a totally different story. In that first year of grief, I would watch a lot of documentaries about death and spirtual things but something I found strangely comforting in my sadness was watching tsunami documentaries. It is a shocking and sad realization that people are having as they are often calmly filming on their phone what to them seems like a big, unreal flood and then… it turns into the most life-altering and unfortunately deadly circumstance that noone can ever even fathom. These videos would make me feel connected in my experience to the fact that every single one of our realities that we live on a daily basis are so fragile. How we get to work, what we eat, resources we have, the people we see everyday… nothing is static and unchanging and to be taken for granted. We must have so much gratitude for the things that we do have in our lives today, without fearing the worst that can happen by any means, but by living so fully in the moment that we can relish the time that we DO have with our loved ones. We can be so at peace in the “STORY” of who we are without being so attached to it that we can’t adapt, mold to the shifting tides and ultimately, be more present to what our life is giving us right now in this moment.

 

Thank you for reading my story.

Springtime renewal

Posted on by Katy

spring grassIts springtime and a lot of people are getting the urges for springtime cleanses. The ritual of starting anew in the spring is an age-old tradition and there’s no better way than listening to the seasons to synch up with natural cycles of life. What does a springtime cleanse mean to you? For some it can be dietary focused with the intention of flushing out toxins from deep within the tissues and allowing the body to release and renew. For others it might be de-cluttering the home (my favorite!) where you can really be mindful of what you actually use and need in your life vs. what is simply taking up space. What physical things in your space fuel you with inspiration and pleasure vs. what things are distracting and cause you stress? Let those things go to make room in your life for growth and renewal. This is similar to how massage goers can view regular massage on a cellular level. Flush out the unneeded energy and waste stored deep in your tissues and let new healing circulation flow through.

My new springtime renewal ritual focuses on my self-care and is a chance for me to reinvigorate my “feel my best” routine. It starts with being mindful of the things that are most important to me to feeling my most healthy and energetic self every day. I choose a few things that I know are awesome things to do for myself and I allow those things back into my life with ease and enthusiasm. A few of the things I’m choosing this season are: drinking more water, stretching for five minutes before bed or in the morning, eating until I feel almost satisfied (not full), and enjoying a little more sleep.

Ahhhhh! If that’s how you feel after reading your own ideas, then you’re on the right track. The key is to allow yourself to be perfectly imperfect. Make some room for that sunshine!

How do you react to stress?

Posted on by Katy

I remember going to the doctor years ago with a barrage of symptoms ranging from skin conditions to some painful gastro-intestinal upset, surprised at how my typically awesome immune system seemed to have taken a vacation. I felt helpless and confused. My doctor asked if I thought my body had been under much stress lately and I said that no, not at all I felt happy, like everything was going according to plan besides my health. After assessing my situation she looked at me bewildered and with her head cocked sideways she asked, “So, you don’t think that living and travelling in a foreign country, going through a break up and then relocating to a new city, new job and having financial strain is considered stressful for your body? ” In that stage of my life, the choices that I saw as part of living the essential adventures of my life weren’t connected in my brain to the stresses that were being placed on my body and my ability to stay healthy. My body was screaming at me “ENOUGH!” and I really didn’t get it until that awareness presented itself to me in illnesses galore.

This is not a lesson to be learned and to be done with. Our bodies are constantly changing, adapting and finding new levels of homeostatic balance at each new stage in our lives. With each choice that we make that concern our daily schedule, food, sleep, activities, exercise, movement patterns like sitting at a desk or driving, we’re asking our body to automatically adjust all systems to accommodate. Not to mention our powerful mental world where our stress response is activated by financial worries, doing enough, rushing, driving in traffic and waiting in lines. The following article highlights how stress can affect us in subtle and not so subtle ways:

http://www.helpguide.org/mental/stress_signs.htm

My best lesson recently was to realize that in extra busy times in my life, even when I feel like I’m “on top of things”, there are really subtle yet specific symptoms that will alert me to my stress before I may even be consciously aware of it. My stress red flags are: knotted up stomach, difficulty sleeping distracted, inability to focus, really falling off of my self-care (diet and exercise) routine (which is doubly counter-productive as these are the things that can keep stress under control). I’ll say things like, “I don’t have time for the gym. I’m too busy!” If you can learn to catch yourself with early warning signs, you may be able to stop stress in your life before it becomes illness.

Here are some articles that highlight common warning signs:

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/stress-health-effects-body.html

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/stress-symptoms/SR00008_D

So, what do you do when you realize you’re stressed out? We all need some tools in our toolbox to pull out when times are tough. Today we are barraged with information about stress relief and the point is: find something that you can and will actually do that will have some effect for the positive. It doesn’t have to be fancy, can be big or small, could take just a minute or it could be a long-term commitment to change. Often times if we can find just some space to put things in perspective, clarity will have its own neutralizing effect on some of the stress. Some small things to try to see if they fit your world:

Easy stretching, taking some deep breaths, journaling, taking a walk, talking with a friend, reading, watching a fun movie, turning off the phone, being in nature, meditating or just becoming more mindful of the moment, cleaning the kitchen, taking a nap, having a laugh attack,  being silly, playing with a pet, doing any kind of art, music or creating.

For larger stress issues in your life and chronic stress, it can be helpful to seek the professional and understanding ears of a therapist to help you navigate your best path to wellness. Other paths to wellness to try, with the recommendation of your doctor if you are seriously ill, are: regular exercise, commitment to a consistent food path that is in align with your health goals (more fruits and veggies!), self-care that includes:  relaxation, massage, hydrotherapy (sauna, steam rooms, swimming) and meditation, drinking plenty of water, and finding playfulness in your life that fuels your sense of worth and joy.

Here is a really cool NPR interview recording about stress:

http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=3911637&m=3911638

A more scientific look at your body’s reaction to stress and your immune system:

http://immunedisorders.homestead.com/stress.html

Perspective on Pace

Posted on by rootsmassage@gmail.com

 

What if you could pick yourself up like a chess piece and transport to a part of a world that lives a little slower: like watch the world go by your front porch for a while. As in lie in a hammock after a hard day’s work knowing that you’ve done enough. We’re talking sitting down with your friends for a few hours of idle chat and sharing rather than maybe just a few quick  minutes. What if you could immediately get that perspective on your own pace of life and how it might be affecting you on every level of your life: physically, mentally, spiritually?

After a break that offered me some much needed rhythm adjustment, I’m looking for ways to hold onto the mellow that is so healing to me. I feel like when the time factor is taken out, I’m able to reflect on slowness not just as a concept but as a part of who I am. My body relaxes.
Must we live so fast? What is my rhythm?
Are there some things that can silently drop off the to do list?
How about one thing at a time today?
What are some meaningful ways to shift the flow for a while just to see how it feels?