It was a Palm Springs conference in the 90’s when anthropologist Angeles Arrien, spoke directly to my soul. Her lecture topic:  commonalities across indigenous cultures in the art of healing.  There was one custom that connected several cultures.  A person seeking medical attention would go to the village shaman who opened the healing session with this inquiry:

Insight sometimes materializes in chapters.  Know what I mean?  Themes show up this way and that.  Connective threads emerge in your face.  Sometimes it takes several aha moments to anchor insight into reality.  Today, with gratitude, I write about a wisdom kernel received from you, my physical therapy patients. A recurrent theme all summer long.

This is a month dedicated to stopping. I have been very quiet, mostly at home or camping. It is not my usual state of being. And it feels good. Feels right. Feels needed. And this emerged today:

Back in 2020-22, with Covid raging away, I taught “not your standard” yoga weekly on line.  An interesting interlude we were grateful to share.  The final 55 classes, became an ambitious dive into experiential anatomy.

Calendared as a day of remembrance, July 20, 2023: The Big Fall. A day to recall what it means to suffer trauma, how healing happens in fits and starts, how at times life lessons get delivered in uncomfortable ways. It got my attention and these 3 reminders have played out with consistency over this ensuing year.

Mary Oliver opens her poem Wild Geese with these poignant lines:

 You do not have to be good. 

You do not have to walk on your knees 

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. 

You only have to let the soft animal of your body 

love what it loves. 

I’ve been clear about the medicinal benefits of low dose cannabis for years. Actually more than 50 years. But here’s the deal: I’m firmly on the elder side of life and even though younger folk assure me times have changed, I feel a bit of trepidation writing publicly about this topic.

A perfect example of prajna paradha, Sanskrit for crime against wisdom. This word actually names what we all gut-recognize: our natural, organic human tendency to turn away for what we know is best for us.

Curiosity about this unique body in motion. Cultivating fascination about every emerging impulse. Ruminating mind pales in comparison, so boring.

This is what I want to say about my feet lately. I trust them like never before. They seem to know what my heart desires more than my head does. And I am following.

I looked at him and said, “Do I really have to do this?” To which he replied, “Did you really want to get better?” I bit the bullet.

There is nothing but liquid turbulence tossing me hither and yon. No sense of up, down, sideways. I hold this precious breath as long as humanly possible.

Life pulls us this way and that. Sometimes we think one thing, feel another then move in a direction totally unrelated. Out of alignment. Sigh.

Been moving through a rough patch lately. Such is life, eh? My 74th turn around the planet right around the corner, a reminder of my draft into life’s black belt training unit. And what is it I am training for? Every day, like it or not, I am the recipient of ever advanced readiness coaching for The Big Whatever.