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Guest Post: A Level in Reiki by Misha

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In March, I tought my first Reiki 1 class.  I tought my first Reiki class at any time, anywhere.

Sometimes the Universe gives you clues. The Universe began giving me clues in the form of questions by my patients, friends, and colleagues about the nature of Reiki.

There is a lot of misinformation floating about the Internet and the world about its nature, and its process. In truth, I didn’t understand the nature of Reiki until I was introduced to it.

Knowledge vs attunement

I was attuned in 2005 and 2006 by two separate Reiki masters.  The first was a younger, Western teacher who gave me little to no introduction. The second was a Grand Master of the original lineage, who was fiercely strict about the seriousness of the training and who came from an Eastern point of view (Indian).

Both tought me a lot. Neither tought me what I needed to experience on my own. And that’s the thing.  Because we are each a different energy signature, Reiki is going to be different in each of us.

Reiki 1 is your Reiki

Reiki 1 is “my” Reiki, as much as my silent oberver is me.  So Reiki 1 is the attunement to your Reiki, that which your silent observer understands and with which it can commune.

I am a Western-trained chiropractor. My education is rigorous and physical, and requires a keen and astute knowledge of the human body and its processes.

Reiki does not require this, per se. But for a Westerner, understanding the energetic nature of life is.  And this is often difficult for Western minds to wrap their heads around.

The good thing about Reiki is that you don’t need 4-5 years of anatomy, physiology, neurology, chemistry, organic chemistry, physics, biomechanis, kinesiology, and chiropractic training and internship to use it to help improve your life.

Reiki 1 It is something that people can, and likely should, use every day for themselves. One needn’t go further than Reiki 1 to improve their lives, and by extension of the self, the lives around them.

Not cheaply achieved

It took me many years to understand and use the power of Reiki 1-3 to its best benefits. During this period, I did not feel ready to share my trials and errors.

Until the questions started coming last winter, I just quietly used it and learned from it.

Then that little voice in my head, the one with the good ideas that are also uncomfortable ideas, started poking me.  “It’s time.”

My two students

When recruiting students, I often recruit through discouragement.  I find that, if you make something less romantic, and reveal that it will actually take some work and will shift you as a person, one weeds out those who are not really interested in the product of study.

So after a discouraging introductory process, two people remained who wanted to know more.

So I tought my experience and my perspective of Reiki 1, and I had the blessing of attuning them. It was a very moving experience for us all.

Misha, one of my students, wrote about the experience in a candid manner that I would not have been able to express in 2005.  I thought it was important to share, for prospective Reiki students and Reiki teachers alike.  So I asked if It would be all right to post here, and Misha graciously accepted.

The following is a blog post that you can find on Misha’s blog:

A level in Reiki

Misha 

A few weeks ago I received my Reiki level one attunement. From conversations I had later, I learned that most people are vaguely aware of it as “some kind of laying on of hands” at best. I’ll first give a short explanation, and then tell you about the experience.

What?

So, what is Reiki, without going into as much detail as the two days of class I had? First, what’s energy work? If you’re into meditation at all, you’ve probably encountered some guided meditations that asked you to move your breath into parts of your body where your airways don’t go. What you’re moving around isn’t literal air but a type of energy. There are many types of energy other than “breath”, which all feel different from each other. Reiki is one of those, and comes from an outside source. There is a methodology to use it to assist healing in the broadest sense of the word. A set of principles to live by is part of the methodology (order and wording vary):

  • Just for today, I will live the attitude of gratitude.
  • Just for today, I will not worry.
  • Just for today, I will not anger.
  • Just for today, I will do my work honestly.
  • Just for today, I will show love and respect for every living thing.

I like the “just for today” part a lot, it’s very… mindful actually. It also means a bad day isn’t a complete disaster, one can always try again tomorrow.

Why?

I was curious about Reiki because I learned some energy work as a child (and figured things out on my own from there), but don’t remember who or where from. I wanted to know if that perhaps was Reiki, and now I know the answer to that is “no”. I also want to learn energy work and meditation methods that are known to be safe, because I will be able to help others with those. Of what I figured out on my own, I know for sure that some practices are unsafe, but not what is actually definitely safe for everyone’s mental health.

What was it like?

I decided to go into it with a clear and open mind, in other words I did not try to learn everything in advance on the web. This did mean I didn’t know about the three weeks of daily one hour and a half practice on oneself after attunement. If you want to learn Reiki too, you have now been warned of that 🙂 .

Lots of coincidences!

The first day was my birthday. A friend wrote to me in her birthday card that she hoped there would be many attractive women for me to practice on. I later told her I would be practicing on someone extremely sexy for the next three weeks.The second day was new moon, to be more precise the day on which the (invisible) moon sets after the sun again. I try to celebrate that day every month, something about new beginnings, I’ll write about that another time.When I found out my now-teacher is a Reiki master and asked if she was planning to teach soon, I didn’t know she had not done so before. She did have lessons planned because someone else had asked her! If I understood correctly she rejected a few potential students for not being serious enough, leaving just me and the other.Learning anything together with one other student is a special, intimate experience, especially when it’s someone you instantly like and quickly develop a feeling of understanding for. I hope we become friends.

Can’t avoid that spirit work

I try not to talk about spirit work. I really do, because I don’t want to encourage anyone to try it. Yes, I learned very much from it, but it has also been incredibly upsetting at times. Unfortunately, it’s so interwoven with energy work that I had to come out of that closet, because I couldn’t predict if anything weird might happen (it didn’t).This got me the question “why do you do that?” twice, which is difficult to answer in the moment. Imagine you find a puppy with a broken leg and take it to the vet. Nobody claims the puppy, so you pay the bill and adopt it. You now have a dog. If someone asks you “why did you get a dog?”, well, why did you? One can make up explanations after the fact with words like “compassion”, “kindness”, “sense of justice”, “sense of responsibility”, but I think it’s healthier to leave those words for other people to describe me than to make them part of a self image I use to reason from to decide what to do in any situation. When I find a task, no matter how odd, that clearly needs doing in front of me, I do it.

Day one

We were taught a lot connecting Reiki to western science and mysticism (not sure if I’m using the right word there). It felt like being back at university. If one is not an energy worker yet, all this would help to accept Reiki as something that could be real. For me, it was still very interesting.

Day two

This was a day of showing the method (hand positions), personal conversations, meditation, and the attunement! Also, dinner 🙂 . Reiki feels wonderful and warm, and intense when first getting to know it.

The next days

Life can become wild after Reiki attunement, I certainly had a few rough days in which things changed for the better in friendships. It’s hard to say if there’s a cause and effect, because things weren’t calm in the week before either.I can say with certainty that I feel better. Meditation is a bit easier, and my preferred posture is now one that fits feeling comfortable in my environment. Straight back, low shoulders, small steps, exactly what I remember being corrected into and being unable to keep up. Posture, body language, can be caused by how one feels. It’s useless to try to correct the symptom without addressing the cause.

And now?

Reiki level 2, for sure, sometime. First, I think I found a reasonably short track for going from informally knowing about mindfulness to being a mindfulness trainer. It’s on a different end of a spectrum, but again it’s a known safe practice to learn so I can help others.

Sometimes Healing Hurts, Pt. 2

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“May the road rise to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face.
May the rain fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the hollow of his hand.”

— An Irish Blessing, author unknown

 

My aunt was a nun.  She was Sister Theresa Fitzpatrick, from Garden City, Long Island (New York).

As a child, and into adulthood, I knew her as Aunt Rita.

Aunt Rita once gave my family a wall plaque with that prayer on it.

I used to stare at it and consider it, thinking that it was a beautiful wish, created by a beautiful someone among my cherished ancestry who had a flair for poetry.

The Irish love their poetry

As a child and a young teenager, I fell in love with the English language, and started to write every chance I got.

It made me feel connected to the Earth and her creatures, to God and to mankind.

As a budding young writer, I became a keen observer; and as I observed, I became aware of that which is not pleasant in human nature.

And as I later researched what I observed, I realized horrible truths that the Bible did not immediately reveal to me, but became self-evident upon observation:

That mankind was both God and The Devil, that we chose to act the way of The Devil, and that, because of our tendency for greed, visciousness, apathy, fear, and cruelty, we were making Hell out of paradise here on Earth.

I began to see my writing as a mission. I was going to be a great novelist, a great poet, a great playwright…my words were going to move the masses of sleepy destroyers into woke (before that was a thing) saviors of humanity and our planetary home.

It was all about communication

But as I passed into high school, as a nerdy, cerebral, emotional teen, I experienced cruelty, shunning, viciousness and apathy from my peers and adults outside my home.

My optimism for my and our collective future waned.

Truthfully, the only reason I did not commit suicide in those days was the Catholic belief that that there was something worse beyond this planet for those who took their own life. So later, when I no longer counted myself among those who call themselves Catholic, my faith system served its purpose for me at the time.

Instead, I searched for ways to “get in front of death.”  I drank, I smoked, I took drugs. I took unnecessary risks with my mind and my body.

I hung out with angry, violent societal misfits who were frustrated like me, but more on a micro level. Their home lives and careers were their hell, so I felt like at least on that level, I had it better than them.

That would change.

My anger became both micro and macro.  It turns out, when you hang out with people who give up on their loved ones, chances are, you lose faith in loved ones, too.

As I grew older, as an angsty teenager and a frustrated adult, I kept Aunt Rita’s plaque above my door out of a strange sense of loyalty to the child in me who once who saw beauty in those words.

But I would scoff at them as I passed under it to face another day of disappointment in life. I thought them fairy tale wishes, from a people who feasted on fairy tales, who were beaten into submission, almost to extinction, by centuries of usurpers who had nothing but contempt for my people, usurpers who had other ideas for the innocent.

The wounded Irish, the wounded me

Still, my inner child still wanted the beauty. She still believed, somehow, that life could be beautiful.

She was still alive, and she wanted to live.

And as I moved into my twenties, I tried to reclaim the passion for life and my dreams of poetry that I once had.

But,

The road seemed long and seemed to move farther away.
The wind seemed to push against my chest.
The sun seemed to burn my face if I dared to turn it upward.
The rain seemed either rare, or flooded my dry fields.
When I met those who loved me, I turned away.
God was a lie. I was on my own.

Fear breeds lonliness

For a long time, I shunned a life of service. I abandoned hope, so I created my own hell.

I became that which I feared most: angry, resentful, poor in spirit and home, and afraid.

All the time, afraid.

Why am I telling you all of this?

Because the mind follows the body, and the body follows the mind.

I ended up with pain from my reckless lifestyle, and that’s how I found chiropractic.

And that’s how chiropractic found me.

Moving from a pain model to a healing model

I was a pain patient for years before I realized that chiropractic was helping connect me to my inner child again, helping her cry out for life, helping her claw for hope.

This has not been an easy, nor a fast, healing process.

My home and career life fell apart three separate times before I decided to take a right-hand turn and become a chiropractic student.

I became a chiropractic student, and then a chiropractic doctor, long before I realized that my career choice was helping me heal myself, and that with every adjustment I received AND delivered, I was reconnecting my spirit with my body.

Only happy while serving is not enough

For a long time, the only time I was happy was when I was learning how to help others through chiropractic care.

Later, the only time I was happy was when I was serving through chiropractic.

But I still struggled for years with anxiety and the health consequenses to my body and life, and therefore, to my family and community.

Reclaiming my health one adjustment at a time

It has only been in the last few years I have begun to reclaim my inner and outer health, and the beauty I once saw in the world. It has only been in these last few years that I have been able to see through the clouds of my hopelessness to my own power and purpose.

Now, on this May Day 2018, I emerged from the Metro to a cold, windy, rainy Amsterdam day.

It was a short, inviting trek along the road to my office.
The wind was at my back, merrily quickening my pace.
The sun shines in my smile at my day ahead
The rain is falling softly on these fields ahead of me
My inner child and my wiser self are walking side by side
God is in my healing hands, and I am in Hers.

I was, and am, still healing.

I still see the mysery. I see it more, actually.

But thanks to years of reconnecting my nervous system with my physiology, I have reconnected to something I lost a long time ago.

I have faith.  I have hope. I have joy. I have love.

Because of this, I have reclaimed a great deal of my physical and mental health.

You are not alone. Neither am I.

In my office, I see in others the hell that I created for myself on a micro level.

They walk into my office with shoulder pain, with low back pain, with neck pain. Of course.

They also walk in with flawed neural patterning that began years and years ago, when something happend in their lives that they couldn’t integrate.

Maybe it was abuse. Maybe it was sorrow, disappointment, or the terrible realization that life is not what they thougth is should be.

If we are lucky…

If they are lucky, their imbalance expresses itself in pain, and they find the right help.

The pain is a cry for help. It is a sign that your neural system is not firing properly, that there is improper feed to your body due to a buildup of stress.

Chiropractic helps you repattern your body and mind so that our bodies AND our minds are more flexible, more adaptable, more able to heal properly.

But sometimes healing hurts.

Many times, we think that if our pain goes away, we are healed, and that the goal of their chiropractic care is to go back to our desperate lives, pain free at least.

But they sometimes find something else. They sometimes hurt more after an adjustment.

Awareness brings consequences.  As we heal, as our brains reconnect with our bodies, we can sometimes become aware that there is a bigger problem than the pain.

Awareness also brings us choices.

We now have a chance to face life full on, with awareness of the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful.

Many cannot stomach this awareness right away, and blame everyone and everything for the way they respond to their inner and outer environment.

We must be patient with ourselves and others during this healing process.  While we must ultimately take responsibility for our choices, while we are subluxated (i.e., in a state of less light, less awareness, inflexibilty, inadaptability, holding nerve system interference), we often cannot make the right choices right away.

While we are subluxated, our ability to access our full capacity is still limited.

We must be gentle with ourselves while healing

We musn’t be hard on ourselves during the healing process, just as we musn’t be unduly harsh to others during this time.

It’s the people who are “painless,” who are disconnected from their bodies, yet who have a sense of dis-ease and dissatisfaction with their lives who are often the most dangerous to themselves and those around them.

Pain as a blessing

People who have pain symptoms at least have the blessings of awareness.  There is a chance at reorganizing their patterning. But this patterning happened over a lifetime. We must have faith in the process and give ourselves the love we need to heal.

It also gives us the chance to grow in ways that we would never have been aware of without the pain.

We need inner connection desperately. That’s what chiropractic offers us.

The state of the profession

Chiropractic has earned the dubious reputation as a pain-reducing modality.

That’s because, sometimes healing reduces pain, and it looks like chiropractic is doing that.

It is actually you that is doing that.

Chiropractic is just helping your nervous system reorganize so that you can do that.

Early on, on a professional level, we lost our way.

Without going into too much history, almost form the beginning, we had egoistic infighting.

We lost faith in one another

Because we lost faith in one another, we allowed our environment — in this case, other health professionals and insurance companies — to define us.

Because of this, many of us, myself included, were and are confused as to the true benefits of what we deliver.

That’s why our messaging is often so confusing.

We are still subluxated as a profession.

Yet, with each adjustment to our profession, with each voice within us communicating the truth, we gain strength in the system that is chiropractic.

When we understand the power of the chirorpactic adjustment, when we start to have faith that we are helping facilitate healing on a profound level, we are better able to communicate with others the real promise of chiropractic.

When we do this, others respond with the innate wisdom that they need this.

The state of the world

On the supermacro level, our planet is crying out in pain. Animals are crying out in pain. Plants, rivers, mountains, are crying out in pain.

Our planet is responding like a body in a dis-ease state.  She’s running a temperature. She is raising her immune system defenses (methane, ancient microbes, new, complex viruses) in order to destroy a pathogen that threatens all her life systems.

In this case, the pathogen is a cancer, a set of cells that is in runaway expansion, that is aggresively and recklessly using up all of the resources that she has evolved over the millenia  that sustain life for the whole.

Guess what — or who — that pathogen is?

The state of humanity

Humanity is crying out in pain. We are cruel with one another and with ourselves. We are in denial of our sickness, and lash out angrily when confronted.

However, thankfully, we are finally waking to the realization of what we are doing, and how we can can repair the damage to ourselves and our posterity.

There is no more time to not know what chiropractic can do for us.  We have to get in front of this crisis now.

Chiropractic is crucial to this process

Chiropractic care is essential to this process of healing.

We have to heal ourselves now so that we have the inner capacity to heal our planetary home.

We have to face who we are, what we are, and our power now.  We have to wield our power wisely now.

Wisdom — healing — sometimes hurts. The pain is sometimes a necessary aspect of our evolution.

Chiropractic is an essential tool for speeding up this healing process, and helping us evolve into the creatures that we need to be in order to fix this hell that we have collectively created.

What ever happened to Aunt Rita?

You know, I never really knew my Aunt Rita well. She lived hundreds of kilometers away from me. I only ever saw her on summer holidays or at weddings.

But my Aunt Rita lived a life of service, one in which she cared for hundreds of children nad families in the school systems and churches of Garden City. She touched many lives whom I only know from witnessing the staggeringly long line of mourners that wrapped around the block of the school gymnasium in which her wake was held.

Aunt Rita died of skin cancer in 1998.

She she didn’t know she had it until pain got in the way of her service. By the time she felt pain, it was already too late for conventional medicine to help her.

In the absence of pain we must be vigilant

Maybe if chiropractic care played an additional role in her life, she would still be here today to serve.

It’s a question that is academic at this point; however, knowning what I know now, I have a pretty good idea that she would.

Now you know like I know

But I didn’t yet know that each chiropractic adjustment builds on the last to help the brain reorganize its patterning in order to give the mind and body the energy and resources to heal and evolve.

But now I do. And you do, too.

Spread the word, the love, and get checked and adjusted. Today.

 

 

 

 

Sometimes Healing Hurts, Pt. 1

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“There is no process that does not require time.” — 6th Chiropractic Principle, Ralph W. Stevenson, D.C.

Did I ever tell you how I came to chiropractic? I actually think I have, but I’ll tell you again.

I was a dumb teenage kid and I got into a lot of car accidents. I walked away from them, but my car did not.

Unlike a car, I have the ability to heal. That’s why I took for granted that I was okay.

But I wasn’t okay. I had jolted my spine into misalignment. I just didn’t know it because I didn’t have pain.

High school gave way to college, and college in North Carolina meant that I had to run two miles in twelve minutes in order to graduate.

“Um…what?”

Two miles in twelve minutes. Running.

That was PE 101. We called it PE run-oh-run.

(I actually just went to my alma mater’s web page to see if this is still the case. Oh my gosh; you kids have it so lucky. You get to do everything from shag dancing to integral yoga to fencing now! https://uncw.edu/shahs/facetofacelabs.html)

In 1984, at 18, I was a pack-a-day smoker who imbibed beer, wine, and double Big Macs and Whoppers on a regular basis. My regular breakfast was Captain Crunch on a pillow of soft-serve ice cream.  My idea of a healthy lunch was chicken salad on toasted white bread. My idea of fun was head-banging at the local live rock bar, watching General Hospital and Mighty Mouse, and playing drinking games with the other meatheads like me.

I most certainly didn’t run.

I barely walked. Needless to say, I had a damn hard time moving my rear-end.

Something began happening to me, though.  My left leg went numb.

It was the darndest thing. There was no sensation in a section of my left lower leg. I could pinch and punch it, but nothing.

I went to see the doctor about it, who recommended an orthopedist, who recommended a physical therapist.

Wrong target. Wrong therapy.

Three times a week for three months, I received electric stim and ultrasound on my leg.  For three months, there was no change.

Then, it was winter break. I went home to New York and all was well.

One day during the trip, I took a bus to the City with my mother. We were going to visit my sister, who managed a Pizzaria Uno on 2nd Avenue at the time.

My back was achy.  I remember it getting worse and worse all the way to the City. By the time we got to the restaurant, my pain was so great that I had to go to the bathroom. I was hyperventilating. Then my legs gave out.

I was face down on the black and white tiles of a Pizzaria Uno bathroom in New York City, 1985. That’s when chiropractic came into my life.

When You First Realize How Much You Need A Healthy Spine

My mother gave me some ibuprophin; eventually, I could stand — wobbly — again. My mother brought me to her chiropractor, who took xrays of my spine.

I had something called an L5 spondylolisthesis. Spon-dee-low-lith-s-thees-iss. It most likely began with a pars interarticularis defect that occurred on L5 left lamina earlier in life. A-pars-inter-arti-cu…

Basically, I had a break in one of my low back vertebrae — might have happened when I was a kid — that contributed to an instability in my low back. Eventually, one of my vertebrae moved a bit forward over my other one.

Here’s what a spondylolithesis looks like.

Thank you, Medtronic, Inc.

I had that picture on the right.

Because my vertebrae was so far out of alignment, the nerves that come out at that level and go down my legs were impinged. Hence the numbness in my leg that the orthopedist and the physical therapist missed.

The problem wasn’t in my leg.  The problem was in my spine.

The break in the vertebrae was an old break. The misalignment occurred over time. My chiropractor let me know that this fix was going to take time.

What kind of time?

Months. Maybe even over a year.

My youth would help me beat it, but I had to clean up my lifestyle if I wanted it to be quicker (unfortunately, I didn’t clean up my lifestyle. It took longer).

Because I was a student in North Carolina, he found a chiropractor for me near the college and referred my case there.

But before I did, because it was scheduled, I went for a follow up to the orthopedist and told him what the chiropractors found. He said, “Chiropractors are quacks. Don’t listen to them. They don’t know what they’re doing. I’m going to set you up for six months of traction.”

Hmmm.

Chiropractic adjustments with people who found the cause of my problem or six-months of traction with someone who didn’t even think to look at my spine, who had made no difference at all before I lay face down on a bathroom floor in New York City?

I said TTFN to my orthopedist and began a nine-month journey of 3 times a week care with my chiropractor.

It wasn’t easy. Some days were more painful than others. Some weeks there was no change. Some weeks were all right.

Eventually, I noticed that sensation had returned to my leg.  Then my spine got stronger and felt better.  I had finally graduated to maintenance care.

Years went by.

Life happened, life happened some more — in fact, 15 years of life happened, and finally I decided that I wanted to be a chiropractor.

That’s a WHOLE other story. More years, more life.

I’ll tell you about it next time.

 

 

How are you stepping into your 2018 goals? Start with last year’s

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How are you stepping into your 2018 goals? Start with last year’s.

Most experts say that we quit our New Years’ resolutions (NYRs) within the month of January.  I think we place a lot of weight – no pun intended – on January 1 being the start of our “whole new me.”  Our bodies don’t really know that it’s January 1. It’s just another day to our health.

So right now it’s mid-December. We’re starting to negotiate with ourselves.

“I’m going to park myself beside this chocolate fountain because starting January 1, it’s a whole new me.”

“I’ll cut back on dairy and grains after January 1 because I’m going to so many family dinners that I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.”

Or even…

“I’m going to join the gym on January 1, but I’m going to start January 15 because it’s going to be so crowded in the first two weeks because of NYRs and I don’t want anyone to see me.”

Look at that last one. WE KNOW that NYRs fail! Yet we still make them! We are the most clever, talented, heartfelt, creative, emotional, and illogical beasts on the planet!

Okay. I’m not going to fight this particular tide. But what I am going to do is to make a suggestion:  If you want to know how to stick to your NYRs this year, you have to start with two things: your “why,” and last year.

Look backward.

Que the time machine. Look back to this time in December of 2016.  Besides the obvious sociopolitical changes (don’t look back at the politics right now; you’re going to turn to salt!), you had an ideal for yourself that you were going to go get!

Did you?

What were your wins?

Mark down your successes. What were your goals for 2017 that you actually made happen? Type or write them down.  What were you able to tick off your list?  What changes did you create that actually came to pass?

Once you get this down, make an inventory of the conditions, both inner and outer, that allowed this change for yourself. How did you do it? Where did you find the strength to make it happen? Who helped you? What helped you?

Now think about these wins. How do they make you feel when you think about them? Accomplished? Proud? Draw on that good feeling and use it for setting your goals for 2018.

Write this down: Success breeds success. The feelings the success you have over the accomplishments of this past year is crucial to creating your success in 2018.

What did you not do?

Take a look at what goals that you failed to accomplish in 2017.

Take a good, loving, honest look at them.

Did you fail because you just stopped trying? Did you set them too big? Did you believe that they could happen? Did they feel too hard to do, or did you feel like you weren’t up to the task?

Maybe it was something else. Did something change in your world that had to take priority? Were you faced with challenges that called your energy away from the task you set for yourself before the challenge?

Maybe it wasn’t time.

Maybe your innate intelligence told you that the goals you didn’t accomplish in 2017 were goals that actually had to be put aside until the proper time.

Maybe you had to take care of a health challenge before you could take on the goal you set for yourself. It might be that you did the right thing by putting it off.  Maybe you and your body just wasn’t ready this year.

In any case, if you are quiet and really give yourself time to listen to that inner voice, your inner voice will be honest with you. Your innate intelligence will deliver the truth if you give it the honor it needs to speak to your inner self.

When you finally come up with the answers, write them them down so you can look at them. This will help you clarify how to craft your goals for 2018, and help you look for pitfalls to your future success.

Above all else, be patient with yourself.

Adopting a lifestyle in which you honor your body and spirit takes mental practice. You can’t be expected to learn to play the piano in two weeks. Give yourself the emotional room to make an honest commitment to your goals.

Have a blessed holiday week!

What I learned about myself at a wine and chocolate tasting event last week

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This is the story of what I learned about myself at a wine and chocolate tasting event last week.

You may know of my fondness for good chocolate. You may even know my fondness for good, red wines, too.

I try to eat and drink them within due bounds.  I also like to choose products that I feel were produced with care and concern. Quality organic, ethical, responsible, fresh, reasonably priced food and drink are always on my watchlist.

So, imagine my delight when I found out about a charitable wine and chocolate tasting event in Amsterdam last week.

For a donation of 25 euro, I could taste my favorite combination of goodness since the discovery of peanut butter and chocolate (yes; chocolate is always in my internal equation).

And I could help people at the same time.

YESSSS!

Good, ethically-created, fair-trade, quality chocolate paired with the best European wines, and all proceeds going to help stop human trafficking.

This event was made just for me.

I finished up work on Wednesday and trotted town to the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam’s bustling Centre district.

I was about ten minutes late (a dreadful habit that is a real crime in Dutch culture, and one in which I am trying to remedy), so they party had started by the time I got there.

I hung up my coat, checked my hair and lipstick in an old-fashioned doorknob, and began to tip-toe my way past a group of people at a slide-show presentation of toward a far door where the festivities must have commenced…

…when I realized that this slide show presentation WAS the party.

There were two wooden tables in the high-ceilinged room with people sitting – empty handed – while a demure gentleman explained the importance of the mission of his company and the derivation of free-trade cacao in the world.

Great expectations

Now, I like a good slide show presentation. Don’t get me wrong.

But in case you missed it, there were two words in the last paragraph that wound up giving me great consternation.

Empty handed.

The adults were sitting like schoolchildren at their seats watching the little man progress from slide to slide, solemnly and meaningfully, while no one had as much as a taste of chocolate or wine in front of them.

A stern looking woman (I swear she was stern looking) directed me to an empty seat at the front of the room, directly in front of the speaker.

Yeah, no one likes that seat.

But I dutifully filled the spot and tried to engage my brain.

It is for a good, just cause…

He was speaking about the cause and the good that his company was doing, the hard efforts and the personal stories, and this was all fine and well…

…except that the perpetual adolescent that lives in my head kept looking furtively around the room and shouting at me, “Where’s the chocolate? Where’s the wine?”

“HUSH!” I told my inner adolescent.  “It’s coming. This is important.  Listen.”

So my inner adolescent sat grumpily behind my carefully constructed expression as the nice, knowledgeable, caring, dedicated man continued his lecture.

20…30…40…50 minutes…

I looked around the room. All the grown-ups there looked like they were pleased to be where they were. They looked almost self-satisfied to me, as if they felt that their attention to this lecture made them better people.

I was not a “Better People.” It was going on 8:00 p.m. and I wanted my chocolate.

My impatience actually shocked me. I even felt guilty, despite the fact that no one else knew my mind.

This was serious business! Human trafficking is no joke! The least I could do was be patient and listen with the intensity that the subject demanded.

That did not stop me from feeling incredibly irritated that I didn’t have my goodies!

I was so embarrassed (for whom??? this was all in my head!) and disappointed with my own irritation!

Which one was it?  Was I greedy or pious? My own absurdity was so incredible to me that I started to laugh at myself. Literally.

“STOP!” I shouted at my inner teenager. I composed my face again and swatted her on her imaginary head. She continued to giggle.

At 8:00 on the dot, (this is the Dutch, after all,) we moved onto the actual tasting.

Okay, good. My inner shame of my inner self could cease. I could forget it.  I won.  I was patient, like a good middle-aged woman, and now the revelries could commence.

I thought we were going to get up and walk into the adjacent room where surely, as I had been dreaming, there were tables full of yummy chocolates, truffles, confections, bon-bons, cakes, cookes, ice cream and the like (I had had a long time to think about this while the man spoke); next to multiple bottles of wine from all of the best vineyards in Europe.

I would grab the first, big, round, wine glass and fill it 1/3rd of the way full with a luscious French red. Only a third of the way full. I didn’t want to appear greedy.  I could always fill it after I drained it with a beautiful Italian red.

This fantasy was never to reveal itself.

This is what happened instead.

The hosts placed a tiny, short, sippy-cup of a glass in front of each of us, along with a full glass of water.

A tray was passed among us, containing small, broken chips off of a chocolate bar.  We were each allowed two of the stukjes of chocolate (stukjes means pieces in Dutch. It’s so much more descriptive of the portions allotted that I thought I would throw it in here).

As we chose our stukjes carefully, another woman came around with a bottle of white wine and dribbled a few drops in each of our glasses.

She literally dribbled, pulled back, thought a moment, and dribbled a bit more. Just a bit.

Priests at Catholic mass serve more wine during communion than we were served at this tasting.

I’m not kidding.

We were to rub the chocolate. We were to smell the chocolate. We were to break the chocolate and listen to the way it “clicked” when it broke. We were to notice the color. We were to roll the stukje around in our mouths and taste its character.  Then, we were to take a sip of wine and notice how it changed in character on our palate and in our nose.

Oh, my gods….

This was an actual tasting.

This was the real deal.  This wasn’t the classy-but-Baucean wine and chocolate party I had dreamed up in my head.  We were being “edjumacated” as to the delicate dance of chocolate and wine pairing.

Do you remember the movie, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Not the Johnny Dep one. The one with Gene Wilder, from years ago.

There was a character named Augustus Gloop. He was the gluttonous child who ignored his host’s verbal celebration of the beautiful chocolate room and began scooping liquid chocolate into his maw from the river of chocolate.

I felt like Augustus Gloop at that moment. I wanted to stick my gullet into a river of chocolate. I had worked my imagination so far out of whack of this particular situation that I was a mental glutton.

Am I alone in this?

I tried to make eye contact with the others in the room, to see if anyone else was trying to quiet their inner thirteen-year-old.

No one seemed in the least perturbed.  One fellow, in fact, thought that I was “making eyes” at him and gave a “flirty look” back at me.

Uh, no…

I broke the tiny chocolate stukje (to examine the “click”).  It flew out of my fingers and ricocheted loudly under the table.

That’s when a few people finally noticed the inner child that is the real me.

Two women sitting across from me on the bench stopped their chocolate stukje sniffing and looked at me.

I widened my eyes, looked around the ceiling, and sucked in my lips to create a deliberate “not me” look that made them burst into laughter.

Finally.  A reasonable, human response.

Coda

After that evening, I decided that  really have some thinking to do about myself.

As much as I like to think of myself as a person who can meet any challenge I set in front of myself, I still have a teenage girl living in my soul.

The lecture, as well as the tasting lesson, were both delivered with love and respect for their subject matters.  I was privileged to attend, and I am grateful that my small donation could help this organization.

I suppose I am a long way from being the perfect person whom I think I should be. In my mind, with my audacious dreams, I feel like the “me” that should be at the helm of these dreams should be a lot more “grown up” than I actually feel.

But I don’t suppose it would help me or anyone if I gave up my dreams because I’m not there yet. Maybe the pursuit will help me be that person.

Or maybe that perfect person really does have a silly, goofy, teenager inside her.  As that tasting showed me, my preconception of the way things should be don’t always match the authenticity of the thing.

As long as my intentions are healthy and my actions considerate, I think I’ll let go of my expectations and accept myself the way I am.

How about you?  Of what expectations do you need to let go?

 

Bring Your Voice to Life

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Your voice is strong.  Bring your voice to life.

I believe there is a place for your passion in this world.

If you think that others have already paved the way, and that your voice doesn’t matter…

LOOK AROUND

For every aspiring healer in the world, be they chiropractor, medical doctor, spiritual director, energy healer, yoga instructor, financial advisor, teacher, space organizer, nutritionist…you get my drift…

…there are THOUSANDS of people just like you who are trying to do the same thing – heal the world – and, despite the many voices speaking words of encouragement and love,

THEY DO NOT HEAR THEM.

It’s because they are waiting for you to deliver your voice – your point of view — to the healing conversation.

It is very easy to get overwhelmed by what is happening around us.  Hate, destruction, manipulation, and greed often seem to have won the spirit of humanity, to have stripped us of all reason and compassion.

IT. IS. NOT. TRUE.

You hold the key to our freedom.

We all do. We each have a key, unique and personal to our nature.

The world needs you to use your key.

IF ALL YOU SEE IS DARKNESS

If you feel like you are fumbling in the darkness, desperately searching to unlock the door to your successful entry into the world of world health and healing,

GET STILL.

Turn off the news.

Turn away from the noise around you and turn inward.

If only for ten minutes a day, listen only to your breath and the sound of your heartbeat.

MAKE YOURSELF AVAILABLE FOR ANSWERS.

When we feel that overwhelm, that’s what we project into the void.

Overwhelm is  not what we want to bring to the world, is it?

I know you want to bring love and healing.

We all do.  And, we all want that for ourselves.

One law of nature that is true, that sees itself realized over and over…

YOU GET WHAT YOU GIVE OUT.

It’s not a new message, but one that bears repeating.  Over, and over, with many words from many different mouths.

The gifts of love, gratefulness, compassion, and forgiveness know no equal at any time. Like the many faces of Divine Light that we wear, our gifts of love are unique for each and every one of us.

Remember: there are billions of people in the world, with billions of points of view.

We all need your voice of love.  We all need your light.

Even if you think your voice is small now, exercise it.

Massage it.

Bring it to life.

Bring it to LIFE.

I love you. I believe in you.

A Lesson For Us All

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The following story illustrates one of two huge reasons why it’s hard to change our eating habits:

  • We talk ourselves into believing we are addicted to them.
  • We actually are physically addicted to them.

In this blog post, I am going to address #1.  I’ll address #2 in a future blog post.

Food is an easy comfort.

All we do is reach for it and consume it.

Food becomes a reward we give ourselves for putting up with, and making it through, yet another dissatisfying day.

it’s the same attachment that some of us have with alcohol and drugs.

To ask ourselves to give up our eating habits is asking us to give up the one pleasure that we allow ourselves.

We are so attached to that addiction that we actually tell ourselves that our eating habit is our choice, and we actually embrace the addiction.

We submit.

We succumb.

We release the struggle for a better way, and we accept — for better and for worse — the way we have.

I want to tell you a story.

It is a terrible story.

Last week, a man I know lost his girlfriend to heart disease.

She was not obese. She was not “obviously” ill.

She was relatively young, she was financially successful, and she died — shockingly and instantly — in her lover’s arms.

Let me fill in the details.

I’m going to change the names.  We’ll call him Paul.  We’ll call her  Joyce.

Paul is 43 years old. He is an acquaintance.

He is in the “acquaintance” camp because he’s kind of unbearable.

He’s judgmental. He makes ugly jokes that are designed to hurt, then he says he didn’t mean anything by it.

He’s sneaky. If he can get away with manipulating a situation to his benefit, he will.

He talks about people behind their back, and then when that person is in front of him, he will shower that person with praise.

We all have our stories…

He has a story about that. He suffered abuse at the hands of an ex-spouse, who took everything – his money, his child, his dignity – and moved to another state.

Since then, he’s become a bit unbearable.

Don’t get me wrong. I am sympathetic.  However, that doesn’t mean that I am willing to suffer his abuse.

So I don’t.

About two years ago, Paul re-met an old lover of his from his college years, Joyce.

Joyce had her own story.

She was smart – too smart for her life choices.

She had once worked as an editor for her local newspaper. The newspaper was purchased and went in a direction in which she didn’t agree, so she moved on.

Eventually, she got a job that paid very well but was extremely unrewarding.  She was the director of a bunch of managers at a company whose mission she disagreed with.

She made a lot of money but was never satisfied with her life.

She had had long-term lovers but never married. She was sensitive about what people thought about her, but she didn’t hesitate to tell others what she thought they were doing wrong with their lives.

If you tried to engage her in discussion, she accused you of being insulting. If you tried to respond to one of her criticisms, she told you that you were being defensive.

Joyce and Paul had one thing in common.  Food.

They each had allergies. He has allergies to dairy and wheat. She had allergies to nuts and legumes.  For their allergies, they listened to their respective doctors and were on a great deal of many different drugs.

They also both hated vegetables and they both loved sugar.

So, they spent a great deal of their time and energy together searching for and sharing sugary, starchy foods that met their allergic profiles. When they ate meat, it was processed meat, as cheap as they could find.

That’s actually quite a niche, isn’t it? That’s not easy – finding sugary, starchy foods that are dairy free, wheat free, nut free, and legume free, while at the same time avoiding fresh vegetables. That takes effort!

Neither smoked; that’s one good thing.

However, neither exercised. They didn’t even like to walk around the neighborhood. They drove to the corner store.

They complained of this ache and that ache, of this or that trip to the doctor.

They complained that the doctor could never “find anything,” and would take the pain killers that were prescribed.

But, whenever I tried to tentatively suggest natural, lifestyle changes in answer to Paul’s complaints, he would chuckle at me and say, “I know that’s what you do for a living, but I don’t want to be bothered; and sorry, but I just don’t believe in that stuff.”

So, we didn’t see much of Paul after he started dating Joyce.  When they were together at a party or a function, we chatted politely for a few minutes and moved on.

On the few times we saw Paul when they weren’t together, Paul would grumble about Joyce.

He would complain and tell unflattering stories about her habits.  Afterward, he would declare, “Well, it doesn’t matter. She’s as good as I’m getting. But I’m sure as hell never getting married again. She can forget that!”

It is difficult being close to people like that. It is not emotionally rewarding.

Time went on.

I haven’t seen Paul – or Joyce – for the better part of a year.

Last week, it was reported to me that Paul and Joyce were in the kitchen, putting together a meal.  According to Paul, they were having an argument. “Nothing out of the ordinary,” he reported. “We were just pecking at each other, you know,” when she stopped short and grabbed her chest.

He ran to her and caught her in his arms, just as she was falling.  They both tumbled to the floor.

She died in his arms.

She was 42.

Friends say that Paul is a wreck right now.

The last thing I understand he said to a group of people he visited was, “I wasn’t very nice to her. I wish I had treated her better.”

Was it her eating habits that killed her?

Given that she had seen doctors on multiple occasions to get evaluated for “serious diseases,” I could guess yes.

But I would hazard a more nuanced guess that her eating habits were only part of the story.

You see, food habits, like any habit that hurts us, are symptoms of bigger problems.

Those problems are inside.  They require self-reflection and a willingness to see oneself honestly.

So, the way we relate to food is often a reflection of the way we feel about the way we live.

You never know when the result of a life not-well-lived it’s going to happen.  But in retrospect, you can always say that you saw it coming.

You never know when you’re going to die, but you can often have a direct influence on its length and quality by intentionally living well.

I am 51.  These things are becoming very clear to me in my own life.

As Claire Fitzpatrick, private citizen, I have been to too many funerals of forty- and fifty-something friends and acquaintances to not notice these patterns.

As a chiropractor and nutritionist

I have seen people turn themselves around.

It is the most gratifying thing in the world to know that I have been a small part of their successes.

However, when I have a patient in my office who wants something I don’t offer – a “quick fix” – someone I can’t reach, someone who is a lot like Paul or Joyce, I shake my head and sadly move on.

I can’t help anyone who doesn’t really want help.

I can’t “walk the walk” for them.

Sometimes, the patient isn’t like Paul or Joyce.

Sometimes, the patient is someone who lives with, and takes abuse from, people like Paul and Joyce — someone who has no kind, loving support.

Sometimes, the patient is sweet, giving, lovely, shy, and lonely. Food is their intimate friend.

Sometimes, the patient is sad, depressed, anxious, and suspicious; someone who want to believe in themselves but ultimately sabotages themselves with excessive food (and, very often, with drink).

Sometimes, they want something better for themselves, but they don’t try.

Or, when they do try, when it becomes emotionally difficult to sustain the effort (as it always does), they lack the will to continue and they quit.

These are the cases that break my heart.

I have all kinds of tools to give. I can show how to use them.

For instance, as of this writing, I am hosting a 28-Day Rapid Reset Challenge (click here for details).

But ultimately, any tool I offer will fail if it is not used.

 

I’m not a psychologist.

I am a chiropractor.  I’m sort of a “neuropsychologist” for the body.

However, I do work with psychologists, and I recommend them often. We tend to see a lot of the same people.

You know, I have seen this over and over: Physical pain is worse when we have emotional pain.

Pain — physical and emotional — is frightening and isolating, and so it often becomes part of one’s self-identity.

Physical discomfort is easier to manage and eliminate if one has faith in oneself.

I wish I could reach into your heart and fill you with self-love and belief.

We walk beside you as you heal; but ultimately, we all walk the inner road by ourselves.

The best I can do is be here, continue to tell you how much I believe in you; and that, when you’re ready, I am honored to help.

Sometimes Being There is Enough

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One of the reasons I chose chiropractic as a profession is that I like to fix things.

I think I got this from my mother. Whenever I asked a question, she had an answer.

Sometimes, it was a wrong answer. But to her, that wasn’t the important thing. The important thing was to have an answer. To be of service.

She was letting me know she was there.

Bless her heart: I don’t think she knew she was doing it.

I think her mother also had an answer for everything.  I didn’t have the privilege of knowing her mother very well, but the family stories suggest that answers flowed like water from MeMa O’Grady.

It was her way of showing she cared.

Being of service has always been a strong calling in my family, on both sides. We have a rich tradition of spiritual leaders, former police officers, writers, health care providers, volunteer caregivers, teachers, veterans, artists, musicians, etc…in our family.  The O’Gradys and the Fitzpatricks have a history of service, and of wanting to serve.

Of course, I adopted the habit. Being of service drives everything I do.

So I know that of which I speak when I say, you don’t always have to fix the problem.

The important thing is not always the answer.

The important thing is being there.

My patients brought that lesson home to me over the years.

When I first got into practice, I thought I had to know everything. That I had to have all the answers.

The first time I was able to bring myself to say, “I don’t know,” was a huge relief.

Sometimes the subluxation — a subtle, physical interference to the nervous system — manifests because of an emotional block, like the feeling that we are facing our challenges alone.

Chiropractic is like that. When the nervous system is free to express itself, sometimes what happens along with the physical release is a revelation.

When that happens, I have learned that my place is to witness and hug.

 

We don’t know how to fix everything.

None of us do.

None of us really know what its like to walk in our neighbors’ shoes. None of us truly understand the perspective of our children, our partners, our parents. None of us can fix all of the others’ problems.

We all go through transitions that are painful, sometimes irreversibly so.  It is the way of things.

Some things cannot be fixed, even if we desperately want to fix them.

Sometimes, all that’s required of us is our presence, to witness and to let the one in pain know that we are there.

Be love. Be there.

I know this message will reach someone who needs it today, right now.

Trust me.

Be love. Just be there.