Journal

My friend reached out to me a few years ago. She wanted a Tarot deck for her precocious daughter’s eleventh birthday. She was having a difficult time finding a deck that didn’t feature, in her words, skinny European looking fairy people. “That’s easy”, I told her immediately, “she’ll love the Wild Unknown deck. I’ve been looking at it for ages. There are no people, its hand drawn, the color is sparse and painted with water colors. There are animals, and the impact is visceral.” On my birthday which followed a couple of weeks after her daughter’s, my friend surprised me with my own Wild Unknown deck. I was beyond thrilled to receive the deck that I had been coveting and touched to be a part of the long-standing tradition of being gifted with a deck.

Our world is made up of vibration and frequency which is why when we hear a singing bowl, we are instantly thrown into a meditative state. In our society we struggle with the fine line of balance. We attempt to balance work, personal life, and our personal priorities, but in the end, most people feel exhausted and burnt out. After all this stress, how can we recalibrate? Listening to the soothing and meditative sound of the singing bowls! These beautiful bowls emit vibration and frequency that helps our brains downshift into a theta state. In this state, healing is possible while creating a calm and centered presence. Since we are often so far removed from being in a grounded state, we forget just how different it can feel from our routine lives.

In this episode Dave and Mimi talk about what it's like being an empath, including health, healing, relationships, and managing energy. Dave Markowitz is a medical intuitive, and the best selling author of 3 books on empaths, including his latest book 'Empathipedia: Healing for Empaths and Highly Sensitive Persons'. Dave will be at East West Bookshop October 5th, 6th, & 7th offering a lecture, workshop, and healing sessions.

The summer before my final year of graduate school, my classmates and I went on a ten-day wilderness retreat high in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. The central purpose of this retreat was to prepare for and take a three-day backcountry solo. On our own, we were to each find a spot in the wilderness where we were to stay without food or shelter for three days and three nights. Before I left on my solo, I worried that the lack of food might interfere with my decision-making. I worried that I might have a panic attack or get sick. Conversely, I imagined that the experience could be relaxing, that I might even feel bored. In reality, once I was alone in the wilderness I did not feel bored or have a panic attack. I felt pretty sure I was going die from a bear or mountain lion attack. I had no house or tent; no weapons, no fire; I had nothing to protect myself. I was totally unprepared for how scared and vulnerable I felt in the wild. I was amazed by how quickly all concerns of my former life disappeared as my focus honed in on survival. How could I save myself?

Change is afoot. Have you noticed? In the Pacific NW, we’re moving from a record dry summer (third driest in a century) to days of drenching rain. The temps have dropped dramatically and the smoke has finally cleared, metaphorically and literally. I’m an intuitive reader at EastWest, and after several months of retrograde planets and their influence: clients feeling stuck, relationships gone awry, and key projects on hold -- the heaviest retrogrades are in their last stages or finally done. So many clients feel they are in deep transition, launching major projects in new directions. Credit a beautiful earth-sign trine on the Pisces New Moon on August 26 for people beginning to move ahead in real ways.

My father died suddenly and without warning. On the morning of his death, I was expecting him to walk through our front door at any moment. My bags were packed and waiting on the couch to travel with him to Boston for an A.R.E. program. As I played on the floor with my children, I remember feeling surprised that he and my mother were a bit late. Instead my mother opened our door alone, her eyes like I’d never seen them. They’d been walking up our driveway, he stopped and bent over; he stood and took a step. He started to fall and my mother caught him. His eyes were already closed. He was already gone.

In the early 1980s, while working in the Personnel Department of a large organization, I noticed a paperback book that had been left on my desk. Scanning its pages, I found it to be a book about developing personal power. Since life has no real purpose, the author stated, we should give it meaning by making it a game of power and supremacy. Those who wield the most power at the time of death, he claimed, win the game of life.

I can't recall seeing so many masks in Seattle as I saw over the past month, but it has been two summers in a row now where pollutants posed a serious health risk. In a previous blog for the store, Amanda Moreno asked a poignant question: Is this the new normal? Perhaps, or perhaps not, but with fall quickly approaching, rather than complain, we can take this as an opportunity to be thankful for some ‘normal’ weather. The rain, as MIT noted, cleanses the air, and without digging deep into the science of forestry, one has to believe that with less rain, Seattle may have seen some fires of its own, instead of just the ash and smoke from its neighbors. What's critical to realize, however, is that Seattle is just another piece of geography.

Have you been finding much of that the past few days? Honest question. You might have been! As an inner state amidst chaos? As an outer state while storms rage inside? What about at this moment? How do you feel deep down at your core? Take a deep breath or two and tune in for a second. Hypothetically speaking, if we just take a Libra New Moon at face value, we might say the focus is on peace, equilibrium, diplomacy, balance… seeing the other side… relationships… beauty.

"September will be a contentious month on many fronts from the personal to the political and everything in between. Spiritual growth comes by way of grit and dedication to those values that speak to honesty and kindness. These two values will be be hard to find or fathom in some cases, so we must be centered in our spiritual core and vigilant in our search for how to make positive contributions to change that honor the integrity of self and the planet."

Reiki Is a Japanese technique for stress reduction and relaxation that also promotes healing. It is administered by ‘laying on hands’ and is based on the idea that an unseen life-force energy flows through us and is what causes us to be alive. If one’s life force energy is low, then we are more likely to get sick or feel stress. If it is high energy we are more capable of being happy and healthy.The word Reiki is made of two Japanese words – REI which means “God‘s wisdom or Higher Power”, and KI which means “life force energy”. So Reiki is actually spiritually guided life force energy.

During my high school years and all the way through college, I considered myself an agnostic at best, and an atheist at worst. I wanted to believe in a higher power, but my outlook on life was so dim that it didn’t seem possible for a loving, intelligent deity to exist behind the suffering we see every day. It wasn’t until I went to India that my perspective began to change. I began to see the possibility of my higher self, the possibility that there could be more to life than capitalism. So forceful was my experience in India that it was no longer a question of believing whether or not something was out there, but a question of understanding what that something was.