Pets and Spirits

On Helping Your Dying Animal(and Updated 7-24-20): On InsightPV.org in the Time of Covid and Protests

https://www.daniellemackinnon.com/rainbow-bridge/how-to-comfort-your-dog-who-is-dying/

Dear Folks, #BlackLivesMatter and let’s give to the naacpldf.org legal defense fund. A statement for Covid-19, BLM and Indigenous Peoples: Immunity=Mutiny!

Some of the recommended Anti-Racist books:‘White Fragility.’ Wow just wow. Also, ‘Why are the Black kids sitting in the cafeteria all alone?’, ‘How to be Anti-Racist’ by Ibram X. Kendi, ‘White Supremacy and Me’ workbook & ‘Why I stopped talking about race to white people’. 

Danielle McKinnon has an absolutely amazing talk on going through hospice/dying & a little on how to handle it after with your dog(very transferable to cats as well). Zoopix App helped me over the death of my cat(below). Thank you, Finn & Diego the Adventure Cat. 🐱🐕

First, Ram Dass slipped in to my photos here with a very funny story about the many vehicles of awakening! 

Please click the link up top for Danielle’s article. I also read ‘You Are Psychic’ by Pete Sanders which includes his healing technique, as well as other books like ‘Mind Over Medicine’ and ‘Because Internet’ on modern linguistics.

Email me if you want to join our last-Sundays book group. Finishing ‘How to a Talk to Your Pet’ by Gail Thackray, an English woman who lives in LA, including some guided imagery I will read and we’re starting ‘Beyond Words’ by Carl Safina. Starts out with Dolphins 🐬 yay! The animal with a four chamber brain 🧠 !

My personal book list goes on(privacy used to be a civil right and might still be).

📚 Topic: Animal Communication(including ‘Animal Talk’ by Penelope Smith)!

InsightPV.org is responding to first Covid-19, the ensuing grave financial losses; now...to the horrible lynching of George Floyd(not a new thing) and how we respond. We have to move from being a fear-based society to being a love-based society. Marianne Williams was/is right. 

Our school continues to have wonderful teachers: Rebecca Bradshaw(former guiding teacher) a Climate Change activist and therapist, Manny Mansbach, Jean Esther, Michael Grady and Tara Mulay to name a few. Dawn Scott, Harrison Blum, Nick Boutros....

Trellis Scepter is the new President of the Board and we are so glad to welcome 🙏🏽 him! These teachers have such wisdom and many have therapeutic background or practices.

Below is my cat trying to find South African Communicator Anna Breytenbach the author of ‘Diablo’.

The late Ram Dass’s(Richard Alpert’s) mystical teacher Neem Karoli Baba: Enlarge! To me he seems to be saying, “What are you doing?” He was a hypnotic medium and great teacher in India. 

 

Re: InsightPV.org Saying Hail and Farewell to Our Guiding Teacher AND Miracle of Love in Yoga

Dear Reader,

Today is Rebecca Bradshaw’s last day as Guiding Teacher at insightpv.org and she has done a really good job of speaking and scheduling great visiting teachers!

She will be missed and the celebration is tonight. If I had played I would have sung, Heart’s “Dog and the Butterfly”(keywords: “She had to try.”) or possibly Sheryl Crow’s “Always on your Side.” She has free talks on dharmaseed.org that really rock!

Anyway, psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher Jean Esther recently did a great parable, on weeds and detaching from our attachments, that was hilarious(long story short), and the week before: Dawn Scott spoke about moderating reactivity. She is a wonderful trainee in the 4-year Teacher Training at IMS Barre, MA.

All wonderful teachers there and a great chance to become part of a community!

In other news I am so blessed to have the very professional and also maternal(and younger:) Sara Rose Page visit me twice a week for Yoga class mid-mornings. Yesterday a totally awesome thing happened. We were doing Savasana at the end to OM music, she played the brass bell my husband had bought for Yoga 🧘‍♀️, and so beautifully, to wake me up....

Then we faced each other in mixed lotus and said our Om’s. I usually run out of breath before she does and although I sing, her Om is stronger; but just as I dropped out I heard an overtone of a Fifth above coming from over my right shoulder way up high, like the golden light of an angel singing. I’m not particularly into golden light as it always reminds me of something else golden(LOL)

and when was the last time I called on angels, whoever/wherever/whatever they are? But I asked her, “Has your class ever been so in tune that you heard overtones?” She was not sure.

I’m not sure we were even all that perfectly in tune(!) but feel free to comment, “Have you ever been so in tune you heard overtones?” I felt as though it might be consolation for the first grey day of October! 

We feel that artists tend to be clairvoyant and musicians, well they tend to hear!

Yoga on Valentine's with Cat Looking On PS: Updated with correct link

Sara Rose does house-calls as well as some of the greatest teaching at yoga-sanctuary.com

Disclaimer: She is my teacher and I'm partial but I've done NYC Yoga/Pilates since the 80's.

 

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Penelope Smith: Free Animal Communication Demo in a Google + Hangout

Looking Through Those Eyes(of Wonder)

Advice from Sara Rose on Facing the Unkown at yoga-sanctuary.com

Today our fearless leader quoted another fearless leader, "Keep showing up & Keep at it!"

Yoga was always about sitting: basically a preparation for getting into meditation posture.

What we practice today isn't that ancient(although some I recognize from decades ago surely) and we are still making it up! Some themes were interweaving & yet fully independent.

Today we did the Hoberman Sphere and I believe there's no Sanskrit name for it! Wow.

We ended with a prelude to putting your leg over your shoulder. Seriously, magical class! And such a nice, grounded studio with picutre windows! I could see Blue sky with clouds from lying just in Sivasana.

End of Year(12/31) pose was Vasistasana Regular and  here's Full Vasistasana(soft-porna):

Right Here, Right Now! By Jesus Jones

Was almost a campaign song in 2008 but was not picked. Could this be the year?

Zan singing, "Right Here, Right Now!" Karaoke 

I've been working on this, this week. Also last Monday pleased to see a candidate come out to Pharrell Williams' "Happy", In so doing he referenced a positive viral video!

Happy by Pharrell Williams Also you can't know Happy without knowing Tacky:

Animal Communication Keynote Re-Revised June 1, 2017 Updated 7-4-17

I had considered giving a Google Hangouts workshop today but failing that here is the Keynote!

Dear Readers, Many clients have asked how they can be taught how to communicate with animals. This talk was meant for Monday May 2d at a small school in Chicopee and we only had an hour but I was out with a weird cold for the speech. I recast it though so you can read it. It's very simple and I saved a few secrets here so people will hopefully still want to contact me! The PDF is below! Thank you for your patience!

Download Animal Communication Saturday 10-4 July 2018 with possible follow-up Saturday 10 AM

Hope James Bowen doesn't mind me using this. There he is with "A Streetcat Named Bob"(Book).Gwen Cooper also writes the most literarily satisfying books about Cats! 

Update: Tina Bekina thought, rightly so, that maybe the Burmese Vipassana prayer might be different for different people. In my Keynote I use Sharon Salzberg's interpretation: "May we be Safe, Happy, Healthy and Live at Ease. " Tina suggests, "Happiness and Confidence". Not sure it was in reaction to this Keynote or not. But it does resonate with the part of me that feels more alive when physically active. As I do with my cat!

As always, these phrases can be changed to suit oneself and more can be added.

The geat teacher Sharon Salzberg once suggested a mantra for walking a city sidewalk:

"May I be peaceful, may I be happy. May you be peaceful, may you be happy."

 

On Prana, the breath and the Sanskrit "Porna": We Are All Enough!

Usually my husband and I study twice a week with Sara Rose Page who runs Yoga Sanctuary.

http://yoga-sanctuary.com

We almost always used to start with a big deep breath in the lungs for me to move it form the singer's belly all the way up to the lungs(Yoga Sanctuary teachers in Thorne's Marketplace on Main St. Northampton MA are great singers as well and Rose plays the singing bowl masterfully). PS: but keep shoulders down and relaxed.

Once I was alone with Sara and we did this and she said, "Yes, Prana, the breath, the full breath." (I am compressing this and meant to write this months ago). "But you know also the Sanksrit word, 'porna'? It means the fullness of a thing unto itself." Not the philosophically workmanlike, "sufficient unto itself" or something ontological(or is it?), but just fullness and enough-ness.

I leave it to others who ask why many people don't feel like they're "enough" or porna in the first place! The Dalai Lama said Eastern monks don’t have the same type of  self-hatred that many Americans seem to.

Update on Sara Rose: Best Yoga Teacher Ever!

Yesterday Sara did amazing work on me. She thought I breathed too much in my belly. And that's what singers do. So she held me with both hands on each side of my solar plexus as my back arched over backwards and I felt😂 1) "Stop that thing. That worldly thing you're thinking of.  Stop.  I got you." I breathed there. 2) She held my rib cage a little higher, near the heart and I felt, "Oh we're getting to a slightly relaxed, more altered state. Love love love and moving on up." 3) Finally the upper rib cage she held: the upper lung where she was encouraging me to breathe more deeply. I'm like, "This is it. This is the full breath."

Yoga Sanctuary

"Don't Weigh Your Self-Esteem." A sign in the cafeteria

When I spend time with very athletic women, I sometimes ask them when, and how often they weigh themselves. I feel like it has psychological significance. And the two most fit women I know say never. Maybe once a year at their annual physical. Our Yoga teacher said that somewhere like a women's college cafeteria there had been a sign saying, "Don't weigh you self-esteem." So the answer of whether and how we weigh ourselves is gonna vary for everyone but that's a nice koan.

PS: Off-Topic: Another nice koan my dad says about skiing is, "Never take the last run."

"Feeling Gratitude" from Yoga Sanctuary website

I am trying to learn this and I thought you might enjoy reading, too: "What are you grateful for in your life? If you take some time to pause, to soften, and just feel, what is there? At first, don’t just dig around for the “good” stuff, but listen to what is speaking most loudly to you right now. What else is there? Softening and making space for all that is real for you is a profound practice. It is the real Yoga because it is about connecting to yourself, and that connection takes courage. Yet from that authentic connection springs the possibility to heal what needs healing, to release what isn’t serving you, to soften your heart and feel kindness towards yourself. And out of this, all the places in your life that are bright and good, that are beautiful and sweet will show themselves too. And the more you keep making space for all of it, the more gratitude for all those good things will shine. And grow. " http://yoga-sanctuary.blogspot.com/2013/11/giving-thanks.html