Salve

December 19 – Healing
What healed you this year? Was it sudden, or a drip-by-drip evolution? How would you like to be healed in 2011? (Author: Leoni Allan)

What has healed me this year, still working on it, actually, is compassion... applied to myself. I started the project a long while ago...while at an all day metta retreat.

I was not enjoying the day ... the teacher was working my last nerve. But, I recognized that uncomfortable generally means making progress. All day, I rewrote the metta statements that we were given. Working on the premise that I needed to take issues that plagued me most and turn them into positive statements. Statements that I could remember and apply as salve as needed.

We alternated between sitting and walking meditation. I abhor walking meditation. I usually can just not get into it ... I worry about falling and get distracted by every sound and sight and just can't keep focus. Not so that day.

During the sitting meditation, I would test out different statements and write down the one that seemed right just before heading out to the walking meditation. During the walking, I would just repeat the statements, fiddling with the words if they were not just right. I also arranged them in alphabetical order by verb so that if I could not remember them, I could think through the letters...

At the end of the day, I had four statements that were at the heart of breaking old agreements and making new ones:
May I acknowledge abundance.
May I allow love to flow to and from me.
May I embrace my gifts and talents.
May I feel beautiful and strong.

Running and working out in general were also helpful. It was most effective to repeat these while I was running, though I also found that I could use them when the gremlins, as Andrea call them, started up the negative chatter.

At times I stalled with this practice, but, for the most part, this is a winning strategy. I realized, at some point, that I needed some new statements, which I created ... but I think these four are still the most powerful.

The phrases often can sometimes have more power when I send them to other people or to the world. Sometimes I direct them at the people who appear to be causing me distress ... tailoring the words to fit their personalities. I know that, in fact, it is my brain that is causing me the distress, but by redirecting my negative thoughts towards people to some positive energy, it lifts the discomfort and the fog...

I don't know if this makes sense to anyone out there, but it really does feel like a salve for me: for my soul and for my heart, and I hope, in a small way, for the universe.

Blessed be...

[Photos: July 2010, leaving the Cabin, Fort Jones (ish), CA]