I’m having a shakti crash after an eventful week. In this context, I define shakti as the life force energy as I experience it within my physical body.  When I say a shakti crash, I refer to what I experience as a result of an overload of sensory input.   Much of my personal time is spent alone in silence and I am someone who likes a lot of empty space, a lot of room between my molecules.  I speak with dozens of people every day and can feel easily overloaded with voicing and listening.  I like a lot of thought time after an experience in order to fully grok it.  I like a lot of still time in between physical exertion times.  I like slow, easy, quiet time spent with friends appreciating The Now.  When I don’t get the quiet downtime, like when I choose to instead hang with fun friends doing adventurous things for extended periods of time, afterwards I get what I call a shakti crash.  

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I’ve made an appointment with a health professional and I made up a list of all the vitamins and supplements I take so they have it in my file.  I’m narcissistic enough to think you might want to see it too 🙂
…. ABOUT ME:  I eat a mostly unprocessed diet with the occasional can of soup, pasta, crackers or bread a couple of times a month.  Otherwise it’s chicken, fish, some cheese, some tofu, veggies.  Potatoes are my main starch. I keep my fat grams about 40-60 grams a day, no butter, I use Earth Balance.
I eat no red meat, no pork since 2005.
I had my gall bladder out in 2004 after 2 bouts with gallstone pancreatitis.
I got another pancreatitis attack a year later and learned to change my diet, lower my fats, start cooking healthy and stop eating lumberjack quantities of fried meats and bread. My website at www.goddessgrub.com is all about my healthy eating journey.  These are the supplements I take each day for past year or so: Continue reading →

No, not mine

I pride myself on letting my facial hair grow and keeping it trimmed so I don’t look like the bearded lady at the circus. Hair is there for a purpose and I like facial hair on me.  Not all my friends do and when we’re in person, some are quick to point out I could use a tweeze.   I just laugh and let them know I grow it on purpose.  Hey, the hair is blonde and smooth and fine, so you have to be right in my face to even see it.  A good friend and spiritual brother is going through several austerities right now.  An austerity is, among other things, an extreme practice undertaken during an ascetic or monastic period of one’s life.  We share a spiritual practice, so when he did a head shaving, I cut my bangs.  When he removed his beard, I got out the Nair and removed mine.  For a month. I know that sounds like no big deal to most, but I’m very into symbolic practices and sharing this was important.   Continue reading →

Have you ever told a white lie? You are going to love this, especially all of the ladies who bake for church events:  Alice Grayson was to bake a cake for the Baptist Church Ladies’ Group in Tuscaloosa , but forgot to do it until the last minute. She remembered it the morning of the bake sale and after rummaging through cabinets, found an angel food cake mix & quickly made it while drying her hair, dressing, and helping her son pack for scout camp.  When she took the cake from the oven, the center had dropped flat and the cake was horribly  disfigured and she exclaimed, “Oh dear, there is not time to bake another cake!”

This cake was important to Alice because she did so want to fit in at her new church.  Being inventive, she looked around the house for something to build up the center of the cake. She plunked in a roll of toilet paper and covered it with icing. Not only did the finished product look beautiful, it looked perfect. And, before she left the house to drop the cake by the church and head for work, Alice woke her daughter and gave her some money and specific instructions to be at the bake sale the moment it opened at 9:30 and to buy the cake and bring it home. Continue reading →

Just another lucky day

Friday the 13th has always been a lucky day for me. Maybe that’s because as a teenager I went through that rebellion stage where I wanted to think and do the opposite of everything I was told.  That included making Friday the 13th be a lucky day for me.  I see now that by me doing that, I was each Friday the 13th constantly looking for the positive aspects of the day.  I was anticipating days before wondering what kind of good things would come my way.  So was it really my lucky day, or did it just become my lucky day due to my belief that it was and my expectation that it would continue?  Either way, I won. Continue reading →

A male friend and a fellow musician were playing music one day and I stayed in the room to listen.   After a favorite tune, he joked, “How does it make you feel when I sing love songs about other women?”  I smiled and said, “She was our angel since she brought us together. That can’t bother me.  Plus, if we’re really All One, what does it matter who is who?”

I got an email last week on the topic that I get the most inquiries about:  Law of Attraction — why am I getting what I’m getting and how do I attract what I want instead? The answer is simple but may take some fine tuning until you really understand what you’re doing and why.   Domino writes: I live in San Diego.  I am trying to use the law of attraction to get men to stop approaching me for sex.   I say affirmations several times a day:  “I am left alone when I am walking. I am left alone when I go shopping. It’s easy to say no. My boundaries are respected. Men have clean thoughts about me.”

Andrea responded:  Domino, with all due respect, these particular affirmations will not help you attract what you think you are attracting (or not.)  The thing most people get wrong about law of attraction is not being clear on what they are thinking and thus attracting.  With the above 5 sentences, the topic is clearly “I want to avoid being attacked.”  The focus is “walking alone, men overstepping boundaries due to their unclean thoughts.”  So just be aware that right now you’re a magnet for that.   Continue reading →

I just watched a show about teens with social anxiety: they don’t want to go in public as they think everyone is looking at them and judging them, or that everyone is talking about them behind their back.  Whether it’s youth or just lack of life experience, what they don’t realize is that nearly everyone feels that way.  They also don’t realize that everyone is so stuck in their own little thought bubble of self absorption and fear, that they’re not looking at YOU anyway, they are staring down at their toes the same as you are, avoiding eye contact for dear life.  God forbid we actually look at each other and acknowledge each other.  I counsel with so many people the past 20+ years that I see patterns in behavior that others don’t get to see.  I average maybe 50 people each month with an hour to tell me about their most important concern.  When I hear 5 or 10 people having similar detailed experiences, I begin to see the pattern.  And I see a lot of patterns in behavior.  It’s one reason I’m good at my job: if I can experience enough of something that it enables me to see patterns within it, that allows me to see the bigger picture.  The bigger picture here is that maybe 90% of us have social anxiety and we all think we’re the only one.  So instead of spending valuable time head tripping over what someone else is thinking, try instead to get out in public, smile and make eye contact, help others feel at ease.  Life is too short to waste it stuck within our four walls alone and unfulfilled.  It’s not always about you.  Try letting it be about someone else for a change.

Sessions with Andrea

My pal Sheila Rindge

Let’s say some prayers for Sheila Rindge, recovering from a stroke on December 19th, 2011.  She’s doing well, yesterday out of the hospital and transferred to HealthSouth Sea Pines on Babcock for rehab.  She can’t do the phone yet but she’s getting better.   I visited her yesterday – she looks good! She’s in good spirits and chatty, of course it’s that in-between/unknown language right now but hey, it’s not stressing her out!  She knows it’ll pass, she just rolls her eyes and shrugs and chatters on.  I laid on the bed and hugged on her while she ate dinner. She’ll be up in no time.  She’s fully aware, can understand, just not speak well yet and loses the word, no facial paralysis, right arm and leg down right now but 4+ hours of physical therapy a day will get it all back working in no time.  No calls obviously but go visit her if you know her.  Her physical therapy is noon to 4pm so visit after that. I was there at 5:30 and dinner had just arrived. It’s a trip feeding herself with the wrong hand laying in bed but she’s getting the hang of it and her spirits are high and light.  Their office office has moved to 1601 Airport Blvd, Suite 1 that says  “Disc Jockeys” on their parking spaces.  I’ll bet husband Dr. David could use a hot meal at lunch or near end of day, just saying… (he’s a vegetarian but cheese is ok.)  I’m sure he’d appreciate a quick drop off while he’s busy getting the new office ready for clients.  Prayers for both of them!

The last two months I’ve been up to my ears in a writing project that has taken me away from this blog.   I’ve been pouring first fruits into the project instead.  I had a pretty active flare up of the old carpal tunnel since I was doing magazine layout at the same time, but hands are back to normal again.  It never lasts long.  I’m such a glass house kind of person, sharing personal stuff all over Facebook and my blog, that when I get a project that I can’t talk about, it blocks out one of your windows into my world.   And there’s usually such interesting stuff going on in that room that it’s hard to not talk about it! Continue reading →