Thursday, November 20, 2008

Beauty is a Feeling!!

Live Green Live Free!!

This is our Eco spot movie, Live Green, Live Free!! We love inspiring others to live energy efficiently, self sufficiently and GREEN!!

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Living My Dreams















Rise and Shine, another day on the hill of dreams.

I had always dreamed about living in the mountains, surrounded by pine trees and majestic views, living off the land and being self sufficient. In my twenties I read The Mother Earth News magazine and read books on living off the land. I thought about ways I could escape the big city and create my most beautiful dreams in some kind of wilderness.

My Fiance and I have both had the same dreams of living self sufficiently, energy efficiently AND living for less money, so together we are continually creating and evolving our Eco Green Lifestyle with the lowest overhead possible.

We live totally off the power grid, heat our home for free with our wood burning central boiler system. We cool our home for free with our solar powered evaporator cooler. We pump our water up from a solar powered well. We use Radiant Flooring under our cement slab floor which heats our home with the heat from our wood burning central boiler. We also use solar tubes for back up water heating. These are just a few energy and money saving things that we do here. We also grow an organic garden that we maintain even through the fall and winter. This greatly decreases our food bill.

This is an ongoing story and a project in process, but this is what we have created so far on our hill of dreams.



This is our cement Geodesic dome home from space. Its architecture was designed by Buckminster Fuller, the original designer of the geodesic dome and fashioned after the carbon molecule. We ordered the dome kit from American Ingenuity Domes in Florida and had it delivered all the way to the Pacific Northwest. The individual triangles came complete with cement outer layer, layer of wire mesh, 7 inches of sytrofoam and the inner layer of sheet rock. The dome is rated R-45 for insulation, which makes the dome excellent for temperature retention.

Stay tuned...the Dream continues...

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

My Sacred Dance Experience

This is a little page on my experience with Sacred Dance, one of my Spiritual Tools. This dance has helped me to integrate body, mind and soul.



Sacred Dance was and still is a form of Hindu Spiritual practice, integrating both body, mind and spirit.



A wonderful tool for centering, grounding and balancing...



The power of Sacred Dance...integrating the mind, intention and our physical bodies. The dance becomes quite profound and expands consciousness.

I learned this Hindu Sacred Dance years ago from a very dear Goddess friend and Yoga teacher/mentor. This dance is very beautiful and very centering. I found that the more I practiced this dance, the more inner freedom and connection I felt with myself and the Divine energy within and without me. The dance consists of mudras, or hand positions, that represent ancient symbols of meaning, like the lotus flower unfolding in all its Beauty and evolution. I love doing this dance in powerful places in nature like in front of the crashing waves of the Ocean. The dance fills me with Lightness of Being and integration with my physical body and mind. Here is the prayer that goes with this ancient choreographed dance. I must preface that the Hindu religion integrates BOTH male AND female aspects, I like this in a religion. The aspect of the feminine, represented by Divine Mother, is COMPASSION. The feminine is loving, compassionate and without judgement.

This is the Divine Mother Sacred Dance prayer....

Oh Divine Mother, may all my speech and idle talk be Mantra
All actions of my hands be Mudra
All eating and drinking be the offerings of oblations under thee
All lying down prostrations before thee
May ALL pleasures be dedicating my Entire Self unto thee
And may everything I do be taken as thy worship,
Oh Divine Mother

Disclaimer: Although I am not really a religious type, I have found that by discovering and practicing some of these spiritual tools have made my life richer and have given me some real tools for centering and evolving my spiritual being.




The Mudras, or hand positions are symbolic of the prayer...




I AM Created by Divine Light
I AM Sustained by Divine Light
I AM Protected by Divine Light
I AM Surrounded by Divine Light
I AM Ever growing into Divine Light




My Breathwork Experience



What is Breathwork?

"How we hold our breath is how we hold our life."
With Breathwork, we learn to consciously explore and create equilibrium in the body/mind/spirit. There are many different breathwork techniques ranging from focusing on body- centered psychotherapy, "Rebirthing technique", accessing specific energy levels, physical health to enhancing spiritual connection.
This process allows full diaphragmatic breathing that frees the flow of breath in the lower and upper abdomen, chest, shoulders, and throat. I use breathwork to access and free the holding patterns of tension in the body, mind and emotions. This repatterning or unwinding experience helps the body remember our center of being that we were born with. It creates space for the body's innate intelligence to do what it knows to do, which allows a healing pathway to the deepest resources of our being on all levels.

Our breath is the only system we have that can be either voluntary or involuntary. Thus it is a connecting force between the conscious and unconscious aspects of our physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual levels. This is why the way we breathe unconsciously can keep our stress patterns in place OR used consciously, it can set them free, which calms and balances the nervous system.



Breathwork and Focusing for me, have been one of my Spiritual Tools. Back in 1999, after experiencing a demonstration of the Breathwork technique, I decided to sign up for just one workshop to see how it could possibly benefit my life. Well, the one workshop turned into a two year participation in a weekly Breathwork and Focusing group led by a local Breathwork Counselor. I always seemed to feel ALOT of resistance in even attending this evening group session. And, since my mother was attending with me, it gave the dynamics of the experience a different flavor and was a little more involved.

Even cutting through my resistance every week was a good practice and afterwards I always felt like I had tapped into a deeper level of understanding of myself and the connection to my inner core of Being. I realized just how much all of us do not breathe, instead, we take shallow breaths that barely get to the depth of our lungs. Breathe is prana, so it would make sense to breathe deeply and take in LIFE!! Still, it takes practice and awareness of the moment to breathe deeply. I am always catching myself breathing shallowly, so it is an process and practice.

In these weekly sessions, we would first sit in a circle and have our hand down on our waste behind our back, this was so we could feel the lungs moving in and out. When we exhaled we would let out a sound, a sigh, a deeper sigh, or even screaming. It was whatever emotion came up, the deep breathing seemed to release the emotion so it could be felt deeply and then released with the exhale. This deep diaphramatic breath would soon create a charge in the body that felt like tingling. The charge went into the hands and created wonderful warmth and tingling. At times, we would put the palms of our hands over our eyes, or even around our head and body and send energy. There is a whole therapy focused on healing eyesight by using this "cupping" technique and sending this energetic energy from the hands.

Parts of the sessions would be about making eye contact with others in the group. We would always do the deep breathing to enliven and awaken the consciousness in our bodies, then, we would go from there. We would make eye contact with others and maintain making contact, this is not always an easy thing to do. There are levels of trust to break through, levels of outer judgement and self judgement. We would close our eyes and imagine that the person across from us had four eyes on their face and that we were looking at all four of their eyes. We would also learn to soften our eyes and then make hard eyes...this was to notice the difference. We can hold so much in our bodies and our facial expressions.

This group was good in that it honored all that we were feeling. Whatever we needed to express, whatever we needed to vent, this was a place to do it. There was even a punching bag in the room for anyone who really needed to let it all out physically. In the Exhale breath, it was taught that it is good to release the emotion outward...do it with SOUND, make any sound that helps you to release it. This may fall closely to "primal scream therapy" from the '70's...but, I don't know. Sometimes I would be driving to my job and I would actually scream and let out my fear or anxiety about performing for the day...this really seemed to loosen me up before getting to the office and release the emotion in my body. I really started to notice great benefits in doing the deep breathing. Most of all, it really put me in touch with ALL that I was FEELING deeply and was used to just ignoring or repressing. When I breathed, I could feel the emotion and WHERE it was actually living inside my body. I could then release the emotion with the help of the deep breathing. I felt like crying many times to feel this emotion in places in my body where it had been locked away. It felt good to re-experience old wounds, because now, there was a way to release the memories and the hold on me emotionally. Of course, this is a neverending process of self discovery and there are always new stresses coming into our minds and bodies and our lives to tend to.

I really felt on a deep level that my marriage would be my demise if I chose to stay in it. I could no longer be verbally diminished every single day and not supported in my positive, loving self and my positive pursuits for myself. In Breathwork I really got in touch with what I was LONGING for...and that was probably longing to really LOVE someone else on a deep spiritual level, to feel a authentic love connection with someone. I was SURELY not experiencing love in my unhappy marriage. So, I really believe that Breathwork, for me, helped me to use my throat chakra in an honest way and to express feelings and speak my MIND!! This is how I was able to finally ask for my divorce, Breathwork seemed to Empower me to say what I needed to say to be happy.

I really believe that my Breathwork and Focusing work helped me to find my voice, a deeper connection with what MY needs are and speaking up for myself. It is very centering and deep diaphramatic breathing truly sends some real prana energy to the brain centers for clearer processing. I believe we can HEAL ourselves with this life force.

We all get stressed and stress hurts our bodies. When we hold the stress in our bodies, it becomes crystalization of our bodies. This is not a good thing for us, so we need to find ways to release this stress from our bodies. There are also MANY past memories from our childhood that are locked into places in our body, they are everpresent until we understand and release them. Some of Breathwork practices also focus on "Rebirthing". Breathwork is an excellent practice which brings more clarity and understanding of the body/emotion areas that need ATTENTION.

I liked writing this piece, it is a helpful reminder for me to remember to Breathe DEEPLY and be Everpresent in the moment and what I am feeling...to not hold onto the stress in my body, as it is no longer appropriate to hold onto in my body. It's GOOD to FEEL CLEAR!!

So EVERYONE>>>BREATHE DEEPLY!!!!!