Old Words. . .New Light

As I tried to search for some new words to share for today’s blog entry, nothing seemed to feel quiet right. So I started to look at some old writing for inspiration. What I found was that old words can bring out new light at different times in our lives. So here are some old words that had shed some new light for me that I’d like to share. . .

Beauty is an elusive trait, something we strive to find in our lives everyday. We look for it in our surroundings, in building and streets, in earth and water. We look for it in people, in our relationships, in friends and in family, in old and in young. We look for it in ourselves, in things we do and in the choices we make. The more we look, the more we find that beauty isn’t any one thing, but many things.

Sometimes beauty is perfection. This is why cloudless days and star-filled nights and white Christmases and crystal- clear oceans and four-leafed clovers are beautiful. Sometimes beauty is found in something that is flawed. This is why dimples and crooked teeth and old ripped jeans and favorite sweaters and rainy days are beautiful. This is also why people are beautiful. Everyone has flaws, whether it is a birthmark, or a bad habit, or a wounded soul. We all try to cover our flows, to hide them from the world so no one can see. But we are not only beautiful in spite of these flaws, but we are beautiful because of these flaws. Each one makes us different and unique, each one makes us special.  Some we can change, some we cannot, some we should change, and some makes us greater because we have them. The beauty is not only in successfully erasing one of our flaws, but even more beautiful is the desire to change, the battle to change, and the resilience to fight again when we have failed.

In a world of ugliness, we find beauty everywhere and everyday and in places where it isn’t suppose to be. And because of this, we wake up everyday and live our lives with the hope that today and tomorrow and the day after that will be more beautiful than yesterday. And that both profoundly and simply, is beautiful.

The Reality of Dreaming

I have always been a fan of sleep and dream time. In many ways I’ve lived a full life in my dreams. I’ve seen my daughter and spent time with her, even though I have yet to be pregnant or give birth to anyone in this lifetime. But I know exactly what she will look like when I do meet her. In my dreams, I’ve led battles, fell out of the sky, then got up walked away without a scratch.  I’ve drowned and watched people mourn me at my funeral.  I’ve climbed various first ascents on different mountain routes I didn’t know existed. I’ve had relationships with men and women I’ve yet to meet. So are dreams really a separate reality or one of the same?

Our hypnotherapist, Clare Taylor, uses dream therapy in her sessions and I was curious to learn more about such connections. Clare told me that during our dream times we sort out the millions of things that stimulate us during the day. Consciously and unconsciously we take in millions of pieces of the puzzles from the color of our co-worker’s shoes, to the scent of our home when we first wake up, to events we experienced throughout the day.  Our dreamtime is our problem-solving time, a time to empty our puzzle box and begin to put the pieces together. In order to do this, we not only pick out the things that are relevant but we release the things that don’t belong to the picture we are working on at the present moment. According to Clare, this happens at different times throughout the night. We use the earlier part of our sleep to sort out the puzzle, shed the pieces that do not fit, and as we fall deeper in to REM sleep, we begin the puzzle-solving process.  Often we work things out in our dream times, but we don’t realize we had until much later in our waking times. Unconsciously we’ve made peace with things that we may not yet have been able to on a conscious level because we feel safer during dreamtime.  And we need more time to work through them in reality. So one way to fully access our dream as a tool is to set an intension for you dream before you fall asleep, so it can also play out in your waking time.

Five years ago when I first moved to Culver City, there used to be this great two-story bookstore that only sold books to teachers and schools. I have always loved bookstores and though I wasn’t a teacher or an employee of any school district, I’d visit the bookstore every once in a while and think about what a great space it was –  bright, open and ready to embrace whomever that walks in. This was the kind of space I’d love to have if I ever wanted to open a business, which I had no intension of doing at the time. Once in a while something would take place in my dream at the location of the bookstore, which I dismissed as an insignificant part of my puzzle.

When we first started looking for a location for RakSa, we checked places in Santa Monica, Venice, Marina del Rey and Culver City. I saw some really wonderful potential locations and never thought about the bookstore. But within weeks of location scouting, the bookstore became available for rent. And now that bookstore is the home of RakSa.

So as much as our dreamtime can act as our peace making moment, it can also serve as a needed reality check to understand what we cannot see clearly when we are awake. I think the magic in our lives is the power of the merging of the two worlds, the conscious and the unconscious, because in truth we are never separated. Have you ever had a day when things happened just like you had wished or dreamed? A day when things worked themselves out in ways that you hadn’t thought of? Or a day when someone who you’ve missed for so long reappeared into your life? The truth is we are constantly manifesting our dreams and our reality even when we are not aware of it. It is when we can tap into this awareness that we can begin to live the life of our dreams both when we are asleep and when we are awake.

Crash but Not Quite Burn

I am writing this entry a week ahead of schedule while the frustration and agony is still fresh. A few days ago, when I decided to take a lunch break and bath in the exceptionally warm winter sun with a dear friend, I received a text from RakSa – Computer crashed severely. We need the original start up disk. Do you have it? We tore RakSa apart and can’t find them.

I finished my lunch and casually went home to look at my files. Clearly marked and put away in the right categories, were all of the start-up disks separated by our two computer stations. So what’s the worst thing that can happen, I thought. We reboot from the start-up disks and we move on.

By the time I arrived at RakSa, one of our managers had been on the phone for three hours with technical support, trying to recover everything from our hard drive. They hadn’t decided to wipe everything and start over, hoping to still recover something from a blank dark screen. I released her and took over for the rest of the night.

So what do you want to do now? Tech guy number 3 asked me casually. Executive decision needs to be made here, do we continue working on this or we start from scratch?

If we wipe everything, all I have to do is install all our drivers and software with the disks I have here correct? I asked ready for what was ahead.

Yes, but it’s not as simple as you just made it sound. He tried to prepare me for what was ahead. We would have to install every single driver manually and in the correct order, and yes you will have to reinstall all the software you need.

I want to wipe everything and start from scratch, I said to him. Sometimes that’s just what you have to do, I thought.

I spent the night at RakSa reviving our main station. Three hours later the desktop was beginning to look like itself again but much more bare and quiet, like someone who had been stripped away of her precious belongings. It began to feel like just over a year ago when I set up the system alone at home. Except then I didn’t have to worry about losing thousands of clients’ data and them walking in the front door in the morning.  I tested everything and once everything seemed to work I went to sleep.

If the seven hours the day before wasn’t painful enough, the next day was spent learning about the incompatibilities of our software, which no one informed us over the year, and trying to network the two stations again. While trying to maintain the usual serene and peaceful environment of our wellness center, after all that’s what we are, we spent six more hours with Tech support number 4, 5, and 6. We were still not back to normal. I decided to head home and start fresh the next day. Sometimes that’s all there is to do, I knew.

By the afternoon of day three we had both stations talking to each other but our credit card processing still wasn’t working. Something we had to wait until after the weekend to fix.

After the first night of this ordeal I laid in bed feeling alone and yet grateful for all the support I had at RakSa. I no longer wanted to do this alone, a feeling that had grown stronger each day over the past year. But I also realized that there would always be things I will have to do alone.  No one else would make that decision of starting over from scratch like I did. No one else would know the history of RakSa like I do. It’s like when your child is sick and you take him or her to the doctor. Of course no one is going to know all her medical history like you do, her likes and dislikes. How do you trust someone else to make a decision for her life?

But I realize what I can do is keep better records and build our team stronger to support us. That’s the next mission. The computers had to start over but we didn’t. This was a chance to do it with more knowledge and more awareness so that we can continue into our second year with greater strength and light. Sometimes we have to give up what we have to have something else. Something beyond our imaginations.

We had to crash because we needed to stop and take a deeper look into what was missing. And we had to walk away in order to have a clearer picture of what was happening. RakSa is growing so fast, yet the important fundamentals can never be neglected. We had to wipe everything clean so we could pick and choose the things that work and let go of the things that don’t. We didn’t restart so we can be where we were but to untangle ourselves and move forward. Sometimes I feel I can’t go on. Sometimes I know I must go on. And eventually I will go on. We all do.

How to say “I love you.”

Here’s a few ways that I’ve learned:

Je t’aime, in French.

我爱你 (Wǒ ài nǐ), to a Chinese Woman.

Chun rak ter, to a Thai girl.

For a Mexican boy, Te Quiero.

We all say I love you in different languages but what probably counts the most is the one whom we’re speaking to understand. Just the same, we wouldn’t bring a bouquet of fragrant roses to a dear friend with allergies, buy a giant block of rare cheese for a lactose-intolerant child, write a love poem to someone who can’t read, or slowly caress someone who’s extremely ticklish. So why would we say I love you in ways they can’t understand.

Truly loving someone is a one-way street. You love out of love, without expectation, not wanting something in return.  Of course most of the time we don’t. But that’s because we love something else, a part of us we need to feed, an attachment to something we’ve developed as we got older. Ironically, it’s all a part of the process so that we can return to truly love like a child again. But I’ve found that feeling love is a two-way street; just because someone loves you doesn’t mean you’d feel it. Sometimes it takes years. At least it did for me.

There is a line my father said to me when I was in my early twenties that I can’t seem to erase from my mind. He told me that I was spoiled and that he’d always given to me more than he gave to my siblings.

I don’t understand why you’re so depressed. You know I gave you something I never gave to anyone else, he yelled at me. He was angry that I wasn’t happy.

What? I responded, equally as pissed that he couldn’t understand.

He looked at me puzzled that I didn’t know the answer, like it was so obvious.

I gave you your own credit card. I never gave that to anyone, he said without hesitation.

His word was so shape and strong. It sliced me quick and deep. I wanted to scream and ask him what did you want me to do with it? Hug it when I cry myself to sleep? Talk to it when I had no one to turn to? But I kept quiet and cried until I was too exhausted to do anything else.

For years when I thought of those words, the same fresh pain arose. I even gave myself a free pass to use it against him. Whenever I felt bad about spending his money, I’d say to myself: Well this is what he gave me and if he can’t give me anything else, I’m going to use it. So I did. I charged all my therapy sessions, my education, my clothes, my food, my vacations, to his credit card, even though what I wanted from him was much more and wouldn’t have cost him anything. But through all that charging and all that distance, my father did give me what I needed. I was able to search for my own path and my own healing, because of his support. At the end he gave me much more than I ever wanted. He was right. He did give me something he didn’t give to anyone else.

I could count the number of times my father has ever told me he loved me. I actually don’t remember the last time he did. But through all the years, I’ve come to feel his love more and more deeply. My father had always showered his children with gifts, education and food – all the things he didn’t have when he was growing up. And until today, he still sucked on fried garlic chicken wings until all the meat was gone and the bone was completely white. He still wouldn’t buy a new undershirt until it had at least a few holes. At our dinner table, he’d take his time with each bite, slowly chewing, maneuvering his chopsticks with grace, and always end with a shameless satisfying burp. He’d embrace good food like I wanted him to embrace me. But I know this and because I’ve tried to learn his language, I’ve come to understand his love.

Love is simple and delicate, yet complicated and requires complete strength. So if you want someone to know you love them, learn their language and tell them how much you love them. Often you’ll find words are not necessary. But the one most important for you to understand is your own language. So constantly tell yourself in your own way, how much I love you, so you can fully feel it when others say it back to you.