The Power of Suggestion

Photo courtesy of Craig Blankenhorn, New Line Cinema

Do you ever have those times in your life when just the suggestion of something causes you to HAVE to do it? You know, like when you first saw "An Inconvenient Truth" and you ran right home to change your light bulbs from the regular Thomas Edison kind to the compact fluorescent kind (or did Edison invent those too?). And while we’re on the subject of Al Gore, once you saw his movie, did you also begin taking public transportation, catching your shower water in a plastic bucket to later water your plants, brushing your teeth with the water turned off, and setting your heating and air to a temperature just a few degrees above or below what it is outside?

We did, and is it ever inconvenient – check this out:

1. MARTA public transportation is now my BFF, second only to my heavily scented, deodorant. Ever since the temperatures hit the 80’s, I role it on thicker than Chicago style pizza in an attempt to outdo the nostril shattering aromatics on the train.

2. Doc B. and I have plastic buckets everywhere, advertising everything from Home Depot to Ace Hardware to Lowes. To tell you the truth, some are in very inconvenient places, like hanging from the shower caddy, while others are simply not our preferred décor.

3. And the brushing your teeth with the water turned off really messes up my 40 year old routine – that’s a hard habit to break I tell you. At least I got some practice with this while in Guatemala since there were some not-so-pleasant repercussions if you accidentally brushed your teeth con Agua de Lake Atitlan.

4. And finally, the air conditioning. It’s so dang hot in our house that the cat has taken to sleeping on the cooling granite kitchen counter tops and, from shear heat exhaustion (or is it pure laziness?), even lays down to eat from his food dish (see photo for proof). But don’t worry, if you come to our house for dinner, we’ll wipe down the counter and feign a scolding if the cat happens to jump up there right in front of your face.



So, would you believe that this blog was going to be about the new "SITC" (Sex in the City) movie and "BRAG" (Bike Ride across Georgia)? Yes, I’m sure you knew that’s where I was headed when you read the title of this blog entry.

What I was going to write about is how the power of suggestion can really make some changes in your life if you let the idea sink in. For example, baby sis and I recently went to see SITC on the big screen. There’s a scene (pictured above) where Carrie Bradshaw is in bed with Mr. Big and is reading him love poetry from a New York City Public Library book. She’s reminding him of how cool it is to check out books for free and then of course there’s that familiar smell of a library book that just adds to the experience. I’ve spent a ton of money in our local Barnes and Noble bookstore (managed by our good friend "Davemus") and I know he’s appreciated our business. But after seeing SITC, the library was calling to me…

A few days after seeing SITC, Doc. B. and I went to pick up Kali and Tequila in St. Simons Island, the finish line for BRAG. This was the culmination of a week-long bike ride that covered about 400 miles during a week’s time. It was so cool seeing all those people of diverse backgrounds cross the finish line on bicycles of all different cost categories. Pretty much every age, race, body shape, fitness level, and sex (I’m not certain if there were any transgendered but I bet there were!) was represented in the group. We stayed at a hotel for the night so we could rest up for the drive home the next day and spent some time at the pool. I could easily tell by the tan lines who had participated in BRAG and who had not. And some of those tan lines were on people that you’d think hadn’t ridden a bike since 8th grade. Witnessing all of this made me want to get on my bike.

So the day after we got back to Atlanta, I put the power of suggestion under my bike helmet. I rebuffed the car and MARTA, emptied the water-catching buckets into the plants, swished my mouth with Listerine and headed out into the Atlanta heat on my 20-year old bicycle. Destination: the DeKalb County Public Library where I renewed my library card that had been deleted from the system for non-use. And as soon as I finish the last two books I purchased at Barnes and Noble, I’ll be riding my bike back to the library to stand in line with all of the other women who saw SITC and check out some musty-smelling books wrapped in plastic.

Conversations You Don't Hear Every Day

Ram Dass(in the blue shirt), Bhagavan Das and Krishna Das (all photos from their respective websites)




Doc B. came home from yoga the other day all excited that Krishna Das was going to be performing at The Variety Playhouse at the end of June. I said, "oh, isn’t that the guy you went to see at Kashi (a local yoga studio) last year?" And Doc. B. said, "no, that was Bhagavan Das." Then I said "oh, well is it that guy that we watched the movie about who did drugs back in the 60’s to try to reach enlightenment before he turned to yoga and meditation and wrote the book Be Here Now?" And Doc B. said "no, that was Ram Dass." And I said, "well which Das is this???" And Doc. B. said "Krishna Das is the one that's well known for his Kirtans".

A year ago, I would have been feeling like this conversation was truly a comedy since I would have been without a clue as to what a kirtan was. Thankfully, through my yoga education, I know that kirtans are Indian devotional chants. This was my only saving grace since I certainly couldn't keep my Das’s straight. For sure a Blue Mailbox moment

So I dispensed with the Das talk until later in the evening when Rumi the cat walked up and meowed hello. I responded "hi Rum Das" - and so now the cat has yet another nickname.

Oh, and here's a moving Haiku recently composed by Doc. B. while still in her post-Guatemalan afterglow:

"Being, not doing
has taught my heart a new song
I will live here now"

Or, you can make it much less moving with my altered version:

"Being, not doing
has taught my heart a new song
zippadeedoda"

P.S. Happy Birthday tomorrow RWO!!!

Back to Life

It's been two weeks now since Doc. B. and I returned from Guatemala. During the yoga retreat, and since then, my throat chakra has been hard at work trying to find the right words to give the trip justice. Not much luck on that while I was in Guatemala and still not much luck since returning home. But because I want to at least get something down in print, including a couple of photos, I’m going ahead with what I’ve got – my "closing circle" thoughts, with a slight detour as usual.

For any of you who have ever participated in a retreat, a support group, a group therapy session or a 28-day drug and alcohol treatment center, you know there’s always a "closing circle." Wait, before I go any further, I should remind my faithful readers and qualify for my new readers that I’ve never been a patient at a substance abuse treatment center. But for a short (witch’s) spell I was in the employ of one. I guess you could call it my 270 day treatment program (270 days in that I barely made it 9 months on the j-o-b, and treatment in that that I was treated like dirt). But it did conclude with a closing circle on my last day of work. By the way, I think I’ve experienced more closing circles in departing jobs than I have in the therapeutic, more typical way.

Here’s the scene of the closing circle at the culmination of my first "real" job (not counting McDonald's where I worked during high school and not counting the Hispanic Community Center where I did my Social Work internship). Seated, in the round, on card-table chairs (the kind my parents set up for their bridge parties), on my last day of work at the treatment center, were:
1) the Director who hired me and that I later learned only did so because she mistakenly thought I would fill her lacking Hispanic quota,
2) a holier-than-thou family therapist,
3) several impatient in-patients, and
4) little old me at age 22.

They each went around the circle and said (i.e., made up) something nice about me or about working with me. Then I closed the circle by graciously (Huh?) receiving my "never alone again" AA chip followed by a recitation of some drivel that I concocted, on the spot, about how much I would miss each and every one of them and how much I appreciated what they had taught me during my stint on the second shift. there really was SO MUCH that I learned, including:
1) learning how to drive the big van full of self-admitted and court-ordered treatment participants to the Friday AA meeting;
2) memorizing the first five of the 12 steps, since that’s all you really have time for in a 28-day program; and
3) perfecting how to avoid "Jim", one of the other second-shifters who kept asking me out.

Oh, and I of course learned the serenity prayer and several other AA sayings that have helped me make it this far in life by taking it one day at a time and keeping it simple, bitch, I mean stupid, since "KISS" makes more sense than "KISB".

So if you didn’t know what a closing circle was, you should now have a good idea of what they involve. But more importantly, I'm hoping you can also imagine how moving a closing circle could actually be if you were even slightly interested in the people sitting in the circle with you. And that’s how I felt with the yoga retreaters. I honestly had no difficulty coming up with at least one thing (or more) that I liked and/or appreciated about each and every person sitting cross-legged on those yoga mats and cushions. During the closing circle, our yogini leader gave us the option of making a closing statement of our choice or reciting a haiku. A couple of people actually did the haiku and I was able to add yet another admirable quality to the list of things I appreciated about those particular participants. Here’s one example:

“Mystical mountains
Sacred energy rising
A lone man fishes”

I thought at first of reciting a haiku since I do enjoy coming up with them. But I decided that would require too much thinking and memorizing while I was simultaneously trying to hear what others had to say. I don’t do well in creating poetry in my head; I need paper. So I quickly lined through that option and decided to go off the cuff. I pared down what I wanted to say into three main memory mementos that I planned to take away with me as I went back to life in the ATL (or the "404", or "Hotlanta", or "that big metro area of 5 million plus that doesn’t fit with the rest of the State of Georgia").

The first "memento" was a reminder statement that the general manager shared with us during our orientation to the retreat center: "go with the flow and remember that the flow isn't yours." She was essentially telling us to just calm down, allow the staff to do their thing and let the retreat happen. In other words, so what if coffee and fruit have not yet been set out before your 7am yoga class, you won’t die of caffeine withdrawal or starve to death either. And so what if the hot tub isn't heated up when it's supposed to be; it'll get hot or the sauna will get heated up instead. The bottom line was that everything would happen in its own time and in the meantime, you’d live (and in fact probably learn from the whole thing).

The second was something our yoga teacher quoted (though I can't remember who said it first) and that is to "speak with one mouth and listen with two ears". One of the things I’m very much aware of lately is how much I just automatically react (verbally) without really listening. It’s habit. And the other thing I do is think about what I’m going to say next while the other person is still talking. Time to work on that; I miss out on a lot and/or don’t remember things I’m told. "Deep listening" is what my therapist calls it and she’s damn good at it. She remembers things I’ve told her that I don’t even remember telling her. And she remembers people’s names and scenarios too. Yes, I’ve probably talked about YO U in my therapy session and my therapist remembers you 

And finally was simply, but not so simply, the word gratitude. It kept coming up during the trip. Words like gracious, thank you, appreciation, etc… were common during the week and you could feel the depth of it when someone said it – it was right from the heart and true rather than a meaningless string of words. Maybe it was how grateful we all felt to be on the retreat or how much "more" we all "had" compared to the Guatemalan villagers with whom we came in contact. Whatever the case, everyone we ran into "had" so much in their hearts...

As always, after a trip away from home, I'm glad to be back...back to life...but I'll be adding a few Guatemalan jewels to my life...