The Beautiful Answer

As the drawing near for the $540 Mega Millions drawing approaches, I thought I’d try a little experiment. After all, the lottery has become simultaneously the symbol for all that is hope and the American Dream, the idea that anyone can plunk down a dollar and walk out a day or so later as a millionaire, and a cautionary tale. I mean, when’s the last time you saw a TV special called How the Lottery Made Me a Happier and More Well-Adjusted Person? 

Uh, never. 

We love to believe that the lottery will solve all our woes. That it will make us more important, lovable, see- and hearable, sexier, and most important, problem-free. Some conscious part of us knows that’s not entirely true, but we believe it anyway, enough to float this industry from week to week, month to month, year to year. 

I have no problem with the lottery itself. It’s an energy, just like a chair, or your mom, or that guy in Starbucks who always smells like dryer sheets. It’s neither positive nor negative, good nor bad. It can be moved about and acted upon, just like any other energy.

I just feel that the lottery should be approached with some playfulness, so I thought I’d look into the astrology of the Mega Millions, and try to cast a chart as if it were a  person. And I was able to find out that the very first Mega Millions drawing was held on May 17, 2002, and its biggest payouts — $390 million on March 6, 2007 and $380 million on January 4, 2011 — happened when the game’s natal Uranus was being affected. Both times, Neptune, planet of hopes, dreams and, yes, doing things to excess, was hanging out right around Mega Millions’ Uranus in Aquarius. 

Tonight, Venus, planet of creativity, the feminine principle and love, will  be part of an applying conjunction to the Mega Millions’ Saturn in Taurus, which squares that Uranus in Aquarius. It’s a little wide — 5 degrees or so — but since Uranus opposes the Moon in Leo, there is a t-square. It’s enough to push the energy toward 22-28 degrees of Scorpio, meaning that could rule someone’s chart, be someone’s natal planet, or represent a significant astro-cartography line through that city or state. 

Me? If I won the lottery, I’d probably give most of it away. Since the Mega Millions’ North Node falls in Cancer, the best use of the money would be sending kids to school. nurturing people, building quality low-income housing and making sure no one felt left out. What a wonderful world that would be. 

“All the great ones have a screw loose,” 

— Stanford coach Tara Vanderveer, talking about 49ers coach Jim Harbaugh 

Don’t you love those people who treat spirituality like it’s some sort of club you’re supposed to want to get into? As if they’re the sole bouncers at the velvet rope just outside enlightenment?

It’s so close, you can smell it. You’re watching all those beautiful, couture-dripping, drug-toting people get into the land of plenty, beats booming, while you’re stuck out on the sidewalk.  You’d do almost anything to not be left out, wouldn’t you? 

If you have’t guessed by my other posts, I hate that shit.

Who are these self-professed gatekeepers, who have decided that spirituality is exclusive? That some people are worthy of enjoying ease, or bliss, or healing while others simply don’t measure up? 

No matter what you believe, this is nonsense. Jesus didn’t care if you were wearing Prada. Mohammed I’m sure didn’t make body size, or clarity of skin, his main concerns. Buddha was sitting in the forest trying to find a way to cope with what had been hidden from him all his life, while those who practiced paganism worshipped the earth itself. 

See?  No club, models, pimps, hos or anything like that in sight. 

Nobody cares if you get into that club. There is no club anyway. Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche called this spiritual materialism, and it has no place for most of us, who are just trying to be better people. So get off our cloud, dudes. We’re trying to do something good here. 

Ryan Gosling or Ryan Phillippe? 

My husband says Ryan Gosling; I’m not so sure. 

Ryan Gosling was a Mousketeer. Not that cool. But he dated Rachel McAdams. Way cool. 

Ryan Phillippe was on One Life to Live. Totes not cool. But he was in Stop-Loss as well, which was pretty darn cool. 

These are the things you talk about when you’re both exhausted. 

If people made Ryan Phillippe “Hey Girl” memes, maybe he’d catch up to Mr. Gosling, who wins by a hair this evening. 

Maybe that’s my next blog: Phillippe Nation. 

A vivid imagination and near photographic memory of my textbooks saved on hours of study, making it easier to pass tests in school. Finding creative excuses for why I’d done this, or failed to do that, were as simple as tuning in to the wildest impulses of my mind.

Spiritually, my explorations were all over the place as I was led by curiosity to the study of Buddhism. I was trained in Mahayana, sitting in traditional Tibetan style shamatha vippasana meditation for a minimum of 20 minutes per day, then 30 or more. Dozens of lectures, sutras, teachings and chants later, I was a Buddhist, trying not to cling to the idea of being anything at all.

But when I found myself jobless in Los Angeles, I landed a job as a phone psychic, using my scant knowledge of tarot cards to gain the position. Far from being a haven for out-of-work actors or charlatans drunk on woo-woo juice, I found myself surrounded by gifted intuitives, each with his or her own area of specialty.

I soaked it up like a sponge.

Read the rest here, on Elephant Journal. 

“You must do the things you think you cannot do.” 

                                      - Eleanor Roosevelt

Meditating on this one big time today … 

Sometimes when it rains, it’s great to get out of the house. Since I have a little curiosity but not much desire to see The Hunger Games, and I figured everyone else in L.A. would be there anyway, I chose to see some art. LACMA had a few exhibitions I was interested in, including one by photographer Robert Adams and a collection of female surrealists from Frida Kahlo to Louise Bourgeois. 

Everyone was there to see the surrealists, of course. It was the bigger, more advertised and flashier of the two exhibitions, hung on canted walls separated with rope sculptures that looked like a cross between something Helena Bonham Carter would wear in her hair and some nautical mess someone had found on a dock. It was cool enough, but very crowded, and full of chin-stroking, um, people looking like they had come to get out of the rain more than enjoy the work. 

To me, art museums have always been like cathedrals. I turn my cell phone off, I walk around quietly and try to just let whatever I’m looking at wash over me. I was an art major in school, but none of that matters when I’m there. I want to be affected, not told what to feel. So it was with some pleasure that I found my way over to the Robert Adams gallery, nearly empty of people, and slowly took in his carefully made prints of nature scenes in the American west. The blacks were rich and dark, the whites shocking. He captured the light and the land, and the tiniest moments most of us don’t slow down enough to see. 

And I noticed that when you get close, really close to one of his photos, you can see inside the thing he’s photographing, to its meaning, its purpose and its reason for being. A woman walking by complained that this tuff was just “all nature,” and huffed away. Your loss, I thought. Maybe if we all looked a little closer we’d see these types of deeply meaningful pictures in our reality, too. 

Maybe it’s the 2012 phenonemon, and the people who still keep writing to me, practically on a daily basis, asking if I believe the world is going to come to an end this year. 

Short answer?  No, I don’t. 

Long answer? I’m being guided in a big way to offer some new programs, providing accelerated healing for those who are interested. I use a hybrid kind of energy work, delivered by distance protocol (over the phone), and have been given a lot more techniques through my guides, who seem to want me to share this on a larger stage very shortly. 

When I did some automatic writing about it, I saw that the reason behind the accelerated healing programs I’m supposed to offer has to do with my work, of course, and getting these techniques out to those who can use them, as well as healers who can spread them among their own clientele. But I also realized that the reason it’s happening now is that 2012 represents an acceleration in our development as a species. When I was in the channeling state, I saw that we’re on the precipice not as far as whether or not we’ll survive, or whether the planet will survive (that’s up to the divine to decide, I suppose, and will take many, many more years before it’s even likely to happen), but having to decide how we want to be as people, what types of people we want to be around, and what type of activities we want to engage in for the remainder of our time on earth.

It’s a pretty big decision. All I know is that one of my life goals is to help people heal, to rid themselves of any mental, emotional, spiritual or physical blocks so they can get their divine purpose under way. I know we are stronger in numbers than alone, and it’s we’re going to turn wishes into dreams, will ned to work together to make it happen. 

Mercury retrograde periods, for most people, are just shy of outright torture. Cars break down, technology goes kersplooey, and forget about getting anywhere on time, It’s probably not gonna happen unless you leave a lot of extra time to get there. 

So it’s with a certain amount of understanding and tolerance that I deal with my friends, relatives, clients and colleagues during these times. They don’t operate under the rules of astrology — I mean, I barely do, and I do this for a living — but I know why something is happening when it does. It doesn’t surprise me, and I can prepare for whatever happens more easily. 

For the past two weeks, people have been arriving for their appointments late, out of breath, stressed out and ready to hit someone. I don’t blame them, really. It’s frustrating when you feel that you’ve made an appointment and can’t seem to exert control over your circumstances the way you do — I mean seem to do — every other day of the month. 

The key word is, of course, control. Let’s face it. If we sat down and thought about it, we’d realize that we don’t really control much in our lives. We control what we put in our mouths — as long as it’s in the supermarket — on our bodies — as long as it’s available in a store — and to a certain extent how we earn and spend our money. Things happen all the time. People get sick, lose jobs, fall in and out of love. We only think we’re controlling them. 

The good things is obstacles are impermanent, too. Mercury will go direct on April 4th, making it easier to move forward and get things done. Just as our illusion of control fades when something goes wrong, things always equal out again eventually. Approaching life this way, as something that ebbs and flows instead of following a straight line of our choosing, probably gets us all a lot further, and takes care of all those wounded feelings when we don’t get our own way. 

Lately, I’ve felt a little like the Marlon Brando character in Apocalypse Now, crouching under a light bulb, glare bouncing off … well, that’s about where the similarity falls off. I’m not bald, that large, or crazy. I don’t kill people, or imprison them in jungle cages made of bamboo spikes. But I did have a revelation recently, which was much like Brando’s famous, “the horror … the horror” line. 

Let me explain. 

When you work with energy, you’re largely working blind. You feel things, see things if you’re clairvoyant, which I am, and sometimes even hear things or sense them in your body as heat or cold, tightness, nausea and the like. But there’s no machine there measuring levels of anything, really. You’re on your own there. 

But as I mentioned last time, I have been heavily into removing energetic patterns I find in myself, from limiting beliefs to those odd sensations of just not deserving more. It surprises me how into this I’ve gotten, given my pretty laid back personality and fairly mellow attitude toward money and abundance. Over time, I’ve gotten pretty successful, I make a good living doing what I love, the healing work and my writing. I’ve been doing this for a long time, which feels like a gift from the universe. I don’t advertise, and never have to worry about clients. 

So when I found an ugly little troll of a pattern that said that money would change me, make me into something I’m not, or  cause me to “forget where I came from,” I didn’t get mad. I dug that sucker out. With a little (OK, maybe a lot) of twisting, tugging and wrenching, I managed to release four or five stubborn patterns that didn’t want to let go. That’s when you know you’re getting to the good stuff. 

When that sucker popped out, I felt about ninety pounds lighter, and my throat chakra opened up like a flower. Amazing. That I hadn’t expected. Didn’t have much to do with playing the lottery, or maybe it does. 

What happens next is in the hands of the universe, right? 

As a psychic and reader of over twenty years, I’ve learned that there is one main question that unites us all. Does someone love me?  Will I find someone to spend my life with, or end up alone?  Am I lovable, and will someone connect with me on that level? 

There are, of course, many variations on this theme. Does he/she love me? Will he/she love me? Will I end up with this or that person? Everyone wants to know, and yet many people are apologetic about it. No worries. We all want the same things, after all. 

Today, I looked for some new love in my life. No, not that kind. I’m a happily married woman who found the right person at exactly the right time in my life. If we’d met any sooner, I would have been too wild, and if we’d met any later, I might have been with someone else. I like to think that person would have been far worse than my husband, who’s pretty all-around cool. 

The new love I sought was from the universe. I decided to try something new today, and just open a new channel. I saw the top of my head, or crown chakra, open up to just see what the universe would do. I sat there not expecting anything, but being open to whatever would happen next. Then I saw a powerful burst of golden light move downward through the top of my head, and extending all the way throughout my body. It felt like an electrical shock radiating all the ways to my fingers and toes. But there were particles inside this light, too, like little bubbles, or flecks of glitter. All of a sudden, I felt lit up from inside, and I heard my guides saying, “You asked to become light when you were sent here and we have lived up to our end of the bargain. Now it’s your turn to see where you can shine.” 

Shit … really? You mean I have to do something about it now?  Kidding, of course.  But that’s what you get when you ask for love from the universe. It shows up in the very next second, if your eyes are open to recognizing it.

My friend Sallie Felton’s releasing a really interesting book tomorrow on Amazon, and I wanted to write a little about it this evening. The book is called Why Can’t I Get Rid of This Clutter? and it’s not just to figure out why you’re a slob. I’m kidding, of course. It’s about how our minds are always spinning around, stressing out about the past and projecting into the future, until we’re overwhelmed and unhappy, not to mention unproductive and procrastinating about what’s really important in life. 

I’ve known Sallie for a few years now, ever since she had me on her radio show to promote my second book. She’s warm, genuine and, most of all, no-bull. Her book is pretty much the same way, providing concrete tools to get started on releasing negative beliefs, and tools (practical, feeling and motivational) to start clearing away all that mental and emotional clutter, so you can find your way to your divine, inspired purpose.  From there, you’re freer to achieve your highest goals and aspirations in life — and isn’t that what we all want? 

Best of all, if you buy the book on launch day — tomorrow, March 21st — you get over $10,000 in bonus gifts, including a pretty nice discount from me on my distance energy healing sessions. There are books, e-books, MP3s, courses, coaching, discounts — hey, I’m gonna have to get this book myself! 

Anyway, just wanted to let you know about Sallie’s amazing book. If it sounds interesting to you, check it out. The value of the bonuses more than makes up for the cover price, and you’ll be doing a pretty cool lady a favor in the process. And as we all know, what does around comes around, and maybe something great will come your way as well. 

Found this quote today, which seems to pretty much sum up every single moment of my life these days: 

“What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.”

                                                          — Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

Did something I’ve never done before today — hypnotherapy. I’m a big fan of trying new things, meeting new people and traveling new places, as much as time and cash will allow.  I’ve done plenty of past life regressions, which are sort of similar, but this was something new for me. Which is how it should be on a Sunday. 

It went well, if a bit confused, in keeping with the persent Mercury retrograde situation. But I’d gone in with no real expectations except to release whatever might be in my subconscious mind which could be holding me back. Never see that stuff coming, do we? 

On the table — I was lying on my back with closed eyes — I felt my body melting away. Balls of energy started to lift out of my body and lift toward the ceiling. I began to feel lighter, less encumbered by all the crap we all carry around with us, often without having any idea we’re doing this. I felt my guides working with me, saying, “You don’t need that, you don’t need that, and you definitely don’t need that.” 

We moved on to my goals, which are many, and I saw that strung out like beds on a timeline. A hand reached down and shoved them to the left — done, done, done, they said — and when I woke up a few minutes later, I believed that was true, on some level. Now to see what happens next, which is always further reason for celebration. 

Two years ago, something major happened in my life. Today, after Pilates and a manicure, after some work and returning emails and reading a great new book I found, I wanted to be quiet for a bit, and just let the events of the past two years wash over me. 

I realized I’m happy to be here. 

I realized I’m happier to be free of whatever was holding me back. 

I realized I’m so grateful for my life that I could cry sometimes, at how fragile our existence is, and how seldom people seem to be in touch with that fact. 

I realized that it’s not up to me what they know or don’t know. I just hope they know someday. 

And I realized that whatever happens tomorrow, it’s gonna be cake compared to where I’ve been. 

What is it about baseball games that tosses personal space out the window? Sure, you’re crammed in next to strangers, most of whom are eating and drinking to excess, seemingly without notice of, say, the thousands of other people around. But that doesn’t mean that if you have to bend down to pick something up, you put your entire ass in my face and then on my arm as you move around to find whatever the hell it was you dropped in the first place. Believe me, I would move if you asked me. I’ll probably have to go to several years of therapy to get over the ass on the arm thing anyway. 

I joke, in part, of course. But the thing that remains is the lack of personal boundaries. What is it about being in a crowd that tosses these societal niceties out the damn window? Do we feel that we have to be seen more if there are more people around? Or do we forget that there are thousands of breathing beings of our species right fucking there next to us as we get into the event we’re there to see? 

I have no idea and, to be honest, I don’t feel like reframing it right now. The game was good — I could focus on that — but even as we were walking away from the park, I kept thinking, “Did that guy have no idea about personal space, or did he feel it was some sort of rare gift to share his butt with me?”

True mystery of the universe. But probably one that’s better off not being solved. 

Why is it that you’re doing something enjoyable — watching a baseball game, say — and then there have to be those guys who can’t keep their mouths shut, try to pick fights with pretty much anyone walking by, and actually manage to make alcohol and its consumption look uncool? Why do they always have to know nothing about the sport in question, and make your viewing of same so annoying that even though you’re a peaceful person by nature, you consider doing them harm, or actually kind of root for someone to give them the beatdown they so desire?

Reframing them didn’t work the first few times I tried. How do you reframe idiots, after all?

I tried meditating, letting them go, working with my breath. Then I had a thought. I’m an energy worker, damn it. Why wouldn’t that work in this instance?  So I glued their mouths shut, energetically of course, and it took about five minutes before they stopped talking altogether. 

A little while later, they left, and almost everyone in our section started cheering. The rest of the game was uneventful — it ended in a tie — but it was way more enjoyable. That and Buster Posey’s homer made even the Biggest Douche tolerable. 

I never get used to living in a desert. Maybe it’s that L.A. hogs most of the state’s water, receiving it through miles of pipeline even from Nevada, and other reservoirs nearby. But once you leave the edges of the city, you’re in straight up sandy, scrubby desert, where the horizon stretches out endlessly flat and close to the ground. 

Our trip to Scottsdale was easy, even on three hours’ sleep, and soon (could it really be that last fall was only a few months ago?) there was baseball. It was boiling hot, with only a few scant breezes, but the baseball … the baseball. It was a sight to behold. The Giants almost caught up, but they dropped the game by a run — the offense was pretty anemic. 

Tomorrow’s another adventure, with hopefully more sleep behind it. More baseball, more lemonade and sunblock. What a great country we live in, with all this fun to be had. 

Those days right before you’re trying to blow out of town are always the most hilarious. They’re the ones when every friend who’s moving calls at the last minute for some help, or they lose your clothes at the dry cleaner, or you get a flat tire — you know, the stuff that takes up your time and drives you crazy in slow motion. I had my own version of that today, with small annoyances, things that took longer than they should have/could have, and just the regular all-around craziness that is my daily existence. It always makes me wish that I could idiot proof my life in some way. 

Not that I’m complaining, mind you. 

I get to go out of town for a few days to do some business (checking out a local theater venue and talking to them about staging my play PUNK ROCK MOM when it finishes with its world premiere in Baltimore, and yes, checking out some spring training baseball. I’m a huge Giants fan, and have been for the past 10 years or so — back when they sucked, back before the torture and the World Series win — and have been going to spring training for 6 years now. There’s a lot of hope packed into those few days in March each year, and a lot of fun to be had. 

So it’s always with a grain of salt that I take these minor annoyances. They try to knock me off my game, but I’m back on it pretty soon. They try to make me forget that I’m lucky to be able to do what I do, and go where I go. They try to pull the wool over my eyes, that stress or rising blood pressure is more important, more worthy of my attention, than the fact that I’ll be in a car soon, coasting through the desert and watching the sun rise over that moonlike landscape. 

Silly rabbit. You’re not gettin’ that weak-ass shit by me so easily. :) 

Though I live in self-involved L.A., I mostly manage to avoid that part of the city. I’m lucky to be in a multi-cultural area, where people of all kinds live together, work together and interact. So when I have to go to the West Side, as it’s called (anything west of, say, Hollywood to most people), or even the dreaded Hills of Beverly, it’s done with some trepidation. 

Today, I had to go over there for an appointment, in a penthouse no less in Beverly Hills. The view was nice, albeit a little smoggy, but I was reminded of why I love this city in ways no one who hasn’t lived here can. The others in the meeting were mostly emaciated, insecure people seeking the approval of others through constant mentioning of designer brands and claims of world traveling and cosmopolitan living. Now, some of that may be true. But I’m always pretty suspect of those who seem like they’re trying to convince you of their worthiness. Just be yourself, man. Relax. 

It had me thinking, on the drive home, about what it means to have. Sure, if you look at it the way the Buddha did, having means that anything — shoes, a home, and even your fucking life — are all impermanent. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enjoy it. If you want designer shoes, or a fantastic bag, and you work hard for it, by all means, beautify your life in that way. But to think that it makes you cooler, or somehow different from other people, is ridiculous. And to assume that somehow the act of having makes you exempt from the facts of life — immense joy, awe, sadness, tribulations, suffering, sickness, happiness and fulfillment beyond measure and death — well, you’re kidding yourself in a big way. 

To me, the act of having had to be reframed over many years. I felt that I had to justify any item I had, even my own lasting happiness, for fear that it would be taken away. Now, I’m older and hopefully a tad wiser. I’m happy I live in a world where someone, a designer, takes great pride in craftsmanship and quality. I’m happy that I can work hard and buy beautiful, lasting things for myself or people I love if I want. And I’m happy, too, that I can buy nothing at all sometimes, because I am enough.