The Debby Connection (and Writing Prompts)

[caption id="attachment_163" align="alignleft" width="231" caption="Pencil Sketch of mom Debby, done by my father in 1976"][/caption]

 

My mother's name was Deborah. When she died of cancer in 2007, she left me some of her precious books, among them Gibran's The Prophet and a well worn copy of Creative Visualization.

Over the years, my dead mother has shown herself to me in odd ways. Every time I do a professional event for the spiritual and intuitive side of Happy Ganesh , always and without fail the first person that I meet is named Debby, usually Deborah.

Always.

(At the last event I did, I found myself talking to two young women who were both "daughters of Debby." Predictably, their mothers spelled their names Deborah. I was not surprised.)

The day I moved into my office space, her favorite song was playing on the radio.

When I questioned a rocky relationship, I opened a book to a handwritten note of mom's, scrawled on an aging yellow sticky note, which read: "It matters how we treat the people we love every day, not just on holidays."

Recently, I wasn't sure how to proceed with certain career goals. I'd been looking for - and found - mom's copy of Creative Visualization, a book published in 1978, years before The Secret and Esther Hicks's work came to fame. Since I teach visualization and manifestation, I'd been looking for that particular book, never dreaming that it survived the book purges to Goodwill. But it had. I was fearful about my career, feeling worried, wondering how I would keep my head above water. And it was in that place of fearfulness that I opened the book, looking again for answers from my mother. Another one of her sticky notes, tumbled to the floor, all the glue long since gone. When I picked it up, it read - in her backhanded, rounded print, "To thine own self be true." Amazingly, she'd drawn a small heart after the words.

When I have questions for her, things that only a mother could answer, she seems to collect herself across the gap between life and death to just show up. It's pretty amazing.

Sleepless a few nights ago, I pulled another book of hers off my shelf. God, Sex, and Women of the Bible by Shoni Labowitz, a feminist rabbi. (My mom was pretty cool, I have to say. I feel lucky to have had a mother who read stuff like this - and who shared it with me!) Sometimes I ask books what I need to know, as if their wisdom will help me find answers. I asked this particular book. I opened at random - of course - to the Deborah chapter.

Color me unsurprised.

I've been wondering about, among other things, career improvement. Crossroads. What do I do? That's what I asked. The book "answered" "Once you have discerned what you want and it feels right in your soul, then ask: What do I need to do to get what I want? Then go for it! Passion moves a woman like nothing else can."

That's her way of reaching me. She knows that books are one of my favorite escapes and it makes me happy to know that she will show up in that favorite place of mine, to give me faith.

Writing Prompts

What gives you unexpected faith?

What phenomenon answers your prayers/wishes/dreams?

Have you had experiences where you believed (or in some cases, flat out knew) that your deceased loved one had come back to help or support you?

 

(Crossposted from happyganeshwriting.blogspot.com)

Hodgepodge

[caption id="attachment_104" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Happy Halloween!"][/caption]

First of all, a shout-out to all the people who came out to Modern Zen's Round Robin event. You may be reading this because you added your name to my mailing list that night. We had a fantastic time. Intuitive messages get the energy moving and it's a (trick or) treat to meet so many new people.

The four-Monday astrology class goes into its second evening on November 1. We'll be talking about Venus and Mars signs. Local and want to sign up? Contact Modern Zen. To see the class schedule, go here. Want a private astrology session? Contact me.

BOOKS!!

If you like reading fiction or nonfiction books about spirituality, check out our Facebook page to join the new Happy Ganesh Book Discussion Group! The HG Book Discussion Group focuses on fiction or nonfiction books about inner growth, spirituality (of ALL denominations), the creative process, spirituality/travel, intimate relationships, and being more present in life. These are topics that I love to explore.
Right now, The Cloister Walk by American poet Kathleen Norris is a new favorite. Award-winning poet Kathleen Norris lived with monks for a year and in that time, explored her own sense of creativity and the Divine. She discusses in the book her own growth as a poet in the silence and schedule of living within a religious community. She also goes into how this year-long experience helped her to see her marriage in a new light, as well as her relationship with her creative forces. Norris's other books are "Dakota: A Spiritual Geography" and "Amazing Grace".

Have you read this book too? What do you think? Thoughts welcome.

What are you favorite books on these subjects? What books have opened you to new ideas? To joy? To challenging yourself? To creative exploration?

Have a safe and happy halloween.

In friendship,

Marissa,

Happy Ganesh President

Image Credit: lobo235

Let the Birthday Party Begin!!!!

Happy birthday to yoooooou

Happy birthday to yoooooou

Happy birthday, dear Happy Ganesh....

Happy birthday to yoooooou!!!




Your party favors are up! If you purchase a half-hour or hour-long reading between October 8th at 10 AM (EST) and October 9th at 6 PM (EST), you get $10 off! It's our gift to you because Happy Ganesh believes in hard work -- but he also believes in thanking friends for support.

To take advantage of your party favor, please click here.

Remember, you can have a distance reading even if you're local - or anywhere in the world. Want one but can't get out of work? Stuck in traffic? No problem. Contact us on your lunch hour. Or we'll be at Modern Zen today and tomorrow. We look forward to your visit.

Whether its through fostering communication with the living and departed loved ones, or encouraging self-expression and self-empowerment through manifestation and astrological classes and coaching, we're delighted to be here for you. (For information on the upcoming astrology class, please go here.)

Thank you again for being a part of our journey and allowing us to be a part of yours.

All blessings,

Marissa

President of Happy Ganesh

Guest on "The Bob Decker Show"!

Today, I was a special guest on The Bob Decker Show! Click here to listen. Good times were had. I took some call-ins and answered some questions.

Live radio shows are always wonderful because everything starts to flow.

Thanks to Bob Decker for having me on - and thanks to everyone who listened or called in. I am so grateful to be able to do this.

The Manifestation Station, July 8

First of all, there are still some small kinks being worked out on this site.

• The RSS feed and newsletter "sign up" button are still under construction. Those should be up and running in the next few days, so keep checking back.


• Ditto the Twitter sign up from this page. However you can still click through to the HappyGaneshInc Twitter account by using the Blogroll on the left side of the page. (See it? See it? That's right.)

Tonight was the weekly manifestation class at Modern Zen (the building formerly known as Griffin's Loft). This is a class that seems - by its very nature - to work best when I am not prepping and when I haven't read fifty theories and nine thousand books on Manifestation and Creation (which to me sounds an awful lot like Manifestation in motion -- just letting it be). I thought I'd take the bull by the horns tonight and actually prep - i.e. -- discuss notes and theory.

See, I recently went to the library looking for books on spirituality, on manifestation, even on being present. I came away with an armful of books (the same armful I mentioned in the July 1st post), determined to Learn More About Manifestation.

Riiiiiighhhht.

Here's what happened. I remembered that I knew a lot more than I thought I did. I also learned that at some point, manifestation links into many, many ideas of spiritual surrender.

1. Thoughts Create Beliefs Create Action


2. Letting Go Will Help You On Many Levels


3. In Letting Go, We Can Only Control Ourselves


4. In the space of "Letting Go", create.

• How do you know you're manifesting what you need?

Someone asked a really great question tonight. "I want to do X thing. How do I know if I am on the path?"

By how you feel. If everytime you think about X thing, about YOU being in this situation, purely, you feel awesome and amazing and want to dance in your shoes and kiss small puppy dogs, then this is GOOD. If , on the other hand, merely thinking about X situation makes you feel drained, unhappy, or angry, then maybe this is not really something you want to do.

• Feelings are facts.

My mom used to throw this one at me and I used to look at her like she was insane. "What do you mean feelings are facts?" I would say. "Facts are facts." Well, mom really meant that feelings show where you are in the middle of a situation. How you feel often shows you what your needs are or are not. Where are you? What is happening for you? It's a biggie.

• "Good feels Good" -- Esther Hicks

I love this one.  Look at that. Good feels good. Was there ever so simple a statement?

That's it? Centuries of people being taught that pleasure of any kind means surefire damnation?

All of us, going forth, thinking that if we reaaaaalllly roll around in pleasure and catnip, the great hand of Big External Force (and sometimes Big Mamma or Papa SuperEgo) will destroy us in a blazing fire?

Think about all the ways society teaches us to put this aside. Don't have too much fun. Have a good time, but after that, come back in because supper's on the table. Good feels good. Let's start there. Good feels like alignment. Good feels like being with yourself. Good feels like whole. Good feels good. Brilliant.

• Negative Manifestation: "I was waiting for the other shoe to drop"?

Does the Universe ever wear shoes? Shoes are there to move us from point A to point Z. They are not there to hinder me, or you, or to drop into our existence and end what was, up until that point, a perfectly lovely time. This reminds me of that Monty Python sketch about The Hand of God.

• Are there any absolutes? (Or, Oh My God, I'm the Teacher.)

I love teaching. I love it. I love connecting with people. I also find myself coming up against the 'image' of a Teacher Who Needs To Know Everything, Ever, About Manifestation. In general, I must have all the answers for you, my student. Some days I believe this. (Those are the days where my beagle looks at me like "Weren't you questioning that five minutes ago?" She's right. She's a smart beagle.)

I walked into class tonight and basically said, "Look, I am your teacher and right now I'm having a small crisis of faith around what that means. It does not mean I know all the answers." I have no idea. The truth is that I know what I have read and studied, and what has worked for me, and what I have seen.

I am also learning about manifestation and some days I break all the rules of it (clamping down, clenching down) five times before I'm out of bed. I'm human. It happens. Sometimes I let go and am able to create and pull things to me in all kinds of awesome wonderful ways. Often, I am able to let go and create more and more. That's fun and wonderful.

• In Class: Manifestation Fortune Cookies

Tonight we did Manifestation Fortune Cookies. I passed around a small bag and every person pulled out a quote on manifestation. Weirdly (or actually, Purely Manifested!!!), every person seemed to draw the exact fortune that somehow mirrored something they had expressed during the class. Perfect. Total Manifestation at work.

Manifestation is faith is creation is God/Source/Divine/Us is letting go. It's all tied up somehow. It's one weird golden thread where all of it -- - becomes something we can hold on to and let it hold us.

Here's to being held and holding back.

G'night, all. Sleep well.

Mourning, Feelings, and Pema Chodron

Since starting Happy Ganesh in October of 2009, I've noticed something about certain parts of the healing field in general.  It seems like we encourage ourselves and others to have compassion. That's fine, ok. But all too often (at least in certain parts of the healing field) I feel like we're encouraged to have compassion in a way that actually sticks us firmly in the spiritual rather than really being HUMAN.

I also hear this a lot when it comes to grief. I've heard people in the healing field say to the grieving that the people they love are around them anyway, that they just miss the physical body. And that's true.

I feel angry about that idea. It  sounds like the reality of being human and feeling grief is being poo-pooed and traded in for a loftier, more spiritual model. Grief is grief. Love is love. Grief lays us low. It takes out of us everything we had to give --- and if we follow the path of grief, it really can bring you back to life. My experience with grief is that it destroyed me - and it showed me what I needed and what I didn't need. It showed me who I was, my own sense of humanity, my own terrors. It allows me to understand that I am alive. That, five years after my father's death and three years after my mother's death, I want to be alive.

If you are reading this and have lost someone, trust your grief. That's the best advice I have for you. Trust your feelings and trust the process. Since I started HG and started seeing mediumship clients, I've noticed that sometimes the session becomes open space for a lot of things to be worked through. I've had clients come in and tell me again and again that they "shouldn't be so sad because they just miss the physical body."

Somewhere along the lines, if my clients are really active in the healing path, they seem to feel guilty about their human losses. It's been five years, or two months, or ten years. Why do I still miss my husband/sister/mother/wife/father? Why can't I just look at their death as energy and be done with it?

Being human is the root of all of this. That means being in some of the most uncomfortable and scary emotions ever. It also means being in joy and happiness. My prayer is that we all find the courage to grief. To really grief for what's been lost. To get in there, get to the root of it, learn about it, and come back up, refreshed. And to go in again and again, if needed, to get to the root and then rise up to joy.

Pema Chodron, Buddhist nun and author, wrote a fantastic book called The Places That Scare You. In it, she basically talks about the danger of, basically, having a special set of neuroses that develop as a result of practicing bodhichitta (the awakened heart). In other words, in trying to *feel* our feelings and be *on a path*, we can drive ourselves a little nuts! If we're hard on ourselves in areas of life, we'll be hard on ourselves as healers, as humans, as people who are mourning, etc.

"One way [of developing neruroses] is to [...] use the training as just one more way that we don't measure up. If we train to become good or to escape from being a 'bad' person, then our thinking will remain just as polarized, just as stuck in right and wrong. We will use the training against ourselves." (p. 106)

In other words, rather than just letting ourselves feel, we'll put ourselves in a category and leave ourselves there. Good/bad. Good/bad. Should/Should Not. Fake BS concepts of spiritual/unspiritual. Being spiritual does not mean giving up being human. It - as I am learning constantly - means rooting yourself in your humanity. (Whew. What a ride.) It means doing it constantly. It means allowing yourself to be human because that is what you are. Your emotional system guides you to where you need to be.

Once, I had a newly grieving woman tell me that she knew she 'should' be over the loss of her husband because she'd read books on energy - and she knew that his energy was released. And she felt guilty for feeling as she felt. Was her husband released into energy? Sure. Did she have every right to miss his human form? Absolutely. To be human? To feel the depth of her own grief without shame? Yep.

Grief is not something that our culture teaches. Feeling feelings is not something that culture teaches. Letting yourself feel grief may be the hardest thing to feel. My first year without my mother was terrible. I leaned on friends. I was numb. I got washed out and washed back in again. And I went deeper into my own soul and into the reality of myself than ever, ever before.

In mediumship, I found -  very recently - that I had been totally submerging my own feelings of grief by buying into the whole concept of "I'm a medium. The fact that I can talk to my dead makes it better. I'm fine." It makes it easier and gives me a sense of spiritual connection, yes. But, what I learned was that I'd hidden certain parts of my very human grief and exchanged it for the purely spiritual. Working with people who have lost loved ones got me going deep within my own grief - and still gets me moving through it.

I hope I never stop.

I hope I can keep moving through my own process around grief and rage, loss and life, joy and gladness. Excitement to joy. To being fully human and accepting of my losses and excited about my open heart and its capacity to feel. This might take me until I'm 97 to really have it down to a science, but I'm willing.

I hope you can too. I hope that, for those of you reading this who are in mourning of some kind, whether its from a death, a letting go, or a moving on (such as an end to a personal relationship, friendship, move, or another big change), that you can keep following and trusting your own heart and your own process. Move through your grief. Let it come and go. Follow your uncomfortable feelings, your pain, and your grief, to your joy and your humanity. Your process is holy and sacred, and different from every other person's on this planet. It's different from mine. It's different from your neighbor's. And let your intentions be what they will be for you.

But for all that, to quote Stephen Sondheim from the musical Into The Woods, "No one is alone."

Thank you for reading.

Welcome to Happy Ganesh!