We were fortunate to take our first visit to Washington DC, last April. I hadn't been there since college, but I'm not sure that time counts as a visit per se. A group of us filled a station wagon and drove straight through from Evanston, IL to DC to march in an anti-apartheid demonstration. Twenty hours each way with just the march in between.

This trip included a number of the Smithsonian museums, a tour of Capitol Hill, and a trip to George Washington's historic plantation, Mt. Vernon. The highlight of our vacation was definitely Mt. Vernon. Although I was in "tourist mode", from an intuitive perspective, it was provoking and life-changing.

Upon arriving, I was struck by how incredibly picturesque the estate is. The fact that the day was clear and warm didn't hurt, but really, it is just the most beautifully situated mansion. From any approach, the outbuildings, gardens, and trails are positioned so proportionally to the main house that they appear to radiate naturally away from it, like rays of light moving towards you from a central star. Just this amazing sense of seamless relationship to everything on the estate.

One of the things that surprised me the most was the interior décor of the mansion. The vibrant paints and color schemes would make any modern designer proud. Many of you know I am incredibly responsive to color, so taking the tour of the house was a total delight! Verdigris, pale teals, warm dry yellows, deep red, comforting neutrals...of course everything in the mansion is authenticated or original, so it was one of the most delicious sensory trips through time I have ever taken. Yummy.

Thusly "lit up", we toured the grounds, walking the trails that lead to a memorial burial ground of the slaves that worked on the plantation, to George Washington's grave site, to the Potomac dock. Down by the dock is a wonderful exhibit that shows some of the forward-thinking and innovative farming techniques that were used on the plantation, things that were completely new concepts back then, like crop rotation, angled fencing, and a threshing machine that George Washington invented himself that made harvesting wheat much more efficient. There is also a replica slaves' quarters that is so authentic it made me feel that the people who lived there had just stepped out for a moment and would be back soon.

I should take a moment here to explain what it's like for me when I "time travel". Historic buildings don't give off energy exclusively, as we know all homes carry the energy both of the families that have lived there. Homes also hold the energy of the guides that are assigned to watch over those who dwell in any particular place. Old homes obviously carry a lot more energy, (one of the reasons I insisted on an antique house when we moved here. The opportunity to live in a house with denser energy was just too appealing)! So, by the time we started walking outside, I was already picking up so many waves of that it was quite thrilling! And the vibe at Mt. Vernon is lovely, I can tell you. Light, and expansive, and full of hope.

It's also somewhat maternal...sort of comforting. I think part of that has to do with the Mt. Vernon Ladies' Association, which basically saved it from ruin after the Civil War. But I also think there is a potent sense of our first president's character still very much alive everywhere I walked that day. The energy not just of a leader, but of a leader who considered himself firstly a farmer, a steward of the land. The energy of a man who shepherded an entire portion of civilization into a new paradigm. The energy is welcoming, protective, inspiring. Yet gentle.

All of this had put a spring in my step by the time we hit the museum, which is a comprehensive collection of fabulous exhibits meant to help students of all ages grasp George Washington's life journey, as well as to dispel many of the myths and misconceptions that have tacked themselves onto the "legend" (the teeth weren't wooden, etc.). Many facts struck me:

He had no natural born children. Martha brought two children into the marriage, as she was a widow, and he not only adopted them and loved them as his own, but educated his daughter (albeit to the standards of the day) as well as his son.

He was an avid reader, and because his own education was interrupted he was a self-reliant learner his whole life, and self-taught in many subjects.

He also appears not to have been very successful in his early life, definitely not a leader born solely of privilege, someone who had to learn from failures in business and soldiering.

In his will, he left his slaves to Martha with the stipulation that they be freed upon Martha's death. Many of my favorite parts of the museum were devoted to the examination of this decision and its consequences. It made me think. What would our country have been like if he had lead by example and freed his slaves while he was alive? More than anything, I came away very clear that none of his accomplishments could have happened without the support of an estate basically run by almost 300 slaves.

But the big moment of the day, from an Intuitive's point of view, was when I stood in front of the exhibit illustrating the end of the war and the establishment of our democracy.

George Washington was offered a monarchy, yet turned it down. Then he was offered the presidency for life. He turned that down too. How did he know to do that?? Can you imagine the country we live in if those two choices had been made differently? He was being pressured by many, many people who worshiped him, to become King, to rule for life. How does one set aside ego considerations in situations like that, in order to make the enduring choice?

The answer of course, is that we are inspired. Our characters develop along spiritual lines to accentuate wisdom and humility, but in the end all of us can be guided, and in this way we can intuit the path that will bring the greatest good to the highest number. We listen to the still, small voice within. Those that know how to open themselves up to that powerful humility, walk a path that is destined, not in the sense that it is narrowly predictable, but in the way that the Power greater than ourselves moves our progress as a civilization along, one life at a time. In this case, our first president was a steward for more rapid growth.

I'm sure if you saw my aura as the realization that George Washington was a channel washed over me, you would not only have seen volcanic white light pop out the top of my head, but exclamation marks around it for emphasis! I was getting messages LOUD and CLEAR about this incredible human being and the decisions he made that shaped the future of our nation.

Everything I saw and felt that day at Mt. Vernon converged upon me and changed my understanding of our history as a nation.  We really are One Nation Under God-just not in the way we may have thought!!

Please read the preceding blog about my my equally powerful experience reading The Lost Symbol, only a couple short months after my visit to Mt. Vernon. Dan Brown's DC is an enlightening ride that cemented everything I picked up psychically--and I can't wait to go back!

Yikes, it happened, of course. Since my last post I remembered movies and books that I forgot to put on the list! I know you will forgive me when I say that the list is a living thing, and will grow and expand as I collect more recommendations for you, and from you:

I cannot believe I forgot Amelie! One of the most amazingly charming movies about being a caring member of a community, and the process of learning to receive love. Actually a movie about all kinds of love. And if you don't go out and buy a garden gnome right after viewing it, then you need more whimsy in your life.

I also thought about the movie Wings of Desire. Note: DO NOT see the Hollywood remake of this film, City of Angels. Put the coffee on and watch the complete 1987 original German film. I don't know if I love this film so much because I saw it during a time when I felt very, very down and alone, or just because it is so beautifully made, but it is just the most graceful illumination of the interplay of hope between ourselves and our guides...

And for the book list, two great offerings from Exeter "native" Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol. I just finished The Lost Symbol--what an elegant thriller! Who else do you know who can blow your mind right out of your conceived realities, all while keeping you awake reading at 3am, cuticles decimated? I read The Da Vinci Code when I was pregnant with Ben, and it was incredibly powerful to read about the hidden feminine while I was creating life. The Lost Symbol has affected me in similar ways. Besides being a wonderful mind walk through symbology and a tour of our capitol, the book is an extremely powerful validation of our ability to create and influence our lives positively through one of the main character's field of study, Noetic Science. I've been on a high for weeks since reading it, and have actually changed my meditation practice to embrace what I learned from this book. Warning: if you come for a reading, I'm going to recommend you get this book.

The First Day of The Rest of My Life

Well, it happened. My boys are off to day camp this summer. Harry will be in first grade in the Fall, so basically my semi-empty nest is all mine from 8:30-3:30 every week day. Last week Harry even brought me a "nature gift" from a walk he took with our babysitter in the woods, a bird nest that had fallen from a tree. I loved looking at its many layers of materials, everything from Christmas tree tinsel, ribbon, dog and cat hair, the usual dry grass and twigs, to long pieces of what looks like plastic pull-ties. It is a masterful piece of engineering. Very snug and comfy and incredibly well built. I hope the next we have built our boys is exactly that.

I am admittedly a bit out of sorts. It has only been a couple of days, and the wildness of the freedom I have is quite unsettling. I've noticed a tightness in my chest and random panic throughout the day-a nagging feeling of, "what am I forgetting?". Rather than being footloose, and I off-balance, trying to learn this new dance. Instead of juggling three or four tasks at at time, I am doing one or two. I'm not sure what to do with all the.....space. In my head, I mean. I'm not used to being so even-tempered, so available, so free from the brain fog that comes from constantly being harried.

Of course I am going to devote time every day to my writing, and I will have more flexibility in scheduling readings. I can exercise when I want, largely. It's the emotional waves that I am riding that take a different kind of energy to get used to-and I expect that will take a while.

In the meantime, I'll content myself with the heady thrill of never having to take my kids to the grocery store again. Gosh, with the money I save every week, I can treat myself to a pedicure, or two!!

Summer Movie and Reading List

I'm asked quite often for recommendations for books that have a good spiritual message. There are many good "how to" books on intuition and spiritual development, but I stopped reading them a long time ago. There are two reasons for this: firstly, I'm working on my own book of that type, and I don't want to be influenced by anybody else's message. So it's a way to guard the purity of what comes through me. Secondly, I absolutely love books (and movies) that carry a spiritual message through the plot. It's far more entertaining and subtle to watch a spiritual story being played out than to be lectured to. Here's a list of some of my recent favorites, just in time for the beach and vacation:

Movies:

The Men Who Stare At Goats. Alan and I watched this movie recently and could not stop laughing. Clooney is just perfection in this, and Ewan MacGregor is so earnest that it is positively endearing. Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey are also totally captivating. You begin this movie thinking you're watching a black comedy, which you are, but at the end you realize you've been taught something about your own spiritual power and the journey we all take to uncover it. There's a great meta joke about becoming a Jedi-Ewan MacGregor's character becomes obsessed with achieving this as his goal, and it's beautiful how MacGregor plays it so straight, it's as if he himself never even heard of Obi Wan. Perfection.

Resurrection. Staring Ellen Burstyn, this is an older movie from the late 70's or early 80's that is sometimes hard to find. It's worth the search, however. Burstyn plays a fast-living successful woman who has everything going for her, seemingly, and then becomes paralyzed in a car crash that claims the life of her husband. She ends up convalescing in her father's house, and in her determination to get out from under his abrasive negativity, discovers she has the ability to heal herself. She teaches herself to walk again, and then goes on to heal others.

The Matrix. I know, I know. Some of this movie is creepy and a little geeky. But that scene when Neo discovers how to dodge the bullets? Come on, tell me it's not spine-tingling! What a metaphor for discovering how we give our power away to our fears! I actually prescribe this movie to my classes and clients when they need a breakthrough in this area. If nothing else, the bad-ass costumes and cast are easy on the eyes.

Coraline. This is an incredible movie, animated ala Tim Burton (I believe he produced), about unleashing feminine power. Coraline is a one-of-a-kind, funky (I totally dig the blue hair) girl whose parents are busy and boring. In her explorations of their new house she has all sorts of adventures, until it turns dangerous and her parents are kidnapped into the underworld....but this kid is no victim. Instead of running for help, she stands on the balcony, screams, "I AM NOT AFRAID!!!" into the sky, and goes and gets her parents back. It's a little scary for kids under 6, but absolute required viewing for tween girls. Go girlfriend!!

The Razor's Edge. Also from the 80's, this was the movie that Bill Murray got slammed for doing because it was a serious role. But watch it and see if you agree with me that he's beyond brilliant. In fact, I think he was perfectly cast. Based on M.Somerset Maugham's masterpiece, Murray plays a wealthy young man just home from WWI, shell shocked and completely disillusioned by the pretenses of society after being so affected by the horror of battle. Unable to rejoin his friends in their return to "normal" life, he decides to reject convention and travel the world in search of spiritual meaning. There's a scene where he's huddled against the cold in a little shack in the Himalayas, surrounded by all his spiritual texts, trying to read to uncover the meaning of his life. He's been sent on this retreat by a Buddhist priest, to meditate until he has his answer. The fire starts to go out, and what happens next is some of the most amazing acting I've ever watched.

Contact. I love this movie specifically because I'm not a UFO-gal. While I certainly don't think we are the only ones in the Universe, I don't hold with a lot of the popular theories about who else is out there and what they want with us. But this movie is so intelligent and tender, while at the same time so exciting, I am riveted by it. And when she makes contact, I just blubber all the way through that scene. It rings true to me.

Books:

If you want to work on opening up to your spiritual path, the books I usually recommend are the Oren series channeled by Sanaya Roman. Start with Living With Joy and go on from there. I love these books because they are a really good education on how we must stretch our thinking in order to understand what our guides are trying to teach us. They also confront the constant fear, negativity, and isolation that we have taken for granted as part of life.

Some really great reads with responsibly good spiritual themes in them, and by that I mean, fiction that doesn't make fun of spirituality or champion it either. These are authors that don't have an agenda or anything to prove, and so the spiritual themes speak for themselves in very honest ways:

The Law of Love by Laura Esquivel

People of The Book

The Year of Wonders

March, all by Geraldine Brooks

Second Glance by Jodi Picoult

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

The Green Mile

Hearts in Atlantis

The Shawshank Redemption--all by Stephen King-movies are excellent too!!

The Temple of my Familiar, by Alice Walker-this is fun for those who loved The Color Purple I once read an interview with Ms. Walker where she stated that writing her masterpiece was a matter of sitting down and waiting until the voices spoke to her. The very definition of channeling.

Anything by Amy Tan!

Anything by Anne Lamott, especially her non-fiction books on spiritual journeying.

A really good non-fiction read about surrendering our need for material consumption is

Not Buying It.

I personally really love books and movies that explore the connection between an object and its owners through time, like Accordion Crimes by E. Annie Proulx, The Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland, and the movie, "The Red Violin".

Now chickens, I'm sure I'm forgetting some and haven't listed some that you love-so keep me on my toes and let me know what I should watch and read next!!

After over twenty years, I have returned to yoga. And nothing in my life is the same.

I first took yoga in college to help with upper back pain. It was wonderful. My teacher was East Indian, and I would hear his melodic voice encouraging us to "ba-reeth rythimicallleeeee" all week between classes. He coached us through a classic Hatha Yoga practice made up of postures and resting meditations, and I performed everything easily. I left feeling good after every session. I did sun salutations at home in the morning every day.

Once the back pain stopped, I stopped yoga. Anytime in my twenties or thirties that I tried to start practicing again, I made it through two or three classes and then.....my lower back would wrench out, or I would become incredibly emotional, or ashamed of my stiff muscles, or I would start comparing my fitness to the others in the class, or I would decide I didn't like the instructor, or my schedule would tie me up. One time my back went out so very badly, I couldn't get up off the floor. Luckily I was taking class with a girlfriend who scooped me up and drove me home.

I decided that my body just didn't like yoga.

Recently, I've started back again. I've sort of snuck myself back into it. Because if I stop too long to think about what I'm actually doing, my brain will start chatting about why it's impossible to keep going. And yes, my back did go out, and I went back to class. I went to acupuncture and kept walking through the pain and kept going to class. My back got better. And stronger.

My experience now is nothing like it was in my college years. Gone is the ease and grace with which I performed my yoga. I use "perform" intentionally. A few months ago my yoga instructor talked about our particularly Western liability in yoga-the need to perform yoga perfectly. Instead of experiencing yoga, or practicing yoga-we Americans tend to attack it with a perfectionist attitude that leads to injuries and frustration. Talk about being called out!

Bikram yoga is performed in intense heat. We're talking 105 degrees. It is a specifically choreographed routine of postures and breathing exercises done in a 90-minute session. And I am absolutely awful at it. My body just won't do what I wish. It doesn't look like I want it to either, and it is very stiff from years of aerobic exercise without stretching properly. My heart and lungs are still developing the strength to deal with the intense heat, and so I must kneel down frequently during the class. I get nauseous and feel faint.

And I cry. Oh do I cry. Bikram yoga is as spiritually and emotionally cleansing as it is physically tonifying. Students are encouraged to look only at ourselves in the mirror and not to compare ourselves with others in class (I'm still working on that one). All that looking oneself in the eyes is very confronting. The tears and the sweat roll down in equal measure. Up come the hold-outs: like dandelion roots, that have sneakily remained underground even when I thought I got them all, the weeds that tenaciously block my soul: all my last-remaining damaging beliefs, repressed feelings, suppressed hopes and strength, ego-driven fears.....Bikram yoga helped me dig underneath them to pull them all out successfully.

I absolutely love it.

I love going up against my extreme expectations of myself every class, my need for perfection, and have those smashed down into little bits. Talk about surrender! Just standing up and breathing is sometimes all I can do-when I want to do so much more. My yoga practice has helped me ask myself, "Why is being accomplished so important to you? To any of us?" I'm searching deeper and deeper into myself for that answer, and as I journey I discover more parts of myself that I have neglected. More parts of myself I have abandoned for an image of the me I think I should be. The Grand Illusion.

I love finding out who I rightly am. My heart is more open. I naturally have the patience to use love and humor in situations which used to baffle me. I'm moving into a realm of radical self-acceptance that I never even knew I needed.

I love how clear my skin is, how my tendinitis is all but gone, how I stand up straighter, sleep better, hydrate better, eat and digest better, how my once borderline high blood pressure is back down into the normal range.

But most of all, I have begun to love being the most below-average yogi in the room. For I have learned more by being awful at yoga, and continuing anyway, then I ever would have learned being good at it.