Prana Pages

Like most Americans today, I was caught up in the activities of the inauguration today.  I watched on cnn.com while on facebook simultaneously reading the comments of thousands of my fellow citizens respond to the broadcast.  What caught my attention more than anything throughout the day, was how often and how powerfully the essence of Spirit and God was evoked.  From the initial invocation to the “so help me God” of the swearing in, to Obama calling on the ancestors in the first line of his Inaugural Address to the humorous benediction and the closing Amens, the power of the invisible was present and omniscient.

The power of prayer only grew from there.  As Ted Kennedy fell into seizure, the facebook posts were overwhelmed with prayers and thoughts of love for Kennedy and his family.  So much so, that I was not the least bit surprised to hear reports just a few hours later that he was smiling in his hospital bed.  So, when President Obama decided to walk much of the parade route, the facebook prayers only multiplied.  I had no doubt that the invisible shield around our Nation’s President would keep him safe as he walked and waved to the people he represents.  He holds within himself, an aura of confidence, of strength, and of stability that will protect and serve this country as he has promised.

As a side note, many facebookers credited Michelle Obama’s Chicago lifestyle for her ability to walk confidently in the cold without a hint of discomfort.  This exemplifies that our First Lady has an internal warmth, a motherly flame as powerful as the Divine Goddess, that will nurture and nourish this nation in the years to come.

I ask you all to keep the prayers coming.  In this time of transformation, our President and his family face a daunting task, and he cannot do it alone.  He requires the invisible support of God and Spirit as invoked by the power for prayer from every voice who will call.

With the rest of the world, I seem to have gotten myself into the vampire mood.  Yes, I picked up the Twilight series recently, and am making my way through high school again, wondering why I would want to relive the experience literally.  I’ve even tasted a little of the short short episodes of 30 Days of Night on hulu.com for some online television viewing pleasure.  What I didn’t realize, perhaps until it was too late, like Bella in Twilight, that vampires are all around me.  They just don’t come in the stereotypical shapes and forms I pictured when reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula in college.

Instead of hearing “I want to suck your blood,” I’m noticing the potential for energy drainage abound.  These little parasites come in many shapes and sizes.  They are quite deceptive.  On the surface, they are quite cute, enticing actually.  They start off simple, like a game of Pathwords on Facebook, or a polite greeting in the grocery store.  But they evolve and develop quickly into time-eaters and energy suckers that waste away hours trying to get the best score or somehow the friend you greeted at the market has you unloading her UHaul into her new apartment four floors up.  Energetically, their auras look like playful little fairies, or fun gnomes.  But once they gain access, they remove their cloaks and reveal their true nature, and they look like the results of a leech mating with an octopus in a bog.

Energy vampires attach themselves to their human hosts, and with each suckle, they grow, until much of the human form takes on the qualities of the critter.  People playing host to these creatures begin to behave like the parasites, draining the energy of all around them, in many ways.  Some of them are time eaters, others prefer happiness as their delicacy, and still others enjoy a good flavor of motivation.  Whatever their tastes, they leave their hosts feeling exhausted, famished, sluggish, and sad.  People who have been infected by energy vampires are masters of games like misery loves company, more please, there’s never enough time, can you do me another favor, or the most deceitful your life is so grand - can I have some? We’ve all experienced these encounters…the person who starts a conversation with you and you can’t figure out how to get out, or the person who asks for a small favor which turns into a huge affair, or the person who somehow convinces you to give away your talent and service to them for free.  Like all things, energy needs to operate on a level of exchange, so whenever a vampire takes, they must leave something in its place.  Thus, when we are drained by a vampire, we are left with all things toxic:  negativity, anger, shame, blame, sadness, exhaustion, fear, hunger, thirst, frustration, and so much more.

The bottom line of these energy vampires is that they operate out of scarcity, and they cannot survive alone.  They do not understand the concept of inner power, and lack the ability to access it, so they search out those who have power, and pirate the energy for their own use.  They are masters at splicing cable wires and overloading electrical sockets. More often than not, we end up blowing the fuse, tripping the circuit, or running out of gas as a means of extraction, but then they just wait long enough for you to refuel and they return for more.  Extraction is not the solution, as Bella knows from her love with Edward, once you go vampire - you can never go back.

The only solution therein lies in prevention.

The only way to prevent the drainage of energy is to realize and affirm the power of the source.  The source of energy does not lie in some circuit box or come from some far off windmill or oil well.  The true source of energy exists on the spiritual realm, on the meta-physical level, somewhere inside our guts.  It is a simple knowing.  Once we know that the source is never-ending, that it cannot be drained, we shift the paradigm into a different realm of being, one of abundance and power.  We all have it inside us.  A simple affirmation and belief in that affirmation can totally change the entire scenario from scarcity to abundance.

I am all I need, and all I need is within me.

The great news is that the power of this source is more contagious than the vampires themselves.  Once infected with the virus of positive thinking and powerful being, one can inspire, motivate, infect, and expel the same energy to all those around them with little to no effort.

My husband and I have very different taste buds.  I tease him because he prefers what I call “kid food” choosing pb & j or mac & cheese over my more sophisticated tastes like lemon-caper chicken in a white wine sauce.  He grew up in a meat & potatoes family, and I grew up in a family of experimental cooks.  The following is a recipe I created that pleases his “kid food” style and my desire for unique flavor.

• Flat-Out brand flatbread or Pitas or other crust of your choice
• Thai Peanut Sauce (we’ve tried many brands, LeeAnn Chin is our favorite, see below for a homemade recipe)
• Peanut Butter
• Matchstick Carrots
• Bean Sprouts
• Cubed Chicken or Tofu
• Red Peppers thinly sliced
• Shredded Mozzerella or soy cheese
• Cilantro chopped

1. Heat the crust until warm or crispy to taste
2. Mix 1-2 tablespoons of peanut butter with 1/2 cup of thai peanut sauce and spread across the crust
3. Saute chicken or tofu with 2 T of peanut sauce mixture
4. Layer carrots, bean sprouts, chicken or tofu, and red peppers
5. Top lightly with cheese and sprinkle with cilantro
6. Bake 350 degrees until cheese melts

In 2007, a Fire year, we burned.  Passions were high, anger erupted, and the heat rose.  Americans fumed when Don Imus’ racial slurs made the headlines.  Barry Bonds suffered a similar fate when his world record talents were revealed to be a result of illegal drug use resulting in bigger meaner headlines than his successes.  James Frey experienced anger face to face when America’s favorite talk show host released her ire at him on national television.   The emotion inside one man in 2007 was too much to contain, and so it exploded in massacre at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007.  When Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and wounded many others before committing suicide, the deadliest shooting incident by a single gunman in  United States history, the country mourned and wondered how such anger and hatred can exist.  Taking a moment, we all could recall our own personal experiences of Fire in 2007.

In 2008, a Nature Year, we changed.  Transformation became inevitable.  As the mortgage crisis worsened, gas and food prices rose, and the stock market fell, Americans everywhere found themselves facing major changes in lifestyle.  The scandals of 2007 were just an appetizer to the big business scandals (i.e. Tom Petters) revealed in 2008 that forced thousands of people out of jobs or into new ways of living.  At the same time, environmental awareness took a huge bump with the popularity of the Toyota Prius and other hybrid vehicles, and “going green” became a household term and corporate buzzword alike.  Unable to find sure footing in patterns of the past, Americans craved the message of Hope and Change from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton alike.

And now, we step into 2009, a Mineral Year. The wisdom of this year lies in our bones, in the stones of the earth, in all that is not burned in the fire, changed by the nature, or washed away in the flood.  In The Healing Wisdom of Africa, Malidoma Some’ describes the element of mineral as “the storage place of memory, the principle of creativity, resources, stories, and symbolism. . . it is the elemental energy that allows us to remember, to communicate with one another, to express our feelings. . .to remember our origins and purpose in this life.”    Thus, Some’ ponders that perhaps the turbulence we experience is a result of forgetting who we are and what our life purpose is.   2009 is about remembering, tapping into the wisdom in our teeth and our bones, and remembering what is inside the marrow of our being, and then communicating and expressing that to the world.

“Smile, you’re hurting your teeth.”  My first yoga teacher told me once.  Teeth clenching is a common phenomenon in yoga practice.

The teeth are the only exposed bones in our body, and often the best identifier beyond our fingerprint and DNA.  Temperance Brennan, the main character in the television crime series Bones, is a forensic anthropologist who can look at skeletal remains, teeth included, and determine details about the person’s life from the condition of the bones.  She can not only approximate the age and race of a person, but when and how certain bones were broken.  She can often speculate about the  hobbies, occupations, types of injuries, and in some cases, even chronic disease or illnesses.  All of this information helps her to determine the identity of the person lying on her table as a skeleton.

So what exactly do the bones do for us beyond maintaining the structure of our bodies?  According to the Dagara tribe of West Africa in Burkina Faso, all the history of one’s life is held in the structure of the bones.  All the memories, all the wisdom, all the experiences, all the stories. Dr. Temperance Brennan would agree.

So, when one of my first yoga teachers once told me, “Smile.  You’re hurting your teeth,” perhaps she was onto something.  I was clenching my jaw, gritting my teeth together, connecting the only exposed bones of my body as I could, perhaps trying to force the pose out of my body through my bicuspids.  She was right, my teeth hurt.  My teacher’s suggestion, one that I have offered to my own students time and again, was that if I smiled, even a fake one, the pose might just be a tad easier.  She was right again.  Bones are so much happier when they are not put into direct contact with one another too vigorously.

I wonder, if Dr. Brennan examined my bones, would she be able to speculate from my bones, particularly my teeth grinding habits, that I practice yoga?

So, this morning, when I caught myself yet again gritting my teeth a little too much while trying to maneuver from hurdler’s pose to low plank, I thought I’d take another cue from the indigenous tribes of Africa. After a couple lion’s breaths to release the tightness in my jaw, I grabbed a stone from my husband’s collection. I live with a person who tends to pick up rocks and stones wherever he goes and they accumulate in odd places around the house, so finding a small stone in the closet of my yoga room was not at all surprising.  I talked to the stone.  I asked it to serve as a surrogate for the wisdom in my teeth.  I told it to support me with its density and give me a little bit of its solidarity.  I asked that it tap into all the wisdom in the bones of my body and set me up properly to perform the maneuver.  I placed the little stone at the top of my mat right in my drishti sight line, and I attempted the hurdler/low plank transition again.

It worked.

As I set myself up in hurdler’s pose, my hands felt like they had become solid rocks, and I was able to lift up and float back into low plank without gritting my teeth and without crunching into my shoulders.

Now I understand where the term wisdom teeth came from.  If only I had kept mine after the dentist removed them all those years ago…