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A Commercial that Inspires...

 

October Breast Cancer Awareness: Oya Monterey Viva La Cure

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and Oya, a sophisticated and caring local salon, is sponsoring two lovely events to promote awareness, raise funds and provide comfort. October 19th is a yoga class for breast cancer survivors, taught by survivors. Relax with friends...ahhhhh...om...oya!

The main event, Viva La Cure at La Mirada, will be held on Thursday, October 21 from 6:00 to 9:00 pm at Monterey Museum at La Mirada, one of the Peninsula's most elegant and beautiful party venues.

It will be a romantic evening of tapas, wine, and Spanish music. Local breast cancer survivors will model clothes from Élan at the Lodge and SLB. The evening will end with a raffle of items donated by generous members of our community. Tickets for the event are $50.00. Proceeds will benefit the Breast Cancer Assistance Group of the Monterey Peninsula. Also known as BCAG, this organization of breast cancer survivors works to improve the lives of local breast cancer patients and their families. For more information and to place a reservation for Viva La Cure visit Oya's own lovely site: http://oyainc.com/events.html

Annual Benefit for Serrena: The Center for Integrative Therapies

We are so blessed on the Monterey Peninsula to have a cancer treatment center (Monterey Bay Oncology) where a center for complementary and alternative therapies is also available. As an ovarian cancer survivor I have been privileged to receive services for some time now from Kaz Wegmuller a wonderful practitioner of acupuncture and Chinese medicine and Brian Elinoy, PhD, an alternative pharmacist.

When I began my cancer treatment I did not know of Serrena and so missed out on some of the ways alternative therapies can help with nausea and stress. Often doctors are hesitant to have patient use alternative therapies, worrying that they will compromise chemotherapy. But more and more research is showing that these treatments really are helpful and thus more and more becoming known as complementary therapies. 

Serrena is also a way to show you care about your loved one who is receiving treatment. A therapist can actual do certain treatments as one receives chemotherapy. A foot massage could be just the thing to help pass the time and show you care.

I find it hard to express my gratitude to Serrena and MBO; I have been given hope when much has seemed hopeless. Thank you to all at Serrena and Monterey Bay Oncology. I hope you can help support this important offering of alternative therapy.

 

Human Dignity: Not Rare at All

Denise Levertov has long been my favorite poet. She helps me remember the beauty of being. Typing her words to you helps me remember yet again.     

TRANSLUCENCE

Once I understood (till I forget, at least)
the immediacy of new life, Vita Nova,
redemption not stuck in linear delays,
I perceived also (for now) the source
of unconscious light in faces
I believe are holy, not quite transparent,
more like the half-opaque whiteness
of Japanese screens or lampshades,
grass or petals imbedded  in that paper-thin
substance which is not paper as this is paper,
and which permits the passage of what is luminous 
though forms remain unseen behind its protection.
I perceive that in such faces, through
the translucence we see, the light we intuit
is of the already resurrected, each
a Lazarus, but a Lazarus (man or woman)
without memory of tomb or of any
swaddling bands except perhaps
the comforting ones of their first
infant house, the warm receiving blanket...
They know of themselves nothing different
from anyone else. This great unknowing
is part of their holiness. They are always trying
to share out joy as if it were cake or water,
something ordinary, not rare at all.

Being with Depression: Where am I?

I have not been writing for awhile now as I am going through some challenges with some relationships, with money, with marriage and with self to name a few challenging places.

The quote I will post shortly has long been a help to me. I find it similar to Martin Buber's advice from I and Thou, a classic philosophical book in which Buber suggests that the end of depression can come through the re-mystification, as I call it, of relationships.

When I meet someone I do not ever really know them or it. Buber suggests that when we/I engage with any part of nature as if it were sacred, or as I have mentioned a mystery, and interact from that not knowing, we can over come depression and sadness. We can fall in love again with the world.

We make objects, Buber also teaches, and this is a powerful way of mankind. We objectify and create. But creating, a sacred act for many, we also make some "thing" and many of us/I find that afterwards there is no sense of satisfaction in that thing. Consumerism I believe thrives on this. We obtain or create one thing, find it not enough, find it, as Buber said, a "dead" object and we move on to the next, living in a constant state of wanting as Buddhists would teach about our being "hungry ghosts."

Yet in these very things we can find mystery and a sense of respect if we shift our relationship to one of curiosity and one of participation with good intent. In fact, I would say none of us exist outside our relationships and it is how we are in relationship that creates a sense of self.

Here is James Hillman's quote, from Dolores LaChappelle's Deep Powder SNOW, that has sustained me for so long. I consider it a small miracle that today, as I was feeling sad, the book was found on my shelf after a long sense of it being lost. I felt as if the book found me, not the other way around.

"Self is the interiorization of the invisible God beyond. The inner... [but] it's still a transcendent notion, with theological implications, if not roots. I would rather define self as the interiorization of community. I would be with myself when I am with others. I would not be with myself when I'm walking alone or meditating or in a room imagining or working on my dreams. In fact, I would be estranged from myself.

And others would not include just other people, because community, as I see it, is something more ecological...A psychic field. And if I'm not in in a psychic field with
others -- with people, buildings, animals, trees, I am not."  -- James Hillman, A Hundred Years of Psychotherapy--And the World's Getting Worse.

I can now remember several authors, John Heron, Charlene Spretnak and Theodore Rozak are a few, who also ask us to re-enchant ourselves via nature. The key is the word RELATIONSHIP. Native people knew this even as they too often degraded the Earth unknowingly.

My point here, to you and to me, is that all knowing is relational and how we are in relation creates the quality of being alive. You and I exist because of each other. May peace be with us all. And may we each know a truer sense of self in relationship.