Entries from November 2008 ↓

 

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By: Suzanne Maiden

I had a great time presenting at the Manic Mommies Escape ‘08. I talked about key techniques you can use when communicating with your partner.  And, these skills work wonders with your colleagues, bosses, and family members.  Try it out and let me know.  I’d love to hear your results. Call me: 678-884-0524.

By:  Suzanne Maiden 

Have you ever loved someone and it makes no sense?  I recently had a client who stated that he loves a woman with such fervor and such frenetic intensity that throughout the session he repeatedly asked me if he were sane.  I reassured him, that his sanity was well intact.  He struggled to wrap his mind around having profound feelings for another when it felt irrational to his cognitive side.  This man could not make logical sense of why he could have such profound and deep feelings for a woman that appeared incongruent with his internal checklist.  Have you ever loved another and it makes no sense? 

Sometimes love is irrational.  Sometimes love makes no sense.  Sometimes love does not care about age difference, or ethnicity, or physical criteria, or health, or money; love does not care if it violates your mental checklist.  Love is non-discriminatory.  Love Just Is.  Love expresses itself without our permission, without our conscious consent, and without our logical cognition.  Love insists on being acknowledged.  Love wants expression.  

Love wants a voice - which may be nothing more than a divine whisper.  Loving another can never be wrong.  Love is the closest emotion to the divine we can express as spiritual beings who temporarily have a human experience.  Love is the Alpha and Omega.  Love is trump.   

By: Suzanne Maiden

Bodies talk.  Apparently they have a lot to say.  Our body speaks metaphorically and tells us exactly what we need to know about our psychological wounding.  Through illness, the body speaks symbolically.  The anatomical location and chakra point of an illness provide us with an abundance of  information.  Oh, many of you will resist my words and immediately become defensive and react with cognitive reasoning.  Some will intellectualize, deny, and refute this reality.  It can feel like too much to integrate that we may have some ownership in our health issues.  

However, in my humble opinion, our resistance does not negate this phenomenon.  The mind and body are intimately, deeply, inexorably woven.  The data support the mind-body connection.  If you find yourself defensive, it is OK.  I get it.  I was too.  But it is important, both physically and psychologically to understand the enormous impact psyche has on the body.  Because when we integrate our cognition with psyche, we awaken.  We identify aspects of soul which need emotional  healing.  Illness forces the issue.

I am a cancer survivor.  I do not like to dwell on this, nor is this a covert means to elicit compassion.  I am OK with my experience.  Cancer catapulted my awareness.  I was forced to examine what toxic energies I continued to carry.  But this essay’s focus is not my cancer history.  My own cancer is merly a springboard to provide validity on how I regard my body as a metaphor for what needed psychological healing.  And, my own therapist had to drag me to this realization - I kicked and screamed and resisted his interpretation of events the entire way.  But now I get it.  He will chuckle at this writing.  I resisted his assertion that my cancer had anything to do with my emotional wounding.  How dare he even suggest that I had culpability!  But I surely did.  Unless I actively worked my stuff, I knew I would die.  I’ve never met one other person who has survived my type particular type of cancer- a 9cm hemangiopericytoma.  The only people I’ve met who are familiar with this rare disease are the loved one’s left behind.   

What illnesses present themselves to you?  Where are they located?  Our Western culture, so egotistically inflated with ’scientific data’ often denounces Eastern thoughts which suggest illness and psyche directly correlate.  However, Western medicine is coming around.  I understand that even Ivy League Medical Schools offer alternative medicine curriculum and expose future physicians to cultural variations for healing.  This is good.  I do not suggest that anyone sacrifice Western medicine to exclusively embrace Eastern philosophy.  I suggest we integrate both philosophies - for they are not mutually exclusive but can live as companions.  East and West finally meet, meld and mesh.  I think this is wise.      

By:  Suzanne Maiden

I swore I would NEVER do THAT to my body - hahahahahahha.  The Universe has such a wonderfully wicked and playful sense of humor.  Because now, after a rare, nasty, mean-spirited cancer that left me with a 13″ scar from my right spine over my right hip into my right groin… I want one.  I want a tattoo. 

Me, a tattoo?  My family does not do tattoos.  My mother had me destined to become a debutante!  But, instead of donning silver slippers, I selected steel-toed combat boots.  Because much to my parents horror, I did not become a debutante, I enlisted in the US Air Force.  And even as an Active Duty military person I never considered a tattoo.  Odd how life reconfigures us and our story.

Now, when I look at my disfigured, scarred body, I think, “I need something to ritualize this experience…”  I conclude the ancient Greek Ouroboros (the serpent consuming it’s own tail) would be the perfect metaphor for me.  Why?  Because the Ouroboros represents the cyclical nature of life and death over and over.  Several months prior to my initial cancer diagnoses, I dreamed of serpents.  They obsessively slithered into my nightly dream life.  I hated them.  But, what I later learned, is the serpent is a powerful symbol of healing. 

Christianity has given the snake a bad rap.  Many indigenous cultures still regard the serpent as the creature who comes from below to bring primordial knowledge.  Even Christianity must give credit to the serpent.  Because, without the snake Adam and Eve would have remained in the Garden of Eden.  Without the serpent - they would have never become conscious.  The serpent brings consciousness to us, to our lives, to our inner conflicts.  If you’re unfamiliar with the Ouroboros, just look at my website header on the right is a shadow of the Ourboros. 

If I am to mark my flesh, it must represent something spiritually significant.  The serpent is a spiritual icon for me.  A friend of mine suggested perhaps having the serpent slither around the entire 13″ scar… what a lovely and apropos image  for me.  This is analogous to out modern day medical symbol for healing - the caduceus which portrays double inter-twinned snakes around the staff.

I still dream of snakes.  Sometimes I’m in the center with serpents in a circle surrounding me.  Each one, individually approaches me and has secret wisdom to impart - but alas, I do not speak serpent language.  The patient, primordial, cold- blooded creatures continue coming to me.  Sometimes they dance with me.  I know something big is approaching me when they begin to appear in my dream world again.  I had a long respite from dream serpents.  Then, weeks before I was diagnosed with more cancer, they slithered into my night psyche again.  This time, the white snake was prominent.  The white snake is the hero of a well known Russian Fairy tale.  The white snake brings wisdom to the king of the land.  I should be so fortunate.

So, once again, I am reminded to never say “never.”  Or, the Universe creates an experience to challenge me.  Here I sit contemplating not if, I should get a tattoo, but how I want it to look.  For me, it is a personal symbol.  I do not do it for anyone else’s eyes but my own. 

What do you think of tattoos?  Would you ever get one?  Call me: 678-884-0524.