Seeking Authentic Voice

 Mornings continue to be plagued by headaches, although they are less intense and more easily managed than that massive one a few days ago. I’ve gone back to some of my training in massage therapy school, twenty eight years ago, to relearn some shiatsu. Shiatsu is acupressure, like acupuncture but using one’s fingers or other tools to apply pressure to the areas of the body where energy is stuck and release it. I have known for some time that my headaches are caused by a tight spot in my neck, just below the skull and a few fingers width away from the spine. I have treated this spot as if it were a trigger point, a tight muscle, and used ice/heat/ice to release the tightness as well as pressure from a massage wand. However, in my reading about acupressure points I’ve learned a couple of things.The pressure point in the neck, the one that correlates to the same spot that is causing my headaches, is called G20, which means Gallbladder 20. It is part of the gallbladder meridian and is...

Recently, in Jan Richardson's Lenten retreat she offered this: "Tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don't speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside."                                                                --Audre Lorde's daughter, speaking to Audre     and then this poem: She Untames Her Tongue For years her tongue was trained in soothing tastes: chamomile and chocolate, peppermint and rosemary. She specialized in pleasant words that eased from her lips, murmuring apologies and niceties, consolations an...

In this morning's meditation Jan Richardson , at the Illuminated Advent Retreat, asks us to ponder the concept of "emptying." She writes: ".... worship begins not only with the presence of call and response, with the meeting of God and of one another, but with the emptying that makes the meeting possible, the emptying involved in preparing of a space of welcome for the Word to make a home. What kind of space are you preparing in this season? How do you make ready, make way, make room for the sacred in these days? What distracts you; what drowns out the Word? Is there some piece you need to release or to simplify? In this second week of Advent, what draws your attention to the liturgy of your life?" Yesterday I wrote a bit about how busy and full my life is these days. It is a challenge to find time to do all that I want and need to do. But I am working at it. I am trying to rise early enough in the morning to take care of that which feeds me. I...

I have been so busy lately that I have literally had no time to reflect, let alone read and write. I have managed, more or less, to maintain my exercise routine. My hope is for both, mornings when I can read, reflect, write, and exercise. This means I need about three hours most mornings. Seriously, who has that kind of time while also working a full time job as a parish priest, being a wife and mom, and  having three dogs and two cats? Sigh. So I exercise most days and read and write as I am able. Life is full and good and I am not complaining, I am just honoring the urges within and my inability to satisfy the many diverse directions my life is pulled in. The philosophy book I am slowly making my way through has moved on from pondering the question of the "ultimate, that which one finds when one reaches the very heart of existence" to the idea of "being" and "becoming." Ultimate, according the various philosophers who have pondered this question ma...