I begin

I just confirmed it with my business partner: I am opening a studio in Oakland!  Now all the classes and working at the spas and the meditation and study and healing I've done in my own body will be put to the test, and Oh, how I've been longing for a test.

I have loved, absolutely adored, these last two years of prayer and contemplation.  I feel I have been given a gift: I learned how to live as simply as I could and work as little as I could and spend all the rest of my time simply Listening.  Well, getting still took the longest part, and then listening.  I could stretch all afternoon in my room, or garden all day in my backyard, start a job and quit it, or leave town for as long as I wanted.  Take any class, make any friends, and eat all the best food thanks to my amazing farmer friends (bless you!).  As long as I was working enough to pay my bills, or enough to pay off the credit card debt that would often creep and then subside, I have been doing fine.

Now through all that joyful resting, I learned that there is something organically occurring in ME that desires to work, with passion and with a purpose.  I had to sift past all the societal expectations (they sounded something like, "Go wear a button-down shirt and push buttons on a computer and get some points on your scoreboard called money!") and sit and sometimes mope, but always keep resting until I finally found the voice that sounds like authentically me and is ready to move forward.  I understand that to move forward I will have to work hard and maybe wake up really early or even try harder than is comfortable for a while.  I can do this for two reasons: I have learned that I want it, and I have learned how to rest and replenish myself.

So WHAT do I want?  I want to sustain my life financially by working with clients to help them achieve the most health they can in their body.  I am a massage therapist, now I want to earn my living doing it.  And I will still pursue all of the rest of it: gardening and prayer and meditation and proper eating and sustainable relationships and yoga and movement; all these things join together to create life and wholeness in me, and maybe the more I learn the more I can pass on to someone else some day.  Today, though, I will learn and study and practice massage, and maybe help a few people live in to more fullness.  Maybe one of those people will be me.