Uncategorized | Michelle Cromer

The Tree of Life

Michelle Cromer September 6, 2016 Leave a Comment

I met a tree in Costa Rica that changed me life. I had spent days working and my friend Simon suggested we take a much needed break and go for a hike. Simon is British but lives in Costa Rica. He woke up one day and decided to exchange the corporate jungle for the real ones in Costa Rica.

Simon is in his mid 50’s but looks a great deal younger. His hair is the color of whisky and his eyes are blue. Not the ordinary sky blue. They are blue like the sea, crystal clear blue, shimmering and crashing and churning. Looking into his eyes you can hear the waves falling against the shore, see the foam flying into the air. His eyes are blue like that warm wool sweater that you put on when the air gets that chill: comfortable, warm, familiar. His eyes are that kind of blue.

After driving on a winding mountain road we arrive in a forest in the Lake Arenal region. As we begin our hike I notice that in the forest the sky vanishes almost completely, only a few fragments of blue remain – like scattered pieces of an impossible jigsaw puzzle. The air is rich with fragrance of damp leaves. Outside of the forest is the noon daylight, the powerful rays of summer. But in here everything is cool and the colors have the softness of that time right before twilight. I take all the air my lungs will hold and expel it slowly. These hikes in the forest are like a trip out of my life, a visit to a place where the measuring of time is done only by the rising and setting of the sun. [Read more…]

The Art of Surgery

Michelle Cromer July 6, 2016 Leave a Comment

“Your profession is not what brings home your weekly paycheck, your profession is what you’re put here on earth to do, with such passion and such intensity that it becomes a spiritual calling.”
Vincent Van Gogh

“I’m sorry I’m running a little late, I just made a nose out of a rib bone,” Dr. David Hecht casually said as he entered my exam room, his lithe movement reminding me of a warrior. He has on green scrubs and his tousled short hair is rich like mahogany. His light brown eyes look like sunlight shining through whiskey. The colors mingle together cascading an array of different shades throughout his gaze.

Everything about him is symmetrical, most obviously his cheekbones, but the symmetry extends to the way he smiles and holds his body. His rugged good looks are unexpected and even in his late 40’s he still possesses traces of what must have been loads of boyhood charm. This is my facial reconstructive surgeon: the man, and artistic genius that ended up putting my face back together after skin cancer had been cut out of my forehead and cheek.

Artists and doctors share many of the same approaches. They are visual people who study the intricacies of human anatomy. And they share highly developed observational skills and a fundamental love for humankind.

Each face is completely unique. Deciding how to shape it so that each feature appears in harmony with the others requires not only skill, but also an artistic vision and imagination. Plastic surgeons need a sense of aesthetics to design an appropriate surgical approach to the individual. An understanding of proportion—much like that expressed in the work of old masters such as Michelangelo and Da Vinci—combined with superior technical skills is imperative. With this combination, a surgeon links art and science, resulting in a more fully realized, beautifully proportioned outcome. The result is a walking piece of art.

But what makes Dr. Hecht a true artistic genius is his ability to access his inner world to bring out something not only meaningful and beautiful, but also necessary and incredible. Inner artistic genius is the inherent and indelible connection to the other world of great imagination, original thought and endless renewal. He sees the world for how it is supposed to be seen; with an open heart, mind, body and soul. He judges none and nothing. They are all the same to him; parts of life that are each equal and necessary, the art of the world.

Each artist is unique. And uniqueness has boldness in it and a core of imagination intended to transcend the common attitudes and collective patterns. Being unique is the spirit that is already there in each person, the inner intention, primary style and way of being that makes a true individual regardless of the pressure to conform to temporary social patterns and contemporary cultural fashions. At the individual level, each of us is an artist, here to give something that is not just unusual, not only exceptional, but that is distinctive and valuable by its very nature.

The inner uniqueness for life aspires to meaningful work and genuine purpose. It would have us undertake the seemingly impossible tasks of transforming culture and helping to heal the world. Not because the world can be saved or redeemed in a hurry, but because it is the impossibility of the great problems and projects of life that awakens the sleeping uniqueness within and changes work from a simple job to a life-long, life-enhancing project. And that serves the dignity and nobility of one’s soul as well as the well being of one’s community.

More than raw talent or potential ability, genius gives a person their unique way of being in and contributing to the world. So the question becomes not whether or not you are an artistic genius, but in what way does artistic genius appear in you and how might it contribute to your own well being and benefit the world around you.

A common idea found in many ancient traditions holds that each person comes to this world at a time when they have something meaningful to offer. I will forever be grateful that Dr. Hecht and his artistic genius are in mine.

Going Barefoot as a Spiritual Practice

Michelle Cromer June 24, 2016 Leave a Comment

“Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

If you ever had the chance to enter my closet, you would realize two things about me: I love shoes and I might have a shoe addiction problem. I have more shoes and cowboy boots than all my friends combined; and I have a lot of friends. But after returning from two weeks in Costa Rica I have decided to spend most of the summer barefoot.

I learned that Costa Rica is at the top of the world, the lone contender from the Americas in environmental performance distinguished in March this year for it’s environmental sustainability by the United Nations. Costa Rica’s relationship with Mother Earth is both remarkable and respectful and I found myself wanting to connect to Her in the same way. So I took my shoes off. And I kept them off. Aside from when I was at the beach or my backyard, I can’t remember when I last spent one day barefoot, much less several.

What I experienced from walking around without shoes was profound. Being barefoot creates presence. Mind chatter dissipates. The animals seemed to be less suspicious. I noticed sounds, smells and saw more detail as I slowly walked. And I discovered the earth is soft, so soft in fact that it deeply moved me. The temperature of the dirt changed step after step depending on the tree cover over me and the leaf litter under me. The moisture, the rocks, the shade, the direction of the wind. It all mattered. With each step I felt met by Mother Earth. Supported. Held up. And something I never expected, I felt better. I noticed improved circulation in my feet and ankles. My neck and shoulders lost all the tension they seem to always have. I had better posture and better balance. It’s amazing to me how wearing shoes has separated me from so much of what I am a part of.

When I returned home I continued my barefoot practice. It’s simple, convenient, and heart opening. It’s a mindfulness spiritual practice that uses our feet as connective soul bridges between body, mind and planet Earth. It raises our consciousness and raising consciousness in urban life is critical to sustaining the planet.

Our shoes distort our bodies’ feeling and function and also disconnect us from the earth. We don’t think about this, working in our offices behind non-opening windows, perched high above the earth on steel encased in concrete. We sleep and move in climate controlled homes and vehicles where we have to look at an instrument to know the temperature outside. Our lifestyle is more like life in submarine or spaceship than on Mother Nature, it seems. Conversely, there’s something primal, damp, sensual and connective about walking on the earth. Something of mystery. This is the thing I love about it: it redirects my abstract concerns. It plugs my attention into something much greater and more live-giving than the ridiculous flock of worries my mind generates.

We’re at a real crossroads now with Mother Earth, and need to change our relationship to Her. Recycling newspapers and buying hybrid cars isn’t going to do it because the mindset behind these well-intended changes still treats the planet as a commodity, a sort of gravel pit of resources for humans to plunder. We don’t need different ways to pillage the planet. We need different humans. A more evolved humanity that sees the ecological and spiritual implications of living as creatures in a much greater web of life all around us.

I’m not ready to kick my cowboy boots and Manolo Blahnik’s to the curb, but I do plan on spending most of the summer connecting to the earth’s chi by going barefoot.

When was the last time your bare feet hit the ground?

Thor – A Gentle Father

Michelle Cromer May 12, 2016 Leave a Comment

He has the kind of face that stops you in your tracks and the first time I saw the Colonel I thought the Norse God Thor was visiting from Asgard. He is a head higher than most people I would consider tall. His blonde hair, which is cut barely a few millimeters in length, frames an almost perfectly symmetrical face. He has distinct cheekbones and his angular jaw look as if it is molded from granite. His eyes are a vivid blue but sometimes they look as if a great body of water has softly melted into milky green hue, the perfect match for his army fatigues. If you get close enough you can see flecks of silver in his eyes. He appears to be in his mid-forties and everything about his body screams discipline.

But as handsome as he is, I always had a sense that his beauty was more than skin deep. Since he had been frequently deployed I didn’t run into him often, but the few times that I did I felt something odd, unusual, unexpected. Also there is an undercurrent of gentleness that seems out of place in his warrior body.

Right before Christmas I heard of his wife’s sudden death. I simply stood shaking my head in disbelief. Their daughter and my son are in the same class at school and just the week before, I sat with his wife, on a bench waiting for the last school bell to ring. I still feel a chill move through my body when I think of it. I didn’t know her well, yet I felt the impact deeply.

I now run into the Colonel in the school parking lot, in class meetings, at a band concerts, and at birthday parties. Wherever his daughter is, he is there too. I am on the outskirts of their lives watching as they travel through their grief. I know first hand that grief never ends, but it changes. It’s a passage not a place to stay; it’s not a sign of weakness, nor a lack of faith. Grief is the price of love. I’ve learned it’s not the weight of grief that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it; and the Colonel carries his grief like Thor carries the weight of his hammer, with gentle dignity and grace. In doing so he doesn’t tell his daughter how to live – he shows her. Every day. Hard things shatter into a million pieces yet soft things don’t break. His greatest strength is his gentleness.

My grandmother used to tell me of the ancient Irish who had a mythic sense of how to weave the world back into fullness when the center failed to hold and all seemed to fall apart and be doomed into darkness. When disorientation became the common shape of life and the four directions seemed about to be blown to the wind, then the unifying fifth direction would have to be sought. This calming gentleness could only be found at the edges of the land in the darkest places and along the misty cliffs where the otherworld plays hide and seek with those of us on earth.

If people are willing to go to that place that seems darkest to them, each will find something of meaning and value. For as the darkness feels closer, the threads of existence move near as well. In facing the darkness one finds again the enlivening thread of gentle hope. If each then turns back again and pulls the thread of life toward the middle of things, then each automatically contributes to regenerating the unified center.

What the Colonel reminds me is that life is not always so certain; even straight roads have subtle curves in them. Perhaps the best thing one – anyone – can do is to listen more carefully to those hidden voices speaking from places beyond time and matter; places buried in the middle of the earth and the center, untouchable and gentle part of the soul.

(Please note: I’m not saying the Colonel is Thor, but come to think about it, I have never seen them in the same room together.)

Balancing the Four Elements for Health and Wellbeing

Michelle Cromer March 16, 2016 Leave a Comment

4 elements

“Stay close to nature and its eternal laws will protect you.”
Max Gerson

My grandmother had four daily rituals in with which she honored the four elements. To honor water, she put her feet in running water. For earth, she made sure her feet felt grass. For fire, she made sure she saw the sun. And for air, she stood underneath the canopy of stars each night.

The Missing Element My grandmother, like other American Indians not only honored the four elements every day, they prayed to the Four Directions every night. Kabalistic Jews spoke of the Four Worlds. The Hawaiian Hula culture immersed itself in the Four Elements. Buddhists wrote the Four Noble Truths. There are four ruling archangels, four cardinal directions, four earth seasons, four times of day, etc. Author Debra Silverman in her book, The Missing Element writes, “Egyptians passed onto us their version of the Four Elements, which is steeped in astrology – the oldest science on earth. These people honored the land they lived on – not because it was a good idea, but because they were dependent on it for their survival and they had to pay attention. They operated with rocks in their pockets and wisdom in their hearts.”

In many ancient civilizations, these four elements are regarded as the foundation of the whole body, part of every basic principle about healing the body, and the foundation of life.

The constant interaction of the four elements gives rise to the processes of the human body and is the impetus behind physical life, making the concept of keeping all of them balanced important. Of course during the normal course of one’s life, the elements go in and out of balance in a continuously changing state of health or disease.

Earth Element
Substances that are solid can be said to have the qualities of the Earth element. Solid qualities of the body that are of the Earth element include skin, muscle, tendon, bone, viscera, fat, and other solid organs.
Imbalance of the Earth element would manifest as symptoms of the organs associated with the Earth element. Some examples would be: skin disease, bone disease, tumors, and other “solid” disorders.

Water Element
Substances that are liquid are of the Water element. Liquid qualities of the body that are of the Water element include blood, eyes, phlegm, saliva, lymph, urine, semen, other liquids of the body.
Imbalances of the Water element would manifest as symptoms of the organs associated with the Water element such as blood disease, eye disorders, renal disease, venereal disease, bladder or urinary tract infection or stones, and any diseases manifesting in abnormal urine or other liquid discharge.

Air Element
Substances that have movement are of the Air element. Moving qualities of the body include respiration, digestion, and excretion, motion of the limbs and joints, sexuality, aging.
Imbalance of the Air element would manifest as symptoms of the organs associated with the Air element such as pneumonia, cough, mucous congestion, tuberculosis, bronchitis, other respiratory infections, fainting, dizziness, and arthritis. The Air element is considered to be the most important element in promoting mobility, strength, longevity, and vigor.

Fire Element
Substances that have heat are of the Fire element. Warm/hot qualities of the body include body temperature, circulatory system, and metabolism.
Imbalance of the Fire element primarily manifests as diseases of the Fire element organs: he heart and circulatory system.

The easiest way to balance these elements is to simply to expose yourself to the elements in their primitive forms. Put your hands into dirt, feeling the coolness, heaviness and solidity of the ancient earth element. Take a bath or visit a stream to feel the flowing wetness of water. Feel the breeze blowing on your skin and get in touch with the change and lightness of air. Turn on your stove or make a campfire and connect with the heat and power of fire. By doing this, you will get closer to an archetypal understanding of these concepts, and like my grandmother you will be on your way to balance the elements on a daily basis.

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