Discovering the Goddess Vibe

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Recently I was invited to Feng Shui the stunning home of Tommy Chong of Cheech and Chong fame. I knew his Los Angeles neighborhood, Pacific Palisades was full of movie stars and I expected his home to be gorgeous. But I didn’t expect to stumble upon a goddess.

tommy-chong-2013-billboard-650I never saw any Cheech and Chong movies so I had no preconceived image of Tommy Chong. I found him to be not only strikingly handsome but one of the kindest and gentle-natured men I have ever met. He seemed more like a sage than a pot-promoting comedian. His eyes reminded me of the old barn door: flecks of deep brown married with lighter hues, so much strength remaining despite the years of weathering, and they held an insurmountable depth that dared to drown anyone that met his gaze. I spent time with Tommy talking about his childhood, his career, his health and his vision for the next stage of his life. And then I was introduced to his wife of forty years, Shelby.

Shelby is a dancer, a seamstress, and an artist and her eyes look as if she used ten shades of blue paint to achieve the striking crystal clear blue color. They don’t capture light; they defy it, embellishing her petite features. Even at 68, no one could possibly outshine her. Five foot seven, flowing golden curls, flawless ivory skin with a willowy walk she had a face cut right from the pages of a men’s magazine. I thought to myself, if goddesses are real, then this woman is their masterpiece. She was all about simplicity, making things easy, helping those around her to relax and be happy. Perhaps that’s why her skin glowed, not from expensive creams or products, but from her inner beauty that lit her eyes and softened her features. When she smiled and laughed you couldn’t help but smile along with her. To be in her company was to feel that you, too, were someone. As if you had been warmed in summer rays regardless of the season. When I gathered up my things to leave Tommy and Shelby’s house, she insisted that I spend the night. Her genuine kindness was unexpected and I felt as if we had been friends for years – as if we shared some sort of history already.

As I got settled in for the night I said to myself, “Shelby is so graceful, calm and powerful and she knows exactly where she is heading with her life and future. I wish some of her goddess vibes would rub off on me.” The second I had that thought I realized that if Shelby can become so incredibly confident, empowered and sensual, then I can too. We all share the same essence, abilities, and strengths. It is simply a matter of choosing to allow the goddess vibe to emerge and connecting to my own unique spirit and that means accepting and honoring what makes me – me.
When we step further into the story we came to live, not only does the mythic territory open, but the deep self-moves and the world of imagination and meaning comes flooding towards us.

lakshmiSo, if your goddess vibe comes knocking on your spirit’s door, invite her in for cake and wine. She might look like the courageous and fierce Egyptian Isis, the outstanding Greek athlete and huntress Artemis, or the brainy politician and warrior Athena. She could be the sensual lover like Oshun from West Africa, or a promoter of prosperity like the Hindu deity Lakshmi. The goddess vibe can be sexual feeling, or a healing attitude, or even intellectual confidence.

What’s important is to cultivate a connection not necessarily to a particular female icon or ancient deity with shapely hips but to the divine feminine energy that ignites them all and, subsequently, all the material and mystical consciousness. In other words, divine feminine energy doesn’t have to take the shape of any particular goddess at all. Look around. Start becoming more aware of this universal She-She power that right now is rising up all around you- and inside you.

We are all goddesses. Or we could be with a little coaching and the right lipstick.

Is It Possible to Love Two People at Once?

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Houses talk to me. Yes I have both oars in the water and I’m playing with a full deck. The houses that I Feng Shui end up communicating with me. It’s sort of like being a “house whisperer.” Some houses become quite chatty and others get downright nasty.

Last month in Scottsdale I met a house that was a real screamer.

Everything, it seemed, was grouped into “three’s.” Three pillows on the couch; three paintings over the fireplace; three cookie jars in the kitchen; three candles on the table etc.

When I asked the owner if she was in a triangle relationship she looked at me like I was a carnival side-show freak but finally admitted she was in love with two people at the same time.

I reminded her of a few examples in literature; The Phantom of the Opera, Wuthering Heights, and who could ever forget Sex in the City when Carrie Bradshaw was in love with Big and Aidan (I never did figure out who to root for in that one). Books and movies feature love triangles because lots of us can relate to having feelings for two different people at the same time. But is it actually possible to love two people at once?

“The answer is a resounding yes,” says Debra Silverman, a psychotherapist for over 35 years in Boulder, Colorado. “Of course we can love two people at the same time. Love is not jealous, humans are.”

I agree and here’s my stab: humans will always push boundaries, explore, and devise new ways to connect with each other emotionally and sexually. And because we are complex beings it is possible that two people can appeal to us as we grow and develop. Naturally we might be drawn to people who complement different aspects of who we are.

It’s possible to love two people at once because you can love them in different ways. Each relationship between two people is absolutely unique. There’s no way to love anyone the same. You love each person differently because of who they are and the uniqueness that they draw out in you.

Physical touch is not required because we fall in love with their courage, intelligence, passion, sincerity and the ability to move and be moved by subtleties of the mind and spirit. They remind us of every good day we’ve ever had. Every summer spent in grass. Every sunrise. Every sunset. They feel like home. And when they speak, it’s like someone slowing plucking the stings of a guitar, a sadly beautiful song, all their own.

Relationships are always a spiritual practice because love has a part to play in the destiny of every soul. There is a path at the heart of each love connection; each has its own karmic blueprint. God or the universe or whatever one chooses to label the great systems of balance and order does not recognize Earth-time.

To the universe, four days is no different than four billion light years.

Love is measured in its effects, how it transformed you, not how long it lasted. Sometimes the longest connections yield very little growth, while the briefest of encounters have the ability to change your life.

Real connections never die; they may go to a secret place, stay there warm and all curled up. They can be buried or ignored or walked away from but never broken. If you’ve deeply resonated with another person, the connection remains despite any distance, time, situation, lack of presence, or circumstance. Real connections live on because they live inside of us.

But this concept may or may not be the raison d’etre for all couples. When I asked my husband he said, “Sure, you can love two people at the same time, anything is possible.” His response makes me think… I may want to listen to my own house.

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Just Do You

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“A new you can still emerge from the old you.” Bamigboye Olurotimi

As we round the last corner and 2016 begins to come into focus many of you might be thinking about making new years resolutions and changing. I have a suggestion for 2016 – just do you.

The earliest recorded festivities in honor of New Year’s arrival date back some 4,000 years to ancient Babylon. The Babylonians marked the occasion with a massive religious festival and made promises to their gods at the start of each year. Caesar instituted January 1 as the first day of the year, partly to honor the month’s namesake, Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, whose two faces allowed him to look back into the past and forward into the future, and to whom the Romans made promises to at the beginning of each year.

Millennia’s later we are collectively still making the same empty promises to change. But in every moment of every day, we’re changing and evolving and growing. In every moment, we’re reconstructing our identity. We’re not defined by our decisions from two years ago. We’re not even defined by our decisions from two minutes ago. We’re defined by whom we choose to be in this very moment. We have this myth of identity — that who we are is the summation of a lot of choices we made in the past. That we’ve got a map for the life we’re supposed to lead, and we’ve got to stick to it. But that’s assuming that we’re all static beings, and that’s not how people work. We’ll never be “figured out.” Over the course of our lives, we’ll constantly be transforming into a more and more authentic version of ourselves.

Each of us is rare. Being unique is the spirit that already resides in us, the inner intention, primary style and way of being that makes us true individuals regardless, of the pressure to conform to temporary social patterns and contemporary cultural fashions. At the individual level, each person is here to give something that is not just unusual, not only exceptional, but that is distinctive and divine.

This year I hope you find moments of peace and your inner uniqueness for life aspires you to do meaningful work and discover genuine purpose. That you have the courage to 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. I hope you experience good health, that you are kissed by fortune, treated kindly by fate, that you jump high, and fall slowly, and that all your landings are gentle. But mostly I hope that you are encouraged to recognize and embrace your inner and exceptional uniqueness.

Piano Playing As a Spiritual Practice

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Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul. ~ Wassily Kandinsky

I don’t think I can say, yet, that I play the piano, but I’ve been meeting with one everyday for almost a year, just late at night, or first thing in the morning. I’ve been learning to follow its notes up and down the scales and I’ve been going through the short pieces in several exercise books. It’s not long before the left and right hand are asked to work at different rhythms and to make surprising steps and rests. And it’s not clear where to look. If I look too closely at the notes, everything slows down and I’ve lost the meter. If I watch one hand too intently, the other one wanders off. So I try to look on from afar, dispassionately, just enough to discern the patterns on the sheet and the shapes that my fingers make as they nearly strike the correct notes. Using this method, I have managed to get through the first few pieces in my piano books. I’ve played them hundreds of times now, inscribing little minuet memories into my muscles. I try to get out of the way so that they can take over while I listen along. Of course I can hear it when something goes wrong but it’s been interesting to find that the wrong note feels wrong to the finger as well.

When my fingers have woven together a passing musical likeness, I move on to the next piece. Immediately the baroque threads get tangled up. Notes ring out in strange clusters and at such a glacial pace that it reminds me a bit of nails on a chalkboard. Over and over, I retrace my steps, trying to find the path out of this woeful, accidental modernism. At the rate I am going there is little hope that I will ever become a very good pianist but this doesn’t bother me. It’s fun to be a beginner, every day, unsure of when and how the music will come.

Something I didn’t expect from the relationship I have with my piano is that outer music is leading to inner music in me. Playing the piano is turning into a spiritual practice.

Like any spiritual practice I have the help of a guru, my teacher Sebastian Estrada. And like any spiritual practice piano playing requires discipline. After hours and hours of practice I’ve reached a moment when the motion of my fingers across the keyboard is actually pleasurable, regardless of the sound. And then something else happens: there’s the sense that the music is playing me, rather than me playing the music.

Professional musicians must have this sense all the time, the very best concert performers becoming translucent to the music that they play. Perhaps this explains how they play large chunks of music, involving possibly millions of notes, by memory. It’s not that they memorize it bar by bar. Rather, they know the music so well that the notes could not go in any other place.

Is that a spiritual experience? Perhaps in this sense: musicians give themselves, via the discipline, to a communication that is far greater than themselves. The source of the music lies elsewhere – in the mind of the composer. But nonetheless, without the discipline and skill of the musician, the music could not be realized, could not be incarnated.

Piano playing takes you out of yourself too. Therein lies much of its satisfaction. And there’s one final aspect to it as a spiritual practice that occurred to me. It has to do with love.

Love is like playing a piano. First you must learn how to play by the rules, and then you must forget the rules and play from your heart. The same could be said for finding God.

A Ring

Through the smoke and across the tables we were taken with each other right from the very start. A chance encounter turned into an enchanted evening, and then a magical life. Our own private cliché. The sort of thing people don’t believe in anymore. Love at first sight.

Barry Cromer walked into the bar where I was having a beer and started busing my table. I looked up and knew I would marry this busboy. As it turned out, the bus boy was the owner of the bar and also the local surgeon in Ruidoso, New Mexico.

We got married, but I never got an engagement ring. Barry left his orthopedic practice in Ruidoso to move to El Paso because I was a shareholder in my advertising agency and couldn’t move. Barry couldn’t afford both a wedding band and an engagement ring since he was starting over. So he gave me the choice. I asked for a Pavé Tiffany wedding band that I have never taken off. Never.

The history of the engagement ring goes all the way back to when cavemen tied cords made of braided grass around their chosen mate’s wrist, ankles, and waist, to bring her spirit under his control.

Circa 2800 BC Egyptians were buried wearing rings made of a single silver or gold wire on the third finger of their left hands, believed to be connected directly to the heart by the vena amoris (vein of love).

In the 2nd century BC the groom gave the bride first a gold ring first to wear during the ceremony and special events, then an iron ring to wear at home, signifying her binding legal agreement to his ownership of her.

In 1477, in the first recorded use of a diamond engagement ring, Archduke Maximilian of Austria proposes to Mary of Burgundy with a ring that is set with thin, flat pieces of diamonds in the shape of an “M.”

And in 1886 Tiffany and Co. introduced the “Tiffany setting,” a six-prong ring designed to maximize the diamond’s brilliance by raising it up from the band.

When we renovated our 100-year-old house, I thought about taking off my wedding band as I painted the walls, but I didn’t. When the priest in the NICU asked if I wanted last rites for our daughter Catalina, I remember crying so hard I couldn’t catch my breath, but I held my ring and somehow that brought me comfort. When we were told that our son Sam was born blind I turned my back to the doctor, twirled my ring and thought of plan B. In our difficult times, times when we took suitcases down from closet shelves and stared at each other in anger, love was there and my wedding band was on.

A couple of months ago, Barry – out of the blue – decided it was time I got an engagement ring. So together, with the help of our dear friend Gina Silverman Smith, we designed a ring, which was made in New York.

I wanted the ring to look Edwardian vintage and Barry wanted to add some blue diamonds to remind me of his eyes. Gina suggested a cushion diamond to enhance the authenticity of the setting.

I finally got it, and I am over the moon. It is stunning. However, as gorgeous as the ring is – and it is – gazing at it I finally realize I will never need a ring to remind me of the love I have for my husband. I got lucky and married the love of my life and I will forever be changed because of the person he is and how much he means to me.

I asked Barry why I am finally getting an engagement ring after all these years, a ring which he now calls my “life” ring. He said, “I wanted to make sure it was going to last.” That’s my guy!

Michelle Cromer