No experience is necessary. While I will have extra decks on hand, you should bring your own deck to become familiar with it. Be sure to choose a deck with the numbers clearly printed on the cards and with color pictures. The Universal Waite Deck is a good choice for beginners. Brigid’s House carries an excellent selection of decks. While it is good to choose a deck that “speaks to you,” for the purposes of this class, it would be more helpful to work with a deck that is easy and without complex or limited themes. Bring pens and paper for note-taking.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
I am not teaching fortune telling. Tarot is a tool for strengthening your intuition and to be used for divination. Wikipedia defines Divination like this: A systematic method with which to organize what appear to be disjointed, random facets of existence such that they provide insight into a problem at hand.
The entomology of the word Divination stems from the noun divinare meaning—“To be inspired by God.”
TO ENROLL
Contact Brigid’s House at 218-732-5347. Class will be limited to 12 students to allow for personalized attention. Class fee should be paid in advance of June 23rd. If you have questions, contact Cynthia Ekren at CynthiaEkren@gmail.com or by calling 218-255-0160. A minimum of 5 students is required to hold this class. If the minimum is not reached before June 23rd, class will be cancelled and all pre-paid fees will be fully refunded.

Last fall I was searching on a professional Hypnotherapist website for better weight release scripts, something that would really sing to me. I subscribed to the site just after I received my master Hypnotherapist certification and I’ve come to really trust it. Questions and comments on the chatboard from other hypnotherapist discussing HypnoGastric Band Surgery caught my attention. I’d not heard of it before then. Several posts extolled the great results, not to sell potential clients on the idea, but in the private arena where other hypnotherapist would come to seek help and insight. Claims of success were extraordinary.

I plunked down my cash and bought a program from England, and heeding the advice on the chatboard, set out to modify the program to fit who I am, and what would work for my clients as individuals. I looked for more Americanized nutrition advice that didn’t include eating mackerel, then enlisted the aid of one client who has often been open to letting me try new things out on her. Soon I opened up the trial to five more people to determine if the posts on the professional site were accurate or not. Some therapists were claiming up to a 95% success rate.   I’ve now taken 8 people through the program—some all the way through the prescribed five sessions—the latest joiner has completed two sessions. And I have to tell you I am really impressed. Additionally (through osmosis?) I’ve released ten pounds!

Here is how it works: The program is made up of five sessions. The first three are designed to prepare you for surgery, which happens during the fourth session. Each client is viewed as an individual, with unique reasons for holding extra weight and a unique history. At the beginning of every session we talk about habits, behaviors, stresses, all of those things that we know factor into the resulting weight gain and retention. Together we identify behaviors to be changed and behaviors to be reinforced. As much as possible, I will use your own words in the suggestive hypnosis session.

One client told me that she was aware of four people who have had the actual gastric band surgery and each of them had complications including hernias, and all have new addictions now. So what good is it to simply substitute one addiction for another?

What this program aims to accomplish is to give you a safe, calm way to begin to deal with the emotions and feelings so many of us use food to repress. At its heart, the HypnoGastric Band Surgery program teaches you to trust your body, trust your feelings—that they will not harm you—and begin to actually LISTEN to your body.

When your stomach says it is full or says “I’m not the tiniest bit hungry right now,” you will hear it.    All who have participated thus far say they have had a tendency to wolf down their food, barely tasting it. One of my favorite suggestions to give is that you will now really taste your food, and WOW, does it ever taste good. There have been studies showing that naturally thin people have more sensitive taste buds. When something tastes amazingly good, we tend to savor it. Forever in memory will be the face of one client as she explained to me her shock, surprise and delight after being given that suggestion and eating her next meal. She could not believe how much better her food tasted.

On the fourth session, you will be well prepared to go into a deep trance state, and guided through an imaginative journey—that of having a gastric band fitted creating a small pouch on the upper part of the stomach. The pouch is about the size of a golf ball and can hold approximately a quarter to a half cup of food. Clients have reported feeling full much faster, after only five small bites sometimes.   What makes this different from other suggestive weight release programs is that you immediately feel as though something has happened. Some clients have felt some soreness in their abdomen. My personal favorite response is the clients who awaken from the trance surgery burping from the release of carbon dioxide hypnotically pumped into the stomach cavity to create space for the surgeon to work. One client now reports that if she should override the messages from her body and overeat, she starts to burp.   The fifth session is scheduled between two and eight weeks following surgery to tighten or loosen the band. If you are loosing weight too quickly or becoming underweight, that is not healthy either, so we are aiming for between 1-5 pounds a week. If it is more than that, we want to loosen the band. If loss is painfully slow, we tighten the band. Positive changes are reinforced during this session as well.

Because each client is an individual and on their own special path, it may be necessary to schedule additional hypnotherapy sessions to address issues as they arise. Regression therapy and Parts Therapy are used to identify motivations for overeating and resolve blocks to weight release. If certain suggestions for behavior changes are rejected, such as allowing the band to slip or not feeling its presence at all, then in a trance state, we ask the subconscious/higher conscious/wisdom to help us understand why and what the next appropriate actions should be—what suggestions will be accepted?   Holding extra weight and over eating is often a result of a need to soothe and feel safe. We do not aim to take that away if it is still needed. It would be like taking a child’s security blanket away and putting them in a stressful crisis situation. Now, through hypnosis, the client has tools to feel safe without food.

Here is what I like the best about this program, it allows the client time to reinforce new ways of thinking and new behaviors. It gets deeper to the heart of the matter even as it encourages a new lifestyle. It offers a more satisfying quality of life. One client said it was like waking up and becoming aware for the first time.

All sessions, except surgery, are recorded and clients are sent home with a CD that they are expected to listen to at least twice a day until their next session. The trance sessions recorded lasts between 25-30 minutes, so that is a commitment of at least an hour every day towards reprogramming the mind. This is something that can be done in the morning by setting the alarm half hour earlier and listening as you drowse awake, and also in the evening as you drift off to sleep for the night. Others have used lunch hours to listen or have taken breaks during stressful times and used it to relax and calm down. One client laughed and said that I have been going to bed with her and her husband every night for weeks now and that he really likes my voice.   Listening to the CD is very important. It reinforces the suggestions, but also trains the mind to go deeper and faster into a relaxed trance state preparing it for hypnosurgery.

Because this is “virtual” surgery there are none of the complications that arise from actual gastric band surgery or gastric bypass. You are given strong suggestions to reinforce that. Hypnogastric band surgery is still only a tool for weight release, not a panacea or quick fix. There is commitment, belief, willingness and effort on your part.

You may not be able to eat even a quarter of what you once could consume and so nutrition is all the more important. Clients need to have a good understanding of what it means to eat healthy foods. In customizing the program for one client, she was given the suggestion that all processed foods that are not good for her body will now taste strange, chemically, toxic. She might even taste the latex gloves of the factory workers who have handled her food. She reported eating a piece of toast and trying to get others to take a bite to see if they also noticed the plastic taste. 

It is important to eat healthy foods, but it is all the more important to be willing and at a place where you are prepared to face your fears and buried feelings. Some clients have reported feeling sad, crying for no obvious reason, or having spikes of strong emotion. As uncomfortable as it is to experience, it is good, as long as it is not prolonged. Like any toxin in the body, old unprocessed feelings are stored in our fat cells. As we begin to feel safer about releasing them, they come up the way they went in. They do not usually just disappear, but must be released. It isn’t always necessary to relive or remember what that feeling or experience was—sometimes it is, but not always—for one client, just recognizing a feeling a deep loneliness helped her to start to listen to that part of herself, which was enough to allow her to move on to the surgical session.

Finally, cost—A colleague from the East Coast whom I met during my HypnoBirthing® training offers four sessions for $800. The physical surgery is between $15,000-35,000 not including expenses if there are complications.  At this time, my rate is $50/hour. Each session will last between 1 ½-2 hours. Included in this fee are the four recordings of trance sessions that are customized for you personally. Five sessions complete the program, but additional sessions may be necessary to achieve the results you ultimate want to accomplish. There are no guarantees because it is really up to each client what sort of experience is had. If you are open and willing to do your part, chances are very good that you’ll release excess weight. I include the fee of my colleague and of the actual surgery because it is important to know the value of the program, and thus, to have a stake in it working. That is part of the conditioning and training the brain.   If you have questions, please call or email me. And when you’re ready…let’s set up your first appointment. 

If you’ve watched the reality TV show Intervention, you know there comes that crucial moment in each story told when the addict must decide—will they get help or not? Usually, it seems, they do. Every now and then, they refuse.

As I write today, I am thinking of someone I care about standing at just such a crossroads. Within the next 24 hours this person is in a place where simply saying “yes” could mean the difference between life and death. We are hopeful, but also doubtful. Partly, it is because this person has passed by this way before, and while we can see the door standing wide open, they are purposely looking in another direction.

That makes me wonder, though, how often have I passed open doors or walked right by alternative paths?

In suggestive hypnotherapy sessions it is helpful to bring the person seeking help to the crossroads while they are in a trance state. In this state, they can vividly see and feel the reality of the choices they are making—or not making. The reality of the choices they could now be making. There is a time when a decision must be made, though. Yes or no? In or out? Hopefully, the client makes the choice they came seeking help with—to take the path where they become a natural nonsmoker or where they can make choices that help them release excess weight. They are given tools and deep suggestions, but always it is their choice at accept or reject them. Sometimes all it takes is having the path pointed out, just like Glenda the good witch putting Dorothy on the yellow brick road.

I believe that wherever your house may land there is a brick road waiting for you to follow. If this person I care about does not accept help today, I believe there will be another opportunity arising and another and another, until either the chance is taken, or this particular session of life school comes to an end. And so it is for all of us.

What door has swung open for you today?

Has someone just put you on a new path, new red shoes and all?

Is it today that you will decide?

It is Possible with HypnoBirthing^® Childbirth Education

With Cynthia Ekren beginning Sunday April 22- May 20, 6:30pm at Brigid’s House

HypnoBirthing®  offers a more comfortable birth option without the use of medications.  Not only are the women birthing without drugs, they are enjoying their experience.

Historically, the stereotypical birthing process has been associated with pain, fear, discomfort, and tension that exceed nearly all other life experiences.  Women in western societies have adopted the belief that the birthing process should be painful, but it’s actually that fear itself that causes the pain. Fear causes tension. Tension causes pain. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. When the fear-tension-pain cycle begins, true pain is experienced.  Not only is pain created by opposing chemicals, the natural progression of labor is impeded.  Dysfunctional labor patterns are created which can in, many cases lead to interventions such as Pitocin and Cesarean births. 

HypnoBirthing® – The Mongan Method teaches women how to eliminate that fear so that they experience an easier more comfortable birth, the same peaceful experience that women in other cultures have practiced for centuries. The extreme relaxation of HypnoBirthing® promotes the natural release of the body’s own endorphins, which are 200 times stronger than morphine. It is not uncommon for women to appear as if they are sleeping and suddenly announce that the baby is coming.

HypnoBirthing®, Also known as The Mongan Method, was created by Marie Mongan M.Ed., M.Hy. (Certified Hypno-Anesthesiologist) in an effort to allow the mother, baby, and birthing companion a means in which the true art and joy of birth could be experienced.    

For 20 years, trained educators throughout the world have been successfully teaching women and their birthing companions the unique relaxation, enhanced by self-hypnosis techniques of HypnoBirthing®. The method teaches that in the absence of fear and tension, a woman is able to call upon her natural instincts through guided imagery, visualization and breath in order to bring about a safer, easier, more comfortable birthing that most mirrors nature. Of 1227 HypnoBirthing® women surveyed only 17% used any kind of pain medication. An amazing testimony in U.S. based birthing.

Now, at Brigid’s House, expectant mothers along with their Birthing Companions can take 5 – 2 1/2 hour HypnoBirthing® classes in a group setting with Cynthia Ekren, Certified HypnoBirthing® Practitioner.  Cost is $250 and includes  the textbook, HypnoBirthing®  A Celebration of Life,  by Marie F. Mongan and Rainbow CD, and an informational packet of handouts. 

In Mindfulness Meditation we practice focusing the mind, bringing it to a still point and through a gentle patience, holding it there. In time, what we notice is expansiveness. Lately, in my hypnotherapy practice I’ve been focusing on two new programs, learning them, really thinking about them and working with them. One is HypnoBirthing®, which I have just completed all the work to become a certified practitioner, and am offering my first group class this coming April 22-May 20. The other is the HypnoGastric Band Surgery.  As I’ve focused on each in turn, the expansiveness that has become evident to me is how interrelated the philosophies are: both programs are about learning to love and trust the body, and the wisdom and perfection of nature.

In HypnoBirthing, the first goal is to dehypnotize women who have been bombarded with messages from an early age that pregnancy and childbirth is somehow a betrayal and attack upon the body. I recall age six watching the comedy series, Love American Style, where a woman had terrible pains and was holding her stomach. I, too, felt sick and wanted to tell my mom how I felt so I repeated what the woman had said thinking it would save me having to explain something I just knew as a feeling or sensation. I told her I had labor pains. She laughed at me, of course, and explained that the woman on the show was having a baby.  Age six I got the message. Having a baby is being sick. Hypnotized.

By age eight I’d received many messages from family and society that there was something wrong with my body. It was too tall for my age, such a big girl. Little girls were cute. Big girls? Not so much. Elephant legs. I heard a man once describe his three-year-old daughter’s ankles as “Cankles”. Three years old.

Five clients have agreed to help me work through the HypnoGastric Band Surgery program so that I can learn it and become proficient with it, and I am grateful for their trust and willingness.  What I am coming to understand is that more than a weight loss program, this is a program about nurturing a trust between the self and the body. The body gives us signals but often we ignore them. “I’m hungry, feed me. I’m full, stop eating.”  The body gives us sensations when we are feeling something. If we are scared, the anatomic nervous system creates all sorts of physical sensations letting us know. If we are angry or sad, the body responds. Through the messages we’d taken in over the years, we find some benefit from disregarding the messages from our bodies. The body talks louder. We work harder to ignore them. Nice people don’t get mad. Only downers get sad. Weak people are nervous. It’s unseemly to be overly emotional. So we disregard what our body tells us. Our bodies give us messages—pain, typically, extra weight, disease. We blame our bodies and distrust them. They don’t trust us to get the message, speaking ever more loudly. We ask outsiders—doctors, health experts, and hypnotherapists—to fix our broken bodies.  And they are not broken. They are working perfectly, telling us everything we need to know if we can just trust and listen to them.

Birth is a natural, healthy function of the female body. Yet, we treat it as a medical emergency. Emotion is a healthy, natural function felt within the body, yet we medicate it with food, alcohol, drugs, anxiety meds, work.

What if we could trust that for most of us the body we slip into to wear in this life journey is whole, healthy, perfect and works like a charm? What if we could stop the war within ourselves? Stop the assaults?  Next time you get a message from your body, really listen. It might be the beginning of a beautiful new relationship.  

I’m a huge Joseph Campbell fan. Campbell is widely heralded as one of the foremost authorities on myth, which means he was enthralled by stories. He is credited with the quote, “Follow your bliss.” Campbell taught about the hero/heroine’s journey, mapping out the various parts of such a journey, their purpose and pitfalls. The major arcana cards in Tarot follow this epic journey, and they also become a clear depiction for us that whether we know it or not, we are all here on this earth on an epic journey. Though Campbell neatly defined each stage of the journey, the truth is, we are at many stages of various journeys in a constant state of movement, ironically, even if that movement is stagnation.

Having just returned from a 33-day road trip to the south, I’m at the stage Campbell referred to the “Return”. There are many aspects to returning, and mine at the moment is clearly a “refusal to return”, characterized by that letdown when all simply returns to normal. I don’t want to return to normal. I want daily maid service and someone to prepare and bring me meals. I want to walk on the beaches and marvel at dolphins and dramatic sunsets. Instead, it is time to attach to the schedule, book appointments, pay bills and vacuum up the mounds of dog hair my sweet boys give off each day.

Then, there is the “Call to Adventure.” This is the first step in every great epic journey. The call of the quest. The first inkling that maybe there is something out there for you to discover. Just as there is the refusal to return, there is a refusal of the call. How many times did you say to yourself that you are ready to break free from your chains, whatever they may be? How many times do we start Monday with some sort of promise to ourselves to heed that call and by early afternoon it is pushed back into the murky shadows of the subconscious with a sigh and a shrug, all our power seemingly going with it.

The refusal is still the journey. The stagnation is still the journey. I think sometimes it is necessary to build up enough pressure behind us so that when we finally heed the call; it is a powerful force that propels us onward. And when we refuse to return? Well, returning well is often as fraught with peril, too.  
No matter where you are in your own Epic Journey, when you are ready to reach out for understanding companionship and help getting in touch with the infinite wisdom of your Highest Self to guide you along please give me a call. One constant in the Journey is the help that is waiting for those who ask.  

It was the first round of Integrated Imagery training at the A.R.E in Virginia Beach and I found myself seated in a room with thirty strangers who almost all looked so familiar to me. The program had us jumping right into the experience and so by day two we were already pairing up, one being the guide and one being what our instructor, Dr. John Amoroso, called the traveler.

I believe the intention I set in one of those first regressions was to understand what I am here to learn. I found myself as a man wearing a frilly lace blouse and swimming in the sea. Swimming for my life it turned out. My ship had sunk.

Surviving that and being rescued, my guide moved me forward and there I was in a large and lush study, a world globe on a stand and I was spinning it pondering my next adventure. Elephants came to mind. I always wanted to ride an elephant.

Moving forward again, there I was sitting on a veranda in India drinking tea with other stuffy Englishmen and quite bored with them. A sprawling, squawking city stood before me, waiting to be explored. With a sense of complete audacity I took to the streets, inspecting people as though they were baby birds fallen from their nests. I had no compunction about violating anything sacred, including the temple. I burst into a ceremony as though I entered a square. A smiling holy man came and took me by the hand, showed me to wash my hands in a fount, and I felt completely welcome.

There were other parts of the regression that were less pleasant, mostly stemming from the fact that I was so much of the world that I had little time for loved ones.

In the regression, when given the opportunity to understand why this particular memory came up, what was revealed is that I am to be a resident of the world. I envy people with deep roots to home. There is a sacrifice in leaving home to travel. You change yourself and when you do that, everything changes, including relationships.

At the moment we are on an Epic Road Trip—a 31-day drive along the Atlantic Coast from South Carolina down and around Florida. It will conclude with my four-day training in hypnobirthing. That in and of itself feels epic but I’ll save it for another blog post. 

Past life regression is like an epic road trip. To be a traveler into the past, into memory and subconscious is to open yourself up for changes. When you return to your normal life, there is the discovery that the limits we put around our world to keep it small have been expanded. Often it is hard to explain or describe to those who choose to stay in their own little towns. Traveling is not for everyone. Sometimes it is our life purpose to understand roots.

Now, six days into the Epic Road Trip, I feel how shallow my roots are to home, and how deep as well. The tug of the ocean, the tug of friends. The tug of discovery and the tug of routine. The man I may have been before seldom felt the tug of home. That is the difference this time around I think.  This time I am working on a balance between coming and going.

Memory is an energetic imprint. It can be hidden in the subconscious, but it is still there. When the energy of an experience is particularly high, it is more likely to leave a deeper imprint, something lasting and influential. Within the human life, there are two times when the energy is usually stronger, and that is birth and death.

In conducting past life regressions, I find it helpful to take the client to a past life death if at all possible. It is in those final thoughts that the imprint is created, and often we are then reacting to something in our present life for which we are puzzled and have no memory. For example, Barbara came to seek relief from her high stress life. She regressed to a life as a Native American warrior killed a short distance from his village, knowing soldiers would wipe his people out and feeling he had let his people down. He died with a terrible guilt and sense of failure for not protecting the women and children. Barbara was the main breadwinner in her home working long hours and had also taken on community board positions tasked with helping others. She does not really enjoy the work on the boards and is frequently frustrated by the futility of it all, but feels driven, and exhausts herself.

Birth is thought to be a happy time when we welcome new life and new hope. But it is also a time of anxiety, stress and trauma. Whatever the mother is feeling, the baby, who will not learn to differentiate from mom’s energy and emotions for some time yet, picks up on it all. One client regressed to her birth described being taken from her mother right away and feeling anxious and confused. When she was returned later, her mother was angry with the doctor and nurses; she picked up that anger in her first feeding, leading to eating issues later.

This March I will be attending the Mongan Method for Hypnobirthing certification training in Florida. I’ve seen what a huge difference it makes in the birth experience for mom to be calm, relaxed, and in a trance-state, deeply in touch with her baby, and embracing the body’s natural ability to bring that baby into the world. My client, Emma, came to me because she wanted as natural a childbirth experience as possible. Her preference was to give birth at home, but as a compromise with a nervous husband, she opted to find a doctor who supported her wish for as natural a birth as possible without drugs. In our first session, I had Emma imagine meeting her baby. Every night for months, she listened to the CD recording of that session. When she returned a few weeks before the birth, she had become a strong advocate for her baby, trusting that she knew how to care best for this baby, and not willing to just be jostled along in a system that holds the energy of fear around childbirth.

While her birth story did not go exactly as she hoped, her daughter was breech and so she agreed to a Caesarian birth, Emma described the moment her daughter entered the world, and losing one point on the Apgar scale because she didn’t cry. She didn’t need to. She opened her eyes right away and recognized her mother and father, immediately attaching to them, calmly and peacefully. The doctor told Emma that she’d never seen a child bond so swiftly to her parents. Through the entire experience, Emma used her self-hypnosis training and so when she held her daughter for the first time, it was from a place of peace and well-being.

I can’t wait to return to my area of Northern Minnesota this spring and begin offering Hypnobirthing classes. Stay tuned for more about this and if you or someone you love is expecting, check out hypnobirthing.com (The Mongan Method). 

I had oral surgery yesterday. It involved one of my favorite teeth, the front one. Right there as a main feature of my smile. My own body is attacking the root, and so there is only a small portion of the original left now. The rest was reinforced today with whatever the latest material is that they use to simulate a tooth, and the doctor advised I not spend any more money on that tooth for cosmetic retouching until it is certain I’ll get to keep it.

 I looked up teeth/root canal in Louise Hays’ handy reference book, You Can Heal Your Life, wherein she catalogs emotions underlying physical issues. It mentioned being unable to sink my teeth into anything, and core beliefs crumbling. Sounds about right. I probably do only have about a third of my original beliefs of how God and the world work, and the rest is sort of up for grabs. There is a loving God/Force/Universe (don’t even know what to call Him/Her/It) who knows my name and calls me to seek a deeper understanding of this Force. That’s pretty much it the sum total of what I am sure of. That, and meditation/hypnotherapy give me the stillness and spaciousness to experience a sense of God/Goddess. 

 What I’ve been learning lately, is that seeking a higher spiritual plain is not the same thing as gaining all the answers; nor is it the same thing as stopping the chaos around us. My spiritual journey has not prevented my tooth from resorbing, and it hasn’t made me fabulously wealthy. I meditate every day, but it hasn’t stopped my husband from getting crabby while he figures out our taxes. Wars have not ended. My body is still aging and though I’ve overcome many habits and fears using hypnotherapy and past life regression, there are a few that linger persistently. More work to be done.

 I have to live for now with the moment-to-moment thought of being careful of everything I put into my mouth. And even with precautions, one day, that beautiful pearl in my mouth might break and become useless to me. That is living with uncertainly. Upon a scale, there are other, bigger things to focus our worries on. We have all watched as the fickle finger of fate hits loved ones and acquaintances. While we are momentarily glad it skipped us this turn around the wheel, it also proves to us how we are still vulnerable.  I could wake up in the morning with a mouthful of rubble, all of my teeth ground to nothingness in my sleep from fear and worry.

 Yet, there is hope and a promise in this seeking, in learning meditation and prayer, and allowing into your heart the belief that we are not alone here. That hope arises when we find stillness within the chaos and noise. When we stop looking at the endgame as eliminating the cacophony and see instead that it is to be in the midst of chaos and at yet at peace that the whole world finally shifts. And when the world shifts, we become opened up to see the spaciousness, the possibilities that we’d missed before, distracted by the drama.

 Mindfulness meditation, learning self-hypnosis and relaxation, and seeking the wisdom of the Spirit are all tools towards finding that peace and stillness.  And that is the part that I can seek my teeth in to. 

November and December were challenging months in our household. Perhaps it was simply Mercury in retrograde, maybe the effects of long-term holiday sugar over-dosing, or whatever, but words were exchanged. Looks, too.  And then, as it always does for us, it passed, like a bad cold, and harmony has been restored. It’s nice to be on the same team again.

Right towards the end of this time of disturbance, husband Keith and I were heading into town together. We’d just gotten to the stop sign about a half mile from our house when we both noticed a Red-Tailed Hawk out in the field about twenty feet from the ground, just hovering in the air. It wasn’t windy out or even slightly breezy. This bird was not flapping its wings at all. It looked like a photo of a bird caught in time and space for us to casually examine. Keith had the leisure to get out his binoculars and confirm it was a hawk. Finally, the hawk flew just a little ways, and then it hovered again. We watched it, amazed. Now though I live in the country, in all honesty, I’m an indoor girl, and perhaps hawks hover like that all the time, but I’ve never seen anything like it. Keith could never be called an indoor boy. He is positively Zen in his habits of sitting out in nature for hours, nay, days, just being still and observing wildlife. He was amazed. After a few minutes, the bird flew directly towards us and then veered off in the direction of our property.

As a totem animal, the hawk is the messenger. Either we are to bring a message to someone, or we should be alert, prepared for a message, sort of like the TV announcer who says, “Stay tuned for these messages from our fine sponsors…”

Hawk medicine people, so I read, often choose earthy mates who keep them grounded because they know they spend way too much time up in the air. (Sounds a little familiar).

I saw Jeanne Troge later that day and told her about the hawk. “I know all about their meaning,” I said. “Except for that hovering thing. What in the world does that mean?”

Jeanne pointed out to me that birds of prey are known to be very patient, very still, when they are hunting, but it is an active stillness. There is nothing passive about them. That reminded me of meditation. Being in stillness and being mindful is not passive at all.

“But the hovering?” I persisted. “There was almost no wind. How was the bird able to stay in the air like that?”
”But it did,” Jeanne stated the obvious. “It didn’t fall, did it?”

 No, it didn’t fall. As simple as that, really and what in my life ultimately doesn’t apply to that message? I’ve felt a bit like that hovering bird lately…waiting, watching, seemingly unsupported and doomed to crash to the ground.  Then, effortlessly lifting and moving onward.