Dr. June Writing Coach

Find Your Soul: Feel Your Awe

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 13:36:49 GMT

Have you ever been bored to death for too long period of time? If you haven’t, I applaud you. If you have, you know how awful that gnawing emptiness is. That restlessness that unsettles us so deeply, we are apt to blame it on everything outside of us-- our situation, the place where we live, they are causing us to feel dead.

No, my dear friend, we are pointing our fingers in the wrong direction.

We get bored to death when something in us is not able to wonder at the big things and little things in our life at our joys and at our grievances.

Being bored to death means our minds and souls have closed themselves off from appreciating the intricacy of own being, the complexity of our souls!

Did you know that “death,” in Jewish spiritual tradition, quite often

pertains to loss of the soul while living? Though loss of the soul while living

can be agonizing, the soul can be found and redeemed!

A spiritual life means learning how to find the soul and to marvel with it.

To ask questions that stir us to wonder like a child in awe. Why am I? How is it that I have life? How did I get here on this earth?

L et me share a deep feeling of awe and wonder that I had when I was I four yours old. The awe came over me when, at 4 years old I was enjoying the privacy of a nook in my home. There we kept a small barrel of pretzels. Though I wasn’t eating them. I just loved the cozy space with these salted treasures stored there. Suddenly the awe and wonder descended on me, till my little jaw dropped.

I knew, in one swoop fell, that I was incredibly lucky to have been born. In order to get born, as I understood it, a mother had to swallow the seed of you. But the seed of you was the size of a grain of sand, one among endless grains, So that my mother picked the seed of me among infinite grains of sand and swallowed it was an event that was not possible. The impossibility of me in that nook with the pretzels, shocked me. To this day, this memory of wonderment with my existence enlivens me when I am distraught and sad. When I feel I have lost my soul, I recall that vivid pleasure of knowing that life was a great miraculous gift.

You are invited to watch my short You Tube video “Here I am: How to Find Yourself and Your Spirit.” May the exercise I give there excite your wonder should you feel tired, and worst of all soul dead!

Making Nice Money: A Painful Way

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 14:00:03 GMT

I made nice money with an online classified site years ago after I applied for a rather rare gig. An Investigative Journalist for a special assignment!

I had done investigative journalism previously with a non-fiction feature about Untouchable (Dalit) Women in southern India called “To Marry a Dog.” For that, I had used as my centerpiece an Indian newspaper article about the marriage of an Untouchable girl to a wealthy man’s dog. Then I had conducted interviews in southern India with women from this deprived caste as well as with a former judge on the Supreme Court of India. When it turned out that no popular American magazine was interested in publishing my article, I submitted it to The International Journal of Women’s Studies where it found its home.

This gig for a researcher/writer would concern other kinds of horror. Newspaper coverage of The Klu Klux Klan from its early days.

A private historical news project had posted the ad. I applied and sent a sample of my work.

At first, I was absolutely thrilled to be hired . I was promised five hundred dollars on completion of my work. Nice money for a short assignment that required little travel. From sun up to sun down I immersed myself in online historical newspaper archives about the KKK. I also spent time at university libraries going over newspaper indexes and finding articles about the KKK that had been photographed on microfilm.

Quickly I discovered the research I was doing about media coverage of the Klan was emotionally taxing. I had to shield myself from what I was beginning to understand. Newspapers presented violent acts against blacks by using words and ideas that hid the hideousness of the crime. Here are some examples:

" On March 1 in the small town of Oaksville in Ontario, the reporter states that Klu Klux Klansman “marched to the house occupied by a white girl, and her Negro sweetheart and courteously and politely evacuated the woman to the home of her parents and there they left her.” (The Gleaner, April 16, 1930)

In this report, the Police Chief of Oaksville was called to “the scene of the demonstration. Note the use of the word “demonstration” and not the word “crime!” The Klansmen were not “trespassers” or “transgressors.” In the words of the Police Chief, they were “visitors whose conduct was all that could be desired . They used no force. Nor did they create a disturbance of any kind. When they finished they disrobed. I recognized many of them as prominent Hamilton businessman.”

The impression of a gallant incident enacted by outstanding citizens, rather than an offense perpetrated by outlaws, is strengthened by the positive reactions of witnesses. At first, neighbors watching the proceedings thought “it was only a surprise party with guests arriving in flowing white robes and a fiery cross over their left breast.” When it became known that it was not a party, but the enforced separation of a white girl from her black lover, they expressed their approval. “The Klansmen acted quite properly. The townspeople were against this relationship.”

Years later, historians, scholars and contemporary journalists , basing themselves on sources other than newspapers and magazines, documented the repressed history of the Klu Klux Klan. Relying on minutes of KKK meetings, police reports and public records, the acts of terrorism that accompanied the Klu Klux Klan’s massive expansion throughout the United States and Canada was brought to light.

In this way, the tragic events that took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 came to the attention of the public at large only decades later. “On May 30, Klansmen went on a riot setting on fire hundreds of homes and businesses belonging to black residents. When the flames died down, three hundred black corpses were found smoldering. (Boy’s Life, May 2001, p18.)

I sent in my article with an aching heart. The check of 500 dollars from came in the mail the following week. But even as I write these words about this assignment and the nice amount of money, long ago spent, I am hounded by the sufferings of the victims and that the evil perpetrated was made to look good in the media.

We have to search for truth in the outside world as well as inside ourselves. That is what I have been doing. And that is what I

hope to teach others to do.

Is it Okay to be Alone during the Holidays? What about New Year's Eve?

Thu, 26 Dec 2024 13:19:14 GMT

Oh yes it is!

With Christmas just passed, and New Year’s eve coming up, we can experience awful anxiety. Geez, what am I going to do? How am I going to get through this? At whose house should I be? At what celebration and where? OMG, I don’t have a date. I haven’t been invited anywhere and the days are racing by.

The New Year’s Eve balloon 2025 is about to drop at Times Square! There is so much pressure to spend holidays, especially this big one with family or friends.

Think you might be alone? Then plan to do something small and inspiring for yourself at home . For if you chase after being with others, it could cause you to be very uninspired indeed.

I learned my lesson about this the hard way when I was a 13 year old pubescent girl. New Year’s Eve of 1963. No boy had asked me out. No party giver had invited me.

Social customs made me think I was going to be very miserable indeed if I didn’t do something memorable. I decided to spend the evening at my Aunt’s apartment in Queen above the soda fountain, and candy store she and my uncle ran.

The problem was their daughter, a few years older than me, was out on a date. Their son lived out of town.

So I found myself facing what I had escaped from. A dreaded state of loneliness, displaced in Queens, craving to do something in celebration of the New Year. Something outlandish. Something I could brag about when my peers asked, “what did you do on New Year’s Eve?

Then I got an idea. After my aunt and uncle fell asleep, I snuck down into their candy store.

Behind the cash register were racks where they displayed cigarettes to sell. I, who had never smoked before, grabbed a pack of menthol Kool and with awkward fingers lit up. I wasn’t sure how to bring in the burning tobacco into my lungs or where to exhale the smoke. I dragged deeply and a fit of coughing came which sent me staggering out to the sidewalk so as not to wake my aunt and uncle.

I choked and smoked the cigarette. Till my throat burned and my eyes shed tears. The aftertaste was misery compounded. Not only of tobacco and menthol. I did something which was bad for me and for my relatives. I stole a pack from them.

Sixty-one years later, with New Year Eve approaching, I ask myself what could I have done that was good for a 13 year old afraid of facing the New Year alone? The same as I would do now. I would curl up with a wonderful book by a fire and a warm cup of cider or eggnog.

With your pet if you have one. And if not, just with your dear old self and a beloved author as companion.

The Awesome Power of Imagination: It Can Change Your Life

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 15:08:14 GMT

If you allow your power of imagination to work through you it can change your life in wonderous ways.

Take for example the brilliant writer Elizabeth Strout. One day in her home, she suddenly saw this imaginary robust woman by her dishwasher with hands on her hips. the woman was glowering at her. That "figment" of Stout's imagination turned out to be the inspiration for the character Olive Kitteridge which she developed into an iconic best seller.

Though I am no Strout, that kind of awesome power fell upon me one day. And it changed the course of my life for the better.

I was on a cleansing diet, just a little bit of rice and lentils each day. Three times a week I got to climb into it a body box– a wooden container shaped like a human body. Only my head was exposed while the rest of me was steamed to release toxins.

After ten minutes, I was up on the massage table so that masseuse could work warm oils into my skin. She was massaging my back when an powerful figment in my imagination took over in my mind’s eye.

A fantastic woman was gazing up at the fly trap she had hung from a tree. I knew at once that her name was Georgie. Dumbfounded, I listened as the story of Georgie began in my head. And with it gushed images, words, feelings and ideas. Like Strout, I did not push the vision away and say, hell she is too weird. Get her out of my head!

I was excited. As a creative person, I had been cultivating my imagination for years. Maybe a character for a book was seeking life through me? She reached up for the fly trap, and hurried with it into her house where she placed it in a freezer to anesthetize the flies. After a few minutes, she took it out to tweak one numbed fly to bring to a spider she was raising.

She was strange, yes, but I felt how much she loved life and all creation. I also felt she was lonesome.

As soon as I got off the table and tipped the masseuse, I dressed and rushed to write down everything I saw and heard. After that day, I continued, whenever I could, the story of Georgie which took shape as a novel.

What happened over the course of many years, is quite surprising. I loved the process of imagining that helped me develop Georgie, her family and friends and the plot intrigues. I loved it so much, I was no longer concerned about finishing my book! Indeed, I have not yet published this novel. But what came from the workings of imagination are wonderful gifts.

Georgie inspired me to establish my Creative Writing Workshop which for 12 years I have been running. Because of my Georgie, I bonded with students and fellow writers and enriched my social relationships.

I also delved into the importance of imagination, a good healthy one, for generating new experiences and keeping the mind vital. So you see:

Creativity is not only about results and trying to get famous and rich.

The awesome power of imagination can change your life!

Here is an exercise I use to enhance memory, focus and the imagination. You might want to do it several times a week.

Pick something pleasant to contemplate. A flower. A plant. A lovely lamp etc.
Look at it long and carefully. Note details.
Close your eyes now. Recreate it in your mind as fully as you can.
Hold the image in your mind in all its richness,
When you get proficient at this, you can move the image in your inner field of vision.
You might even like to make an imaginary person pick the flower or smell it, or whatever.
Extra: See if you can draw something like what you see in your mind's eyes. Or see if you can describe it in writing.

You might even be on your way to writing a short story with a fantastic main character. Or just as good, causing something else very positive to happen in your real life. Maybe one day soon a friend will bring you a bouquet of flowers!

Real Life Stories: The Thief who Stole my Daughter's Phone

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 15:04:06 GMT

Every word of what follows is factual. I wrote it down two days after my daughter told me about the episode. Though the burglary happened quite a few years ago, its inspiring message still rings true today. So I am publishing it now on my site to share with you.

My daughter, 21 years old at the time, was living in the spiritual town of Safed in the Galilee. This was the area where Jesus first wandered the Judean countryside attracting multitudes and teaching and healing them. It was also the area where 1400 years later, Jewish mysticism and kabbala took root. People who travel to Safed learn quickly that there the earth and sky meet. For that reason, very unnatural things can take place. And indeed, they did in my daughter’s apartment.

Miriam was woken up abruptly at four in the morning by a shocking sensation–someone alien had entered her two story flat. She jolted up in bed and held her breath. Beyond her bedroom door she heard the unmistakable treading of unknown feet in her living room. Stilling the pounding of her heart, she cried out, “Who is it?” The movement in the living room became frenzied as whoever it was, frightened by her shout knocked into furniture in a race for the swiftest way of escape.

She ran into her roommate’s room and shook her out of sleep. The two girls slowly crept down the stairs into the living room. A quick sweep of the scene showed them that the intruder had run away. Then Miriam went to the refrigerator. On top of it she kept her prized possession—her digital camera. She was relieved when she touched its canvas case. A few minutes later her smile faded. Her mobile phone which she had left on the table to recharge was no longer there.

It took her a few minutes to calm down and do what she felt was the right thing to do.

She borrowed her friend’s mobile and angrily punched out an SMS message to her own phone which the thief would receive in a tone reminiscent of the Bible.

“If you keep my phone, your life will be cursed from this day on.” Then she pressed “Send” and watched the icon of an envelope flashing as her message was sent.

This morning when she called me she was very upset. That a malevolent someone trespassed into her private domain bothered her intensely. She was feeling invaded, molested, set off balance. Everything seemed to break apart for her; all the hard won order she had made in her life crumbled into chaos—moving to a new town; getting a new apartment and a new apartment mate. The phone numbers of all her old friends were lost to her.

Moreover, she had just begun her first day of a horse-back riding instructor’s training course. To get there she had to travel a long distance and she was going to do this without any communication. To even call me she had to borrow someone’ else’s phone.

But something else was troubling her deeply too. Though the mobile phone company had cut off all outgoing calls from her phone once she had placed the complaint, they gave her a piece of information. At four thirty in the morning, one half hour after the burglary, the thief had used her phone to surf the net. It wasn’t the money for the server gone down the drain that was troubling her.

What really troubled her was this question: What kind of thief had she cursed for the rest of his life? One who breaks into her apartment, runs away with her mobile phone, and devours the internet? And after she had blocked all outgoing calls, the device in his hand, the prize of his thievery, was useless to him.

Did this person, whose life must be so deprived, not only of material possessions but spiritual possessions as well, deserve to be cursed for the rest of his life? Yet, there was no way she could take back the SMS message she had sent to the thief. The thief had definitely read her words, “If you keep my phone, your life will be cursed from this day on.”

“Dear God,” she said over and over again. “Please change the heart of this thief. Please bring him back to you so the thought of stealing will never enter his mind again. Never mind the phone. I just bought myself another one.”

Miriam called me once again overwrought and excited. “Mom, you won’t believe what happened. When I woke up I noticed the thief got in again! But now my stolen mobile phone and charger are back in the living room. And next to them is a note.

‘Here is your phone. I will never steal anything ever again. I am sorry for the trouble I caused you. Please take this money.’

“Mom, next to the note, the thief left me fifteen dollars! What does this all mean?” She asked me “I’m frightened!”

I didn’t know how to answer at first. My daughter’s piety has never ceased to amaze me. Then I said, “I guess it means your prayers are extremely strong. What a lucky thief! He stole from someone who has the gift of prayer! Your prayer that he should never steal again, that his heart should become good woke him up!”

“You don’t think it was my curse, Mom?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Maybe you’re right,” my daughter answered. “But what am I going to do with two phones now?”

What Will Happen to Me During a Spiritual Life Coaching Session?

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 13:14:59 GMT

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How to Bond with Your Grandchild or Child

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 14:18:42 GMT

Of course you worry about the new generation

You have your young ones or growing ones in it! In my case, I have a handful of grandchildren who are raised in a world gone digitally mad.

They believe they can find the truth about anything on Wikipedia or You Tube videos. You and I are not considered as smart as their devices. The wells of experiences we have had do not peek their curiosity. They prefer interacting with 3D reality rather than with the real you and me.

What can we do when they barely look up at us when they are on their screens?

Personally, I get hurt and insulted. Sometimes I feel fury which I express by ignoring the child. But the cold treatment disturbs me far much more than it disturbs them in their virtual bubbles. I need to bond with them.

They need bonding too, but don't realize how much it could nourish and and make them feel loved.

Now I want to share what I did to avert disaster in my relationship with one of my grandsons. For once upon a time, we had been close. Yet in his home this summer, I saw his preference for screen over me.

I was jealous. I was angry. I was resentful. Yet as a grandmother in my daughter's home:

I could not restrict his use of the phone.

I could not take away any privileges from him.

Perhaps you will agree with me for NOT giving in to my fury and resentment. I did not yank his phone from his hands which I could have done thereby sparking off a battle.

Unless I approached him from my inner place of light and love and respect, the atmosphere between us would become hateful. He would happily stay tuned into cyberspace.

Then suddenly an insight lit me . I could reawaken him to the natural world that on occasion he still loved! Because he was a good child at heart Something good would happen to him, to me, to our relationship.

I said, “Hey, how about you and me spending time fishing the Everglade canals? I’ll rent rods for us and buy bait.”

He was excited. “On one condition.,” I added. "Just you and me. No threesome. Your Smartphone does not come .”

In this way, out of the house, and device far away, I began growing close again to my grandson. The connection was deepened when I offered to attach the live worms to the hooks which he was queasy about. I became grandma wormer. And he the fisher boy. He tossed his line in with and within minutes caught his first peacock Bass. But then, oh darn, we hadn’t brought pliers to pull out the hook so we could not toss the fish back into the canal! So the two of us went running through the Everglades park with the writhing fish attached and us crying to help us free it.

The sales guy in the bait store came rushing out to help us. He showed us to yank out the hook and what spot in the canal to release the fish. My grandson, the sales guy and the fish that got its life back became friends that day.

The next day my 15 year old grandson volunteered to leave his Smartphone in the house and to come with us to fish!

Over the next weeks, we graduated from using worms as bait in the freshwater canals to using squid as bait in the saltwater sea. I was queasy about the squid. My two grandsons, now my buddies cut up the tentacles and threw their lines out into the sea.

What Kind of Help Do I Need? Part 1

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 15:11:17 GMT

Part 1

Typically, you are able to deal with your struggles alone. But be honest. There are times when persistent distress, anxiety or grief overwhelms you.

Then you might think of going for professional help. So, you do some research and find out there are hundreds of therapies to improve your sense of being and a mass of possibilities for getting supported by a coach. You might be more overwhelmed than ever! Let me help you through this tangle!

I will share some of my personal experiences of several mainstream therapies and coaching treatments which I have undergone when sorely troubled. And I will explain what I have learned about the theories behind some of these-- as a researcher and a spiritual life practitioner for decades. I will also give you examples of how a specific therapy might enfold for you.

In part 1 of this blog, you will become acquainted with talk-based psychotherapy and the special technique of narrative therapy that a therapist might use. This in itself might bring you some healing.

What can I expect in psychotherapy?

In psychotherapy, you will not be lying on a coach as Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, had his Viennese patients do. You will not be focusing on your subconscious childhood urges or primal fears and fantasies as modern day practitioners of psychoanalysis might have you do.

In psychotherapy, you will be sitting on a chair across from the therapist you have chosen or beside her on a screen online. The focus will be on your conscious mind. Deeply hidden impressions in your subconscious mind are not the province of a conventional psychotherapist.

The psychotherapist will be a health professional often with a master’s degree in psychology, social work, or counseling. She or he will be licensed by your state. This person might have specialties in a psychotherapeutic technique like narrative therapy.

It is important to find out what special techniques the therapist uses. These might set off greater positive changes in you than just therapeutic conversations.

The therapist will ask questions. You try to expose your feelings and your thoughts. The premise is that verbal communication is enough to resolve some of the issues troubling you. From what you say during the course of treatments, the psychotherapist is expected to identify your problems and offer advice. This is considered talk-based therapy.

Think about this. Are you able to express yourself well in speech? Are you able to articulate your feelings and thoughts? If not, any therapy primarily talk-based, may not be for you.

The drawbacks of sheer talk-based psychotherapy

Your conscious mind may already have struggled unsuccessfully for years to solve your persistent predicaments. Excessive talking might keep you in the thought loops that cause your suffering. The therapists’ sound advice might not penetrate your subconscious mind or inner being. For this reason, an insightful psychotherapist will be able to occasionally supplement conversations with special techniques that bypass speech.

Special Techniques in Psychotherapy

Narrative Therapy

When my husband was in oncological care, the hospital provided 10 subsidized therapy sessions for me with a psychotherapist. I was assigned to Sharon, who sensed that I might prefer to do more writing than talking in our sessions. Because one of her specialties was narrative therapy, she suggested I write a short autobiographical essay for each session about different aspects of my life.

Writing and speaking, though both verbal forms of communication, operate from totally different parts of the brain

A study in the journal of Psychological Science claims that “[…] the two brain systems are now so independent that someone who can’t speak a grammatically correct sentence aloud may be able write it flawlessly.”

This means that in therapy, some people might achieve much deeper calm and self- acceptance by writing more and talking less.

The idea behind narrative therapy is that the stories we construct about our lives are what smothers us. They cause us suffering! So slowly and with insight we can reconstruct them anew! Now that is empowering!

Let’s try to empower you through sampling some narrative therapy

1. Reflect on this question: How many times have you told yourself that you were damaged irreparably by someone in your life or some tragedy that befell you?

Who is that person? What did they do to you? Or what happened that has impacted you forever?

2. Now reopen that story and sharpen your intuition. Begin to write about that person or calamity on a fresh piece of paper from a fresh point of view.

3. What hidden blessings were there in your relationship? What good did you take from the struggles and distress and calamity that make you who you are today?

Has your perception shifted a little? Do you feel somewhat strengthened? Do you feel your heart and mind expanding inside?

YES, YOUR STORY IS BEING WRITTEN ANEW. GAINING DEEP INSIGHT IS A PROCESS. JUST KEEP IT UP. TILL YOU DECIDE WHAT KIND OF HELP YOU NEED!

drjune@drjunewritingguru.com

Imagine Yourself In a Spiritual Life Coaching Session: What Will Happen to Me

Mon, 06 May 2024 07:00:00 GMT

So What Will Happen to Me?

You may have heard of Spiritual Life Coaching and not known what might happen if you sign up for sessions. First of all, what does "spiritual" mean here? For now, think of it as a desire to discover your inner self and soul and to manifest them more fully in your daily life.

In this blog, I am going to take you through your first Spiritual Life Coaching session now. Ready?

Imagine, you are with me ONLINE in a quiet sacred space. By sacred, I mean, one on one, we feel compassion for your predicament. We all have predicaments. We are precious beings having a physical life.

I give you my heartfelt attention as you reflect upon your life as it is now.

Rather than repressing emotions or finding distractions in this sacred space you encounter yourself as you are now. You allow yourself to feel.

So many thoughts and emotions from the past will come up. Some you will want to share with me.

Unlike therapy, we will not linger forever in the past. In order to bring you to your present life, I might ask you:

If you had a magic wand, what would your life look like? What obstacles do you want to focus on today that you might transform?

Sessions with me are all about you, Your vision of a happier life is what we want to uncover

Greater happiness comes this way in each hour long session:

You consider your life circumstances and what has brought you here.

You contemplate how you feel and what images are arising in your mind.

Whatever memories come up, whatever images and associations, you are free to express them to me.

Perhaps you have self-images that are holding you back from feeling fulfilled?

Can you envision yourself fulfilled and joyful?

You share your deepfelt answers, new images and insights with me.

Then I create for you, if you like, a writing prompt based on what I have heard from you. Writing, rather than talking, can also help us tap deeper into your inner vision.

You may have your first moment of great understanding. during your first session. More AHA moments will come in future sessions, mark my words.

Am I Too Old to Become Creative? Is It Too Late for Me?

Wed, 01 May 2024 17:30:58 GMT

In this blog post, you will hear the story of a human being who maintained creative power till she passed away at the age of 101 ! Her very life challenges the ageism of our culture that makes people doubt themselves as they grow old.

It is society that teaches us false ideas about who can create. Only the youthful and beautiful, it tells us. Aging people should step back, take anti-depressants and stay silent.

This belief, gets me angry and sad. In my spiritual work and writing, I often do research until I find remarkable human beings so connected to their inner life forces that as the years speed by they become more creative. Let me share what I have discovered about one of America's most famous painters. The latest bloomer in American history, Grandma Moses!

When you read about people like her, you will take big steps forward to give voice to your creative life now.

Only at 78 years old, eleven years into her widowhood did she start painting seriously! From that point on, she made a practice of expressing her experiences in paints on hard boards. For the rest of her twenty-three years, her creative skills, originality and imagination simply intensified!

Every week, she completed at least two paintings . When she had too many paintings cluttering her room, the owner of the country drugstore near her home consented to put some in the window of his store.

In 1938 a NYC art collector passing through this back woods town saw her paintings and bought up the whole lot. Then he rushed to her farmhouse and begged her to paint more.

This collector spent the next year finding a venue to show the world her pieces. He discovered that the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan was planning a group exhibition on America's folk art as part of the Modern movement.

Three of her paintings were displayed there!

There, an art dealer was awed by them. He organized a solo show for her at his prestigious art gallery in Manhattan.

Too old to become creative?

At 80 years old, she had her first solo exhibition! It was titled "What A Farm Wife Painted."

From one solo exhibition, this elderly widowed farmwife was rocketed to great fame and fortune. Her paintings figured on greeting cards, and plates and US postage stamps. Her bespectacled face figured on the cover of Time Magazine. At 100 years old, to celebrate her centennial, she adorned the cover of Life Magazine.

25 of her pieces were painted after she turned 100!

At 101 years old, she did her last masterful work titled "The Rainbow." She died, leaving 1500 paintings in galleries, museums, and private collections. At auctions, paintings of hers generally go for over a million dollars.

The most inspiring lessons you can learn from Grandma Moses!

Never did this widowed woman think “I am too old or pained or disempowered to create.”

Grandma Moses, turned to painting in her late 70’s after arthritis hit her hands. No longer able to do the needlework she loved, she picked up cans of farmhouse paint and brushes.

She made a practice of expressing herself every day in the way that was comfortable for her.

And in a place that was right for her. She painted in her bedroom on a table that she could tilt!

She created because it gave her personal meaning in life. She connected to her inner purpose. She did not intend to be famous and rich.

She even declined attending her solo premier, claiming that she already had seen her paintings!

She painted from her memories and from impressions of her experiences that touched her deeply.

She looked upon her paintings as sketches of her life. She wrote in her autobiography, “A little today, a little yesterday, as I thought of it, as I remembered all the things from childhood on through the years, good ones and unpleasant ones…”

Her mind and heart were kept vitally young by her dedicated practice and passion of creating.

At the age of 88, Mademoiselle Magazine ran a story on her called :Young Woman of the Year."

You are never too old to become creative. It is never too late for you. Whether it be with paint or words, get in the practice of creatively expressing your experiences as you mature and grow old!

Here is a plan (for those of you who choose writing)

1. Dedicate a new Notebook or File to expressing your Life Experiences

2. Dedicate times to do this every week

3. Begin with a phrase like, “I remember this from my childhood.”

4. Even one strong sound can incite memories. An example: Say the word FLICK aloud. Then like a movie, watch memories, thought and feelings play in your mind. Write them down!

Outcomes if you keep up this practice

1. You will keep your life juices flowing

2. You will keep your creative life alive

3. You will find fulfillment in connecting to a deep inner purpose

Work with me to help you uncover a creative practice meant just for you!

Schedule a Consult

How Writing Can Shape Our Lives

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 12:57:07 GMT

Any woman who has faced profound griefs in her life, has such complicated feelings, it is difficult for her to get them out clearly. When that happens over time, she can lose herself entirely.

I want to share a true story about such a woman who lived long ago. This woman after a series of tragedies became a loser . Yet she went through a remarkable change in mid-life. She is on the list of Smithsonian Magazine’s “100 Most Significant Americans of All Time.”

What tragedies struck her? She was widowed as a pregnant young bride six months after she had married and uprooted to the Carolinas. There her new husband died of yellow fever. Her grief was compounded by an awful journey back to New Hampshire. She finally returned to her mother's home. Months later she had an excruciating birth.

It was the death of her mother that broke her. She fell into a state of nervous exhaustion that immobilized her. She could not take care of her baby son. She could not keep her own home. She was carried about from one boarding house to another where she tried to heal. She spent most days hysterical and unable to move.

How her recovery unfolded

At the age of 41, she was “ conveyed ” by a relative to the office of a healer in Maine. Phineas Quimby had gained a reputation for using great insight to help patients rejuvenate.

Soon after meeting the invalid Mary, he sparked off a remarkable change in her. What he seems to have done, is to perceive the vigorous woman that she was by Nature. Then he was able to convey to her that deep inside she was truly a creative dynamo.

(This might happen to you!)

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For this woman who lived long ago immobilized by unhappiness, was able to get up from her chair and to rejoice!

But her journey to great productivity had only just begun. Soon, she began to journal about her enhanced sense of being. Writing for her was a struggle. She strained to put her insights together into sentences. She yearned to express the depth of her experiences in words.

For the next fifteen years, she worked on this first journal. She perfected it. She expanded upon it. Even after she self-published it in 1875 and it sold 1,000 copies, it was in the satchel she carried wherever she moved.

It was among the other manuscripts she was now working on.

She became prolific because she was passionate about new-found purpose.

Her major book, first titled Science and Health, which she revised 50 times was described by the Women's National Book Association in 1992 as one of the “75 Books by Women Whose Words Have Changed the World" .

Her “words” became the foundation of the Christian Science church that she founded. And the foundation of the College that she established. They were the inspiration behind the magazines and periodicals that she started to publish.

At the age of 87, accomplished author and spiritual leader Mary Baker Eddy established a newspaper which to this day is a prestigious online and print periodical with global circulation.

What does all this mean for you?

Writing your inner world of feelings and thoughts can actually shape your outer life! Here’s how you can get on your way to being highly creative and prolific.

1. Set a time to focus on acknowledging your precious self

2. Create a quiet place for reflection

3. Visualize the brilliant self that is stifled in you. Become aware of its energy. Listen to what it tells you. Write down what you hear.

I would love to guide you at this point.

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When Life Doesn't Go As Planned

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 15:22:11 GMT

Did you ever feel you are leading a life you did not plan?

You got on a plane headed for a particular DESTINATION. But it landed you in another DESTINY!

That's what life did to you,.

It does it to many of us.

My best childhood friend Susie planned on becoming a nun when she got bigger. I planned on becoming an actress.

At 19, Susie married a boy she met at Hillel Jewish youth group.

I went on to dream of becoming a free-spirited female who would never marry or have children. I would dedicate myself to literature and art.

After a brief spree in Manhattan doing just that, I met a man one summer in the Vermont woods. That autumn, we began building our homestead in Massachusetts.

Within a few years, I was a monogamous wife living in the West Bank of Israel with five wonderful children we created.

My planned life of wild abandonment to art and literature in New York laughs at me now. And I laugh at it.

White-haired and lined, I have 16 grandchildren, a baby boy born last month and the 17 ^th due in September.

And yes life goes so swiftly. Right after the birth of my 16 ^th grandchild my Granddaughter gave birth to her second child. (See us in the banner of this blog) I am twice a great-grandmother.

So what are YOU supposed to do when YOUR life doesn’t go as planned?

Honestly, becoming thankful for all that has come unasked for brings inner peace. But sowing gratitude and peace in your mind and soul is a long process.

For me, being a contented great-grandmother comes after much confusion and regrets about abandoning my personal dreams tied to America.

It comes after years of developing spiritual awareness about my “mistaken destination” with ten new wrinkles for each year.

It comes after working with gifted teachers and therapists and becoming a mentor myself.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU

If you are confused by your life...

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Yes, You Can Slow Down Time

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 13:08:58 GMT

Time flies quickly at any age, especially when we are happy. We may also notice as we grow older that life itself slips away even more so quickly.

Can we do anything about it? We certainly can!

I am doing it right now. I am writing about the baby in the banner of this blog! That is my three week old grandson who with his mother (my daughter) spent a few blessed days with me last week. This photo will help me savor these precious moments that have passed. But the photo is not enough.

The photo cannot convey the deep stirring in my heart that has helped me recover. From fatigue as a result of my husband’s death, followed by my brother’s death, and a devastating war in Israel which personally affected me and my family .

Though I am writing about my healing with my heart full of gratitude, a healing brought about by holding and caring for a newborn and his mother, I am aware that this experience is still filling me at this moment.

I cooked for my daughter nourishing meals so she could have rich milk to nurse her baby.

The warm and soft feeling of having nurtured is in my 73 year old body now! This has not passed by even though baby and mother are back in their own home. The sensations of having given of myself, not by tender teat, but by tender loving care, fills me at this very moment.

HERE IS A PLAN FOR YOU TO SLOW DOWN TIME

1. Think of a special moment gone by that you want to bring to life again. Reflect upon what are you thankful for. Hold it in your mind.

2. Now begin to write. Express your feelings and thoughts about how if felt then.

3. Now continue writing about how those moments feel NOW. Let the EXPERIENCE fill you with new understandings and insights and impressions.

IF YOU DO THESE THREE THINGS ABOVE, THIS IS HOW IT WILL AFFECT YOU

1. You will become more mindful of your existence as you compose your words.

2. You will find great meaning in events that seem to have sped away from you.

3. By your creative reflection, time will slow down!

TIME cannot rob us quickly, if we set our minds and hearts to expressing what we have been through.

I would love to help you.

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Happiness Does Not Last: Gratitude Does

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 11:15:24 GMT

In recent blogs I’ve written about how to deal with anxiety, fear, suicide of a loved one and deep grief. Now here is one that begins with pure joy . For as you may see in the picture, I am about to kiss again my newborn grandchild--my 16 ^th one at that.

Babies always have the scent of paradise on them with something deeply mysterious in their tiny human features. My new grandson Uri, which translates from Hebrew as My Light is no exception. His eyes for the first time are taking in this world.

But alas, this world is ruled by a law that assures nothing stays the same and happiness will never last long. The very impermanence of happiness can make us very sad indeed.

As I kiss my newborn grandson, I know how quickly he will grow. Already he knows how to nurse like an expert. His eyes search out my daughter’s eyes. He already shoots a powerful stream of urine in the air when his diaper is being changed. Sooner than we can believe he will be standing in his crib, then crawling on the floor, walking, running to his adulthood.

While I am growing old , very old indeed. When he is ten or eight or 6, God knows, I may not even be alive. And yes, it could make me and my family very sad indeed.

And that is perhaps why I felt weakened after my 16th grandchild was born. Two days after his birth I came down with a fever. I had been so overtaken by happiness I hadn’t taken the time to assimilate this VERY HAPPY experience.

TO ASSIMILATE HAPPINESS THAT HAS PASSED MEANS A FEELING OF GRATITUDE WILL STIR WITHIN YOU NOW

GRATITUDE OUTLIVES HAPPINESS!

Feeling gratitude for what we have already been given and may yet be given IS within our power. It breeds deep LASTING joy.

Feeling gratitude takes the place of fleeting happiness. Expressing this in words as a prayer, a poem, a journal entry, a little narrative records it forever in your life story.

Expressing gratitude is a creative task that takes practice. It means writing about HOW your joy came about. For feelings of gratitude arise usually after a terrible problem is resolved; after a possible danger is averted; after a deep wish has been granted; after a bout of sickness in the family, upon seeing someone you longed for, or any painful phase which turns out well.

Writing about your joy means you have to feel the sorrow or worry or distress that proceeded it. You have to write about that too.

HERE IS A PLAN TO GET YOUR STARTED

1. Recall an event that brought you great happiness.

2. Now begin to write about the less happy circumstances that preceded it. Write down all the details you can.

3. Then vent your relief, your thankfulness that all this good happened after all.

IF YOU DO THESE THREE THINGS ABOVE, THIS IS HOW IT WILL

AFFECT YOU

1. You can accept calmly that any happiness that depends on what the world throws your way, will not last.

2. You may feel a lasting joy which you yourself generate!

3. You will feel immense appreciation for all aspects of your life, its joys and its sorrows and trials and tribulations.

Need help? Schedule a Consult

The best way to honor loved ones who have passed: Put your feelings down on paper!

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 13:30:00 GMT

How to Honor A Loved One Who has Passed?

First, let me tell you a story about my own grandmother, blind, paralyzed, deaf and dumb, and the man who adored her.

Grandmother Betty never moved her hands or legs or mouth, never opened her eyes, and never ate anything without Grandpa feeding her. I never saw her take a sip, without him holding a cup to her lips. Even thinking of her as a granny was a stretch that my child’s mind couldn’t make. Grannies cook and pressure you to eat their food so you will grow; they fuss over you and have eyes that light up when they see you. They smile when you speak with them. They’ve got things to say when you pose questions . But not a word ever came out of her mouth; nor did a word of mine go into her ears.

By the time I was born, glaucoma completely robbed her of her sight. Soon after, she suffered a stroke that left her unable to hear; incapable of speaking; and unable to move most of her body but for one arm. On my monthly Sunday sojourns to visit my grandparents with my father, she was slumped in her wheelchair. Though I knew that Grandpa every weekday made sure she spent time in the living room of their snug apartment and not in bed.

DON'T TAKE ANYONE'S LIFE FOR GRANTED!

I took my vegetative grandmother as one of the givens in the world. I would find her forever collapsed in a sitting position on our monthly visit.

My grandfather would wait for us expectantly. to usher into their small apartment. Inside would be Grandma Betty, elbow propped on the arm of her wheelchair, her torso leaning heavily on her palm and her face downcast. I do not recall if there were signs that she was aware of our presence. My father probably moved me towards her with subtle shoves to kiss her on the top of her head. The grandmother I had only heard about, the prolific seamstress, the gifted cook, the warm and compassionate matriarch who opened her home to family who had fled from Nazi Germany to NY-- no longer inhabited her flesh and bones.

A photo portrait that I recently found shows the German American émigré I never knew. Robust, full of self-confidence a glint of humor in her eyes, glancing up at her husband Joseph with pride, a slight smile suggesting that while she loved and respected him, she was the one kept their domicile together.

Like the day that my grandfather took my father Jerry who was then a young boy by subway to pick up her sewing machine after its repair. My grandfather with pride returned with her machine mission accomplished. The restored treadle meant that with her deft hands, their walls would resound with the busy click of the presser foot as she guided the stitching on garment or fabric.

“Here, it is,” he presented the wooden case to show her.

She looked around. “But where is Jerry?”

My grandfather gasped . He had left him in the sewing machine shop!

Joseph, being good hearted but rather absent minded, needed her to take care of things properly. And she was doing just that until so afflicted, she could not.

So he took over the running of his wife’s body and mind. Without an aide or caregiver, for the next thirteen years, he alone got her out of bed for each new day. Single-handedly he would slip off her nightgown, get her onto the toilet and clean her, brush her teeth, wash her with a cloth, shampoo her short thin hair and comb it. Unaided, he outfitted her in the clean dresses she wore.

And then spent the day with his once dear companion, puffing on his pipe, emptying out the tobacco, reloading and tamping it into the bowl of his pipe, often reading a newspaper, making something to eat, God knows what, strolling around is apartment with her trapped in immobile silence.

FEELING YOUR LOVED ONES

Sometimes, bodily empathy with Grandma Betty comes over me. Particularly if I close my eyes, deflate in a chair, prop my chin on my hands heavily and slump, I can feel her abysmal despair.

But what did my grandfather feel? From my Sunday visits, I witnessed only his joy at seeing us. His pleasure when he dealt the cards for us to play gin rummy.

When he beat me, he cried, “Now I can eat!” Then he would get up, and go to the refrigerator to offer me a Coke. The fridge was almost bare. Grandma did not eat much.

Was his stomach tied in knots from woe? Did he spend time crying? Did he beg the powers that be to make a miracle, and when they did not, did he pound his fists in is pillow? Did he slump in his chair too over his smoking pipe?

QUESTIONS ABOUT LOVED ONES WITH NO ANSWERS?

What kept him going through this latter part of his life, this painful grand finale? I do not know. But I know exactly the moment the curtain came down and life lost meaning for him. The morning he found Betty lifeless next to him in bed. After her funeral, his deterioration became pronounced. A wet spot on his trousers. Absent-mindedness. He did not care to play cards anymore. He did not care if he could eat.

I wish he were alive so I could heap on him all praises I have for him now. My God, You were a saint! You are a light in my life.

I wish he were alive so I could ask him the questions that burn in me. How on earth did you do it ? I hear eloquent silence in response. She was my love. She was my life.

***

Is there a loved one you wish to honor through a story you will write? Are there questions you never asked him or her, but will ask now?

Here is THE PLAN.

1. Bring the loved one who pulls at your heart right now into your mind

2. Enrich your image by detailing special things you did together

3. Now using your memories, flow of images and specific details that are coming to you, WRITE all you can on paper about this loved one. Dying to find out things about them you did not know, let your questions flow on paper!

When you get these 3 things right, this is how it will affect you!

You will become awed by the very existence of this person in your life.
The experiences you had with them will reveal their deeper meaning.
You will truly appreciate the fleeting moments you spent with him or her.
Answers about him or her will come as you write!

Your heartfelt words about your loved one will be awesome!

Need Help and Guidance?

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How to Go from Being a Loser to a Winner: Power of Soul and Mind

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 14:41:27 GMT

On the list of Smithsonian Magazine’s “100 Most Significant Americans of All Time,” is one woman, who had faced nervous collapse to such an extent that often she had to be carried about from one boarding house to another.

Tragedies had stricken her. She lost her newlywed husband just when she had first become pregnant. And this was only the first blow of many that would lay her low. And in those days, laying low meant lying in bed where she spent most of her miserable days in states of hysteria and psycho-genetic paralysis. Her daughter had to be brought up by someone else.

Before I tell you her name, I ask you: How could anyone go from feeling totally lost to finding she could be a highly productive, immensely influential, and tremendously powerful human being?

Her success story began like this.

At the age of 41, she was “conveyed” by her second husband to the office of Phineas Quimby, a clock maker turned healer in Maine. Quimby, who had gained a reputation for using the power of mind to help patients recover, greeted Mary who was by then an invalid. Yet soon in his presence, something sparked a remarkable change in her.

What he seems to have done, is to intuit the vigorous woman that she was in Truth. Then he was able to convey to her the sensation of who her True Self was. Swiftly, the false beliefs about herself ---that she was a hopeless loser, began to evaporate.

She was able to get up from her chair, to walk from his office outside, to break into laughter, to rejoice in all the newness . Soon, she began to write about her recovery, expressing her insights and beliefs about how the power of soul and mind could transform anybody’s troubled life.

For the next fifteen years, despite some relapses and mishaps and a painful divorce from her second husband ,that first manuscript-in-work was with her wherever she boarded.

Even after she self-published it in 1875 and it sold 1,000 copies, it was in the satchel she carried among the other manuscripts she was now working on. Passionate about new-found purpose, she was always revising; then using her updated writings as lesson plans. For her empowered personality attracted students, ardent followers, and apprentices until she had hundreds of devotees.

Her major book, first titled Science and Health , which she revised 50 times and subtitled With Key to the Scriptures was described by the Women's National Book Association in 1992 as one of the “75 Books by Women Whose Words Have Changed the World" .

Her “words” became the foundation of the Christian Science church that she founded, as well as the College that she established and the monthly magazines and weekly periodicals that she started to publish.

At the age of 87, she established a newspaper which to this day is a prestigious periodical enjoying a large circulation .

No matter what kind of eccentric personality Mary Baker Eddy had, we can only wish we were as prolific as her. That into our very late 80’s, we might also be actively manifesting our purpose in life!

How could a woman who had been a confused and befuddled loser half of her life, have revealed her purpose at all?

She was made aware, at first through the help of Quimby, that it was her mistaken beliefs and her false ideas about herself that hid her inner power. They kept her from her Truth strengths.

LET ME HELP YOU DISCOVER YOUR INCREDIBLE TRUE STRENGTHS

SO YOU in YOUR glory will triumph!

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Surviving Suicide Loss

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 14:03:34 GMT

I Recommend this First State of Grief

After receiving the phone call that my brother had suddenly departed the world in a whirlwind of agonizing emotions, I became a stunned survivor of suicide loss. Within a few hours, unlike Elizabeth Kubler Ross, who claimed that denial was the first stage of grief, I was overcome not by denial, but by fact .

My brother’s painfully abrupt departure from life was unfathomably true. It was already tearing my soul apart. Hours after speaking with his friends and a detective in order to grasp what might have happened, I picked up a pen to write.

I surprised myself by outlining a chronology of occurrences that proceeded his death. I could not express my pain or abject confusion at this infant stage of grief. But I could break up my personal catastrophe, and his, into tiny increments of time. I craved to make order from the chaos. I began tracing recent events, pinpointing significant things that occurred in the last months of our relationship.

Tracing certain events was like connecting dots to find the overwhelming picture within!

He had called me out of the blue and told me of his dream to move down to Florida.

When I tried calling him, a month later, his phone was disconnected.

I wrote him an email. It bounced. I called the firm where he worked. What? He had just retired and moved south, leaving no forwarding address?

Then I messaged my children in alarm. Their uncle Rob, I wrote had dropped out of the world, so it seemed.

After that, I searched the internet and Facebook for a friend of my brother’s, who might tell me where he was. I found that friend out in California. I messaged him, explaining who I was and that I was worried.

The friend replied. My brother had moved to Florida. All was well with him. But his email account was closed, and he had changed his phone. He would have my brother contact me. I suggested in turn that we swap cell phone numbers.

A few hours later it was my brother who called to my delight. He was as funny as ever. Yes, he had migrated to Florida, but his 2 cars had two different GPS systems each one took him a different way. Ha. Ha. He kept getting lost.

He gave me his new phone number and email address. Then I messaged my kids, I found your Uncle Rob!

Three weeks afterwards, I called my brother using the new contact information he had given me. But this phone, I discovered, was also disconnected. And my emails went unanswered.

I decided to call his friend in California the next day.

But suddenly, his friend called me.

I jumped to answer the phone, “Is everything okay?”

“No,” he cried, “Rob died. Police found a note.”

Writing a brief chronology of my brother's last month on earth was my initial way to search for hidden clues that I might have missed, hints that maybe his destiny was glinting…. before it hit me like a bolt of lightning.

IF YOU HAVEN'T ALREADY DONE SO IN YOUR GRIEVING, WRITE A SEQUENCE OF THE LAST DAYS OF YOUR LOST ONE

Here is THE PLAN

1. Look for reminders about things that happened on certain of those last days. (sticky notes you took/calendar entries/ text messages/emails/audios/photos

2. Become aware of emotions you were feeling

3. Now write your sequence of the last days of your loved one

WHEN YOU GET THESE THREE THINGS RIGHT, THIS IS HOW IT WILL AFFECT YOU.

1. You will be dealing with your grief in a creative way

2. You will gain new insights

3. You will become empowered by this terrible experience

Understanding how things unraveled sequentially can be immensely healing for survivors of tragic loss. I am here to help you.

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Signs after Death of a Loved One

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 13:42:41 GMT

A Wild Parakeet Comes to Me

Blog

I am writing this elegy for my dear brother Rob while watching a wild parakeet rest on a bare tree across from me. My only sibling, my younger brother, died tragically two years ago, leaving a note behind which detectives discovered in a kitchen cupboard. But it is the appearance of this wild bird I want to tell you about.

This wild bird makes my mind stream back to a window near the hospice where my husband had been ailing some time prior to my brother’s death. I had been woken up in the morning by a raucous choir. Looking out to the window ledge, I was surprised to see a drove of green feathered birds speaking loudly with each other about seeding grasses they would feast on today, the berries, buds and insects that would be so sweet, and ideas about flight paths they might take through the air. Oh how they had lifted my spirits when my husband was dying.

Soon after sighting them, I learned that the parakeet population in this area had begun with a one male and female, who loving freedom, had made a daring escape from their cage when being delivered to a pet store. Sometimes I would I chance upon a screeching colony of these birds in a nature reserve . I never did actually see them, for they were up on fronds of fifty feet tall palms. But when I waited, I would see them fly off in flock squawking to another part of the preserve.

But not until today when I began to write this elegy did one come to perch on a tree near me.

This tree is without blossoms and leaves. So this one green parakeet balanced on a thin branch just a dozen feet above the sidewalk with its long tail feathers suspended, says so much to me.

It is without comrades or camouflage, there for my eyes to see. What could this mean?

My brother Rob, beloved by his small flock of friends suddenly departed this world. For the past 24 months, I have tried to make sense of my warm and witty, highly intelligent and vulnerable brother who never married or had children. At the end of January 2022, the beginning of the New Year and what should have been the first blessed year in his new life, he was found lifeless in his newly leased apartment.

Just one month before, Rob had handed over the keys to everything he knew to soar to new horizons. Heeding his own counsel and rejecting advice from certain friends, he executed his very radical plan. He sold his home which he let me know was for him a beloved child. This home, where he spent weekends and holidays, enclosed his best memories and the blood of his life. Soon after, he also gave up his apartment in Manhattan that had contained his daily existence for 40 years. He emptied it out and handed over the key: according to a friend, he gave away much of his clothing to the doorman there. He retired from his law firm where, since he finished law school, he had found another home. There his career took off and at its apex; he was well-known and esteemed in Manhattan commercial real estate circles.

On Sept. 11, 2001, he lost many professional friends and clients when the World Trade Center was brutally razed to the ground. And even though he managed to attract new clients, he continued, to mourn the ones who perished.

Maybe scars from that, and afterwards scars from the pandemic informed his decision to take leave of New York. During the pandemic, he had begun to call me a great deal and to share his feelings-- his loneliness during the lockdown, going into the office and being one of the few souls in the entire building. Yet with his great wit he also had me laughing hard. He had spent a day trying to find a barber who might secretly open his doors for clients who during the lockdown had butchered their hair by mistake. During one of those conversations on the phone he spoke more seriously about his dream of getting out of NY. He was going to map out a new future. I thought he would manifest his dream gradually. Escape from New York and expand his wings.

In Dec. 2021, with one small suitcase he traversed the skies and landed in West Palm Beach.

The courage this took, without even knowing the medical benefits in Florida for people over 65!

Imagine moving to a state without having a clue about the health system there which became an issue for him when he began to feel not quite himself.

But who can blame him for not feeling himself? The challenge he faced just to get from his new home on Military Drive in Boca to West Palm Beach was so difficult that he made jokes about the conflicting navigation on his GPS which got him lost every time he took one of his two cars.

On a more serious note, even finding an ear specialist who could see him in the foreseeable future was a goal he was not successful in attaining.

One thing is clear. He intended to be freed in Florida—to enjoy the sun and water, the pleasant climate, to spend time with his friends, to visit his niece Estie and her family who lived nearby and perhaps spend time with me when I visited Florida. To be outside on the golf courses that he loved. To listen to the music that made him joyful at home in his cars perhaps on too high a volume. To go deep sea fishing. To work out in the gym; to get massaged, to sweat in saunas, to swim and more than anything to run. A few days before he died he was out doing just that and came back to the apartment grounds bent over with a splitting pain in his side. Residents in the area helped him. And he apparently regained his composure and strength and intention.

Above all, he intended to live a simple life in accordance with the truth in his heart and nature of his soul. Because he left so little behind, what he did leave by way of belongings, ultimately jumped out at me. Aside from assorted papers and documents and many CD’s of his favorite music, were two books. Just 2 books. One on cultivating mental strength and the other, I want to speak to you about now.

It is called End the Struggle and Dance with Life by Dr. Susan Jeffers. At first I paid no attention to either of the two books which were in this box with his few belongings. Then something made me pick up this book up and to gaze inside. I wouldn’t be sharing this discovery with you now, for Rob with all his love for people, guarded his privacy zealously. But I will share some things because his hard won insights might enrich us all and make us more insightful and happier.

Opening this book, I was stunned to find on the title page, an inscription Rob made to himself “End Struggle Rob. Am Alive!” And on almost every page after, he made checks of agreement with a green pen, underlined or double scored sentences; highlighted and circled passages in orange iridescent pen. He poured out sentiments in the margins showing me he was totally engaged with ending the Struggle in order to dance with life.

Dancing for him, at this fateful point was expanding the wings of his soul and attuning to its joy.

Here is some of what he scribbled in the margins of those pages.

Y ou have come miles.

Just let it be!

Focus your attention on the beauty of now. I am ready for a great year.

One month into that year, 2022, he was found lifeless in bed, this book on a shelf. Among hundreds of markings in the book, I found these in which he underscored words of the author Dr. Susan Jeffers.

Our spirit can lead us all the way home.

Reaching a place of intense clarity and light is simply a matter of rising above the clouds.

Life can be a mass of exquisite moments

All the dangers in or world are like a blessed wake up call. They tell us to live now, not tomorrow, not when the children grow up, but now!

It tells me a lot about what he hoped to find before he was found without life. Rob was struggling to find renewal for his very being that is for sure. He truly yearned to connect to everyone and everything in a different way than ever had before. He was going through the throes of a blessed wake -up call so he could LIVE NOW. And the now he faced was so different and so difficult.

We do not know exactly what happened those last few days. Apparently, he was not feeling well. He had not seen a doctor yet. Unfortunately he turned off his phones. He never found an ear specialist that could see him. We have still not received the autopsy report.

The final death certificate says, Cause of Death, Not Determined. But I am soothed now by certain words and signs.

He highlighted this in the book he left behind:

Reaching a place of intense clarity and light is simply a matter of rising above the clouds.

Yes there you are Rob. Above the clouds full of intense clarity. Looking down on us, you are shining the light that burns within you, the light you yearned to be illumined by.

Let these last words of yours help others in crises.

The tree is empty. The parakeet has taken flight. Yet the tree and the parakeet are animating my mind. Excitedly, I read about wild parakeets . They belong to a sub-species of parrots called ring-necked parakeets or monk parakeets that prefer to fly in flocks containing thousands of birds for company. When they land, they groom, kiss, and nuzzle each other as a way of showing affection. Their behavior shows devotion, trust, and family closeness.

Yet for me this one solitary bird that rested across from my house, without the comfort and protection of his flock, may have symbolized something important about my brother Rob. Experiencing wide open expanses is crucial to parakeets. They like to explore with full wings spread. Indeed as these birds glide, nerves in their wing endings awaken. There is no restraint. There is a sense of unbridled joy in their freedom. They relish the beauty of now.

How to Pray Without Being Religious: My Secrets and Confessions

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 20:27:57 GMT

My Secrets and Confessions

I am an American in Israel living through a painful war in which my sons are serving. I am an American Israeli living through a national tragedy. But I keep my true self hidden. I have written so little publicly about the impact of this war on my family, friends, neighbors, and myself.

For I am not a political person and I do not want my words to be drawn into the virulent conflict over who is right and who is wrong. Though I have strong opinions about this, I keep them to myself. But the suffering I am going through and my rich search for a personal God within it, I do want to share.

The word “personal” God is crucial here. Though I am not religious, it has carried me through life. For me, it is the God of my Childhood, the Lord who found me when I was 11 years old after my mother had died.

Though I was brought up without religion or forced faith; though I heard no Bible stories; though I was never taken by the hand to synagogue or church, at 11 years old soon after my mother died, a strong impulse inside led me to lay on my belly at bedtime. Hands steepled on my forehead, I lay bare my heart for hours to this God of My Childhood Understanding.

For the next three years, I did this every night. Though the art of prayer seemed to have left me when I became a teenager and became infatuated with boys and then embarked on the adventure of life, it returned to me in many forms throughout my life.

I pray fervently now as a 73 year old anti-religious woman beset with the constant fear of losing a dear one, for so many have here. For I know that precious life can be swept away. I pray because I know I am powerless to do anything mighty against this almighty force. I talk, I plead with him/her, I give much thanks when I feel relieved.

But what might this mean for you who are reading this?

Let’s say something terribly disturbing has happened in your life. You are rankling with pain and confusion. But organized religion does not inspire you. You do not feel uplifted and healed in church or synagogue. Prayer books, Bibles and institutionalized liturgies and services leave you feeling dry and cold. You are not engaged at all in this “edifying” activity.

Yet being engaged in an edifying activity is what will heal you!

Intimate prayer is a healing act in which you seek and are drawn to your higher power.

Yes, express your personal crises in your own words from your inner being!

Mumble your hopes. Mutter your fears. Cry about your needs. Let the regrets and doubts and confusion stream from your lips. Or still better stream onto the paper!

Conversing with the God of Who You Are is the deepest kind of devotion to your own precious life. Be brave enough to let the stops out and to sink to the bottom of your pain with pen in hand.

Here is my own personal prayer I want to share which I wrote the other day.

Oh, please God, Be the God of love, God of Beauty, and Peace, not one who loves sacrifice and blood.

My heart is being cut apart every second; pieces of it will be scraped from the earth here. For it is earth that devours its inhabitants, every droplet of them. And why did I settle here? And why did I stay here? And now what am I to do but pray and grow weaker.

Please give me strength. Do not hurt me anymore. I am already impaired from loneliness, already sickened, weakened, and maddened from a poor way of life, from being widowed and isolated and till I can no longer stand it. But who will catch me when I fall?

O dear God I want my daughters and sons to live to a ripe old age, to become parents of many, great grandfathers and mothers of many more. To be fulfilled and blessed. God please I beg of you: Bless my children with all good and do not forget to help me.

O God help me.

Two days later, I poured out my gratitude when there were signs everywhere my words had been heard. My sons came home on leave.

How to Grow Old Gracefully

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 13:03:26 GMT

Don't Forget to Grow Wise!

So much is written about how to grow old gracefully. Do lots of exercise; eat a healthy diet, reduce stress (which in my own life has hardly been possible) cultivate friendships etc. This is wonderful advice. Yet, we seem to have forgotten the deeper aspect of living.

The more experiences we weave into our being, the greater should be our insights. (This is why I advocate keeping diaries or writing memoir pieces) The more we encounter in life, our perceptions and awareness might grow deeper if we set that as an intent. But who in the world ever says, “I want to grow wise as I age!” When was the last time you heard, I want to grow beautiful with the wisdom I have attained?

I am sharing this picture as a banner who clearly grew old with a great light in her soul. Great Aunt Flora who is holding a one year old rendition of me.

She possesses that divine grace I want to bless you all with this year!

Creative Writing about Dying of a Loved One

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 12:00:00 GMT

This is a photo of my husband and me taken four years ago by his bed in the hospice. I am doing Reiki on him which he loved, for he was a Master Reiki practitioner himself. Though he is alert in this shot, more often than not he slept.

My children would come to visit him and together we would feel the crater that was already being cut into our hearts. When my children left, I would sink into a chair and cry, pray, and afterwards take up my journal to write.

I took notes on how my husband looked; what he had murmured; what the hospice nurses had said to me about the final journey of a human being and my husband’s in particular. In this way, I stayed put. I was ever present to witness the second awe-inspiring scene of a lifetime. The first being birth; The second dying of a spouse.

Three weeks after his funeral, I went over my notes. Later, I began to draft a piece of creative non-fiction. For three years I worked on it. It kept me vitally creative in the fresh years of my widowhood, years which might have been continually confusing. Ultimately, in Nov. 2022, it was published by Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine as “A Crash Course in the Wonders of Dying.”

Here is an excerpt:

I hurry back to my husband’s bedside. I call his name. I plead, “Please stay with me here on earth.” He has lost so much weight he resembles the da Vinci painting depicting emaciated St. Jerome wasting away in the wilderness. I close the curtains, cocooning us in floral cloth. The leaden sky presses against the window, but we two are isolated from the iciness of the universe, warmed with snapshots of our life above his bed. There are our sons and daughters, and several stick figures smiling on paper, our grandkids’ wishes for Grandpa to get well. All at once he thrusts up an arm as if someone is indeed reaching down for him. No! His mother Grace is emerging from the ceiling! I force his arm down. She cannot take him now.

Ever so long ago, her son and I met by chance on a path in a forest outside Plainfield, Vermont. He had just resigned his post as philosophy professor, bought five acres and enrolled in a summer program in ecology at Goddard College. His hope was to leave academia forever and live off his land. At the end of the summer, he proposed I join him on his five acres, where we would lay down roots. “Will you spend a lifetime with me, June?”

Dear God! That lifetime cannot be over."

Why Writing in a diary is Important

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 13:45:00 GMT

Confess Your Feelings!

Confessing your secret thoughts and feelings in a diary allows you to get to know yourself better. And if you hold onto this diary even after you have filled its pages and you begin another volume, you will be keeping a record of your existence!

Our experiences are precious; the infinite collection of them makes us who we are and who we become. Yet how easily we forget what we have gone though and those who impacted us in some deep way. Our memories become thinner and more worn, until they sink from our consciousness. Then they are buried in the avalanching of new experiences. Aside from photos we may have taken that captured moments, we give no written testimony of what we are going through as we breathe!

Most likely no one is going to write our biographies. But you can become in a way your own personal historian. I did at the age of 8 years old. And have continued to be so (for the most part) for 65 years.

When I was 8 years old, I got my first little diary from an uncle of mine one Sunday. It was white synthetic leather, with a little lock and key. At first, the promise of expressing little secrets in this filled me with joy. But then, that same Sunday I unlocked the diary and wrote my first entry: "Dear Diary, Uncle G gave me a fun spanking. It was horrible. I hate him. "

Six months after my first entry about him, I wrote exuberantly about the saddle shoes he and my aunt brought me for Christmas. Apparently, I had forgiven him. Though I didn't say so, clearly he had never spanked me again. My diary was full of praise and love for my aunt. I suppose she told him, it wasn't nice.

This I can remember only because of what I wrote in that diary. Why is that important? From that point, I grasp the roots of my bond with this precious aunt of mine. My love for her grew and grew until her death at 94.

So did my love of journaling. Though for many years I stopped keeping a diary, when I was hit by a middle age crises, I began again. And I haven't stopped since. I am 73 years old now.

How To Find Deep Friendship at An Older Age

Sat, 09 Dec 2023 13:30:00 GMT

Try Platonic Love

In the first and second parts of my blog “How to Find Love at an Older Age,” I wrote about my widowed neighbor M. We struck up a loving friendship which ended for me, when he hinted at marriage.

It ended for me because my neighbor is 10 years older than me and suffers from severe osteoporosis. It ended for me because I took care of my husband who was 10 years my senior when he became ill and decrepit.

I did not want to become a caregiver again for a second spouse.

When I told M, I would ever marry again, we said goodbye and he left my house sadly.

After this happened, I wrote, in the third blog of this series, that finding love at an older age is only possible when we change our state of mind in regard to what love means. Personally, love at an older age became for me warmth and companionship with a dear someone.

It turns out, my 82 year old neighbor also changed his state of mind about what love means for him!

When I bumped into him months later, he said he would be perfectly happy if I became his Yoga and Chi Gong teacher instead of his wife. Would I please teach him motion and movements for his ailing body?

Of course, I cried. I love teaching.

And so once a week, we spent time together in my studio alone. Was it romantic? When I corrected his postures, I did it so as not to arouse him or me. Oh my God, what might come about if we found ourselves needy in bed?

Would I disturb this platonic love between a student and his teacher? Of course, I would.

How Important is it To Be Rich?

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 14:15:00 GMT

A Millionaire's Blues

So many people are bent on becoming successful and wealthy. They feel that without a great deal of money and great accomplishments, they cannot be satisfied.

But did you ever have a millionaire complain to you that he was unhappy? I did. I've also known some others that didn't complain. People close to me. One of them took his life.

Very rich people can also feel empty.

Take a highly accomplished 60 year-old whom I met at a barbecue he hosted on the patio of his mansion. While the sirloins and lamb chops were sizzling, he turned to me: " I don't know what the hell I am doing. I feel alienated from my own life. What is the meaning of all this?" He lifted his chin towards his white brick palatial home. "Hell, it is causing me angst, he said.

So I want to ask you readers, what purpose might there be in having more money than you would ever need?

What is a Platonic Relationship?

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 14:00:00 GMT

It is perfect love

There is an old neighbor of mine, a man I knew for years whom I have been writing about in "How to Find Love at An Older Age." I was a friend of his wife. He was a friend of my husband. He lost his wife 15 years ago. Two years ago, after I lost my husband, this man and I began a relationship which I tell my children is Platonic.

"What in the world does Platonic mean? They ask. Well...

Philosophically, “Platonic” alludes to the ancient Greek philosopher Plato who never used the term himself. However, Plato often in his works referred to ideal forms that exist in a higher world as perfect abstractions-- the pure reality above our impure material existence

The ideal form of Love spelled with a capital L casts only its shadow on the endless variants that we call love spelled with a small “l”. Our loves on earth are poor simulations of the Awesome, Divine and True Love of Higher Reality,

I imagine the term Platonic love evolved to describe a human love that expresses some of that Awe, some sense of Divine and some sensibility of Higher Truths.

Now you see where this discussion is going.

Platonic love means the relationship is not physical. For those of us who have journeyed long in this life, we know that sex, which can be so pleasurable, is potentially volatile. The passions it expresses can turn into hate, jealousy, revulsion, or even cruelty, and apathy.

Not so a Platonic relationship which can remain pure and innocent. You can even have two or three Platonic lovers at the same time. But Beware! Platonic love is not recommended for the young!

When elderly M comes to visit and we sip tea, before I instruct him in chi gong, I see the great light of his soul sparkling from beneath his eyeglasses. I experience a great warming of my insides without sensual physical contact. Afterwards we talk passionately about philosophy and religion or whatever stirs our hearts. Without the turmoil of romance, this love is calming and brings tranquility.

I wonder. Could there be a Platonic lover in your life that you have not yet nurtured?

How Do We Find Love at An Older Age?

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 01:00:00 GMT

Change your State of Mind

You cannot find real love at an older age, until you grasp this: You have more years behind you then ahead of you. Though you can grow old with grace, most assuredly every one of us in this world will die.

We have to make a shift in how we conceive of love. We have to change our state of mind in regard to our ideal of love.

Personally, I knew what love meant for me when I was young, beautiful, and sensual.

It meant falling into the arms of a handsome ripe and mellow man.

I knew what it meant for me when I got married at 24 to an attractive, but not a knock- down-handsome male. He made up with his lively mind what he lacked in brawn.

Love meant living in the woods. Love meant moving to have adventures in Israel, writing together and studying philosophy and exploring all kinds of ideas.

Love meant trust. He was my dear friend. The father to my children.

Love meant staying together to escort our children to teen hood and then adulthood. Once they became adults, my need for my own space grew.

Love with graying hair became awareness of my own separate existence and changing needs. Love meant I had earned a badge. I was a survivor of marital fights and fury and rollercoasters of making up and starting over again. Together my husband and I became become grandparents for the first time and 14 times thereafter.

When my husband became sick and succumbed to his illness, my white-haired love took the shape of a new crater in my heart. I sought to fill this by reaching out to other widows, by coaching them and mentoring them. And by relying on another love of my life.

Love for me is writing and teaching others to ease their pains and capture joys of their fleeting lives.

And yes, hearing about what you have to say about what love has meant to you and how you are finding it at an older age!

How Do We Find True Love at an Older Age Without Getting Married?

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 14:30:00 GMT

Part 2

Though it gets mighty lonesome having survived the death of one’s spouse, I had my reasons for not wanting to marry again. But how I crave companionship! A companion to coffee with, to discuss things of heart and mind with! To laugh with. So, when my 82 year old neighbor, a Holocaust survivor, and I met up on the bus and had a joyous trip together, I was happy when he suggested we see each other again.

He arrived at my door at the appointed time, hunched over even more than last week, his head severely inclined towards the ground with osteoporosis. But he had brought over a play list and said he wanted to dance. I could see the muscles had disappeared from his legs altogether and wondered how in the world could he move his body in dance?

When he turned on “Wild Thing” and his eyes fired up behind his glasses, his hands began to to sway, to shake, to express all the life he had caged up inside his frail being. And me, not wanting to get too romantically close to a man 10 years my senior who was feeble, danced a few feet away from him.

The next week, it was my turn to provide a song from my play list. We danced to Led Zeppelin’s "Stairway to Heaven," and when he got tired, we sat down over tea to study the strange and mysterious lyrics.

Then he hinted that it might be a nice if we were to marry. Not after this play list, but perhaps after the next one? How much time do we have left on earth? After all, he was growing towards the grave. And I said, Oh no, I do not want to marry again.

I did not confess that I had taken care of my husband, also 10 years my senior, when he became ill with cancer and dementia. I would never do that again. And no way would I join my merge my meager bank account with a new man however old. Whatever little I have, was going to my 5 kids. So no thank you to marriage.

When he left my house, his steps were slower, his head more downtrodden than ever. We had found real love at an older age. Now it was going. Then he seemed to be gone.

How Do We Find Erotic Love at an Older Age?

WCAdmin@marketamerica.com (Market America WebCenters) — Sun, 12 Nov 2023 16:33:23 GMT

Part 1

Don't rely on your eyes. . Use your heart. That’s what I did. I am beginning to experience amazing results.

After four years of being a widow and feeling more lonely with each year, my 82 year old neighbor showed up on the bus I was riding and asked if he could sit next to me.

I had known him and his deceased wife for years. But I had not seen him in such long a time, I was shocked by his appearance.

His back was now severely hunched, neck bones clearly collapsing. His head hung low. I didn't want to shame him by staring at his infirmity. I bent forward to hear him and to place my words near his ear.

The entire ride we spoke heart to heart. Eyes to eyes was impossible.

So what is erotic about this?

Eros is meeting our deep core needs. Sex is only one need. The human soul, our precious hungry soul, needs so much more.

How to deal with emotional disturbance when nothing works

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 14:15:00 GMT

Letters from war, part 4

Quite often during the Israeli-Hamas war when grief is so deep and the unknown future makes demons in my mind, I struggle to find inner calm.

But over the past few days, I begin to buckle from the efforts. When I try my Chi Gong practice, I can barely stand on my feet.

I chant my favorite Om mantra but cannot make sounds come out of my throat. I do deep Yogic breathing, but my chest is constricted. I pray to the God of my Childhood.

Then I do something I never allow myself to do. Late afternoon, I give into to my deep weakness. I collapse on the sofa.

I surrender to my weakness giving my body and soul what it craves. Quiet. Effortlessness.

Being in the humble presence of my helplessly bewildered self, scared to death of war and life.

Make order in your life during turmoil

WCAdmin@marketamerica.com (Market America WebCenters) — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 14:15:00 GMT

Letters from war, part 3

Living in Israel, a country at war now, puts me into horrible fits of emotional disturbance. All our world is upside down and all things out of place.

Therefore on the second day of war with Hamas, I found myself at my daughter’s house cleaning out her kitchen drawers, immersed in an activity that was very much needed and thankfully dull.

On the third day, I attacked her very cluttered refrigerator, throwing out moldy food, making room for the fresh and new.

On the fourth day I busied myself righting her baskets of vegetables, which not only contained yams and onions, but pieces of kids’ chewing gum.

We are experiencing the human need to ground, to draw strength from a reality where forks and spoons can bask in their proper bins and used chewing gum can be happily relegated to its proper place.

Dealing With Excessive Stress

WCAdmin@marketamerica.com (Market America WebCenters) — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 13:30:00 GMT

Letters from war, part 2

How to deal with excessive stress?

While I receive an alert that missiles from Gaza are on their way to a nearby town… while I see pillars of fiery light race across the sky, the way to deal with stress is to find shelter. But for those of you lucky enough not to be in a war zone please take this symbolically.

Wherever you are hit with stress and fear, first of all find a safe place within yourself. Pray to your god or your guardian angel. When you can, share that sense of a quieter heart with someone else.

Make a phone call to a lonely person you know. Visit someone who is bereaved. Tiny acts of goodness and kindness are divine for personal anxiety and stress.

Finding Joy During Stressful Times

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 03:04:29 GMT

Letters from a war zone, part 1

How to find joy during highly stressful times?

This is what I am learning in the aftermath of the Hamas massacre in Israel in which intense grief, sorrow, fear and shock are paralyzing… in the wake of inner tension that increases as war escalates with Hamas and Hezbollah… with missiles hitting homes nearby, I sometimes find ways that bring me from stress into tranquility.

Even though you are not in a war zone, become aware of your own spirit (higher self) within all the things you go through in life. Draw strength from this beneath the chaos.

Sometimes the sense of calm lasts only hours. But oh my, that is a godsend!

An Unbelievable but True Personal Essay:

WCAdmin@marketamerica.com (Market America WebCenters) — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 07:42:00 GMT

This unbelievable act of stealing happened to my daughter during the period of time she was living in the mystical town of Safed and I was studying kabbalah for my doctorate. I wrote it down in story-like style, though every bit is factual, two days after she told me. I gave it the title “Remorse of a Phone Thief,” but I never did anything with it by way of publishing. This is the first time it is seeing the light of day!

Two days ago, my twenty-one year old daughter Miriam was woken up abruptly at four in the morning by a shocking sensation– something or someone alien had entered her duplex apartment. She jolted up in bed and held her breath. Beyond her bedroom door she heard the unmistakable treading of unknown feet in her living room. Stilling the pounding of her heart, she cried out, “Who is it?” The movement in the living room became frenzied as whoever it was, frightened by her shout knocked into furniture in a race for the swiftest way of escape.

Miriam ran into her apartment mate’s room and shook her out of sleep. The two girls slowly crept down the stairs into the living room. A quick sweep of the scene showed them that the intruder had run away. Then Miriam went to the refrigerator. On top of it she kept her prized possession—her digital camera. She was relieved when she touched its canvas case. A few minutes later her smile faded. Her wine colored mobile phone which she had left on the table to recharge was no longer there.

Miriam borrowed her friend’s mobile and angrily punched out an SMS message to the thief:

“If you keep my phone, your life will be cursed from this day on.” Then she pressed “Send” and watched the icon of an envelope flashing as her message was sent through the air.

This morning when she called me she was very upset. The impression of a malevolent someone having trespassed into her sacred domain bothered her intensely. My daughter was feeling wounded, molested, set off balance. Everything seemed to break apart for her; all the hard won order she had made in her life crumbled into chaos—moving to a new town; getting a new apartment and a new apartment mate. The phone numbers of all her old friends were lost to her. Moreover, she had just begun her first day of a horse-back riding instructor’s training course. To get there she had to travel a long distance and she was going to do this without any communication. To even call me she had to borrow someone’ else’s phon e.

But something else was troubling her deeply too. Though the mobile phone company had cut off all outgoing calls from her phone once she had placed the complaint, they gave her a piece of precious information. At four thirty in the morning, one half hour after the burglary, the thief had used her phone to go surfing on the internet. It wasn’t the money gone down the drain that was troubling her, though she would have to pay for each precious minute of the surf.

What really troubled her was this question: What kind of thief had she cursed for the rest of his life? One who breaks into her apartment, runs away with her mobile phone, and devours the internet? And after she had blocked all outgoing calls, the instrument in his hand, the prize of his thievery, was useless to him. Did this person, whose life must be so deprived, not only of material possessions but spiritual possessions as well, deserve to be cursed for the rest of his life? Yet, there was no way she could take back the SMS message she had sent to the thief. SMS messages are annoyingly persistent. They keep ringing until they are acknowledged and read. The thief had definitely read her words, “If you keep my phone, your life will be cursed from this day on.”

The next day, in between dealing with police officers at the precinct who were supposedly “handling the case,” and running off to the mobile phone sales outlet to buy another phone, she spent time in prayer. “Dear God,” she said over and over again. “Please change the heart of this thief. Please bring him back to you so the thought of stealing will never enter his mind again. Never mind the phone. I just bought myself another one.”

This morning Miriam called me once again overwrought and excited. “Mom, you won’t believe what happened. I can’t digest it. When I woke up I noticed the thief got in again! But now my stolen mobile phone and charger are back in the living room. And next to them is a note. ‘Here is your phone. I will never steal anything ever again. I am sorry for the trouble I caused you. Please take this money.’

“Mom, next to the note, the thief left me fifteen dollars! What does this all mean?” She asked me “I’m frightened!”

“You don’t think it was my curse, Mom?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Maybe you’re right,” my daughter answered. “But what am I going to do with two phones now?”

Source

The post An Unbelievable but True Personal Essay: appeared first on Dr. June Writing Guru .

Amazon Shorts and by that I Don’t Mean Clothing

WCAdmin@marketamerica.com (Market America WebCenters) — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 07:41:00 GMT

I was one of the writers for the Amazon Shorts Program in 2007. When I decided to write about my participation in this program now for this Post, I decided to refurbish m my memory about how they worked. I looked up Amazon shorts and got links such as: Men’s Shorts and Women’s Shorts, Men’s Flat Front Shorts, Denim shorts, Pull-On Shorts, Stretchy Shorts, Casual Shorts, Comfy Shorts and more… all from Amazon. But good heavens! I was searching for a reference to that fabulous program where once upon a time published writers could send original very short pieces to Amazon. Amazon would then sell them at 49 cents on individual Author Pages to whoever wanted to buy. For Amazon I supposed, it was an innovative scheme meant to address the decline in the sale of entire books. And for the writer? Goodness, if an author got a royalty of two percent on the sale that would amount to a penny. But giving Amazon the rights to publish your micro-work on their macro site was a way of building up a readership and platform.

I will never forget the excitement of being accepted as one of their shorts authors. I was sent a contract which I signed. I got a welcome kit with spreadsheets to fill out for every piece I wrote. My first piece was a personal essay about a bizarre incident that happened to my daughter and me with a kabbalist in a cave. It was called “A Sage in the Cave.” The spreadsheet asked for title and full author name as I would like to appear on the details page. I was asked to provide a 50-100 word first person account placing the piece in context. “Explain why you wrote it; something to appeal to the reader. This must hook the reader. Don’t say, I wrote this because writing is what I do. This is my first “product” description: When my daughter and I first crept into the burial cave in the ancient town of Safed famous for the mystics and sages who studied the Zohar there, we did not know our lives would be transformed by the kabbalist who was squatting there. In “The Sage in the Cave” I try to make sense of the events that brought me to this encounter with a mystic who told me about the roots of my soul.”

The copyrights for this original piece for Amazon are mine now. Because the Amazon shorts program is dead in the wake of Kindle. All that remains of the shorts are gendered denims and pull-ups. “The Sage in the Cave” is a true event that happened to me and my daughter during the period of time I was doing research on Kabbalah for my doctorate. You may read it now even if you didn’t pay 49 cents.

The Sage in the Cave

Four days before Rosh ha Shana, the telephone rang. It was my youngest child, Miriam “You are coming to Safed to visit me!”

Safed, an ancient town in the Galilee built on a mountain slope, is famous for the mystics and sages who studied the Zohar in the little stone structures hemming the narrow alleys. Behind arched windows and beneath the rounded ceilings they wrote and taught their interpretations of the Zohar. These sages are buried in the ancient graveyard at the bottom of Safed and in tombs in the surrounding hillsides and valleys.

In one of the cave on the wooded hillsides it is believed that Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, (a great Talmudic sage who lived in the second century C.E) hid out from the Romans who were rounding up Jews in wake of their revolt. Supposedly for thirteen years, living on wild carobs and spring water, Rabbi Shimon and his son studied kabbalah. It is an article of faith among ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel that Shimon Bar Yochai actually wrote the Zohar in this cave while hiding out. No one knew about this book until one thousand years later in Spain when a Jewish mystic named Rabbi Moses de Leon claimed that the Zohar suddenly fell out of heaven into his hands.

It is not surprising that after the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, many made their way to Safed. A community of mystics began to flourish there. However, one of the mystics who was drawn there was not a Spanish exile at all. He was a Jew who had been living in Egypt. He had exiled himself to an island in the Nile to pray and contemplate for years. One day, a voice commanded him, “Isaac Luria. Get out of Egypt! Go up to Safed!” Rabbi Isaac Luria is also called “the Ari,” the Lion, so powerful were his teachings and personality.

Though the Lion only taught a fellowship of disciples in Safed for two years before he died of the plague in 1578, his interpretations of the Zohar have gained so much authority over the years that there are centers all over the world teaching his kabbalah—the destruction of the Seven Kings of Edom; tikkun and restoration. Even Madonna learns about tikkun and the Seven Kings too. She is one of the Lion’s disciples.

The Lion is buried in the ancient graveyard of Safed, and tens of thousands of people visit his shrine each year. In September 2004, Madonna had planned a pilgrimage to Safed to rest her head on the wall which separates women from the Ari’s shrine. Not long after that, Miriam asked me to come to Safed too where she was studying Judaism, mystical style at a seminary. “Mom, this time I won’t take no for an answer. I’ve been here three weeks already. You haven’t seen where I live. You haven’t met my new friends.”

I had put off the journey several times. “It’s a five hour trip! I don’t want to take a bus crowded with ultra-orthodox Jews and their modesty police. I won’t be able to wear a short-sleeved blouse. And I read that they make the women sit in the back of the bus. And once, when the bus filled up, they made one woman get off the bus!”

This time I made no excuses to Miriam. She was right. Without a doubt, going to the kabbalistic town of Safed at this time, was the right thing to do. I was already working on my doctorate dissertation on Franz Kafka and his relationship to kabbalah and the modern spiritualist revival. My mentor for my Master’s was again my guide. I was studying more kabbalah. Though the kabbalah in Jewish mystical circles is compared to a forbidden orchard. You are not supposed enter it until you are over forty years old. I was fifteen years past that. I was enrolled in two courses in the kabbalah. And I had been doing one spiritual practice or another for the past fifteen years.

I believe we all have spirits and souls, and bad emotions and thoughts cloud the soul so you can’t experience its crystal and clear and godly nature which is what health is all about. In Hasidic thought, which comes from the kabbalah, negative emotions are so bad they are called the evil inclination. Living where I do, a lot of times it has been hard not to get sad, not to be frightened and not to worry. And all these emotions cause physical ailments, because the soul affects the body.

Sadness is an impediment to the soul’s progress. Fear is a vice because it shows a lack of faith in God. King David knew this well though most of his life he was running from his enemies and through his psalms trying to uproot his dread and fright. Worry is just as bad. It makes hair go gray and makes holes in stomachs, and stops the flow of energy which causes all sorts of sickness. So I spend time each day doing Yoga and meditating, sometimes on my breath, and then at the end of exhalation, holding my breath poised in the space between me and the cosmos which surrounds. Sometimes I meditate on an object, like the image on a Tarot card, a sword for example coming out of a cloud in fire.

Now these were the days that, you’re supposed to start preparing yourself for Rosh ha Shana, the Jewish New Year. You’re supposed to ask forgiveness for the bad things you have done and to remake yourself anew. Though I had often prayed on the High Holy Days in orthodox synagogues both in America and here, “I have betrayed; I have lied; I have stolen; I have committed incest and other forbidden sexual relations,” the liturgy did not exactly fit me.

I hadn’t done those things. My evil was negative thoughts and emotions which had really weakened my physical body over the years. So for a few weeks before Miriam told me I was coming to Safed I held my hands out and asked for the strength to be strong. I asked for the strength of a clear and devoted mind. I asked for power over myself. And as I did, I visualized a figure in white, holding a sword of fire.

Soon I was getting off the bus in Safed, and Miriam and I were at the famous kabbalist’s shrine, the Ari, the Lion’s shrine, lighting candles and saying,

Bless this New please, please!!

Then hand in hand, we made our way down the windy steep path. The atmosphere was crisp and clear without the tension and political undertones that cut through the air where I live. Here, there were no traces of the Intifada. Only the message of Jewish mysticism could be felt. The world is a veil behind which God hides himself. If we seek, we will find God in everything, in every insect, in every molecule of every stone. The excitement of mystical possibility fills the air of Safed.

I was squeezing Miriam’s fingers when I noticed a burial cave with ancient oaks growing out from the top of it and a sign that said, “Here are the graves of Hannah and her seven sons,” all of whom had been wiped out by the Romans because they would not bow down to Roman idols.
Outside the cave was a strange man. “Go inside,” he directed us. “My friend is there. Tell him I am waiting.”

“No! Don’t go in!” Miriam grabbed me by the elbow.

I brushed her away. I stooped to get in the cave. Miriam followed. At first we didn’t see “the friend” inside. But when our eyes adjusted to the darkness, we saw a bearded man about forty years old wearing a yarmulke. I noticed that he had very bright eyes.
“Do you have a match so we can see the tombstones?” Miriam asked him.

A match book appeared in his hand and he lit a small candle.

“How do they know Hannah and her seven sons are buried here?” Miriam wanted to know.

Holding the small fire he said, “Kabbalists can feel the presence of souls by putting their hands on the stones. There is more energy near the tombs of the righteous where crowds don’t congregate. So it is easier here to feel the presence of souls.”

Except for the man outside and us three in the cave there was no one else around. Most people just walked from Safed down to the Lion’s grave then walked back up. But we had continued down the slope.

The reflection of the candle was making quivering shadows on the man’s face. He said, “Lighting a little flame near the tomb is good for the soul of the deceased righteous person and for our souls too. We unite with them and their souls tell us secrets that are usually hidden. “

By this time, Miriam had edged closer to him. Hands gripping her knees, she was listening to him. Holding a small candle in his palm, he had begun mumbling as if he was talking from a trance. I could not hear what he said. I drifted and did not know he was telling her about her life and who she was. I did not know that she was shocked and could not move. I didn’t know what was going on until I heard him say, “Tell your mother she has strong prayers. I was in the next town when I got a message that I had to come here.”

Then suddenly it struck me. I had been visualizing a figure holding fire. Here he was in a cave telling me about my life, my relationship with my husband. Even to tell me, my husband was currently abroad which he was and that I was overly dependent upon him. I had energy of my own. Why didn’t I believe in my powerful inner self?

After he finished speaking, he rose to a stoop and spread his white prayer shawl over his head. He exited the cave and Miriam and I crawled to the opening to watch as he ran down the mountain with his friend, the fringes of his prayer shawl flying in the wind.

Source

The post Amazon Shorts and by that I Don’t Mean Clothing appeared first on Dr. June Writing Guru .

My Second Diary – Part 2: The Massive Publicity Campaign that Did Not Make Me a Star

WCAdmin@marketamerica.com (Market America WebCenters) — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 07:39:00 GMT

Part 2

For my book promotion tours I spoke before synagogue congregations in synagogues and at the podium at Jewish cultural fairs in the New York/New Jersey area. You speak about your book and hopefully people will buy copies outside in the hall. My sister sold twenty copies for me. And at Jewish cultural fairs on weekends when parents come with their kids, the last thing they needed was a diary about the Intifada in the life of one Jewish mother of five. Three months later, my cousin, another believer in me, flew me, my daughter and son down to New Orleans (where my cousin lived) to do book signings. We set up a table with a pile of my hot-off-the press diaries at Barnes and Nobles. When no one came near the table my children tried to usher them in.

“I don’t read,” one woman complained to them. And then the bookstore owner told us there was a problem of widespread illiteracy in Louisiana. I am sorry about that. But my point is this. The book promoting campaign which made me feel very important and famous did not turn my diary into a best seller or me into a literary star.

But I kept writing diaries. I started a third diary called An Israeli Mother’s War Diary. I sent the first thirty pages (all I had) to Neil who got the executive editor of Harper Collins enthused. And me? I was flying high making plans about what I would do with the money that would be pouring in. And what kind of house I would buy for my family and where would that be? And what outfits would I wear for all the interviews and appearances. Would I let TV make-up artists paint my face again? No, I’d ask them to go light on the powder. I hate masks. When Neil arranged a meeting between David Hirshey and me in 2006 at Harper Collins executive office, I flew into NY with stars in my eyes. Literary World here I come! A nicer man in such a high position you will never find. Hirshey explained that he had pushed Harpers to make a deal for my proposed new diary at a board meeting. The writing was good. The subject, the second Intifada viewed from a mother’s point of view was timely. But the marketing people at Harpers Collins argued against him. The problem had to do with money. They couldn’t take on a book unless they could be assured of at least 10,000 copies sold.

He apologized. “Publishers can now track how much an author has sold in the past. Then they can predict future sales.”

Did he notice how I sagged in the leather chair across from him? I had to digest that my writing life might not lead to stardom. This was a hard morsel to swallow. The literary world had changed a great deal since I called the editor at Feldheim and described my book to her on the phone. It had changed even from the days I had got big advances from my Parisian publisher. I rose and shook his hand devastated at not having become a well-known author overnight. After a while, I became grateful that I had this meeting with the executive editor of Harpers Collins. As disappointing as it had been, I had gotten a peek into the highest echelons of the publishing world.

And I took comfort from the projects that I did have. I was now beginning my PhD on the mystical life of Franz Kafka. Four years lay ahead of me in which I would get a lucrative scholarship which meant a salary each month while I researched and wrote and traveled to deliver papers at conferences. I tried to bless and be thankful for what I had.

Source

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My Second Published Diary – Part 1: The Massive Publicity Campaign that Did Not Make Me a Star

WCAdmin@marketamerica.com (Market America WebCenters) — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 07:37:00 GMT

Part 1

I have been blessed with mentors who have put themselves out for me in inconceivable ways. Because of my professor mentor I began teaching at the university with only a BA. Because of Neil Amdur, my journalist mentor, my diaries, the first, and the second Storm of Terror: A Hebron Mother’s Diary in 2002 were published. The publisher was Ivan Dee, a small prestigious publisher of non-fiction in Chicago. For the second diary, Neil was determined to making a huge publicity and book promoting campaign. Dee bought me a plane ticket bound to New York from Tel Aviv that October. Neil did the rest. After I landed at JFK, he gave me a list of the busy two week schedule of interviews and appearances.

And every single one of them took place: An interview with Tom Brokaw for his Nightly News ; a session with a photographer and journalist for the Daily News which would feature excerpts. I was photographed holding bars in a prison cell as if I was imprisoned. The idea was that I lived behind barbed wire in a settlement.

I am not photogenic to begin with and the startling photo showed a haggard hideous author. This hurt my vanity but not the promise that publicity even if it is unattractive would promote my book. I was interviewed for the feature story in the Newsday magazine section “A West Bank Mother’s Diary” and photographed (much more flatteringly) for its cover. I was driven to a radio studio where Mitch Albom interviewed me live for his show. I was escorted to Leonard Lopate’s studio for his NY & Co radio program where I was broadcast live.

I prepared this little for an op-ed piece in the Times. I called it “There is No Road that Leads from Madison to Hebron:”

(WARNING: THIS HAS A BIT TO DO WITH THE MIDDLE EAST CRISIS. IF YOU DON’T LIKE POLITICS, PLEASE SKIP)

“I was a flower child in Madison, Wisconsin in the late 1960’s. This needs explanation. I mean how did I get from Madison, Wisconsin to here?

Ostensibly I was going through for a liberal arts degree; in actuality going through the political, sexual and ideological wring-mill of the counter-culture. The books that turned us on like Siddhartha guided us on our search for a more beautiful reality, one without strife and war.

So it is difficult for me to make sense of the fact that since the first Intifada began in 1989, my family and I have buried so many murdered friends, victims of terror. An American guest asked my daughter, “Just how many friend and neighbors have you lost?” Estie went through sixteen fingers and then stopped. “So many I can’t count.”

Here I have raised my five children?

There is no conceivable way I could have gone from resonating with John Lennon about a world without God and religion, to here where Moslems and Jews are warring to decide to whom this sacred city of Hebron rightfully belongs to, the heirs of Abraham or the heirs of Ishmael.

I would never have got here at all if Polly from Appleton, Wisconsin hadn’t given me a car. The car belonged to her elderly aunt who kept it parked by her house to use for shopping once a week.

I was hanging around Madison, going into my fifth year there, not wanting to leave the warmth of the Student Union Ratskellar, not wanting to venture into the cutthroat money-mad world. My graduation from college had come and gone when Polly came to me and stuck out her palm. “I’ve got a 1964 Plymouth for you for you. Now you can go.”

Polly, if you hadn’t given me the Valiant, I would never have got to Hebron.

You might say it is obvious I was affected by the drugs, the LSD, the Mescaline, the golden hashish from Mexico that formed the mainstay of our 1960’s college diet which we imbibed with Marx, Fellini, and Freud. For everybody knows there is no road that goes from Madison to Hebron

This is where Destiny comes in. I got into the car and onto I-80. I drove back to New York, because that is where I was from. But I would never return to Long Island. I would never be materialistic again. I learned in Madison, not so much in class, (often the University was shut down because of violent demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, Dow Chemical, and the recruiters that came to campus from the military-industrial complex) I learned from the ideas that vibrated in the tear-gassed air. The roads most people took towards careers and money weren’t worth a life.

So I took an apartment off the Bowery where bums lay drinking in the street. That was more authentic than plugging into the capitalist machine. I tried to earn a living as an artist, a poet, an actress, seeking in art, the road that leads to truth. After two years of dire poverty (sometimes friends gave me slugs to get into the subway); after living life so dangerously (every day I walked stealthily and carried a big stick), after experiencing a very lonely destiny, I yearned for Polly. My Valiant parked on the street below was most mornings on cement blocks. The tires had been stolen again; the battery pilfered. I bought a new battery and a chain. The chain was sawed off. The battery stolen once again. I went to a neighbor and stuck out my palm. Here are the keys Polly gave me. You want a car?

Oh, Polly, where were you then? If only you would give me another set of keys! How could I get out of the Bowery without a dime? How could I get out when in me burned the fire of conviction, that to take a bourgeois nine-to five job was to sign my own certificate of death.

It was then I had my first vision. Not actually my first. But this was the first not brought on by what was circulating in Madison. This was deep inside. This vision showed me that the beauty I was seeking could be found, not in Manhattan, but in the wilds. The vision came with an urgent imperative. Leave your art and poetry. Go after the infinitely more real. Seek for Native Americans living in teepees. They are living in harmony with themselves and natures. You are not. They have a spiritual life. You do not.

At three o’clock one morning in July 1974, I boarded a Greyhound bus for northern Vermont where I was told I might fight Indians in teepees. The next day, walking in the woods, I saw a man with a little child. ‘Where am I?” I asked the man, an existential question. “Plainfield,” he said. Then a question blurted from his lips. He never had asked anyone before because it hadn’t mattered to him. Are you Jewish?

I answered, “I’m a citizen of the world. But if you want to know, I was born a Jew.”

His question and my reluctant answer ticked off a journey which ended, or began, with our getting on an El Al airplane five years later on our way to Israel, young immigrants with our two -year old son. I have called it destiny.

The settlers I live with call it God. They might say God took me out of Madison. They might say God put the keys in Polly’s hand. I say God gave me the vision of teepees which brought me to Vermont and the question I ultimately had to deal with, are you Jewish? And if I am, where is the most authentic, the most real place to be Jewish?

Religious Jewish settlers say Hebron, the city of our forefathers and mothers.

But I was always an anomaly here. I’m still going down the psychic road to truth. I have returned to my art, my poetry, writing here, here a mother of five often under sniper fire, here often with explosive devices by the side of the road, and Hamas would-be suicide bombers all around. A far cry from the world John Lennon asked me to imagine for my progeny.

There is no road that goes from Madison Hebron. But I tread it none-the-less.”

Source

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Up One Rung on the Ladder to Success

WCAdmin@marketamerica.com (Market America WebCenters) — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 07:36:00 GMT

Though we are no longer in touch very often and our close teacher-student relationship is just a memory, writing about my advisor makes me feel thankful. He was the one that got me a teaching job at the university which I hold to this day. He held out the hand that helped me mount the first rung of the academic ladder to success. That he did this for me when I was only doing graduate work for my Masters showed the faith he had in me. With only a BA degree behind me, people do not set foot near the bottom of the faculty hierarchical ladder. They do not get university teaching jobs. But I wasn’t even a regular people. I was over 50, living in Israel, a country with virulent ageism. Yet, he still offered me an adjunct lectureship in the Overseas Program. The marvel happened like this.

In his office, we were discussing my diary that would be coming out with Ivan Dee Publishers in Chicago, Storm of Terror: a Hebron Mother’s Diary . He was pleased about that. So I shared my outline for my next book. It was going to be similar to the mystic Gurdjieff’s Meetings with Remarkable Men , but the meetings I would write about would be with remarkable women. Women I knew, who against the greatest odds, were breaking out of their binds to build a spiritual life. I told him the title, “ Women in Search of God.”

“You got it!” he exclaimed. “A great idea for a course.”

“I’m talking about a book.”

“And I’m talking about you teaching a course. But there have to be men in it too. Men and Women in Search of God . You’ll have to adapt it for international students coming to study in Israel. Create a syllabus and show it to me.”

The course which I designed was called The Search for Spirituality . The contemporary women I had meant to write about dropped out of this project. I selected a few spiritual heroes and heroines in the Old Testament and New Testament. This adaptation made the course relevant to Israel where both Judaism and Christianity were born. My advisor insisted that be a 4 credit course. He had so much faith in me. He didn’t realize that this was too much to expect from someone who after a 30 year break from being in college was now back in academia doing a Master’s degree.

Besides, I was an introvert and painfully self-conscious after being regarded for years as an ignorant greenhorn who obviously doesn’t know anything because she couldn’t speak Hebrew properly. I had turned down teaching English as a Foreign Language in Israeli public schools for this reason. And for years I had been doing freelance writing in the solitude of my bedroom study and everything else I did spiritually had been in my closet.

But four credits it was. And it was a required course which met four hours a week. I was so nervous that before I could even step into the classroom, I had to do long meditations and Yoga poses to calm me. But even then I had had panic attacks while teaching. Suddenly, my mind would fog out and I would only see white, not a thought, not a clue what I was doing before this group of students.

One day a student called out, “Ms. Leavitt, your course is called In Search of Spirituality . How come we aren’t we learning how to have spiritual experiences?” He claimed that he would not read texts abut Abraham and Sara and Jesus and Martha and Mary anymore. He got the others refusing too. “What about us? Our relationship to God isn’t as important as these 3,000 year old dead people?”

I didn’t want to report him to the disciplinary board. Not to spare him. But to spare me. I didn’t want to appeal to a higher authority. I went home and prayed. My way of praying for an answer is to try to write truthfully from the bottom of my heart. Though getting down to the truth is hard in dark moments of all those tears, I was able to compose a letter to the students. I read it to them our next meeting.

You’re right . I never taught in college before. But I’ve been searching for spirituality since I was your age and writing about it. So the head of the program gave me this job and here I am. And here you are. We were thrown together by chance. Was it chance though? Or is there some kind of guidance working even in this classroom so we can learn through struggle? You’re struggling with this course, because it doesn’t meet your expectations. And I am struggling to teach it. And everybody we are reading about in the Old and New Testaments struggled and faced trials and troubles. Just like us.

That soothed the atmosphere in my classroom. Though I still had a great deal to do to make the course more focused, I kept on teaching for the next 20 years.

Source

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How Disappointments Alter Us and How Mine Altered Me

WCAdmin@marketamerica.com (Market America WebCenters) — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 07:33:00 GMT

Being tossed around like this professionally made me puzzle about my fate. What am I meant to do with this precious gift of life? Should I keep writing, when I was not building a sound career as an author? I wished the Oracle of Delphi was still around in Greece, just a short trip from Israel. But her prophecy was gone and the prophets that used to roam Israel were also long gone. Since I tend to be spiritually inclined, I made a study of the symbols on Tarot cards which supposedly connect to deep human themes in the universal mind or in Jungian terms, the “collective unconscious.” I began doing readings for me.

“Tarot, Please show me the meaning of my soul’s purpose!” I whispered these words for fear that one of my neighbors would hear me from her window. Since, this would be witchcraft which in the Old Testament called for death by stoning. I kept my spiritualist activities hidden.

I would have kept the spiritualist side of myself hidden away if it were not for Franz Kafka and a true teacher-guide who appeared in my life. For years I had been collecting catalogues from universities in Israel about their MA programs in English literature. When I turned fifty years old, a voice in my head screamed. “You wait any longer you are going to be frustrated and menopausal to boot.” One year later, I signed up for the Master’s program in Foreign Literatures at Ben Gurion University, not yet deciding if it would be the thesis track or the general track. The thesis track would allow me to continue on for a PhD and get into the academic world. The general track would not allow me to do either.

My first year, the professor I had for Victorian literature advised me not to do the thesis track. He said, “You won’t be able to write in a scholarly way. Your style is for diaries and novels.” I remember getting up from the chair across from him absolutely deflated. Why tell an eager person she can’t ? Why clip her wings? Did it make him feel superior? For crying out loud, why?

My second year of studies, I took a course on Kafka with a distinguished American-Israeli professor who did his graduate work at Yale. After immigrating to Israel, Mark Gelber became one of the founding professors of Ben Gurion University. One day while reading the Kafka novella Amerika for his course, I encountered a paragraph that struck me to my core.

The main character is lost in a strange dark labyrinth. He sees a guide holding a lantern up high. The main character becomes ecstatic. Why? Because he is certain that this guide will show him the way out of darkness. I hurried to my pack of Tarot cards and flipped through them. I found what I was looking for. The Tarot card the Hermit with its symbol of an old man holding high a lantern. This symbol can mean a wisdom figure, a higher guide at this time can be found within the psyche and soul.

Excited, I decided to let my spiritual activity be known in my Kafka class. I made an oral presentation of what I had discovered for the semester project. Using an overhead projector and the plastic transparencies of The Hermit and other Tarot symbols in Kafka I had duplicated upon them, I showed them on the screen and explained the spiritual meaning. My professor was enthusiastic. He said I must do the thesis track and write my dissertation on this subject. He would be my advisor. This was something! He actually believed in me! In the hallways, I bumped into the other professor, the one who didn’t believe in me. How little he seemed.

Doing research for my thesis taught me to feel humble. Not humiliated as the professor who didn’t believe in me made me feel. To write about the Tarot in Kafka, I would have to put aside my own thoughts for the time being. I would have to cite scholarly articles and scholarly books about Tarot images in the works of other well-known writers. I could then spin off my theories about Kafka from these discussions.

So I hunkered down into the university stacks and discovered that doing research is as exhilarating as writing. The stronger smelling the scent of book, the more exciting. It opens up the psyche, makes the ego melt with minds greater than yours.

Nowadays I tell the writers I mentor: “Don’t rely only on what you know. Go research and get inspired by what you didn’t know and now you do know!”

More than that, doing research is humbling. Writing in a scholarly style is even more humbling. You can’t say, “I feel.” You can’t write, “I think.” You always have to refer to someone greater who said it before you. And everything has to be footnoted with a respectable book or article.

I got into the hang of it. I wrote my first academic article while I was taking a course on the Countess of Pembroke. In it, I compared one of Pembroke’s biblical poems to an interpretation by the medieval biblical commentator Rashi. I sent it off to a journal and got a rejection pointing out the weaknesses in my article. It was a peer reviewed journal. For those of you who don’t know what peer reviewed means here goes.

The editorial boards of these journals are very selective about what they publish. Still, the author, if his/her work is accepted, gets paid nothing. The reward is getting published in a prestigious journal. The more publications in such journals, the better are your chances of climbing the hierarchical ladder which can raise you from instructor, to adjunct lecturer, to senior lecturer. After that maybe then you can get onto the tenure track where it is possible to climb up to assistant professor then to associate professor, onto professor and then to the tippet top– Distinguished or Endowed Professor. The reward for me, merely a graduate student was this. Any article submitted to a peer reviewed journal is sent to outside readers for their evaluation. Should they reject an article, they make detailed comments for the author about their reasons why.

Well, I received one of these comment sheets for my rejected Pembroke article. So… taking their criticism absolutely seriously I rewrote the article based on their review and sent if off. It got accepted! And as I continued to write for academic journals and got my share of rejections with constructive comments, I also came to understand how positive an editor’s impact can be. I do not mean line editors who merely correct grammar and punctuation. I mean developmental or substantive editors who detect weaknesses in the very premise of the work. What is not said and should be said. Or that what is said is senseless and unconvincing. Or that what is said is unfounded. Or it is soggy. Or it is dull. It is not original. It is boring. It is wordy or water-logged. From them, I learned how to strengthen the premises from which a writers’ words spring.

All this I learned because I was living a life I had never planned. My original plans of becoming a fabulously rich and famous novelist and diarist had not panned out. I was living a richer life as my altered self.

Source

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Confessions of a Struggling Author Shaken to the Depths.

WCAdmin@marketamerica.com (Market America WebCenters) — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 07:29:00 GMT

My professional bio looks like a success story. (Note the word “looks like.”) Sure, over the years, I have published a lot. And in the beginning, I had heaps of beginner’s luck. It’s what came after that made the difference. The frustrations and let downs that’s what shaped and formed me the most. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In 1984 I sold my first book Flight to Seven Swan Bay after calling Feldheim Publishers in Jerusalem and asking to speak with the editor-in-chief who quickly came on the line. Once I described my just-finished novel for young adults that took place in a forest in North America, she requested that I come in to sign a contract. Six months later, I saw Flight to Seven Swan Bay displayed in bookstores and cited in book reviews.

But this literary success quickly gave way to a struggle to keep my muse alive amid much personal distress. As an American who had immigrated to Israel because my husband desperately wanted to, I wound up as a homesick ex-pat, alienated from Israeli and worldly culture because I lived in a West Bank settlement. I turned to diary writing to keep sane. The blank pad that I titled “My Muse Book” hoping it would help me fire up ideas for my next novel, Falling Star, turned into personal accounts about the chaos of my daily life. As I wrote each day, I only wanted to catch glimpse of who I truly was and hoped that this would bring wholeness to my fragmented and frightened self.

It was my diaries about living as an American immigrant and alienated settler that captured the interest of my brother -in-law an editor at the NY Times. Acting as my agent, Neil was able to interest US News and World Report in publishing a seven page excerpt. This featured hunk of my diary in turn attracted the interest of a large publishing house in Paris. They gave me a generous advance for one volume of the diary intending to sell the foreign rights to an American publisher.

The makings of a great success story?

Sure. Except their marketing plans changed mid-project. They gave up the American marketing idea, publishing the diary in French translation and selling foreign rights only to a German publisher. A few months later, when they dropped the project altogether, I was heart-broken.

Source

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How Dr. June Writing Guru Works

Tue, 07 Jul 2020 07:25:00 GMT

I began calling myself Dr. June after getting my PhD in literature at the age of 60. I’ve got white hair and so many wrinkles that some days I don’t look in the mirror. I’ve got so many experiences under my belt, my midriff is growing. I’ve known some literary success and a great deal of failure. I have learned to look inside for spiritual guidance and don’t get answers all the time. When I read, I want to be stirred to my depths with higher emotions. When I write, I try to draw from my deepest mind and soul. I don’t often succeed but I love the word soul. I often have to do spiritual practices to remind myself that I don’t need fame, wealth, prestige and power. I believe that the act of writing and even failing at it can spur wisdom and insight.

I believe words written and spoken from the depths can open our hearts, raise our minds. You see, at heart, I am an educator, a writer and now so happy I am also doing spiritual and life coaching for people in some kind of need.

Source

The post How Dr. June Writing Guru Works appeared first on Dr. June Writing Guru .

Dr. June Writing Coach

Find Your Soul: Feel Your Awe

Being bored to death means our minds and souls have closed themselves off from appreciating the intricacy of own being, the complexity of our souls!

Making Nice Money: A Painful Way

I made nice money with an online classified site years ago after I applied for a rather rare gig. An Investigative Journalist for a special assignment!

This gig for a researcher/writer would concern other kinds of horror. Newspaper coverage of The Klu Klux Klan from its early days.

A private historical news project had posted the ad. I applied and sent a sample of my work.

Is it Okay to be Alone during the Holidays? What about New Year's Eve?

Oh yes it is!

The Awesome Power of Imagination: It Can Change Your Life

If you allow your power of imagination to work through you it can change your life in wonderous ways.

Creativity is not only about results and trying to get famous and rich.

The awesome power of imagination can change your life!

You might even be on your way to writing a short story with a fantastic main character. Or just as good, causing something else very positive to happen in your real life. Maybe one day soon a friend will bring you a bouquet of flowers!

Real Life Stories: The Thief who Stole my Daughter's Phone

Every word of what follows is factual. I wrote it down two days after my daughter told me about the episode. Though the burglary happened quite a few years ago, its inspiring message still rings true today. So I am publishing it now on my site to share with you.

“If you keep my phone, your life will be cursed from this day on.” Then she pressed “Send” and watched the icon of an envelope flashing as her message was sent.

“Dear God,” she said over and over again. “Please change the heart of this thief. Please bring him back to you so the thought of stealing will never enter his mind again. Never mind the phone. I just bought myself another one.”

‘Here is your phone. I will never steal anything ever again. I am sorry for the trouble I caused you. Please take this money.’

What Will Happen to Me During a Spiritual Life Coaching Session?

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How to Bond with Your Grandchild or Child

Of course you worry about the new generation

What can we do when they barely look up at us when they are on their screens?

They need bonding too, but don't realize how much it could nourish and and make them feel loved.

What Kind of Help Do I Need? Part 1

Typically, you are able to deal with your struggles alone. But be honest. There are times when persistent distress, anxiety or grief overwhelms you.

In part 1 of this blog, you will become acquainted with talk-based psychotherapy and the special technique of narrative therapy that a therapist might use. This in itself might bring you some healing.

What can I expect in psychotherapy?

It is important to find out what special techniques the therapist uses. These might set off greater positive changes in you than just therapeutic conversations.

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The drawbacks of sheer talk-based psychotherapy

Special Techniques in Psychotherapy

Narrative Therapy

The idea behind narrative therapy is that the stories we construct about our lives are what smothers us. They cause us suffering! So slowly and with insight we can reconstruct them anew! Now that is empowering!

Let’s try to empower you through sampling some narrative therapy

Imagine Yourself In a Spiritual Life Coaching Session: What Will Happen to Me

So What Will Happen to Me?

You may have heard of Spiritual Life Coaching and not known what might happen if you sign up for sessions. First of all, what does "spiritual" mean here? For now, think of it as a desire to discover your inner self and soul and to manifest them more fully in your daily life.

In this blog, I am going to take you through your first Spiritual Life Coaching session now. Ready?

If you had a magic wand, what would your life look like? What obstacles do you want to focus on today that you might transform?

Greater happiness comes this way in each hour long session:

Perhaps you have self-images that are holding you back from feeling fulfilled?

Am I Too Old to Become Creative? Is It Too Late for Me?

It is society that teaches us false ideas about who can create. Only the youthful and beautiful, it tells us. Aging people should step back, take anti-depressants and stay silent.

When you read about people like her, you will take big steps forward to give voice to your creative life now.

Too old to become creative?

The most inspiring lessons you can learn from Grandma Moses!

Never did this widowed woman think “I am too old or pained or disempowered to create.”

She made a practice of expressing herself every day in the way that was comfortable for her.

She created because it gave her personal meaning in life. She connected to her inner purpose. She did not intend to be famous and rich.

She painted from her memories and from impressions of her experiences that touched her deeply.

Her mind and heart were kept vitally young by her dedicated practice and passion of creating.

Here is a plan (for those of you who choose writing)

Outcomes if you keep up this practice

Work with me to help you uncover a creative practice meant just for you!

How Writing Can Shape Our Lives

How her recovery unfolded

What does all this mean for you?

When Life Doesn't Go As Planned

Did you ever feel you are leading a life you did not plan?

My planned life of wild abandonment to art and literature in New York laughs at me now. And I laugh at it.

White-haired and lined, I have 16 grandchildren, a baby boy born last month and the 17 th due in September.

So what are YOU supposed to do when YOUR life doesn’t go as planned?

For me, being a contented great-grandmother comes after much confusion and regrets about abandoning my personal dreams tied to America.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU

Yes, You Can Slow Down Time

Time flies quickly at any age, especially when we are happy. We may also notice as we grow older that life itself slips away even more so quickly.

Happiness Does Not Last: Gratitude Does

But alas, this world is ruled by a law that assures nothing stays the same and happiness will never last long. The very impermanence of happiness can make us very sad indeed.

Feeling gratitude for what we have already been given and may yet be given IS within our power. It breeds deep LASTING joy.

Feeling gratitude takes the place of fleeting happiness. Expressing this in words as a prayer, a poem, a journal entry, a little narrative records it forever in your life story.

The best way to honor loved ones who have passed: Put your feelings down on paper!

How to Honor A Loved One Who has Passed?

DON'T TAKE ANYONE'S LIFE FOR GRANTED!

FEELING YOUR LOVED ONES

Was his stomach tied in knots from woe? Did he spend time crying? Did he beg the powers that be to make a miracle, and when they did not, did he pound his fists in is pillow? Did he slump in his chair too over his smoking pipe?

QUESTIONS ABOUT LOVED ONES WITH NO ANSWERS?

How to Go from Being a Loser to a Winner: Power of Soul and Mind

Surviving Suicide Loss

White-haired and lined, I have 16 grandchildren, a baby boy born last month and the 17 ^th due in September.