No worries- something happened to me in the desert

What happened to me in the desert? This year, the playa drew me in again. I was so ambivalent about going to Burning Man but at the last minute I decided yes, I have to do it. I must go to that strange mystical event in the middle of nowhere yet again. Good thing...

Something shifted in me this year big time. I recall saying to a friend that each year I go it feels like it is still the same me going through the same struggles and feeling the same inner resistance to the dust, to the heat, and my indecisiveness shows up everywhere. Not this year though.

I am not sure what to call what happened to me but the word that best describes it is Grace. There was so much inner stillness and peace within.  None of the old patterns that had reemerged in previous years were emerging this year.  Why? What was going on?

There is no reason for it that I can "figure" out. Listening to more than my fair share of Adyashanti on the ride there and in previous weeks maybe had me ripe for some sort of awakening but the truth is that there is no logical explanation for these shifts when they occur. I guess some part of me was ready to give up the inner struggle with which I had grown so accustomed to all summer long. Creating and resolving inner conflicts as a means to keep from being bored seemed to be the cycle I was in. I didn't even realize it.

I am sharing this because this is my truth. For one week in the desert a platform of inner stillness and grace was built. This stability anchors me now. The previous worry bug that use to plague me seems to have gone to sleep. I don't know if this will last. Most likely not, because I can recognize this as just another state. It doesn't worry me that it won't stick. Nothing seems to stick anyways, as much as I want it to. Relationships come and go, jobs appear and dissappear, laughs ring in my ears and then become echos. water falls from the sky, soaks into the ground, evaporates and becomes a cloud, a dream, and then rain again...


What I want to transmit is that now that I have been living with this experience for an extended period of time I feel like my cells, my overall energy body, and my physical body are infused with this intelligence and the sparkle that comes when one is more at ease with reality and is not in a constant state of resistance to what is. I am in a sense, being recalibrated to this new way of being and feeling in the world.  don't misunderstand me, I am still experiencing struggle, pain, sadness, loss and other traditionally labeled "negative" emotions but the difference is that now when they come up I go sit with them instead of busying myself so I don't feel them. I am cultivating the practice of not creating an additional story on top of the feeling that perpetuates and increases (unnecessarily) the original sensation that was coming up.

In a way it feels like I am reverting back to how I was as a child, only doing it in a way that is infused with wisdom and a groundedness. What I mean by this is that I am allowing feelings and sensations to arise and not be resistance to them as I have been in the past. for some this may seem like a no brainer, but for me this has been a constant challenge. I have a certain image that I was trying to uphold, the archetype of the calm, collected and intelligent, and independent woman who has it all together. well, we all know these can be true parts of me but they are not the truth of who or what I am, and there is certainly no way that I can be these things all the time until I first let go of trying to be them all the time. I have tried so hard to be a certain way that what I was missing is that I need to let go of the trying and just BE who i am actually am. its interesting how I have to go through all of these learning and felt experiences in order to arrive back at the natural state of what/who I always was.

ok, I am done rambling. this is a huge topic and I don't feel like I covered everything I wanted to but I must get outside and go run around the lake! We are having our last days of summer before autumn knocks its crisp little hands on the doors of the east bay.

My etsy site is up and running!

Greetings!  I just got my etsy site up and running. Please go to:
http://www.etsy.com/people/spiritintoform if you want to see the jewelry I create.

I create some of it from new materials, but I like to use reclaimed materials as much as possible... I also use pieces of nature and random stuff I find lying around that calls to me to be made into some other incarnation...

I am inspired by all things natural, little things, and my designs will continue to evolve as this rekindled love affair with making jewelry unfolds. all my pieces are one of kind, made with love, and "intention" to detail

I also will make items to order!

the calling

lost in between time zones - the west holds me in its palm. where I was born, a country with daffodils, bullfrogs and thunderstorms cradles the child yearning for 4 seasons and ever changing cloud formations. space time comes to me in sleep asking if I want to enter Pleides but I am not ready to jump so far into the unknown yet. a duckling body and swan face. sun brings warmth and a likeness to all those that breathe. it is our pleasure to bring forth sacred sound from before the physical era began. all souls recognize the calling eventually; its a calling to return home. the artist paints finger paintings in the sky. nothing lasts except the nothing underneath the silence. we run towards and away every in and out breath.

dance my life- live my dance (a spiral conversation)

the notion that dancing informs life and life informs my dance is something I am just starting to explore. i have never thought of dance in such a way that it can actually inform my life. although it may be "silent", it speaks. it is a language. what is it that is needing to be expressed that comes through my dance? subconscious elements can surface through the medium of dance and movement.
i have just spent the past two days in a training with Anna Halprin. A 90 year old storehouse of knowledge, spirit, zest and gentleness, Anna is a living treasure. This weekend was about the felt, kinesthetic experience. connection with others. trusting in another.

fool on the hill

Joni sings: "I wish I had a river, I could skate away on..."

I keep thinking I should just give up. give in. not as noble sounding as surrendering. but maybe the spirit behind it ends up being the same thing in the end. what "giving up" leads to is indeed surrendering once the phase of self pity is fully experienced. right? maybe...

I have spent so many of my days longing. what am I longing for? really? longing for another person to share in my experience of this crazy whirlwind of a life? is that really it? today i wanted to give up. I, Emily Lewis, lead a solitary life in many ways. solitary in my waking, solitary in my sleeping. solitary in shopping, dancing, cooking, eating, praying, weeping, laughing, hiking, biking, walking, smiling, singing, searching for truth, writing about searching for truth, thinking, thinking about not thinking...the list goes on.

democracy... when is the house of cards going to fall?

in light of recent events in the good old midwest I thought I would take some time to go into some political ramblings which is something i don't usually do. so my blog is now opening up to whatever I need or want to write about that is most potently needing to be expressed...

i would like to point out how it is not just our individual selves that are falling apart and letting go of old structures. this unraveling is happening on a mass scale, a macro scale ALL OVER THE WORLD! the coming of 2012 isn't really so much a "coming" anymore as it is an "its here". PEOPLE: WAKE UP! We are in the middle of major shifts NOW.

Body Wisdom

Today I had a completely new experience. When I sat down to meditate I started to focus on what I would call my inner body. The inner body is like an energetic field, comprised of subtle sensations, movements, twists, contractions, expansions. It has a lot of the same qualities one would think of the physical body having but mostly energetic in capacity. It has its own movement as from what I experienced today. I had experienced this before when getting cranial-sacral, and I have experienced this in other more dramatic ways like through dancing and other forms of movement, but never on this subtle have I stayed with the inner bodies movements and will. I say will because the inner body seems to have its own will. During this process today, my mind was busy on some level, noticing what was happening, wondering how this could be happening, analyzing, trying to interpret, (doesn't sound too much like meditating I know but the inner body wanted to express itself so that is what happened instead). So what exactly happened?

Moving from stillness

Is time speeding up for anyone else out there?
From my experience, the speed at which we are living is noticeably getting faster...

"Is it raining? is it snowing? is a hurricane a blowing...
the danger must be growing, because the rowers keep on rowing..."
Gene Wilder- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

love is the key - a poem for lovers

i will write the sweetest song for you my love

moments into days into years
sometimes I feel you taking form
when you find me I will be waiting with open arms

and yet, for now
my love - a river
that flows towards the mouth of the ocean
ready to merge with whole essence
swirl into loves sweet abyss

the truth of who I am is part of you
the truth is that love and sorrow dance so close in the candlelight
you cannot tell them apart

sweet sweet honey
this is love
wind and rain still make me smile

walk along the shore with me
stay up till dawn with me
you inspire me to share my stories
my life, stacks of leatherbound journals and you untie the string
the pages fall open with ease and grace
i am open here my love

my heart aching,
singing,
dancing...

today is the only day that has ever existed

have you ever noticed that today is the only day you have ever lived? i am not quite sure how to explain what i mean but i am going to try. something in my internal world is shifting and with this shift everything else is changing. right now this feeling is subtle, but it is the peculiar recognition that time is not actually real. its like i am standing still and everything is moving around me. i described it to a friend in relating it to nintendo. when you are playing nintendo, you are watching things move on a screen but nothing is moving at all. the pixels are just lighting up in different areas and there is the illusion of movement. so it looks like mario is running, but really it is just an illusion that everything around him is changing. he is alsways in the same place on the screen. so it's kind of like that i some way. it's also that there is a growing sense of how nothing is actually real, not just that time isn't real. the attachments to outcomes and people are decreasing. right now that comes across as sort of detached in a dispondent way maybe, but that is because there is so much growing i need to do in the area of compassion. but to my surprise, the compassion is growing.

synchronicity and rambles

This is my first blog since 2010. so happy new year. since the solstice the theme of synchronicity has been glaring me in the face, in an up-close and personal way. so much that I can't not write about it in a public forum.

what role does synchronicity play in my life? why am i experiencing more of what I perceive to be synchronistic events lately than I have in a long time? is it because I am placing more attention on when it is happening or am I placing more attention on it because things are happening that are asking for me to pay more attention to them? and how they are related? it feels kind of like a chicken and egg discussion but with a bizarre little twist. everything comes back to trust. i'll explain that later.