Journey into Healing Day 4 & 5

Santa Monica beach. Copyright (c) 2012 Wendee Holtcamp

“This week will be like a tsunami of mind-blowing information.” – Davidji

I can't believe it's been a month since I updated my blog- my bad! I have been working on an article on the whole H5N1 (avian flu) brouhaha and the associated "dual use" dilemma - something your average scientist, let alone your average person, has not heard of. Dual use means research that could be used for good or evil. In the case of the H5N1 research, there are two studies where scientists made the deadly bird flu (which kills something like 60% of known infected people) more transmissible, and hence better suited to be turned into a biological weapon. The question becomes: should this research have been done?! Now that it has, should it be published? That has been the subject of a heated debate over the past 4 months that has totally flown under the radar of the general public. Science has a whole section that highlights past articles on this issue so you can get up to speed, if you are interested.

So I wanted to finish my blogging on the awesome Journey into Healing workshop, and share some of my highlights, and then leave you with a few last photos. And by the way, this workshop has been life-changing for me in that I have meditated for 30 minutes every morning except for two, and on a couple days I've done twice daily meditations (usually when I'm particularly stressed). I am really enjoying the practice.

My highlights...

• Valencia Porter is a medical doctor who has amazing credentials, and she also specialized in environmental health, which fascinated me since I have been doing so much writing in this area lately. In one of her talks, she described the Ayurvedic wellness perspective, which is to treat the whole person – body, mind, and soul. She said, “If all your tests come back fine, even if you still feel like crap, you’re ‘healthy’ according to the Western model." But according to the Ayurvedic view, illness is the absence of vibrant health in any one of these three areas, and it aims to not only treat the whole person but also sees people as individualistic rather than a one-size-fits-all view. It's very much NOT about just prescribing medication until the symptoms go away, as Western doctors so often do today.
  
  
• In one of Davidji's talks, his descriptions of "doshas" -- vata (air), pitta (fire) and kapha (earth) -- were hilarious! He is such a talented speaker, as he is just plain funny and his passion for the subjects comes through. He had us all in stitches. In an Ayurvedic approach, one's diet, medical treatment, behavioral care, etc, can depend on your constitution or dosha. I hope to write more about this in the future but there's tons o' info online about doshas if you are interested! Which do you think I am?
  
  
• Last, in one of Deepak Chopra's two talks, he said something in passing that I just loved. In his lilting Indian accent, he said “And if I don’t like a thought... ‘NEXT!’” It was funny, simple, and extremely profound. In other words, we can just tell the thoughts we don’t like to scram. And I have literally said this - NEXT! - to several of my thoughts over the past month. Try it - to works!
  
  
• And last but not least: RPM - Rise, Pee, Meditate! :)

My roommate Suzi (from Ireland), Paige (she came up on the second to last day to hang with me at the La Costa Resort) and me.

I loved these "tree of life" paintings they were selling. I got a 5x7 card of one. They come in all sorts of colors.
Davidji, Peaches the Buddha Princess and me on the last day.

Journey into Healing Day 3

Copyright (c) 2012 Wendee Holtcamp

Another busy day at the Journey into Healing workshop, but tomorrow is the highlight for me - Byron Katie will be here in the evening! She is a true luminary and I want to do "the work" with her if I get the chance but my ego is going nutso - like I can't, I'll look stupid, I'll make a fool of myself, I'm scared... I don't know if I'll get the chance or not but I really would like to. She isn't associated with the Chopra Center per se, as far as I know, but is more like a speaker that is coming in presenting at the workshop. The Journey into Healing and the Seduction of Spirit are the Chopra Center's two signature workshops - this one focusing on health and overall well-being and the other more focused on meditation and spiritual well-being and healing.

When we did instruction on meditation over the past couple of days, they said that people often need less sleep. And I kid you not, I woke at 5:30am, 30 minutes before my alarm was set! We had 6:30am yoga so I got up and was rustling around and didn't want to wake my roommate so I dressed and went outside to sit and journal and drink hot tea. It was a lovely morning and the almost full moon was setting and it was chilly but slightly warmer than yesterday. Then it was yoga, followed by group meditation (sitting silently for 30 minutes, repeating the mantra you're given silently) and then a break and then more talks. We learned more about Ayurvedic health and medicine by Dr Suhas Kshirsagar, which was very interesting, a talk by Dr Sheila Patel on food as medicine, and we had an Ayurvedic cooking demo by Teresa Long. The lunch was vegan again and with a Latin flair - chile relleno, marinated tofu, rice, guacamole and salsa plus fresh greens and cilantro dressing. OMG so delicious! In Ayurveda, they serve the biggest meal at lunch with a lighter meal at dinner. I'm actually not on the dinner meal plan so my roomie and i have been eating at the restaurants at the resort on our own but they also serve some vegan/Ayurvedic options as well as "regular" options.

Deepak spoke again this morning also and this lecture was a bit more on the level. It was quite good. I will have to add some conference highlights and quotes when I get more time. In the afternoon we had another group meditation and then another yoga session There are three options - beginner, advanced and chair yoga. Now i would've gone to the advanced every time but this morn i was running late and accidentally followed y roommate into the beginner, and this afternoon we decided to try chair yoga just because I'd never heard of it and wanted to see what it was like. I thought maybe it would be moderate but no, it was really simple stretches on the chair, but good nonetheless. I'm excited about the regular advanced yoga tomorrow.

Well it's 11pm and I have to arise at 6am (unless of course i arise at 5:30am again!) so I'll catch up later. Tomorrow i may not blog because Paige is driving in and we are going to hang out here and maybe hit the hot tubs in the evening! Have a great day - and don't forget to meditate! I am really liking it!! It's amazingly peaceful and calming to sit in silence and still your mind.

Journey into Healing Day 2

The fountain at night - earth, fire, water, air, space. Copyright (c) 2012 Wendee Holtcamp

Today was so full I don't know where to begin. The workshop has been a lot more lecture than I expected, and less meditation, but that could be because I missed half of the afternoon group meditation because I ran back to my room. Tomorrow we have yoga at 6:30am, so I need to get to sleep soon.

I'll just give the highlights... Deepak (Chopra, of course) spoke at 715 this evening, about the fundamental nature of reality - is there a physical and spiritual realm, or is everything manifest in the physical realm (the view of many scientists) or alternately (Deepak's view) is everything spiritual or manifest in a non-physical realm. It was a pretty deep talk, and he isn't a super animated speaker. He had some profound thoughts and the discourse reminded me of the philosophers of old, like Descartes, etc. And what he said made clear sense in an abstract, obscure way. And that's the "other hand" - that the stuff he was speaking about was somewhat obscure and more philosophy than 'practical matters'. I have never seen him speak or heard him on his radio show or read his books (other than the one on world peace) and I have no idea whether he's normally in a somewhat low spirit (low energy) or whether it is due to the very recent death of the co-founder of the Chopra Center, David Simon. Both are MDs, and they founded the center many years ago and worked side by side. Simon got cancer a couple years ago and just passed away in January. At any rate, I didn't come here for Deepak, per se, but for the overall experience, and that has been great. My favorite part of what Deepak shared was a guided meditation on the different types of awareness (awareness of the physical body, of the senses, of mental space itself, and of relationships). It got me into this state of bliss and peace. It was weird because at first I had a sense of irritation and stress, and then I started to feel bliss. It wasn't a long meditation, only like 15 minutes or less. Then I was very tired!

The rest of the day was filled with lectures. I was actually super excited in the morning by Dr. Valencia Porter who is an MD with a Master's in Public Health with a speciality in environmental health, which as you may know i've been writing a lot about lately. She is about my age, has two kids, and I loved her overview of mind-body connections. She has an impressive background.

The other highlight was Davidji - he talked about Ayurveda and the three "doshas" or constitutions, vata, pitta, and kapha. I won't get into the descriptions but I found it really intriguing and fun. The best part was his presentation - he's hilarious and a lot of fun to listen to. I had previously tried to figure out my "dosha" at a website and couldn't but his descriptions of the types were so funny and made it very clear. There is also a "quiz" you can take. Now I have no idea what kind of scientific basis there is for any of that part of Ayurveda, but I was surprised that there's a lot more to it than the typing/doshas. Ayurvedic medicine is from India and includes many modern practices too like surgery and other things, particularly nutrition and eating vegetarian and mostly veggies, whole grains and herbs and spices that are nutritive and healing - stuff that is certainly backed by science. Yoga/exercise is another leg of the stool. And the big thing is the connection between the mind and the body. That does not mean that it's "all in your head" or that you can heal every ailment by just meditation and yoga by any means. But I don't think there's any doubt that a lot of people in modern society could sure as hell gain a lot from doing yoga and meditation... and as Valencia showed from reviewing many studies, there's a wealth of data backing up the evidence behind the benefits of meditation in particular in everything from breast cancer to heart disease to diabetes.

The lunch was all vegetarian, mostly vegan, abundant and delicious! There was quinoa, and vegan eggplant "parmesan" and a big salad, and fresh fruit. Yum!

Journey into Healing Day 1

Hanging by the fountain of life! The Chopra Center, Carlsbad, CA. Copyright (c) 2012 Wendee Holtcamp

I am in Carlsbad, California on the so-Cal coast, 30 minutes north of San Diego and an hour and a half south of Los Angeles. I flew into L.A. yesterday morning (at an ungodly hour) for the first day of the Journey into Healing retreat at the Chopra Center. Let me just say, I could feel the anticipation, excitement, and a bit of nervousness bubbling up within me starting the day before. Mostly, I was and am just totally stoked about this. It has been a helluva month, with teenager issues, ex-husband issues, and just some generally painful losses and changes, and I needed to "get away" and I stumbled upon this from Byron Katie's website, because she will be here on Saturday of the 5-day workshop.

I flew into L.A. rather than San Diego because I would be visiting my friend Paige at the end of the experience. Wait, let me back up. I flew into L.A. for another reason. I actually "manifested" this experience! I know that may sound weird, and it's not something I normally talk about if you know me and my blog... but the reality is I'd contacted the Chopra Center to see whether they accommodated media requests, and I heard back positively from their marketing director. I was really excited, but then.... radio silence. A week or two passed and I followed up but nothing back. Finally it was just two weeks before, and I knew that airfares were about to get jacked up, so I said, I am going to go to this retreat, I just am. It's going to happen. So I bought the plane ticket to L.A. - if it didn't happen, I could visit Paige for a week. And what do you know? Two days later I heard back from the marketing peeps (she had been out sick) and it was all good. So I'll be blogging daily about the experience and perhaps will write an article at some point. I will be writing a white paper for them, as well, in exchange for comped registration.

To be honest, I'm not all that familiar with Deepak Chopra. I have only read one of his books, and it was on world peace. I came here primarily because of Byron Katie, and the indescribable draw I felt toward the need for healing. All I knew was it had experiences of yoga, meditation, lectures, and Ayurvedic medicine.

So I rented a car at LAX and headed down the coast. As I neared Carlsbad, I-5 goes right along the ocean and wow was it gorgeous! The sun was out, blue skies in every direction, and a brilliant emerald blue-green sea. I turned in at the resort and it's really gorgeous - white stucco and terra cotta tile roofs. I got into my room and my roommate had gotten in yesterday from Ireland, but she wasn't in the room. The room is really nice. A massive bathtub set in marble sets off the bathroom, and the room has a really nice view (not of the ocean - we are set in from the sea).

The first day is a half-day only for first timers. We have to complete a class in Primordial Sound Meditation that people who have been here before have already done. Registration didn't start until 1pm so I grabbed a veggie wrap at the marketplace store, and a tropical smoothie and sat in the sunshine. It felt so incredibly good. There's no humidity (unlike Houston) and it was just a quintessentially perfect sunny day. The morning in L.A. was freezing! And the temp dropped sharply at night, too But the daytime was so lovely. I sat by a fountain and ate my food and chilled until registration began.

I went in and sat towards the front, and of all the places in the world people could have and have come from, guess where the person I sat next to is from? Houston! No kidding. We had a nice chat and then the class began! To be honest, I have meditated now and then for a maximum of maybe 20 minutes. Usually when I do it, it's for about 10 minutes. I started a year or so ago saying ok I can handle ten minutes a day. I enjoyed the calming effects of it, when I did it. But I've never been trained in any technique or meditated in a group. I know that science has shown that meditation is beneficial for calming stress and improving health and wellbeing but that's about it. So I'm actually quite excited to do this more. We had a nearly two hour class on some of the benefits of meditation, and specifically Primordial Sound Meditation (taught by Amanda).

Essentially, the theory here is that the universe was putting out a sound at the time of your birth - this is based on some ancient Indian Vedic writings - and they have been turned into 108 different sounds - essentially Sanskrit words - that have no "meaning" per se (just like "ding" of a bell has no meaning). When you focus on that one sound in your meditation, it brings you back into harmony with your life purpose. Now it may sound a little cheesy, and I have no real idea about the vibrations of the universe and that kind of thing, but the point of having a sound to focus your thoughts on when it starts going all monkey-mind on you seems like a good one to me.

After the lecture, we got a time for our "ceremony" to get our individual mantras. In the mantra ceremony, I and one other woman went into a room that was dimly lit with a candle lit and a flower in a glass bowl on the table. We sat down in chairs, and the instructor talked to us about what to expect through the whole thing that lasted maybe 10 minutes. She first sang/chanted some words in Sanskrit (I'd really like to know what they mean!) and then she said our primordial sound several times, then asked us to join her in saying it aloud - first at normal pitch three times, then quieter, then at a whisper, and then silently in our mind. We then meditated with the sound for about five minutes. From now on, we won't say the sounds aloud or tell anyone what they are, not because it's some big secret thing, but because when you do, you start to associate with conversations and words and the point is to have a sound that isn't associated with anything so your mind can just focus on the sound.

I'm a pretty skeptical person about some of the "stuff" behind this but I have to share my experience. During the part during which we were saying the sound aloud and progressively quieter, I felt this spontaneous and uncontrollable desire to burst out laughing. And this wasn't out of skepticism or anything like that. It was a pure and spontaneous laughter and giggle that bubbled up in me, and to be honest I suppressed it because I didn't want to be disrespectful and make anyone think I was making fun of the process. It was actually a miraculous special sort of thing because I haven't had a lot of laughter lately... it has been a pretty tough ride the past few months. It made me happy. I liked my sound. And that's a good thing.

So I was born at 8:58pm in the Los Angeles area, and I got to thinking earlier about the symbolic meaning of that time - whether or not this means anything or not - but that is right at the time of dusk in summer, right when the sun has gone down and there may be just a hint of light. It is the time of metaphorical death, I think. The winter of the soul. I have been drawn to the concept of death lately, and because of this experience and that in our Group Meditation which took place at 6pm, where we were told to ask three questions - Who Am I? What do I want? What is my purpose? - I really have been thinking about the idea that perhaps one of my future life goals will be working with people close to death. I really am in a transitional part of my life, moving from being a mom and writer to figuring out what I'm going to do for the rest of my life after both kids leave. I have had (as the kids will attest) too many ideas to count. I have thought of opening a cafe with vegetarian food, running a "green" B&B, going to Africa for 6 months to travel, working with the poor and homeless, going to seminary...my mind is open.

After the ceremony, I individually went into the main room to meditate for 15 minutes, which we are told to do to help it get settled in. Then I went back to my room and there was my roommate! It was perfect because I had totally unplugged, turned my cell phone off with no email or text or phone service and I was so tempted to check my email on my phone earlier to see where I might run into her, but I told God, you know, I will run into her at the perfect time! And sure enough, I did. I kept my phone/email off all day and night - quite an accomplishment! Ok, I didn't really turn it off until the thing starts at 2pm but that is still a huge accomplishment for phone-addicted moi.

We then had a Group Meditation at 6pm, where we all sat in the main lecture room in chairs and meditated silently. After that I was starving! My roommate Suzi and I ate at the Bluefire Grill and I had lentils with lemongrass and basil. One of these nights I ann going to go hot tubbin! There are several on property and I love hot tubs! Well now it is 8am, and time to get started on our first full day. I'm excited to ask myself: Who am I? What do I want? What is my purpose?

Green beans and almonds. Or, the universe is fair and just

"Demon kitty" - ha ha! The flash made his eyes like lightning! I'm coming home from Dallas with a new baby! This is a stray kitty that I fell in love with... I absolutely love long hair cats, and I have been wanting a new kitty for a while. With some losses in my life lately, this is just what my soul needs - the joy of new precious fun loving life!

So, I've had an incredibly emotionally challenging few days, and Friday I got a massage and the lady was really sweet and gave me a 90-minute massage even though it was only for 60 minutes. Trust me, I really needed it that day! And you know, it brought back this memory I'd forgotten about.

About 15 years ago, when I was living in a small apartment in Pasadena with two little ones (or maybe I just had Savi, and was pregnant), and my marriage was already starting to crumble. I used to always eat these frozen green beans with almonds. I LOVED them and it was about the only vegetable I ate. It was a rectangular package of Birds Eye julienned green beans, and there was a packet inside each package of slivered almonds. The almonds absolutely MADE the green beans. One time I got a package and there was no almond packet! The horror! I was really frustrated because I was really craving them and for whatever reason, I remember that I was really aggravated.

So what do you think happened the next time I went to eat this same type of green beans? This was not another packet I'd bought at the same time, but literally I went back to the grocery store another week or so, and bought more. I opened the package and guess what? TWO packets of almonds!! I kid you not.

The message I got from God loud and clear was that that life was fair and when we lost out on things, we would ultimately receive it back. That message came to mind because the last time I got a massage a few weeks back, the lady gipped me by like 10 minutes. But then Friday, I got an extra 30 minutes! My life has been full of loss and heartbreak lately - much more than I have gotten into on this blog - and I have been having a pretty serious faith crisis. And that just started me feeling better and I've been better since. I went to a mini-women's retreat at my old church, and I started listening to this book-on-CD Making Your Thoughts Work for You, and it's so inspiring. I'm really trying to get out to the Chopra Center to see Byron Katie and attend the Journey into Healing workshop in a couple weeks and I went ahead and bought a plane ticket to LA hoping it will all work out!! I am so stoked about this workshop!! Trust me, emotionally I desperately need it! I will also visit my friend Paige - can't wait!

I'm in Dallas visiting my mom and stepdad having a nice, healing time - making amends for some rifts from the past and treating my mom to a 90-minute massage and dinner at a Greek restaurant. Today we are going to a travel show and doing some shopping. I will probably be coming home with a Macbook Pro laptop (my laptop is on its last leg, and I've been eyeing a Mac for the past 5 years or so - it's time to make the plunge!), and a new kitty, and a new lease on life. Oh and last night I got to visit with my old college BFF Joe, and his best friend Rob, and we used to have soooo much crazy fun that it's not fit to print! ha! We had lots of fun, and it was great to see them again after all these years. It was his daughter who found the stray kitty. I think she may be sad to see it go!

Joe and Rob at Thai Spice, where we went to dinner.More photos to come when I download the pics from my camera.