The Grand Game of Story

I had a Tarot reading on Saturday night. The reader referred to my fifth chakra. There were tears in her eyes. “You heart is closed,” she said, holding her hands over her heart, “and to have what you desire, you must open it.”

A long conversation with a good friend and therapist helped me sort through this . . . → Read More: Acknowledgement

For the last year, I have been facing the “battle of the bulge” around my middle. For awhile, I accepted this next phase of life, sad I would no longer where the form-fitting clothes of 40 or 50. Alas, I was finally feeling—and looking—old.

Then I talked with a girlfriend, put myself on the South Beach diet, . . . → Read More: Fat as Messenger

Throughout my life, my body has been a messenger, a “multilingual being,” as Clarissa Pinkola Estes calls it, whose demands that I pay attention have caused me to turn my life in more positive directions. That happened this past year when, after months of financial stress, I met with my intuitive naturopath who, in no uncertain . . . → Read More: The Body’s Messages

For the first time in my life, I feel old. My body sighs with chronic aches, I am blind without my reading glasses, and the last time I shopped, the clerk asked if I was eligible for the senior discount. Ouch!  

My naturopath swears by a yeast-free diet and a topical slave as the anti-aging miracle . . . → Read More: Lessons of Aging

Within the body’s history, threaded through its muscles and sinew, bones and blood, is a deeper knowing, a more profound legacy of who you are, where you’ve been, what must be undone and redone if you want to move forward.

I discovered this quite by accident in my early forties when I wrote a series of short . . . → Read More: The Body as Anchor

Many years ago, I held a small women’s circle at a local bookstore. I asked the women in the group to tell a story about themselves. As the women introduced themselves, I was surprised by something I hadn’t planned: all the stories were about the body.

One woman talked about her flat chest and how the boys . . . → Read More: Body Parts

I lost 30 pounds in my early 50s. It wasn’t a journey I’d planned. It was triggered by a health issue that forced me to clean up my diet. In the year that followed, I traveled deep into my body’s story not only to get to the source of the health issue but also, quite by . . . → Read More: The Body’s Stories

I was 22 when I had an abortion. I was lucky. Abortion had become legal the year before. That was not the case with one of my friends. She had to fly to another state where she was loaded, cattle-car fashion, into a van and whisked off to a clinic for a hurried procedure. All she . . . → Read More: The Body Politic

As I clean and paint the upstairs apartment I’m moving into, doing work that is physically exhausting in exchange for a month’s free rent, I wonder at the lessons of this particular brand of abundance.

I am not a physically-strong person. I prefer to leave the dusting, the cleaning out, the banishing of the gunk left over . . . → Read More: Heavy Lifting