Marya Mann : Blog : Birthday Youthing, Writing, & Moving Experiences

Birthday Youthing, Writing, & Moving Experiences

Aloha Kakou!

Peace begins with a smile. As I tap out this message to you, I am smiling because your birthday wishes touch my heart and smiling energy fills my eyes, mouth, chest, belly, legs and feet, with my arms and hands brimming with the beams you engender.

Grateful for you, your steady friendship, for shaking me up when I was stuck in old ideas, for sharing a passion that took my breath up a notch, and for arousing gratitude for the All-That-Is when I was down.

Sending thanks, I am reminded to hold a clear, strong vision for our health, planetary harmony, and the world we wish to see. As we cruise around the Sun, year after year, I learn more about you, myself, and the values we affirm through Ancestral Healing Movement ceremonies. In Hawaii and beyond, the Love Continuum connects us to the ongoing dance of Nature, to each other, and to the Dreaming, to the DNA glowing with regenerative stories that give fearless life to the best futures we can imagine.

Like me, you probably walk in many worlds. We wield quantum magic, empowering feelings and thoughts that stabilize climate restoration, creative discovery, and inventive in-formations for new social, physical, and spiritual architectures. How do we thrive? How do we accept responsibility for the ancestral legacies, both the wisdom and the wounding? How do we heal? How do we forgive perpetrators, victims, and rescuers alike? Then we will be at peace.

This is the ancestral need: to drop the sludge of grudges and feel the love flowing in. There is no scientific, philosophical, or artistic purpose to revenge living.

I propose forgiveness living. Triggered? Let it go. Glimmered? Soak it up. Thriving through forgiveness, pure and simple, we are an adventure in personal, social, collective, and ancestral healing.

Some people say growing older is mandatory and growing up is optional. I believe growing old is optional and growing up by going with the flow among larger and larger fields of goodness is the imperative.

How do you go with the flow? It’s a kind of crazy optimism, like that of the 17th century Japanese poet and samurai Mizuta Masahide when he said, “My barn having burned down, I can now see the moon.”

He framed his tragedy as a gift. In darkness, he found moonlight and praised it.

The gifts that I want to share with you today, our “birthday present,” doesn’t stem from a tragedy, but a desire to prevent tragedies of omission and invoke the blessings of good questions.

The gifts are two questions.

THE QUESTIONS AT THIS AGE

Here’s the first question: What is the one big personal lie you tell yourself? Is it that you’re not good enough? Is it that it’s too late for…relationship….work renewal…learning something new? Is it that you’re not…abundant, smart, connected, supported (or you fill in the blank)…enough enough?

Personal lies do us no good. Banishing the big ONE, the LIE that has stopped you above all others, will invigorate a new universe inside you, because you’ll see its shadow in every part of your inner life, and notice how it has manifested in the outer world.

I can easily point to my lie: I lied to myself that I would never have enough time for making “good enough” the writings, books, stories, art, poems, and dances I continually created. This particular book or that song, poem, or painting had to climb a mountain of perfectionism masquerading as excellence, to get past my inner Ms. Perfect, fiercely protecting her verb tenses, analogous colors, and anatomical detail without an excess of dependent clauses.

Seeing the lie brought insight to my habits of self-talk, the critic running after my Creative Spirit with a butterfly net and the perfect tracking shoes. I know Ms. Perfect well; I’ve been watching and trying to hide or negotiate with her for five decades!

The personal stories, the ones that mattered most when I saw their relationship to my part in our climate crisis, were hardest to tell, and so I put them aside, mostly working as a freelance journalist and learning, researching, and dancing in temple ceremonies and cyclical gatherings with in Native American, Indian, Balinese, and Hawaiian indigenous cultures.

I relished the fun of meeting exotic yogis, innovators, dancers, musicians, and peace activists whom I admired, and having many hours to ask them questions, and then the privilege of writing about them — in resonance with all I had felt and seen. I sold thousands of articles and features about these luminaries and my experiences to newspapers and magazines. It became clear to me that ordinary people, inspired by purpose and living to their fullest, could become statesmen, vibrational medicine pioneers, Hawaiian hula dancers, organic taro farmers, solar business entrepreneurs, and visionary artists. Each had a unique way of aligning their creative spirit to creation.

Almost universally, even back then in late 1990’s and 2000s, they were futurists, working hard to dispel damage damage to ecosystems and advance climate regeneration.

Which brings me to the second question I want to share.

HALE MAKUA’S QUESTION

The second vital question for our time was posed by the Kahuna Nui Hale Kealohalani Makua, the Polynesian mystic who spent his entire life reminding us of the Great Mystery and its importance in solving complex problems in these turbulent years.

The question confronting us now, he said to his biographer, the anthropologist Hank Wesselman, is this: “Have we learned the lesson yet, or are we going to settle for another 2000 years of spiritual blindness and applied barbarism?”

I won’t settle for the blindness, but I do wish to settle into my natural body, and to do work arising from my basic goodness, actions that bring more friendship, joy, and intimacy to life.

I also want to not settle for the “blind aggression” popping up in our communities. I feel outraged by it, while still envisioning that the Garden of Eden is a paradise we can restore on Earth. We can do both at once. We are quantum, both particle and wave.

It’s easy to miss the good fortune if we are busy with comparison-mind and happiness-chasing. Trying to find absolute rights and wrongs is a trick we play on ourselves to feel secure and comfortable. But it’s much more fun to dance with the Moons of ambiguity, waxing and waning. Life hurts, we grow dark, and the light comes, isn’t it incredible?

There is a cartoon of an astonished looking man saying, “What was that?” The caption below read, “Bob experiences a moment of well-being.” The ordinariness of our good fortune can make it hard to catch, but the magic of really Seeing, and then becoming one with what is Seen, the Seer, and the Seeing, opens up a friendship toward ourselves as well as surprise, the aha! that brings awe and simple pleasure.

When we love what is, flaws and all, hopes and losses and dreams, we affirm that we are on the leading edge of something. Creation’s unfolding brilliance in our own bodies, consciousness ripening on the page when we write, floating in the air when we sing – this isn’t just an amusement; creativity is an art and science to be studied. It is the holy work of scribes who have been at it for 10,000 lifetimes. We can’t do it wrong. There are no wrong choices in the inner life.

YOUTHING

The best comes from attuning to this moment and staying fluid. In our writing, movements, thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, we are like light, sound, energy, and water. We move in waves. When we pause to center on the “I” behind the I, we renew attention on the Life Wave behind the eyes, in the heart and
belly. The waves of living essence and motion we share, these keep coming back to us: the smiling energy.

In this sea of smiles, we are literally “youthing” not “aging” – renewing attention, renewing ourselves, with curiosity and care.

The way we see things changes things. Thoughts do become things. That’s why looking within to see what beliefs and especially what big lie we carry and where they are from becomes a mirror on the universe and our most significant lineages. Ancestral knowledge resides in our bodies as DNA and the epi-genetic field around it.

Ancestral sources can carry great wisdom as well as unconscious longings, trauma, tenderness, healing, and inspiration. When we transmute the roar of negativity into positive energy, we do it for ourselves but also for seven generations who lived before us and seven generations that are coming after us. The best effort we can make to help them is to heal our inner lives, to restore contact with our true selves, our elemental sources, our Souls, and the World Soul.

I appreciate you opening your mind and heart to the Quantum Healing and Love Continuum Movement practices, teachings, and stories you find here, and even sharing them with others. We are already share the World Soul. How does the World Soul speak to us? Through the Dreaming. Through the Body. Through the Dreaming Body. Isabel Allende says of her writing, “I open a vein and let everything flow.” In Healing Movement, I open a flow and let everything go into inner and outer worlds as needed for the unfolding of health, truth, and beauty.

Writing moments are moments with you, my friends, readers, exalted souls, artists, writers, shamans, yogis, and wave-riders, you who share this adventure. I am so grateful you are in my life, weaving our loom of love.

NEXT LOVE CONTINUUM SATURDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2024

Please mark your calendars. Look for details coming soon on our Love Continuum Winter Solstice Ancestral Healing Movement Ceremony on Saturday, Dec. 21, 1 – 5 pm. Dreamweavers will journey through the Library of Akashic Records. I will love to see you there.

If you are called, please write me back with thoughts, questions, and generative ideas.

Sending flowers from the field of all possibilities! Mahalo nui loa!

Love, Marya