Gaia, Mother Earth, nature and back to it!

When body, mind and spirit are on overload, the brain, heart and soul react. Mine have gathered resources and said, 'basta, enough, fini.' When life isn't working, one option is change. It is generally my default choice!

It is time to move. So we move. It is time to be closer to earth, to be more grounded and to relax and calm.

The last 2 years have been calming in some ways. We have been living on 3/4 of an acre with 62 trees, in a little bungalow. We have had parties and people living with us and bbq's and thousands of flowering and food plants in baskets and planters. And we have had places to hang a lot of windchimes!

But now we trade the over-sized yard for no yard, but proximity to the Ogden River. We trade a house we share for a place of our own. We trade lots of room for entertaining for just the right amount of space for Adam, Danica and I. Now we walk barefoot in the grass and the river...

Maybe we have needed this for some time, but it is right now that I can make the change. It is now that my brain can adjust for the changes of a move. It is now that I feel confident, grounded and personally empowered to move.

So this weekend we move and next week Adam & Danica start album 1 of The Listening Program and I move to album 2 of my second full time through. Good things are happening for my little family, here at home and we welcome the changes and the opportunity to get closer to Gaia, Mother Earth and nature.

I am happy. I am at peace. I am ready for what is next.

One of the toughest things I've done in my life-Stand-up Comedy

When I first moved to Salt Lake City UT in December of 2003, I really didn't know anybody. Well a couple of family members, a bit too busy to hang out with, so I had to find something fun to do, alone. One of the patient's in the office where I worked gave me a coupon to go to a comedy club, called Wiseguys. Sitting in the audience laughing with the rest of the crowd, was better than therapy.

I really enjoyed the local comics the best! They made fun of living in UT, which I began to understand, the longer I lived here. Local comedians always warmed up the crowd for the 'headliner' and I grew to love the local guys best. It didn't take too long to hear the same jokes, over and over, sometimes with subtle changes. I laughed everytime, even if I'd heard jokes before!

It was interesting to observe, how comedians worked to fine-tune a joke until it worked,, getting the maximum laugh-age every time.

Now I have entertained crowds and listeners and viewers, live and on television and radio for years. I understand what it takes to warm an audience up, get them riled up, excited and listening to every gem or brilliance that drips out of my mouth. but stand-up? That is serious, tough business there.

After some time of living in SLC, a brief relationship of mine, ended abruptly and uuuugily and I was pissed about older men. Really pissed. So pissed, I cracked people up when I vented. I talked about hair sprouting out of the oddest places and the balding men growing their thin hair out, putting it in a pony tail and sporting a 'skullet.' Funny stuff, right!?!

Someone said, 'you should do this at Wiseguys,' and I made the decision to combine venting about stupid things men did, in my life, while crafting something humorous, to try something I had never done before. Stand-up comedy!

I did perform several times and found that women thought I was hiiilll-air-eeeeee-ous. Men, not so much!!! One time I was ready to do my whole 'Dating Older Men' diatribe, with some new material, donated by other dissatisfied women, when I realized I just couldn't this night. I looked around the place, at a roomful of older men. They would not think I was as funny as I thought I was, so I had a few minutes to come up with something different to entertain this audience.

Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8kNtZj4N3g&NR=1

Diction

http://www.imdb.com/media/rm2979895296/tt0058385 "The Rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain..." is a line from a movie that came out when I was in the 4th grade! Professor Higgins does his best to get the guttersnipe Eliza to become a lady.

Being in television and/or radio was always a dream of mine. Never afraid of the stage, nor a sufferer of 'mike fright', I majored in Broadcast/Journalism in college, right out of high school. http://920kvel.com/index.php

Years later I realized my dream, by working first for a mid-sized market TV station. I had a weekly interview show, which was a blast for me! After that stint I went to work as on-air talent for the sister stations KVEL and KLCY in Vernal UT. I am a big deal there, just so you know!!! http://klcy.com/ I still have fans!

I was live on the air 4 hours every weekday and did 8 newscasts a day. I also introduced concerts, emceed events and was the queen of live remotes!

Then I relocated to Tucson AZ to take a position as the Business Development Director for 4 radio stations in that market and my on-air presence was minimal.

During all this experience a couple of things happened. I lost much of my 'Chicago dialect', developing a smart-ass, smooth (in my opinion)persona with lazy language peppered with slang and made-up words! It has stood me well for nigh onto 10-15 years!

Now an odd thing happened with my language skills recently that I didn't notice right away. My diction has sharpened. Where I used to slur and accent my words for effect, I find I am unconsciously speaking more clearly. My consonants are becoming crisp. In a state known for lazy speech, mine is snapping to attention! If you listen to me, give you our toll-free number, for instance, you will hear me pronounce the 't' on the end of every 8, in 888.228.1798. That's a lot of '8's'!

As I start The Listening Program for the 2nd time through, I am seeing my speech and language skills improving and I'm wondering what effects will be evident in the next weeks from repeating TLP at a higher level of functionality this time...

Stay tuned!!!

So I didn't have a Heart Attack or 2?

So here is how a stress test works. I got an EKG and they took more blood to check blood oxygen levels. Mine were still fine.

Because I showed up for this party in pink striped jammies, turquoise tank top and leather sandals, my wardrobe needed augmentation. cute top was replaced with non-descript hospital gown and lovely blue socks with rubbery grip stuff on the tops and bottoms. It's those little sock things I wore on the, soon to be mentioned, tread mill.

They moved me into a cardiac area. I should mention by now, my chest pains were minimal but my headache was quite noticable. And my blood pressure was still too high. Mike injected radioactive isotopes into my IV. I asked him, if I sneezed, would I blow up. He just looked at me. I explained it was on an old school Twilight Zone episode, from when I was a kid, or a 1950's movie. He was unmoved.

Then he put me into a Gamma Ray Transmorger or something like that. Took s'more pictures of my chest. After that tedious moment in my life, laying on something the width of a butter knife, he wheeled me into the stress test room. I wasn't allowed to walk anywhere but to the bathroom. Apparently going potty posed no risk to my heart.

In my non-cute hospital socks I did 12% grade fast walking at 2.5 mph for 10 minutes getting my heart rate up to 160. Now this was awesome! Seriously! It was the highlight of my weekend adventure because I have not been able to exercise like that for nearly 6 years! A car wreck and subsequent knee injury has prevented it. I did 3 micro-current treatments on each knee 2 months ago and they have been improving. This experience showed me I could get back to it! Yay! (Silver lining.)

Another trip to the Gamma Ray Transmorger and I was back to my observation room, where Adam was sucking on a delicious smelling coffee drink from Starbucks.

I only had to wait about an hour for my Egyptian cardiologist to tell the new doc, on shift that my heart was absolutely fine but I needed blood pressure medication. Fine. I did not have 1 or 2 heart attacts the night before. Yay! Good to know. This doctor recommended I take Kapadex for acid reflux and go get checked out by an MD, a surgeon to see if my gall bladder needs evicted and a gastroentomologist or something to see if my esophagus is okay. Huh..

Someone is going to have to do a lot of talking to get me on blood pressure medication. This is the 3rd time my blood pressure has jacked up like this. Normally my blood pressure is low. If I go use medication how will I ever know what is causing this to happen? What if it is something I should be watching and changing my diet or something for? How will I know. So I start somewhere. I pulled up akaline foods off of Google. If I stop eating acidic foods, perhaps my innards will calm the heck down. I'll have less discomfort and my blood pressure will stay where it should. And if I start walking on my treadmill at home I will drop a few pounds raising my level of health that way.

And through this all, I'm fairly sure my listening to The Listening Program helped my brain filter all this confusing activity and handle the weekend adventures with some intelligence and lack of out of balance emotion. I know I need to do something different to improve my health. I also know it has to make sense and not be some medical protocol without reason and logic behind it.

Heart attack protocols

My son, Adam drove me to the hospital late at night. No one asked us why we were there for 25 minutes. If I had really been worried I would have put up a stink. They took my info and description of what was happening and moved me right into the cardiac bay in the ER.

I was having chest pains that went all the way through to my back and radiated across the middle of my torso, under my chest. Then I had a numbness in my right ring finger, little finger and hand and a vasculare headache in my forhead. I know most heart attacks involve the left side of the body but I also know that women have different sympoms from men. Given my family history, I didn't mess around.

The 2 previous times I went through this, I got an EKG and blood oxygen tests which always looked fine. This time, they did those tests and more, but first I have to share Adam's experience watching Barbara put my gi-freakin-normous IV in the inside of my right elbow. It hurt and I told her so! I also felt something warm running down my arm and he back of my hand. Was pretty sure I was bleeding.

Adam said, he saw blood spurting out of my arm, spraying the side of the bed while forming a pool on the floor. The solution? Throw a towel on the floor!!! EKG came back fine. So the did more tests this time. They did a CAT Scan of my chest and abdomen and then another one with contrast. Iodine injected into my IV created one of the weirdest experiences of my life! My hands got hot then it felt like my pajama pants caught on fire, then the rest of me, then I got cold and it went away. About that fast.

Later they did an ultrasound of my gall bladder in case that was having an attack.

Six hours after the first EGK, they came in and did another one and took more blood. Apparently the blood on the floor couldn't be used.

All this time Adam is trying to sleep in a chair. Poor kid doesn't have his license yet. He only has a permit, so he can't drive without me in the vehicle. He was stuck, witnessing all this. Kindof rough for a 17 year old, but he handled it very well. He had to leave the building to get phone reception to pass on to his sibs the updates. And while he was doing that, Danica, 14, was home watching 2 year old Matthew, my grandson, with no adult there to help her, as she worried about her mom. Remember we thought I was having a heart attack or 2...

I have always like taking tests as I seem to do well on them, but these tests, even though I kept passing them, were not my favorites!

The next tests were glow in the dark. Since they would not let me drink water all night long, graham crackers were impossible to eat! They made me drink whole milk, Gross. When you don't drink milk it tastes like drinking meat while smelling wet fur. Gross. However, at that point, liquid was good. They said the milk and crackers would help my body assimilate the radioactive isotopes they were going to put in my IV. WHAT?

Not one but 2 heart attacks?

If you are the oldest person in your entire family because of heart disease and you have serious chest pains and things like unto that, you are not messing about, wasting time, but getting to a hospital. That would be my weekend. Lovely. My blood pressure is normally about 125/70, nice and low. But a few times in the last 2 years, my blood pressure shoots up and gives me a run for my money. I had no idea why until I mentioned to a physician's assistant that my orthopedic surgeon said he had no problem with me taking 3-800mg Ibuprophen a day for knee pain. Huh. I had a problem with that! I kind of like my liver and my kidneys just the way they are. The PA, calmly said taking the Ibuprophen is probably what jacked up my blood pressure, so I stopped taking it all together months ago. It's okay, my knee is doing much better now anyway.

So what caused my blood pressure to jack up this weekend? Maybe stress? Are ya paying attention here? Life is a bit crazy! I also think it has something to do with how I eat. People think I eat pretty well. I make my own savory olive oil with herbs I grow and things like that. But more and more lately, I'm afraid to eat most everything. Everything gives me heartburn. Everything makes me feel distress after eating. I was at a loss.

I should at this juncture explain the picture on this blog! The tape around the IV really wrinkled up the inside of my right elbow to give me an idea of what I'll look like in a few years when I hit 100. That IV is the most painful thing I've had in my arm. The gauge they use in ER is way bigger than the surgical needles. I squawked like crazy when Barbara stuck me. I like her otherwise, but that was seriously not pleasant for the next 24 hours I spent in ER.

Depression and time

Depression is the kind of thing you may not even know you have. It can sneak up on you. It can just be. It may be part of your identity if you let it.

Suffering with depression you may say things like, 'Life sucks,' 'nobody understands,' 'nobody loves me,'and you just may not ever see silver linings or light at the end of the dark, dark tunnel.

When I started listening to The Listening Program, I had every expectation I would get gain. I had no idea what to expect. I had hopes the sensory integration component would help with chronic pain, other than that, I really had no idea what to expect.

I got help with sleeping a bit more deeply in the second week and I was feeling better generally in the first 4 weeks.

Weeks 5 and 6 I crashed emotionally and cried for 2 weeks. it was like I couldn't hold the hurt and pain and unhappiness in any more and it fell out in little riverettes down my cheeks. (I made that word up.) It also felt like a dam burst in my heart and I unleashed the pent up sadnesses I held so tightly all those years.

For awhile I was afraid it would never stop! That I was so old and so full of black emotions they would never end.

But in 2 weeks total they ended.

I listened to the other albums in TLP for 8 more weeks and was, quite frankly afraid to go back to the speech and language albums for fear I would lose another couple weeks to tears and prepared by buying boxes of tissues and putting them everywhere!

They weren't needed. Whatever filtering and coping mechanisms I seemed to be missing appeared to have resolved the first time through listening. I really wondered at that. How amazingly miraculous was that experience?!!

I still am listening to TLP. I know every time I do another cycle of listening I will get new gains. And depression is a bitch. Sorry, but it just is. Nasty, insidious, sneaking and debilitating. It makes you someone you are not. And I know so many of us suffer in varying degrees to this bitch of a condition. I really want others to see the hope I see... that listening to this amazing music can change your brain and change your life for the better and for good.

Now if I can just keep from getting any more head injuries!!!

Hope for Depression

For someone who has suffered from depression for any length of time, for whatever combinations of causes, life can look pretty bleak. It tends to surprise others, on the outside looking in, that this outwardly happy, yet tired person, really wants to die.

You probably know someone who killed themself, committed suicide, took their own life. Maybe someone close to you. Maybe you have considered or even tried to do it. I'm betting a lot more people contemplate it, than you think. There is a saying religious-types like to spout, that God will not give you more trouble then you can handle. And I'm going to call bullshit on that one. IF that were true and it's BIG IF why are so many people so self destructive? Why do they do things to try to feel better, only to have said things not make them feel better? And why do people die by their own hands. I say they reek of so much sadness it reaches an intolerable saturation point and they go. Life is way too much for their ability to cope, sleep and ever feel good, they can not take one more minute and they leave.

I thought about it one day. I was so tired of having no control over my own life, feeling trapped until I could not breathe and feeling invisible to those I loved, that I sat in my truck, holding my new little daughter and thought about knocking it out of gear, rolling down the hill into the swiftly moving river. I just wanted to leave the planet. I loved my children as much as I could at 33 years old, handicapped by debilitating depression. I looked at her and shoved the thoughts aside. Who would love and take care of my children if I left the planet. Noone, I was fairly sure.

I remembered standing all night long, as a teenager, staring out the frosty window, as the giant snowflakes fell past the street lamp, wishing somewhere out there was someone who would love me. Somewhere was someone who would see how special I was and appreciate those things that made me, me. I just wanted to feel loved. I thought love was not lonely, sad or invisible.

Years went by. I read nearly a bazillion books searching for answers. I was ridiculously devoted to organized religion in the hope that's where the answers would be. I didn't waste time or money on drugs, alcohol or some of the easy fixes. I do appreciate the immediate reward of retail therapy, but then I'm kindof a girlie girl! But even chocolate, shopping, or the UT favorite pasttime, getting large, from eating ice cream, are fleeting and don't keep you warm at night in your bed. And there is no lonliness like being completely alone while living with someone.

My TLP provider warned me, going into the listening process, I should have someone I could talk to. He made that very clear. I had a great friend I felt I could depend on and went on my way to start my 30 minutes a day of listening. By week 5, I knew I was in trouble. Emotions very close to the surface, exploded at will. Everything and nothing set me off. I pretty much cried for 2 weeks. My friend, by then, was in her own crisis, so I went to a licensed social worker, who taught me to recognize where my emotions were coming from, so I could deal better with them. In my second visit, he blew me off, so I never went back.

Still really needing some help I found another counselor, who had personal understanding of my position. She was quite helpful in my now, weekly, visits. Which was great because the next 2 weeks I really wanted to rip someone's head off or punch someone. If you know me, that is ridiculous. I'm not violent, I oppose all war and to be in that situation was repugnant and made me even angrier.

By week 9 of listening, I was no longer tearful or angry. I felt calm and energized. The shift seemed abrupt and final. By week 13 several things resolved, the best was I had my first nights sleep. You may think I am kidding. I do not remember in my whole long life of EVER sleeping through the night. Ever.

Everything woke me up. A skunk in the neighborhood and train going by, traffic, cats, dogs, a rattle in the heat vent, being hungry, thirsty, hot, cold, bad dreams, babies, kids, husbands... I have even been awakened twice by pilot lights going out on a stove. Crazy, but true and then one morning I woke up and something was different. I had slept all night long, in one continuous period of time, without waking. Asleep. Sleeping. All night long. For 7 straight hours without interruption and I was amazed.

The next night I did it again and again the night after that and all week long, I slept all night long. And the next week and the next month and somewhere along the way, I became a believer. I understood that the life I had known was on it's way out and a new, healthier life had been ushered in and maybe, just maybe, there was a light at the end of this tunnel of sadness.

a light at the end of the tunnel of Depression

Twice a doctor has recommended medication, for managing my depression. I refused the first time and the second time I gave in. I took antidepressants for 3 days. Not long enough to do anything except prove to me, this was not my path. I had a reaction, the doctor said could not be from the drugs. But as they were the only change to what went in my mouth, that was ridiculous and killed her credibility. She retired that month anyway, but there ya go. Weird.

So what path could I choose that would indeed make the difference I had needed for so many years, then decades?

In December of 2009, I started listening to The Listening Program from Advanced Brain Technologies. I had no idea the impact this activity would have, partly because I didn't realize all the issues I dealt with daily in various ways. Typically when things don't work right in our lives we have a few choices. We can ignore them. We can complain or vent, which is not the same thing in my mind. We can look for solutions to the cause of the issues. Or, what most of us do, we look for how to work around it, assuming there is nothing to be done.

The system in the human body of taking in sound, is not only hearing. Your hearing may be fine physically and yet it may be impossible for you to process what you hear, for one thing. These are 2 different things and it isn't a simple situation, at all.

The auditory system, of taking in sound frequencies, effects your whole body. It effects your physical ability to be balanced, coordinated and have rhythm, know right from left, recognize sounds in the space around you and which direction they came from and your accuracy in performing large and small motor skills.

The auditory system and it's ability to work with your brain,is key to everything about you. It can effect whether you understand people talking to you and whether or not you can string a sentence together that truly expresses how you feel. It can cause you to wet the bed. Or not wet the bed. It can filter out the irritants in life, like high pitched sounds, repetitive sounds, motions and something's touch on your skin. It can define whether you like to be touched or not and whether you will venture to touch or not. This is the tiniest tip of the iceberg that can, below the surface of your life, make you miserable in everyway conceivable. Yet people go on their merry ways oblivious to a fairly simple, worth the effort and expense solution.

This isn't magic, smoke and mirrors or snake oil. TLP isn't a cure all, but having your auditory system function efficiently with your brain is life changing and The Listening Program, used as designed, can do that for anyone. I have no hesitation in saying, from my personal perspective, everyone gets gain from listening to TLP. Everyone. And those of us shifting and morphing into people we can live with are changed in positive ways by functioning brains that support us, make us feel safer in our environments and deal with the indubitable stresses in life.

Depression Continued...

Knowing how depression feels, personally, the last thing I wanted was for my oldest son to suffer with it too. At 15 he couldn't have the coping skills or the experience to handle the tough life we were leading. In rural UT where we lived, teen suicide seemed like a hobby. Kids died from shooting themselves, overdosing on drugs and/or alcohol and disappeared. (Uintah County) Not my kid. Not if I could help it.

When everything in your life sucks except your vacuum, something has to give. I looked around my life and realized much of it was out of my control, due to the circumstances of it. So, what was in my control was my question. So pregnant with little kids, getting my own job wasn't a good option, to improve my financial control. Finances control freedom and opportunity. I didn't have a vehicle or a phone and lived miles from town. The closest neighbors were 1/2 a mile away and I had nothing in common with anyone I met. Living below the poverty level will do that. I couldn't call my parents, living in Texas and what would I tell them anyway? They were affluent.

How do I explain where my life went after marrying? How do I tell them the daughter who grew up in an upper middle class suburb had to drive through the river in 3 places to get to her ranch? That I cooked on a propane run Coleman stove and over a fire. That I learned how to cook in Dutch Ovens for greater meal choices. Or that my family used a 2-seater outhouse and hauled water and heated water on a stove for bathing and cleaning. How bout that I fought Kangeroo rats that run across the tops of hanging clothes so my shoulders often smelled like urine? That I had no friends and no support system and how do I explain how my life came to be that way.

So no support system, money, transportation or communication, what could I control?

How I handled it. I could control how things effected me. I could read books, so I did. I read everyone of the 20 books I could check out from the library at one time from the Santa Clara UT library, where I lived then. I read every book by Wayne Dyer and Napoleon Hill and Andrew Carnegie and self help after self help book. I read other peoples journeys from the edge of their personal abysses and slowly began to feel better.

I looked for other things I could change in my life and I cut my waist length hair to my shoulders. When my husband had a fit, I cut it one inch long all over my head and dyed it dark ash brown. I wore less layers of clothes, spent time outside and started to get a tan. I started flowers from seed and planted them. I pulled trees right out of the ground as the untended yard was over grown with them. I painted a bridge on the property and read more books. I spent time with my children, when they wanted me to and tried harder to make our home life better and easier on them.

All those things helped as I am naturally a pretty upbeat person. But they didn't solve the problem or the root of the problem or even the symptoms of the problem. I knew there had to be a solution to my depression. I didn't know what it would be in 1993, or 1994 or 2004 or 2009. A lifetime of dealing with a saturation of sadness, running under the surface, while maintaining an outer appearance of everything being just swell and Hunky Dorry and my personal favorite, "Peachy!" (If you ever here me use that word in response to how things are going, just know it's a lie and I'm covering my true feelings.)

(Still more on this subject of depression coming...)

Depression

The curious thing about depression is, when I have so much to be grateful for, why I can get so miserably unhappy. But that is depression. There are arguments for chemical imbalance, who wouldn't that effect? Or environmental factors, genetics or maybe life just sucks, and I repeat, who wouldn't that effect? But no matter the cause, depression is debilitating. It makes you non-functional. You can't think or you think too much and worry over everything and see no light at the end of the tunnel, no silver lining and no clever metaphors about anything.

In 1993, was in a Clarke County library in Henderson NV, perusing bookshelves, when I happened, kismetly, upon books about depression and women and depression. I read 10 books that week, finding recognition of my mother's life and my own. At 38 years old, knowing medication and therapy were not choices for me, one for millions of reasons and one for lack of money, I decided something. I decided if I was unhappy, I would change everything about my life, that I possibly could, that was making me unhappy.

I started the list. I had no control over my finances. I loved a man who did not love me back. I had no personal passion for anything other than my children. My family sharing a home with my brother's family while our house was vacant in UT. My house in UT did not have hot running water and was heated by a wood/coal stove. It was old and had been empty for 10 years before us. We had to replace rotted floors and I did so many things to try to make that house an acceptable place for my children to live to no avail. As I recognized the symptoms of depression in myself and that my mother had suffered from it, I thought of my children.

Starting at the top of the list, there was Jason. Jason at 15 refused to share a room with any of his younger brothers and made a closet into his sleeping space. It had no light and he put his bed in there, hung a few black posters and called it good. He was so surly, I put a poster on the outside of his door that read, 'Some mornings I wake up grouchy and some mornings I let him sleep in.' In anticipation of my children falling down the depression domino path, I had greater resolve to stop the sadness madness. (More to come...)