Ampersand Gazette #21
Welcome to the Ampersand Gazette, a metaphysical take on the news of the day. If you know others like us, who want to create a world that includes and works for everyone, please feel free to share this newsletter. The sign-up is here. And now, on with the latest …
“‘The avoidance of suffering produces suffering,’ said Kelly Wilson, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Mississippi and a co-developer of an approach known as acceptance and commitment therapy, which encourages people to stop denying or wrestling with unpleasant emotions, and instead to accept them.”
from an article by Erik Vance in The New York Times
“Fall is the Season for Building Mindfulness and Resilience”
September 27, 2022
Okay, okay, I know suffering is a tough subject. In fact, the reason it’s so tough is because suffering is subjective. You get to determine what’s suffering for you and I get to determine what’s suffering for me, and we might not ever agree on what suffering is. But that doesn’t mean suffering isn’t a worthy subject.
One of the spectator sports the West loves to watch is judging the suffering of others. Writing it down like that makes it sound terrible, but it’s true. Not only do we often relish the suffering of others—creeping traffic after terrible car accidents, anyone? But we also love to judge it. Well, so-and-so doesn’t have it as bad as thus-and-so. Who are we to say?
I’ve been counseling people over their suffering for more than forty years. One thing I can say for absolute certain is that when someone brings me suffering, they aren’t wondering whether they’re suffering. And yes, Virginia, there is a difference between genuine suffering and suffering over suffering.
The words we’re avoiding here are “drama queen,” and I’m allowed to use them because I’ve been accused of being one so often that my picture is next to the definition in the OED. No, seriously. Some of us do suffer over our suffering. It doesn’t really need judging, Beloved.
Enter Dr. Wilson’s idea “accept your suffering.” It’s good advice, and acceptance is not what you think it is.
I had a totally fraught relationship with my first mother-in-law. Whenever we’d go to dinner at her house on Long Island, I’d leave there so angry that I’d give myself laryngitis! Not kidding. It got to the point that my then-husband used to laugh all the way home as I barked at him like a seal. In retrospect, it was funny but not until I understood about acceptance.
You see, the thing that made me so mad at my mother-in-law was that before every single meal she said to her beautiful, innocent two-year-old granddaughter, “Michelle, pray to Jesus for your sins so we can have dinner.” Two-year-old a sinner? Well, I sputtered.
Until I was studying scripture at seminary and read this: Agree quickly with thine adversary,” (Matthew 5:25) and the cartoon light bulb went on over my head. Punch pause …
So right after I read the piece above from The Times, along comes Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day with this little tidbit of wisdom …
In the words of French philosopher and writer Henri Frederic Amiel (27 September 1821-1881)
You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.
Truly there are no mistakes, Beloved.
Back to agreeing quickly, and that light bulb ping—you know the sound. Somehow that day I was wearing the right color and the planets were in the right places and the time of day and the slant of the light on the page were just perfect, and I got it.
I don’t have to agree with what any adversary is saying or doing. I only have to agree that any adversary is saying or doing something that I am allowing to cause my suffering.
It sounds more complicated than it is. Here’s a simpler way to say it: I have to acknowledge that it’s happening. Because the minute I fall into wishing it weren’t happening or wishing I could change it or wishing I didn’t have to hear that garbage before a perfectly nice dinner or any form of resistance at all, I am contributing to my own suffering.
I didn’t tell my husband the night I decided to put it into play and see what happened, but I can tell you that for the first time in over a year, I left that house, not exactly calm, but also not exactly laryngitically mad either. My voice remained intact.
Here’s what I did. When she said her usual spiritually-manipulative line to her grandbaby, I simply, interiorly, agreed with the fact that she had said it. My longing for it to be different didn’t change at all, but my resisting her saying it had done a one-eighty.
I started to use the technique with my clients. I now call it Reporting. Like Dan Rather. Just read the news. This happened. He never said whether liked it or not. He just said what happened. The minute we report on what’s happening, we move immediately into witness consciousness. (Eyewitness News, anyone?) and out of our own participation in the suffering.
The next time you’re suffering, become a television newscaster or a radio announcer. Report on it, and see what happens for you.
&
“So how do we overcome the unhelpful tendency to stay quiet? Ms. Abi-Esber and her team tested how well various strategies worked to coax people to speak up, and they found that the best approach was—ironically, given that empathy can also hold people back—to try to put yourself in the other person’s shoes.
“… Dr. Simon suggested thinking about the negative impacts of not providing feedback, too. People should “remind themselves that providing feedback is often the most caring option, all things considered,” she said.
“Once you’ve overcome your shyness, there’s the question of how best to frame constructive criticism.”
From a column called “Live” by Melinda Wenner Moyer
“The Case for Criticism” in The New York Times
October 5, 2022
Nobody likes to be criticized. Nobody. But we’re all called upon to give opinions, feedback, and all sorts of interactions. How do you know when and how to speak up and when not?
Well, despite the recommendation that we put ourselves in the other person’s shoes, even though we can imagine it, we can’t really do it. Even with the best of intentions. Not really. Because I haven’t had all the formative experiences of nuture, nature, and neighborhood that you have. Nor have you had mine.
After I read this article, I had two incidents in my life, back to back, that taught me something about speaking up. The first has to do with my oldest friend. We’ve known one another fifty-one years.
She’d sent me a series of emails that increasingly upset me. I interpreted them a very specific way—clearly not the way she did. She meant, and I knew this, to be helpful, but it hurt me every time I read one, so I wrote her an email and told her so. And hurt her just as badly. Ooof. Not my intention at all.
But I knew that I needed to speak up or else it was going to sour our friendship. And she wouldn’t know why. So I did. It took a couple of weeks, and we found an even keel again. I apologized. She apologized. We affirmed our good will toward one another.
That was someone I knew and knew well. The other incident was a new cozy mystery author whose series of books I’d just read and enjoyed so I’d joined her email list. She announced that she was doing a special run hardcover of her first book of the series and including a short story as a bonus at the end.
I’d read the short story the night before and been horrified to see that she and an editor and a proofreader had all missed the spelling, or misspelling, of a word that was the turnkey of the plot, which was about some missing sapphire earrings. The word they’d meant was “bauble” as in an ooh-sparkly glittery thing and what they’d missed was the use of “bobble” as in to mess something up in its place.
Well, I didn’t want her to print that special edition with a mistake like that, and I’m an author who, despite my best efforts, sometimes miss something in error in my own books. So I wrote to her, author to author, and said, Look, if it were me, I’d want to know.
A few days later she wrote me back a charming email that said Woo! Thanks, and now I can correct it in the new special edition. Thank you, etc.
Both times I spoke up, it worked out. It doesn’t always, but what I know is this: only you can ever really know if you need to speak something. What I did here, in both cases, was wait a few days and let the desire/need to speak up sit on a back burner. When the impulse didn’t go away in either case, I took action.
Remember after 9/11, there was an ad campaign with the slogan, “If you see something, say something.” It’s not bad advice. Let’s modify it a little. If you see something (unless it’s an emergency) and you want to say something, sit on it for a bit. If the urge is still there, take your time. Construct your criticism in the way you would want to hear it if it were leveled at you.
The most important thing in any speaking up situation is that you be as kind as you can whilst being true to yourself.
&
“Being socialized is almost like being gaslit …”
from a book review of Hysterical: A Memoir by Elissa Bassist
in The New York Times
October 8, 2022
I am hard at work on what I’m calling The Chakra Correspondence Compendium. It’s a compilation of all the information I’ve accumulated in my chakra research over forty years of working with them. And it’s a lot, and a lot of fun for me.
SNEAK PREVIEW: What I’m planning is an inaugural one-year cohort of no more than six who want to learn Chakra Healing from the Chakra Doctor starting in January 2023. If this draws you, please email me and we’ll connect.
One of the things it’s drawn to my attention over and over again is how acculturization plays a part in everyone’s psyche. A bigger part than most of us realize. We cannot be who we are without having been affected to one degree or another by the culture we live in. It’s true for every human.
And we forget this at our own and others’ peril. Perhaps my drama queen is in play here, but … it is no mistake that the entrance to the Temple of the Oracle at Delphi is engraved with “Know Thyself.”
Part of knowing yourself as a person, or in any role that you assume in life, is knowing how your upbringing, religious training, education, family structure, values, morals, ethics, philosophies, credos, ideas have affected your notions about yourself and the world.
I was born with an imbalanced set of muscles in my eyes known properly as strabismus, but known colloquially as wandering eye. What it meant for me was that everyone thought I was a clumsy, awkward kid until I was seven. I routinely knocked things over—like glasses of milk—because I couldn’t tell whether I was reaching for the “real” one or its image.
Then one day, my second-grade teacher caught me closing one eye to read the blackboard in school. When she asked me what I was doing, I told her I had to do it to see the board. She marched me to the school nurse, they called my mother, and the next morning I sat through a battery of tests in an ophthalmologist’s office. My surgery was scheduled for the day after the school year ended.
Years later, my mother asked me why I’d never said anything to anyone about seeing double. I looked straight at her and said, “You have two eyes. I have two eyes. I assumed all four did the same thing. It never even dawned on me.”
Acculturization works the same way. We assume people we meet are like us. And they’re not. Or, they are, but they’re not. We’re all different, and we all need different things in life.
This injunction to know yourself and your influences is especially necessary when working with other people, even moreso as a healer. One of the things podcast hosts have been asking me lately is: Once I learn about the chakras, can I do chakra work on other people?
The short answer is No. Because unless you know where your own issues, weaknesses, blind spots, acculturizations are, all you’ll do it project them on to others, and not help them to heal at all. Once you know yourself thoroughly, and take responsibility for your own quirks, then you can do the work on others.
That’s why I am initiating this training program. Yes, we need energy healers. Of course, but we need educated ones. The plan is a one-year training, five hours per month. Two two-hour teaching sessions, and one private session per month for a year. At the end of that time, you’ll know if you can help others.
And serving others is what an Ampersand world is all about.
&
And in publishing news … WOO HOO!!
It’s not unusual to have a flurry of activity around my birthday, which was Wednesday, but this year was beyond my wildest dreams.
Thank you for all the good wishes sent my way.
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I am so pleased to announce the creation of a new platform for readers called Shepherd.com, and I invite all of you to visit for yourselves. Ever since Amazon bought GoodReads, it hasn’t felt right to me, so this is a great alternative.
I found out about it because Ben Fox, the founder, contacted me to ask if I’d like to be a featured author and I now have four pages of book recommendations on Shepherd.com!!
One is for The Best Mysteries for Exceptionally Quirky Female Sleuths—this one features Legally Bond, the 8th Mex Mystery.
A second is for The Best Chosen Family Romances—this one features Ascending Apparition, the 3rd Boots & Boas Romance.
A third is for The Best Subversive Historical Fiction—this one features Jezebel Rising, the 1st Subversive Lovelies which premiered on my birthday on Amazon.
And the final one is for The Best Books for the Chakra-Curious—this one features Energy Integrity Rose Thymus Chakra, the 8th chakra workbook.
I am so flattered to have been asked, and please, go check out Ben Fox and company’s total love affair with authors and books. Utter magic.
&
Jezebel Rising is now available as an ebook on Amazon. I did attempt to create a paperback, but it’s too long, and Amazon won’t print it!
Rent Rx, Book 9 of The Mex Mysteries, is up on Amazon as well, having at long last secured the lyric reprint rights.
Christmas Presence, Book 10 of The Mex Mysteries, is up for pre-order on Amazon, and will be live on 11.11.22—I just liked the date!
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There was a spate of podcasts uploaded around this time.
The Miracles Happen Fertility Podcast with Dr. Maria Rothenburger—we had an amazing talk about fertility and infertility and pregnancy and the chakra system.
The Closer to Venus Podcast with Johnny Burke—a fun conversation about chakras and the magical information they provide if we’ll heed them.
The Spiritual Rockstar Podcast with Daniel John Hanneman—an all-over-the-map conversation about the chakra system with another energy healer.
The Feed Your Business with Love Podcast with Jenn Dragonette—a delicious conversation about how to use chakra work to support yourself in your business.
More to come as well … so exciting.
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And on Saturday, five beloved, stalwart souls, ranging geographically from Santa Fe east all the way to Nairobi met with me as the first beta testers of the Integrity Chakra Spectrum Card Deck. I got so, so, so much wonderful feedback—it was amazing and enlightening and awe-inspiring and the best birthday present ever.
And so, Beloved, life continues at a somewhat accelerated pace at Cupcake Manor, until next time, wherever your corner of the world is, Be Ampersand, and know, please know, deep in your heart that you are whole, perfect, and precious just the way you are,
S.