New Year…New Start…Welcome!

Welcome to the inaugural edition of “The View from JQ’s Loft!”

This blog will be a weekly edition posted by noon each Monday.  It will be, at the current time, ramblings, musings and observations of life in transition.

The idea for this blog is the result of 5 weeks in Maui. Five weeks with an intentional open and expanded heart, the blank canvas of mind and attention and curiosity about the possibilities.  It has been time spent in fellowship with my favorite people.  Ten days with my oldest daughter, Meagan and her fiance Ryan and three weeks with treasured friends from At Ease Technologies, Cynthia Zaal, Robert Pettaway and Michael Mead of Houston, Texas.  Michael was my first sweetheart at the ripe age of 14 and is still the one whose presence I enjoy most.  We were joined the final week by Dr. Philip Rothenberg, by self definition a recovering M.D., whose generosity of spirit, love and knowledge provided me with reason, clarity and courage in the search for my own path through cancer treatment options.

In contemplating the next and possibly the final stage of life, I find myself with no attachment to the anchors that drove me in stages past:  responsibility, accountability & duty.  My moorings have been cut…I am 27 again with all of the options and none of the burden and pressure twenty-somethings feel to create a productive life.

The contemplation as been tempered and defined by recent divorce, death of a father and cancer.  Any of these can serve as a monumental opportunity, but collectively have provided beyond an opportunity…and more of a mandate for change.  There is very little motivation for growth when love is rich, the bank account is full and you are in a state of health and wellness.  Disappointment, despair, death and failure create the catalyst and energy for change;  change equated to the opportunity for growth, creation and development…for the birth of a new paradigm

To let myself be open for the possibility of growth, creation and the development of a new paradigm for my life has required some new skills.  The most most important is the ability to let myself simply be…be quiet, still and empty enough for what is to be next to have the chance to appear.  I attribute this area of growth to two main resources that crossed my path…totally without input, desire or direction from me:  Gerard Schwind and At Ease Technologies. I am noticing that as I need teachers, the teachers appear.  I do not have to find them…I just have to see them as they come

I spent 18 months with Gerard Schwind, MSW.  When I describe my counselor as one who deals in rigorous honesty (sometimes brutally so), I can see him nodding and smiling in affirmation.  When I began to see Gerard, I carried my name on a 3 x 5 card and the day I met him I had spent 20 minutes trying to decide which tomato was the best one to buy.  He showed me the path to finding me…gathering up all the pieces of me I had left scattered along my way until nothing of me remained.  He taught me many things, but, quite simply, he taught me to see a shovel for what it is and call it a shovel.  I had been seeing and calling it a teaspoon.

At Ease Technologies came into my life three days after Gerard sent me on my way.  I have learned so much in my 21 months doing their work that I can only touch on it here and promise one day to do an entire edition on their technology.  I have learned and practiced the ability to let go–of everything;  especially my mind, thoughts, ego and patterned reactions.  Letting go of the stresses that have been accumulated and stored in my body for a lifetime has opened up vast amounts of space…new space for love, creativity and spirituality.  The work has given me the skill to watch, or witness, my decisions, options and reactions as a third party would, providing clarity not before experience by me.

I will touch on these and endless other topics as the weeks of 2008 open before us.  I close 2007 with such intense feelings of blessing and gratitude for all that I have been given.  I look forward to 2008 with, as Michael Mead would say, the curiosity of a child…and the excitement of a child on Christmas morning.  I hope that all of you stay with me on the maiden voyage into 2008 and beyond…where none of us have been before. 

Jacquie