Deb’s thoughts as a Redheaded Black Swan

Don’t get her angry, though, by exhibiting prejudice - or her Redheaded SheHulk will start raging against injustice…but when she turns green - it is with LOVE for ALL LIFE.

#DeeperWithDeb ~ Your destiny requires mental fitness ~ Philosophy enables clear, life-centric thinking

 WHIDBEY WONDERLAND

How community, creativity, and self-trust saved my life

Dedicated to the friendship of Jane Klassen

I moved to South Whidbey, between Langley and Freeland, on April 15, 2018. I was nearly dead from the symptoms and affects of a chronic mold exposure that occurred in Bellevue 2014-2015. After that, I had been living a la airbnb, in a series of places, to try to find relief from severe life-altering environmental ‘allergies.’ I don’t like that term, because it implies our body is over-reacting to something natural. Environmental toxins are real, measurable, and a significant invisible contribution to the ever escalating rates of human disease, across all diagnoses.

As well, I was suffering from massive mold-induced brain dysfunction. I have records of my brain function from August to October 2018 when I worked with Betty Snyder using her LENS - Low Energy Neurofeedback - equipment. That modality sends subtle bio-electrical pulses into human brains via a handful of wires and software that can be run on any PC. They divide the brain into 21 segments to apply the electrodes. My first treatment Aug 2018 showed 18 out of 21 areas were functioning on a sub-par level. Many of the bar charts were scary low. 1 area was in seizure. So that means I had 2 brain areas functioning in the normal range - under 10%. This practical data and the intellectual research I did to try to heal from a condition that was killing me softly are a foundational part of all these hypotheses I have about my right livelihood, Wellbeing Philosophy. Proof positive exists of the spider that bit me causing my spidey senses - #JOKES! - just one of the brain capacities that didn’t just return, but seems to be astronomically better after I turned 50.

Having set the opening scene, let’s see how this journey became one that only came into being because of the wise, loving, and caring neighbors who held my hand as I saved my own life. And that I returned to life, via collaboration, is the joyful work I get to do for the rest of my life.

I painted the above pictures during a Touch Drawing Workshop with Deborah Koff-Chapin on December 7, 2018. The self-portrait predicts what was about to unfold in my life. Deb and her husband Ross were the first two neighbors I met during my first social outing as a Whidbey resident. I attended a monthly SONG BATH she offers to the community rotating between Aldermarsh and Healing Circles.

There are 3 major things to note about my “subconscious self-portrait in heart chakra green” that demonstrate the impact of the artistic modality that Deborah is known for globally. Most obviously, the radiating waves illuminate what I have come to describe as the philosophical theory of bio-electricity. I lost 100 pounds in 33 weeks via a profound understanding of how energy medicine works. Energy medicine and modalities like sound healing - such as the Song Baths that brought me to the Touch Drawing workshop - work on our human bio-electrical systems. Stated simply, our hearts and brains work by generating electromagnetic waves.

The second subconscious prompt to note is the 3 eyes. I was letting myself know that I had access to wisdom beyond the standard knowledge I had been taught as a philosopher. I mean this in terms of being able to synthesize many different logical statements into a brand new hypothesis.

The third interesting self-teaching is the leanness of the body. I have been morbidly obese since I was a toddler. The arm position seems to be suggesting that I am dancing. Which I will continue doing for the rest of my life, unless contagious or traveling, at Prayer Body, Sundays 10am to noon at Bayview Hall.

The story gets better! While Deb provided the sound healing and artistic tutelage I needed, her husband Ross Chapin provided the somatic and movement mentoring that was crucial to my ever evaporating body. As I became friends with both of them, I would pitch in to re-organize things after Song Baths. In May 2019, after I joined them at Prayer Body and my burst of new energy became apparent, Ross suggested that he could show me some of the foundational principles of Contact Improv.

Talk about a life-saving random act. Learning to dance, in contact with my South Whidbey neighbors, has eradicated the self-isolating effects of a childhood that was mostly touch-free. Especially over the course of Fall 2019, when I joined a Contact Improv workshop led by Maureen ‘Momo’ Freehill. During that process, Ross was always ready to partner with me to teach me new ways of inhabiting a body that was no longer carrying too many pounds to move freely.

While Ross and Deborah are my first couple of neighbors, there are other ‘couples.’ Like Kimmer Morris of Island Somatics and Laurie Keith, massage therapist and fascial priming expert, two of South Whidbey’s preeminent bodyworkers. They know how to use touch to heal, but beyond that, both of them are dedicated to teaching their clients how to think about moving every day, so that they stay able to move fluidly every day of their lives. That they gave me that gift, of knowing how to operate my own body with proper structural alignment, while paying attention to my fascia network, meant that I quickly became friends with each of them, through our mutual dedication to dancing with our neighbors.

The third ‘couple’ are Joseph Sanchez and Christine Tasseff of Prayer Body fame. I met Joseph summer 2018 as he was offering his own form of Sound Healing via the Didgeridoo and percussion at Healing Circles. We became friends and I will forever owe Joseph a debt of gratitude because he would consistently encourage me to attend Prayer Body. He looked past the 300 pound body that was sick, as he invited me to be part of a community that shares the love of dancing and caring every single Sunday. I attended my first Prayer Body on April 14th, 2019. My one year anniversary on Whidbey. I was over 300 pounds. I danced for the full 2 hours. Christine welcomed me lovingly, as she does everyone, and at one point offered to bring me a chair, to make sure I was not going to have a heart attack, which was appropriate. She had no idea that first dance, that I was going to stick around and transform before her eyes as I fell in love with her expert dance instruction detailing how dancing the 5 rhythms is the instruction booklet to staying alive. I am honored to be the embodiment of the power of Christine’s teaching and the work of Gabrielle Roth it is based on.

I’d like to draw your attention to one very salient fact. Artists, architects, dancers, musicians, sound healers and bodywork practitioners formed my Healthcare team. I know that is why my results defy the expectations of the medical world and its paradigm. Instead of diagnosing what was wrong with me, I went with a strategy of ameliorating what was going right for me. Always prompting myself to create new thoughts and actions that made me challenge my own boundaries, so I did not remain mired in the habits of 49 years of obesity. While willpower allows some to lose weight, there is a constant pressure to return to the familiar habits that put the weight on in the first place.

To build not just neural plasticity but also physiological plasticity, we have to be counter-balancing subconscious patterns with constant new learning.

That I chose dance - improv dance - ecstatic trance dance with live musicians creating sound masterpieces at the height of their talent, for the joy of enlivening their community in many ways - is why I get to learn, at 51, what it feels like to be lean, and more importantly, to have the energetic capacity to become the vibrantly rare person I was always destined to be.

So I have talked about community and creativity as step one and two. Step three is going to be the hardest for most adult Americans. I consider it my own Right Livelihood to be a champion for the need to learn self-trust in order for each of us to achieve our optimal wellbeing.

If I had followed the standard of care or listened to any expert advocating a tried and true way, statistical validated, in other words, I would not be a paragon of human potential. I might have gotten better in some way, reduced some symptomoloy, but being a 300 pound, 50 year-old, menopausal woman, I would have been given a trifecta, at least, of prescriptions and ordered to exercise slowly and with caution. I AM CERTAIN the overall result would have been becoming numb to my own potential and returning to the sheep pasture of corporate cubicle farms.

I don’t mean to judge our current work culture, without mentioning I am a veteran of two decades as a successful Payroll Software Implementation Consultant. I ran payroll. I know the full process of technical and business steps to run a direct deposit interface so your paycheck net lands in your bank account precisely when you expect it to. I have an informed opinion on how ill our 40 hour work week and all its toxic patterns can be to the health of all workers. I don’t want to sling insults, but rather bluntly talk about how hard a life of empaychecked servitude is for everyone. We can do better, America. But not until we stop being the United States of Hypocrisy.

For instance, I wholeheartedly support the concept of Obamacare, but the implementation of it was bought and sold from the start by the industry who wanted to - NO, is bound by its duty to its shareholders to - ensure its profit margins weren’t affected by legislation. Based on what I have demonstrated, I now have some great ideas for Obamacare 3.0 that I will be eager to share with Barack and Michelle as soon as they can make time for me, so long as we can agree that the organization be an NGO with delegates from Canada, the UK, Scandinavia, the EU where there are many models of how to serve a populace wellbeing with compassion for a reasonable cost. THIS IS NOT A RANDOM TANGENT, BTW. Time to exercise your 6 second attention span. I had to self-finance my own healing and be my own doctor, nurse, therapist, and second opinion.

You see, in conclusion, what we do for a living, for 8+ hours a day, the largest chunk of time we spend, even outpacing sleep for 90% of working Americans, is the biggest predictor of our health outcomes. Then comes the unresolved childhood trauma and neglect that create our personality foibles, which become the fulcrum of all our adult behaviors that seem beyond our control. They really are, in a foundational way, unstoppable because hurt and lack early on, change the course of our lives. The reason creativity is part of so many treatment recipes is that it is a practical way to unpattern ourselves and to become aware of our self-limiting habits and beliefs.

I consider my own work, Wellbeing Philosophy, as the antidote to lives of quiet desperation. I offer practical strategies to live with Logic and Love Intertwined, in creative collaboration with human potential wherever it manages to emerge.

Thank you, Whidbey neighbors, for saving my life, so that I can work to share stories like this one that pivot from my autobiographical outlier example to how we can solve the seemingly intractable problems surrounding us on all sides in 2019.

I see our blind spots as homo sapiens clearly and I am ready to share simple strategies that employ Evolutionary Logic so that we can all start making complex, humane, and life-centric decisions to save the planet and the future of our species and all the species Evolution deemed necessary before we arrived.

~ Ms. Evolution, the prodigy of Mother Nature and Father Time

(a persona who performs my one-woman-show on demonstrating human potential after 50)

NEXT UP: If you think art, dance, bodywork and self-trust are the whole story, stay tuned, by signing up to my Wellbeing Philosophy newsletter email list, a short scroll below, to find out about the contribution of tuning forks, singing lessons, and an explanation of energy medicine to my hypothesis of how I ignited a reverse aging process destined to become a case study of human potential.

References to pre-metamorphosis compromised condition:

Here is the first version of this wellbeing autobiography written in September 2018, I am sure you will see that even my writing has evolved. The LENS intake asked me to document what my problems were and my inability to write logically - to my own level of expectation - was prominently mentioned > https://www.insightsoccur.com/whidbey-healing