Category Archives: Health

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Health, Humanities, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase, Writing

Oh. Yeah. I Remember That.

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Imbolc                                                                    Valentine Moon

A few days back I wrote this post.  In it I admitted my yearning for the mystical, the mysterious, the contemplative; but, the metaphysical superstructure for them had been stripped away. (by me.  and for the most part happily so.)  Those impulses, partly stirred by the long, cold winter and its isolation, welcome, but draining at the same time, have been niggling away at me for some time.

(Progoff)

Then, I remembered.  I know how to get those elements back in my life.  The Ira Progoff Journal Workshops. I’ve done two of these, the three part series.  I’ve included some introductory material on them below.  Progoff was a Jungian analyst who worked over his career to develop a means of self-work rooted in Jungian method.  His efforts produced the Intensive Journal ,Process Meditation and these workshops.

Here’s what I like.  The work is yours, for you and reviewed by no one.  It’s a method, which I’ve used off and on, for many years.  As some of you know, I was in Jungian analysis, also off and on, for many years.  That means the worldview behind Progoff’s method reaches into deep work I’ve already done.

There are no guru’s here, no dogma, no path other than the ancientrail of self-wisdom. There’s no follow up, no encouraging you to do more.  Yet, there is a deep passion for the work individuals do on their own through Progoff’s methods.  It fits me and I’m glad I remembered it.

In fact, I’m headed off to Tucson, Arizona in late March for a six-day retreat to do all three workshops.  There will be, too, side trips to Carlsbad Caverns, Chaco Canyon and grandaughter Ruth just before her 8th–no longer required to ride in the car seat–birthday.  Ah.

 

Introduction to the Intensive Journal Program

Experience a life-changing process to give your life greater direction, vitality and purpose. Developed in 1966 by Dr. Ira Progoff, our nationally-recognized program has helped 175,000 people lead more fulfilling lives. Discover resources and possibilities you could not have imagined. The Intensive Journal method can be your honest friend in the creative process of shaping your life.

Article 1: The Intensive Journal Process: A Path to Self-Discovery
by Kathy Juline
Article 2: The Write to Fulfilling Life: An Interview with Ira Progoff
by The New Times
Article 3: The Way of the Journal

How can you benefit from this method?

  • By using an integrated system of writing exercises. It’s much more than a diary.
  • Gain insights about many different areas including personal relationships, career and special interests, body and health, dreams and imagery, and meaning in life.
  • Apply fresh approaches to access your creative capacities and untapped possibilities.
  • Work in total privacy. Neither you nor anyone else will judge or analyze your life.
  • Use a method that is without dogma. The Intensive Journal method is a process that can be used by people of all different backgrounds, interests and faiths.
  • Attend workshops at leading centers for reasonable prices.
  • You do not have to like to write or be a good writer. You are the only one who reads what you write.

Part I: Life Context (LC) Workshop: Gaining a Perspective on Life

Develop an inner perspective on the movement of your unfolding life process. Gain greater awareness of the continuity and direction of your life as it reveals what it is trying to become.

Generate insights about major areas of your life, including personal relationships, career and special interests, and body and health. The dialogue process provides a unique way to gain feedback and momentum as you deepen your understanding of these areas.

Part II: Depth Contact (DC) Workshop: Symbolic Images and Meaning in Life

Deepen your experience as you focus on the exercises in the second half of the Intensive Journal workbook. Learn how to use Progoff’s unique non-analytical method to draw forth messages from you inner symbolic experiences which can provide important leads in your unfolding life process.

Using Process Meditation™ techniques provides specific ways of developing your spiritual process in the context of your entire life. Explore experiences of connection that had significant meaning, gain insights about your ultimate concerns, and explore major themes in your life. Progoff’s advanced meditation techniques provide an avenue for greater reflection.

Part III: Life Integration (LI) Workshop/Journal Feedback™ Process: Integrating the Life Process

Progoff said the Journal Feedback process is the “essence of the Intensive Journal method and one of my main contributions.”

Experience the cumulative dynamic process created from working with material in one workbook section and how it can lead to entries in other related areas. This progressively deepening process generates an inner momentum and energy as you apply Progoff’s non-analytical Journal Feedback techniques. Your workbook becomes an active instrument as you approach situations from different perspectives.

New awareness and growth become possible as you realize connections between diverse areas. You are drawing your unfolding life process forward as you move toward greater wholeness and integration.

Health, Our Land and Home, Third Phase

Handy, Man

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Imbolc                                                                 Valentine Moon

Looks like we’ve found a good handyman.  Dave Scott’s going to do several things: fix a cabinet door busted out by fighting dogs, rejigger the doors on two others, fix a lock on our sliding doors to the back, remount some curtains with a new oak fixture and, most germane for me, install my Studbar pullup bar.  I know, Studbar.

While researching this piece of equipment, I found a review of it on the Walmart website. The reviewer, a guy, referred readers of his review to the company’s website:  www.studbar.com.  Imagine my surprise, and probably everyone else’s who used the link, in finding this leads to The Studbar, a Montreal bar for men who love men.  The correct link is www.studbarpullup.com.

As long we’re on the subject of masculinity, we may as well talk about my initial uneasiness with hiring a handyman.  A totally irrational uneasiness.  That being, gee, I should be able to do these things and if I can’t I’m not a man.  Irrational, maybe, but there nonetheless.  It’s irrational because if I followed out this logic nothing would ever get fixed since, as I’ve often said, I learned all my father knew about fix-it matters.  Nothing.

(see, I found this image of the four primal male archetypes.  the handyman is not on there. So, I’m a lumberjack and I’m ok.)

This sort of failure cum shame hit me pretty hard the first time Dave came over to fix a door Kate and I could not get back on its hinges.  I didn’t expect it, like many unpleasant things it just showed up and took over.  So, yesterday when he came, I made sure I met him and walked through the tasks with Kate and him.

A nice guy.  A dog lover.  A mechanical engineer and a contractor in addition to handyman work.  He’s here working today and I feel fine.  Progress.

I know.  Studbar.  Geez.

Cinema and Television, Health, Third Phase

A Plan

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Imbolc                                                      Valentine Moon

Put together a plan.  I’m going to rest until the pain subsides and while it subsides I’m going to take nsaids and do some gentle exercises.  With a plan I don’t feel creaky; I feel proactive.  Knocking back the pain reduces the aversive conditioning, resting helps the injury heal as do the anti-inflammatories.  The gentle exercises keep the stiffness down and promote flexibility.  There.

So many deaths recently.  Shirley Temple.  Sid Caesar.  Seymour Hoffman.  Maximilian Schell. Which of course is a nonsense statement.  So many deaths always.  What it means is so many deaths of people of whom I had awareness.  I remember Shirley Temple as Heidi, but I remember not her specifically from that film but her grandfather.  Sid Caesar I remember from television’s live black and white days, another generational divide I’d not realized I belonged on one side of.  Seymour Hoffman I remember in so many roles, always in the complexity of the character, often a character of ambiguous morality. Maximilian Schell, not for any movie, but for a square jawed Teutonic presence.

These are the generation ahead of me, with the exception of Hoffman, and as such are, in a sense, my parent’s generation though they’re younger than my parents would have been. What I mean is that I can still distance myself from them by saying, oh, was he still alive? But that gambit won’t work much longer.  Soon, I’ll say.  Oh, yes.  Of my generation.

Just noticed the segue here.  Probably not coincidental.

 

 

Aging, Health, Third Phase

Injured

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Imbolc                                                                 Valentine Moon

Been feeling like a creaky old man.  The fall I took last Saturday produced a first class large bruise on my inner left elbow which I believe took, for a moment, all of my weight. The resulting motion wrenched my left arm away from my body, tearing or pulling something where muscles insert to my sternum.  I mention this not to be gruesome, but to explain why I’ve been feeling creaky.

It matters.  I don’t mind being an old man, not one bit.  Older is what I am.  What I am is ok.  Except.  My chest hurts, up high around the sternum.  Each time I lift anything aversive conditioning sets in.  The pain itself is not such a big deal, definitely manageable as pain.  But the pain, and this is why I’m writing this, erodes my sense of myself as a healthy, fit old man.  That makes me anxious.  I wonder, what else is wrong?

This is not a conscious process.  It took a couple of conversations with Kate to get it.  The pain changes my self-image and that changed image chips away at my self-confidence.  Yes, sure, in time I’d get used to this, if it were permanent.  I’d compensate, as I imagine many of you have had to do at one point or another.

This post is about getting it out in plain sight, claiming what I’m doing and telling myself that, as Kate said, I’m injured and injuries heal.  True that.

I already feel better psychically, just from realizing what I was doing as I reacted to the pain.  Now I want to shed the anxiety and let it be.

Old man, yes.  Injured old man, yes.  Creaky old man?  Not right now.  Not yet.

 

Health, Third Phase

Do No Harm

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Imbolc                                                              Valentine Moon

The first rule of fight club is don’t talk about fight club.  The first rule of working out at home is don’t hurt yourself.  Applying the sensible Hippocratic oath to yourself.  Oops.  Twice this week I’ve broken the first rule of working out at home.

First, I pulled a muscle in my right arm.  Owwee. But ice and rest and heat have pretty much brought it back.  Not fully, but on the road.  Then, this evening, I went for my first pull-up, two exercises into the P90X leg and back workout.  Ready to get started I reached up, pulled hard and the next thing I knew I was on my back, the back of my head (fortunately, the really hard part) had bounced off the concrete basement floor and I had road rash on my elbows.

Sorta backward when you hurt yourself when you’re working out to improve your fitness.

This required a concierge physician’s examination.  She shined a flashlight in my eyes, palpated my head and rib cage (it hurt for some reason).  She said nothing made her nervous. But. If anything tingles, or I’m confused or if I see lights when I turn my neck, wake her up.  Fortunately, she sleeps right next to me.  That’s not a problem.

So, I’m taking two days off and I’ll get back at it Monday.  But.  I’m buying, in fact I just ordered, a stud mounted pull up bar.  The one I have now attaches to the door jamb.  Or, should I say, was supposed to attach to the door jamb.

Health, Writing

Now In Its Tenth Year

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Imbolc                                                                  Valentine Moon

Bit of a setback with P90X.  I pulled a muscle in my right forearm.  Have to go slower, avoid things that stress it.  But I’ve had injuries before and will again.  Time and ice.

Though I can’t get back into to the 2005 archives right now I think it was the 5th of February or so when I began this blog.  That would make this the early days of ancientrails’ 10th year.  Though you couldn’t know this from your vantage point, I have shelves of notebooks that I kept before these blogs.

Ancientrails does represent a continuation of that work, if not a direct one.  At one point I had a spiritual journal, a journal much like this blog and an art history journal. Ancientrails contains traces of all three with a twist in midair to account for the public nature of the blog.

Writing seems to be a necessary part of my life, not really an outlet, but a moment of creating something new.  I like Yeats on this:  creativity is the social act of a solitary person.  That’s the way ancientrails feels to me.  The Great Wheel blog is a different matter.  It wants to be the voice of a mythologist and an activist.  I’ll let it be what it wants.

Here we’ll have the usual mish-mash of things, stuff I’m interested in, stuff that frustrates me, stuff I’m learning, stuff I hope for, the lives of folks I know.  Now in its tenth year. How about that?

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Health, Retirement, Third Phase

Kick the Bucket List. Live As A Eudaimoniac.

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Imbolc                                                            Valentine Moon

Friend Tom Crane was talking about how the bucket list might be different.  “Imagine if your bucket list was things like looking in the eye and telling everyone you cared about that you loved them deeply and had for a long time.”

In my view you better have your bucket list imprinted in the daily way of things or it means little.  Why save up to the end things you can do today?

A bucket list is a close relative of the finish line model of retirement.  Wait until you no longer have work dragging you down, then do all the fun stuff.  Bucket list.  Wait until you know you’re going to die, then do all the fun stuff you didn’t have the courage to do before.

Tom’s idea is better.  Let’s consider those things that would make our life and the lives of those around us more rich, more peaceful, more fruitful.  Then, do them.

This, by the way, is the guiding notion of eudaimonia.  Here’s a repeat passage from a post last summer:

Composed of two Greek worlds, eu (good) and daimon (spirit) Aristotle and the Stoics after him promoted it as the end of human life. As such it has often been translated as happiness or welfare, but perhaps a better phrase is human flourishing.  Or, without getting fancy, why not good spirit?  Both have an active turn, taking us toward enrichment, fullness, striving within a humane ambit.

Now there you have an internal state worth cultivating.  It’s the difference between a noun and a gerund.

 

Health

You Can’t Take It For Granted

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Imbolc                                                           Valentine Moon

This quote is from a Star-Tribune article about Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s recent death from an apparent heroin overdose:

“You can’t take your sobriety for granted,” said Dr. Marvin Seppala, chief medical officer at Hazelden. “This is a lifelong illness. People have got to stay wary for the rest of their lives.”

From the outside this seems like it shouldn’t be true.  You get sobriety under your belt, you have experience and knowledge, why should you get into trouble?  Because the thing that alcoholics do normally is drink.  The thing heroin users do normally is use.  Not to use, once you’ve passed over into addiction, is the abnormal condition.  That means that sobriety is a lifelong commitment to an abnormal standard.

It can be done.  I’ve done it.  So far.  At times, the farther away from 1976 that I get, a thought wanders through: is it really true?  That’s a slippery thought and treatment teaches us to stay out of slippery places.  But the point is that it has to be countered even now, 38 years sober.

 

Health
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Yoga.  This will take a while to get.  Difficult for me, co-ordinating the various moves and it requires stamina and strength as well as flexibility.  I probably have the most to gain in yoga of all the work P90X has to offer.  Which means, of course, that I’m starting the farthest from where I want to be.

A few poses here.  It will require real work to do them well.

Health, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Doing Stuff

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Winter                                                               Seed Catalog Moon

I have a ways to go before I get up to 7 or 8 verses in an hour.  There’s still too much to learn, too often.  This is not a bad thing, just the way it is.  But I’m pushing myself, trying to get faster and more accurate at the same time.

P90X will be the same.  Right now I’m having to hit the pause button a lot.  The various exercise require precise movements and I’m not exactly quick at picking them up.  Even when I get the form right, I have to monitor myself.  Today, in the shoulder and back workout, there were a lot of moves I had never seen:  Congdon curls, for example.  Still, as with the first resistance day, I found this much easier than the plyometrics.  Much.

Tomorrow is yoga.  Right now all these exercises are new and that makes the sessions take longer.  That will pass; the sequence uses twelve different workouts so the repetition’s a bit slower than I would like.  Still, I’ll get there.

Tomorrow Missing shows up on the computer screen.  Looking at Bob’s work, making decisions.  Just as soon as I get it finished, it starts going out.