Life Interupted

March 9th, 2010

Just over a month ago, I started blogging with great enthusiasm. I was committed to this! I was going to blog religiously every week! I would respond to every comment the minute it was posted! No slipshod, slacking-off blogging for me. And I knew I could do it. For the first time, after a year and a half of dealing with serious illness and three major surgeries, I was seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I was back on track – getting healthier by the day and raring to go…

And then, to pinch an old joke, I realized the track I was on was a railway and that light at end of the tunnel was, in fact, a train….

 And, tragically, this train looked like it was barreling down on someone I love much faster than it was barreling down on me: A few weeks ago one of my closest friends was – completely out of the blue – diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And, worse, it had already metastasized. Because my friend recently moved to a town in Ontario where he would be closer to his long-time, long-distance love in Detroit, he no longer had a home in Toronto. Since Toronto is where he needs to be for his treatment, he’s moved in with my family – and into a house that was already bursting at the seams…  

This has been a time of huge adjustment for all of us. For him, of course, in ways most of us can’t even begin to imagine. But for all those who care about him, too. Right now our attitude is very positive. The statistics on pancreatic cancer, especially at this stage, are terrible – 96 to 98% succumb. But doesn’t that mean a few people out of every hundred do beat the odds? And is there any reason he can’t be one of them?

But thinking this way leaves us in a balancing act between staying positive and upbeat – believing in the power of prayer, meditation, and creative visualization – and facing the facts. What’s the difference, I ask myself, between absolute faith and complete denial?

And I find myself not thinking about him but about me. He is the person who has always been there for me. Last year, on days when my husband wasn’t available, he was the person who hauled me to doctors’ appointments and to the hospital for 6:00 am surgeries. He was the one who was there when I came out of anesthetic. He was the one whose car I barfed all over! I’ve know him for thirty-four years, and our lives are entwined in ways too numerous to mention….. But he isn’t just my friend. He is my techno-support. He is my webmaster. Without him, you wouldn’t be looking at this blog, my newsletter would never go out, my website would be a disaster….

What in the world would I do with out him?

And just how selfish and self-centered am I to be thinking about me when he is facing the greatest crisis of his life? Is this, I ask myself, also a matter of balance? A dance between thinking about “self” in a healthy way – really considering in necessary detail the difference between how our lives look and how they might look – and a blast of selfishness and self-obsession? All this also makes me wonder: What is being “negative” and what is being realistic? What is delusion? What is hope?

These are important questions. And even though they aren’t specifically related to the stated topics of this blog — like kundalini, consciousness, and the divine feminine – they are questions about life, so I invite you to respond to them.  And, more importantly, I ask you to put the name David McMaster, 54, Toronto, on every prayer, meditation, chanting, white light hot-line you know…. And I thank you for it.

Posted in Just Talkin' | 8 Comments »

Lilou Mace interviews Teri on her latest book The Divine Feminine Fire

January 25th, 2010

Recently I was interviewed by Lilou Mace on the web TV show that she broadcasts from France. After losing her job, Lilou wrote and self-published a book called I Lost My Job and I Liked It. The book became a huge success. Her webTV broadcasts have also become extremely popular. She has interviewed such leading lights as Deepak Chopra and Julia Cameron, and her broadcasts get as many as 250,000 hits a month. Lilou is a beautiful person who is dedicating her life to spreading positive thinking and spiritual awareness. All the interviews she has done are archived on her website: www.liloumace.com. Check it out!

Needless to say, I felt very honored to be on her show! She posted the interview on The Divine Feminine Fire on youtube, and as of today it had over 1,100 “views”. I’m so excited to think all these people are hearing about the book! Thank you Lilou!

The interview can be found on youtube by searching either my name or the book title. If you’d like to see it now, you can just click on the triangle below – yeah, the one right on my nose…. Really, I had to laugh! It makes me look just like Miss Piggy!!!

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Just Talkin' | No Comments »

The Bean Test: A simple foolproof method for determining kundalini awakening and mystical awareness!

January 8th, 2010

The Bean Test:

Take it now!

When I write books I always feel obligated to let readers know right up front where I’m coming from and how this might inadvertently – or not so inadvertently!! – slant what they are about to read. When I do this I always find I have to struggle to find a way to include enough information about who I am and what I believe without blabbering on and on about myself.

But seeing as how blabbering on – if not about oneself, at least about one’s opinions – is sort of the basic idea of a blog, I decided that I am obligated to not just to tell you little about myself but to provide a full frontal strip-down that reveals my deepest wackiness.

So, here it is:

I talk to beans.

Dried beans. Not living bean plants. I mean, lots of people talk to plants, No. These are dead, dried up, desiccated beans. But I don’t care. I know, really know, that these beans have FEELINGS. And I, above all else, do not want to HURT these feelings. And so when I am getting ready to make my famous five-alarm chili and sorting through the dried kidney beans to find the wrinkly, cracked, dirty, REALLY dead beans, I apologize to them. I pick each bean out one by one and set it gently aside and, as I do, I feel its PAIN!

I know exactly how that bean feels. I’ve been cast aside for prettier, curvier, less wrinkly beans! Oh, I’ve been left out of the pot before!! I know what that’s like. My heart goes out to that bean, and I talk to it. I say “Look, bean, things aren’t so bad for you right now. Things are, in fact, good for you. You don’t have to get cooked!! Or eaten!! Or…well, you don’t even want to think about what comes after being eaten… No, you get to escape all that! You get to go right to being compost without having to endure any of these indignities!! Look! I am going to put you in the compost bucket right now! You are one lucky bean!!”

Okay, okay, maybe I don’t go quite this far. But I do feel something for those beans. I do find myself wondering if they, at some deep elemental level, are aware of being separated from the other little sentient bean beings they have existed beside for so long. Or, perhaps, if the beans who are going to get eaten are – in some way we can never possibly understand – joyful that they are about to get to fulfill their life’s purpose.

Wacky as this all might sound, it arises out of a lifelong spiritual search – a search that with every passing day has led me evermore certainly to the conclusion that everything in the universe, not just plants and animals, is alive. All of nature – rocks, cliffs, canyons, dark-brown crumbly earth – all of it pulses with a vibrant, intelligent life force. And that this life force – known as prāna and, sometimes, prāna-shakti in yoga – also pulses through us.

In the Hindu traditions that Hatha Yoga and Tantra have arisen out of, it is believed that this life force exists in the human body as kundalini or kundalini-shakti and that it is through the awakening of this energy that perception is altered and we are given the eyes of the mystic – eyes that allow us to see the universe as it really is: Alive. Pulsing with Divine energy.

And so I declare what shall henceforward be known as the “bean test” to be the ultimate test of mystical awareness and kundalini awakening!

Admit it now! At some point in your life you have put that potato chip with the burnt edge in your mouth and eaten it because you didn’t want to hurt its feelings! You have swallowed that deformed watermelon seed because you didn’t want it to feel left out! You have rearranged the eggs in the carton so the last two are sitting beside each other and won’t feel lonely!!

And, if you have – even once! – I am calling out to you. Asking you to enter into a discussion about life energy, about prāna, about kundalini, about divine energy – whether you want to call it jeng chi, dumo fire, mana, holy spirit, or holy wind….

Because I believe this divine cosmic force is awake in you, and that an awareness of how this cosmic force pulses through all of us and through everything – more importantly – how it unites us all and makes us all One is at the core of what will save us and our beleaguered Mother Earth.

Visit teridegler.com for information on Shakti, Sophia, Shekinah, and Kundalini or for details on Teri’s books and workshops. Her website has more information on her newest book The Divine Feminine Fire.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Just Talkin' | 37 Comments »