2020 is my year of non-striving: doing less, being more. But I am still very easily pulled into my default striving mode, especially when I get excited about a topic, I read about some successful woman and feel like that’s who I “should” be … or it’s really late at night, and I somehow find myself on the 40daywholehealthchallenge.com webpage and then bam! I’ve suddenly signed myself up for Lissa Rankin’s 40 Day Whole Health Challenge.
Oh, and, by the way, the challenge starts the next day cause it’s an online class, and I didn’t read all the details before I jumped right in. I guess there’s no time like the present! So, here I am! I am six days into the 40 Day Whole Health Challenge!
But signing up for this class didn’t come entirely out of nowhere.
I’m excited, nervous, and curious for this class. I am super happy to be exploring The Woo in a structured environment.
I like having teachers, and steps to follow, and a path laid clear for me – helping me understand how I’ll get from point A to point B.
I like that during the class, Lissa will walk us through her 6 steps of healing.
And since I paid for the course, I know I’ll take it seriously and dedicate time to understanding and exploring the content.
The thing is that, as I explore The Woo, I oscillate between believing 100% that I can cure myself … to believing this is all crazy and I’m being taken for a ride. Is my mind really that powerful? Can I really believe my way to better health? Can my mind heal what western medicine cannot?
I honestly don’t know. But what I like about Dr. Joe and Lissa Rankin is that they come at these questions from a scientific research and medical background. They are using that knowledge to explore how the mind can make the body sick — and how the mind can make the body well.
I have no idea what I’ll get out of this 40-day challenge. Right now, the biggest goal I have is pursuing Step 1 of this 6 step journey: Believing that healing is possible.
I knew when I started #WooWooWednesdays that I was committing myself to writing once a week about how The Woo is showing up in my life. I expected these events to be HUGE and AMAZING and LIFE CHANGING. After all, this is The Woo we’re talking about.
What I’ve realized is that the way The Woo shows up in my life isn’t always going to be huge, incredible, and life changing. It can’t be. That would be insane.
Rather, The Woo is also going to make its presence known in subtle ways throughout the day. This week, The Woo showed up:
In my decision to walk back into my bedroom before heading out the door — and seeing the headset that I needed lying on my nightstand, just waiting to be thrown into my work bag.
In my spur-of-the-moment decision to walk into a store and then immediately seeing a dress that I loved. The dress was my size, in my price range, fit perfectly and was exactly what I’d been looking for to wear to an upcoming event.
During a long drive home. I was expecting rain and windshield wipers, but instead, I was greeted by blue skies peaking out from behind the clouds. I got on the road just as the rain showers ended.
And The Woo showed up today, in a post by a friend on Instagram who shared a quote she heard on a podcast. She’s not sure if this is a quote by Ross Gay or he was quoting someone else, but either way, she said the words stopped her in her tracks.
“It is negligence not to acknowledge the things that delight you.”
And with that, I am acknowledging The Woo — in its big and small ways — because it continues to delight me.
Have you ever read something that makes you see a subject in an entirely new light — and that new light makes total sense?
That’s what happened to me after I read The New York Times article, “Who’s Afraid of Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop?” by Elisa Albert and Jennifer Block. The article’s subhead is, The long history of hating on “woo.”
If you’re interested at all in the #Woo, I’m sure you’ve heard a looooot about The GOOP Lab. While I’m watching it and have many, many thoughts on it (Hello, vagina episode), right now, I’m more interested in what this NYT article has to say about the #Woo.
Here’s a passage from the article (bold emphasis is my own):
Throughout history, women in particular have been mocked, reviled, and murdered for maintaining knowledge and practices that frightened, confused and confounded “the authorities.” (Namely the church, and later, medicine.) Criticism of Goop is founded, at least in part, upon deeply ingrained reserves of fear, loathing, and ignorance about things we cannot see, touch, authenticate, prove, own or quantify. It is emblematic of a cultural insistence that we quash intuitive measures and “other” ways of knowing — the sort handed down via oral tradition, which, for most women throughout history, was the only way of knowing. In other words, it’s classic patriarchal devaluation.
When 19th-century medicine men were organizing and legitimizing their brand-new profession, they claimed the mantle of “science” even though there was no such thing as evidence-based medicine at the time. In order to dominate the market, they slandered all other modalities as “quackery,” including midwifery, which we know achieved safer birth outcomes back then, as itstill doestoday. Pejoratives like “woo” or “pseudoscience” are still often applied to anything that falls outside of the mainstream medical establishment. (Think about this the next time you hear something harmless or odd or common-sensical dismissed as an “old wives’ tale.”)
A lightbulb went off in my head after reading this. Oh, I thought, so this is where disdain of the Woo began. This is why I’ve been so embarrassed/ashamed/closeted about my exploration of The Woo. This is why I’ve barely told anyone about this blog. And this is why society, at large, ridicules The Woo.
The growth of Goop and, more broadly, of the multitrillion-dollar wellness industry is cause for concern. On the surface, it looks full of promise and hope. Dig just a little deeper, beyond the claims of all-natural miracles — the energy healing, the cold therapy, the anti-aging treatments — and what we find is at best, a waste of money and at worst, harmful methods that actually compromise your health.
But then, in an interesting twist, Stamp goes on to explain the significant role the medical establishment has played in fueling the rise of wellness.
For virtually the whole of its existence, medicine has disenfranchised women and, to varying degrees, continues to do so. Even as medicine has modernized with an emphasis on autonomy and resolving bias, it remains, at times, paternalistic and patriarchal.
… Medical care has not accounted for what women need and want. Women are more often dissatisfied with medical care, feeling that it has failed to recognize their autonomy and unique biological and social needs. Women are more likely to have chronic illness and autoimmune diseases, both of which can be challenging to treat from a doctor’s point of view but even more challenging to live with.
I say YES to this. As someone with a chronic condition, I know how challenging my condition is for my doctor to treat and how super challenging it is to live with.
I finally turned to The Woo because, after years of seeing doctors, I didn’t know where else to turn. And If I didn’t find solutions in The Woo — meditation, mindfulness, the law of attraction, visualization, hypnotherapy — I’d be much, much worse off.
That is why I love this paragraph from the NYT article:
It’s condescending to suggest that if we are interested in having agency over our bodies, if we are open to experiencing heightened states of awareness and emotion, if we are amazed by and eager to learn more about the possibilities of touch and intention and energy, and if we’d like to do everything within our power to stay out of doctors’ offices, we are somehow privileged morons who deserve an intellectual (read: patriarchal) beat-down. Openness to intuitive measures that might help us avoid or ameliorate chronic despair and disease does not make us flat-earthers.
YES! So much YES to this! I believe in science. I believe in Western medicine. I still see all my doctors, go to a therapist, take prescription drugs, get yearly physicals, and I intend to continue to do all of those things if I need to.
But exploring ways I can aid in my own healing, improve my mental health, and vastly improve my quality of life doesn’t mean I’m consumed by “magical thinking.” It means that I know science has its limits, and I have the right to search beyond those limits if I’ve hit a brick wall in my healing process.
This weekend I did something very Woo-y. I went to an Abraham-Hicks Law of Attraction workshop! For some, Abraham-Hicks and their teachings can seem really out there. For others, Abraham-Hicks seems totally normal.
It all depends on your view of the Woo.
In short, Esther Hicks channels a collective consciousness known as Abraham, and the teachings of Abraham help us to understand how to use the Law of Attraction to manifest our desires. During workshops, Abraham invites audience members who raise their hands to come to the stage, sit in the “hot seat,” and ask Abraham questions, like — how do I deal with an overprotective Mom? How do I manifest lots of money? How do I heal myself?
While seeing Abraham in person can be very Woo-y, the entire experience surrounding this workshop was Woo-y for me.
To begin with, going to this workshop happened on a whim. At the end of January, I wondered if there would be any Abraham workshops in SF in 2020. So I logged onto the Abraham Hicks website and BOOM! There was going to be a workshop in San Francisco! In eight days! On a Saturday morning when I had NO PLANS!
Even better — tickets were still available.
Even better — rooms were available at the hotel where the workshop was taking place for LESS than the rate Abraham-Hicks had negotiated.
The weekend kept unfolding like that — easily, pleasantly, full of good surprises. The hotel turned out to be really nice, with waterfront access where you could sit peacefully, watching the ducks swim in the calm San Francisco bay while planes took off in the distance from SFO. (I captured this view in the photo above).
On the morning of the conference, I sat there for 15 minutes, taking in this view and centering myself. When I headed inside to drop by the hotel Starbucks, there was NO LINE. It only took 1 minute for my chai latte to come out, complete with my name printed correctly in big, bold, capital letters on the cup!
Then, I had no problem getting a seat with a decent view, and I sat between two very nice women. One was celebrating her birthday and gave herself a ticket to the workshop as a gift. Another had just moved to SF. When she found out there was an Abraham-Hicks workshop close by, she knew she had to attend.
When the workshop got underway, most of the audience’s questions were intriguing and mirrored many of my own.
And then, when it was all over, and all of us streamed outside, it only took 5 minutes for the valet to bring my car around, and I zoomed on home to Napa with no traffic.
It was a weekend of seeing the Woo in action, and I chose to end it by floating for an hour in a sensory deprivation pod to meditate and relax.
I think I fulfilled my Woo for the weekend (and perhaps the rest of the week).
The theme of “other” seems to be popping up in my life a lot right now.
I’m listening to Michelle Obama’s audio book, Becoming (yes, the one that won her a Grammy). In it, she talks about how politicians used and twisted language and facts to scare voters when Barack Obama ran for president. The efforts were meant to insight fear among voters, so they’d see Barack as “other,” and someone unfit to be President of the United States.
And January 27 marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz — the ultimate example of the horrors and atrocities that can happen when one group of people marks another group as “other.”
So it was reassuring when I stepped into my meditation class this week, and my teacher’s first question was to ask us what keeps us from showing compassion to others. Our answers ranged from fear to discomfort to busyness to distrust — and media and technology.
In a true sign of the Woo, my meditation teacher had chosen this passage to read to us:
The television set and the computer are the most popular temples these days: when your mind is inside them, it’s confusing — but nothing is asked of you, and you carry no responsibility. Your attention is suspended from your own concerns — which feels like a relief — but the mind is in a passive position that doesn’t call up anything from its depths. Attention is in a trance
When we are in the trance of technology, we are absorbing language and images and storylines that can easily paint our neighbors and strangers as “others.” After all, as the Ajahn Sucitto quote says, when zoned out, “nothing is asked of you, and you carry no responsibility.” But IRL, we do carry responsibility, and it’s helpful to listen to the tea, which reminds us to hold each other and ourselves in reverence.
Yes, I am wishing you a Happy New Year on Feb. 2. Not only did I miss the traditional Jan. 1 New Year, but I also missed the Lunar New Year. Even so, this New Year’s wish is taking place right on time for me.
Between holidays, travel, work, and sickness, I wasn’t in a place on Dec. 31 to consider the New Year or what my “resolution” might be. I frankly had no intention of making a resolution. Resolutions seem forced to me, and they’re either quickly forgotten or cause too much stress — and are then quickly forgotten :).
But in January, my meditation teacher invited us to think about our intention for the New Year. She asked us:
What is your deepest intention for the New Year? Kindness? Simplicity? Courage? Compassion? Resolve? Peace? Explore what really matters and to stand by yourself (as you would a dear friend) as you do so.
This resonated with me. She was asking us to be quiet, go inward, and see if a word arose. Just one word — not some grandiose resolution about losing weight, starting a business, or changing careers.
So I sat, quieted my mind, and listened. One word arose: non-striving.
Now, I don’t know a lot about non-striving — what it means or how it’s practiced. But the word deeply resonated with me. Even though I’d bypassed making an “official” resolution, my head was swirling with what I wanted to accomplish in 2020. I wanted to grow this blog. I wanted to start freelance writing again. I wanted to eat healthily, get in shape, lift some weights, maybe join a gym or yoga studio. I wanted to explore meditation and Buddhism more deeply. I thought I could take an art class. Oh, and I wanted to decorate my house and clean out my closet.
Yup, that list went on and on and was, frankly, ridiculous. It was mid-January, and I’d already made myself feel like a failure in meeting my goals, and I was exhausted physically and mentally.
Non-striving seems like the only healthy approach I should follow for 2020. Not only is it encapsulated for me in this Clearing poem, but this blog on Psych Central gives a simple explanation of non-striving: Trying less and being more.
I still intend to accomplish things in 2020. I will still set goals and work toward reaching them. But I will not push against the universe to do so. I will not overburden my heart, my mind, and to-do list with endless tasks that weigh me down instead of lift me up. In my non-striving, I hope to honor my health and my goals instead of sacrificing one in the service of the other.
Yup, I know hashtags are overdone. But after my #TheTeaTalksTuesdays post, I couldn’t resist #WooWooWednesdays. After all, it seems like a perfect hashtag for The Land of Woo. So, what’s the purpose of #WooWooWednesdays? It’s to share ways the Woo is showing up in my real life, like…
Those coincidences that are just too coincidental
That health change that’s a little too good to be true
That mind shift that puts everything into perspective
It’s also a way to make sure these Woo Woo incidents aren’t slipping by, unnoticed. It’s to help me pay attention, so I can notice and celebrate the way the Woo is showing up in my life.
This week’s #WooWooWednesdays happened on Tuesday. I was shopping and stopped by this fancy little “epicurean boutique” — their description, not mine — to get some hot tea. See, I live in Napa and Downtown Napa is going through a revitalization. I try to shop, eat and drink in Downtown as much as possible. After all, I want my downtown to be successful.
While this epicurean boutique is adorable, filled with fancy vinegars, olive oils and mustards, it plays horrible dance music that is just Way. Too. Loud. I stopped by once this summer and had an awful time communicating with the barista. The music drowned out his voice. I could barely order my iced tea.
On Tuesday, I figured I’d give this little boutique another shot. There was a different barista behind the coffee bar, and when I walked in, it happened to be the silent moment in between songs.
That quickly changed. The second I started to ask the barista about their selection of teas, the music started blaring again. Yet again, this barista’s voice was drowned out, and I had trouble hearing and ordering.
“Why can’t they just turn down this stupid music?” I pleaded silently in my head. And I also vowed to never, ever shop in this store again.
Then, the Woo stepped in.
The barista looked up at me.
“I can’t stand this music,” she said. “It gives me a headache listening to it all day.”
I was stunned. She was picking up on the conversation I was having in my head!
“Do you have any control over it?” I asked. “Can you turn it down?”
It was just the two of us in the store. She looked up at me, stepped out from behind the bar, walked into a back room and turned off the music. She then walked back to the coffee bar, looked at me in triumph, and we stood there in blissful silence, with smiles on our faces, as my tea steeped.
I think I’ll have to rethink my vow to never return to that store.
I’ve had a sore throat this week so I’ve been drinking a lot of tea. I mean a lot. So much that I’ve started looking forward to the words of wisdom printed on the labels of my tea bags.
Now, not all of these words of wisdom are winners — like how not all fortune cookie fortunes are winners (or even actually fortunes). But some of these words of wisdom feel like they are being sent from the universe.
In honor of this tea bag wisdom, I’m starting #TheTeaTalks — beginning with this gem I received today.
It could not be more timely, reflecting the message of “Clearing,” the poem I posted yesterday. For me, this will be a year of non-striving (more on that later). Rather than forcing my exploration of The Land the Woo or holding onto expectations of where it will take me, I want to keep an open and curious mind.
In 2020, I need to strive less so I can learn more.
My mediation teacher read this poem to us a couple weeks ago, and it left me speechless. It was as if poet Martha Postlewaite was in my head, reading my mind.
The poem, “Clearing,” was exactly what I needed to hear when I needed to hear it. It may be my mantra for 2020.
I am no expert in Woo-Woo. In fact, the more I learn, the more overwhelmed I feel.
There’s so much that can be considered Woo — energy work, chakras, crystals, manifesting, mysticism, craniosacral therapy, EMDR, magnet therapy, prayer, traditional Chinese medicine, Rolfing, mediation…..
The list goes on and on, and it varies based on who you talk to and what they believe.
So, why did I start this blog?
The Woo fascinates me: Ever since I was young, I was intrigued by the idea of the mystical, the spiritual, the unexplained — like people who say they’ve had past lives, or experienced spontaneous remissions, or survived near-death experiences. I find these stories fascinating (although sometimes I also find them super freaky and unsettling and I have to stop reading).
The Woo is helping to keep me sane: I have always had problems with depression and managing stress. I’m a bit of a Type A personality, and I hold on to my emotions deeply. I see a therapist regularly and take anti-depressants. But it wasn’t until I started meditating that I could begin to really calm my mind and manage some of my stress.
The Woo gives me a different perspective: As an adult in my 30s, I developed unexplained hearing loss. That triggered an increase in my depression and the never-ending question of why did this happen? Western doctors say the hearing loss is permanent, they don’t know why it occurred, and there is nothing they can do to help me. Reading books and watching videos by Dr. Joe Dispenza or listening to the teachings of Abraham Hicks is giving me a new perspective on my hearing loss and helping to lighten my load and my depression.
The Woo offers insight: Why are we here, on this earth, in these physical bodies? That question has plagued me since I was 11, and I started learning more about life and death. The Woo gives me new ideas and concepts to ponder that are helping me form my own answers to this very unanswerable question.
I want to learn more about the Woo: I am a journalist by background. I love reading, researching, and writing. I’ve realized that over the years, I’ve actually been exploring a lot about the Woo without even realizing it. I’ve tried energy healing, Alexander Technique, acupuncture, hypnotherapy, essential oils, manifesting, meditation, and talk therapy. So why not chronicle my journeys here?
I see this blog as a safe place to question, explore, and experiment with “alternative” treatments and ideas. What I make of these ideas may be totally different than what you do, and what I end up believing may be different than what you believe.
But that is part of the journey into the Woo.
Please note: I want to emphasize that The Land of Woo does not give out medical advice, and I’m not advocating that you give up your Western doctor. You need to do you, and what is right for your body and your health.
