From “Artist’s Recovery” here is a prayer for Francis Gaspar: “God, please help me to open my eyes and my soul to the beautiful things and feelings that bring me the most joy.”

“Teach me to trust that I deserve joyfully and peacefully to be my creative self as an act of worship to you. Thanks for caring.”
I have no personal idea of how Francis teaches in the classroom but I have personally experienced how he conducted drumming sessions, at least twice. Francis develops leaders not followers.

I remember his injunction during the drumming sessions. “Don’t follow my beat. Drum your own way. Listen. Decice when to insert your beat.”

Developing leaders and not followers is no easy task. It would be easier to train others to conform, to obey,to follow. But Francis thinks out of the box.

In his training sessions and in his management consultancies I can imagine his struggles. I can imagine the tension between going the easy path by giving in to the participants who think echoing him or following his lead please him. Or should he challenge them to maximize what is already in them as personal gifts?

The temptation would be to earn his keep and to leave his students/participants choosing the easy way out. I suspect that sometimes Francis gets better response from his many pets especially from Bruce their family dog than from humanity. This means that Francis has a unique style of communication that even animals naturally understand but human beings deafened by social conditioning especially from verbal priorities cannot. Martha Beck has so much to tell Francis.

This is why an artist like Francis needs an expansive dimension: “to find his creative self by an act of worship.”

“That which is not expressed externally will through the Universal Law of Balance and Equilibrium need to be expressed internally to restore harmony.”

Dr. Christine Page continues: “Pain represents suppressed anger.”

The old pain on my upper right arm is back. I have been liberated from such pains for weeks. My no salt, no fat diet eliminated the pains. Could it be the cold – constricting my blood vessels. Or wait, days ago I consciously struggled against the unnecessary suffering of a relative who obviously wasn’t doing enough self- care. I was angry at what I perceived as martyrdom. Both our daughter and my husband warned me against fighting the battles of others. My blood pressure rose to its old level after weeks of new medicines, pineapple juice with reducol, and a no salt, no fat diet.

According to Joe Vitale: “You don’t purify the person, place or thing. You neutralize the energy you associate with that person,place or thing. So the first stage of Ho’oponopono is the purification of energy.”

“Not only does that energy get neutralized, it also gets released, so there’s a brand new state. Buddhists call it the void. The final step is that you allow the Divinity to come in and fill the void with Light.”

It is Chinese New Year in the Philippines on January 30. The Philippine-Chinese connection has been pervasive, at least as far as I can personally remember. In my generation, I don’t think there is any Filipino who can honestly claim he or she absolutely does not have a Chinese ancestor.

I claim to be Western in my thinking, but the English language I use daily is replete with Chinese. A quick trip to a dictionary showed an array from A to W. Chinese amah to Chinese white. I suppose had I gone to a bigger dictionary i would have found Chinese words for X, Y and Z as well.

In his graduate school classes, my husband would have fun with an aphorism: “God made Adam and Eve but the rest of the world is made in China.” In Wimbledon in 2011, a sales clerk saucily answered me when I asked where a piece of luggage was made: “Tell me, what product can you buy nowadays that was not made in China.” Of course he was Asian but not Chinese.

How China has evolved while I wasn’t looking! Amazing! I grew up the nuns in school and the priests in Church exhorting me to pray for “poor” China. But in 2002 hen my family and I joined a group tour to some selected cities in China I had a culture shock. How in heaven’s name  did”poor” China build a Zhenzhen (my encyclopedias could not help me with the spelling neither me spelling check, neither Google. After all it’s garbage in, garbage out!) highway with twelve lanes on either side?!

In Beijing, the traffic was awful. I even saw some impatient pedestrians jumping over the iron bars of the islands separating the lanes To my disappointment we went through several restaurants but could not find pancit canton nor lumpia Shanghai, staple entrees in Chinese restaurants in the Philippines. In 2002, China already had Christmas trees in the shopping centers. In our hotel on Christmas eve we were bold enough to borrow a Christmas tree from the lobby.Emboldened we attempted to have a Catholic liturgical session at the lounge of our floor. Of course we were not allowed. Public assemblies were no permitted. We quicly greeted each other a merry Christmas then retired to our separate rooms

I have a 101 stories about my Chinese experiences but certainly not for now.

Neale Donald Walsch’s books have given me answers, not even my two masteral programs and my doctoral degree have given me. I like the shocking revelations that stimulated my parochial convent school mind!

I like how simply the book has shown me the meaning of my life.
“….choices that could lead to more than one outcome.” Any choice I may make has multiple repercussions And I’m not even considering the subconscious and the unconscious effects that come with the package.

Here lies the problem: “If all you desired is what your soul desires, everything would be very simple. If you listened to the part of you which is pure spirit, all of your decisions wold be easy and all the outcome joyous that is because…

…the choices of spirit are always the highest choices.

Yet you are not only a spirit. You are a Triune being made up of body, mind and spirit. My practical solution for the moment (actually for two years now) is the Ho’oponopono strategy which surrenders to Divinity all that my consciousness is not capable of handling. And certainly it has been working for me.

Inspired by Donna Eden, I have been practicing pro-active self-care coupled with professional medical healthcare. I’m convinced I know my body best. I have God as my primary partner in my self-care. Whenever I am in pain or I feel anxious, I no longer get angry with God.I go to the metaphysical level. I don’t want to get caught again in the religion-spirituality debate. I don’t want to get into a depression like what happened in the 90s; no chance of my being a Van Gogh!

I thank God for anything that usually gives me enjoyment like flowers, plants, trees, mountains, rivers etc. Usually I recall beautiful pictures from my newsfeeds on Facebook. This brings me to a higher level than pain and anxiety. When I feel better I thank God for everybody. This practice was inspired by what I read about hell – separation from god, banishment from Eden.

Lately, I had to go to the emergency room because my blood pressure rose, this after eating only steamed fish for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a week. My personal doctor hold clinic hours only in the mornings so we had to go to the emergency room.

It was a blessing in disguise. The attending doctor saw what had been overlooked all these years. Salt – Sodium.The next day after a no-salt breakfast, my husband took a reading of my blood pressure. What a joy to have a reading of 129. After a no- salt lunch my blood pressure was still below the usual 140.

The next day when my husband went to one of his regular classes, I took my blood pressure. I was shocked – as high as 187! I repeated and repeated by the lowest I got was 141. I knew better than to panic. I drank medicine and rested.

I am back to researching what else can be done. I suspect the fish that I have been eating for weeks without salt nor oil is the culprit. I am due for another check up in a week’s time.