Channeling Anne Morrow Lindbergh

A cottage by the sea

I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I love Anne Morrow Lindbergh. 

She and I, we both lost our sons very early in our lives. I'd like to think that it was partly her grief that fueled so much great writing. That's exactly what I'm trying to do do here, leaving Manila behind and opting to live by the sea for close to a week to find the inspiration that will give me my second wind on the last leg of writing my thesis about grieving mothers. So help me Anne, and help me God.

I write from the terrace of my little cottage by the sea, under the shelter of towering Talisay trees, listening to the gentle waves at play on the shore just beneath me. I'm on an island in the southern part of the Philippines, in a place that my father used to frequent as a young boy.  The property where this quaint and charming resort stands belongs to the family of my father's boyhood best friend. Both of them are in heaven now. 


I find great solace and inspiration here. In the mornings it is so peaceful and my bedroom faces the sea and each day I wake to a gentle, peach-orange sunrise. Barefoot, I walk out onto the terrace and sit on a rocking chair as I gaze out on a vast and endless sea.


There's something about being by the water that always helps me write. Perhaps I was a mermaid in a previous life? :-)  But always, my best writing is completed when I have solitude by the sea. In the mornings or late afternoons, I take long leisurely walks on the pantalan when everything is quiet. And in the evenings, I have meals with myself under a blanket of skies filled by a thousand stars.


Anne Morrow Lindbergh was spot on when she said -- 
"If you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments."  

Ah, there's that word again -- surrender. 

Excuse me now, as take a break from wading through the grief, and surrender to the call of the beach below my window.  See you later...



 

My Mother's World

And so I have finally set foot in my mother's world. Well, sort of.

I haven't become an actress as one of my closest friends joked, but I now find myself working side by side with people from the industry that has been a part of her life for almost half a century now.

I thought it would be awkward, but to my surprise, I immediately felt at home. I guess in that sense, I am her daughter. For the longest time, while growing up, she sheltered me from her industry, but I guess eventually finding myself part of  her world (but not quite) was inevitable. The board is composed of 30 members, some of them have been there for a really long time -- pillars in the industry, masters of their craft and highly respected. It's an interesting mix actually and I look forward to working with each and every one of them in time. PDI ran a list of the board's new members in yesterday's paper.

I've always loved movies so it's a thrill and great honor for me to be a part of the new Movie Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB) -- and a huge responsibility to ensure that the movies and television shows that our children view are rated properly.

It was interesting to finally meet other children of show business --  Grace Poe- Llamanzares, our Chair and Liezl Martinez  who is a board newbie like me, met for the very first time today. In spite of the fact that our parents had known each other for four decades, we had never been introduced.  In my album somewhere, I have an old black and white photo of attending Liezl's 3rd birthday party at their home in New Manila. Other than that, we never had the chance to get to know one another.

New chapters are always interesting when they unfold -- new experiences, a whole new set of characters, a different plot...as they say, abangan.

Stop and Smell The Roses

Smelling the roses, being enthralled by how the pieces of a puzzle fit together, seeing the sunlight as it dances in the clouds, feeling the thrill of reaching a mountain summit: these are experiences that need yield nothing more to be fully justified. And one might go so far as to argue that a life devoid of such experiences is hardly a life at all. -- Edward Deci in Why We Do What We Do

New Beginnings

Each day brings with it the promise of a new beginning... I'm about to have two over the next couple of days. Thank you Lord for the doors that open. Go before me so that the way will be smooth.

Tina Tagle's Serendipity

Tina Tagle's Serendipity

I read Tina Tagle's blog today  and I was simply blown away by the woman's irreverence, candor and honesty. In a world filled with so much pretense, she is so refreshing! I'm sure many people will disagree with me, but I like Tina. She tells it like it is. Walang kiyeme kyeme.

I'm not really a fashion person, but I like the way she puts herself together and boy, she looks fab for fifty-something! At mukhang totoo lahat, if you get what I mean. I know that many are perhaps put-off by her outfit of the day displays but I guess the woman is just being honest. As my friend Joey Reyes says, "nothing wrong if you can afford it, if it came from your pockets and not someone else's at kung carry mo ba and it will make you happy..." So I guess that's Tina's philosophy too.

Today the Philippine Daily Inquirer ran a review of her blog Blogging with the real housewife of Dasma and naturally it drew hundreds to Tina's blog. I am sure naloka sya momentarily.

People who are as real as Tina, usually have gone through a lot in life. In spite of being the lady of leisure that she is, I wonder what her struggles have been. You don't have that kind of tenacity, that kind of gift to laugh at yourself, and the courage to say it like it is if you haven't been through the eye of some major storm, if you haven't been through hell and back.

Basta totoong-totoo sya at maganda ang puso nya. I'd love to meet her someday.

Listen To Your Body

“THE BODY is all-wise, pay attention to it when it speaks,” my mentor would constantly tell me when I was often falling ill.

Relationships can be stressful. Work and the people around you can cause you stress—as was experienced recently by a dear friend who had been afflicted with one form of lung infection after another in the last three weeks.

His doctor told him that the number of infections he’d been having was highly unusual.

I knew that my friend had been terribly unhappy at his job for months now; he had been at odds with his boss. He couldn’t quit because he needed the money, but without a healthcare plan, his resources were being drained by medical bills.

I told him that perhaps his body was speaking loud and clear—his lungs could no longer tolerate breathing in the negative energy at work. It was a light bulb moment.

‘Toxic’

Another young girl I knew was in a rigorous nursing course. She wanted to be a nurse but felt so alone in the program.

“The people in my course are just so toxic and competitive!”

She said that while in the hospital, recuperating from unexplained back pains, she had been bombarded with text messages by insensitive classmates about work that was due that week. The poor girl was still hooked to an intravenous drip while surfing for answers on her iPad using her other hand.

When I visited her that day, I shook my head and asked her, “And you guys want to be health-care providers?” Slowly she began to see the irony of her situation.

According to healthline.com, Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) was the term coined by Dr. Robert Adler (1975), director of the division of behavioral and psychosocial medicine at New York’s University of Rochester, to explain the link between what we think (our state of mind) and our health and our ability to heal ourselves.

PNI is a relatively recent branch of science that enforces beliefs that physicians have held for many centuries, perhaps well before the ancient Greeks. The premise is that a patient’s mental state influences diseases and healing. Specifically, PNI studies the connection between the brain and the immune system.

Many PNI studies have focused on how stress, hostility and depression impact the immune system. Many conditions such as heart disease, arthritis, osteoporosis, ulcerative disease, delayed wound healing and premature aging, are related to stress and negative emotions.

The mind is certainly a powerful thing and emotions can wreak havoc on one’s psyche and body. Thus, the unexplained migraine headaches and backaches, the palpitations or asthma attacks that are found to have no physiological reasons, are often indicators that there is something amiss deep within and the body is speaking, sometimes softly at first.

When several attempts to get the message across remain unheeded, the body finally caves in and a trip to the emergency room or a hospital confinement is warranted.

The website lifepositive.com cites a study that found out that “susceptibility to influenza, for instance, is higher in families that are rigid and chaotic than in balanced families. Psychologists have found that people could be trained to improve their resistance to disease by recognizing the mind-body link in disease and learning how to deal more effectively with emotionally challenging events. In such cases, what is important is the extent to which you can bring change in yourself by recognizing and altering the patterns of behavior that characterize you.”

Meditation, prayer help

Meditation, yoga, prayer or quiet time, exercise and journaling have all been found to be helpful in managing stress and in keeping the immune system healthy. Stress is a given, and some degree or amount of it is healthy.

It becomes problematic or harmful when it becomes a constant in one’s life—either through people, situations or relationships.

Learning to set your boundaries, tuning out the negative energy and for lack of a better description, building a “force field” to keep the emotional vampires who suck the lifeblood out of you are ways to keep yourself sane and healthy.

The bottom line is that you’ve got to be peaceful and happy to stay healthy. Throw the stress out the window or take yourself out of the negative situation. Stress is often the result of wanting to control things or being fixated on a particular outcome.

If you can’t, find a way to manage the toxic energy, be self-aware, know your limits, do what you must and surrender the rest. Work on what brings you bliss, and the healthy part will simply be a natural by-product of choosing joy each and every day.

Published in "Roots and Wings" in the Lifestyle section of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, 
6 February 2011

Awakening

Fall. November 2009. Awakening Center in Brentwood, CA.

“Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath away... ”

BRENTWOOD, CALIFORNIA— Every morning for the last week or so, a sunrise like no other greets me the moment I wake up.

When I first came to this retreat center, I was frightened by the silence. The stillness was deafening. A solitary house on a hill surrounded by 17 acres of gentle hills and valleys punctuated by olive trees all around. A couple of days later, solitude has become my new best friend.

Out here, the morning skies are a tapestry of magnificent pinks and blues.

Each day, I hike down the hill and feel a little bit like Pooh, in his hundred-acre wood, though mine is much smaller. I walk over to my “thoughtful spot” on the property and write on my journal as I listen to the music on my Ipod which my daughter had lovingly put together for me before I left Manila last week.

In the late afternoons, I walk the labyrinth behind the house and watch the sunset casting its awesome orange glow on the mountains that surround the property.

I understand now how in the stillness you are able to hear yourself better and connect with all that is hidden within you. Every joy, every sorrow, every thought held captive rises to the surface and when it does, you catch it, stay with it and try to find the answers to the many questions that come with it.

Not an easy task to do, and not a comfortable one actually. But it is while I am here at Awakening that I have found myself living what Marcel Proust spoke about when he said: “The voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes, but in seeing with new eyes.”

In these breathless and sacred moments, nothing changes, and yet everything changes. When you take the time to step back and be still, relieving yourself of the day-to-day cares of the world and the voices that drown you out, you learn to see the world and your life with new eyes. The ground beneath you shifts, and everything, in that transformative moment, is changed forever.

Sometimes, in the rat race that is life, our spirits become sapped. Drained by negative energy and emotional vampires, tragedies and chaos, the day-to-day demands and responsibilities that pull at us from all over, the stress that is part and parcel of life.

Unless you make a conscious effort to break away from all of these, you will definitely burn out. The mother or father who takes care of a family, or the leader of an organization, will not be able to give enough if he or she has left nothing for the self. And this is not being selfish. To care for other people, you must take care and nurture yourself first.

Be in the light

Negativity is a given, in many shapes, sizes, colors and forms. I like what Wayne Dyer said: “The real you can always choose to remain impervious to non-peaceful entreaties. When others don’t come to you in peace, they can only reach the outer protective coverings. It is always about how you choose to process events, not the events themselves that determine your level of peace.”

Oftentimes, you tend to forget this and you let the sadness or the negativity swallow you, rather than just allowing it to slide over. “Always choose to be in the light,” Dyer says.

One of the more practical tips he offers is for one to literally move into a naturally lit area when one is overcome by gloom or doom.

“Whenever you find yourself thinking morbid thoughts it is imperative that you physically get up and let in some light. Then notice how much better you feel with the presence of light. Letting in the light literally allows you to erase the dark thoughts… The light is a faster energy and its presence is a symbol of the fact that God is the way, the truth and the light. Invite the light in the next time you experience morbid thoughts and notice the difference.”

In this corner of the world, fully bathed in light, I find myself blown away by yes, those breathless moments that are gifts from above. And while I know these moments are few and far between, I still need to appreciate the here and now for what it brings—gifts and lessons meant solely for me.

You need not travel far to find solitude, or to experience stillness. However, it helps to stay close to nature because sitting in the midst of all its serenity and splendor, one sees God’s signature. In doing so, we are able to hear Him more closely.

It need not be in the quiet hills of a retreat center in California, an ashram in India or resort in the Mediterranean. Within the city are pockets of quiet run by the religious, countless sanctuaries in the mountains of Baguio or Tagaytay, small areas of peace on the shores of Batangas, Bohol, Cebu or Palawan—wherever your heart (and okay, your pocket, too) leads you, go and be still there.

The important thing is to step back, even for a while, confront all that troubles you head-on, in the quiet of your heart, where you can shut the world out even for a couple of days. To pray, meditate, take quiet walks with yourself and take directions from the Big Guy up above.

Someone once told me, “What a lovely surprise to finally discover how un-lonely being alone can be.”

I did not understand it then, but after a week here, I do now. As the year draws to a close, and the so-called busiest month of the year is upon us, I hope that one way or the other, you are able to take time out to find your quiet spot.

Reflect and be thankful for what was, and with hope and renewed energy, look forward to what is yet to be. Let go of what is negative and leave no room for anger or bitterness, jealousy and hate.

In its place let there be only truth, forgiveness and peace and possibly, new beginnings. In the process, I wish you be blessed with a breathless moment or two, those moments that make for a life fully lived.

Published as "How I Discovered the Joy of Being Alone" in my column "Roots & Wings" in the Philippine Daily Inquirer's Lifestyle section, 15 November 2009