#re-align

Did you miss us?  

So I messaged my partner-in-themes @ohhelloholly and told her I wanted to restart Monthly Themes as a way to direct and focus my journaling, meditation, and overall self-improvement projects.  She was immediately onboard - because she’s awesome like that - and voila!  Monthly Themes returns.  As always, we invite you to join us if any given theme resonates with you.  

For October our theme is Re-Align.  I love this one!  (Okay, I love them all, but this one especially.)  The last two months or so have been really challenging for me.  Family turmoil and work drama had me in survival mode and not focusing as much on my own well being as I probably should have.  It’s okay, life is messy, and sometimes things get back-burnered.  But I’m back to prioritizing my own health and happiness, and that means taking a fresh look at my goals.

October is going to be all about getting back in touch with myself and the things I want to accomplish; the person I really want to be.  Unfortunately, when I get stressed and overwhelmed, I am not the nicest person.  I forget to think about compassion and end up snapping at people, being abrupt, and frazzled.  I’m an irritable bitch, is what I’m trying to say.  And while almost everyone in my life understands and forgives, I hate the way I feel.  My brain is fast (you should see how quickly I jump to What-If Panic!) but my mouth is always faster, and the nasty remarks or the impatient rudeness rolls off my tongue before my brain can slam on the brakes.  So one of my priorities will be to Re-Align my attitude with my better angels.  

There are other things I will be working on, and I will write about them throughout the month.  I’m really excited to be back doing themes, and so happy that Holly is with me.  We’re going to have a lot of fun, you guys. 

Today in Godsmack History:  “Re-Align”

“Re-Align,” the third and final single from Godsmack’s Faceless, released on March 16, 2004. In that same year, it reached number three on the Mainstream Rock chart and number twenty eight on the Modern Rock chart in the United States. The single was released in its album form, but was also used to promote their upcoming (at the time) acoustic EP The Other Side, which was coincidentally released on the same day!

According to Sully Erna, the song is about how every time he tours to New Orleans with Godsmack, he gets sick. Originally Wiki had attributed this to having been killed in New Orleans in a previous life and being haunted by "evil spirits" every time he visits New Orleans. On Wikipedia: Fact or Fiction, Sully Erna dispels this iteration as “sounding crazy” but does acknowledge that bizarre things have happened in the past. 

Day 341 – A moment of doubt vs Facts

Stabilizing within Self-forgiveness.

I forgive myself that I have not realized that I have allowed myself to fall into fear of loss and doubt experience and started to judge myself as ‘I did not do all what I could for what I committed myself to accumulate’and within that believing that if I doubt, fear – that obviously means that I did not do everything I could, all I did was not good enough and…

It was a while since I'd been here. I walked out of the -20 degree weather into a warm living room. As I unburdened myself of my layers, he went to the kitchen and began to grind the coffee. "An early evening brew" he said, smiling. I looked down, realizing I had placed my handbag on the floor. "In Romania, if you put the bag on the floor, they won't serve you at the restaurant, they believe it's bad luck" I explained, as I picked it up, carefully placing the bag on the couch. "I don't know why I believe it, but there must be some truth to it" I remarked, wondering how I had put faith in this idea."Sometimes it sticks with you" he said in his cadenced tone. I paused. "Yes, that's a good way of putting it."

We had gotten together that afternoon to work on me. He was a teacher of the Alexander Technique and I was in need of a long term solution for my lingering back problem of the last year. He had used the technique to recover from a car accident years prior and was someone I'd met one summer. I'd temporarily become part of Toronto's Brazilian community. Love affairs, hand holding, spirits entangling, the collision of us lasted not very long but long enough. It was a moment of the past that had faded away as quickly as it had come. It had been years since we'd seen each other, but I realized that his tempo was welcome in my life because he was something different. He didn't really define me or know me from what I did, but we shared many similar viewpoints on health, spirituality, openness and general approach to living. Life is boring if you always surround yourself with everyone who agrees with you and likes the same things.

We had spent time earlier that day working on my re-alignment. Alexander, it is said, developed his technique because he was chronically losing his voice. Since he was an actor, it was detrimental to the development of his career. A close examination of posture using mirrors revealed he was shutting his larynx down due to an incorrect tilting of the head. He developed techniques to correct this and many actors and musicians use them to this day to correct chronic body alignment issues.

With careful movements, he took my body and introduced new ways to sit, to bend, to stand, to lift and to lengthen. Slow, thoughtful movements, that required the necessity to trust the other person's ability to see you from another viewpoint. The technique relies on the movements to be guided by the teacher, and the student must let the movements be made. The mind is a powerful thing, and letting go is very hard. I said this thought aloud. He replied, "we are teaching you to un-habit what you have learned."