Transcription of Beginnings #1
Speaker 1: You are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast. Recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland, Maine and broadcast on 1310 AM Portland. Streaming live each week at 11 AM on WLOBRadio.com and available via podcast on doctorlisa.org. Today is September 18th 2011. Thank you for joining us. Here are some highlights from this week’s show.
Elizabeth: So how are you living in the world? What are the gifts you’re bringing into the world? What are the gifts you’re allowing to come in to you? I mean that’s huge. What do we allow in so we can give out differently?
This is written for everybody. This is not my story. This is our story of how we part with those we love and the things that are left behind.
Chris: So but again, in talking about intentions and goals, it came a point where I realized that I was going to ever reach this goal that I’ve had for a long time. I needed to do something different.
Just inspired me and energized me really and it was soulful energy, it was intellectual energy but it was just optimistic energy of the possibilities that we have in Maine.
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Dr. Lisa: Hello. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, recording the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour from Portland, Maine at the offices of Maine Magazine. The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour is available locally Portland, 1310 AM streaming WLOBRadio.com and podcast on DoctorLisa.org. We welcome you to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour.
We begin our show as we always do with a quote from the book Our Daily Tread which was published in collaboration with IslandPort Press of Yarmouth. Our Daily Tread was written in honor of our late friend Henley Denning and all proceeds her organization Safe Passage. Safe Passage provides approximately 550 children with education, social services and the chance to move beyond the poverty their families have faced for generations of the Guatemala City Dump. Visit them online at safepassage.org.
Today’s quote is from Mother Theresa. “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to one another.”
Dr. Lisa: Elizabeth Peavey is the author of Outta My Way: An Odd Life Lived Loudly. A collection of columns from her Casco Bay Weekly days and of Maine & Me: 10 years of Down East Adventures which was awarded the Maine Literary Award for best Maine-themed Book. Her essays and articles appear frequently in Down East Magazine where she’s a contributing editor since 1997. Her monthly humor column Out of My Yard can be found at TheBollard.com. Elizabeth has taught public speaking at the University of Southern Maine since 1993 and has served as guest lecturer of creative non-fiction at University of Maine Farmington. Her latest book Glorious Slow Going: Maine Stories of Art, Adventure and Friendship, a collaboration with renowned Maine landscape painter Marguerite Robichaux is due out in 2012. She recently performed her one-woman show My Mother’s Clothes are not my Mother to a sold-out audience at the St. Lawrence Center for the Arts in Downtown Portland.
Good morning Elizabeth.
Elizabeth: Good morning.
Dr. Lisa: I’m actually fascinated by this quite varied background you’ve had. Today’s show of course is our very first show ever for the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and it’s pretty amazing that we have you on because I’ve always considered you to be one of my fellow creatives within the community but you’re a little just a few years ahead of me and I used to read Out of my Way. So it’s great that you’re here and we’re doing this new beginnings thing and in your life, you’ve had new beginnings. So tell me about these recent new beginnings that you’ve been.
Elizabeth: Well it’s been an entire season of new beginnings and ironically enough it ended with an ending and it started with an ending when I lost my Mom 2 ½ years ago. That all coincided with some crises in my career as a print journalist, as a content provider, the whole world is changing and I had a very lovely long run for many years doing my column, writing for Down East, travelling all over the state, doing commercial work in town. I was always busy. I was always happy. I had a community and things were fine. I was maybe a little bit on autopilot. It was not always my best work or my most challenged work. You write a humor column for as many years as I did, you can get a little formulaic after a while.
Then slowly, surely, all of these venues, sources that I was so tied into changed or altered or used me less and my professional life was kind of disappearing on the horizon and the analogy that I used is that I had been on this subway car and going fast and going along and blur and happy and all that and all of a sudden, we’re at our last stop and I’m the one left on the train. Everybody’s out and I’m like I don’t need a business card. I don’t need to join Facebook. I don’t need a website. I don’t need to do any of that because I’m me and I’m sitting on the train all by myself.
So last January, I really was not a New Year’s resolution person but it was just more the turn of the calendar that I woke up one morning and said I got the rest of my professional life to think about and what am I going to do.
Dr. Lisa: Tell me how this coincided with this changing your personal situation.
Elizabeth: Well I lost my Dad when I was 26. So I sort of considered myself possessing a PhD in grief. I preceded all of my friends. Except for the friends who lost a parent at a very young age. I was the first adult in all of my circle of friends to lose a parent. So I kind of stood at the gate when one of them subsequently lost a parent and said I’ve been down that road. Walk this way. So when my mother’s decline, my father died of a heart attack, boom. Gone in an instant.
Dr. Lisa: So he was pretty young?
Elizabeth: He was 64. I was the last child. The really last child.
Dr. Lisa: How many brothers and sisters do you have?
Elizabeth: I have 2 older brothers who are 10 and 7 years older than I am.
Dr. Lisa: Okay.
Elizabeth: As I like to refer to myself in the show, the mascot.
Dr. Lisa: We have one of those in our family. We call her the bonus baby.
Elizabeth: Yes.
Dr. Lisa: So your father died when you were 26 and then your mother lived …
Elizabeth: Another 25 years.
Dr. Lisa: Another 25 years?
Elizabeth: Yes and her decline was gradual and slow. So in the back of my mind, I said I know this territory. I’m mentally preparing for it. she’s not going to go now but she’s going to go and I know the grieving process and then of course boom she dies and I’m a mess and you never can prepare yourself for that because every grief is different and this I think because there was so much ambiguity. We were making so many decisions. Nursing home, assisted living, back to rehab, can she go home? Can she drive? Can she not?
It was a constant, constant decision-making process. So we were all exhausted on top of everything. And I gave myself a good solid hard year of just grieving and letting myself mourn and restore and then it took me kind of another 6 months or so to get my feet back under myself with any injury whether it’s mental or physical. It takes a while to put your legs back under yourself and that’s when I felt physically and mentally and spiritually capable of doing something about my life.
Dr. Lisa: So is this how the January piece came in for you?
Elizabeth: Yes. It was sort of around that time. The first thing that I did and as I tell my writing students, the only way to start is to start. I said website. It’s like I said my career was disappearing into the horizon and I’ve been in Portland for over 30 years. I’ve been like whoa. It’s like who are you? So I had to eat my own words and I started working on content for website and that was a lot of work because I didn’t want it to … I want it to reflect who I was so I was very thoughtful and very careful.
Dr. Lisa: This is ElizabethPeavey.com?
Elizabeth: Correct. Yes. I also decided I have been giving away all of my professional life. Public speaking coaching, manuscript coaching, writing instruction and all of my friends who are actual professionals you know nurses and doctors and it’s like you have to start charging people when you do that. So that was part of the other aspect of the website is to figure out how I would professionally put that together.
Dr. Lisa: Why do you think that you had given so much away over the course of your life?
Elizabeth: A little bit of oblige that I just felt that it was easy for me to give these things to people and because they’re not tangible. It’s not like …
Dr. Lisa: The writing and the public speaking.
Elizabeth: Yes. It’s not like I’m giving you … writing a will for you. I’m not massaging your broken foot or something. It’s like I’m talking to you about writing. So many people do that casually. I don’t even think people who ask for help think of it as a professional service. I think it’s like let’s sit down and talk about my writing because you’re a writer. I think that it’s fun because it’s fun for them and don’t necessarily consider it.
Dr. Lisa: Wait a minute, who are you having out? Because a lot of people I don’t know that don’t consider writing all that fun.
Elizabeth: Right. Vocational writers.
Dr. Lisa: So then you decided that you did have some value …
Elizabeth: Yes. I never really did not …
Dr. Lisa: Or have some value that maybe you should charge people for.
Elizabeth: Exactly. I’m of that … you don’t want to talk about it. It’s always like oh I’d love to do your project and at the very end it’s like oh you don’t have a budget for it. I just went that ascetic route to want in to come in and do this long memoir workshop and then at the very end it’s like so your budget is oh nothing.
Dr. Lisa: Yes, that’s a little discouraging.
Elizabeth: It was a little discouraging. That that should be the question upfront. I mean I charge for my work. Do you think you can afford me? Not give the whole thing and say oh by the way …
Dr. Lisa: This is actually a really important lesson for anyone who’s listening to the show is that setting the expectations ahead of time is important and knowing your own value and asking for something back. This is an ongoing issue.
Elizabeth: Yes and that’s always been the worst and the hardest thing. Especially as a freelancer, the trick is not necessarily doing the work. It’s how to charge for it and it’s a very secret society and it’s very typical to find out who charges what and who gets paid what and I don’t know if I’m like at the top of the heat or people are saying “tee hee” when I give somebody an estimate.
Dr. Lisa: It’s much easier to have somebody fix your furnace and then you can call around and find out how much is going to be to get your furnace fixed. Instead you’re trying to write and this was part of your new beginning was deciding okay, I’m worth this much, I’m going to put this on my website and I’m going to begin again.
Elizabeth: Exactly because at a certain point in your life, you feel like I have spent 30 years training to do this and it is a valuable skill and people don’t … again, I don’t go into my accountant’s and say oh you like numbers, thanks for doing my taxes. Bye.
Dr. Lisa: You know as a doctor, I do understand this. Or somebody wants to talk to me about their transition so you know that I get this and I actually Gen Morgan sitting next to me from Maine Magazine. She does the same. She’s also a writer and she does the same sort of …
Is that not true Gen?
Genevieve: It’s true and actually Liz, I wanted to go back to one thing that you said that I’ve thought was so interesting. You said that you gave yourself 6 months to get your feet under you and I don’t think that people understand that there is that fallow period when you’re starting something new and that I think people decide that they want to have that change in their life and then I think the change should happen. So I’m interested in that fallow period.
Dr. Lisa: Well I always tell my students, my writing students of any age even my public speaking students that all of these process are muscles and you don’t decide I’m going to start running today and do your marathon and you don’t start playing the guitar and go to Merrill Auditorium the next day. Once you even a follow period, you need to start slowly and build those small muscles back up again so that you have some stamina and can go some distance and sitting down specially something like writing which is so solo and so focused and it’s so easy to be neither of those things that you have to retrain yourself and rethink those processes and get your head back into that situation and I was fortunate, I kind of just stumbled around for a number of months trying to figure out working little pieces here on the website. Little pieces there on the manuscript for the show. Working on manuscript for my book that is coming out with my friend Marguerite.
But it was all going in different directions because I was also teaching and running a household. It’s so easy to be distracted when you’re self-employed. But I was given the greatest gift a writer or anyone I guess can be given a friend in Bethel had a condominium. It was her mother’s condominium which was vacant and she gave it to me for 2 weeks so I was isolated, unplugged, no internet, no radio, no phone, no friends, no husbands, no nothing and I got up in the morning, I walked for an hour. I came home. I wrote for an hour. I ate breakfast. I wrote for 3 hours. I had lunch. I wrote for 3 hours and in the afternoon, did chores, wrote again. Read in the evening and all of a sudden, those muscles that I have been working at up till that point all came back into harmony. They all became one big muscle.
Now as I sit down to work, I never have my email. When the email is off, I never let myself Google anything. I unplugged the phone. Even if it’s for an hour at a time but it is that discipline that I was able to establish in that quiet and not everybody I mean I’m 52. I mean it’s the first time that I’ve actually done anything like this. I’ve been a professional writer all my life. Not everybody has luxury to take that time and have that quiet but that’s where I got my momentum going again.
Dr. Lisa: So you were hitting the reset button essentially?
Elizabeth: Well I was pounding the reset button. If it were as easy as a press, I think everybody would do it. It really is like …
Dr. Lisa: It had to be sort of thrust upon you?
Elizabeth: Yes. You get your head up against the wall. I mean I have so many pages that I just threw away. I mean writing is about editing and finding your voice. I mean when I used to write my column, I used to say it’s like pulling down a big roll of paper towels is that I would have to write 2 or 3 paragraphs before I figured out what I was saying. So those had to go and then I was able to get what I was doing and I think in this big picture stuff, I did a lot of stuff from my website that I’ll never use. I did a lot of stuff for the book with Marguerite that’s gone for this show, long gone and this show is actually coming out of a book so I have it in my oh I can use that in a book maybe because I hate to throw anything away. I’m a very big recycler.
Dr. Lisa: I mean you’ve got this Maine background, right? We were very frugal here in Maine.
Elizabeth: We are. That’s right. Exactly.
Dr. Lisa: We don’t like to throw things out, and sometimes the letting go of things is the most important part as you’ve said.
Elizabeth: That’s … now, I mean coming back to the show and the things …
Dr. Lisa: Yes which is about letting go I believe.
Elizabeth: It is so much about letting go and the irony is that when Mom was living, when she down-sized from her big farmhouse into the condominium, my brothers and I were just ruthless with her things. I mean of course they were the nice things. The jewelry and some of the furniture’s but the tea cups and the milk glass and the silk flowers and oh you’re going to get that. You’re going to get that. It’s like all of these stuff is so awful because you don’t need the thing when the person’s there. That doesn’t have any value and then the minute she was gone, they become almost fetishes that it’s like I’m pouring this emotion of losing my mother into this ridiculous bent can opener or this pie tin that she used to keep her thumbtacks in.
Dr. Lisa: I remember we did a workshop together and you read a piece about your mother’s fingernails.
Elizabeth: Yes.
Dr. Lisa: It was very early on.
Elizabeth: That’s exactly. This is from that.
Dr. Lisa: Okay wait, you didn’t keep your mother’s fingernails, did you?
Elizabeth: No.
Dr. Lisa: That would be very strange. I’m sorry.
Elizabeth: Finger nail polish.
Dr. Lisa: So it is about the small things that we keep. Not necessarily body parts.
Elizabeth: No gosh. Oh.
Dr. Lisa: I’m sorry. In the play though, you did talk about … I think you were telling me off-air that you were looking at various pieces, you were sorting through them and deciding what it is that I keep, what it is that I give away and that whole process is just it’s psychological, emotional, intellectual at so many things.
Elizabeth: Well it is and again as I said, the things that actually have monetary value I mean those were not I mean they’ve already sort of been absorbed into our lives. It’s the weird stuff that basically has absorbed the memory that there’s that knitting bag and she hasn’t picked up a knitting needle. She hadn’t picked up a knitting needle for 20 years but it was always in the den closet beside the sewing machine and it had a smell that smelled of the den closet and it’s nothing I’ll ever use. It’s nothing that I’ll ever take out of my house and yet to put that in the garbage or you know to a box to goodwill, it’s like you’re saying I reject you and that’s where the trick comes in is to say my mother’s clothes is not my mother. My mother’s things are not my childhood.
So when I get rid of the object, I’m not getting rid of the memory. I’m not getting rid of the person. I’m just getting rid of a thing. I think the best analogy, I was actually thinking about this recently. My mother played piano. She took classical piano and she was a young girl and could always get her to play piano and she got older and she had a little bit of arthritis in her fingers but the fingernails my mother like to drink gelatine and especially in the 70’s. She had these talons. So she’d say oh I’d love to play but she hold up her daggers as I like to call them and she wouldn’t be able to play. So we had these pianos upright sitting in the house for 25 years that went for silent and then out of tune hopelessly and then what is a piano then when it goes quite?
Dr. Lisa: It’s a piece of furniture.
Elizabeth: Or just a wooden strings and nothing. It’s nothing because it doesn’t do anything. It’s a piece of furniture. You can’t sit on it. It becomes nothing and a lot of the bleep I need to make is that knitting bag is just a thing and all of the light is gone.
Dr. Lisa: It’s like an unused piano.
Elizabeth: Exactly.
Dr. Lisa: But it’s hard because these things they do then to become almost sacred. They are almost sort of icons and if you get rid of them then it’s as if you’re discarding your religion in some ways.
Elizabeth: And it’s that though the finality because death is so final. Holding on to something, you can always say well I can always get rid of it. But I can never get it back. I mean I’m the type of person that is actually gotten up at dawn to go out to the curb to retrieve a bag of New Yorkers. It’s like there might be one article in there I didn’t read. I can throw those away later.
Genevieve: There would be a time when I have to get that. I want to clip that cartoon and sent it to a friend.
Dr. Lisa: So with all these the follow period, the new beginning, the website, the book that you’ve just written and completed, the play that you’re doing, tell me what things looked like for you and your next beginning because really it’s a series of beginning that it sounds like you’re going through.
Elizabeth: It is. One of my favourite words is recrudescent and I just sort of feel like I had been a husk little seed and I had to. I mean I had to be quiet and I had to mourn. Everybody does it differently and there were so much involved in mourning my mother as I said the end was sort of difficult and ambiguous. Did we make the right choices? Did we not intervene soon enough? Did we take too much freedom away? So I had to process as we say all of that and think about that. We were exhausted. I mean the last 6 months of her life required everyday care even though she was in facilities, I got to be proactive and be there and one of us was there all the time. We were exhausted. I mean just sheer exhaustion of grieve and then really letting go and healing and mourning and the difference between mourning and grieving and I gave myself the luxury to do that and I again was fortunate enough that I have a husband with a real job as opposed to a freelance-writer job.
There was some money in the estate. it wasn’t the first time Mom supported my writing career and I just gave myself the year and I said for the rest of my life, if I don’t do this now and I know that the grieving process doesn’t end when you say boop, okay a year is over. I mean but it more so is different and it grows more tender and it’s less jagged and so when I’m sad about my Mom now, it’s actually sweeter. It’s not oh I did the wrong thing. I wish I could you know, I’m going to go back and interview that nurse. Was she giving her her pills? I don’t trust her.
And now it’s gone. But with that, my age, being 52 is an odd time especially for a writer because everybody wants new and fresh but I feel as though I have always created a place for myself in the world I never had a job per se. I never was given oh, you’re going to be perfect for this. I always went out and found a place for myself and because I didn’t make a place for myself, I kind of forgot that and so when there was nothing there, I said okay, the only way to start is to start.
Dr. Lisa: Then you began making a place for yourself again.
Elizabeth: Again and with the show, I mean the response to show has just been overwhelming. I mean the first one sold out well thanks to Bill Nemitz, he wrote a very nice column in the Sunday Telegram and that certainly spread the word but it’s the response, everybody of my age group and not necessarily that has a story to tell or an armful of clothes in the back of their closet or weird friend of mine in the West Coast heard about this. I didn’t keep anything for my mother’s stuff except a purple velvet cord around her neck that she used to keep her keys on. So we all kind of taken pick what we want.
So my goal is to take this on the road. Probably small venues in New England first but if I get this up on its feet enough, then I love performing. I have a background at theatre so why not? I still can’t believe I’m doing this so why not that?
Dr. Lisa: Why can’t you believe you’re doing this?
Elizabeth: It’s … there’s going to be a 125 people staring at me tomorrow.
Dr. Lisa: Okay but if you’re a writer, you have potentially a lot more people staring at you just in a different way.
Elizabeth: Yes. If I forget what I’m writing, I can hit delete, delete, delete. When I’m standing in front of an audience.
Dr. Lisa: So this takes some bravery?
Elizabeth: Yes and as brave as I have ever been in my entire life to do this and I can’t believe that I’m doing it and I’m so glad that I am.
Genevieve: What a wonderful way to translate your grief.
Elizabeth: Indeed. I think it’s to share, because as I said I was so thorough in my grieving and my mourning that this is written for everybody. This is not my story. This is our story of how we part with those we love and the things that are left behind.
Dr. Lisa: Well it is great. So we’ve been very privileged to talk to you today. Liz, Elizabeth, Peavey. I still haven’t come up with a new name, a new Dr. Lisa name for you but how about Inspirational Liz? Is that a little bit too much for you?
Elizabeth: Oh.
Dr. Lisa: But it’s been great to have you. We really appreciate your coming in this very very first infant episode of Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and it’s perfect. Absolutely perfect for us.
Elizabeth: Well I had a wonderful time I love talking to both of you. So thanks.
Genevieve: Good luck Liz.
Elizabeth: Thanks.
Dr. Lisa: This morning is a very exciting morning for us because we are beginning our Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and in the studio, we have a group of very talented individuals including Jen Morgan who’s the wellness editor for Maine Magazine and also a Chris Kast who works with Brand Co. and Maine Magazine … Maine Home Design. Has many many talents of his own and John McCain who you’re not going to hear from but believe me he’s providing genius in the background. This segment in the future is going to be more about food and nourishment and the things that we do to nourish ourselves physically, spiritually, emotionally but we’re starting with how we’re nourishing ourselves as a Dr. Lisa Radio Hour Group and I have apples in my hands. Apples that I bought at the Whole Food Market down here in Portland and they are one of our sponsors.
So we will talk about food as a physical sustenance but we’re going to talk about other types of sustenance such as spiritual and emotional sustenance and Chris and I and Jen in spirit because he wasn’t physically present but Chris Kast and I, we were at the Thetics Conference over the weekend and talk about sustenance, what do you have to say about that Chris?
Chris: Wow. That’s a big and heavy topic. It was interesting that TedEx Dirigo, that is this past weekend was mind blowing. Mind blowing in that it nourished the right side of my brain in ways I never thought could be nourished right here in Portland. The ideas and the discourse and the thoughts of what we can do here in Maine from harnessing wind power that really theoretically and practically power the nation to the healing power of just simple touch.
Dr. Lisa: There was a nurse that came in and talked about work that you had done internationally.
Chris: And how important that was and that how we forget as human beings that really one of the best ways we can nourish ourselves and other people is just a simple touch. A gesture of healing. That was pretty powerful and even the figures of speech theatre and how they used theatre to bring nourishment of your own life to inanimate objects. The puppets that they had there. They became alive. They came to life with their touch. So it’s still now just a week later is resonating loudly in my head and there’s always themes and it just inspired me and energized me really. It was soulful energy, it was intellectual energy but it was just optimistic energy of the possibilities that we have in Maine. It was pretty great.
Dr. Lisa: Then we were talking about this and Jen is also been part of this conversation. When we were talking about the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour, we’re talking about wellness in a much broader sense. We’re talking about again, physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual. Jen writes a column for Maine Magazine and profiled me I believe in April.
Genevieve: For the inaugural wellness issue.
Dr. Lisa: Exactly.
Genevieve: Every April will be wellness edition.
Dr. Lisa: Oh very nice, so you actually … Maine Magazine is all about wellness and in fact you’re going to have an entire issue that is all about wellness which I love and you are an ongoing basis talking about how to nourish and how to nourish with locally grown people, places, foods, so the apples that I hold in my hand, we have a gala and we have a honey crisp and they’re both from the Ricker Orchards in Auburn bought at the Whole Foods Market. In this last issue of Maine Magazine, you talk with Alexander Petrov who works with TedEx Dirigo to bring this great idea into the state also we’re soon going to be talking with Dr. Richard Maurer who is a naturopath and he deals with food and nutrition and that is …
Genevieve: That will be next week’s broadcast.
Dr. Lisa: But you interviewed Dr. Maurer for the September issue of …
Genevieve: Well really what I did was… all summer long when I was up on Mount Desert Island, people would stop me in the grocery store and ask me what to eat. They knew that I was the wellness editor at Maine Magazine and they thought that if anybody should know, I should know what they should be happening for dinner. And I thought I don’t even know what I should be having for dinner. So I mulled that over for a little bit and I decided to ask my friend Richard Maurer who’s naturopath in Falmouth. What should I have for dinner? And the article is about his answer which you can read about and we’ll talk about on the next Dr. Lisa Radio Hour.
Dr. Lisa: I think the interesting thing for me as a physician in my own practice is that it is all very individual and what feeds us physically is individual as is what feeds us emotionally and intellectually. But what we need to start doing is looking at sustenance as exceedingly personal, and making friends of our food is something that most of us aren’t doing. In fact they have the apples in my hand and Chris who’s from New York said that “you mean apples grows on trees?”
Chris: Yes, when I was a kid apples came from the Key Food or the AMP. Being in an urban area, you never connect the fact that oh this stuff that I’m buying in grocery store actually grew in a natural environment and now with corporate farming and one of things at the TedEx thing, we were talking about how we’re being impacted by corporate farming and really we should pay more attention to buying local organic farms and it’s the garbage in, garbage out mentality.
Genevieve: And Dr. Maurer will say that believes that we actually do know how to eat. We just have to look 2 generations before us and eat more like our grandparents did. Before apples came in in trays wrapped in cellophane.
Chris: Exactly and it’s the thing about advertising. We are victims of advertising in certain relationship because food is advertising when it comes in you have it your way and the right way’s not necessarily that way.
Dr. Lisa: And I think that that’s … when you talk about making friends with your food and eating locally, it’s also about choosing the food you actually recognize. So I have an apple in my hand. We can tell that an apple looks like an apple or I talk to my patients about eating whole grains because whole grains look like whole grains. That’s not like whole grain bread that’s been processed to the point where you can’t actually recognize it. so you make friends with your food, you choose food as you would your friends from things you recognize because you really wouldn’t make friends with people that you can’t recognize and you wouldn’t also … you want to know where it’s from and you also want to know how it makes you feel short and long term.
You wouldn’t be friends with somebody short term if they made you feel sick or maybe you would but that’s a different show. We’ll talk about that later. But long term, we all have to be thinking about how the food makes us feel. And also when we are with our friends, I feel like I’m getting into a little bit of Mr. Rogers here but when we’re with our friends, I’m not wearing a sweater. But next week I’ll bring one and then I’ll really go there but when we’re with our friends, our food that we want to eat mindfully and joyfully and enjoy our food the way that we would our friends.
So I know it sounds a little bit silly but really it’s very similar. I mean if you are putting things into your body that you don’t recognize or that you’re not feeling friendly with, then it’s the same with hanging out with people around you that are not part of your “tribe”.
Genevieve: Well I think you and I were talking about it a week or so ago about food that’s packaged food that’s already pre-digested food for us that our body doesn’t have to.
Dr. Lisa: That sound delicious. That’s true and I talk with my patients a lot about this and in fact I teach a dragon’s way class. It’s called Dragon’s Way and it’s Qigong-based. Qigong is a movement-based … it’s similar to martial arts but it moves your chi or your energy and nowhere in the Dragon’s Way eating program is processed food because your body, it’s kind of like eating baby food. If you’re eating anything that’s processed, it’s like some big mother machine is whished it all up for you and you put it in your mouth and that’s like being a baby again.
So we should be actually have to work a little bit for our food. We should actually have to eat an apple which takes a little bit of effort because otherwise our bodies are going to do what baby bodies do and kind of …
Chris: I’m not ready to go to Depends.
Dr. Lisa: I wasn’t going to go there but thank you Chris for that. Lightening the mood. I’m appreciative of that little piece of wisdom. So and it’s also … the interesting thing I talked recently with people who talking about feeding ourselves and again feeding ourselves emotionally, physically, spiritually, I mean it’s about treating ourselves with kindness and compassion. I think that one of the things that happens with a lot of my patients and people that I know is that we beat up on ourselves a lot. We spend a lot of time talking about what we don’t do. How we don’t go running and we don’t go biking and I recently had a patient who came in and said “May I have your permission not to go to every yoga class that there is. Every running group there is. Every biking night there is?” I said yes, you have my permission because sometimes it’s a little bit too much. It’s overfeeding.
So I don’t know. Thoughts on this Jen and Chris?
Genevieve: I think she’s talking about me.
Dr. Lisa: It could be anyone.
Genevieve: No I’m only saying that because I can relate to that. Sometimes even the best activities can be exhausting if you overdo them or you overexert yourself and just in the way you’re talking about how you have to make friends with food. You have to make friends with your own body and treat your body as a friend and not something just to whip and lash at the gym.
Chris: That’s a really big thing. Making friends with food and getting to know food full disclosure. It was a Dr. Lisa blog. It was earlier this fall and it was about garlic scapes.
Dr. Lisa: Oh yes. I remember this.
Chris: And you had garlic scapes. Those things look great and I had never seen one and I cook a fair but it was okay, so I followed your advice, I went to the farmer’s market and I asked the farmer about them he said you can do this. I got home and looked at them trying to make friends with them and I had a momentary lapse and total panic. So I called Dr. Lisa. So, about these scapes and just that ritual and that process helped me almost enjoy it more and introduced them to the family. And they’re like what is that alien-looking being? Well it’s a garlic scape and this is what we’re going to do with it and people got involved. We talked about it and we talked about where it came from and it was really this great thing so I introduced one small child who basically the food can’t touch and very specific eater to something new and enjoyable.
So that was really … that’s what it’s all about. Discovering and nourishing and that’s part of it.
Dr. Lisa: And it’s appropriate because garlic scapes are actually the shoots from the garlic bulbs so they are the new beginnings. It’s been great to have you both here today. You are part of this new beginning of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour. We honestly couldn’t do this without you. Without Jen Morgan and Chris Kast and I couldn’t do this without John and Kevin Thomas for Maine Magazine and we’re still excited to have everybody here. So thank you very much for coming in today and talking with us.
Genevieve: Thank you Lisa.
Dr. Lisa: That’s really great.
Genevieve: Great.
Dr. Lisa: Yes. I feel truly blessed to be amongst such a creative group of individuals and I know that we’re going to send this message out into the world and people are going to listen and join our community and become part of our tribe and all good works will be done. I’m so happy to be joined today by Maine Magazine wellness editor Genevieve Morgan. First segment we called them Maine Magazine Minutes.
Genevieve: Hi Lisa.
Dr. Lisa: Hi Jen. How are you?
Genevieve: I’m fine thanks. Thanks for having me on today. I am thrilled to be here today because I’m talking with Eva Goetz who is the owner of PatchaWorks in Plymouth, Maine and a wonderful healer in our state as well as a shaman and my column in the October issue of Maine Magazine is all about energy medicine. Energy medicine has probably been one of the lesser known and lesser understood modalities of alternative and complementary medicine but Eva’s here to tell us a little bit more about it. What she does and how it works. Welcome.
Eva: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me and thank you Dr. Lisa. Thank you Genevieve. It’s a pleasure to be here. So how can I help?
Genevieve: Well I think we’re all wondering when somebody talks about energy, it’s a very loose term and I know that when I talk about energy medicine, I get a lot of rolling eyeballs and cuckoo signs around people’s foreheads and I’m wondering if you can tell our listeners what do you do and how does it work?
Eva: That’s a great question. Wonderful question. Everybody I work with differently but I want to go back to the question you’re asking about energy and energy medicine first. Let’s kind of give a little bit more maybe understanding about that and credibility.
Genevieve: That’d be great.
Eva: Okay. Many people in our culture understand acupuncture now, right?
Dr. Lisa: Yes.
Genevieve: I do. As Dr. Lisa, I do acupuncture in my practice. I’m firm believer.
Eva: So when you’re working with those points, they’re note exactly physical points. There is much energetic points. Is that correct?
Genevieve: Yes. That’s right.
Eva: That’s right. So when somebody is blocked in a certain meridian, what you’re going after with those needles is to clear those points, correct? And those are different points. They can be linked to the kidney or to the heart or different ways of flow. The energy paths I’m working with are the chakras. The chakras are larger, the little points that Dr. Lisa is working with are actually chakras. They’re just smaller chakras but we have 7 main chakras. We have one that’s linked right around the meridian called the first chakra to our grounding. Second chakra is right around I’d say 2 or 3 fingers below the navel and it’s your creative center. It’s the second chakra and we’re going really … I’m just giving very very … a sketch here.
The third chakra is solar plexus and I call it your personal sun. How are you shining in the world and the fourth chakra is the heart chakra. How are you loving in the world? What is right loving? Unconditional loving? And the fifth chakra is your throat chakra. And the sixth chakra is the third eye. The seat of a different kind of seeing. Your intuition and everybody right now is really working on giving permission of strengthening intuition because that’s so important than healing. Right Dr. Lisa and Genevieve? You all know that and the seventh chakra and we’re just going to go through the seven is the crown chakra. It’s the way that you’re able to access spirit into your whole body.
Okay so that being said, if we start up to the chakras, the first three chakras are around the physical matter. The heart is what bridges matter to spirit. So I’m going to leave it there and it gets a lot more complicated but what we’re doing as energy healers is were actually cleaning the pathways and clearing the pathways to your original self. Not the self that’s been conditioned by society, not the self that’s been conditioned parentally or through the generations but what are those seeds? Those beautiful seeds that you yourself are carrying that are just ready to shine and bloom in the world. So that’s what we’re doing.
Genevieve: Well that’s fascinating because as you know we’re talking about new beginnings today on our first show, on our first Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and we’re all here starting something new. So how can people use energy work to shift their perspective and start something new?
Eva: Well one of the main locators of energy is the Earth. So one of the things that you can do, this is so simple as if you get up in the morning and let’s say it’s a beautiful morning and you can, if you can get your feet on the earth and just breath that energy from the earth all the way up through your ankles up through your knees, up through your thighs all the way up through your hips, all the way up through the whole skeletal system through the crown of your head, you’re already intentionalizing a clearing because that’s our connection. Our original connection. That’s something so simple. Our breathing. Getting up in the morning and just sitting quietly and breathing. Taking five, good, beautiful conscious breaths is already a way of clearing the system.
You don’t have to sit and meditate for 20 minutes although that’s a whole different kind of mediation but simply taking the moment to consciously clear is a way of starting the day and also strengthening your energy system. You have that daily just with breath. Minute you inhale and exhale it’s all about energy.
Genevieve: So tell us about PachaWorks and what you’re doing.
Eva: I’d say around good ten years ago PachaWorks has been now working and established and so I work privately with clients to come in and I work with emotional needs, physical needs, spiritual needs, working across the board. And I also have been running groups and I also have done some trainings in shamanism and so …
Genevieve: Tell me a little bit more about shamanism because I think that’s another one of those words that immediately people have pre-conceived notions about.
Eva: Well basically, shamanism is about being in connection. Connection with the planet, connection with your environment. It’s a classically … it was the one who could travel between worlds to access information that would be valuable to you in this world. I think the modern shamanic practitioner is so varied right now. Yes there are those with gifts who can travel between worlds and using the journey techniques so precisely to bring back exactly what’s needed in order for your puzzle to fit back into place so you have a more grounded, more whole way of looking at life. That does happen. A lot of us are doing a lot of hands-on work now too.
Genevieve: When you say travel between worlds, just what … for our listeners out there because that’s I think people will say really far out or inaccessible to them.
Eva: Exactly. Well I like to bring it back down a little. Can we ground it a little bit? Let’s ground it and I know other shamanic practitioners out there are going to shoot me but let’s ground it. I feel that one of … we talked about the lower world and I like to think of the lower world as how are your feet on the ground?
Genevieve: That makes sense.
Eva: How are you accessing your past? So we can travel down into that world. You can do it therapeutically for years in therapy, right? You can do it acupuncturally if that’s a word. You can also do it shamanically through talking with somebody. So it’s really gifting the client with another story that will serve them better than the old story they’ve been living. So that’s the lower world. That’s the lower world. The middle world or the world of heart in classic shamanistic terms is this world. The earth world. I like to look at it as middle world as the world that we were talking before. It’s how do you bridge loving. So if you clear out the lower stuff, if you clear out the gook and the lower stuff and you bring that up, already how you love is very different, right? Yes, so how you can access information is different.
So how are you living in the world? What are the gifts you’re bringing into the world? What are the gifts you’re allowing to come in to you? I mean that’s huge. What do we allow in so we can give out differently? So that’s the middle world of bridging. The upper world is how are you accessing your intuition? How are you accessing your beliefs? How are accessing the spirit however you decide to lift spirit because that’s very important. There’s so many people walking around in spiritual devastation. They don’t have anything to hold on to. Faith or whatever. Faith can be simply in a tree but it doesn’t have to be as big as oh my religion or what have you which is really good too for people. It feeds them.
But I think if we’re fed on all levels, if we’re fed from relationship level which is your heart level from how you’re grounding and how you’re feeding yourself which is the bottom level or the lower world level and how you’re accessing spirit and feeding you on the intuitional level then you’ll be healthy. That’s health. So that’s a really grounded way of looking at it. In shamanism, it’s very grounded.
Genevieve: Now also you mentioned you were doing some healing through movement, tell me about that.
Eva: Yes. Well Trisha Marshall who’s been an amazing journey dance person was just now in a very beginnings of seeing how we can use journey dance more intentionally as a clearing tool for people. So we actually can take one problem that maybe somebody’s working with and actually have them dancing it all the way through. Now dance, classically through the ages and the traditions, many traditions and mainly in the shamanic traditions has been a way of bringing in energy and also releasing energy. So it would be a perfect way of just bringing things down. In a way that a lot of people could understand it.
Genevieve: And you’re doing that at the studio?
Eva: No. Right now, we’re just working on this right now.
Genevieve: Okay.
Eva: We’ll keep you informed about that.
Genevieve: And then tell me about 108 Angels.
Eva: 108 Angels, such a wonderful project. The other hat I wear is I’m an artist and I wanted to infuse my healing more consciously into my art. So I created these grids of angels that individually each one of them is just beautiful and alive that when they come together, they make something new and I’m really seeding with 108 Angels right now that “individually were terrific but when we come together especially around one problem, we can solve it” and I don’t think enough of that is being fed into the collective right now. We’re so involved in all the disparity and fighting each other rather than saying hey, let’s take one issue, that’s what 108 Angels is about. Let’s take it and recreate something bigger than ourselves.
108 Angels is to be used in hospitals hopefully. This is what we’re seeding as a way of not only bringing a beautiful piece of art but also a way of helping that institution bring in funds because each angel in the grid can be sold off like you would sell off a brick in the building.
Genevieve: Why 108?
Eva: Oh 108 is a very magic number. It’s the number of both creation and destruction and transformation. There you go.
Dr. Lisa: Perfect. I love that. Birth and death and rebirth.
Eva: And it’s also the number of the beads in a Mullah.
Dr. Lisa: Very nice.
Genevieve: Thank you Eva for coming in today. It was so interesting to talk with you and thanks so much for joining us. There are so many people doing extraordinary things in our state. Find out who and where they are every month in the latest edition of Maine Magazine and each week here on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour. Our most recent edition is available at your local newsstand or contact us for subscription at MaineMag.com.
Speaker 1: Support for the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is graciously provided by: Akari Salon, an urban sanctuary of beauty wellness and style located on Middle Street in Portland, Maine’s old port. Follow them on Facebook and learn about their new boutique and Medi-Spa at AkariBeauty.com.
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Dr. Lisa: Gibson Fay-Leblanc’s first collection of poems Death of a Ventriloquist was chosen by Lisa Russ Sparr for the 2011 Vassar Miller Prize and will be published in 2012. His poems have appeared in magazines including Guernica, The New Republic and Poetry Northwest. In 2011, he was named one of Maine’s emerging leaders by the Portland Press Herald and Maine Today Media for his work directing Telling Room where he still occasionally teaches writing. Gibson is the poetry editor of Maine Magazine and is work on a novel.
As we’ve been talking about that new beginnings, I know you’ve had a lot of new beginnings in your life. You’ve had a series of children and you’re constantly writing new things, you’re doing new things and being part of the telling room and other things. Tell me about your understanding of the power of intention. Setting intentions to setting call it setting goals but how do you work that into your life?
Gibson: That’s a great question. Over the summer, I stepped down as the Director of the Telling Room and part of that was one of the things we always tell kids at the Telling Room is you have to go where the story is. You have to go where the heat is where you feel the most passion and interest and for me I have this novel idea that have been kind of kicking around for years and I’ve been working on it here and there but I came to a point where I realized that I was never going to be able to sit down and finish it without some big block of time. I couldn’t tear myself away from the work that I love at the Telling Room if I was there every single day. So I had to sort of live up to my own advice that I give to kids which was to make a hard choice and pull back and work on this other creative project.
But again, in talking about intentions and goals there came a point where I realized that if I was going to ever reach this goal that I’ve had for a long time, I needed to do something different. Liz Gilbert is a great writer who we brought to town a few years ago and she has a great little story that she tells about saying no.
Dr. Lisa: She’s the Eat, Pray, Love author?
Gibson: Yes. Author of Eat, Pray, Love and many other great books and just also a wonderful person.
Genevieve: Great supporter of the Telling Room.
Gibson: And great supporter of the Telling Room and she talks about saying no and it’s really not easy and you expect that you finally get up the courage to say no to things that people will respond and just pat you on the back and say good for you.
Dr. Lisa: Well they do respond. They just don’t respond in a way that you like.
Gibson: Yes but they don’t … they sometimes are upset and it’s hard to choose the things that you’re going to do but you ought to do it.
Dr. Lisa: We really appreciate your coming in to talk to us today. It’s been great and I think it’s wonderful to know that people are out there doing what they can and using their own talents to further the talents and the opportunities of others in the world. We appreciate your giving back.
Gibson: Thank you. It’s my pleasure to be here.
Dr. Lisa: Each week we take a post from our bountiful blog and consider some of the bigger themes that we grapple with in our lives. Today’s post is:
Recently I met with a dear friend and long-time patient who has in the past year known a blessing of a great love. This patient and her love are a bit older than me. They each had prior marriages. They have each experienced the trials and tribulations inherent in being human. They have been party to illness and death, pain, heartache, they might have become easily bitter and wounded but such was not their fate. Such was not their choice. They each chose instead to live and love fully regardless of past hurts. Upon finding one another each fit well into the life of the other.
Well not simply. Each had had a prior life after all. Each had family and friends. Each had a background of complexities to meld with the complexity of the other’s background. Recently, there’s been a new illness with which to contend. An unforeseen wrinkle introduced into a relatively new relationship. Some might question the fairness of this. Bemoan the situation. Not my patient. Nor her love. Instead they are moving forward accepting the wrinkle, acknowledging that live will always and ever have its challenges that most relationships new and old bring with them complexities. An important message this, that ultimately it is up to us to decide only one thing.
Whether we are willing to love, whether we are willing to work for this love. Whether we are willing to risk the uncertainty involved. Whether we are willing to risk the possibility of loss. Whether we are willing to join with another despite the almost certain fragility of union. Whether we are willing to continue through participate, submit, be present. Whether we are willing and able to be blessed. Read more of our blog posts on www.bountiful-blog.com.
Dr. Lisa Thank you for joining us today on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour. Genevieve Morgan and I have appreciated spending time with you. This week we spent a lot of time talking about new beginnings and the transitions that we each face in our lives and I encourage each of you to spend a moment thinking about your life and the pattern of your life that continue to make sense for you as well as the patterns in your life that no longer make sense. Please spend some time on the DoctorLisa.org website examining the types of tools that we have available to help you in your transition and we hope you join us again next week.
This is Dr. Lisa wishing you a bountiful life.
Speaker 1: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is recorded in Downtown Portland at the offices of Maine Magazine on 75 Market Street. It is produced by Kevin Thomas and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Editorial content produced by Chris Kast and Genevieve Morgan. Audio production and original music by John C. McCain. For more information on our hosts, production team, Maine Magazine or any of the guests featured here today, visit us at DrLisa.org. Tune in every Sunday at 11 AM for the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour on WLOB Portland, Maine 1310 AM or streaming WLOBRadio.com. Podcasts are available at DoctorLisa.org.