Dad and Laurie's pup Rascal. We love him. Can one imagine a baby being cuter than this guy?!!
Today I met with Jaunita. She will be my doula. Whatta resource is a doula, and how lucky I am to have found HER. I went to a holistic mom's meeting and she sat next to me, a lovely Peruvian woman, who left LA to live in Marin, and came back to LA to be close to the family. Her first child was with a man from Germany. She was in her eighth month, and the visa papers had still not processed, so he came to be with her on a tourist visa. Lucky Europeans. All this and with a plastic bag over her shoulder that she crocheted.
Collecting the plastic bags that littered the roadsides and creating a co-op of women to crochet them was long one of my dreams (one of many) while I was in Matombo, TZ.
Well, considering I may soon be spending a lot of time there, hoping to make myself useful, it is a great time to learn now! So I am very much looking forward to spending more time with my new friend.
I also went to work today. What a wonderful job I have! It certainly is nice to really enjoy this work, and feel that my clients really appreciate me. My business is growing and I am convinced that I could develop a good clientele if I could continue like this. But so much of the future is unknown.
How can I nest?
The money I am making is good for survival, but it is also optimal in regards to WHO I am serving, or massaging, lets say.
I never made it happen in Sonoma County, feeling that my heart just wasn't into following what my hands loved to do. What I enjoy now is working therapeutically with people who otherwise wouldn't know about, or be able to afford massage.
Now I work on people who come in with pain and/or physical injuries that are usually directly caused or compounded by instability at home, financially, or psychologically. I feel that what I can reflect as a non-judgemental listener, who responds merely by sensitive (or elbow deep! But still SENSITIVE) touch is an under valued therapy in the medical world. Not to replace talk therapy, but even that isn't able to provide what massage offers, which helps to release old patterns of holding, memories and negative reactions that are stored on a cellular level. The caring touch of massage also releases the more pleasant neurochemicals that flood the body in a new way. All of this, and if the client is simply able to lay down in my relaxing environment for 20 minutes in the day, it is has a big impact.
So, all in all, three cheers for massage,
and as I cruise more of the web, registering for classes I will soon take, and job offers in Africa, and daydream about all the ways I COULD have done this better, DIFFERENT, CLOSER to Tino,
I will allow myself to turn it off for the night, cuddle up between all my millions of pillows for a little meditation, and then sleep, basking in a satisfying day, and that there is more to come tomorrow.
