Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Home-Camp and Sisterhood




August is a very special month for members of my beloved IGGPPC as it is the month of Iggle camp! 
For five days we “get together” and watch movies, tv shows, play games, go on scavenger hunts, bake and craft TOGETHER! But since this is a pen-pal event and we all live in different parts of the globe it's more of a virtual camp. Although this year we did have a lot of activities promoting getting out and moving around, form going out to catch pokemon to Yoga challenges on different locations around each of us.  I know it ’s a very strange concept and hard to grasp for "outsiders", but if you’re in, I swear it’s super fun! You can read all about it here.

What makes camp different from our day to day experiences in the community is that, instead of being separated into age groups and everyone doing monthly activities at their own time, we all try to do things live and interact as a group. We also get sorted into troops so you get to meet all sorts of new friends from every age-range. This year I was sorted into Troop Firebolt which is all about Harry Potter, so not a good match for me lol. I honestly don't know how troops are created or how campers get assigned to them, but despite my lack of enthusiasm for my troop's theme I had a great time with wonderful and magical friends. And fortunately there are a whole lot of activity options that don't involve Harry Potter :P

I've been told I'm a Hufflepuff so I went with it for my troop's ID


Camp crafts are always my favorite and below are some of the ones I created this year. I also learned to make friendship bracelets (not pictured.) Believe it or not I've never made them before! Now I'm excited to swap with some of my friends :D But I think my favorite craft this year and the one I can totally see a use for, for more than just fun, was stamp carving! It was awesome, and so much easier than when I tried it in middle school. This time it came out right!

I also got to escape the “camp grounds” (my place) and go chase the Hello Kitty Truck that finally made an appearance in MA. 
How cute is this?!

I was still participating in camp while out in line for the truck though, being out gave me a great opportunity to get a lot of items for my scavenger hunt and go practice yoga outdoors. 
Plus my outfit was a camp closet-challenge of being a character in red. Can you all guess who my character was?



This year, August became extra special, because apart from all the fun above described, after more than half a year since I found out of it's existence, I finally got to join a new community which is the OTSPSS which stands for On the Same Page Secret Sister. A project devoted to sending cheer to someone else and letting them know someone's thinking lovingly about them for six months. It’s meant to lift up spirits, create a sense of community and sisterhood and bring a monthly, dependable ray of sunshine to look forward to even if you're month happens to be lackluster otherwise! It’s such a beautiful project with a very encouraging and positive community and I’m so, so happy I finally made it in! 


It’s a super fun project really. Think secret Santa but throughout the year in 6 month-long sessions. Half the fun is trying to figure out who your sister is and of course in the process getting to know someone new and hopefully build a strong friendship with them. Each session you get two new people to interact personally with. The sister that showers you with love and the one to whom you are her sister and you get to shower with joy.

I sent out my first package over a week ago and I’m already almost done planning for September and this past weekend I received my very own package from my sister which is super exciting! I honestly don’t know which part is more fun. But either way August was a great month for letter writing, new friendships (even if they're distance ones) and late summer campy fun!

Can’t wait to see what the next season brings :D



Saturday, August 27, 2016

Is This a Test?

August has been crazy! Running around trying to squeeze as much summer fun before the season ends while creating, editing and submitting work to different and new art opportunities. Going to Manhattan to deal, for my very first time, with professional printers while producing more images still, trying to figure out school stuff and all while being very sleep deprived!























If you remember back in March my apartment was flooded, which I know is something I manifested and there was a lesson there to be had ( if you missed it you can catch up here.) What I didn’t get into was how absolutely awful my building’s new management is. They did the bare minimum back then to help and things have just gotten worst over these months. 
I don’t want to be putting more negativity out there so let’s just say they have made living in the building less than desirable... 
I looked into moving earlier this summer but things didn’t line-up and the message from the Universe seemed to be clear: Stay put for another year. To be honest though, signing the new lease felt wrong! But what could I do if no other options fell into place and obstacles to move kept popping up? At leas my little unit has always seemed like a safe heaven to me and I love it or I did until this month. The entire month, under feeble excuses like changing light fixtures that did not need changing, these people kept coming into my place, getting everything dirty, leaving my door unlocked for who knows how long while I was out of town and breaking parts of my closet that fell on me as I walked in to check on things! 
To top it all off they were banging, drilling and knocking on my door at ridiculous hours, that as tenants we could be sued for noise disturbances at those hours, which resulted in my before mentioned sleep deprivation.I tried talking to them but it didn't seem to be of much use, they clearly have no regards for alternate life schedules. It got so bad, all I could do was cry at some point and I thought I was really going to go crazy! 


Why would the Universe make me stay under such terrible conditions? I was even starting to pack despite still having about 10 more months on the lease and then it clicked! The lesson!! There is ALWAYS a lesson to these things and I needed to find it in order for them to go away. 

Last month at my intuition workshop our teacher was telling us a story of how she would butt heads at her former job with a really aggravating guy. It was getting insufferable, until one day it dawned on her that it was a reflection of her, when she accepted this and let go of the issues he brought up in her, gave them up for healing, the annoying guy "magically"  got moved to another area where she never had to see him again! My answer lied within this story.

So for the past week I’ve been trying to switch my perspective (granted I needed a little sleep before I could be more zen about things haha.) I’m not 100% positive on what my lesson is yet, but I greatly suspect is one about adaptability and more than anything flexibility. 
I’m working on figuring things out but my first order of business was, still is, to send Love and Light to these people. It’s so hard when people are disrespectful, rude, insensitive, etc. not to get mad and instead send them as much Love as possible, believe me I know! But getting caught up in negative emotions just gets us trapped in vicious cycles, some of these cycles even make you believe your apartment sucks and you're gonna end up in a psychiatric wing somewhere; While when we send Love and focus on learning something, we heal ourselves and change others for the better eventually. 

So Love and Light to the entire new management and maintenance team in my building while I figure out what else are they here to teach. Maybe that’s all there is to it,  a “practice test” to put into use everything I’ve been learning this year. What do you think?

Image from Elizabeth Harper's Sealed with Love



Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Trust

Hello everyone! Sorry I didn’t get to post sooner! July was incredibly busy and amazing!! Beyond any predictions I could have had and was so packed with different adventures, that I'm sure when I look back at it in years, it’ll probably make the list of one of the best summer months ever! But it wasn’t without its challenges, and the one lesson that kept up coming was TRUST. Which was very insightful since I thought my only predominantly recurrent lesson was patience haha.



Here's how the lesson presented itself in different forms through out my main adventures:

I started the month still at DisneyWorld with one of the most important members of my soul-family having a blast. But throughout our week of fun we had some communication issues and a recurrent theme of lack of trust, especially me towards him. We talked some issues through where he did mention I never trust him but we brushed most things under the rug so as to focus only on the fun. But as the time came to say goodbye I couldn’t help that familiar fear of the unknown from creeping into my heart. When were we gonna see each other again? Would he keep his word of not disappearing? What if the distance became too much to bare? Etc... These questions have always been there haunting me for years, but it wasn’t until this month that it clicked how much it is connected to trust issues! I need to learn to trust that it will all work out and that he will keep his word. Ghaa!! So hard! LOL






















The second week of July I had to leave for a class field- trip to CT for a Native American museum. This is only about 2-3 hrs from my place and was supposed to be a one day thing. But the meeting point for my class was super far from me and I would have had to wake up dangerously (for me) early, so my mom decided to get us a room in the area and turn my class into a 2.5 days mini-adventure. Never being one to pass a trip of any kind I jumped on board knowing it was mostly about class and not driving without sleep. I'm still forever grateful and I'm SO lucky! Because as it turned out the class ended up being a bust :-/ The teacher was over an hour late! The whole group was already there but we couldn’t get in without our teacher since he had the tickets and group reservation. I then ended starving because as I was going to get a snack while we waited, our teacher showed up and decided to rush us so we could make it to an awesome-sounding seminar, but he got side-tracked, talked about things we had already covered in class and we missed the seminar and the local Tribe Chief cancelled on the rest of our activities because she was sick. At the end our trip only consisted of waiting outside the building and then wandering through certain areas of the museum :/ I was so upset at first and forgot again to TRUST the Universe to have my back. Thanks to this failed class trip, I got a super fun weekend away with my mom and because the class was a bust we were done earlier so I had more time to go out and take pictures which is my main art medium so yay! It was all for a reason, sometimes I still forget…



A week after that I went to a week-long retreat in upstate NY for intensive classes on Intuition and healing. And what’s the key source to develop those intuitive gifts? Thats right trust!! Every time during class I dismissed something or thought I had made it up and doubted my abilities I got things wrong (usually the thing I dismissed was the right answer,) but when I just went with it and removed the fear of looking stupid, I did excellent! That’s when I started to hear the Universe’s shouts for me to just trust, trust, trust! 
To make the lesson even clearer for me I got a chance to learn how to fly in a trapeze, and let me tell you it was the most absolutely horrifying thing I’ve ever done voluntarily! But I HAD to do it to get those pictures of a new experience hehe. Even though while I was up high leaning over the edge I truly regretted it. The whole thing was a giant trust-exercise. You have to trust that the people holding on to the ropes of the harness are not gonna let go, you have to trust your body will have the strength and balance to climb a 30ft high, rickety ladder; once you’re up you have to lean your entire weight out of the platform and trust the person behind you pushing your hips further forward really has you and can hold your weight, then you have to grab the bar and jump off into thin air, and to get down you simply let go of the bar trusting everything will be ok!! It’s super scary and like a girl there said on her first try “It just doesn’t seem natural to just let go and jump at the nothingness beneath you.” And it so doesn’t! But if that doesn’t show you to trust I don’t know what will. 
Apparently I only listen to what the Universe is trying to teach me through travel and crazy experiences :P But hey! How awesome is it that less than two years ago the doctors said I did not have more than two days to live and now I’m swinging on a trapeze?!



I’m still struggling with this lesson, I’ve heard it and I’m processing but bad habits are hard to break lol. When it hits me that my true, close, local friends are down to one it’s hard to trust more are on the way since I’m such an introvert, it’s hard to trust my body is working for me and will release all the chemo weight on bad days when I can’t find anything to wear, it’s hard to trust things will work out with a certain someone when he just goes MIA for weeks at a time! It’s hard to trust the Universe’s plans when I get a red light for submitting my art to certain things I’m excited about and pushed to finish projects that are overwhelming and yet I can feel that if I just let go and trust things will just fall not place, I wonder why it’s so hard?
And what could've triggered this lack of trust, maybe it's always been there hidden from the conscious mind and it's now being brought to the Light to be healed... I guess it's time for me to keep practicing jumping off the trapeze platform, how about you? <3


Image from Elizabeth Harper's Sealedwithlove.com