November in Colorado

Here are some photos from the lovely Colorado trip I took with my parents in November.

And, of course, you must know it was far more incredible in person.

My Little Reiki Bastard

My latest piece published on the Reiki Animal Source web newsletter. Check it out!

I call my cream-colored stray cat, Oliver, my Little Bastard. As soon as I’m about to drift off to sleep at night, without fail, he wakes me up. On purpose. He walks across my printer, turning it on and off and on again, creating little mechanical cartridge noises. If I stay in bed, he goes next to the charger cord on my cell phone, chewing it and knocking it to the floor. If that doesn’t work, he finds my to-do list, or a magazine I left out, or a piece of important mail, and systematically shreds pieces from it until I jump out of bed and chase him from my room. He seems to get some sick pleasure out of waking me out of sleep at night. Reiki has cured none of this.

Aside from perpetually figuring out a way to slip by and escape outdoors when I leave the house (particularly on days I’m in a rush) my Little Bastard has no major ailments. His back leg used to creak on occasion when he walked. He takes a lot of heat in his hips when I give him Reiki, but now the creaking is gone.

I was Reiki attuned last May, during my final semester of college. While floating by on my student loans, a $150 attunement seemed like a manageable expense. I was fascinated by the idea of energy healing, but also very skeptical. My self-treatments dwindled many times. Disbelief and doubt from my family and others leaked into me. It’s easy to make excuses like “Oh, I’ll do it tomorrow,” or “I don’t have time just now for a Reiki treatment,” or even, “This can’t be really real.” At times, the very thing that I was using Reiki to treat—my tendency to deny myself any me-time—got in the way of treatments.

One thing kept me going, however: my Little Bastard.

The day I came home Reiki attuned, Oliver was all over me. I gave him his first treatment that night and he’s come back for it ever since. He’s a hands-on Reiki cat. He tackles me as soon as I crawl into bed. He crawls onto my chest, situating his paws between my collarbones. He rests his chin on his paws and closes his eyes. The weight of his warm, slender body seems to melt into me, and I relax, too. Usually, my hot hands last about ten minutes, and then he leaps off my belly to more of his usual antics.

This uncharacteristically bastard-free time is something I look forward to daily.
It is a rare night when Oliver does not demand Reiki. Those few peaceful moments between me and my cat are definitely fleeting. But they’re consistent. And now that I am convinced that Reiki does have a place in my personal practice, I have my Little Bastard to thank for it.

About the Author: Jessie Tierney was Level II attuned at Equilibrium Energy + Education in Chicago, IL. She graduated Columbia College Chicago with a Fiction Writing degree in May of 2008. She's 23 and lives in Aurora with her Little Bastard and two golden retrievers, Bisou and Cody. Check out her website for her photography and writing.

Coal is Not The Answer

Coal is not the answer!

Create your own slogan.

Here's mine:

A Riddle!

A riddle: What happens when you graduate from college, have loans to pay back, rent to pay, and bills bills bills?

Answer: You move home.

I've been back to the beginning for two months now and can say with honesty that now, finally, I am okay with it. For awhile ...

But I think the reason for this settled feeling stems from seeing an end to it all. For a month there, I was absolutely cluesless as to what I wanted to do. I needed a change, but felt disoriented and unable to make the first step. My body responded to this uncertainty by having panic attacks pretty regularly. I had one at work, where I was ringing a customer up and I could barely mutter the price of her book without bursting into tears. I was a mess.

Now that I've applied for some promising jobs and can actually visualize a future for myself--independent of my parents--I know it's going to be okay.

But it wasn't always like that.

There were entire days, weeks, where I couldn't stand being in my body. I berated myself continually, thinking that I was a failure for having to move home after trying to make it with a full-time job paying rent in the city. When loans kicked in, I could not. But that didn't make it okay. Moving home for me was much less painful than for most: my supportive parents gave me my own bedroom and even donated the sunroom as a space for me to practice yoga every day. They gave me space and don't pressure me.

Still, the percieved failure and my inability to foresee a future was paralyzing. I couldn't stand the thought of settling in at home. I had a life to live! Great things to accomplish! But finances strangled me.

Depression set in. There's nothing worse than a total lack of motivation. I started to forget what I loved to do. I forgot what made me happy. I forgot how to be happy.

After weeks of this desperation, trying and trying to figure out what was wrong with me, why I couldn't just be okay in stillness, I knew that I had to change my outlook. Telling myself that my living situation was not acceptible had made it unbearable. I had to get my perception back into shape.

I was not going to revert to medication this time. My anxiety and depression from the past had beome manageable for awhile on meds, but then they came back. My doctor's solution was to up my dosage. I hate the idea of medication. I needed to find the root of the problem and irradicate it from there, not cover it up with happy-pills.

I started practicing yoga every day again. My practice had dwindled and stopped over the months post-graduation. I started watching my thought patterns. Each negative self-statement ("I'm boring;" "I'm unmotivated;" "I'm freaking out...") was countered by a positive statement ("I am an engaging, thoughtful and loving person;" "I am passionate;" "I'm experiencing a little anxiety right now, but it will pass..."). The practice of countering negative statements was painfully slow, but slowly it began to work. I kept track of what I was eating, being sure to get enough fruits, vegetables, and protein. This, I assure you, was a full-time job.

So here I am now, about four weeks after the initial desperation, anxiety attacks, and depression. I've just applied for two new jobs that would allow me to supplement my bookstore income. I'm excited again, looking forward to projects and writing again. I just got a small article published on the Reiki Animal Source website. Baby steps.

I think the most important thing for me to remember is to keep my Sanity Practices going. If nothing else, yoga every day. My boundless energy tends to get me into trouble, wearing me down eventually. My Sanity Practices keep me in check.

i Miss Riding Horses

Above picture: me riding CH Mirific at the Midwest Signature Horse show under instruction of Tom Thorpe of Northern Tradition Farm.

An excerpt from my memoir-in-progress:

Falling Off Horses

by

Jessie Tierney

I heeled Angel into a show trot—her favorite part of the class—to make one last loop around the ring before the lineup. She got bigger between my thighs, like a thick-skinned balloon filling with air, but this was more than air. This was passion, it was purpose, a realization that this was what we were born to do.

I had a line of sweat across my forehead from my derby but she trotted so powerful that the breeze blew past my face, past the chain link fence that ran the perimeter of the arena, ruffling the leaves on trees as we flew by. The sun baked my navy suit coat and the chinch-chinch of Angel's hooves kicked up sand as it flecked off the fence.

We had the class. You can tell by the way the judge looks at you from the center of the ring, cocking her head to the side with her pen resting on her clipboard. You can feel her eyes on you, admiring eyes that are glad that you're telling her so decisively who gets the blue ribbon. I smiled, not only my body in rhythm with Angel's movements but also my thoughts. We'd stretch a little taller and she'd pick her knees up a little higher as we made a pass down the side.

Horseback riding was natural for me, the immediate necessity to stop thinking about everything and focus totally on your relationship with the horse—it was something my body responded to. I didn't have to try to ride; I just rode.

"You're a natural," people would say, shaking their heads, and I silently agreed, my heart glowing, knowing that, yes, this was the most natural feeling on earth. My spine stretched toward the sky, my long legs locked in, my hands softened in contact with her mouth through the reins, my whole self moving smoothly, at once a part of my horse and also unconsciously aware of my entire being.

We were exploding with energy down the side of the ring, "on the edge," as my riding instructor, Melinda, would coach for, and I noticed that the judge actually scanned the arena to look for us when she called for the trot—she wanted to watch us on our last pass.

There is a moment when you're riding that everything in the world comes into one straight line. You feel it originating from your heart, then deeper than your heart—from the soul, maybe, and everything is in balance. The trees, the bleachers, poor starving people in Africa, the ocean, the sun—everything is connected. I've only ever totally experienced it when I'm riding. And that pass down the side of the ring was the most extended length of time that I felt that purity, that oneness with not only my horse, but the universe. If you were there watching, you would witness perfection, a tall slender girl in sharply accurate yet soft posture, her legs fanned out away from her chestnut horse’s flanks, her chin toward the sky, chest open; the horse’s ears pinned forward, with her head set and a white blaze with a tiny round brown dot running down her face. Every moment, in motion, was photo-worthy.

Then a woman carrying a large blue bucket hooked it on a pump just outside of the fence, and without thinking, she jerked the handle on. A huge blast of water and what sounded like a bullet erupted through the fence into the dry arena right in front of us, just as we were trotting by. Angel leapt fifteen feet sideways, and my one-with-the-universe momentum cracked—I kept going straight.

It was strange, because the way she moved, she kind of ducked from under me, catapulting my feet out of the stirrups and vaulting my body into the air. It felt like I was up there for a long time. I remember seeing the diamond-weave of the fence, the greenness of the grass, the veins on leaves, the sun and the sky. It was a beautiful day, one of those days with cauliflower clouds hinting at patches of bright blue. I remember twisting my torso so my right shoulder swung around and my back arched, thinking, this is just like high jump. I was in another zone now—apart from the reality of riding and apart from the reality of not-riding. There was a third. It felt amazing. I stayed suspended in air for what felt like five minutes, slowly floating down toward the thick arena sand. I remember thinking calmly as I descended, I hope Mom's getting this on tape.

I thumped in the sand shoulder first, a ripple in water, followed by hip and arm, enveloped in the dusty grains like in afeatherbed. I snapped up off the ground, and Carleton, my trainer, was already there, his young eyes worried from behind awrinkled face, reaching his arms toward me, crouching as he walked, like he was trying to hold my body together as he approached. I was mostly worried that my suit would have to be dry cleaned again.

“Are you okay?" he asked, his worried face softening as soon as he looked into mine. I brushed the sand off my butt and my from my elbow, looked up at him and said, "That was AWESOME."

Carleton's mischievous smile came back as he handed me my derby, "Well Angel thinks so, too," as he motioned toward the lineup where Angel was, set up between two other horses, her legs parked out and her head raised up, looking out at the audience like royalty.

"She wasn't about to let you stop her last pass—soon as you were off, she hooked a right and went straight on into the lineup! Knees were this high!" We made our way over to Angel, smiling.

He gave me a leg up and flew up onto the saddle, back in the lineup, back in the class again. The tips of my fingers scratched her sweaty neck through my gloves.

I was back on, waiting for the placings to be announced, and everything was soft and quiet. Like a contentedness, a relaxed smile settled into my mouth, my posture tall but not forced, my legs fanning out from her steaming body. I had made a discovery.

And, to make things even better, because the fall was not my or Angel’s, we won the class.

Wow was I young. Look at that little face! This picture was taken during the placing announcement in the class from the above story excerpt. I was 13 years old.