Mmmm turkey on rye is the best.

That’s all for now.

I don’t feel so good this morning.

My stomach has actually been doing really good these past few months, I think switching from regular milk to soy milk has helped a lot, and I’m not eating as much chocolate as I was this past winter. I wasn’t drinking beer and coffee for a while either.

But since Friday morning it’s been feeling bad on and off again. I guess I haven’t been very kind to it these past few days, I really have to be careful about that.

So today, unless I start feeling better, I’ll probably spend the most of day snuggled with some blankets and books. Mmmm.

Yesterday was fun though. We had planned on going down to South Street in Philadelphia, we were going to try to meet up with and . But while driving to the train station we realized that it was really freaking hot out. Walking in Philly is no fun when it’s humid and the temp is up in the 80s. But we were practically in Lansdale by then, so I suggested going to Assi Plaza – which Michael still hadn’t seen.

I wrote about this store in this entry. I certainly didn’t stress enough that this is a SUPERmarket, as all the comments on it from people were “oh yeah we have asian/int food markets here too.” Indeed, that’s the same thing Michael thought. But really, this is a supermarket, like any other big grocery store that you’d normally shop in, except it has different food. And dishes, and rice cookers, and a food court. So he was somewhat skeptical when we first went in.

I left him in the store for a few minutes when my cellphone rang and I had to edit our plans with for the day. When I came back he was all “THIS PLACE ROCKS!” And was excited as I was when I first went there. For real, this is a huge store and it rocks.

Mostly we just got aquainted with the store. Browsed the snack aisle, which is always fun. Picked up some Koala Cookies, Pocky, and Gummies. Got some wasabi mayonaise and wasabi paste, some Ginger salad dressing, a couple cans of canned coffee drink (and I discovered this morning that Michael drank mine!). We then walked into the food court and Michael said “Oh, we have to eat here.” We did, it was delicious, and I managed to eat noodles with chopsticks, yay me! But the food was spicy hot, and probably not the best thing for my stomach.

I think it’s safe to say that Assi Plaza will be a frequent shopping place for us now, even if it doesn’t have the most convenient location.

After lunch we drove down to and ‘s place. We got stuck in traffic on the Blue Route for over an hour. And arrived at their place around 3:30. Bae wasn’t feeling well, so we went to Ridley Creek State Park with just where there was some sort of Druid festival. Unfortunately the “festival” was quite small and seemed to be a group that knew each other, so rather than going to that we just went hiking on some of the trails in the park for about 45 minutes.

The hiking felt good, but it got tiring quickly because of how warm it was out. We left the park around 6.

We then headed to Media, where we stopped at the Harvest Books Outlet there – 5 minutes before closing, d’oh! I love that used bookstore, all the books are $2 or less, and when we have 45+ minutes to spend there I always leave with a bag or two full. This time we only had time to pick up one book.

After that we headed over to Iron Hill to have a couple beers and some appetizers (again, bad news for my stomach, I am so bad!). After that we went to Trader Joe’s, which Michael had never been in.

Man, I’m glad I don’t live in Media, that boostore, Iron Hill and Trader Joe’s are with
in 1000 feet of each other. Such temptation every day!

After Trader Joe’s we drove back to and ‘s place, where we settled down for a couple hours with a bag of cookies to watch the Evolution Smevolution episodes of The Daily show, they were great.

Arount 9:30 we went home. My stomach was hurting and I wanted to go to bed.

And now it’s today. We got our copy of Shamanic Journeying: A Beginner’s Guide by Sandra Ingerman yesterday. It’s an excellent book, really gets straight to the meat of Shamanic Journeying, and answers a lot of questions. Of course Way of the Shaman by Michael Harner is THE CLASSIC in this field, but it’s nice to get descriptions on methods from different teachers. I managed to read half of Shamanic Journeying: A Beginner’s Guide last night (it’s only 80 pages), and I’m really impressed, I’m gonna go finish reading it now. *Yawn*

After much hard work, it’s now up:

http://shaman.princessleia.com

It’s a site for both Michael and I to spout our shamanic journeys and thoughts. It’s a work in progress, we’ll be adding and expanding pages probably forever.

It has an RSS feed:

http://shaman.princessleia.com/?feed=rss2

I’m not doing a LJ syndication though, I’d hate for people to comment on these things and never have me see them, heh. I know there is a wordpress LJ plugin, but I don’t feel like making a new user for us and setting that all up.

And I can’t accept compliments on the design, it’s not mine at all. For the first time in a long time I am using someone else’s theme, I just haven’t had the time to make my own. This one fits nicely anyway %)

“I feel like I can’t relax and concentrate, like you’re going to walk through the room, or the cat is going to come bother me.”

“Yeah, we need a room for this.”

We’re referring to our meditation and journeying practices.

That’s when we thought of the space above the garage. We get to it via an outdoor stairway along the side of the garage.

It’s an unfinished room that we currently have some spare household things in, a couple tents for camping. It is not insulated so it’s very hot in the summer and very cold in the winter. Although it has a light, there are no electrical outlets up there.

It has potential. We need a room that’s detached from our normal house life. Somewhere where we can close the door and shut out the world. While in our Magic Room we are not disturbed. With a little bit of work this could be the perfect place.

As if we weren’t convinced, Michael reminded me of something I had completely forgotten. When we bought the house, there was a dreamcatcher on the door. I thought we had gotten rid of it, but we didn’t. It’s still there:

If that’s not some sort of sign staring me in the face, I don’t know what is.

We got a new coffee maker here at work. It’s got a digital display, menus, and is all sleek and new looking.

I strongly dislike it.

The old one we had just had three mechanical buttons: Coffee/Tea, Espresso, Hot Chocolate. Each morning I hit the espresso button twice, to fill my cup halfway with hot chocolate and half with coffee – which makes a relatively yummie mocha drink.

I guess what I liked most about it is that it wasn’t something that would break like a computer might, no digital display to go bad. Broken coffee machines are horrible things. The old coffee maker was very simple.

Simple is good when it comes to coffee.

The best strong coffee I drink is right out of our french press. No buttons, no complexity, you just put the ground coffee beans in, add hot water and push down the filter thingy.

Mmm french press coffee.

But the new coffee machine has more buttons and a digital display explaining that it’s making my coffee, tells me to enjoy it, and warns me that it’s very hot. Plus the espresso button is on a submenu rather than being on the front *sigh*

I’ll admit though, it’s fun to play with. Our office computers were down the better part of the morning (arg) and I spent some of that time playing with the new digital coffee maker.

Only trouble with playing with a coffee maker is that it makes coffee. I had a Mocha AND a Cappuccino this morning. Yeahyeahyeahyeah! %D

The week has been going by quickly for me.

I’ve been doing a lot of deep thinking. Too much deep thinking. My brain hurts. All those philosophical questions that float around your head and invade your dreams when you’re studying a new form of spirituality.

I’ve felt disconnected, and not much like myself.

Writing about it helps, but that’s all in a notebook for now (you know, a notebook, made out of paper).

What I need is a good beer and a good chicken sandwich. Maybe I’ll drag Michael out for these things tonight.

And friends, I’ll definitely need to hang out with friends this weekend.

Good friends are so wonderfully grounding.

Tired today.

Around 3am last night I woke up sneezing. I got out of bed to blow my nose, and sneezed about a dozen times in the bathroom. This was weird, I have never had such a sneezing fit before. I tried going back to bed but kept having to blow my nose and I didn’t want to wake up Michael. So I curled up on the couch with my blanket, a glass of water, and the box of tissues. It spent about an hour relaxing on the couch, Caligula came up and joined me. I considered taking some Benadryl, but with it being so close to wake-up time I knew it would make things worse for my work day today. Around 4 I figured my nose had stopped running enough to sleep again, so I went back to bed. I didn’t sleep well, and I really didn’t want to get out of bed this morning.

Stupid allergies, they’ve never been this bad.

Which reminds me of pharmacies. For a while I didn’t have health insurance, and without health insurance prescription medication is outrageously expensive. So I shopped around for my medication, ended up going to Skippack Pharmacy. It was a bit out of the way, but I was supporting a local business and paying less.

Now I have prescription coverage in my health plan, so it doesn’t matter where I go. I fully intended to continue going to Skippack Pharmacy, fighting the traffic on 73 to get there. But I keep getting bad vibes from them. The last time I called to ask about a prescription, both women I spoke with were short with me, even though I was very nice. In the past I’ve been waited on by clerks who were taking a personal calls while ringing up my sale, or chattering with a co-worker the whole time. This sort of thing bugs me, and makes me feel like I’m wasting my time trying to support a local business if they’re going to treat their customers with such indifference.

I should just use the prescriptions by-mail program that is included with my insurance, then I wouldn’t need to leave the house at all (and buying 3 months at a time is slightly cheaper).

Now I’m going to the soda machine to get a Coke before I fall asleep.

I am really tired today.

I got up around 5:30, Caligula alarm clock woke me up then. Took a shower, got Michael out of bed and while he was showering I got everything together for the second day of the Shaman course. We were out the door by 6:30.

It’s amazing how little traffic there is at 6:30 on a Sunday morning. We arrived in Malvern at 7am, sat and talked with some other members of the group until everyone else arrived.

Around 7:30am we got to watch and participate in the fire building ceremony for the sweat lodge. That was cool.

The sweat lodge was great. I made it through the whole thing! And apparently it was an especially long one, so I was really proud of myself.

During part of it I got very tired and saw some things, what I’d normally attribute to the “I’m about to pass out” feeling, but then I decided to take some of the things I’ve learned from my fellow students about visions and thought about these things I was seeing. It had amazing results, not only did thinking about what I saw pull my attention away from how tired I was feeling enough to get me through that round, the meaning I gathered from analyzing that vision was enough to carry me through the rest of the lodge. I let myself believe that what I was seeing was a spirit guide helping me through the ceremony.

This belief led me into a place that has always been dangerous spirituality for me. Nothing I want to discuss in public right now, and I don’t think I’ll have trouble getting past this now, but it will take some thought.

The morning sweat took up the entire morning, by the time we were entirely finished, had taken a dip in the pool and changed back into our clothes it was noon. We settled down for a nice breakfast for lunch, then gathered inside for more teaching.

The afternoon was spent discussing different things. We were all pretty tired from the sweat, but hung in there. Around 2:30 we went outside for a drum dance, which was fun and kept us all awake. When we came inside there was more talking and then a short journey and closing ceremony. We were finished around 3:30, and although we wanted to stay for the Crystal Bowl Healing, I was way too tired.

As part of our “homework” we’re going to get into the habit of journeying at least once a week, and writing down our journeys. Since I’m very inexperienced I’m going to try to do it more often than that. We also are supposed to try and keep a dream journal. I think I might put these together into some sort of electronic form, maybe a private blog? Filtered blog? We’ll see.

In all, I had a really good day, but it was exhausting. Having a sweat in the morning like that really is something else.

Going back to work tomorrow is going to be tough %)

Today we went to our first day of the Shamanic Life course.

We got there at 8:30, and it turns out there are 20 people taking this course, which is more than I expected. My psychotic shyness kicked in immediately. Plus all the names to remember! I felt slightly uncomfortable, I’m coming from a history of doing a lot of spiritual things on my own, and this group thing is a huge (and difficult) step for me.

During coffee people walked around and introduced themselves to one another, I kept ahold of Michael and that helped %)

The morning went well, I even talked some in that big scary group, people asked a lot of excellent questions. Everyone is really nice, and throughout the day I was able to gather up the courage to chat with a few people.

In the afternoon we did our first Shamanic “Journey” which I might go into detail about later. I felt somewhat unprepared because so many of the people in the group already had experience with this and I had only read about it. But my first Journey went well, since it was my first time I had a more experienced person journey “with me” to help me find my spirtual guide. Afterwards we both talked about what we saw, it was a really interesting discussion.

I keep almost elaborating on these things, but it’s so hard to explain without seeming weird. Perhaps sometime in the future I’ll be able to articulate this experience in a way that doesn’t sound crazy. Of course if anyone is interested I wouldn’t object to trying to explain it in a more private setting, just drop me an email.

For now I am just going to say that I’m pursuing this spirtual path because it feels right. Shamanism has been practiced all over the world for thousands of years, with very little variation from Africa to South America to Northern Europe. With this path I’m able to get in touch with my ancestor’s practices before they were taken over by Christianity, and practice the rituals of the natives of America, where I make my home today.

Today we also did some drumming, which was fun, but I’m horribly self-conscious about my lack of musical talent, I’ve got no rhythm! I am hopeful that practice will remedy this. I didn’t do bad though, everyone makes mistakes. Michael and I even stayed late to do a short drum dance, it was great!

Tomorrow we have to leave the house by 6:30 am so we can get to the class at 7:30 to build the fire and have a sweat lodge at 8:30 am. I’m sure tomorrow will be more exhausting than today, but I’m ready!

Now I need to go get my pajamas on and get sleepy %)