But seriously. This morning I was in with my osteopath, and once we both discussed the universe having a hellacious turn with everyone in everything in July, we both mused how things seem to be evening out again… in August. August! How did this happen? Wasn’t it just yesterday that I was nursing my New Year’s hangover? Wasn’t it just yesterday that I was planning my first quarter? Have I really been to Colorado Springs, Finland, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Haiti and St. Maarten already this year? Have I really been doing that much writing? How the year has zipped by so fast is a mystery to me, but also one that I don’t wish to solve. Heading out of the tail end of my Saturn return hasn’t been the easiest thing on the planet. I’m quite happy to leave it behind, thank you.

Yes, this is going to be a Woo Woo entry. You have been forewarned.

I’ve been on a bit of a journey over the past three or four months to figure out matters of the heart and what they mean to me. The interesting thing is how it’s not just being solved on a mental and emotional level, but a physical one as well. (I can actually talk about this aspect a little because it’s not going in a forthcoming book. Kind of. You’ll see.)

I’ve been reading and meditating a lot on the subject, and I find the more I open up on those levels, the more other opportunities to open up further come to me. The most fascinating of which came out of my yoga class. Some background – there’s a woman that I’ve seen in my class on a semi-regular basis. The first time I saw her was actually at an event held at the yoga studio, where a guru came to speak with us about… well. That’s not important. But what was fascinating to me was my reaction to her. She sat up front, a thin blanket wrapped around her thin frame, watching intently. I was both drawn to her and felt revulsion, which I immediately understood to mean that for whatever reason I was to have some sort of interaction with her at some point, but I was nowhere near ready yet. I’d continue to see her around the studio, took some classes with her from time to time, was friendly with people who knew her, but that was pretty much that.

That event took place roughly a year ago. Last week before class as I was setting up my mat next to Narayan, I saw her sitting next to this woman whose mat was on the other side of mine. She was cross legged, the other woman was laying down in corpse pose, and I couldn’t help but watch them as Narayan and I caught up. It was fascinating. I could feel something changing between the two of them, and I couldn’t explain what it was. As our teacher came to class everyone took their places at their mats and stopped chattering. I turned to look at the woman who was laying down. She was glowing like a beacon. It was incredible.

So I caught up with her – the “sitting up, see her around class” her, not the “glowing” her – after class and asked her what she was doing. She explained to me that it was a kind of healing that was done on a super deep cellular level, told me the name of it (I believe she said Satnam Narayan, though I could just have Narayan’s name stuck in my head, so don’t quote me on that), and asked me if I’d be interested in learning how to do it. I told her I’d be more interested in experiencing it before figuring out if I wanted to do it to someone else, so we set a time to meet the next day. She told me her name was Casey.

“I want you to think about something you want to heal,” she said to me.

“I already know,” I told her.

The next day we met as planned, and Casey took me to a room with warm-toned walls and soft lighting, where a yoga mat with a sheepskin on it sat in the center. She motioned for me to lay down and asked me what I wanted to work on.

“Matters of the heart,” I said. “I’m having a hard time letting go of and forgiving others, even when they haven’t meant to hurt me. And as a result my heart is closing, and I don’t want to do that.”

She nodded. “I’ve been working on that a lot lately. I know exactly what we can do.”

Before we got started, Casey explained to me how it all works. It wasn’t an exchange of energy so much as it was like an assisted healing. I’d lay in corpse pose, she’d hold my arm as a form of anchor, and then we’d go into the silence focused on my heart center. I pressed her further for more history on who she was, and she told me of how she’d come to doing Kundalini yoga roughly around the same time I had. She’d also had a tough childhood, and had a career as a stuntwoman for years before giving it all up and enveloping herself in healing. Since then she’d taken teacher’s training and taught yoga while she was training and strengthening as a healer.

Casey covered me with a blanket and anchored to my arm. I immediately felt comfortable with her. I started breathing deeply and felt myself slip into a meditative state, and before I knew it I’d fallen deep, deep, deep under – so deep that it felt like what happens when I go to hypnotherapy, so I knew I was on a subconscious level. It was like I was out, but I could still hear everything going on around me. I could see her working with me, even though my eyes were closed. And then I started seeing all sorts of things – faces of people from my past that I wanted to forgive, experiences that I went through that replayed with different endings, and vibrant, vibrant colors. I felt Casey disengage from me and almost felt sad that it had to end. When I opened my eyes, I looked up at her and said, “Wow.”

“You go deep,” she said with wonderment in her voice. “You’re very sensitive. Very.”

I nodded. I couldn’t find the words to speak, but I could feel… and what I felt was something I’d felt before – an opening in my heart. Like it was light. And I remember feeling this in the past and equating it with fear, so I’d rush to lock it down fast before I lost a part of me. I guess it’s taken me a lot of time to understand that I’m not losing anything when my heart is open. I’m gaining.

Casey had to rush off to teach a class, so I took some time to root down before I got back in the car to drive off. She’d warned me that I’d need to solidify for about a day or so. “Be gentle with yourself, and be mindful that you’ll want to fall back into old habits,” she warned. And sure enough, as I sat there getting used to this new open and empty feeling, I was battling my brain, which was insisting I wanted a chocolate cupcake real, real bad. Anything to fill up that new empty feeling that was inside of me. Anything to get rid of what I wasn’t used to feeling.

Since then I’ve been locked in a battle of wits that I’ve almost lost a few times, but have soldiered on through because I refuse to lose to a wad of grey matter inside my skull. All the readings I’ve been doing about ego and mind matters state that the more you tear away the old behavior patterns, the more the mind and ego fight… and man, were we fighting. We’ve been fighting about whether or not it’s a good idea to eat an entire bag of Trader Joe’s salted cashews in one sitting (not – I won), whether or not it’s a good idea to call exes (not – I won), whether or not it’s a good idea to sleep all day (not – I won, even though I’m on the tail end of an illness), whether or not it’s a good idea to not exercise (three miles of walking today – I win again.) But the most interesting thing to me is that throughout all the fighting and the whatnot, this open feeling in my heart has remained.

So when I went to see my osteopath this morning and had the opportunity to connect with Narayan about our Pebble Beach plans next week, I saw Casey coming out of one of the treatment rooms.

“How are you?” she asked.

“I can’t explain it,” I said. “It’s amazing.”

“You look amazing,” she said. “Are you dealing with any—“

“Relapse stuff? Yes, I’m battling, just as you said I would,” I laughed. “But my meditation on my own is deeper, and the open feeling in my heart still remains.”

“Good,” she said.

I told her I wanted to try it again sometime soon. She instructed me to call her and hugged me goodbye. And ask she walked away, I remember something she told me. We’d discovered that we were born under the same sign. “We have the ability to die and become reborn over, and over and over again… the person you were when you walked in here is not the same person you’re walking out as.”

She was right. And I couldn’t be happier about that.