“Rita passed away Thursday, March 12, 2020 at 10:55 am. During the past several months, she shared with Paul the hope that her clients, students, friends and family would continue to carry the Willow System around the world…washing it ashore as waves on the ocean.
While a formal memorial for Rita has not yet been planned, Paul is certain that the best way to celebrate her life is to ensure her legacy. The work to publish and produce her books, “meditative optimizations” and courses continues, so please support this labor of love by donating to the GoFundMe campaign.
In this video from 2017, Rita shares prescient thoughts we hope will comfort and empower as only she could.”
Let me leave you with three questions:
What was / is Willow for you?
What do you notice in your life is an illusion?
What does the high side of the reality you want to create look like?
It’s March 1st or thereabouts, the point being that I’m moving into new digs, an apartment complex with the very 60’s, beach-y name of Surf Terrace. I love that I actually need to make my checks out to Surf Terrance, the owner having been either drunk or distracted when he filled out the paperwork for his newly-purchased investment property.
Despite its beige and brown exterior, the apartment complex brings The Pink Motel bubbling up into my mind. A novel I read as a 12-year-old, it was one of my favorites with Florida as its sunny and exotic backdrop and an eccentric cast of characters to meet. For some reason it continues to be fodder for the imagination of the girl born and raised in foggy San Francisco but who no longer considers it home. To this day, I’m drawn to the brightly painted houses I’ve seen in San Miguel de Allende and Lima. Much to my neighbors’ chagrin and eventual acceptance, I even had my home in Oakland painted and dubbed Big Green.
I never expected to become so attached to Long Beach with its oil rigs never far from sight, but its port city grittiness and diverse demographics are actually what resonate. On tour, the modest swimming pool and common areas of Surf Terrace are deserted, giving me the sense that privacy is prized over community. That in a weird way also says Home.
Then as I walked through the front door of Apartment #218, there is the full-on ocean view punctuated by palm trees, and the warmth and aesthetics of a tropical place pour into my heart. After all my wanderings this past year, I know that Home is inside me, not necessarily just “where the heart is,” but in every cell, put there by soul-stirring sights, experiences and memories.
My friend and mentor Rita Harrison was diagnosed with Stage 4 Brain cancer on December 26. The surgeons said they stopped counting the lesions at 20. The oncologist’s prognosis: “two weeks or a short month.”
Today is February 29, 2020, Leap Day. Rita is still with us, a thin wisp compared to the forthright, kick-ass woman who used to leave me puffing during our “short, German walks.” When she smiles, her light shines through and I recognize for a moment.
She has beat the odds, exceeded expectations, and every day there is as much reason for hope as despair. As the patient who has decided she wants to live, her game plans include the “as well as” she has advocated throughout her career as a healer. Radiation, the latest hormone therapy, accepting light, an invitation to her estranged son, birch water, a massage with Latschenkiefer (mountain pine) are among the things she has undertaken and requested. Some days her husband Paul is unsure if her desires are based in method, meds or madness.
Despite her desire for a “collaboration,” the doctors are too mired in their fears to dare. Hospice, they recommend, and since she refuses, they continue their due diligence of providing the kind of care disconnected from that Living Life to its Fullest thing. To call it wretched and regale you with horror stories is old news. There are a million tales out there of how the System has failed us.
So what does living or dying look like today? That Rita woke up at 4 am asking for a Guinness? That she cannot stand on her own accord but wants to do therapeutic horse riding? That one moment we are paralyzed by the fear that Rita won’t be with us tomorrow, the next we plan our move to a new apartment with a breathtaking view of the ocean. Paul says that he will never be able to enjoy Christmas or New Year or Valentine’s Day celebrations again. So he looks elsewhere for moments of joy…and they are there.
Take a look at this powerful documentary about a brave woman looking to take her life back from crushing pain. This screening is a real and unedited look at Kristie Farley’s session with Europe’s leading specialist and developer of the Willow System, Rita Harrison. You will more than “get back” the 55 minutes from all the surprising parallels to your own life that we can almost guarantee will show up. Whether your pain is the “small, nagging” kind or the beast that assaults you in a dark alley, you don’t have to live with it.
The screening will be followed by a Q & A session. RSVP for the Zoom link.
The great thing about Gratitude is that when you start to notice what you are thankful for in your life, those ‘things’ keep flowing in. My heartfelt thanks to Crystal Hoshaw for sharing with me the concepts and understanding of Pooja / Puja and Ojas.
I was her practice client, and as anyone who has had a Willow Session knows, all participants are challenged to really show up, and by that, I mean in a big way. Not just body, mind and soul, because there’s more… When you explore everything from meridians and chakras to your lineage and the Unknown, the discoveries and transformations are bound to be deep and powerful and have you looking around for a tissue.
So in answer to the quintessential Willow question, “What else?”
Pooja – offering honor and reverence to myself and others. Ojas – living a juicy, vital and essential existence. Wow, nice work if you can get it.
We’re an odd lot – Americans – when it comes to celebrating our holidays. Never mind the Christmas in October creep, let’s take Thanksgiving and our love-hate relationship with it. “It’s a really big deal here, i’n’t it?” notes my Brit friend Paul. Grounded in the tradition of breaking bread together and being thankful for blessings, it’s become a mad, frantic dash to… I don’t quite know… you fill in the blanks… gluttony, excess, strained pleasantries.
Take my shopping trip to Ralph’s two nights ago around 8:00. I strategically timed it to avoid the after-work rush, and thankfully, no jostling and weird cart-maneuvering were necessary. Of course the shelves were bare of some key items on my list – heavy whipping cream and Happy Eggs (organic, brown and delicious!), and the vibe was more Armageddon than Norman Rockwell’s depiction of warmth, home-cooked food and happiness. The clincher came when the rushed shopper behind me tossed two bags of frozen rolls onto the belt.
I wonder what it is that makes us so disconnected from the meaning and appreciation of days once dedicated to the rhythms of life and simple rites of passage. I’m going to let those musings lie for now because I’m busier these days with my own housekeeping.
For some time, my life has been about my disconnects and reconnects – with loved ones, my habits and purpose. The changes have been glass-shatteringly uncomfortable, but today is a good day – as it is every day – to stop in my tracks and notice the blessings that have come in strange packages.
I’m thankful that:
My daughters and I are happily spending the holiday apart, all of us comfortable in doing what we want and without the need to fulfill obligations.
It’s Thanksgiving morning, and I’m not in the kitchen over-cooking (as in cooking too much food) and burning.
It’s storming in Southern California, and I don’t need to get into a car today.
I have a new non-profit, The Pain to Power Foundation, that is reconnecting me to whatever it is that I want and need.
I’m sitting at my laptop and blogging with joy again.
May your holiday season be filled with strange gratitudes.
I have a story around the Fulfilled Inside, Strong Together Retreat coming up in November that captures the magic of life and how unexpectedly blessings come when you allow them in. The trick is that we most often don’t know what it looks like to truly welcome what we haven’t been used to receiving.
Funnily enough, I met this woman at the very first retreat Rita gave …perhaps it was about five years ago. She was fxxking angry then and what with the “orange one” in power, she is still fxxking angry today. Of course that’s not all she is, and I’ve gotten to see the different shades of her passion and love.
She expressed the greatest resistance to the subject matter – love – and came to me several times before the Early Bird deadline with questions about payment details, anger about Arizona being the destination (with its political climate), and so on and so on.
“I have such a resistance to going,” she said, her statement actually laced with one fxxking after another. “I really don’t want to go, and I know that probably is a sign I should.”
“I’m not here to push you,” I said, “you have time. Go ahead and sit with it some more.”
Only two nights later, I was awakened by the vibration of my phone which had fallen onto my chest. It seemed a dream to read her text, “I’m going to go to the retreat with Rita. I’ll just pay in full to you.”
When we finally talked in person, she told me how miraculous the past several days had been, that after some 20 years since her divorce, she was now in a relationships that in hindsight, had been unfolding for the past month. This old acquaintance had come back into her life through Facebook, and after several long conversations and a deep feeling that this is what she had been opening herself up for, she had a “boyfriend!!!!!!!!!!!! OMG”
I had never heard her speak so vulnerably, excitedly about how open her heart was. “We truly love each other,” were her exact words. Let me tell you, I love this woman dearly, but “fxxk” and “asshole” were more a part of her vocabulary than the word “love” ever was.
We’ve talked more and since, and realized that just the process, the work she did in deciding whether to attend the retreat was part of opening her heart and stepping into a new beginning. Fancy that.
The day started uneventfully …smoothly and productively even. Then a conversation triggered a rolling, like an earthquake, that rumbled and culminated in tears and shouting. We’ve all been there.
My shoulders started to hunch and as I headed back to my room, I imagined I was going into those old patterns of guilt, hiding, and defensiveness. The “ehhhh, uhhhh, arrgh” going through my head was a bouncing back and forth of not feeling guilty but wondering if maybe I should, wanting to accept responsibility but not knowing what for, maybe even the ever-popular passive-aggressive poor-me I’ve been known to do.
Interestingly, the work I was heading back to was transcription of Rita Harrison’s latest e-book, “Ascension for Grounded People.” If my impulse was to hide, Kismet …that’s not where the book took me. Both soothing and “Wake Up,” it was just what I needed to manage the blow-up.
Well, no need to rehash the details of the conversation or dissect the beast to find out what sparked the explosion. That would have been my part of my old habit of wanting to “stick the dog’s nose in the pee” or “fix things” …both man-glued responses (which I’ll talk about one of these days).
So instead of retrieving the experience and old files, I’ll leave them wherever they are now and jot down what I did differently instead:
It wasn’t my fault, and It wasn’t actually anyone’s.
I allowed the discomfort to wash over me, and then took and gave space and time …without knowing what that would look like.
I embraced that we were having real conversations, person-to-person, direct, authentic, not always happy-happy. Hiding behind texts and emails and empty “Have a nice day” hasn’t been more satisfying.
Before I sign off, here’s something else to help with finding peace in the noise and chaos of life.
Is a Foodie a Food Snob? Too bad we’ve made it so, what with our lives becoming so disconnected from food and a true love and appreciation for it. We don’t grow it anymore. We don’t harvest it anymore. We don’t even cook it for ourselves very much anymore. So in order for a Foodie – someone who truly loves and enjoys food – to be able to savour what they eat, they must look for a quality and experience that isn’t always easily accessible.
…because the process of eating begins way before you put that first forkful in your mouth. The quality of the ingredients and the intention with which it is grown, cooked and eaten – all of this matters in how our bodies enjoy and process our food. But wait. Before you draw a conclusion that I’m advocating that you must eat organic, clean, vegetarian, or whatever it is we think is healthy, I’m not.
I think I’m actually advocating going backwards – not forwards – with respect to food. Back to basics, that is, with food and the intention with which we eat it.
How about if we looked at and changed or refined our assumptions:
Organic is better – not an obsession with organic per se – but quality from the ground up.
Bring the comfort back to food because the ‘ahh’ effect can boost our metabolism if our body is not simultaneously stressing over whether the mashed potatoes with butter will make me fat, or the piece of apple pie a la mode will make my ‘numbers’ spike.
Slow down, be grateful for, and enjoy the process of eating and dining. It’s not the food which is the problem with ‘fast food,’ but the fast.
Open up your mind about what the healthy and unhealthy is. Did you know that avocado oil is not healthy to cook with or overuse?
I invite you to read about Individualized Nutrition Plans (INP) and some of the intuitive eating articles and books out there. As always, I welcome your feedback!
I’ve noticed that my living spaces have been dark these past 6 months, and I’m done with it. Burned through 3 light bulbs and taken to carrying a notebook to a favorite place near the canals… all to write in the light.
It’s not just dark spaces but hiding in them that I had become too accustomed to, so I went with my housemates to see a beautiful home right on the ocean, with design details that make you go, “I could get used to this,” and a view that leaves you gobstruck in stillness and silence.
“I want this,” I said, but first I had to decide to stop hiding. I hadn’t noticed I was doing that, by the way, but good friends and allies do, and gently bring it to your attention. So what did I come up with to do?
Pick up the phone! It’s so easy these days to hide behind our telephone’s other functions that conversations seem a big deal. Make it not.
If part of my work is to do social media and marketing, I’m putting myself – my authentic self – back in the equation. Out there. I’m Val Joy, and here’s a new picture!
As an agent, own what it really is and my talent for it, instead of hiding behind my client.
Don’t wait – hunkered down in my dark space – for the opportunities to come knocking on that door. Step out onto and into the Life Path that I designed for myself at some point. Have you had a reading by the way?
What do you resolve to do today when you decide to come out from hiding?
Fighting for Happiness 