No Longer "Here"

On Thursday, August 13th, at 7:05pm, Denise Kajal Marie Cigliano passed away peacefully in the presence of friends and family at Sloan Kettering Memorial Hospital in Manhattan.

At Chuang Yen Monastery in Kent, NY.
 Left: March 19th, 2105; Right:August 18th, 2015

I would like to thank all of her friends and family for all the love, prayers, and healing they selflessly offered to her during her difficult and protracted stay in the hospital. While it did not defeat the physical disease, it lessened her suffering immensely and nourished her spirit and soul, giving her the courage first to make one last stand and fight, and then to make her final choice to greet her passing with hope and surrounded by love.

In keeping with her extraordinary life, a seeming chaos of rapidly developing events unfolded perfectly to grant her wish that she receive a final blessing by her beloved spiritual guide Gurudev (Yogi Amrit Desai) who spoke to her over the phone just minutes before she fell into a deep sleep. The expressions on her face as she lit up and nodded yes, yes, yes (after days of nodding no, no, no... no more!) as he spoke and sang to her will be forever etched into my mind and heart and assured me that she had transitioned painlessly and with perfect understanding and joy into the Pure Land where she belongs. We all now have another angel in heaven.

She did not wish to have traditional viewing, services, and burial. As she had attained the wisdom that perceives the underlying unity of religions and that the same God has been revealed throughout history under many names and guises, she did not wish to have a denominational service in which ANY religion or name of God was held as superior over another. She instead wished to be cremated and for her friends and family to hold a simple memorial in her honor, and that those who wish to speak at the gathering do so without imposing their truth on her or others. Given her vigorous love of life, I'm sure we all know that Denise would prefer that we assuage our mourning with a celebration of her remarkable being and life and of life itself.

-- From an announcement email sent to her friends and family on August 16th, 2015.

-- Written by Eric LaVigne

And The Fingers Are Knotting Again

After more than two months of grieving my beloved pooch, I've started to come up for air.  I had just begun to feel more myself after my thyroid surgery in November 2012, and my Bear had been fine, until one day in January, he wasn't.  It was a very difficult month of caring for him and facing the prospect of life without him, and once the shock of his leaving us wore off, the exhaustion set in and the grieving began.  I could feel the beauty in the excruciating pain of this grief, knowing it was born out of a tremendous love.  I was careful with myself and allowed myself to feel and move through it as best I could.

I was so very blessed to have had this amazing creature in my life for nearly 15 years.  I can't begin to describe this gratitude.

And so it happened as I thought it might... I woke up one morning and wanted to make a mala.  My dear friend Joseph Anthony (find him here on Twitter, and watch his beautiful kirtan videos, so full of devotion) had requested two custom malas.  He was so blessedly patient and supportive as I went through this process of grieving and healing.  And then, one day, I felt ready to create and this is what came into being. 

108 Bead Picture Jasper & Jade/Fuschite

27 Bead Tiger's Eye

It felt so wonderful to be knotting and creating again.  I have two more custom orders and then I hope to be filling up my Etsy shop once again.  It has been a long time coming.  Thank you all for your patience, love and support.

Rest in Peace my angel

Witness Is the Door

Inner & Outer Consciousness: Witness is the door to create a shift from reaction to response

by Gurudev

It is important to pay attention to what you are doing and where you are going in order to get what you want and arrive at your desired destination. But to get to the Source within, you have to be in response to the present to stay connected to your Being.

If your attention is heavily consumed by the insecurity or fear, your future will captivate your attention. Your concerns for the future will be more important than the step you are taking now. As long as you are being in polarity, you are in response. Witness is the door to create the shift from reaction to response.

What you want in future represents the outer, external dimension. But, how you do what you do to get there is the inner dimension. The outer dimension is the journey in the dimension of time and space. Inner dimension stays connected to the Being Presence that we are.

Outer dimension we deal with is the material, physical as well as mental forms. But, behind all the forms there is harmonious interplay of consciousness and energy. Only in human beings there is an individual "I AM" and ego-mind that has the freedom to induce personal thought forms for or against omnipresent Presence of "prana Being" or life force energy and consciousness.

The choice breaks the omnipresent Presence of prana-Beings or subconscious life force and super conscious beings that we are. We are "I AM THAT I AM", but through identification with thought forms we separate from the omnipresent Presence of polarity and live in perpetual conflict with omnipresent Presence that we are.

Loving Fearlessly

There is something so beautiful in the indescribable pain of losing one you loved so deeply. That tremendous pain reveals to you the glorious depth of that love, which was fearless of the sorrow that would come when it came time to part.

Rest in Peace, my beautiful boy.

Bear
May 12, 1998 - February 13, 2013

 

Attachment

From Eckhart Tolle..."How do you let go of attachments to things? Don't even try. It's impossible. Attachment to things drops away by itself when you no longer seek to find yourself in them."

Perfect message for this time of year, don't you think?  Especially when you're a Taurus and are easily distracted by all things shiny and sparkly ;)

Gift to myself for surviving another surgery..spinner ring by Etsy
seller BelViaggio Designs ..love, love, spin spin spin!

Hope these weeks leading up to the holidays are not so stressful and filled with peace and gratitude, with love to my lovelies, kajal xoxo

Time Bomb Gone

It's finally gone.  My "Adjustment Bureau" has been working overtime to get me to this place, and honestly it feels surreal.  (If you've seen the movie, you'll know what I mean, if not, see the movie!)

My thyroid.  That ticking cancer time bomb.  It's finally gone, and has been since November 15th.   I was advised back in 2005 to have it removed, because of all the radiation I've had to that area and because there were two nodules on it.  That's how long that time bomb was ticking.

Other (extremely) challenging life situations got in the way, and the surgery took the bottom of the totem pole on the priority list.  In 2005 I was going through a very difficult divorce, in 2006 my mother was diagnosed with Leukemia, in 2007 my divorce was finalized, and three months later I lost my mom (love you mom).  The year after losing her is barely a grey numb fuzzy memory.  My yoga studio and my teacher and sisters helped me through, and that is an understatement.  A year later to nearly the anniversary of losing my mom, my teacher finalized months of confusion and pretty much kicked me and many of my sister's booties out the door, as she was following a newer and shinier guru (in her eyes), and those of us not getting in line behind her were not welcome any longer.

That is a whole other blog post(s).  I feel a deep connection with the Anusara community in their path to healing.  Mine was a different situation, but the challenge and difficulty for my sisters and I was very similar.

Later that year my sternum started crumbling.  Yup.  My bone just wasn't hanging in there, because of all the radiation I had when I was a pre-teen with Hodgekin's Disease.  It went undiagnosed, I was told my skin was forever damaged from the radiation and I would have to live that way for the rest of my life.  I was in tremendous pain, I couldn't get on my mat, and without asana practice I leaned very heavily on the teachings of my Guru, and did my best to accept that this was just the way it was going to be. 

My Adjustment Bureau (henceforth the "AB") had other ideas though.  After a year and a half of living that way, the very best thing ever happened (I didn't know that at the time).  I was diagnosed with breast cancer.  If you've been reading along you have an idea of what happened, because that's about when I started writing.   My AB got me to Sloan-Kettering (SK) in a very round-a-bout way that I will always be grateful for.  They saw immediately what was going on with my sternum, they fix them all the time for people like me that had way too much radiation years and years ago (they don't give you so much anymore).  So while they are the best of the best for this type of surgery, and for breast cancer surgeries...well they had never had one person present them with needing both at the same time.  Hey I know I'm special but sometimes I'm wayyyyy too special.  All the doctors had a long talk and they decided to do it.  Three surgeons, lots of skin grafts, over eleven hours on the table, days in ICU...and wella!  They put Humpty Dumpty back together again.  No pain afterward, no cancer, they got it all.  And I could take a much deeper breath after the surgery with everything fixed up so nicely.  That feels AMAZING.  I was a happy camper, a stitched up one, but a very happy one nonetheless.

And more good news...chemotherapy was not recommended for me afterward.  They wanted me to take the drug Arimidex for 5 years.  Most of my blog posts over the past couple of years have something to do with what the Arimidex did to my lungs, so I'm not going to get into that here...let's just say it made me cough for a year and a half.  Really nasty icky coughing, sometimes so badly I thought I would choke and die.  And I'm serious.  It made me want to die.  I finally stopped coughing in June of this year, and have been working to get my strength back and gain weight ever since.

Once I started to feel stronger and had more energy, I finally tackled the garage.  There have been boxes in there, unpacked, from when I moved out of my house and into this apartment.  That was in 2006.  I'm sure you can imagine how that hung over my shoulders.  But I could never get it done (see "tremendous life challenges" above).  With the gorgeous weather we had, I was out there sorting, dumping, purging and organizing for days and days, and a tremendous carload of donations made their way to Goodwill.  What was meant for keeping is now nicely tucked away in plastic covered bins.  And that felt AMAZING!

And I also got to do lots of fun stuff that I couldn't do for years, like just be able to go out and do fun stuff because I wasn't in pain or hacking my head off.  More AMAZING!

But then it was time to address the time bomb.  My head and neck surgeon at SK, who is so totally hip and cool, scheduled my surgery for September 25th.  It was very obvious after I left his office that I wouldn't be having surgery that day.  No one could get the date right (not even the person scheduling my pre-surgical testing), and other odd things that made me feel that it just wasn't going to happen.   

Well, I was right.  My AB stepped in and I came down with a stomach flu the day before my pre-surgical testing, with the surgery only a few days after that.  Temp and all.  And there went the time bomb surgery. 

Turned out the AB had important reasons for nixing the surgery.  My mom's brother, my favorite uncle, had been fighting prostate cancer for some time.  He took a turn for the worse.  I hadn't been able to travel since 2008...but there I was on a JetBlue flight down to Florida just a day or so after starting to recover from that stomach flu (on the day I was supposed to be having surgery!).  I was able to spend time with him while he was still lucid and he was so, so happy I was there.  I was so happy I was there.  I was able to stay in Florida until the time came to say good-bye.



Rest in peace favorite uncle, love you always

I did feel a little like a gypsy because part of my family (including my uncle and one of my brothers) lives in south Florida, and my dad and my other brother and his family live in north Florida, in Jacksonville.  So I did some traveling back and forth between south and north Florida with my dad for the month that I was down there.

It was very sad but also so wonderful to be with my family who I haven't been able to visit in years.  I was also able to attend the weekend gathering in Jacksonville honoring my Guru's 80th birthday.  I couldn't believe I was there as it started, and I started to cry (reminder...takes a lot to get the tears flowing for me).  I felt like my AB did extensive work to get me to where I absolutely needed to be...not yet time for surgery, time to be with my family through a difficult time, and time to be with my yoga family for a very auspicious occasion...all which did wonders for my spirit.

When I finally got home I felt stronger and definitely weighed more since I left.  Surgery scheduled for November 15th.  This time it felt right.

And so here I sit three weeks later, ticking time bomb gone.  I had two nodules on my thyroid that we've been watching for a long time...turned out the smaller one did have a tiny cancer in it.  It had clear margins around it (surgeon speak for "they got it all out"), and the exact word that my surgeon used to describe it was "inconsequential".  It probably wasn't going anywhere, but he was still glad they removed it.  I have a nice new scar right across the front of my neck, another battle wound to be proud of.  It's healing really nicely and before I know it, it will be a very fine line, barely visible.  Blessed and Grateful, and I say that over and over like a mantra, can't say it enough.

And so as I said at the beginning, it feels a little surreal.  With the exception of a few basal cells that I need to have removed (again from the radiation, and again had to be low on the priority totem pole), for the first time in several years I don't have anything "big/challenging/difficult" hanging right over me.  I can actually make plans!  In a week I'll be allowed back to full activity.  Could that mean.....yes!  Back on my mat! ......Mala making.....absolutely!  .....Reflexology..... a definite possibility!  (Many people will be thrilled if I can get back to that, especially me!)  I'll be taking it slow, staying present and savoring each and every second, filled with gratitude.

And I no longer hear the sound of ticking...the time bomb is gone!

Eternal Summer

Courtesy of The Daily Mutts

Hello September.  Thank you for arriving on the heels of a gorgeous blue moon, which lit up my entire backyard, and with a warm, sunny stunner of a day.  It's time to start saying goodbye to summer, but in my heart, so grateful as it is for the continuing healing and recovery this one has brought for me, it will always be summertime.

Have a lovely holiday weekend, dear ones!