I am super smart, super sensitive, and super intuitive. I feel everything and I am curious. I spend a lot of time figuring out who I am. And I do that in a myriad of ways. I research, I start my day every day with meditation and journaling. That is not a once/day thing. It is my life. My life is a living, learning, realizing, moving. living, and breathing meditation.

I forced myself through life for years. My first efforts were to succeed in life, in this society, by their rules. That did not work. I had the proverbial crap beaten out of me, over and over and over again. This allowed me to learn about my strength, my persistence, my capacity for love and for unconditional Joy.

It turns out that Joy has absolutely nothing to do with conditions or life circumstances. I have learned that even the worst of times can turn out to be the best of times. Deep emotion forces us to dig deep- really deep. And that is where we find ourselves- out true self, our inner strength, who we truly are.

Who am I truly? What makes me tick? What is important to me? These are the questions one starts to ponder. I found out that I am super sensitive. Sensitive to energy- my environment, the people that are around me, the sounds, the thoughts, the feelings that I  didn’t even know were mine and those that had nothing to do with me. Now I know. I can differentiate them. Well I am sixty so I have had a lot of time to learn this .

I do not like to talk about where I have been. That is useless, I like to talk about who I am today and where I am going. You need some background though. I was determined by eighteen that I was going to break out and do something that the other chickens weren’t doing. I was going to break out of the box I grew up in and succeed! Unbeknownst to me I had lots of emotional baggage that was causing me to approach things in what became obvious as a difficult way- brutal even.

I was good in school, exceptional even- according to the tests I took, math and science were my forte’- even though I dreamed of being a model and a journalist (because even then I loved writing and I was tall and skinny- in the 60’s and 70’s tall and skinny translated to model material and they all looked so happy!).

Math and science being my best scores and my wish to break out of my small town and away from the family of origin, I signed up for engineering school, and I got in. I almost flunked out. Here I was at a  university where most people were much more prepared than me (I hadn’t even had a real chemistry class much less calculus). Determination was my strength. I knew I was smart- I can do this. I entered into a required class and found a microscope. Not on living tissue- on metals. It is amazing what goes on inside supposed inorganic, nonliving material. I was mesmerized. My grades went sky-high the more I studied energy. I accomplished a 99% on a comprehensive final exam in Classical Thermodynamics! what?!

I entered engineering in Florida, My dream spot. In the aerospace industry which I thought was the most exciting thing happening on the planet. And I excelled. I became a sought after Project Manager from some of the most successful companies in the biz and only once wrote a proposal that didn’t get funded. (I later proved them wrong)

Then came the “life happens” . Death, physical destruction of my own body, lost love… and depression. No longer was I the up and coming star of the defense industry. Broken, nonfunctional, incapacitated . These were in retrospect the best days of my life. I was no longer wife, mother, engineer- none of that, just me. Penny.

This gave me time to spend all my time hanging out in nature. Just to be in nature was restorative . The desert, the mountains, the lakes and rivers, the woods, the oceans. Talk about resurrection! When I ran out of money and time for that, I tried engineering once again. Abruptly, it became obvious that was never going to work again. Ever. So soul searching I went. I had been badly hurt in an accident and loved the body workers that kept me going and thought “wouldn’t that be cool”? help people stop hurting rather than helping to make weapons of mass destruction.

I went to massage school. I loved every minute of it and never want to leave these incredibly loving, compassionate people. So, for the last twenty years that is what I have been doing (that and journaling and meditating and adding energy work to my daily practice). So, now I am a licensed massage therapist, outstanding Bowen therapist (you will have to read about that on my other blogs),  teacher and blogger doing my best at initiating people to health without drugs.

I still write-everyday, it’s meditation for me- it’s exploration for me. And I still research every day, I do not accept as best or correct anything that is out there- I find what is best for me and those that I care about. I take nothing for granted. And I own my own intelligence.

Life Is Good, or at least interesting in any given moment.

Peace,

Penny

www.pennymichaels.com