Kate Spade & Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Bourdain's suicide touched me. I have been quite the fan of his since high school when No Reservations first aired. His and Kate's suicide kind of surprised me; didn't see it coming.

It really is true that you do not know what someone is going through. Our daily faces are just all smoke and mirrors.

Also, wasn't there a prediction of a shocking or surprising celebrity death? 

I don’t know much about Kate Spade, but I loved watching Anthony Bourdain’s shows.  There was something so lived-in about them, and Bourdain was such a rock star to a Boomer: he had hit his bottom early and transformed his experience into a creative dialogue between the sacred and profane that was as relatable for me as Anne Lamott’s writing.  He called himself an asshole and sat down to eat with everyone everywhere.  I always felt transported when watching his shows.  Watching them was like reading a good book; I got to go somewhere else and be there.  Last night Anderson Cooper replayed discussions with Bourdain that related his idea of the value of accepting others’ food as accepting them.  Bourdain seemed to embody Lola’s words: “stay strong, have faith and most importantly love.  Love yourselves, love others and love this beautiful complex planet we all share,” but as Carmen suggests, “it really is true that you do not know what someone is going through.  Our daily faces are just all smoke and mirrors.”  Bourdain’s suicide seems to suggest he didn’t see that he was demonstrating love or realize its value.

I’ve believed in the existential idea that the external world is just a macrocosm of my own stuff and journey and think I’ve internalized the shit storm going on around me to the extent that I’ve reached an impasse.  I realize this is an entirely narcissistic endeavor. I read cards to try to understand myself in relation to others and to focus on what I’m supposed to be doing and have thought this was valuable, but maybe the way I’ve done it is just another obsession. 

It takes a lot of energy to fight through the tornadic whirl of karmic stuff to stand in the center of the vortex Melanie describes.  Standing in the stillness, nothing appeals.  I don’t want the entertainment I always found in reading and watching.  Everything going forward seems like a karmic trial, and I’m tired of lifting my scythe and trying to get to the other side, and it doesn’t make sense to move that way anyway.    

I keep having these temper tantrums with myself in relation to myself and others.  It’s easy to rail against life in bureaucratic hierarchies and get pissed off about being imprisoned in them.  I keep creating these mess barriers in my home, relationships, and self.  It’s just so much drama I don’t want to clear out, because everything will seem so empty once it’s gone.  I keep telling myself to stop, look, listen and read the words of wisdom on this site from so many: Bluebelle, Jeanne, Michelle, Starpath, Paul W., Lola, and Carmen this morning.  I focus and see there’s only one way to go … a Jessica Jones jump.  I have to take responsibility for my health and gifts and love and put them to use. 

I don’t know where I read or heard it but someone said there are two remedies to addiction: finding joy in the mundane and developing mastery in some action.  I think what Lola said is the third: loving and maybe the fourth: trusting that energy is never lost and even if you don’t see it, loving has value on all planes of existence.  I’m sad that Bourdain ended his life.  Maybe he didn’t see he could be an asshole and still be loved.  Maybe he started using heroin again.  Regardless, his life showed he put up a good fight and left many honorable lessons behind. 

A few thoughts -- did you all know that since 1999 the US suicide rate has increased by about 30%? It started going up prior to all the existing social media, so that can't be the only culprit. The rise also somewhat pre-dates the opioid crisis, so that can't be the only thing, either. And most are not using guns for suicide, so that can't be it. Mental illness remains a stigma, but not nearly as much as in the "old" days. Experts are flummoxed. I have my own unsubstantiated opinion. I have struggled with anxiety and depression and trauma since young childhood. A therapist once told me "Mild depression is merely realism, an honest reaction to what is going on around you." I think more and more people are just giving up, and I can't blame them. It's kind of like leaving halfway through a movie that you know ends badly. I think our existing world may be dying. There are days when I'm not sure I have the strength to see how it all turns out, I feel trapped. So while these individual suicides may come across as surprising at first, to me the overall trend is not a surprise. I get it.

I totally hear you, Laura.  I think part of it is everything happens so fast, but special counsel investigations apparently.  My global angst goes from being mortified by our president's behavior everywhere and about everything to feeling powerless on so many levels.  My belief system strongly suspects we chose this life and have to make the best of it for a positive spiritual reason, like finding our power and using it in loving ways.  

Have you ever considered shamanic training, Laura?  One starts tomorrow. http://www.shamanicteachers.com/workshopsnorthamerica/webandtelephoneclasses.html

I've been visiting Sandra Ingerman's site ever since Melanie suggested she needed to find a good shaman.  There's good stuff there, like "Eric Pearl teaches, In quantum physics if you change the behavior of one particle, another particle in a different location will instantaneously react whether inches or universes away. Lower frequencies entrain or attune to higher frequencies not the other way around.  So back to the core principle of the Medicine for the Earth work, we change the world and heal others by who we become – by our presence and by the love and light we radiate." http://www.sandraingerman.com/creatingaweboflight.html

Gracesinger, Carman, Lola, I get comfort reading your words. I'm so grateful you are here, writing out your feelings, and sharing them with us.  I want to send you love and surround you with healing. And I need it too.  You help me when I see you helping each other. 

I have felt such sadness in the collective this past two months.  An old friend who has never been suicidal or depressed before,  took a lethal overdose of prescription drugs two weeks ago.  He survived it, thank God. He said he just felt the will to keep going had gone out of him. 

I heard also from a psychiatrist friend who says the psychiatric emergencies seem to be up this past month.  

The news is painful right now - young immigrant children pulled from their parents' arms-- I find this heartbreaking and nearly unbearable to contemplate.  Having a psychopath and a traitor for a president.  The G7 summit really got to me.  It is mortifying to have our president do what he did in front of the world, mortifying and depressing that our country elected a deranged, maniacal mean-spirited bully who hates democracies and loves dictators.

But it's not the news specifically that got to  my friend directly nor would it have affected Kate Spade or Anthony Bourdain directly.  As a collective, people are reeling and dispirited.  We will get our mo-jo back but it's going to take a while.  It's the end of an era and we will prevail. But a lot of people are struggling. 

Meditation helps a lot.  Just sitting and connecting with your body and nervous system, and feeling the way it feels, the stress, the painful thoughts, the sorrow in the Collective, just letting it pulse through you.  I think of it as being in the eye of a storm. I let the stress move to the periphery and I stand in the eye. It helps.

You all help too.  

Then there is the connection to spirit. I  sit and read the stillness. The objects in the room begin to vibrate. I feel love is here in the room with me.  And with you too. There is so much love in this world. Much more love than the lack of love. 

Gracesinger - Thanks so much. I have considered shamanic training in the past. I discussed it with a close friend who is Native American, and she gently told me that it would be viewed as cultural appropriation and to please not do it. So I deferred to her, in my efforts to support People of Color in any way possible, including by considering their feelings on these matters. She did suggest that if I can find a shamanic-type training that comes from my own culture (southern Europe), that would be okay, but so far I haven't heard of any.  Peace.

Jeanne - thank you as always. Today I took some time for self-care - basically a light nap with noise-cancelling headphones while listening to nature sounds (may favorite is "Wilderness Rainshower"), and my reiki-emitting cat at my side. I was too tired to actually meditate, but was able to clear my head a bit.  I'm sorry about your old friend, but it sounds like exactly what I was talking about - people are losing the will to go on. Glad they survived and hope they feel better going forward. Love.

Love back. Wilderness Rainshower sounds like the ticket, and a Reike emitting cat.  Ahhhh.   I once had an enormous boy cat named Fluffball who gave me shoulder massages. When I was resting, he'd sit behind my head on the pillow and kneed my shoulders while purring. 

Gracesinger, in the spiritual realms, I do believe you are correct, that negative or low vibrations seek, attach, and emulate the more positive and higher. In this incarnation, I think some of us are still dealing with getting rid of the negative that seeks us out and disrupts our maintaining ourselves at a higher vibration. 

I'm typically a Pollyanna, but in the last seven months or so, I've had a hard time maintaining. I saw elsewhere, you also mentioned hearing the same old voices and demons back again. Some of that is Pavlovian from our experiences here. I come from a narcissistic family dynamic. Nothing like what we see in the White House, but dysfunctional none the less. Having been through therapy, I was told to cut or limit my contacts with my family if I couldn't manage to keep their behaviors from disturbing me. The therapist did not diagnose my family, as she had no opportunity to evaluate them. She could however tell me when their behaviors towards me were inappropriate, etc. Then one time she had the occasion to talk to my ex. She called me warning me that she detected some narcissistic traits, and proceeded to tell me what he would do in the given circumstances. She was dead on the money.  I started educating myself on the traits, and lo and behold, I've seen the same things in my family, which is why I attracted one as a mate. It was what I was used to. I've lived away from them all for decades, and in some cases, I was estranged from some of them for long periods of time-depending on the circumstances. 

To make a long story short, I had worked for decades to try and repair or improve relationships with my family without compromising myself too much. Often I did get the short end of the stick, but things were better. Then dad had his strokes, and my sister saw an opportunity to get him to buy her a house (narcissistic parents tend to enable their children-it's a nasty self fulfilling cycle). In one felled swoop, my sister undid all my years of work. I had been named POA and executor for my parents, had been preparing to have my parents move in with me so I could take care of them in their last years, and both sisters behind my back got dad to buy the younger sister a house and moved himself and mom in with her. I was do dismayed at the betrayal and what that would do to everyone's well being, I had two deceased uncles and a grandfather come to me at one time in my dreams to try and console me. This move also dis significant damage to my relationship with my father (he was told that I was after his money-ironic right? I offer him a home-no strings attached, the other two want a house/handouts, yet he believed I was the one after his money). I was always the family black sheep (scapegoat), as I didn't rely on them, as they were emotionally abusive towards me. Decades of work went down the drain. My grandfather had also shown me symbolically that he was drowning-so I knew it meant the end of the family. Within 5 months, the stress of it all caused my mother (who has Alzheimers) to have a stroke, and my younger sister overdosed on her pain meds three days after we got mom out of a 6 week stint in rehab. I've had to deal with my sister's hostile fiance and future mother in law, and need to try and figure out how to get my parents out of the legal situation of now owning a house with my sister's boyfriend. 

I knew from my research that you can't cure a narcissist, so things wouldn't change, and I kick myself for having believed that it was  possible. My sister came to me within 48 hours after her death to show her shame, and that my parent's health had been harmed (it appeared in the dream they don't have much more time-and what time they had was shortened by my sister's actions). When faced with abusive behaviors from her boyfriend and his mother, I didn't bite my tongue or reply from a place of love. I didn't get in the gutter with them, but I did defend myself when faced with diatribes. This was regression for me. 

While I haven't seen my sister in my dreams again in the last few weeks, I would suddenly find myself replaying the nasty scenes I was forced to endure while helping my parents before and after my sister's funeral. I'd then start ruminating about all the ways my sister damaged our relationship thru the years. I couldn't figure out why this kept coming up. I kept thinking it was because I was the only one concerned with what her plans would do to her health, and that I'd been shown her death was coming for several years. I stopped telling her what I was seeing a year and a half prior, as she kept blowing it off. I thought these negative memories were because I felt guilty I hadn't gotten thru. I finally figured out that she's coming around and when she does, I don't even realize she's here, but I'm obviously recognizing her energy and that is bringing up all the old feelings that I should be past now. It's knee jerk-while I loved her, I always had to put my guard up when she was around for my own well being. That hasn't changed since she's passed. It's Pavlovian that when I feel her, I remind myself of what she's capable of so that I don't let my guard down. I do think she and I were connected in ways that I don't feel with the others in the family. I also think it will take time and conscious effort on my part to recognize when she's around and learn to trust her again now that she's in a different place/mindset spiritually. 

I bring all this up because I think it's happening to more than just me. There's a shift coming about and those who won't do well with what is coming are starting to prepare to leave. We have others who have passed who are coming around to guide us or prepare us, and old Earth habits kick in when they are near. I've seen a number of psychics who's materials I read having significant health problems (like my sister). I think the fact that several of us are having problems with past issues resurfacing is all part of the process of getting us to realize what's working here vs what works spiritually. It's preparing us for the shifting tides. It's reminding us what we've been through, and we have to be vigilant in applying what we've already learned. I thought I had won the battle and always looked on the bright side. I have won, but that doesn't mean that there won't be some clouds that momentarily obscure the light I've come to love. It also shows me that it never hurts to continue to try and learn, and that past lessons need refreshers so they can become building blocks for future lessons. 

I had quit reading the news early last fall. Too much negativity. I can still pray and send love and light into the world without needing to have specifics as provided by the news. I haven't been meditating for a number of years now, and it's time to get back into that practice. I have to get back to the place I was previously where I look inward instead of letting what others have to say bother me. As Eleanor Roosevelt said "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." 

I know I still have more losses coming in the near future, but I also have known that I have a long lifeline, and much more ahead to look forward to, like the many of those here who are learned and full of grace, but who are having a bit of a bumpy ride themselves as of late. We'll all appreciate the smooth sailing once it arrives. We wouldn't appreciate it as much when it comes if we hadn't had a bit of turbulence along the way. I think it's a huge shame that we see some big names who thought they had fought their demons and won succumb. There's a lesson in that for us all as well. We may have baggage, but we are meant to still move onward and upward. 

Thanks to all who posted here.  Such insightful writing.

Some of what was written gave me a little flashback of decades ago when I was in my late teens and early 20s, and reading the Seth books.  For those that aren't familiar, a woman in New York in the 1960s named Jane Roberts kind of stumbled upon her ability to channel (supposedly) a non-physical personality who called himself Seth.  I took the books with a grain of salt at the beginning, but they are profoundly insightful, intelligent, and really fascinating from the point of view of both physics and metaphysics, no matter who actually wrote them.  Not foo-foo stuff at all.

Anyway, at one point she/he was talking about changes that would happen in the first few decades after the millenium.  I need to go back and try to find this, but I remember something about how the vibrational energy was going to start spinning faster and faster, and that many would find themselves unable to cope.  There were other things mentioned, too, many positive things, but I don't remember them now.  Need to read those books again and see what resonates now that I'm older and living in a different time.  The Nature of Personal Reality was a favorite among those books.  

Thank you for bringing up the speeding up of vibrational energy.  I learned about this phenomena forty years ago when taking classes in eastern philosophy.   Since then, I've learned that quantum physics has theories asserting the same phenomenon. 

All natural things  move in a spiralic path, e.g., the earth and the whole solar system move this way - in a circle that moves forward. So we go around the sun in a year, but we are also moving forward along with the sun through the galaxy. The path looks like water going down a drain.  Gravity pulls it along to the drain, so it's moving in a circle that is going forward towards the drain. As it approaches the drain it spins faster.  Consciousness is also energy and our world and our thinking and behavior are also moving along this spiralic path.  

We are entering the center of the drain. Everything is accelerating - computers and phones, technology, the lawlessness and viciousness of the GOP, information, the mindfulness movement, the amount of love and giving, and social media, are all accelerating. Climate change is also accelerating as is our knowledge of the climate via the accelerating number of people entering the climate science field. Population is also accelerating. 

But as we reach the drain, there is new energy coming up.  This is the way black holes work and there are physicists such as Nassim Haramein,  who show mathematically that the opposite energy is coming up the drain as the old energy is going down.  With the water in the drain, there is air spiraling up as the water spins its way down.  It's depicted in the Yin/Yang symbol which is a two-dimensional representation of a three-D phenomonon.  

So the ancients also understood this phenomenon of nature.  The takeaway is that as our world as we  know it is going down the drain, a new world, opposite in nature, is coming up.  That is what our positive predictions are about.  They are the beginnings of the new world.

So you can thank Donald Trump and the dark money oligarchs for expediting the demise of an old system.  This shift fits some ancient prophecies as well. 

Wow, that makes complete sense, Becky and Jeanne.  

Cindy, both of your posts about your struggles with a challenging family of origin deeply touch me.  I was born to an alcoholic father and a mother who was born to an alcoholic father, so alcoholism sketched the intergenerational narrative of my family of origin.  For example, I am the oldest of five siblings, and we have moved in and out of playing the roles of hero, lost child, scapegoat, mascot, and enabler across our lives.  

Given a strong genetic and psychological predisposition to do so, I ended up bottoming out in my early 20s.  At that time, I felt that I needed to be exorcised and discovered that ACOA perfectly described how the confusion sown in an alcoholic family informed my psychological development.  AA became my church; through the program and community of others, I learned how to pray and was fervent in my use of its tools to address the challenges I was experiencing staying clean and sober.  For example, I frequently had miraculous experiences of absolute relief, when I confronted my desire to drink and use, engaged in grandiosity (“self-will run riot”), or felt unrelenting resentment towards others and gave the whole mess over to God’s “will and care with complete abandon.”  I knew that my damaged psyche and destructive behaviors weren’t working and grew to trust that “God would and could if sought.”

I made tremendous strides across the subsequent decade; however, my warped sense of machismo attracted and married someone who, in retrospect, demonstrated all of the red flags associated with an active alcoholic and molester.  The marriage lasted long enough to produce a child.  While I managed to stay clean while raising my child, those years were punctuated by very painful interactions with members of my family of origin and my ex-spouse and members of his family of origin.  When my child was young, her father did something dastardly.  Suffice it to say that I was spiritually devastated and while members of the criminal justice and healthcare systems were able to identify associated symptoms and problems, the systems themselves failed to protect me and my child. 

While my ex and his family of origin would continue to maintain a toxic mythology about the situation and the dysfunctionality in my own family of origin acted out our stuff across the next two decades, I found healing in several ways: my connection with God and the earth and a new spiritual journey that opened to me when I was given the name of a powerful woman who confirmed what my ex had done and why and offered psychic development workshops and participation in a community whose members became my soul coven.  I had a profound kundalini-like awakening and began to enjoy my connection with others, the earth, and God again.  I became enthralled with the mystery and magic of my chakras and the journey.  I participated in shamanic healing experiences, including a journey of soul retrieval with my parents.  I came to know myself and others in light.  I came to know the healing power of Quan Yin (who embodies the energy of Mary, compassionate wisdom).

Then I made a major move away from my community and back to the local of the family of origins for myself and ex.  Between members of these families and (always) people in my workplace, I have had many exhausting opportunities to employ all of the lessons I learned from AA and my soul coven.  So, I completely relate to your personal story of working very hard to sort through dysfunction and try to heal and practice new strategies in trying interpersonal situations. 

Several years ago, the unfolding mental illness of one of my siblings resulted in my distressed cry of help to my other three siblings.  While each lived far away from one another, each stepped up to the plate that was a severely mentally ill sibling in significant ways.  Each brought his and her gifts to helping my sibling sell her house, find alternative living arrangements, support her hospitalization and health care needs, and obtain social security benefits.  The situation prompted us to acknowledge and share where our respective spiritual journeys had taken us in the years we had spent a part from one another.  Several of us ended up going on a trip where we spent a Chinese New Year in Hong Kong harbor followed by a visit to Quan Yin’s monastery.  My response to your first post about your journey came from a place related to the “decades of work” we had all undergone that for once didn’t go completely “down the drain.”  I had come to appreciate that all of the members of my family of origin were spiritual creatures on our own spiritual journeys and that there was love there, and it was strong enough to support our sibling in crisis and our aging parents in a beautiful way. 

I came to participate in the community represented on this site because I found myself searching for some relief from the sudden election of Donald Trump to the presidency.   While I have zero skills when it comes to remote viewing and psychic prediction, I have played with lots of different kinds of Tarot decks over the years to try to understand my relationships with others and figure out what to do.  I relate best to those streams that have to do with spiritual growth and development on a “psychic” level … in love and light, like yours.  It’s surreal to me that it’s now often related to all of this “alien talk.”   Sometimes, when I sleep and first awake, I see images of people who “check in” with me … either as glimpses of their faces or in light.  I found a community I sorely missed since my major move more than a decade ago.  Much love to you, Cindy, and thank you for sharing your story because I completely relate to it.

Jeanne, I have to agree with you. Lately, after the far-right candidates are rising, we also see grassroots Democrats. As we get through the midterms, that will be the point of no return. The GOP will be starting to die off and the grassroots movements will grow. I feel that it is coming sooner than later. It's likely the next recession will happen before the 2020 elections and a Democrat will rise. Zoron said that it will get dark until 2022 when there will be fighting and the light takes over 2022. I feel that there will be people motivated to register to vote and will be a surprise in the midterms.

Its essential that people register and vote, and campaign. Its ebtterthan going silently into the dark night.

Zoron I like your 2020 prediction. I have the same feeling since the first read the future night, but how is it possible for the GOP to become fragmented and die off? I feel the downfall is coming sooner that later.

Posted by: Laura F.

Gracesinger - Thanks so much. I have considered shamanic training in the past. I discussed it with a close friend who is Native American, and she gently told me that it would be viewed as cultural appropriation and to please not do it. So I deferred to her, in my efforts to support People of Color in any way possible, including by considering their feelings on these matters. She did suggest that if I can find a shamanic-type training that comes from my own culture (southern Europe), that would be okay, but so far I haven't heard of any.  Peace.

Sounds like pre-Christian European spiritual paths. That tends to be accessed via paganism/the occult/witchcraft communities. The closest to an intact shamanic path in the West would be Seidr, a Norse-based path, which isn't specific to people only of Norse ancestry. You might also check out the work of Raven Kaldera and Sarah Anne Lawless.

Thank you, D. I had looked into Wicca and Norse Paganism, but they don't resonate with me.  There are some Southern European pagans...in Southern Europe... I figure the Universe will lay out a path at some point. In the meantime I'm looking into becoming a Life Coach, which is kind of a modern form of shamanism (albeit diluted).

Excellent!!... Zoron!

Aw shucks, Zoron