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.