Cover artist Katerina Merezhinsky is transforming the cover art from JPG to PDF – once she’s got that done, we submit, and behold! A book will be forthcoming.

Level 3 Dances – Integrating Energy Patterns into Choreography

In Chapter 29 of Unveiling, “Pragmatic Esoterics,” I write about how we can learn to access, cultivate, and circulate our internal energy, or ch’i. This is something that martial artists do all the time. (Particularly true for “internal martial artists”; those who do T’ai Chi Ch’uan, or similar arts.) So far, elatively few of us do this in dance. (In Unveiling, I mention a few dancers whose work would readily inspire this kind of practice, though. I’ll post some links from the Unveiling website a bit later.)

Now, after having pulled back from both teaching and performing over these past few years, I am rebuilding my practice from the ground up. And now, all of my dances are essentially “energy work” dances.

This doesn’t mean that anyone can see a visible difference; this is largely a felt-thing. But just as those who have trained their sensitivity to energy work can detect ch’i flow in a martial artist, yogi, or ch’i kung practitioner, we should be able to detect it in a dancer. And not only detect, but observe and emulate, over time.

The piece that I’m working with right now incorporates energy-drawing movements and a basic Microcosmic Orbit (see link to Mantak Chia’s book below). I use figure-eights and other moves to access, build and compress the ch’i in my tan tien. (Geographic center point of my body.) I use shimmies to “vibrate” the energy. Other physical movements correspond to distinct “energy” movements and intentions.

This is a little complex, but not much more so than learning to play zills while dancing, or learning to dance with a veil. And it feels juicier! I’m really enjoying the sensation!

Unveiling Launch: June, 2011 – Sneak Previews, Special Links

What’s the best way to get to know someone? Know their friends, and know the books they read. The two, taken together, are the best measure of a person’s character, value, and quality.

In that vein, for the next 31 days (one day for each Unveiling chapter), I’m going to offer a series of blogposts (again, one for each chapter) featuring links to the books and articles that I reference the most in Unveiling.

What will you get from this?

• A “free look” into the world of Unveiling – “boldly go” where no man (or woman) has gone before
• A guide to your summer reading list (Unveiling plus its “best-of-best” resources)
• An “insider’s guide” – makes you one of the ones “in the know” about all that we will think, do, and discuss as we “unveil” Unveiling to ourselves!

Where to start? With the most important question of all:
Chapter 1: What Do Women Want?

If it’s been a long time since you’ve read Chaucer, why not take time for a little review? (You might wait until winter, when you can do this with a tankard of ale or a cup of mead, beside a roaring fire — but bookmark this blogpost for later reading.)

Chaucer was a great student of human nature, and this doesn’t show up any more clearly than in his Canterbury Tales. Of the many men who’ve tried to answer the question, “What do women want?”, he was one of the first to come up with a good answer. To get his take, as expressed in The Wife of Bath’s Tale, visit an online Canterbury Tales version.

In counterpoint (and I’ll leave it to you to find what Chaucer thinks), read what David Deida says in his advice to men about becoming a “superior man.” Deida, in essence, has written a corollary to Unveiling, except that it’s written by a man, and directed to men. His book is: The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire
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You can get a preview of Deida’s book through Amazon.

Unveiling – The Book that I’d Read Right Now

I’ve been having lots of emotional stuff come up lately. Men. Relationships. How it is that I’ve created what I have so far. (Some of which I’ve liked, and a great deal that I haven’t – but am working to change.)

This “emotional pot” got stirred up as a result of something called natural healing. I’ll write more about this in my Alay’nya Blog. Suffice to say, natural healing is powerful, effective, and very surprising.

Late last week, I had a session with Dr. Anita Kloss, who has recently joined Dr. Dennis Sievers at Care Plus Chiropractic in Fairfax, VA. Great session. Did all the usual chiropractic things. But then Anita did something else.

I asked for it. I wanted it. But that doesn’t mean that this has been easy.

The natural healing “treatment” feels as though nothing is happening at all. But Anita told me that I should pay attention to my dreams; things would start to show themselves to me.

Gosh, have they ever!

The first round of dreams – starting two days after the session – were all very positive and upbeat, I could feel that the way in which I was dealing with things was shifting. All very good.

Then the next round of dreams – two nights ago – went much deeper. It simply showed me (a bit more amped up, but in core essence, it showed) a pattern that I’ve had for a very, very long time. A pattern with which I’ve had some success in healing, but am absolutely not complete.

Progress, yes. Complete and total breakthrough and mastery, not yet.

Which is okay. We’re all human, we’re all growing, we’re all working through things.

What I did, this morning and yesterday morning, was to start using the Principles for body awareness and integration that I’ve learned over many years – and disclose in Unveiling – to help me soften my reactive tensions, get grounded and anchored once again, and release resistance.

Many years ago, I started writing Unveiling because I needed a guide. Lacking an in-person teacher (I had many such, but no one person in a central guide-and-mentor role), I looked for a book. There was no book. I resolved to write my own. Now, fifteen years later, Unveiling is very near publication.

And in this moment – in this time of processing some real pain-body stuff – I’d grab my copy of Unveiling and use it. (That was, if I wasn’t reading it already.)

I know all the stuff in the book. Most likely, in one way or another, you know much of it too. But sometimes we just need an external source – a person or a book or something outside of our own heads – to provide the guidance. To give us a way-point. To help us get clarity. And to remind us to soften, anchor, release, and breathe.

Unveiling is available for pre-order. Visit Cleo’s Closet – the Unveiling Pre-Order Page to get signed up for your copy as soon as it is available. (This means getting one of the soon-to-be-rare signed, dated, and early-numbered collector’s versions.)

And to get started, you can read Unveiling segments online. Visit the Unveiling website. Look for the most recently-added pages; new material will be put up (for a short time only!) each week.

And best wishes with your own, private-unto-yourself, healing and unveilng!

Unveiling – With Hats and Veils

After a busy week, just getting back to Unveiling edits, in the middle of Chapter 4.

We can let our minds wander back to some of the images we’ve seen of our mother’s time, or possibly, of our grandmother’s. These were the days in which women wore hats. Back then, a woman was simply not “dressed” if she were without a hat, as it gave a sense of completeness to her costume. A woman’s hat literally “topped things off.” (from Unveiling, Chapter 4: Playtime for Grown-Up Girls, p. 45.)

I wore a hat when I went to a mini-fashion-presentation at my friend Dolly’s house yesterday; CAbi (Carol Anderson by invitation) – lovely clothes! What I particularly like is that they comfortably encompass both professional and casual dress; very versatile. They are also mostly “stretchies” – figure flattering and immensely comfortable. Although I love designing and making my own clothes, I’m anticipating wearing a great deal of CAbi in the future!

Everyone loved the hat – but it was all about fashion, so it was important to “dress for the occasion.” (Contact me at alaynya (at) alaynya (dot) com if you’d like me to get an invitation for you to the fall showing – and the presenter, Renata, is looking for representatives in the New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut aresas. Let me know – I’ll pass your name along!)

I expect hats to surge in popularity for this spring – and did you know that famous millener (hat maker) Philip Treacy has been commissioned to make hats for the royal family, for the upcoming wedding of Kate and William?

I first saw Treacy’s work on Project Runway, and was enthralled – hat-making taken to a new level, and to our current generation. Wearing one of these hats, we’d have all the power of unveiling – and not have to remove the hat!

Unveiling in Final Proofing/Indexing Stage

Thumbs back up to CreateSpace. I leaned on Travis, my Publishing Consultant, just a little bit last week. He leaned on my team. They got the re-laid-out interior page proofs back to me in record time. Now re-reading and proofing. It’s going fast; there’s just a lot of it.

Minimal posts until the changes list is submitted.

Unveiling: The Inner Journey Website Makes Pre-Orders Possible!

I am so excited — after a very long day of work yesterday, the Unveiling website is now starting to have the “look” and “feel” of a more polished page. And most importantly, it provides the link to Cleo’s Closet, where you can pre-order a copy!

I’m thrilled to have a little gig this weekend with a local synagogue, working with their children’s program to celebrate Purim. This is the celebration by the Jewish people of Esther’s heroic actions to save them against the evil Haman, who plotted their destruction. What a marvelous coincidence – I write about Esther in Chapter 8: The Essence of Stillness.

I’m going to do some research today and put up some content about Esther and Purim. I was so excited about this last night that it was hard to sleep! What fun!

Unveiling: The Inner Journey – “Personal Empowerment” Means Taking Total Responsibility

I’m getting a good lesson in taking total responsibility for my creations right now.

Of course, one of the basic themes of metaphysics is that we create our reality – all of it. So if there’s something that we like, it’s our reality-creation. And if there’s something that we don’t like – the same.

Let me digress for a momen. In this blog, I’m often writing at three different levels. The first is about the actual content and material of Unveiling.

The second is sharing from my life how to put the Unveiling teachings and principles into action. If it is part of the more abstract or conceptual learning, it will go here. That means things like: understanding and using our archetypes, doing our personal integration, discerning whether we are on a “Heroine’s Quest” or an “Inanna-Descent,” or other aspect of our pathworking, etc.

The third “level” of writing is sharing the actual day-to-day pragmatics of being an author; not just writing a book, but getting it into publication, sharing the word, etc. For details on becoming an author as a means of generating revenue, see my scientific/technical/business blog.

What follows is a combination of levels two and three; the pragmatics of getting a book into print (level 3) and how this relates to pathworking.

Once more, Unveiling is “back in the shop.”

Two weeks ago, I completed (yet another) full-pass edit/proof, and found well more than 100 tiny-little changes. (I call these the “comma/semi-colon edits”; they’re not always that, but they are minutia of that level.) When there are over 100 changes, instead of submitting a “changes list,” the thing to do is just a full “manuscript resubmission.” Which I did. Contacted my CreateSpace Publishing Consultant, Travis Craine (who is a dear, by the way, and who really tries to work with me). Agreed to the manuscript resubmission, paid my fee, and my credit card was duly hit. I uploaded the new manuscript.

I knew enough now to call up and confirm that they had the manuscript. Had a lovely little chat with someone on my “Team” at CreateSpace. She told me that they were “a little busy” (codeword for completely swamped), and that I would get my newly-laid-out digital interior proof towards the end of the timeframe usually allocated for this.

So I focused on other things, and gave this a week. Actually, a tad more than a week – I uploaded on Monday of last week, and didn’t recheck until yesterday (Tuesday; eight days after manuscript resubmission).

Big mistake. (Did I mention this “total responsibility” thing?)

There on my “Message Board” from CreateSpace was a little note — I needed to go pay them a fee. Well, damn, I’d already paid them a fee. A quick call cleared that up. But — eight days are now lost. I told them that it was their job to move this project to the “head of the list” since it was their fault that they had boffled their own system.

The response, from the sweet young man at their end, was that they were “extremely busy right now” (codeword for “completely overwhelmed”). Fine, I understand, and I’ll keep putting the pressure on them until they do move this project up.

So the thing is – here’s where “total responsibility” comes into play – as an author who has chosen to self-publish (no one forced that decision on me; I could have gone with a regular “publishing house” and cut my profit margin by two-thirds), there is no one who really cares about the progress of this book except me. Not my “Publishing Consultant.” That’s not his job, really. He’ll help when I ask, but the bottom line is that moving my book through the system is my job, not his.

So here we are — back on top of CreateSpace once again.

They do a pretty decent job, by the way. I’ve been pleased with their layout design and implementation. (They send these tasks out to one of their free-lance specialists; I’ve been happy enough with the work done so far.) But this is the second major time that they’ve boffled the work flow process at their end, and it all has to do – more or less – with their software tracking system, but at the end of the day, it’s a matter of accountability and who’s keeping their eye on the ball.

And at the end of the day, for the self-publishing author, that has to be the author him or herself.

Enough on this topic for now. Will go lean on Travis and my CreateSpace Team just a little, and after marketing and curriculum design, there is always the index to finish.

And still, I continue to recommend to friends who have a “knowledge-based business” (teaching, consulting, or doing specialized work) that they publish or produce their work so that it can teach or communicate in their place. And for the rationale, please visit my scientific/technical/business blog.

of how the “share” from the blogpost is getting over to FB – is it going to my personal (Alay’nya) page or over to the Unveiling page?

Still have a head cold, but the symptoms are less troublesome, my energy and mental focus are better, and just in time. I’ve just edited (re-edited; re-edited and re-written for the nth time) a few short, but absolutely crucial paragraphs in early Chapter 7.

Yesterday was fine. I cruised along; slammed through creating a raw index for Part I, and now feel – with raw indices done for the first half of this book – that that task will be somewhat under control.

So I turned my attention to inserting the edits that I’d written into margins of the “interior page layout proofs.” The Ded/Ack/Intro, all went fast. A few checks back and forth on things, but overall smooth, easy, went well. Part I (Chapters 1-5) similarly fast. Even Part 6, which starts to get a bit “meaty.” (The Hero’s Quest, and the Heroine’s as Well – actually a bit of a complex subject.)

Put in the first few edits from Chapter 7, and had to call things off to get a minimal number of life-maintenance chores done. By the time I was back, the cold symptoms had taken over in terms of low-energy and a nasty, snippy mood – the best thing was to go to bed, which I did.

This morning, back to where I left off at a really crucial, tricky, delicate part of Chapter 7.

Here’s where I digress, if only for a moment. Unveiling is really about five books in one. I sure didn’t plan it that way. This is what evolved over the last two years, and I’m as surprised as you are.

Part II is where a whole book-unto-itself starts. Actually, two books; Chapter 6 (the Hero’s and the Heroine’s Quests) really can spin off into its own book, and probably will someday. But the heart and core of Part II is Chapter 7, which deals with archetypes. Specifically, feminine archetypes.

Tricky stuff, because some really neat, surprising, and ultra-valuable things emerged over the course of the last two years of work. One of them had to do with a number of different archetypal systems that I was able to correlate, and make a whole lot of pragmatic, common sense in doing so.

The other was the correlation of one of our archetypal modes, the Mother mode, with recent understanding of our neurochemistry.

My first major reference on this topic was, God(dess) bless her, Dr. Louann Brizendine’s book, The Female Brain.

This is basically a good book. (About 1M other readers agree with me, across multiple languages given the translations that have been done.) It has two really good things going for it:
1) It’s about the right topic (us, our brains, our neurochemistry), and
2) It’s a fairly easy read. Light, comfortable, conversational and breezy.

The thing that it doesn’t quite have going for it – which I found only during my last major revision – was that it is not super-well-regarded by the author’s peers.

One reason for this came to light when I – almost by chance – started to look at the roles of two neurochemicals, dopamine and oxytocin, more closely. Dr. Brizendine’s book (which I still recommend, by the way, not all of us want to dive into academic literature, or even good texts), is a little too loose on how these two neurochemicals interact. Maybe because it is, by now, six years old – a near-lifetime in the realm of brain research. But also, it is written to be light. And the dopamine/oxytocin/estrogen mix in our brains is really not a “light” subject.

So I did a lot more digging around, came up with some stellar additional references, revised my thinking about how we can personally “manage our brain chemicals,” and finally – as of half an hour ago – finished rewriting a couple of delicate but essential little paragraphs.

Damn, this is good stuff. And it’s not just me; I’m not just being self-congratulatory here. But if I were to come across this chapter, written by someone else, I would be so thrilled, and be having such a life-changing, eye-opening, oh-my-God(dess)-this-really-is-it! experience that it would blow my mind out of my body for weeks.

The best way that I can describe it is that I’ve been “obedient.” I’ve listened to an inner muse, to guidance, and gotten the inspirations – and then been really patient in the researching, the writing, the editing, and the re-editing and the re-writing.

It’s taken a whole lot longer than I ever thought.

And you know what? It will have been worth the effort.

And it’s really, really close now.

This little bit in Chapter 7 – the whole oxytocin/dopamine/estrogen shuffle – really had to be worked out in some detail, to write even a couple of decent overview paragraphs. And you’ll have this in your hands, so very, very soon.

Hallelujah! We can see it coming!