Monday, May 02, 2011

I can see my path

I've been running at full speed the past 6 weeks. Much has happened, but despite trying to sit down to write in my blog many times the past few weeks, I couldn't seem to come up with the words.

At school, I am learning A LOT. My mind-body class is a body psychology course and is truly changing the way I see the world and interact personally in it. The psychology of the body rests in the muscle tissue, and taking kinesiology (upper body) at the same time, and devoting four hours a week to psychotherapy (individual and group) is changing my life in a huge way. I am finding the entire greater subject, how to change ourselves and the way we think and feel and relate to ourselves and the world, absolutely fascinating. On a personal level, I am taking it one step further, learning about PTSD and trauma recovery and understanding what happens to the normal body psychology when trauma occurs to result in PTSD. An amazing quote I read this morning was:

PTSD has been described as the failure of time to heal all wounds

My plans to become certified in Trauma Touch Therapy have not changed. My entire drive to getting my business up and running successfully is in part so that I can set myself up to be as successful as possible during the course of TTT certification. An interesting side effect of my body psychology course has been in the realm of gender (of course, I am always looking for that stuff anyway!). I've been reading more about body maps and also a bit about the biological difference between men and women. It became apparent to me that men process their emotional lives much more within their body-mind, whereas women are much more apt to process emotional material in the brain (ie: via talking, crying, etc). After a bit of trial and error and application of energywork and meditation techniques I have learned over the past 18 months, I managed to learn how to CONTROL my gender switches.

The result of being able to control my gender has led me to feel more in control of my own life and my own body. For the most part, I don't interfere. If I wake up as one gender, I don't force it. Its just not necessary! But it has helped me adapt better in social and professional situations. I am starting to work with my therapist to identify ways that I can choose to be a certain gender to take advantage of skills as one gender or the other, or as a coping mechanism. The whole thing is very exciting for me.

Despite the enormous amount of personal change, and time devoted to it, I am spending the majority of my time putting together my business ideas. In school I am taking a career development class. It's essentially an outline of all the million things that can be explored in building a career. It touches upon dozens of topics each week. I feel very thankful I have spent the time that I have before this quarter started on business development, because I am just barely keeping up. My weeks consist of multiple trips to the library and skimming/reading piles of books, weekly meetings with my employment counselor/mentor, volunteer work with a local non-profit holistic health clinic, site visits and competitor research, and writing. My father has decided to help me on the project and is taking on design and infrastructure plans. Working with my dad has been extraordinary. We don't have the best relationship and being able to work with him on a project that he is passionate about (healthcare design) has become very rewarding. We have been meeting regularly and spend a lot of time going over how my business ideas fit into current healthcare management and design challenges. It is great to be able to bounce my ideas off of him, especially since he is considered one of the experts in the healthcare design field in the US. Working together is allowing us to work out a viable innovative healthcare solution to todays healthcare challenges looking into the future, and not back at the past. Seeing my ideas in physical space layout instead of abstract clouds in my mind has launched the project to a whole now level and allowed me to conceptualize what is needed to truly integrate healthcare systems.

I feel as if I am racing the clock though. My unemployment runs out in mid-July. This quarter ends mid-June. I get my license to practice massage as a certified massage therapist any day now, and once I get it, my time will be even more stretched as I race to get all the pieces together so that I have an operating practice by mid July. My solution to a difficult question over the past year (the scalability and organization of my business ideas) has been to open a sole proprietorship immediately, and start a corporation for my main business ideas separately at a later time.

With only two quarters left of school, and the help of my dad, by January 1 I could realistically have a proposal ready for contract and bidding. However, I have decided that I will not launch. I have decided that I will seek part time employment as a Massage Therapist (MT) and work on my sole proprietorship while enrolling back into Mesa College and taking my time to get my Associates Degree (I still wanna learn languages and study art and music!!!). Once I accomplish my AA, I plan on going on the Bastyr University and realize my lifelong dream of studying there, to get my bacholor's degree. After that, I would like to go on and study integrative health. By the time I am nearing the end of my schooling, the market for integrative health will be much better (right now it is a little too preemptive.... there isn't enough demand yet) and I will be ready to launch with all the right variables in place (or at least more than I have now).

Since I was in junior high school I have dreamt of studying health and bringing a new way of health care management to the public. With so much personal and professional transformation happening, doors are flying open for me and my path is illuminated for me for the first time in my life. It is looking to be evermore transformational over the course of the next 7 months.

I have hope!
I have purpose!
I have taken back my life and it is mine now!

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