Blooming at 51!!

There's a lot going on in my life right now. All very exciting stuff! I feel so much alive!

I'm not going to share every detail with you because some stuff is private and concerns others but lets say that there's love in the air!

Ever since I did the Biophoton therapy I feel great and I have so much more energy. Last week I went to see the therapist for the last time. Now I just have to go there maybe 3 or 4 times a year just for a check up. Because I have more energy I'm more interested in learning new stuff and going on an adventure or exploring the world. Isn't that just cool!!

Falling in love also has to do with the way I feel today and the last couple of weeks. I feel like a complete new woman. It's not just that I fell in love with this great guy but I also fell in love with myself and I'm finally in peace with the person that I am. For the record: I'm not having a relationship with this guy but there's something special between the two of us!

There's something you have to know about me to better understand where I'm coming from. I have been a victim of rape in the past, not once but 3 times! So my self esteem has been very low for a very long time. I was almost 20 when I was raped the first time. After I got raped the last time (11 years ago) I lost all interest in men or sexual intimicy. That changed when I fell in love and it changed even more about a month ago when I suddenly got through the message (it was more like a thought that suddenly popped out in my head from nowhere) that I had to look into Tantra. At that point I only knew of the existence of the word Tantra and that it had to do something with sex, but that was all. So, I bought this book about Tantra from Margot Anand: Tantra, a way to intimicy and ecstacy. There are a lot of exercises in this book that you can do on your own so that you learn to feel comfortable with your own body. I started dancing and looking in my eyes in front of the mirror every day. It was very strange in the beginning but after a couple of weeks I started to feel more and more comfortable and finally last Sunday I realised I have grown to really love myself and feeling comfortable with me and my body. Other people (friends and neighbours) have noticed it too.

So yesterday I went to the sauna for the first time in my life. A huge step for me to do this! My friend Ina and I decided some time ago to go to a Spa in Nieuweschans. A couple of weeks ago I told her I wasn't interested in going to the sauna but the new me decided she wanted to go there.

The Spa in Nieuweschans is about a 45 minutes drive from where we live. There's a source with salty water and we first stayed in this water (37 degrees Celsius) in an outdoor pool for about 30 minutes. It was very relaxing. After a stay in the lavender room and the restroom we had lunch and after that we went to the sauna.

Inside there were a steam sauna, a heat sauna and an infra red sauna, a lovely swimmingpool with a strong jet stream so you could swim up against it without moving forward. I thought that was cool.

There also was a place where you could warm your feet before you went into a sauna and a place where you could scrub your body. Upstairs there was a deck where you could rest in between the visits to the sauna. Outside in the garden there was another sauna. A really big one for 60 people or so! There were also cold showers and a plunge bath (?) with really cold water. The first time I just took a cold shower (in tiny steps) but after the second round I went into the plunge bath and after the plunge bath I even put ice shavings (?) all over my body. It felt great. There also was a hut tub outside and a cool place where you could sit next to an open fire. We didn't went there because there wasn't enough time. My friend had to be home at 4 o'clock so we had to leave after the second round.

What surprised me the most about this first visit to the sauna is, that it felt so normal to be around other naked people, men and women. In the past I felt really uncomfortable with the idea of other people looking at my naked body or me looking at their naked bodies.

So now I'm officially hooked on the sauna and almost can't wait to go there again!

Although it's not allowed to take photos inside the Spa I took a few just before we had to leave. I show you the only photo I dared to take from the outside pool.

A friendly German gentleman (Nieuweschans is very close to the German border so there are always a lot of Germans in the Spa) who arrived at the Spa when we left the building took a photo of Ina and me in front of the entrance of the Spa.

Another great thing that happened yesterday is that Ina and I decided to follow this course in Oriental dancing (Egyptian belly dancing). It'll start on the 9th of December in Groningen. The night before yesterday I tumbled accidently (or maybe not accidently but it just had to be this way) on this website. Because I have always had the desire to learn how to belly dance I was immediately interested. I told Ina about the belly dancing and she was also very interested. Lucky for us there was still room for new students. I hope I'll be able to make the moves!! If you click here you can watch Aina teach other women how to belly dance.

My Inner World

The last couple of weeks I have daily visited the website My Inner World. This has been such a great inspiration to me and lots of good things have happened to me since the first day I started the guided journeys. It's as if I'm only attracting the good stuff right now. Everything is becoming so much clearer to me and I can better focus on the NOW.
If you register to this website you can follow the guided journeys and keep all the information you gather in your private journal.

The photo has been taken at the Citadel at Mycenae in Greece in 1978. I love this photo because it has something mysterious.

Tagged

I was tagged the other day by Alice. I have to write down 7 facts about myself, either random or weird or both.

Than I have to pick 7 blogfriends and tag them too. But because all the people of the blogs I frequently visit have already been tagged, I just want you to ask to feel yourself tagged when you read this post.

These are the 7 facts about myself.

1. When I hang my wash I like to use only the same coloured clothes pegs on the same line and I always start with the blue ones.

2. I love to wear soft socks in bed.

3. After every scrapbook or other creative project I have to clear and clean my table.

4. I find it difficult to throw away things and that's why I have problems with storage in my small house. (I really need to work on that!!!)

5. I love buying books!!

6. My biggest wish is to live near the sea in a warm country.

7. I often loose stuff in my own house, especially paperwork! (Have to work on this one too!!)

(Picture: some paintings in my bedroom I have made a long time ago!)

Something to share with you

This is a You Tube video of a performance by Jeremy Larson. He's Elsie Flannigan's boyfriend. I was curious about his music and found this. I think it's a great performance! He's so in to his music! You can watch other videos of Jeremy after this one is finished. I also love Make believe!
Don't forget to turn off my music list first.

55th wedding anniversary

Today it was the 55th wedding anniversary of my parents. I made this canvas with their wedding photo as a present. They loved it!!

Look what I found!!!

Today I went to our local recycle store and found this wooden case for records. It only cost me one euro!!!

I took off all of the old cover. Luckily that went very easy because it wasn't made of paper but of some self adhesive material. I have to repair the inside just a little bit. I have to take it completely out anyways, because I want to decorate the inside of the case as well. I'm not sure yet if I want to make it a scrapbook project or a mixed media art project.

I'm still busy reading and watching videos about Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth. At Oprah Winfrey's website you can watch a couple of videos of her and Eckhart talking about A New Earth. Really interesting!!!

Yesterday I went to Utrecht to pick up Zander and his friend Manuel. They stayed with Zander's dad during Fall vacation. When I arrived Zander was really in a foul mood. He constantly picked on me without me doing or saying anything. I tried not to react in the hope he would stop. But he couldn't stop himself (he also wouldn't listen to his dad), and so I decided to leave earlier than planned. In the train I sat a couple of seats away from him. At home he went to his room right away and he stayed there most of the time.

It makes me sad that he's picking on me so often. When he was younger we had a great relationship but nowadays ...... big sigh!!!

Finished my 2 goddesses!!

Finished my 2 goddesses today!! I added a couple of more layers using gold leaf, little metal hearts, beads, rhinestones, stars, flocks, some thin paper with texture, darker paint (hair red girl) and at the end painted all over the surface with pearly paints mixing it with glazing medium.

Newest projects

Yesterday and today I worked on the 2 heads that I drew and wood burned on my exercise piece of berch plywood. First I colored (with water color and color pencils)and painted the heads. The paint has to be translucent.

After that I painted the hair and background. Drew in the wet paint with the back of a brush and added some glitter in the same color as the paint. Then stamped on the dry paint using distress ink.

For the girl with the blue background I made her top out of patterned paper and collaged it on the wood using mod podge.

On the red background I used a paper doyle as a mask with plum acrylic paint and a french lily stamp with antique gold metallic acrylic paint.

On the blue metallic background I added some small pieces of a paper napkin (only the top layer) using mod podge and added some silver acrylic paint using a piece of mesh (?).

I think I'm ready for a complete girl now. Can't wait to start!

Bike trip

Today I went on a bike trip to a heath nearby where there's also a dolmen. It's only 10 km from my village. It was such sunny and warm weather today that I didn't want to spend all day inside the house. I left quit late so I had to stay closeby. I'm so glad I can make biketrips like this again!

I took my sketchbook for the Suzi Blu workshop and a book of Eckart Tolle (A new Earth) that I'm reading at the moment. I also took my patchwork blanket to sit on and of course my camera.

I first went to see a heath very close to my house. Somebody wrote about it's existance in a local newspaper this week. The heath was a bit of a disapointment because there was only sand and no heath at all. But the small path I took to go there was really beautiful because of the Fall colors.

When I arrived at the other heath (near Gasteren) I went to the dolmen right away and found myself a nice spot in the sun.

I started to read in A new Earth. I have just started to read it, together with a friend. He already read the book 4 or 5 times and is still having new insights every time he reads it. I read chapter 2: The ego, the current state of humanity (this is my own translation in English). My friend and I will be discussing this chapter next Tuesday. It's not easy to read and it's even harder to explain what I've read in English, so I won't do it, but let me tell you that I find it very interesting!!

I stayed on the heath for almost 1,5 hours, just reading, taking some pictures and drawing. It was very calming. Sometimes there were people walking nearby but it wasn't annoying.

On my way back home I stopped to take a picture of a brook called Drentse Aa and I also took a picture of me in front of the brook. There was a lot of wind so my hair looks like shit!

When I almost arrived at my village I saw a buzzard on a pole. I had to use my 12x zoom to get a better look at it. It was really far away and this was my best shot. You can see that the buzzard was looking right at me.

First sketches Suzi Blu workshop

These are my first sketches I made for the Suzi Blu workshop. It's my homework for this week. Today I drew 6 new faces that I need to practice color shading. So that's what I'm going to do after I finished this post.

I also have to make a Healing Art Journal. I already started to work on it but I have been too busy the last couple of days to find the time to finish it.

Zander has been ill for the last 2 days. Just a sore throat, a head-ache and belly-ache. He will be going back to school tomorrow. He and I are doing much better these last couple of weeks!! All the people who work with him noticed it. He's doing so well at school and he has become more involved with his schoolwork. Today he told me that he asked one of his classmates in an e-mail to tell him about the homework he missed on yesterday. He did that all by himself!!! For a kid with autism - and maybe especially for Zander - that's awesome!!! I'm so proud of him!!