Lessons from New Age San Fran

There are different ways to experience san francisco:

Born and raised there, its city life at all its extremes.
Moved there for work, its restaurants, bars, and beautiful landscapes.
I went there and had a New Age experience because that's what i was attracted to.

What do i have to offer?
I learned to look at what I had to offer at a Gift Circle. We all wrote on an index cards what we were in Need of, or Searching for, and then also what we had to offer. It was a simple economic plan to start a Time-Bank, where an hour of service becomes an hour of service received, so i traded massages and offered lessons and received massages and lessons. But surprisingly, I had never really thought about what i had to offer. Asking the question and continually searching for what I have to give changed my mentality about the capitalist culture. I didn't know how to "make it" before and still be happy, but now I know that I'll always have something I'm willing to give, something I'm good at that others can benefit from.

Our bodies and emotions are connected.
It seems really silly to even say that, but not many people take that truth very far. Massage, tapping on pressure points, yoga, breathing exercises... All these are tools for converting tension into release, and emotional pain can manifest into physical pain, and its usually of the chronic variety of pain. Its a little unbelievable from a skeptics perspective because the scientific method hasn't progressed that far, at least not in popular awareness, but so far, empirical experiences show that the obvious connection between our emotions and our bodies has VERY broad implications that will be studied further.

Projections R Us
We react against others based on what makes us uncomfortable in ourselves, in society, in existence. It seems simple, but uncovering what those discomforts are is difficult shadow work that requires courage and willingness to learn and be humbled by our imperfections. There are fortunately many of us working at this every day, in every moment, and it is for the benefit of all humanity as well as for each individual doing the work.