I was noodling around on the Google keyword tool with a business coaching client the other day, and I discovered that 2,740,000 people per month Google search “How to be spiritual,” which kinda blew my mind. It made me think of my 5 year old daughter Siena, who we’re pretty much raising as a Buddhist who loves Jesus. My very Methodist mother wanted to take her to church one day and Siena, who knows how to meditate but hasn’t spent much time in Sunday School, said, “Nana, I don’t know how to do God.”

It was the end of the summer and I was injured.

“No sweat,” I figured. Nothing a little yoga wouldn’t mend in a couple of days. . . but for some reason, it didn’t. After a massage, Acupuncture and Ayurveda  it only got worse. This had never happened to me before. I was terrified.

As I explained here, I’m just got back from Harbin Hot Springs in Northern California, where I was on a spiritual pilgrimage of sorts after AstroTwin Ophira Edut told me that the stars had big stuff in store for me. At her suggestion, I decided to go on retreat on April 3, when six planets aligned into my house of endings -- a once-in-a-lifetime astrological event. My mission, should I choose to accept it, was to learn the life lesson I’m supposed to learn so I don’t have to carry into the next 12 years, the baggage from the last 12.

Ophi charged me with viewing the retreat as a sort of rebirth, and when she said that, I knew I had to schedule a session of Watsu (water Shiatsu, a type of bodywork that takes place in a pool of warm water, which was born at Harbin Hot Springs). I’ve had two Watsu sessions before, so I know how profoundly emotional these sessions can be. And I know how maternal, womb-like, and birth-ish it can feel.

My intuition told me it would be just the thing. So I did it. And oh, baby…was my gut spot on.

Joy…Noel…Peace…Believe: the clichés of Christmas. They’re dangling between the boughs of your tree, embossed in bold calligraphy on the Christmas cards, and possibly blinking in your front window like a spiritual Bud-Light bar sign. Words we display in gold sparkle across the fireplace before we re-box them for another 11 months. The implications of these words…the implications are something else.