Why This Empath Loves Japan

On the morning of Trip #8 to Tokyo, I’m so excited. Bouncing out of bed as if today were a major world holiday! Which, of course it is, in my world.

Bouncing out of bed at 6 a.m. when my plane doesn’t leave until 12:45? As if this made a lot of sense!

Oh, but it does. Even though I really need every hour of comfortable reclining in an actual bed. Nobody, not even the coolest traveler outside of first class, emerges comfortably after 13 Read More »

Umbrella Trust

I was raised in New York City, hardly the trust capital of the Western World. Tokyo is different: Larger, cleaner, and radiant with trust. It shows when I give people aura readings and empathic merges. It also shows on the surface of life in this enormous, bustling, entrepreneurial, energetic city.

Last Saturday was rainy. Walking around during lunch, I found a great deli. Outside the front door stood a big rack where people had parked their umbrellas. I contemplated the prospect. I gulped. Finally I placed my umbrella in with the rest. Read More »

Eliza Doolittle at the Japanese Ball

Songs from “My Fair Lady” are running through my head this morning because last night I was really treated like royalty. It followed busy days of doing sessions with my incredibly talented, kind interpreters Kyoko-san and Makiko-san. Before us came a parade of clients, these included:

• I loved hearing the cello-deep voice of a pianist and composer, not my friend Jeffrey Chappell but a Japanese man whose inner child flames out through his eyes with a similar outrageousness. Read More »

From Japan, Tales of Delight, Rain, and Silliness

What was it like, teaching my first two-day workshop in Japan about reading faces? For me, it began by having an adventure with the toilet.

Here’s the back story. Literacy has been a big blessing throughout my life. Actually, reading is the ONLY skill in my life where I have been precocious, somehow figuring it out by the age of three. (By contrast, I was more than a year old before I could sit up on my own. And it wasn’t until age 14 when, thanks to a fascinating aha! experience in the New York subways, I finally realized that I could move my eyes in my head without moving my entire head.) Read More »

Strange Beauty Products

Being in Japan makes a woman feel beautiful. Everywhere you go, you see gorgeous men and women. In the neighborhood where I’m staying, embassies are nearby so people on the street dress especially well.

Come to think of it, everywhere in Japan I have visited, both during this trip and my six previous ones (all sponsored by VOICE) I have seen wonderful fashion choices, elegant creativity, huge sartorial finesse.  

In such surroundings, one begins to feel a contagious elegance. It’s like being in Paris, only the people are my size.

Yet, in all candor, I must report on two close encounters with pretty dubious beauty products.

THE MAGICAL CREAM

Normally, I’m like a kid in the Tokyo subways. With all the colorful advertisements, all I can do is read the pictures. Saturday night, however, Chikako-san was with me. She’s impossibly elegant, tall and slender; probably she’d be as photogenic as Greta Garbo if only movie makers caught on to her. But to me Chikako is just a a typically helpful member of the VOICE staff. Okay, she is also funny, smart and – very important, silly. So we always have fun together.

It also helps that she speaks English fluently. As we rode in style, I noticed a prominent ad for a beauty cream at the end of the subway car. She translated. This cream, said the ad copy, removes all asymmetries from your face.

Yes, you just put on a little dab here, a little dot there, and that’s all there’s to it.

Examples were given, like having your nose a little too much toward the left side or having one lip be fuller than the other. Put on that simple cream and watch your face sort itself out.

“Do you think it works?” Chikako asked me.

I just roared. Of course, I roared with laughter, being a face reader. A face reader who has spent close to 10 years of her life studying how faces change over time, then collecting photos for Wrinkles Are God’s Makeup: How You Can Find Meaning in Your Evolving Face. (This link takes you to my home page, where you can click on the brown book cover to read more.)

If I were writing from home, I’d add photos, like the ones about how Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall changed in 15 years. Here I don’t have them handy, nor do I have hours to play with computer since a day’s full set of sessions is starting pretty soon. But probably you can find loads of asymmetries easily just by looking in the mirror. Cover up one side of your face at a time, using a blank sheet of paper. Compare left and right.

Some of those asymmetries involve bones! Others are based on the placement of eyeballs. Your nostrils may be shaped differently, too. So that’s some beauty cream, being advertised, right? Still, it pales compared to the wonders of my toothpaste.

TOOTHPASTE OF TEMPTATION

Dollar stores are very popular in Tokyo and Osaka. Of course, technically, they are called “100 yen shoppes.” Or sometimes you’llfind a real bargain hot spot with a name like “99 yen” or even “98 yen.”

Every time I return to Japan, more of these stores can be found. And they’re not like American dollar stores, mostly odd lots of cheap toys, dishware, and tools. These are more like convenience stores, selling everything from orange juice to sandwiches to sewing kits and you-name-its.

At my aura reading workshop on Saturday, during lunch break, I went to a 99-yen shoppe that I remembered from last time. They sell marvellous baked sweet potatoes. I browsed in wonderment at all the products crammed into the store and bought some items I needed. 

That included a new tube of toothpaste. When packing, I had brought just one miniature tube. And that was supposed to last for a month? What was I thinking? Even a week was pushing it, squeezing that tiny tube.

So, in my blissfully Nippon-illiterate state, I compared five brands of toothpaste and chose one with a name in English. Not Crest. Not Colgate. But at least something readable: White.

Back home, I’ve been known to use Rembrandt. With all the coffee I drink, I’m at risk for brown teeth. So here I figured, “Hey, why not?”

Fast forward to my subway trip with Chikako-san. I pull out my toothpaste and ask her to translate what it says on the back of the tube. Here’s my paraphrase:

“If you use this toothpaste and experience discomfort or pain, immediately discontinue use. Then go immediately to find a doctor.”

The wacky part is that I still used it, once I got back home. Call it morbid curiosity. How bad could one little smidge of toothpaste be?

Yum, minty taste!

My teeth have never been whiter. The results were absolutely amazing.

Not just that. If I had been listening closely, I probably could have heard enamel on my teeth screaming: “I’m melting…….”

 So this toothpaste comes with a free concert.

Okay, “White” is clearly way too effective. 

Nevertheless, I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. Not yet.

In my family, I’m notorious as a tosser. Already, I’ve already thrown away the packet of bobby pins, bought the same day, another of my adventurous purchases at the 99-yen shoppe. (You ladies know how bobby pins always have a plastic tip at each end, so you don’t gouge your scalp or slice through your hair? Not these bobby-babies. They went into my trashcan as fast as you could say, “Ouch.”)

But so far I have been unable to trash my new toothpaste. I’m thinking, “For results this great, maybe I could use it once a year.”

Aura Readings of My Sumo Wrestler

Okay, he may not know he belongs to me in any way. Nor that I read his aura. Here’s how it happened.

He was waiting for the airport bus, just like me, only he was significantly larger and wore a blue silk outfit you won’t see guys wear back home in suburban Virginia.

I was standing with my greeter. “Reiko” had met me outside of customs, helping me navigate the way onto my ride from Narita airport to downtown Tokyo. Reiko wore smart high heels, a crisply cut black dress, and a sweet, shy smile. She was my first personification of pampering from VOICE, the company that has sponsored my latest trip to Japan.

This time, the bus was crowded. To find a window seat, I had to walk nearly all the way to the back. Settling in to my white-doilied seat in the immaculate conveyance, I saw “Yusei” come down the aisle. Nobody else seemed particularly impressed, but I was. And one look at his huge girth informed me that this man desperately needed a full double seat. Since none were left, I offered him mine. We smiled and bowed at each other and I moved nearby.

SECRET ADMIRER, ONE SEAT BACK, ONE SIDE OVER

All the better to watch him, to read him.

In a land where most people are slender and graceful, sumo wrestlers are revered. Within effective staring distance, I noticed that Yusei wasn’t fat, which was what I expected. Huge, yes. But this his was a  powerful, muscular build. I’ll also admit, I expected him to smell strange or, at least, sweaty in the way it is easy to be on a warm summer day when you weigh something like 300 pounds. Yet every inch of Yusei was fastidiously groomed, from the large sandalled feet to the straight jet-black ponytail folded over and clipped to his head.

But if Yusei’s enormous daintiness shocked me, that was nothing compared to his energy field.

• The huge projection at the Grounding databank at Yusei’s root chakra, of course I expect that.  He filled the bus.
• Equally, even exquisite large, however, was the Spiritual Connection databank.
• Power was hugely developed, of course, at the Solar Plexus chakra.
• At the Throat and Belly chakras, I could read the price Yusei had paid, the scars of his lifestyle/training. Whatever the glories of the Sumo path, it doesn’t encourage personal self-expression, joy, or spontaneity. Not for Yusei, anyway.

When we embarked at T-Cat, Yusei turned to me and said thank you again for giving him my seat. Would an American football star have bothered? Or would he have traveled alone, ignored on the bus but idolized by the national consciousness? This celebrity athlete and spiritual servant, unmasked with Deeper Perception, showed his true Sumo wrestler’s heart of humility.