Monthly Archives: December 2023

The Alchemical Marriage

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A big healing component, if you are on the spiritual path, is the sacred marriage of ego and soul. For myself, this is the very root of my being, my core truth and it guides me every step of the way no matter how often my ego protests (which is on the regular).

The journey of the dark night of the soul is a journey of soul coming into the body to marry the ego. Through tragedy, be it the loss of health, a loved one or any other version of well being, security, fundamental love, or sense of identity, the ego is forced to go within for sustenance because external reality no longer provides what ego needs.

As in my previous blog and why I wrote that one first (reflections of the dark night blog) this is a very difficult path to take. My ego protests all the time, feeling too weary from grief, worn down by challenges, sad or inflamed with anger to give a crap about the soul’s high-falooten promise of this supposed sacred marriage actually giving ego real fundamental sustenance (love, security, happiness, peace).

I am pretty sure my protest looks like anybody else’s protest and I always say we are all the same in our darkness and unique in our light.

But I stay the course. Ego protests, I move through it and I am back on track. Cause it takes time for the soul to embody.

Think of body like a living vessel, alive and sentient, intelligent and imbued with an epigenetic already installed personality that gets conditioned by our upbringing. This is what your ego is. Ego is the personality of body, And most of us have bodies filled with years of repressed feelings and negative vows from our upbringing along with the multigenerational wounds and traits from the past.

Body is the shadow so when we do “shadow work” we are literally clearing the body of the muck that keeps soul hovering above the head or maybe only a little of the way in. The more we clear out the muck in body, the more room for the soul to enter and take up space.

In my mind I think of it like soul as water and body becoming soil to absorb soul into it. Before doing parts work, shadow work and depth healing (whatever you want to call it), body is more like solid rock that cannot absorb soul into it. This visual may help you understand in a simple way.

The more simply and viscerally I can integrate the idea of the alchemical marriage the more I feel inspired to stay on path. I visualize my body becoming less like rock and more like soil when I am processing deep grief, emptiness, anger, etc. Processing just means feeling. Feeling each feeling without wrapping a negative narrative around it allows feelings to leave the body.

The body becoming fresh soil is the key. Another way to say it is to return body to its natural state, healing body of trauma, PTSD, anxiety and dissolving the neural pathways that sabotage.

Mind-Body is important. Eating foods on the edge of the grocery store versus the aisles is an easy way to understand this. Fresh veges, fruits, meats, fish, eggs (and for you vegan/vegetarians choosing beans, nuts and seeds over super processed fake meat products). Drinking plenty of water, getting proper nutrition. Not over indulging all the time in food, drink, or drugs. This is key as body relies on you the exact same way a pet relies on you to stay healthy. This includes movement too.

I know for myself, I also rely on crystals, flower essences, and herbs. I find incredible value and major help from stones. I am a stone whisperer. They are sentient beings here to help us as they are part of earth, Gaia’s body. Our bodies are Gaia’s body. Herbs, stones, and flower essences are Gaia’s medicines.

(Here is also where I would like to plug sunsoulessences.com. Tiffany is a powerful medicine woman, Seattle based. I only buy my essences from her since I discovered her. Feel free to email her too, she can custom make an essence or help you to choose one).

I am not a religious person but I am deeply spiritual and consider the spiritual path to be rooted in nature. Spirit is nature too. Nature goes way beyond what the measly five senses of the human earth body can detect. True spirituality is not an idea, it is living reality.

My spirituality has never been belief based because since I was a little girl I remembered being a soul with many lives past and future lives. Ater my full blown spiritual awakening in 1995, I have felt and had memories of being on the other side, living on other dimensions, connecting with guides on the other side and feeling the many layers and dimensions of reality.

I won’t ever try to indoctrinate anyone or turn my spiritual connection into dogma. All I can do is use it for my own path and to guide others who seek me out. Early on, only a few years after my awakening, I married Gaia in the desert. It was a sacred marriage of mother and daughter. I made a painting to commemorate the ritual and a mantra came to me, “I have become part of a larger mother”. Since then, I have relied upon mother earth to ground me with her gravity, stones, flower essences, and herbs.

I also rely upon my celestial guides on the other side of physical reality, the other side of the veil. My mom is there now too as a guide. The main goddess I work with is more of the stars than mother earth though I see all goddess and god beings as aspects of Oneness taking different forms. I like to work with the different forms, it is my preference, while in my heart of hearts I feel Oneness as Spirit and understand that we are all One energy.

This is the perhaps the only doctrine I possess. We are all One.

My truth as a soul having a human experience is what guides me every day but let me tell you, I am on no mountaintop and I will never profess to be above the human experience, some guru or enlightened being. I am a basic human woman who has psychic awareness and a healing gift to offer others and offer myself. I struggle like everybody else and want the average things in life just like everybody else. My ego protests hard core and I have healed a very dark and shattered psyche from the ground up.

I hope for this blog to inspire you on the spiritual path. And also to ground the spiritual path in the simplicity of heart. The alchemical marriage of soul and ego is real and it is a process. There is no end result either but there are results. The results for me have been mammoth. I feel a sense of peace as my foundation most of the time these days, I suffer way less, and my capacity to love myself and others is much more open and expansive. I find joy in the little things and presence even when the moment is hard.

I am still not at the point where soul and ego have merged like water into soil. I would say that now, after about twenty years on the conscious spiritual path, soul and ego sit beside each other but still feel like they are on different tracks as if watery soul is beside body that is more like soil but still very rocky. This is progress as my soul used to hover way up above body completely (where are my dissociation girlies at.)

I seem to switch back and forth between soul or ego being in the driver’s seat of my conscious self. When ego is in the driver’s seat I lose trust and I start protesting, filled with that weariness, emptiness, unmet longing, or whatever difficult feeling is presenting and don’t care about marrying the soul, I just want life to get easier. When soul is in the driver’s seat I still feel all the difficult feelings but I remember to feel the feelings, express myself creativity and I am inspired. Most of all, I feel trust in life no matter how dark and difficult the tragedy.

Back and forth between ego and soul. This is the tension of the current part of the path for me. I can look back and see the different ways soul and and ego have interacted and know the future will bring progress if I don’t give up.

To be continued, forever.

Dark Night Reflections

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It is ok to feel like crap while going through a negative experience in life. Negative experiences are the vicissitudes of life and sometimes they hit hard. They usually do. You would not be human to go through crisis, loss, and the crumbling of your steady state with a positive attitude.

The dark night of the soul refers to the journey you are on when the vicissitudes strike.

You might experience the sudden tragic loss of a loved one, a child, a parent, a spouse. You might experience caregiving a parent over a period of years through dementia, cancer, or Alzheimer’s disease. You might be going through a difficult divorce, the loss of a career, financial loss or the loss of your home. Maybe you are traversing through cancer or a severe illness. Maybe more than one of these experiences are happening at the same time. Maybe your life has been riddled with vicissitudes. You could be one of the people caught in war or the victim of a brutal crime or the victim of cataclysm.

From the soul’s perspective we go through loss and the vicissitudes to learn how to love, grow, transform, gain more compassion, forgiveness, unconditional love, acceptance, build resilience, bravery courage, be better versions of ourselves or become the true self. And while all of this is true, it is also true that going through the trials of life just sucks and it’s awful and hard and wretched. Going through tragedy leaves us empty, depleted, feeling ripped off and cheated, can take us into a place of deep despair, anger, and often be too much to endure. Both are real and true.

Learning to live with loss tragedy and to move through dark night cycles is tricky and hard. It is hard to know when focusing on transforming the self through loss is helpful medicine or when it’s an attempt to repress pain through reframing it, which only makes the body sick and psyche create neurosis, depression and anxiety. It can be equally hard to know how to honor negative feelings and let them out without creating negative narratives that trap the feelings in an endless neural pathway of suffering.

You feel empty, sad, angry, confused, despairing, to name a few and these difficult feelings are hard to sustain over a long period of time. But sustained difficult feelings is the reality. You don’t go through loss and get over it on a week or a month or a year or even fives years, or even a lifetime. Depends on the loss. Sometimes loss comes in bundles, just when you thought you were in the clear, another one strikes, or you go through five losses at once. Not easy to say the least.

The mind keeps trying to navigate through the dark night and narrate all of the changing feelings each day. You might go back and forth between experiencing negative thoughts and inspired thoughts, between questioning why and being straight up mad at the sky. You might flip back and forth between hopeful transforming and feeling defeated. You may reach a dead end like there is no way out.

One thing you can keep doing forever, is to meet the experience you are in without resistance. Hello, dead end. Hello, emptiness. Hello, I would like to not exist today. Hello, I just a need a dopamine hit. Hello, I am transforming myself. Hello, I have nothing to give. Hello, despair. Hello, numbness. Hello, hate. Hello, hope. It is OK to feel and experience all of this in heart and mind with openness and permission.

If actions and behaviors emerge that are unhealthily dangerous to yourself or others that is another story not for this blog. But that’s real too. It can be all too seductive to fall into an abyss of depression, or get triggered back into PTSD or a re-emerging of acute anxiety. You could take it all out on a loved one in anger or withdraw from your loved ones. Addiction can take over. It really does take effort to care for the self through a dark night and yet our ancestors went through so much grief pain and loss for us to be here. It is a part of life to understand better.

In my current experience of the dark night, I am learning that I get exhausted from trying too hard to transform through loss. This would be in contrast to the younger me of the past who steeped too heavily in the negativity, anger and sorrow. I guess you could say that I have explored the extremes and gotten stuck in both of them. I know what both feel like now. Now I am learning how to meet each feeling and experience with an open heart. I also am learning that channeling my mind works best.

Writing this blog is channeling my mind. I love to write. I find that when I am writing I feel equanimous, my nervous system regulates, my heart feels calm, I forget about myself for a while and I get super focused, for hours. I have come to understand that creative expression is my favorite channel for sustainability through the dark night. I wrote my first novel to heal shame from childhood abuse that lived inside of me. I wrote poems profusely as a young one to make it through each day when things were at their worst. The moment I am writing I find myself in a zone of being, This zone feels free of suffering as suffering lives in the mind.

How differently you can move through your dark night if you learn how to meet your internal experience with acceptance, feeling the feelings and channeling the mind. Skills make all the difference and also, it’s OK to be a mess and fall apart.

The Key

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it is OK to feel what you feel. sink into the feeling by allowing it to consume your body and take you for an emotional ride. grief ride. joy ride. anger ride. fear ride. inspiration ride. peaceful ride. confused ride. shame ride. insert the feeling here ride.

if you have trouble naming your feelings i suggest keeping a feelings wheel saved in your photos or notes app or get a feelings wheel pillow. that thing is great for those of us who have trouble naming the feelings.

beyond naming the feeling, don’t do anything else with the mind but to notice what you are feeling.

name the feelings, beginning with body feelings.

my belly is bloated. my jaw is clenched. my heart feels heavy, my feet feel light.

next, relax the vagus nerve by unclenching the jaw, relaxing the roof of your mouth, softening your tongue in the mouth, relaxing the butt muscle and all the pelvic floor muscles. take a deep breath or two or three. maybe do a few switch nostril breaths. let body be a wet noodle. let gravity, mother earth’s love, hold you. release body into her gravitational hold.

now…keep naming. move to the movement of body. are you staring into space? are you pacing, dodging, darting? if your movement is frantic or causing distress and you can’t relax body maybe splash cold water on your face or put ice on your risks or shake your body for 3 minutes…

maybe have a seat or move into a stroll or lay down.

keep naming. now heart. are you ugly crying? wretched grief abyss sad? are you feeling seething inflamed anger? ferociously frustrated? mildly annoyed? feeling rejected, dejected, unseen or ignored? feeling inspired, wired, elated? feeling confused and like you are imploding? are you feeling numb? are you feeling dissociated or depersonalized? use the feelings wheel if you need.

don’t tell any stories in the mind at all, only use the mind to name feelings.

if you come across any guilt for being bad, wrong, or insert judgement here, ignore it like a pesky fly. don’t bargain with it or let it seduce you. ignore guilt, nine times out of ten it’s just a useless neural pathway.

allow the feelings to run their course through your relaxed body the best that you can right now, you don’t have to be perfect or get it right. just feel. it’s ok to feel what you feel. no need to change it or fear it or turn any frowns upside down or hide it. sink deeply into it’s drug like effect washing through your body and heart and don’t tell any stories about it, don’t think with your mind any deeper than naming what you are feeling.

check the vagus nerve again, the snake. relax the snake by relaxing the head of the nerve (which is the roof of the mouth) and the tail of the nerve (which is the butt muscle).

feel and name and keep the body relaxed for as long as you have time for and if you have time to feel the feeling fully, the feeling will course through and leave the body.

and this too will pass.

if you don’t have time and you need to go do something or be somewhere, call upon your guides to shut off the feeling and seal up your aura and/or make a mental intention to come back to feeling your feelings later. if you can’t do this, go back to relaxing the vagus nerve or maybe you need to take your anxiety meds or a theanine or GABA. can you get some support?

rinse lather repeat. for the rest of life.

it’s OK to feel what you feel.

feelings are not moral so never listen to the morality police that loves to yap out of mouths because we’ve all been taught that feelings are somehow moral when they are not. feelings are human. save morality for behaviors and give yourself full permission to feel what you feel. no comparing.

it is life’s mystery why some experience more tragedy than others, or worse tragedy. equality is not found in our individual experiences of expansion and tragedy. equality is found in only one place, the fact that every single one of us is as valuable as the other no matter what. makes it hard to love one another when we have such varied experiences of loss and gain, the have and have-not injustice. can often make it hard to love yourself the most.

the truth in me says that no matter how difficult and unfair, life is supposed to be this way because it is Nature’s way of teaching us how to love ourselves, each other, the planet, all of life. Nature, the Goddess, Spirit, Source, call it what you will….that transcendent mystery.

life in these human bodies on earth is not for the flimsy, you can see this by looking at all the ways Nature can be dark and cruel with her cataclysms, parasites, viruses, poisons, and seemingly no attachment to who or what gets sick or dies in a sudden and needless loss. mother animal eating her weakest baby to save her other babies shows it well, in a living metaphor.

on the deepest level i feel how Nature’s dark side, her vicissitudes, take us to our knees and only then does human nature really learn compassion, unconditional love, forgiveness, acceptance and also empowerment and courage, resilience and bravery. the dark feeds the light like compost being spread into the soil under the full moon’s light.

you will blossom again after every tragedy that sinks you deeply into the abyss. and when you are blossoming toward the sun on cruise control coasting through a warm summer breeze, the abyss will snatch you again when least expected. these cycles are what life is here. to not escape but embrace the symbiotic light and dark cycles of life is the key.

The Positive Pole of Emptiness

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Currently we are in the new moon Sagittarius month (as of 12/12/23) and it’s squaring Neptune Pisces and Chiron/North Node Aries. The headline of this energy is to align your higher self truth with the feeling in your heart of spiritual love to heal the insecurities of the Self carried in the soul throughout lifetimes. This is a mouthful, I know. It always is with astrology and my goal is to try to break it down into bite size digestible bits by sharing my personal experience with the energies to inspire your personal journey.

Sagittarius is all about pointing the arrow at truth, optimism, expansion, growth and a sense of adventure as guided by its ruling planet Jupiter. For me this sense of adventure is currently being applied inward. I am having a big revelation around the feeling of emptiness that I have lived with forever and lives inside all of us to a certain degree, some more than others. In me, the emptiness lives large. I have psychoanalyzed the negative pole of emptiness within me and gotten to the root cause many years ago.

The negative pole for all of us usually stems from not being attuned to as child by your caretaker(s). Basically, in your own combination, experiencing not being held enough, paid attention to enough, given affection and words of affirmation enough, being told to not feel your feelings, and given messages that you are wrong or bad for how you are expressing yourself as little baby/toddler and child. Add in abuse and neglect, which many of us experienced to some degree as children and these roots all factor in to the degree and quality of emptiness that lives inside of you.

Emptiness is a complex feeling, perhaps even an archetype. For some emptiness can live as a lack of a sense of self, causing the ego to externalize the sense of self onto others. It can also live as a feeling of an endless void and hunger for that void to be filled within. To fill the endless void we seek the dopamine hit which lead to the addictions and habits that keep the emptiness shadowed far far away from our conscious awareness.

You can form habits and be addicted to drugs, alcohol, food, porn, sex, relationships (codependency), shopping, video games, success, thinness, beauty, accomplishment, helping others, the list goes on and on. Obviously some addictions give us clout or positive reward by society while others are shamed or frowned upon, so those who have the positively framed addictions get a secondary dopamine gain from the validation society gives them. Habits and addictions also form in the brain as neural pathway loops that repeat in the mind such as “I am bad” or “I am wrong” or “I am guilty”. “I am” and insert the negative adjective here. These negative vows can live hidden in the subconscious or you might identity very consciously with these vows.

Food was my main addiction but it isn’t any longer. The internal neural pathway loop was always, “I am bad”. Most of that loop is dissolved now too after years of consistent effort on the healing path.

I started the practice of meeting the emptiness with radical acceptance five years ago when i got on the autoimmune paleo diet to get an autoimmune skin disease in remission that I live with. It was hard work but remission from the skin outbreaks motivated me (they are horrifying). After four years I stopped being so angry all the time from being deprived of my main source of dopamine that filled the void and I could finally sit with the emptiness that lives beneath the anger for the first time.

In the past year I have cultivated the practice of “sitting” with the emptiness which for me looks like saying, “hello emptiness (my old friend), have a seat within me and I will allow you to be here and not push you away with anger or food.” After practicing this for the past year another addiction was realized. Fantasy. It is amazing how well fantasy works to shadow emptiness and provide dopamine. Fantasy connects to getting attention from others (the attention I never received as a child).

Most of us feel a dopamine boost when eyes look upon us with admiration or desire. We know it’s crap to externalize and measure our self worth by how others see us but let’s be real, humans are pack oriented and we all do it. Shame might arise when you see how you get your dopamine hits and what helps me let go of shame is to remind myself how we are all the same in our fundamental needs, desires and how we get them met as humans. Love is a fundamental need.

The key is to learn to build an internal sense of self worth to balance out our animal nature’s need for external validation but this blog is not about that. It is about the emptiness. I am excited to finally be free of food addiction after a life long battle that my mother battled with her entire life too. I am excited to be free of fantasy as a shadower of emptiness too. My self worth feels pretty solid inside but let me tell you, it was shattered at a very young age. I am a healer because I have walked the path and the path started out in a very dark place.

Allowing the emptiness to surface from the ocean depths of my psyche has been so powerful on my spiritual healing journey. I feel passionate about exploring the positive polarity of emptiness now that I have built tolerance for the negative pole of emptiness. The positive pole is its medicine.

The emptiness is not just an abyss of endless hunger caused by abuse, neglect and not getting attuned to and receiving nurturing as a child. Though it is that too and building tolerance for its unbearable abyss like feeling is a skill that will liberate you from addictions and habits that keep the true self repressed in the shadows. But what is the positive pole of emptiness all about? And could I tap into it to discover an entirely new land of opportunity?

The positive pole of emptiness feels, to me, feels like an innocent child, like endless potential, like a nebula made of unrealized dreams, like creative luminosity seeking embodiment, and unmet passion seeking connection and engagement with life. I get this sense of endless unnamed everything swirling around in an abyss of light wanting to come through me as creative expression in contrast to the negative pole of emptiness as unnamed nothing swirling around in an abyss of darkness wanting to suck my soul into a black hole until the self is dispersed and no more. Not dramatic, no not at all!

For real though, in a simple word, it feels like the positive pole of emptiness is potential.

Not so much as in “I can manifest anything I want in the world” but more like, “I can express myself in any way I want and the potential is endless.” Because let’s face it, the world is filled with limitation and tragedy. Or as Buddha would say it, life is suffering. We cannot control the vicissitudes and how they will befall each one of us. Our karma is our karma. We cannot stop tragedy or over-personalize with a sense of control in either direction of light or dark. All of life in this earthly realm is a polarity of light and dark, they are equal forces dependent on each other and each one of us lives out our own fingerprint of light and dark experiences of expansion and tragedy.

What you can control and where you do have power is how you choose to narrate and express who you are, the story of your life, your sense of truth and values into this world and with others. If you shadow the emptiness with addiction, habits and the negative vows that keep you in a familiar and safe place your whole life then you don’t really have a lot of choice and you can’t really tap into the positive pole of emptiness, into that creative potential. Analyzing and healing the self provides you with the ability to choose. Reminds me of that quote by Jung, “I am not what happened to me. I am what I chose to become.”