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Honoring the Storm

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There’s a kind of spiritual wisdom that tells you to let go, to witness your thoughts and feelings and not identify with them. Mindfulness work is a powerful tool. And there is another powerful tool that complements mindfulness, a way that honors not just the stillness but the storm.

The path of truth, healing, and awakening isn’t only about increasing awareness and the inner witness through detachment. It is also about emotional endurance, not in the sense of white-knuckling through pain, but in the sacred art of fully allowing pain to be felt. Not through reactivity or blame but through attunement with your own heart.

Enduring a feeling means staying with it, not running from it, not numbing it, not trying to make it go away. It’s letting the grief swell in your chest, the anger burn in your belly, the loneliness ache in your bones. It’s letting the storm of sensation and emotion move through your body without abandoning yourself in the process. Endurance is choosing to remain present with what’s hard, because something in you knows it deserves to be felt all the way through.

The grief, the anger, the loneliness, the longing, the despair, the messy, holy ache of being human.

This isn’t about indulgence or wallowing, though that can happen. This is about devotion. When you allow yourself to truly feel, not to fix, not to reframe, not to rush past, it honors not only the emotion but the story that gave rise to it. The betrayal, the loss, the misattunement, these things matter. And your body, heart and soul knows it.

The story matters because it’s where your truth lives. It’s where your boundaries were crossed, where your heart was broken, where something sacred in you was torn. To name what happened is to say, I matter. My pain matters. What was done to me is not invisible. Remembering the story doesn’t trap you, it sets you free. It gives form to the feeling and meaning to the healing. It allows you to reclaim your voice and not just feel the wound.

Enduring feelings is actually the strongest thing you can do. To stay present with the truth of what you feel, to cradle it in compassion, to let the emotion speak until it’s ready to leave. This is how healing moves through the body, through feeling not fleeing, through endurance not erasure, through compassion and not control.

Learning to feel your feelings all the way through is a delicate practice that requires a leap of courage . Especially in our culture, where we are taught that feelings equal weakness. When in reality feelings are neutral. Feelings are energy that needs honoring and release and the only way to do that is to feel them.

Healing and transforming is not only about letting go by not identifying with thoughts and feelings. It is also about letting go by letting the feelings express through you long enough to know the hurt is loved, allowing the storm leave in its own time.

What You Bury Doesn’t Disappear

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Whatever you look away from doesn’t vanish, it goes underground.

It slips into the shadow, where everything else you didn’t want to feel or couldn’t safely express has already been exiled. The ignored, the overwhelmed, the denied. And once there, it doesn’t disappear. It joins everything else waiting to be seen, to be felt, to be brought back into the wholeness of who you are.

Feelings. How many difficult feelings have you turned away from because they made you feel guilty, weak, or too exposed? Or maybe you turned away from your feelings simply because they were too painful and inconvenient. Perhaps it was the messaging growing up telling you that to not express feelings is to be strong, neither parent attuning to your feelings as a child.

But feelings don’t dissolve by being avoided. They stay lodged in the body, in the psyche, in the soul. And unless they’re welcomed back, they shape us from the shadows.

Gifts. Yes, even your gifts get exiled. Like being a naturally gifted artist in a family that valued practicality. Or a sensitive, empathic boy growing up in a culture of toxic masculinity. The world doesn’t always know what to do with your magic. And when it doesn’t get received, your brilliance goes into hiding too. Our gifts are specific. They are meant to be nourished, not left to grow mold in the dark.

Wounds. Whether it’s the big ruptures, abuse, neglect, major harm or the slow drip of subtle betrayals that alter the shape of a child’s sense of self, the wounds remain. And if they aren’t brought to the surface for healing, they calcify. The wounds we still carry from past lives come with us into our present life. This is what karma really is, the soul’s unfinished healing, waiting for us in this life.

And even deeper than the personal shadow is the ancestral shadow. This is the ocean floor of the psyche.

This level of the shadow doesn’t just belong to you but to everyone who came before you in the bloodline. The alcoholism, the rage, the abandonment, the silence. The unspoken rules. The buried grief. The patterns that repeat themselves across generations until someone, maybe you, stops and says: no more.

You are not responsible to heal the bloodline but you can offer back to the ancestors what you no longer wish to hold. Whatever healing you do on yourself heals seven generations forward and seven generations back. 

You don’t have to excavate the entire shadow. It’s not about perfection. You can become more aware. And in that awareness, there’s power. You can become more attuned and healing is the result of attunement.

Shadow work isn’t always dramatic. Sometimes it’s quiet, a daily act of turning toward what was once turned away from, with compassion instead of fear. This is how you reclaim yourself, not by fixing what’s broken, but by seeing what was exiled and saying, you belong.

Inner Child Wisdom on Peace

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“Peace is better than happiness”, says my inner child. Winter is her name and she tends to have a specific wisdom (children often do). In spirit of the solar eclipse in Aries, I am going to let Winter write this blog, as Aries energy is all about a child’s wisdom, will, and innocence.

“Why is peace better than happiness,” Winter?

Because happiness is fleeting, mom. It comes and goes depending. Life is half darkness and tragedy. Sometimes we get what we want and sometimes we lose what is most dear. Some people experience more tragedy than others too. You just never know. You never know when it will be your turn to go through a vicissitude (I love that word). At any moment you can lose your health or someone you love, or your job, home, your freedom, your safety…I mean, being human is no joke. It’s a scary ride, a sad ride, a tragic ride and it is also all the rides that make you smile and laugh and feel the wonder and awe of life.

Life is dark as much as it is light but happiness depends on the light. Whereas peace you can feel no matter if life is being tragic or awesome.

Peace is not easy to feel though, you have to work at it. You have to do all the things you know about, mom. You have to regulate your nervous system, heal trauma out of the body, honor and feel the feelings, dig up the roots of the negative narrative, reparent the inner child (thank you for that, look at me now!), learn to develop the witness and watch your thoughts and feelings but not identify with them, and you have to narrate your life so you aren’t telling a crappy story about yourself when even the worst most horrible things are happening to you or have happened to you.

Justice is wonderful ideal that we should work toward but it doesn’t totally exist in nature, or at least in the nature of this earthly life which is more about balance than justice. Earthly human life seems more like a game of chance with what destiny you are given, like a roulette wheel but with human destinies instead of numbers.

There is not any rhyme or reason to who gets what in terms of tragic experiences (except for the ones you create yourself). I know the soul has made an astrology map leaving clues about why it goes through all the things in life, what the soul is here to experience and all that stuff. I love Blue’s perspective (soul’s name). It’s just that…from another perspective what matters is only love. That’s my wisdom.

Think about it, if the intensity and quality of tragedy a person experiences in a lifetime is random, and there is no sense of fairness or justice around it, and we can’t control the vicissitudes, we can’t control the darkness, then we realize how scary that is and how random that is and this is humbling because we don’t have control. Not having control over the vicissitudes shows us the power of love. Why is one little girl dying from violence at age nine while another little girl manifests her dreams and lives a full life until she is an elder?

The randomness of tragedy teaches compassion and understanding and lets all humans know that we are in the same boat together, even if some people have it harder. It makes it so that when you have it easier, you might offer more love and support to those who have it harder. And when you have it harder, you can find peace through the darkness and hopefully find support to comfort you too.

But the randomness that creates the diversity of each life having a different fingerprint of hard and easy or light and dark is also a teacher in itself. You can’t judge when the vicissitudes are not in your control and you realize tragedy can happen to anyone at any time and it is not personal (except when it is, like when you do it to yourself or harm another on purpose).

Soul is true also. We are here to experience and learn different and specific things. The natal chart is the map showing this and there is meaning for tragedy on soul’s level too. It’s both.

On another spiritual level beyond being individual souls, we are all One energy, One consciousness, One spirit playing the part of every individual form that exists and when Oneness is playing the role of being human, it wants to incarnate into random roulette wheel fates simply for the experience of it. Deep stuff. This is what Oneness tells me when I listen.

You think I am tangenting but I am not actually. Because if you want to feel peace, you have to have a relationship with a bigger self beyond the little self. Your fancy name for that, mom, is the transpersonal. Call the transpersonal whatever works. Nature. Being. God. Goddess. Jesus. Athena. Doesn’t matter as long as your heart feels it. To have peace, you have to be able to let go and let God as they say. Let go and let nature. Let go and let being. Let life be llifing you and surrender to both the light and the dark of being human.

It’s funny because when we go through loss, we only lose on the human level. When somebody dies, their soul lives on in another dimension. When you lose your health, your soul is still healthy, it’s only the body getting sick. The other side, the spirit world, is this polarity to the physical world. The eternal sits right next to the temporary. I know some people don’t believe or experience this but oh well, we cannot speak to everybody! Peace can be felt without a spiritual orientation though. You can surrender to nature and not believe in the other side and still develop peace.

It might be hard to develop peace and take lots of effort but the reward is that you wind up valuing life and living a full life no matter what your blueprint of tragedy is for you in this lifetime.

Peace is accepting the dark and the light equally. Peace is watching feelings of grief and pain express while knowing you are not those feelings. Peace is not clinging to happiness, justice, or fairness but instead rooting the mind into acceptance, compassion, and understanding. Peace is a relaxed body and an open heart.

Peace can be felt when the worst tragedy happens. You don’t have to reframe tragedy into something positive, you only have to narrate tragedy as part of life that will transform you if you surrender to it. Peace can be felt when the scariest things are happening too, when you learn to move into and through fear. Peace is full bodied and does not evaporate. When you find yourself in the pitch darkness of life, peace is the candle you can light.

True, you have to heal to feel peace. You gotta heal your mind, heart, body and soul in whatever way works for you. Maybe you are becoming your true self, maybe you are learning that you are not your thoughts or feelings, maybe you’re connecting mind to body or awakening your soul, maybe you are developing self worth and a healthy self esteem, you get the idea…whatever it is, happiness will always come and go like a treat but peace can bring a deep everlasting fulfillment that does not require a constant smile.

That’s all for now.

Thanks for letting write this blog, mom!

Love,

Winter

2024 Energies

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Welcome to 2024. Can you believe it? How quickly is time going? Seems to me that a year feels like a few months and I wonder if this is from getting older or if time itself is feeling quicker for everyone? I sense both.

Lately, I have noticed myself wanting to slow time down by doing less and being more. To ignite the action of being. I write it this way because it seems in our modern hustle of society it requires intention, effort and action to still the self in order to be more and do less. Not only does this slow time down but it helps self to stay anchored to your inner truth, connection with the divine, connection with nature and to stay conscious and intentional.

Makes sense to me as we enter the year of the wood dragon in Chinese astrology. Wood is all about fruition in the physical (think of a tree). Dragon is all about action, independence, leadership, magic, and confident energy. It is yang energy, action action action.

In numerology 2024 is an 8 year. The frequency of 8 has a few meanings. It is the number of abundance and achievement and it is also the number of karma.

Karma is directly tied to abundance and achievement. As a literal metaphor, think about the difference of the crappy self centered CEO stepping on the heads of their workers to make themselves richer and to achieve more versus the compassionate small business owner paying their employees a fair wage and treating everyone as an equal so everyone can experience prosperity. The latter is true abundance. The former is greed. You can achieve in either direction rapidly this year.

In your own life, if you treat yourself and others with more kindness, tolerance, compassion and understanding you generate true abundance and release the karma of feelings building up in the body and soul that become our metaphorical baggage.

Digging a little deeper…notice where you may be mean, critical, judgmental and fear based when it comes to how you talk to yourself or think about others? Pay attention to your inner and outer speech and thoughts because this year will amplify and put into action whatever we are thinking and believing.

The way you speak and think about yourself, life, and others will be what quickly and abundantly grows this year. We can easily see this happening in the world and in the collective, both in our awakening and positive advancements as well as in the continued horrors and problems around the globe. Can you also see into your own self and life where you might be perpetuating judgement, hatred, criticalness, and negative narratives based upon built up fear, grief, despair, anger, and disappointment in the heart?

It’s tricky business to learn how to feel feelings without wrapping negative narratives around the feelings, which in turn, wind up pushing the feelings into the body. This will make body sick or hurt, which will then make the mind go more negative toward self and others in a loop from mind to body and body to mind. It’s the 8 turned on its side as an infinity symbol. This is a form of karma as an endless loop or vicious cycle. The positive is always available to us, feeling feelings out of the body makes it much easier to narrate and speak from a place of love making an infinity loop of true abundance.

Learning to grieve is a big need for every single of one of us. I won’t go into in this blog but it is a mammoth topic of importance in my not so humble opinion.

Feeling feelings without the morality police coming in the mind to persecute is essential ( for example: “you shouldn’t feel this way, there are people worse off” insert guilt here). I always like to think of feelings as energy poop. You would never say to yourself, “I am not going to poop. I feel guilty for pooping, I shouldn’t poop. I am poopless”. How ridiculous! Pooping is the most natural thing in the world even though it’s smelly and yucky and we really don’t want to mention it or think about it. And if there is no pooping issue, we don’t have to think about it.

Feelings are the same as poop except feelings are invisible energy needing to leave the body on a regular basis. If you don’t poop you get very constipated and sick. If you don’t feel, same thing. Because feelings are real energy, body stores the feelings that aren’t pooped out through feeling them and that can turn into physical sickness, pulled muscles, broken bones, back aches, diseases as well as mental-emotional-soul wounds that turn into neural pathways that embed in the brain and often are passed down to future generations through the DNA. Epigenetic multigenerational trauma is a form of karma too.

Learning how to feel feelings without dwelling in them is key. The dwelling part is the thinking part. If you don’t create a story around the feeling and repeat that story in your mind, the feelings will leave the body and you won’t dwell. Even if the same grief comes in waves for ten years or even a lifetime. Normalizing grief, anger, sorrow and all difficult feelings as a simple part of life like pooping is what I remind myself of, to help me stay out of narrating.

Instead of narrating, I just name. Hello grief. Hello sorrow. Hello anger. Sometimes I have to write a poem or story to get the feeling out. Sometimes I need to paint to get it out. Or sing. Or dance. Or watch a show to cry. Or vent. I always need to move my body to keep the feelings pooping out. We all have our ways and learning them is vital for health.

But reminder, it’s OK to be a messy human creating stories of pain that need detangling and understanding. Hello therapy. Hello journaling. Hello energy work.

This year there will be more immediate karmic consequences and fruition of what you put into action based upon your thoughts and feelings. I am getting into the nitty gritty of feeling feelings because you can’t just positivity-police yourself into loving kindness and confidence in order to achieve and be in the flow of abundance. You can’t just wave your magic wand (unless you are Gandalf), and you can’t ignore the darkness and only look at the light. These tactics are unskillful and will grow more problems.

You know me, I am going to be a broken record reminder of the internal world of you. Inner achievement. Inner fruition. True abundance. True independence. Real magic. Healing.

Inner achievement: being able to feel feelings out of the body and stay out of negative narratives a little bit better than before.

Inner fruition: growing a little bit more self love, self acceptance and loving kindness that will spread into the external world toward others. It can go in the other direction too, extending love, acceptance and compassion toward others can help you feel it for yourself.

True abundance: the internal sense of well-being generated by the power of love and caring that gives back to self and others so that what you create in the world is prosperous for everyone.

Real magic: all of life visible and invisible, internal and external, is alive-conscious-sentient energy being shaped by our thoughts, feelings, behaviors and actions. We are co-creators of this life and can invoke the divine (or nature) to help us create. You don’t have to go it alone, support is everywhere in the spirit world and in nature.

Using real magic to create abundant inner and outer achievement won’t make the injustice, horrors, and pain banish just like that in our life or in our world…obviously. It’s a slow and steady process over time in the ongoing journey of being human on earth. And I don’t mean to be reductionist. I am only focusing in this specific aspect, for this blog.

This year will be a super jolt growth spurt of what we put out and that is based upon what is happening within. Same goes for the shadow side, untended and unconscious wounds will get worse too, judgement and criticism will create wounds. Shadowed anger, grief, and all difficult feelings will create bigger problems and illnesses.

Back to doing less and being more. By spending a bit more time being versus doing, the nervous system can regulate and calm, we can create space and time to notice what feelings need tending and what thoughts are being perpetuated. This is part of my 2024 plan and I share only to inspire.

Also, I cannot end this blog without mentioning Pluto going back into Aquarius on January 20th (after a retrograde in Capricorn) until is retrogrades back into Capricorn once again come September 1st and very soon to be full on in Aquarius until 2044.

A new era is upon us. Think back to 2008. That’s when the last new era was upon us in Capricorn. So from 2008 until now we have been in a certain Capricorn cycle of death, loss, rebirth and transformation as a society. Now we enter an Aquarius era of death, loss, rebirth and transformation until 2044. More on that later…

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.”

Presence is the Victory

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Relax the Vagus nerve and the entire body relaxes. All anxiety lives in the body not the mind. Anxiety cannot live in a relaxed body. These facts were taught in a training I attended five years ago along with the quickest and easiest way to relax the Vagus nerve by relaxing the head and tail of the nerve, the soft pallet of the mouth (upper roof of mouth) and the butt muscle (I like to also relax the entire jaw and pelvic floor muscles).

I call it, relaxing the snake. Try it out.

See what I mean?

Notice how often throughout the day your butt muscle is clenched and your tongue is hard pressed against the roof of your mouth. That is your body in a state of anxiety.

When I first did this I noticed clenching all the time. I was being triggered throughout the day without realizing it. Micro-triggered. Meaning, my mind was not aware I was being triggered but apparently my body was because of the clenched head and tail of the Vagus nerve.

Trauma that is not dealt with lives in the body too. Many people on the healing path these days move trauma out of their bodies through somatic practices like EMDR therapy or Somatic Experiencing (SE). For me, it was telling my stories to a loving witness over and over and writing fiction stories that moved the trauma out of my body.

Many paths to the same place.

You can see the nervous system as the holder of trauma and maker of anxiety. Most of us have stored up trauma, hence why most of us have clenched butts. The terms tight ass and stick up your butt, make a lot more sense with this understanding.

After the training, I made relaxing the snake my mindfulness practice. Throughout the day and night I checked in, noticed and relaxed the snake. After about a month or so of this practice my nervous system transformed. I was amazed. I realized, just like the trainer said, that I did not need fancy or complicated techniques or breath work and I could do this practice anytime, anywhere.

This is when I began to fully connect to my nervous system and realize she is a living creature. I had given her a healing that to this day, has lasted. I did not know then what I was about to endure in the coming years. My mother going through a cancer battle into her death and going through the pandemic alone to name two very difficult life circumstances where had I not learned to relax my body, I would have caved.

Around the same time I learned this technique, I experienced a massive cessation of anxiety when I got on the autoimmune paleo diet. I was given proof of how much anxiety lives in the body and not the mind when I got on the diet summer solstice 2018 (and I am still on it today in a modified way to keep my disease in remission). Again, within about a month, much of the chronic anxiety I experienced throughout my entire life vanished. Just with food.

This is when I began my deep dive into the health of the inner body connecting to my mental health. I made links between the autoimmune disease, anxiety, multigenerational trauma, and the oppression of the feminine. The diet and relaxing the snake changed my mental health forever.

In 2014 I started doing yoga regularly, at least four times a week for an hour. This also made a major impact on my mental health. It created some cessation of anxiety but more potently, as the word yoga means, it yoked mind to body. This yoking allowed my soul to come into body versus hovering a foot above my crown chakra, hoping to find a way in.

The feeling of embodiment is like nothing else. Contentment does not have to be achieved externally when embodied as it feels good to just be. Colors are brighter, tastes are richer, sounds are more resonant, intuition is stronger, the mind is more clear, the heart is more open, the body is more grounded and it is easier to be present and being present is…well…everything.

When I am present I am loving, tranquil and content. When butt and mouth clench, soul pops out of body and as a result suffering usually ensues, through sometimes it feels more like being a flat soda.

When I am present I have space in my psyche to make choices instead of knee jerk reacting or following the well-worn default path that leads to the same disappointing result.

When I am present I am aware that life truly is happening in the now. The past lives only as memory and stored trauma. The future lives only in imagination or worry. Presence is where life is a verb opening up a never-ending unfolding of possibility.

It is possible to choose love, acceptance, and compassion. It is possible to process sorrow, anger, despair, and pain without resistance or creating negative narratives. It is possible to notice beauty and to be tender and understanding. It is possible to let go. It is possible to lighten the footprint and treat life with more care. It is possible to dream. It is possible to take a different path. Within.

I highlight the word within as we often cannot control the harsh circumstances of life in the external but we always have the ability to shift how we show up for what life brings us whether fair or unjust, pleasure or pain, shadow or light.

As humans we all operate the same even though we each have our own fingerprint psyches, ways of being in these bodies and in this world. Reflecting on my path into presence I realize that I have given myself the most important gift and won the most important prize.

Presence is the victory.

The Equanimous Mind and Becoming the Pearl

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Lately I have been working on navigating the dark and light cycles of life and within, with an equanimous mind as my foundation. Essentially, this means not seeing the light cycle as better and the dark cycle as worse or the light cycle as good and the dark cycle as bad. Both light and dark cycles are equal but different.

Ego prefers the light and has an aversion to the dark cycle because the light cycle is more pleasurable, feels more safe and is generally more fun. The dark cycle is harder to traverse for ego, it is a cycle involving fear, confusion, insecurity, loss, anger and entering the unknown. Yet the darkness is as fruitful as the light. Both are needed and both depend one each other.

Our ego’s are innocent much like a pet. Think of how your pet reacts when you have to take them to the vet. Suddenly your sweet pup is shaking, growling, deeply afraid, they may hide, run or bite. To the pet, they are being taken away from their stable secure comfortable and loving routine into a terrifying place where they are being probed and prodded, who knows what will occur!

This is a great metaphor for when we go through a dark cycle, either externally or internally. Often an external circumstance triggers the internal darkness (which I call the abyss) or the other way around but sometimes if the chemicals are off, the abyss will just come independent of an external catalyst.

No matter what causes the dark cycle, the darkness provides an opportunity to heal and grow. Rarely do we heal and grow in the light. Our egos, much like our pets, do not really care about healing or growing. We all just want comfort, love, security, ease and pleasure. It’s really very innocent. The ego is our innocent human personality and let’s face it, being human is a stinky experience. Go right past the shimmering skin and we are all guts, piss, blood and poop. Our desires take over. We go through pain and we get fragmented. Messy and sticky is our human self. It is OK!

The soul (or true self) is the part of us that desires healing and growth. Soul wants to experience being a human, to learn, evolve, experience it all, love and create! Our souls understand that healing and growing means treating ourselves and our loved ones with more love, care, compassion, skill, and integrity. Self love is imminent when we heal and grow. Not only that but when we heal and grow our soul can shine through into the world.

Childhood abuse, neglect, and life long conditioning by family and culture mixed with our ancestral epigenetic wounds cover the soul in so much mud that almost no light can shine through. Like the lotus blossoming through the mud, the darkness is the mud and the mud provides the grist needed for ego to turn within to soul to remember the true power available to each of us, within.

The power of being a soul is the power of love, creativity, and wisdom. (You do not need to be spiritual to know this as you could call the soul the authentic self and understand that the power within is the power of the human spirit backed by nature).

Ego is not bad for it is our human personality formed and forged in the fires of attachment. Ego is simply misguided. When we heal ego it allows our true self to shine through like a diamond.

The dark night of the soul is the process of the ego turning inward to reclaim this power and the only time the ego turns inward is when the external become so difficult it is forced inward through loss or tragedy. Just as much as humans tend toward craving pleasure, comfort, security, and love we also tend toward growing through the experience of loss.

It is a skill to learn how to use the darkness as a tool to heal and grow but also it just happens naturally, like how if you lose your health through a health crisis you may naturally transform from being a self focused go getter always trying to achieve the next goal to becoming a more humble and compassionate person who savors life and loves with more of an open heart. The path of difficulty brings the path of reward.

I know that the abuse I went through as a child was the catalyst for my soul shining into this world and for me becoming a healer. I am not condoning abuse nor bypassing pain or accountability here. I am only reinforcing the fact that when we use tragedy, loss, pain, darkness and the vicissitudes of life to heal and grow, the self will turn from a mud ball into a pearl. The soul can shine like a diamond into this world.

Same goes for the inner darkness. Whenever I use my abyss for healing some piece of writing or art comes out of it, as does a new layer of humor, awareness and wisdom.

Wrapping this back around the the equanimous mind…

If I know the dark cycle is as valuable as the light cycle then when I fall into the abyss of my own inner darkness or when life hands me the next loss or crisis, or both, I can reduce the unnecessary suffering by welcoming the darkness with acceptance or at the very least, non-resistance. I can allow feelings of insecurity, sorrow, anger, agony, despair, and confusion to pass through my psyche without buying what the negative narrative is selling.

With these two very distinct skills, I can create space within and space within creates choice. And when you have space to choose, you will tend toward healing, growth and back toward the light again versus getting stuck or self sabotaging. The pattern of suffering will begin to slightly change. Over time, the pattern of suffering will dissolve.

This is the process of the mud ball becoming the pearl within.

Of course if I fall into abyss and I do listen to the negative narrative, binge on crap food, watch five hours of tele, hate on myself for a night, and lose all faith in life and myself, that is ok too! (I am being a bit light and cheeky with this example as not to get too private, but you get the idea of falling deeply into your darkness where you feel disconnected from the light all together, the spectrum of this is different for everyone and I have experiences many different intensity levels on the spectrum).

On the path of healing sometimes we hit the abyss bottom and the climbing itself (back to the light) becomes the mud ball to pearl journey. Thirty five years ago, I was always in the abyss. Twenty five years ago I was in the abyss a third of the time. Progress happens. No matter how deep your darkness goes, you can turn toward healing, you can turn into your version of a pearl.

Being the pearl is a feeling of self love, an open heart and a soul shining which is natural and not forced. Becoming the pearl does not have an external marker. Maybe you never get the thing you want in the world, maybe you do or maybe it takes a really long time. The world is fickle and uncertain for as much as the New Age tells us we can always create the external reality we want. But you can always create your internal reality.

The version of happiness that stems from an open heart, self aware mind and your soul shining into the world is powerful, free, and cannot be taken. It is the dark and light cycles that keep the soul growing and evolving, turning mud into the pearl. Having an equanimous mind is a daily practice yet also roots in the wisdom of understanding the true value and necessity of dark cycles.