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Imagine…

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I finally made contact with my father on the other side three days after he died.

We cannot fully understand the spiritual side while we inhabit physical bodies. So they give us metaphors, pictures, use our own brain’s language, and give us feelings to communicate with the physical side. With us.

My dad showed me a picture in my mind of him as Spock, sitting at a computer (like he always did as a human) in his life review. He communicated a very upset feeling because he was understanding where he went wrong and hurt those he loved without realizing because of his Spock nature. Spock being the perfect media archetype to help me understand that the autism was not just his brain in human life but his soul’s nature. A nature not familiar with feelings. He is learning about feelings through being human. He showed me this.

My mom comes through super strong and always has. I can speak her voice out loud and that is how I communicate with her. I have out loud conversations with her every morning. She was at peace with dying and with her life when she fell into the coma seven years ago. This allowed her to “move up” as a spirit guide very quickly.

When you get to the other side you lose your human suit and human personality and become your soul only self. But you don’t know everything. Life continues on as it does in the physical world. The more aware you become, the more choices you have. The more you love, the less you suffer.

The journey doesn’t stop once you cross over. It’s not like you have all your conflict and unknowing in this world and then you cross over and you are blissed out and know the secrets of the Universe and all of life.

True, you instantly lose the human suit which means you lose human pain. But if a soul dies with enough attachments and ignorance when it gets to the other side, it might not even make it to life review. It might hang out in the astral world and stay connected to its earthly life. A ghost.

If you are ready, when you cross over, you will be flooded with the love of spirit and feel all the pain of being human dissolve. You might then go into your life review to understand what you learned and how you impacted others.

You might be offered an opportunity to become a spirit guide and go into training. My mom showed me with the school metaphor how this works. You learn in levels, freshman, sophomore, junior, senior…each level is a different color.

You might choose to reincarnate or not. Maybe you return to the star group you came from and do not return to Earth. It’s all a choice but just like on Earth (as above so below), the more aware and loving you are, the more choice you have.

My mom has taught me a lot from the other side about the other side. It’s pretty easy for me to communicate with her. With my father, it is taking more effort. He is only a freshman and my medium skills are dodgy. Sometimes strong and sometimes weak. I always want my medium skills to increase but I cannot seem to control it.

We all have the skills to talk to our loved ones on the other side. It is a natural part of being human but this fact has been hidden from us so that we learn to give our power away to other people. Externalizing the power source is how the patriarchy maintains control.

God is not on the outside and you can absolutely talk to loved ones on the other side.

True, I have a gift of communicating with the spirit world but also you might too and not even realize it because you have been taught to believe you have to be gifted to do so. I am here to tell you that you don’t have to be gifted to communicate with loved ones on the other side.

When I talk to my mom or dad on the other side, it’s not like having a conversation with a human. It’s not a supernatural experience. They don’t put a picture in my head like a picture on the screen. It’s subtle.

With my father, I hear his voice the same way I hear the thoughts in my head. With my mother, I talk out loud as her the same way I talk out loud with myself.

When I see pictures in my minds eye it is the same as if I imagine a picture in my mind. Nothing out of the ordinary is happening when I communicate with my loved ones. The real skill is learning to feel the difference between them and yourself and to trust yourself.

I am not writing this blog to give you the five easy steps to talk to your loved ones on the other side. But I am writing this blog to tell you that if you find your way to communicate, practice that way, learn to trust yourself and learn to feel the difference of energy between you and the other, you can do it.

It’s not supernatural. It is natural. The other side is nature too. It’s just the non-physical version of nature. Physicality is only a tiny portion of nature picked up by our five senses. But nature is everything.

Find your practice. It could be communicating with your loved ones through writing, speaking, or in a state of meditation and visualizing. Practice every day, or as often as you can. Ask your loved one to communicate with you. Play with the different modalities of communication.

I know for me, the modality is different with my mom than with my dad. This teaches me that the strength of communication is determined by the relationship. My mom is a junior so it is easy to talk with her out loud but my dad is a freshman and I need the cards.

The sad part is that if your loved one is in a deep soul sleep, you won’t be able to communicate with them. Not every loved one is active and available. A soul may either be in deep sleep or have moved on away from Earth. I am lucky that both my parents are active and spiritual guides.

My father was not sure if he would stick around and be a guide. I gave him my permission to carry on, knowing if he chose to do so, I would grieve all over again. But I didn’t want to hold him down with my attachment. He chose to stay and it felt like winning the lottery. We humans are very attached creatures!

I am keeping this blog light hearted and childlike on purpose. I never want to claim to know the truth of all existence or have the way for all people. Taking anything spiritual too serious or claiming too much power is always a sign of deception, be it with religion or anything new age.

Psychic powers are natural human powers always braiding with the ego. The very flawed wounded ego that every single one of us possesses. Therefore, I remain child like and playful as I write this. I also admit that when my psyche is muddied, so are my channeling abilities. I make mistakes.

Any psychic channeler who cannot say this and takes themselves too serious, I would be wary of. But that’s just me.

I am a realist with awareness of myself. I know I am talking to my mother and father on the other side. I know my experience is real. And I also know I am a flawed human filtering the entire existence of all of life through my teeny tiny ego human self.

I also want to share that no matter how much I communicate with my parents on the other side, it does not take away the grief of losing them as human beings.

I am always about the both/and philosophy. Grief cannot be spiritually bypassed. And connecting to loved ones on the other side does not remove grief. Grief is grief. Grief is life. You cannot be human without living with grief.

The skill is about being able to flow back and forth between the two. You can be crying your eyes out with grief and then you can be channeling your loved one on the other side, without one canceling out the other.

Our culture fears grief and shuns internal divine connection. In my opinion, both of these cultural norms are dangerous. Imagine a life where you did not fear your grief and it was as natural as breathing to connect to your loved ones on the other side.

Can you imagine this?

January 28, 2019

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The Beauty of Death and Spirit

Last night, I was awoken by a dream in which I looked at the pictures on my phone and there was a photograph of mom sitting naked in a living room. In the dream she was dead like she is in real life and the photograph communicated to me that this was a snapshot of her from the spirit world.

Her body looked robust, healthy and the picture had a hazy, nostalgic and ghostly feeling to it. I woke up in the middle of the night feeling spooked, a rare feeling for me because I communicate with the invisible realms commonly. But the feeling I awoke with was a different sensation than I am used to experiencing.

I felt mom in the room, literally. I know it may be hard to understand how to feel something on the physical level that your five senses cannot detect but the sixth sense is as fundamental as the other five. When you detect something in physical reality with the sixth sense, it is as real as sight, sound, touch, smell, and hearing. I sixth-sensed mom in the room with me. It was not my intuition that felt her, the faculty I usually engage with when communicating with the invisible realms.

Not only did I sense mom, I sensed the realm she was in. I got spooked because reality as I know it shifted into a new reality, so alive and real it was undeniable. I felt unsafe suddenly in the dark…

Quickly my fear diminished. I could not hear my mom or see her, I could only sense her in the room. Just like the picture in my dream, it was a totally silent sense. I could not communicate with her but she was there. I instantly had the thought, “what if my mom’s death is going to open up my psychic senses?” I welcome that happening and would use it to help others just as I use my intuition to help others.

Sleep took me minutes after this intense experience…

Now I know she is here.

A friend said to me that mom is being as great as a support for me now as I was for her, through her cancer battle. I feel this. I feel her guiding me.

I am still in the mourning phase where I am wearing her jewelry each day. My mourning decorations are made of pearl and rose quartz, not black clothes. I want to wear more color because she always wanted me to wear more color. I am wearing more make-up because she did when she was alive. I want to model her as a way to mourn her human life with honor. What writer said that mimicking is the greatest form of flattery?

Yesterday, I felt the beauty of death and I know I am simmering the death story in my heart so I may write it out poetically. My way of fully honoring Vivian.

Being there was one of the greatest gifts of my lifetime. I believe we willed her death to be as gentle and sacred as it turned out to be. With fire in my belly and a will like Joan of Arc, I asked mom how she wanted to die, four days before her death. She said she wanted to be surrounded by family. I said, “lets make it happen”.

There are a few key moments in my life where my will was so fiery that I would not allow any other version of reality to happen other than the version in my heart. This was one of them. And…it takes a village. My family, friends, and people we reached out to on social media, all sent prayers and energy for my mom. Along with spirit, I feel we willed her death to be as she asked for it to be. This is the story that is my truth.

They say death is not in our control but I do not agree. I recall a time about twelve years ago, when I was reading tarot out of a metaphysical store in Portland…the owner was a wise and fiery crone who would lay down wisdom for me in key moments. During those years, I was struggling to heal certain aspects and slugging through some serious mud. I wasn’t suicidal and did not consciously want to die but she said to me, “Michelle, be careful or you will unconsciously call death to you.”

That sentence struck my heart like lightning. You know how you hear wisdom and it changes you instantly? I suddenly understood what my energy was creating and I did want to call a near-death experience to me to learn the value of my life. I also understood how death is unfixed and malleable.

Our spiritual and religious cultures tend to perceive spirit as a fixed all-knowing parent (or all-knowing parents when there are multiple gods and goddesses). In this story of spirit, we are the children to be rewarded or punished for good or bad behavior. All relationships and experiences are written in the stars ahead of time, such as having your destined true love, destined birth, destined death, etc.

I don’t feel this to be true for me.

I do feel many of us make soul contracts, choose our parents, and travel lives with divine purpose and intention. But not every soul does this. I feel the variety is endless.

If you believe in heaven you will go to an etheric heaven created in the fourth dimension for your belief to play out…if you don’t believe in spirit your soul will be recycled into nature…if you experience your self as a multi-dimensional being of light you will travel into lives in and outside of earth…if you know past lives are true it is because you have and will reincarnate, etc. These are just a few examples of many experiences. It is not one path for every soul.

Basically, my wisdom is that spirit is pure creativity, hence the possibilities are endless for the soul’s journey.

Spirit is all-loving but not all-knowing because spirit is learning and growing through becoming souls. Any reality can happen at any moment in this huge creative art project called life. Fixed destiny is real too, because if spirit is pure creativity then fixed fate is also a reality to experience.

My knowing is that spirit is playing, creating, learning, and evolving through being individuated into form of every kind, from incarnating as big as a universe all the way down to incarnating as a single cell. Appearing as form is spirit’s activity, lesson, longing, and creative act.

Spirit manifests as everything, in the realm of appearances and all form is spirit behind the scenes of every appearance.

I see through a “zoom out, zoom in” lens where spirit incarnates into every form and dissolves back into oneness in ebbs and flows, cycles, and designs. Spirit desires to become form to experience itself in relationship, to forget it is oneness, and to create.

Therefor, as souls we play all the roles…we play the good guy and the bad guy, we play the powerless and powerful, we play human, rock, mountain, mouse, single cell bacteria, alien, whatever the form may take. Sometimes souls play in a linear progression to evolve an individual soul, collective soul, or species…and sometimes souls play in a non-linear way and incarnate to just be or just do it with no intentions, contracts, or agenda.

The variety truly is endless…

All this being said, death is a creative act, in my truth…

Mom’s passing was a creative and sacred act. Being there to facilitate and witness her death was one of the most valuable treasures I will ever experience…priceless and beyond comparison. I feel gratitude and awash with beauty.

Attachment Wounds with Self

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Another way to understand the impact of attachment wounds is to look at the relationship you have with yourself. Is there an anxious, avoidant or disorganized wound present between you and you?

Do you avoid yourself by always focusing on the other in relationship? Making them happy, morphing more into the type of person they are, doing what they want to do, being who they need you to be? Are you always the liquid in another’s container? Codependency is one way to understand this dynamic. Experiencing an avoidant attachment wound with yourself adds a layer of awareness. You might feel insecure and unsafe with yourself. You might lack self trust. You may need the other to be your focus in order to feel secure.

If you experience an anxious wound with yourself you might find yourself over analyzing yourself all the time. Analysis paralysis happens because when you put a period at the end of how you feel about yourself in any given situation or relationship, or with what direction you want to take in life (among a million other decisions) it creates too much anxiety and ambivalence is the result over and over again. Or you may find yourself stuck in ambivalence with yourself, unable to tell how you think or feel about yourself or what direction to take.

Whether avoidant or anxious the root is how your sense of self formed by how you were parented under age seven that created ruptures with self love, self worth and a sense of security with yourself.

A disorganized wound with yourself would show up as a mixture of avoiding yourself and being stuck in analysis paralysis, depending on the day or the situation. Sometimes you might bounce from over analyzing yourself to throwing your focus on the other person and what they think. The other could also be society, the world, or the internalized voice of a parental figure.

A secure relationship with yourself looks like trusting yourself, loving yourself unconditionally and feeling worthy just for existing, outside of conditions.

Attachment wounds and styles tend to express on a spectrum. You might be forty percent secure and sixty percent anxious, for example. An attachment wound with yourself might get triggered by a specific person or situation. Becoming aware of how the wound shows up is less equational and more a flexible mix of feeling into your relationship with self while being able to zoom out and analyze yourself.

Healing attachment wounding is a life long journey. It is often said that what gets broken in relationship must be healed in relationship. This also includes the relationship with yourself.

Through a parts work or depth lens, the self has many aspects; the ego, soul, inner child, protectors, archetypes etc. There are many ways to label the parts. This can be a helpful way to heal the psyche. On a scientific level, your neural pathways literally are the sense of self and these pathways can be rewired through parts work and reparenting the inner child. More ancient practices did the same thing when the shaman would give a soul retrieval to the wounded person.

Through a mindfulness lens you can heal through not identifying with thoughts or feelings and building awareness as the witness watching thoughts and feelings pass through the body and mind. And through cognitive behavioral work you can reframe negative narratives about the self and change negative behaviors through conscious choice. These are just a few modalities.

Many paths up the same mountain. I like to use a bouquet of modalities, finding usefulness in all of them. May you find the methods that work best for you as you develop a more secure attachment with yourself.

The Alchemy of Becoming

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This June 25th, 2025 Cancer New Moon conjunct Jupiter is a lunation cycle that amplifies your capacity to trust emotional intelligence as legitimate information. Cancer doesn’t just feel, it attunes to what genuinely sustains life versus what merely appears nourishing. Jupiter’s expansion here means that subtle emotional signals you might have ignored become impossible to dismiss. Jupiter is making the feelings bigger on purpose so that you can attune to your heart’s intuition and wisdom. 

You may find yourself more sensitive to environments, relationships, or commitments that drain your vital energy, even when they look good on paper. This isn’t about reacting and being overly emotional (though that could be the unconscious expression of this energy) but about developing a more sophisticated attunement to what actually serves your wellbeing or the wellbeing of others. Feeling is healing and your feelings are valid and important. See where 4° of Cancer is in your natal chart.


This expansion squares Saturn conjunct Neptune in Aries, creating a paradox that’s both disorienting and essential. Aries is the self-at-center and demands immediate self-assertion, knowing what you want, and taking action. But Saturn applies pressure, limitation, and delay while Neptune confuses your sense of self as it dissolves rigid or outworn concepts of who you are, who you have been, and how you act.

The square of Neptune/Saturn to the New Moon/Jupiter forces you to act from deeper authentic feelings and impulses you may not understand yet mentally, rather than the should-based identity or actions you’ve been accustomed to for many years. You might discover that some of your most cherished ideas about who you are were actually constructs designed to win approval or avoid rejection. Neptune dissolves these false selves while Saturn ensures whatever emerges can withstand reality. See where 1 and 2° Aries is in your chart. 

The Finger of God points this tension toward transformation of self through loss. This is known as a Yod and it is pointing to Pluto, the planet of death and rebirth through rising from the ashes of loss. Yods are mysterious and take time to understand and fulfill. Look where 3°  Pluto is in your chart to see the point of transformation. There may be a loss in your external world or this might be more of an internal sense of loss. The discomfort you feel between caring for others and honoring your self and needs isn’t meant to be resolved through compromise, but through a fundamental reconstruction of how you operate.

Pluto demands that you stop trying to balance opposing forces and instead allow them to synthesize into something entirely new. You’re being asked to become someone who can be deeply feeling, care for others AND unapologetically honor the evolving self, not by switching between modes but by integrating them into a more complex way of being. This transformation might be a pointed event but typically happens through every day situations that make your old patterns impossible to maintain (people pleasing and avoidance to name a few), forcing you to grow.

The tension you’re feeling isn’t something to fix or escape, it’s the exact pressure needed to birth a more authentic version of yourself. Instead of choosing between tending to others’ needs or your own, allow yourself to honor both simultaneously. Notice where you’ve been operating from an either/or mentality, believing you must sacrifice your desires or needs to be loving or abandon care for others to claim your power. The discomfort of holding these seeming opposites is what breaks open old limitations and creates space for a more integrated way of living and loving, aligned with your true self.

New Moon Blessings. 🌑🌹

The Sacred Ground Beneath the Battle

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There is a difference between neutrality and clarity.

In times of harm, staying neutral is not wisdom.

It is often a reflex born from fear. A survival strategy we learned to avoid conflict, to keep the peace, to stay safe in a system that never truly protected us. Staying neutral in times of harm can be a spiritual bypass.

But true healing and spirituality calls us into embodied presence.

And presence asks us to return to what is true as a soul having a human experience. 

This is the moment Arjuna found himself in.

Arjuna is the central figure in the Bhagavad Gita, an ancient sacred text from India written over two thousand years ago. The Gita is a poetic and philosophical dialogue that takes place on the eve of a great battle. Arjuna, a warrior and prince, stands on the battlefield and sees that the people on both sides are his own kin, family, elders, beloved teachers. Overwhelmed by sorrow and confusion, he drops his bow and refuses to fight.

And who among us hasn’t felt that?

We look at the world, at the polarization, at the cruelty hiding in policy and posture, and we feel that same collapse.

It is easier to say, I rise above it. Easier to call it all an illusion and return to stillness.

But in the myth, Krishna, Arjuna’s charioteer and a divine embodiment, does not say, “Yes, stay still.”

He says, “Remember who you are.”

He reminds Arjuna that while the soul is beyond form, we are also in form.

And what we do here matters.

Finding your inner compass is part of healing.

Not to choose a side out of ideology or outrage but to remember what really matters. To remember what is sacred.

It is possible to reject harm without becoming harmful.

It is possible to take a stand without feeding division.

It is possible to live in truth without needing to call others evil.

This is not about enemies. It is about choosing the side of life. The side of liberty. The side of dignity. The side of soul and humanity.

When Arjuna picked up his bow again, it wasn’t to destroy. It was to act in alignment with dharma or true purpose. Not to serve the ego craving power but to serve what restores balance.

This is exactly the moment Arjuna stood in. The moment when the soul is asked not to escape the discomfort, not to fix or control the unfolding, but to remember that the battlefield itself can be the sacred ground and the site of transformation. Standing up and standing firm for human life beyond yourself. 

And just like Arjuna, you don’t need to have all the answers. You just need to remember who you are. The one who doesn’t walk away from love even when it hurts. The one who is learning how to embrace the discomfort of transformation and not resist it.

That is what this time is asking of us collectively. And it also applies to your personal trials of loss and transformation that arrive to awaken your true self and evolve your soul.

Love is not passive. It protects.

Spirituality is not silence. It sees clearly and takes action when necessary.

Compassion does not mean looking away.

There comes a time when choosing not to choose becomes its own kind of harm.

And that time is now.

There is a deeper kind of bravery. One that does not fight against but moves toward what is true. It comes from remembering what is sacred and letting that remembrance shape how we live. From this ground we can rise beyond the illusion of good and evil and still act with courage, clarity, and heart in service of a world where systems care for people rather than use them for selfish gain.

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.