Tag Archives: inspiration

The Alchemical Marriage

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
3

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

Posted on by
2

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
2

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

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Negativity is Love

Posted on by
Reply

Life has been rough for me the past five years among it being rough for us all collectively. By rough I mean, there has been a lot of crisis and loss. Loss and crisis come for us all in cycles. The daylight cycle is when life is going smooth and easy, fun and stable. The dark night cycle is when loss strikes, the vicissitudes of life rain, and one way through is to turn ego inward toward the inner light of the soul.

This is a metaphorical quest for the holy grail.

We each have our own version of this with a different narrator, tone, actors and plot. You cannot compare losses nor can you compare how each loss feels to each person. Just like we all have fingerprints but each is unique, we all have dark night patterns and each is unique. Some people are in long dark nights that last for years while other dark nights may last only a year or less.

In my spiritual truth the soul’s blueprint for the duration, depth and amount of dark nights that will be experienced in a person’s lifetime can be mapped by the natal chart. But if you don’t vibe with astrology or mapping your dark nights, doesn’t really matter. There are many paths up the same mountain.

Dark nights turn the mud ball into a pearl (you being the mud ball).

Through my very difficult dark night these past five years (loss on many levels) my therapy practice has blossomed like a lotus growing through the mud. This makes me think of Leonard Cohen’s line, “there is a crack in everything, that is how the light gets in.” The light has been my healing work for others and myself. I have gained tremendous resilience, self reliance, self love, self worth, spiritual connection, wisdom, acceptance, and achieved a mastery level of self care.

I do not think I could even recognize the person I was in 2017 anymore and who I am now feels more fully ripe.

But it’s not all positive. Life is always light and dark, negative and positive. On the negative side, I struggle more with my mental health issues, I harbor disappointment, regret, and I feel weary much of the time (therapists are people too moment). This aspect is why I desire to write this blog. I am not alone in how I feel and I want to normalize disappointment, regret and weariness.

The expectation our culture promotes that if you work hard and stay dedicated you can have the life you want and get what you dream of is total and utter bullshit. There, I said it. In the new age the same toxic positive expectation is promoted through the “create your own reality” rhetoric. True, some do get what they want when they work hard and stay dedicated. True, some do create their desired reality outcomes with their thoughts. But that is only one tiny slice of the big diverse complex pie of life.

Many people’s lives turn out disappointing in certain areas. Regret is natural to feel. Weariness happens. A ton of us experience tragedy for no reason such as losing a child, never finding a partner, living in poverty you can never climb out of, getting stage four cancer, just to name a few. Lately so many are victims to the storms and fires emerging from climate change ( though mamma earth has been taking out swaths of humans throughout all of time).

War, famine, abuse, sickness oh my. The vicissitudes are real and ever present. Buddha spoke of this when he said “life is suffering”.

Happiness and joy may be too tall an order through a dark night. Maybe having peace, calm, equanimity, and keeping the heart open to love is more realistic when tragedy strikes or life is putting you through too much for too long. It’s perfectly appropriate to feel disappointment for how life has turned out due to what happened to you out of your control and the choices you made.

The pressure to be happy, fulfilled and have no regrets is all too much sometimes whether that be during a dark night or not. For some it is too tall an order for a lifetime. My father lately in his dark night speaks of mudding through being the most important thing. For some, serving others and being less in self may bring a certain ease. Many paths up the same mountain again.

What if fulfillment, happiness and joy were not the only emotions being sold by the narrative that we should always follow our bliss and go for our dreams? What if that was only one narrative out of a grab bag of many narratives about the meaning or quality of life that were all considered equal? Maybe then we would not fear disappointment so much. Maybe then we would not fear negativity so much. It’s ok to have your negative side.

Peace, calm, resilience, compassion, forgiveness, acceptance, humbleness, confidence, and self reliance are some of the treasures birthed out of a dark night and these qualities can exist right beside unhappiness or a lack of joy. I do not mean to suggest a black and white framework of no happiness or joy. I am only wanting to create space for the treasures only loss cultivates. I only wish to normalize negativity and allow joy and happiness to take a backseat for a country mile.

So what if you complain a lot or you see the glass half empty. Maybe that’s because life has been rough outside of your control and you’ve been managing so much just to survive. It is ok to muddle through, it’s ok to have regrets and disappointment. This does not mean you are a bad person who has no gratitude, you don’t need to feel guilty or write in your gratitude journal. You can accept the negativity as a part of being human too.

The pearl self that the dark night creates doesn’t mean being a positive ray of sunshine. Becoming the pearl can mean not having a nervous breakdown, being able to laugh, to love, to stay balanced, have some peace, wisdom, understanding, and to know you are stronger than you ever thought you could be.

I have much more to share on this topic for future blogs. My intention is to share my vulnerability in service to your vulnerability. The negativity, disappointment, and weariness in me honors your negativity, disappointment and weariness in you. Both are love.

Free Flow on Tending the Garden

Posted on by
Reply

I am allowing myself to write whatever wants to flow out of me for this blog, in service to your healing path. I feel idealess in Seattle. My mind is blank. Let’s see what comes out…

Music is healing because it speaks to the heart. We all know this. We all know how a song can validate the sorrow you feel, inspire joy, bring inspiration, make you feel alive. That alive feeling a song gives you is how you know you are connected to your heart, aligned to your soul, whatever you want to call it. Yet when it comes to making key decisions in life about relationships, jobs, homes, the big stuff…why is it we tend to ignore that feeling of aliveness, suppress it, deny it and instead look reasonably at the big huge life choice to analyze what is the “right thing”?

The actual right place to use reason and logic is in the daily moments…but before I get to that I want to say that listening to that feeling of aliveness is always most important when making the big decisions in life because that feeling tells you that it is the journey you are meant to be on…

This does not mean the journey that makes you feel most alive will guarantee protection from getting hurt, protection from divorce, loss, or failure if you want to judge it. Pain and loss are all part of the correct path for your soul to learn all it is here to learn. The alive feeling tells you the correct soul path to be on for all of your learning, healing, and growing. Sometimes that path does end in a terrible loss forever or for a stint. Sometimes the loss is due to your own behavior and sometimes it is not. All is meant to be when you listen to the aliveness because it is meant to be for you to learn what you are meant to learn.

I think about how my mom went through a brutal chemo journey battling cancer before the disease took her human life. I think back to the diagnosis, the suffering, the fight, the pain, the loss and it tears me up inside. Yet at the same time, I know her soul was meant to go through the experience of pain, loss, and hurt. How do I know this? It’s that feeling of aliveness I get inside when I tap into the memories. I feel how she was meant to experience the cancer chemo journey. The feeling of aliveness can be happy or sad, filled with grief and pain or levity and light, just like a happy or sad song brings out that feeling of happy or sad aliveness.

The spiritual path that I am on stems from the belief that the soul needs to traverse through pain and loss as much as pleasure and gain in order to grow and evolve and experience new experiences. You may not feel the aliveness in this belief and if not, no worries. This is my offering to you if you want. The comfort and security we all seek can be found in knowing that pain and loss are meant to be as much as pleasure and gain.

This is not to justify needless abuse on any level from personal to cultural, from parent to partner to government. It simply means that while we traverse through the abuse we grow as souls. To be able to change society for the better, abolish racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and every form of prejudice, the soul must be strong and soul strength does not come out of the blue. Soul strength is learned through facing very scary and unjust experiences.

Life is a weird paradox of having to traverse through suffering to reduce suffering.

I think about how we are in romantic relationships too. The marry for life thing. The one love forever thing. I don’t believe it is the only route to take but this route is a work of art because love and being in a relationship are two very separate things. To keep love alive in a life long or long term relationship requires work and tending just like you have to work in a garden to make sure it bears fruit, flowers, vegetables and not just a patch of weeds. The work you put into a relationship may be filled with loss just as much as losing the relationship.

In a relationship you lose your full freedom, you lose a sense of control, you lose time, you must face your insecurities and lose that armor that protects you. You may also lose the relationship itself. Both sides of loss are growth for the soul. What gets broken in relationship gets healed in relationship. Over and over and over and over.

I think about the abuse I endured as a child and how hard my healing path has been, how much of myself I have lost due to the abuse others did to me and I know I would not have become a therapist had I not endured those hard times. This is that paradox again. It is my calling to be a healer and going through pain is what brought me home to my calling and cultivated my soul to be a good therapist. Now, I thank my past because it made me who I am today and I am happy with who I am today. I am living my calling.

The way that you narrate loss is much more important than the loss itself. Narrating pain and loss as bad and to be avoided will only make you more fearful of pain and loss. Telling yourself pain and loss is bad will only make you inauthentically behave with yourself and loved ones to avoid causing pain and this inauthenticity will set up a ton of resentment that you will suppress into your shadow, cutting yourself off from your feminine energy. The energy of embodiment and feeling within all of us.

People pleasing, passive aggression, enabling others so they can avoid pain will all lead to the soul shrinking into the shadow while the ego learns to be functional only when things are going well, easy, flowing, expanding. Then, when a painful time forces itself into being, the ego crumbles and cannot endure, learns helplessness, becomes anxious, neurotic, and perhaps even cruel. I think the phenomenon of ego becoming disconnected from true self has much to do with how pain and loss is seen as bad, the true self is seen as bad, and all power is seen as existing outside of the self.

True power always comes from deep within.

I think about the pandemic right now and how hard it is for many people to adjust to not being able to flow, get pleasure, expand, experience the fun. If you have not built up a tolerance and appreciation for pain and loss and learned how to endure and grow through it then you will suffer too much and all sorts of mishaps will birth from the fear. Weird beliefs birth from the fear of loss and pain such as beliefs in a fiery hell or conspiracies of doom or any belief that encapsulates the fear into one externalized power source holding you captive.

The deeper truth I feel is that we all are connected to a true source of power within. The divine is within all of us. Our soul essence is within all of us. And the only way we wake up to this inner source of transpersonal power, wisdom and love is to have the external world hurt or restrict or deny us because then we are forced to go within. When not forced to go within the ego will always look outwardly to get everything it wants. Money, sex, attention, food, drugs, success, a thin body, accolades, pleasure, a partner, a career, a family. The ego when not connected to soul seeks everything on the outside and forgets the inside is where all the power, security, love, and wisdom originates.

This is not to deny that when outside forces deny you equality and rights due to your race, gender, age, sexual orientation, ableism, body size, and any form or prejudice, that you are dealing with a whole other layer of pain and loss that makes your journey harder than the those who culture gives privilege to in the toxic system we are working to heal.

This also is not to deny that we are here to have external experiences, relationships, families, jobs, and all the things this earthly life offers. And some people are more externally driven in an authentic way too.

I speak more about balance. What about the inside?

The inside is much more vast, deep, and endless. From the ego self we expand into the soul essence, then the group soul essence, then the universal essence, nature essence, archetypal essence, divine essence and the essence of oneness. You go within and wind up nestled in the oneness where you can feel your self always connected to the whole like a single cell of the liver feeling itself as part of an entire human body. You look outside of yourself and you get a very short term limited experience whether it is one of pleasure and gain or loss and pain, whether it is one of abuse or love, justice or a crime against humanity. The outside short term experiences are the fodder but not the be all end all.

The experiences on the outside are supposed to wake you up to the inside of you to develop your inside experiences. Your true self and connection with all of life, however you call it. When you wake up to your soul and the divine inside you feel the true power coursing through you. It’s that feeling of aliveness. The same aliveness you feel from a song is the aliveness you can feel drumming up the courage to protest against racism, ask the one you love to be yours, start your own business, escape an abusive situation, or any circumstance large or small, awful or awesome.

To narrate pain and loss as fodder to awaken your true self and divine power within brings growth, healing, and expansion. That feeling of aliveness is the most natural feeling and key to the inner awakening journey. We have no guarantee in this life other than we will die and the soul will leave the body forever. The little losses lead to the big loss and loss is prevalent throughout life, yet all of the losses are of the physical form and not the essence.

The essence remains fixed, eternal and always transforming and shape shifting. The essence lives on. The essence evolves and expands and recycles and moves from one body to the next, one incarnation to the next, one experience to the next in an infinite procession of love. You may not feel this to be true and that’s alright, these are only words on a page. I feel the aliveness in this truth every day and this is why I am so spiritual. It is the feeling of aliveness for being a soul coursing through me each morning when I rise that makes me feel happy inside.

This is why you want to listen to the feeling of aliveness inside of you at all times concerning every important choice in your life. It is your internal compass that assures you are following your soul path and not putting your soul in the shadow while letting your ego run the show. When ego runs the show it will try to keep you safe from pain and loss and your life and sense of self will stagnate or be on repeat, go into depression or feel like an ennui.

The place to use reason and logic is more in the day to day tasks. Get on the mat whether you feel like it or not. Brush your teeth whether you feel like it or not. Regulate your nervous system whether you feel like it or not. Do your practices and do what you need to do whether you feel like it or not because these daily actions will support the feeling of aliveness and your soul direction in life. Pull out the weeds. Fertilize the soil. Water the vegetation. Don’t follow your feelings on tending to the garden. Follow the feeling of aliveness in choosing what you want your garden to be.

 

New Moon Channeling

Posted on by
Reply

Today is the new moon in Cancer (opposing Saturn in Capricorn) and I am compelled to write a blog inspired by the energies. I am going to be playful and ask the new moon in Cancer to speak through me and provide a message and then ask Saturn in Capricorn to provide a message. These words below are channeled….

Cancer New Moon Speak:

Good morning, child. I am here in my newness, my darkness, my beginning…to seed love as unconditional and tender love, love that is full of compassion and understanding, love that knows that humans are fallible and have their shadowed side and are capable of betraying, lying, hating, harming and losing sight of me and of tuning into love and giving love. When a human loses connection to me then they suffer and harm, it’s really that simple. I don’t judge. I don’t take away my love just because a human is mean or vicious or harmful. I love all of my children the same whether they are on one side or the other side of awareness and love. I love those who hate and betray and harm the same as I love those who love, help and benefit the whole of you, the heart of you. When you tap into me you can do the same, you can love everybody the same. Loving does not mean allowing or liking or justifying. You can love while you say, I don’t like what you are doing or how you are behaving. You can love while saying, you are causing harm. You can love yourself too in that way. You can say to yourself, I love me even though I am not doing a good job right now. Love can be there no matter what. I am the love that is there no matter what so when I meet an angry hurt scared human my love connects to them and fills them with medicine. Love is medicine. Maybe the human does not receive my love but if they don’t it does not hurt me because I know their own pain and fear prevents them and it has nothing to do with me. I might retreat from them and focus on where love can be met instead but I will continue to love everyone the same. I have my moods, my cycles. I may reveal more or less, I may express from a quiet and moody place or a tender and open place. I have a strong veil around me, a shell, a protection. Yet this veil is not armor or defensive. It’s just my nature to make sure I can feel safe to express my love and if I cannot feel safe, I still feel my love but will hide it from you. Sometimes I can be defensive and my veil does turn into armor but this only happens if my own wounds make me see you wrongly because you see, my parents in the sky did some really crappy things to me a long time ago and now I suffer from insecurities I am still trying to heal. I heal through you, humans. You heal through me, moon. We heal each other. We get defensive and put on our fighting armor when how we were treated as children rises up in our heart feeling threatened by the others. Don’t you see it? You are all a bunch of scared hurt children when you get defensive and mean or judgmental. I get it because the sky lords have their drama too but I am here to love and not war so I work through my pain by taking good care of myself and I hope you do the same. Take your walks, baths, and find your cozy places to nestle and eat your medicine and find the one person you can open up to and be seen and heard and make art or something beautiful even if it’s just photo you snap in the world. Be at peace with something. We are beings, you and me, of a different kind and yet I am inside of you and you are inside of me. I am all reflection, you see. I am a reminder that we are all connected and part of the grand design, interdependent at all times. Tune into your heart and the hearts of everyone who you like and don’t like and even hate. Not one of you is above the other even if some of you are lovers and others are haters. I know that’s hard for you to grasp but my counterpart Saturn understands the harsh realities of human life best so let him speak now and may you be blessed.

Saturn in Capricorn Speak:

Good morning brave humans. It is brave to be alive in your reality. It is not easy to be alive in your reality. The amount of pressure inside of you is great. The pressure is the way all of the mistreatment you and your bloodlines have faced lives in your body as fear, helplessness, confusion and pain meeting your head’s thinking place that is always strategizing ways to solve and fix and turn what hurts into something grandiose and bad to separate from completely when in reality, it is not so. There is no devil or a hell place where all the bad can be contained as separate from the good. Wouldn’t that be convenient? Your churches and psyches try so hard to contain all of the harm and pain into this one place or being that can represent it all and yet this is causing more suffering and more harm and more pain because it winds up scapegoating types of people and parts of yourself the same. Be careful of your projections, human. You may judge those who seem so different and yet they show you what you have shadowed in your own consciousness deep beneath the surface. You may not overtly try to contain all of the harm into a place like hell with a devil but in your shadowed consciousness you may feel an existential dark abyss that will swallow you whole if you do not do good and work for the light. It’s complicated. Keep fighting for what is loving, just and right so all humans can be treated with equal value and get rid of those parasites feeding off of your vulnerabilities and… just don’t become a zealot with your ideas because you fear what is harmful, wrong, and cruel so deeply that you think you can eliminate harm from the human species once and for all like some utopian place opposite the evil place because….you can’t. Humans are both light and shadow. By light I mean aware, loving, and caring and by shadowed I mean only that you have shadowed the part of you that is naturally unaware and instinctual and like beasts of the earth are. Those connected to earth, the indigenous as you call them, understood this and they did not shadow their animal side. They performed rituals and rites of passage to honor their animal side which prevented too much harm, violence, crime, hatred and lust for power to grow and they allowed for their animal part to mix with their soul part and live in a balanced marriage within and in the tribe, until…they were defeated by the people who came to use abuse them. But these users and abusers are not the devil, they are ignorant and greedy and lost and feel helpless in their shadows. You see, you were meant to fall and lose balance and war and learn and grow from it. Learn that your power is within and learn to come together in a new way and how to love again after pain and unjust defeat. You humans are animal and soul and your modern societies have shadowed and marginalized and oppressed and bullied and abused your animal side so much that you are all sick in the head and causing way too much harm and hurt. The animal is just as spiritual as the soul. The animal is the feminine nature aspect of spirit and the soul is the masculine nature aspect and by masculine and feminine I don’t mean man and woman, I mean what you might label yin and yang or magnetic and electric. There are two polarities to your original natures and they don’t go away even when you flower into the variety of expressions of that. Polarity is the skeleton of your realm. You cannot oppress half of your polarity nature by judging the animal as savage or base or less-than while putting the ethereal infinite soul on a pedestal and trying to turn yourselves into saints and angels made of all softness and light. Light and dark are equal polarities that rely one one another within you, at all times. Darkness is not the shadow. Shadow means what is hidden. Darkness is the soil that nestles the seed and the night that replenishes the day and death that rebirths life and instinct that keeps life growing. Your animal nature is meant to birth into a limited human beast and be part of a creature eating creature interdependent world and to decay and to poo and pee and copulate and feel pleasure and pain and cause blood and crave and lust and feel with instincts that are sacred in the domain of the goddess who has been completely shadowed and turned into the devil in your psyches and this is causing so much war and suffering that even I, Saturn, cannot take it anymore and you know me. I will take away your freedom in service to your freedom. I will force you to face the reality of life that you are both animal and soul and to heal by facing your limitations and ignorance. You are meant to be both animal and soul and to birth and die and to experience all human life has to offer. I hope for your kind to heal and unify and then I can be set free inside. You see, I am suffering too because I am bloated with all of your karma. I hold it all for you until you work it out. So please set me free by listening to mother moon and finding your way back to love soon. Let the animal out of the shadows. Remember your indigenous animal roots connected with Earth and bring back the rituals that expel the energy, cravings and pains from the psyche so that animal part of you feels valued and safe and held in the temple of the soul. I will tell you what to do but only you can do it. I will take away your freedom but only you can set yourself free.

End of channel…

Back to me writing again. That was fun and I wanted to write from a different place this morning, not just explain what the energies mean but engage the energies and speak them into being much like we do in therapy when engaging in parts work or journeying.

Do you channel? I am sure many of you reading this do. Channeling is a natural human ability to bring through the consciousness of other life forms. When you channel, the other life form you connect with mixes with your psyche’s language and consciousness. It is through the imagination that we channel. The imagination is not only “make believe” it also a gateway to translate other energies, life forms and parts of Self in the shadow.

Channeling is a dance between two forces and meant to be taken lightly. Exploring the new age realm of channeling and working with metaphysical energies opens new doors of perception and intuition. Channeling is not meant to be taken as a dogmatic truth or to compete with science and reason. I like to see channeling much like poetry that inspires and awakens an inner sense of wisdom and connection to all of life.

If it feels right take it in and if it does not feel right, toss it out. No big deal.

New Moon Energy Blessings.

 

I Love Saturn

Posted on by
Reply

I have not written a blog in a long while and hoping to return to more regular posting, especially during these days of the pandemic. This blog is inspired by a conversation with a client about the benefit of Saturn.

Saturn is ruling our lives collectively right now through restriction and limitation with the pandemic and through the movement of dismantling racism and the toxic patriarchal structures. Saturn is in your natal chart effecting you on a personal level too. In this blog, I want to discuss Saturn from a personal healing perspective.

I want to share my perspective on Saturn as he has been transiting my north node Capricorn for years now which is like Saturn riding Saturn because Capricorn is ruled by Saturn.  I also have Jupiter in Capricorn. Wherever you have a Capricorn planet or node you are heavily influenced by Saturn’s way. Wherever transiting Saturn is in your natal chart is also showing you where and how Saturn is influencing.

Saturn is the creator and upholder of structure. The original structure of this Universe we play in is made of of time and space. These bodies we inhabit are also structures that allow our expansive eternal essence to play the game of being limited by birth and death within time and space. The structure itself is Saturn’s domain. He rules restriction, limitation and he governs the laws of nature.

Think about how nature has consistent patterns always in operation. Night and day. Rain and sun. Creatures eating creatures. Decay, death, birth. The patterns of the body’s breath, digestion, and hormonal regulation. These inherent patterns of nature are ruled by Saturn and nature goes way deeper than the physical level we can detect with the five senses. The patterns of the soul moving to the other side with the death of the body and the laws that govern the other side are nature too. Nature and Spirit are not separate categories. They are the same and ruled by laws and structure. This is Saturn’s domain.

Saturn rules the natural structures of the Universe, seen and unseen, that operate automatically without conscious awareness. On a healing level in your psyche, Saturn rules your sense of discipline, consistency, dedication, restraint, discernment, ambition (or evolution) and how you stick to the routines and structures of your life.

In your natal chart Saturn rules a sign in a house. My Saturn is in Gemini in house five. Whatever house is ruled by Capricorn is also Saturnian. I have Saturn ruling my house twelve. You may also have other planets ruled by Capricorn, hence by Saturn.  I have Jupiter and my north node ruled by Capricorn. For me, Saturn plays a huge role in my soul purpose, creative expression, expansion, and my relationship with the collective unconscious. Saturn plays different roles for different folks, some more than others.

I consider myself very Saturnian…now. I used to not be. I used to be all flow, never finishing what I start, having no discipline or consistency or structure. I did what I felt like doing whenever I could and always dwelled in my feelings (anyone with a Cancer south node will relate to this). But I am no longer the spiritual care-taking mother feeling my way through each moment and floating above ground. I am now the pragmatic grounded father with set routines I follow each day, a firm schedule, and a very structured existence focused on growing a metaphorical lush garden. I find balance in the flow and in my feelings in between my routines. My feelings now have a strong container, good boundaries and a realistic lens to look through.

Saturn has turned me into a happy person and this happiness is an internal sense of being, independent of external circumstances. This is why I love Saturn…it’s all his doing, through me and for me, in service to this little ego known as Michelle and in service to my expansive soul seeking Saturnian structure in this lifetime.

Natal Saturn in Gemini house five is where Saturn shows me how difficult it can be for me to spontaneously communicate creatively and in my self expression…how I tend to take life very seriously… how I tend to lose focus creatively and become scattered….and also how I prefer to work on a few different projects at once and always have a love/hate relationship with my creative works. Saturn here also gives me serious dedication to painting and writing. I don’t see my creative expressions as a hobby but more of a job, as Saturn is very serious and work oriented in light hearted playful house five.

I used the serious energy of Saturn to learn (Saturn is  about learning over a long period of time, baby steps up the mountain) how to finish creative projects through making a focused, dedicated and consistent effort and by discerning the best projects to actualize. I learned how to create a routined time structure to stick to while taking the risk to spontaneously express my true self through my creativity. Saturn says, “scared? Do it anyways. Push yourself.”

This is how I led the scared animal (Ego) to the safe house (Saturn).

When I wrote my first book I dedicated three hours a day, six days a week for two years to writing and completing it and I did. No matter if I wanted to write or not, I did it. This trained my ego and brought me the result of a completed book. Both my newly trained ego and the completed book brought much more contentment than the fleeting pleasure of following how I feel in the moment. Saturn teaches you how to obtain a deeper more fortified fulfillment based on your soul longings versus always being trapped by the moment to moment nature of your moods and feelings.

I say trapped because when we are always at the whim of passing moods, we don’t accomplish the broader desires of the soul that take time, patience, restraint, ambition, structure, and dedication to accomplish. Saturn helps us achieve soul fulfillment and purpose.

Saturn takes away the cookie. When I wrote my book I did not get my cookies each day of hanging out with friends, going on excursions, lazing around or whatever my passing mood wanted to do with those three hours. The cookie is a metaphor for what your passing mood craves in the moment just to feel good, or to stuff away painful feelings, or to avoid what needs to be done for a larger goal. Saturn does not hand out cookies on the daily but he does reward your true self in the long run, if you dedicate to his ways.

Saturn took away lots of pleasurable moments yet rewarded me with a completed book and the ability to actualize my creative goals. I would say writing this book was my first initiation of integrating Saturn.

Transiting Saturn continued influencing me. This is when I made my next long term dedication. I committed to hot yoga four times a week. Before this commitment my yoga and exercise routines were always intermittent, inconsistent, and sporadic. My relationship with my body was broken due to the traumas of my past, my mind lived separate from my body and I judged my body constantly. I wanted to commit to yoga to heal through the practice.

I learned from my book writing experience how to do what I don’t feel like doing over a two year stretch of time. Saturn teaches you discipline if you make a serious commitment to him. My discipline with writing made my dedication to yoga easier. I went to class for two years in a row at least four times a week whether I wanted to or not. Many years later and I am still doing yoga (now a home practice) at least four days a week. My body has changed dramatically. My mind is now yoked to my body. I no longer judge my body.

I love being in my body now and this is why I love Saturn. Through dedication, consistency and the practice, I am nestled happily in my skin.

The next huge and perhaps biggest Saturn training of all is when I went on the autoimmune paleo diet. I have to live on this diet for life to keep my disease in remission and the disease I have is pretty awful so the motivation is huge. This diet is beyond hard. I had to let go and grieve all the foods I loved, eating out, eating to socialize, and eating to celebrate. I can only eat certain meats, vegetables, fruits, and fats. My food range is extremely limited.  I have been forced to transcend a very intense food addiction. Yet I made my dedication to Saturn because eating this diet keeps my disease in remission and the happiness of remission far outweighs the happiness of eating the foods I can no longer enjoy.

I love Saturn because I have liberated myself from a life long food addiction and it feels so wonderful to be free. I love Saturn because now my body is healthy, happy, healed and reconnected with my mind. I love Saturn because trauma no longer lives in this body. I love Saturn because I can accomplish my goals and not procrastinate or make excuses. I love Saturn because I love my routines that provide me with daily comfort and joy. I honor limitation, restriction, restraint, patience, dedication, discipline, discernment and the contentment that stems from accomplishment.

I am only sharing a few tidbits here about Saturn as not to turn this blog into a novel though it already is probably too long. I share my personal story in service to inspiring you to embrace Saturn in your chart and in your life.

Saturn is very structure that allows us to be infinite spiritual beings having a limited human experience. He forces us to overcome our limitations so we can grow into the best version of ourselves even under the most painful and restrictive of circumstances.

In shadow, Saturn is rigid, miserly, pessimistic, tyrannical, and toxic like the patriarchal systems of society that marginalize, abuse, and control people. Every planet has the shadowed side when tossed into imbalance. In your personal life this could look like being too structured and rigid and marginalizing aspects of yourself like your feelings and desires too much so you can stay safe or be rewarded with your status and accomplishments.

In balance, Saturn asks you to look at the long term and larger tapestry of your life. Being in the present moment is always the place to be yet we can do this as we also dedicate to creating, over time, the life we choose for ourselves and the world. Saturn’s accomplishments take time, patience, dedication, restraint, and hard work to build slowly over years.

You can even bring Saturn into the feelings, such as when you understand how trust is built over time through practice and not just experienced with the intention of feeling it. Same goes with self love, self worth, and self esteem. Saturn builds these feeling qualities within the psyche over time through various healing practices we do and not through the mind making intentions alone. Words may initiate and activate but only actions create change. Saturn is in the doing.

I love relaxing into Saturn’s way of being and he is big part of my healing path and how I guide others on their healing path, especially in healing attachment wounds and forming self love. The person I am today would shock the person I was ten years ago. The person I am today is happier, healthier and more balanced. Saturn is the safe house for my scared animal too, on the daily. When I get anxious I trust it will transmute on the mat and it always does. When I feel afraid, I know saying my invocations will bring peace. I soothe my nervous system through practice and I am my own safe house. I hope these words may bring some Saturnian inspiration to you.