Tag Archives: life

Earth School

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I am reposting a blog my father wrote a month after my mother died. As a way to honor him and as a way to grieve. If you’d like to read more, his blog is still up to read at: http://www.realityincorporated.wordpress.com

My father was a brilliant writer and kept a blog for quite a few years, writing once a week in his usual routined fashion. He wasn’t afraid to tell it like it is. Once my mother died, he only posted a couple more times. His blogs were mostly political, but sometimes he told stories.

Like Buddha said, life is suffering. I like to call it earth school. You never know when sickness or tragedy or an unfair and unjust vicissitude will strike. Some suffering (not all) is a necessary part of human existence. The lessons you learn. The transformation of who you are as a result. It is not always positive, but love does not ask for positivity at all times.

My father got stuck in his grief for my mother. When she died, he was alone and he wanted nobody but her, that’s my neurodivergent depressive dad. And he remained that way for the seven years he lived after she passed.

Through the years, I learned to fully accept him instead of trying to change him or make him get better. Fully accepting somebody you love for their shortcomings is a powerful love lesson. I learned it through the difficulties, not from just knowing I should. Struggling is the point. That’s how we learn.

I now carry that level of acceptance into all of my relationships. Who am I to judge another person’s path? Who am I to place my expectations and standards on another human being? And this is just one of the powerful lessons I learned in becoming my father‘s caretaker through the years.

My father learned how to let go. After his first fall, he was forced out of his independence and home of 23 years. The home my mother died in. He never got to say goodbye to his home or to his faithful cat Joey.

Before he lost the ability to have full conversations, he conveyed to me that sentiment of “well, is what it is.” But I remember one evening in the hospital right after he fell for the first time, him wailing out in a lucid moment “I just want to sleep in my own bed, even if it’s only for one more night!”

I believe my father truly learned the lesson of surrender, all the way down to having to be cleaned and have his briefs changed by strangers in a strange room far from home. By the end he was at peace, with the help of medication and my daily presence. 

You don’t learn unconditional acceptance or deep surrender when everything goes your way and life remains happy and stable. Tragedy sits right beside the lessons and the blessings, neither canceling each other out. The soul is ever evolving growing and learning through limitation, loss and darkness. 

Love encompasses all.

BEFORE THE CANCER CAME ….

Posted on February 5, 2019 by halviv

Before the cancer came there wasn’t the slightest doubt in my mind that I would be the first one to go. After all, I was 3 years older than her, and in this country women generally outlive men by about 5 years. And she always seemed so much stronger than me health wise, and much more capable of handling difficult, messy legal and personal situations that inevitably occur after the death of a spouse. Besides, from personal experiences it appeared that women were better equipped to handle this type of tragedy and adversity than men.

Before the cancer came she was eager to indulge in all the various social opportunities that life in our new home city had to offer. We both retired from our jobs when we were in our fifties and moved from the the East Coast to Las Vegas. She loved going to the overpriced, style over substance shows featured in Strip hotels. Yes, they generally offered lots of noise and glitz, little in the way of depth, and were designed for tourists who wanted a break from throwing their money away in the casinos. But it made her happy so we went. As the years wore on, however, we frequented those shows less and less.

Before the cancer came, she had designed for herself an entire array of card and mahjongg games in the community social center to keep herself fully occupied. She, and her card-playing buddies, would often go at it to well past 10: PM. When she finally came home she would have to watch a little TV in bed in order to wind down before shutting out the lights. As the years wore on, however, her night games became less and less frequent, until finally she only played during the day. Then the daytime games began to diminish also.

Before the cancer came she had decided that our weekends would start on Thursday, which generally meant eating out and gambling. The only nights we ate dinner at home were Monday-Wednsday. On the weekends we would always see new movie releases, then have dinner at a quality restaurant and finally end up feeding the machines in some casino. The few times that she did manage to accomplish a major hit she was so highly excited and joyful. It was wonderful to behold. And then, like all the others, that activity also began to diminish. I suppose one could call it the process of growing old.

Then one day the cancer did come. I remember I had been out by myself that evening and when I came home I was in a hurry to check my email on the computer. Before I could do that, she announced to me that she had cancer. “What kind of cancer” I shouted in shocked disbelief. Seems she had been to the doctor who ran some tests and told her that she had Stage 4 cancer in her colon that had spilled over into her liver. At first I was in full denial. “How can they determine that you have colon cancer without first doing a colonoscopy,” I shouted. So she scheduled an early morning colonoscopy. When the doctor finally came out after the exam and told me that she did indeed, have colon cancer that had spread to her liver, my heart sank. This can’t be happening I told myself over and over. This is what happens to other people that you hear about through gossip. But now, this was the new reality for both of us.

So, at first she sought treatment at a nearby Cancer Center, which put her on a regimen of chemo pills which in the end did nothing but give her neuropathy in her feet. The simple task of walking became more and more painful for her, and then impossible as time wore on. So next they started giving her almost 2-hour long infusions of chemo which initially seemed to be working. But they also made her highly nauseous and by the end of the week she was usually throwing her guts up. She started losing a lot of weight, not an unusual occurrence for cancer patients. But early in 2018 the chemo seemed to be doing the job to the extent that she planned to attend our granddaughters wedding that was be held back East, 3000 miles away.

Two days before the wedding in May 2018, however, she developed a stomach blockage and had to be taken to the hospital, and the trip was cancelled. Our other granddaughter was also planning a wedding on the East Coast in October 2018, and my wife had faint hopes of making that one. But by then her health had deteriorated to the point that such a trip also became unthinkable. Another stomach blockage occurred and this time they decided to operate. But it meant staying off the chemo for weeks before the operation. She became weaker and weaker and the simplest of movements like getting in and out of bed became undoable. The last time we went out together was in early December 2018 and she could barely make it. I sometimes believe that if she had not been denied the chemo for such a long period she might still have been with us. Maybe thats just wishful thinking.

On January 9, 2019, the love of my life, my wife and best friend for near 55 years succumbed to cancer. And here I am, alone and broken-hearted, left to rattle around in this big empty house by myself. I Skype with my 3 daughters which does help considerably, but it’s still an empty existence. I’m reminded of the poem that Irish poet Dylan Thomas wrote to his father who was on his deathbed at the time-” Do not go gentle into that good night; but rage, rage against the dimming of the light.” In the end, my beloved Vivian did go gentle into that dark night. But she was more than ready to be finished with the suffering that cancer had inflicted on her frail body. The only consolation I have is that I’m pretty old myself, so I should be with her again on the other side in the not too distant future.

Faces of Grief 

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Grief doesn’t always look like crying and missing the person (or whatever has died or ended that was deeply installed in your heart and life).

It can look like depression even though it isn’t. You might have no energy to do anything and not find joy in the things you were finding joy in. You may feel lackluster, empty, or low without a lot of feelings or expressing of yourself. 

Grief can feel like a raw searing loneliness. Like there’s a big gaping hole that once was filled with that person and your purpose with that person, place, thing or situation. This is a very specific type of loneliness. Loneliness that is the absence of what was.

If you’ve been a caregiver over a long period of time, then grief can feel like all the years you gave lead you away from the life you knew into a cave of survival. And that cave is gone too along with that person you gave it all to.

Greif is about the goneness and its many layers. How that affects you may not be typical to what we think grief might look like. Such as crying, wanting to talk about it or be with other people. Or in experiencing emotional longing for who or what is gone.

There can be a strange feeling where you don’t long for what is gone but you still feel that absence. That particular form of grief emptiness is an adjustment period.

A huge part of grieving is making space and honoring the transition from what has died into what is going to be reborn within yourself as a result. Death transforms you. Space is needed to process the end and that doesn’t mean mentally talking it through per se, it just means stillness and rest and time. 

Grief can be felt different every time. The grief I am experiencing with the death of my father first showed up in my body and I hadn’t experienced that before. My body got hurt and then it got sick because it needed me to stop doing everything. I had a hard time with that but I knew that surrendering was important.

Some grief is so big that the entire universe has to stop for there to be a grand sacred pause.

To honor the end for as long as it takes requires awareness, prioritizing, and self-care. Unfortunately most of us don’t have the privilege to take the kind of rest we need but even if you have to work full-time or more it might look like doing that and then doing absolutely nothing else for a period of time.

And it’s OK if you feel depressed or you don’t feel like talking to anyone. It’s not clinical depression and you will come out of it. Nobody knows what it’s like to grieve but yourself. We grieve alone, even if we’re grieving with family and friends because everyone grieves differently.

And what you need is what you need.

Maybe you need to write or paint or sing or dance or be alone or not be alone or eat all the treats or fast or take a vacation or cry your eyes out or wander around like a strange ghost not knowing who you are or couch rot, or some of the above or all of the above and everything else I’m not mentioning.

You might experience grief in agonizing waves or in gentle showers of tears or sorrow. Or you might find yourself in a daze. Spaced out. Forgetful. Detached. 

You might need to take time to remember. Going through old emails and texts and voice messages, letters and pictures.

If you surrender to how you feel and don’t judge yourself and don’t compare yourself, grief will be your guide. It will last however long it lasts and also grief lasts for the rest of your life. Sometimes.

Grief can get stuck if you don’t allow it to be present. When my mother died, grief got stuck inside of my father and he did fall into a seven year depression. He never came out out of. That is not the same thing as the period of time where you might think you’re depressed but really you’re just grieving.

How do you tell the difference?

If you are allowing grief to move through you then you are practicing self-awareness, self-love and taking time to listen and attune to what you need. When grief gets stuck you’re carrying on with life and avoiding yourself.

It takes patience, love and skill to be an aware human that doesn’t calcify from getting stuck by grief and life’s trials. But even if you do, that’s OK too. We are all at different points on the path. I say this because I give love to my father and where he was on the path.

As a healer, I am devoted to self-awareness self love, healing, and growing. Grief is a big part of anyone’s life journey. Learning how to grieve is a big part because we are not taught by our culture which does not support the grieving process beyond a funeral, flowers, and cards. And that might not be what you need to grieve at all. 

My intention in writing this blog is to share with you what I am learning. To help carve out space for you to get in touch with the grief you are experiencing. 

Grief wears many faces. May you allow yourself the time and ways that you need. May you also allow for the flow because grief ultimately needs flow, surrender and letting go.

I see you.

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?

Dear Death

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Dear Death,

You took my father last Saturday on January 17th, 2026 at 1:30 pm.

The last liquidy remnants gushed out like a waterfall from his lungs through the mouth and nose onto my hand lying over his heart. That was the moment you arrived in the ER room to bring him home. I watched his skin turn sort of blue as he gasped for air in his drowning lungs. There was one more gasp before his head dropped and his glazed distant eyes closed once and for all.

Finally, peace.

He only wanted to go to lunch and to return to his bed in memory care, where I walked in to find him during my usual morning routine time.

Every morning for the past fourteen months I have walked into his room to get him out of bed and onto the exercise machine in the little gym. After that he would have a banana in the lobby. I would walk him for a lap with his walker before we would finish our routine with a the vitamin and electrolyte water I made him to drink after brushing his teeth and washing his hands. This was our sacred time. I would ask him the same questions while he drank down his liquids. What’s your favorite color, drink, food, etc. What year is it, what city is he living in, etc. I committed myself to being there every morning since we brought him up to Seattle.

But it’s been much longer than that, Death. It’s been since you took my mom in 2019. That is when my devotion began. With sister as my partner, she became his dad and I became his mom.

When you took mom home, dad died inside and never recovered. So sister and I slowly took over the logistics and care of his life, allowing him to stay in the house he lived in for over twenty years. All of my vacation time was with him, in the house that felt like a tomb since mom died. He only wanted to hold on and have everything stay the same.

We did our best to give him what he wanted for five years until his first fall that led to assisted living in Vegas and the second fall that brought him close to me. Long story short, Death, he has been the center of my Universe for seven years. I have not taken a vacation. I have not followed my own rhythms. I made the choice to sacrifice and I built my life around caretaking him.

You know my voice well because I have been calling out to you for years. You collect the calls from those who have loved-ones in memory care units because it is truly that difficult and sad. You could create a symphony from our voices. And you know it’s not anything bad, how we call to you crying. You know it is a form of love. You know it’s the system that is messed up. That grace does not always look like the body staying alive. The you can also be the grace.

I have no shame. I am an advocate of love.

I watched dad’s body persist as his heart sunk into depression and his soul and mind took a backseat. I grieved him long before you took him home. I have been grieving him for years. I became a master of grieving. My body eroding, my heart enduring. It always felt like too much but I came to accept that. Love must accept everything not just the easy and bright stuff.

I am no saint. Nobody is a saint except the saints. I won’t pretend to be selfless and pure. I sacrificed out of love and it tore me to pieces and I live with no regret. Tragedy is tragedy. Hard is hard. I am glad I did it and deep down I understood you would take him according to his destiny, not my own and that somehow our destinies were intertwined.

And you did. At 1:30 pm with my hand over his heart after five hours of watching him aspirate. The trauma of those five hours. Of making him go to the hospital. The entire time the dementia having him say over and over, “I want to spend time with my daughter”, “leave”, “I’m fine”, “I want to go back to my room”, “I want to go to lunch”.

Through all of the coughing and liquids coming out, the relentlessness of dementia and suffering persisted until finally, toward the very end he said in his only lucid moment, “I can’t take it anymore”.

That is when they finally gave him morphine. Because finally a doctor with heart intervened and understood. Wasn’t afraid. Wasn’t trying to force. He was attuned.

That doctor took me aside and sat me down and got on the level. That doctor ordered the machines to be shut off and for dad to be able to take a few last bites of food because he wanted my father to have what he wanted and to have peace at the end. That doctor was an angel in disguise.

I was advocating my ass off but I did not have the authority the doctor had. Words will never express my gratitude.

Death, you came all of the sudden. Out of the blue. You snuck in on a Saturday and decided we first needed to explode into crisis. Dad’s signature move, one more time. The fourth and final crisis.

He demanded the nurse take the oxygen tube out of his nose after she administered the morphine and there I was, suddenly alone with him in the room, hand over his heart, telling him to go into the light on repeat like a mantra.

The medication finally stopped his suffering and allowed his body to relax and let go. And you granted my deepest wish, to be with him when you took him home. My soul wanted more than anything for him not to die alone.

You have given dad and me the greatest gift, Death. You are just as much life as birth is life. The soul comes in and the soul exits earth school and you are the one who leads the soul back to its origin. You are natural. You are love.

I took the Seiko watch off his hand, still warm, but no longer animated by the soul. Took it to a watch repair to remove a link. The watch was working great when I dropped it off and continues to work great on my wrist, yet when I picked it up from the shop at 5 pm, the time read 1:30 pm. A glaring sign.

And I finally was able to contact dad after three days. He was in his life review, realizing everything he did to cause hurt, making peace, seeing what he still needed to learn. I could feel his soul without the human suit, akin to Spock from Star Trek. Now I know he is safe and healing on the spirit side.

It takes time for the human grieving and for the soul on the other side. It just takes time. We are all on the path…

Death, I love you and I will see you again. I consider you a teacher and a friend. Thank you for the mercy you gave me and my dad.

Love,

Michelle

Anger and the Cardinal

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Below is a blog I wrote in 2019. I am experimenting with more personal healing blogs you can all relate to and I want to share some blogs from the past:

The anger stage takes turns with the denial stage, two weeks and two days since my mother’s passing.

Denial is a strange trick of the mind but easy to understand. I don’t forget for more than a second that my mom is gone. But those seconds of denial feel astounding when they suddenly crop up. Like when I wanted to text mom to tell her the new Grace and Frankie season was on Netflix. That one second of denial shocked me once my mind realized she was dead.

The anger stage is harder to understand because it’s rooted in the feelings. It doesn’t help that we are culturally conditioned, especially women, to judge anger as bad and repress the feeling. In truth, anger is coming up for a reason. I think anger comes up not only in reaction to forever loss but also because death brings up the long buried past…especially the death of a parent figure in the family system.

We all grow up in dysfunctional families because we are all born from the same systemic and multigenerational trauma that gets passed down generation to generation, making parents flawed in how they parent because they were once wounded children. Nobody is free from this. Each generation becomes more aware and has more opportunity to heal as a result. Each family has their own version of the dysfunctional story as told differently by each individual.

How much you have worked on healing the wounds of your family past correlates to what will rise up when there is a death in the family. Death feels like a band-aid being ripped off the wound. In fresh grief, hurt will unleash from the basement of your psyche through the triggers that naturally occur as each family member grieves differently.

Our grief journey is very personal because each person has a unique relationship with the deceased and with the living family.

The day after my mom’s death, we packed up every item of mom’s clothing to be taken to donation in a frenzy that only grief can create. Our action caused pain for my father. It was too fast for him. We cannot avoid the triggering hurt that occurs because grief is not something we can control. I have been witnessing myself not be in control. This is why I call it “the grief creature”.

I believe the triggering hurt is meant to be an opportunity for healing.

Healing has many components. Differentiating your sense of self from your family members, validating and expressing the hurt you feel, accepting the way others are and have been that is different than you, letting go of judgement, forgiving, gaining more unconditional love, allowing your vulnerability to be seen, and rewriting negative narratives about the past that are not true, are some of the detailed aspects of healing from family pain.

Death forces what has not been healed up from the basement and into the light of awareness, through anger. Anger says, “I feel hurt,” and points to what is unresolved. Hurt has a root and that root needs love, recognition, and tenderness.

Each one of us has a right to feel angry about past wounds even if the one doing the wounding did not mean it or wasn’t aware. We can validate our anger and hurt while also learning acceptance and perhaps even forgiveness. We have the opportunity to let go and heal to the capacity we are ready to engage on our soul’s path. Death opens the doorway and urges us to see past our limitations and face new edges.

I am facing my new edge. I am learning how to differentiate between anger that my mom is gone and anger rooted in a dusty wound covered in a musty outdated tapestry. I am looking with soft eyes upon unresolved feelings. I am learning how to express anger in a healthy way.

That’s the thing about feelings, they need an outlet. Thoughts only need to be observed and not identified with to leave the mind but feelings need to be valued and expressed to leave the body.

Anger is hard for me to express. I don’t want to punch or scream into a pillow. I don’t want to throw things. I think I may need to sing out anger. I am still exploring…

Grief is the opposite of control. I cannot wrap up all of my feelings into a nice and tidy file named grief and open it when I have time or it is convenient. The grief creature moves mysteriously through me. Messiness and suddenness must be embraced. I tell my friends I cannot plan ahead because each day I feel different and cannot promise being emotionally available like usual.

Those who have been through it tell me, “I remember feeling that,” and I am reminded that although we move mysteriously alone through the dark night of grief, we all take the journey and we all relate to the same experience filtered through our personal and unique story.

Through feeling and expressing the anger stage of grief a rebirth is occurring that is hard to describe. It reminds me of the picture on the classic Judgement card in the tarot. Gabriel is tooting her trumpet as dead bodies rise from graves, rebirthing into new life. Gabriel’s trumpeting is symbolic of the anger that calls the past out of the basement and into the light, to be given new life.

I am being more present, open, honest, and vulnerable with the hurt, my flaws, and the flaws of my family. To be honest, I enjoy engaging in the painful healing process, no matter how hard it is and how vulnerable I am learning to be. Mom’s death is bringing me deeper into my soul essence and purpose. I feel liberated to be free of ego driving the bus (but I will save this for tomorrow’s blog.)

In conversation with my sister, touching upon our deep family wounds, a bright red cardinal landed on her porch and watched her as we were Skyping. We both knew it was mom. We both had reached the other side of anger and found healing through being loving, communicative, and open. My sister commented on how our family has not been through anything like this before, specifically with how grief is effecting the family dynamics were are navigating through now that mom is gone. Truth.

Mom’s death takes us to new levels and places within ourselves and within the family. She watches us through the eyes of birds.

Mom was always unconditionally loving no matter how challenging other personality traits presented (in any of us.) Unconditional love is a quality our family has in abundance. I have always associated cardinals with unconditional love and also with Virginia, where I was raised.

Now, the cardinal becomes Vivian.

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 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.

Full Moon in Sagittarius

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Today’s full moon in Sagittarius isn’t soft. It isn’t gentle. This full moon arrives with truth and a purpose. It wants to take you out of the familiar comfort zone and to sit still long enough in the discomfort to feel into your truth, that felt sense that comes when your soul remembers something your mind has forgotten.

The Sabian symbol is 20 degrees Sagittarius. An image of people cutting ice in winter for summer use. It’s a strange kind of metaphor. Why would anyone do that unless they had foresight about what would be needed in summer? That’s what this moon is revealing. How to prepare for a time you cannot yet see. Can you do something now that only your future self will understand?

This isn’t a moon of trying to manifest ego dreams. It’s a moon of getting in touch with the promise your soul made, that may or may not be aligned with ego’s need for security, pleasure, or validation. The promise made before life’s hard losses. Before the tiredness set in. Before the doubt became everyday noise in your head. It’s the promise of your inner truth.

This full moon cares that you’re listening and wants you to prepare.

The Sagittarius moon always wants to point you toward something larger and more honest within yourself. And this one especially isn’t satisfied with avoidance, half-truths or surface roles. It’s going to burn through the noise, through your outworn identities, through the masks you wear out of habit. That can feel like grief for what is dying. It can also feel like clarity for what is newly birthing. Sometimes both at once. Whether it be personal and internal, about relationships or the collective, who you are becoming and how you show up is changing.

There’s no pressure to leap right now. Just to begin to understand where you are headed. Maybe you feel like something is not working the way it used to. Maybe the old forms have dried up and the new ones haven’t shown themselves yet. That’s exactly where this moon wants to find you. Not in the perfection of clarity and strength. But in the rawness of the conflicts and in the honesty of truth that is not giving up.

If you feel discouraged, that’s part of the path. If you feel like you’ve given everything and nothing’s come back yet, this moon sees you. And she knows. She is not asking for proof or a solution. Just your openness and presence. Just the willingness to believe in your true self that wants to create and wants to love even though life hasn’t gone the way you imagined. Even with the wounds and mistakes. Even in the dismantling happening all around us.

Let this full moon remind you that the blossoming of knowing and preparation you’re doing now matters. Preparation might look like setting intentions, taking an honest assessment and reflection on who you are now, where you’ve been and where you’re going. Or it may manifest us something more tangible and clear. Allow your openness and curiosity to explore inwardly or outwardly. Try something new that speaks to your inner truth, no matter how subtle or small.

A Ritual to Work with This Moon:

Write a letter or a list or a sentence of what is within yourself or in your life that you are ready to release and let go of that does not align with your honesty, integrity, or truth anymore. If you need a prompt you can pull a few tarot or oracle cards to ask what it is you need to let go of before writing.

Choose and hold one small special stone, seed or crystal and allow your hands to transmit the newly growing version of who you are becoming or the new version of your inner truth into the object… this can be poetic, fragments, loose ideas, images. It doesn’t have to be a full clear logical picture. Take your time with this, close your eyes, allow your heart to speak.

Light a candle (red or what your intuition tells you).

Burn the paper from the flame of the candle as you say:

“I release the old and outdated with love and gratitude”.

Put the stone, seed or crystal on top of an ice cube that you put in a small container with a lid (use one or as many ice cubes as your intuition tells you) and say:

“Full moon show me the way for my honesty, truth and integrity to root within and into the world. Show me how I need to prepare and bring me your auspicious blessings”.

Jupiter rules this full moon and he wants to bring you those auspicious blessings. He wants to help humanity evolve and prosper, each individual, relationships, families, and the collective.

Once the candle is done burning, close the lid on the ice turning into water with a stone on it and keep it on your altar or in a sacred place for 24 hours. The next day drink the water and keep the stone or seed on your body or on your altar.

The journey may not be simple or easy. This full moon asks you to embrace the challenge and step out of the comfort zone. Trust in your becoming and take the first step onto the invisible bridge, into the new.



Past Life Healing

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One aspect of transpersonal healing is attachment healing seen through the wider lens of the soul. When you begin to understand your attachment wounds not just psychologically but spiritually, you see some aspects may not have begun in this life. The ache of abandonment, the grief of loss, the hurt of not belonging, these patterns also have roots in other lifetimes. They carry forward through the soul’s continuum, waiting for you to meet them again with more awareness, more choice, and more compassion.

Some wounds are older than this lifetime. You can try to explain them, analyze them, wrap stories around them, but they still hum quietly in your nervous system, unexplained and unresolved, waiting for your presence. These are not just psychological wounds. These are soul wounds.

In astrology, soul wounds are reflected through Chiron, Pluto, and Saturn. Chiron represents the soul’s attachment wound, where you feel most insecure, where love feels most precarious, and where the longing for healing may never fully resolve. Pluto carries the wounds of power, where you have been controlled or controlling, betrayed or destroyed, and where intensity or fear still lives in your system. Saturn brings the karmic weight of responsibility and soul contracts. Wherever Saturn appears, there is work to complete, limitations to transcend, and lessons to integrate.

These soul wounds often reveal themselves through relationship, and not just with anyone. Often it is the same souls returning in new forms. A soulmate is any soul you have shared one or more lifetimes with. They return not only for love but for healing. The one who rejected you or whom you rejected. The one who left too soon or whom you left behind. The love that died in tragedy or the life that ended before the love could fully bloom. Soulmates return as different possibilities from the life before.

Sometimes this possibility means coming together again with more presence, freedom, or in a new form that brings joy. Sometimes it means letting go and accepting that the relationship cannot continue, and finding peace through forgiveness or release. The healing is not in the outcome. It is in your capacity to meet the soul bond and yourself with clarity, compassion, and strength. Often the lessons arrive through pain and loss.

What you do not resolve, you carry, and that is karma. Karma is not punishment. It is the continuation of the inner journey. The same stories, emotions, and attachments will echo through your psyche and your life until you choose differently. But karma does not only repeat wounds. It repeats longing. It repeats unfinished love. It repeats joy that never had space to land. You are not here to suffer in your patterns. You are here to bring them into the light, to recognize them, and to let them go.

As you do this work you also prepare for what comes next. What you release in this life becomes freedom for your soul when you cross the veil. The more you let go here, the more choice you will have there and in returning. The body dies but the soul continues, weaving its tapestry of evolution. And yet the trauma of death for those still living is real. The grief held by the ego is not less sacred than the journey of the soul. They sit side by side. One does not cancel out the other. The sacred lives in both.

If you want to tap into this healing, try this:

Bring to mind someone who feels karmic to you, someone with whom there is unfinished business, deep longing, or wounding. Sit quietly, hand over heart, and say:

Whatever our connection has been across time, I release the suffering. I open to the awareness in my mind and the love in my heart. I forgive what could not be. I forgive you, and I forgive me. I allow the soul lesson to be revealed.

Breathe. Let your body respond. Notice the sensations that arise. See what unfolds in your imagination. Trust what you feel and what you see. You may wish to work with a psychic or medium for support but always remember that you know more than anyone else. You are capable of opening your intuition and receiving the guidance yourself too.

If you want to go deeper, you can be led into a past life regression or gently guide yourself if you are able to enter a meditative state. The exact details of a past life are less important than the feelings, images, and body memories that rise to the surface. That is where the medicine lives.

This aspect of transpersonal healing goes beyond the limits of the thinking mind and touches the deeper truth carried in your heart and soul. While it isn’t an exact science and the path may not always be clear, it offers a kind of healing that purely ego-based work cannot reach. It brings meaning to the pain, connection to the myth of the Self and peace to what once felt impossible to resolve. The soul remembers what the mind forgets and when you listen deeply, healing moves through you in ways the intellect could never orchestrate.

Honoring the Storm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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