Tag Archives: love

January 28, 2019

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The Beauty of Death and Spirit

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

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

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

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

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

Sleep took me minutes after this intense experience…

Now I know she is here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t feel this to be true for me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The variety truly is endless…

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

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

Attachment Wounds with Self

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Alchemy of Becoming

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

New Moon Blessings. 🌑🌹

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.

What You Bury Doesn’t Disappear

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Moon Channeling

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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.

 

5 Skills on the Path of Transformation KO

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This blog is addressing five skills you can build when doing the hard work of creating new neural pathways in your brain on your path of transformation. These skills will make you more peaceful, less anxious, more graceful, less self-doubting, more fulfilled, less chasing the dangling carrot, more present, less stuck in the past or future, more equanimous, less victim to the natural dark and light waves that life presents.

These skills may or may not lessen the ebb and flow of intensity in your psyche because a lot of how we roll is our temperament. Some of us roll more passionate, expressive, up and down, reactive and sensitive. This it is not wrong or bad. We all have our natures. Do not waste your energy judging yourself. As a friend just reminded me during one of my own internal storms, it is important be on your own team and treat yourself kindly.  As a former teacher put it poetically, who you are is not a design flaw.

Happiness is a feeling always in flux depending on circumstances. Peace is more sustainable and brings a certain contentment through dark and light times. Grace is learning how to traverse life’s dark and light times with more fluidity and ease. Fulfillment is being aligned with your true self in all your choices. Equanimity is the ability to have distance from your thoughts and feelings and to not identify with them, creating inner balance. Becoming present happens when the inner witness is strong inside.

The following five skills will help you achieve more peace, equanimity, grace, presence, and fulfillment on your path of healing, in service to true self and self growth…

1) Resilience. The reality is that the feelings you try to avoid and run away from inside will never go away. You will either repress them or feel them. You may repress them by being really angry or hurt by another and blaming them so you can avoid taking responsibility for your emotional experience. You may repress them through the spectrum of addiction/enjoyment/distraction with food, shopping, working, looking good, getting attention, drinking, drugging, etc. But when you are on the path of transforming, you face your addictions/dependencies/distractions and feelings start to rise up.

When you stop projecting onto others you also face all the feelings in the shadow rising up to be felt. And not just feelings. Also, the dark personality that copes with the feelings. Such as your super sarcastic bitchy inner queen, or your lazy nihilistic asshole, we all have our shitty personality that helps us cope and repress the feelings in order to survive. These dark personalities may be in the shadow or not. Mine is not in the shadow but I only show her to my close friends. It’s different for everybody but your dark personality has a bunch of beliefs that are false, such as love is not real, life is meaningless, this type of thing…beliefs that help you cope with what hurts or what you do not have.

To build the skill of resilience is to radically accept the dark personality who has helped you cope with life and then to radically accept all the intense hurt and feelings that are hard and scary to feel that the dark personality protects you from feeling. Radical  acceptance of everything you experience will create resilience and resilience gives you the capability to handle life in the dark and light times and especially long periods of darkness such as the dark nights of the soul we all go through.

2) Non-identification: This skill is connected to the practice of mindfulness. The key is to witness the dark personality and all the hard feelings without thinking you are the dark personality or the hard feelings. You may feel like the queen of bitchy sarcastic rage, for instance, but in your mind say, “this is not me”. You may feel extreme anxiety but in your mind you say, “I am not this anxiety”. You need a practice to be able to say these things to yourself and believe it over time.

You can meditate a few different ways. You can sit and do it. You can do it with yoga by connecting breath with movement. You can chant. You can color, draw, or do something with your hands that is repetitive while you witness your thoughts. Or you can do walking meditation.

The key is to be able to witness your thoughts and feelings, not to make them vanish. This builds the witness muscle. Just like building any muscle you get stronger with consistent practice. As you build the witness you can get stronger and better at not identifying with the constant stream of thoughts and feelings coursing through you as well as the many parts of self. We have the dark personality that protects the vulnerable inner kid, we have all the archetypes connecting to self, we have the family system traits, so many parts inside!

To build the skill of non-identification you need to commit to a consistent meditative practice. It is that simple. When you build the witness inside you can stop thinking you are your thoughts and feelings. You begin to free yourself as you grow more resilient to the darkness as you stop identifying with thoughts and feelings.

3) Mind-Body connection. This skill is also rooted in a meditative practice as well but also you connect mind to body through what you consume. We are supposed to be mind-body connected but the split occurs due to the broken world we are born into and our bloodline’s wounds lighting up in the DNA mixed with how we are raised and what we endure. Long story short, we have to find our way back to the natural mind-body connection that is our birthright.

When mind-body are reconnected we feel our feelings in the body and release feelings as they rise up. This keeps us healthy just like pooping out the excess food we eat each day.

When we are mind-body connected we can’t over eat or drink without it hurting and therefor we can’t escape the moment through food, drink, and drugs…we can only use them moderately because body requires balance. When we are connected to body overdoing it feels like crap physically. When we are disconnected from body we can drink five beers or eat a whole bag of chips and not feel any physical discomfort and in fact we may feel great because we are satiating the void. Numbness, dissociation, and de-personalization are all real deals. Connecting mind to body brings the us back into feeling the body’s responses to what we consume and what we truly need in the physical.

It seems by default we all identify with self in the mind and the mind bullies the body.

To build the skill of mind-body connection you need to have the boring practice that you force yourself to do each day. Find your way to the practice right for you. Is it alone or with others? Is it with a video or an app or just creating some space alone?

The other vital way to connect is through food, drink, and everything you put in your body. How much do our minds bully the body? We say, “I love beer,” and identify with being a beer drinker. We say, “I am a chocolate lover” and identify with eating sweets on a regular basis. These are examples. The body may be saying, “ouch my liver,” or “my intestines are growing bacteria and throwing us into disease” and the mind never listens or cares because the self identifies with the things is it consuming while ignoring the body’s needs.

Every body has its own requirements for a diet right for that particular body. Same goes for movement and self-care. What happens if you challenge your mind to listen to body and use that as a practice? Can you notice the cravings instead of giving in to them? Can you tune into your body and take the long road of discovering its best diet and way to stay healthy? Can you release identifying the self with what you consume, radically accept the crappy feelings that rise up when you use restraint and bring the witness to your practice? This will reconnect your mind to your body.

4) Unconditional love. This skill is built through the transpersonal path of connecting self to the divine. The divine does not have to be God, Goddess, or any version of spiritual belief from religious to non-religious. Thoreau connected to nature as his transpersonal force. You can call the transpersonal and see the transpersonal however feels right to you. The understanding is that you are never a disconnected self living in a disconnected word. There is a larger force than you and this larger force can take your burden, your cravings, your confusion, your anger….this force can bring you peace and what you long for deeply, can provide miracle moments, can open doors, make connections, and open up your heart.

You can keep the force as a natural mystery in your mind or hold the force as a God in heaven or a pantheon, it does not matter…but when you cultivate this connection you can begin to access the feeling of unconditional love. This is a natural feeling every human is capable of experiencing. When you feel it you let go of the hurt connected to others and to the self. Letting go does not mean not feeling hurt anymore, it just means that you accept the hurt and you accept those that hurt you, including yourself.

Once you accept the hurt and those who hurt you unconditional love rises up naturally and helps to wash the past away enough to make peace with unfairness, loss and all the vicissitudes of life.  Feeling unconditional is a process. To build the skill of feeling unconditional love is to cultivate your transpersonal relationship just as you would cultivate any relationship in your life. The more intimate you become with the transpersonal the greater your capacity to feel unconditional love and release the suffering in the heart.

Mindfulness helps you distance yourself from suffering. Connecting to the transpersonal transmutes the suffering.

5) Courage. I know it sounds simple but it’s an invaluable skill that takes time to build unless you are one of those naturally courageous people. Most of us aren’t and judge ourselves for it. Instead, let’s radically accept the lack of courage and not identify with this lack.

With courage we can face what we tend to avoid. What we resist persists. If you don’t face your fear of being vulnerable you will continue to hurt others close to you and yourself with your avoidance. If you don’t face your fear of the broken messed up world you will continue to escape reality and grow stagnant and angry. If you don’t face your failing relationship you will continue to endure with a stiff upper lip and false hope while the sensitive one in the relationship or family system will unconsciously feel all of the anxiety you avoid and they will suffer and not understand they are feeling your feelings too. These are just a few examples.

Courage is key. We all avoid pain, doubt. and vulnerability because we are all scared. Courage gives us the quality to face what we fear. You don’t need to have confidence in yourself to have courage either. Courage is not high self esteem. Courage is simply a willingness. If you are willing you can walk through what you fear and show up aligned with your true self.

You can ask the transpersonal to give you courage and it will work. You can also take a pragmatic path to building courage by telling yourself you will do one small scary thing a day and build tolerance in increments. I know for myself, I have a lot of weakness in this area. On my own path to building the skill of courage, I find that asking spirit to give me courage while meeting spirit half way and doing small scary things is the best recipe.

Courage is incredibly transforming because when we face what we avoid we become who we truly are and this sense of fulfillment opens up many new doors within and in the world.

Resilience, Non-identification, Mind-body connection, Unconditional love, and Courage I capitalize in honor of these powerful skills on the path of transformation and healing. These are not easy skills to build nor are they the only skills that matter but they are five potent keys that will change your life and awaken your true self.

Mindfulness and Transpersonal Practice Reflection…

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Mindfulness is being aware of your thoughts and knowing you are not your thoughts. You are your breath, you are this moment, you are a separate ego-identity connected to the collective energies that are connected to oneness…

Collective energies coalesce in many ways, becoming more individuated beings like like Russian dolls inside of Russian dolls…the largest doll is Oneness, Source, God, Goddess, call this Force what you will.

You can turn Oneness into a human like being to help you feel close with it, you can feel Oneness as nature if you tend toward atheism. You can see Oneness as many gods and goddesses if you are earth based in the way you feel connected. Doesn’t matter, so long as you feel the connection to Oneness.

The intellectual word for Oneness is the transpersonal. Beyond self. Bigger than self.

The next Russian doll inside of Oneness could be a group soul, a star system, a galactic system of some sort. Doesn’t matter. Just a big fat system we are all connected with all of the time.

Keep going….Russian doll inside Russian doll and eventually you reach the bloodline. The collective dragon that is your ancestry. There is also the collective being that is the human race. There is also the collective being that is Earth.

This is not science and I am not describing these Russian dolls as facts. I am using metaphor to open your imagination and help you feel your connection to the collective nature of life that constantly individuates into specific forms and returns to Oneness in a continual infinity symbol of movement…

We are not separate beings having to do all of the work, shoulder all of the weight, and figure it all out. We can surrender to the larger forces. We can ask our ancestors, spirit guides, Oneness, whatever words work- to take our burden, to control our addictions, to bring support, to offer truth, to bring clarity, etc.

We can ask. Ask and ye shall receive is an infamous line that speaks wisdom. But in our American society we have a belief system that says if you ask for help, if you surrender to the transpersonal, if you admit you are powerless, that means you are weak and being weak is bad. I call bullshit on this belief.

The human ego succumbs to the forces of nature. We are supposed to succumb just like any Earth creature.

You don’t scold a little doggie for not knowing when to stop eating. You don’t expect a lab rat (I know, sad) to not get addicted to the thing being tested on it that is addictive. You don’t expect an abused animal to be strong and accept love like a well taken care of animal. Humans are the same. We are Earth creatures that are constantly being overpowered by nature and nurture. Be it a storm, a chemical reaction, cravings, fear, sickness, hunger, longing, our upbringing, conditioning, and the family system….all of the reactivity and and all of life’s powerful forces are natural.

Mindfulness is watching the thought stories that develop in the mind that tell you that you (or they) are bad, not enough, wrong, need fixing, etc. These thought stories develop based upon what we have been taught and also based upon what karma we bring into this life from previous lives. None of these ideas, beliefs, or feelings define you.

You are not your thoughts and feelings. You are this moment. You are breath. You are not the separate ego-identity that thinks you must shoulder everything, that avoids, distracts, tries to fix, solves, and figures it all out. You are larger than the ego-identity.

There is a line in the latest Star Wars sequel that I love. The Emperor says, “I am all of the Sith,” to Ray as he is trying to destroy her. Ray responds, “And I am all of the Jedi.” Both the force of pure evil and pure light know they are not separate ego identities. Ray and the Emperor know their ego-bodies are avatars of the present moment but that all of who they are is all of the Sith and all of the Jedi.

This reminds me of how I feel astrology to be true. I always say that human beings are the dreams of the stars and planets and astrology is how the stars and planets we are communicate with the dream ego pretending to be human.

Science is awesome for figuring out the world of the five senses that we experience. For prolonging health and life and understanding life. Science has its place in comprehending so many aspects about life. And it is important to remember that the five senses are human faculties. We see with human eyes. Hear with human ears. Feel with human hands. Taste with a human tongue. Know with human thoughts. Speak with a human mouth. Understand with a human brain.

The capacity to comprehend all of reality far exceeds our human faculties and science is limiting as a result just as spirituality is limiting. You would not want to perform surgery based upon spiritual knowledge!

The only way to know more about reality is to feel more. Experience more. Have a connection with more.

Some develop this connection with a spiritual belief that turns into a felt experience of faith. As Victor Hugo wrote, to love another person is to see the face of God. Some people feel the transpersonal connection through love and relationships. I feel my soul beyond this life. I feel my guides. I feel the other side. This does not make me crazy. This is not woo woo. This also does not give me super hero powers or make me better than you. We all have ways to connect with the transpersonal.

No need to glorify or make fun of anyone’s version of connecting with the transpersonal.

The thoughts go to extremes of glorifying or ridiculing because the feelings feel scared, threatened, hurt, betrayed, desiring, needy, on and on. The feelings when not accepted, turn into extreme black and white thoughts. All good. All bad. Religion bad or stupid. Metaphysics woo woo or crap. Atheism reality or cut-off. And this goes with everything.

Mindfulness is observing the feelings and then learning how to accept the thoughts that rise up without believing in them. Eventually you can accept the feelings too. Mindfulness is really about tolerance building. You build tolerance to accept heart break without believing a story that you or they aren’t good enough or that the world is doomed or that love is crap or whatever the story may be.

Tolerance building is for the ego. We have egos because we are creatures. Ego allows us to function as creatures in this world. Mindfulness is ego training. It trains the ego to continually turn toward presence and not the story. Presence is another name for Oneness too.

The whole shebang is constantly about connecting to the transpersonal so you don’t get stuck in finding who you are, who others are, and what life is, in the mind or in the thoughts or in the story. Same same.

Letting go is accepting and accepting is mindfulness. Letting go does not mean you no longer feel the hearth break, anger, sorrow, or whatever difficult feeling you wish to be free of. Letting go means you accept the feeling and build tolerance for it happening inside you without believing the thoughts you are telling yourself about the feeling.

This is why the practice is key. Be it meditation or yoga. Practice builds tolerance for the feeling of discomfort in the body while not giving in to the thoughts that want to stop the practice.

So much of healing is about consistency of the practice to build more tolerance and awareness so you can have the choice to not buy into what the thoughts are selling that stem from painful feelings you are attempting to avoid. Feelings come first and then the thoughts arise which exacerbates the feeling which then intensifies the story and ego’s sense of self lives in this vicious cycle when not mindful and connected to the transpersonal in some way.

Sometimes we have epiphanies in the practice. I had a mindfulness a-ha moment that changed my life forever…

I had only meditated a handful of times so I call it beginner’s luck really. I  began mediating the Vipissana way, focusing on my breath and watching my thoughts float by in sentences as clouds because I am very visual person. All of the sudden, I felt a strong feeling. The only way I can describe it is that it was a feeling of my me-ness. I felt this feeling of being me in my breath. At the same time, the thoughts rising up did not feel like me. In that moment, who I am reorganized itself within me. I knew I was my breath and not my thoughts because I experienced it.

After this meditation I no longer needed to meditate as much anymore because I no longer sunk into my thoughts to the point where I felt my self as my thoughts. Don’t get wrong, thoughts still have great power over my ego. I think all the time and I react to my thinking at every turn but at the same time I am witnessing myself doing this.

The witness watches the thinking mind.

This is why yoga is my practice. Because yoga builds my tolerance to have thoughts without reacting to them. My witness is strong since that a-ha moment but my tolerance for the thoughts that rise up needs building because I still desire avoidance and escape from discomfort.

We are all different. You may need to meditate every day for life to not sink who you are into your thoughts but you may have a natural ability to tolerate discomfort and face fear. Every ego struggles to find equanimity in different ways.

I can very easily watch my thoughts, knowing I am not my thoughts, while still reacting to the discomfort in many ways and losing equanimity. I accept this and this is why I practice every day or most days. This is why I also surrender every morning to the transpersonal.

Each morning, I open the directions, call in the names and all of my angels, ancestors, and allies and say a prayer/intention for myself, all of my family, all of my friends, and all of humanity. When I do this I find my anchor, my truth, my strength, and my love in the transpersonal. Ego on her own is way too fearful!

We all have different ego personalities. I like to compare them to litters of puppies because this metaphor helps to understand that our temperament is our temperament.

My ego is the scared runt in the litter. I know this about myself. I know I avoid fear to find comfort. I am the pup hiding behind the couch while some of my brothers and sisters are in the front lines barking and being tough. Other brother and sister pups are just following along, not leading or hiding. And so forth, you get the idea.

I know that yoga is what helps my ego learn to be more brave and equanimous in each moment of scary life. I know that surrendering to the transpersonal every morning gives my ego strength.

I rely on my connection to the transpersonal every day. Every single day. I stress this point because spiritual and mindfulness hygiene is as important on the daily as brushing the teeth. You go one day without brushing your teeth and they get gross. You go one day without connecting to the transpersonal and practicing mindfulness and the ego can fall into the rabbit hole of whatever is your personal hell hole. We all have our personal hell hole and it’s alright. No problem.