Tag Archives: mindfulness

Attachment Wounds with Self

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Alchemy of Becoming

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

New Moon Blessings. 🌑🌹

The Sacred Ground Beneath the Battle

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There is a difference between neutrality and clarity.

In times of harm, staying neutral is not wisdom.

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

But true healing and spirituality calls us into embodied presence.

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

This is the moment Arjuna found himself in.

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

And who among us hasn’t felt that?

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

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

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

He says, “Remember who you are.”

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

And what we do here matters.

Finding your inner compass is part of healing.

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

It is possible to reject harm without becoming harmful.

It is possible to take a stand without feeding division.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love is not passive. It protects.

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

Compassion does not mean looking away.

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

And that time is now.

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

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.

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.

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.

 

 

Notes on the East, Mind, and the Story

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This blog will go deeper into the east direction of healing as first written about in the blog entry, “The Defeat Story and the Transcending True Self.” Healing started in the north and you can read about that in the previous post.

East is the mind and here we can find the mindfulness practice that allows us to be witness to the story of defeat versus buying what it is selling. When we can watch the mental stories and the mind blah blah blahing while knowing true self is not the thoughts, we free ego from being enslaved to the story of defeat. This gives space for true self to rise up from the shadow and synthesize with the ego. No need to understand how this works. If you learn to watch your thoughts but not believe in them and if you learn how to be the witness to your mind but not identify with mind as self, the true self will rise, synthesize and become ego. The healing of the east is connected to the air, seeing the big picture like a wise eagle up in the sky.

I want to share my personal story of healing in the east. Back in 2010, when I was 38 years old, I had never meditated before minus a handful of times. I had done countless journeys inward in the form of creative visualizations and shamanic journeys. I had stared out the window and allowed my thoughts to reveal themselves in silence probably every day of my life. But I did not think I needed to meditate and I had no desire until my father suggested I try it when he noticed how much I was struggling with a certain issue in my life.

Smack dab in the middle of New York city, I closed my eyes and began the basic practice of watching my breath and noticing my thoughts pass like clouds through the sky of my mind. Beginners luck. Within just a few minutes a profound felt experience took me over. I could feel me being my breath and the thoughts not being me. Suddenly, I changed forever. I no longer believed my thoughts were true. I no longer felt my self to be what my thoughts were telling me I was through their stories and more deeply, I no longer felt thoughts themselves to be anything even close to who I was.

An emptiness seized me for weeks afterward as I would have thoughts about me or whatever topic rose up and every single thought seemed irrelevant. Not pointless or bad or wrong or any judgmental thing. Just a soft neutral irrelevance that left me feeling empty because I used to fully invest in my thoughts before that. I used to not have a sense of space between me and my thoughts. All of the sudden there was space and complete differentiation. Thoughts seemed nothing more than song on the radio.

I am very mental by temperament. I have seven air planets in my natal chart which represents mind. I am a huge meaning-maker. Eventually, I found my way back to the love and joy I experience for allowing my thoughts to have some weight. During that period in 2010, I would have said, “I have seven air planets in my chart, is just a thought. Astrology is just a thought. I am a meaning-maker is just a thought. None of it matters. I am, is just a thought.” and let it all go the moment those thoughts rose up in me. This is a path many take in life and it is beautiful and true in its own right. I swung back to the middle because my true self love for meaning-making led the way.

Every time I get too invested in thoughts I can return to that place and drop all identification with thinking and identities that thinking creates. To identify with your thoughts means to believe them as true and to believe what they tell you informs you about the nature of reality, self, or whatever you are thinking about. We use thoughts as a means to communicate and they have their purpose. Eventually I found the right balance for me in how much I invest in thoughts but I don’t identify with them at all anymore. I can blab on and on about my natal chart and how it makes sense of my internal experience and I also don’t identify with Astrology as a concept, at the same time. This is how it is with every mental understanding that I love and that gives me a strong felt sense. I love exploring the archetypes, they give me a strong self sense and I don’t identify with archetypes as concepts.

I identify with only a felt experience of being me. It’s wordless. It’s love if I have to give a word.

I share my story of east healing to show how quick it can happen to loosen the grip on the mind. When we over-identify with the stories our mind tells us, we suffer. Buddhism is rooted in the psychology of detaching identity from thought. We are not our thoughts. Even being a “me” is a thought and radical practice of this transcends sense of self past the individual level. We are not who we think we are.

Thoughts are not ours. We don’t make them up. Thoughts travel around and we catch them with our brains that are like nets catching butterflies. Or you can see the brain as a radio station and thoughts are the radio waves. Those of us who channel experience this consciously all the time. I turn my brain to a certain channel and channel a certain being.

The big idea (which is a thought too, so everything I explain in this blog is also moot) is that we are not the stories we tell ourselves and we don’t make up thoughts we think. Rather, the human being is a frequency channeling other frequencies in one big frequency being.

How is this healing?

Because, for example, when you let go of believing you are insecure and not good enough, space is created within. This space will naturally fill up with love. Love is the frequency of oneness that is the core power inside every single human being. Love is God. Love is Nature. Love is Universe. It’s the most natural thing in the world. Yet it is very easy to blotch out. If you spend all day trying to prove your worth in the eyes of others or chasing after projections of what you think will satisfy you or tell yourself you are a piece of poo or tell others they are a piece of poo or whatever story of pain and suffering you tell yourself, you blotch out the natural love that is the very core of existence.

I don’t use the word love like a hippie woo woo creature you can make fun of but you might make fun of me anyway. Let me remind you, love is strong. Love is childbirth, love is surviving abuse and war and starvation, love is saving a life, love is working through problem after problem, love is communicating truth, love is being honest, love is being open, love is being vulnerable, and love is being present. Love is hope. Love is the blood in the body and the gold of the soul. The west is where we feel this love. The east is where we clear space to feel this love.

I have not formally meditated in years. I do a vinyasa yoga practice that connects breath to movement and this keeps me centered so that I remain the witness of my thoughts. Four times a week. Chill. I have huge struggles in certain areas and I am not on any mountaintop when I share that being witness to my thoughts is something that comes easy to me. For you it may be harder and you may need to meditate daily to stay the witness. We all need a different kind of practice.

You can meditate by simply watching your breath and thoughts pass by while sitting in silence. You can watch your thoughts and breath while chanting, making something with our hands that does not require thought, or do some form of movement that allows you to watch thoughts and breath at the same time. You can meditate for five minutes a day or hours a day. Some ancient eastern practices make it complex and add all sorts of fancy breath work. There is a lot of variety to choose from and practices root back to the beginning.

True self rises from the west when we create space by not identifying with thoughts. This is my take on it, coming from a western point of view where I have consciously chosen to embrace the creative play of being an individual soul. I don’t believe in the individual soul as a static thing because as we lose the human suit we may become more collective and when I let go of all thought, I feel only oneness as the play of forces and form. I like to use all metaphysical concepts playfully, poetically and free to morph, as a result.

I feel the play of forces and form that is oneness choosing to put on the costume of the individual soul. Like the Russian doll image, I feel oneness as the core doll evolving through individuating itself into more and more specific life forms. I feel oneness evolve through creating stories of being different life forms. Just as humans stem from the single cell bacteria here on earth…I feel oneness as the spirit version of the single cell bacteria, continually evolving into more and more life forms. Metaphysical tangent.

True self is the authentic individual aching to emerge from the shadow of the ego where it waits for ego to make space for it to rise.

When space is created by not identifying with thoughts, true self can begin to rise and embody the conscious personality. True self is a felt experience and not a belief system. Why must I always express myself creatively? It’s my true self. Why am so sensitive and feel things with the volume way higher than most? It’s my true self. Why am I so spiritual? It’s my true self. It’s me beyond an idea of me. It’s living breathing me.

I was blessed to be raised by parents who did not tell me what to believe about who I am or life itself.  I was raised without religious or moral dogma. I was raised with a felt experience love, even through the dysfunction, abuse, and troubles youth delivered. This may have made it easier for me to know who I really am. I can only imagine the struggle for some who are raised with strong mental belief systems and dogma that forces them to repress their true nature at a young age to survive or be liked. I think about this especially for LGBTQIA kids and it breaks my heart that their true nature is made to be sinful and wrong by religion.

We all face the battle of true self versus conditioned self if we don’t align with our culture’s value system, on any level. Yet even if you are gender binary, christian, cis-male, straight, between the ages of 18 and 35, healthy, handsome, wealthy and educated with the cultural norm kissing your feet, you may equally battle discovering your true self because the world will mold your success so easily and distract you from looking within. However you are praised or marginalized by family and culture will inform how your true self is repressed or valued. Nature and nurture.

A certain true self temperament may not let any amount of cultural/family conditioning, abuse or trauma repress their true nature. Another temperament may crumble from the slightest thought of being humiliated. The reality of being oppressed, abused, or steered away through a strong value system put in place by family and tradition effects each individual in varying degrees. You can notice this in siblings who grow up in same household and culture but respond to external life in very distinct ways based upon their distinct internal experience. The distinct internal experience is the true self.

True self exists beneath and beyond thought but thought turns true self into a word and a concept. In the east, space is made between the felt experience and the thoughts that are always flooding in to costume the felt experience into a story. This story, when identified with, cements itself into the psyche and loops. This looping is called a neural pathway. The reason why we get stuck in habits of thinking and behavior roots itself in the way the neural pathway plays on repeat like forgetting to change the radio station and it always playing the same song, over and over. This is suffering.

 

 

The Dark Night of the Soul

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I am compelled to write about the dark night of the soul because I am currently journeying through a dark night myself. The recent death of my mother was my entrance, this time around. We all take our turn in the dark night journey. Loss is the entrance. This may be a loss of a loved one to death, to the break-up of a relationship, loss of health to illness, loss of a job, loss of a home, loss of youth, loss of a dream….loss.

In astrology the dark night of the soul would be associated with Pluto, the planet of loss that happens out of your control that takes you to your knees in surrender. It is through this surrender that the soul transforms. In tarot, you could associate the dark night of the soul with the Death and The Hanged Man archetypes. The former applies to the actual loss, the latter to the journey that comes with the loss. If you pull these cards, you know it is your turn.

The dark night of the soul is not fun, easy, predictable, or known. Each time a person goes through it, it is their own unique journey. At the same time, the dark night of the soul is archetypal, universal, and collective. There are key elements we all experience when going through it. It’s helpful to know that you are not going insane and that nothing is wrong with you when you feel…

Hopeless, like nothing can lift your heart out of the shadows.

Despair, like you’ve fallen into an abyss and there is no light to be found.

Confused, like one minute you are in your every day life with your usual struggles and pleasures (no matter how intense they may present) and the next minute you’re in a different place emotionally. You feel feelings you cannot name. Your life does not seem to make sense.

Angry because you feel as if life unfairly took something important from you.

Judgmental of yourself because you are not functioning like your usual self and being vulnerable makes you feel embarrassed.

Like hiding or withdrawing because interacting with others makes you feel worse. Maybe you are envious of what they have that you have lost. Maybe you try to explain yourself but it makes you feel worse to do so. Maybe the contrast of your life against their life is too much to bare. Maybe you need silence. You don’t laugh as easy. You don’t feel chatty. You cannot care about their lives the way you normally do. You have very little to give.

Like escaping self-destructively into food, drugs, alcohol, shopping, television, or whatever thing or activity will act like a balm on the harsh feelings. Maybe you have an addiction issue and the dark night takes you to a new level of needing to surrender to not partake in your addiction. Maybe you don’t have an addiction issue but keep over doing it and feeling bad about yourself and struggle to find balance.

Like you can’t sleep or you sleep too much, your dreams are intense, you wake up each morning in a fog, you never feel truly rested.

And these are just a few of the feelings and experiences I am tapping into that we all share when in the dark night. The dark night is not a depression. It is a rite of passage.

Just know you are normal for experiencing all of the above. This journey will take its own course in its own time. There is nothing you can do to stop it and it is enforced upon you.

Surrender is the key.

Surrender is all you can do but at the same time, you have a choice to continually make and grapple with every single day. I stress “grapple” because the dark night of the soul is an internal wrestling match on the regular.

You can surrender and radically accept all of these feelings and experiences that seize you, not identify with the feelings, let them pass through you and allow the dark night to mysteriously transform the myth of your soul.

Or you can resist the dark night by identifying with the feelings and telling yourself a story that creates suffering based upon these feelings.

This story can be that you are bad, guilty, wrong, fucked up, not good enough, or that you need to just pull yourself up by the bootstraps and get on with life, that your feelings can’t compare with those who are going through worse, that you don’t have the right to feel pain and loss as you push all your feelings down into the shadow, slowly making yourself sick either through seeming like a shining star of strength or through self destructing from escape into addiction or fleeing or doing something impulsive that makes your life fall into suffering. You get the idea.

Suffering is the story, not the feelings.

The internal wrestling is hard because the feelings that rise up in the dark night are unnamable and often intense. The key is to let them rise and pass through you like chemical storms.

Agony, loneliness, despair, anger, regret, every form of vulnerability where the ego feels like its fallen off the throne and lost its crown, can present in the dark night. Or maybe you feel a low level blah, a loss of interest in your regular activities, or you need to be alone. Depends on the temperament as we are all different.

The key though, is to allow the feelings and desires to present and be honored without buying the stories the feelings want to sell.

Sometimes the thoughts create the feeling but I think more than often, the feelings create the thoughts. You feel sad and then you tell yourself, “I am not good enough”.  You feel confused and you tell yourself, “I am lost.” You feel guilty and you tell yourself, “I am not lovable.”

This is why I am not a big fan of reframing thoughts to change the feelings. I think this winds up invalidating the feelings and then what you resist will persist and the feelings will find a way to express, often through physical illness or projection onto another. Feelings need to be recognized and felt to leave the body. Our culture has a morality around dark feelings being bad and it winds up making the self sick as a result.

I am more of a fan of mindfulness practice. When a big scary or dark feelings rise, instead of trying to change the feeling into something positive, witness the feeling, feel it, and do not identify with it. You are not your feelings. If you do this, the feeling will rise like an internal storm, express, and leave the body like waves that roll through.

When you identify with the feeling that rises inside, you create a story from it. If you identify with despair in your dark night, you may create a story that says, “my life is always painful and I never get a break.” This traps the feeling by perpetuating it over and over inside of the story. This causes suffering.

If you don’t identify with the despair rising in you, the feeling will storm, express and leave the body. This is where the magic happens. Somehow, from letting feels express and leave the body, you slowly begin to transform.

This is the soul journey of the dark night. The essential nectar. It’s in the meaning making. It is spirit playing the role of you and making a myth out of your life. It is you finding forgiveness, redemption, and reconciliation for yourself and for those who have hurt you. You let go of the clinging, you release the suffering, you release the karma. Your heart purifies and you remember who you are. Love.

This is how the soul transforms. Through loss.

The dark night of the soul is an archetypal rite of passage that is meant to transform your soul. Grief is the medicine. But you have to allow this to happen.

If you resist the feelings by over-identifying with them and creating stories of suffering that perpetuate the same patterns in your life, you wont transform. You will petrify. You will grow more resentful, guilty, bitter, defensive, untrusting. You may get sick if the stories turn into physical aliments from all the trapped feelings.

If you don’t identify with the feelings that rise within you and you learn how to let them express and pass through, you will mysteriously begin to feel differently about yourself, your past, those who hurt you or who you hurt in your past. You will begin to find forgiveness, redemption, and reconciliation.

Forgiveness. Redemption. Reconciliation. Big words, big topics. I will save digging in for another blog.

This is the power of of the dark night of the soul. It is soul medicine and to understand the medicine you must remove judgement on light being good and dark being bad. You must remove the perspective that happiness is good and sadness is bad. That gain is good and loss is bad. You must allow the full spectrum of life experiences and feelings expression within you, without identifying with them. You must be willing to heal, grow, and evolve. It’s very hard!

If we collectively (and we are starting to) understand and educate about the medicine of the dark night of the soul it would be easier because no singular human would feel isolated in their experience and they would have a map for how to traverse through the pitch black dark night of their soul journey. Perhaps many of our ancient elders experienced this collective wisdom in their earth based cultures?

I am only giving a brief summary here and I am writing this mid-dark night of my soul. Figure I have another year left. I am internally wrestling my ego’s compulsion to identify with the feelings and tell myself negative stories about self. My witness is strong and although the negative story maker is busy as work, I am not identifying with those tales.

It’s important to understand that not identifying often means saying “no, I wont believe this story about myself,” not necessarily being free of the negative stories blabbing away in the psyche every time a hard feeling rises up. It’s learning to ignore the blah blah blah while allowing the feeling to swell and express without thoughts. Eventually the thoughts and meaning-making return but as a wise soul myth, and not a false negative self story.

I am just now beginning to enter the realm of forgiveness. More to come. I am in the dark night with you and if you are not in the dark night, hello from the darkness.