January 28, 2019

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.

Anger and the Cardinal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, the cardinal becomes Vivian.

Attachment Wounds with Self

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

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

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

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

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

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.

2024 Energies

Welcome to 2024. Can you believe it? How quickly is time going? Seems to me that a year feels like a few months and I wonder if this is from getting older or if time itself is feeling quicker for everyone? I sense both.

Lately, I have noticed myself wanting to slow time down by doing less and being more. To ignite the action of being. I write it this way because it seems in our modern hustle of society it requires intention, effort and action to still the self in order to be more and do less. Not only does this slow time down but it helps self to stay anchored to your inner truth, connection with the divine, connection with nature and to stay conscious and intentional.

Makes sense to me as we enter the year of the wood dragon in Chinese astrology. Wood is all about fruition in the physical (think of a tree). Dragon is all about action, independence, leadership, magic, and confident energy. It is yang energy, action action action.

In numerology 2024 is an 8 year. The frequency of 8 has a few meanings. It is the number of abundance and achievement and it is also the number of karma.

Karma is directly tied to abundance and achievement. As a literal metaphor, think about the difference of the crappy self centered CEO stepping on the heads of their workers to make themselves richer and to achieve more versus the compassionate small business owner paying their employees a fair wage and treating everyone as an equal so everyone can experience prosperity. The latter is true abundance. The former is greed. You can achieve in either direction rapidly this year.

In your own life, if you treat yourself and others with more kindness, tolerance, compassion and understanding you generate true abundance and release the karma of feelings building up in the body and soul that become our metaphorical baggage.

Digging a little deeper…notice where you may be mean, critical, judgmental and fear based when it comes to how you talk to yourself or think about others? Pay attention to your inner and outer speech and thoughts because this year will amplify and put into action whatever we are thinking and believing.

The way you speak and think about yourself, life, and others will be what quickly and abundantly grows this year. We can easily see this happening in the world and in the collective, both in our awakening and positive advancements as well as in the continued horrors and problems around the globe. Can you also see into your own self and life where you might be perpetuating judgement, hatred, criticalness, and negative narratives based upon built up fear, grief, despair, anger, and disappointment in the heart?

It’s tricky business to learn how to feel feelings without wrapping negative narratives around the feelings, which in turn, wind up pushing the feelings into the body. This will make body sick or hurt, which will then make the mind go more negative toward self and others in a loop from mind to body and body to mind. It’s the 8 turned on its side as an infinity symbol. This is a form of karma as an endless loop or vicious cycle. The positive is always available to us, feeling feelings out of the body makes it much easier to narrate and speak from a place of love making an infinity loop of true abundance.

Learning to grieve is a big need for every single of one of us. I won’t go into in this blog but it is a mammoth topic of importance in my not so humble opinion.

Feeling feelings without the morality police coming in the mind to persecute is essential ( for example: “you shouldn’t feel this way, there are people worse off” insert guilt here). I always like to think of feelings as energy poop. You would never say to yourself, “I am not going to poop. I feel guilty for pooping, I shouldn’t poop. I am poopless”. How ridiculous! Pooping is the most natural thing in the world even though it’s smelly and yucky and we really don’t want to mention it or think about it. And if there is no pooping issue, we don’t have to think about it.

Feelings are the same as poop except feelings are invisible energy needing to leave the body on a regular basis. If you don’t poop you get very constipated and sick. If you don’t feel, same thing. Because feelings are real energy, body stores the feelings that aren’t pooped out through feeling them and that can turn into physical sickness, pulled muscles, broken bones, back aches, diseases as well as mental-emotional-soul wounds that turn into neural pathways that embed in the brain and often are passed down to future generations through the DNA. Epigenetic multigenerational trauma is a form of karma too.

Learning how to feel feelings without dwelling in them is key. The dwelling part is the thinking part. If you don’t create a story around the feeling and repeat that story in your mind, the feelings will leave the body and you won’t dwell. Even if the same grief comes in waves for ten years or even a lifetime. Normalizing grief, anger, sorrow and all difficult feelings as a simple part of life like pooping is what I remind myself of, to help me stay out of narrating.

Instead of narrating, I just name. Hello grief. Hello sorrow. Hello anger. Sometimes I have to write a poem or story to get the feeling out. Sometimes I need to paint to get it out. Or sing. Or dance. Or watch a show to cry. Or vent. I always need to move my body to keep the feelings pooping out. We all have our ways and learning them is vital for health.

But reminder, it’s OK to be a messy human creating stories of pain that need detangling and understanding. Hello therapy. Hello journaling. Hello energy work.

This year there will be more immediate karmic consequences and fruition of what you put into action based upon your thoughts and feelings. I am getting into the nitty gritty of feeling feelings because you can’t just positivity-police yourself into loving kindness and confidence in order to achieve and be in the flow of abundance. You can’t just wave your magic wand (unless you are Gandalf), and you can’t ignore the darkness and only look at the light. These tactics are unskillful and will grow more problems.

You know me, I am going to be a broken record reminder of the internal world of you. Inner achievement. Inner fruition. True abundance. True independence. Real magic. Healing.

Inner achievement: being able to feel feelings out of the body and stay out of negative narratives a little bit better than before.

Inner fruition: growing a little bit more self love, self acceptance and loving kindness that will spread into the external world toward others. It can go in the other direction too, extending love, acceptance and compassion toward others can help you feel it for yourself.

True abundance: the internal sense of well-being generated by the power of love and caring that gives back to self and others so that what you create in the world is prosperous for everyone.

Real magic: all of life visible and invisible, internal and external, is alive-conscious-sentient energy being shaped by our thoughts, feelings, behaviors and actions. We are co-creators of this life and can invoke the divine (or nature) to help us create. You don’t have to go it alone, support is everywhere in the spirit world and in nature.

Using real magic to create abundant inner and outer achievement won’t make the injustice, horrors, and pain banish just like that in our life or in our world…obviously. It’s a slow and steady process over time in the ongoing journey of being human on earth. And I don’t mean to be reductionist. I am only focusing in this specific aspect, for this blog.

This year will be a super jolt growth spurt of what we put out and that is based upon what is happening within. Same goes for the shadow side, untended and unconscious wounds will get worse too, judgement and criticism will create wounds. Shadowed anger, grief, and all difficult feelings will create bigger problems and illnesses.

Back to doing less and being more. By spending a bit more time being versus doing, the nervous system can regulate and calm, we can create space and time to notice what feelings need tending and what thoughts are being perpetuated. This is part of my 2024 plan and I share only to inspire.

Also, I cannot end this blog without mentioning Pluto going back into Aquarius on January 20th (after a retrograde in Capricorn) until is retrogrades back into Capricorn once again come September 1st and very soon to be full on in Aquarius until 2044.

A new era is upon us. Think back to 2008. That’s when the last new era was upon us in Capricorn. So from 2008 until now we have been in a certain Capricorn cycle of death, loss, rebirth and transformation as a society. Now we enter an Aquarius era of death, loss, rebirth and transformation until 2044. More on that later…

The Alchemical Marriage

A big healing component, if you are on the spiritual path, is the sacred marriage of ego and soul. For myself, this is the very root of my being, my core truth and it guides me every step of the way no matter how often my ego protests (which is on the regular).

The journey of the dark night of the soul is a journey of soul coming into the body to marry the ego. Through tragedy, be it the loss of health, a loved one or any other version of well being, security, fundamental love, or sense of identity, the ego is forced to go within for sustenance because external reality no longer provides what ego needs.

As in my previous blog and why I wrote that one first (reflections of the dark night blog) this is a very difficult path to take. My ego protests all the time, feeling too weary from grief, worn down by challenges, sad or inflamed with anger to give a crap about the soul’s high-falooten promise of this supposed sacred marriage actually giving ego real fundamental sustenance (love, security, happiness, peace).

I am pretty sure my protest looks like anybody else’s protest and I always say we are all the same in our darkness and unique in our light.

But I stay the course. Ego protests, I move through it and I am back on track. Cause it takes time for the soul to embody.

Think of body like a living vessel, alive and sentient, intelligent and imbued with an epigenetic already installed personality that gets conditioned by our upbringing. This is what your ego is. Ego is the personality of body, And most of us have bodies filled with years of repressed feelings and negative vows from our upbringing along with the multigenerational wounds and traits from the past.

Body is the shadow so when we do “shadow work” we are literally clearing the body of the muck that keeps soul hovering above the head or maybe only a little of the way in. The more we clear out the muck in body, the more room for the soul to enter and take up space.

In my mind I think of it like soul as water and body becoming soil to absorb soul into it. Before doing parts work, shadow work and depth healing (whatever you want to call it), body is more like solid rock that cannot absorb soul into it. This visual may help you understand in a simple way.

The more simply and viscerally I can integrate the idea of the alchemical marriage the more I feel inspired to stay on path. I visualize my body becoming less like rock and more like soil when I am processing deep grief, emptiness, anger, etc. Processing just means feeling. Feeling each feeling without wrapping a negative narrative around it allows feelings to leave the body.

The body becoming fresh soil is the key. Another way to say it is to return body to its natural state, healing body of trauma, PTSD, anxiety and dissolving the neural pathways that sabotage.

Mind-Body is important. Eating foods on the edge of the grocery store versus the aisles is an easy way to understand this. Fresh veges, fruits, meats, fish, eggs (and for you vegan/vegetarians choosing beans, nuts and seeds over super processed fake meat products). Drinking plenty of water, getting proper nutrition. Not over indulging all the time in food, drink, or drugs. This is key as body relies on you the exact same way a pet relies on you to stay healthy. This includes movement too.

I know for myself, I also rely on crystals, flower essences, and herbs. I find incredible value and major help from stones. I am a stone whisperer. They are sentient beings here to help us as they are part of earth, Gaia’s body. Our bodies are Gaia’s body. Herbs, stones, and flower essences are Gaia’s medicines.

(Here is also where I would like to plug sunsoulessences.com. Tiffany is a powerful medicine woman, Seattle based. I only buy my essences from her since I discovered her. Feel free to email her too, she can custom make an essence or help you to choose one).

I am not a religious person but I am deeply spiritual and consider the spiritual path to be rooted in nature. Spirit is nature too. Nature goes way beyond what the measly five senses of the human earth body can detect. True spirituality is not an idea, it is living reality.

My spirituality has never been belief based because since I was a little girl I remembered being a soul with many lives past and future lives. Ater my full blown spiritual awakening in 1995, I have felt and had memories of being on the other side, living on other dimensions, connecting with guides on the other side and feeling the many layers and dimensions of reality.

I won’t ever try to indoctrinate anyone or turn my spiritual connection into dogma. All I can do is use it for my own path and to guide others who seek me out. Early on, only a few years after my awakening, I married Gaia in the desert. It was a sacred marriage of mother and daughter. I made a painting to commemorate the ritual and a mantra came to me, “I have become part of a larger mother”. Since then, I have relied upon mother earth to ground me with her gravity, stones, flower essences, and herbs.

I also rely upon my celestial guides on the other side of physical reality, the other side of the veil. My mom is there now too as a guide. The main goddess I work with is more of the stars than mother earth though I see all goddess and god beings as aspects of Oneness taking different forms. I like to work with the different forms, it is my preference, while in my heart of hearts I feel Oneness as Spirit and understand that we are all One energy.

This is the perhaps the only doctrine I possess. We are all One.

My truth as a soul having a human experience is what guides me every day but let me tell you, I am on no mountaintop and I will never profess to be above the human experience, some guru or enlightened being. I am a basic human woman who has psychic awareness and a healing gift to offer others and offer myself. I struggle like everybody else and want the average things in life just like everybody else. My ego protests hard core and I have healed a very dark and shattered psyche from the ground up.

I hope for this blog to inspire you on the spiritual path. And also to ground the spiritual path in the simplicity of heart. The alchemical marriage of soul and ego is real and it is a process. There is no end result either but there are results. The results for me have been mammoth. I feel a sense of peace as my foundation most of the time these days, I suffer way less, and my capacity to love myself and others is much more open and expansive. I find joy in the little things and presence even when the moment is hard.

I am still not at the point where soul and ego have merged like water into soil. I would say that now, after about twenty years on the conscious spiritual path, soul and ego sit beside each other but still feel like they are on different tracks as if watery soul is beside body that is more like soil but still very rocky. This is progress as my soul used to hover way up above body completely (where are my dissociation girlies at.)

I seem to switch back and forth between soul or ego being in the driver’s seat of my conscious self. When ego is in the driver’s seat I lose trust and I start protesting, filled with that weariness, emptiness, unmet longing, or whatever difficult feeling is presenting and don’t care about marrying the soul, I just want life to get easier. When soul is in the driver’s seat I still feel all the difficult feelings but I remember to feel the feelings, express myself creativity and I am inspired. Most of all, I feel trust in life no matter how dark and difficult the tragedy.

Back and forth between ego and soul. This is the tension of the current part of the path for me. I can look back and see the different ways soul and and ego have interacted and know the future will bring progress if I don’t give up.

To be continued, forever.