Spirituality — Blog

Hello dear souls

It’s been a while. I haven’t posted because what’s been happening in me the past six months often hasn’t been able to reach words, at least not for people beyond those right in front of me.

Something about putting words to screen to strangers feels more solid than what’s been wanted, which is to live in and as the ocean of consciousness. Constantly presently and amorphously flowing, feeling, and transforming. Nothing solid to rest on long enough to share.

The usual ‘this is who I am and this is what is now’ would simply be ‘I am nothing and everything and unfolding what that means every day.’ Not very colorful.

I’m starting to land though so this is who I am and what is now.

It’s quite a time to be alive. I vacillate between seeing it as a collective transformation we’re in, and as one journey of the Self that would be my experience regardless of what time I was born.

The former can feel like victim, the latter can feel like ego. Somewhere in the middle is where I try to stand.

The reality in front of me lately though is pervasive transformation. Everyone it seems is going through some major upleveling, some wanted, some not. Some are leaning into it, alchemizing the challenges and loss into growth and new. Others are spiraling in the pain of change and letting go, resisting and grasping.

For me it’s been both. And the resultant growth has been rapid and stunning.

From deepening my partnership, weaving our lives and families. To shifting my source of self-worth as I continue to choose not to work in the conventional sense, shedding old identities and ideas of ‘my purpose’. And most poignantly, to learning what it truly means to be presence, embodying this path in being not just in mind, and why that is truly all that matters.

The upleveling I’m now navigating is in my body. I’ve been dealing with gut issues that nearly consumed my days and mind the past 6 months, making very loud and clear the emotion-gut-brain connection. After trying all the Western tricks, I turned to the East, to Chinese Medicine—Chi Nei Tsang, herbalism, breathwork and natural healing.

At first, I felt the gut problems were my body processing all the life changes. But now, I have a different story. That I’m at last grounded and strong enough to be able to feel what I never could. That the emotions my sensitive being wanted to experience throughout my life are rising to at last be felt. Emotions that I simply couldn’t handle before this path of self-realization. Emotions that now, in the stability of a new home, relationship, self-love and feminine embodiment are bubbling to the surface.

Because of my deep sensitivity, I was in stress response for most of my life, primarily living in the sympathetic nervous system of fight or flight, perpetual survival mode.

This was my body’s way of coping with life, of navigating and being an accepted participant in this world despite my differences.

My relationship with food and my body was one manifestation of that coping. I’ve written about it in the past, so to summarize, it was a life and soul-consuming war with self-rejection and anxiety.

I asked my Chi Nei Tsang teacher how my body digested well back then when I was basically never operating from the ‘rest and digest’ parasympathetic nervous system. His answer—because it had to. This is the power of Earth chi, or the miraculous machine that is our physical body. It shows up for what we need.

At that time, if I added debilitating gut issues to my list of struggles, I wouldn’t have survived. There was no space to deal with that.

But, of course, the accumulated emotion doesn’t just go away with compartmentalization and distraction. It must, when one is ready and ripe for it, be felt to be released.

In Chi Nei Tsang, it’s believed that emotions need to be digested just like food. And when they aren’t, they’re stored in the body, wreaking havoc on the health, and often gut, over time. This builds until either the symptoms become unignorable, or one cultivates space to feel, release, and heal.

The snake has been a persistent symbol coming in lately. Every time I close my eyes, I have slides of archetypal visions.

Two coiling snakes forming the DNA helix. Or one slithering upward in turns like the Tantric kundalini energy, a sun crown of gems at its head. Or a strong, calm, beautiful woman with a knowing smile lying relaxed across a throne made of Earth, a big anaconda wrapped around her arm and body.

I’m having a diamond serpent ring made in honor of this, an amulet marking a new and important stage of my path.

The symbolism is clear—shedding. That’s what I’ve been doing. Shedding old emotions, stories, identities, and patterns. Any and everything I hold in my body and mind from where I’ve been that doesn’t serve where I’m going.

Shedding’s what I’ve been doing since this all started in 2018 with my first guided Bufo journey, but something deeper has opened in the past six months.

Life brings you what you’re ready for. 2 years ago when Raf, my Vedic astrologer, said to me that I was about to embark on a 2.5-year journey of extremely hard work, I ended that Zoom call resolved and braced for the kind of hard work I’d always known—external. Career-building work. Running faster on the matrix’s hamster wheel work.

It started that way.

Trying to show up dutifully for the task of the stars Raf apologetically but bluntly relayed to me, I doubled down on my mission to build the organization that’d awaken entrepreneurs. That’d raise millions, invest in heart-centered founders, and help them change the world.

I won’t reiterate the labyrinth this took me down, but the point is the hard work wasn’t external. It wasn’t AWA.

It was internal. It was Self. To a depth I couldn’t have imagined when first hearing Raf’s prophecy. To an intensity I couldn’t have handled at the time.

Life brings you what you can handle, when you can handle it. The truth of divine timing has been both an infuriating and glorious realization for me since then.

The next two years became a slow unfolding of the layers of the true hard work I was set out for, each at a time I was ready. A flower of infinite petals gently blossoming open.

And the past 6 months have been some sort of culmination.

This Monday was the peak of that culmination. The total solar eclipse.

Caesar and I traveled to Mazatlán, one of the towns on the eclipse’s path, to see it. We joined Aniwa, a medicine group based there with whom I sat in 2021, for two overnight Peyote ceremonies, the second leading into the eclipse on Monday morning.

I couldn’t have anticipated the quantum leap in consciousness from that experience. Sitting hand in hand with my beloved on the red dirt of Aniwa’s land in remote western Mexico, amidst rolling hills of dry brush and 300-year-old cacti, under a bright morning Sun slowly consumed by the dark Moon, the fruit of my soul work from the past 3 years sprouted forth.

The indigenous myth of eclipses is the masculine, Sun, merging with the feminine, Moon. The feminine overcomes his light, bringing darkness to the world below, unveiling what’s hidden in the shadows before allowing light to return. A process that brings a form of death and rebirth to beings along its path.

At 11 am, an hour after the eclipse began and the Peyote ceremony circle closed, and just as the moon began to fully embrace the Sun, I watched the ring of fire and I merged with it.

I felt it as a portal to a new life and being. I felt my past and identity disintegrate into the disappearing solar flames. I felt the stuck emotions and dis-ease in my midbody soften. I felt fears that I both knew and didn’t know rise and express themselves to Caesar through my voice and tears.

A catharsis. A release. A final letting go. I felt a huge space open in its place. Space for my truest self—unapologetic, free, and alive. To never again be smothered or shapeshifted. Space for Caesar and our love. Finally surrendering and opening to the love I always dreamed of. Knowing I deserve it. Knowing it’s my birthright. An unconditional, eternal, infinite love that is a mirror of what’s within me.

We cried and held one another and watched with awe and reverence at this cosmic phenomenon happening both in the sky and within us.

Thank you Mexico, thank you Father Sun and Sky, Mother Moon and Earth. Thank you Peyote medicina. Thank you Aniwa. Here we are, and on it goes.

This is what’s came through in support of this flowering since I last posted,

What I’m reading

The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

The Prophet (again)

Between Heaven and Earth

What I’m watching

Richard Rudd

Blu of Earth

The play of life

What I’m contemplating

Worth is not given, it’s claimed.

It is not necessary to talk about revelation. Be it.

Imagine if we created an environment based on beauty relaxation and creativity. Richard Rudd

Your vibrational state is your contribution to the collective. Peter Crone

Enlightenment is when the expression of love supersedes the seeking for truth. Robert Grant

When the winds of change blow, some people build walls, others build windmills. Chinese proverb

Simplicity. Patience. Compassion.

You cannot travel the path until you have become the path yourself

Whether we experience what happens to us as an obstacle and enemy or as a teacher and friend depends entirely on our perception of reality. It depends on our relationship to ourselves. Pema Chödrön

So now you identify yourself with the eternal that is within you and within all things. It doesn’t mean you want to see the atom bomb come, but you don’t spend your time worrying about it. Joseph Campbell

Hence, the traditional magician or medicine person functions primarily as an intermediary between human and nonhuman worlds, and only secondarily as a healer. Without a continually adjusted awareness of the relative balance or imbalance between the human group and its nonhuman environ, along with the skills necessary to modulate that primary relation, any “healer” is worthless—indeed, not a healer at all.

The most sophisticated definition of “magic” is “the ability or power to alter one’s consciousness at will.”

Often wrong but never in doubt.

I think you know how to love better than any of us. That’s why you find it all so painful. Fleabag

To heal is to touch with love what we previously touched with fear. Stephen Levine

Accept it, leave it, or change it. Eckhart Tolle

The day you stop racing is the day you win the race. Bob Marley

If 50 million people say a foolish thing, it’s still a foolish thing. Bertrand Russell

The best work that anyone ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him. Always.

The truth will set you free…but not until it is finished with you. David Foster Wallace

One day I will find the right words and they will be simple. Jack Kerouac

What I’m listening to

Chantress Seba

Medicine Music

Persian Rose

What I’m using

Chinese Medicine herbs, Evergreen

Abalone Medicine sleep tincture

Blue Willow tea

Lava Love cacao

AYA Sacred Wear silk kimonos

Logan Hollowell

In high school, when it was time to learn about Darwin’s evolutionary theory in science class, we had to get a signed permission slip due to its contradiction with most religious teachings. I remember thinking how silly that was, of course I’d choose science over religion.

I was brought up going to Christian church every Sunday. When my mom let us choose whether we wanted to continue come 9th grade, I was a hard no. Zero part of my logic-limited mind could find truth in the idea that there’s a man in the sky judging us, or that humans descended from a man and woman named Adam and Eve in a magical garden, doomed to suffering after their defiant eating of a fruit.

Then, as I continued down the track of Western science and was hypnotized in a new way, a new set of challenges followed.

These were the familiar Western challenges that are actually revered in our culture—an achievement-attached career, externally-sourced identity, material-attached sense of security, and for me these led to an eating disorder and chronic anxiety.

Thankfully, as goes the human experience, the suffering pushed me inward, to the path of spirituality in order to seek what I wasn’t through the material realm, despite what I was taught in science class.

Why would what’s been taught to be true cause so much suffering in our world? Because it’s not true, or at least it’s incomplete. A half-truth. Matter and spirit are two sides to one coin. Science and spirituality need each other for explaining reality, or at least pointing to it (the truth is ultimately inexplicable as we’ll see).

My path then, like many in the West, became a seeking to reconcile these esoteric teachings with my materialist science upbringing. This brought me to the time of Ancient Egypt, which since has become a source of awe and deep inspiration.

Science and spirituality weren’t always mutually exclusive. There was a time when they were leaned on in unison, one supporting the other and vice versa. One of the earliest examples of this was the time of Ancient Egypt—the lesser-known birthplace of philosophy and psychology, astronomy and astrology, alchemy and chemistry, mathematics and reason.

The mystery schools from this era in 5th-3rd century BC provided the jumping-off point for great minds of Ancient Greece including Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Parmenides, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and others, and whose philosophies maintain to this day.

This was a time and place when science and spirituality were deemed two halves to a whole, both equally vital in forming the fundamental explanations of the universe, and this is how knowledge was taught.

These schools were exclusive not by class but by readiness of mind and spirit. “The lips of wisdom are closed, except to the ears of Understanding,” as was the saying. Hence the name Mystery Schools, and why we sadly only know bits and pieces from what was passed down mouth to ear over millennia. Only those initiated knew the full truth of what took place within—a profound confluence of logic and experience.

The purpose of these schools was to awaken to the deepest truths of the universe and existence in order to live according to its wisdom, and its teachers knew this to only be reached through the transcendence of the conceptual mind. They knew that words are mere pointers to the truth, so they used them only to provide a framework within which a lived experience—direct contact with the truth itself—could later integrate back into 3D reality.

So, this is how the Mystery School students were recruited and selected, not through a promise of intellect, but through a promise of death and rebirth—a resurrection from mental ignorance into embodied wisdom.

The students, deemed “initiates”, were selected after a period of psychological trials and then put through years of conceptual teachings followed by experiential initiations designed to activate this knowledge from within, often frighteningly so.

These initiations were designed for facing and transcending fear. Fear was seen to be the bridge to cross from matter to spirit—it is the primordial human emotion we all feel when we solely identify with matter (i.e. the body, a job, a home, a relationship, etc). When we believe we are separate beings in a material world, we feel vulnerable, and we fear death. These initiations brought students to face this fear of death physically as well as psychologically through trials like staying for days in a sensory deprivation chamber or drinking a brew of consciousness-expanding plants like the blue lotus.

Fear was transcended when initiates walked through these proverbial fires and came out alive and well, an experience that brought them out of body (matter) and into their soul (spirit) to not just know but become the eternal essence where one is merged with all and therefore invincible, fearless.

The brave souls that completed this curriculum left reborn with a whole new perspective on themselves and life, one free of fear and full of peace and awe for the unseen truth underlying their physical world.

The effects of teaching matter and spirit synergistically are clear in Ancient Egypt culture, as their separation is clear in our culture today. Pharaohs were advised by the priests. Pyramids were designed by those manifesting from the wisdom of spirit, in concert with their knowledge of astrology and mathematics. The feats of engineering and development that occurred in this time far surpass any other civilization at that time and in many ways haven’t been met since, despite being pre-industry and technology.

Ancient Egypt is the mecca of science and spirit and the miraculous manifestations that come from a civilization driven by both.

So what happened? How did we stray from this?

What’s esoteric (meaning “understood by a small number”) often stays that way. Though the selectivity and discretion of these schools were important for their integrity, they also prevented the wisdom from expanding. This combined with the Christian Roman Empire working to silence their teachings through the destruction of the Alexandria library, Pagan temples, and all scholars and sages within.

The Ancient Greek philosophers that studied in Egypt during that time like Pythagoras, Plato, and Socrates, without likely having gone through the full initiation, took back to their country conceptual reason only, sans spirit.

Along that thread, centuries later came the Age of Enlightenment (ironic name), the separation of church and state, the scientific method, Darwinian theory, Newtonian physics, and the West’s fearful attachment to matter and ignorance of spirit.

It’s even seen in our language—the noun ‘matter’ is also the adjective ‘to matter’. Or the noun ‘substance’ is the root for the verb ‘substantial’. To the West, only matter matters. The unseen is considered unreal—only what we can see, hear, feel, touch, or taste is considered true and worth teaching. Cue centuries of war and homicide, rapid growth in industrialism and capitalism, environmental destruction, and a mental health crisis.

In this matter and spirit separation, spirituality went down its own path to ignorance—to that of religion, which, in most cases, is a set of dogmatic and patriarchal belief systems the Church self-servingly picked and chose from original religious texts. This manifested as taking everything in the Bible literally vs. symbolically, deifying Jesus Christ, and detaching religion from internal (“the kingdom of heaven lies within”) to something external, a place where the Church could control.

But all is well, this is simply the mysterious process of our evolution. And evolving we are, quickly. As Eckhart Tolle says, “We can’t deeply know something until we lose it.” This separation was needed in order for it to reemerge from a place of deeper reverence and wisdom.

Spirit is returning, gaining back its clout and re-weaving into science and culture as it was in Ancient Egyptian times, though in an even more robust way that includes modern knowledge we’ve gained since then—including the discoveries of quantum physics and epigenetics in the 1900s, both of which eerily align with the ~3000-year-old spiritual texts that were taught in the Mystery Schools such as Hermetic Philosophy and the Chinese I Ching.

In the attempt to discover the basic material ‘stuff’ that makes up the universe, modern physicists were stumped with a revelatory finding that warranted its own field—quantum physics. What this field has discovered is that the basis of our reality is not particles of matter, but waves of potentiality. That the universe (including all beings within it) is like a living mind, ever-changing, all connected and interacting. The word ‘universe’ itself is aptly named, meaning ‘one song’.

Epigenetics, synergistically, is the study of how our environment, interactions, and state of consciousness impact the nature and expression of our genes, thereby proving our interconnectedness and harmony—One Song.

In modern science’s effort to dig to the most fundamental truth, it has had no choice but to rest on its ancient sister—spirituality. That we are, essentially, emanations from the One, the ineffable, the transcendent, the unmanifested—God. If you can summon the courage to release the ignorance that hangs on that word, it can return to our lips as the original sacred pointer to the truth.

The opportunity today is to bring back this duality with the new resources and discoveries we’ve gained since. To weave modern knowledge of fundamental reality with its lived experience through psychedelic medicine, breathwork, or meditation, and bring the magic of this synergy into our work and lives. To play in matter, while being rooted in spirit. This is the antidote to the problems we face today, and our chance to learn from millennia of imbalance and step into a new era of embodied wisdom and harmony.

To go deeper,

Read

The Kybalion

The Hermetica

The Lost Art of Resurrection

Metahuman

Infinite Potential

Secrets of the Mystery Schools

Watch

What is consciousness?

Decoding Hermetic Wisdom