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
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
What I’m using
Chinese Medicine herbs, Evergreen