What I'm Loving: September

Hello dear ones. Coming to you after another big month. As is the way this year. I’ve said it before and will again because cosmically we’re at its peak, this year marks a turning point. A fork in the road. A vice for making changes and choices—the decisions of which will seed what’s to come for the next stage of our individual and collective lives and onward. With the lunar nodes in a T-square with Pluto and coming into eclipse season, this vice is tightening. Here we are. Patience, trust, grace, presence and thoughtful intentionality and integrity are being asked now more than ever.

For me, this has brought in even more shedding and cleansing. Releasing any and every pull of my attention and energy not in alignment with my soul path, my bliss, my peace. And finding my own steadying pillars through the Earth, silence, solitude, creating, and my love.

I’ve been staying in a cottage on 45 acres of land in Petaluma and will until my partner and I move into our first home together in Piedmont this weekend. After nearly two years of fluctuating homes and emotions, I decided to listen to the call received months prior.

During my Ayahuasca ceremony with the Yawanawa earlier this year, I was served Rape´ (pronounced hapeh) by the chief. A grounding masculine medicine, Rape´ is often served towards the end of the journey as a supportive counterpart to Ayahuasca’s feminine energy. Bringing focus and clarity to her oceanic and nonlinear experience.

He told me to ask the medicine a question, after warning me of its strength and before placing the end of his Tepi (two-way pipe) at my nostril. What followed was a 20-minute lifetime of the most unraveling experience I’ve had. My question was, where is my home meant to be. The answer seemed to shake itself out of my body. Like it was buried deep, my human not yet ready to know it, while the ancient shamanic medicine ruthlessly worked to answer the question brought forth.

It took everything I had to stay seated upright, yet I had no choice. This Rape´, made by the Yawanawa themselves in Brazil, was masculine energy at its most poignant. It demanded my straight spine and incisive presence and strength, as it brought the same in return. Falling back in surrender was not an option. My hands digging deeper into the dirt below my convulsing and retching body, I sat there in lotus and I took it, along with its answer. ‘It’s the Earth and it’s You,’ a voice spoke almost violently within. With a fire meant to incinerate the doubts or questions it knew would arise. A voice that held a conviction saturated with anger for not being heard for so long. A voice that alluded—it’s time to let go of the attachment and limiting belief that I must be in or near a city to actualize my reason-for-being. That my path is not dependent upon anything or place outside myself. That I must choose my home from inner truth, not conditioned belief.

And what I’ve unveiled about my inner truth thus far is that I’m here to embody, feel, and serve the ancient feminine energies of the Divine Mother and her home of this Earth. Energies that humanity’s earliest civilizations revered and honored, energies that were pillaged and silenced in the rise of the patriarchy, and energies that are now arising from their ashes with renewed strength.

After that ceremony weekend, I landed back in the city, though the answer stayed in my body. Now stirred to the surface, no longer ignorable. The months that followed as you know brought continued transformation and revelations, and external shifts to make way for them. Including getting this quaint and magical Airbnb in the golden hills of northern California. With the Earth and with myself.

My time here has brought the easiest peace I’ve come by. Not through trials or suffering, but through the environment of peace itself. Through natural simplicity, ritual and routine. Through observing the ignorant wisdom of horses and goats, cows and chickens. Through living in harmony and awareness of nature’s movements, her weather, her changing moon and seasons. Through a community of humans at rest with who they are, who live from their hearts and ease, not their thoughts or fears. Connected to their bodies, each other, and their land. A peace that’s come through hearing myself, in the silence, with the trees and with the wind, away from the thousands of rushing humans squished into a few miles. All of whom would pass through my body and awareness in my time in the city, the sponge that I am now, leaving me working to discern what was mine and what wasn’t.

I’m immensely grateful for these blessings after a chapter of instability—a healing oasis on spacious Earth, followed by our own home as deep in nature as the Bay Area can offer. I’m grateful for what’s coming, and I don’t regret or resent what’s been. These two years of living untethered and in full surrender to the death and rebirth that this life wanted for my soul were no doubt needed to manifest this new aligned stability. Burn the forest so flowers may grow. Chaos, order, destruction, resurrection, so it goes.

I’m open and curious to witness what moves through me after grounding physically for the first time since I left Field Trip and LA, and embarked on this labyrinth journey into Self.

What I’m Reading

If Women Rose Rooted Sharon Blackie “‘The world will be saved from the western women. And if we stand with our powerful and inspiring native sisters from around the planet, together we all might just have a chance’-Dalai Lama”

Pablo Neruda poetry “Let me be alone with the day. I ask leave to be born.”

Undefended Love Jett Psaris and Marlena Lyons “The way you felt when you first fell in love is the way you can feel all the time.”

What I’m Watching

Allow presence to shine through the person Eckhart

Your body is not physical Deepak

The school our world needs Krishnamurti

Sharing spiritual realization with others Eckhart

What I’m Contemplating

Every decision you make is not a decision about what to do, it’s a decision about who you are.

The distance from your pain, grief, your unattended wounds, is the distance from your partner. - Stephen and Andrea Levine

Speech is at best an honest lie. Silence is at worst a naked truth. - Mirdad

The decision to have the perspective of whether we live in a friendly or hostile universe is the most important decision of our lives. - Albert Einstein

Adventure is jumping boldly into existing and engaging in every moment as if it’s the most important moment of your life—because it is.

Die in love and live forever. - Rumi

Everyone has a choice. And every choice has a consequence.

You must face annihilation over and over again to find what is indestructible in yourself. - Pema Chodron

The most important spiritual growth doesn’t happen when you’re meditating or on a yoga mat. It happens in the midst of conflict—when you’re frustrated, angry, or scared, and you’re doing the same old thing, and then you suddenly realize that you have a choice to do it differently.

The first sign of love for the masculine is timidity, in the feminine it is courage.

No man is free who is not a master of himself. - Epictetus

The whole future lies in uncertainty: Live immediately. - Seneca

The problem isn’t that people are uneducated. The problem is that they are educated just enough to believe what they’ve been taught. And not educated enough to question what they’ve been taught.

The cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation. - Terrence Mckenna

You are under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago. - Alan Watts

Who knows why we were taught to fear the witches, and not those who burned them alive.