Tag: Presence

We Women

I have been blessed with a lens into the most beautiful support from women in the last few years that allows one to hope for a nurturing future of how we connect to one another in community. Honestly, I have been lucky to have a handful of wonderful friendships from a young age with girls who have become lovely women. I know not every woman is so fortunate, however, the choices for women are evolving. I have been part of a group of women who are absolutely dedicated to supporting each other however they show up for the love of sacred feminine energy re-emerging on this planet. That means all judgements and comparisons are dropped and competition is not entertained as necessary or desirable, and not just because a woman has aged out of being perceived as a threat; acceptance is offered with camaraderie simply because you showed up. Wow, yes to more of this!

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We all have our own paths and learn how to be in the world based on our familial exposures and that cannot escape the over culture that creates our conditioning on a larger scale. I grew up in a household of a working mother and my closest friends in elementary as well as middle school had mothers that stayed at home and maybe who decided to work when they were older, some in traditional systems and one as an artist from her own space. My mother focused on work outside the home and with time became the breadwinner of our family. It was a different dynamic than the other households of my friends. I noticed their mothers were more relaxed and perhaps happier in some regards while I knew my own mother was pleased with what she had been able to create in her life after marrying my father while still in high school. I was proud of my mom and felt she was an excellent example of dedication to making the best of your circumstances.

Years down the line, I was surprised when I found myself desiring to stay at home with my children, and I felt it created an assumed point of disappointment with my mother though now I know differently. Before this — my work as an elementary music teacher had already faced the judgement of females who had chosen careers of more influence and power. I found as I moved in the world as an early twenty something that elementary public education was not so valued by many. Parents of students were unbelievably disrespectful and colleges of my at the time husband who was studying medicine on occasion belittled the work calling it “cute” or “adorable” (never his male colleges by the way, only the females) which when I was still living from an immature ego myself, infuriated me. I felt my work was important but also that because it was with children, knew it was perceived as less valuable. This is nonsense, of course, because music works across both hemispheres of the brain to create better coordination and advanced thinking as well as providing an emotional processing platform for youth among other things. Working with children is an incredibly powerful point of shifting the future reality of humanity as we mold the subconscious and nurture belief systems with more ease at that impressionable period of life. If you want to make a change, do it within yourself and then with your children.

With my spiritual work and diligence to changing patterns within the familial line that I knew were not going to be passed on to my children and enough years staying at home to deeply accept my choice, I now no longer care how I am perceived by a woman who has chosen differently. I knew what I had to do once the children were here and I have the good fortunate of being supported in doing so for which I am eternally grateful. I didn’t want the rearing of my children in the hands of paid providers. There’s nothing like being faced with your ingrained patterns as well as those of the other parent day in and out, and work outside of your home can make the perfect escape so that outdated patterns persist. Can you work and make these changes? Yes, absolutely, if you are self aware with a want to improve, you can. Can you stay at home and ignore needed change? Yes, absolutely. Immersion made the way clear here.

These life experiences have created for me a vantage point of total support for other women in whatever they choose so long as their hearts are happy and they have the support they need in however their paths take direction. However, I sometimes still encounter a woman who carries a sharp edge in her tone for the woman who stays at home, maybe she dismisses her as less important than other woman who work or makes defensive comments for her choice. While I don’t care how I am perceived, I do care for the good of women and the connections women are able to form. If the working woman can see that the work of living everyday for every person has its inherent value regardless of the system or the kind of work — it would release her from judgement. If the woman working feels judged as somehow less of a mother or less of a woman, how far from the truth is that? It’s only as true as we give it belief. If the woman choosing to stay at home can be at peace with the work she is offering as just as valid as whatever current societal stories are pitching, we may all be able to claim our womanhood for however it fits each of us best. We are all Goddesses, as far I am concerned and we are all working, children or not.

If we could drop these judgements, how much better would we all be?

Imagine if we replaced all the judging and comparison with lifting each other up. What if we women united and allowed ourselves to be in the energy of fierce love and devotion to one another simply because we can see that’s where real influence and power can thrive for the good of us all?

Whatever You Call God

Jessica, the lovely soul who began this blog with me back in 2016, reached out yesterday to share a video she found of the actor James Van Der Beek speaking on his experience of cancer and being stripped of the roles that defined his worth.

When we were in high school, Jess and I were extras in the pilot of Dawson’s Creek which became his claim to fame in the roll of a small town boy seeking a career in film making. While neither she or I watched the series in full and there was no direct exchange with this man during those days on set, we both felt a little extra jolt around death in midlife. I’m sure many folks in this age range feel the passing of a well known 40something in a certain kind of way for his familial loss and life not lived.

His vision was towards recovery during this recording and his words from the heart:

View Video HERE

Seek Within

O trespass sweetly urged! Give me my sin again. — Shakespeare

So often we look outside ourselves for something to be satiated internally. We want people to love us so that we feel a certain way or we want a thing that will help us embody a particular energy – maybe confidence or desirability. We want someone else to tell us or show us we are good enough. At the root of it all, we are seeking love and quite possibly we look for our divinity everywhere but inside. If someone else sees us in our best light or appreciates something about us, it must mean we are lovable and that can be addictive. You can find yourself chasing illusory love through achievements, big ticket items, grand experiences, or the presence of another reflecting your divine birthright of love —- or you can give that source energy to yourself and be delighted when someone else offers you the same without a sense of longing.

Longing is not in and of itself bad , (it may ultimately lead you to a spiritual path) but it can leave you feeling pretty out of sorts until you see it for what it is: an invitation to seek within, to hold yourself with what you wish to be reflected back, and to know YOU dearest one are love.

Stag Gazing

This morning there was the most beautiful visitor passing along the trail that runs through my yard. He’s probably my favorite passerby yet; there’s just something majestic about them that makes me hold my breath in their presence. With that stilled breathing, my heart slows too and I sink into deep appreciation for nature and the wisdom a stag seems to carry with his crown.

The Stags by Kathleen Jamie

This is the multitude, the beasts 

you wanted to show me, drawing me 

upstream, all morning up through wind-

scoured heather to the hillcrest. 

Below us, in the next glen, is the grave 

calm brotherhood, descended 

out of winter, out of hunger, kneeling 

like the signatories of a covenant; 

their weighty, antique-polished antlers 

rising above the vegetation 

like masts in a harbor, or city spires. 

We lie close together, and though the wind

whips away our man-and-woman smell, every

stag-face seems to look toward us, toward, 

but not to us: we’re held, and hold them, 

in civil regard. I suspect you’d 

hoped to impress me, to lift to my sight 

our shared country, lead me deeper 

into what you know, but loath

to cause fear you’re already moving 

quietly away, sure I’ll go with you, 

as I would now, almost anywhere.

Ain’t Misbehavin’

Traditionally interpreted as a song about staying true to another person, the title by Fats Waller dropped into my mind for another reason: staying true to you. For the purposes of this post, “misbehave” means behaving in any way that isn’t authentic to your essence; it’s any action or non action that is an untrue expression of your soul signature. So stepping away from conventional standards if those have you in their grip, is essential to know if you’re behavin’ or misbehavin’. You may also need to allow a lot of space around what you’ve been conditioned to believe is right and good as well as timeline management on what needs to happen when, if it applies to you behavin’. Here it can be especially important to remember that we humans have created time and the ideas around how life *should be mapped out. Just go ahead and let yourself drop any should right now unless you’re applying it to what feels true to your heart and brings peace to your mind while upholding the highest good of all. This may also require looking at what the “highest good” means with a soft heart and deep trust in the intelligence of your emotional body.

Baba Yaga’s Call

We are at the threshold of the Snow Moon today and it’s Imbolc as well. It feels as if the Bone Mother calls on those ready to dive into fierce introspection. She is a prominent Slavic figure depicted in folklore as a sort of wicked grandmother. She is a powerful, wise, forest-dweller who may help you or devour you depending on the way wild nature moves through her when you cross paths. She represents the space between the living and the unknown, owning fears, and standing face to face with the untamed parts of yourself while opening to initiate radical transformation. She’s not too unlike the Hindu Goddess Kali in some respects, but Baba Yaga claims the power of the Crone; the old woman that many seek to overlook through repression as useless and no longer desirable. That’s a trick, of course, to keep you from knowing her as an archetypal ascended master.

If she doesn’t scare you off, consider calling on her for support in your shadow work under the last Full Moon of this Wood Snake Lunar Year. Ways to support yourself with the final shed through shadow integration:

  • Confront Fears: Make a Trigger Board. You may have heard of Vision Boards and you may or may not have had good luck with those. They can be an excellent tool for creating new experiences if your fears aren’t holding you back in some way. To Make a Trigger Board, you may only need tools for visuals of words and some paper with honest reflection about your triggers. List the things that you know hold you back. If words are effective enough for you, let that be but if visuals are more helpful, bring in printed images or magazine cut outs of the images that are going to be most helpful to your true processing of what holds you back. Write and/or cut and paste with intention on the paper or poster board of your choosing.
  • Devour Fears: Hold the words and images in your view. Consider ways you may respond differently. You may have to devour your ego to do this successfully. Invite an image of Baba Yaga into your mind and ask her how to devour your ego. Ask her how to gobble up your fears. Give some quiet space to see what surfaces as an answer or answers. Be gentle with yourself as you do this. Don’t rush through the quiet space, in fact, let there be more quiet space than you think you need.
  • Reclaim Your Power: Aim to be open to the different responses you gather. Let yourself imagine moving past any triggers and fears with as much loving grace as possible. Spend time seeing yourself reclaim your power in any scenario where you may have gone quiet before, questioned yourself, or reworked back into a known pattern instead of progressing in a way that would help you to make the gains you seek. Comfort sometimes becomes more appealing than change and we stay in ruts we know aren’t helping us. This is a time to be honest about that. Create visuals in your mind or externally of how you feel after you’ve moved past your fear and revisit these as often as you need to convince yourself it’s better on the other side of comfort and fear.
  • Forest as Reset: Get into the woods if you can after your trigger work. Let Nature hold you and help you to self-heal. Be with the earth in reverence and witness yourself moving with a lighter heart. Earth will hold you every chance you give her.

Sending so many good wishes to the brave souls approaching shadow work. If you find yourself in too deep, remember to call on a therapist to assist you. Some caverns are deeper than others and asking for support to help you out of there may be what’s needed! Love yourself enough to do what’s right for you.

Redirection

“Every time I thought I was being rejected from something good, I was actually being redirected to something better.” — Steve Maraboli

Rejection can be such a difficult emotion to experience. Oftentimes it takes a long while to look back and see how that showed up in life as a redirection to something that was better for you. Maybe that something better is not what mass opinion would note as better -but for you, it’s the better match. Sometimes this rejection can be experienced as coming from another person not wanting to be in relationship with you, a series of events that keeps you from realizing a dream, a situation at work going sour, no call backs from your auditions, or any number of ways you may know this happens that I’ve yet to encounter myself or through conversation with others. We can even feel rejection when it was not intended depending on how our expectations have set us up to interact with others and to respond to ourselves.

Rejection is difficult, however, shifting to the mindset that there’s no such thing as rejection and replacing it with redirection is quite the liberator. The sooner you can get to assuming you’ve been redirected whenever rejection is present, the sooner you’ll feel trust in what’s occurring. It’s worth assuming and in this case assumption won’t wreak any sort of havoc in your life. There are little ways we can nurture ourselves that have big pay offs and this is one of them. If you can start here, today, with replacing any rejection experience you’ve had with redirection, the benefits will start to appear immediately.

Affirmation: I am always directed in ways that are better for me than I could have guessed. Any rejection is actually redirection towards better alignment.

Everything I Wanted

“In the Divine Plan, every righteous desire of the heart is satisfied”. – Florence Scovel Shinn

When I was 17 I had the inspiration to write a list of what I wanted in life. I included details about my ideal partner, my children, how it would feel to be together, and how I would feel with all those things secured. I sealed up the list in an envelope and I tucked it into my favorite book at the time.

Twelve years later, I was packing up to move to another state with that ideal partner and those two kids just in the gender order I had specified, and the forgotten list fell out of the book. I paused for a long while looking over what 17 year old me had very directly listed I wanted to have and I felt everything freeze around me seeing it all received. I HAD EVERYTHING I WANTED. That may look like a lovely blessing and I definitely felt it as such at the time. I was a bit wowed at how I had simply listed it all and easily received it all without toiling over it. I didn’t repeatedly look at the list and wonder about how it would happen. I just clearly stated what I wanted and let it go. So this realization of how life *can work shifted into my conscious awareness and I say it like this because I have no doubt that some unconscious part of me understood already. It also helps that I wasn’t asking for anything outside of the realm of what we consider to be common occurrence. Those things take more trust and imagination to bring about.

As the move continued on, I didn’t think about the list much more but in the year to come, I found myself begin questioning everything I thought I understood about reality. HOW did that happen exactly? I began to feel curious about astrology and venture down pathways to understand different lenses of life as well as to write poetry and some short stories regularly which caused me to seek inspiration points in others. I found observing the qualities in others as well the way people relate to one another to be an excellent past time; it was super informative for how reality appears to be different depending on the participants.

As more time passed, I began to have symptoms of what many refer to as spiritual awakening. I felt different in my reality, with contrast coming up between me and those around me. I saw others differently than I had seen them before because I was changing. I learned to respond differently to the reality to heal the unhealthy patterns that were playing. I devoted myself to creating a healthier physical form after childbirths and within that began a practice of Kundalini yoga which I attribute now to the pattern awareness that occurred. When I first practiced this yoga I felt like I would vomit after every session for many weeks, and yet for some reason I kept doing it with adjustments here and there to help myself through that reaction. More recently, in a training to teach Kundalini, I understood that was a release of toxins in my body. The breath work and the lymphatic cleanse cleared so much energetic density from my body and it was absolutely worth it to do that work and to ultimately feel better. This also meant becoming more sensitive to my body and what my body needed as well as what it did not need.

I became more sensitive to everything around me as well. I could always read people with ease, but their motivations began to become apparent to me and I could feel their feelings too so that a person’s energy would speak to me before they ever said a word. I found this to be overwhelming for a time, wishing I could just process myself and not so much other information at once too. As I learned to anchor into this way of experiencing life, my external reality took on some challenges that didn’t match that original list at all. Everything I wanted was shifting into an external expression that wasn’t at all what I wanted, but now that I’m a decade deep into venturing away from the list, I’ll say I’ve come to view the growth that has occurred as it’s own blessing. Loss is a great teacher. I’ve learned to have gratitude in each day, to let forgiveness be an ever-present practice, to be mindful of what I speak, that saying less and sometimes nothing is more effective than anything I could have uttered, how to give without a thought for what may come back, how to expect the best from others knowing that allows them to show up as such, and how to love others as well as myself unconditionally. I’ve also learned to trust the universe to know best what’s in alignment with my highest good and to welcome what shows up in my reality now under that frequency.

Sometimes our ego and our soul want or need different things. Making sure they’re aligned is imperative. Otherwise, it could be that everything you want is only in service to a particular aspect of you, but not in service to the whole. That moment of thinking “I have everything I wanted” for me was a gateway to one of many spiritual awakenings. Sometimes Spirit creates a little precursor moment to releasing the ego because the soul has other plans.

Revolution

— Words from Nikita Gill

Current thoughts on Revolution:

Many of us are accustomed to complacency in our comforts and perceived freedom. We are trapped by something or another and on the edge of collapse. What has fed us no longer can. Morals have taken on legs and arms to dress themselves differently so we don’t recognize them anymore. I see again and again they’ve walked away completely from some.

The soul, if to survive, will have to revolt.

Being present at this moment may create discomfort and that’s okay. Being positive at this moment may mean being sure of what you can stand by and what you cannot.

The Violet Flame

“The use of the violet consuming flame is more valuable to you and to all mankind than all the wealth, all the gold and all the jewels of this planet. ” – Saint Germain

I first came across a book on use of the Violet Flame in a chain bookstore while my husband at the time and I were there. He was lego interested and I was not particularly, so I found myself wandering over to the new age spirituality section which I hadn’t spent time in since my late teenage years. Somehow I was interested to peek there with no current reading agenda that required a purchase but because I had recently been given a gift card to the store, there I was.

I stumbled across a very small book tucked in to the shelf called, “The Violet Flame”. Having an incredible fondness for the word violet, I had to peek. I’ll explain myself a bit more: My great aunt was named Violet and she made herself available to care for me as a premature infant, living with my family for a time period until I had grown to the point that my parents felt comfortable with other arrangements. She and I developed a sweet bond that continued on until she passed away when I was twelve. Besides this, the previous husband with me at the store had partially grown up on Violet Court and was living there when I met him, and one of my favorite group song projects from my freshmen year of school was Das Veilchen by Mozart which you may guess means “The Violet”. It’s a funny little song about a violet who wishes more than anything to be plucked and held by a maiden he admires. Instead of his wish, she tramples him and still he is satisfied because it was her… So I was drawn to the word Violet and had to know about this flame. The book had bits in it that rubbed me the wrong way at the time because of religious intonations but the curiosity I felt was stronger than the uncomfortableness. I bought it along with some other treasures that day.

I began with the prayers in the book as meditations and chose to think of them like that so that I could move past my limitations and just see how those words may work in my life. The more I recited the words, which I did about three times a day, the lighter I felt. Forgiveness began to move through me in new ways and other books began to show up in my life that allowed me to work even more thoroughly with forgiveness and compassion for memories that replayed of childhood challenges and scenarios that cropped up as a newish parent myself. The words I found in this book allowed me to go back into memories and release what was difficult as well as to do that in the moment when I found myself feeling blaming energy. The words helped me again years down the road when I found myself living without a husband and doing my best to offer steady, balanced, and loving parenting to my children so they wouldn’t need to go into their memories as adults to forgive mistreatment. However, I’m not claiming to be a perfect parent here. I’m sure my children will have things they plan to do differently and if they can make improvements, I applaud them. I hope they will.

In hindsight, I know this little book was a gift to come across and in the case it helps you now, I’ll share one of the prayers I found to be especially supportive:

I AM Forgiveness acting here,
Casting out all doubt and fear,
Setting men forever free
With wings of cosmic Victory.

I AM calling in full power
For Forgiveness every hour;
To all life in every place
I flood forth forgiving Grace.

If you choose to work with this text, it’s also lovely to close your eyes and visualize a gently warming violet flame holding you as you recite. As you grow more comfortable, see the flame growing also. Let the flame grow to hold your home, your neighborhood, your community, and beyond until you have the entire planet wrapped in the violet flame with forgiving grace circling everyone and everything.

Forgiveness is important work and the more you can forgive, the better life will be. Hope you decide to try this out, dearest ones.