Latest Event Updates
New Moon to Lunar Lammas, Healing the Feminine in 2017
Ahhhh, friends.
What a year, no? Our first moon cycle in 2017 inaugurated a man as the leader of our metaphoric house who bragged about the exploitation and objectification of the female body. Our values supported this.
The normalization of exploitation in this house is unacceptable.
The female body. The female body. The female body.
How is your house? How are you tending your one true sacred space?
At home–here on earth, our first and most taken for granted body–what’s it been like for you? What level of your own shame stories, meaning your internal narratives about your worth, about being or not being good enough, about your rights, have you become more aware of this year?
How mindful of the stress you are carrying, its physicality, are you? The stories that your body is carrying about you and your experience?
How well have you been at declaring your own right to your own path of unique heart, spirit, soul?
From an earth-based perspective, the growing season of the year relies as much on what has decomposed being turned under, transforming to nutrients, as it does on the potentiality of wild starry fruits blossoming from a single seed. It is an endless continuum of stages and cycles, from dying and dark to birthing, blooming, fruiting, and harvesting, too.
When the moon is dark she is between the earth and the sun, and her other half sends the light of the sun back at itself. We here on earth fall still in her darkness, a holding, receptive gravity.
The moon holds all, receptive and active.
When she is active or full she is at the height of light, actually reflecting the light of the sun back on us here on earth.
Between these two polarities are the fluidity of transitions of dark and light. Metaphoric, yes. And also cyclic and specific. Both applications, and all their subtleties, are necessary. Again, the feminine holds all.
From a menstrual perspective, we track our personal moons. Chances are our personal moon doesn’t follow the actual moon. So we use the moon’s phases as a metaphor to understand both the biology and psychology of the feminine psyche.
The new moon as metaphor is day one, or when we first bleed. When we first bleed, we are dying and birthing at once, as now we re-engage the solar or ovulatory, fertile aspect of our selves. As the days of our cycle accumulate, we track where we are. We learn to re-embody the fluidity of the inter-lobal functioning of the female body, for again, the feminine holds all. For example, at stage four, the Gibbous moon, which can be anywhere from about day 7 through day 17 depending on your unique, beautiful and powerful body, we undergo an abrupt rise in the neuropeptides FSH (follicle-stimulating hormone) and LH (luteinizing hormone). There is a rise in estrogen level and left hemisphere brain activity and simultaneous testosterone and right hemisphere activity and increase in libido. Read Dr. Christiane Northrup’s Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom to learn more!
Our discharge is known at this time as E-type mucus, which is when small tubules are present in our discharge that hold sperm! This is us in our fertile, almost full cycle. At stage 5, our metaphoric full moon, G-type mucus immediately follows the release of our ovum, and this sort of mucus actually keeps us from getting pregnant. Like the moon at her peak active phase when she’s full, our bodies too lean from our full momentum back into ourselves. And so at peak fertility we start again towards the reflective, recycling, dark and dying phases.
The growing season on earth follows these 8 stages, too!
Lammas, again using the metaphor of the phases of the moon, can be understood as stage 6, the Disseminating Moon. Like for the year! Disseminating moon, according to Demetra George’s Mysteries of the Dark Moon is the “first stirring of dark,” when the seed has become what it was meant and the “life impulse must fulfill, distribute energy and disseminate and share the value of the meaning.” From a menstrual perspective, it is “the luteal phase” when “we turn more inward, preparing to develop or give birth from something deep within ourselves.” (Northrup, 2010)
Disseminating moon is the fruiting phase, or harvest. Whether an ovum has been fertilized, or it was the fertility of a new idea that peaked, maybe a transformed inner narrative, or however it was that you lived out this growing cycle psychologically, biologically, spiritually and creatively, the disseminating moon phase from a menstrual perspective is the fruiting time, our first harvest. After peak fertility phase.
And so it is we celebrate Lammas, the First Harvest of the earth’s natural growing year. People who tend these concepts, embodying them and staying close to nature, outside with feet grounded upon her and skin and blood and biology and body in one rhythmic inhalation exhalation of all that is, recognize this as connected to a variety of different anthropological rites. Traditions the world over acknowledge with celebration the bounty of fruit on the vine at summer’s height.
From a lunar perspective, which for me is the feminine-embodied perspective, we celebrate Lunar Lammas when the moon is in the sun sign of Leo and full.
So, ya with me? We learn to track the phases of the moon, and then to metaphorically apply these phases. They can inform the dark and light aspects of our biology, and of the seasons of the year. We too learn to hold all, to think quantum or multi-dimensionally, to hold our still point within, and All At Once at once!
Lunar Lammas is the full moon on Monday, August 7, this year. Already the sun-made shadows of heaping breathy green tree walls here are muddled, that certain angle of soupy dark I so love.
Mind what this moon cycle brings. It is your harvest. What will you reap? Mind what stories live, what experiences happen. Mind your light and your dark. Mind your experiences this month from a reflective viewpoint that holds the continuum of the year, all those spirals of moon around the far side of the earth and back to between the earth and sun, again and again.
What is illuminated under the active light of her reflecting back the height of the summer sun? For that is what happens on Lunar Lammas.
Unplug from your computer or other e-devices. Leave your phone in the car and get outside. Restore your natural circadian rhythm from all that electronic interference.
Give yourself back to yourself. Back to your body. Back to the earth. The natural perfect spheres of rhythm. Happy first harvest season friends~!!
To understand more, make some time and visit my Facebook page. We will spend this month learning more about the moon’s 8 phases.
Full Moon and Healing The Story of Culture
This full moon presents us with a reality highlight. A shining on who we are in our most present, day to day, practical ways.
Who we are is how we Be.
Discernment can be tough when it comes to understanding what I mean. Societal arousal is high. The open, gaping wound of fear-driven, hate-talk projections can be so consuming We all easily forget that we co-create our experience, we are not victims, we are powerful not powerless, imagination is infinite and love is pure and transformational, we are responsible, we can begin within.
Nature teaches. What we sow we reap, and this is what begin within means.
Begin within. What stories do you tell yourself? Literally, what does your self-talk look like?
Do you listen to your inner guidance? Do you trust yourself?
Begin again. Do you take time to feed yourself instead of over-caffenate? Do you constantly expose yourself to an endless steam of social media and click bait content, chemically co-creating your own addiction to hyper-arroused cortisol, your stress hormone? Do you fall to sleep with your head wired to electronics? Is it how you wake?
This also is food, what your brain, heart, and soul absorb.
Begin again. How are your relations? One basic tool I practice is that if my relationships with others are off it usually means I am not being accountable to my own relationship to my self. What I don’t confront within myself I will act out in my relations. This is called projection.
Baby steps. Be gentle with self-truth.
How are you feeling and what do you need to be accountable to? Meaning how do I feel, in my body, right now? What do I need?
Gentle, gentle. Begin again:
People who come from environments where displacing their needs was the norm, like those who experienced normalized dangers like violence or poverty, who had an abuser in the home, who had untreated substance abuse in the home, were taught it wasn’t safe. They unconsciously, through the normalization of this is not safe, learn that it is unacceptable to feel because to survive meant silencing or repeatedly ignoring the normal metabolic, stress-relieving processes of feeling. Folks like this may struggle with the concepts in this post.
That silencing, that self-shaming, becomes a part of your chemical program. It creates the perceptions you have of safety and the world around you. If these normalized traumas exist in the home, we call it systemic because it is of the family system. If it exists in the community, we call it cultural. There is almost always a relationship between one and the other.
What we don’t work out, we act out.
Woman as sexualized object is so normalized that we are accused of sexualizing our selves if we dress in ways that flatter our body. Consider how normalized this dangerous ideal is of shaming the female body.
This is crazy. Name it. Feel it. Break down patterns inside yourself that support shame. Breakdown paves the way for breakthrough.
Woman as caretaker is so normalized that mothers and wives often believe they must carry the entire emotional reality of their children and husband/partner. Consider how dangerous this is to shaming your own rights to your own needs, and how dangerous it is to the system because it teaches everyone that they don’t have to be accountable to their own.
This is crazy. Name it. Feel it. Breakdown paves the way for breakthrough.
Often coming into real health for folks can first look and feel crazy! Because when an individual starts to see that she was taught to participate in the normalization of negating her own needs in order to survive it can feel like she is going crazy. Breaking denial deregulates a persons entire reality.
Break down paves the way for breakthrough.
Healing is a process, health is a process. Transformation happens. Begin within.
Begin within. Begin now. What stories do you tell yourself about your ability, your right to meet your own needs? About what you need and what would happen if you gave yourself the self-care you need?
This moon highlights the peak growing season of spring. Metabolic storages of sunshine getting ready to transform to fruit and bounty! Begin again. Tolerance and love can only be practiced when we are in the habit of tending it inside ourselves. This is an active energy moon, manifesting! Tolerate your truth without judgement. Tolerate your own shame, your own feelings, any self-shaming stories or ways within you with the compassion you would give a best friend. This moon WILL highlight (GROW) whatever your energy level is…which is connected to your stress…which is connected to your self-stories and relationships…which is connected to how you feed your own needs.
Begin within: What are you exposing yourself to? How can you reframe what you are feeling, what you tell yourself, to understand it as your own needs crying out to be met?
What is seen beneath this moon the elders used to say was prophetic! This ain’t metaphysics hahaha! Simply put, we are complicit: we are accountable to how free we keep the infinite source of our heart, our mind, our soul. We are accountable to our choices and how they interconnect us in relationships. Begin within, what do you sow? How consciously, gratefully, joyously do you choose to take this one chance we get to live? This moon is a spotlight into that.
It will grow us toward the peak of the light season–summer’s start. This moon tide will hold us to ourselves, full moons bring the tension of more light, literally the sunlight reflected back at us in the middle of the night sky… Sunlight that increases until it pitches to its height at the Solstice, and after that–harvest or growth will be a momentum that we are already in the middle of.
So Now is a time to tend. Now is the time. Always. Right now. It’s all we have.
Begin again. Be gentle. If you want to change the world, start within yourself. Change happens within with the soft steadiness of love.
Happy Full moon, friends xo
Divine Love & Healing Shame on Lunar Beltane
Beltane, if celebrated on the lunar-led earth path of the medicine wheel, is tonight.
Ancestors used to celebrate Beltane as the traditional start of summer.
Think fire, passion!! May Day, when maidens danced the Maypoles and the lusty earth was potent with the growing BLOSSOMS that at spring were birthed! When certainly some of those ancestors made love to celebrate the union of romance and marriage, as the union of sun and earth that produced the fertility of crops every year.
What a special time to think of LOVE.
Agape LOVE. Unconditionally altruistic, life giving, accepting. Transformative. Eros love, the craving for union, the longing for self and other as One. DIVINE LOVE.
I start tending my “dark” side at Halloween. On the medicine wheel, I walk an embodied daily understanding of as within, so without, and vice versa. For me, this is the truest way to be in sacred relations to all of life.
What this means is that when the days darken, I tend the season of the dark. I take it as reality that from Fall Equinox onward, and especially when we reach November and the time changes, this is a time when I am closest to my own interior darkness.
Recall (from Wild Women Wisdom, Ovulation and the Active Imagination, Nov 13, 2014) that the psyche projects its earliest understanding of dualistic thinking. Dualism is self and other. Think as well of opposites, mom and dad, good and bad, right and wrong becomes internalized as the right worldview. Good behavior is behavior that gets positive feedback so all else is bad behavior. This becomes an unconscious way we relate to the world!
Dualism is the nature of consciousness. Carl Jung deepened our modern understanding of this by helping us realize that what we are conscious of, our thoughts and feelings that we can see or name, has a compensatory opposite energy too that we can’t or don’t. He called this our shadow.
Basically, what we associate with as bad we will stuff into our shadow, where it dominates the unconscious. In this way, what we don’t work out will get acted out. Or as Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Tonight, and in general what is peaking or being brought to the light right now, is related to your conscious or unconscious experiences from late October onward.
One of the reasons (from Wild Women Wisdom, Wildness on the Full Moon Tide, Jan 5, 2015) women repress their strength or natural association with the realm of the feminine godhead (and therefor with the realm of the collective unconscious) is because we in Western society esteem a male God. Meaning the feminine has been relegated to the shadow.
The feminine, however, was at one time divined among many other aspects through menstrual mysteries.
During the 14th and 15th centuries 9 million women burnt at the stake because of a document known as the malleus maleficarum which associated menstrual mysteries with being a witch (see Shuttle and Redgrove’s (2005) The Wise Wound for more info.)
Inherent feminine wisdom, or the biological fact that we are cyclical and rhythmic just as the moon and the sun, the seasons and the tides, had to be buried deep within the collective psyche. It was demonized or repressed, which means shamed to the extent that rhythmic knowledge of one’s own psyche either as a female, or in regards to anima or feminine instincts, became associated with Satanism!
Lets consider more closely the archetypal mind of the Goddess, or the feminine divine, as a counterpart to the more known and illumined God. The Goddess oversees the realm of dark, night, intuition, death and rebirth (because the female rules the women’s mysteries, of which birth is one) receptivity, and on a more temporal or practical level, emotions, though that is equally an embodied male or animus or egoic part of the process as well (see Ann Ulanov’s interpretation for more on this.)
Bessel van der Kolk is a doctor who coined the term developmental or complex trauma. This is when the nervous system experiences normalized, environmental traumas like untreated substance abuse in the family, domestic violence, or poverty, among other things.
I would like to suggest that the wound of the feminine, or the collective suppressing of the power of the feminine, is an untreated complex trauma in society at large.
In my own experience, healing it means healing the wound of, in Erich Neumann’s words, the patriarchal uroboros in the feminine psyche.
Uroboros is the snake eating its own tail. Think about it. If the feminine’s strength is the darkness, and the darkness is also what’s been demonized both through the repression of feminine instinct as well as as the demonization of dark as wrong or bad, well then. That’s kind of a problem that, like the uroboros, is self-perpetuating.
This Beltane my dear friends, WRITE ON YOUR HEART A COMMITMENT TO YOURSELF TO LOVE YOURSELF WHOLE AGAIN: Shame shames shame. The shame cycle is part of the nebulous core of almost all complex traumas. SHAME SHAMES SHAME. This is the patriarchal uroboros.
Begin within. Healing is about awareness, keeping right relations within by starting to love yourself by being with exactly how you are feeling right now. Healing is about softening, utilizing the Wise self to be with, to accept what is right now. To accept unconditionally gives us the choice to Love. To serve and to create union with the shadowed aspects that the Full moon illumines.
At Beltane, let us align our Wise selves with the sacred heart of Divine Love inside of each of us, and transform shame. Healing is not so much an action plan as a way in which we learn to unconditionally accept and relate to our self.
This be my prayer for us all!
Myths and your story. Following your Bliss.
Seven years ago in 2010 before California, before north cubby holes and south green rooms and southwest desert sandstorms, I would stand on the deck waiting tables at the Yacht Club in Ocean Pines, wind blowing (like a million different Pusser’s winds, Naptown holllaaa wudup Chessie and back then) and it blew warm and westerly like Hawaii, through my hair.
By the time second season came on that wind blew every single time a cover band played Ventura Highway. The kind of timing that always makes me giggle, alright alright haha I hear you, mama earth-G0d-Mystery-Baby Jesus, whatever it is. All Love no disrespect. Ventura Highway special wind all that Fall.
Anyway, that’s how I knew I would roll. Or how the Call came when I said yes to it All. Listening to the wind 🙂
Chessie the Bay Monster at Light City last weekend, where the Bay meets the City, Inner Harbor, Bmore
Now that I’m back home, land of birth-home original-soul home, I think all the time about Pirate Life. Haha maybe you have to be a writer to understand this? All love to Erika and our Nous, if so. My own private inside though, my secret place to run, haha since I was a kid! Is a yohohum deep in there that came alive whenever I neared the tide line of beach mud.
It’s been really alive since June 2015, when I arrived back in Maryland after a 10-day on the road cruise, back east from Laguna Beach. California Adventure behind me.
Pirate Life. I can’t help it you guys. Argh y’all, it’s true. I listen to the wind 🙂
Other things Calling. It was CSNY Southern Cross that called me again, back home here. And ohhh for real, oh wow them warm Laguna Canyon winds.
Carl Jung called these synchronicity. Joseph Campbell lined up coincidences in rows and said, this network from inside to outside you that you can follow is Divine, is the Mystery, and when you acknowledge this, you Follow your bliss.
Paraphrased. Anyhow.
This blog is a sweet outpost for me: A crow’s nest for my soul. A high and wide in the branch somewhere in the home of a Keebler elf. Hobbit style keeping eye lookout on all the kids. Thanks for letting me indulge the Words as a way of saying thanks to the Holy What Is.
Mama Wound: The VICTIM. Under Spring Gibbous Moon
“LOVE OR FEAR? You have to love yourself. You have to feel that you deserve to be happy and that you deserve to live and you deserve to love. Because two emotions can’t exist at the same time…Emotions are the tone of your whole BodyMind.” Dr. Candace Pert
The human MindBody is QUANTUM. Repeat that a million times while smiling and chanting YUM over and over in the harmony of Om, and educate yourself about it until you understand what I mean.
The moon navigates us gravitationally. Up down up down. Repeat this, too.
The western wound of the Feminine is a metaphoric understanding that demonizes the role of emotions–the flow of nuropeptides-– and therefor creates an adverse affect, or literally the back-up of emotions in our body. So I will name this wound metaphorically the Role of the Victim.
What areas in your life do you self-vicitimize? Dig on it, think on it. I’ll say it again: The wound of the Feminine translates in the body as the wound of not being allowed to feel. VICTIM.
We experience Shame for feelings. We Shame Our Feelings. Which is a spiral, the Shame Cycle. I shame how I feel so that chemically, when I feel, I feel shame. DANG! It keeps the Victim in place.
And guess what, you can get addicted to that bad-feeling fear-based Shame Cycle!
Cognitive behavior therapy is an inherent behavioral science that underlies all EBT (evidence based treatment) models for therapy, and is elsewhere found in the 12-steps. From a Cog B perspective, we might say VICTIM is a Core Belief. Maybe The Core Belief? In any case, most of us know what it’s like to walk around with repressed fear at our core, for sure.
Victim. I deserve or belong in pain. I am worth Nothing.
How do you relate to being a Victim in your own life? What about Martyr?? There’s a real connection here to codependency in relationships, too.
We disown our own needs all the time because we pathologize everything haha because of that whole addicted to feeling bad thing, and pathologizing keeps that secured!
Why do we deny our needs?
We receive a million stories a day that a) We can’t change the way things are (because we’re Victims) and also B)Feeling anything but positive is wrong. Haha so then we depress our feelings. Because it’s wrong to feel bad. And so then what do we do? Try to medicate them! AND YOUR BRIAN CHANGES EVERY TIME YOU CHRONICALLY MEDICATE FEELINGS! Learn about the science of addictions! The science of the BodyMind! LORD! Learning to name feelings and feeling them. Check your self. For real. What ways do you Victimize your self? Cuz you believe it’s easier than feeling how you feel, and owning what you need?
It’s worth a look.
On the somatic level this impacts your immune system. To depress your feelings and other basic (think Maslow) physiological needs. And then shows up in your hormones. Which have to do biologically with how you process stress and also, is impacted by your diet and other genetic and environmental factors including being fed and getting enough sleep. This wiring gets passed on to your kids! And is ultimately, again, about whether or not those basic needs are met, and then if we are able to process stress and deal with our emotions day to day.
SUCH MIRACLES we each are, if we get mindful about our miraculous capacities! Literally. Mindfulness is the Healer Within. Such miracles we are even if we’re not mindful of it! Either way 🙂
This conversation is different from chemical imbalances that people suffer with, requiring medication in order to function. That’s very real. But it’s also related, because in the same conversation we could look at how many of those peoples are a composite of at least a generation of unprocessed complex trauma (basic needs not met, power dynamics that create neglect or abuse in the family, community or home) and they end up dealing with said familial or societal imbalance through substance use and abuse, which takes us back to the neuropeptides of emotions again, and the soft wiring of DNA Feels, and unmet needs.
In any case. Own your needs by getting real with your self about what is really real in your life, right now.
And at least open your mind with me when I suggest that there is Collective Subconsciousness to Patterns. That show up, against the very real cycles of practical things like Nature’s Growing Season. I mean. You’re living and growing, right? I sure hope so.
The Wound Of The Feminine is in us ALL. It begins within. That’s all.
April. First quarter moon of Spring.
Welcome APRIL! At the first quarter moon of Spring.
“Eostremonap is “Eostre’s Month,” the time to celebrate the feast of the goddess Eostre. Easter is the English name of the Germanic goddess Ostara. Her feast coincidentally took place near the Christians’ Paschal feast, and her name was retained for th leather in both Modern English (Easter) and German (Ostern). Eostre is a goddess of spring and the dawn–a goddess of new beginnings. Her name is related to “east” where the sun rises.” -Alaric Albertsston
The first quarter moon means we have increased the amount of sunlight reflecting to us in the middle of the night via the face of La Luna by a half. The sun is the outward expression of growth and light, and this is our first moon cycle of the Spring, of Dawn, Birth, or East quadrant on the medicine wheel of the year. It is now, this week especially, that the momentum of the season’s shift finally starts to feel like it has taken hold.
This is the time of the tender primacy of new growth. Of fresh soil and wee buds bursting forth on the branch. This is nature’s natural aligning energy.
Stay close to yourself: Spring or Birthing season is connected directly to renewal from death, allow your heart to draw light from the teachings of traditional Easter and Christ. Birth does not happen in a moment. Laboring is a process.
Allow your process.
Allow. Add some exercise to your daily routine to make room in the physical body for the upcoming growing season of the soul.
Allow. Check in with your sleep cycle. I know mine has been a MESS since daylight savings. Do you need to make some changes? I pulled an almost all-nighter Saturday so I could turn in last night at 8. It worked! I got 9 straight hours for the first time since the time change.
What’s your caffeine intake look like? Are you eating well?
The spring and the time change are adjustments to your personal biorhythm, called the Circadian cycle.
Allow. Allow what is.
This station of the moon’s cycle is a good one for becoming mindful of what is working in your day to day. It is EXCELLENT for initiating small, daily behavior change.
Be well!! Be good to you!! As always, begin within~April
RePost: Soul Work IS NOT Self-esteem
Most of this article appeared on Wild Women Wisdom originally on March 4, 2013
Now, it’s important to clarify some ideas.
This work, the women’s work or depth development, lets call it soul work. Soul work can edge up next to concepts that are self-helpy and lots of people, including myself, get eye rolls when it comes to that subject. Yea, it seems to surprise people when they learn that I shrink at New Agey I’m-okay-you’re-okay movements. How can I bulk at New Age stuff and keep a column that educates on the symbolism and influence of cycles in our life!?
Specifically, it’s any philosophy that says it alone is the right way or the only, singular answer that makes me grind my teeth. Finger-wagging judginess immediately shuts me down. This is LIFE! Multiplicitious, infinite, totally quantam. There are sooo many options, so many solutions. A person says spirituality should be this or should look that way and I am the first to counter: the most spiritual thing I’ve done all week was dance sweaty til 3 am then eat a cheese steak dripping full with grease…!!
Soul work, to me, resonates because it is personal. It starts with the premise that the answers are within you. A person like me just affirms the existence of what Carl Jung calls the anima function–the receptive, the dark or normally unseen, the soul. It is my goal to grow an appreciation of how our society has suppressed this aspect, to help see how our thoughts have programmed “tapes” that run in support of this suppression in your own life, and finally to help translate how the soul might be speaking to you. I am, after all, a language teacher! Your connection to your own deep sense of aliveness has nothing to do with how I define mine, likewise I have no business telling you how to experience or define yours. I just help you tap into and follow the communication going on in your interior life.
Soul-work IS NOT self-esteem. Laura San Nicolas, a soul-focused psychotherapist in Laguna Beach, emphasizes this. It’s not about feeling better about ourselves. In the Western world, the generation in which I was raised, as well as the ones beneath mine, have come of age with this stigma: brought-up with unspoken entitlement resulting from having all our security needs easily provided for. Think Maslow here. We live an inherent belief system that life should be easy, and if indeed we are confronted to actually develop and challenge ourselves, we bemoan that life isn’t meant to feel this way because it feels hard or we think we shouldn’t struggle. As Laura says, “Who ever said that life wasn’t meant to scare us? To be difficult or challenging?”
We have on our hands generations of twenty-and thirty-somethings, (I count myself among these numbers here!!) having “quarter-life crisises” or “thrisis-es” because the concept of self-esteem is uniquely tied in to the same soul-suppressing, societal brainwash that equates self-worth to consumer success. I have+so I feel good=I am worth it! So when the soul-life, which is the life that regenerates us from within, that helps us acquire meaningful understanding of our own experience and therefor gives us reason to engage from day to day because it imbues our unique experience with personal meaning, starts to emerge, it almost always starts because we feel bad. Soul work is about transformation. It has no arrival point. It is a way of experiencing the world, one that keeps a steady awareness of the relationship between interior life, and the life going on outside us in the rest of the world.
Soul-work therefor is about feeling alive. Thomas Moore, in his book “Care for the Soul,” says “the soul can be deceptively simple. You take back what has been disowned. You work with what is, rather than what you wish were there.” I understand this to mean what it took twelve steps to teach me (I need things laid out good and simple!): Responsibility, or taking daily action towards what is going on in my life here, how, today, just for today! What is directly in front of me.
Living a life of soul means engaging in the work of my own real life. The relationships, the duties, and the fun parts of what I am expected to show up to in my own life, today. It is my own real life that is the teacher, do I show up today or do I check out? Checking out is what Moore speaks of by disowning.
And if I am disowning, that’s where I start. Not with why, just with a simple, present yes, this is happening. Which takes me back to self-honesty as the way to hear the message, sometimes the siren, that the soul is signaling. We learn to be gentle with this work, tender, yes. Because really being connected in a meaningful, soulful way is a challenge. It’s not the artificiality of well-combed hair and a perfected, smiling sheen. Soul work is not the same as look-good, feel-good self-esteem.
It’s about real life. Which get’s us dirty and at times, is going to knock us to our knees.
New Moon of Spring :)
The dark is the power of the feminine, as death is the power of life.
The dark moon, before she peaks. This is the feminine in her essence. Without the light of the sun, which is the light we see nocturnally reflected at us via La Luna, she is who she is. NO MASKS. Nothing but herself to feel, to witness, to be with, to see.
Take heart dear friends, tonight’s New Moon will move us finally into a real initiatory feeling of light and movement. Some of this tension–WHICH lS THE TENSION OF BIRTH, WHICH IS THE MEDICINE OF SPRING—birth comes not easy, now! Do not quit!! will be surpassed by the new life bubbling within.
But you must claim it. You must set out for it, you must take up, on your behalf, your own fight.
For your light. Your heart. Your soul. Your LIFE.
Trust the flow. Take quiet time right now, dark moon is the most powerful time to get still, to go within.
Be gentle with what is, with what you see or feel there.
Love. IS.
This be my prayer~~
Happy new moon friends!
Spring Equinox, on a Last Quarter Moon
Spring Equinox is today!!
It is the Entryway into Season of Light.
Entryway a word I use specifically, meaning Threshold Time, time of powerful pause, when two states exist side by side.
At once we hold the Season of Dark’s end, right next to our Sacred entry to Spring.
The winter is our dark night, for all of us!
The Season of the Dark Night of the Collective. It is North on the Medicine wheel, aligned with the wisdom of death, dying, stillness, darkness, quiet, loss, letting go, grief and grieving, potentiality in its raw, unformed aspect. It is all of the space necessary to hold the birth of new life that comes with spring.
This weekend we are at the Crossroads, seeing backwards over winter, and forwards into the coming spring. Spring rotates us eastward, it is air which in March on the eastern seaboard brings me into my experience of fierce winds and change, and too lands me in the miracle of breath, of the knowingness of peace that comes when I begin within, with the simple, profound gratitude for that mystery which breathes me. It is birth, intellect, insight, seeds, innocence, foolishness, sweet~ It reminds us intuitively that with rebirth comes another season of light and fun, another season of the Sun.
We are at a Dual Threshold, for this Monday too, the cross-quarters of the Medicine Wheel intersect.
This happens because the Moon is also half light, half dark. She walks backwards towards her dark, while the Sun marches us forward into the Season of Light. walks us as Backwards and Forwards at once every so often, and from its tense momentum comes Birth. This is always medicine of the Threshold, which we call not just Entryway but Initiation.
As well, it is the Good Medicine of Spring. Birth. East. Dawn.
Free Association Meditation:
Make two lists. One titled Light or Birth. One titled Dark or Death. Remembering the Dual nature of Dark, to die and at once, to hold UnSeen the potentializing energy of what still shall be.
What words or phrases come out naturally under each title? What words or phrases, dreams or thoughts, feelings, instincts inform each title?
Hold Space for Each.
Is there a mantra that holds both, that honors the Sacred Continuum of how the two are connected? A sacred way which weaves more than one idea across the spectrum of letting go and coming to be? Which holds the true inner-outter diversity of Life? A sentence that claims what you want, see, or need? Create one or two.
Choose the language that best suits how you want or need to Relate to it. This is an Intention.
Tend your intentions as we move through the Season of Growth this year.
Remember, right relations begin within~With Wisdom, Comes Responsibility. Your own medicine is what is alive in your own life, a day at a time.
Be gentle, be good to you. When the light comes on, the dark dispels.
Love is all there is~
Don’t Let Them Tame You~
