It’s been a rough week, particularly in terms of the peaks and valleys of my emotional energy. I suspect this has been the case for many people. I don’t see how we couldn’t be feeling the ripple effects from the atrocities going on in the world. But this also makes it more important than ever to tend to our inner light…to not let our pilot lights blow out… and to turn up the source that generates the warmth of who we are.
I watched a movie this week called “Detachment” (on Amazon Prime) which is about teachers and students in a troubled high school, and it was pretty dreary. To be honest, it reminded me of my own high school, and I thought about how in areas of poverty, things haven’t changed much, and for a time, with poverty on the rise, they are going to be increasingly worse. I remember the resignation of my teachers over the way the things used to be, when they felt like students had hope for their futures and parents cared. But people living in survival mode often don’t have any reason to believe things will ever be any better and left to their own devices, they aren’t necessarily wrong.
What a difference it makes when we know there is something other-worldly rooting for us, so I think it is more important than ever to be looking for those signs. In fact, I think those signs will be imperative in navigating the road ahead. But typically, I don’t believe we can truly attune to that knowing, unless we get quiet from time to time. Unless we “tune inside” rather than only “tune outside”. By tuning outside, I not only mean letting our thoughts be influenced by things happening outside of ourselves, but also numbing ourselves to the effects of those things by further tuning out with even more things outside of ourselves. Instead of the numerous things we can use to check out, that we instead check in. That we find things that make us sparkle on the inside. That have us feel good, even if only for moments each day.
In the movie, the primary character is played by Adrien Brody. He says “We all need something to distract us from complexity and reality. No one wants to think about the struggle that it takes to become somebody. To get out the sea of pain that we all have to get out of.”
It can be especially painful watching those we love struggle to find their way.
We are all at risk of having a void that fills up with whatever we let in. But we do have a choice in what we allow in.
I’ve been participating in a 4-day online writer’s workshop via live zoom that has been 3-4 hours each day. Day 1 was lovely, and I was very enthusiastic and reenergized. Day 2 kicked my ass. OMG. I know it was supposed to be realistic, yet encouraging, but the realities of publishing are rather discouraging, and I put myself through the wringer while ingesting the content as presented on Day 2. (Day 3 was better, and I opted to skip Day 4, which was today, and I will watch it as a replay tomorrow….not taking any chances lol).
My grandma used to have one of those old wringer washing machines. Have you ever seen one? It was fascinating. Sometimes I would watch her as she took the wet items once they had been washed and fed them through the rollers. As each came through the other end, it would be flattened out stiff. Then she would pull on and shake each item back into shape and hang it on a clothesline. They would dry so much quicker, having had the majority of water squeezed out of them.
My mind felt stiff as a board at the end of 2nd day of the webinar. All the juice had been “squoze” out of me. Spellcheck is telling me “squoze” is not a word, but I’m making it one, because it most accurately describes what I was feeling. “Squozed”. I was experiencing a freeze response, which resulted in me hanging myself out to dry. According to the Cambridge Dictionary “hanging someone out to dry” means to allow someone to be punished, criticized, or made to suffer in a way that is unfair, without trying to help them”. The thoughts I projected on myself were judgmental and condescending. The last thing on my mind in that moment was what I could do to turn them around.
It was toward the end of the break-out “editing” session that I was watching on my laptop, and another live zoom webinar I had signed up for was also beginning. It was called “An Evening with Spirit”. I realized I had missed the beginning, but as I logged in to that zoom via my cellphone, trying to watch them both, I caught the majority of reading that a medium was giving to a zoom audience member that was very “spot on”.
Aloud, I said “Please God, I really need a message from spirit right now”, hoping the next medium would be drawn to me. I was feeling so lost and uncertain, when suddenly I noticed I was also getting an incoming call from my friend, Bonnie. And there it is. How fast spirit answered my call. I fumbled around trying to figure out how to answer it, which would ultimately drop the zoom. I answered on the last ring and was surprised at the tears that started to pour down my face as soon as I heard Bonnie’s voice. I couldn’t even get my words out for the first couple of minutes. And then I spent the rest of the evening with spirit, via Bonnie. Interestingly, only minutes after answering Bonnie’s call, I also had a text from another good friend, Renie. I hadn’t spoken to Bonnie in months, and while Renie and I don’t talk very often either, we had spoken about a month prior. My point is, that they both chose that precise time to reach out.
We all have those people, our earth angels, that are so in tune with us that they can bring in the messages we need to hear in just the right moments.
We can hear them ourselves… since we do have a direct connection to God through our souls… but when there is earthly crap blocking our connection, sometimes we need someone to run interference.
Signs come in other ways too.
We can open a book and read what is on that page. It can be surreal how perfect the message is.
Also, I don’t feel her around as often these days, but I’ve also experienced the feel of my mom’s hand on the right side of my mid back several times over the last two days, which is how she lets me know she’s still here in spirit. I know it’s her because it never happened prior to her death, but I felt it a great deal over the first couple months after she passed, and now when I am in most need of reassurance.
Every morning, I have been shuffling the last remaining “Crystal Messages from the Crystal Kids” card deck I have from the 7,500 decks the friends I collaborated with once had printed. Interestingly, I got this particular card deck (and the tube of corresponding crystals) off my mother’s dresser when I did deep cleaning of my parent’s house after she passed away. Every day I pull a card and then find the crystal from the bowl I keep them in. Sometimes I wear the crystal for the day, or I put it in my workspace while I write. The reason I’m doing this is because I once put a great deal of creative energy into this endeavor. But I had also been in a very lower state of mind at the time. I have cleared out a lot from my subconscious since then. Every time I shuffle the deck of cards and utilize the messages I once channeled/wrote, I feel I’m reclaiming some of that energy to create what is next on my soul’s path. This was the one I pulled this morning:
I thought it was perfect since I am craving stability. How I am creating stability is by giving myself the nurturing, protection, and guidance I’ve sought from others all my life. Checking deep within as to what I need. And I’ve needed a lot lately. Sometimes, I feel like a crying baby in a crib…and as I aim to parent myself I try to feel into what baby “me” needs. Also, the “soothe allergic reactions” seems like such a random bullet point in relation to the others, yet I’ve also had incredibly itchy eyes lately and more sneezing than normal. Regarding memory, writing my book is having me doing a deep dive into my memories, especially those of the last 15 years. Lastly, I absolutely feel like I am learning more and more each and every day.
We have to be our own person. First and foremost. Your body is host to your soul. The inner spark inside of you. Your direct connection to God. We are basically God’s army on earth. We are like sleeper cells, ready for activation. Soul’s in a trojan horse. How do we let the inner light out…and be like fireflies… beacons in the darkest of times?
He/She/They God needs us to be someone who is capable of loving someone else. Really, truly, caring about our fellow humans on the planet. Not just the ones who look and act most like us. In tending to our inner flame, can we help spark the spiritual big bang? It’s clear to me that I can’t physically help every person I see hurting, but can my thoughts help them? I believe they can. And by helping others around me, surely that is helping me and those I most love, as well.
The last thing I feel like doing these days is meditating, but I keep doing it anyway. Not for very long, just enough to perk me up. Like an energetic fix. I used to try to meditate perfectly (of course I did) but now I do what I can do. I have a Dr. Joe Dispenza recording, Inspire V1, that includes ten tracks of music where he also guides the listener through to master the breath. I spent a lot of time in the past trying to do breathwork and I’ve never been great at it, but I finally concluded there is no good/bad, but merely practice. You can google kundalini breathwork to get a better idea of what I’m talking about, but it basically involves exhaling all the air possible out of your body and then taking a long, deep inhale, utilizing the energy coiled at the base of your spine, up along the back of the spine, adding charge as it rises through the chakras, and supercharging the third eye and activating the crystals in your pineal gland. This pineal gland is said to be a transmitter…drawing to you everything you need to fulfil on your soul’s purpose. I will say I can absolutely feel something happening in the area where the pineal gland is the middle of the top part of the head.
I mean, that should be enough incentive to do it all the time, right?
Reduce stress, increase energy, improve focus and achieve spiritual enlightenment. What more could a girl want?
So par for the course, I didn’t feel like jumping into action this morning. I had a couple things I had to take care of, and thereafter, at least as many things that I did because I was procrastinating.
And then finally, I thought, I need to get my shit together. So, I grabbed an eye mask and settled in to meditate. I started the first track of the recording (Emerging Heart) and after about a minute I had the thought, “I wonder if I look different after I mediate?” So, I stopped the recording and took a selfie. I meditated (which was all breathwork) for 15 minutes and then I took another selfie.
My first thought when looking at the photos was OMG I hate how I look close up. And far away, for that matter. I can’t believe I’m going to include these in my article. But then I thought about how I hate every picture that is ever taken of me, but then when I look back at it a few months or years later, I think I looked so much better than I felt at the time, so I just need to get over that crap. This IS what I look like and whatever. And you know what? After staring at them for about 15 minutes off and on all day, I think I may really, truly have gotten over it. I finally love this woman with my whole heart and this is what she looks like!!
In examining these two photos side by side, I could see a big difference. I’m so curious if you can too? They are taken 15 minutes apart with daylight streaming in the window as the only light. The one on the left is before the meditation and the one on the right is after the meditation. I feel like I look softer on the right (after the meditation). Less tense. Less annoyed at myself. I feel like my face looks fuller. Is it soul expansion? I feel like my skin and eyes look brighter. Is something radiating from within? I think so. I’m absolutely certain that how we look is absolutely affected by how we feel about ourselves (remember the rice experiment from last week??). In the meditation, I was literally giving myself an energetic infusion of love and light.
My friend Bonnie (the one who called me right before I went into full on breakdown mode) recently had a session with a shaman. He talked to her about the importance of keeping our vessel (body…both physical and energetic container surrounding it) full of life force energy. For one thing, that means keeping our distance from people who drain our energy. But also, we can practice a spiritual hygiene of sorts by releasing the bad juju that gets in our field. These, of course, aren’t the terms he used, but I don’t know if I need permission to use his exact terms so I’m erring on the side of caution. The terms I use are instead how I’m feeling them.
He said we benefit from spending 10 minutes a day sitting on the ground and allow any energy that we’ve absorbed that isn’t benefiting us to release into mother earth and she utilizes it like fertilizer and returns good juju into the world, and also our energy fields. As the negative leaves our bodies, the positive tops back off to fill the resulting void. Our job is to keep our containers positive. Part of what makes it work is that we are consciously emptying ourselves of what doesn’t serve us and allowing for what does to take its place.
The shaman told her when our bodies are imbalanced from negativity and disharmony, we become heavy and our vessel is essentially like a squishy water balloon, heavy, floppy and jiggly rather than the light, air filled vessel we need it to be.
There is no reason for me to worry about the future of my book. It will take care of itself, if it is meant to be. I also don’t need to waste any energy on what I could’ve, should’ve, would’ve, done in the past that might have made today different. But there is a lot of benefit that come from staying in the moment and counting the many blessings I am truly grateful for. Could things be easier? Sure. But things could also be 1000s of times harder. There are so many horrific things happening in the world right now. There is no way that the energy reverberating from the crumbling happening on the other side of the world isn’t affecting us every minute of the day. We may not be able to be agents of change in a hands-on way, but we can be lighthouses, by making sure our inner lights are shining despite what is going on in the world, for our sakes and the greater good.
Every day I take the shit that is trying to clog up my vessel and I work to shake it up/alchemize it and let it go. In addition to breathing, I’ve been trying to spend a little bit of time every day to dance. Country music has been my medicine lately, and it has come through in the past, as well. I put in my ear buds and dance around in my bedroom for 5 minutes… letting my entire body fill with the resulting sparkly energy that is generated. I also scheduled a massage for the coming week. It’s not easy having faith in these times, but we must do what we can to stay grounded. No matter what, we have to look to what’s possible, what’s to come.
I had this little bubble glass heart with a mustard seed in it since I was a teenager. It belonged to my mom. I am pretty sure she had it since she was a teenager. I think she told me she got it when she made her confirmation in Catholic grade school. I always wanted to put it on a chain and wear it, but I never had the right chain. But I finally started wearing it late last summer.
At the time, I was also watching the series “The Chosen” on Angel.com. On the very day I felt compelled to put the charm on a chain and start to wear it, the episode I watched shortly thereafter showed Jesus speaking the words of the Psalm 17:20, that are stamped into the adjoining charm, to Matthew.
I wore it without ever taking it off for a couple months. I had an x-ray taken at a new chiropractor that I feel I was divinely guided to go to. I’ve been making progress on an issue I had discovered I had with my neck, that I didn’t even know I had, but if not corrected would have likely caused me a lot of problems several years from now. The necklace is on my neck in the x-ray. The day after the x-ray was taken, I lost the necklace. I have no idea what happened to it, I just noticed it was gone. If not for the x-ray, I wouldn’t even have been sure I had it on the day before. I looked everywhere. I could have chosen to be upset, but I knew I had received the message I was meant to receive, and now someone else needed that message, and no doubt they found my necklace somewhere random at the perfect time.
IF YE HAVE FAITH AS A GRAIN OF A MUSTARD SEED, NOTHING SHALL BE IMPOSSIBLE UNTO YOU.
I love the parable because I have a big idea riding on faith the size of a mustard seed. I envision the ideas sprouting within my book, growing into the branches of a tree that bear fruit in the form of a community where women can find shelter in the shade of its branches, to rest and heal.
Around this same time of losing my necklace, I had been doing an earlier version of the exact same writers bootcamp that I was doing this week for a second time around. I remember panicking then, as well, with all the information I was considering about what getting published entails. Shortly thereafter, I had started watching a video series by the late Wayne Dyer to keep me inspired. He introduced an author, Immaculee Ilibagiza, who then spoke on surviving the genocide in Rwanda after hiding in a cramped bathroom for 91 days with seven other women. It was an incredibly moving story and at the time (how soon we forget) made me realize how ridiculous it was to be having anxiety over absolutely anything at all, much less writing a book.
I had started to listen to her story at home, but then had errands to run, so I was listening in the car as I drove. She was speaking about the time where they were mere seconds away from being discovered by the enemy who was hunting for them and whereas she had faith throughout the entire search, she was suddenly panicking. At the exact moment she spoke the words “my soul told me don’t give up” my eyes were drawn to a handwritten sign that was in the middle of the median of the street I was driving on. I was so shocked that I had to drive all the way back around to drive up on it again to be sure that was, in fact, what had been written on the sign… and I took a photo:
I want to end this with a post from my beautiful friend Sara. I love how she worded her post and it felt very affirming for all that I’ve been feeling of late…
I’ve been reminded several times this week, it’s darkest before the dawn. I learned when I used to work the 4:00 a.m. shift at the airport, in the dead of winter, prepping planes to get ready for their 6:00 a.m. departures, that it is also coldest right before the sun rises. I could actually feel the drop in temperature. Yes it was cold prior to that time, but literally, just as the sun was lighting the horizon, it would suddenly feel significantly colder than it had prior.
If you, like me, find yourself shaking your head by what you see and hear anytime you leave the house, and you can’t imagine that things could actually get better than you could ever possibly imagine them being, DON’T.GIVE.UP.
As always, I do apologize for any grammatical and spelling mistakes I might have missed.
I thank you so very much for reading my words. Writing this weekly article has gone from being this huge scary thing to being my favorite thing. It is the saving grace of my life right now. I literally feel like I energetically get all cozy in a blankie and take a seat with you all around a firepit and share conversation with each and every one of you while I’m writing. I truly hope you are as warmed by my internal flame as I am by all of yours.
~Much Love