We've seen things. We know things.

Look deeply into the eyes of the being in this picture. I was going to joke and say, “This is how I feel after Covid, am I right?” but the wisdom I see here shames my giggle and hushes my nervousness in the presence of something uncomfortable. Here is a face that knows the arcane, things that could disturb your rest. She is a female condor, one who not only eats death, but can actually fertilize her own eggs, snatch a creative spark right out of the maw of the mystery and hold it in her body until it becomes new life. Gazing into those eyes, I see freedom.

It’s been a while since I shared with all of you and I’ve missed the connection. While I was able to move much of what I do to a virtual platform, I wasn’t able to teach or do group work in person. I recently began seeing people in real life at my office on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and the bliss of human contact almost makes me weep with relief.

But things are not back to normal. As many of you have figured out, normal is broken. In fact, normal was actually pretty sick and soul killing to begin with, we’d just gotten used to it. Jokes aside, after countless months locked in a house in the company of my own demons, there is something I recognize in the eyes of that condor. We’ve seen things. We know things. None of it is going back in the bottle anytime soon.

Like the condor, there is strange life gestating within us of mysterious origin, and there’s no way to know what’s in those eggs without prematurely cracking them open. But my sense is these are the seeds of the world that will be born from our brokenness, the shattering of our certainty. While we wait for their time to come, I plan to enjoy the stillness for a little while longer.

Winter Solstice 2020 ~ Form and Possibility

The solstice is always a moment of rebirth.  It is only when we succumb to the inky clarity of utter darkness that we remember ourselves to be the true source of all light.  Calling back the tendrils we’ve sent out searching for meaning and connection, we breathe a sigh of relief as we realize we are and always have been exactly where we are meant to be.  It’s easy to miss, like your glasses on top of your head.  But it’s there, this return home to our most fundamental truth.  We are what we seek.  

This year on the solstice there is also a conjunction of the planets Saturn and Jupiter, the interface between our subtle body architecture and the infinite possibility of life.  It is a remarkable opportunity.  

Saturn sets your sails, and it’s important to understand that your unconscious beliefs also have a hand on the tiller.  While you stand on the prow declaring progress in one direction, these unseen motivators often cause the vessel of your life to move in a very different trajectory.  It’s easy to fall into a sense of futility and defeat.

The problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know.  We have in our bodies 30 trillion cells, and inside each of those cells lives six feet of DNA (much of which isn’t human).  We do not fit inside of ourselves, and our very existence breaks the laws of physics.  It would be impossible to personally account for all the programming we carry, and so to reconcile and bring the system into balance, we have to reach outside of what we think we know for help.  

Jupiter is the planet of miracles and wild cards, of what you never saw coming.  It is the part of us that exists beyond the gates of the encampment we’ve built based on what we expect to be there, not knowing that we’re recycling the same stale materials over and over again.  

This conjunction is an invitation to reinvent the idea of structure.  Without the influence of Jupiter, Saturn is simply a block of typeset, printing out the same story time and again.  What would it be like to open ourselves to something outside of this system that only allows and proves what we already believe to be true?

Start with what’s important to you.  Take your time.  There are many layers to it as it distills to something essential.  When you’ve got a sense of it, let yourself feel the yearning for it, this impulse from your deepest light, allowing your whole being to become an invocation for the fulfillment of this desire.   

Like the impossibility of your body, the shape you are made of defies all known laws. Rather than conforming to what you think will fill your needs, ache for what you love and allow that to mold you into a shape that will let in all the help and wonder you couldn’t possibly imagine.  

A caterpillar doesn’t know it’s becoming a butterfly; it just knows it’s hungry.  What emerges from the cocoon is never up to us.   

Grounding and Boundaries

Power is presence contained in order to be effective.

The safest and most powerful place you can be is firmly ensconced in your body focused on the moment at hand, present in both time and space.  This is your point of power.  Unfortunately, most of us go through life with our attention – and thus our energy – hemorrhaging out of us in the form of anxiety about the past or the future.  We relive old nightmares and anticipate new pain, both of which create a state of distress in our bodies about which we can do nothing.  We have no agency with the past and no control of the future.  All we accomplish by this projection of our attention is to rob ourselves of what we need in the present moment to live our lives.

When we are dissociated and our attention is elsewhere, the body becomes alarmed, like looking up and seeing that nobody is at the wheel of the bus, but the bus is still in motion.  This generates even more anxiety which further fuels the sense of powerlessness and prompts the system to send out more tendrils of attention to other places and times.  It’s like we’re looking for ourselves everywhere but where we should be, at home in our bodies in the present moment. 

So one of the fastest ways to calm down is to notice the sensations in the body, which rehomes our attention back where it belongs.  The simple act of feeling your breath lets your body know that you are where you should be, listening to the messages the body is always sending that keep you safe and informed.  The more time you spend attending to this stream of information and not the channels of memory and worry, the calmer and more grounded you become. 

A lifetime of being overextended energetically causes us to deplete our own tissues of life force in search of more fuel for our day-to-day needs.  This is how we get sick.  Once we bring our attention back into our bodies and stem the outlay of energy, we stop funding remembered or imagined scenarios.  Over time, our reserves come back up and we have the resources we need to be effective and powerful in our lives. 

It is only from this place of power that we can honestly experience empathy and compassion without the need to control or manipulate anyone else’s state.  When we are not grounded, we make other people responsible for how we feel, and all of our behavior towards them is tainted by this conditional need.  When we are grounded and present we can allow them to be who and what they are without fear that it will destabilize us in any way.  We can then afford to be vulnerable and honest about how we feel and what we need. 

So again, boundaries are not about establishing a tough membrane, a false front that keeps us separate.  The truth is that we are none of us separate, yet paradoxically each one of us is unique and discrete with an integument created by our presence that keeps us defined and safe.  A boundary is not an external structure, but a field, an emanation that connects us to the ultimate ground of being and activates a field around us with the unassailable truth of who and what we are.  We just need to step into it. 

The more time you spend focusing your attention on the origin point four finger widths below your navel, breathing all your stray selves back home, the more energized this field becomes.  As your reserves come back up, try imagining that your lower three chakras are almost closed, maybe about two or three percent open, in order to contain and save that energy for your personal use.  With this as your base of power, the upper chakras can open and be available to love and share with the world without condition or agenda.  

Reiki and Wildness

Offering reiki to wild things is a way of cooperating with the organic intelligence of the material world. What beats your heart is wild. The love in your dog’s eyes is wild. Your soul’s code is wild, unresponsive to the dictates of the conscious mind.

There are things that don’t obey us. This is good. Just as you wouldn’t let your demanding two-year-old into the operating system of your computer, there are enormous swaths of life that run independent of our tinkering. To try to impose our limited agenda on the elegance of our wildness is arrogant and grandiose at best, inevitably leading to catastrophic results.

In our wildness is our ability to heal. To surrender to it is to deliver ourselves to the unmade and chaotic realms where matter and spirit, form and emptiness, come together. It is the intersection where what we are made of meets what we come from and we understand that there is no difference between the two.  

So working with wild things is about listening, noticing, allowing, and learning from beings and parts of self far wiser than us. Pay attention and be willing to adapt and follow. Be receptive to the deeper impulses as they pull you out of your habituated response to life and into the places where you have no control.  Let yourself be held; let something else steer the ship.

Whether you are working with a fallen sparrow or your own deepest wounds, soften the edges of your container and impose no agenda or tether. Let what you are working with move freely into and out of the field of the energy you are offering, trusting that they know what intensity and duration works for them.  Hands on or long distance, just make the reiki available and trust that the wisdom of the wild thing will use it well.