From Survive to Thrive: What is in between duality and unity

Dear readers,

2018 is going to be a year filled with turbulence and change. For many, it will most likely be a terrifying year, but my own heart is soaring with gladness. A sense of knowing tells me that the divine feminine is at last anchoring back into human consciousness. The long lost energies of receptivity, intimacy, patience, kindness, but also the darker feminine witch so long relegated to the collective basement of humanity is returning with its creative and healing powers.

The deep earthiness of living in complete alignment with Earth energy and consciousness in a physical body, so familiar to plants and to animals, has become foreign to human beings. Divorced from our bodies, our feelings, from one another, and from the consciousness of all things, we have over a period of centuries and millennia, forgotten our innate wisdom and creative abilities and have given nearly all of our personal power away. Living on Earth has been reduced to survival in conditions which are tantamount to living in the dimension called “Hell” by many religions. We are victims, most of the time just getting by. We rely on ourselves for so little, and our emotions and attention are constantly being manipulated by entertainment, news media, politicians, and a sense that we don’t have the ability to provide for ourselves or to keep our bodies healthy.

How do we move from merely surviving to thriving? How do we move back into our bodies? For me, the answer is both simple and complex. We must learn self-love. We must remember who we are as well as remember the great wisdom and awareness of the plants, the animals, and the Earth herself. Our cultures allow us only to consciously love and accept only a very small part of ourselves and of one another. The majority of our thoughts, feelings, impulses, ideas, desires are not acceptable to other people. And for the most part, our bodies are also not good enough to be loved as is. We are taught to  judge self and others mercilessly from the time we are still in diapers.

Yet taking back our power and returning to a state of full empowerment requires our willingness to understand that everything is alive and conscious. The conventional education of all children conditions us all, regardless of the cultural background in which we are raised, to perceive the totality of the world which presents an extremely limited and mythological view of life. Thriving requires us to shed the skin of all that we once believed to be real and true and forces us to live in the now.

Here are some examples how all of us give our power away:

1. We entrust the state of our health to doctors, thinking that so-called experts know more that we do about our own bodies and what we need to be healthy.
2. We allow other people, also “experts” to tell us what we should or should not eat.
3. We give away our self-love to people who tell us what is beautiful and what or who deserved to be admired or loved. We begin to criticize the way we look, and our hearts feel sad. This is very detrimental to our health.
4. We believe that we cannot make a living doing the work we love, using our talents. We give away the majority of the waking hours of our adult lives to doing work that is not satisfying and which does not benefit the well-being of all people, animals, plants, and the planet.
5. We rely on yet other “experts” to tell us how to relate to other people, including in intimate relationships.
6. We condition our children to fit into a system, criticizing the parts of their personalities and behaviors, and even medicating them so that they will fit in. By doing this, we give away large portions of our psychic energy.

Before we can fully take back our power, there is a lot of work to be done. Much of this work we can accomplish by looking within our own hearts and minds and by learning to embrace the parts of self that we have neglected for so long. This is a healing process. We can change our own DNA and modify our own cellular structure by releasing energetic blocks caused by patterns of living and thinking that are harmful to the human as a creative being.

The Earth, as a conscious planetary being, is also evolving and healing, and this evolution involves some turmoil. It is easy to observe the chaos around us as our political, religious, financial, educational, and other institutions and established ways of being that embodied survival, manipulation, and exploitation founder and collapse. This cultural paradigm which required that we allow ourselves, the plants, the animals, the water, air, minerals, and soil to be used as resources is quickly shifting and deconstructing, as is the planet herself.

The transition between survival and thriving is made more difficult by the fact that most people are still not conscious. There is a lot of fear, anger, and aggression embodied in people and in our institutions and way of life and being. For example, in my neighborhood, there is a considerable amount of crime. Break-ins, car theft, etc. The convention of duality that is so ingrained in people is hard to break. Those who steal embody disrespect of others and lack of self-love. By their actions, they speak a language which expresses that they feel the need to take from others what they feel they don’t deserve or cannot earn. They implicitly believe that the universe is not abundant, but they want to experience abundance through disrespect. Those who are victims of the thieving express fear and anger. They want to protect their way of life and their property. The possibility of a world in which there is enough for everyone and where everyone respects self and others seems unreachable, impossible.

How can this gap be breached? To create a way of life based on love and respect, it is necessary to face the monsters inside of each of us which prevent us from living together in a loving manner right now. Not everyone is ready to make the leap. Even those who are educated and who believe themselves to be spiritually evolved are not necessarily any further ahead than those who have been less privileged.

The divine feminine has been suppressed from our cultures, institutions, from the light of day for thousands of years. All of the wisdom needed to create a balanced human being and balanced social structures have been kept from our awareness and out of reach of our love or of our intellect. To become creative beings once again and to let go of the passive-aggressive culture of a repressed feminine will take some work and some time.

In Dolores Cannon’s 2011 book “The New Earth: The Three Waves of Volunteers”,  she explains that while the Earth undergoes extensive turmoil in the form of mudslides, volcanic eruptions, and possibly a meteor which causes much of land to be temporarily submerged by water, many people will be taken temporarily to another location (another planet?) to weather the storm. I have heard several predictions that seem to indicate this possibility, though the state of our consciousness does seem to determine which timeline or outcome we will choose to experience during these times of turbulence. It will not be the same for everyone.

There is some impatience within me, as I would love to see more people eager to take a great leap forward, embracing the ability to look inward and to use our consciousness to create new realities from within and with one another. We have such huge potential for love and for the creation of realities which benefit all people, animals, plants, and our beautiful planet. From chaos to a new order does not seem like such a great leap to me, but, then again, I know it is for most of us, who cannot yet imagine a world without struggle or fear. Most people still believe that reality is something fixed that is outside of self, that we do not have the power to change. How wrong they are!

I am very much looking forward to life on New Earth, and I know that in 2018 my mission will begin to fully unfold and be unveiled even to myself. I hope that I will have the courage to live without compromise, fully aligned with my purpose and my mission to help humanity and the planet in this challenging transition.

 

I speak for the weeds (a poem)

From a matrix of sand, spewing gravel, humus, and a heartfelt explosion

of abundance

I sing unending joy. I drive, poke, peek, push

From within the ranks of green soldiers constantly mown down in an acceptance of defeat

I rise up, we rise up, diverse, tangled, fleshy, juicy, untamed

We are the voice and talents of our beloved undomesticated mother.

Living unframed, we are the wild women

shamed into invisibility or porn

Our abilities mostly unseen, our beauty defamed

We are pushed outside the acceptable window of vision

Those who purportedly seek status, perfection, power

cannot see us

We know no hierarchy

Only freedom entices us. We are the artists and purveyors of the green side of the brain

The heart of darkness of humanity has plunged us into a blind eye

plumbed the heart of being into a footnote.

Yet we embody the feminine power of birth, life,  healing, and the creative juice

Infinite shapes, textures, chemicals, potentials, striving

We remain pure, never hybridized, not studied, used, developed

Just poisoned, attacked, eliminated

We bother the perfect unity of control. We are not an image with which you can comfort yourself

We hear of the genocide of peoples

We are told of the extermination of animals

The endangerment of species

Yet here we live, wild

in the perfection of multiplicity

An infinite expression of life force

We are the motion inside of you

The water that feeds you

The medicine that heals you

We are the voice of love from your mother

The mother you never embrace, thank, or appreciate. Your toes have not wriggled near our roots and the worms for so long.

Yet our contact would restore you to balance and bring you peace and health.

I speak for the weeds, whose passionate expression of indomitable life cannot be crushed

Remember, gardener.

What are you growing? Who are you helping? What are you creating?

We are here to help.

 

Daimons and demons: mediators between the earthly and the divine

Hello dear readers,

In the ancient world, people actively maintained relationships with ancestors, animal spirits, and cosmic entities. The human imagination played an active role in communicating with the natural world. At some point, humanity was diverted from our connection to nature. I believe that when Christianity was established as a religion, in a diversion from the original teachings of Jesus, the church as well as certain political and economic forces made a concerted effort to demonize nature, the feminine, and humanity’s connection to our personal higher self.

Shamanistic healer and psychotherapist Dr. Steven Farmer explains that the daimon, a sort of genius and animal spirit that was a revered protector in many societies around the world, was transformed into a feared “demon”. The natural world and all that was earthly or below ground was transformed into a shadow arena, relegated and downgraded to being the realm of only dark energies: demons and the devil.

Suddenly only the cosmic arena, the male pole of spirituality, was considered a source of good, light, and salvation. Thus, heaven became relegated to the sky. The spiritual became distant and separate from our bodies and the world we live in every day. And nature, women, the feminine, the animal and plant kingdom and those who were versed in the healing arts of plants, animals, and the imagination became evil and were feared.

Women, who had once been the highest priestesses and sources of great wisdom were suddenly considered inferior, with smaller brains and lesser abilities than men. Nature and the bowels of the earth became the domain of hell, torture, dreaded punishments. Sexuality and the body, which came from the Earth, were included in this litany of evil. Man and woman were officially divorced from their own bodies, their own intuition, direct connection to the personal higher self, and from a consciously loving and connected relationship with our planet and with nature.

In fact, the daimon (Greek: in-dwelling spirit), of which spiritual writer, psychotherapist, and historian James Hillman speaks in his wonderful book, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, is the voice of our higher self. As we live in our temporal earthly bodies on this planet, we are always, if we so choose, connected to our higher self through our intuition and our imagination. The pineal gland in the brain, also known as the third eye, is the gateway to our higher self. Images of the pineal are ever-present in ancient art, architecture, and sculpture. The winged snake symbolism refers to the connection of the earthly to the cosmic realms. Mystics believe we all have many spirit guides, ancestors, and other wise and benevolent sources of energy who accompany us along our path. Because we are born onto this planet with free will, they will not interfere with our lives unless we call upon them for help.

Like the daimon, Earth herself is alive and seeks to communicate with us. Shamanic wisdom teaches that there are three worlds: the lower world, which is located inside the earth – under the ground; the middle world, which is where we live; and the upper world, which would be the cosmos or heavenly domain. The shaman is trained to navigate all of these worlds. He or she has special guides or helpers which are often in the form of animals. These spirit or power animals would have been called daimons (Greece) or geniuses (Rome) in the ancient world.

By grounding ourselves in our bodies and connecting to our planet Earth, it becomes easy to recognize that all of creation is one family. When we become aware that the lower realms are just as sacred as the middle and higher realms, we gain increased wisdom and balance. Our current society is in chaos. For too long certain factions in our society have suppressed necessary knowledge about ourselves and our reality from us.

The human being is a very powerful creator. Once we reopen our hearts, imaginations, and balance our minds, bodies, souls, and spirits, we will intuitively  embrace and revere the feminine once again. We will understand that the sacred feminine is equally important to the sacred masculine, and humanity will become more cooperative and compassionate. It is my hope that by restoring credibility to intuition, emotion, and to the feminine, our health will improve, and our societies will become more peaceful.

The feminine point of view is all encompassing, nurturing, and intuitive. The female brain uses both lobes and makes connections between apparently unrelated ideas, thoughts, feelings. The creative conceptual mind is necessary for the advancement of technology, social structure, and for the health of our planet. Knowing that all people, plants, animals, and the planet herself are interdependent is so important. People who are religious often talk about going to heaven. Do they know that home is inside of each of us? We are here on Earth to learn to love self and one another. This is true purpose of life: love and consciousness. Our insight is a dear friend, not a demon of whom we should be afraid. By demonizing our inner wisdom and our higher self, we are cut off from our own power and our own ability to heal our own bodies, hearts, and spirits.

I think it’s time to rehabilitate the daimon and take back our power to see within and beyond the veil.

Pineal (a poem)

In the bedrock of soft ooze

sprout the rods and cones of a ladder to Jacob’s dream

spruced upwards

gazing inwards

the hallucination of a dream left behind for too long

the yearning of a sunken volcano

a sisterhood of souls abandoned

yearning for the connection

sailing towards the energetics of a wise and warm embrace.

I am told humanity has folded its legs

tucked its head

and wound itself into the embrace of a temporary womb.

the pine cone falls from a lofty place

dropping swirling shedding

layers of forgotten dreams

shattering the brutal murder from the shards of history’s mind wipe

she lies in a tomb shrouded in moss and cobwebs

vines entangle the stone, hair, bone, twig, and flower

enwised

a new being unfolds

tentatively stretches a sticky limb

through a film once designed to hold and protect

she is reborn

looking inward

to revise the heart of humanity

 

Women and Weeds (a poem)

Smooth army of blades upright, uniform

invaded by shapes careless

of a perfection that strives

to eliminate dissension

Furred and spiked, clingy climbers

lacy, rebellious, fleshy

climbing high above the ranks of the well-behaved soldiers

Tight, orderly brains trained to shut out the mind-well

 

Wizened fingers once knew how to pick

from endless array of plants

the perfect remedy

Yet our scientific control box has shifted woman and plant

to black or white, ugly or beautiful, beneficial or garbage

Discarded, we are weeds

Full of juice, joy, vitamins, healing powers, whispers of wisdom

If only a few are coveted

Many are valuable, unseen, untasted, unexperienced

Wasting away are the talented many

Stronger for genocidal craze

The DNA an arsenal of innate adaptation

Perfected because left alone

Left out, not boxed

Unconventional is the new beauty

Powerful is the weed

Left alone to evolve

Woman is no hybrid either

Abandoned, crushed, used, disregarded by so many

She and weed are rising, will rise together

A new glorious day beckons

in a softer, wilder, world

the feathered throat of mother spews

a web of glorious love