Has a softness

Where mercy dwells in silence

Where the Divine dances your song

As tears flow sometimes unknowingly

Remembering yourself 

Is a task for the brave

And for those willing to believe

They are never truly left alone.

The past few months I kept repeating the words “no self”. I pondered the significance for me and for the period of time

We are entering into. The ancestors have been moving beyond worlds. opening new portals which have yet to see light, battling forces

So that humanity can birth a sense of dignity and pride in creation it has never witnessed. The armor which has bound generations together in both darkness and light,

In every miasm that has traversed familial and cultural dynamics, is being pulled apart dramatically between heaven and earth.

The choices we are making are influencing the past and have already imprinted future generations to come.

The spirit world is offering us the opportunity for truth, and that is

Creating internal and external chaos for many.

Over the past two years we have been asked to shed many skins, cry many tears.

Our hearts have been broken over and over again as we stare into the mirror and do not recognize

The weary visage staring back at us.

Who have we become?

We think we know our true stories until another story comes out of nowhere and destabilizes our very core.

The time of “no self” will show us threads of a story we could have never envisioned.

A visage we have never seen when looking in the mirror.

Skins we have never worn thus bodies we have yet to become acquainted with.

There will be times when you feel like you are living someone else’s story.

But it will be yours.

And it will be your mother’s.

It will be your father’s.

It will be your children’s.

It will be your neighbor’s.

It will be the world’s story rising up within you and asking you to accept the unknown.

Who have we become?

That question will enter our hearts a myriad of times and a will greater than our own

Will become our saving grace and constant companion in the path before us.

Wishing you peace and gentleness in the unknown ahead.

These are indeed, transformational times.

As we come to the end of this year and into the next, the desecration of humanity will continue as the polarization of light and darkness tears through the very foundations we and our ancestors have created in our search for purpose. Purpose has been so individualized in especially this last century that sacrifice has become a way of survival of the fittest. Sacrifice of physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual concepts and ways of existing. Relational trauma has become a way of life that has rooted itself into class, socio-economic culture, religion, sexuality, and society as a whole. We actually don’t know how to separate ourselves from it to the extent that it defines our purpose. 

Everything is changing. It has been over the last few years. I listen closely to people’s thoughts and feelings. They can’t recognize themselves anymore. They also can’t recognize those closest to them. There has been such a numbing within relationship foundations that being present has become a burden for many. Think about that for a moment. How can being present become a burden? When the idea of the wound is greater than the actual wound itself, when the trauma takes on a lifeforce predicated upon a distortion of power, when the individual self is denied or when a society becomes so invisible that it doesn’t matter anymore to the outside world. Yes, being present can become burdensome. It also becomes a sacrifice in which many are tired of repeating.

During this time of deep purification, we are being blessed with an opportunity, especially with this new year upon us. While chaos continues to unravel, our desire for purpose through intimacy will surge beyond our pattern of self centeredness. The ways in which we live and thrive in this world will have the chance to shift into a pattern of reciprocity and compassion. Sacrifice will embody an entirely new definition and relational trauma will be given the chance to finally breathe its way into healing space. We will begin to recognize ourselves in ways we never did before. We will begin to recognize each other too with different eyes. The level of intimacy we have craved for generations will be upon us. It will feed any purpose we are here for without even trying. It will shift sacrifice to a more gentle undertaking where we don’t feel like we are being forced upon our knees wiping every tear from our face.

Are you ready?

There is a descent into the underworld where we embrace flesh and bone as much as we do spirit.

There is a descent into darkness where we fall upon our knees and give thanks to the landscape that nourishes our understanding of good and evil.

How fortunate we are to listen to the wilderness that runs through our veins, echoing our names over and over again until the illusion slowly dissipates into oblivion.

To realize that we die so many times during our lifetime. The psychopomp materializing out of an emptiness, appearing in a form of a being we recognize as aspects of oneself.

A hidden landscape versed in the chorus of angels as well as the entreatments of demons. The ruler of this underworld are those wounds we hold close, yearning to ascend, reaching for any hand to help guide our way out of pain.

We become the master of life and death within our own experience. A nuanced pulsation of light and darkness, love and hate, a hunger for light to be fulfilled by pushing through the mire of a reality created by thousands of years of disconnect from grace. We become the psychopomp that we have prayed for to carry us through this confusion of self and to leave the underworld as we originally left it. With love.

Yes, with love.

I can’t tell you you will never feel alone.

I can’t tell you life will be easy.

I can’t tell you you will never suffer.

I can’t tell you you will always feel like you belong.

I can’t tell you you will never feel like you are at the edge of that precipice, teetering on the brink of exhaustion.

What I CAN tell you is this.

You are loved and held in a grace so palpable beyond any realm you could ever perceive that any thoughts of separation you feel during this earthly existence will be but a distant memory once you remember you are of the light.

Where dreams of innocence

And peace feel like nectar underneath my feet

I could feel the wind blow

Through every chamber of my heart

Thanking the Divine

For being able to whisper

Love songs of hope

To weary ears

That will listen to its music.

To be grateful

Is such a privilege

So few dare to behold

As it requires complete surrender of

Body and soul

To a silence

So sacred

That once you embrace it

You may never be the same again.

She found a life worth living

An intimacy borne of courage

And grace

That could only be seen

By those who allowed

Her wounds to heal

Without judgement.

She wanted to be who others needed her to be,

Who others thought she actually was

Even walking the path the universe laid out for her.

Until the moment came

She realized in her own absence, the emptiness

Was a darkness she could no longer carry.

So she stopped pretending,

And threw her shame out the door.

Closed her mind and heart to all those voices who never really knew her.

And she became herself

A thousand times over

A thousand times within.

Not even the universe recognized her.

It didn’t matter. Because she finally recognized herself.

I don’t often experience this in NYC but a man in his thirties asked me how my day was going. I responded in kind and then we sat near each other. There were a few moments of quiet, followed by what seemed at first was light conversation begun by him again. I rarely have time to myself and was torn between engaging and politely telling him I just needed not to converse with anyone. I try and take moments of solitude when I can, even when my car is getting serviced. I noticed he was calm, almost too calm, so that piqued my interest as to where the conversation would go. I let him lead and I simply listened. He began by sharing that he just moved back to NY to be close to his mother and that over a year ago, he retired from the military. He had been in since he was seventeen. He would tell me of the fifty seven countries he visited, warfare school, some of the perks for him of being in service. As he continued the conversation, I pulled back into a more neutral space. I noticed he began to become hypervigilant, his leg began to shake, his speech quickened. Then he started to traverse the darkness. His traumatic brain injury, 8 concussions from blasts, one from jumping onto his friend to protect him from being killed. His protocols range from a number of medications from antidepressants and antianxiety meds, to steroid shots in his skull on an ongoing basis. The frost bite in the bones in his feet has caused drop foot, his shoulder is severely damaged from an explosion. I saw the nightmares in his energy field and asked him if he slept okay. He said no, he suffered with nightmares constantly. I understood why this sweet man walked in to ask how my day was. I understood the need for normalcy, for connection, for knowing that he was okay. There was one part of the conversation where he said to me he wasn’t crazy, as though posing it as a question. I told him that it would be okay if he was. With all that he went through, crazy was just a part of walking through to the other end of healing. He asked me if I noticed if he kept looking over things all the time and that it was a bad habit he developed from his trauma. I told him his hypervigilance had saved his life many times, what a blessing. And that as time passes, he will find other ways to cope as he feels safe. He went from calm to very anxious, even showing me pictures of his wounds and some of his training. I sat there and looked and listened, realizing that he was inviting me to become a part of his story just for that moment, so that perhaps his story could have the opportunity to be witnessed and also shifted from his perspective, even from mine. I asked him to please find support here, a tribe, while he kept saying he thought he would be okay. I said it was okay even if there were times he wasn’t okay.

I notice that during this war between the Israelis and the Palestinians, as in all wars, so many are taking sides. The epigenetic threads that we are creating in response to this will be passed down to future generations. Peace will not come if we don’t become a part of everyone’s story. We are too immersed in anger and grief to allow ourselves to be open to perceptions of suffering from people we would never even think of holding space for. Problem is we will never know how anyone has truly suffered until we bear witness to a story we would never even think of listening to.

Your ancestors will rise

In every cell in your body

In shackles and chains

That only you could unlock

With shattered hearts

Only you can mend

With tortured stories of lives gone astray

Only you can rewrite

With buried hatred

Only you can heal

Just waiting for someone to take their hand

And show them there is another way

To soften those moments

Where the darkness forgot

That forgiveness is the path

To redemption.