In the spring of 2018 I was, one morning, preparing for a psychedelic ceremony that would commence within a few hours of my waking.  It was a moment for which I had planned, travelled, and was incredibly excited, but to my dismay life chose to tenderize me the night before (as she is wont to do) by depriving me of sleep completely at a time when I was already rather overwhelmed and under-resourced within the circumstances and details of my life, my health, my housing, my relations, and my finances.  Where the night before the ceremony I had felt well prepared and extremely excited for the rigors of the journey, the morning of found me as a haggard, fragile, anxious, reluctant mess, and very fearful for how that would translate in both the psychedelic space and my physical health afterwards.

I got on the phone with my closest sister and we were exploring my intention for the ceremony which had revolved around money because at the time I believed that to be financially prosperous and stable was my “bone-deep soul need” (if you’ve ever been money-poor for any extended period of time, you may relate).  In the midst of the conversation I dissolved into a torrent of tears and heard myself saying “I can’t go on like this, I’m feel like I’m dying.  I’m so miserable and lonely I can’t stand it.  All I want is to feel good, all I want is to feel joy.  I need joy in my life, I need to joy to be able to deal with all of this struggle and pain and insanity.  I need joy in my life or I truly am going to die.”  We both paused for a moment and then my beloved friend said quietly, “It sounds like that’s the true bone-deep soul need to take into this ceremony.”

Life is a master at revelation if we will let it be.  Now I knew the true bone-deep soul need that had directed me towards that ceremony, and I did take it to the journey, and something extraordinary happened in response: the inborn well of my joy began to flow that day in a way I had never experienced before.  From that morning through the next five months arbitrary joy – a felt and present joy that had nothing to do with external circumstances – was the ship of my very enjoyable days.  Money, home, romantic love, and good health didn’t budge much in their positions, but I was radiant and glowing with reverence and wonder for the glory of life in a way that rendered the shit-show of my circumstances an adventure to be navigated with wonder and curiosity instead of a shame-drenched testament to my utter failure as a person. It was among the most profound and transformative of all the periods of my life.

There was, however, a day when that wonderful wave abruptly ran ashore as all waves do.  I then found myself sitting, naked and a little afraid, in the presence of the old and familiar fear, pain, rage, and sorrow that I knew so well before that blessed five months.  Though they were newly tempered and a little less severe in their re-emergence, they were still strong and completely confident in their right to take back control of my experience should I make space for them to do so.  Dodgy territory!

I felt deep fear as the vista of sliding back into deep depression loomed before me, then I recognized that moment as a choice point.  For this I am enduringly grateful, because that recognition, and the response that followed, has truly changed my life. Having just sat in five straight months of Joy, and remembering the utter agony of that morning before I had gone into that ceremony as well as how much of my life and my precious, irreplaceable time I had lost to feeling so wretched in the past, I chose to cultivate arbitrary joy as a central tenet of my experience.  Thus a great work commenced.

That was two-and-a-half years ago, and feeding joy has indeed become central to my way of being.  It has been a wonderful and enlivening experience, to say the least.  I have found that even in the depths of profound difficulty joy is not only available to me, but welcomes and reaches for me as a friend and an ally.  I have continued to dance with circumstances ranging from annoying to devastating in the time since I embarked on this cultivation, and joy never wavers, disappears, or fails me.  What I have realized in this journey as well is something that I wasn’t recognizing even though the words I spoke that day on the phone could have let me in on this secret from the onset of this exploration: joy is not only wonderful and beautiful, it is an essential survival skill of the soul in times as dangerous and endangered as these are.  My beloved friend Sarah Cruse, a woman of color (I’m of European descent), said to me one day when we were talking about this “People of color know this: we’ve always known this.  Now you know how we walk through the challenges of this world with our hearts intact.”

Before we progress I want to make a very important distinction: though the terms are used interchangeably, joy and happiness are – to my mind – very different things.  Happiness is circumstantial and stimulus oriented: something that I like/want/approve of happens, and I am happy.  Whee!  Said thing passes or changes, and happiness is gone.  If we have not cultivated the relationship with inborn joy, but have instead yoked our sense of well-being to the caprices of stimulus, then we are in a very imperiled position because external stimulus, that which we want and that which we don’t, is beyond our control.  The magic and medicine of cultivating a relationship with the joy inherent within us, and what makes this practice so utterly transformative, is that true joy is not stimulus specific.  Joy is an essential, inborn quality that are made with, something that cannot be implanted or extracted by the slings and arrows of fortune, but can be fortified and nourished through practice and dedication.  Because of that, true joy has a profound indomitability exhibited in things like Anne Franks famous diary quote “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”  As a young girl chased into hiding and living in terror of discovery by a vicious government bent on the annihilation of her and her entire race, this is an extraordinary stance to rest in, one that only a deep relationship with that fundamental and incorruptible element of self which joy is, can proffer.

So how do we cultivate arbitrary joy, the unexpected survival skill of the soul?  It’s so much easier than one may imagine!  There are two simple practices I would love to share with you to get you started with tending your inborn well of joy.  They are short and easy to integrate into either a formal meditation or spiritual practice or throughout the course of your day as needed and wanted.  I feel that these practices are crucial to being able to gracefully navigate the manifold stresses and dangers that are pressing so heavily on us as individuals and a collective right now.  They are simple, effective even in the short term, and utterly transformative in the long term.  The more you do them, the stronger they get, so take them in and make them a part of your days!

Here are links to the practices, which are completely free and a gift to you, so just click, settle in, and receive, and may arbitrary joy flourish through you and around you as you stand in your place in the story of the world.

Go here for the first practice, The Wellspring of Joy

Go here for the second practice, The Inner Smile

Thank you, bless you, and so much love to you, friends!

Love, Maitreya

~Beauty Feeds the Soul~

Maitreya

Good morning everyone…

There’s been something percolating in my heart and mind all weekend that I don’t have absolutely clear thoughts about, but I do well to let things out and sort out the details as I go.  I am, as are we all, a work very much in progress.  So I’m going to share this and see what happens.

Friday I made an exasperated post on my fb page about “The Party” on the 4th of July that has now become infamous and thrashed more than a few peoples reputations and social standing in our community (that’s a big deal in a small town).  The tone of my own post was shaming, centered as it was on “we must take this seriously: we must do better”.  I made that post in a moment of exasperation and I’ve questioned myself on it ever since I saw the comments and shares pile up.  There was hypocrisy in my words, and it’s been eating at me.  Now that I’ve seen the info make it out of state and can feel the potential ramifications of the criminalization of all gathering with beloveds, I am seriously questioning how I participated in the vilification of the event and the social media frenzy of general vilification, shaming, and “trial by twitter” in regards to any and everything happening right now (thanks, Steven Grant).

There are a few reasons I call my own words hypocrisy.  One is that I have been to a few gatherings since the pandemic and the lockdown began.  A few have been small and with close friends and I feel fine about that. I will continue to feel fine about that.  We need each other now more than ever and being with friends is hugely important.  But one in particular was a gathering of around 50 people in an indoor setting where none of us were doing any mitigation measures and the organizers only nod to the virus was “If you don’t feel well, don’t come.  With all due respect to Covid, we feel that it is time to get on with our lives” (that’s an almost direct quote from the invitation).  That sounded fine to me at the time, and was how I was feeling as well.  At that time I was holding the virus in the frame of knowing that statistically speaking, it’s not that big a deal (read the whole thing before you burn me down over that one line) and also, and more so, that I would not submit to have my freedom to love and gather with my friends to share my gifts and celebrate life be compromised for something that I did not actually see evidence of around me.  I am also holding an array of information that leads me to believe that this entire situation was planned and is part of an enormous effort to centralize the world into a one world government (look up Event 201 if you want to learn a little bit about the non-coincidence of a Covid Pandemic Planning Exercise that happened last October, sponsored by Bill Gates who stands to make trillions from the vaccines being developed that will necessitate the final “re-opening” of society.  And Event 201 is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of evidence that this was planned.  It’s some seriously scary shit).  So I was in a similar place to that of the organizers of “The Party” were when they planning and subsequently enjoying the thing.

So here’s why I call myself a hypocrite for my shaming tone: I absolutely understand why people are gathering.  We’ve been in this whacked limbo for months with shitty to non-existent leadership and utterly confusing information about absolutely every aspect of this virus from how it works in the body to how it travels between people to how to treat it and beyond.  Take masks for instance: from the popular motto “masks save lives” to “this mask will not mitigate the spread of Covid-19 in any way” written on the side of N95 mask packages to Fauci quoted as saying “masks don’t really make a difference, they just make people feel better” while CNN has now gone as far as to say that people who won’t wear masks are psychopathic, there is a lot being said about every detail of this thing, but it all goes in different directions and none of it really makes much sense to the layperson (that’s us).  Compounding this is an incredible array of attendant complications to the shutdown of the economy and the restriction of life on every level (Governor Newsom just outlawed singing in Church, for fucks sake, while the very appropriate protests involving thousands of people yelling, singing, dancing, and rubbing shoulders in all manner of way got his full endorsement), and what we are met with, at the most basic level, is that we can’t live this way.

We can’t live in this endless, amorphous fear of something a lot of us can’t actually put our hands on, we can’t live in this limbo about how to relate, we can’t live in this isolation that is driving many to economic ruin, depression, substance abuse, violence, and suicide.  We can’t live without each other, and the governments tactic of pressing us indefinitely into conceptual cages of separation without clear leadership about how we are going to deal with this to help us believe that this is being handled well, while expecting us to submit to the increasingly constrictive measures being enacted against us in the name of answers and plans that are nowhere in sight except for the fucking experimental DNA mutating vaccine being developed that may be ready by December if it skips clinical trials, all the while withholding any inkling of a possibility that this is going to change into something livable again in the near future is unsustainable to the maximum degree, and people aren’t going to do it.  They are going to lose focus.  They are going to do what they want and need to do, which is to connect, and to live.  So I understand why people are gathering, and because of that my tone in my original post was hypocritical.   I understand wanting to gather and dance and celebrate and laugh with friends in a beautiful place in the height of summer, the season of celebration and connection.  We are hurting, and we need relief.  Zoom concerts and classes do not cut it.  Life online is not life.  We need each other,  we need connection.  And I understand why they will continue to gather because of it.

That all said, a little while after that gathering, an fb friend posted something that pulled me up short.  It said, essentially, “I wonder if any of my Covid naysayer friends has ever read any accounts from Covid ‘survivors’ to get a handle on how this thing actually works?” (Thanks, Amelia Mae).  I had not, so I went and looked for some.

What I read blew my mind, broke my heart, and changed my perspective.  And freaked me out a little: a lot of people that attended the gathering I was at were from the Bay and LA, places where there is a lot of Covid.  I didn’t know that was going to be the case before I agreed and went: do you know that people are leaving the city in droves at this point because they don’t want to be there and now they can work remotely?  It has made the rental market here tighter and more expensive than it’s ever been, and they are bringing a lot of the city – including, probably, a fair number of asymptomatic Covid cases (but that’s speculation) – with them.  It’s a situation.  But that’s another matter

Here’s what I read in the Covid survivor stories that really got a hold of me in a different way: “recovered” from Covid can mean debilitating fatigue and brain fog, constant shortness of breath, racking cough, nausea, and/or diarrhea, extreme vertigo, and more, months after initial contraction of the virus.  The symptoms can disappear for spells of time and then suddenly re-appear and wipe someone out for weeks at a time.  Some stories spoke of having initially become ill in December and still exhibiting symptoms in July even though the person is considered to be “fully recovered”.  If you’ve ever been nauseous or had diarrhea, you know it’s awful in the short term, and diarrhea can strip your body of all nutrients and minerals quickly enough to be a serious medical issue in the short term: it essentially means you are not actually absorbing any nutrition from your food.  I can imagine (this is, of course, speculation) that over time that equates to a low-level starvation.

As someone who has lived with a chronic illness for the past 7 years, the reality of debilitating fatigue and brain fog are very familiar to me, as I have already spent years mitigating the presence of both, and not something I would wish on anyone or be willing to take on afresh myself.

I put all of this information together, for the first time, with the knowledge (which had been a distant piece of information for me at the time that I attended that gathering, not something I was holding in the forefront of my mind, hello, many-faceted privilege) that this virus is most dangerous and devastating for people of color, the elderly, and the health-compromised, and essentially least dangerous for people like me: a young, healthy, able-bodied white woman living alone in a beautiful natural setting full of fresh air, bright sun, and good water, with a fridge full of high quality food and good natural medicines of all kinds in the cupboards.

There was a bit of a train wreck in my consciousness at that point as the separation between “statistics” and “realities” suddenly dissolved, and I saw that to blow this virus and its importance off is, actually, a perspective of white privilege that is genuinely dangerous to the people around us.  While privileged (mostly) white people continue to gather at ever increasingly large events, the people who are most burdened by this illness (and who are also dealing with the systemic racism reality at a new level as we thankfully turn towards changing that for good) are not gathering.  Not even to bury their dead, who are increasing by the day.  That’s something to seriously consider if you’re white and throwing statistics around on your way to a party.

Yes, statistically speaking, Covid is less dangerous than driving.  Yes, it was planned at worst, and/or is being actively exploited by the power elite at best.  And it’s also genuinely dangerous for the most vulnerable and pressured among us, and statistics and nefarious plans aside, that matters in a way that deserves our attention and our care on a personal, communal level.  It deserves for those of us who are not at risk and can afford to focus on something other than losing our loved ones to it to pay attention in a different way and treat it with respect.  It deserves that we move beyond our obsession with individualism and freedom and apply our intelligence to figuring out how to care for the ones around us who are vulnerable so that they can live their lives according to their own truth and nature as well and easily as we want and demand to.  That’s maturity.  That’s loving the world we are a part of in a way that takes everyone into consideration.  That’s also dismantling exceptionalism and white supremacy.

Here’s why this differentiation between statistics and experience matters: statistics are mathematical models derived from available data.  Numbers, ratios, info.  Statistics aren’t the reality of the situation on the ground, in the body, in the community.  Statistics don’t address the detail that to have “recovered” could mean being debilitatingly ill indefinitely and developing various compound illnesses and conditions because of it (extreme scarring of the lungs is starting to show up in people who have “recovered”, and this could inhibit their breathing, i.e., the oxygenation of their bodies, for the rest of their lives.  And that’s just one thing discovered so far!). If we’re working with a 99% “recovery” rate, which is amazing statistically speaking, but actually looks like the above for a considerable percentage of the “recovered”, that carries a different meaning and asks for a different consideration than if “recovered” meant “all gone, all clear, all good.”  Especially if loads of the “recovered” are in some way systemically or personally compromised to begin with.  And the fact that the load of the burden of the virus’ impact falls especially hard on people of color asks for a far different consideration than it’s being given by the people for whom it is mostly a conceptual piece of information happening to “someone else out there, but not me.”

I don’t agree with the way the virus is being handled by the “authorities”.  I believe there could be so much more sophistication and finesse in our response to it from the government on down to the individual.  I don’t believe that the “lockdown” of society that left liquor stores open but shut down natural health practitioners and trails into the fucking wilderness, has anything to do with our collective well-being.  I just don’t.  I believe that it is being used to manipulate us and corral us into submission to totalitarianism, and that is truly terrifying.

But I know now, just from doing a little simple reading that anyone could do, that this virus is real, and it’s nasty.  Now I’m taking more precautions and being more careful.  There’s just so much we don’t know about Covid and what’s going to take care of everyone as well as we can.   We as individuals have to be humble to that and not barricade ourselves behind statistics that support us doing whatever we want to do in a moment when a deeper maturity is being asked of us.  We have to be humble to the reality that we just don’t know what’s going on and not behave inconsiderately or recklessly because to do that plays roulette with other people’s lives in a way that is unconscionable.  Yes, there’s a %99 “recovery” rate, but does that justify blithely tossing the dice about who gets saddled with the long term ramifications of this infection?  It doesn’t.  It just doesn’t.  It’s a non-starter as a conversation point because the effects of the virus are not evenly distributed, and we have to take care of all of us as we figure out how to move through this with grace and more sophistication than the pathetic lack of leadership we’ve been dealing with so far.  Yes, we are statistically more likely to die in a car accident than by Covid: thusly, we drive sober because to drive drunk greatly increases our chances of killing ourselves or someone else with our car.  It’s the same game, friends: we take what precautions we can so that we tend to each other as well as we can in the midst of all this not-knowing while we do the work to figure out what can actually work better and then ultimately best in the long run.

I am not advocating for fear and paranoia.  I am not vilifying the desire to gather with beloveds.  I am not saying that anyone who doesn’t wear a mask is a psychopath that is actively engaging in violence.  I don’t believe that masks make that much of a difference, but it’s a piece and it doesn’t actually bother me much.  I’m not suggesting we abandon our vigilance and skepticism about the path of totalitarianism that the government is steadily unrolling around us with Covid as one of its central pillars.

What I am saying is this: it’s a good and right thing to do to recognize that there is something going on that is worthy of respect, consideration, and discipline of action and behavior, and that we each have a part to play in taking care of the whole.  We’ve always had that part to play, and now we’re finally face-to-face with that reality, and I hope above and beyond hope that we actually get a little disciplined with our radical individualism and do it.  Discipline isn’t synonymous with deprivation, it just means engaging with skill and a broad scope of vision that takes into account more than just our own needs and desires.  It’s high time that we come out of the tower of self-satisfaction and set up camp in the territory of stewardship of the world.  It’s a good place to be.  It feels better, even when it hurts.  I mean that.

And what I’m also saying is this: let’s not turn on each other so quickly.  I know that everyone is scared and hurting and at their breaking point, but we are all here together, even after bonds are severed and wounds are delivered through nasty words, so let’s not attack each other so freely.  Let’s hold each other more kindly and “love our way through it” as my spirit ma La loves to say.

These are the times when it is of the utmost importance that we close the gap between our ideals and our behaviors.  This is no mean task.  This is the essential work of an integrated life.  I know the people who hosted The Party and many who facilitated at it: they are all loving and caring people who just want to be and share with their friends and made an error in judgement at a very critical moment.  Anyone and everyone can and will do this at any point throughout their lives, especially now.  That’s not fundamentally “bad”.  It’s human, and it’s going to happen through each of us at different times, so let’s see how we can be compassionate about mistakes and save the “trial by twitter” for when malicious and blatant disregard for life is actually evident.  If they, and I, and everyone else who has something to learn right now (that’s all of us) use this moment and every subsequent mistake coming as the learning opportunity that it is, get humble in an empowered way, take the teaching and show the fuck up for the learning, and do the good work of evolving our souls into the adults we are able and being called to be, we will thereby evolve our world into a gorgeous and livable place for all people and all beings.  Possibly in record time, Goddess willing (I think she’s betting on us).

We’re deep in the territory of initiation right now, and we can do this well if we stand up straight, listen deeply, and respond with full heart and soul when we hear something clearly.  I have faith in us.  I really do.

To anyone who may have been hurt by my actions or my words at any time in the course of this whole experience, I apologize.  I am doing my best and learning as I go and I am sorry it took me so long to see this forest for its trees.  I am still in the process of seeing, and will continue to stay open, humble, and present to the work of the times.

May it bear sweet fruit.

Maitreya ~ July 2020

https://anchor.fm/theartofsoulfulliving/episodes/A-Moment-of-Magnitude-ef4j1d

At the heart of the coronavirus pandemic shutdown of society is an initiatory possibility.  This could be a moment where everything changes for the better if we go all the way down to the bottom of our beings and harvest the wisdom awaiting our attention there.  But though a moment may have initiatory possibility written into it, initiation is not assured: wether or not we are initiated has everything to do with how we relate to the opportunity, how we navigate the moment.

Let’s go there.  Let’s go all the way down and through the gates, surrendering a piece of false regalia at each one so that we can come into deep communion with the Truth of our Being, claim our true regalia as we walk back through the gates, and emerge as embodied wisdom ready to co-create a life-giving and beautiful world in which all can thrive and flourish.

Includes the song Wild Joy, the first single from my upcoming album Fertile Darkness, which is a feast in song of the fruits of my own initiation.  Pre-order your copy of Fertile Darkness here to receive Wild Joy as a pre-release gift (album drops May 6th):

https://maitreyawolf.bandcamp.com/album/fertile-darkness

I was there when the sun began to pour its light into the land this morning.  Birds gossiped and celebrated amongst trees combed clean of dross in last nights windstorm, trees that now whisper and dance in a softer breeze.  The air is clear and soft, the light golden and luminous.  Crisp air chills my lungs but enlivens me softly.  There is a delicious comfort to pulling my wrap closer around my neck and stoking the fire before taking my tea onto the deck to behold the stirring of the land.  It is autumn in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in Northern California.  All is parched and yearning for the kisses of the rain people in this harvest time, but this is a holy moment of transition from summers intensity to winters enclosure, and all around me is a beauty that I drink in with long, slow breaths and deep, quiet, reverence.

The land is always beautiful, but today this beauty is especially clear in a remarkable way.  There is a special sheen to the light of the sun on the oak leaves and pine needles.  There is a special staggering romance to the songs of the birds and the chill through my wrap.  Today my heart aches with grief, and today this grief and I are ripe to feast on all of its difficult riches.  All seems lit from within, though my eyes are swollen and sore from a long night and an early morning of heavy tears, and my bones are weary with exhaustion.

Today, I am in the lucidity of grief.

Who among us that has lived even the briefest moment would say that the roses of life grow on a bush with no thorns?  To behold, even vaguely, the life of the world, is to behold a tapestry woven of beauty and horror, brimming with insane violence and maddening banality alongside the most staggering and rhapsodic wonders of all kinds.  This earth, and this experience of living a human life, is simultaneously a madhouse and the most gorgeous Eden conceivable.  Grief is one of the natural responses to being even the tiniest bit sentient and present to the magnitude of it all.  It visits every life, regardless of whether it’s wanted, welcome, timely, or tidy.  It is natural, it is healthy, and it is the inevitability of being a creature who loves.

Grief is often regarded warily when it visits, though its visits to a life are as assured as breath and could therefor indicate how utterly normal it actually is.  But the feeling of that cold rain in the bones that so many people experience and call grief has a lot more to do with how grief is met than with what grief actually is; I would call that despair, personally.  There’s a distinct and important difference between the two.  Despair is what grief becomes when it is unintegrated.

This is something I know with the whole of my being that is so often misunderstood: grief is a potent, vital power woven of sorrow and care, one whose gentle and insistent invitation is to a full embodiment of the exquisite and difficult miracle of being fully alive.  When grief is actively met and integrated, it hides nothing and gives all as soul nourishment.  It feeds creativity.  It deepens the capacity for love to flow through a being.  It enriches the heart and soul of a person with a sweet and biting fullness like the flush of a great wine on the tongue.  Grief, when met openly and allowed to inform the development of a life, brings us into exceptional intimacy with the truth of living.

It would follow then, that to become literate in the ways of grief and grieving is an art and skill worth cultivating.

Unfortunately, we live in a determinedly grief illiterate society, the fact of which is the cause of unfathomable suffering.  In North American society the social emphasis is on positivity, productivity, maintaining good outward appearances, and carrying on with business-as-usual no matter what holy force has walked into the temple of a life.  Because of this, grief – a very holy force indeed – is most often hounded, manipulated, medicated, rejected, denied, feared, and misunderstood at the expense of the griever receiving the soul-enriching and deepening medicine that it carries as its inherent and sacred gift.

Grief is not tidy, you see.

It won’t coddle our concept of ourselves and our identities any more than it will the status quo of societies colonial profit model that insists – often through sharp, bared teeth – that the show must go on, feelings be damned.  Grief is of the soul, not the spirit, and definitely not of the mind, so in a mental society that values the bright heat of spirit far beyond the darkly luminous depths of soul, grief is actually threatening and treated as something to be managed and subdued as efficiently as possible.  But grief is an alchemizing force whose presence in a life is meant to transform through deepening, and it is a force that is altogether immune to control.  Because of this, to attempt to control and diminish it is to ensure that it becomes a slow poison in the heart and manifests as unintegrated behaviors whose aim is to draw healing and loving attention towards the grief by any means necessary.

This is the cost of grief illiteracy, and it is high.

To let grief in will disrupt our status quo.  There is no haggling with that.  The important thing to hold close is that that disruption is beneficial to the development of our souls as whole beings and true, full humans.  When done with care, love, patience, skill, and support it is an incredibly good thing.  It will pull back masks that constrain us.  It will suddenly reveal how little we can breathe in the cages we have decorated so well for ourselves.  It will invite us to the freedom of actually living in the truth of our own experience and letting the profundity of living actually affect us instead of trying to “keep it like it was” and “run the show” all the time.

It’s a good thing to be rocked in the right way from time to time.  It’s a good thing to have a wild and holy force come singing through your whole experience in a way that clarifies and heals if you can bear the discomfort and answer it’s messages.  It takes skill and it takes deep courage, and it is oh, so worth it.

So my invitation is this: when grief comes unexpectedly into your days, turn towards that uncomfortable yet holy visitor with curiosity, presence, and welcome, so as to invite its singular and miraculous gifts into your life.  Settle into the discomfort of actually experiencing it instead of the agony of attempting to avoid it.  Allow it to do it’s slow alchemy of enriching and deepening you.  And do not welcome that ancient power alone.  Grief suffers terribly in isolation.  Solitude is good, isolation is crushing.  When grief comes one must be held in at least one loving, patient set of arms besides their own, by a person who can allow the grief to be and move without trying to “make it better”.  Seek out the help you need without shame.  Allow yourself to be seen.  There is no shame in grieving.  All beings grieve, it is an act of love.  It is so utterly natural and true.  It is one of our most profound shared experiences as humans and we need each other in those times.  To be held in it, or to hold someone in it, is one of the most profound ways to share love in this life.  Let it be seen, and let it be supported.  Be sure that it is.  When grief comes, move slowly, breathe deeply, listen completely, and behold the shimmering of the world when your eyes deepen with that sacred fire.  Let it affect you.  Let it change you.

Grief is one of the many gifts woven into the tapestry of Life.  Allow yourself to receive its blessings and then live those blessings as your own gift to Life.

Soul.

Bright and deep magic here.  This beautiful word carries the energy of an essential element of our being that has become mostly homeless in these strange modern times.  It is a word that names that which I cherish as precious and holy, that which is the solace, ground, and guidance in the terrain of all my days.  For many, this word and the current of reality that it speaks is a foreign place, if they are aware of it all.  Or perhaps a concept over which to fret about judgement, damnation, and salvation when under the spell of priests and old books written by white men with sick agendas.  Rarely is it seen as what it is: mysterious, deeply powerful, and fundamental in the nature of creation and existing.  So I want to explore this together a bit.  Join me?

Societies success is predicated on the dumbing down and disconnecting – from absolutely everything except addiction and consumerism – of individuals and groups so as to render them powerless, confused, distracted, afraid, and easy to control.  It is a soulless endeavor by design and necessity, and it is effective.  To embody soul, then, is an insurrectionary act of resistance, and liberation.  It is a life-saving and life-giving act of the greatest and most urgent importance.  It is the foundation of the resilience to claim our power and walk through the experiences and transitions that we face as individuals and a collective life in the universe and the world right now.  When we contact soul, we stand on our own hallowed ground.  When we live soul, we are Creation embodied.

This is not exaggeration.

So what is soul?  And how does one embody it?  What is it not, and how does one discern?

What is soul is a hard question to move with.  It’s a western-mind question, a tiny arrow pointed at the stars.  Let’s stretch beyond the reductionist question-answer mind and into the realm of beholding.  This is a more conducive relationship to have with the exploration, because soul is not a point in the matrix of existence that can be grasped between the fingers.  To behold it, there needs to be an opening within the being and the mind: not up and out, but down and in.  Not to the sky, but to the soil.  Not to the light, but to the darkness, that oft maligned and misunderstood energy.  To the inner world, otherworld, and underworld.  So here we begin: soul is not a thing, soul is an essential creative force, and we contact it through feeling.  Experience as well, but not bright and fast experience, not modern society super-stimulus experience.  Slow, dark, quiet experience.

Imagine this: you are in a forest in the dark.  Night breathes and rustles all around you.  The humming of insects is a song deep and vibrant in your body, the touch of the breeze a caress over your whole being.  The shaggy outlines of silhouetted trees form a frame around the star-laden sky vaulting overhead.  All your senses are alert, your whole being is humming with the life of the night.  Your whole being listens, letting the richness of this darkness soak you all the way through.  You are utterly, deeply, alive.  And in this aliveness, in this softening out of the totalitarianism of the mind and the stark severity of daylight, you are opening into deep contact and conversation with the vitality of Life all around you.  You start to deepen into wisdom and eros through communion with your own unhurried nature, and the more than human world on its own terms.

This is soul territory.

I can hear folks now – “The woods in the dark?  Fuck that.” And for some, it’s true, it may never be the right thing.  Heavy programming against the fullness of life there.  But hear this now: the woods in the dark are glorious, their otherness an embodiment of territory that exists within us all but that is, for most, denied, ignored, or exiled to our great misfortune.  This is not the only place that soul lives, either.  It is, however, so much of how soul feels.  Soul doesn’t refuse light or day or mind, it is not adversarial to those frequently beautiful things: it is there in all those things, should we allow it, and it’s also something different.  It’s the rest of our experience, the one that society surgically removes so that we will be more manageable cogs in the machine.  That exquisite different place and way is what I’m inviting you into here, through the simple and holy portal of feeling.  The feeling of breathing in concert with life, alive in all your senses and deeply rooted into the earth of which you are a part and into the sacred ground of your being.  Feeling.  We could speak of soul all day and night and we wouldn’t be touching it in any meaningful way.  Soul is the essence and foundation of our being.  It’s the beat in our hearts, the light in our eyes, the sound of our voice, and how we touch life with our lives.  It is cosmic, but not bright-star cosmic, it’s dark space cosmic.  It’s the field as well as the dancer within it.  And feeling is our way into communion with it.

Soul can only be experienced, and to dive in and embody it in a world that is savage and hostile to its depth and power is an act of extraordinary passion and bravery.  If any risk is worth taking, this is the one.

Risk?  There are a few things that make the embodiment of soul risky.  The first is that when one  embodies the soul, one ceases to be an automaton.  One becomes fundamentally unruly because one will deepen and become rich in the truth of the essential nature of being, thereby becoming sovereign in the most sacred and magnificent way.  To root oneself in Soul is to become radiant with the light and shadow that creation itself is woven of.  It is ultimately empowering.  This is threatening to the status quo in our personal lives and in the broader world around us.  Our friends, family, lovers, co-workers, anyone around us may become an Agent Smith in that moment  and try to wrestle us down into the accepted mold so that their world is not disrupted by the awakening and expanding of our own, or just distance themselves from the strange challenge of it.  Many will support us in it as well, and be inspired to move towards their own soul because of our journey!  This is glorious when it happens.  But it needs to be known that it can be awkward, alienating, and difficult.  There is a cost.  This is what I mean when I say that to embody soul is an insurrectionary act: one becomes radiant with the power of creation, and that is a light whose illumination is a rendering sword of truth as well as a healing balm.  The consequences are unpredictable in both their beauty and their difficulty.

Another risk inherent in the embodiment of soul is that soul and grief are inextricably interwoven.  They are strands in the same braid: grief, joy, and soul.  The plait of being.  Grief is frequently conflated with despair, and people are often terrified of it and violently resistant to it, but grief and despair are not the same thing.  Grief is a fertile and life-giving force, one of the many dances of love.  It has enormous gravity and enormous consequence, and is utterly gorgeous.  Music and poetry pour out of it: life shimmers with a dark radiance when we are in its sacred territory.  Despair is bleak and toneless, powerless and miserable.  It has passed any possibility of beauty and sunk into stagnation.  Both of them hurt, but one fills the well of the heart through the spring of the soul, and the other empties and dries, leaving only sour poverty in its wake.

Grieving is a holy act.  If we allow ourselves to experience love all the way on its course from headwaters to the sea, we inevitably encounter loss and the grief that attends it.  If we lean in to the grief, if we let the loss soak us to the bone, we enter into a holy alchemy wherein life can sculpt the light of our Being into a greater radiance.  And yes: it hurts.  It can feel unbearable.  But it’s not unbearable.  It takes subtlety and sophistication to be with it in a life-giving way, and if we can do that, we are rewarded with an experience of living profoundly deep and rich beyond comparison.  We have to walk into it in a state of empowered surrender, and that skill takes time to develop.  In empowered surrender, we choose to stay with the wound and pain of the loss, choose to sit up straight and embrace what arises there with love and patience and a clear eye, we choose to deeply behold and be affected by it.  Simultaneously we surrender to the magnitude, the mystery, and the wisdom of what is emergent in that space and let ourselves be cooked and grown by it.  We let ourselves be affected by life in all its fullness.  And we call in our allies to stand beside us as we do it.  We are meant to make the walk, but we are not meant to walk alone.  To grieve is an initiation into a new order of the self.

Grieving is a holy act.

Then there’s this too: to awaken and embody soul is a warriors path because the first encounter on the path is with the truth of oneself.  That can be some rugged shit.

When we come into direct contact with ourselves, we see the savagery and wonder of creation and the world right there within ourselves, and that can be terrifying.  It’s rarely comforting to meet oneself utterly naked, especially since the meeting is so frequently abrupt and severe.  The ugly buckles us over with shame and disgust and the glory overwhelms us in myriad ways.  We recoil from one and grasp after the other, wringing our hands about both in exasperation and embarrassment without realizing that absolutely everyone has the same stuff going on. It’s quite a bind.  And when we meet that material, the only way through it is through it.  There is no going around it once it has arisen, nor will it be negotiated away.  Once it has arisen, it will not recede, and it is there to be embraced, known, and integrated whether that’s what we want to do or not.  It’s just there, the reality of who we are.  What we encounter is what we’re actually woven of.  That’s what we get to love, be with, refine, enrich, embody, and offer in this life.  It is beautiful, utterly exquisite and singular in all of creation, and it is also challenging, stupefying, and shot through with pain that one may not know how to deal with or be with in a life-giving way.

This is a challenge that is worthwhile.

There are options, of course.  Society is made of the option to flee in place.  Society offers opportunities to escape the self, others, life, and the moment without ever moving an inch through a huge array of systemically integrated distractions and socially sanctioned addictions (hello social media and the bar).  What is known but not deeply understood is that this constant escaping is wounding to the whole being.  People get that it’s not good, but they don’t fully grasp how violent to life it actually is.  It traps us in a constant state of agitated exile, locks us into childish and ludicrous behaviors, and retards the magnificence of our essential nature.  It wastes our LIVES, our miraculous, one-shot-ever opportunity of being who we are right now, just for now.  You are the only you there will ever be, you have an important piece of the puzzle to make manifest through your life, and society is designed to deny the fulfillment of that miracle.  It’s an extraordinarily violent situation to be in.

I’m not exaggerating here.

The souls imperative is to engage and actualize itself.  It has a deep radiance to manifest in the world and that’s all it wants to do, no matter what it takes.  So to check out, to distract, deny, numb, and avoid is to deliver crushing wounds to our own greatest possibility in the course of our days, and it happens on a regular basis, as far as I’m seeing.

This is the pain that is not worthwhile.

So what do we do?  How do we do this work of embodying the soul?

We go down and in with everything.  Not in a narcissistic way that wallows in pain and twists the knife and calls it “deep work”, but in a deeply curious, loving, powerful, and humble way that hunts for the wisdom and the ecstasy in every experience so as to emerge with the gift.  We have to get the gift, you see?  Not for ourselves, but for Life.  This is crucial, this is among souls deepest agendas.  It’s not about the self anymore, it’s about what we can harvest from the beauty and pain of our lives to craft into a gift for the life of the world beyond us.  Life has to become about legacy at some point.  It has to move from the realm of self-interest into the realm of devotion to beauty, because beauty is everyone’s nourishment.  Legacy is one of souls deepest concerns.

To embody soul is utterly beautiful.  It’s a beauty that makes you weep with a broken hearted adoration for the magnificence of life and laugh out loud as you finally, truly SEE the flocks of birds whirling and diving overhead and the thick cords of rough bark on the trees around you.  Truly, there is no greater beauty than to embody the soul in service to life and the world.

So it comes so clearly to this: we let ourselves be touched.  By all that is beautiful and all that is horrible in ourselves, the world, and life, we let ourselves be affected.  We let the darkness in.  We let the light in.  We send down deep roots to receive and integrate the influx of both before we unfurl magnificently to pour forth that life giving beauty.  We stay present with what is, especially when it hurts and we want to flee.  We stay grounded, we move slowly.  We listen.  We listen to the more-than-human world, and let that affect us completely.  We deepen.

We deepen.

This is soul territory.  It’s a way of being, and the root of our true nature.  We meet it in how we feel life and touch life.  How we live in the fleeting gift of the self, how we enrich the world with the unique medicine that we are as an individual in the life of the world.  It’s the beat in our hearts and the light in our eyes, the sound of our voice and the love that binds us to all to which we are devoted in this life.  It’s not to be explained, only to be illuminated, praised, and then experienced.  Don’t wait too long.  Your soul is what matters.  Don’t make it come after you.  Turn towards it and truly live.

I’m by your side: lean in.

after every catastrophe, there’s a reaction of the impulse to flee to some “finer land”. i get it. i have it. and i have this to offer into that wound as well……

this country is our homeland, even though we are the descendants of invaders. it’s sickness and disarray is, in part, the legacy of those same ancestors. who else’s responsibility is it to do this dreadful and exciting work of awakening from this hallucinogenic disease of empire and violence? does that responsibility land on the natives who are struggling to survive after 500 years of colonialism? this holy land is not to be abandoned so we, the beneficiaries of this empire, can go cozy up in someone else’s finer garden. they did their work.

are we to go and force our way into a beauty that someone else has tended with our little (or grande) caches of imbalanced wealth, wealth that we have accrued by being the beneficiaries of empire, to escape the extravagant sickness writ large all around us and pass the buck of responsibility onto whoever happens to be poor enough (or brave enough) to not be able to bail when that discomfort comes crawling around the edges of our picture perfect lives of comfort and ease?

this land is ours to heal through intimacy with both the wounds and the beauty of it, and dedication to the incredibly brave acts of transformation that this time requires. this place is our place to stand and deliver: we have lived here all our lives letting the rest of the world twist on the spit of this empires insatiable greed that is destroying the world (and if you think canada doesn’t have it’s own skeletons in the closet, just think tar sands and ask the natives). this land has given us home, food, beauty, love, shelter and life for our whole lives. we worship her owls, her deer, the chittering of songbirds at dawn and the raucous barking of coyotes at dusk. we revere the shore and the forest, the mountains and the vast open desert, ALL OF WHICH IS IMPERILLED.

will we abandon her to the bloodsucking deep state that festers here, wringing its hands in anticipatory glee as we buckle and strain under the pressure of propoganda and orchestrated violence, to secure our own ease and isafe guard our own ignorance and inaction?

now is the time to become mighty. we are the people. we are many and they are few. if we emerge from the conditioning of radical individualism and “little powerless me, what can i do?” disempowerment, a mighty roar indeed.

let’s have conversations that matters. MANY. let’s make that more of a priority that starting new businesses, getting laid, and taking extravagant vacations to profoundly poverty stricken countries that are suffocating under americas extraordinary pressure on the world.
let’s befriend the natives of our places if they are still there to engage with. learn their history. listen to them when they speak. include them in the all the conversations.
let’s learn about the land where we live, and participate in caring for it. let’s join the local organazations and participate in the processes of restoration happening so dilligently in every conceivable area.
let’s engage in our local political process. this is for all my cool-kid neo-tribal conscious community folks who are never there sitting beside the cadres of elders who are ALWAYS there at the meetings – let’s not complain about the laws and regulations : let’s go to the fucking meetings and PARTICIPATE in the decision making processes that shape our world. let’s learn about what’s happening, and make our voices heard.
let’s do the work that needs to be done where we are. no matter where we are, there is MUCH to be done.

live with a heart that is open to the devastated agony of the moment as well as the profound brilliance of that same moment. it is only the heart that allows in the fullness of experience that can access it’s true power to meet that fullness. and this time is FULL.

we are being offered an incalculably magnificent opportunity to transform this part of the world into a shining piece of the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. we, as americans, are in the belly of the beast with the magic tools that can change the course. stay. right here. this is beauty, no matter how horrible it looks.

don’t run away.

let’s stand where we are in love and magic: this is our responsibility. and this responsibility is a GIFT.

DON’T TAKE THE BAIT

I’ve been thinking about this a lot this year, watching the tragic comedy of this administration play out its super-villain game over and over again, and watching the tsunamis that ensue in the collective body of the people as a result. Every week there’s a new affront to some beautiful place, minority group, or social program that gets everyone spun and furious and frazzled about how horrible it all is. Every week some new group is enraged (rightfully so) and ready to battle the establishment (thank god). Everyone including me.

I love that so many are so alive and awake to the reality of what we are dealing with right now, and are so ready to take it on. But now I also realize something that is very important to me being able to follow my own prime directive to Live as a Magical Act, and that is this: don’t take the bait.

One method of waging a war is to do everything in your power to confuse and exhaust your opponent. It’s effective. The body, the heart, the mind, and the spirit all get tired, and after a certain point they may just give up because of it. That tactic is being used against us. Well, in my opinion. People are so worked up over every latest assault that they are losing focus, becoming tired, spending their precious life force in worry, agitation, angst, and fear. Myself included. Anger is a tremendous fuel, but it burns out the system. Like turbo: it uses all the gas in short order, and then chronic illness and checking out set in. I know from experience. It isn’t life affirming, it disperses my power, and it wears me down. I’m tired from it, confused, frazzled, and compromised. So I’m done with that mode of relationship to the nature of this moment: I’m hereby reigning reclaiming my sovereignty over my own consciousness.

How am I going to do that? I will stay informed, but manage my emotional responses. I will not voraciously read every account of how terribly fucked up everything is and feed the part of myself that says “See? SEE??!!! We’re doomed!!!” I will not engage in extended discussions about how awful the tax plan is, the travel ban is, the shrinking of national monuments is.

I will focus on the cultivation of my life force, because if the great mystics of the ages can develop magical powers, so can anyone else who disciplines themselves and applies themselves to the study, and I feel that cultivating magical powers along with a strong body and a clear mind is a crucial foundation for dealing with a world being torn apart by dark forces. The physical is only one aspect of reality, never forget that. It is by no means ultimate. All manifest experience is vibration. Consciousness creates. Tune yourself well.

Besides this I will participate with what I love and believe in, sharing my life force with the myriad good works that are happening all the time that make the world beautiful under the radar.

I am hereby reclaiming my consciousness and my sovereignty. I am an embodiment of the life-giving power of the Earth herself, and I am hereby aligning with THAT reality as a means by which to bring about the more beautiful world my heart knows is possible.

I invite you to do the same.  Even better, let’s do it together…..

Reclaim your power. Don’t take the bait.