Love

Love is a strange thing. I am finding that my capacity to feel and express love ebbs and flows much like the weather. It's heartbreaking sometimes when I consider the breadth of love that I feel for a person and that sometimes it's less than more. Am I falling out of love or deeper into it? Half the time I don't even know. I don't totally know what I'm trying to say but I needed a place to put this and haven't been long hand-writing in my journaling lately so this is the next best thing. - more later -


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Addiction

I relapsed on Monday. Memorial Day. A day I remember used to be filled with pizza at the pool because school was out and we were free to dip into that timeless summer haze. I now have 5 days sober (again). Fuck, this feels hard. Why do I have this disease? My sponsor, Nicole, tells me that alcohol and drugs are just a symptom of the illness. That addiction is a disease like any other. This makes sense to me and I hate it. I'm meeting cool, strong, amazingly enduring people in the program, met a guy I really like, feel supported, connected. Yet I still grabbed that bottle of whiskey and returned to a state of powerlessness that overran my entire being and reduced me to tears and a vomit stained shirt. Powerlessness. It's a thing. Here I am, sober today though, smoking too many cigarettes and sitting with my shit. All of it. And I'm writing again. It's a start.


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The Disease of Attachment to Time

Monday:
Many animal totems today. And I was (re)united with some soul family last night; with tribe. I haven't yet met them here and I know they came at the perfect time. I so wish I could write a novel about my every experience, and am in moments, releasing the burden of knowing that I will not be able to make any of this nearly as potent as it is in the sensory experience.

Wide-circing Heron: Patience and grace

Tuesday:
I am writing poetry and notes mostly in a journal now and on pads of paper, rather than full essays. I am turning inwards and then vacillate to turning outwards, and both seem to be creating an expense of energy. Recognizing the need for other creative outlets and last night felt a severe lack that I don't play an instrument. Singing, though. This is just sort of journal feeling rather than for an audience ...

September, "a time of transition", and I've never felt everything that I do so acutely. This morning I moved into surrender. I felt a buzzing in my pineal gland and it was something I've never experienced before. Other things going on, too. Trying to write on here every day to stay consistent with a ritual but this is obviously more journal-feeling.

Oh, I do have something for the collective: If it's from your heart, even if it doesn't make you money, you should do it. You don't have the time not to. Expansion will happen. I haven't gotten to the point where I'm comfortable with the Big Expansions in embodiment, though. I will say that my brain actually sort of aches with "growing pains". I can feel it happening. This will obviously sound what society likes to call "nuts" to those who have not experienced this. Okay with it except for the fact that it is sadly such a construct, and keeps so many contained to attempted normalcy, which the earth is desperately attempting to reverse. It's happening, too. Tribes are reuniting. Grateful.

Also, from an experience I had this morning: surrender brings an actual floating sensation if there's a ritual guiding you into it. At least, it did for me. It still feels very hard to not be focusing on all the "how will this look/feel/what will I do?" pieces (future-oriented) but I was able to let go a little bit more from that while in this floating space.

Resistance // Free Flow

There gets to be this point when talking to others stop helping. Because all we are trying to do, at the core, is take ourselves away from our pain. Come from wherever it does, it is unavoidable. And what I'm learning is that the more we run from it, the more we try to avoid it, the more it persists. I've connected with Carl Jung's quote, "What you resist persists" since I first heard it a few years back, but now it takes on new meaning. I have gotten close to the end of resistance, at least in this phase. I can't preemptively conquer pain. Can anyone conquer pain, at all? I feel that in actuality, it doesn't stop. It doesn't go away -- it just changes form and, in the same breath, neither does joy go away but simply change form. It depends on what we feel more. I understand that this feeling is a choice we make, because we do, ultimately have the ability to choose, but based on our core strength, the level of ease of difficulty in choosing becomes so varied. If heavily conditioned to fear and run from what makes us uncomfortable (via distraction methods in their myriad forms), perhaps the only way to wake up from this illusion is by intense, full experience. Experience that shakes us out of the illusion that we can avoid what we don't want and choose what we do, as if life is some emotion buffet -- pick what looks delicious, bypass what doesn't -- and brings us into the reality that we are here for just that: to experience all of it in service of growth, of collective growth, of collective planetary growth so that all beings may evolve and thrive. Feeling into our personal experiences, from the sublime and orgasmic to the horrifying and terror-inducing, is the very thing that might allow this evolution to carry on -- that might allow each of us to move through those sentient experiences of the latter, move through them into the joy that resides on the other side. I've experienced this in my life in small doses, and have been assured by those who have gotten the big doses that there is abundant light on the other side of these horrendous & necessary experiences. I must trust this for it is this trust, this faith, that will carry me, and this whole sensory-experiencing package that houses within it the same light that is of all things through to the other side.


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A Knowing of Peace

This is what I know in the deepest parts of my being. There are some things that simply cannot be authentically felt until they are felt. And thus, they cannot be processed and integrated -- and at some point, written about -- until then. This is what I would like my mind to come to, to find rest within: no amount of preparing can prepare me, or anyone, for the felt sense of an actual experience.

I believe that one can build strength and core, and resource support, in between the waves. That this is the time to seek your buoys -- during the calmer stillness between waves. And when the waves come, one must ride them out. This is when the strength and core and support are necessary -- in moving through the wave. And on the other side, I would imagine there's more of all of those waiting in offering, waiting for gathering, for integration, waiting to offer hold, care, space. I am grateful for this knowing.


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Feelin' the Bern of the Independent Party ...

Ok. So. If Bernie Sanders were to run on the Independent Party ticket, he would not win, this time around. BUT, a seed planted long ago in the Grassroots movement for the Independent Party but not tended to and water would begin to bloom -- people would realize its need for cultivation, and as is the way with humans who are waking up, a collective watering would occur. And with this water, as with all things that begin, something will grow. Slowly at first, and as the collective awakening of this planet occurs, the Independent Party would start to show signs of actual life. Actual life in that something might happen with it.  And with that, the dismantling we've all imagined might start to occur. Real. Change. A dismantling to the system that we so need to break down if forward movement will ever occur.



A social activist friend of mine who has spent years studying systems of power has a feeling that Bernie Sanders is simply aiming for Secretary of State or a similar, lateral position of that sort. Perhaps Bernie does believe he can win Presidency. Perhaps he believes he can't. But the thing is, if he wins on the Democratic Party ticket, the wheel just continues to rotate back and forth, back and forth.



This message of the wheel is of the exact same sentiment that is so powerfully portrayed in Khaleesi's chill-inducing statement from Game of Thrones, Season Five: "I'm not going to stop the wheel. I'm going to break the wheel." I have no doubt that this is a direct message to our current society in a shifting paradigm. Breaking the wheel is the only way for the beginning of an actual breakdown -- a systemic breakdown -- to occur. The two-party system, as anyone who is paying even the slightest bit of attention knows, is just a game. Back and forth -- families buying elections. One party in power and the *other* party stopping "them" from achieving any real change, then the other in power and the same thing happens. We're tricked into believing we're making actual headway with the women's right to vote (first Caucasian/White women, then Native American women, then Asian American women, then African-American women), then the Civil Rights Movement ... on into legalizing marijuana in certain states and now marriage equality. These are all HUMAN RIGHTS. No one should have the ability to make them or take them away. The government spoon feeds us what we want years after we've hungered for it so much that we're almost numb with starvation, and then finally dumps whatever it is this time around in our starved mouths so that we rejoice and celebrate this so-called "victory" like it's actually been won. Like we didn't deserve to EAT, but now we are getting to so we should be thankful. The thing is, we won all this stuff a long time ago. We won it through our very existence. It's just been taken away from us. And the rate at which these human rights are being returned to us -- this pace at which we're allotted our fill is too slow, yet we celebrate these "victories" like they're something. Like we're actually winning, as if it's a game that can be won. This is the thing: it's always two steps forward, one step back; one step forward, two steps back. "Progress" moves at the rate that the wheel does, and since it's a wheel, with the same two parties rotating it back and forth, there is no actual effective movement at any sort of pace that is necessary. An Independent Party movement would change all of this.



Yes, the Independent Party splits the Democratic vote. But even if a Republican did win the election, perhaps things would have to get that bad for more people to wake up and build on the Independent Party movement. Perhaps things have to get even darker for there to be a real shift to occur. This is how it works, right? Fuck the truth of this because that shit is painful, but if there's going to be a collective movement forward, things need to get dark. Because it's only then that people move towards the torches others have lit, and then light their own with the fire that burns there ... maybe even berns.



*** 



Oh, and one other thing: Nothing changes if you check out. You might get to live a quiet life on a farm somewhere, or go eat a bunch of drugs at festivals and shows year after year and pretend the outside world doesn't exist, or go to your 9-5 and acquiesce to the rat race until you're burned out and wondering where your whole life went, but what's the point in that if there's no future for your family, your friends, your relations, the plants and animals around us ... and if you want to get really far out, no future for you in a future life (if you can get down with the reincarnation/regeneration thing)?

The point is, you can't check out. You're making a difference regardless of what you do -- you're either harming or healing. That's the way it is right now -- you signed up for it by being alive.

Healing the branches, ignoring the roots: The Problem with (Some) Allopathic Meds

I am realizing, in action, the extent of the way allopathic medications mess with our natural body systems. If there is trauma to be processed, the body will release it through various methods, one of which is through the nervous system. I have witnessed my nervous system release through shaking, chills, and when rapidly flowing from me, the feeling of electricity leaving through my hands, feet, face ... You may have experienced it as well after holding in trauma in the form of pain via fear/anger/sorrow -- if so you know it's quite a thing to behold. Our bodies know what to do, when aligned. The first time I settled into nervous system grounding work with a psychosomatic/spiritual healer, my body immediately started to release as she made contact with my feet, knees, adrenal glands, shoulders, then a cranial-sacral hold. It release all this old stored trauma through my feet, working to clear my lower energy body, and also through my hands, leaving them in a unique mudra as the electric feeling rendered them shaped. 

When we take allopathic medications -- and specifically I'll refer to anti-anxiety pills (the ones that provide a temporary high of some sort in the short term, but end up exacerbating the experience of anxiety later) -- we sever the mind-body connection of releasing trauma. * Our thoughts don't necessarily slow down (and this is especially true, I would guess, if one's experience of trauma -- and the pace of one's thoughts -- is an especially heightened one), and what's healthy is for the body to release this trauma through the nervous system. Anti-anxiety meds (and those of the "pain killer" variety) trick our bodies into numbness. But it's merely a delay. Since our thoughts and what would be the residual release (on multiple levels) don't stop (even if they seem to slow down), the experience of the held trauma stays, and actually compiles upon itself. So we end up with more to release later. Our minds may go into overdrive without our body's response of release what must be release for the healing process to be underway. So when the meds do wear off, the body has even more it needs to handle and can even go into shock. This ... is a problem. It is a systemic problem, so how do we heal it? Cleanse from the meds ... I'm the last person to say something is easier done than said. But I also know that the discomfort is worth the eventual peace that comes from physiological alignment. This is one piece of alignment, but all the pieces hinge on one another.

* This understanding is based completely on my own experiencing, and what is channeled through it.


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