Creative Spark Nurturing

Dissolve & Evolve

My sense of self has dissolved a million times in the last few months, my entire extistence thus far feels up for internal review. There is a strong urge to become a river, a mountain, a pebble, a tree, a song, or the wind that moves through the leaves.

It’s alright—being bound up in identities and certainties is the least reliable and most volatile ground humans can walk on. I am continually freeing it up for the Divine to move through. I surrender! Tomorrow my grip may return but I know the miracle of release.

There are ravines at points along the path that narrow our passage and ask us to be deliberate about each step. It requires a pause where we gaze into the dizzying drop below, wobbling back to center as the “center” changes shape. Placing roots to sky, my perception of reality having shifted on its axis— there is no other choice but set my weight down and allow the field to empty.

Nestling into the space between here and there, long held notions of identity and dreams of directions no longer visible or viable can melt like salt in water. Oceans rise and swell and fall from my face, rearranging the shape of the riverbeds, always tumbling forth to greet the sea. What is left to do but worship these tears made possible by this incredible aching body, instrument of earth and something more than that too…stardust and frequencies of light and sound, readying myself for the dissolution of all ideas, karmic patterns, distortions and energies too heavy to carry.

Our inner navigation systems must recalibrate to what is happening now, not what we thought would happen, or what we want to be happening, but what stretches out before us in present time. Disorientation can reorient us if we can regain a sense of our inner landscape. Find our feet. Find our hands. Find our spine and sense what is there. Noticing what happens. Bones heavy, muscles soft. Settling and allowing the golden wave of our own energy to return back to us, warming what is ready to thaw in its own time. Vitality returning, clarity bubbling up from a hidden spring just on the other side of a no-longer-so-certain habitual response that is changing shape right below the surface. ✨♾️✨

Supportive Healing Practices

Above you will find a document full of supportive healing insights and practices I have compiled. It is probably most easily navigated on a computer!

For reference, the introduction is pages 1-9; the practices portion is pages 9-30; and pages 30-34 are recordings (energy healing, breathwork, and playlists for dance and movement.)

If you have received a version of this as a client in the past, you will notice it is updated; I will continue to update it over time. Feel free to share but please do so with context–meaning I would ask that if you share it, please share my name and website as well. Thank you, I hope this serves you and whoever needs it well. Many blessings on your path always! 

Cleansing Prayer of Protection

Mural of the Holy Mama from a recent adventure to San Francisco

How’s everyone doing? Moonbeams got you worked? This full moon in Pisces has something else!! It’s been a deep deep deep summer, eh? beautiful healing opportunities…to me it has felt like unraveling threads that we have been working on for years… no going back to the patterns that we’ve untangled from…if we want to live honestly. Beaming love to all the bodies and spirits deep in the healing waters. Find the edges, find the container, feel where you are held. The edges of your skin, the soles of your feet, palms of your hands, center of the earth…call in your support systems and as you feel safe enough to—surrender to the release process that is already occurring.

So back to the purpose of this post— I wanted to share this prayer again! I may have shared it before, or a variation of it. I change it as needed, and bring the energy through my body through any simple ritual that feels good—whether that is cleaning, meditation, walking, gardening, taking a flower essence or tincture, writing, rhythm + sound, burning incense or herbs, salt & oil body scrubs, bodywork, touch, lighting candles, breathing, intuitive movement such as dance, shaking or slow unwinding that engages the limbs (physically or visualization) to help clear, ground, embody the intentions, and direct the energy as it moves. Bringing Spirit through the body so there is a felt sense of wholeness & communion, where true strength, beyond patterns of domination, can emerge.

I call upon my Spirit, Guides, Teachers, Sacred Guardians & Holy Protectors, benevolent ancestors, benevolent elementals and guardians of the land— through the Unified Field through which all is made whole—I thank you and ask for your presence, assistance, and protection now.

That any and all energies not of love return to the Source of All that is, now. That any distortions, extractive and exploitative energies, known or unknown, across time and space, return to Source now.

That any and all contracts or agreements no longer relevant or resonant for my individual or our collective well being dissolve here now. I call all of me back to me now. Anything I am holding in my body or my field that is not mine to carry, I release and return to Source now.

May any and all energies that do not emerge from love dissolve here now, fully and completely, easily and without effort. May all parts of me, and all beings and their parts who I am in relationship with, be filled with the healing power of Divine light so they may find their own pathway home. May any aspects unwilling to emerge from hiding be protected against any actions or intentions of harm inward or outward. May all energies and patterning that perpetuate harm find a path of return—to the earth, to Source, to be transmuted for the highest good of all.May joy, love, truth and beauty expand through every cell and may my presence be a healing to all I am in relationship with.

Thresholds

There isn’t a savior beyond our own understanding that we are part of an eternal river’s rising and falling. There is no easy answer or endpoint, just the willingness to pay attention, to feel, and to trust the wisdom of our experience. The more powerful we become, the more we are asked to kneel closer to the earth, and let go. The more we allow energy to move through us without resistance, the more we experience moments of radiant fullness, connected to our place in the web, humbled by all that is beyond our control.

Our hearts will not stop their work of breaking, but we will stop hoping for that anyway. Often the most we can do is honor the water’s wise path, sometimes bone dry, sometimes teeming with life. I trust my body as an extension of the earth, my vision as an extension of her knowing. I trust her cycles and I trust my own. I listen to what calls me further in. I trust presence, the movement that spirals out from stillness. I listen to what I don’t understand. I become the river who always meets the sea.

We are not initiated once, but thousands of times. Many of our leavings and arrivals are barely noticeable, but we notice, and we are changed. We are led, continually, over thresholds we cannot plan for. Divine order changes its tune as we sing along. And the chords we strike, just by being, create cosmic waves. Barely perceptible or earth-shaking, our energetic signatures exist here as an essential part of our collective experience. As we empty the vessel of striving, we make space for what forces desire to come alive through us. A welcoming. An opening. A walking through. We are merging worlds, learning to tone in resonance with Mystery, breaking contracts with which we no longer agree, weaving our stories one revelation and one question at a time. One toe always in the water, inviting the ceremony of entering.

The soul is not static. Spirit shifts. Bodies soften and harden with the tides of time and experience. We are called to crack open wide, not for ultimate bliss but for ultimate presence, as we leave behind the comfort of knowing and enter the realm of soul that begins at the edge of the woods, at the precipice of comprehension.

There are some thresholds that will ask you to step back before you cross them. The guardians of the sacred will assure you—it’s ok to put one foot behind the other, to exist quietly and thoughtfully in your own skin without proof to the world that your stillness has worth. To breathe in and receive the miracle of this moment’s arrival. You will know when it’s time. You will remember the feeling of forward movement, and you will trust it because you have listened, and felt, and waited for the moment the wave swells around your spine, fluid matching fluid, currents carrying you to shore without pulling you under.

Your spirit will ask your body why it believes the pause and recoil isn’t exactly the movement needed for the way forward. If you resist the question, forcing your way through because the pause feels unbearable, you will be reminded to respect discomfort, until you have sat with it awhile, watching it slither snake-like through old grooves in your system, really listening to what it wants you to know.

If you have ever loved anything, or seen the eternal from behind human eyes, then you know fear and beauty can walk hand in hand. And you know that love can be there too, and that feeling the enormity of aliveness doesn’t make you anything less than honest and brave. If you are a bricklayer or bridge builder, unearthing is the first thing you must do. After that, it’s befriending winds and floods and earthquakes, so you understand the way it may go at some point down the line, building deliberately with danger in mind, hands dark under a moonless sky, strong with feeling, gentle with knowing.

Touching what is will bring you through the doorway of home, where everything changes because you have. And when body turns wise as stone, water will find its way slowly through the cracks to remind you what else you’re made of. Don’t be fooled by stories that are not your own, pretending to have answers you haven’t touched for yourself. Keep listening. You will be carried. It is enough to dance in the dark until the first sliver of light illuminates what is growing. It is enough to tend to the glow of embers until they catch themselves alight.

Space-Making, Energy Hygiene and Ritual

For more writings and offerings on this subject, you can scroll down or click here:
Major Arcana VIII: Strength Part Two
Major Arcana VIII: Strength
Simple Ritual: Every Space an Altar
Prayers for Our Times

In these times of massive unearthing, we have all been contending with humanity’s history of shadows and false power plays that have harmed our relationships to ourselves, the earth, and each other. It also becomes more common for us to be confronted with visitations of dense energies—whether it’s our own unresolved pain, ancestral wounding, or the energies that attach to those wounds. It can be disruptive and confusing to experience, but excellent for practicing our work as energetic boundary artists and potent creator beings.

We are all processing big waves of energy that are nothing less than transformative—both external waves and the internal waves that rise up to meet them. It can feel overwhelming to the body & field, and often very confronting as what may have been hidden or suppressed for survival becomes lit up in our bodies.

Whether it’s an energetic distortion meant to be confounding, or it’s intentionally directed healing energy, upon relating to it we will face old patterning that has been roiling under the surface but hasn’t been quite tangible yet. There is a vulnerability in transformation, and that’s ok. It’s also where our skills can be honed, and where we can find true strength—with a solid support system and a dedicated practice to lean into.

Because you’re embodied, you have a powerful say! If an energy, a person, or situation feels off, you get to say no, I cannot and will not make space for this. You can parse through the relational complexity and layers of what is true in a larger context later; trust your instincts and get your space now. With self-granted permission to stand fully in your own energy, you may eventually move beyond any need to blame or create enemies out of other complex humans or energies. Take all the time needed. Being able to choose is the healing.

You can engage in what you feel safe enough to engage in. You can learn to discern what is yours to carry and what is not. This is all a part of the process of gaining capacity to hold more of you, from a foundation of self trust and acceptance, outside of any expectations or energies that are not supportive of your full expression.

You are capable of summoning tremendous strength & simultaneous softness. You can grow your capacity to integrate the most tender parts of you, that have dwelled mostly in shadow, by becoming a loving sanctuary for them. Holding hands with all the inner-yous, and the grand expanse of your spirit, all the love of the infinite golden sun vibrating in every cell.

You are in charge of yourself and responsible for maintaining healthy boundaries, which requires good energetic hygiene. Staying in your own energy and committing to your grounding rituals, whatever they may be, is an essential practice. There is no perfection, just presence.

A good first step when met with intensity (whether from within or externally or a combination,) is simply acknowledging, sensing and noticing what is coming up for you—not necessarily the story about it, but how it feels in your body. This begins the process of stewarding the physical through energetic shifts, becoming the embrace that can hold you through it.

Notice the color, texture, or quality of the energy present; maybe you also see or sense a picture associated with the sensations that you’re noticing. Notice what happens to the energy or picture of the energy as you notice it—Ask if it belongs to you. This ability to hold enough neutrality to “see something for what it is,” even if you’re seeing or noticing just one perspective now—is everything. This is the beginning of learning to discern what your own energy feels like, and what is yours to work through versus what isn’t your responsibility to hold.

I encourage you to create a prayer, maybe a written one, or a spoken one, a painted one, one you can dance or sing, or all of the above! An invocation for space-claiming can be fierce, or gentle, and it will change as you do. What matters most is that you feel it in your body and let it come alive through you. Creating a ritual around the prayer helps it settle into your cells. A ritual can be as simple as a breath, a movement, a lighting of a candle, a tone, a word, the creation of an altar or laying on the ground and feeling your body itself as an altar….a solidification of an inner desire, or deep pulsing need made physical through a simple action.

I say variations of this prayer below, channeling it depending on what is needed & what is present. I engage in ritual of some kind whether that is cleaning, meditation, visualization, walking, gardening, taking a flower essence or tincture, writing, burning sacred wood or herbs, salt & oil body scrubs, lighting candles, breathing, touch, intuitive movement such as shaking or slow unwinding that engages the limbs (physically if possible, through visualization if not,) etc. to help me clear, ground, embody the intentions, and direct the energy as it moves. I bring in color, rhythm, and sound frequencies as I am moved to. My intent is bringing the spiritual through the physical until there is a felt sense of communion, where true strength, beyond programs of domination, can emerge.

I call upon my Spirit, Guides, Teachers, Sacred Guardians & Holy Protectors, benevolent ancestors, benevolent elementals and guardians of the land— through the Unified Field through which all is made whole—I thank you and ask for your presence, assistance, and protection now.

That any and all energies not of love return to the Source of All that is, now. That any distortions, extractive and exploitative energies, known or unknown, across time and space, return to Source now.

That any and all contracts or agreements no longer relevant or resonant for my individual or our collective well being dissolve here now. I call all of me back to me now. Anything I am holding in my body or my field that is not mine to carry, I release and return to Source now.

May any and all energies that do not emerge from love dissolve here now, fully and completely, easily and without effort. May all parts of me, and all beings and their parts who I am in relationship with, be filled with the healing power of Divine light so they may find their own pathway home. May any aspects unwilling to emerge from hiding be protected against any actions or intentions of harm inward or outward. May all energies and patterning that perpetuate harm find a path of return—to the earth, to Source, to be transmuted for the highest good of all.

May joy, love, truth and beauty expand through every cell and may my presence be a healing to all I am in relationship with.

Changes that happen when we practice energetic clearing, grounding, and space-making:

  • We give ourselves space to unwind, settle, & find regulation in the ebbs and flows of our body’s responses. We are able to practice self acceptance, compassion, and nonjudgement as we notice what is up for us.
  • We lessen the charge around heightened emotional energy that may create an urge to shame, blame, fix, rescue, hope for rescue, or feel an energy or a person as an enemy. This removes the urge to punish, to perpetuate entanglements, and also engage in relating in less than authentic ways, like fawning, in order to feel safe. Nervous system healing is deep work that occurs over time, as we feel secure enough to move out of self protective responses that keep us in cycles that are draining and sometimes retraumatizing to the original wound (abandonment, rejection, war dynamics, etc.) No judgement on what has kept us safe, just an opening into something more nourishing for all.
  • The action of choosing where we put our energy is immensely healing. Many ruptures occur because there wasn’t a choice available except surviving the moment. What is harmed in relationship is healed in relationship. That doesn’t mean we can always heal in the same relationship where a rupture occured, but there is an opportunity for repair when you choose yourself, & engage in relationships where loving presence is available. We get to practice saying “no” and saying “yes”—where protection is less about building a fortress and more about clearing out the old & amending the soil to create an enriching environment for something new to emerge.
  • Boundaries are a practice for greater ability to move, think, feel, and exist more freely. They help us see ourselves and others more clearly too.
  • As we grow our capacity to hold ourselves through the waves, we grow our capacity to hold others too. Boundaries “I am available for this/ I am not available for this,” do not have to be restrictive, although if we don’t have practice with space-making, the pendulum can easily swing from fully open to fully closed. Grace, time, space, titration, and love are needed here, becoming more fluid than rigid.

Ourboros

I love this time of year! Season of Metal in Traditional Chinese Medicine, Season of the Witch, Season of the Underground Songs and Letting Go and Lifting Veils…A time to…

Go back to your own primal ground of being. Go back to bone deep knowing. Conjure up the dregs of patterns you thought were dead, and let them give you a way to find radiance within you have never known before. Layer by layer, breath by blessed breath, destroying softly to reimagine fiercely. Opening to what is growing that you do not yet know, but will soon remember. We return to familiar places in new ways to reconfigure the blueprint. It can be enough to start with trimming the withered parts without uprooting entirely. But there is a time to uproot, unwind, unravel. What feels most real in this breath? Slowly now. Inhale grace, exhale force. What feels true now? A sacred process cannot be pushed past its present rhythm. Death brings life brings death, and sometimes it’s hard to tell if you’re dying or being born. Just keep going.

Go back to the beginning, which will ask of you a descent into the many layered depths. Keep eyes open for the snake, whose shape from above looks like a dragon, like the one alchemists spoke of, who eats his own tail, whose wholeness is inherent in his existence. The end is the beginning is the end. We are the keepers of all that is and ever will be. It is the task of embodiment to shed what is outgrown from our cells, so we may create & be present for what is to come. The healing of the planet and humanity will always begin as an inside job, one that extends into ever widening circles. We were made for it. Just keep going.

Go back to the beginning, which may also be the end of another beginning. Go back to the vast field of listening, where you can hear the sound of unknowing, how grasping gives way to merging. May you know your unchanging light and shifting shadow as the gift, holding all that you are in reverance. May you grieve how you need to, and howl with laughter. May you feel the weight of the choice you made to be here, & the lightness of all that is possible now that you are.

Returning to the Center

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.“
Wendell Berry

There are ravines at points along the path that narrow our passage and ask us to be deliberate about each step. It may require a lightening of our load or perhaps a pause where we gaze into the steep drop below, dizzy before returning to our center. In these pauses we remember that reclaiming our power means giving up tightly bound ideas about what true power really means. Pushing ahead, past the sensations rising up to meet us, is not always the way. We can of course, if it means protection at any cost. But maybe here we place roots to sky, set the weight down and allow the field to empty. Nestling into the space between here and there, long held notions of identity & dreams of a direction no longer viable can dissolve like salt in water. A cleansing solution made from the dissolution of all ideas, patterns, and energies too heavy to carry beyond this point.

When the world has shifted on its axis, our own navigation system must recalibrate to what is happening now, not what we thought would happen, or what we want to be happening, but what stretches out before us and within us in present time. Disorientation can reorient us if we can regain a sense of our inner landscape again. Find our feet. Find our hands. Find our spine and sense what is there. Noticing what happens when we simply notice. Bones heavy, muscles soft. Settling into being and allowing the golden wave of our own energy to return back to us, warming what is ready to thaw in its own time. What would it feel like to sense your inner architecture in a new way? Vitality returning, clarity bubbling up from a hidden spring just on the other side of no-longer-so-certain certainty and habitual response that is changing shape right below the surface.


Belly Softens, Root Deepens

To shift perspective, we must change positions by noticing the one we find ourselves in. Perhaps a shoulder drops, a jaw unclenches, a belly softens, a root deepens. A breath comes, and goes. A thought or emotion acknowledged drifts to another, one that creates more space in the field, in the sinews, in the fluid between cells. We may adjust back and forth, expand, contract, tighten, loosen—it wouldn’t be art if it were only one or the other. 

We don’t need to land somewhere and expect it to be our final resting place. But without somewhere secure to anchor, a sense of settling in, we wander without clear sight. Sometimes all we see is what is right in front of us, lit by the candle we hold close to the heart. How we nurture this flame, by attention to its inexhaustible existence, determines how well it illuminates on the path ahead. Vision focused inward first allows the unfolding landscape to paint itself as we move forward. What appears before us or within us may not be as it seems as first glance. With deliberate movement across the dangling bridge between danger and beauty, we become subtly attuned to the accuracy our perception, and just how changeable it is. Intentional exploration of what is possible becomes the interplay of sculpting what we desire, and reckoning with what is here for us now.


Sometimes we lasso a star that burns light years ahead of us, and slowly collect its radiance, a bright becoming into the one who patiently awaits our arrival. Each step becomes the next one, colors bloom and shift, swirl and muddle, leave and return. We let transformation take us, anchored to earth body, cosmic body, heart blooming center— rooting and dissipating simultaneously.


We sense what is to come, or what we will become, long before it lands. Follow sensation, play with story, and give enough room to let the story change. Mastery requires critical review of all facets of our experience—we don’t know something until its shape has changed at least a few times, until we have changed shape more than a few times.

I wonder how playful discernment could be? Like juggling two disparate ideas that spontaneously merge into one ball of light, the one we hold in our palms, beaming from our heart, something to embrace, to create with—might this be a way to see that one thing we’ve seen a thousand times, and start to feel, see, sense, and know it in a different way? How would it feel to bring the wandering ones within home? To let all their paradoxical perceptions linger, to hold them, listen to them, and send them off again into the world, sure of the only thing we can be sure of—that they have been loved.

As the Light Returns

Still from Alphaville, 1965

Just here… practicing being human and dancing with what it feels like to be a multidimensional being in a body, like all of us, a force of nature wrapped in stories and sinew and stardust. The dance shimmies us into spaces yearning be explored, touched, held, and loved. Sometimes I go willingly and other times my wise animal body would rather curl up and wait for the storm to pass.

There is no judgement when I just witness the weathered pathways my nervous system is familiar with. Spiraling softly into crevices where it seems nothing could flourish, I notice what happens when courage unfurls its wings, where compassion brews its nourishing broth, where I become the one who soothes the uprising in my tissues, with the help of other bodies, whether tree or sea or human, opening channels of receptivity and release so the impulse to hide or explode gives way to open arms and curiosity.


From the quiet dark, burgeoning miracles. From the pulsing underground, eruptions of light. Ever present reminders of disintegration ride alongside the undulating forces of imagination and sensation. Beholding beauty is a full time occupation.
A body might slowly, gently open an invitation for contraction to dance its way to the light, to be warmed, or grounded, to be seen more clearly and touched more kindly, where it can give itself new names, like grief, or shame, or fear, or uncontainable excitement, all dissolving like salt in the waves when we let it come & go without fighting what is here.

Maybe softening can feel more safe than it has before; maybe today, the body does not feel it can go there. It’s ok. Root in and just be witness to yourself. Our animal body is as wise as our spirit. It does not work to banish any protective response, to make it unwelcome; aliveness is a devotion to a practice of sensing, noticing, and being with. This is a practice of self trust, as our own guide, feeling held by all who are here now, all who have come before, and all who will be. The luminous field welcomes all of us home.

“The light returns, the light goes.” Little by little. As the heart spills over its edges to touch its own vastness, we find ourselves as the unchanging spark amidst all rising and crashing.

The heart can hold all of you, me, us. Call yourself, ourselves, beloved. May we let ourselves receive inside our deepest folds, and give from the depths we are able to offer from, allowing our capacity to shift and change shape. As the light returns, may our own clear-seeing reveal to us what we need to see or be seen by in this moment. May our own clear-sensing reveal to us all we need to feel or be felt by in this moment.

“May you be at peace. May your heart remain open. May you awaken to the light of your own true nature. May you be healed, may you be a source of healing to all beings.” Tibetan Buddhist Prayer

Stills from Alphaville, 1965

Find Your Anchor, Your Golden Thread

IMG_8777
Carried by the call into the unknown

Your spine grows longer against the edge, replacing bone with river rock, eyes with constellations and feet with roots. When it becomes too wide to reach across the churning waters, and it is only you and your old tales wrapped in decaying leaves, find your anchor, your golden thread. Take with you every singing cell and every emptiness you gave a name to. Morning star catches a ride in your hair & all burning thought is ashes now, sinking under the wings of birds. Dance through the labyrinth of a beginning, or maybe it’s an ending, which is just another name for something new. Mysterious child of the divine, fire-breathing creature of the wind, dressed in the waters that were your original home, let yourself be altered at the altar of your own heart—allow the body to know itself as earth and stars, to move itself into whatever shape it desires to take—this stretching is you growing. Your wings are wide, even when the muscles’ memory of whiplash settles into constriction, holding their ground until your unbroken song comes through.

As you are uprooted by the unexpected, you are welcomed by the infinite. Keep moving through—transformation cleanses stagnancy in the mutable river, as you find yourself embraced by your own skin, prickling as the divine guides you to your edges so you can find your center. Lay battle worn swords down in the inexhaustible flame at your fingertips, forging the in-between way. Dullness has no place here—you are carried by the call into the unknown, sharpening your brilliance, treading softly as you deepen in the fertile darkness. Your hands will learn what it feels like to grip lightly to the thread that guides you to the room with windows thrown open, where the sun is always aglow.