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Over the next ten weeks, I will be teaching a course to invite you into yourself in a way that is not explaining yourself, storying yourself into being, egotizing your existence, or avoiding what you don’t want to be with. I know. This isn’t me selling some get fixed quick promise or a guarantee of healing. And yet, when you learn how to become aware of the subtle energies in your, you create choice. And choice is where empowered life begins.

So think about it. Take a risk. Try out 90 minutes of being with yourself in both comfortable and uncomfortable ways. See what it is like to share this with a community of people embodying with you. You might be surprised at the results.

Simply click on this link below to register. From there, all you need to do is show up.

The world is a busy place. There is so much asking for your attention and your time. Spending 90 minutes a week being with your body…some of you might need help with that. That’s why I am starting a 10-week series to facilitate embodiment awareness two times a week.

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Today I am offering you a prerecorded embodiment awareness class. Above is a sample of what I am offering starting July 8th.

And now. DETAILS.

PREREGISTRATION REQUIRED

To register, you can click this button:

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You can also send me an email at mindfullynessa@gmail.com or a message here on substack to let me know what class(es) you plan to attend.

Once you have registered and paid, I will send you a link for the class.

Cost and Payment

• 1 class - $17.50

• 10 classes - or one class per week - $145 paid in advance

• 20 classes - or two classes per week - $220 paid in advance

Payments can be made through Venmo or Wise.

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I look forward to meeting you, sharing embodiment with you, and giving you a chance to experience yourself in a new way.

Starting July 9th, you will have the chance to take a 10-week series of embodiment classes with me. Hopefully this video will give you a chance to decide if you are interested in trusting me with your awakening.

Today’s video is a story that popped out of my mouth during the interview with Bethany. Hope you enjoy.

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Remember, if you are interested, starting July 8th you can choose to join me for a 10-week practice meant to inspire you into embodiment. Details coming soon.

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A Brief History

I have had some sort of breath, movement, energy healing, and meditation practice for over 20 years. Over the years, what I do and how I do it has morphed, integrated, and become. My practice is an alive being, not a stagnant series of stretches follow by an obligatory meditation.

To me, any act of embodiment including yoga, meditation, chanting, or breath work is not about dogmatizing you into another person’s idealized self. The practices I teach and I practice have the goal of creating an empowered self. My goals is to create a sense of acceptance towards the self as it is.

The empowered self is very important for me to state as a core intent because a large part of my embodiment practice uses kundalini yoga techniques. The guru nature of kundalini yoga in the west has always been a huge red flag for me. The guru template has kept me away from sharing my practice. I chose to discover the medicine of kundalini yoga alone rather than become part of a toxic paradigm. I believe this paradigm has shifted and that kundalini yoga is now ready to shift into a yoga of discovery rather than dogmatically accepting an out of date demand.

For those of you who have done kundalini…what I offer has roots in kundalini yoga but it not kundalini yoga as it is taught by many practitioners. I am an energy healer and therapist and I cannot teach anything without integrating my knowledge of energy, healing, and psychological depth into what I offer and how I practice. While kundalini is a base point for what I offer, it is not an identification point. I know from the classes I’ve attended and the trainings I have done, what I offer is unique and cannot be held to only one genre of practice. For those of you who know of my work, it is similar to my brand resistance.

Any healing has to happen in relationship and relationships are always unique and ever changing. An embodiment practice is a relationship to the self. To actively engage in a practice means to be flexible and interested in what is new in the moment of the practice itself.

Reflections on the benefits I have received through my commitment to an embodiment practice.

For me, the benefit of a regular practice has been indescribable. I have changed to my cells in a way I would never have expected and could never have projected. I wrote this list for myself but chose to share it so that others might realize how important time spend with the authentic self and body in practice creates subtle changes that over time snow ball into a whole new way of living.

• During the practice, I can adjust myself or find movement through injuries and pain. I have never injured myself doingmy embodmine practice but I have been injured and my practice has not had to lose its depth or effect.

• The silence that comes through allows me to hear a quieter voice than that of the known mind. This quieter voice comes through often in my regular life as intuition, higher self, and perspective depending on what is going on.

• My consciousness changes between the beginning and end of my practice.

• I experience pleasant sensations in my spine. As a 48 year old person with a significant spinal injury from horseback riding, this is noteworthy. I don’t wake up with spine pain. My spine feels consistently flexible and strong.

• I can shift between nervous system states of being - sympathetic to parasympathetic - within a few breaths. I also feel like I have a choice on what kind of nervous system state I want to be in when I am triggered.

• I have healed my nervous system immensely. There was a point in my life where I could feel my body degenerating from stress. I have not only stopped the symptoms of degeneration but have made active steps back towards consistent nervous system well being.

• My digestive system functions better. I know how to eat and digest in a relaxed vagal state instead of a stressed state of fight/flight/fawn. My body does not have to fight what I ingest because I eat in connection to my sense of fullness and trust in my food.

• My state of being does not always have to be thinking.

• I have a deeper connection to my higher and spiritual self.

  

• I can find my deeper self during triggers and know how to make different choices that cause patterns to not repeat and feel victim-like.

• My observer mind keeps getting stronger and stronger.

• I can feel connection to my body and heart even in moments of great stress.

• The key to a healthy psyche is a witness/experiencer/questioner. The witness self observes the situation one finds oneself in. The experiences experiences the situation, letting the self be immersed in it. The questioner asks what is going on with a curious mind to bring the full self on board with the situation. Moving through sensations and emotions in my embodiment practice has made this tripod of awareness stronger in me.

• I have an ability to tolerate and understand my negative mind cycles without acting on them or reacting to them.

• I talk to my body in the midst of negative sensations and emotions without becoming the negative completely.

• I can access softer emotions and underlying normally unfelt emotions by not tightening into emotions as they arise or thinking into them. I let emotions flow during my practice without story and this means I often find a softer emotion that moves into an “ah ha” moment during my practice when emotions arise.

• I feel like stepping into and out of states of being is a choice. I am not taken up by the current of negativity or overly fantasizing.

• I have a more balanced endocrine system. As a perimenopausal woman, the breath work and energy movement I engage in support my decision to not use hormone replacement therapy. My practice has minimized my symptoms. I allow hot flashes to move through my system during my practice as a release. The emotional stagnation that can lead to rage, terror, or deep grief is caused by a tensing against emotion that my practice teaches me not to do. My all time favorite healing to give to people is a hormone balancer where I connect with the pulse of the thymus gland and bring each endocrine organ into connection to that pulse. During my practice, I do this as an energetic check in and often find that my endocrine system is already in resonance with my enodocrine organs.

• I don’t get as lost in relationships. I can track my needs, my boundaries, and myself more in those tough indiviudal interactions and in groups.

• My insecurities, child self, and super ego do not run my life but are a part of myself I can hold with understanding and compassion. I can actively choose to be vulnerable or engage healthily with shame and guilt as a way of healing my defended self.

• An understanding that I am more than my defenses or disconnections. There are aspects of myself that I thought I would never ever get around or that were just me. For example, I really did believe I was a type A person. Not anymore! Now I know that I can access parts of me that I didn’t realize where even there.

• Improved orgasms in length and strength. I didn’t expect an embodiment practice to improve my sex life but it has.

• Bye bye incontinence. I know this is something any woman over a certain age or having had children has to consider. I can cough, laugh, move without peeing myself.

• Breaking patterns in the moment happens to me all the time. I might start a fight and go into narrative or have a disagreement with someone or maybe even just get judgy in my thoughts and I just have no interest in continuing with the conflict.

• I can sink into the fact of being me without pushing myself.

• My husband and children could probably write a reflective list just as long as this one on how I have changed and become more relational, interested, and in the moment with them.

• I can not just feel but sustain eros and creativity. For a long time I thought I was never going to be creative again (thank you homeschooling 3 children while working). I am once again an active creator of my life.

• Less…less…and even less interest in screens. My reality has become more concrete and real to the present moment. I turn to working on my land and being with people in person or learning something new in order to feel alive in my world.

The foundational step is discovering a multidimentional practice. I am offering a 10-week embodiment practice starting on July 8th. From there, only you can discover the possibility of the unknown you.

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While I will be writing and sharing more about the classes starting on July 8th, please feel free to message me here on substack or email me at mindfullynessa@gmail.com if you need details sooner to clear out your busy schedule.

In all of the imaginings below, the possibility for embodied change comes from an active embodiment practice. Practice creates the possibility for a different experience.

Today I ask you to spend a bit of time with me imagining what it would be like to live your life whole, complete, and empowered.

Healing Repetitive Patterns

Imagine: You have once again experienced something happening in your life that you really think you have done everything you have needed to do to make sure it never happens again. You talked it out with friends, a therapist, AI. You let your emotions flow. You really thought this time you were “healed.” And yet…it has come back again. What do you do? Well duh. You do what you know.

You think more. You reach out to your friends, watch instagram feeds for answers, do all the things to fix you. To know. To tell you how to make sure this pattern goes away once and for all. You feel more, have a good cry, go to a rage room and break stuff. You follow advice, diagnose yourself, and believe other people’s five part solutions. You try to make it all go away again.

Or you decide to try something new.

You engage with the unknown inside your body to learn how to break the pattern. You begin with interest and an open mind. You know you don’t know everything there is about this pattern. You trust the pattern is trying to wake you up to a deeper aspect of your being. You understand your body has answers but don’t know how to listen or don’t let your listening go deep enough to find the mystery of self that is wanting to awaken.

It starts with breathing into the sensations arising in the body as a result of the situation. It gets stronger through an embodiment awareness that can only come from practice, not just desire. A desire to connect deepens the possibilities and allows for engaged interest. You converse with your body, aware that it is going to talk to you through pain, numbness, sensation, emotion, and pleasure.

You let something new emerge that softens you into yourself, that brings you into a wash of relief, that tells you this is how I can live in my body without push, without having to perform or do, but simply through resonance of self in the world.

You feel more secure, more able to handle what comes to you in life.

You trust your body as a sensory being and this trust enables you to break patterns in unknown ways and weather the patterns when they come back.

The pattern itself is no longer about fixing yourself or becoming healed. It is a process of self discovery based in curiosity and trust.

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Conflict and Fights

Imagine: You have a conflict with a partner, best friend, family member that turns into a fight. You are in the thick of it, holding your own, ready to take out your cell phones and compare what you said by text to what he or she said by text to PROVE that you are justified in how you feel. The old resentments and grievances are now front and center and seem completely connected to this new conflict in your mind. Words like “everything,” “nothing,” “every time,” “always,” and never become the currency of communication.

Your transferential wounds emerge in the fight. No one sees you, listens to you, wants you to express yourself. Here is where you get lost in the old and cannot see into the future without the projection of the past getting in the way. The fight deteriorates and you walk away feeling defeated. These patterns are never going to be changed. This is just the way your life is.

Instead…you feel the presence of the past in your fight and you stop for a moment. The charge of the fight feels old, known, and hurtful. You have done this enough times to know how this ends and how you will feel later after the fight. You think something along the lines of “Hmmm. I might be able to break this pattern if I search for something different here.”

You facilitate yourself into breath and movement because thanks to your embodiment practice, it is a reflexive way of being. You find the place inside yourself that is stuck and you breathe into it, move into it, release something stagnant. Suddenly you find a relational hurt, an old need, something softer and unexpressed. Instead of fighting you drop into a more vulnerable expression. You let your true self be expressed. Intimacy develops as you share this deeper aspect of yourself with someone you love. Instead of coming out of the fight mad, detached, feeling defeated; you feel whole, met, seen and loved.

Two Choices

Imagine: You are vacillating between two choices - to embrace something new or stay with the known. The known way of being feels safe in that you know everything about it but also has this flavor of not being right for you, a place where you are dying inside, or a situation that is consistently showing itself to be stressful but it is known and in that you have a sort of security.

The new feels unknown but has a certain allure. You have some sort of fantasy attached to it. A part of you wants to explore this fantasy but the safe known of the other situation has you doubting yourself.You imagine all you can be, how every problem could be solved if only you can make this choice and not carry your old self into it. In this new there is possibility but with that possibility comes insecurity.

You rationalize, make lists, think about your future between one choice and the other. At the same time you convince yourself that either the old way of being is for the best or you create a case against the old choice and demonize it to make sure that you will never need it again. The fantasy in the midst of the old never goes away. Perhaps you do research, make sure you can function in the new choice. Ultimately you either jump into the new way of being with no acknowledgement of the negative or you collapse into the comfort of the known and choose to stay where you have been.

Funny how this whole time the body has been talking to you and you either missed it completely or ignored it as being irrational. Perhaps you feel anxiety, stress, collapse, depression, or tension every time you walk into the reality of your known life. Perhaps you feel scared or even terrified towards what you want. Either way you dismiss any negative feeling that feels new and favor the uncomfortable negative feelings that you have lived with your whole life.

An embodiment practice means you don’t deny this sense of self but dive into it, feeling into all of who you are in both scenarios. You make a choice with your whole being instead of enslaving yourself to the known past or jumping disembodied into an unknown future.

All of these imaginings have similarities. Breaking patterns, self discovery, a bridge between body and mind.

You have to practice to know how to engage differently with yourself in the moments of trigger.

This is why the foundational step I am offering is a 10-week embodiment practice. From there, you can discover the possibility of the unknown you.

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While I will be writing and sharing more about the classes starting on July 8th, please feel free to message me here on substack or email me at mindfullynessa@gmail.com if you need details sooner to clear out your busy schedule.

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At the end of this series of posts, I will be offering an opportunity for those of you who are interested to either attend embodiment classes online or engage in a hybrid of embodiment classes and group relational processing.

I find myself wanting to cross two worlds - my own private experience of what I know life can be and the everyday struggles of an individual caught up in the rigors of their own minds. The solution I have come up with is quite simple. I have decided to share more of my embodiment practices with my clients during sessions and group meetings in order to enable people to shift out of their minds and into their bodies.

Today I am announcing that anything I create from here until my next evolution of being is going to be based on the intent to bring enlivenment into people’s lives through a deeper connection to the body.

While many of us know that we should be able to allow our bodies to talk to us or that a more fulfilled life requires deeper embodiment, the methods most of us use to do so is research, studies, facts, opinions, media, mind, thoughts, head, mind. To learn how to silence the mind. To recognize thoughts and even emotions as transient states of being. To be able to hold the self as an incredibly complex being made up of many parts. These are the needs behind a fulfilled and connected life. I have a deep desire to teach people how to walk the walk of awakening, not to simply be fixed and live in the paradigm of disease and cold depression.

WHAT DOES THIS ALL MEAN?

Okay. I realize right away that some of my statements are only going to resonate with people who have experienced my work. So I am going to TRY to simplify what I am talking about into a few words.

Think kundalini style movement and breath work therapy mixed with self guided energetic awareness building instead of simple talk therapy. I know. Just that!

Consider the concept of allowing breath and faciliated embodiment movements to bring you into the choice of experiencing the wisdom of the body without the constraints of the ever present mind. Add to this the importance of being witnessed and guided through the experience of the body into a way of being with another person that emerges as a dynamic inter-relational field.

Dynamic inter-relational fields have all those things I’ve been writing about for years inside them - compassion, interest, curiosity, and most importantly aliveness within the unknown. This field has the potential to bring people into a felt sense of relating to support the movement of defense into self and child awareness into the container of an adult mind.

My Own Sadhana Journey

Before I get too caught up in bringing my future intentions into this post, I want to share my past two years in the light of my practice, my own sacred Sadhana (daily practice).

I was first introduced to a kundalini style movement and breath work practice through a mentor decades ago. I loved the practice but never at that point thought of it as a every day need. I used what I was taught when I felt disconnected, stuck or simply tired by the burden of life. I knew that the practice made me feel better in the moment, but in no way did I carry that through to doing it regularly.

My regular practice was mellow - a more vinyasa flow type of yoga with meditation after usually holding a crystal to open me into a deeper state of trance. I saw practitioners to help support me through my body’s injuries and diseases and I met with therapists to support me through my mind’s inconsistencies. I studied and in the course of those studies discovered transformation in group therapy, engaging in elements of the hero’s journey myths, and allowing myself to have breaks from every day life to get centered into my own truth. I assumed that some of my health issues would be with me forever and some of my deeper ingrained mind and defense patterns would never go away.

Somehow in allowing the ordinary life to be present in my healing journey, I let go of demand. I stopped wanting yoga, meditation, transformational groups, and retreats to solve my problems or heal me. Instead I began to see that all of these tools work together to allow me to become me. This drop in to my core self without idealization, demand to fix, or push to be something I’m not happens to also be the core turning point for my own vitalized life.

In the midst of all this shifting, I decided I wanted to get my Kundalini yoga teacher training certificate. Really this was about me wanting to do something just for me. I never planned on teaching, I simply wanted to have more tools for my own practice. Yet the discovery of joy and fullfilment is connected to the daily practice I had to adopt to get my certificate.

The ability to feel satisfied and joyful with my life is intricately linked to my daily practice. It is this that I want to share with you - the transformed me and the possibility that lies within all of us.

Eventually my own relationship to my Sadhana has done what it, I think in its essence, is supposed to do. I have amalgamated the practices I have found a ground in over decades. This is what I seek to teach. These practices that have been invaluable to my own life are what I seek to share.

Over the next few posts, I will be sharing a bit more about my journey and offer a free video kundalini STYLE class for those of you who want to feel into my version of this practice.

At the end of this series of posts, I will be offering an opportunity for those of you who are interested to either attend embodiment classes online or engage in a hybrid of embodiment classes and group relational processing.

Stay tuned.

Know someone who you think wants to become more alive? Share this post.

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Here is what I’ve learned so far:

• Empowerment happens in deep knowing, not loud action.

• Being absolutely clear and coherent creates boundaries without a need for fight or words.

• Differentiation and individuality can happen while simultaneously feeling deep connection.

• The unexpected can simply happen.

• Digesting the senses is kind of like being a breatharian that also enjoys food.

• Emotions are like google maps for the heart and soul.

• Self value is built through existence not accomplishment.

• Acting on intuition without questioning it creates trust.

• The unknown feminine as a companion to everyday life is terrifying!

• The simple act of being can become nourishing. Sit still. Wait. It will come.

• The feeling of flow in the body is a sensual form of self care.

• The support that exists in the universe is bigger than a tiny human brain can imagine.

All this after four weeks. I am now completely hooked into discovering my everyday feminine.

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I am pretty sure it is obvious to anyone who is observing the power in the world right now that its just a little bit…imbalanced. You can use other words to describe what’s going on that are more incendiary and disconnected but does that really help anything? Does talking about what’s going on, separating the self from reality, or reacting in intense forms of separation really support anything but the imbalanced power? Today I am focusing on one aspect of the solution - embodying into your femininity as an everyday truth.

One of the super powers of femininity is its ability to differentiate without contest. This is because the essence of the divine feminine is compassionate acceptance. Right now the world at large is too merged with the imbalanced masculine (greed, power, wealth and all distortions of the masculine) to understand that what has to change internally is not to attack but to accept with an answering power of connection.

Think of the phrase “fighting fire with fire.” When life gets scary, our human inclination is to react with the same energy that is scaring is. Community is found in acts of separation. Blaming, hating, judging, feeling superior, not tolerating, avoiding, feeling confused…the lower self grabs on to pretty much anything it can when society does not feel stable. The impulse to react within the known has to shift into a willingness to swim into the depths of mystery. Only in the differentiated unknown can we find a sustainable solution.

Yes there are problems within patriarchal paradigms. Women need to find their voice. The weak and underprivileged need to stop being oppressed. I have literally never heard someone talk about any of these topics without embracing the masculine. Fighting against men or intolerance. Identify as a feminist. Judge the oppressors. Identify the self in polarity. The known safety of the masculine continues to control our reactions and interactions.

The energy of the masculine is what we know. It’s mostly yang with a little bit of yin. There’s value in push, the outward flow into action. It exists all around us as the currency for our culture, our society, our basic needs, our work, our way to relate. We are raised in masculine constructs and taught to behave in the masculine. Our structures are prevalently masculine. It is the role of the masculine to contain the feminine in a safe way and allow the feminine to flourish under its being. Control has taken over.

The energy of the feminine is not lacking in our lives, it’s just not as easily accessible. It’s yin with a bit of yang. It is discovered in stillness and depth. It yields while also staying true to what it is. The feminine is abundance through the current of loving compassion. Femininity is presence without action, emotion with flow, clarity through acceptance. Femininity needs the boundaries of masculinity just as much as masculinity needs the clarity of femininity. One does not exist without the other. Our structures allow for femininity but tapping into it does take a conscious disconnection from what is comfortable.

The Nature of Femininity

The divine feminine has a specific energetic that is very different than the male. It is found in the yin, the depths of darkness and water, the flow of abundant life and creation. But remember the symbol of the tai ji, the grand ultimate. Within the yin there is yang and within the yang there is yin. To be feminie is to trust the masculine, to rely on it, to rightfully use its nature, to allow flow between the two dynamic forces.

陰 yīn

The Chinese character yin depicts the shady side of a hill. Cosmologically, yin is synonymous in its characteristics with 道 dào (the way) , in that it is the soft, receptive, and quiescent aspect of life. In humans, our storehouse of primordial yin is the ocean out of which all of our manifestations in life are drawn. Yin is the basis of the bones and the nervous system, which may be thought of as deriving their strength and integrity from our primordial source ... Yin comprises the physical substrate of the body.

Lonny Jarrett - Nourishing Destiny

Because of how effortlessly available so many of our social constructs are, the feminine has to get loud for us to yield to it. The masculine supersedes our default way of being and the feminine occasionally overpowers it. Anyone who has either experienced the process of natural childbirth or natural death has witnessed the power of the divine feminine. The waiting. The terror. The unknown arising. The beauty incarnating. While it is easier to open to the vast power of the feminine in the midst of great transitions, it is also terrifying.

Is our culture imbalance calling loud enough to invite you into choosing transition?

Are people ready to start to bring true feminine energy into their every day lives?

I’m not sure. What do you think? I think it’s time to embrace a leap of faith.

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New experiences are how shadow mending is verified. In relation to the world at large right now I wonder if something new is growing within the obvious repeating patterns of war and hatred. Doing shadow work means creating embodied change. The unfamiliar can only arise through recognition. I’m questing…is the everyday feminine already awakening? We as a species may be expecting something more profound, more grand than the simple invitation to embrace into the nature of stasis.

Who among us is ready to bear the foundation for actual lifestyle change is the world’s current uprising of shadow? The world simply needs more people to hold a cornerstone of support for human evolution. Those who feel called may have to be to alone for awhile to awaken those who can’t make the shift. Feminine power needs to be uprooted from our own psyches and embraced as more than a want and more than a masculine overlay. Femininity has to become a right. A need. A way of being. Only through this will we discover embodied equilibrium.

Take note here that I said PEOPLE. Not women. We have two currents in our body and you can consider them however you feel comfortable philosophically - light/dark, yin/yang, divine/evil, and what else? Male/female. The power imbalances we are seeing in the outside world directly reflect our own inability to balance power currents in our own bodies, in our relationships, in our work, and in our lives. The effects of these imbalances are merely rippling outward to affect society, culture, jobs, politics, lifestyle, relationships. The world needs to acknowledge that wholeness is not actually based in duality but rather our ability to create connection from separation.

The feminine is not perfect. It is an aspect of the fractioned whole. Imbalanced feminine power would be a different kind of toxicity if left to run unhindered. The movement that the shadow is seeking is a return to a state of connection, not another imbalance asserting itself as the answer. Femininity is not about winning. It is about being. It thrives in expressing. It is grounded in deep knowing. It is slowness in a fast world. It has compassion for hatred. It is security within insecurity. It’s the spiral that is asking you to wind itself into your life.

The thread that makes this whole dynamic difficult is that masculine energetics have overtaken what we believe to be structured reality. Can you imagine a doctor simply telling you “I don’t know” and sitting with you in the discomfort of that? Could you have patience for a teacher who asks you to find the solution to a problem without telling you how to find the answer? Would you trust a boss you asked you to motivate inside yourself without giving you a deadline? Who would you be without people in power telling you who you are?

We are more comfortable letting the feminine in as SHOULDS in our lives. Structures and facts are the foundation for how everything functions in the world. Many of us know that the answer to balance is in the feminine but choosing it feels so dissonant to real life that we just give up and succumb to what is easiest. This is not a victim statement in my mind. This is a simple surrendering to the current of the real. It is succumbing to what is accessible.

Embodying feminine currents in life is going to feel like work. It is understandably terrifying. It will feel like giving up, breaking down, losing at first. If it wasn’t so scary, more people would be doing it already. My question for you is, can you be good enough here and simply try without expectation? Can you let your feminine arise without an agenda?

We spend a large percentage of our day in the imbalanced masculine field of yang, push, struggle, fight, act, engage, do. Simply being on a screen is draining. To actively come into balance, you have to actively seek and embrace the everyday feminine. Eventually you will get comfortable enough with it to let it leak into who you want to be as an everyday self instead of who you think you SHOULD be.

Embodying the feminine in theory isn’t work but…every had a baby? I think for now we all just need to admit that it needs to be a bit hard. It should feel against the grain. It won’t feel natural and easy to let the energy of the feminine run as a balanced current in our bodies. The masculine is what we know. It’s how we’ve been not simply raised but how we’ve conditioned to engage with life. Our self identity is so wrapped up in masculine energetics that we cannot just undo years of training. We need the masculine but with less overdrive.

Beware the Trap of Idealization

Idealizing the feminine will make the everyday feminine harder to embody. Our everyday flawed human selves can practice engaging in feminine currents. Femininity can destroy just as much as it can create. Balance is never going to come through the destruction of the other, but through acceptance of the other in a field of universal understanding. We live in a world where the mix of dual energy exists to give us clarity on what wholeness feels like. Too much of one is just as diseased as too much of the other. Every person’s balance has to be uniquely discovered and expressed. Letting go of expectation and allowing ourselves to curiously explore the energetic of the feminine is part of how to heal the rift we currently have within us and around us.

My personal idealized feminine is Amma. Here is this deeply embodied feminine heart of a woman who travels the world giving free hugs! It does not matter who you are, what you’ve done, or how you show up. Amma freely embraces you with all of her loving soul. Here’s the thing. I have a husband, children, a dog, cats, farm animals. If I embraced that kind of being all the time my chickens would live in my kitchen and my children would have never moved out. I personally would struggle with that much giving because receiving is a life lesson for me. To know Amma exists and humans have that potential is deeply grounding for my faith in humanity. But I can’t be her. I have to be me and me is going to be type A sometimes and overly controlling other times and disconnected at points. I’m not a saint. I’m just a human trying to find balance in the life I lead.

I remember years ago I idealized communal living. I wanted to step out of the money making system and live in a world where communities of people cared about each other and let go of the exhausting striving for money and success that we consider the threshold to cross in growing up. The community living experiment, for me, was an epic failure. Ironically it was because all the people I was trying to do it with were raised as capitalists and no matter how hard we tried none of us could get out of the “me” mentality enough to actually nourish the whole. Decades later I live in a country that understands the value of the “we” and the “me.” I found a structure that represents balance. It took awhile. I had to both step out of my idealism and also embrace truths of human nature. I didn’t need to reinvent anything. I simply needed to expand my seeking.

Committing to the Everyday Feminine

Now that you’ve read my theoretical thoughts. Let’s move into the actual practice of embodying the feminine as a lifestyle. Remember. There’s no need to invent anything. Merely expand your seeking.

All of those lurking shoulds come into play here. Get familiar with your own. Here is a list to consider.

• I should use social media less.

• I should slow down.

• I should not base my self worth on what I do but rather who I am.

• I should be better at not losing myself to other people.

• I should know who I am.

• I should trust my emotions and let them guide me.

• I should meditate.

• I should think less.

• I should be more present with my loved ones or my children.

• I should be more loving.

• I should receive support better.

• I should feel abundant.

• I should be more sensual.

• I should embrace being vulnerable.

• I should be more creative.

• I should trust my intuition.

We all do actually have feminine energy lurking in us waiting to be assimilated in our daily life, our work, our self identity, and in our relationships. The feminine has been conditioned out of our default way of being. Healing modalities and concepts tend to embrace the feminine because being out of balance is the source of so many of our emotional and physical dis-eases. To rediscover our femininity, we have to step towards engaging in trying out the shoulds that work for us until they become natural for us.

To consciously step out of the flow of life into the deeper you involves a rebirth, a redefine, a rework, an exploration. Maybe you don’t like to meditate but you love laying down on the ground in the sun, listening to insects and birds. That could be your practice. Perhaps you like to stare into your phone for hours of every day not thinking. Experiment with thought free time without the phone. A tendency to freak out emotionally but not have emotions when “functioning” could be a sign that your doorway into the feminine is to let yourself have your every day emotions. Do you see why I write that the doorway into your own unique feminine has to be discovered by you and no one can tell you how to do it? It is as complicated as you are.

As you start to embody the everyday feminine, your lifestyle is going to change. What you define as your work is going to shift. Who you are and how you express yourself will become something previously undiscovered. What noruishes you is going to be different. Needs will be re-identified. Life as you know it will change. You will be more free to be your whole self.

The everyday feminine is going to feel outside of social norms. For instance, crying in public or at work. Can you imagine feeling safe enough with your emotional state to express and not suppress? Notice right now what restrictions your brain is already coming up with to justify NOT doing this. This is your conditioning into the masculine structure of being. Embracing the feminine is a subtle act of revolution - to allow space for a balanced sense of self to become part of the cultural real.

Consider the journey I am inviting you to adopt through the following poem:

Yang-Yin Poem

By Kate Lightstone

The fighter in me taught me to fight
Taught me to hang on when the Sun was too hot
the fields too dry
the water too little

The fighter in me taught me not to let things lay;
to pick up sharp, broken pieces
and handle them with grace
so that I may piece together a reflection
I understand

The warrior in me showed me that I can defend this temple
a fortress impenetrable
that can stand on her own
no you many not hold my hand
no you may not help
I can do it
I can do it

My fighter grew tired
pushing walls out around me
so far out that eventually a beautiful moat appeared
that no friend nor fiend could wade through

I grew lonely
the warrior tired of pushing
my fighter tired of the fight
my soul so thrust in overdrive
I recognized no part of me

I grew silent
the warrior grew sleepy, body forced into rest

and in that space
small stirrings of my womb began to whisper

I could fight no longer
but I could write

I could fight no longer
but I could sing

I could push and climb and scrap no more
but I could lift paint to a canvas and my voice to a note
and begin to pour a soft kind of salve onto the walls I had so steadfastly built

And when I believed I was losing sight of the Self that I knew
painting the walls with softness
A thousand tiny flowers pressed up gently through the soil
where I’d waged my last battles and whispered:

“Give us a chance to grow”

What could I build when I was not fighting?
What could I grow when I was not tearing down?

What could I unleash into the world that would heal more wounds
than any walls could have prevented?

I did not know.
And so the flowers whispered on:

What if you were soft?
What if were gentle with yourself
the way you are with children
What if you gave that little you
a chance to grow?
what would you know?

And so I did what scared me most —
I lowered my bridge
crossed the moat of my own making
and walked out towards what I had avoided for as long as I could remember:
Companionship
Exposure
Connection

I will always have a warrior’s spirit
in my nature
in my blood

But I now choose to create from my experience
a path for teaching
no walls of mud

Although at times I try to hide
within the confines of my fears
I choose move forward
open by choice
guided by womb-stirrings
growing at the borderlands of love
I show up here
I am here
I am here

Eventually we all will be called into the feminine. It is present all around us and supports our presence on this planet. Perhaps you already know of a practice that brings you into your feminine being. Maybe you want to play and explore your way into having more. Trust yourself. Find your path. Create more balance. The world needs your presence.

Meditative Offerings

I am giving you two meditations to facilitate tapping into female energy. The first will allow you to feel into your feminine with the safety of the masculine binding it. The other will allow you to feel into your imbalanced feminine without boundaries.

Here is a meditation into flow with balance. For this meditation you will need to be lying down. Feel free to add some zest to it by being outside on the ground or as close as you can get to it.

For the second meditation, sit in cross legged position or a chair with a straight back. You need to have access to your full body as a sensational being.

Thank you for reading. Feel free to share, comment, and like this post if it speaks to you.

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Think about your life for a second. Think about how you THINK about other people. Think about the thoughts you have around your friend groups, your coworkers, your social groups, your community. The following questions can support getting clarity around your thoughts?

• How do you relate to groups of people as an individual?

• Who are you to people?

• What is your persona around groups?

• Do you feel like yourself or do you feel like you have to be someone other than yourself to be in groups of people?

• Do groups of people drain you, energize you, or have no affect on you?

• What, if any, kind of people do you instinctually feel connected to or want to connect to?

• What kind of people do you avoid connection with?

• What makes you feel like an “us”? Belief systems? Life style choices? Ideals?

• What makes you feel an other as a “them”? Politics? Gender? Wealth? Status? Class?

• What are the personal judgements or beliefs that you hold that allow you to be justified in separating yourself from an other without getting to know them?

  

Belonging

We all want to belong. We also all inherently resist belonging. When I facilitate groups, my main interest is centered on feeling into the participants’ continuum of belonging. Our tensile relationship to belonging is personal and, well, subconsciously devious. The ways we resist belonging define how we relate to the limiting beliefs enmeshed in our “us” versus “them” mentality.

Whenever we find ourselves in a new group of people, we instinctually will begin the process of inserting ourself into the group and also extricating ourself from it. This process is habitual. The insertion and extrication currents occur simultaneously. The desire to belong or not belong is a product of a society that does not know how to truly accept people for who and what they are. We cannot force this socially taught dichotomy into embodied connection without owning our own part in it through exploring our own relationship to belonging over and over again..

It’s pretty obvious that “us” versus “them” is being used by media, politics, religion, and society itself to highlight or evoke a polarization. It seems like culture is more interested in propagating the split than healing it. We justify reasons to be against others, to find the otherness of others, to forget the human struggles that connect us all. Our insecure self secretly and, when we are honest with ourselves, not so secretly likes the world of “us” and “them.” Why do we do prefer separation to connection?

Why is it easier to create a relationship to “them” than it is to remember that we are all interconnected in a universal “us”?

There is a force in the world that wants us to root into an “us” versus “them” reality. One the surface, this is not a force that sees value in the heart or in the interconnection we have to all that surrounds us. This force does not seem to care about the future of our children or a world where we as humans evolve into understanding how to cultivate peace and love. At first thought, the force wants us to align with “them” and, consequently, hate.

Looking deeper, this force is actually inherently positive. Why? We are born with the gift of choice. It is one of the pillars of our existence as human beings. Only in knowing how to separate can we make a choice to unify. We need shadow to arise in its darkest forms in order to cultivate unconditional connection as well as to consciously choose love. The “us” versus “them” creation force is a force of deep trust and surrender into our own choices, no matter how much we may suffer as a a result of what we choose.

Stepping outside of the demand of your own programmed “them” requires an evolution that moves from awareness into a sense of choice.

The Allure of a Closed Heart

Here’s the problem. In reality, there is so much energy and habit that can go into a “them” mentality. A “them” way of being has an energetic building and often a release to it. This process becomes addictive on multiple levels. The “them” has a churning sense of polarity that can be custom built to satisfy your own viewpoint and provides a clear corridor to avoidance of all your fears. It also has the power to connect you to your own wounded disconnection without ever needing to do the work of connecting. In a way the “them” can feel like your own internal algorithm is building a case against oneness or connection that is completely specific to you. Once you have picked your flavor of “them,” the “them” will appear not only in your physical life but your digital life as well. It’s creepy.

Have you ever wondered why we humans tend towards heart problems, circulatory diseases, and blood coagulation issues that get more likely as we age? This is because we close ourself off to our own heart over time. We harden. This is the natural side of living in a society that does not push us into greater degrees of acceptance and any true seeing of other people. We get to categorize into separation and avoid looking without and within.

Before we know it, we are habitualized to a life that is disconnected from our hearts and only aligns with solutions by closing down even more. I sometimes wonder if this is another side effect of our tendency to live in our own heads. The science of heart-brain communication reminds us that no matter how much we want to believe in the brain as THE solution to our problems, we cannot live a healthy life without the input of our heart. Why then do we prefer to listen over and over again to our brain and avoid our heart?

Your closed heart is safe. It is protected. It knows how to relate to the world in black and white. It seeks reasons to stay closed so that it doesn’t have to feel vulnerable. A closed heart would rather yearn for things to change than actually change anything. Intimacy, connection, love, and compassion are easier to desire than to create. To transform and experience trust, deep connection, surrender, intimacy, vulnerability, and to fall into a long term love are all concepts that involve a lot of risk.

Point to Consider: How many times do you tell yourself that the change you desire is too hard for you or will require too much work on your part?

We are more likely to seek out reasons to close the heart and keep it closed. We rationalize how to shut down and shut out others. This is the personal appeal to the “them” mentality that is stronger than our own desire to change. We use this against ourself. We conclude that negative sensations and the feeling of negative emotions is an excuse to shut down our heart. When we find reasons to cultivate a “them” we are aligning with our own inertia in service to our closed heart.

In addition to this lure of the closed heart, there is also the release found in the energy that goes into the “them.” Just feel into your own relationship to any “them.” Start to think about all the reasons you are justified in feeling this way. Let yourself feel the separation and the pull it has in you. As you do this, notice how everything gets activated. Feel how it grows and changes, getting stronger. Feel how good it can feel. Patriarchy, feminism, racism, war, politics, the environment. What gets your negative juices moving? Let yourself feel it here with me now. Feel the plesure. Feel the possibility. Feel the sense of choice.

Your energy is moving, yes. It is moving in a stream, or possibly even a flood, of negativity.

This is not a risky movement for your energy. It is a familiar way to push the world away and to make yourself important. It is a safe way to be separate and not have to go deep or self reflect too much. Your ego can run on this energy for a long time without ever getting sick of your own thoughts. Any negative feelings or uncomfortable realizations can simply get pushed into the abundant energetic stream of “them.” It is so easy! It takes zero mindfulness, no attention or self honesty, and has a scary familiarity to it that can be rationalized and justified in any direction you want to take it. Quite frankly, it is one of the most addictive ways of being we have available to us. It is also so easy to fall into and believe.

Hatred spreads. It grows like a tumor. What may start as a simple seed of thought or an evasion of feeling easily becomes systemically narcotic.

We can feel hatred in a location in the body that doesn’t seem like it has anything to do with our heart. We can hate with our entire being. We can radiate hate. We can run hatred inside us so that it becomes more familiar to us than the truth of our own being. Hatred keeps us safe. It keeps us separate. Hatred keeps us feeling alive while just as loudly killing us off. The more we run hate inside us, the harder it is going to be to trace it to the root — our own beautiful and vulnerable heart.

The Root of Hate

Inside us all is a core wound that says “I cannot be loved for who I truly am.” It’s not a hard wound to end up with. How it originated in any person’s creation story simply tracks back to a time when we expressed our self and someone rejects us.

We all get rejected at some point in our upbringing by someone who is really important to us. It’s not hard to create this wound in a child. As a parent, I’d say it’s actually impossible to NOT create this wound in our children. The moment this wound occurs, we decide that we have to separate a part of our core self from our self. To be loved and accepted, we avoid feeling the wound by creating a “them” inside our own being. We separate from our own innate “I.” How many times we are exposed to feeling unloved or rejected and how we are exposed to this wound defines how potent our sense of “them” and our loss of “I” becomes.

This “them” that forms inside of us is saying that something has to die inside us for our “I” to survive in the world.

We choose hatred because without a boundary between “I” and “them”, we believe we will be killed by the other. Our hatred keeps us in control through choice. Hatred is a black and white vision of reality that does not have any bandwidth for grey. Hatred is choosing death over vitality. Our hatred knows that to close our heart is the ultimate act of avoidance

Hatred is easily referred to as a closing of the heart. I am going to argue it is important to take this easy supposition one step further.

Hatred is a closing off of a relationship to not just our heart, but our soul seat - the place inside us that connects our core self to our heart’s expression. Our soul seat is where our soul’s purpose and soul’s longings reside. Our soul seat is the sacred space of our heart. All of our heart energy feeds into the soul seat. The soul seat brings us into a place of individual knowing of value and uniqueness as a necessary part of the world as it is.

Our soul seat answers the question, “How am I meant to share my soul with the world?” How often do you ask yourself this question? How often do you get an answer?

By opening to hatred we are shutting ourself out from our own soul’s purpose, the reason we are here on the planet at this moment as humans. When we hate, we are rationalizing ourselves into believing that we have to compete to survive. We have to fake who we are to live. We are choosing to be killed off to maintain control and avoid pain. We are creating an eclipse between our truest expression of self and our life.

Self Hate

Whether or not you are more comfortable internalizing or externalizing your hatred is based on how you process the wounds of your soul. The root of all hatred starts within as an avoidance of pain and a subsequent deep rejection of our self. From there, some of us are more comfortable running energy that cloaks the rejection or externally feeds off of it. All hate stems from the initial impulse to hate the self.

For some of us it is kind of like a moment of duh to read think about the root of hatred as self hate. To say that all hatred begins as self hate is more obvious to those of us who are full of self hate. You are the people who tend to internalize hatred into self hate.

For those who struggle to make this connection between hatred and self hate, the comfortable relationship to hate is going to be in externally running of its energy - hating others. You may find you are addicted to the releasing energy of hate. For those of us who disassociate from hate, there is even more deeply ingrained self hatred.

In those of you who disassociate or who cannot admit hate, you are rejecting your soul’s purpose at its deepest level. Your soul path feels like it cannot even be present in the world because of the hate that exists here as a beacon of light.

Whatever combination of hate you have, recognizing the fact that personal work on hate needs to begin within can be a hard reality to swallow. It’s so much easier to demand that the world change before we soften our heart to our soul.

Hating Those We Love

This type of relational hate is more subtle than the habitual hatred we choose in our desire for space and defining self. Feeling hatred towards those we love actually stems from wanting to protect ourself from deepening into an unconditional love. Sometimes we love someone so much that we hate how they don’t give their own self the space or permission we give to them. We love someone so much that we hate the choices that they make to close themselves off to who they truly are.

Sometimes we hate people we love for not being able to deeply see us or actually for deeply seeing us. We want to be valued without taking risk. We would rather hate someone who seems not to value us than soften ourselves enough to ask to be valued. We are afraid to risk the person we love’s rejection and so we suppress our self. When someone deeply sees us, they may believe that we are capable of something we do not believe we can achieve. We may enter into hate because we do not want to admit a truth about ourself that is necessary to open into deeper self love.

Hating those we love is saying, “if I can love you, why can’t you love me?” or “I hate you for not being able to love me the way I love you.” The conclusion we come to is to hate as a response that avoids fully surrendering to the force of unconditional love. Hating those we love is wanting to be seen more. Hating those we love is also sometimes not being able to love someone in their choice to shut themselves off from the love that is shared between you.

Hating those we love can also be a side effect of jealousy or envy. In this case, we are reacting to something that we think we can’t have that someone we love does have. For example, we may hate someone we love for being able to easily engage in self care or for being effortlessly artistic. We may not at first feel this as hate. We may even, in new relationships, feel this as admiration, lust, and a reason to fall in love. Yet as love progresses this same thing we once admired changes to hate when we feel like we cannot have what we want in our own life.

We may wish that the person we love feels more value in their own achievments or pay more attention to what they can effortlessly accomplish. We may want recognition for our own unique skills. All of these negative feelings get confused in wounds and defenses and our inability to understand and appreciate our own precious uniqueness.

The Wake Up Call of Hate

Our inability to be our self or our lack of willingness to know our self is the root of hate. If you think about it, this process inevitable. This process is also completely ordinary in our human world. This is why I believe that there is a connective force of awakening and choice behind it. Hatred is, at its root, pure love. Without it, we will not understand how to choose love and how to express our truest self as love.

Hatred is asking for light. Hatred is begging for your own slowing down and seeking of an inner truth that has been lost to you. Inside hatred is an impulse towards something that is judged and denied. This impulse is often one of vulnerability, innocence, connection, and self expression. This is the place inside us that wants to open to its birthright of loving everything, everyone, and all that is true about the world. The birthright of worth, expression, and value. This is need in its purest form. The need to be needed and the need to be loved.

Often when we try to wake up to hatred, fear comes up. The fear is trying to tell us that we WILL lose ourselves if we open. This is the voice of separation that is trying to keep out change. The ego is strong in this voice. We need to be able to hear the fear for what it is and acknowledge that in embracing it we will actually find ourselves. The fear is convincing us that to risk anything but what we know will cause us pain. The desire to shift hatred means we have to be able to accept this fear as part of a process.

• First, we get to experience the emotion that feels like a choice - hate.

• Then, we have to surrender to the true emotion underneath that is running the hatred itself - fear.

• Last, we get to choose to seek inside and speak to our own heart and soul and ask ourself what we need to be needed and what we need to be loved?

The following is my own meditation with my self hatred. (FYI - Paid subscribers get a guided meditation at the end of this post.)

I feel hatred as a conduit of darkness inside me. My urge to do something about the darkness is impulsively greater than my desire to sit and tolerate it, let alone get to know it. I want to move it, act on it, not be absorbed by it. I want to push away and not feel vulnerable. I must tolerate all of these currents of sensation to go deeper. Hatred is my place of death. Hatred spirals into negative thoughts and emotions all on its own. To sit in the space inside myself that hates is to accept myself as dead. To fight it brings aliveness…but also spreads the death.

Instead I bring in unconditional love and say to this space, “I want to know me here.” I feel a lightening and also a hiding. The feeling is more tolerable. I must remember to withstand everything without making anything bigger than it needs to be. I sense my own loss of innocence, my surprise at how cruel others can be to me. I sense my innate distrust of the world with my pure naive soul. I wonder what care is. I feel acceptance towards my own soul’s vulnerability. I feel a need to be important inside my own heart. I ride the subtle waves of opening and do not ask for my self to be any greater than what I can handle. Flowing through me in this moment is what is, not what I want it to be. I step aside and surrender to the current.

Transformation: Is it Possible?

When you decided that there were parts of you that you needed to hide, disown, fake, avoid, or forget your own path towards hatred began. It is impossible to live in this world without the impulse to hate. To transform it, you have to own how deep hatred resides inside your being. You have to recognize your tendency to push away as an attempt to claim space and also your tendency to reject parts of yourself to avoid pain. Both of these inclinations engender hate.

Hatred that is ready to be transformed will feel like a forgetting of a self. When hatred feels like forgetting, it doesn’t have that addictive quality to it anymore. Hatred starts to feel bad while a coinciding feeling of choosing differently arises. It fills the black hole inside that is our ultimate separation from your own light and path. When you can build your container to feel this type of hatred, you no longer want to nourish it and addictively run it’s energy. Instead you want to awaken to your inner self and acknowledge it’s preciousness. You break the shadow cycle of self sabotage.

The following is a meditation to explore the current of hate inside you. Please Please Please go easy on yourself if/when you choose to do this meditation. It can be pretty scary and dark here. Perhaps you need to invoke a spiritual ally or protect yourself and your space. Do something conscious that shows you are strong enough to withstand the feeling of hatred and explore what it is opening you to. Remember that making the feeling of hate bigger is going to be instinctual and noticing that current without aligning with it is going to deepen your transformation into what else is present.

Breath is the single greatest element you have for not simply living, but thriving.

You can use breath and take it for granted.

OR.

You can choose to use breath to actively engage differently with your life.

Breath is the simplest tool you have at your disposal to shift your reactions, your thoughts, your emotional charges, and your trauma. Breath can be used to regulate hormones, to shift nervous system responses, to clear trauma, to stop repetitve (and totally unhelpful) thought cycles, to engage in the present moment. Breath Breath is simply waiting for you to use it, to be aware of it, and to harness it. The choice is so simple…isn’t it?

Breathe more. Breathe different. Befriend the breath. Become the breath.

So often people want to face their problems with their brain. This same brain that is so busy thinking about how to resolve itself while keeping itself necessary. The brain is coming from a belief that there is something wrong with you. It is the source point of your limiting beliefs. It creates your problems because what it knows is not what you need.

The breath is oriented completely around everything being right with you. This is why it is such an amazing teacher and crucible for change. You may instinctually want to turn to what you lack as a way to create what you want. When you turn to the breath, you are orienting toward what is open, available, and present. The breath is all and more, known and unknown, friend and instigator. It is a gift waiting to be opened and explored.

Today I have a breath meditation for you that is used to transform fear in an embodied way without getting triggered by fear as an emotion. The meditation can be used to remove blocks of stagnant fear inside your body so that you can feel your core more clearly. When fear can be felt as an embodied sensation, you are teaching yourself how to be in positive alignment with your nervous system.

I also have included for you a discussion on differentiating what you consider breath work and what you consider breath meditation. Both are valuable tools for transformation.

• Breath work is used to shift your relationship to your present moment in the midst of life with all of its busyness, stress, decision making, reactions, and work.

• Breath work helps you differention between reaction and self.

• Breath work allows you to make a choice in the moment to come out of pattern and into change.

AND

• Breath meditation creates cellular memory.

• Breath meditation teaches you to engage in alternate states of being through different methods of breathing.

• Breath meditation teaches you how to get out of your head and into your body.

• Breath meditation creates a focal point for your mind so that you can breathe and notice sensation.

Both breath work and breath meditation are essential for transformation, for creating the you that you want to be and living the life that you want to have.

Ok. So here goes. I hope you enjoy this meditation. The side effect of this meditation when done to completion is a complete let go and relaxation of tension and a return to the self.

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Have you stringently controlled your thoughts because you want to make sure whoever reads them doesn’t judge you?

Do you obsessively think positive thoughts because you know that negative ones have more power?

When you get something you really want do you wait for the other shoe to drop?

What’s the common denominator in all of these questions? Authority.

Exploring your unique relationship to the known and unknown aspects of authority key you into the more subtle ways you resist personal empowerment. In today’s world, where power dynamics are coming out of shadow and authority is often in projection, getting clear about your own ability to relate to power is doing the work of the collective.

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The Images

You have been taught how to engage with authority and power. How you have been treated by authority and people with power over you affected your reaction to those who yield the staff of responsibility on your behalf. The unconscious holdings in our family system around authority have formed your ability to feel your own inner authority as trustworthy or something to suppress. All of the authority figures in our lives creates our images around authority.

Can you draw a picture in your mind of what you see when you consider a quintessential authority figure?

• Does authority have your best interest at heart?

• Who do you have to be to deserve a positive relationship to authority?

• Who do you turn into when you no longer care about what authority is telling you?

• Is authority demanding something of you?

The images you have around authority relfects how you react to the different types of authority. Strong authority, weak authority or missing authority all have their own triggers. Where you stand within constructs of authority reflects more how you react than how you feel. Authority invites reaction. It invites us to respond to it.

“Yes.” “No way.” “I don’t care.” “I’ll do whatever you want.”

There are not a lot of creative ways to respond to authority. In fact, choice is pretty limited. The ways to react to authority reflect some version of submit, rebel, withdraw, or surrender. Reactions to authority are a blend of these respnses. They create your own unique response to authority.

Any response or reaction is a version of not you. Self when something is bigger and overpowering you is reflexive and learned. It is you running a program of you. This program is going to differ immensely depending on your upbringing and the level of fear, shame, and guilt you have in your body related to authority.

Response to power is not simply rational or thought based. There is also an unconscious cellular response to power. Survivors of an abusive childhood or sexual trauma perceive authority in anyone who has the same energetic pattern as that abuser. Overpowering authority in young life creates a stronger cellular response to authority - one that is unconscious and overpowering in and of itself. You cannot ignore your cellular response to authority if you want to explore your own empowerment.

Every response to authority is not completely conscious. When you respond to authority with a reaction (or a justification) you have already lost a piece of yourself. Whenever you have lost something of yourself, your ability to be relational suffers.

The unconscious expression of a response to authority takes on a posture that communicates your reaction. A submissive person holds themselves very differently than a rebellious one. You may have separated a piece of yourself away from an authoritative reaction and feel this as disassociation. In the face of authority you react habitually, compulsively, or instinctually. You may even react positively to authority because you distrust or fear some other authority more. No matter how you react, you can be more curious about the reaction itself.

The “Yes” Response

“Yes” reflects an ability or desire to surrender. When you surrender to authority it shows that you trust it. This may seem like an idealized reaction to authority when really it is a symptom of trust and a reflection of positive authority in your upbringing. A “Yes” response may show that your inner authority aligns with the outer authority’s dictates. Yes you are still responding to something bigger than yourself. You are doing it with acceptance because you want to or can. It is always good to question a “Yes” response though because you may be cellularly triggered into complacency and actually desire a more negative reaction that you do not let yourself have.

The “No way” Response

“No way” shows there is a push back and a need for a separation or boundary from an authority. When you rebel from authority you present a false self that is bigger than necessary in order to keep an other part of yourself intact. You pretend on the surface to be strong andsecure. The “no way” response has power without trust. While a clear response is present, your inner reaction may not simply be hidden from the authority but also from yourself. Power can feel like a drug, especially power in reponse to authority. Softening into the place of distrust or fear of authority is more difficult when the “no way” response is present.

The “I don’t care” Response

“I don’t care” reflects a complete giving up in response to authority. Anything you tried in the past didn’t work. The only solution is to go away. When you withdraw, you go away and let authority take you over. Within the withdraw is a loss of self. The self no longer matters because the authority is always going to win over you. Your “I don’t care” may not even have an authentic, trackable thought, emotion or will in the face of authority. Giving up is devoid of life. Another belief takes over and moves into the body letting the power have all the authority it wants. A strong “I don’t care” response may never even realize that another response is possible.

I would consider the “I don’t care” response to be responsible for the cold depression that is so rampant in our society. Cold depression occurs when you have no joy or eros for life. You do your duty. You go about performing life. To the outside world you might be successful and functional. Yet life just feels like a never ending duty to perform. The self is gone and authority has taken over.

The “I’ll do whatever you want” Response

“I’ll do whatever you want” is a learned response that masks your authentic reaction to authority. It has a timid cotowing type of respnse. You submit to authority by tamping down your own spirit and trusting in the collective. You believe you have to get small in the face of authority. This response creates the energy that I call sheeple. It is the place where authenticity is not sought and so the masses become dangerous. Followers don’t care. Followers submit. Followers do not question. Followers trust in people that are not trustworthy. This response is dangerous in that the self is acknowledged as being in service to the authority and does not count as being valuable in its individualism. There is a sense of brain washing in the “I’ll do whatever you want” response. Life is present and interesting to this response, it is just not questioned.

In day to day living, your responses to authority continue to safely navigate you through life. There is no ideal way to interact with authority. What can be present is an awareness of what in you is responding to authority and why. Knowledge of reaction reflects a chance to delve into and explore the deeper images and triggers at work. Eventually inner authority can be assessed based on the stimuli of outer authority.

Inner Authority Check In

Your rections to outer authority created a loss of inner authority. Inner authority is difficult to embody into. Being low on trust in authority itself is totally understandable. Abusive and totalitarian power abounds, as does the power that says, “I know better for you than you know for yourself.” (caretaking power) It’s no wonder your inner authority has been taken over, lost, distorted.

Whether a sense of inner authority is natural or alien to you, the practice of accessing it can be cultivated with patience and reflection. Any aspect of your life where you are either required to do a task without question can create a curiosity towareds inner authority. Boundary issues also reflect a desire to find your authority. These are two easy places to cultivate the practice of a check in.

• First identify the situation. What are you being asked to do?

• Breathe down into your body. Feel your physical reaction to the situation to see if you can identify your unconscious cellular response to what is going on.

• Put the situation, the dilemma, into your belly with breath. Notice how your belly reacts. Does it have tension, resistance, fear? Listen to your core. Stay with yourself. Breathe and listen until the sensation turns into a sense of alignment, ah ha, or release.

• When it does, bring the situation through your breath up into your heart.

• Check in again.

• Does your heart race, hurt, feel panicky? If so stay with your response as sensation instead of thought. Listen. Slow down. Allow something to change.

• Then bring your situation back to your core and check in again. Are heart and core aligned? Listen and breath until you have a sense of coherency between heart and core, body and spirit.

When you know that your inner authority is in sync with your body, you will find your reaction to authority changes. This may require some sort of uncomfortable confrontation with yourself or another. It may need you to act in a way that seems foreign or risky. If you can stick to your true self you are learning how to remember who you are. You can start to align with your inner purpose, heart, and divinity with trust and surrender. You can become free to be you.

Here’s a meditation for you to support the process of finding your own inner authority alignment.

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Think of it this way…

Emotions are energetic in nature. They are supposed to be sensations. When we can have emotions without grabbing onto them with our thoughts, they flow. The express themselves as their fluid selves, moving through our bodies and our consciousness without attachement. When we can be emotion, emotions stay as energy in motion.

When we need to think emotion, we become stagnant. When we think emotion, the trap is getting stuck in story. When we think into emotion, we risk losing the emotion and letting it get trapped inside physical body. This creates pain, disease, and suffering. Shadow emerges not through thinking it into being but through allowing emotion to surface and flow.

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Alive people feel alive through feeling emotion. They accept emotions. They let every range of emotion be a part of their communication with the self. There is no “bad” emotion. There is simply holding onto emotion too tightly when we do not know how to let emotions flow. I want to teach you how to let emotion be sensation. This is the essence of my embodiment practice teachings.

We need to spend more time embracing our energetic nature to avoid having our physical nature weigh us down and consistently dampen our experience of being alive. Embodiment occurs when we can welcome our true nature into our physical body. When we can allow ourselves the freedom to be energetically alive, we connect with the vitally alive world around us.

It’s weird (or at least to me it is) how so many modalities of energy healing require some sort of attunement or perfection or idealization to prepare oneself to practice it as an art. We shouldn’t need to be upgraded to do any sort of energy healing. We are energetic at our core nature and physically human as our secondary nature. To tap into our energetic self is not work and definitely does not need to be idealizied.

We simply need to be able to understand that we are not as strongly physical as we believe ourselves to be. Our thought oriented self can be put to the side. The more we can practice being energetic, the more potential we have to let emotions be a tide that run through our bodies instead of a control mechanism for our behavior.

Today’s post gives you two videos as part of my Embodiment Series. The first video is an explanation of the how what and why behind allowing ourselves to try to engage with emotion as energy in motion.

(I do also just want to note that as a perimenopausal woman, the ablity to allow emotion to be sensation has eased all of the potential health problems and mental struggles so often attributed to this stage of life. So there’s that too.)

The second video is a breath and energy healing exercise combined to move deeply embedded blocks in the physical body without having to think into them and create stories.

As usual, any feedback is welcome here with this post - likes, questions, comments, restacking, sharing with a loved one, and of course subscribing. Thank you for engaging with my work. It wouldn’t be what it is without you.

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Embodiment Lesson #11

In this lesson, I talked about two different breath practices that I’ve offered in the past. The first breath practice, as mentioned, is used with a trigger to move an emotion, found here. The second is used to remove emotion and enter into a parasympathetic state of being, found here.

If you would like to engage in a breath practice that moves stagnant blocks in your system, try the video below.

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…Or perhaps you have just fantasized about this kind of magical connection…

There’s a reason why romance writers spiral into the interest and attention dynamic as they weave fantasies of a perfect couple. They are working off of a premise that we all crave being interesting. At our core, we all want attention. When we are given the full attention of someone else, everything around us and inside us becomes more alive. That embodied sensation of interest creates the capacity to feel erotic.

What if you could allow attention - not just receiving it but also giving - to be erotic? (Teaching point: Erotic does not equal sexual. Erotic means to feel vitally alive as a sensate being in your own body.)

There is a paradox with attention and i…

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Today, I am offering a microcosmic solution. The idea?

Eventually in our life we are going to be called to look at that thing we are trying our hardest to fix about ourselves while simultaneously wanting to ignore whatever it is with all of our being.

We all have a place inside us that we believe is broken or inherently flawed.

If you immediately defend yourself when reading that statement…you are in denial of your own shadow. I don’t care how much work you’ve done, how much you have evolved, how deep you know yourself. Eventually you will be ready to face, understand, and accept your unloved self as a permanent aspect of your being that will need attention for as long as you are human.

Anyone who spiritually bypasses or overly fixates on disease and diagnosis is going to fight the need to go into the unloved self. It’s hard to admit that there’s always going to be a spiraling in that as part of the dilemma of being human. It’s also a gift - the paradox and the fight.

When you can work with your unloved self and understand it has value and is giving you something essential to your life and light, the charge you have against it decreases. Instead of feeling hatred, acceptance can arise (over time, be patient). Curiosity can develop. The feelings of shame and guilt and rejection can be ridden through like a storm instead of used as a place to act. Once accepted, clarity and peace become part of our life experience. Our “I am” doesn’t have to push, it can simply flow and accept.

I recognize that this feels like a big ask. My last two posts have talked about how HARD this all can be. There’s a lot of softening, breathing, and not fixing that has to go into this type of deep awakening. The loudest aspects of ego and the undercurrents of fear can actually just BE and not be controlled.

You don’t have to be fixed.

You don’t have to be healed.

You can simply be aware and make choices as you are…a perfectly imperfect and ordinary human.

Conscious Regulation

Here goes. The following video is an explanation of the ideas behind consciously regulating on behalf of another. Conscious regulation is an act of meeting the unloved self in another with a presence that is flowing and open, transforming defense into compassion. The unloved self is by nature dysregulated. The unloved self by nature feeds off of an inability to settle into truth. Simply by allowing the unloved self space to express while still feeling the deep presence of another creates possibility. It bridges our unloved self into the capacity to feel who we are with light.

Next…a chance to experience what conscious regulation looks like and feels like in your system.

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Today I am writing about hatred, rejection, death currents, and the internal monster WE ALL HAVE INSIDE US. No one is free from this human dilemma. We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t somehow resonate with what is happening in the external world. Be brave. Look within. Find the parts of yourself that scream, “GO AWAY!” Use them to discover the parts of you that want protection.

Bring your adult consciousness into the scarier aspects of being alive. When you do the work of true shadow acknowledgement, you can begin to hold yourself and others in a new way. When you can meet shadow with compassion, safety, and acceptance that you it has not yet received, yo…

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These days, our endocrine systems are on overload. We are exposed to so much that’s hard to digest. Additives, toxicities, pesticides, scents, cell waves (to name a few)…we simply live in a world that is harder on our hormonal system to keep in balance than we ever realize. When things are more complicated than we realize, it means we’re also taking for granted all the innate work our body is doing to keep us healthy. A breath practice that helps balance our endocrine system takes the pressure off the body and let’s us get a different sense of our own baseline embodiment.

When you’re stressed out, you actually don’t know what is real and what is reaction. It’s crucial to your own embodiment to have tools that give you a way to reset and come out of autonomic stress responses.

All of my embodiment lessons incorporate the vital concept of becoming alive to your own body without having to take a lot of time to do it.

Welcome to the ninth lesson in my series teaching you simple steps towards Embodiment or, as I like to call it:

Embodiment Practices and Teachings for Less Than 15 Minutes A Day!

Before I go too much further, I invite you to like my work, add a comment, or share this post. That’s how us writing folk gain an audience for the work we do.

To actively start to commit to any embodiment practice, it’s important to gain more and more tools that support your own capacity to consciously breathe. This means PRACTICE…AND practice in my world means PLAY!

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Do you believe me? (Because I’m curious about what reading this brings up for you.)

I can’t talk about 30 years of learned transformational relationship dynamics in one post. You’d be reading for a year or so at least. My intention today is to give a bit of a ground to those of you who have someone in your life that makes you think,

“hmmm. I might be able to relate deeper here.”

Last month a friend of mine described my relationship with my husband as “enlightened.” Another friend recently told me she couldn’t believe how honest my husband and I talk about ourselves and our relationship in front of each other. She was noticeable uncomfortable with our ability to share our struggles openly with acceptance and clarity. Something clicked for me as a result of these unexpected feedback statements. Afterall, I’ve been in this relationship for decades. I’m more likely to take it for granted than appreciate it.

By cultivating a relationship that prioritizes working through triggers, giving space for triggers, and allowing for personal autonomy; my husband and I have something that others want for themselves. It’s kind of silly that I don’t realize in the day to day living just how special my relationship is. We’ve spent over 15 years in transformational programs and psychotherapeutic training. Often together. It’s not like what we have together is surprising. Yet people’s reflections have me thinking… what do we do for each other that goes beyond the relationships that I see all around me.

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In my line of work I feel blessed to say that I have also worked with some couples (not always romantic) that have a similar commitment to honesty and growing into each other through their triggers. These relationships need to be honored for how truly rare they are.

Couples, family bonds, and deep friendship can all hold the potential for a transformational relationship. Many of us humans have major issues around one gender specifically or can only attract a certain type of person that seems repetitively toxic. When this is the case, it’s important to give space for other relationships to have a potential of transformation instead of over fixating on the need to find the perfect match or soul mate ideal.

A transformational relationship requires equal power.

The only relationships in our lives that can give us the freedom to be our fullest selves need to be completely 100% clear in regards to a power differential.

Many relationships’ innate power dynamics undermine the ability to mutually enlighten.

Feel into or think into this concept of power for a bit. It’s an edgy topic to write about and definitely an edgy one to think about. I wouldn’t even know if it to be true if I wasn’t blessed with the mutual interest in transformation that exists in my own relationship. Since I work on the other side of the power deferential too, I have the contrast necessary to know that the power differential is a limit to uninhibited transformational growth.

Teacher to student, therapist (or coach or healer or medium) to client, doctor to patient, guru to the masses, self help book writer (or influencer or pod cast creator or substack writer) to an audience.

Every single one of these relationships have an innate power dynamic. A power differential of over and under.

The contract that exists in these relationships is that the practitioner has done the work to have a specific expertise in regards to wholeness and health. The client relies on that work to find health and wellness for themselves. Don’t misread me. There’s a benefit to these relationships. I’m simply not writing about that benefit today.

Mutual conscious transformation cannot be cultivated whenever there is an agreed upon power dynamic (or a shadow power dynamic that is fueling emotional triggers). When this power dynamic exists, we are going to keep a part of ourself separate from the other.

That part we keep separate? No matter how it is expressed or what we think it is, it ultimately relates to the part of the self that feels like we are innately unlovable.

Transformation in relationships have a flavor of disassociation similar to personal growth. In personal process we want change to happen but we don’t want to be there for the process of change. In relationships that flips a bit. It becomes, “You do your work. I’ll do mine. We’ll see if we still want to be together on the other side.”

Great idea.

BUT.

Divided, you’re missing something epic!

You are unquestionably missing an essential concept in any thought process you engage in that requires separation to transform. A deeper unknown is being avoided. Some underlying separation dynamics to get curious about here.

• There could be shadow power dynamics present as an undercurrent playing themselves out in your relationship or your relational fears. Uh oh…FYI. These will always haunt a relationship until they are mined into the surface of consciousness and equalized.

• There could be an aspect of self sabotage within the desire to hide a piece of yourself away from your partner.

• There could be codependent merging that you are trying to escape from.

• There could be a competition for needs/space/attention that is controlling your ability to take up space.

• There could be an aspect of your unloved self wound that does not trust your partner to love you through or in spite of what you find within your own work. Did I say “could”? For this one, I should probably say “is.”

While there is value in engaging in individual work, demanding it of the other or not being interested in each other’s process is a red flag.

Hiding any part of your psyche from a person you deeply care for is a choice to engage with the limiting belief that not all of you is capable of being loved for who you are.

A question: Where can your dark sides transform into something ordinary and accepted if not in the relationships most important to you?

Most relationships have a boundary that says to your unconscious shame and hatred, “you are not welcome here.” Your internal monsters are set free in your own mind but never let out into the air of safe mutual relating.

Worse, is when we use our internal monsters to self sabotage and push people away, thus proving the point that we are incapable of being loved for all of who we are.

Relationships need relational acceptance for both the ordinary and the worst aspects of yourself to feel completely loved.

And

Relationships need relational interest in the ordinary and the worst aspects of yourself to fully love yourself.

Showing up for another person in a relationship can’t happen without an all inclusive crucible of cultivating an ability to love and feel loved AND WHOLE by self and other.

This is a tall order. I know. But think about it.

You are never going to be safe to be fully yourself or feel deeply connected to others if you don’t believe you can trust others with the worst parts of you. That part of you that is NOT your friend inside, that thinks mean thoughts about you, that does not let yourself be fully known to those you love is going to hunker down and control your experience into sabotage and separation.

If you want to feel free in relationships to be yourself, you need to be able to accept all of who you are. Everyone deserves to have someone in their life who accepts all of who they are. The work starts within. Then that work reflects without.

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One of the traps I notice about embodiment is that there is an inclination to push listening TO the body. However, being relational to your body is a two way street. There is a tendency to need to learn “how” to listen to the body without recognizing what may come easier or require less push. Talking to the body, for many of you, may be much simpler than taking that quieter more prolonged time to listen to the body that so often involves a leap of faith into the unknown.

A lot of times what we struggle with in relationship with others is also a struggle within ourselves. These struggles show up in our embodiment. How we embody reflects your ability to be in relationship with self, others, and the divine.

Example: If you find yourself having a hard time finding compassion for others, perhaps you first need to learn how to give compassion to your body or your pain. If you over give compassion to others, there’s probably a part of your body that you refuse to check in with and be in relationship with that is fueling the urge to caretake.

Today’s post is an invitation to remember that you have the power to be in deeper relationship with your body through talking to it, emoting towards it, and being curious about what it needs to hear. Your body needs communication towards itself just as much as you may need words sometimes to clarify path, intention, or desire to move in the outside world.

I know that the holidays are busy for most people. Instead of writing too much more (the longer post I have been working on is going to wait until next week to go out!), I’ll keep today’s post short and simple. Watch the video included in the post if you want a directed experience of talking to your body. If that doesn’t feel right, just try it on your own and see how it goes.

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Abundance is a current that many of us struggle with, wanting to pigeon hole the word into society’s addiction to money. Yet an abundant life is so much greater than the ability to transact our lives in the medium of things and stuff.

I love teaching abundance practices. My joy comes as I witness these practices giving people space to be true to who they are and the space they take up. The practice drops us out of beliefs around competition for resources and reminds us that everything we need is already here, in our lives, waiting for us to take note and absorb what we can.

I am a total fan of irony. So after saying all that, the practice itself and the rest of this post is for paid subscribers!

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We all have a place that we go inside our head that is totally not helpful to anything we want to become or achieve. And yet, it is so alluring to stay there, to listen to the voices, to heed the call of the ever so powerful negative.

The thoughts that won’t stop.

The scenarios that haunt your insomniac mind in the middle of the night.

The flashes of fear based outcomes that cannot be stopped.

The should have/would have/could have revisions of a scenario that already happened.

Extreme versions and habitual versions of a self that thrives on worst case cogitations can catch you aware…or unaware.

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As far as I can tell the socially approved solution to the negative mind doesn’t actually face the negative mind.

Think positive.

Control your thoughts to be what you want to experience.

Focus on what you want.

Feel the good in your life.

Well, I’m not going to say these methods don’t work. I will say that the…

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Welcome to the eighth lesson in my series teaching you simple steps towards Embodiment or, as I like to call it:

Embodiment Practices and Teachings for Less Than 15 Minutes A Day!

Before I go too much further, I invite you to like my work, add a comment, or share this post. That’s how us writing folk gain an audience for the work we do.

To actively start to commit to any embodiment practice, it’s important to gain more and more tools that support your own capacity to consciously breathe. This means PRACTICE…AND practice in my world means PLAY!

Today’s lesson utilizes a simple breathing technique to invite your higher self into your body. This time of year, as the days get shorter and shorter (in the Northern Hemisphere), invites us to connect with our own inner mystery. We come into the self to be able to discover what the longer days have in store for our creative energies and life pulse. It can be too easy to fall into depression or the lure of over stimulating holiday socializing. You are being called into something deeper though…your embodied spiritual self.

I recommend using this breath practice to remember that you are more than your physical reality. By allowing yourself time to contract into your spiritual self, you are embracing the energy of nature.

There is a bonus for my paid subscribers in this post. You’ll get the opportunity to engage in a longer meditation practice using this breath (scroll all the way down). Let me know if you like the longer format…so that I’ll offer it more often to you.

EMBODIMENT LESSON #8

EMBODIMENT EXERCISE #8

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It’s amazing how many of life’s problems can be solved through some sort of mindful embodiment practice. This doesn’t need to be taken very seriously either. It’s just a matter of recognizing that to feel connected in a meaningful way to our lives, we need to feel connected in a meaningful way to our bodies. Step by step, slowing down and playing with the myriad of techniques that exist to support this process is what I am using Substack to teach.

I am a multidimensional being (just like you are by the way). The concepts I share in these videos are a result of years of study and my own practice. Because of this, there is not one specific root to what I teach. The practices you will encounter are based in Energy Medicine, Kundalini Yoga, Tai Chi, Qi Gong, Dance, and Breathwork. I will do my best to give sources and credit as required. I have found for myself that by engaging in multiple types of movement and philosophies makes it so I can utilize what is right for my body as it changes. You are invited to do the same. Don’t judge what doesn’t work. Just be open to trying something new!

I hope you enjoyed these videos. Thank you for watching, breathing, and embodying with me. The world needs you.

I am currently working on classes to embellish my embodiment series, so don’t worry if you aren’t called to subscribe to my substack. You’ll be able to purchase a class down the road with extended teachings, videos, exercises, and philosophies.

I welcome any feedback you have in regards to what you want more of, less of, or any questions that develop.

Learn something new here? I’d appreciate an act of giving back. Subscribe. Share. Leave a comment. Give me a heart. Everything is appreciated.

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