You Put Your Right Foot In…

by The Blyss Catalyst, posted in Uncategorized

More and more I wonder maybe the Hokey Pokey really is what it’s all about.

All this shimmying around and wiggling about, all these funny steps, up and down and in and out and round about, and you have no idea where it’s going and maybe none of it means a damn thing. But it’s wacky, senseless fun when you just give in. Love the nutty thing. What else is there to do? May as well get in the circle and play. Maybe no one in that bouncing blob of bodies knows what they’re doing really, but it gets more fun the more people join in. Cast aside your aims, throw up your arms. Surrender to the silly, the absurd, the pointless. Just dance. No fixation for point. No idea what you’re doing there. Or why. Never mind the proper way. Or what you look like doing it. We all look ridiculous anyway. Strict motion looks all the more preposterous. You’ll end up tripping on your own feet. Or not having any fun, the most tragic loss of all. And vying to make sense of it all just ruins it. Who cares the reason you’re playing? Reasons never hold the clout they promise. Let go, let be. That is the only freedom.

And so, kiddies, I say put your left hip in. Spin and wiggle and shake it all about. Do it on skates. Do it with loose, far-flung, swinging moves. Swing out wildly. Put your whole self in. Put your whole self out. You do the Hokey Pokey and you shake yourself about. And when you stop to wonder how silly you look, what the hell it all means, when it’s gonna get you somewhere…you just turn yourself around. And that’s what it’s all about.

My Dreams May Be Dusty

by The Blyss Catalyst, posted in Uncategorized

Drumming up dreams has been the juice of my life, and nothing gets my juices flowing more than the vast, green landscape of what may be someday.

Yet dreams are apt to turn wicked, swallow us whole and spit us out — if left unkempt, bare-boned and fleshless. It’s too easy to place another dream on a mantle of maybe-somedays, gathering dust until we have enough money or have enough time or have enough energy or have enough disgust with our own excuses and we’re finally ready to lasso one in, only to find we’ve missed our wagon to the pastures.

Somedays have a tendency to gel together until we can’t decipher one from the next; they get all clumped up and saggy, like a former beauty queen that let herself go. Untended to, they lose their shape, their playful charm, their bewitching powers to move men into action. Somedays aren’t pretty wrinkled and old, and we, who once would’ve given life and limb to acquire just one, eventually find we can’t stand to look at them anymore. Given enough time and dust particles, the nastiest few will grow a face and bellylaugh right at us. Not in a lighthearted, chuckling way. Somedays cackle. Progressively louder as they age. They taunt and nag with reminders of how much was promised them when first we fell in love. They love to do this just before bed.

My nights have been riddled with the haunts of Somedays past, those dusty old bones scuffling around the inside of my skull in a slow, demonic way. As the clock tisks its unforgiving tongue at me, and as the mercy of sleep creeps ever further, I flop around my bed in fits of desperation with each ghost summoned. An avalanche of Somedays rally together and pound at my heart, leaving little cracks in their wake. Another night lost to the vengeance of dreams done wrong.

Eventually, juices run dry. Dreams give up the ghost and simply fall asleep. Somedays age and grow bitter with time. Sooner or later they tire and fade. But bygone, they never do die.

However faint, a heart still beating promises life yet. Possibility hangs on ’til our very last breath. My dreams may be dusty, but damn it, I know they’re still alive.

The Polly-O & The Poetry

by The Blyss Catalyst, posted in Poetry, Uncategorized

Whilst reaching for a scrumdiddlyumptious log of Polly-O, I stood looking at what’s left of the medley of magnetic poetry pieces speckled across my fridge. Over time I suppose some have found their way into the crevices behind the counter, strewn upon my checkerboard floor and squished up in its linoleum cracks, into the sandwiches of midnight snackers unawares…and such. So now the remnants of a once full kit of refrigerated literary morsels have dwindled down to perhaps 40 or so remaining hopefuls. But I’ve always been one for a challenge of lexicon, and so took a stab at what I could construct with the survivors. Here is what is now splayed on the face of my fridge between coupons and band flyers (not all at once, obvi – as you’ll notice the duplicate words):

MUSIC IS MY ROAD

I STARE AT YOUR HEAD AS WE SLEEP. LOVE’S SWEET MOAN THEN SILENCE. I COULD SOAR ABOVE TIME LOVING YOUR LIGHT.

MEOWS ARE CAT BARKS

PLEASE DRIVE ON AFTER DEATH; ETERNITY IS A TRIP

SHE’S ABOUT AS BLUE BUT NEVER AS MEAN AS HE

SOMEWHAT-TRUE LOVE WILL NOT DO

I RECALL WHAT HE SAID ABOUT DEATH. A COOL BLUE PLACE, REPULSIVE SMELL THEREAFTER.

LOVE IS CHOCOLATE LANGUAGE AND FLUFF

THEY POUND TV IN ME, YET I ONLY WATCH DREAMS

STARE, WANT, FIDDLE, MOAN, SWEAT, SPRAY…THEN LOVE IS SAID

LATHER A FRIEND WITH A WET PUPPY DRESS

Okay, so that last one was a tid-bit outlandish, but overall not too shabby, (if a little cheesy, pun intended) given my limited selection. Aaahh, the power of Polly-O….

Thank You, Troubles

by The Blyss Catalyst, posted in Grief / Loss / Trauma, Uncategorized

8/31/16

I warned myself it’d be a trying and emotional trip on many levels for a myriad of reasons, so I can’t be disoriented that I’m leaving feeling wiped, a bit nauseous (literally, but that might be from the junk masquerading as “food” that I kept shoveling in attempts to suppress the stress), and heart-tender….And yet, on the very same plane, the trip was fulfilling and filled to the brim with blessings (like I got to fall in immediate swoon with Lauren Taylor and her brilliant babygirl Taylor, who are Lucy’s new amazingly awesome caregivers and who’ve gone above & beyond their caregiving duties to make her feel welcomed and me feel at ease! Love you two mucho a LAWT!)….If my strife has taught me anything (and in fact it’s taught me a phd’s worth), it’s that there are simply no absolutes, and love and pain and hardships and miracles – and everything in between – can, and often do, work in cahoots together, co-existing ever so oddly and perfectly together. I feel all the feels. I’m bigger inside than ever before..and I’m headed back to the West a little banged up but stretched ever more so in the direction of my true divine Self.

Thank you, ache, thank you, troubles. I trust the propulsion of your push.

Driven to the Light

by The Blyss Catalyst, posted in Growth & Transformation, Mental Health, Uncategorized

*vulnerageous alert*🚨
On my right forearm is a tattoo of the Luna moth. I’d been searching endlessly for what I wanted to place there, until one evening I came across a picture of this gorgeous and sprawling, seafoam-hued creature with a caption that read, “Forest creature. Inhabits the darkness but is always driven towards the Light.” The next day that totem was on me for life.

By clinical assessment and personal experience, I am officially depression-free — after nearly 2 consecutive years of relentless affliction. 🎉 Tackling that beast was entirely by deliberate intent, and by no means was something that was going to happen anyway. It was WORK. It was roll-up-my-sleeves, spit-on-my-hands, strap-on-my-shitkicking-boots, ima-take-this-fucker-down-and-thats-all-there-is-to-it, hellbent-AF, hard and daily work. It took abiding by practices and rituals and processes everyday when I often wanted to fuck this shit, stuff buckets of candy in my facehole and sleep for 28 hours. (Mostly) I made good on my promises because future me said she needed me to and she had so much in store for me, and I believed in her guidance. So I did the dang thangs. And bygone, the dang thangs worked. Daily meditation practice. Dance therapy. Journaling. EFT. CBT sessions. Exercise. Yoga. Gut healing foods (Google gut brain connection). Letting kindred community in and surrounding myself in it. Surrendering what no longer served me. Energy work with healers. Time in nature and digging my bare feet in the earth (Google grounding). Daily gratitude practice. Deactivating old brain patterns and undergoing a major overhaul of my speaking and thinking. Employing plant medicine. Reading 184836 books (or something like that) on recovery and trauma and personal transformation. Releasing toxic vices…And the longest ellipses ever to denote the rest of the myriad of tools I threw out there to slay the beast that tried to slay me. Even when I had nil funds to spare, still I was crown-chakra-deep in healing and recovery using whatever channels and resources I could afford at the time. I gave it my best shot, and my best shot won me the game. A game I call, “Alyssa ain’t going down like this.”

On my darkest days, when I had no fight left in me, laying on a cold floor in a puddle of my own tears, still I knew my long game was strong. I knew no matter how far into the abyss I had gone, I would always, eventually, get myself back. No matter how dark my world got, still I could hear future Me calling, even if I could barely see her. Now she’s finally crystal clear to me; In fact she’s shimmering…

All I had to do was keep searching for the Light.💡screen shot 2019-01-13 at 6.20.24 pm

New Pains, Old Roots

by The Blyss Catalyst, posted in Growth & Transformation, Shame / Guilt, Uncategorized

The current pain is not the real pain. It is an incarnation of a bigger source with a rope ladder hooked to it that travels back through time to its original place. Be willing to feel your way back and look at what you haven’t wanted to look at. It takes on the form of a sinister lie. “I’m not good enough”…”I’m unwanted”…”I don’t belong”…”I’m all alone”…”they wouldn’t love me if they only knew me”…like that…Disfiguring narratives that run a toxic current throughout your life, ever-prompting you to either sabotage things to affirm their accuracy or exhaust yourself overcompensating to prove they’re dead wrong. Either way, they’re running you (ragged at that). Dig them up from their bedrock and deconstruct their programming by holding them up to the light and seeing them for what they are. Lies. Then acknowledge that YOU are the one still carrying them around, permitting them to steal your vitality and joy, and strip your ability to be present to what’s actually happening (versus experiencing the present as a trigger from something in the past). Feel how their energy feels in your body then give them love and release that energy — by moving, meditating, jumping vigorously, dancing, journaling, creating, communicating, visualizing, whatever feels good and right to you. Howl if you have to – just move it as it comes. All energy wants to flow through and out of you. As you do this, your current pain will simmer and you’ll gain back the power to deal with the circumstances that incited it. Have at it, self-healers!screen shot 2019-01-13 at 6.36.11 pm

Well Isn’t That Refreshing

by The Blyss Catalyst, posted in Growth & Transformation, Uncategorized

It’s refreshing to realize that I can be in pain and still love my life. I can still be really happy while carrying a stone of hurt.

It’s refreshing to know that I can feel pain and not make it mean one negative thing about me or my future, that I don’t have to go down that route of default thinking. I can shut down the thoughts that steal my power, moment by moment, and in doing so, build the muscle for creating only empowering stories about me and about my life.

And it’s refreshing to know that I can be in pain, and not be at the effect of it, not be its victim. That instead of the experience of just sitting there enduring it, idly waiting for it to pass, I can study it. I can bring wonder and inquiry to it, and utilize it. Let it be useful to me. Let it be a portal into healing rather than something that takes me out. I can become interested in what there is to discover in it, what gifts are embedded in its folds for me (and there are gifts — to the willing student). Point is, as a human being I can have my default ways or I can access a whole range of other approaches and responses that would open me and deepen me and cause me to become a bigger human being than I ever knew myself to be before the pain.

Just thought you’d like to know…

Refreshed,
Lyss

What I Do Know

by The Blyss Catalyst, posted in Grief / Loss / Trauma, Growth & Transformation, Romance, Sex, & Dating, Self-Love, Uncategorized

I’ve gone a little quiet these days. Sometimes I process challenging times publicly and creatively; but some darkness renders me speechless for I don’t yet have the words or actions that even closely resemble feelings that have no shape or coherence yet. To say the least, it’s been a grating and grueling year, a disorienting and losing-myself one. And it has grown me and deepened me as all darkness does. It’s opened my eyes to more of what I do want in life by contrast of having experienced so much of what I do not.

And now, at the outset of an already grinding year (few years, to be honest), it seems that I have just a bit more uphill to go before the big upswing, which I know is certain to come, as life’s pendulums always ensure.

What’s up right now is that I’ve lost my job, my house, and my long-term relationship in the span of a month. I feel like I’m walking around in life with no epidermis, all raw and gooey and like I have no identity or container to hold my parts together, and I’m dripping all over the place, staining the sidewalks with my mess.

But what’s also up is that after a lifetime of tremendous losses, traumas, heartbreaks and formidable mountains of adversity, I now know a few things about myself and times like these. It is in this knowing where I’ll find my footing and my safety in an otherwise very unsafe-feeling time.

And what I do know is this:

I know I’ve made it through all of my bad days and not one has failed to spit me out to the other side transformed. Not one have I not come out singing. Not one hasn’t turned out to be the catalyst to my next plane of expansion and self-actualization (in other words, made me more ME).

What I do know is that times like these only prompt me to dial up the self-love and compassion, and out of that, I synthesize with my Higher Self in a deeper and more avowed way than ever before. A more in-my-own-corner way than ever before.

What I do know is that when I’m forced to confront fear and loss and confusion triggered by present events, I then have an opportunity to heal the parts of my past where all that is actually sourced from, and I always choose to dive deep into that opening, as much as it wrings the hell out of my heart to do so. I know that if I just stay in the fire, many old hurts that have long overstayed their welcome will be exhumed and purified from me and I’ll be that much freer, that much more rooted in my Light. And what I do know is that facing fear and pain only musters out of me the tools I have to battle those beasts, and I’m prompted to call upon the medicines I know — dance and movement, meditation, journaling, EFT, prayer, my personal growth resources, community, time in nature, and on — just throw everything I got at it. Here is where all of those seminars and workshops and all the conscious learning come out of the world of insight and actually play out and pay off.

What I do know is that because things always work out for me in the end (and they do for all of us), having traversed yet another once formidable mountain only serves to have me more connected to humanity and be a space for others going through the painful places where I have been. I get the honor of being allowed in there with them because they can trust that I can hold space for any kind of experience, that there isn’t anything they can give me that I can’t be with, and they would be right. And so my dark places only serve to make me more of a contribution in and to the world, and thus they are a gift to me, for that is perhaps the best me I could possibly be, and ultimately the reason I’m on this planet.

What I do know is that I always have a choice, no matter what life throws at me. And I choose to stay in the fire, and trust. I choose that when the bottom is dropped, the only way for me is up.

I hope you do too, because the world needs the gift of more humans like that.

To our collective transformative fire…i love you, brave ones.

It feels like a time to rage

by The Blyss Catalyst, posted in Politics, Uncategorized

(when Kavanaugh was voted into SCOTUS)

I know it feels like a time to rage. To seethe. To want to knock some evil-souled, dictator-worshipping, archaic and patriarchal, mothereffing fascist teeth out. Your (our) disgust & outrage is valid. And potentially useful. I trust we all know how to channel them productively & non-maniacally (eh hem, VOTE in the midterms!). But I want to take this moment to say: Remember that your Love is more powerful than your hate. And more necessary at times like these. Love doesn’t have to displace your very valid rage but it could be honored alongside of it and equally utilized as a mobilizer. And what there is to honor is that Love is at the core of any upset. It is your Love — of people, of justice, of this country, of this world, of this life, of your values, of truth, of Love itself — that would ever have you upset at circumstances that controvert what you know as truth and goodness.

Now I’m not trying to be some airy-fairy, do-gooder voice from la-la land here. I’m guilty of mentally shoving my fist far down some well-deserved, patriarchal throats an embarrassing amount of times these days. But if I stop to take a breath and a pause, and I center myself within the uproar to see & feel what’s really there, what I come to is my broken heart. And the only reason a heart breaks is because it loved a thing. And still does.

Now what to do with such a realization? Honor your hurt but then act out of your love. Take an action from what it is you stand for and love. We must resist spilling our rage all over those who are the inciters of it, or supporters of that which incited it, for by now we know that not only does that not work, it causes an even greater divide and gives power to those on the opposing side, and not the good kind. The kind that fuels them with all the more insistence to fight your stand. They won’t listen past the rage. Mismanaged rage & disgust and vehement hate is what led to the sad state of “us versus them”, fierce tribalism we’re in, in the first place.

Mother Theresa said: Don’t invite me to an anti-war demonstration. I’ll never do that. But invite me to a pro-peace rally and I’ll be there every time.

Let’s speak from what we love, act from what we love, speak and act from the values we love so much, and stand more for what we are pro than what we are anti. And maybe it won’t win the war overnight, but it’ll certainly fuel us with the power to keep standing, perhaps in a more sustainable way than hate ever will.

I know I myself fail at this all the time. But it’s an effort worth keeping at…and standing for.

#standforlove #andvotingisanactoflove #bytheway

Yesterday Told Us Some Things

by The Blyss Catalyst, posted in Politics, Uncategorized

30013132557_1b1e6962bc_hYesterday told us some things.

Yesterday told us that telling our stories of trauma and abuse is a disgrace if it inconveniences a powerful man. Most especially if it intercepts a partisan agenda.

Yesterday told us that requesting an investigation of our abuser is ludicrous and shameful and only turns everything into a circus, a sham. How dare we.

Yesterday told us that if we can’t recall explicit details of our trauma like date, time and location, it’s as if it didn’t happen.

Yesterday told us that throwing a tantrum, refusing to cooperate, lying, shaming those questioning illegal and wicked acts, undermining, insulting and mocking the questioners, and ping-ponging their own questions back onto them like an evading child is apparently acceptable behavior of a person in one of the country’s highest and most influential positions. That acting in a way that wouldn’t get you hired at Arby’s may still get you a lifetime role of making critical decisions for the entire nation, impactful on generations to come.

Yesterday told us that even though only about 3-4% of reports of sexual abuse are fabricated and even though a victim’s story is corroborated, she will no doubt be met with disbelief because, you know, her abuser seems like such a good person on paper.

AND…

Yesterday told us that there are still heroes amongst us. That there are good, decent, brilliant, powerful guardians of justice that will not back down to the majority rule.

Yesterday told us that there are still champions of integrity in our government who will execute every tool that they have and fight to the bitter end on behalf of those oppressed voices, and they will not stop until justice is restored.

Yesterday told us that it is NEVER too late to turn the seemingly inescapable tides of injustice around. That as long as you have a will to fight for what’s right, it ain’t EVER over. And fuck the rules and your stupid gavel.

Yesterday told us that no matter who you are, no matter what official and appointed powers you have or don’t have, that all you need is a voice and a stand to change the course of history. You don’t need a plan or special clearance or a certain platform or resources or to hold a significant position. Just your voice. Just your stand.

Yesterday told us that decency and justice aren’t a partisan matter. They’re a human one. That if you search your soul, it will guide you to what’s right and if a true patriot you are, you will heed that call even if dare flies in the face of your party. Yesterday told us we are more beholden to our soul than our party.

Yesterday told us there IS still hope on the horizon, evident in those on the right side of history. And wouldn’t ya know, those from BOTH parties are hanging out there. Fancy that.

Yesterday told us there is still fight in us yet. That together if we keep standing, keep voicing, keep coming forward, keep VOTING, keep not shutting up, and keep ministering those values foundational to the nation that we still so clearly love and honor so very much, then ain’t nothin’ over. The fight is still worth it.

Terrified, traumatized and all, our civic duty compels us to the stand.