Author: The Blyss Catalyst

pOsSiBiLiTaRiAn. disciple to Bliss. descendant to wolves. wooed by sea & forest. born to wild light. native dialect is dance. equal parts lady to hooligan.

Mama Spirit Grad Day Year 3

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

8/8/18

8.8 My Mama’s Spirit Graduation Day. 3 years today. And I’m only now turning the corner of accepting the reality that she’s never coming back. Grief can be a slow brew like that.

All day today and the few days leading up, I’ve been exploring what this day means to me, trying to get present to all that it contains and what there is to honor of it. And while I do find myself somewhat tender and somber about it, something else keeps rising up, trumping the pain this day holds — by far. My mind keeps frogleaping the ache to go right to it.

And that is all the people who came rushing in to hold me tight through this time 3 years ago, and never let go since. Those who showed up and kept showing up, so that I could fall apart safely, knowing they were there to gather me. Who threw all their love and all their support and all their tools for healing into the void left by the catastrophic event. The humans without which I’d have been swallowed up by the dark, endlessly lost and floating alone in the abyss like a kite with no string.

I dedicate this day to you. To all you who tethered me to the earth, and made it safe to come back down to. I owe my life — and regrown heart — to you.

Prayer hands emoji times infinity 🙏🏽 I love you with all of my lost and found soul, sacred family.

[i apologize if you’re not tagged yet and you were someone who in some way held space for me and helped me heal; I’ll keep adding more as my mind gets represenced to all who came through in a direct & chronic way. I’m sorry for the delay. The years have held so many. A good problem to have.]

Living with Monsters

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

Suicide doesn’t end the pain. It just transfers it to other people. And I can attest to that the pain never goes away. You just get better at living with it.

It’s like suddenly a behemoth, scary, grotesque monster moves into your house and won’t ever leave, forever. So you just get used to the big blobby thing and live with it. You learn to talk with it, hear it out, sob your guts out with it, maybe even help it heal – slowly, be just a little less monstery…..But at the end of the day, no matter what you ever do, there’s still a giant fucking monster in your house.

There’s still this big ol’ cumbersome thing taking up all that space, making messes, and causing some people to run in the opposite direction from you. No matter how well you learn to deal with it, it’s still always going to be something to manage. Forever.

Please don’t be afraid to reach out for help. Making people you love live with that monster is way, WAY scarier.

National Suicide Hotline: 1-800-273-8255 ☎️

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Bon Voyage, Anthony

by The Blyss Catalyst, posted in Uncategorized

I don’t have words for the sadness I feel to have lost such a legend and hero. On a personal level, it hits me hard because Anthony Bourdain is one of the biggest influences and inspirations in my hunger to soak up the world and its stunning array of cultures, to travel far & wide & never stop exploring. He has been a personal hero of mine since I was a teenager, then just a traveling tadpole w/only a few trips under my baby belt. He whetted my appetite for bigger & grander (and longer) exploits in my future. Watching him engage with the world on his escapades made me starry-eyed. He made the great big world of grand adventure seem so doable (and MUST-doable) to me, and he made strange lands with unpronounceable names seem so approachable and magnetic. Those who really know me, know that I don’t see travel & exploring & soaking up the world’s cultures as mere luxuries. They’re therapy. Medicine. A lifestyle that has the power to heal – us & the world. They’re the best kind of education one could have on earth. And I relate to travel the way some would relate to their religion. For its values, the culture of travelers, its traditions, its lessons, its sacredness, its promises, its transformation, its way of connecting you to the Truth of yourself and of life, for all this, I have always claimed travel to be a sort of religion for me. And Anthony was a guru in that religion. Someone I look to with not only great reverence, but great relief and gratitude that he was on my team, forwarding an important mission that I so desperately want the whole world to be a part of. If only everyone were to travel more and engage with other cultures more often, I truly believe this world would be a much more peaceful, loving, richer place for everyone….So thank you, Anthony, with all of my traveling soul, for helping bring that possibility to life. For helping to restore the world one great adventure at a time. Your impact was colossal, your spirit magnanimous…Happy trails to you, on your next Big Adventure… 😥🙏🏽🌎💔✈️🍱🌮🥠🥡

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Separation is a prison

by The Blyss Catalyst, posted in Interpersonal Relationships (non-romantic), Uncategorized

Separation is a prison.

I once rehearsed for a play using a Barbara Streisand song. Strange for a girl of 13 years old, but it called to me. The song was People from the film Funny Girl.

“People who need people are the luckiest people in the world,” it went. “We’re children, needing other children. And yet letting a grown-up pride hide all the need inside.”

I’ll never be too proud or too grown-up or too independent to say I need people. Community. Connection. I need support and I need kinship.

Can I survive without that? You bet. But the experience is that of solitary confinement. I can survive in a prison. I can pretty much survive anything. But I’m not interested in surviving. I’m interested in self-actualization, for all of us. We can’t be the fullest expression of ourselves without others, without relationship, without connection.

It seems really “cool” to say you don’t need anyone. I get the sexy mystery of that whole “lone wolf” gig. But I think the coolest people are the ones who surrender to the interdependence innate to their humanity. Though it’s not an easy task trying to make it in life without support or connection (even though it can be done doesn’t mean it should), for the official record, maybe we don’t need anyone to survive. But we sure as hell do to thrive. And for those of us who can own that, well, we are the lucky ones.

Standing shoulder to shoulder with you all, in our co-thriving,
Lyss

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It’s the Clutching That’s Hard

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

Maybe things feel hard because i’m clinging so tightly to the past and to the way i think they ought to be. When the winds try to blow you loose, of course it hurts if you’re clutching to a tree fighting against them. Losing the past surely brings some pain, but it’s nothing compared to the pain of grasping on to what is no longer for you.

I think underneath all this pain and struggle i’m feeling right now is ultimately the sense of losing myself – the self i’ve always recognized as me. The Alyssa I was with a mother on the planet, the loss of which reshapes the whole configuration of one’s world entirely. Mom’s not coming back, and I’m still busy resisting that, therefore i’m also resisting that the Alyssa I knew back when i had her is no longer the me that i am or am emerging into. I’m something i do not yet know. And that scares the LIVING BEJEEZUS out of me. I have never known me without her. I have never not known the security and familiarity of the me that I am through her eyes. I’d venture to say she was the most influential, impactful factor to my life, and thus the life i had was largely shaped by her being in it. My whole world had her stamp. The struggle i’m now in feels like one of survival, and the threat of it has been showing up all over the place – in the realm of money, living situations, work, relationships, well-being, etc.….but ultimately, I think it’s about surviving her departure with the Alyssa I know still intact. It’s a losing game, because that just isn’t possible. I’m not that girl anymore. I want to be, but i simply can’t be. I can keep parts of her, but by definition, i am not the Alyssa i was and have known for so many decades. So the overriding essence that’s there all over my life is this feeling of being no one for some time. This in-between being that isn’t this or that. Not anything definable or knowable. Not even to my own self. Just one big edgeless becoming. Into what I don’t know, because even the plans and visions and intentions I once had for myself – well they’re all part of the me that I was. With these past few topsy-turvy, turned-inside-out-y years, all has been detonated. Everything must be reconfigured. Except there is no “re-“ to any of this. I am not rebuilding because that would call for reconstruction from the old parts to build again some sense of order that I once knew. I have more new parts to me now than old and I’ve no idea yet how they work, what makes them go, what new things they can do.

Some of you may have read a passage somewhere out there in the personal growth space about a biology teacher named Mr. Bartlett. Here it is (by unknown):

I remember Mr. Bartlett. In biology class he discusses the transformation of caterpillar into butterfly —

”What is the process that goes on inside a cocoon?” he asks. “Has anyone ever seen a picture of the insect at the halfway point between caterpillar and butterfly? Does anyone know what it looks like?” No one has or does. The next week, Mr. Bartlett finds a cocoon in the woods and brings it into the classroom. We crowd around as he takes a blade and neatly slices it in two.

The cocoon looks empty.

“There is nothing in there,” says one of the kids.

“Oh, it’s in there,” says Mr Bartlett. “It just doesn’t have a shape right now. The living organic material is spun right into the cocoon. Caterpillar is gone, butterfly is yet to come.” We stare in wonder.

“Real Transformation” says Mr Bartlett, “means giving up one form before you have another. It requires the willingness to be nothing for a while….”

If you’re reading this and you’re one of the ones on my team who loves me, thank you for the space you’ve given me to be who I am, what I am becoming, and to be nothing in the in-between. And thank you for the grace you give me to be scared but listening me as strong through it all.

Have you also been clinging to a you or a past or some iteration of something that no longer is, and can you too feel the constraint of that gravity? Can you give yourself the permission to let go and be in the wilderness of the unknown for a while, in order to become something beyond your current definitions and known edges? Can you see the adventure in that, and are you willing to feel the pain and the fears of Real Transformation, trusting it will all be okay? Way way better than okay, for life rewards bravery. Can you keep in this sacred knowing? I am holding space for you.

Cheers to life, in all its configurations

OJ / Lyss

Recovering Shameaholic

by The Blyss Catalyst, posted in Shame / Guilt, Uncategorized

Just as any addiction, we can put ourselves in recovery from shame. Shame too has its way of weaving itself through your life, saturating your world. It too has its way with your body, soul, and mind, until you feel pulverized and worn. And so we can, if we choose, come to a place, empty and bedraggled from the war we’ve been through, dragging our done-for, weary bones to the doorstep of healing, and enter our recovery. And through that door is a commitment. Is a declaration. To rehab all the parts of ourselves that habitually go to shame as some kind penance. Or just plain awful habit (one we didn’t generate but copied). It ought to be a strict and consistent practice in the beginning, a daily one. A moment by moment one. Consciously choosing to give up the pull towards that ugly vice we’re weaning ourselves off of. Listening to the soft voice we can’t often hear over the loudness of shame, the one that so clearly tells us what it needs but we so often snuff out and deprive. Practice — until you’ve rebuilt yourself anew, liberated from the grips of shame and replacing it with self-love. So much self-love. Honor and compassion and grace, too. They’re all there. Because self-love is a gift that never stops yielding more of the juicy good stuff. That’s the kind of high I’m after. What say you? 🙏🏽

There are Behemoth Mountains to Forgive

by The Blyss Catalyst, posted in Self-Love, Shame / Guilt

There are behemoth mountains to forgive.

Of things calling for my grace. So there’s a whole lot of upwards movement. Along my climb, I offer up this:

I forgive the days too anguishing to bear

I forgive my collapsing when I could not bear them

I forgive the pain that comes of clinging

I forgive the attachment that’s led to suffering

I forgive the suffering that’s had a chokehold on me

I forgive the getting lost

I forgive giving up trying to find the way

I forgive the not knowing how

I forgive resisting what’s right in front of me

And behind. And ahead.

I forgive not always being the best version of me

I forgive the times I was actually the worst

I forgive how that got all over the people I love

I forgive the messes I’ve made

And the messes life’s made for me

I forgive the conviction that I myself am a mess

I forgive the emptiness when it descends

I forgive the darkness, and my hating the darkness

I forgive how long it sometimes takes to find my way out of the darkness

I forgive my own hate

I forgive how long i’ve chosen not to forgive until now

I forgive the cards life’s dealt me that I cursed as too much for one soul to bear

I forgive myself for the grudges I’ve held against life

I forgive the times when the blessings were lost on me

I forgive not being able to outrun my demons, the being swallowed up by them

I forgive the ugliness that’s brought out in me

I forgive the ways I’ve exploited my trauma, using it to become bitter or to isolate or push people away or stop me from serving my purpose

I forgive all that I haven’t yet done but always wanted to by now

I forgive what I’ve done that was a colossal waste of my time & energy

I forgive the mistakes

I forgive making the same ones again & again & still yet again

I forgive the anxious burning in me that has me feel so incomplete

I forgive my incompleteness

I forgive how many times I’ve had to start over. And over and over and over again. It seems like too many times

I forgive the judgement of that

I forgive withholding my Light from the world

I forgive forgetting who I am, what I am here for

I forgive the forgetting

I forgive the forgetting

And I promise to keep climbing these mountains of grace

We are Here to Be Love

by The Blyss Catalyst, posted in Growth & Transformation, Self-Love

We are Here to Be Love

Doesn’t mean we act always in accordance with Love

(yes, we are a contradiction, “we contain multitudes”)

It means we always come back to Love.

And so,

we stray.

And that’s okay.

Perfectly, messily, humanly okay.

That is the work.

The straying a gift,

An invitation to return.

And in the return –

a reclamation, a renewal of vows,

more claimed by Love than before.

How gallant and gritty, how full of grace are we

to keep delivering ourselves

again and again and tirelessly again

Returning, always once more,

to Love.

And the more times we return to a place,

the more it becomes our Home.

Happy Straying, Wanderers.

Happy Returning, Lovebirds

Lyss 💖

Move Over Broken Way

by The Blyss Catalyst, posted in Grief / Loss / Trauma
Suicide didn’t really take her. Depression & Anxiety did. Isolation and the pain of pleasurelessness did. The tragedy of lack of community was her sickle. It’s what happens when our joy is strangled; when our Truth is ripped out from our skin. We die. In many kinds of ways. With some, it happens slowly over the decades, while in others, it tears in quick like a snake, all at once in that crushing soul-blow kind of way.
It came in like that with her, a swift and sudden venom. Only the last 3 or 4 months of life did the Fog of Lies descend to the degree that they did, to maul her Truth apart. But that was enough. She fought her big beautiful heart out, to the death. But they won. They told her that true, cozy, artful and yummy Joy was out of her reach. That Tribe was the thing of ancient legend and fable, not to be believed in this day, at her age. And if you want to know how it is I fiercely carry on, it is that I’m on a mission to avenge my mother’s killers. I’m out to invest the rest of my life telling depression to go FUCK itself on behalf of all its cheated victims by way of catalyzing the potent power of play and laughter to free all beings on earth, birthrighted to their Truth – which is to say we are none more than bliss and bone. A wild love incarnate.
On my watch, society will no longer regard joy-inducing things as an afterthought luxury partitioned for our leisure time, but will recognize them as lifesaving medicine. Or I will die trying. As long as I’m breathing, this world will have to deal with me on my fluorescent soapbox, shouting with all my might in a unicorn onesie and clown nose on, that the silly is sacred, that exploring is our mind’s air, that sock-sliding across floors saves souls, dance breaks at work need be standard and secret handshakes a modus operandi, intimacy in community is healthcare, sisterhood & brotherhood are as crucial to wellness as water, cuddling is cellular regrowth, music is a salve, making art, any art, is our spirit’s devotion to its maker, hand-holding is as natural as blinking, comedians, healers, shamans and artists are on par with doctors, games are as necessary as taxes, lightheartedness is the new heart surgery, grounding practices and belly laughter and ample time outdoors with our bare feet caressing the earth should be written into our medical plans.
The Puritanical reign is as OVER as it was murderous. Let the stuffy, buttoned-up kin suffer in sweetless silence, but let my people go. F..R..E..E..D..O..M is having its heyday now, and hey hey brethren, can I tag you in? FUN is about to rightly displace the stupidity of boring convention and all that is heavy will step down from its false throne. I hereby declare my life as a coup to overthrow the status quo, which never did know what the hell it was ever doing for us in the first place. The era of the carrot-chasing, the buckled-down, the disconnected, disenchanted isolated is going DOWN, for it is no match for me. For the Love Warriors who make up my army. We are the loosey-goosey, UNbuckled clowns. The wild ones who haven’t forgotten the bliss in our blood. The ones willingly swept up by sweet whimsy, intoxicated by life’s constant enchantment, for we can still smell the magic, our senses not yet punched out of us.
To those who smirk and speak of love and laughter as a cheesy cliche, like too-cool-for-school girls, you better RUN from me. I will call you out on your cowardice. I will make a mockery of your oh-so-serious systems. Your straight-laced, poker-faced, undergraced, spirit-sucking systems. Make way, all you nose-to-the-grindstone, pleasureless zombies. You got some trouble coming your way and it’s about to rock your stiff, dumb joke of a paradigm. The soul-suppression you subscribe to took my mother but forgot she had a successor, and it messed with the WRONG om-ie. I’m ushering in a new day dawning, and it means business about FUN and play. It has to now; it’s come down to a matter of life and death.
If you’re not with me, and I know many who aren’t, you can go take a goddam hike. And I mean that quite literally. It could very well un-chisel and change your mind.
Do it in a tutu, get a few long tree hugs in there, and it just might save your soul…
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Farma Over Pharma

by The Blyss Catalyst, posted in Uncategorized

4/20/17

Having to hide that you use reefer in any form but not that you drink alcohol or buy pharmaceuticals is the stupidest form of editing oneself in my opinion, because it’s like feeling free to say what’s true insofar as it is condoned by what society & the Feds dictate is okay, never mind that that archaic determination of what’s “okay” is completely based on manipulative, agenda-driven lies and pernicious propaganda propagated for 100 years, with not an iota of truth or the public’s interest in mind. For those of us not at risk of detrimentally impacting our livelihood or other integral areas of life (again, UGH at that sad fact), I say come clean that you’re green! Stand proud! Stop the normalization of the vilification of the natural, healing, non-addictive, panacea of the plant medicines that this earth yields us in plenty. There’s nothing wrong with you if you choose farma over pharma, green over machine. You can still be a highly productive, successful, upstanding member of society making moves and living in accordance with integrity, and be pro-cannabis. It just makes you a happier, less stressed member 😉 (not to mention more connected & conscious)…..Happy 420, all! #legalizenationwide