If your self-love journey doesn’t include it all

“I must have a dark side also if I am to be whole.” ~CG Jung

And if your journey along the path of evolved conscious living doesn’t deliberately include & absorb all the parts of you that are not at all evolved – where you are the utter antithesis of enlightened living – then you are not saturated by your own consciousness, and you’ve missed the point of embodiment. If your path doesn’t also embrace where you are a total fucking asshole, a vain and vacuous thing, a batshit control freak, a fuddy-duddy, down-n-out, insane clown — then you will never know the true depths of self-love, but only the cherry-picking of self-judgments. If you can’t embrace full immersion into all that is dark, you can never learn the heroic measures of how to bring your own self back into the light.Shadow-self

Darkness, Go To Your Room.

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Okay, Grief, it’s back to basics for us.

After detonation, and all has been leveled, we face Ground Zero. We begin with our most fundamental needs.

My working through these messy, miracle-marbled blows to my world may not be over for years, or ever. (probably ever). But for this chapter, I am calling the explosives off. Picking through the rubble to start rebuilding. Having long ago earned my trauma survivor Scout badge, i have a keen sense of closing time, of when enough is enough. And i heed it.

This is the beginning of the end for my Dark.
…and my Bliss said, “Let there be light, and there was light”….But first, there was my Word.

Stepping into the barren valley. I begin with the breath. I begin with water. With rest. With life-affirming foods every cell of me aches for like a newborn to mother’s milk. I begin with moving my body in the soft ways it wants to move, tuning in to the parts that may have been silenced during destruction. [When was the last time i listened to what my knees had to say about all this? What might my shoulders reveal about my losses? Perhaps my hands have questions of their own. And perhaps dancing them out might beckon their answers.]

I strap on my pack, replete with more than enough tools. Whatever i’m missing comes promptly from my communities.

Enough endings. It’s time to begin.

I Got Mood Poisoning; Must’ve Been Something I Hate

Low vibration energy turns toxic if we let it stick around, like water that stops flowing turns swampy. A degree of steam-venting can be useful, but staying stuck in the quagmire of hate, fear, complaining, gossip, self-depreciation, scarcity, or any of the low vibe, denser states, surely finds us tired, grumpy, suppressed, frayed, and disconnected. Pay attention to what you’re putting your attention on, and recalibrate accordingly — according to your highest intentions that align with your Truth & Bliss. Awareness, choice, and owning it all can yield us the power to shift ANYTHING. We can alchemize everything back to our joy & peace, back to the Truth of who we are – and anything can be our access there, even the heavy moods, if we pay attention, intuit, and then choose to shift. I believe life’s compass is always pointed towards the light, which is why it feels so bad when we’re misaligned with our Truth. Happy recalibrating, sorcerers.

W, w, waaait a minute, please!

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It’s the hardest year to leave.

I entered this year with my mother….I end it without her.
(well…on one level)

It’s nearing closing time now. I feel a little bit “Phew, glad THAT one’s over”, a lotta bit jazzed for my expectant visions on the verge of birth…..And somewhere in between, I’m holding a bit of a floor tantrum, tugging on the pant cuffs of 2015, kicking and begging for it not to make me leave.

I don’t want “old acquaintances be forgot and never brought to mind”, not ready for that auld lang syne. I want to keep all my acquaintances, all my dear loves, until my last breath, brought to my mind for all the length of time.

I didn’t know one could be so conflicted about a mere turn in a number. A fresh year has always seen me at the ready, revved to dive in and turn loose with the paint. I’m such a sucker for blank canvases.

You know that dream where you jet off somewhere and then suddenly realize you left some critical item behind? Like all of your luggage or Grandad’s hallowed heirloom entrusted to you. And now you’re all kinds of “Oh shit, what do i dooo?!” and desperate and panicky and there’s this dreadful sense of “without-ness” deep in your guts and your heart?

Yeah, kind of like that. Except I lost a whole person to the year. The dearest one to me, the one whom I thought I could never live without – not for a day, not when i’m 80 years old. The one whose name I couldn’t utter in the same sentence as “death” without choking up and shuttering, just like a big ol’ baby. Or, the baby I was.

Yup, you growed me up, Year. I have stretch marks from the growing pangs to prove it.

Here in you, Year, I lost loves and dream jobs, lifelong wishes nearly made manifest, projects near launched and pets gone and once-dependable realities and relationships I’d thought were impervious to change. And I lived. I lived on all the stronger, the more flourished, all the stauncher in my faith and my sense of all-is-well. I’m either batshit delusional, or you carried me safely through, knowing these losses were actually carving me. Knowing you’d make a Michelangelo out of me yet.

2015, I honor you. I bow to you and I am not mad. I have a sacred hurt born out of such a deep love of the things that I loved. You dug into me that teaching. That all of our pain is only a testament to how much we love Love.

But please, my dear Year, just a little while more. There is so much of me, so many parts of my heart, I leave here folded up in you, beloved and brutal sensei of a year. So much of my life engulfed by your tides before I could even fathom what was happening. Before I’d had the chance to muster up my goodbyes. Let me take just a little while longer to offer them now, before you make me go.

…And then I promise, it’s straight to the canvas with me.

Because of You

It’s July 1st?? Whaaa?! d’uh fuq?…I just came in from my night walk in my neighborhood park brimming with ogling lovers spooning ice cream to each other, dogs dashing the field blissed the fuck out because wheeee GRASS!!, old friends at stone tables intent on crushing the other on the chessboard between ’em, and i’m swooning up at the moon who is most definitely smiling precisely back at my twitterpated gaze, and i feel…..romanced (athat moon and i are something of an item, you know) and i’m falling madly deeply in love with my life all over again. (I’m talking in that hardcore, teenage way – yeah, that intense)….when it suddenly dawns on me – it’s my San Franciscaversary….!!!!! 2 exact years since that fated first blind date, when I rode in past midnight, travel-bedraggled and weary, with little more than my houseplants and an AirBnB reservation. This SF with her sexy reputation, and me, Bay Area Bambi on her wobbly legs and doe-eyed high hopes – I knew not one of her dizzying streets, not one of her (many) suitors or lovers, not any of her murky moods or sunny spirits. I was simply a girl showing up, hoping to be loved. I wasn’t even sure I’d grow to love her. I wasn’t quite sure of anything really – except that i was terrified and thrilled and everything was possible and nothing was certain (as any epic love begins). i’d left my life and all that was familiar 3,000 miles behind, for what MIGHT await me here.

And now here i am, two full cycles ’round the sun later, looking up at that same all-knowing moon i once begged for answers from on a night back in Philly concerning the decision to take this very life leap i ended up pursuing, and it’s all so sparkly crystal clear why i left, why i showed up. It was who and what lay on the other side awaiting me, that pulled me here – like that voluptuous moon’s pull on her abiding sea. i just didn’t know it then.

If you’re reading this and you’re one of those folks residing on the other side of that giant YES i bellowed those years ago, i want to thank you in ways that “thank you” doesn’t quite have the muscle to deliver, but you should try to grock anyway.

I want to thank you for being my moonpull. The invisible force that hooked into my heart and led it West, whispering “Come with me; we’ve got plans for you.” For getting especially loud around the time of Colorado I-80w, when i very nearly turned the car around to head back east, mid-“what-in-holy-fuck-am-i-doing?!”-sobfest. “You can cry as much as you need, just keep driving West,” you echoed in my heart. So i rode – trusting and crying and driving and meltdowning, interspersed with bison jerky breaks (man, i love those Rocky Mt. pitstops), following that pull, my heart irrevocably lassoed by it. It had a present for me. You.

And oh man, You. You who makes my life fertile and rich and alive and replete with nutrients that feed my spirit and rapacious appetite for delight and laughter. You who so often, and without knowing, bring me to fat, blubbery tears of joy out of my sheer awe that i could be loved so well by so many perfect precious people. You who hopped on my path and shifted its curviture forever. You are why I find my life so divine, so delicious. You are the sweet in my honey moon.

If perchance you don’t know you’re in that You, then this: if ever I’ve said “i love you” this side of the Mason Dixon, you’re the you my Cali residency belongs to, the you I heard piercing through the sobs; and when I’ve said “i love you”, what i’ve always meant is all that i’ve stated here. “I love you” is simply the Cliff Notes. When i say i love you, i’m saying thank you for guiding me down roads I do not know how to traverse alone, even when you don’t know you’re doing it, just by virtue of your being. I’m saying thank you for giving my life shapes I didn’t know it could ever make. I’m saying i’m in on your secret, you time-hopping travel guides. A girl back on Interstate 80, trembling at a driver’s wheel, listened…showed up…and now finds herself in a future rife with delight, swooning under a sweet honey moon on a murky July night, falling madly deeply (epically) in love with her life, in that teenage way. Because of You.

So thank you…and all that it means.

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NYE 2014: My Wish For You

It’s about to get all swervy up in here….With my last slow, loungey hours of 2014 before the booty-bouncin’ and bubbly elixirs swoop in and giddy me up, I’m closing out this last 360 turn around the sun by clearheadedly saying: […eh hem…and with the drumroll]

Thank you, fraands and fuzzy-loves, my playpals and champions, my cohorts and confidants, and my partners-in-crime against mediocrity. Thank you, my Family – the one I was born to and the one I scooped and gathered along the way like found jellybeans at *Easter {*er, Spring Equinox}. Thank you for spending a year of your life with me in it, for contributing to my expansion, for giving my life its ever-shifting, gyrating shape. You helped growed me up and colored me in with your distinct and vivid hues of love. My chalice runneth over with the wisdom, development, celebrations, surprises, triumphs, and tasty memories the year has yielded me – every bit of all of it owed to the people I got to fold into my year and my heart. Now side by side, hearts and hands held fast together, we cross into an unmarked chapter, and plunging onwards, I hope you this:

That you cause yourself to leave behind the rocks that do not serve you but only weigh you down. I hope you trust yourself enough to distinguish what those are – right now in this ever-ready-for-you moment, and that you lay them down at the threshold of the heavy door you now close, and plow ahead unburdened by all that’s expired. I hope this year you uncover untapped spaces of your imagination with which to paint your days dripping in dreams and delight, and with a feverish, Jackson Pollack-esque gusto. I hope you get devoted to the cravings of your heart and make a love story of your own Self-discovery. I hope it’s a lusty one, your epic Great Romance, with little blue birds circling about your head and singing, and a hero swooping in on a big white horse and there’s riding off into sunsets and all of that yummy, swoony stuff. And I wish you the insight to see, once and for all, that this hero…is You. No more waiting in towers, lovely. I knight you now into the Kingdom of your own Sacred Hero’s Heart.

I re-invoke in you the native tug to keep discovering new ways to enchant thyself, and to do damage to the synthetic impediments that ever led you even once to suppress that talent. And as with every forest enchanted, pokes the head of a dragon every now and again. Sometimes a 3-headed one, with fangs and fire and an appetite that’s seemingly satiated by only your quaking vulnerabilities. I bid you the courage to stare these hot heads square in the face, and then braver even – to just…stop…battling…them…stop exhausting you, sweetness…And love them instead; Triumphing here is valor of the highest order.

I command, yes command, you feed yourself with joy-charged ionic air–that is to say with rushing waters and verdant plush forests and mountains that seem to laugh off your problems in that humbling, guru-esque way. And i wish you to cut your stagnancy with swirling-dervish-like dancing, and if that isn’t your style, then whatever mobile way you can get your body to say what your mind isn’t always willing to go public with–but personally i hope it’s the silly & wild let-loose style (for silly is the Sacred at play, i say).

And then let’s fill your forests with art and climbing things and with projects you love and communities that love you back. I hope trumpets fire off in your heart and waken you to the fanfare the entire Universe has been sounding off in your honor all along – you sweet, messy blessing. Do you hear the divine’s ribboning hymns that sing your name without you having to do a thing but be your precious, tender self? I do. Don’t worry; it takes practice being with your perfection. In the meantime, I can lend you my listening.

For the ruin that marks every tale of a dancer of edges, I wish you to study the fine art of alchemizing wreckage into fuel for your transformative fire, disaster into desire, should you choose to surrender and give way to the kind of pain that always does become the very salve that heals itself. This kind of hope’s gonna hurt, my beloved brave ones. But I promise promise promise, the skin you shed unearths gods within, and you will be stunned laying eyes upon who you truly, wholly are beyond what you never imagined you could endure. If you are gutsy enough to be ripped wide open and offer up your guts as an offering to the Cosmic feast. Inside the once unchosen places, are folded the Elysian fields of forgiveness, comes compassion, comes a kind of radiance that makes you gasp and wince at its radical beauty. Be prepared to fall in love. Or never mind that; unprepared falling in love is yummier yet.

Oh yes, and that. I hope you lots of unprepared falling-in-love-ness. I see toe-curling in your future, sweets.

I hope this year you write your story in a way that is honest, which is to say infused with the aromatic Truth of who you are, rippled with vibrational sacral giggles, you laughing with You. And I hope that you come to see that who you really are is however you choose to write yourself – and you are your own Magellan in this way, so abracadabra I say! I decree this is the year you paint yourself epically, write yourself divinely, ever-expansively, boldly, heroically. You are a masterpiece already. But you’ll need to write out, sing out, dance out, ceramic-wheel out your gorgeous story so that you all of your Cells and all of your Selves can know this too. And if you practice unlearning taking yourself too seriously, you will come to find out that all along, you were delightfully, epically, silly-ily perfect, forever and always. And then you’ll just have to find a new hobby other than all that fixing-upping of you. Take up disc golf or something, you whacky humanoid imperfect perfection. For me, that is who you are, and what I want for you, for us, is to be as we are and to love and write and create from our honest, tender places. To come out of dark towers and build glittering palaces of our Truths.

You are a fairytale, mah lerves. I am blessed to pair up our paths. Now lock arms, rev up them wings….Let’s go…

Joybrationally,
Lyssie Lovebeans

Blue Messengers

My dream was brief but landed heavily: three small electric blue butterflies landed on my forearm, started gnawing intently at my skin. It hurt slightly though they weren’t being violent. It was as if their work had purpose, and they knew I could take the discomfort – and should. I tried hastily to tug them off, but they remained unfazed, and only grew more steadfast at their undertaking. At last, the one with skinny black stripes on its wings, broke into my skin and swiftly dug its way inside. I stood there aghast, watching as the creature pierced a vein and vanished up my arm. The other two immediately followed suit, shooting up the same path, and my whole arm began to pulse with a fiery heat; a burn, burn, burn from my finger to my collarbone….And then I woke up. Not sure what to think, but looks like metamorphosis wants in…

Feeling: Love-baked

Sometimes I just don’t know what to do with love’s grandiosity, the herculean sum of it I have for the people I get to fold into my life. Sometimes a monsoon swells up in my chest and I’m swept away by curling waves of enchantment, whirled about in a circumvolution of gratitude. Sometimes I’m thundered by awe; lightening-struck by cracks of concentrated mirth in my sky. And sometimes I feel like I just might spill over and my love could flood the room, punch out the windows, take over the streets. Sometimes it feels like I don’t have enough skin to hold it all in.

Sometimes I’m tugged by the urge to gather my people up into a giant copper tea cup and drink up; infuse them into the cells of my body. Sometimes I want to scoop out the space and make an ice cream cone of intimacy, dive in and let it run down my chin (funny how that word sounded out becomes “into-me-see”…*lightbulb*).

Sometimes, whilst belly-deep in filthy rich conversation, locking eyes with a person of mine, it feels like I might suddenly erupt into Incredible Hulk mode and my shirt could shred apart and my buttons pop off and I’d transmutate into a blissed-out, *happy-hearted monster (*The Hulk-hearted? hmm). Right there, right in front of everyone! And it’d be like, “Wow, that just happened,” and it would be slightly awkward but tender and honest. Like I just couldn’t help it. Like, “Aw, look how much she loves us! She made herself into a BEAST!”

Sometimes I find myself thinking of people and wishing I could knit them all into a big fuzzy afghan that I would then cloak myself in. Lay my body down on a plushy mound of grass under the high summer sun and nap in their communion. Lullabied by sweet honeycomb sacred safeness. I’d drift to sleep thinking of their faces and dream that we were fluorescent furry caterpillars weaving cocoons with our language. We would say, “We should make these pulse and glow in technicolor RAINBOW!” And we would all agree, and so it shall be. And then I’d wake up and swim in the delight that waking life is even sweeter than dreams. Because people. The real time rapture they are.

Sometimes I want to turn myself into a carnival and have the people squeal in glee on the Tilt-a-Whirl in me…like WHEEEEE…and waltz in the communal majesty we build out of “WE”.

And maybe i can’t do all that (i said maybe), so maybe i’ll just tell you this is how i feel and that these truthy words are the very cupcake center of my oozy woozy heart and maybe you could just get the bigness of who you are in my world and know that your presence is stamped all over it.
~lovegatherer~

Feeling: Love-Baked

Sometimes I just don’t know what to do with love’s grandiosity, the herculean sum of it I have for the people I get to fold into my life. Sometimes a monsoon swells up in my chest and I’m swept away by curling waves of enchantment, whirled about in a circumvolution of gratitude. Sometimes I’m thundered by awe; lightening-struck by cracks of concentrated mirth in my sky. And sometimes I feel like I just might spill over and my love could flood the room, punch out the windows, take over the streets. Sometimes it feels like I don’t have enough skin to hold it all in.

Sometimes I’m tugged by the urge to gather my people up into a giant copper teacup and drink up; infuse them into the cells of my body. Sometimes I want to scoop out the space and make an ice cream cone of intimacy, dive in and let it run down my chin (funny how that word sounded out becomes “into-me-see”…*lightbulb*).

Sometimes, whilst belly-deep in filthy rich conversation, locking eyes with a person of mine, it feels like I might suddenly erupt into Incredible Hulk mode and my shirt could shred apart and my buttons pop off and I’d transmutate into a blissed-out, *happy-hearted monster (*The Hulk-hearted? hmm). Right there, right in front of everyone! And it’d be like, “Wow, that just happened,” and it would be slightly awkward but tender and honest. Like I just couldn’t help it. Like, “Aw, look how much she loves us! She made herself into a BEAST!”

Sometimes I find myself thinking of people and wishing I could knit them all into a big fuzzy afghan that I would then cloak myself in. Lay my body down on a plushy mound of grass under the high summer sun and nap in their communion. Lullabied by sweet honeycomb sacred safeness. I’d drift to sleep thinking of their faces and dream that we were fluorescent furry caterpillars weaving cocoons with our language. We would say, “We should make these pulse and glow in technicolor RAINBOW!” And we would all agree, and so it shall be. And then I’d wake up and swim in the delight that waking life is even sweeter than dreams. Because people. The real-time rapture they are.

Sometimes I want to turn myself into a carnival and have the people squeal in glee on the Tilt-a-Whirl in me…like WHEEEEE…and waltz in the communal majesty we build out of “WE”.

And maybe I can’t do all that (I said maybe), so maybe I’ll just tell you this is how I feel and that these truthy words are the very cupcake center of my oozy woozy heart and maybe you could just get the bigness of who you are in my world and know that your presence is stamped all over it.

~lovegatherer~

The Magic of Conversation

It’s important to get that in a very real and marked way, one conversation really can change a life – the nature of it, the context, the shape of its future and trajectory of its path. I recall a countless sum of these flavorful kinds of conversations, both one to one and in a community or group setting alike, that as I look back and scan the outflow that came of that dialogue, I’m connected and present to the shifts and leaps and course changes that would have never ensued otherwise. A whole other world sprouted out of a moment in time spent sharing words that mattered. A new future emerges. Just like that. It was this breed of conversation that catapulted me to California, 3000 miles from all that was familiar and safe, driving west to manifest destiny. Somewhere in a parallel reality, the shape of my life is entirely unrecognizable, were I able to peep a glimpse. And where it split off was in a conversation. Fierce words that pierced my fear and awoke a slumbering Self. Yet this was a cooperative and participatory act, for words that make a difference only do so in those willing for a difference to be made, those willing to put themselves at stake, and gamble familiarity (*beware this league of communication – there is often a shore to leave; but oh those glimmering horizons towards which they may cast you). And so, my brilliant bevy of mattering word utterers…engage. Pivot the chronic pull to figure it all out within the confines and isolated crevices of your mind. Check in to life and with others, fully, out here, where life is happening, and have important conversations. Your engagement with the world and with the folk you share it with brings honor to life and all it has to say, and lends a wide open platform to unfurl its secrets. Hold them up to your heart and hear them. Offer others the gracious space of your sacred listening on which to unfold their own found magic. Everyone is a sourcerer in a way. Invite dialogue that digs. Ask questions that raise eyebrows and tickle brains. Dare to be intimate. Be willing to get messy. Request coaching and contribution and support from the lush and endless resources that abound in your life (Google’s got nuthin’ over personal exchange). Place your know-all up on a mantle, let it rest for just a while (don’t worry, you can have it back), and allow for naivete to be an asset now. Tap in to the lives of others and fold their findings into your cache (this could potentially be one of your highest yielding life hacks). Nothing lights people up like contributing what they know and sharing life experience; let them be that gift. Voice your wants and challenges and make bold requests for what you need. Put the whispers of your heart on loud speaker. Then listen keenly. Plug in. Seek, explore, play, co-create through language. Generate possibilities into being starting with the word; this really can be linguistic alchemy. Try things on. Lean in to life, and try out someone else’s model of living and working, for a day, an hour. See what happens. Experiment with what is said, even when it’s totally new and uncomfortable (perhaps especially when). In these exchanges, allow the seemingly fixed parts of you to re-order and contort for the sake of expansion. Put your identity at risk. The uncomfortability will soon be assuaged by a newfangled, thrilling existence, where you may just find the magic sauce, the sweet spot. We weren’t meant to level off homeostatically. We weren’t meant for rigor mortis living. I think we were always meant for the becoming; and any moment of interaction is our next possible abracadabra. Accept that even a mere sentence has the power to go THUD in a room and rearrange the formula of the future. Be open to discoveries in a single interaction that can alter everything on a dime, because anything can – if we’re open. And above all, it begins with the willingness to have any of it profoundly make a difference. Happy conversing. Everything you want really is here for you.