Category: Growth & Transformation

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.đź’ˇscreen 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.

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 đź’–

It Could Be Worse

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

Some days it feels like all of my energy and all of my time and all of the space of me is spent arduously fending off the razor-edged fangs of cynicism. Resignation’s piercing claws. It isn’t me, but some contagious condition, and still it’s my battle to bare at times. My venom to alchemize.
….but hey, at least I didn’t have a day like this guy’s: #SFstormsarenojokescreen shot 2019-01-13 at 6.23.38 pm

Blue Messengers

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

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…

The Magic of Conversation

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

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.