Category: Spirituality

Personal essays on spirituality in all forms to explore personal beliefs,  philosophy and growth using mindfulness, intuition and research.

Spirituality

Home Runs.

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I played multiple sports as a kid.

I played multiple sports really badly.

I was terrible at baseball. But I was our number one batter.

I had an unwavering belief in my ability to absolutely 10000% just swing for the fucking fences. And I usually did. If I didn’t, I would knock myself over from the sheer force of trying.

I think this is one of my favorite qualities about myself.

I have said before, what is true in the physical is true in the spiritual.

I can’t catch to save my life, I am kid in the sandlot levels of bad. Catching a ball takes a second, it’s unpredictable. You have to be able to map it out and make a calculated decision. I, am indeed, better off standing there like a dork with my glove in the air. I overthink it, I panic and I choke.

But if something is coming right at me and all I have to do is hit it as hard as I physically can? MVP, baby!

Ya’ll wonder why I like a good metaphor so much? It’s because they’re god damn enlightening, that’s why.

I have talked a lot on this blog about the work I have consciously and meticulously done to get through the hardest times in my life. I haven’t talked much about how strongly I have followed my intuition when it really, really mattered.

I knew I was supposed to move out west for over a year before I did. I would think on it, I would try to figure out where, I would price out moving companies. Every time I would get overwhelmed and I would ask myself how the fuck I thought I could ever actually make that happen.

I would stand there with my hand in the air hoping somehow it would fall right in. I guess you could say it did. That is one way of looking at it.

I can distinctly remember three moments in my life where I felt like the word ‘Go!’ was yelled at me and my entire life path changed course in a split second. Mentally, first and then very quickly after in my reality.

These moments led me to opening my own business, moving in with Perfect on Paper Guy and leaving on May 4th to drive out west.

I do not, in any single way, regret those decisions. They were the most instinctual decisions I have ever made. They were the exact right thing to do.

It’s funny actually, the snap decisions you think I wouldn’t regret, the ones I have made out of of fear and not my instincts, are often the ones I actually do.

Some things end. Businesses have shitty landlords and then you have to close. But I was so unbelievably successful, then and after. It blows my mind sometimes if I actually look back and think about it. It was incredible, I am so fucking proud of myself for it. It’s probably what most people would look over my life and label my #1 achievement.

Relationships end too. Relationships have things happen in them that are so fucking dark you can’t even imagine what your life would look like if they hadn’t happened. There is no reason I can possibly think of why we should have had to lose our child. I really can’t. But I will, never, ever regret meeting him or jumping when I heard the word ‘Go!’. It changed the entire course of my life, I am a completely different person.

I could look at these two examples and think that they are prime examples of how much I should not trust my intuition, look at how much heartbreak they led to! But I don’t see it that way.

When I moved in with Perfect on Paper Guy the second time, right before I ended up moving out west, I had the same instinctual feeling. The only time I doubted it, I asked to find a four leaf clover. Something I had looked for many times and had never found. I found one.

This could definitely be seen as ‘Do not, under any circumstances, trust your intuition.’ But again, I don’t see it that way.

It set me up in the wildest and most perfect way to move out west.

I’m sure there is something that will happen one day that will make me want to cry and say, ‘I wish I would have never moved to the fucking desert!’ just like I know I have with the other two in the worst moments. It’s natural when shit hits the fan.

But I will never regret it.

Right before these moments, I couldn’t imagine how I could get past where I was at that time. It felt like I was fumbling around in the dark trying to find my way somewhere.

Until the lights snapped on and I swung for the fucking fences.

I opened a business in three months. The physical labor of the build out was done in less than three weeks.

I started packing to move in with Perfect on Paper Guy the night we got back from Joshua Tree.

We made the decision for me to move back in and I signed out of my lease the next day. I started moving in that week. This was April 23rd.

The event that led me to snap was on May 4th and started driving with zero idea where I was going. On May 9th, I figured it out and signed my lease. I got back to Indiana on the 11th and I was in my new desert home by May 22nd.

It took me 19 days to move out west.

Something big is coming, I can feel it in my bones. It’s a deep seated adrenaline that’s starting to boil up in my soul.

Feeling it now, I realize that I had this for a month or so before I got pregnant as well. It went away when I saw those two lines. I knew something big was coming and it did. I had already swung.

I know something is coming and I’m spinning my wheels trying to figure out what the fuck it could possibly be.

The ideas I have seem outlandish.

But then again, they always did.

Something is coming, I’m poised and ready.

I’m not looking for the ball, I’m looking at the fucking fences. I know when to swing.

And, baby, it’s always a home run.

Spirituality

Flies.

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After my morning dream journal and reflections, I went to sit outside. I have been doing this every morning but I am usually out before sunrise. It’s Sunday so I slept in and went out around nine.

It felt nice, the sun was warm on my skin and I was still sleepy so I enjoyed lazing around in it.

But then the fucking flies started to swarm. I prayed for them to go away so I could enjoy my morning. They kept coming, I kept swatting. But I didn’t want to go inside, god damnet.

So I just sat still. I was uncomfortable. I worried about the health dangers of flies landing on you.

I kept sitting still until I could focus on something else.

There were a lot of butterflies out today, a large monarch as well as many small ones. I watched as they danced around each other.

Palo verde trees are plentiful in my yard. They are inspiring in the way they grow, gnarled and spiked. They twist and turn up to the sun and they provide coverage to the baby saguaros until they grow even taller than they are. But they still affectionately hold them close.

Their bark is green, an evolutionarily trait they adapted to be able to produce the life giving chlorophyll they need to survive. The leaves they do have are very tiny, you can’t see them unless you are close. Leaves let too much moisture out and in the desert, moisture is scarce. You have to keep what you can. So instead, they grew to be tall and green.

Everything is green in the desert. People say it’s not green but it is.

The flies continued to swarm.

They remind me of what I have been thinking on recently, how evil whispers. How it badgers you relentlessly, only coming back stronger if you try to swat it away. It whispers until it’s screaming. It whispers until it’s drowning you, until it’s all you can hear.

The worst things seem to try and demand the most of my attention. It may just be a buzzing in my ear. But it distracts me the most from my purpose.

There was a period of time that I didn’t go outside after the sun rose because all I could focus on were the fucking flies.

My purpose is to stay present, despite the flies.

My purpose is to stay present with the flies.

They will always be there when the sun is shining. I can let them ruin my morning or I can choose to accept them as an inevitable part of the balance in life and enjoy myself anyway.

I enjoy looking at the butterflies and the Palo verde trees, protecting their little baby saguaros.

I wondered why the butterflies couldn’t be the ones swarming me instead. That would be much easier.

I guess that’s just how it is.

Good whispers too. It just doesn’t come back stronger if you swat it away. It’s polite. I wish it wasn’t.

Eventually, I did go inside. It got to be too much. But I had done what I came to do, I stayed in the sun.

I accepted the flies until, for a moment, they became nothing but background noise.

Then I took a shower to wash off the feeling of them. Purposeful, but still gross.

I think I learned a lesson. I also think that next time I sit outside in the daytime, I will wear pants instead of shorts.

Practical and spiritual, there is usually more than one lesson to learn.

Self Reflection

The Sun, The Moon, and The Stars.

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I live in what I would consider to be the most beautiful place in the entire world. I am floored by it daily, I can’t believe a place like this exists. There is rarely a day that the sun isn’t shining. At night, I can see the moon and the stars so brightly that it feels like I am legitimately in outer space. Stars shoot so frequently through the sky above me that it’s inspired me to diligently study astrology to see how all of this beauty could translate into my life. I spend so much time learning about the mountains, the rocks and the animals. I love every last bit of it. 

Writing my last blog, just a moment in time., sent me into a two day spiral. My body was an animatronic robot going through all of my normal activities while my brain was somewhere else. My head was wrapped in cotton while simultaneously going up in flames. Writing that blog poured lighter fluid all over me and posting it was the match that set it ablaze.

I was in the place that tells me this will never, ever get better. It sneers at me that I will never be free, I am cursed by it. There’s no sense in fighting against it, it is hellbent on dragging me into inevitable madness. 

Outside, the sun shone so brightly that it was boring into my skull. The mountains loomed over me, I was looking at them but I couldn’t really see them. They were ominous and even the moon felt like it was judging me. I can’t see the beauty around me when my mind is in the past, it doesn’t compute. My surroundings aren’t familiar to me, I hadn’t seen them yet.

Inside, I obsessed over every detail. Every moment in time that I might have been responsible for how everything turned out. Trying to fill in the gaps of what I couldn’t remember. I oscillated through outward rage and inward shame. I berated myself for wasting my days off by being in this headspace, for not being able to get it together and felt disgusted in myself for pouring out my vulnerability on the internet. 

I don’t really remember what I did Sunday. I know I did laundry and I cleaned. But I don’t remember anything else. This is par the course for episodes of this magnitude. I will be so deeply entrenched mentally and emotionally in the past that, later, my brain can’t even bring the actual details back up. I’m grateful there was only one day of this. Last year I lost a full month from December to January. There are only some details I remember from the time I was pregnant, most of it got thrown out completely. 

Monday was more painful but it’s also crystal clear. This is a good sign. 

I knew I had to take some sort of definitive action in order to leave the mental state I was in. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t. I am always scared it will be one of the times it doesn’t. Those are the really dark times. But alas, we must persevere.

I have been journaling a lot recently. I have different journals for different purposes. My favorite one is used for writing down all of my nature observations in between the thoughts I have at the time. It’s grounding. I also have one for dreams and I have one for rage. 

It’s tiring to write it all out by hand. I have multiple dreams a night so I switched to cataloguing them on my laptop to better reference repeated themes and make connections. They have been extra vivid recently. They are abstract but loaded with meaning. They touch on the deepest parts of my psyche that I struggle to look at. They dig into the roots of my life, they aren’t concerned with my most recent past. 

It’s even more tiring to write out all of my rage by hand. My hands can’t move as quickly as my thoughts and there are many times I struggle to keep up. It’s frustrating. Yesterday, since there were so many thoughts competing for my attention and ultimately torturing me, I switched this to my laptop as well.

I spent hours, and I’m not even remotely exaggerating, hours typing out every single thought that came through my mind. It is 8,683 words. 8,683 words in the format of a letter I would never send. There was a point where it was only making me angrier. There was a point where I felt like it was only confusing me more. There were moments of desperation and there were things I felt embarrassed to even write. I questioned my faith in my spirituality. There is even a section that I go on a whole diatribe questioning if I had fully lost control of my own sanity. I was afraid that if I quit typing I actually would.

I had some semblance of clarity for a while. I took a shower and ate two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I was more optimistic going through pictures and videos of my past few months and appreciating how beautiful it all really is. I posted them to put some positively out into the world. I laid down to go to sleep. 

But I couldn’t. Those fucking thoughts had me in a chokehold once again, careening me backwards. I went back to it. I typed it all out in the form of a text message. I knew deep down that I wouldn’t actually send it but god damn did it feel good to play with fire for a second.

At three am, my entire mind deflated. It had run 8,683 miles and it was exhausted. I was ashamed of myself for still feeling all of these feelings, for needing to write them all out. I was afraid that I was actually just a crazy person, obsessed with my own pain. I wondered if I even had pain at all, maybe I am just really dramatic. 

I focused on releasing everything I wrote that day, acceptance moves forward. Resistance impedes. I don’t want to carry it all with me anymore, I’m sick of being angry. I will embody indifference, I will find peace in my grief. It’s over, it’s all over.

I ended my night by writing a letter to myself, reminding myself that what is not released in some form can only fester, turning itself into bitterness. I reminded myself that there is a very big difference in writing letters you’ll never send and then actually sending them. I reiterated how proud I should be of my bravery to start over here in the desert. I remembered how proud of myself I really was. I remembered how far I have come since last year, since May 22nd, since Saturday night. 

I didn’t sleep much and I still had dreams. But they didn’t have much depth, they were surface level. In the last one I ‘realized’ that today wasn’t my day off and I was too tired to go to work. Simple shit. 

I wake up to my dog staring at me a few inches from my face. The second I crack my eyes open she is tucking her head under my chin and pawing at my face. If I sleep past six am she thinks I might possibly be dead and therefore unable to feed her. She is happy when she finds out that I am not. I am too. 

I get up to let her outside and the sun is shining in that particularly jovial form it does sometimes. It is hitting the catclaw vine that grows over the top fencing of my yard in the purest way. It is just bright enough and it’s refreshing, whispering promises of a better day as it graces my cheeks. 

I leave my front door open so the crisp morning desert breeze can come through the screen, clearing out all the remnants of the past two days. It is peaceful, it is optimistic. It’s a breath of fresh air and possibility. I am right here. The sun is happy I rejoined the land of the living. I am too. 

I am lucky to live where everything survives by sheer determination and force, I get to live in an oasis where things grow delicately and green, wrapping around my home in a way that creates a sense of loving safety. I get to live where animals come and visit me, I have become the Southwest Cinderella. 

I find true healing here in the mountains. It is quite the cliche, forgive me for that. But I feel one among the plants and animals that manage to thrive here, just like me. I am comforted by being held in the valleys of the ancient mountain ranges. They hold steadfast, reminding me that years of violent eruptions and moving parts could redefine my structure but it all ends in an awe striking result. 

You know I love a good metaphor and, lucky for me, it’s chock full of them.

It only took two days to find myself firmly rooted back into the present. That’s not a long time at all. It wasn’t time wasted. 

Everything I experienced led me to exactly the place I am right now, this present moment. It has made the worst years of my life seem like the world’s most beautiful gift. 

Among the sun, the moon and the stars, I am scrubbed fresh, more prepared to keep going. They hold my hurts for me and they will give them back to me if I need to look at them again. If I don’t, they’ll release them for me for good. They guide me to the wisdom I need, they nudge me down the right path. The mountains anchor me through. They all called me here, after all. They know what they’re doing.

I will keep listening.

Self Reflection

For the Love of God.

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The song Angel Band by Tyler Childers is what I would consider to be my favorite song of all time. I saw him California and I think I blacked out in the third row when he played it live. I tattooed ‘Hallelujah, Now I See’ across my palms.

It’s a song that I’ve played over and over when I’ve been at my lowest, desperately searching for why I should continue living. It’s a song I’ve played in euphoric moments when I realized that was why. It’s the song I wanted to play when I walked down the aisle when Perfect on Paper Guy and I got married. 

I have listened to the last minute of it, over and over, while I internally writhed with rage, anguish, and joy. It encompasses such a broad spectrum of feelings and moments for me that I think it’s etched into my soul at this point. 

Sometimes I get embarrassed to love something someone else made so much. But I think that might be the point of why music or art is made, to provoke the heart and the mind.

I write off and on through phases of my life. Usually at times I feel stuck in my brain. I don’t even know what I am looking for but I’m going in with a flashlight and a shovel to dig it out. I know there’s something, I’ll find it if I keep digging. I’ll find it if I keep making logs of fossils, sediments, if I keep crafting experiments to test hypothesis. 

My subconscious has been my own personal Everest. The diligence I’ve dedicated to climbing it is unmatched. At times, the level of attention to detail I’ve paid to it has driven myself (and everyone around me, I’m sure) into madness. No stone goes unturned. Sometimes there’s nothing, sometimes there is an entire ecosystem thriving under one small rock. 

As a child, I loved flipping rocks to see what was underneath. They are the Midwest’s version of tide pools. If I chill the fuck out, I like doing it as an adult too. 

What is true in the physical is often true in the spiritual. 

I used to be really religious when I was in highschool. I chose to be, it wasn’t forced on me. I found a sense of belonging, structure, and purpose in the church. I pushed it to extremes, as you can guess I would, and I got burnt out. I had held myself to standards that a teenager really had no chance of upholding, not when they’re riddled with hormones and a healthy desire to self destruct. 

My shortcomings and mental battles within myself truly felt like an angel and devil on my shoulder, pushing and pulling at my soul. I thought I could push through if I was just dedicated enough.

When I decided I apparently was not, I gave up. I turned my back on it. I had a lot of shame about this. I think it was the beginning of feeling like I could not trust myself to see something through.

If I loved something so much but I wasn’t good enough for it, I’d bow out. I’d turn my back and walk away. I’d convince myself I never believed in it in the first place. If I wanted something so badly but I couldn’t measure up, I would repress it.

Fifteen years later, I still don’t believe in the Christian idea of God. I say that from a place of complete truth, I’ve overturned all the stones. I do think Christ’s teachings in the Bible hold a lot of merit as a tool when interpreted from a perspective of searching for clarity and purpose in both the physical and spiritual realms. He’s a philosopher, if you will.

I do believe in the idea of a Universal Spirit, a Source, a Higher Power. It is not so much that I feel like it is bigger (and therefore different) than me, as AA would suggest, but more that it is both separate and part of me. My highest self, maybe? Universal consciousness? It is not that much different from ‘God’. But it’s not personified, there’s no rules for its acceptance. It just is. 

Honestly, I think all of these different religious paths come from the same source and just present in whatever way we will find most palatable. But this is all just my opinion on my little blog so don’t come for me with ya pitchforks. 

Whatever you want to call it, I know it when I feel it and I know when I am in tune with it. My vision and my awareness expands. I become a part of everything, I see from the front of my own eyes. I feel and absorb things as they happen. I can feel every emotion and I can express them from my true self. I do not hide from anything: past, present, or future. 

Most of the time I am in a state of tunnel vision, seeing everything from a little farther back, not quite here. I think about things as they happen, label the feelings. But I don’t quite feel them. This is not unbearable and I am a little better at recognizing this now and it might take a few days, but I can push myself out of it. 

At my worst times, I am watching everything from the back of my brain. I feel nothing, I believe nothing, I don’t trust myself or others. My brain is turning it’s wheels, looking for a threat, looking for a solution. Looking for a way out. Analyzing, analyzing, analyzing. But I cannot see any patterns, I cannot put the pieces together. I have spent months in this stage, usually after a traumatic event, and I don’t usually have a lot of memories from those time periods. I am, essentially, an animated corpse. 

A lot of my distrust in myself comes from rotating through these stages, the last two predominantly. The first stage used to happen so little that I thought it was a fluke, a delusion. Mania, even. 

When I cannot succeed, live up to expectations, or be good enough: I will turn my back, repress, and walk away. I will feel ashamed of the moments I had in my true self where I felt joy, love, excitement. Even more so if I expressed them. I feel stupid for believing in them, believing in anything. 

Fear is the only emotion that I cannot tell you what it really feels like. I can tell you what anxiety feels like. I am anxious all the time. But I don’t think it’s necessarily the same thing. Anxiety is looking for solutions, disaster planning, it’s thinking ahead. It’s a manifestation of fear, most likely, but it’s not fear. It’s covering it up.

Fear is subconscious, for me at least. Fear is repressed. Deeply. 

If I am afraid that I will not be good enough, I am weak. I hate both of those things, so I repress them both. If I am afraid that I will not be good enough and therefore I will be left, I hate that even more. I repress it even harder. 

While I am repressing my fear, I am also repressing my other emotions. The love I have for someone, the adoration, the giddiness of being around them, the desire to be secure and loved. My outward expression of love towards someone makes me feel embarrassed, ashamed. I will look like a fool when they leave. I will look like a fool if they hurt me. I will look pathetic when they realize I’m not good enough. I will look pathetic for thinking they were good enough.

I turn my back, repress, and walk away. I have done it so many times. When the fear dissipates, I go back. But I’m not fully there, I’m subconsciously looking for the sign that I need to prepare, pull back, and repress it again. Sometimes I will shut down out of sheer fear of myself, I don’t trust myself to not keep repeating this pattern.

I am forever careening between hopeful and hopeless.

My fathers were the first men in my life to not live up to the idea I had of them. God was the second. I was left, wondering why they never showed up. Why they never pulled their weight and did the things they said they would. 

My fear of never being accepted, never being good enough no matter how hard I tried, has pushed me into a role of being the savior in my own story. I have written my own Bible in the electrical and chemical signals of my nervous system. It is my universal truth. 

“She’s shouting in the aisle

She’s shaking something fierce”

I began questioning the Bible and it’s teachings in my late teens. Can I question and disidentify with my own version in my early thirties? Can I create a new belief system, new commandments, new verses and parables to build on?

“Feels so good to be here

After all these faithful years”

The tattoos on my palms include an eye on each hand. In the center of the eye, and the center of my palm, is a circle that is inked red. This was a tongue in cheek nod to the phenomenon of stigmata, the appearance of bodily marks that correspond to the wounds of Jesus’s crucifixtion. 

I do not believe in the Christian idea of God. I don’t believe in Heaven. And I sure as fuck don’t believe in going to hell when you can experience it right here all on your own. 

However, stigmata is said to be a representation of a very real connection with Christ and that those who experience it are those who wanted that connection so badly that they would put themselves through the trials and tribulations to get there. 

“Just took a walk with Jesus

Just touched his nail-scarred hands”

If we are viewing the connection to Christ through a lens of metaphor for connection to Source, was it a tongue in cheek reference at all? I marked my body, the palms of my hands, with the words and symbolism to encompass everything I believe in. The words I’ve repeated to myself over and over through my own version of hell. I’ve held fast to nothing more than blind faith that I would be reborn, transformed, and full of all encompassing joy on the other side. And I did it with all the joy I could fucking muster.

“Didn’t even bother her

That he ain’t a blue-eyed man”

I believe in the weeping and gnashing of teeth. I believe in the absolute agony of accepting where you are in a moment that feels like it will eat you alive. I believe in the power it takes to not cower and hide your face while it all rages around you. And I believe in the bravery it takes to grit your teeth, turn towards it and stare it down with your god damn eyes open. 

“Hallelujah, jubilee”

I believe in being baptized by water and I believe in being baptized by fire and I believe I have experienced both, multiple times. Each time, I find more clarity, more peace, more joy. I am closer to the core of who I am. 

Every single time, I am reborn. Every single time my capacity for love grows tenfold, and my fear is quelled. At least for awhile, I can see clearly.

“I can hear the angel band”

It’s funny how often fear is mentioned alongside love in the Bible. It’s almost as if they are two sides of the same coin, you can’t have one without the other. 

“I was blind but now I see”

What if fear finally took the backseat? What if I was able to experience a love that is greater than fear?

“And I’ll jump right in amongst them

When I reach the glory land”

Self Reflection

The Past, Present, Future, Now.

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After I decided that I was, indeed, going to stick around on this ol’ earth to see what the fuck was going to happen next I woke up the next morning with what I can only think to describe as an ‘emotional hangover’. I drug myself out of bed and started my coffee, let the dog out, and found myself staring into space on my couch. My head hurt, I felt dehydrated, my stomach was in knots, I wanted to vomit. I still felt my mind plagued with thoughts on distaste for my current situation, anger, and loneliness. You might say that I was only choosing to focus on the negatives.

I’ve been studying a lot recently on how the brain works to process emotions and how it creates thought patterns. Essentially if you consistently live in a certain state, the neural pathways will exist to keep you in that state as it is familiar and what it craves. The whole concept reminds me a lot of addiction, was I addicted to being miserable? I didn’t think so as I could tell you what made me miserable. But was I choosing to be miserable about those things? 

I have also been studying on the idea of ego and the most intriguing to me was emotional ego. As I sat on my couch feeling like shit, I took a mental step back. I observed those feelings I described in my body, my body’s reactions to the emotions. I let them be for a minute and then consciously removed myself from them. My consciousness is both entwined and seperate from my body. I felt the part of it that was observing the body and the other part that could see the thoughts and the subsequent reactions only for what they were, thoughts on a situation from the past. It is no longer my present moment.

My present moment was here, on my couch, drinking coffee. I looked around at the different colors in my home, the environment I had so painstakingly crafted. I like it here. The art is meaningful. In fact, how can I forget how loved I am when so much of the things in my home remind me that I am? 

I choose to ignore it. I choose misery.

What happens if I choose to only live in the present moment? The right here right now which consistently unfolds into the future? The concept of past, present, and future is truly a perplexing one to think on as neither truly exists. But if the present only exists second to second does it exist either? Even as I typed that present moment is already gone. Are we living in a constant state of both past, present, and future as our seconds unfold into all three states simultaneously?

I meditated on this concept for a part of my afternoon, probing my memories and my present moments. Trying to truly expand and experience the layers of my own consciousness and how far it went. What were its limits? Where did these thoughts come from? What was the source? Why could I think on all of this and also still have a song from earlier playing in the background of my thoughts?

I actually fell asleep for a few moments and when I woke up, I felt a very strong sense of peace. Here I was, in the now. The past was not now. It could only affect me if I chose to ruminate on it. The unknown of the future can only affect me if I choose to ruminate on it. But in the present now, what was there to experience other than contentment of my own company?

I poured myself a nice little glass of soda water and continued a book by Elkhart Tolle that I had been reading off and on on my vacation and very soon it dived into this very concept that I had been exploring in the afternoon. The synchronicities of the universe make no mistakes.

I spoke with my sister before I left about the idea of ‘letting go of the rope’ in life. There’s a common mindset I find myself in where I feel as if I am on a dock holding onto a rope with all my might that is attached to a ship in the water. As the current tries to take it, I sweat and struggle. I get pulled along inch by inch even as I turn around and heave to continue pulling it backwards. But it keeps forcing me forward. In my own fear, I want to keep it with me and docked where I can see it. But there’s no bigger sense of relief than when you let go of the rope, feel it whip through your hands, stand back, and watch it set sail.

The letting go of the rope is truly the only time life can set sail. There is no true control but only an ego’s desire to arrogantly decide its and others path. There is no story to unfold but instead a series of just right nows to continuously choose to experience and how.

I like it, Picasso!

Self Reflection

The Current.

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As you might imagine, I spent the past week after my last two posts spiraling into the depths of a deep depression.

I could not trust my own reality. I could not trust myself. Every thought I had, I questioned. Every memory that kept popping up, I evaluated my mindset in it. How did my own warped perception color the situation? Where else has my past manifested? How much of my relationship ending was at my own hands? How many people have I pushed away? How can I ever trust what is good, what is right, what is truthful from my own perceptions and from others words and actions? The lenses I evaluate my life through are defensive and often (as much as I hate to admit) self serving.

These past events and the maladaptive coping skills, I discovered, roll into all parts of my life. The same issues persist in my friendships. I keep them at arms length from the beginning because I always expect them to leave. I do not invest my emotions into women as readily as men because I do not expect it will be reciprocated. It has hurt when I do and it is not. I am very guarded. I’m even guarded thinking about it, I’ve realized, because I think this will be one of the hardest challenges for me in my process.

But anyway, I’ve been going full cuckoo bananas. I haven’t eaten, I haven’t slept. I’ve been lost in my own emotional and mental turmoil. I have been destroyed by feeling like I can’t. I can’t move on, I can’t move forward. I can’t go backwards. I can’t unlearn these things. I feel lost, blindfolded and groping into space to try and find anything to hold onto.

The night before I went back to work I didn’t fall asleep until six am. I was doing reading after reading of my cards trying to make sense of things. It only made less. I was not trusting myself, my intuition, my own reality before me. How would it? (And by saying they weren’t making sense, I mean they were telling me to REST. And I roared back, “TRY AGAIN” on a loop for hours.)

After this day, I was so drained there was no way not to sleep. But I woke up at four the next morning already back at it. My thoughts woke me, like a swarm of wasps, already buzzing and stinging. I have been evaluating the resistance I meet in my mind recently. Like a door that’s closed, I feel myself butt up against it. Instead of turning back, I have been opening and seeing what I have hidden behind it. I have often found that it’s a series of doors. Every one that is opened leads to more wasps flying in.

They say that every bad coping skill was one that used to work for you at some point in time but now no longer does. I avoid the things that make me anxious, I shut them back. I close the door to things I don’t want to acknowledge because they are hurtful, dark, or frightening. I do need to make sure I reopen the doors, but I need to be more cautious with my approach. Eventually, I found myself swarmed, stung, bruised and defeated. I am overwhelming myself. I am burning myself out over analyzing. It’s starting to feel like all the doors are closed for a reason, I am creating my own misery. Maybe I need to take my whole ass out and let the momentum hang suspended.

That morning, an hour after waking, I attempted to meditate. I wanted to give up, I couldn’t focus. The wasps were relentless with their constant attacks. It was then that I decided to try a new tactic.

In my mind, I am in front of only one door. As I open it, it leads to nothing. Nothing at all. It’s a black expanse that goes on infinitely. There are no thoughts, no emotions. It just is. As I step through there is no feeling of falling or anything under my feet. I am suspended in the nothing. The door closes, the light from it gone, I am encapsulated. It is peaceful.

As thoughts find a way in, I imagine a chest. The lid is closed but there is a space for a key. As they arrive, they go from my mind to the box in a fluid motion. I do not need to consciously open it, they meet no resistance to deposit them inside. As they come in, I send them through. I know I can pick through the contents later if I so choose, they are not permanently shut away.

To keep myself grounded, I visualize myself as a tree. My roots dig deep into the earth, I am steady, I am solid. But I am not stuck, my limbs sweep out to feel the universe. A weeping willow, I am able to adapt and fluctuate with the winds. I shed the leaves I no longer need as they reach their breaking point. They are peacefully cast off to be blown away with the next breeze. I am graceful, strong, wise.

At another time, these looping thoughts quickly thread together to create a never ending string of pearls. They keep thwacking together, one by one, I can’t stop it. But then I do, I have scissors. I easily snip the ribbon, slicing through the silk. I let the pearls scatter. It doesn’t matter if one rolls away, I do not need to find them.

I have not found a visualization with my ex partner that doesn’t break my heart. As I start frantically gathering up pearls, I stop, and I send them to the box.

These visualizations are so detailed because I had to make them so detailed. If I had to open the box, I couldn’t put things in it as easy. I would have to picture myself purposely opening it. If the tree wasn’t a weeping willow it made me feel like my arms were stuck straight out (I don’t know, dude, that’s just how it felt.). If the ribbon wasn’t made of silk, I had trouble cutting through it. Or sawing through it. It had to be a flimsy ribbon cut with scissors. I had to make myself realize that I wasn’t doing any of it wrong because it needed so much detail, it made it what I needed.

I never really committed to these things because they made me feel stupid sitting in my bed thinking of myself as a tree like I’m in poca-fucking-hontas. But, it was working. In these moments, I felt more in control of my racing thoughts. I felt present in the moment I was in. I could stop a debilitating train of thought if I snipped the ribbon that strung them together or if I locked the stinging thoughts into a box.

I had been doing mild versions of this before and abandoned them, but that’s okay. I remembered again. That’s the point: I can regroup and refine my approach. It’s okay to lock certain things away if they are not productive to growth, if they are self loathing disguised as self exploration.

Although as the week went on, I found that the scars I had unwrapped to inspect had thin skin. Although they had healed over, they were not calloused. As things rubbed against them the skin had become raw, irritated. Eventually those wounds fully reopened to reveal a larger wound than before. The pain from them felt new but familiar, it ripped through me like a wildfire. Choking out my logic and sense, I could not visualize to get past the deep rooted feelings of hurt it incited. I found myself twice in a room of my own destruction when the anguish eliminated everything inside of me but the hurt of that child who felt rejected. I couldn’t block her out anymore.

I am trying to ride the waves as they come in. Trying to stay present and grounded but also riding out when I want to leave my entire life behind. I feel strong, capable and then weak, miserable, and pathetic. I can’t make heads or tails of it. I have regretted even beginning this journey at all. I’ve questioned every decision, questioned my own sanity. I have thrown every last tarot deck I owned against the wall and as the cards ricocheted around the expanse of my home, I screamed, “How am I supposed to get to Death and see The Sun if I cannot make it past The Tower?”

I truly want to see a way through. I really do. I want to see a balance of my emotions and consistent day to days. But I just don’t right now. And maybe that’s the whole point. I always have a game plan, I’m always ready for action. I always had ways to ‘soothe’ but they were either unhealthy or outright ignoring. Maybe this is just the one time I have to weather the storm, stick it out, and I’ll finally see The Sun. I literally just have to figure it out as I go along.

Not every day is going to be a good day where I can visualize myself as a god damn weeping willow. Some days are going to be harder. I can learn from the days when I destroyed everything I could touch (including regretfully my Paris Hilton tea kettle) and learn from when I cleaned it up. I can realize when these emotions are coming and not do it again. I just have to keep going. There’s really no other option, I can’t run away from it. Besides, it has to give soon, constant misery is boring as fuck.

And honestly, in my spiral, I did laundry. I kept my house clean. When I couldn’t force myself to eat, I drank four hundred protein shakes a day. I don’t think I am because, mentally, I want to throw myself off a building but I am still existing and attempting to take care of myself. I have started to eat again and I have slept for more than a couple hours a night. I am at least treading water in between the times I am washed away with the current.

When I was putting away laundry my only thought was, “this is the worst task I could ever imagine doing in my whole life.” on repeat. But the result was that all of my clothes were clean and ready for the week. When I’m getting dressed for work I don’t think, “Man, I really hated folding these fucking pants, hanging this shirt, and organizing these fuuucking socks.” No, they’re just there. I don’t avoid them because I hated what went into being able to wear them. It’s okay to hate my effort, to feel stupid, to feel like it’s not working. One day it will. When I don’t like how I handle something, I will regroup and refine my approach.

One day the reward of this time period is going to be similar to having clean clothes. I won’t think about how much I hated what went into it, I won’t avoid it because of the misery I experienced in it.

It’ll just be there and I’ll wear it.

The Burning.

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When we think of Spiritual Awakenings there are images that come to mind. Birds chirping, a beautiful but approachable woman (probably the one you saw most recently in an all natural skin care ad) sitting cross legged in a millennial grey room with her eyes closed and a serene smile on her face. Maybe a different woman: long wild hair streaked with grey in long tasseled skirts untangling the secrets of the universe. You might possibly smell patchouli. You think crystals, chakras, and other buzzwords. You might even think of a lost soul kneeling in a church, succumbing to the way of the Lord.

I’m here to say: It’s not always like that.

Two months ago I discovered my partner was having an affair.

To say I went into a rage is an understatement. I truly felt like my soul left my body as I ripped through my life destroying everything I could control. The most vile words I could imagine came out of my mouth as smooth as honey. I viciously ripped everything I could from him piece by piece. I went public with my fury to let the world know how he betrayed me.

This rage lasted for a full week. I was feral. I was mentally frothing at the mouth. I became unhinged. I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep. With clenched teeth and wild eyes, I drove miles in my car trying to separate myself from the hurt in any way that I could. I would grip my steering wheel and scream out in anguish. It was like nothing I had ever experienced before.

The point I want you to focus on is that I felt like my soul left my body. In this sheer primal rage my mind was violently ripped from its center. Everything I was and had been was absolutely destroyed by the wildfire of emotions I was experiencing.

When it had nothing left to destroy the anger finally subsided. I stopped running. With my chest heaving, I turned around to see nothing but charred, smoking, and desolate trees for miles behind me.

To be quite honest, I didn’t know fuck all what to do with that.

But the smoke was clearing. I was beginning to have clarity. I made my way through the next few weeks and reflected on the ones prior. I began to notice how… divine it all seemed. I could map the events leading up to Affair Day and what happened afterwards and it all seemed a little too.. perfect. How every single thing that happened moved a chain of events along to a point where everything fell into place.

I was able to make choices with ease that had been agonized over before.

In a series of mundane moments that I can’t actually pinpoint to sound poignant and woo woo, I started to have a deep rooted feeling of, “Everything is exactly as it should be. I am exactly where I need to be.”

But I couldn’t tell you the exact moment I felt more ‘spiritual’.

I started deeply exploring my mind in the couples therapy my ex partner agreed to do after Affair Day. Our counselor challenged my thought processes and how I interpreted my interactions with the world around me. It began breaking the cycle of what I know now is Codependency. As I beat my self limiting patterns back, my True Self began to emerge.

With the desire to rebuild my True Self ignited, I stumbled upon a book with exercises on meditation that integrated grounding, breathing, and visualization techniques. Our counselor had mentioned this in my one on one so I decided to start giving it a shot. (You think with all the therapy I have paid for over the years I would have taken this advice before, but I digress.) I started to ground myself multiple times a day. I began to feel more present in the now instead of the later.

I dug deeper. I meditated on the idea of building self. On who I wanted to be, who I was. I began to open myself up to what I sometimes refer to as Spirit or The Divine. I started reading Tarot again and found the messages I was receiving deeply reflected and affirmed my circumstances. I implemented the advice that was given. I felt led. I felt like the weights I had put on myself over the years were slowly lifting as I trudged along. Soon I found I could run.

One morning I realized that the constant need for control in my life had faded. I had started to have an understanding of what it felt like to truly trust my ‘intuition’. I am working on trusting myself to hear it.

I know it will take time. This is just the beginning, I’m told.

What is Spirit? I don’t know. I’m still defining it for myself. What I can say is that I’m grateful it all happened. It was supposed to. That primal state of rage completely destroyed everything I had defined myself by until that moment. I am not the same person I was. Things don’t look the same, they don’t feel the same. I think of time as before and after.

None of these things eliminate the hurt of what I experienced. It’s anguish lingers. Those trees I looked behind me to see are still smoking, but the fire stopped there. I have turned my back, my feet are planted forward on solid ground.

The smell of smoke may still always remind me of the hurts I’ve endured but the warmth of the Sun will remind me why I embraced Death when it was drawn.

At the end of every funeral there’s a moment when you look around, exhale, and get up to begin moving on.

This is Hawkmoth Rising.

Me: The Person