Tag: lost

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Signs, Magic, White Rabbits, and Crowns

I considered not sharing this one, as it is quite personal not only to me but my family. However, I wanted to give everyone reading this the opportunity to believe in signs, synchronicities, and magic. Mom and Sandi… I hope you are okay with me writing this openly, and if not, I hope that you can forgive me.

Not long ago, I finally went back. I went back to the spot off of Hwy 24 in Leadville where I got the news from my older sister that her time here on earth was limited, finite. I parked at the space where mine and Sandi’s bodies remembered they were much more water than skin and bones. Yet, when I parked at the Mineral Belt Trailhead, I didn’t have much time to process. The parking lot was busy, which I soon realized was because a local college or high school track was working out there, some of the team XC skiing while others ran loops on the groomed ski trail. Because Pacer and I are both quite sensitive and highly attuned to the energy around us, my main priority was to put my own skis on and get into the quiet of the woods as quickly as possible. 

After a mile or so, we got into our groove and my mind started to quiet. Around two miles in, the pine trees started to close in around us and I thought, “This would be a great place to see Sasquatch.” Minutes later, Sasquatch appeared (maybe just a large black cut out, but let’s use our imaginations) and Pacer made a new friend. I laughed at my mind’s conjuration, and we skied on. While Sasquatch was cool, he (or maybe, she?) wasn’t our sign. Actually, I wasn’t expecting one, which is perhaps one of the best parts about magic… it’s always there, and it reveals itself more easily when your mind isn’t holding on to any particular expectation or trying to predict future events. At the same time, you should always expect magic. It was when we crossed the road, splitting the trail, that I saw it on the back of a sign (this is not the first sign I’ve gotten on a sign…I think it’s the Universe’s way of ironically chuckling and saying “here’s your signier sign!”)…a sticker of a crown.

But not just any crown. This one is gold, with three plain and slightly crooked points. This crown is the signature logo of the band “Train”, my older sister’s favorite band, perhaps a hair over Matchbox 20*. Think “Calling all Angels”, “Drops of Jupiter”, and “Hey, Soul Sister.” While the band Train is still well known, I can’t say its a super popular band in the mountains of Colorado, nor have I ever seen the sticker before (and at least in my area, people put stickers everywhere…the back of cars, on stop signs, bathroom stalls, on the signs naming ski slopes, etc.). It was almost as if my older sister was saying, with her own signature eye roll, “I’m right here! I’m literally always with you.” This was obviously not just for me, but my family as well.

*As you’ll see throughout this post, my older sister often speaks to me through music and her favorite bands/artists: Train, Matchbox 20, Goo Goo Dolls- while born in the ’84 and ’88, we were 90s kids-, and Justin Timberlake (specifically, “Can’t Stop the feeling”, the song my mom played at her post funeral lunch), and Avril Lavigne (my mom played “Head Above Water” at the cemetery, which is when I sobbed and Ieft mascara stains on my dad’s shirt.)

My signy sign.
Me wearing my Amanda’s hoody.

As I was saying before, the funny thing about magic is that magic is all around us and in us. We’ve just been trained to not see it. Even me, just last year, thought I didn’t have enough of it and went out in search for more. Yet when my mind starts to quiet it’s like my awareness opens up and I can “see” more, as in I can see how foolish it is to believe magic is sparse or needs any action on my part to come into fruition. (As Michael Singer likes to say, we’re on a planet spinning around the sun at just the perfect distance that life can grow and we can breathe without burning or freezing, and we think we need to control things?)This all led me to seeing…

Yep. 

A white rabbit. 

My Alice in Wonderland signs started happening a few weeks earlier. The white bunny came while skiing down another trail outside the town of Buena Vista. I caught only a glimpse, but I saw the magical creature. My mind instantly went two to things: 1) perhaps this was the reincarnation of the bunny I killed the previous year while mindlessly driving up the road below (this of course, led to intense feelings of guilt and many tears), and 2) the rabbit that led Alice down the hole into Wonderland, or Underland. (In Tim Burton’s rendition of the classic book and later Disney film, Alice referred to Underland as Wonderland when she first visited as a child.) Always the one looking for animal symbolism, I drove home with the intention of looking up the rabbit’s message, while, of course, Matchbox 20’s newest song came on the radio with the lyrics “I know you think I’m gone, but I’m all in. Don’t get me wrong.” (I believe when I looked at the time, it was 2:22, just to triple my signs for the day.)

My first Google search led me right to this site (the blogger’s name, of course, was Amanda- my older sister’s name): https://www.amandalinettemeder.com/blog/white-rabbit-spirit-animal-medicine-symbolism. Her post not only talked about Alice in Wonderland, but a white rabbit symbolizing the release of fears, play, and awakening intuition, or, the inner mystic. Exactly my journey of the past 7 or so months, and, what I believe, what I’m waking up to. 

In the next few weeks, I received more signs: A scene from Alice in Wonderland paired with a Carl Jung quote in a random Instagram post, photos of white bunnies, and a client mentioning “not going down the rabbit hole”. Normally, I would have agreed with him…when we’re spinning in a rumination cycle, we’ve got to breathe and recenter. This time, though, I had the insight that maybe, instead of going just halfway down the rabbit hole, I needed to go ALL THE WAY DOWN, and follow my beliefs back to their root, and decide for myself what was real and what wasn’t. 

I watched movie one, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, a day before my mind and old belief systems once again tried to take rule. As you may know, the book is full of good quotes, such as “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Yet, the line that Tim Burton added that struck my heart and raised emotion came from the Mad Hatter:

Mad Hatter (to Alice): I don’t like it in here. It’s terribly crowded. Have I gone mad?

As to which Alice replied: “I’m afraid so. You’re entirely bonkers. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.”

The following week, as my mind tried to tell me more stories of how I screwed up and wasn’t enough, I pondered and pondered on what Alice meant. Eventually, I gave in to asking for guidance after Obi-Wan sent me a cryptic quote:

“To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of meanings.”   – Susan Sontag

I replied back, “I feel like you’re trying to tell me something :,)”) before replying back with the Alice in Wonderland quote, speaking to my frustration. Obi-Wan’s reply was very Obi-Wan-ish, and perfect:

“Whoever has the ability to be aware of large amounts of stuff, if they can learn to use the awareness, will be on the cutting edge of changing others awareness’s. 

This is how the dark becomes the light and light creates new darkness.”

My mind doesn’t have to bring me down if I can rise above it. And, if by simply reading my words, I can perhaps allow you to start questioning all the voices in your head (or parts, to be more therapeutically correct, in reference to Internal Family Systems), then we all have the opportunity to see things in a new way. Which, psychedelics, or not*, is the point of the movie. To question reality as we perceive it and then choose the world (the heaven or hell of our minds) we want to live in. Then, the unconscious becomes potential.

*As a psychosoul therapist, I am supportive of using psychedelics as a tool for healing. And, while I’ve had many people infer or tell me I should try psychedelics because of what I write about, I have not yet tried them. There are several reasons for this, but the one I’ll name now is that I’m interested in seeing how far I can get into the magical realms of energy by simply quieting my mind and believing what I know, for I often don’t believe what I know to be true.

It was shortly after this when my “rabbit hole” signs started shifting. To be precise, I pulled an Oracle card that read: “Slip down into the rabbit hole of enchantment and wonder.”

To be honest, I’m not sure what “enchantment and wonder” actually looks like for me anymore. I do know I had it as a kid. I loved to build forts, both inside and outside, and get carried away in games of imagination, be it “dress up”, playing with barbies and stuffed animals, or playing “cops and robbers” with my best friend across the street (Terry, I believe, actually did end up becoming a policeman). I remember the last lingering wafts of imagination clinging to my youth after I watched Bridge to Terabithia and then wandered around the trail-less woods under a cloudy Ohio sky. Somewhere soon after, it must have left me, although my love for wandering (and often getting lost) in the woods blessedly stayed.

My curiosity never completely went away either, and its only grown stronger the more I’ve let go of judgement and comparison. And so, it was my curiosity that led me to the second movie, Alice in Wonderland: Through the Looking Glass*.

*Again, I watched the Tim Burton edition, although I have fond but distant memory of watching a much older version with my older sister.

I won’t rehash the full movie for you (beside the fact that the Mad Hatter also endured the “not enough wound” for being a little different, as witnessed in scenes with his father) and instead tell you what thoughts the movie led me to, or maybe, reminded me:

1. What I cannot see, because I have forgotten how to look, is all the times in my past where I have been guided and protected. And, the times where I have chosen my own ego way, when I tried to control rather than (co)create, how my guides worked overtime to make sure I remained safe. I may have ignored the signs, rejected my emotions, and gone astray, but I was and never have been alone. Especially in the times I felt the most lost.

2. The one fundamental truth that I have come to fully believe in is that life is far more magical than we have been trained to see.

Which is kind of weird, but exactly the point. In order to see, we have to unsee. To make our own choice, we have to acknowledge all the choices that have been made for us. To see reality clearly, we have to see what we’ve been trained to believe and interpret. To get to know who we really are, we have to make friends with all the voices in our head, whom may or may not be real. Is the world good or bad? Or does it lie in the gray? Are you or I to be trusted? Or is it all the same? Does heaven or hell exist anymore than Wonderland or Underland exist?

Perhaps we have all gone mad. After all, all the best people have. For it is we who know the secret, that it all depends on how you choose to perceive it.

And, when we let go of judgement and what we think we want, life will bring us exactly what it is that our soul desires..the deepest, unimaginable, fairytales of the heart.

*There were actually way more signs and synchronicities than I could comprehensively include in this blog post without making it longer than you or I are willing to read off of a computer.

**A friend sent me this almost as soon as I finished the full draft of this post.

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The Choice

In all the best movies about light and dark, be it Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, or Harry Potter, the protagonist always asks themselves the question: What if I am just like them?

What if I am just like Darth Vader? What if Im just like Lord Voldemort? What if Im just like Sauron?

The wise teacher usually replies with something like: Well, it’s your choice.

Do you want to believe in fear? Or do you want to believe in love?
Which is the same thing as saying, do you want to give your energy to the darkness?
Or do you want to give your energy to love?

Most of us, at some level, have already made that choice. We’ve chosen to, to the best of our conscious ability, to be good friends, good neighbors, good partners, and good community members. Some of us have taken another step and chosen to be good to the earth and all the animals that inhabit earth. Yet most of us have forgotten to look at how we treat ourselves.

In order to look at that piece, I believe the better question is: What if they, the villains, are just like me?

What if Darth Vader is actually just like me? What if he simply just chose to believe in fear, and in doing so, shut down to love? What if he killed his own innocence before trying kill everyone else’s? Because…he got so scared that he thought he had to dominate the planet in order to feel powerful, because he had actually lost his own true power when he left his innocence and creativity spirit behind?

In the end, we don’t have to fight the darkness. We just have to make a choice. Darkness is just forgetfulness, which invites in fear and we create these crazy stories in our head of not being enough and unworthy of love. When we shine the light of love and truth on darkness, when we choose to love ourselves even when we’ve made a mistake- a choice that wasn’t in alignment with love, darkness can’t survive. Darkness was never real in the first place, just made up. Instead, we can put our own light energy into the belief, the deep knowing, that we are all enough and all deserving of the highest form of love. 

The choice is yours: Will you believe in your own light?

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Unshakeable

The truth is,
to become unshakeable,
you have to be broken.
Layer by layer.
Part by part.
Cracked.
All the way down to your core.
All your wounds,
exposed.

Then,
you must choose.
To armor more,
to let the cracks turn to scars,
the skin thicker than before.
Or,
To let go.
To open up.
To shed your skin.
Each layer disintegrating
into nothingness.

To become unshakeable,
you invite death in.
Forgetting who you were,
to remember who you are.

It is in the stillness of winter,
the hush of the snowflakes,
the whisper of the trees,
where peace is found.

And in the quiet,
standing naked,
you become free.

****************

At the beginning of the year, when I told a therapist “I want to become unshakeable, but not in the narcissistic kind of way”, I wanted it to mean that I just had to believe in myself, to be confident, and then I could achieve the things I wanted to. But really, becoming unshakeable meant: achieve nothing, fail at everything. It meant losing labels, money, physical ability, and almost all of my hope. It meant praying on my knees (or in the fetal position), picking myself off the floor, and facing the long standing belief of never being enough, in the midst of my woes. It was fighting for myself, the child within, who had been conditioned with the belief she was unworthy, to repent, but regardless, that she could never be enough, who was controlled by the stories of the shadowed priests in her mind. It was holding onto the thread, the chosen thought gifted to me my Obi-wan “that isn’t me.” I am not my thoughts, my fears, my pain. I am the love that lies underneath. Becoming unshakeable meant throwing all of my love at my wounds, all of my love to the little girl who had learned not to trust herself. Demanding that I was enough, money or not, trophies or not, boyfriend or not. It was me coming back to my truth…that I was, always, inherently enough. The rest just lies and fear. Even when the anxiety came back again, choosing to see through the illusions, my protections, and leaning into both love and my enough-ness. It was becoming nothing to remember I was everything.

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How My Sister Died (A Lesson on Dying)

While I have previously written on the literal aspects of “how” my older sister died from cancer (with many of the roots of the disease such as mental health and diet left untouched by doctors), I’ve never really delved into the way in which she transitioned from human back to spirit…or the lesson she left for me in the process. Here is that story.

****

“Call me when you are both together.”

When we got the text from our older sister, Sandi and I were both out camping and adventuring in the mountains. Blessedly, we weren’t that far apart. I was in the Holy Cross Wilderness area and didn’t receive the text until I was back to my car and had cell reception. I believe I somehow managed to suppress the thoughts and much of the anxiety I felt around the elusiveness but also known meaning around the text. Sandi wasn’t so lucky. She and her partner, Sage, were well above tree line, exploring part of the off-trail Nolan’s 14 line on Oxford and Belford, when Sandi received the text. Already crumbling with emotion, she navigated the technical line back to the trailhead as best as she could.

We met in the middle. Leadville. Right off of Hwy 24 at the Mineral Belt trailhead. Sage took Pacer’s leash from me and walked with her as Sandi and I called our older sister. Amanda, just 4 years older than us, calmly, peacefully, told us, her younger sisters, that the doctors had told her they could do no more for her cancer ridden body and that she had a limited time to live. Sandi and I simultaneously and instantaneously collapsed into a unintelligible pile of emotion and tears. Our mom, always the tough one, stoically stood by Amanda and listened to her eldest daughter tell her younger daughters that she had accepted her fate and trusted God was with her.

And there we were, all of us together, both broken and at peace.

Over the next few weeks, after Sandi, Pacer, and I drove back to Ohio to help our older sister transition, we got an up close glance and what dying looks like. In hindsight, what a strange thing…to be guides to our sister in the death process. (Amanda would later guide me on my own.)

Sometimes, Amanda was tearfully happy, especially when her closest friends or our younger cousins came to visit. Sometimes she laughed at our dinner mishaps or the mess she was leaving for us to clean up. Sometimes, she was frustrated at the bills she had left to organize and the limits of her body, while other times, she offered us grace by allowing us to help. Sometimes, Amanda was in pain. Sometimes, she cried anxious, panicky tears, like when we went over her will. Oftentimes, she asked us to hold her hand.

Sometimes, she was grouchy.

This, I want to highlight. Not all, but a lot of family members of dying loved ones have the extremely painful experience of their loved one going through a temporarily grouchy or even mean period before their death. This most acutely affected Sandi. I can’t quite remember the situation, it might just simply have been Sandi giving Amanda her medication to help with the physical pain, and Amanda uttered something like “you’re killing me”, which caused Sandi to retreat to the kitchen in tears. I can imagine that this sliced like a knife, especially when I had the same (but inaccurate) worry that I was killing my older sister with the prescribed pills from her doctor. What was really happening here to my older sister, who, just a week earlier had declared our indoor picnic lunch with our mom, stepdad, and 2 little cousins “the best day ever”?

My belief now is that this was one of the final fights from her ego, her fear-based human identity, that now faced imminent death.* (This will be the key point of the second half of this essay.) Amanda was never truly mean, grumpy, or in a bad mood throughout her life…it had only been her wounded self and the ego trying to protect her from the beauty pain of life. In these last days, Amanda’s ego knew it couldn’t survive the end of the physical body and the spiritual transformation happening within. It spoke its last words, then dissolved like the wicked witch of the West (Amanda loved the play Wicked), before Amanda surrendered and her ego disappeared forever.

*From my understanding, the brain can also start to malfunction near the end of life due to low oxygen, deterioration, etc. Again, this is an example of the outer reflecting the inner. Additionally, Gabor Mate explains in When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress, how childhood trauma can lead to Alzheimer’s (among many other diseases), using the case study of Ronald Reagan.

After that, I believe Amanda was already living more in the spirit world than she was here on earth. From what I have read on near death experiences (NDEs)*, her spiritual guide team was already with her and re-orienting her back to true self and Somewhere Else. On September 1st, my dad’s birthday, she mustered enough consciousness to sing him happy birthday and tell him he was the best dad ever. (This, I know, meant the world and back to my dad. He and Amanda were more alike than she would have admitted, and as so often happens with parents and children that are similar, they often butted heads.) If my memory is accurate, it was later that night, she said her last word, “yay!“, a parting gift to all of us.

*Recommended: Dying to Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing – Anita Moorjani

In the wee hours of September 3rd, she quietly made her full transition from human to spirit and back to Somewhere Else. Her family and friends would no longer know her in human form.

Since then, Amanda has turned up in my and my family’s life in various ways. Roses (her middle name was “Rose”), butterflies, felt senses (a heightened gift Sandi often experiences), her favorite songs on the radio at times that could never be just coincidental, by doors creaking open (to the slight fear of my one of my younger cousins), and most recently, in a dream.

I wish I would have written it down as soon as it happened, in the still hours of darkness. I could only partially recall it back in the daylight hours. Amanda had come to me, looking young (probably around 30) and joyful, saying something like “This would have been an easier way to say goodbye”. Yet that felt odd to me at first… I already knew goodbye is only real in the earthly realm and in fact, we were now closer than we had ever been in our human armor. Now, as I write this, I think I know what she meant…she was leaving a message for all of us, for this essay, on how to die.

While I have limited experience with dream interpretation, what I believe my sister was telling me and encouraging me to write, is that it’s easier to say goodbye to our loved ones and human body when we have already dropped our ego identity and reunited with our true essence. We don’t have to put up a fight, we just surrender and allow the transformation to occur, because really, it’s an “awesome” (Amanda’s word) experience. However, I realize that sounds a little a little out of reach in just a few sentences. So instead, let me outline the stages of her death from the above description.

  • Acceptance: When Amanda told Sandi and I the news, she was calm in the acceptance of her fate.
  • Half & Half: I have often been told by my Reiki therapist that I am often half in, half out, or rather, half in the material (ego) world and half in the spiritual (energy) world. For Amanda, her spirit was at peace but her ego was terrified.
  • Pain: Anxiety, grief, and anger, suffering, and physical pain with long periods of rest/sleep. The ego fears its own demise and often doesn’t want to go without a fight. Pain exists in the separation of our minds and true self and diminishes in unification. This step can be quite intense if the separation hasn’t yet been addressed. Grace allowed Amanda to fall asleep after these intense energetic periods.
  • Surrendering: The ego simply can’t survive death or the call of a spirit back Home. Amanda’s human identity ceased to exist, although her body allowed for one more step…
  • Joy: “YAY!” (The soul celebrating freedom.)
  • Physical Death & Return to Spirit.
  • Peace.

If I’m being completely honest, the ego death I’ve been experiencing over the past several years has been just as messy (if not much more) and emotionally painful. Without really realizing it, I fought my ego death, hard. My ego is especially tricky and manipulative (hence why I was able to date a covert narcissist for 3 years) and my fear was subtle, at least from my conditioned human perspective. In time, I allowed myself to be unravelled and stripped from identity, a process that was extremely uncomfortable (to say the least). Really, it was my only choice. It was either that, physical death, or returning to live by my ego, which would have killed me anyway. Slowly, I began to see how my mind and fear (often around not being enough) were in control of my decision making and how I went about creating my life. Yet that is a story for another day. For now, let me tell you how to die (while still alive), starting with some clarification of the ego and the “dark night of the ego”.

What is The Ego?

The ego is our human identity, often created from a foundation of fear. When explaining the ego to others, I usually just call it our “fear-based mind”. The tricky thing about the ego is we often don’t realize we have one, saving it only for those we call “egotistical”. Yet the ego lies on the spectrum of believing one is not enough, from martyr to narcissist, and can present in various ways. In actuality, when one is identifying with their human self and all of its fallibilities and success, they are believing in a false self. For this reason, I have even called our human self our shadow self, for it hides our true identity. That being said, neither our ego or our human self are bad. A healthy ego is the realization that we are human and keeps us safe from physical harm (Ex. Fire is warm, but bad to touch). It is also of upmost importance that we love our human selves and the life we’ve been given… in playing out various identities, we are healing past wounds so our soul can evolve. It is also in physical form that we can create in the material world and allow for all kinds of magical experiences.

How is the Ego Formed?

The ego begins forming sometime in childhood, once the brain has had some time to develop and the mind can start creating meaning and stories. Yet at birth, we are all simply sensory beings. Some babies cry a lot, I think because they are feeling the stark contrast of being in the realms of heaven, in the cocoon of a mother’s womb, and then squeezed out into a world of various energies being swirled around. All babies, however, are generally curious. It’s like they were just plopped down here in this weird place and have no conditioning telling them what to think, expect, or who they should be. They’ve got joy still in them too, laughing at sweet nothings. These are all general statements and other factors play in, such as the well-being of the mother and father during pregnancy, past life imprints, and overall sensitivities. What really matters, however, is the story a child tells themself about the sensations in their body after core needs (yes, food and shelter, but mainly, connection and love) have gone unmet, or rather, the heart has be invalidated. It is these stories that the ego is formed from, and it usually begins with feelings of unworthiness. Sadly, our society has been built off of conditional love which creates the world’s deadliest weapon: fear. So instead of minds growing from the fertile of soil unconditional love, most minds grow in the barren desert of the subtle and not so subtle tyrannical rulership of fear.

The ego can also carry unhealed wounds from past lives. This is what I call “karma”. Yet regardless if the wounds are from this life or a previous life, we have the opportunity to heal all wounds once we start to un-identify from the ego. How I see it is that we live a chunk of our lives forming and perhaps strengthening the ego (historically, this has been until death or midlife), and the next chunk of our lives unravelling ourselves from it. If we can do this before physical death, well… I’m excited to see what happens.

The Dark Night of the Ego (Ego Death)

I want to start out by saying (writing) that the dark night of the ego and hitting rock bottom are two different things. Hitting rock bottom is relatively quick. It is the night on the bathroom floor after drinking too much, the life-altering diagnosis, the end of a romantic relationship, or that first time you make a decision with the heart rather than the head (ego). It is what I call “the crack” that leads to the dark night of the ego (others refer to this as the dark night of the soul, but I see the soul rejoicing when this happens). The dark night of the ego, on the other hand, is usually a several month to several year long process (there are, of course, exceptions), where, layer by layer, the ego-identity is unravelled until we get closer or even back home to our true selves. For many who have undergone this kind of spiritual awakening, the process has been painful. Yet I think this is going to be less so in the coming years, for many light workers have walked the “path of darkness” to leave a light for others to follow. (I first read and appreciated this phrasing in a Mary Magdalen book, describing Jesus’s death.)

How to Die (While Still Alive)

When the ego becomes our identity and is based off of fear, it limits the beauty of life and the potential of our souls to heal, create, and love. When we allow our ego to die, at least the fear-based part, we actually get to experience what it means to be free while in human form. True freedom, I have learned (the hard way), is of and from the mind rather than something gained by material wealth or by experiences manifested from a place of lack. Transcending the ego means moving from a place of pain (hell) to a place of joy (heaven). It allows our hearts to lead over the ego-mind, giving the steering wheel back to our soul’s and the ability to live from a place of peace, despite life’s circumstances.

But how do we do it? And is it possible to do it now without experiencing tremendous amounts of pain?

Yes…and/but, if you’ve numbed from the emotions in your body throughout your life in any way (and this is especially true for empaths), there is probably going to be a lot of energy moving through that may or may not come in the form of emotional, mental, or even physical pain (backache, throwing up, injury, etc). Fortunately, I believe that the need to experience pain is going to be less and less true for future generations as more parents, and the world, becomes more emotionally and spiritually intelligent. Plus, if you haven’t yet noticed, a large chunk of the current generation of kids are already coming in way more conscious (and energetically sensitive) than previous generations…they’ve got great bullshit-o-meters and have little tolerance for conventional norms.

Ok, with that caveat, the steps on how let go of the ego:

  1. Be disobedient to the (lower/ego) mind*.
    All those thoughts in your head, you don’t have to listen to them, and you certainly don’t have to follow them. Call out the fear-based stories and the conditions that have been given to you. Choose to see through the illusion of the mind. Choose to see things from another perspective. Choose to see through the lens of love.
    *I added lower mind because this line is paraphrased from The Gospel of Mary. When “mind” is used in that text, it is not talking about the ego mind but the “higher mind”, which I believe refers to true, unified consciousness (what some might call “God”).

    Extra: Starve the ego
    You may or may not experience “the crack”, either because you don’t have to on your journey or you choose to intentionally “starve the ego”, simply meaning, you don’t give it what it wants. This is in part not listening to it, but is a slightly more intentional experience of rewiring your brain’s reward system, meaning denying the brain the normal ways it seeks out dopamine hits, be it seeking out validation through big accomplishments or simply checking how many likes you received on your latest social media post. In the past, many spiritual teachers have done this by both living as a hermit and starving themselves (which could be a reward system for those with eating disorders). Very few have actually received enlightenment that way, and I believe the work now (especially for those of us who would prefer to be hermits) is to stay in relationship with the others.

    Be prepared for the ego to “flip the fuck out”(the profession phrase I often use with my clients doing ego work). And for those who have dated narcissists, double check for your own inner narcissist trying to manipulate your process. Remember, the ego fears its own death and will kick and scream its way out. Love that, too.

  2. Breathe: quiet the mind.
    Some options include: meditation, play, dancing, creating art, walking in nature. Anything that turns down the volume of the mind or allows you to turn it off altogether. Pay attention to your breath…it is, after all, what makes you alive and able to live beyond the shadows.

  3. Love fiercely.
    The ego is made up of fear, and the only thing fear cannot survive is love. My suggestion here is to consciously throw all the love you have at the fear-based stories in your mind, all your wounds, all your pain. When these things start to surface, see them, feel them, and love them. Call on the Divine Feminine for help. Love yourself through what you would call mistakes or sins and the times you were invalidated as a child, when your parents weren’t or didn’t know how to be there for you. Love yourself through the stories of “not enoughness”. Remind yourself that any story other than one of love and inherent worth is untrue. This is in part what therapists would call “re-parenting work”, but with even more clear (higher) seeing and love.

    During my own journey, there were times when I “woke up fighting”, meaning my anxiety and fear-based thoughts would start as soon as I opened my eyes I’d have to immediately chose not to believe the fear, and, after praying for help to see with clarity and through the lens of love, I’d end up repeating “I love you. You are enough.”

  4. Listen to the heart and body.
    This often feels like a foreign concept, even….especially for people in the athletic world who have learned to overrule the body’s signals. It’s even more foreign for empaths who learned that feeling was unsafe and built up layers of armor. However, listening to the heart and body is completely innate. Many of us may just have to deconstruct to get there.

    If you have any aches or pains, you can start by feeling and breathing into them and asking the area “what message do you have for me?”. You can also practice breathing into the heart, taking 3-5 deep breaths and focusing on your heart center. Practice feeling your emotions. If they don’t move (think of a passing cloud) in a minute or two, get curious if you have a block that is not allowing the emotion to pass, or if there’s just a lot more in there from suppressing emotions for so long. (Note that thoughts can keep emotions stuck.) If you have a block, feel into why its there and/or how it is protecting you. Underneath emotions are sensations, the gut feelings. The contraction and expansion. Notice when your heart energy feels like it is getting bigger or growing smaller. Your heart will be one of your greatest guides. Be patient…if you have a lot of blocks or emotions that need to be experienced in the body, you may not be able to access these sensations for awhile. Keeping going. This leads us to our last step…

  5. Trust the timing of the Universe (ask for guidance and reassurance when you need it)

    You may experience situations during this time that you want to deem as unfavorable, but really, these experiences are just showing you how the ego is still in charge and what needs healing. From a “higher” perspective, it’s truly “all good”. Along your death journey, ask for guidance and support from your spirit guide team, be it angels, deceased loved ones, ascended souls, animals, etc. Notice who or what shows up in your life. Maybe you find a teacher, therapist, or friend, or maybe the right book or podcast appears holding just the information you were seeking. You may ask for signs that you’re on the right path, and look for synchronicities (like angel numbers). Most importantly, and once again, be patient. In a human body, it’s usually impossible to see the intricacies of life and how we affect one another, or one situation (no matter how small) is the catalyst for something else. Remember that saying “love is patient”? That’s true. That is trust. Only fear is ever in a rush. The peace and healing you are seeking will come as long as you hold the intention in your heart. Even though the path may be unclear, all you have to do is follow the breadcrumbs and keep putting one foot in front of the other. As Rumi said, “As you start to walk the way, the way appears.”

Extra exercises to support you on your journey to the underworld:

1. Sit with The Trees
Trees know how to die. Each Autumn, they die externally as their leaves and needles fall to earth. They just. let. go. Softly and gracefully. This is because trees don’t carry the weight or anxiety of the human ego. And, while our surrendering may not be so graceful, what we can do is notice each thought as it comes up, realize it is not us, exhale and relax the body, and imagine allowing the thought to fall away. This is, in fact, meditation. Tree energy can help support us in this process, especially during the fall and winter, so this is a great practice to take outside.

2. Newborn
When you wake up in the morning, pretend you were just plopped down here. You have no prior conditioning. No expectations. Just be curious about the strange, beautiful world you are in.

3. Free-write
Free-writing has literally been a god-send to me, as it connects me to my higher self and guide team. In your journal, head the page by writing something like “Spirit, what messages do you have for me today?” and then just let your pen flow, doing your best to avoid conscious thought. Some people find it helpful to write with their opposite hand. The messages may be super simple (and very needed) at first. As you get more familiar with the process, you’ll find it easier to ask specific questions as well.

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Don’t like who you think you are?

You are not who you think you are.

Don’t like your body?

You won’t have it for long, so love it for the ride it’s taking you on.

Want to crawl out of your skin?

Break open. Feel. it. all.

Are you on a path you despise?

Turn towards the unknown.

The totality of who you are cannot be stated by thought. Your soul cannot be confined by the constraints of the ego. In order to know yourself, you must die unto yourself. Only in death can you experience the entirety of yourself. You are infinite. You are Love.

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Patience

“My Love,
Patience.
Trust the timing of the Universe.
Trust the timing of your soul.”

Patience is hard for most humans (and for my dog when she’s waiting for a treat.) We fear if we don’t move, if we don’t work hard, if we ever just stop and rest, that nothing will ever get done and we’ll never get anything we want.

But how much of what we want have we really gotten by working hard? Rarely is it the ease, peace, and joy that I hear at the depths of people’s wishes. We must always be cautious of what we create when fear is leading the way.

It hard to be patient when we are healing. We want to get it over with, forgetting the medicine is in the pain. The more we understand the causes of our pain, the swifter our healing. (Scientifically speaking, the pain center for both physical and emotional pain lives in the brain.)

Patience can also be hard when we feel lost. Patience asks us to trust, yet most of us lack trust in ourselves, others, and the Universe. Yet it is only when we are lost, when we have forgotten who we are, that we can be found. It is in the the liminal stages of lost and found and with a torch made out of patience and trust that we can discover who we truly are.

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Push-Pull (2)

ANXIETY EXISTS IN THE PUSH-PULL OF OUR HEARTS.

THE SIMULTANEOUS YEARNING FOR LOVE WHILE FEARING IT.

WE CALL IT IN & PUSH IT AWAY.

THIS IS THE TUG-OF-WAR GAME BETWEEN OUR MIND AND OUR HEARTS,

OUR EGO AND OUR SPIRIT.

IF WE COULD JUST REMEMBER WHO WE TRULY ARE…

WE‘D HEAR OUR SOULS TELL US TO “JUST LET GO.“

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Who We Are (Walking the Wanderlust Path)

Why do we work so hard to resist who we really are? Why do we hide the gifts that come naturally to us?* Or rather, from the gifts that come from our spirits.

Blatantly put, I am a cancer** sign made of light. My purpose is to bring people back Home to themselves.

The manifestation of this comes easy to me as a therapist and writer. It just kind of flows. To those who know me, they may have unapologetically (okay, maybe a little…I’m still working on coming Home to myself) heard me say “I’m really good at my job”, which is something I rarely to never say.

Of course, I’m also very true to myself as a therapist, writer, and coach. Unique is a very accurate word…unique and a little eccentric, which is why I think my clients like me. Me being weird allows them to be themselves. While I’ve read almost every therapy and spirituality book I have time for, I tend to just blend it all together with a touch of intuition. Actually, I’ve really just re-defined my job as mental health therapist and switched to using “psycho-soul therapist” instead.

Yet I tried, at least for an extended break, to walk away from these “jobs”, or callings. I thought other professions were better and more exciting (ie. more travel, more free time- but free time isn’t the same thing as freedom). Or, at least, they get more validation from parents, extended family, and Instagram followers. My mind believed all of this, even as the rebel in me rejected the office job, nice house, marriage and kids ideals. Really, I simply just trapped myself in another world from the ideals of other rebels and adventurous types, rather than just listening to my heart and creating something new altogether (or, even if it was “old”, staying true to me).

This is what wanderlust is all about…not traveling, not going adventures, not exploring new places. It’s about walking the path that is unique to you and yours alone. It’s unknown, and that is the wilderness.

*Okay, okay. Of course I know the answer, at least partially, to this question. The mind takes over when the heart has been invalidated. Anytime a child has their emotions ignored, goes unseen, is told how they feel or should act, a child’s flame is being dimmed. This goes much deeper than someone telling a kid that their dreams are unobtainable, although that can certainly play a role. We can read all the parenting, teaching, therapist/coaching books we want, but our only job as adults who have kids in our lives is to keep their inner flame burning bright. It’s just really hard to do when our own lights have been dimmed. So we all must ask ourselves the questions “Who am I?” “What are my divine gifts?”, and do the work to get back Home to ourselves.

**Cancer zodiacs are water signs and some astrologists relate cancers to preferring being at or around their physical homes. My belief is that may or may not be true and that cancers are more accurately about connecting their inner and higher selves, which also connects them back to Spirit.

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Breaking Free: Returning to the Heart

The heart and body are in direct communication with each other. The heart is the voice of the soul. If you are not living in alignment with your soul, your body will let you know.

[In reflection of my own journey and others who share a birthday close to mine, my theory is that anyone who is a Cancer zodiac sign (especially for females), a natural born empath and sensitive (attuned to energy) soul, has in some way been directed towards this message this year, perhaps through an injury or illness, if she is not already living 100% heart centered. (I would love to know if this is true for you if your a Cancer sign!)]

The message the body is revealing may be slightly different for everyone. A good starting point is checking out Heal Your Body by Louise Hay, where she listed out the spiritual message of various injuries and illnesses based on body parts. Then, if you have an injury, you can further explore the message based on what side of your body is injured. The right right side gives voice to the ego (or masculine), while the left side speaks for the spirit (or female).

For some people, the most uncomfortable part will not be the pain of the injury or illness. It will be in the deconstruction phase of the ego as it is the ego-who we believe we are- that block us from listening to our heart. Many of us “think” we know what we want but the heart does not speak through thoughts. The heart speaks through feelings, emotions, and the body, especially when the soul is really trying to get our attention.

The deconstruction phase asks us: Are you willing to let go of all that you think you are? This may be attachments to past memories or labels that we or others have given to us, such as athlete, cashier, hard worker, or even “Type A” person.

The deconstruction phase may represent the “chrysalis phase” of the transformation process (where our insides turn to mush) or it may represent the “coming out of the cocoon phase”, as the ego represents the outer shell.

There is both a letting go and a fight. A surrendering of who we think we are, while also fighting not with but through the ego so as not to turn back, to return to the old version of ourselves that lives from the mind and not the heart.

How do we trust our hearts when most of us have been give the message we must fear love and trust a voice outside of ourselves to gain “salvation”? Yet trust is the essential piece. Every time doubt comes in, we must fight to come back home to ourselves, to trust, to allow the light to shine through. (We don’t fight the darkness, we fight for the light).

When we go through the deconstruction phase, you may literally feel like you want to crawl out of your skin. As others have reminded me, I will remind everyone here: this is a sign that you are on the right path. Growth is uncomfortable. Yet it is in breaking through her shell that the butterfly gains the strength to fly. It is in pushing through harsh conditions and rocky soil that wildflowers gain their vibrancy. This is the message that life gives us, the signs from the Universe that we are on the right path (sometimes the Universe puts up with me when I ask for a “signier sign”).

We must trust the signs, trust ourselves and step into the flow of life. Once we break through the ego, peace and ease will follow. Yet we have to push through the discomfort to allow the joy to come through. If you take my hand, we can make the leap of faith together…

Normally I hate a candid photo, but this ended up being a very authentic photo of me in my deconstruction phase.

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Ending the Hustle: Exploring Strength Beyond Survival and Fertility Beyond Reproduction

When I came to realize strength, or maybe toughness is the better word (it’s all semantics really), was not an external characteristic but an internal one, I spent a lot of time contemplating what the word actually meant. While this post explores a few topics, such as hustle culture, survival energy, and fertility, much of it is a contemplation on what true strength really is…following my heart in world that is often led by the mind.

Strong isn’t about surviving.

Fertility isn’t about being a mom (although it can certainly encompass motherhood).

Strength and fertility, I am certain, go hand in had. But not in the way most of us think they do…

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I was a tough kid with an empath’s heart.

Scrappy. Always hustling. Not afraid (or maybe more accurate, not caring) of flinging my body across the basketball court or acquiring the next bruise.

“Only the strong survive” read my well-worn armband, a quote from my favorite NBA player Allen Iverson (pre-domestic abuse allegations).

This was my rough exterior. Like a soldier going into battle, only with life being the enemy, I armored my heart and prepared for a life a struggle and having to fight my way to…the top? Happiness? Something better? I didn’t have a whole lot of examples of anything else to look up to, I just knew I wanted something different.

Of course, all my friends saw through my baggy basketball shorts and cut-off t-shirts, sometimes earning the nickname “mom” from some of my male friends. I hated it, but I really couldn’t help myself as I reminded them to study…I just wanted the best for them. As much as I tried to hide it, I could never bury this loving, nurturing part of me.

But with this part came my emotions, and I knew- learned early on in life- that was unacceptable.

My equation? Physical pain= good. Internal pain= bad.

Back to the grind.

Working hard to earn my worth. Slaying my way through another report card of straight As, berating myself for anything less. Hours exhausting myself first spent in the gym, then running outside as I got older. Never really stopping for. a. chance. to. take. a. breath.

To listen to my heart.

Figure myself out.

Even in my 20s as I rebelled and rejected America’s 8-5 (or longer) culture, the hustler in me couldn’t really let go. Dropping the habit was one thing, dropping the mindset was another.

The armor, although softened slightly, remained a vigilant guard around my heart.

Honestly, I didn’t even know it was there, I was so used to it. Or rather, I only became conscious of the protective shield in my early 30s. I didn’t realize there was another way of living.

*************

I’m not sure what made me decide that the intention for my rights of passage during my second year of grad school would be to embody my Divine Feminine. I don’t think I even really understood the feminine and masculine energies back then. And still, even when I received signs of fertility, abundance, healing, and closeness with Mother Earth (namely snakes and wild turkeys), I wanted to reject them.

(In case you’re wondering, the masculine energy embodies the “doer”and gets things done. The feminine energy is the creative, life-force energy. These two energies work great together…but only if we lead with the feminine. …Did I just explain where America went wrong?)

Fertile? I had never once in my life wanted to have kids. I may have had a very short time period during childhood playing with barbie dolls, but the stories I told during play never involved families. I definitely wasn’t interested in baby dolls. Maybe I knew fertility had a bigger meaning than just having kids…but I’m not sure my mind ventured further than fertile vs. barren soil. And I figured that, at least, I honored and fulfilled my nurturing side at work. For a long, long time I left it at that.

My grad school “yearbook” picture. Looking back, I realize that my friends saw the real me before I even saw myself.

*************

It has really been only recently, as in two weeks ago, that I started to put two and two together. And really, it was only “kinda” me. Or maybe it was the actual me, the higher self me. Let me explain….

One of the things that has helped me the most in the past few months are my free writing sessions. I also call this channeling, but I don’t want to scare anyone away. Maybe I’ll write about that at another time. In short, the message I received from the quick writing of my left hand was that I didn’t have to fight to survive, that I just needed to allow the earth to provide while living in harmony with it. That this is my Divine Feminine. My only fight was to come back Home to myself.

I likened this to hunters and gatherers I learned about in school. Despite being vegan for a decade (again, habits can die while mentalities live on), I embodied a hunter, risking my life in the search for food. Yet I was always meant to be a gatherer, sometimes growing, but usually just picking, and harvesting the fruit, nuts, and vegetables that were already gifted to me.

In short, fertility is my inherent abundance, my power, and in that is my manifestation* abilities. The only thing I can do is block it. Which I’ve gotten really, really good at after 30 years of practice.

*I actually told my Reiki therapist the other day that I needed to drop the word “manifestation” for a bit and just “be and allow.“

My block? My hustle. Or rather, my hustle mentality. The voice that told me I had to do, do, do in order to be worthy anything good. The voice that said I could only have nice things if I worked hard for them. The voice that said I had to earn even my rest.

My Reiki therapist (his really name is Anthony, but maybe I should give him a name like “Ghandi” or maybe even “Obi-Wan Kenobi”, as Dan Millman nicknamed his teacher “Socrates” in The Way of the Peaceful Warrior) encouraged me to meditate and practice Being, to find the serenity within myself as I also fought to challenge my negative thoughts. Once in awhile, as much as I doubted it, the Universe showed me it working in my favor* , whether by circumstance or intuition.

*The obvious “duh” here is the free, almost daily sessions with Obi-Wan Kenobi and having a place to live (even if I always worry about being a burden) during this wanderlust period.

First, when I blew the tire on my sister’s mountain bike (downhill mood), and then after a laser therapy session (uphill mood), my intuition led me into a nearby bike shop. Still walking in the door, I almost instantly locked into the blue eyes of the bike mechanic behind the counter (I swear, if there was a high resolution camera put in slow motion, you’d see me taken aback and stutter for just a millimeter of a second as my soul registered his). And, whether it’s a summer fling or something more, somehow I found myself spending time with both a teacher in flow (being with movement) and someone that I simply like Being with…sometimes talking, often not, looking at the horizon for hours on end. Could I really not doing anything and still be liked? Or course my mind tried to abandon ship and self-sabotage within a week and a half. Why? Because my Ultimate Block, I realized as I was discussing accepting and allowing Love* in with Anthony/Obi-Wan Kenobi is that I don’t believe I deserve Love. So how could I possible allow Love and joy to flow through me, let alone accept a guy being nice to me? (Empaths and narcissist come from the same wound, even if they fall on opposite sides of the spectrum, which is a big part of the reason why an empath may find themself in a relationship with a narcissist.)

*Capital “L” Love = Unconditional Universal Love.

However, saying this untruth out loud (deep, deep, deep down I know it’s just a cognition I’ve been conditioned to believe) for the first time seemed to help loosen the lie’s death grip. Maybe I could fight this thought (while accepting my ego) and allow Love in.

Herein lies my strength…my choice to fight this internal battle of Love over fear, heart over head, intuition over ego. To stay true to my heart in a world ruled by a conditioned mind. I’ve wanted to give up more times during this run than I ever have during an ultra race. Yet with a soul that demands to be free, I know my life my life depends on me staying in it.

And this is where this story of quitting the hustle, strength, fertility, and following my heart becomes a story to be continued…

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”― Rumi

*Nuance: I use the word “fight” a lot as it’s the best word I have at my fingertips. I kind of mean it and I kind of don’t. In some sense, it absolutely does feel like I am fighting for the freedom of my heart and soul. I am constantly challenging my thoughts and the rule of my mind over my heart. Yet in this, I’m not labeling my mind or thoughts as “bad”. The goal is to be able to witness my thoughts without giving in to them, which allows more room for the heart to lead.

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Transcending Fear (Part 1): The Voice of Doubt

Did I mention that I’m terrified?

Actually, I’ve been terrified about most major life and big adventure decisions that I make.

My stomach churned the week before I flew to Tanzania on my own at the ripe old age of 23, and I was constipated the week before I started the Colorado Trail. The week before starting grad school, I was nauseous, even though I was starting the school year with a hiking backpack rather than one for books. I sweat through my first t-shirt during the 8 hour drive across the state to see the guy I had a crush on for 10 months, although I had luckily thought ahead and brought a change of clothes. EVEN before getting Pacer, I worried. More recently, before moving into a yurt for the winter, my mind anxiously debated (taking up most of my mental space) for nearly 2 months if it was the right move. Then, after deciding to take a sabbatical (the professional word for an extended vacation) when my bank account was already low in an attempt to hike the CDT with my dog, I often teetered the line between terrified and trusting. Luckily by this time, I had learned some inner tools on what bravery and self-love …but really, I was just at the beginning of the process.

Currently (as of 6/20/2023), I’m petrified (truly, nearly frozen in place) on making the decision of whether to continuing hiking or not. There’s fear of being stuck in the middle of nowhere in Montana with Pacer, or the fear of having no idea what to do or where to go should we return to Colorado, having no place to live and little income to work off of. After being close to a panic attack, I return to three questions:

Am I not trusting myself?

Am I not trusting (the goodness) of others?

Am I not trusting the Universe/Divine?

While it would most definitely be a big challenge, I know I would protect Pacer “Sunshine” and figure it out if we continued on and did get stuck in Montana (should Pacer decide she was done). Yet I don’t want it to be up to Sandi to rescue us (again). More so, I want Pacer to be happy. This brings me to the heart of my fears: the fear of making the wrong decision.

At this stage of my life, the fear is rarely on either end of the decision, but the doubt in making one. The suffering is in the the liminal state between thought and action.

My inner chatter goes something like this:

Am I making the wrong decision?

Am I being dumb for attempting to hike across the country with a dog?

What if the critics were right?

What if my mom was right?

Am I wasting time on a hike that might not work out when I could easily be playing on my favorite Colorado mountains and going to a local winery after?

Maybe I’m not brave, maybe I’m just ignorant.

Am I burdening others with problems I’ve created for being stupid?

If I choose to stop, would it confirm all the above?

Eventually, I catch a beam of light coming through the darkness. I use ALL of the tools I learned in the last 8 months and wrote about in “Light & Dark: Reflections on the Human Experience”. I return to that which roots me: my values, meditation, prayer, and love.

My core values (family/friends, adventure/freedom, growth, and kindness) orient me back to the life I want to create myself, one that does not offer certainty, but does require fully living and offers personal expansion. In the form of prayer, I offer up my pleas for help and guidance from the divine and the spirits who walk withe me. (Okay, often I’m asking for answers and really hoping that an angel comes to me in a vision or I receive a vivid dream where I am given me the specific, detailed, outlined, double-spaced in size 12 font answer… and then I just remind myself to surrender.) I meditate (after much procrastination and googling all possible solutions), coming back to my center in the midst of the chaos of my mind. Slowly, I return to my heart and the new found love (although I can feel its ancientness) I have for myself. Even without the answer, I can trust that whatever happens, whatever decision I make, that it will be okay.

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I am a big believer in both psycho-emotional-somatic inner work that I do in therapy, as well as energy work. In using both, it almost amazes me how fast things can move (albeit, the rush of intensity of the “negative” energy can be a bit overwhelming before it clears out). I wrote this piece and part two (currently sitting partially in my journal, partially in m mind), in the few days around summer solstice and driving through 3 national parks, using nature and intention to quicken and aide my healing.

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