DatingGod

Shamanic Interactive Theater

Some of you have been reading these since the blog started back in 2003. Some of you I know irl, but most I've only met digitally. This blog showed me how we can transcend space and time, share our beautiful twisty radiant interiors together - proof that there's no such thing as separation.  

Some of you know that I've experienced another big transition with lots of the usual transformation. This one came with a 40-lb. weight loss, a move to a cabin in the gorgeous Blue Ridge Mountains of NC, with me and the fuzzy guys deep in shamanic hijinks. 

It also comes with the fruition of a project I've been working on since 2012 - Shamanic Interactive Theater, offered in the live streaming webcast space. And as always, I invite you all first. Because you've seen the progression over time - you're the original Integral Shamanics tribe.

It's hosted at Patreon, which is set up like a digital version of the Medicis, the Italian patrons who essentially funded the Renaissance. Patrons agree to offer monthly pledges and the artist offers them rewards. It's sort of like blogging, but with deeper ways to connect, interact.

How this has freed me is that high quality, professional shamanic journeying weekly webcasts for creativity, vision, and respite can be offered. I can write for a tribe that is as hungry for edge consciousness ebooks as I am - sending out monthly content about the shamanic process, ranging through non-fiction shamanic tool materials, shamanic magical fiction, psychonaut travelogues, and collected tribe journeying experiences. 

I've explored and practiced with a wide array of access points into the interior. Experiential tribe is the way to travel. After many years of nomadic solo travels, I'm pouring all my energy and resources into digital shamanic tribe, so we can explore the liminal places in tribe with other open-hearted travelers. 

Come journey, drift, read, dream, create, dance, sing, snooze with us. No previous shamanic experience needed. 

I so hope to see you there . . . may this find you delightfully inside your own shamanic groove, loving life and so glad for the beauty and brilliance of being alive . . . 

Much love as always,  xoxo Kaye Soleil

 

Energy Dance

I just did a reading for someone. Via skype. First time in many many many months I've read like that for someone.

There's another few long-time clients who have me do readings ever so often for them, but it's mostly listening. This one was a full-out, all hands on deck reading complete with energy clearing and moving - a real healing - one of the brightest in all my years of doing readings. 

An enormous part of it was the person I read for. She and her new man. Both of them high energy, thoughtful, accomplished, compassionate. They didn't come with inflated ideas of witchery psychic whatnot. They just let the energy flow.

When she reached out and asked, it took me two days to respond. Because I don't do readings any more. I was told during that first vine session back in 2012 not to charge for sessions, and then was told in another to stop doing client sessions altogether.

So I went and got a public health govt job, and now I work for a start up on a mental health app. And though they have both been good jobs that I've learned a lot from, they never even approached the edge of the beauty and expansive Yes I experienced this morning.

It's what I was built to do. This complex moving of energy. This assisting others in their healing process. Sure, I do it in my current job, but not like this. Not even close.

And the folks that I still do readings-lite for never feels very good. I'm not charging anything, so there isn't an energy return, just giving. Most requests I simply don't respond to. But the ones I feel to, I tell them about the vine's directive, and they say okay, but can we still do a session?

I keep thinking that these folks will realize that the lack of true exchange cheats them out of any real healing. That they'll send a gift or something. But they can't see what's happening. Just ask for more when they want a fill up.

So my real job has been to slowly back away, to remove myself from these folks, one at a time. A process that's been going on for about eight years now. And so a lot of people are pissed off at me. Ex clients, ex friends, ex family, ex bosses, ex boyfriends, ex neighbors. Which as an empath kind of sux.

But that's the point isn't it? To move away from the sux, and toward the radiant.

How long would you keep going to work if they stopped paying you? Or stay in a relationship so one-sided? Wouldn't the real issue be that you keep showing up to that sort of work, that sort of relationship? It better be dang good of the rarefied kind for that to energetically work out. 

And so I get up at 6 am every morning and go to a job where they like my work, but they find me weird and actually don't like me very much so my days are surely numbered. But I get paid pretty well so will stay until it's time to move on. So yeah, what most of the working world deals with.

And then I have a session like this morning. And remember the sort of real healing work I can create and be a part of. Radical truth telling, received. The dance I love so much.

When she first reached out, she asked about pre-paying (as I took down all the payment stuff from the website which is still up which is very telling). I said that if she found the reading helpful she could paypal whatever she felt to afterward.

I'm curious how the energy exchange will pan out as these are folks highly attuned. Whatever they choose to do will be very telling for me. Light up a small path forward for me perhaps with healing work. 

Because hearing Mother Ayahuasca tell me to stop charging or seeing clients was a blow, but I'd been struggling since the beginning around making a living from the work. I've come to see that in general, being in business for yourself means that one common aspect is that people will try to cheat you out of cash, or at least get the price down as low as they can. It's a cultural disease focused on hoarding resources.

But the rage that's been leveled my way, the lies and weirdness, the hammering belief that healing work, spiritual work, should be for free, given from a pure and loving heart with no expectation of remuneration of any sort, and my inability to untangle the knot of it, meant that I could never make a living from it. I made three heroic attempts. But there is healing work. And then there is the business of it.

My new personal practice is to look for places I can give freely. Where I genuinely expect nothing in return. It's educating me around what this feels like, what the boundaries are, how people receive. So that I can better know what to ask for and when, because most people just want to take. They don't know any better. They believe they're drowning, but the water is only 6 inches deep.

So now I'm coming down from the energy dance of the session. Coming back to my life, and the work that I do.

What work do I really want to do? What work can I do that I can make a living from?

Ausadi: Dancing In Apogee

Eleven days ago, I returned from a week-long trip to Spain. Ibiza, an island off the coast, shot through with a barely hidden magic. The architecture, sweeping swirls of adobe. The plants, outrageously thorned, twisty, and still blooming, tough survivors of hot, dry summers that turn freezing over wet winters. 

But I didn't go for the greenery. At least not that kind of greenery. I went for the DMT. The liquid DMT. Orally available, totally pure ayahuasca/pharmahuasca called Akasha, created by two alchemists that call their non-traditional, culturally emancipated adventures Ausadi.

(One of the alchemists, that I'd come to refer to as the Thai Mage, had found me back in 2013. Cruising the net during one of his syntax searches for Jed McKenna. Following the hits down one by one, reading, seeing if the syntax matched content. He really thought he'd found Jed, thought Jed was a woman. It took him a handful of emails exchanges with me to realize I wasn't him. Because would Jed admit he was Jed? Of course she wouldn't. Because there is no Jed. )

So May 8-16 was the inaugural Ausadi offering. Seven participants from around the world gathered at a surreal villa on the northwest coast of the island.

I was the only American amongst folks from Thailand, Australia, Great Britain, Bahrain, Lithuania, Croatia, Ibiza. The only female participant. Three people led the group- the two alchemists who also doubled as healers,  teachers, plus a radiant woman who did a lot of things - yoga, energy work - but mostly radiated her tantric brand of "isn't this AMAZING?" no matter what was occurring. An Argentinian chef prepared the cleanest, most delicious, healing food I've ever had the delight to partake of.

I arrived really ill, had a very difficult week. I'm not a traveler. Don't enjoy being away from my home, the land, my fuzzy tribe. But mostly it was the accumulation of the past decade of imbalance, vibrated to critical from the past two and a half years in a cubicle in an anteroom of a hell of our own making. No need to catalogue everything. Suffice it to say that digestive, endocrine and nervous systems were shot.   

I did four doses of DMT over five days. With the first two doses, my body did a time lapse series of explosions, a morass exodus of negative emotion, thought and toxic sludge. (This was no dis to the Akasha. The DMT elixir is pure - none of that horrific end to end roto-rooter that is the traditional ayahuasca experience.) 

Then a one-day break to give my body-mind-heart a rest. Then the third dose, which brought on twenty four hours of what can only be described as the sweetest, most gentle lifting up/into/through to the space known as enlightenment. It encompassed a tour of some basic high level energy moving skills, a conversation with what we generally call God, a tutorial of dozens of different aspects of how God Awareness moves in the world and how this being over here can flow with it. (I'm laughing as I write this. How small the words. How enormous the concepts. How all-encompassing the experience. How pitiful the attempt to share the unsharable.)

Then the fourth dose of Akasha, the last for the week, that appeared as a sort of tour of the first three doses, but also a kind of shaking loose of more toxicity that had the last couple of days show up as shaky, precarious, difficult to navigate. 

I don't imagine that I was much fun to be around. And probably won't be for a while. I'm back in Durham, NC. With my fuzzy loves. And all I'm doing is permaculture gardening. Which in itself is amazing. There is still a lot of imbalance going on, toxicity flowing and likely will for a while. But since Ausadi, my body now has the strength and vibrancy to do four or five hours of strenuous plant and soil work each day, (which hasn't been even close to possible in over a decade). The body is 10 pounds lighter, and getting strong again, muscles building, spine strengthening. Cracks in the mind where the Awareness shines through are still on the move. A baseline stability of mind and heart that often flows right into joy, awe, heart achingly beautiful gratefulness.

Maybe once the farm is at flow level - all the seedlings  in the ground, all the new beds designed and in place - maybe I'll begin writing again.

I want to write about DMT. About the experiences of it. Which is impossible of course. But writing about it was also the thread that kept asserting itself all during the Ausadi week, how impossible it is, and also how I must. How it's fine if I don't. Okay to remain consumed with the fear, but such happiness chorusing through the rainbow serpent when an ape breaks through to the angel with the help of a keyboard (or any other method of creation in this world as artist, artisan or conscious movement of energy in any capacity which covers pretty much everything, so yeah, divine expressions of love via the brushing of teeth, a walk to the mailbox, watching the rain sans resistance to the droplets, etc. etc. etc.).

It feels like the past three years has been about jettisoning everything that stands in the way of nutting up to launch and write. To finally face annihilation, death. To put down the sword and let the flow of nature take me. And to write about it as best I can until I can write no more.

But who knows? It's all just story. Just the monkey trying to make sense of things the monkey mind can't fully comprehend. The monkey desire to tell the story of its own death as it makes way for the angel being born out of the top of its head. It whimpers in fear, pain, but shifts its body, surrenders its mind, opens its heart, breathes deep, exhales and is jettisoned into the night sky, eyes bright and wide with awe, wonder at what this place really is, of who and what it really is. 

All I know for sure is that Now is about permaculture flow. Of water, borage, vermiculture casting, teeming microbial soil. Of ladybug, nematode, canid, perennial, feline. Of cucurbit, human, tomato, wood chips, bamboo, purposefully placed chunks of downed trees.

I'm all in. The 5K insurance settlement funded the trip to Ibiza. Savings, retirement, health insurance, credit - all cashed in to buy the monkey 10 months of freedom.

I've known for several years that this life was forfeit. How in essence this being is conscious, walking dead. The knowledge of it has been carried with resistance, pain, anger, grief. But now? There is enough of a crack in the monkey mind to experience the stream of light, awareness that pushes it forward onto a different path. 

I wake up in the morning covered in snoring kitties, being spooned by a 60-pound pitbull. I lay for a while and just take it all in. The swamp-paste of Woodrow's canine morning smooches. The silky down of Malcolm's belly fur. The birds trilling wake-up in the forest surrounding the land. The easy stretch of a sore yet supple body. Then it's arise, feed everyone, splash some icy water on my face. Sneakers on, grab a quart of iced coffee and crusty work gloves, tie on a bandana and head out to inspect what's gone on overnight with the growing plants and the tribe of nature, discover how I can assist in that day's dance toward apogee.  

A ~7 minute video taken at Can Verru. A bit of the essence of the villa, some of the folks that were there:

  

 

Make Art. Tell the Truth. Be Free.

I quit the public health job. Gave a month's notice. Trained a replacement who still has that rosy save-the-world shine. Got the f*ck out.

A decade of study and work in the public field, only to discover what I knew before I did all that moving and grooving and research and yelling and planning and cajoling and presenting and writing and nutting up for one more recommendation to the Board.

This is a prison world. First the walls were built. Then the process began to lock down every single gate (farmers run out of business, don't drink the water, eat the food, breathe the air).

Most of the gates were closed down years ago, but the gates had been painted with images of children laughing, gorgeous bursts of flowers, fecund fields of fruit and veg, people dancing and laughing and f*cking (but tastefully, have to mind the censors). And because we were all so terribly busy, too caught up to look closely, we believed the images mirrored the truth. Then we began to believe that the images were the truth. (It looks like food, smells like food, tastes like food - how can this not be food? and then we eat it and get sick, yet again.)

I spent two and a half years working to increase the health of a population of 38,000. But what I discovered was that the folks in charge didn't actually want the work done, just the image of it. The most important thing was that it look like what we were doing supported increasing health. Lots of noise and wind and the moving about of furniture. But at the end of each day, it was still about keeping people in boxes all day, breathing moldy air, teaching and forcing a life of the mind.

Slavery has come a long way in the past fifteen thousand years. On one side of the cost-benefit analysis is keeping the slaves ill enough to not rebel, so what little available energy is consumed with baseline survival, time and money spent on the prescription meds and surgeries and treatments and distractions needed to stay in forward motion. On the other side are slaves so ill and demented that they can't work, so sick and crazy that they are impacting the slaves who have learned to like their cell. I've spent the last decade watching how money flows in and out to hold that razor balance. 

They paid me well to organize the slaves, make them appear more happy, less ill. Sick people are less rebellious (although some folks are required to act out their rebellion through violence and mayhem so that there can be a group to blame for the crawling fear and 3 am dread we feel). But in the end, being paid well for that kind of work is misery money. No real joy comes from that kind of cash.  

But underneath the acknowledgement of all of this, is the knowledge that the walls were raised, the gates locked, but that ultimately we all have a key. We've forgotten where we left it, but we do have it. Maybe this too is a belief that will ultimately die, like all of the beliefs before it. But for now, it sits there. The knowledge that there is a way out. 

But as I write this, all I can think about it is: who is reading this and what will they do with any info I post here? Who reads my emails and texts, listens to call, follows browser history? How many people are killed each year for telling the truth? How many hunters are there?   

I've started following a blogger who knows she is being watched, and yet still crafts these defiant, mysterious posts. Layered with symbolism and clues, the tightly packed one or two paragraphs require reading and rereading to begin to see beneath the surface to what she's saying. It is high art in the information age. I'm grateful to read it. 

Likely, I post this because of her. For how far she is out on the limb, sending posts from that edge. 

Maybe it's to tell myself what I told her: Make art. Tell the truth. Be free. 

Here

Sitting here on this Friday early morn, I look back at my living of six years ago and think of how much has changed. Or a decade ago, and how I'm barely the same person any more.

The radical shift began in 2004, when I walked away from everything and everyone I knew, to go live in a cabin on a mountain, where I began writing posts for this blog most every day. Then going back to school, getting a BA then an MPH. And how that radically altered me. There was no more holistic healer life. It was replaced with the whole scholastic living thing, sitting for three years and reading and researching and typing papers and taking exams. But it was the thing that happened in 2005, at the tail end of the BA that radically altered the landscape. Or rather began the deep internal explosions that began to tear down the house I'd lived in for so long.

It was a book. You know the one. It was a moment of arriving. Of finally finding someone who identified the process I was in. Who left messages on signposts. Signposts that dotted the path behind me, making sense of the rubble of the past. Lots of signposts up ahead, with only the one closest to me in sharp relief.

It was a signpost that allowed a radical kind of seeing. That the things squished up against the edge of an abyss were meant to go over the cliff. And that all I had to do was let them go, let go of all of it, that it was more painful to try and hold onto them, and utterly pointless to try and process any of it. The signpost showed that something would remain after all of the things were gone, gone, not whistling as they fell away, but simply going over the cliff and then, poof, disappearing.

That letting go was hard work, and it took the better part of three years. In that time, the MPH was finished, I moved back to the Carolina coast to stay with my sister for a few months, got an apartment, got a job, quit it within six weeks, began doing shamanic work full-time. 

And then the big event happened. The event that changed this living forever, in a way that there was no retuning back from. It cored me, ripping out what felt like viscera, but turned out to be just the essence of who Katherine thought she was. While it was going on, it felt like I was dying. So painful that I prayed for death. And so I died.

Not that I had any real choice. Because it was an event that was a test. One of those places where the rubber meets the road. One of those once in a lifetime opportunities to see what you're really made of, who you really are, what you are willing to do.

You say you love? This is your chance to prove it. You say you're willing to sacrifice anything for this being that you love? Prove it. If you don't do it, you show that you never loved them at all, only used them for the comfort and safety that their love gave you. If you do it, you die. 

While I was dying, there were a thousand chances to turn back. And I did. Many times. But each time I'd see the effect it had on the being I loved. He was dying too. And each time I turned back, he descended into a suffering that was truly horrific, much more horrific than dying myself. And so I let go, let the tide of death keep taking me. Because when I let death have me, when I turned my energy away from living and opened instead to the love inside of me, the love for him, the absolute release of anything other than love for him opened some channel for him, and his suffering vanished. In the flow of my love for him, his own dying process became pain free, easy, gentle.

Until the end. The last two days before his physical death, he was disoriented. He became almost unrecognizable. The flow of love between us disappeared. When he was able, he wandered around the apartment as if searching for some place he couldn't find. When he lay down, it was into a quiet place inside of himself that I couldn't go. Nothing I did had any effect on him. Not to comfort him, love him, care for him. And then he died.

The last memory I have of him is of his open eyes, vacant, unseeing. During his death process, the apartment became infested with fleas. And as I lay there with him, his lifeless body, a flea crawled across his open eye, disappearing into his fur. Any belief that this was a death that could be returned from, that he might still yet live, evaporated, replaced by the image of an insect on his unseeing eye.

For a couple of days, there were practicalities to deal with. Cremation. Cleaning the apartment of the things death leaves behind. It was done mechanically, as if I were operating in a vacuum, outside of sensory experience. The only thought was: where has he gone? The only feeling, a kind of mute anguish that he was nowhere to be found.

It was during this time that I began to see that I'd changed. That entire swaths of behaviors, coping mechanisms, scripts for interacting with other people, methods of acquiring money, exchanging them for things, were gone. What it was all replaced with was a clear seeing, an ability to see love from not love. And not love was all around me.

Where the process of the last ten days of his life had been a total opening to loving him, the next ten days was about this clear seeing, with that one thought and one emotion somehow powering me, the ferocity of its sound echoing into all corners of my living. In the wake of his physical death, the only thing left was a flow of love, the love that he'd opened up in me that couldn't be stopped. It poured into the only two things that remained of him: the one thought, the one emotion. The pointed, singular focus of the ten days of loving him turned its beam into my living, beginning to scour it clean of anything not love.

Just as the beam of love had caused me to die when with him those ten days, it began destroying my life, my living. Before those ten days, I would have said that they were two separate things: me, and my life. Who I was, and then the life I was trying to create, always seeking to adjust it into something that was better, more "me". But I began to see that they were the same. There was me, and out of it came the expression of me, me made manifest in the world. They weren't separate things, but a flow between inner and outer. Whatever was in my living was there because of me, and since I had died, the living began to shift to reflect the fact of my death, the fact that there was now no one there to live it.

I'd spent a lifetime, many lifetimes, trying to turn not love into love. In the wake of his physical death, it wasn't that I finally discovered the folly of this, it's that there was nothing left inside of me that even wanted to try. The pointlessness of not love was utterly apparent, like an insect on an eyeball. Horrific to witness, but not a part of the love that flowed in a place out of its reach.

It took two years for the bulk of the scouring that came in the wake of the new seeing. Two years of dealing with lots of very angry people. When you see that the cornerstone of human personality is built on an exchange of resources, and that this exchange is dressed up to make not love appear as love, and you are no longer capable of interacting with not love, your relationships fall away. And not just the big ones - family, friends, clients - but all of the little ones too, the clerk in the store, the other people attending a meeting or party, the people you meet who might become friends.

When people give you things, and you don't give them anything back, even if you didn't ask for it, or want it, they get angry. There's a protocol of energy exchange, in the ways we interact with one another. And if you don't follow it, you're out of the game. And not with a "you have to sit this one out" but with a kick and a shove because they see you as just a loser on the playing field, the asshole who just stands there, refusing to catch the ball, or pass it to another player. It doesn't matter whether the immediate game is called family get together or meditation class or the purchase of an organic onion. It's all the same game and the exact same rules apply.

The tricky part of this, I discovered, is that the playing field is where all of human survival occurs now. Maybe it always has, but in the past, there was the possibility of going off into the woods, the desert, a mountain. All land is now owned by someone else, and if you want to be on their land, you have to pay rent, and to pay rent you have to work, and to work, you must be on the playing field.

I thought for a while about just going out onto the front lawn, laying down, not getting back up. I tried a lot of variations on this. But physical death wasn't appealing, at least not yet, and so I always got back up. Each time I got back up, though, I moved to a further and further corner of the field, away from the main play, into positions less and less essential to the game. People stopped caring that I wasn't doing much, stopped giving me things, and began to leave me alone. It helped that I learned a way to not accept things by pretending I didn't notice they were being offered, or by refusing to accept anything on any level, but complimenting them on their generosity before walking away.

My play pared down to a minimum of exchanges, a few simple tasks that could be exchanged for the things needed for pure survival. And in this tiny space on the field, way off at the very edge of the field, something shifted. Because there was so little energy being expended in the living, there was now enough quiet for a question to finally be heard.

"What do you want?"

And because there was so much energy freed up from not playing much of the game, there was now enough energy present to muster up a coherent answer.

Knowing that not love was no longer an option, and that for whatever reason, I still had to remain on the field, I answered, "Whatever is needed for this next part of the journey, whatever will show me the truth."

"You have to be a little more specific," it said.

I looked around at what was left of my living and said, "Less people. More quiet. A job that provides some basic service of living - something to do with clean food, air, water, connecting people with nature. A living that is supported by a stable base so that this next leap can be taken and the living flows with it."

I would have been happy with a hut in the woods and a job as a trail guide, but what was provided over the course of a few months was an effortless flow of radical changes that was easy, gentle, relaxed. A two bedroom home on a quarter acre in the outskirts of Durham, 90K, no money down, and at closing an extra free quarter acre valued at 18K added as a gift from the seller. A part time job with full benefits and generous salary as a wellness coordinator with tasks that require 95% of my time to be spent completely alone, producing health widgets for a needy population that provides access to clean food and exercise, education about healthy food and nutrition.

Once that was all in place, the new groove stabilized, a Thai shamanic mage found my outpost here on the net. Not a teacher who swoops in to say do this, do that. But some guy halfway around the world who said, hello, I know who you are. And for some reason, I wrote back, even though I hadn't written back to anyone like this in years. We exchanged a few emails before we realized why we were writing. He had a radical shamanic tool he could teach me how to use. And he did.  

And so now this is my living. The next leap well underway. Everything that is needed is here. Everything not needed is gone. There is only going to a job for three and a half days a week, making widgets, handing them off, then spending the weekends working the new shamanic tool. Then going into the next week working with the new shifts the tool has created. 

This new tool isn't a nice tool. It cuts deep. And because there is so little in the living, the tool saws away at the remnants of not love that are hidden deep inside a human. At the baseline software, sure, and the DNA, but also what lies beyond it.

Baby Wallace and the weaselly twins, Emmaline and Malcolm, roam the fenced in woody, wild half acre. A woolly, free-spirited garden produces herbs and vegetables for vitamixed smoothies. A few other humans, the only ones whose presence survived the culling, interact every few weeks or so via phone and net. A little light back and forth on face*book. Posting the novel I wrote a few years ago chapter by chapter for an online publisher. The occasional client met with in this home's healing room or via skype or phone. 

It's very quiet now. So quiet. 

And the real journey has just begun.

Clear Senses

So much of what I'm doing these days is a kind of un-doing. Like removing wrappers of insulation from what i perceive, how i perceive.

The day to day whole-song process of it isn't something I'm conscious of until somewhere well into whatever is being unwrapped. I only know the note to be played and work toward perfecting that note until it rings with Yes. Once a string of notes has been perfected, the song begins to make itself known, and I get a clearer sense of what the song is about.

Not knowing what the song is forces me to be fluid in the moment, to let go of results, because I have no end game in mind, only the current note. And with the only intention of singing the note to a place of Yes, the freedom to go where the notes lead is allowing the old, tired songs from my past to be removed from the replay lineup.

And again, a huge part of it is not writing or speaking about it because someone looking in from the outside is simply going to be shouting from their own old song, insisting that the notes they hear coming from me are this song or that song. The shouting muddies the tone. Slowly, the songs I'm learning are becoming a part of me, ringing so clear and strong that hearing words spoken against the song from outside of me are less and less important. Keeping right company has been invaluable with this. The ability to walk away from anyone at anytime if it feels true is one of the strongest tools available. The courage and trust it takes is a muscle, built up over time. It brings outrageous clarity around what we want from people, what they want from us, what we're willing to offer, what feels true to accept.

And so I can share a bit of the songs I've learned, even as I still don't know their endgame. They show up as mundane, but the effect in my living has been profound. Profound enough so that dedication to perfecting the current notes is the main focus, and this effort, rather than a discipline that I make myself do, is something that gets done because on the other side lies Yes, and more Yes is so very Yes . . .

One of the most fascinating occurrences to me has been the arc of spending so much time outside. It began with the burning of plants and not wanting the smoke inside the house. The urge to burn plants, to begin understanding what the plant world offers humans, what we have to offer them, kicked in about 9 months ago. For 9 months I've been going outside a dozen times a day, in the cold, in the rain, in the hot sun. I've talked to stars and trees, vines and ants, seen fawns and hawks and foxes and cardinals. I've interacted with deer, wasps, fog, high wind, cicadas, clouds, moss. So many songs still in process of being revealed. 

By going outside, a dozen times a day, for months, and then checking the weather app on my phone, I now know what temperature it is, simply by walking outside and feeling it. I can tell by the level of humidity I feel how it's going to impact my thought processes. I can feel rain coming or leaving. I can sense different types of emotional and mental energy that's going to be stimulated by the density of electromagnetic  currents in the air. By knowing the temperature coming during the night, I know how to adjust the windows and heat or ac to provide restful sleep. I never knew how deeply the weather effects mind, body, heart. Now I do. The song of weather . . . 

The body pain - digestive, back, knee, neck, jaw, shoulder - that's been a constant in my living the past six years nearly made me lose my marbles and go home in a huff. I had all sorts of pharmaceuticals I could turn to, which I did when the pain became unbearable. At the height of coping in this way, I was taking muscle relaxers a few times a month, and ibuprofen 1000mgs at a clip, three or four times a day. I was seeing the Korean acupuncturist regularly. Trying detox after detox. Yoga classes, three times a week for months helped in some ways, but made other things worse. The pain would release for a few hours, sometimes even for a day. But would always return.

And then a few months ago, something clicked. It was a process of un-doing, and with it came releasing from all of the things propping me up - painkillers, forced exercise, detoxes, sessions with the acupuncturist. Just let it all go and let the pain rise. 

I began to watch the pain, look at the pain, get very clear exactly what and where was hurting. I stopped pushing to make myself do "good" things, and stopped trying to force myself to quit "bad" things. Instead I followed the trail of what felt true in the moment whatever it was, and then watching the result on the other side. I learned that making decisions, coming up with solutions and plans to do good things and stop bad things came from the logical, male, left part of the brain, but that the impulses came from the asymmetrical, female, ever-flowing and changing right part of the brain. 

What I saw was this: the issue isn't about forcing good in or bad out, it's about raising energy, using the lever at the core. This lever at the core demands that we give up what we think we know, and instead follow its directives. This core knows exactly what will work, and it what order the steps need to come, the notes need to be played. Everything that we hunger for, crave, is simply a primal need for more energy, to be so alive, so vibrant, that our lives, every moment, is filled with Yes, singing in cells and neurons, down all of the pathways that make up a human and its connection to the web of Life.

And so I get stronger. The pain unwinds, the strength needed to live the new awarenesses I've discovered the past three months begins thrumming through my consciousness, and I wake up to the song of strength . . .

Or cutting off all of my hair. It felt so true to do it, to keep cutting closer and closer until arriving at the current buzzcut with the curly mass at the top. As I did it, played the notes that required more and more to be cut off, it was surrender to what can only be described as ugliness. It was a willingness to let go of showing up as beautiful, womanly. But when the moment came, as I applied the electric clippers to my head and shaved the hair down to the scalp, all I felt was: Yes. 

What blew me away was what happened as I left my home over the next week. People began seeing me again. The buzzcut? It changed everything. 

As a heavy-weighted, 46-year old female, I've gotten used to being ignored when out in public. After a couple of decades as an attractive young female, having people stare at me when I walked into rooms or down the street, it was shocking to simply not be seen at all, even when trying to get someone's attention to ask a question or share a conversation. And yet over the years I embraced the invisibility, began to truly enjoy the anonymity. There is great power in the stealth of invisibility :)

And so now, in many ways, it's like being in my twenties again. Except for now, it doesn't matter. There's no need for the energy that people send with their eyes. Only a lighthearted acknowledgment of whatever it is - fear, admiration, confusion, delight, lust - it's all fine. It's not mine. I'm just over here enjoying the song of the hot pink buzzcut whirlwind that lives atop my head . . . It feels so good to sing it . . . 

So many other songs in the process of being sung. Drumming and toning as prayer to the beings and teachers that are available to us just on the other side of this reality, those beings and teachers that don't care about our mind's desires, only what our hearts sing out at full shamanic volume . . . Taking all three of the feline weasels out into the yard every day, training them to the ways of cars and hawks and dogs and people, letting them slowly acclimate to the weather that exists outside of the house, being with them as their true nature in relationship with things winged, wiggly and crawly is explored. . . 

What song are you in process of singing? What song have you just discovered you're singing, after many months, years of playing the notes? What notes are you playing, over and over to perfect their tone of Yes? 

So many songs to sing . . . such a gift to be alive . . . every morning, the day before an open pathway to release the No with a shrug, to cock an ear to the sound of Yes in the nighttime sky . . .

The Anti-Guru

Half-way into the six-month Integral Shamanics Training Program I've come to realize deeply and fully why I waited so very long to launch it. I have an abhorrence of guruship, of being set up as cosmic teacher, of telling people what to do. It's a visceral reaction, an acknowledgement that the only teacher is an internal one, even as it uses outside sources as a mirror to reflect possibilities of growth, awareness, leaps in consciousness. 

Early in 2011, I became obsessed with the program's vision. I could see its simplicity, its practical application. It was a stripped down, clarified version of the tools I use to do shamanic and psychic sessions for people, tools I'd honed from some 30 years of study and practice with shamans, energyworkers, psychics, yogic masters. The program structure was taken directly from the architecture of my Master's degree in Public Health with its concentration in Social Behavior and Community Health. The philosophic underpinnings were what I'd come to see as human culture circa the new millennium, what the false belief systems were, how entrenched they were in the human mind, body, heart, spirit, and how painful and arduous the process was likely to be as a person set about freeing themselves from them. And how simple, though not easy, the process to freedom was.

I knew the program wasn't about enlightenment, couldn't be about Waking Up. And not only because I myself wasn't enlightened (whatever the frak that is) but also because I understood so very clearly that enlightenment can't be pursued, much less taught. What the program would be was an introduction to a small but comprehensive set of tools, tools for accessing the energetic data stream that runs underneath, behind this thing we call "world".

The tools would be straightforward - shamanic, psychic, energywork. Participants would learn how to shamanic journey, build a medicine bag, connect with guides and power beings. They'd access the psychic flow of data using the psychic channels present inside of themselves. They'd clear and balance the energybody using sound, movement and repatterning techniques, tune chakras. They'd bring all of these skills into practical applications in their everyday living.

A personal development component was also added to help people navigate the ass-kickings the body-mind-heart-spirit go through as they attempt to peel away the beliefs they hold at a deep level. These false beliefs say that the keys to their freedom lie in another's hands, that anything not observed with the five senses is imagination or mental illness, that the only reality is the one that media, friends, technology, family, government, health practitioners and mainstream educators say is real. And they aren't real, only a mass consensus, layered over and over, a hundred thousand layers deep, until the layers appear as a solid ground. But they're not. Yet the trick is to unpeel the layers, allow them to fall away, even while navigating the fear that arises as what was once believed to be a solid floor to stand on is in fact merely wisps of thought, feeling, projection.

The vision of the program hinged on levels of awareness: Access the data stream while lying down with eyes closed to enter shamanic reality (journeying), then access the stream sitting up with eyes open (psychic reading), then bring it all together while standing and moving the body (energywork). The three levels of access each hold a key to the free and easy access that is inherent in the stream.

Shamanic journeying requires surrender and acceptance of the flow of data - a kind of passive release into the universal energyfield, to interact with the healers and guides and beings that can be met with there. This softens the hold the mind has on controlling and shaping what is allowed into consciousness enough so that the prison walls that are our current culture's human mindstate can be dissolved enough to be seen through. 

Psychic reading is acceptance of the fact that we have the ability to know what's going on, and that accessing this knowledge is as easy as pulling a book off the shelf or net, and then reading it. This breaks through the belief that psychic info can only be accessed by people who have "the gift", or that it's something that is mystical or spiritual. It shows that it's simply another way to read, to gather information, like surfing a universal google portal.

Energywork is acknowledgement of the energyfield that flows through body heart and mind, that moves through environments, all of it setting the stage for how human consciousness is experienced. If there is dis-ease in the body, mind or heart, there is also imbalance in the energyfield, and by working with this powerful underpinning of the material world, the body, mind and heart can be healed.

And so it goes.

It's now three months into the inaugural six-month program, and folks are beginning to find their sea legs in the shifting currents of their expanding awareness. There's less fear and more excitement in the exploration. And most of them finally get that I'm not a guru, just a fellow explorer who is passing on identification of the tools, sharing some ways to use them, encouraging them to find their own way, their own method of incorporating them into their own storyline.

Because I'm not a guru. And the past three months have held some very intense moments where some of these nine folks got upset or angry when they came to me for The Recipe To Fix The Unhappy, and I gently or not so gently, handed it back to them. One person quit the program, then a few days later, rejoined, in many ways still wanting to quit, but willing to keep showing up, because the expansions being experienced ultimately surpassed the fear arising. Three people almost quit - I watched them descend into something awful inside of themselves, where they saw that all they wanted was the happy and the joyful and the funk arising was certainly not that. And then each one of them got it: the awful, the funk, was only the barrier, the block, the one they'd been banging their heads against for years. And each one of them faced it straight on, and passed through the wall as if it weren't there, like the collection of layers, of false beliefs that it was.

For over a decade, I set myself up as a spiritual teacher, with the goal to project an image of perfection, of radiant light and sweetness, of Having Arrived At Healed. But I've learned that one of the most valuable things I can show to others is that this swirl of living can be faced and swum in without drowning, no matter how dark or light the waters appear. Transparency is more valuable than the projection of another layer, no matter how shimmery that layer appears. And that until I get my own sea legs with this new way of showing up, I'll be facing my own walls until they dissolve into mist.

We all have walls to walk through. I plan to keep orchestrating this training program reflecting that. Showing my process. Letting them see what goes on behind the curtain, even when someone has mastered all the tools they're just learning to use.

And so I'm not a guru, or even a teacher. Just a guide, a shamanic cartographer. A flicker of their false belief system made manifest, so that they can see through, and then let me go when their hearts, minds, bodies, spirits are clear enough, strong enough to let go of the image projected out of this being called Katherine. 

Why? Why Not?

The dirt nap is coming for us all . . . a conscious dance of shiva is a good way to go . . .

Dance Exorcist: Shamanics In Motion

Releasing Into the Interior

The posts here get further and further apart. There are lots of stories occurring over here, but the directive around them is clear: not for the blog.

Some get told to clients, as a way to help them see a bigger picture or to show a concept being explained in motion. Others get shared with loved ones, for whatever reason that arises in the moment. Most don't get expressed into the world, at least not to other people. They stay contained inside this body-mind-heart where they appear to be distilling down into something closer to the truth, which is an impossible statement, but again, as close to the truth as can expressed at this time, in this space, for this reason.

I don't experience the telling of a story as a bad thing, that there's anything inherently wrong with the human desire to tell stories from the unfolding of a life. It's just that it's so clear for me at this time: it's about holding the stories, watching the desire to story tell as a way to somehow capture what's flowing, pin it down, make it stay. Which is impossible. And by its very act kills the germinating seed of Yes.

There's a way to tell stories so they become empowering, for both the speaker and the listener, a way to tell a story that includes the listener in such a deep way that the story being told is actually their own story. This blog used to be that, and maybe still is if someone stumbles here and goes back through the nine years of archives. And maybe it'll be that again, maybe the stories occurring over here will request they be posted, let loose on the internet in this form.

But for now, the writing is pouring into two places: the extensive handouts created for the Integral Shamanics Training Program and a private doc and notebook where the words and concepts and stories don't have to be shaped - just flow out fingers and heart and mind and simply exist without further input, from anyone, anyone, no judgment or editing or backlash. Just flow. 

Because the current underlying awareness is around something I've known about for decades, called different names by different teachers I studied and apprenticed with. Grandfather Albert, a Mi'kmaq shaman, who led a four-day total fast in the forest - not even water - because he said at the end of the fourth day, the bad spirits would see you as dead and release you. Fiona, who showed how to disappear from the entities' sensors by repatterning emotional and mental frequencies. Laura and her many tomes about the aliens. And then the gift from The Vine a month ago, where she showed me for five hours, relentlessly, mercilessly, who we are, why we were built, who built us, why, what it all means, what we have to do to be free. Now Paul writes about it in such a straightforward way, calling it wetiko. And David Carse and Jed, who keep saying: further. 

A few months down the line, I'm going to offer up all of the Integral Shamanics training program handouts for you - some sort of free ebook I want to set loose in the world. For today, here's an exerpt from the handout for the first class in the training program:

Participant introductions: telling our Stories of Yes

Transparency is one of the core principles of Integral Shamanics, along with mastery and tribe.  We live in a culture that celebrates two extremes around this flow of energy: perfecting an opaque image and TMI (too much information). Perfecting an image is about creating a physical, emotional and mental mask that fits with cultural norms and usually allows its wearer access to more resources (money, other people’s time & energy, etc.). TMI is an energetic response some people have to the cultural norm of projecting a perfect image, and is also an attempt to clear the mind-body-heart of the tension that results from the tremendous energy it takes to project and maintain an image. Rigidity and withholding is another attempt to deal with the buildup of tension, as a way to tightly control and hide what lies underneath the mask.

Antidote. One antidote to the extremes of image, withholding and TMI is to simply hold the energy, to not release into talking or showing how either happy (positive charge) or sad (negative charge) you are. To hold energy, simply remain silent, breathe, watch the thoughts but don’t express them, let the world swirl around you, only take action you need to take, either for practicality’s sake or because you feel to move/speak. This is different from  withholding in that it’s conscious holding, so that the barrier of control can be felt, the boundary seen and moved when it feels safe and advantageous on a level behind/beyond world and it’s desire to amass resources.

Holding. In this moment, what energy  (emotional feelings, intense thoughts, physical sensation/pain) can you feel pushing at you, either from outside, or inside? Hold it – whatever it is – without trying to change it – to make it better or less or gone. Be with it. Breathe.  Say Yes and Thank you. Allow the vibration of these words, the feelings and sensations that come with them for you to move through you.

Stories of Yes are also powerful antidotes to the energy drain of keeping an image alive that is not Who You Are. They can be joyful or sad,  from this moment, from your recent or distant past, or echoing to you from the future. They can be spoken, sang, danced, drummed, presented as artwork or crafted object to pass around, as silence, or whatever else you feel tells your story.

Who You Are. Whatever story you feel to tell in the first class, let it be something true, something in its revealing that will illuminate Who You Are, how you got here, what place on the map of Aliveness you can feel yourself being drawn toward. Know that the story you share will shift the vibration of all of the folks who’ll be gathered during the first class. Let the story you tell be from your heart, mind, spirit, the organs and vibration, muscles and light, fluid and charge that is you in that moment. If you’re not sure what you want to say, sit with it between now and the first class. Right now, in this moment, be quiet and ask yourself: Who Am I? How did I get here? And when it’s your time to tell your story in the first class, ask yourself again . . .

 

John Cleese: A Lecture on Creativity

Well worth the time to watch :)

Past Life Stories

Since I started consciously diving deeply into things of a spiritual nature some thirty years ago, I began having past life remembrances. Sometimes it was talking with someone and watching as their face changed into another face - a boyfriend, very blond and blue-eyed anglo, morphing for a few moments into a classically korean face, and a flash of the life we lived together in a fishing village. Other times it came out of nowhere, as "downloads" that appeared in a millisecond, fully formed, into my conscious mind as complete remembrances, usually followed by how these lives were impacting my current life - I'm in the middle of the forest and can read the forest as if it were a book, the sounds telling me who was there, what they were doing. The patterns of moss on the bark and light showing me what time of year, what the seasons before had been like. The scent in the air telling me a thousand different things of soil and plant and stone and animal and coming weather. All of it showing me how I've read data streams before, and how in this life I read the psychic and shamanic streams, and that my love and endless fascination with it was born out of mastery in that forest life.

As I've gotten more practical over the past decade, I've filed these memories as a kind of unknown. No way to prove they were real - they could just be imaginings, projections. I was fine with not knowing, because these "memories" always brought some sort of relief, healing. So regardless of "truth", I felt an outpouring of gratefulness for them.

Over the years as I've worked with more and more clients, and so many past lives came up during sessions, I began to see what genuine healing occurred when soul pieces were brought back and integrated into the body. And the stories witnessed while in shamanic reality, when told to the client, often triggered great release and understanding for them, explaining all sorts of things they hadn't grasped the importance of - a love for a specific place or type of work, a hunger for a certain way of being, a fear or illness they hadn't known the basis of.

Witnessing these stories for other people, I felt such connectedness, a sense that these past lives were as real as our current lives, this supposed "reality" we all travel in in the Now. And that by bringing them into the conscious mind, a deeper sense of wholeness came into the living, clearing the way for access to more energy, flow, purpose. Knowledge and wisdom as power. Acceptance that this reality and how its put together is so much more than random.

And so, as I've been doing more soul retrievals on myself, more past life remembrances have been flooding in. Explaining so much. Bringing such healing into this living. Helping me slough off the No that remains. Opening into more Yes. The quiet of Yes. The stillness of the unobstructed flow.

So I thought I'd start telling you lovely Tribe of Yes the stories of some of the past lives I've been remembering. Some are sad, some are weird, some are flashy, some are violent, some are quiet, but they are all entertaining. What's the point of having a life if it can't be a helluva good show? :)

Zoom and Stillness

It's been a roller coaster couple of weeks inside this brain, body, heart. Nothing going, of course, according to plan.

The plan was to do a deep cleanse for the nine days after leaving the fellowship. Water fast, yoga, walking, lots of sleep. Instead I sort of crash landed into a pile of No, and spent the time mostly resisting the urge to pack up the kitties and flee to some cabin in the middle of nowhere. 

Partial cleanses occurred. Lots of sleep occurred. Days free of burning and fermented and caffeinated plants occurred. Carby snacks found their way into my belly, via a tunnel in my mind. Kitties snuggled the heck out of me, then avoided me when the No got too noisy. Joyful interactions, and less joyful interactions. Stepping up and backing away.

I got a lot of work done. Okay, maybe not a lot, but enough. Over the next couple of months, This is happening, and there's lots to do to build it in a way that's strong, stable.

Part of the last couple of weeks has been questioning whether or not I can pull it off. I've been doing this work for almost three decades. Teaching others how to do it for the past fifteen years. Planning it for over a year. But putting it all together, in three local and global online locations? This is new.

The tagline for the training is: Mastery, Transparency, Tribe. It's technique based - shamanic skills, psychic skills, personal development - a very practical way of learning how to access, translate and utilize the data stream that runs behind, underneath this world. Gold standard methods used worldwide, across all times. Clear, straightforward, easily learnable, like playing the piano, or learning to read.

But a vital aspect of using these skills isn't so head-on and has to do with transparency. It's around how to do healing work without pretending to be sunshine and light, without wearing a mask of "perfect". Because trying to show up in a certain way blocks the flow, actually decreases access, and limits the ability to translate.

And yet sunshine and light is generally what's expected of healers. Being respectful, being kind, is simply about being decent. Whether the healer is a physician or a massage therapist or an energyworker, decency goes a long way in helping clients, patients, relax enough, feel safe enough, to enter into their own space of healing. But the dynamic of healer as perfect, and client as broken, needs to change.

We're all - every single one of us - in various places of aliveness and decay. It's the way of this place, this world. Enlightened people get the flu, die of cancer, go bankrupt. People with abusive tendencies and lots of cash have access to medical treatments that 99% of the world barely knows exists. There is no "fairness", only flow, movement, change.

We take the actions that Life is urging us to take. Or we fight the urge, based on some sort of "should" lodged inside the body-heart-mind of how we believe we're supposed to show up in the world. We find a hole in the wall of resistance, and take action to release the should. Or we sit at the base of the wall, and eat cupcakes and watch tv to pass the time, trying to ignore the drumbeat inside that says: Further.

Facing who we are, and who we're not, takes courage, fortitude, and usually comes packaged with suffering. Grief and mourning are part of it. Anger and depression, too. So is pointless joy, random moments of synchronicitous hilarity and revelations of perfection. And on the other side? Immense gratitude. 

The past couple of weeks have been about asking myself: how dare you step up to take on a tribe of folks, to teach them, be with them as they navigate their own storms? It all just seems too big, so impossible, so foolish to take on. I feel inadequate to the task, afraid that my own patterns and struggles will keep me from being there for folks in the ways that they need, from engaging with them in a way that facilitates Yes for both of us.

But where I keep coming back to is this: it's still about individuals, helping them see the map, teaching them how to read a word, a sentence, a paragraph at a time, showing them how to access their own individual way of translating this for themselves, the people they serve in their living. It's about doing session with them, entering into the landscape inside of them, helping them unweave the No a strand at a time, see the story they surround themselves in. It's about feeling such profound joy whenever Life gives me the opportunity to do this with someone. It's about showing up, over and over, even when fear is present. It's about being still and knowing All Is Well. 

And of course, as usual, Life has shot me through a tube, dumping me out with a thud in a land where only one path is available. I suppose I could listen to the fear that says I'm an idiot for not being in a job with health insurance and 48K a year. But that path disappeared a few months back. I hunted around for it for a while, and still am open to a trail if it happens, if I find it. But for now, there is only this one path, called Tribe of Yes, and the landscape is mostly unknown, and the flow of dark moon and bright sunlight cycle quickly, and the razor's edge between delusion and vision is hard on the feet.

Maybe I'm throwing a party and no one will come. Maybe this is just another emptying out. Or maybe this is when it all comes together - the shamanic, the psychic, the science, the muscles gained from years of mountain climbing - to create something that assists this huge shift in consciousness we're all deep inside.

I want to teach as many folks as possible about the data stream. How it's there for all of us, like an infinite library that contains all times, backwards and forwards, all dimensions. How the library card is our birthright, along with opposable thumbs and highly functioning frontal lobes. How to use that data stream to help connect the global biosphere in a way that sings Yes, that births a global organism that joins in the conscious, universal dance with truth, eyes wide open.

And as it all unfolds, I'll write more about the process. Transparency was taught to me here, in this digital stream that connects humans across vast distances of time and space. And so the word, the vibration, that I'm aligning to match is: courage.

Courage in the face of the No.

Courage in the midst of storms.

Courage in the quiet, the stillness, the Nothing.

Courage.

Failure and Flight

This past Thursday was my first day free of the fellowship I've been in the past year. My friend Kelly sent me this in a series of back and forths:

You have a cubicle hangover. Your body and mind are coming out of autopilot defense mode after almost a year, right? Totally good to just accept it and take some time to integrate the freedom and process the feelings of rejection and relief.

I read those words and felt: okay, yes, this is what's occurring, this is the Not-Me that I am very aware is coursing through mental, physical, emotional bodies. It's what's underneath the recurring startle, the cascading knee-jerk responses that say Do Something, do something Now, what are you just sitting there for when there are broken things that need to be fixed?

It's from a year of doing things, not sure if they were being done right, doing my best, and so often receiving only a response of a frown and silence. And then taking that and going back and trying again. More frowns. More silence. More work. More trying. Until I woke up one morning back in October and got: this sh*t feels awful and it isn't Who I Am, and they know it, and I know it.

That is the point where the lawn and the moon and stars and the burning and fermented plants and Florence and the Machine came in. Where this combination of their energies crashed into me, hammering at the wall of No that had been created, a kind of jailbreak that was surprising, not just in its content and methods, but also in how successful it was. Frowns and silence lose their power when the previous night was spent with the universe flowing through body, mind and heart, dancing outrageous gorgeous electrifying Yes until I fell down on the lawn in a heap of wonder.

But there was still work to do. I needed income. The fellowship didn't finish up until December 31st. There was no next job to move into yet. Then they asked to extend my contract until the end of February. With still no next job, I accepted, put my head down and worked. Stopped socializing with the folks I worked with. Stopped taking a break for lunch. Stopped trying to make any of it anything other than the work, and getting as much of it as I could done. Total focus on what I'd agreed to do, committed to seeing it through until Life released me from it.

I stopped writing. Stopped trying to do anything other than work, then come home, watch tv shows and movies, read, sleep, with forays out onto the lawn every couple of days. I ate a lot of healthy food, continuing the healing of gut and back pain through energywork and compassion and acceptance and release. Spent a lot of time outside, on the lawn and on the back porch, day and night, watching as the land around me moved into winter. I spent a lot of time doing this:

 

And I learned that being still and quiet for long periods of time facilitated both the snuggle and the flow. And I also learned that I still have many friends in the world, friends that call and text and visit, friends that skype and do sessions and send long emails describing their own process of setting themselves free. Friends that are planning their own escape from the No. Friends that filled my entire 46th birthday day (February 16) with wine and song and hysterical laughing and music and the magic that is facilitated via smartyphones and skype.

And then I created something that blew my mind, and my heart, wide open. It's been in the works for over a year. Something I took extensive notes on as new aspects popped into my head. That I wrote narrative around when I came in from hanging with the moon and stars, communing with Florence. That seemed more like a dream than anything else. That I kept adding to only because it felt more real than the supposed real life I was living. It was the answer to the obsessive questions blaring through heart and mind the past couple of years: what do i have to offer? is it valid? is it genuinely of use? does it genuinely make things better for people? do they want it? It was this: 

 

 

It's all still in motion. More will be revealed. I just need more time on the couch. More sleep. More time outside walking. More yoga and hot baths and green smoothies. Less thinky thoughts and connection to the stored past inside me that allows fear to deliver its electroshocks. Less contraction. More expansion. More time to process it all. More time to allow the Yes to flow more seamlessly now that the ordeal, the training, the trial, the test, the Whatever is done for this leg of the Waking Up process.

And as she has been for months now, the soundtrack is courtesy of Florence and her Machine:

     

 

2012 and a Happy Colon

My digestive system didn't feel well on Friday morning, so before I left for a session with my Korean Chinese Medicine practitioner, I only had a spinach and strawberry green smoothie. Eating light before Tui Na massage and acupuncture with Jin is always a good idea, but that Friday, it was a very good idea.

Jin put me on a 48 hour water fast, noting in his stern, yet kind way that it might be difficult, what with New Year's Eve and all. No lemon, no herb tea, just water. I'd never done one before. I was nervous. But I trust him. He's very, very good at what he does. 

And so after two days with nothing but mug after mug of steaming hot water, this morning at 7a the fast was broken with a mug of ginger tea, with just the tiniest dash of stevia, about a tablespoon of vanilla almond milk. Delicious. Now I'm drinking a mango, strawberry, blueberry, spinach smoothie, and holy cannoli: it is fantastic. 

The fast itself wasn't that big of a deal. I woke up the morning after the session feeling like usual, that I'd been in a car wreck the day before. Jin's stuff makes swedish deep tissue work or rolfing look like a back tickle. But once the bruising and pain subsides, the range of motion and absence of pain, the sheer feeling of flow in the body is . . . fantastic.

A pretty monstrous headache kicked in yesterday at around 3p yesterday, but aromatherapy oils - tangerine, camomile, peppermint - massaged onto my forehead and neck helped, as did a long aromatherapy bath with eucalyptus and lavendar. A lot of napping occurred, as did hitting the bed early, along with much aimless, random kitty snuggling, both feline and human instigated. And four pounds were missing from the scale this morn, mostly bloat of course, but four pounds of bloat is a beautiful thing to have vamoosed.

I thought about food a lot. I discovered that pretty much everything triggers the desire for food for me. Tired, bored, up, down, happy, sad, confident, confused - all caused the bright idea to pop into my head: let's get something to eat! But I kept coming back to the fact that Jin said my digestive system needed it, and so I trusted him, and trusted my trust in him, and hung in. But what I also noted is that I craved for the largest part, healthy stuff - veg stir fry and green smoothies and such. 

The real parting gift happened last night, at a little after midnight. I went to bed at 8p, covered in toasty kitties. I don't remember anything waking me, just opening my eyes, a phrase from the dream I'd just been in looping round and round. I got out of bed, had a glass of water, took a tee-tee, sometimes whispering the phrase, sometimes just watching it repeat inside my head. Then I crawled back into bed, pulled a kitty up into my arms.

Then I noticed the sound of explosions in the distance. It took a few moments for it to register that it was fireworks, not gunshots. And then I realized: It's 2012. 

Then the significance of the phrase made itself known, how it was a message for the new year for me. I got out of bed, walked to my desk, and wrote it down:

Transformation: it goes in as one thing and comes out as something completely different. . . transformation . . . it goes in as one thing and comes out as something completely different.

So, that was my new year's eve. How was yours?

 

Psychic TV, Tech Support, The Story of I

The process I've been going through the past few years with the Integral Shamanics work has been paralleling the Waking Up/personal dismantling. I'm constantly questioning, asking: is this true? is it genuinely helpful? what does it really do? how can it be done better? clearer and more easily translatable? more usefully? is there bullsh*t involved? how can it be pared away to reveal the Yes?

The IS email list of ~200 people, a list collected over the past decade, has been a gift. It's a mash-up of a few lists started, maintained haphazardly, then set down when I went through transitions where the holistic work was let go of for a while. When I pick it back up again, I start a new list, but then eventually send out an email to the old list, inviting anyone who wants to rejoin the new to let me know. 

200 doesn't seem like a lot of people, but these are core folks - they open the email newsletters, reach out for sessions or to give updates or just say howdy. They are a lot like this blog, which has honed itself down to about 50-75 readers - again, not a lot of folks comparatively, but core people, many of whom have been following DG for years, some since the beginning back in 2003. About 20 of those keep in fairly regular contact, either through comments or email, but most show up once or twice a year, when a post triggers something for them, and they feel to de-lurk.

I'm happy with both circles of connectivity because despite the changes of the past decade, and the comings and goings, both provide a sense of love, of respect and acceptance, and also a safe place. Inside that safety I get the deep blessing of growing in the presence of family, of tribe who knows I'm a bit of a problem child, but that there are also waves of adulthood that come with gifts for the folks who feel to tune in.

They are also a kind of laboratory, a place to send out invitations when I'm trying something new, when another deep transformation is under way. I bring the underpinnings and basic architecture of these first to this blog, and then when some of the kinks are ironed out, and the flow is a little clearer, to the IS email list.

With the blog, it's more of my own personal action. With the list, the action beyond the personal takes place, where whatever gets triggered via the blog or the newsletter moves. The folks who want to engage in sessions, who want to take the conversation started digitally and move it to analogue, who are engaged in their own conscious process of transformation, feel to reach out for some assistance. In the land of minimal connection that has become my living, this is where the deep fun begins.

Once or twice a year, I contact a psychic or shamanic practitioner when I feel to reach out for help. It happens when I'm good and jammed up around some issue and the suffering has gotten red line and I need a little perspective outside of my own brainbox. Usually there's a fair amount of fear going on inside me, but even with that, it's always a dang good time. 

It's fun to get info around a thorny issue scratching up my living, but it's also great fun to watch another deepwork practitioner do their thing, to see what sort of tools they use, what sort of story they wrap their data in for presentation to both their psyche and mine. Most access some sort of guide or guides who tell them what the deal is, which they relay to me. Some just see an entangled path in the living and get to clearing it.

Most have a truly wonderful sense of humor - a delightful mix of la-la-la lightness and pitch black dark humor around the horror, man, the horror. Some are all business - they go in, do whatever it is they do, come out, give the facts, ma'am, just the facts, like they're working a conveyor belt, if that conveyor belt were worked by someone very, very skilled at watching and tweaking and assembling the shamanic widgets gliding past. 

And with every passing day, I watch more and more closely what it is that I do in session with my own clients. There is the part of me that is doing the work, fully engaged in the healing process being done for the person. Then there's the aspect of my consciousness that is receiving personal healing and messages, a sort of parting gift from The Almighty Yes for the work being done. And then there's the overarching witness, who watches and notes everything occurring. 

This witness is sort of like a recorder - for everything, all aspects - probably some sort of personal awareness of the Akashic Records in motion. This same recording that's utilized to analyze layers and details post-session can also be used if a client asks a specific question weeks or months down the line about something that occurred during a particular session. Or even years later, such as the email I received yesterday about how I'd said during a psychic session 8 years ago that her business would franchise in 8 years, and how as I read the email of how she was now franchising, the energy of that session, her response, rehydrated back into my conscious mind with clarity.

For the past year I've been working on a proposal for an Integral Shamanics Healer training program. It's grown to around twenty pages of outline on all aspects of it - content and flow, and also how to structure it so it can be web-based. And as I've worked on the proposal, sorting out what it is I actually do and how to teach it to others, going through all of the syllabi and materials for classes and workshops I've done over the past 15 years, it's fed the session work, and vice versa. 

And then there are the sessions themselves. For the past few weeks I've been hyper-conscious of exactly what happens in sessions - how the information comes in, how I translate it and relay the info to clients, how it's received. 

With the shamanic sessions, the soul retrievals, it's like watching tv, but without sound. There's often a cartoon kind of feel to it, as if I'm watching an animated version of real life. It comes across visually as real, but with slightly blurred edges, like watching a streaming net video of less than stellar quality, which causes the moments and images that broadcast in hyper-High-Def to come through with an almost psychedelic quality, so multi-dimensional it takes my breath away, jolts the mind a little, like a few seconds of a Mystical State.

There's usually a mythic feel to the sessions, grand and sweeping, like a high-budget movie with A-list celebrities, with the client as star, and me as the character that walks around for a bit, sometimes interacting, but mostly watching, collecting. But rather than a movie's straightforward dialogue and visuals, the scenes that unfold in the sessions are what I've come to call "emotional gestures", a kind of highly dramatic heuristic of a person's issues, beliefs, their personal wounds - emotional, physical, mental, spiritual - as well as their ancestral wounds, passed down from their family, tribe, the planet.

It's common that scenes from past lives come up, a sort of how-to of how the wound began, how it was carried into and is being expressed in the current life. And the "missing soul pieces" are also pointed out, by the lens of whatever it is that points the camera of my witness, that brings the mystical states in and out, sometimes to stop motion, rewind, play it again, sometimes several times, often at different angles or levels of close-up or wide shot.

The incoming flow of information and scenes seems to have nothing really to do with me. I don't create it or shape it, just witness. I'm not striving to make anything happen, just releasing into the unknown, staying relaxed so as not to squeeze, think or flex away from the flow of energy, information, data.

The real work comes toward the end of the session, when the journey into shamanic reality downshifts into four-wheel drive, when the actual real-time healing part begins, where the soul pieces are integrated back into the bodies, resistance and blocks to healing played with, toxins/No/imbalances healed. After this flows into conclusion, I come out and speak with the client, telling them what I saw, what happened.

This final fifteen or twenty minutes of an hour session is the most challenging part because it's often not what a person would prefer to hear, and it's usually around things they'd rather not talk about or want seen. More and more though, the sorts of folks who've been doing session seem more ready, more willing, are stronger, their hearts and minds more flexible, able to take in more info.

The psychic readings follow a similar path, but because I'm not going into "shamanic reality", it's more of a conversation, a back and forth, the client stating what they'd like to look at, a sentence or two around what they feel the issue is, like going in to a physician's office and saying: it hurts here. And then I go in and look around, watch the flow of information that arises. 

There's very little mythic feel to psychic readings. They come across as more practical. It's still like watching tv, but they often have sound to them, and the visual/audio stays in the background because the two layers are occurring at the same time: watching the scenes and interpreting them to clients as the scenes unfold in the moment. During a psychic session, I'll sometimes stop and go silent for a few moments so to better tune in, go deeper, before I come back to the surface to relay the info. How I picture it is that there is this world, and then there is the psychic/shamanic/dream layer beneath it, and to do this kind of work means to move between the worlds. Shamanic sessions are immersing in the world beneath this one, then coming back and speaking about the what was seen and done. The psychic sessions are a quick moving back and forth, surfacing and immersing depending on what needs to be done and where.

In a psychic session there's more time to go back and forth with the interpretation. As the info is being relayed I can watch how the client receives each chunk, and energy levels can be readjusted- tools like kindness, firmness, languaging, metaphor, backstory, pauses for their commentary and insights flowing in to tweak the reception.

I use to say that the psychic readings were more informational, and the shamanic sessions were more experiential, but I've come to see that the only real difference is how the client feels to receive the information. Not everyone can or even wants to wrap their brain around a shamanic session's contents, but most folks can engage in a psychic reading as it appears much like a deep conversation between two people.

But the psychic readings usually only take a person so far. They're like pointing out tools to a person, and whether they choose to use them post-session is up to them. During the shamanic sessions, actual healing takes place, sometimes fully, often as a jump-start, a clearing away of enough debris on the path so that they can gather up some speed. I'm much more conscious of the fact that this is their gig, and my presence is as tech support, cartographer, editor for film quality and selection of content. 

Realizing that's it's story, relating to it like story doesn't diminish what it is. Because it's all story. Western med, Korean applied Chinese medicine, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy - all story. We're all on an adventure called Being Alive, and knowing the story is half the fun.

And I'm so grateful to have one of the best seats in the house. To tune in and watch shows on the billions of channels that is Life in motion. To witness the flow of Yes, and the seeming No that blocks it. To have the vantage point of seeing that it all fits together, an infinite mosaic of Beingness living out each sliver in full-on prism.

You do, too, sweet Tribe of Yes. You do, too. All that has to be done is Open Your Eyes . . .

Pods

Last night, while I was sitting out amongst the stars and sky and trees, letting the grainery and greenery have their way with body mind spirit, in a flash of awareness, I noticed what was going on around me, and it was so loud I wondered how I could have not heard it before. And what I saw was that it had been going on all day, ALL DAY, and I'd edited it out, as unnecessary, as unimportant, as lacking meaning. 

Ha.

It was the trees. Spawning. Pods bursting open, the large, dark brown seeds exploding outward, pinging through the leaves, landing on cars, crackling against bark and stone and branch. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. Pa-pow-pa-pow pow pow papapapapow. Pow. POW. For hours. Raining life down to the earth from the safety of the womb.

What a courageous act. What a frenzy of possibility. What a massive, hopeful flinging of more hope in all directions with as much force as could be mustered. Natural selection at its finest. 

Most would probably land somewhere and die sooner than later. On the road to get squished. Or on the lawn to get mowed. Or amongst too many of their brethren and only a few survive past initial sprouting.

As midnight closed in, they began to quiet, all spent. By morning, silence. I'll be looking for them again tonight . . .

***

And a shout out to all of you folks who did sessions with me the past couple of weeks. It has been transformative . . . showing how willing folks are, how open to love and truth and Yes . . . showing me where my own wounds are, and how to heal them . . . showing me that I don't have to push so hard with people, that they find their way in on their own time, and that's it's perfect and perfect and just so Yes . . . showing me that this is the sort of work I want to be doing for a long time . . . 

Shamanic Calibration

With the new openings occurring, I feel drawn even more strongly to do sessions with folks. And yet the way they play out, the techniques I've used are realigning, opening in new ways.

Whenever I've gone through shifts in the past with the healing work, rather than just play new things out with regular sessions, I've created a new format for them, charged a minimal session fee. For a while I did "half-hour shamanic power sessions" for $35 which honed specific skills so they could be done in a super-condensed way, which I liked to refer to as punching a hole through space-time and flinging us through. Woohoo!

Folks usually were disoriented afterwards, with no real integration time at the end of the session, but they were effective, often dramatically so. And they changed the flow of shamanic sessions when I finally let go of the half-hour format and moved into 1-1.5 hour sessions again. The level of intensity stayed up, and also less time was taken afterwards staying connected with folks. In letting go, it helped them find their own way, building their own muscles of integration, their own choice of how to take action based on what they felt ready for.

So, new shamanic sessions are forming, done telephonically, and I'm sending out invitations and details via the Integral Shamanics email list. Some of you are already on it, so if you already receive the emails (with the banner logo of the blog, and a blue email body) no need to resign up. If you're not on the list and would like to be, just send me an email at integralshamanics(at)gmail.com. (replace the (at) with an @ - it's to fool the blog trolling spam bots :)

 

 

 

Shamanic Yes, Always Available, Let Go, Dive In

When the request is heartfelt, and true, Life always says Yes. 

In one moment Friday night, a moment that came out of seeming nowhere, after a cascade of moments that showed me where the hole was inside of me, I realized that it had been years since a musician created songs that I felt myself deeply inside of.

And the realization came as I listened to Florence and the amazing tribe she leads. Greenery and grainery singing down my neural pathways. Out in the midst of wind and dark night sky, dancing for stars and the small, brilliantly white slice of moon, I found myself inside a groove that showed me my place in the web that is this world and the worlds underneath and behind and above it.

Shamanic soul retrieval. Florence and her fantastic Machine drilling down deep through layers of No. Calling me to dance the surface of skin and the musculature underneath and the current of prana as it unleashed the Yes inside.

 

Florence And The Machine - Breaking Down - Ceremonials Vidéo MrMusic sélectionnée dans Musique

Florence and the Machine "DOG DAYS ARE OVER" Music Video from LEGS MEDIA on Vimeo.

Shamanic Psychic Obsession

I get rather obsessed about things. All sorts of things. I discover spaghetti squash and a perfect-results way to cook it and then proceed to eat it a dozen times a week, for weeks on end. Or happen upon a new tv program - like the Stargate shows - and watch 25, 30, 35 episodes a week for weeks, months on end, until all 300+ shows are watched. Or yoga, 2, 3, 4 times a week for months. Or books on anarchy, or homesteading, or greenery growing and grainery brewing, dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of them.

These obsessions come and go, and my elegant theory around it all is that because of my psychic shamanic sensitivities, whatever is happening in my body/mind/spirit gets amplified, and if it detects something is needed, things like motivation and will go pedal to to the metal until whatever need is occurring gets satiated. And then it's done. Finito. 

For a couple of decades I was obsessed with performing and the fame that goes with it, with that transformation to bright, sizzling, vast energy that fills a person with brilliant light when they plug into it. Sometimes it was just as a model with the presence of a photographer. Other times it was on stage in front of 1000 people, bright lights shining heat, the rustle of the crowd like the sound of a lover's breathing, the small movements of their body telling you how to open them, how to receive them.

And then it shifted to the holistic work. Releasing into that space of vast, charged, deeply humming energy in such a way that all the people in the room could be taken with me, class space as space ship into the infinite Yes. Or adjusting the environment on all sense levels so the person on the table receiving energywork was invited, carried, linked into the energy space that lives just behind this ordinary one, supported as they found their own way to meet and inhabit the Yes. 

And now that is falling away - that need for either myself or the people I'm with to be in a state of heightened awareness, to submerge into the mystical experience of the layers underneath the layer called World. It's been falling away for a few years now. Not because those heart expanding, mind blowing, body luscious states aren't YES. They are. But with each passing day, I get that it is genuinely the Yes that's calling to me, and that where I'm heading now is toward the yes. Which is very quiet. And inside. This human body. And the body of kitties. The body of plants. The body of stones and soil and rain and dwelling and apple and bowl and shoe and bed. 

Who knows where this human called Katherine will end up? The movement is away from other humans. I wish it weren't. I so wanted to be a part of the tribe - loved, respected, a member who contributed in a deep and meaningful way. I guess that's the desire to be a hero that lives in all of us, yes? To bring back fire for our tribe. To save us from the coming storm. 

But all that is falling away too. And is almost gone.

What's left is a new obsession, a simple one - to make a living in a useful, bullsh*t-free way. It's been building for a few years, rotating on a single question: what do I have to offer folks that is genuinely helpful to them? And for most people, asking themselves this question is pretty straightforward- learn carpentry and get a job, get credentialled and go teach (although in today's job market, this path isn't as clear as it used to be). 

For three Mach-10 years that culminated with the right to attach several letters after my name, I was obsessed with higher learning, with science, with psychology and public health and social behavior and chronic disease. I still am. But it's rapidly becoming clear that I don't fit into the culture of that world. 

Maybe it's the job I'm in. It's too visible. My freakness is too obvious to the folks around me. We leave an important meeting with high-level folks, and two minutes out the door, the CEO asks me: so what are your thoughts? And because I haven't had time to process, what comes out is something way beyond a recap of How The Meeting Went.

I've got it together enough to not speak about how all sorts of different health issues each meeting attendee was dealing with was lifted into the light, and how their different emotional patterns fit into each physical expression, and how that impacted the way in which they heard what my team and I were trying to explain to them. But the clinical, professional assessment of presentation and reception? Not currently something I can give on the fly. I need some time to shape it, to figure out what needs to be edited out. Otherwise the psychic shamanic cat is out of the bag, and it won't be read as psychic shamanic. It'll simply look childish or emotional or irrelevant or just freakin bizarre.   

And it's a small office. I watch the discomfort of the folks around me - they know something is off about me but they can't put their finger on it. Am I immature? Am I arrogant? Is it lack of confidence that has me pulling back? Is it social ineptness that has me missing basic social cues? They don't understand that I've spent a lifetime discovering the hundred thousand other things occurring just behind the ordinary reality. That I'm watching things they can't see yet, hearing things they can't identify yet, putting things together in a way they haven't gotten strong enough to deal with yet.

This doesn't make me better or smarter or anything like that. By far, I am surrounded by folks smarter, savvyier than me. You seriously do not want someone like me building your bridge or developing your biologic cancer treatment. Me? I'm like the folks on Alphas or even X-men or even the cancelled tv show Lie To Me. It's just mutation that's been practiced and honed to a skill.

Did I just compare myself to a superhero? What the f*ck else can you compare this shamanic psychic thing to? Van Gogh and his mad visual acuity around color? Perfumers and their hyper-sensitivity to scents? These are all still about the known, accepted five senses, and the shamanic psychic thing is the spidey sense that lives inside of a human, with conduits through the nervous and digestive systems, receptors in the pineal gland and solar plexus, a kind of hijacking of different areas of the brain so that the inflow of data can be interpreted as visuals or smells or sounds or emotions.    

So why aren't I a superhero? Why aren't people flocking to me in droves for this fantastic shamanic psychic whammy that I can lay on them? 

There are dozens of possible answers to this. Some that blame me for being a crazy, deluded, incompetent wackjob. Others that blame clients for wanting the psychic feel-good, as in don't tell me the truth, tell me what I want to hear, tell me good things about flowing cash and loving soulmates and meaningful careers and effortless vibrant health. 

But the truth of it is that these skills and abilities live inside me. I've honed them for years. It's a normal part of every day. And it doesn't work like other people think it should work. It's more like being a physician, a healer, than most folks realize.

It's not:

I Know Everything About Everything, And Can Make Very Very Good Things Happen To The People Who Give Me Cash to Sit In The Scary Eyes Metaphysics of My Divinely Appointed Tarot Card Reading and Connection With Angels and Dead People

But rather:

This is what is occurring, this is what set it into motion, and these are different options and these are the most likely outcome for each of them. 

Not very sexy, is it?

And really, how successful is a doc who just says: lay off the cake and get your fat a*ss to the gym? And the ones that tell you the cancer is coming if you don't quit smoking or a heart attack is on its way if you don't lay off the Bo*jangles? Probably the least popular of all.

People want pills and treatments, they want genuine healing. They go in sick and want to come out well. That's what I go to my Korean acupuncturist for. But I'm not really that kind of healer. (I do healing work - the shamanic psychic thing has that piece to it, too, but the freakin scope of that is best saved for another post)

And so what am I? I'm more of an MRI. An organic MRI that sees physical, mental, emotional patterns. But how can I use this skill? What do I have to offer folks that is genuinely helpful to them? 

I have to make a living. Don't we all? My obsession with getting the BA and master's was around plugging into a career in a field I found fascinating and spot on with usefulness. 

And yet I don't fit. In a way that I understand may get me fired. My current contract is a temp one that ends January 1. I most likely have a job until then :) because I'm not failing at the job they hired me for - I'm just more weird and less fantastic than they thought I'd be. But who knows? And who knows after that? 

I'm applying for different jobs in the area, all public health chronic disease sort of gigs, but in larger companies, where I stand a better chance of blending in to the scenery, having my freakness be less visible (it's how I thrived in Cubicleland and Hiveworld).

The desire and need to be plugged into the Bright Mystical YES is gone. The obsession now is a life spent communing with plants, animals, weather, stones, of pulling even further back from World and into earth. 

And yet the question still comes around, over and over: What do I have to offer folks that is genuinely helpful to them? And how do I make a living doing it? 

Corporate intuitionist? Garden shop worker? Animal shelter attendant? Jury selection consultant? Some form of IntegralShamanics healer I don't know of yet? 

Living Outside the Box

Back in 2004, on the very first day in the back-to-school-extravaganza I took part in at the age of 38, in my very first class, psych 101, we watched a video on pathological states. And there, up on the screen, I saw my friends and colleagues and I described, the very basic skill of energetic connection we used, the one that flowed dozens of times a day as a normal part of our living.

In the film, it was described as mental illness, delusional people hallucinating that they could talk to plants, that the plants could talk back. And as I sat in that Albany, NY university auditorium, shame flooded through me, a sense of horror at being found out, judged as crazy, tossed out of the halls of science for being a nutcase. 

It was a warning flare from Life, letting me know what the lay of this new land was, what I was facing, what I'd need to do if I were to survive the experience I'd felt so strongly to pursue that I'd moved to a new city, left everything and everyone I knew behind. Life let me know that I'd have to disguise myself, have to hide who I was. Because if I began talking about energy and the connectivity of living, the web-like fascia between all beings - plants, animals - humans and non-humans all the same - stones - everything - they'd lock me up and feed me pharmaceuticals. And this wasn't random fear. These were the facts of this new world: No Wackjobs Allowed. 

In general, going back to college sounds like a normal enough thing. Sure - there are the challenges of the expense, the uprooting of a lifestyle, the mental strain. But for me, it was like entering the enemy camp. For those of you who've been reading this blog long enough, you'll remember I called myself a Spy in the Land of The Mind. 

I'd lived a nomadic life, based on pursuit of something outside of mainstream living, something I could feel pulsing inside of me, so gorgeous, so amazing, so outrageously Yes only an idiot would say no. Activated when I was a child by nature and books and accelerated learning in school, it shifted in teenage years toward theater and acting, being onstage or in front of the camera, and to the drugs, alcohol, promiscuous sex that went along with that lifestyle, that community. In my twenties it moved on to yoga, meditation, running, clean diet, the rigidity of ashram living. After that, things seemingly devolved for a while, a breaking down into the dark side of it all, fleeing an evil guru, escaping into exile onto the mean streets of NYC, getting drunk, stoned, more and more often. And then 30 came along, and I fled the city, spent a year in a kind of shock, then turned 31, beginning an intensive time of self-healing that paralleled a 7-year apprenticeship with an energetic master who helped hone psychic and energywork skills in a 100+ different modalities. I got strong and learned and rooted.

This next part I only remembered just last night. I'd forgotten it these past eight years, forgotten the beginning of the freefall that landed me in Albany, caused me to walk away from the happiest life I'd ever known. I'd always thought it was a series of events, cascading loss that ripped through my living - loss of best friend, violent downstairs neighbor that led to loss of home, betrayal by my lover, 9-11 that brought a difficult economic landscape to the NYC upper suburbs I lived in. But what preceded these events was something that set me up inside myself for all the events, or my reaction to them, to break apart my life so intensely that I'd have little choice but to go nomad again.

For 7 years I'd apprenticed with a master, learned her techniques, made them my own, incorporated them with other skills learned from shamans and psychics and energyworkers. By year two, I was seeing clients of my own, building a name as a strong healer, working with corporations, hospitals, working with other healers in the group, refining our techniques together. My abilities bloomed, deeply so, so intensely that even my teacher called me for assistance, to look at issues inside of herself or her family. 

In year 6, things began to change. There was a group of ~10 that had been studying with the energy master for five or more years, and in around year three, the teacher let in a new person, said she was accomplished enough to join the advanced group, although we all had to spend time bringing her up to speed. Over the following couple of years or so she became very close with the teacher and the group dynamic began to change.

I was one of only two of the group who was working as an holistic practitioner full-time, and both of us were poised to begin assisting the teacher as she expanded her classes. But instead of either one of us, the new student began assisting. I don't even know really how it happened. I didn't really think in terms of ambition, or lineage, or any of that sort of thing. But one day, I got a call from the new student, saying that she and the teacher had decided that if I wanted to be a part of the new training program expansion, I'd have to study under the student until she felt I was ready. 

It was one of those moments that feels like a bomb going off, total silence for a few moments as you try to figure out what just happened, utterly disoriented. I'm trying to remember what the actual conversation was but I only remember fragments - me saying: but that makes no sense, why would I need to train with you when I have more experience than you, have years and years more practice, when you still are using the techniques in rudimentary form, and haven't worked much with clients?  . . . and she saying, interrupting me over and over, passive aggressive comments that all members of our group found difficult in dealing with her, how she'd shut her eyes and simply keep talking, talking over anything that you tried to say, allowing only monologue on her part, only opening her eyes and smiling broadly when you'd finally given up and gone silent and she'd hug you and say: so we're agreed! and she'd happily walk off.

But that day, that conversation, I held my ground. No, I would not train under her. No, it was not okay that I was supposedly not allowed to assist in any of the classes. No, it was not okay that I was to stop working with clients until cleared by her. No, I didn't believe that this is what the teacher wanted. The student was not amused.

Weeks of back and forth commenced, culminating in the teacher agreeing with me - there was no need to train with the student. But the damage was done, and the training program expansion went on without me. Oops, the student forgot to let me know about a class date. Oops, she forgot to include me in organizing schedules or days or practices, or really anything. She simply left me out of the loop, and the teacher would back the student, saying how busy the student was with her full time job in addition to the training program, how she didn't mean to exclude me. And so I let go of trying to be a part of the school, and focused on my own practice, my own clients.

Within a year, all senior students were essentially working under the student, and the once cohesive collective of vibrant healers was now just a group of women who saw one another less and less. And when the teacher moved to California, the local school shifted completely under the student's control. 

That last year, I took a job working part time in a women's gym as a trainer. The student would stop by the gym every few months or so, and I'd initially feel so glad. The ruffled feelings, the group dynamic shift, had all been so upsetting. I just wanted us all to feel close, to be a part of the new training program together. And so the student would show up at my gym, say she just wanted to stop by and say hello, and I'd feel happy to be included, sought out. But within minutes she'd ask for my psychic advice - issues she had going on at her job, or with her romantic life. I'd tell her what I saw, but it was never what she wanted to hear, and she'd be dismissive, condescending in that broadly smiling way of hers, then walk off, and I'd stand there, feeling like sh*t and not knowing why.

And so, when the cascading shift of change hit, I just let go, let it all go, stopped fighting it. My heart felt so broken, I felt so defeated on every level, I just walked away, left it all behind, didn't even try. I gave away my possessions, gave notice on my apartment, even though I didn't have anywhere else to go, any money saved, no plan, nothing.

And I think after that, I was ready for anything. It's like I was stripped nekkid and jettisoned out into a brand new life like a blank slate. I had no idea what was next. And so on that morning when I woke up on that mountaintop in that cabin in Virginia with one of those emotionless directives: Go Back To School, I just did it, amazed and delighted as a dozen things clicked into place effortlessly, dumping me out into Albany, NY in less than three months. And in three years of back to back semesters, I had a BA in Psych, a master's in Public Health, over 10 years as an holistic practitioner, and no idea what to do with it all.

I found that because of all of the science I now understood, to the holistic crowd, I'd become a sellout or a partypooper or simply The Man. I found that I couldn't go back and simply be a holistic practitioner, and so I've pressed on forward, into the unknown.

The job I'm at now is a fellowship with a contract that ends January 1st. I don't know what happens after that. I don't know if there's a place for me in this world, this world of highly educated, savvy people whose religion is science and who live by its tenets absolutely, unequivocally. These are the people who run the world, who head hospitals and universities and government agencies, run corporations and research centers. They were, vastly by and large, raised in comfort and support. If they ever heard a plant speak to them, they'd see a doc, get a scrip, breathe a sigh of relief as the plants around them fell silent.

To them, people like me are freaks, mentally ill, just plain weird. Although sometimes, because it's become trendy, people like me can be kind of fun, if we do things like feng shui or meditation, as long as it's Granolahead Lite, as long as it makes other people feel happy and good about themselves, their life. They don't want the dark side, don't want the death or the void, don't want a light shined on the carefully constructed illusions they believe to be reality. Of course not. They are at the top of society, the upper level of resources and knowledge and power and control. Why would they want someone who sees it genuinely differently?

I want to tell them that we're heading into a very dark time, but that it's going to be okay, even as everything we know changes. I want to tell them what's coming, but it isn't what anyone wants to hear, and I've learned, hard learned, to hold it in, to not speak.

I wish I had the courage to just be a freak, to let others believe what they do, view me as whatever they do. But only a few hundred years ago they were burning people like me at the stake, fifty years ago tossing us in snake pit mental institutions. Now they press us to take medication, and if we still don't conform, they kick us out of communities, jobs, churches, families, peer groups. 

When visionary leaders talk about how they want people who think outside the box, they mean color of skin, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, maybe even small degrees of "different" in thought or perception. But for people who truly live outside the box of mass consciousness? Hell no. That's insanity. That's anarchy. 

And I watch as I drift even further away from the herd. Getting stranger. Less involved. Seeing underneath even more layers of this thing we call The World. I'm much better at not saying anything, not commenting or speaking to what I see, what is obviously going on.

Yet it gets more difficult to see the line between what they believe is and isn't okay. It's as if all of living were an enormous swath of expression, movement, flow, and where we are as a species, where the mass consciousness is, is a demarcation on that continuum: We will believe in things you can see, hear, smell, taste or touch physically - anything other than that is a pathology that corrupts sensory perception, rendering it unreliable.

And yet I've been a psychic, a shaman, an energyworker, an Alternative Practitioner for so long that it's simply how I live. I am constantly inappropriate, realizing it only in that three second wake of silence as the people around me attempt to compute the anomaly.

Did you know this? Did you know that there's a very specific language, dance, collection of images in a culture, a subculture, a metaculture? Did you know that this is all a tightly choreographed dance? If you're a female, did you shave your armpits? Is your hair clean and smooth? Do your clothes fit? Do they match, e.g. does your costume fit your character's role? Do you say the new catch-phrases? Do you understand the current metaphors? Do you smile at the right time about the right things? Do you express dissension at the right moment? Do you express the correct level of friendliness for your social station? Level in the hierarchy? Do you pair bond in an acceptable way? Do you relate to animals and plants and stones and air in a way that demonstrates that they are Other and not as important as humans? Are you thin, healthy, young, energetic, outgoing, confident? If not, are you working toward these states? Or at least the appearance of these states? Do you love to shop and see how its excellence is advantageous? Do you channel your animal nature, your intrinsic hard-wired love of violence into watching sports or instigating drama and competition in those around you?

Does seeing all this as you walk through your days make your eyes bug? Does it blow your mind that you are watching actors on a stage, and that all you have to do is say your lines, say your lines dammit, but it's getting harder and harder to do because really what's the point?

As I drift even further, to the outermost edge of the herd, I lose ever more interest in where the herd is. But I have a job. I go to the store, the market, deal with the acupuncturist, the landlord. Before every action, every conversation, I have to remind myself where the line is, where that place is that they can see and then see no more beyond it.

I watch as things slip and slide, move back and forth over the line. The person at work who answers questions that I haven't spoken aloud, only thought in my mind. She doesn't realize she's doing it, but one day she will. And I know better than to expect she'll be awed and pleased by the realization, and want to be my BFF.

Or clients who used to book sessions for the feel-good, who are slowly realizing I'm doing something very different.

Or the decent job I'm doing at work, though my bosses feel something is off somehow, though they can't seem to put their finger on what or why. Just find out what they want and give it to them is my goal. Do the work. Do good research, write good papers, give good presentations. Give them what they want, how they want it, when they want it. It's what they pay me for. It's a fair trade. They have no need for any of the other things I see, or do, or experience. And it's the way it should be. 

I do very few holistic sessions with folks any longer. I send out no newsletters, no website updates, barely return emails. It's been heading that way for many months, but culminated in something that happened a few weeks ago. I did a session with a woman who genuinely wanted a nice psychic reading, something that would make her feel good, strong, give her pointers for having the things she wanted in her life. Instead she got a nihilist who told her how she'd surrounded herself with No and if she wanted it to change she'd have to leave certain people and situations behind. By the end of the session she was so angry she could barely contain her rage. And the next day she sent one of the most hateful, vitriol infused emails I've ever received. Instead of engaging, I sent her a refund, wished her well, and then blocked her email and IP addresses.

In the moment it all felt so practical. I 'd done two sessions during the previous weeks for a woman who'd had a biopsy done, had helped walk her through what the diagnosis would be, possible courses of treatments her medical team would recommend, what things to look for. I thought the two sides of the same push of energy were perfect: one woman crying on the phone, telling me how grateful she was to have found me, the other spitting bile and threats, calling me a charlatan, a scam artist.

Neither was true. Neither was false. Neither got what they really wanted - make the cancer go away, make the bad feelings inside go away. But both got what they needed. And somehow, between the polar aspects of their energy, something in me let go. 

Since then, I only do sessions here and there, no more simply saying yes. I took down the paypal link on the website, ignore most of the emails, pointedly opt out of the psychic, shamanic gig.

I don't know what's true with it anymore. I can tell you that I saw her cancer, saw it move, saw what would make it stop moving, go away. I can tell you I saw the relationships the other woman surrounded herself with, what it would cost her to set herself free. These are absolute truths to me. Like seeing the wind move a tree branch, watching the leaves flutter. It's simply what is observed. But is it helpful? Does it truly assist other people? I'm no longer sure.

I don't know what's happening anymore in general. There's no goal, no ambition, no plan. Sometimes there are pulses of energy that move my living in one direction or another, tell me to take an action, or refrain from an action. Beliefs unpeel, one by one, in the course of a conversation, a single exchange, during a dream, or watching a tv show. No trying. Not much effort anymore.

Still painful as all f*ck. But it passes much more quickly, sometimes within seconds, in the time it takes to take a breath and release it, or turn my head to look in a different direction, or simply say No Thank You.

I don't pray for things anymore - money, love, success, good health. Instead I pray for the grace to accept what Life brings, for the courage to face what's in front of me, for the strength to acknowledge my part in the flow of energy that surrounds me.

And I pray for silence, that I can let go of needing to speak at all. In this current social climate where everyone clamors for their voice to be heard, where everyone believes that they have something vital to say, to contribute, I long for the courage to stop adding to the noise.

Or conversely, for the trust that if something needs to be said, it'll be said. It doesn't need to come from me, or if it does, it'll be so obvious I won't need to hold it back, it'll bloom into the conversation and that'll be enough.

The conversation back in 2001 with that student when the bomb went off was a turning point. I feel something similar coming around. Don't know what or when. Feeling such fear and vulnerability around it. Even as somewhere underneath, courage is building, the strength to make the next leap needed. Or maybe it's trusting that the force of movement will take me where I need to go if I simply surrender to the momentum.

I understand now that I'm not the wind. I'm the tree. And I'm okay with that.

I'm in better financial shape this go around. And there are so few material objects to lose or social fabric around me to tear. There's more trust in what's happening. And less need for drama. And yet I feel more naked, more vulnerable than ever before. As much as I can, I keep my eyes open, try to stop repackaging reality into pleasing shapes. As things collapse, I breathe, sleep, snuggle kitties, look for the way through.

More will be revealed. 

And now the narrative quiets, finally out of me, released.

I turn toward you, feel you as you sit, reading these words on the lighted screen in front of you.

Do you feel this change, this big shift in the world, too?

I guess if I have a tribe anymore it's you folks, you few dozen scattered over the globe.

As you read this, what's been triggered in you? How are you navigating it all? 

Anarchy & Beautiful, Terrible Yes

The only reason I'm not writing, really, is because I don't feel to. And part of the lovely, mundane magic is that it's okay not to write. There's nothing that has to be done. Only what I feel to do, based on what Life is bringing me. Right now, I need to work and sleep and eat. Not much else. There are a few things I feel to do simply because I feel to, things like be with kitties, and do yoga, and watch tv shows, and eat pie, so I do those too. Some make me feel better, some worse. But it all feels true. And it's all Whatever. 

There are a couple of things I feel to share with you.

The first happened on my way to work a couple of weeks ago, when I was deep inside a state of misery so profound it was like being eaten alive. There was nothing wrong occurring. It's still a good job, a good life. And yet the bonfire of Human Torch inside has kicked it up a few notches in the past two months, so the truths being revealed of What's Really Going On have been profoundly hide chapping. Yet again.

And so I drove down the road, hands gripping the wheel, trying to get my head molded into a shape that would allow me to show up at work calm and ready to get things done. Then I saw something that caused a few moments to extend into one of those time expansions where everything slows down. And heart mind and body blew open wide with recognition, acknowledgment, knowing.

It was a turtle. In the middle of four lanes of pre-9 a.m. rush hour traffic. His head was raised, his legs pumping. But he didn't seem afraid, just focused, moving in a straight line, oblivious to the corridor of death he walked through.

I almost slammed on my breaks, pulled over to the side so I could leap from the car and lift him to the other side of the road. But in that expanded moment in time, I understood that I had no role in what was happening. I actually heard: do you really think his life or death is up to you? That if you get him to the grass on other side of the road a hawk isn't waiting for him?

And in that expanded moment, I saw how a hundred thousand things were happening - the wind was at his back, then from the side, impacting his speed; cars were going at different speeds and these hundreds of cars would either miss him or hit him depending on a hundred other things, whether people were talking on their cell phones, or swerving trying to avoid him or even aiming for him. But this intersection of these thousands of individual threads of action were occurring out of a dance of Life, and this turtle's life or death was up to something much larger than him, or me. 

Of course there were also several pieces of my own bullsh*t racing through my mind - around how if I get out of the car and enter into that traffic I risk dying, etc. - but I also felt this anguish, this acknowledgment of how this wasn't my fight, and how leaping in to make it my fight was an option, I could do it, but was it true?

And I got that who I was even a year ago would have found the leaping true, but the person I was now, the person I've become, knew that it wasn't. Life let me enter into that expanded moment, to see this ordinary turtle, simply going about the business of his living, just like me, just like you. When we are being brave because we have a corridor of death to cross, and we feel to cross it, this what we do, even knowing we might die in the middle of it. Because this is being alive. This is being here, on this planet, at this time.

After work, I looked for the turtle, or his body, but I didn't see it. Maybe he lived, maybe he died and became crow food. And that too is perfect. All of it.

The second thing I feel to tell you is about Sons of Anarchy. Movies and television and books and blogs - all the ways we humans have evolved to use to tell our stories - have been a direct way, all my life, that Life uses to teach me, to move me, to show me deep aspects of precise angles of living.

From April through mid-July, it helped me wrap my head around scientists and the scientific way of looking at the world through the Stargate series - some 325+ episodes. Sure, it's entertaining, and fantastic, but at its core, it's about people who encounter "magic"- religion, belief, myth - and then look for how it's based in fact, and truth, not denaturing it, not denigrating it, but simply looking for the moving parts, the practicality of the truth of it. And then, once I was able to integrate it into my living, using it to help me walk and talk in this new land of science and academia my new work is in, it moved me on to the next: society and how we are part of a whole.

Specifically? Anarchy.

Before Sons of Anarchy, I had no understanding of right use of violence, or true outlaws, or anarchists in general. I still barely barely have a grip on the side of this roiling volcano top of perspective - a feeling of how this is another aspect of how The Matrix is actually true. Over the past few weeks, I watched all three SOA seasons, then went back to begin watching them all over again, letting the information go in at an even deeper level as I read the works of Emma Goldman, John Zerzan, Cleckley and Fromm and Tarpley. 

We all feel so sh*tty for reasons that go far beyond our will and ability to control our thoughts and feelings. If mustard gas were released into your home right now, would you be able to control your physical reaction to it? What I'm waking up to and seeing is that there is mental, emotional, environmental poisonous gas being released. 

Of course, I've had an intellectual knowledge of this for years. But now, to truly see it, is a whole new level. Like the difference between thinking your mate is cheating on you, even knowing it in your bones, and then walking in them on them nekkid with your best friend. The sh*t changes you in a way that you don't get to pretend your way out of.

I don't know if I can do anything about any of it, either for myself or for others. I barely understand it yet. What anarchy is, what it means. What freedom really is, what it costs. But it's all there. Another layer of this reality we live in. And it's shocking on a level that I know is changing me for the duration of this life I'm in. Hidden inside this finely crafted television series is a revealing, a tool for Waking Up, just as subversive as The Matrix, and if you let it, as effective as having your own zen master, your own personal Jed McKenna.

Or maybe, for you, it'll just be a great ride, a fun tv show about SAM CROW, full of bang shoot em up and hot biker dudes and tough smart strong women. It's all good. It's all Whatever. Life brings us exactly what we need when we need it. We just have to have the courage to look it in the eye, let it do it's work in our heart, body, mind. 

Because seriously, what the f*ck else better do we have to do?

Much love to you all . . . til we meet again here on this screen . . . maybe tomorrow, maybe next month, or next year. Leave your comments, send your emails . . . you know I feel you, as I know you feel me . . . 

Elucidation

I woke up this morning with another one of those messages.

What the heck else do I call them? It's like having a line from a technical manual read out loud. Utterly emotionless, without any sort of judgment or inflection. Just a statement of fact. Said once. Fini. And then I lay there, watching as my brain fills in the details of how it applies to my living, this thing I'm doing called Untangling, or Waking Up, or growing up, or Whatever.

This morning's was: It's Not More Story, It's Less.

It's not about adding anything in - a new technique or endeavor or plan or frame. It's about letting go of the different storylines of Katherine, thread by thread.

And I saw that "enlightenment" is about no more personal story, as in the person isn't seeking to create a specific storyline that they think is "good". It isn't about creating more, but about opting out, over and over, to the aspects of the story of world that are about more exciting, more colorful, more amazing dreams.

And even with this letting go of self-generated story, it's about surrender to whatever the storyline is that Life has for the living. To see Life's storyline, the personal, will-asserted storyline has to be released. Two competing plot generators is simply confusing and dividing.

The tricky segment of this surrender? Moving from the wanting that self generates, to the wanting triggered by the radiating from Life. The difference: one is a grasping toward, the other is a delighted, willing following of sign posts.

Yet there is creating story and telling story. And it's the telling that has always served my Untangling.

Which leads me to what to do with this blog. This blog here that turned eight-years old in April. 

In no particular order, the issues are:

• folks I work with, as smart and sensitive and evolved as they are, seriously don't have a context for what the shamanic life is about, or what psychic ability means, or how deep transparency is simply the next wave of human evolution. i've genuinely stopped posting details based on this alone.  it isn't about fear. it's about recognizing what another being can and can't take in based on how awake they are. and acknowledging that i love my job, the work i'm allowed to do there, in the environment that these lovely folks have created and sustain on a daily basis. this isn't opinion but statement of a recognized fact: appearances count, and to hang with a certain tribe means you have to dress in a way they can accept, physically, mentally, and emotionally. i toe the line on all fronts. but the blog, and even my twitter account crosses the line. 
• i hardly read anyone else's blog anymore, so it's more of a monologue than a conversation, which doesn't lend itself to the whole bloggy spirit. i apologize - something in me just turned off - like a switch - for all but a few blogger's stories. 
• i still have a hard time with the haters and semi-haters and advice-givers and general groove-harshers that like to enter a blog home, lounge on the sofa, partake of the snacks, and then poop on the rug. it isn't just me. every single blogger i know has to deal with this, and the ones that write/talk about it don't like it or enjoy it any more than i do. it is a very present, very sucky aspect of blogging. much like having a conversation with a friend in a restaurant and the person at the next table gets up and comes over and sits down and takes over the conversation with complaints about their many health problems and how you really are such a p*ssy and a loser and your fear of the dark is so pathetic, and then they laugh in sheer enjoyment, hahahahaha! seriously, it takes a tremendous amount of energy not to lean over and poke them with your fork. you know it is. and then you realize all restaurants are filled with these folks, and you wonder if you should just stay home, stop eating out, and yet you miss out on amazing meals cooked by other folks, and the ambience of favorite places to go, and the energy that's created when you go out with friends you know and love.
• blogs as they were - these amazing, intimate dwellings in the wilderness of the internet, a place where folks could come and hang out, love and be loved - is pretty much done. there are lots of possibilities for the next wave - letter.ly, less personal posting - but none of them feel right. 
• who the heck even reads this anymore? i know there are somewhere between 10-50 people. i think. since i backed away from responding to most comments and emails a couple of years ago, and the blog content got so intense, less phun, it appears that most folks wandered off. but then i'll hear from folks i haven't heard from in a while and realize i have no idea who still comes here. (except for you hardcore dozen or so who still regularly comment or send emails)

The real issue though, in this living called Katherine, is of course why I'd want to keep writing, what purpose it serves in my living, this Untangling.

I'm very clear I don't owe anyone anything. That used to be a huge deal. It isn't anymore.

My heart still cracks open in Yes when I read an email or comment from someone and they share a connection they felt reading a post, or how a post triggered something, a light or a signpost, for them. The feeling I have that the blog serves a kind of "breadcrumb" purpose for a few folks is validated.

And yet there isn't a doubt in my mind that if this blog receives no more input - from myself or from others - Life will simply redirect us to wherever else we need.

So why write? And how to create a new environment that the writing can thrive inside of?

The former is the same thing it's always been: this is a main channel that Life uses as a guru-process for the Untangling inside of me. If I show up, and write, with the lights on in heart and mind and body, something Not Me falls away, and the process of this living is made more clear, less tangled.

I haven't figured the latter out yet. Or rather it hasn't revealed itself. And it's like a splinter in my mind. Energy is building, but no direction yet in where to direct it.

And so I do this sort of posting, feeling uneasy about it all, even with it's infrequency and lack of detail. 

So, if you feel moved to, leave any insights or feedback you have to all this in the comments section . . . maybe you have a tool I can use to help navigate this new landscape . . . and this is also helpful if you're someone who reaches out infrequently so I know you're still around and want to be included if I do some sort of disappearing act to another place or format . . .)

The Sweetness

Day 1 of a cleanse. Yet another cleanse. The latest in a long line of hundreds of them, stretching back over 25 years.

The first impulse was to deem them all "failed", but they all served a purpose. I dumped some of the toxic load in the body, heart, mind. Lost some weight. Gained a fresh perspective of food and eating and the emotional ties I have to them.

Yet none of them ever were part of a big breakthrough, a big enough breakthrough to hold and not go back to the patterns of dis-ease, the dark ignorance that lies between desiring a refined carb and putting it into my body. The Big Breakthrough where the light goes on and stays that way.

It seems like such a simple thing, and it is. But it isn't easy.

Just don't eat refined carbs.

But for 40 years now, I can only do that for small amounts of time.

I'm facing something at my current job that I faced in my holistic work: I can't go further, can't really do the work I was meant to do at the level I'm capable of if I don't break through this wall of illness, dis-ease, discomfort, fogginess, emotionality, addiction. 

By most anybody's ruler, I'm doing good work, sometimes even excellent work. But I know this body-mind-spirit is capable of so much more, like seeing a door cracked, brilliant light pouring through. Would you be able to resist the urge to open the door, let the light fill the whole room?

And so: cleanse.

Yoga. Green smoothies. Green vegetables. Raw eggs. Herbs and supplements to assist - olive leaf and triphala, ground chia seeds and probiotics, green powder and digestive enzymes. This is the plan for this cleanse.

Will it work?

Even now, as I sit here typing this, it occurs to me that what I most want to do is go into town to try out that locally famous diner that serves amazing omeletes and home fries and coffee. Yes, that would feel good.

And it would. For a while. Til night time came and the desire for more hard core Up kicked in, and I moved on to key lime pie and gluten free pizza with pepperoni and mushrooms. And then wake up the next morning with heaviness in body and mind, a swollen face like I did this morning.

Food is my great comforter. My favorite thing to do is what I did last night: eat pizza and pie, snuggled in on the couch with the kitties, watching SG1 episodes, the sound of life in the country - trees and wind and small scurrying  and flying beings settling in for the night too. My whole body and being relaxes. Kitties prrp. Daniel Jackson discovers the stories of The Ancients. Dinner is delicious.

But then, as I go off to bed, belly swollen and back aching, I get that this is just another favorite thing that comforts me that is rapidly reaching the critical point of having to be jettisoned. If I could just do this one night a week, maybe it would be okay. But I don't seem to have the desire, the will. 

All I want is to hang with my fuzzy guys and snack, watch stories. Just drift.

During the day I do work that brings change into the lives of other people. I always have. I make big changes in my own living. I always have done this too.

Just in the past few years I went from being a feng shui consultant to academia, then to the state and social work while simultaneously working as a shamanic healer, now as a health care reform chronic disease research fellow. Since 2005 I moved from Chester, NY to Kent, OH to Pulaski, VA to Albany, NY to Troy, NY to Wilmington, NC to Chapel Hill, NC.

I'm as afraid of change as anybody. But I'm more afraid of stagnation, inertia, settling, giving up on having an adult life that is enjoyable to live inside of. 

I'm grateful for the family I was born into, the life I've lived. So grateful for how strongly forged I am from living in such close proximity to roaring fires. And I've spent my entire life working so hard to shed the darker parts of my familial birthright: shards that reflect physical and emotional abuse, drug addiction and mental illness, ignorance and unwillingness, violence against self and others, a distaste, disdain for work and love and honesty and forgiveness and spirituality.

It's as if I looked around inside of me, my head, heart, body, life, and saw what wasn't Yes, what I could feel wasn't me, and I spent four decades aligning myself with people who could help me jettison those shards. But then I reached a place where the only person who could go on was me. The teachers and fellow students grew smaller and smaller in the distance. The solo journey began.

It all sounds so self-absorbed, so egotistical. And it is. This ego inside of me has grown monstrous. 

But I don't know how a person could survive what I've been through without having such a huge, mirrored ego. Maybe it is monstrous and should die. But I feel grateful to it. From the perspective of inside looking out, it has a certain billion-faceted radiance, like an emotional prism. And it's carried me to the place I now stand.  

Maybe other places have been more still and quiet, more fun, more "spiritual", more happy, but this life I now inhabit is more self-sufficient, more honest than any other. It's fierceness, it's utter coldness in divvying the landscapes - both inner and outer - into Me/Yes and Not Me/No has given me the gift of living with a lot less Untrue than probably 99% of the population. The sheer bullsh*t quotient is now so low in this living it's like an extended bass note of Yes as backdrop to everything.

Which is maybe why the ego now shows up in all its vibrant monstrous glory. The very vessel that brought me here, is now the vessel I have to move on from. Maybe ego is a boat and from here on out it isn't a journey by sea. Maybe I can break it down and use its components to build a nice house in this pretty land whose shores I now walk on. 

Or maybe it's bonfire time...

And so this all brings me back to the cleanse. It's really so very basic, so very bottom line: if I don't empty out, there won't be the room, the energy to do the next part of this journey.

It's so simple. So straightforward. 

Yoga and 5 Tibetans and Tabata to gently, fiercely break open the physical and energetic bodies from scar tissue and rust.

Clean, pure, vibrant, simple fuel to nourish the tiny organic machines and systems that power this living called Katherine.

Simple. But not easy.

Unless it's time. When it's time, the path clears.

Is it time? 

I stand trembling at the gate. Scared, alone, but here. Scared, but standing at the gate.

Survival Tips For Life in The Land of The Blind

I don't want to write, then I do, then I don't again. I wonder if writing ability rusts from lack of use.

The things going on don't feel important enough to write about, or important only to me, or important in a way that still doesn't have focus, stability. I'm not sure if what's going on makes sense, not sure if it's Waking Up or mental illness, not sure if the actions I'm taking will lead to healing or just more endless loops.

And I'm more reluctant to write because I know folks at work are reading - either the blog or the twitter feed which links to the blog. They don't know that I know but I do because of the fear and anger they slide between when they see me. Supposedly I'm a psychic, which is scary to them because they think it means I can read their minds, and then they get angry because I can go f*ck myself because they have nothing to hide from a wackjob like me.

They don't understand I'm not interested in the contents of their mind. They don't understand that human minds, mine included, are roiling pits full of fear and judgment and rage and pettiness and pointlessness. Looking into the minds of kitties is pretty fun actually but humans, not so much. 

I got bored with it all sometime around last year. Unless someone was paying me or asking me or something in me pushed to give the info, all I did anymore became a cursory scan to see: yep, naked roiling pit, or roiling pit covered with a joyful Happy Happy tarp, or roiling pit buried under several feet of geometrically superior architecture, or  . . . yeah. It's still like this, but the scans are even more surface and quick.

Why don't I use my psychic abilities for something amazing? Why don't I use them to win the lottery?

I have a friend who works for the F*BI, who asked me to help him solve a case. It was one of the most horrible experiences of my life, looking into that metallic razored shredding violence, and then not being able to give anything helpful to my friend to save someone's life, other than this person had cancer and the particular emotions and random past experiences of that member of the gang and what the neighborhood boy who was helping them was mentally experiencing. What was the point of any of it?

And I have won the lottery. Well, $100 bucks. I was walking past a convenience store and felt the energy of Now, This that kicks in when it's giving me A Download of informational truth. I walked into the store, it pointed me to one of those scratch offs, which I purchased, and found I'd won $100. I've never been able to duplicate the experience, which makes sense because I didn't create it in the first place, only followed up a directive with an action.

So it's a passive kind of skill, this psychic ability that lives inside of me. It can be pointed at things, people, situations, but it seems I have no choice in what gets seen. When clients are paying me to look, I can look at basic streams of a living - the relationships around them, the work situations, the health of the various bodily systems, organs. The probability of where these streams will end up shows up clearly, but it doesn't mean it's where they will end up.

And usually it's not what folks want to hear. That's been one of the most shocking and hardest truths to face: folks don't want the truth - they want to hear nice stories about themselves. Ironic, yes. 

And so I work as a health researcher now. The money is good, the company I work for is outrageously kind and adult and respected and cutting edge. I had a two-month review last week and got "outstandings" which was nice to hear. But the job I do uses so little of me. It's like Einstein working as a cake baker. Maybe the cakes made are really yummy, but not a whole lot of deep mining occurring.

(Did I just compare myself with Einstein? I did! How can you not feel kinship with a person who envisioned quantum foam???)

But the truth is that I'm still settling in to these huge life changes. I'm having to relearn the language of science, and the folks I work for and the job to do: absolutely perfect. And the folks I work with - how could they not sense that I'm a freak? Not like the others? A threat? I'm the actor on the stage with the smirk on their face, messing with their Actor's Motivation Mojo, and we're in the middle of Act Two, with a full house.

They're fine. It's me that's the problem in this scenario. I need to just keep my mouth shut other than to say my lines. I work very hard to do just that but I'm not pulling it off very well, and the audience just thinks I'm a sh*tty actor.

I feel so apologetic these days. Seriously apologetic, walking around feeling so badly that I can't play with others any more. They take it so personally. They don't understand that I want to, but I can't. I don't know why. It just is this way. My eyes are open, and they won't close. 

Or maybe I'm just a butthead with delusions of depth. Could go either way, don't you think?

I don't know what any of it means, or even if any of it is true, or if just another looping time-eating path. I don't know if I'm healing or just playing a healer on tv. I purposefully choose to live in an apartment outside of town, away from most folks, chose a cubicle tucked into a corner away from everyone, and yet then I'm left with only the sound of my own roiling mind to keep me company. 

Okay, there's kitties here too, and the occasional human to have a laugh with, so it's okay to put away your tiny violins . . .

I've been this way my whole life. Interspersed with soaring leaps of fascinating side trails and bursts of amazing color. But always back to this. Sitting away from others, failing to integrate my freakness into the general population. Always with someone who is willing to pay me for some work, a place to live, access to goodness, warmth, food, kitties.

I'm so grateful for my life. In this moment, I could just weep with how fortunate I am, how grateful I am to be alive and in a living so filled with goodness. 

Is this it? Is this all there is?

I can admire the folks on the stage who still want to put on the big productions - the Cirque du Soleils and Death of a Salesmens. But I know that no matter how amazing, difficult, expensive, fantastic the show, it's still something that will end when the lights go out. And off stage, behind the theater, off in the distance, the dark, something thrums, something vast, something still, something . . . 

Logic says that all a person has to do is walk away, just leave everything behind, kitties, job, everything. Go live the life of a hobo, a nomad, a traveler. But I know this is a trap too.

In my heart I know that the stillness has to happen in the mind, in the actions taken out of the web of beliefs, picking them apart, letting them fall to the floor. 

Yet how is this different than any other person who drops out of Life?

How am I different than the woman who lived downstairs from me - with her disability checks and diet related health issues and medications and cigarettes and crap food and isolation and incessant tv watching and anger and neediness? Am I different, better because I claim to be psychic, Waking Up, have an eight-year old blog and a master's degree, am a member of a CSA and shop at Trader Joe's?  

You are now experiencing the confusion, the weirdness, the judgment going inside of me. The back and forth. The judgment and release. The expansion and contraction.

Is it Waking Up? Is it mental illness?

All I know is to keep following the the strongest push of Yes, the direction Life makes larger and more bright.

My car broke down on Thursday night and after three hours of calls on Friday morning I was still unable to find a mechanic or a rental car. And so I let go and find that without a car I can't escape to prepared foods, yoga, errands. And so I sit, and then am moved to write.

Maybe more distraction. Maybe drilling down. 

All I know is that something connected inside of me that wasn't connected when I began writing an hour ago. 

That pointless smiling Yes is gently pulsing inside of me now. 

But mostly I see how beautiful the kitties are. Yes they are.

The rest of it? Who knows?

Postcards From The Now

Maybe it's about writing smaller posts, ie post cards from the Now? The habit here is to do long essay-ish posts, but it just ain't happening. Maybe it's about not writing for a while. For those of you who've been coming here for a long time, you know I go through this every couple of years or so. But this feels different.

At least I wrote this:

I would like to withdraw my application for the Program Coordinator position. I appreciate the opportunity to meet with you all last week, and wish you all the best in finding an excellent new team member.
 
Best Wishes,
Katherine Turner

The only thing I feel around it is: relief. Not regret, not bummer, not oops. Just relief. That I'd stopped tormenting my heart with my mind. That I stopped threatening the Yes with a big fat pending No. Every time I looked at the kitties I'd get a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach at what I'd be putting them through, the calm I would be tossing away as if it were a small thing. And I kept remembering my friend Kelly's words when I called her from the road immediately after the job interview, when I was dealing with the first onslaught of Just Say No Thank You. She said: it's okay to be still.

And although I appreciate all the emails telling me in one way or another that not pursuing this opportunity is about fear in some way - fear of change, fear of success, etc. - and that I should follow it through until they tell me No, that I should take their No as the real No, not my own intuitive, psychic No - I would just like to say: why do you devalue psychic ability in yourself? Why do you not listen to your own intuition in your living? Why do you fear what doesn't come from your mind or outside of yourself?

Can you imagine living your life totally in the flow of What Is? Of listening to the warp and weft of body-mind-spirit plugged into Body-Mind-Spirit?

I can. And more than that, I can feel it's presence. That's why I say: f*ck the prestigious job. Success in my book is following the trail of Yes. Even if it leads me to Nothing in Nowhere with No One.

So often in this Hiveworld of a job, where about 10% of what I can offer gets utilized, where I'm underpaid and overworked, I forget that I'm educated and capable and smart and have earning potential. Maybe that's all this job opportunity meant this go around: look at the sort of folks who want to hire you, look at the salary they offer, the sort of work you could do. So that even though the psychic Yes said No this go around, there'll be others.

And if not? I trust that too . . .

Soul Sister

You would not believe how many posts I've started and then left to languish in "draft" mode. Why? Because they're cack. Spew cack. Cack of the toxic runoff variety. And no matter how pretty I shape it, I'm just not going to post that sort of thing.

Mostly I'm tired. Really tired. I spent all day Sunday on the couch watching old Medium reruns. Actually, I did leave the house once. I went to the mall, bought thermal pajamas with wide-eyed, psychedelic owls all over them, went straight back home, then went back to the couch with my new jammies on.

I'm having many small pity parties. Several a day. Served with green smoothies and roasted broccoli, and okay, leftover pumpkin walnut gluten-free cake from the xmas dinner I attended. I'm drinking green tea, and okay some half decaf Newman's carmel coffee. I lay down on the couch, the kitties climb atop me and drape themselves up and down and in every nook and cranny, Season 3 of Medium lights up my laptop, and the latest small pity party commences.

I remember trying to watch Medium when it first came out but I didn't like it. People were always hollering at her, ridiculing her. She'd have a dream, and because it wouldn't be perfectly spelled out, like watching a documentary, or reading a research paper, people would give her grief, tell her she was nuts. It felt upsetting to watch it, watch the anguish she'd go through week after week. But a couple of weeks ago I started watching from the pilot episode, and it's been a great source of comfort, even as it's the ambient backnoise for my small pity parties. Each episode brings nuggets of understanding, of sympatico, that only another psychic could pass on. And I'm grateful for it. And it sure adds a dimension of "social" to my pity parties that drone on with just me and the fuzzy guys.

A lot of what I've been dealing with the past few months has been around coming to terms with my psychic abilities, what they mean, what I'm supposed to do with them, how I live with them. They come with so many down sides, and I don't think I've really admitted it to myself before, what a burden they are in so many ways.

People think it would be so awesome to be psychic. They think they'd avert Bad Things, and bring Good Things to their lives, the lives of folks around them. But the truth of it is that it makes you a freak, a freak who can never be a part of the flow of living that is this culture we live in, but who still has to make a living, deal with landlords and coworkers and department store clerks and family.

I keep trying to come up with a way to describe what it is like to be psychic in the way that I am - I hear, see, and feel things - like watching a movie going on right behind the regular movie of "reality" that's playing. And a couple of days ago, when I jetted in and out of the mall to get those pajamas it hit me: it's like being around shrieking people. Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, picture the people around you shrieking. Shrieking at a high pitched decibel. But they're not aware enough to know they're shrieking. And so not only do you have to deal with the fact that your ears are freakin killing you, you have to pretend there is no shriek. And even though I've gotten very good at dealing with it over the years, very grounded and practical, it still doesn't change the fact that when I leave my house, and enter the world, there is so very much shrieking, such loud shrieking, and everyone insisting they are so very quiet and lovely.

Poor me, right? Poor, psychic, misunderstood me. I told you there were pity parties afoot.

But there's more going on than I'm writing about. There's a job, an amazing job. A job with one of the top medical facilites in the country. A job that would utilize my MPH, the program management experience I have, and my knowledge of the holistic world. A job that would mean a ~8K raise. Where I'd get to work with MDs on the cutting edge of global holistic medicine. And I'm going to turn it down. Actually, they haven't made a formal job offer, only invited me to come back up, do a second interview and meet the whole team I'd be working with. But I'm not going to go. Because my psychic ability has spelled things out very clearly - it's not the place for me to be, that it's very existence in my world is nothing more than a test by Life to see if I'm ready to move on. And I know I'll email them, tell them I'm withdrawing, but in the meantime, all I can think about is the money and the prestige and f*cking Hiveworld and my oven that doesn't work.

Poor me. Poor, poor psychic me. Saved from a hell job by warnings from psychic postcards from the Yes.

And so I lay on my couch, then go into Hiveworld, even though I was supposed to have this week off, but can't because the Hilarious Coworker's replacement quit and someone needs to man the cubicle. But then after work I go back to the couch, watch some Allison and Joe, Manuel and Lee, watch what it's like to be her: a psychic who talks to dead people, then comes home to a man she can talk to, kids she can snuggle with, a context of Love and Yes she can do her psychic work out of and not go nuts from the echos.

Me? I'm just over here on a couch, throwing small pity parties for myself. I'm grateful to be out of range of the shrieking, grateful that I have a job that allows me shelter and food, holistic clients that allow me to use this psychic stuff for more meaningful use, kitties that snore and squeak and sigh and lick, and words, that I can string together so that my inside can flow a bit to the outside.

Weeeeeeee

I had so much fun at The Fur Ball. Seriously, look at that relaxed mug to the left.

But, really I should explain. I was both drunk and stoned.

My idea of hell is a large group of people all running around, throwing back liquor, doing the dating, mating, and preening dance. No matter how lovely the folks are, and animal lovers all showing up for a charity function to benefit local shelters are some dang lovely folks, I don't do well in crowds. Things like malls and concerts are the worst, but parties are right up there. Think about it: would you like to be a psychic at a mall or a party?

The first Fur Ball I did was three years ago, and I was still in pretty bad shape from The Hoon's departure, from my new job in Hell aka Cubicleland, and so being out at a crowded party, working as a psychic no less, about killed me. Twice, I actually had to get up and go hide some place quiet and talk myself down from the ledge, or at least out of a technicolor yawn.

The second year was better, because I allowed myself to drink wine, and flow more with the partygoers. This year? This year was FABULOUS. I took a whole valium about two hours before I had to go. Actually wore something decent - maybe not swanky but at the very least a little frisky. And makeup - I wore makeup! And did my hair in these little twisty dred kinda things. Tossed a bunch of sparkle powder over my head. Then went to the Fur Ball and drank champagne and ate sushi from 6-10pm. I laughed and chatted and did readings for the nice peoples. Kept it light and breezy with the readings - only made one person cry - a marine in full dress uniform, though. I played with Netop the painting dog. Snuck plates of sushi for the girls who were stuck working off to the side explaining the auction items, too far away to make a run for the buffet. Raised $280 for the animals from the readings I did. And went home at 10:30 tired but relaxed.

I think valium and champagne should be part of every psychic's tool kit . . .

What The Shaman Thing Is And Why I Do It

Ten years ago, if someone would have told me I'd be doing shamanic healing work, I'd have laughed at them. I do serious work, I'd have told them. I meditate, do deep energywork, systematically analyze and remove the Untrue from my body/mind/heart/spirit. I don't play head games, do make believe, conjure up fairy tales around talking animals. But then I woke up to the fact that it's all a head game, every single thing we believe is reality, the western and the eastern, the Matriarchal Age, The Patriarchal Age, The New Age, all of it. And I saw the machine that makes it appear so real: mass consensus.

This mass consensus? Wildly popular, but not so reliable. Mayan priests sacrificing hundreds of people a day, the kings personally opening up a small vein as a show of fealty to their gods, because their gods needed blood to survive. Soulmates. Western medicine pharmaceuticals as clinically proven effective method for the treatment of chronic disease. Women, cattle, and people from foreign lands bought and sold to be used as organic machines. Buy Green. Placebo as another word for wishful thinking. All you need is Love. Cancer is born at the nexus of environmental factors, heredity, and poor self-esteem.

Mass consensus, like a virus, propagates itself by saturating us with interpretations, of stories, from the moment we're born, continuing throughout our life, layering on the latest update in the tales called reality, the newest flavor of faux presented as fabulous and/or cutting edge. Why? Because we're built to find meaning at the confluence of our six senses and the ever-evolving consciousness existing in all three brains - the grey matter housed in the skull, the central nervous system, and the digestive tract.

Of course, there's the hard-wiring. The physical/energetic chains of DNA carrying the coding for things like the ability to store fat, or protection of our progeny coded into behavior via hormones like oxytocin. Or the neural mapping we're born with that adapts as we grow, like mistrust of strangers. (There's actually a large portion of the brain that is used for face recognition, which is why we generally feel more trusting of human faces like our own, like we've grown up with, and less trusting of different species.) A behavior like mistrust is the result of a chain of neural connections that rose from animals having more of this short bit of programming surviving to bear offspring more often than those that didn't. And if this behavior is reinforced during childhood, it's ramped up in different ways, and viola: racism, sexism, xenophobia, speciesism, etc. 

All living beings are born with and develop hundreds of thousands of these small "programs", programs that are part of survival (survival defined as permission to be one of the select organisms that gets to breathe and eat and cruise around long enough to propagate). Supposedly, humans are at the driving tip of evolution, with the pinnacle of humanhood - a kind of Human Adulthood - made up of qualities we value as most highly evolved, a kind of Higher Programming, such as kindness, selflessness, humility, joyfulness, humor, emotional intelligence, etc.

And from what I can gather, from my own experience, what I've witnessed, Waking Up/Enlightenment is breaking out (or being ejected out) of the programming, all of it. Here, the rubber meets the road, the Human meets Beyond Human. And at this place, a few years ago, at this edge of Human, where hardwired programming is seen for the intellectual and emotional coding it is, I found myself dumped out on the front lawn.

And for a very very long time, I sat there on that front lawn, sat there and wondered: what the f*ck happens now? When all of "reality" is finally seen as only story, as something we all got together and made up, what the heck do you do? How do you eat? How do you keep a roof over your head? How do you interact with the billions of humans crawling all over this planet, with their varying hardcore beliefs in This or That portion of the made up story? What's the point in any of it? There's no more striving for dominance or mating for biological superiority or even trying to make the world a better place. So what do you do? Do you just lay down and die? 

There was no one for me to ask. The ability to connect with other humans, even so-called Enlightened Folks, had been severed (by Fate? Life? God? I've no clue - only that it did, that it dang skippy did) I could hold no conversations, sign up for instructional classes, read applicable how-to books, throw myself on the mercy of Seasoned Teachers. I spent several years looking for something, anything, anyone. Then I Got It. There was only one direction left: Inward.

And so I turned inside and asked: so what the f*ck? What the freak is going on? What the heck do I do with this body, this mind, this time? And in a series of alternating hilarious and horrifying 3-D experiential images, what I saw was story, all the story collected inside of me, clinging in clumps to organs, crackling like downed power lines along nerve pathways, tucked away in tiny packets, hiding amongst the fat cells. And at this point, I picked up the only remaining tool I had left to go ferret these stories out, the tool known currently as shamanism, which is a Siberian word for "one who sees in the dark" but what really just means Someone Who Heals By Telling Stories.

This delighted me! So perfect, so full of Yes! Because I love stories. I'm obsessed with them. I have been all my life. Seeing them, hearing them, creating them, passing them on. Stories? Really? The last piece is about simultaneously observing, deconstructing, and swimming in the stories? Awesome! 

Because I'm built for stories. To read, to tell, to watch, to write. Observe: I have a memory of a past life (although I'm not sure whether past lives exist, only that I have memories of dozens of what appear to be past lives). In the memory, which is no more than a few moments, I'm walking through a forest, but not as I would now. In it, as I walk, I'm reading the forest, as if it were a book, listening to it as I would to a person telling me an intricate tale of adventure, every single seemingly minute aspect telling me a story about what happened yesterday, the year before, what the present story of the forest is. I can tell from the color of the bark on the tree what precise time of year it is, what the rainfall has been like, the quality of sunlight. The sounds, of birds and wind, the rustle of branches and forest floor, tell me who is there, what they're doing. All of it, the layers of sights, smells, sounds, the feel of the soil underfoot, all of it like words, sentences, chapters, full of meaning that connects deeply inside of me. In the memory, it's thousands of details, bits of data, and I'm assimilating them all in a hot second, because that is what I do automatically, after living my whole life in the forest. I know the language of the forest, and I read each new moment, eagerly and efficiently, with an open mind and heart and body.

In this life, by the age of thirty-one, I'd become the type of Serious Granolahead who was pointedly going about erasing her story, because she was told and she believed stories were bad and unelightened and stupid and a ruse. There was a rigidity to it, thundering judgment about every single tale coming out of my mouth, ridicule for the sorts of tales other people told. My way was the best way, the only way, and other people were deluded, less than. I was more spiritual, would be enlightened first. They were still telling themselves silly stories of The Sky God or Archangel Michael or The Ancient Alien Arturis from the Pleiades who gave them accurate information on what vitamins and supplements they needed to take. I was beyond all that bullsh*t, and I righteously displayed my sneer to those I deemed Sadly Lost In Their Story.

Then, six years ago, the time release bomb began going off, lighting up every single aspect of this story called Katherine, this world called the twenty-first century, this nothing called Enlightenment, this fallacy called reality. It broke me down in ways that peeled my brain like an old potato, shattered my heart like a shorted out light bulb, tore my mind apart as if it were cobwebs, wracked my body with illnesses, injuries, painful structural misalignments. Save for enough of a sliver to stay alive, it destroyed every single aspect of my living, what I knew as reality. And when, in exhaustion and defeat, I let go, when I finally stopped fighting and let freefall take me, where I ended up was loosely draped across the remaining timbers of my structure, this life and personality known as Katherine. What was left was a kind of elemental way of being in the world.

I'd done thousands of shamanic journeys, visualizations, meditations, etc., over the past 25 years or so, but they were never more than a kind of spiritual weight-lifting, designed to Power Me To Enlightenment. But after The Bomb, I began journeying for survival skills, as a way to literally get info and insight on how to stay physically alive after The Kaboom, after all ties with other humans were cut off and I had no way to get help outside myself. And it turned out that shamanic journeys were in perfect alignment with how basic, how elemental my experience of living felt. The basic premise of journeying is that you close your eyes, listen to drumming, and let it take you where it takes you. Behind your eyes, out of the darkness rises color, movement, then story. It is the story of you, of the world, of the ancients and the aliens. It's fascinating and magical, and it's practical and cut and dried. It's a place to go for answers.  

I do the Shaman Thing because at it's core, it's straightforward story, told in a way that any brain can wrap itself around. It's birth and death, sensation and intuition, sun and moon. It's animals and people and strange and beautiful hybrids. It's visions of past lives that fit so precisely, so intricately as a mirror to the present that it's breathtaking. It's the dark forces of living that try to f*ck with you, spiders with thick sticky webs and snakes with deep fangs. It's light forces of Yes beaming love and sweetness, smiling skeletons, spiders that show the web of All Life and your place in it, caduceus snakes that twine together to show how duality works, or the ouroboros eating its own tail to reveal secrets of renewal and re-creation.

Of course it's created story. It's the remaining bits of Katherine connecting to the stories of all Creation. It's taking vibration (a quality of energy like whirring or imbalance) and translating it into a material that can be worked with while still cruising around as a human (stories!). And from this elemental place I operate out of, it's the simplest, most straightforward connection between the Nothing and Being On This Planet.

I don't identify much with people anymore. When I get a shock of recognition, I'm most often looking at my nettle plant, or into Emmaline's sparkly eyes, or at one of Malcolm's dastardly deeds, or at a bee pulling nectar from a flower, or feeling the sun on my face. But I no longer have contempt for people. The sneer is gone. I feel an incredible love for them (even as I still may feel a bit skeeved at particularly noxious ego runoff they fling around, but this is only because of those leftover chunks of stored past inside of me, and they're less every day, and it sort of feels like an occupational hazard, like being a nurse and encountering bodily fluids, no way around it, it's just the dealio).

I do the Shaman Thing because it acts as an outrageously effective translator. It's a place to go for answers, have a few laughs about What The Heck Is Really Going On behind this thing we called the world. I also do it because it utilizes the odd mix of expertise I've developed that still remains - the psychic ability, the energywork healing skills, the knowledge of both holistic and scientific languaging and images - intertwining them in a way that enables me to make a living (which we all need to do), contribute to the Yes (which is fun, like dancing), learn more about the Human Adulthood of evolution (which is fascinating). Mostly, though, I do it because it's the only thing left to do that I can do. Everything else has fallen away. Hiveworld, psychic readings, this blog, life with kitties, soul retrievals: it's all the Shaman Thing. 

Supposedly, enlightenment means the end of story. But from the (supposedly) enlightened folks I've met, read about, their story goes on, even if they're not attached to it anymore. And for now, the story of Katherine is elemental, pared down, growing more simple and straightforward every day.

Integral Shamanics. Standing in the world, but diving into the worlds behind it. Soul retrievals using a hybrid of shamanic reality and high-technology. Resident feline power animals and those furry and feathered and scaled friends who meet me in shamanic reality. Doing deep transformative work with film makers and house painters and psychologists and restaurant managers and government agents and stay at home moms and mortgage brokers and accountants and writers and healers and stylists and carpenters and on and on and on. Who knows why we end up with what we have left? This, for now, is what's left in this life. The Shaman Thing.

Slowly, bit by bit, the world is falling away, but what's still showing up is the Shaman Thing. When Katherine is completely ferreted out, smooched and said adios to for the final time, the shell that remains will probably be the Shaman Thing. I'm so grateful. Because it come with tremendous freedom and versatility, but mostly because it's so much dang fun . . . 

 

Spiraling, For the Psilocybin Set

Maybe what I'm dealing with, going through, is interesting. But it doesn't feel that way. It feels like a person learning to play piano or guitar, and playing the same scales, over and over, hitting the same clunkers, over and over. It's every day, getting out of bed, walking to the piano, picking up the guitar, even when I don't feel like it, because I'm a pianist, a guitarist, and I hear music in my head all day every day, and I'm driven to learn how to translate it out of my head and into a space of reality where I can see it. And because if I don't, I go mad from the music, the constant music in my head. And also because I love it, even when I don't, but mostly because as this personality known as Katherine, it's what I do.

Around and around and around. Is that me running a spiraling flight away from the enemy? Or closing in on my prey for the sustenance I need? Or am I just circling the drain?

Observe:

1. My money situation gets more wonky, which a public health educator job would solve in a flash. An educator job would mean a 15K raise. But all the educator jobs are near metro areas, and I can't afford to move right now, and with my health issues still kicking my butt, making a job and home and city/state move feels wrong. But the money squeeze spasms at least once a week, and so I apply for jobs, and because of my MPH and 10+ years of experience, get an interview for an amazing job. But within a day or two, something feels off, and then I withdraw. And am immediately flooded with feelings of such Intense Yes that I know I did what I was supposed to do: don't go anywhere yet. But then the money squeeze kicks back in, and on and on. And each time I go through it, I feel a little sicker, and am a little less financially able to move, and I feel a little panicked, and begin to mistrust the Intense Yes, and start the job search back up, and on and on. (I've done this pattern at least 20 times in the past six months.)

2. My health/pain trifecta: back pain, weight gain, and digestive weirdness (though the digestive pain is gone thanks to the amazingness that is green smoothies)

- Leads me to a doc, who prescribes some sort of symptom manager med that I have crazy terrible side effects to or that doesn't work at all. I go back for an eval, and they act as if they can't hear me. I mean this literally. I'm pretty sure they believe I'm making it all up. (I've been to nine different health practitioners - four from western med, five from practical but more alternative methods.) 

- The latest doc, who I went to see yesterday, said my lab results were perfect, that all levels look exceptional, and she can't find anything wrong or off, nothing, anywhere. I begin to give her more details, tell her that after I exercise, walking or race-walking or dancing or lifting weights, my body goes into a weird sort of all-over spasm, or how the over-eating is in response to feeling like I'm starving to death, and only a Nacho Daddy from Flaming Amy's or the Indian Buffet will keep me alive, how every mouthful is like Say Yes to Life in morsel form, or more about the back pain, how it feels connected to a web of fear inside of me, like negativity from my past is on the move in the fascia, the branches of nerves in my back. (Yeah, I know I should have kept my mouth shut, but I was in ridiculous pain yesterday afternoon - picture a wounded, cornered black she-panther out of her mind in pain.) So she prescribed Cym*balta, which thanks to Dooce, I know gives crazy nightmares, and when I research it, get that ain't the only thing it gives. Plus, I'm pretty sure that all the mood-alterer drugs also contain some sort of biometric tracers so that The Eye can keep track of all the folks who can see through "reality". (And you know I'm only half kidding.)

- In desperation, I took a muscle relaxer, Flex*eril, (from an expired bottle my sis gave me- you would not believe the odd things she gives me that I actually keep for a rainy day) and it took away the pain, but also made me pass out somewhere in the middle of watching Stargate Universe, awaking at midnight to a black screen and a cat on my head and no memory of how I got there. I fumbled to my bed, and woke up this morning more than a little groggy, but that's also because I got a full night's sleep, 10 hours worth, which I haven't in a really long freakin time. (Plus, because I didn't wake up twitchy and in pain, the kitties and I snuggled and purred for a couple of hours in bed, and that was amazing.)

- But I know not to get too excited about the successful med. I've been through this pattern dozens and dozens of times, and chances are really really good that this was a one shot deal, and the pain will be back, and nothing will solve it, until I again spend time and money and energy trying to figure it out on my own, flail, fail, fall down, then go to another doc/practitioner, who prescribes another med, or does another treatment, which works maybe one time, and then stops.

- This is the pattern, the exact pattern, over and over. So, how do I just stop? The pain is excruciating, incredible, mind-blowing, freakin awful.  

3. My psychic sensitivity ramps up more each day. But it's so spot on and odd that I'm scrambling to find a way to use it, or simply to know what to do with it, or how to live with it and not be scooped up and sent for a nice long drug fueled vacation at the looney ranch. 

- I'm talking to someone and See they get an intense health issue in six years, and See what they need to do to shift it, to stop it from happening, but they've been really clear that they think I'm a total complete nut job and more than a bit of an idiot, so they wouldn't listen anyway. (I'm getting these sort of hardcore hits once a day or more, but what am I supposed to do? Turn the volume down? Check out of the world and the people in it even more?)(And don't even try to tell me that I should tell them, that it's my responsibility to tell them, because I've done this hundreds of times and the only thing it does is make them either terrified of me, or actively hate my freakin guts or both)

- Or a client calls and the source of their issue is from one single pattern of behavior, but because they don't see themselves as that behavior, they are in total denial. But every single "problem" they bring up is directly out of that one behavior, so the whole hour is spent with me repeating the same basic thing over and over, and they hang up really, really pissed off. And then something else happens with them, and they have zero recall of what I said in the session, and they tell me I'm a bad psychic, and then unsubscribe to my mail list. (This is why I spent $350 on various recorders and software  so I can now record all sessions. Clients think it's so they can go back and listen to sessions and it'll help, which is totally true and a big part of it, but from my side? It's proof.) 

- Or that the Seeing is amping up, and clients aren't calling to book sessions. And I don't know why. At a time when my seeing is getting so clear it freaks me out a little, even as it feels like wealth, like Yes pouring out, only a person here or there is interested. What does this mean?

- I keep thinking about the woman, the spiritual teacher I studied with for over seven years, who taught me how to hone and utilize my psychic skills to help folks. She waited years before really telling me the truth of what was going on, and even then, still didn't tell me all of it, so that when I found out, I was furious with her, so dang mad that she didn't tell me the truth, even when she said she was telling me the whole truth. And I realized how she'd spent years watching me wallow around in utter bullsh*t, spending our time together - weekly sessions and classes with her, thousands of hours - making me feel better. It kept me coming to her, because I felt so bad and she made me feel better. But the "feeling better" was tigerbalm on a bullethole, the bullethole about two inches left of center in my chest. And now I look back and wonder: what if she would have brought the hammer down and just smashed the bullsh*t, really helped me see? She operated out of the belief/fact that seeing the truth of the bullethole would have caused me to run back to the reality of the masses/world that said: bullethole? there is no bullethole. She says she was peeling back The Faux one tiny layer at a time, calling it The Drip Method of Waking Up. And I see that it's my reaction to this experience with her, that my viewpoint of To Tell or Not Tell The Truth, of not just hanging out with clients and making them feel better, but in bringing the hammer down, of pointing to and showing them the bullethole, that means that 95% of all clients I work with never come back. I feel it as they walk out the door: this was just too freakin much, or what a crock of sh*t, and as they walk away it's like I'm watching someone with speed wobbles. But in the moment, when I'm sitting with a client, and I see what's really going on, I tell them, I don't know how to not tell them. And the truth of it is that my teacher is surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of clients who love her and allow her to make money and live. I'm lucky if I see a client and they come back. (I don't feel sorry for myself, poor me for My Truth Speaking and no one is listening, but more frustration, as in serious hardcore frustration at not knowing how to communicate what I see effectively enough so that it's helpful for folks. Or maybe it's not about helping folks, but about me and what I do with this energy I came into this life hardwired with, even if folks don't want it or feel it's useful or needed.)

- And I wonder if I'm not just full of sh*t, if I'm delusional and making sh*t up. But every day, several times a day, I get immediate feedback that what I See is true. I wonder that this only means the law of averages is making itself known. But on what statistician's study would it show up that there's a chance I could correctly "See" a person has liver cancer and won't recover, or shouldn't quit the job they hate because it's burning something out of them and if they switch jobs they'll take the burn with them, or their husband is going to leave them, or how when they get stressed they scream because it's what they used to do up until they were four years old because they are extremely sensitive and screaming channels out the Funk they collect? If what I am is crazy and delusional, how can I know these things, see these things, every day, day after day, week after week for decades?

- And it isn't that I choose to see the "negative". I See what I See. I don't choose what I See. Because if I could choose, I'd love to tell people about the soulmate, the cash, the vibrant health. I so would. I would love to be the person that everybody talked about: she brings The Happy! But I See what I See. When I See it. Sometimes it's so lovely it makes makes my eyes hurt, my heart ache. Sometimes I do See the cash and the soulmate and health. But usually not. Usually I see the "problems". And what will change the "problem" to a "not problem". But the thing folks need to change? It's usually something they love and don't want to let go of. Or are afraid of living without. What does that mean?

- It appears that I watch so many television shows because it's killing time, but most of the shows I watch - Medium, Lie to Me, The Mentalist, the Good Guys, Castle - I watch because it feels like hanging with people who wouldn't think I'm weird. and I think we all need that sometimes: to hang out with people who don't think we're weird.

So, maybe this is interesting, maybe it's not. It's just the same things, every day, week after week. Like Groundhog Day, for the psilocybin set.

Stored Memories / Emotional Vapor Fuel

I'm back to walking again, and I remember why I stopped. I convinced myself it was because I felt sick, and I did, I felt sick and exhausted. But mostly it was because of the emotional funk that rose up out of my subconscious when I walked. It almost always processed itself out by the time I arrived back at my house, but that first mile or two of rage, sorrow, confusion, craziness? Not much fun. Maybe something inside of me decided that I could only handle one battle at a time - food addiction or stored emotional past - not both. Or that could just be the bullsh*t talking. No way to know for sure of course.

But the back pain always keeps me motivated to exercise. I can't go too long without doing some weight lifting and cardio, even with the miracle that is Art and his whirring machine of pain relief. So I'm walking again, and last night's walk showed me something that stopped me in my tracks, literally standing still on the sidewalk in the leafy suburb I live in, the nice, comfortably upper middle class folks jogging and biking and walking around me. It was one of those epiphany moments, one of those moments where a hundred thousand Intellectual Knowings all of a sudden transforms into full body-mind-spirit consciousness. It was a direct line of something from my childhood, carried through into adulthood, that I'm in the final process of dismantling:

The belief in "boundaries".

The backstory: the extreme emotional distance my mother treated me with in my childhood shifted when I reached mid-teenage years into a relationship of listening to her, trying to help her solve her problems. For the next 15 or so years, to keep her attention, I made myself available to her anytime she needed it, usually as long phone calls, sometimes several times a week. This translated into how I lived out my other relationships, by believing my most valuable function was to listen to people's problems, to be nice to them, always flexible, never complain, never say no.

Translation: no boundaries, stunted sense of self.

What I developed to cope with this was anger and energy vampiring. The energy vampiring was what my mother was doing to me, which I only realized when I was in my early thirties, and what I turned and did to folks around me, which I only realized about seven years ago, right before I headed off for the back-to-college extravaganza when I was 38. I'd choose the strongest, kindest people I came into contact with and attach to them, usually a "teacher" of some sort - a therapist, spiritual practitioner/guru, or mentorish folks, but also with close friends. The anger was used to shove people away when the weight of their need became too overwhelming and exhausting for me. I collected lost souls, first just folks I met as my life unfolded, and then clients. It was what I did with my mother - let them call me at all hours of the day and night, spend hours and hours listening to their problems, trying to help them do a Grand Life Remodeling Project. 

I keep writing and deleting the next paragraph, writing specifics about my relationship with my mother, how it ended. But it isn't right to put it here, and it isn't helpful for me energetically to write it. Whatever demons she faces are her own, and my perspective on them is utter bullsh*t. None of this is a blaming of her or anything I believe she did or didn't do. This is the dismantling of Katherine. No one else. Period. 

The important part for me is that this energetic pattern with my mother translated all over my living, and really kicked into high gear when I began seeing clients for holistic work in the late 1990's. I allowed, and even encouraged people to become dependent on me, because I believed I could help them, but also because I believed that being of assistance to other people was my only valuable function. My sense of boundaries was so tenuous that when clients wanted to see me socially, I went along with it, even though it just meant that I no longer got paid for session work, and instead did sessions over dinner, or with cocktails, which seriously, seriously, was not fun for me, what felt like my life force being suctioned out of me via my eyes and ears and center of my chest. But I didn't believe I had a choice. I believed that if someone needed me, I had to be there, sublimate whatever issue and feelings I had, and be open, kind, generous, loving. 

The direct link between the pattern with my mother and how it played out with clients and intimate relationships was that with all of them, if I ever tried to pull away, or tried to change the dynamic into something with more balance, these folks expressed denial that anything unbalanced was happening, then judgment of me for what I felt, then pure rage unleashed at me as punishment, contempt, acts to destroy or discredit me.

Those three patterns of energy coming at me - denial, judgment, rage - kept me locked into the No Boundaries pattern for years, for decades. But when I read the Jed McKenna books, something clicked into place, and I could see the pattern for what it truly was. And most importantly, I could see my role in it, my part, how I kept it all going, and why. The why? Because I was afraid I had no other worth than my ability to be of service to other people, and that if I denied people they'd leave me, and if everyone left me I'd be alone.

But back in 2008 it began heating up, and with The Hoon's death it reached conflagration. One by one, I stopped doing things for people, and guess what? All my fears came true. I denied people, they left me, and I was alone.

But I stayed with it. To face the fear. What was this being alone? What was this no social life, no friends, no support system, no assistance? And the longer I stayed with it, the longer I saw that with only a few exceptions, all of relationship is built on fear. All of it - family, friend, work, community - all of it erected as a scaffolding around the fear inside of us. Of dying. Of being sick. Of missing out. Of being uncomfortable.

As I went through this process, I was continually offered "friendship", offered assistance from teachers/gurus/mentors, but I understood I had to reject it, reject it all, even small assists, completely, absolutely staying away from any temptation to energy vampire off of another person. And also, people from my past kept showing up, coming back around for another pass. They wanted things to be like they used to be, they wanted me to be a holistic practitioner like I used to be, or they showed up as absolute replicas of past folks, Life enticing me to pick the pattern back up. And I did. Again and again and again. I can't even begin to express how hard this last part was, how actively angry people got at me, the browbeating, the sanctioning, the punishing that came at me in person, through email, over the phone. A daily, often hourly onslaught of angry, needy, sad humans, an avalanche of emotion and demands, judgment, rage, and self-pity screaming that it was my duty to fix Their No, my fault that they felt the way they did.

When I look back, it's so clear that the onslaught was occurring to force me to build strong boundaries. It was about keeping folks out so that I could see clearly how to draw a distinct line between them and me, between what they were choosing to do with their energy and time, and what I no longer was. I wasn't responsible for anyone outside of my own skin. And more than that, I couldn't actually do anything for anyone outside of my own skin, not in and of myself.

And I did get to the place where I kept everyone out. With the exception of a small handful of folks on an extremely limited basis that Life showed me was about immediate survival, everyone was out, every single one. And what I began to notice was a sort of drip method of interacting, small bits here and there that felt clear, true. They appeared to quickly fade into funk again, and I'd back away, but I began to get better at recognizing the signals for me to move closer to someone/a situation, and to back away from them/it.

And I discovered that there is no Good Person or Bad Person, only Energy Occurring Now, In This Moment. And so rather than having Friends, Acquaintances, and Non-Friends/Enemies, everyone outside of my skin stands alone, to be moved closer to or moved away from based on the ongoing energy present in the moment of Now. It's a dance of following the Yes. A dance whose choreography is created by something way way outside of my mind, though the mind stores and runs the programming of this human life, with the heart as the instrument the energy plays on, and the spirit interpreting the seeming mundane plodding of a life into both the vast expression of Yes and the tiny grain of sand it is.

There's a decent flow going right now. Still bumpy, still pocked with blank spots and exploding mines, but there's a groove. I can have conversations with folks, go to the movies, assist clients, help someone climb their own looming mountain. I can reach out for help, get it, give something in return, leave. Someone can reach out to me, I can give assistance, they offer something, then leave. Sometimes I give then receive nothing, but only if it feels true. Sometimes they receive then give nothing, but only if it feels true. No good, no bad. No right, no wrong. No rules. Just dance.

And last night I saw the pattern and thought: That's It, the epiphany solved the pattern, it's done. But then I wrote this post, and in the process of writing I saw the next step: dissolving the boundaries.

First there was no boundary. Then there was a boundary. Now it's about removing the wall between Self and Other, not to merge and lose myself, but to allow Life to have me flow wherever it wants me to, letting the new strength inside of me keep me "safe", Life doing the attracting and rejecting for me, me just following along, content to let Life take me down the river of my living.

I have no arrogance that I'm done with this stuff. I can only taste it right now, just the merest hint of its magnificence. But I'm at that Beyond 51% Place, that point of no return, not because I can't go back, but because I see too much truth to want to go back.

Awesome.

And so apparently this is why I still write. Sure, some sort of arrogance that says: record the steps. But also because it continues to clear the path for me. Before I wrote this post, I thought the breakthrough last night was about erecting boundaries, but now, after writing the post, I see that it's about seeing that there is no need for anything as bulky and clumsy as boundaries.

This is what writing has been and still is for me: spiritual autolysis. It's not the only thing I use, but it still has strong function and utility and flexibility and groove. And that's all that matters . . . for now . . . Yes.

So party on, party peoples. May this find you deep inside the awareness of your own choreography, that dance that is yours and yours alone. 

As you sit there, wherever you are on this globe, whatever year and day and moment it is for you, a cup of coffee, tea, beer, wine, smoothie, water beside you, how you are alive inside your body, your mind in whatever state of aware, awake it is, remember:

You are gorgeous. You are full of love and light. (We all are.) You are also full of sh*t. (It's okay. We all are that too.) Hopefully, yours comes with kitties. And green growing plants. And the embracing of sun and moon and night and day and dark and light. Your soul's work is to see that your caacaa is compost. Nothing to be afraid of. Turn the sh*t into fertilizer. The directions for doing this are inside of you. The next step is whatever is lighting you up. What's harassing you via mind or experience? What reoccurring thought or pattern keeps arising in your living? Start there. I swear to you: all you need is inside of you. You don't need anyone to fix you or solve your problems. All you need is to say, to pray:

Thank you Life for my life . . . thank you for this situation, this person that I may not understand now, that may be causing me pain, suffering . . . thank you . . . I trust you . . .  thank you for making the next step so obvious via so much energy, so that my attention cannot be moved away . . . thank you for giving me courage to keep facing this . . . to hold my gaze squarely on This Moment of Now . . . so that I can't help but see the truth . . . thank you Life . . . thank you for my life. . .

Yes.

Strong

Having a blog like the kind of blog I have has it's serious challenges. Crazy people send crazy emails, for years on end, using 17 different email addresses because I keep putting blocks on whatever they send. Then they try and friend me on Face*book. Judgmental people send judgmental emails telling me how nutz and fruitz I am, and how fabulous they are, how they've figured it all out, and did they mention how fabulous they are because if I'd just be like them, I wouldn't be so nutz and fruitz. Then they get fired and can't find another job and lose their home and have to move in with their Catholic parents Frank and Doris and go to mass with them every morning at 6 a.m. Or they have a nervous breakdown and end up on a ward for two months and not getting the fun drugs but the drugs that make you twitch and drool and want to eat cheetos. Or their closeted gay husband absconds with their adopted chinese child and all their cash for a financier named Javier, or  . . . okay now I'm just making sh*t up.

But the point is: we are all nutz and fruitz. Every single one of us. Enlightened guys and gals get in awful car crashes, get cancer and kick the bucket even after treatment. They die of heart attacks in the middle of the night, get Alzheimer's and slowly fade away into the mists of their mind. They go bankrupt, are married to buttheaded men. They have unruly dogs with anger issues. And these are the enlightened folks! What can that possibly say about those of us who are just waking up? Or about the folks who are psychic, holistic practitioners, healers? Are we perfect? Do we have it all figured out? Is that what gives us the right to show others what's happening in their lives? Give guidance? Do we have to have it going on from all 360 degrees in order to help alleviate pain be it emotional or physical?

F*ck no.

And in case that wasn't clear enough: Heck freakin absof*cking strip down nekkid run screaming through a Thai fusion restaurant  NO.

(okay so maybe green tea does offer a little hitch for a giddy up)

For the past year or so, I've been obsessed with this very issue. How healers and psychics and enlightened folks are human. We are in human form. We have bodies. We have karma or are at least still in the game. Sh*t still happens. And hiding it, trying to pretend that it doesn't, is downright evil in my book. Because it encourages folks who are honestly struggling, who come to us for help, for assistance, to feel Less Than, to view themselves as broken or damaged or dumb or unspiritual, to set healers up as a bastion of what they need to change themselves into if they want to feel safe and whole and okay.

Of course, the bottom line is that folks don't want to go to folks who just talk about it, they want folks who have done it successfully. People don't want elegant concepts and theories and protocols, they want what works. But the thing is, none of us have all the answers. The only answers are inside of each individual. It's their soul work, and theirs alone. All any of us healer folk can ever do is assist. I don't care if you're Deepak Chopra or the top rated Cancer Clinician or Carrot Top: all we can do is assist a person in their process. Period.

And here's what I really really need to say: because of the lack of transparency in the holistic fields, and in all health fields - western med included of course - we are much less helpful than we could be. Because folks miss out on what it all looks like, how it all plays out on a day to day basis, what healing looks like while it's in motion. Because it's messy, and often painful and full of apparent setbacks, and comes with all sorts of gifts like shame and anger and very scary colon action.

I get why we do it: we want folks to come to us for help, so that we can genuinely be of assistance, and we know that being human doesn't negate this. But with the way our culture currently is, we're encouraged to see sick and old and unpretty as repulsive and frightening. And if we show up as robustly healthy, and effortlessly youthful, and good-gene-blessed gorgeous, more folks will pay us, and more folks will seek us out. And the cycle of bullsh*t, the shell game of what healing really is, continues.

I don't want people to be like me. I think that whatever the heck got programmed into me - be it dna or karma or brain chemistry or whatever - is definitely not the way to go if you have other choices. For the entirety of my life (this go around if you're into reincarnation theory) Life has kicked my heart, mind, and spirit eight ways from Albuquerque. And I am grateful for it. I wouldn't change a dang thing. Because the truth is, genuine healing comes with tremendous gifts. It comes with the ability to see, really see what's going on. It comes with the ability and know how and cojones to opt out of the faux, to see the false advertising for what it is, and to just say no to a bad time no matter how cleverly it's disguised as a good time.

I often feel lonely out here, hanging my splayed panties and holey socks and t-shirts with the rip in the armpit out on the front lawn for all to see. But it's worth it. Because transparency is the way to go. I know it with all my heart and both of my ovaries. And whatever the challenges and costs I'll be here doing my best to let folks see what the real deal is.

Do you know of anyone else out there really, truly doing the transparency dance? Not the nice-nice shaping of stories, but the real deal? If you do, please feel free to list their names and website addresses.

I just found one yesterday. And she's lovely: Kate Strong.

Hi-Tech and Holistics

I just sent an email out to all the folks on my holistic email list, then realized: there are folks out in blogland who aren't on the Integral Shamanics email list and so won't get a shot at the free webcam sessions I'm doing to help work out the final kinks on doing sessions this way. Now you can. Here's the pertinent parts from the email: 

Phone sessions can now be recorded, with a copy of the session emailed to you as an mp3 file after the session. It's high quality input and output, so it'll be like reliving the session, getting a chance to go over all of the info to make sure that you didn't miss anything, a chance to keep hitting pause to write notes, write your thoughts and insights, etc. (as well as give your subconscious a chance to manuever around that pesky mute button the ego sometimes uses in the face of some of the more intense Truths :)
 
Sessions can also now be done via webcam, and also recorded, with a copy of the session sent as a Quicktime video file (or another type of video file - just let me know and I'll convert it for you). If you want me to use the Soul Cards during your session, I can hold up the pics so you can see the cards as we go along.
 
Any of the sessions can be done this way - Psychic and Medical Intuition sessions - even Soul Retrievals, though the part of the session where I journey and go in to do the actual retrieval won't be captured on the webcam . . . because the only visual on my side will still be occurring behind my eyes!
 
There's no charge for any of this new stuff. It'll all be part of the sessions from now on. I can call any landline or cell phone, no problem, no charge, and record the session. I'm using Skype, but you don't need to have it for phone calls. (If you live outside the United States, though, we'll need to use Skype). (For in person sessions, I hope to have a digital recorder in the next couple of weeks so that I can record and email your session audio to you.)
 
For webcam sessions, you will need to download Skype and have an account. It's safe and Skype to Skype calls are totally free. And awesome. Deeply, deeply awesome . . .
 
And, as this is still a new technology for me to be using with holistic sessions, *three people will receive a half-hour webcam psychic/medical intuitive session for free* That way we can try out the new technology together, no worries. (Phone sessions using the audio recording are easy - I just press play, and then email it to you . . .) The only thing I ask in return is that after the webcam session, you'll let me ask you some questions about how the session went for you, what you feel might make it better, etc. To put yourself in the running, just send me an email. I'll draw three names using a randomizer program, and contact the winners Wednesday by mid-morning to set up a time for you.