We find ourselves in turbulent times. The world as we know it is undergoing a fiery transformation. Much of what we see in the news does not align with our internal moral compass.
We may feel out of control, demoralized, or paralyzed in our ability to act in ways that reflect our truth of showing love, compassion, and respect for others.
We come from a lineage of ancestors who faced immense challenges. These old ones live in us, offering us counsel, resources, and guidance as we, too, face challenges. They remind us of our resilience, strength, and determination to hold a vision for a heart-centered world in thought and action.
The eye of the storm is the place within our hearts that guides us as we chop wood and carry water through right action, remembering that the hurricane is swirling around the perimeter, yet we can still see clearly using the quiet reflection within to guide us.
As these shadowy parts surface, each a piece of the whole, tyrant and victim in their expression, we experience deep polarity within us, and between us.
If our unconscious aspects rise to the surface without our processing the feelings, we witness more destruction, alienation, devastation, suffering, and war being acted out. War only creates more wounding and trauma, perpetuating a system of injustice.
We must bring love to the disparity, separation, incongruencies, and differences in opinions. Only through love can we heal, have hope, and evolve. We must love all the pieces to bring ourselves back to wholeness, incorporating all we are.
Here in the Midwest of the USA, we enter the winter months, the dark incubation period of our cycles with nature. We are learning to feel the subtle energies of our animal nature, our intuition. We grew up learning about the five senses of our physical bodies: sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing. However, our intuitive body and non-physical senses have been dormant, waiting patiently for us to remember. In reality, we have way more senses than we can imagine.
Our Ancestors can assist us if we choose to connect and ask them for guidance. With their assistance, we can work to bring to consciousness the trauma and shame from the secrets of our past, which led our lineage to go askew.
First and foremost, we can thank our Ancestors for giving us life! Then, we can ask our Ancestors for guidance as we tap into our inner knowing. With this adjustment in our field, we can more easily navigate our lives and live from a place of truth, love, and light. We also help our Ancestors, as when we heal, we heal seven generations before and after us. We heal the world.
I am keenly aware of how the cold creeps in with each challenge we face. Are we not metaphorically dying of the frigidity in our detachment from the pain of it all? Our feelings, stifled, held back in the “it’s too much.” When we have had enough, what can we do?
We can compassionately lean into the warmth, support each other, allow the tears to fall, and the anger to dissipate, and transform into compassionate service.
We can bear witness to the pain. We can listen, love, reach out a hand, embrace, text, call, or write, without judgment or advice. We can be present. We can be warm.
On the Spiral Path, we are continuously dying metaphorically and being reborn, deepening our understanding of our lives and how everything and everyone is intricately connected through an energy field of complexity. We are both an independent system and a cog in the wheel of humanity, interdependent!
At a microcosm level, we each need to look to our communities and how we can get involved at the personal level to bring dialogue for systemic change. We may need to do personal self-reflection to see ourselves as agents of change at the same time as we expand our perspective to see what we can't yet see. This also means healing our traumas to bridge the gap between us and the other. At a macrocosm level, we can work towards healing by being in right relationship with ourselves and the planet.
How we navigate during this time is crucial. Can we hold the other in love and compassion, even when their story is not ours? If we cannot, we often find ourselves in a place of judgment, reactivity, and intolerance, further creating separation, anger, and even outrage.
To navigate this chasm of differences, we must each unravel our attachments to pain and suffering or entitlement that keep us in unhealthy patterns of behavior, creating further trauma. Once we untangle our emotions and heal the wounded part of ourselves, we can see more clearly and respond more compassionately.
Aahara's warrior program was born in a Shamanic Breathwork, I had a vision where I downloaded this program. It was seeded, and within a year, we were offering the Shamanic Warriorship Path Series. This program has evolved to reflect a new paradigm of warrior work involving collaboration and co-creation with the natural world, including specific animals who informed the development of this new paradigm shift for Humanity.
We are in Ireland as Guest Facilitators with Becky Wheeler's, Intuitive Ireland Journey. It has been an inspirational experience being here in the incredible energies of this ancient land as we deepen our relationship with our intuition.
Do you believe in magic? Do you search for four-leaf shamrocks, knowing that they bring good luck? When you find one, do you watch for synchronicities, validating that you are lucky? Or you can feel the effects of full moon energy? When there is a full moon, I wake up at 3:00 a.m. when the veils are the thinnest between the worlds, some say. I am very awake and energetic, often cleaning the house or taking on a big project!
Do you believe in magic? Do you search for four-leaf shamrocks, knowing that they bring good luck? When you find one, do you watch for synchronicities, validating that you are lucky? Or you can feel the effects of full moon energy? When there is a full moon, I wake up at 3:00 a.m. when the veils are the thinnest between the worlds, some say. I am very awake and energetic, often cleaning the house or taking on a big project!
Love is a creative life force energy that contracts through the pain, when we sit in the pain, feel it, and open our hearts to compassion for ourselves and others, there is a shift. We expand a bit more to life and all its juiciness.
In finding forgiveness for each other and ourselves, we can expand, and this helps us shift to feeling more love.
As we step into this next year, we are stronger, wiser, and more reflective of how we will live our lives. We can usher in this new 2024 year with an inner power of truth to live our lives from an embodied place of love, truth, and wisdom. We can come from our hearts, letting this be our guide as we step into greater clarity of what is meaningful in our lives.
When we breathe, we affect not only our own lives but the lives of everyone, as we are all interconnected in this vast network of life. When we Breathe together, we share, grow, and evolve our lives for change in ourselves and in the World. We can choose how we want to show up in the World. We can choose to be in right relationship with the land, people, and resources. We can choose to heal and not to harm.
Our world is at a crossroads, a turning of the wheel of change, and we can support each other and ourselves by finding the still voice within us that knows the answers, meet the pain with love and compassion, and find peace both within and without.
Yes, we are returning to Africa! This pilgrimage will be our fourth time leading a journey to South Africa. It will be my eighth time returning to the White Lions at the Global White Lion Protection Trust after being called there in 2011 in one of my Shamanic Breathworks. Each time I have returned has informed me by giving me clarity in some way as to how to live my life and my purpose.
The spiral carries a deeper understanding of how change happens. It is an excellent metaphor as it comes with so much less judgment as it acknowledges that each time we revisit a pattern or problem, we can see it from a higher perspective.
Herein lies stories, each a legacy of transition, beauty, pain, and lessons for us to find more and more of who we are, to be in service to love, light, and truth. We are warriors finding our strength, wisdom, and guidance to live our lives in alignment with our highest purpose. We are each on this life journey, all interwoven in the tapestry of each other, connected in ways we cannot even fathom, bringing to light the highest version of our warrior self.
“I don’t want to do this.” “I want to go home.”
“I want my Mama.” These words are written on my first mandala* during the Spiral Path: Cycles of Change segment of the month-long SHIP. You can see that I had a lot of resistance initially going through this initiation process. These three sentences were coming up for me as my spirit/soul/psyche lead me to do the deeper work of excavating lifetime (and lifetimes) patterns I had developed to feel safe and to avoid feeling the pain and even delight of being a human.
If we truly want to know who we are, we must understand not only our journey but the journey of our ancestors. The stories of those who came before us give us perspective and meaning. Change is held in a cauldron of past, present, and future. Each timeline affects and is affected by the other in a co-creative process. Alchemy. Growth. Change.
In 2017, a friend from Australia invited me to join her and another woman facilitator on a journey to the South Pacific Island of Tonga to connect with Humpback Whales. The Tongan waters are birthing and mating grounds for a specific population of humpback whales. Every year the females come to give birth, nurse, and raise their young until they are strong enough to make the trek of their migration. This is one of the few places humans can swim with the mother humpbacks and their babies.
Death and Rebirth......
To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven; time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted....
Many are sharing with us that we are at a new beginning astrologically. With this shift of Pluto into Aquarius, with many of the planets at 0 degrees, along with Mars which just moved into Cancer, a zero degree Aries new Moon, Saturn just moved into Pisces, and Jupiter just moved into Aries. It is a time of new beginnings of historic proportions catapulting us into a new era of consciousness for humanity.
Life is just plain hard sometimes. There are so many challenges to face that are confusing, sad, painful, and overwhelming. I feel like I am seeing it with new eyes and not just seeing it but experiencing it myself.
What calls you to the Mystery? What old story keeps you from connecting to your deeper knowing? Keeps you from trying something new because someone told you that you couldn’t, or you told yourself you couldn’t. As we meet the part of ourselves that yearns for a connection with the Mystery but doesn't feel worthy, we can transform it. We can return to right relationship with ourselves and nature.
What touches you? What calls your soul? May you listen with new awareness to what brings tears to your eyes, what cracks your heart open just a bit during this new 2023 year.
As we enter this season of darkness and renewal (here in the Northern Hemisphere) let us each find time for ritual and ceremony to stoke our inner hearth, to feed our hearts something good, to nourish our body, mind, and soul during this time of incubation. In tending to our inner world, we can slow way down and remember who we are, connected and one with Spirit. This can bring balance in our lives and a renewal of life force.
In our world right now, it may be hard to find Hope with so much devastation, alienation, division, and upheaval. But during all this chaos, something is happening that is quite magical. We are beginning to remember our ancient history. More and more messengers are reminding us of our connection to nature, the sun, moon, stars, earth, water, fire, air, and spirit.
I love the ocean! It stirs something deep inside of me (and many of us, if not all of us), a remembrance of my origins. At several times in Earth’s evolution, there was one land mass. The first was called Vaalbara. It was surrounded by oceans, essentially salt-water amniotic fluid. It was like an embryo, growing and gestating, reaching for new birth. The salinity of the ocean is the same as the human amniotic fluid as well as the same as our tears and blood.
We hope you are all doing well as we enter the harvest season here in the Midwest. We can feel the changing of the seasons in every cell of our body, an ancient knowing that informs us we are preparing now for going inward.