Owning the Witch

Six years ago, back when I first learned what energy healing was, I was sitting at my kitchen table in San Francisco with a friend who had flown in from Australia to spend the summer with me. We were releasing energy together when all of the sudden, I got hit with the biggest vision I had ever experienced, before or since.

I was huddled on the floor with my children as the cottage burned around us. I was trapped in that hellish heat, knowing that my children were going to die because of what I was.

The vision was so strong that I couldn't breathe. I was left gasping and nauseated and clutching the edge of the table. It was your classic burn-the-witch flashback, one that any woman healer - any woman, really - will be familiar with.

My friend sat across the table, hand wrapped around his coffee mug, looking at me quietly. With empathy, but also with a prosaic “yeah, that’ll happen” demeanor.

For years, whenever this vision would pop in, I would see a tree, barren and blackened by flame. It’s only been recently that the tree has begun to flourish and blossom again.

Whether this is something that really happened to me in a past life, or was my assimilation of the collective consciousness, or was simply my subconscious processing fear doesn’t really matter. Even though I’ve worked with it for years and healed much of it, it still has the power bring tears to my eyes.

Years later, I was working with a healer on burnout. Energetic work - channeling, healing, holding space, helping people process their emotions - can completely tank you out if you aren’t replenishing yourself properly, and I hadn’t been. She noticed that I kept putting my right hand on my neck and tipping my head to the left when I was thinking, something I’ve done for as long as I can remember.

She closed her eyes, opened them again, and told me that I'd been hanged in a past life for being a channeler. 

I think of that every time I find myself holding my neck.

Coming out as a channeler was hard - it took me years. I still feel uncomfortable talking about it with people, and not just because it's a tricky thing to explain. Even though I've become slightly more open with it, whenever I think about posting something extra hippie on social media - crystals, oils, sage, whatever I’m geeking out about at the moment - I hesitate. 

Lately, I’ve been thinking about where I’m still hiding, where I'm not stepping in fully. And what my responsibility is to those who have come before me and those who will come after. 

Part of our feminine ancestry as healers, herbalists, and midwives has been many millennia of fear and often violent death.

But it’s safer now than it has been in any point in known history to practice this light. We are now on the leading edge of processing that pain and that trauma for thousands of our ancestors, for our future children, and for the collective. But it’s not easy. It can make something as simple as an Instagram post feel deeply unsafe.

I’m a channeler and an empath and a light worker. And since we are all mirrors of each other, if you’re reading this, you're probably a healer too.

If you’ve ever held energy in your hands or used light to heal an energetic wound or burned sage and felt the difference, this is part of your journey. If you know you’re meant for something bigger and you feel right on the edge of that power, this is part of your story.  

We are all part of this history, whether in past or present lived experience or as a member of the collective.

I want to fully step into this. I want to own the witch and the hippie and the channeler and know that those are all just labels to help put words to a universal truth that we are all so much bigger and brighter than we know. We have power we don’t yet fully understand. We have access to wisdom and abilities that we are only just beginning to dream of.

It’s time to harness our potential and learn to ride the edge of that wave. Because it’s just beginning - and it’s going to take us somewhere we can't yet imagine.

Left to Roll

Dance class usually makes me feel better about life - I get to spin and move, endorphins kick in, sweat flows, my brain disengages, and my daily life disappears for an hour. 

But today, I couldn't get the backward roll. Tip onto your right elbow, swing your left foot above your head, tuck your chin, roll to the back of the room. I just couldn't get there. As I stood behind my section of the class, scrambling to catch up while everyone else rolled perfectly with the music, I got hit with it: 

If I don't do it right, I'm alone. 

It felt like the room expanded and contracted around me as my heart flipped in my rib cage. One of the main limiting beliefs that's driven my life clicked into place like the last puzzle piece. 

Perfectionism is a tender spot for me. There's always this need to "do it right" and I think I finally understand why. If I don't do it right, then I get left out. If I don't do it right, then everyone rolls without me and I don't know how to catch up. 

Pretty deep for a Wednesday morning. 

Catching where we limit ourselves is crucial. Because I'm tired and it's been a long week, a long month, a long year, I don't know quite what I'm going to do with this. But awareness is plenty for now. Along with the knowledge that there is no right, there is no wrong, and I'm not going to be left behind if I'm not perfect.  

Shifting Shadows

Everything feels like it’s zinging ahead at warp speed. It also feels like it's moving as slow as blackstrap molasses. Life so enjoys its contradictions. 

Sign of the times, I suppose - and these are very interesting times. You’re feeling it too, I’m sure. Like everything you thought about your life has suddenly flipped inside out and situations that were idling in the garage are suddenly launching forward, sometimes straight through the still-closed garage door. While other situations have unexpectedly come to a slamming halt or changed tracks entirely.

Astrologically speaking, things haven’t been this interesting since the ‘60s and, as we all know, the ‘60s were a decade of massive change.

Spiritually speaking, we’re receiving great influxes of light. Like we’re being downloaded with what we need to shift the planet away from destructive patterns that humanity has found itself entrenched in. While this involves flux and the break-down of certain systems, I believe the possibilities are far greater than we can currently conceive.

I believe my job - and yours as well, if you’re reading this - is to hold that expanded sense of light and love and possibility. To send that love to the places in the world that are being deeply challenged. To send our brightest rays of light into places that are feeling the shadow.

In a session I had last week with one of my writers, I said that we don’t feel the shadow unless we're being touched by the light. 

When those shadows crop up in my life, when I feel the deeper spirals of areas of challenge that I’ve been working on for so long, I try to remember that we only feel the shadow when the sun is moving over us.  

I believe it’s our job to dream bigger than we ever have, both in our own lives and in what’s possible for this spinning blue orb on which we live.  

Some are diving bravely into the light and the shadow, some are resisting with all their very powerful might. As I develop my fledgling business I’m seeing both - in others and in myself.

My shadows show up in my frustration with others, always places where I’m deeply frustrated with myself in a way I don’t fully see yet, so it has to be shown to me in the guise of someone in my life. My resistance shows up in money - another spot of historic shadow. (Oh, money.) Intellectually, I’m beginning to understand that money is simply another channel of energy as well as another way to see the reflection of where we still want growth. But emotionally, I still sometimes get sucked into the morass. (Oh, the deep sucking morass of suck.) 

Money collects so much shame and so many shoulds. I should have more than I do, I should have worked harder, I should have worked better. I should be working on my writing but I’m working on money, I should be working on my writing but I’m working on money. I should be saving more, I should be spending more.

See how it’s all work? Hard and contradictory and there’s just no winning. Locking myself in with the brain gremlins and letting them yell at me is the surest way to stay in the swirl.

My task now is to breathe through each moment. When in doubt, make sure I’m inhaling oxygen - in and out, in and out. My job is to look for what feels fun, what feels like play. To inhabit my body and life fully. To write my story without judging my story or how I tell it. To see myself in others and ask myself to take any frustration I feel and look for that source of frustration in myself rather than spackling it all over the person who’s reflecting it back to me. To take things seriously while holding them lightly.

We all have a deeply important job, and it's more important than ever. My question is - and I would genuinely love to hear your answer - what feels like your task now? What feels like the best way you can be you? Which is, in the end, is the very best way you can contribute to the experience we're all sharing here on this earth. 

We are all bigger and brighter than we know.

We are all built for more than we can currently envision. We are all reaching for the place where what we can't yet imagine has popped like magic into our lived reality. 

We're all just looking for magic. For love. For truth. For peace. For what we feel - down to our bones, down to our souls - we're truly meant for. The irony, of course, is that magic exists inside of us, fully formed, just waiting for us to dig deep enough to see it. We already have more access to more love than any human can hold. We have access to truth and peace in every moment.

I believe this more than I've ever believed anything. 

But I am also just a person in my own body and my own experience and my own brain and sometimes what I know to be true gets clouded in a haze of humanity. We're all in a haze of humanity. Those who blast through the haze create genius. Those who peel away the wispy layers of fog reveal brilliance. Those who make it their sole mission to know who they are realize that they're already everything they ever hoped or dreamed. 

So here's a toast. To blasting, to peeling, to lurching and soaring our way through this human experience. To becoming so fully human that we feel the divine and lifting so high into the divine that we realize how deeply lucky we are to be human. 

Whatever's holding you back, blast through it. Whatever's asking for your courage, show up as the mighty being you are. Whatever wants to be expressed so strongly that it burns you up if you don't let it out, commit yourself completely and fully to that creation. Commit yourself, know yourself, be yourself. For you are mighty and brilliant and strong and a blazing star through this human plane.