The In-Between Is Where Life Happens

My horoscope said that the entire month of July was going to be awesome.

So far, I’ve been dumped by someone I really liked, run out of money for the first time in many years of self-employment, and turned 38. 

Dear Horoscope: I CALL SHENANIGANS.

But I actually do feel better than I have in a long time. Peaceful, calm, and happy. Despite that whole turning-38-with-no-job-no-money-no-husband thing.

Because I’m doing my thing.

We all have our thing. That thing we do to keep ourselves sane, keep ourselves happy. The thing that, if we stop doing it, our life slowly starts to slide off the rails and we’re not sure how or why it happened.

Some of us need to run, some of us need to write, some of us need to garden, some of us need to draw, some of us need to meditate.

My thing - apparently - is diving deep into the center of my soul and my energy, digging around, and seeing what needs to be released and moved around and otherwise shifted.

It settles my head, the head that wants to spend its time making me feel less than, feel unworthy, feel like it’s best that I don’t have what I want because I just don’t deserve it.

It settles my heart, the heart that sometimes hollows itself out under the weight of what it sees and wants but feels it doesn't have yet. 

It helps me feel at peace with whatever is happening in my life, helps me understand that my worth does not rest in external circumstances, and it helps me feel open enough to smile at people I pass on the street. 

The power we wield over our own lives isn’t so much around getting what we want, but in how we exist in the in-between spaces - when we don’t have what we want, when we don’t know what’s coming next, when we just don’t know.

The in-between is where life happens anyway.

It’s tempting to feel like my life will start when I have the job, when I know where my money is coming from, when I meet my future husband.

But that’s just not true. My life is happening right now. It’s happening in this coffeeshop, on this bright California July morning, as I write for you. It’s happening when I go out for a run to the beach or remember that the top on my car comes down and it’s a beautiful day, so I should really just drive out to Sonoma in the open air to eat hush puppies.

The in-between is where we can sink down into our thing - dig in our garden, write our next story, run an extra two miles today. Just because we know that our day goes better when we do.

And all we have is the right now. Literally, that’s it. It’s a relatively simple concept, but it’s one of the hardest things for humans to grasp. We’re constantly straddling what happened last year and what we hope will happen next week. But our only real power, our only real joy, is in what's happening in this moment.

So look up. What’s happening right now?

Is your tea kettle whistling? Is your favorite person or animal in the room with you? Just be with that for a moment. 

I’m sitting in my favorite coffeeshop on the road to Stinson Beach. The sky is blue, the sun is bright, Can’t You See by The Marshall Tucker Band is pouring out of my headphones, and words are finally pouring out of my fingers after staring at my laptop for half an hour worrying that whatever I wrote wouldn’t be good enough.

But it is good enough - as long as one of you reads this and gets something out of it, then it’s perfect.

That’s my life. Right now. And it’s a good one.

May you enjoy each moment of your life for precisely what it is, as it’s happening. Because this is where joy lives. Right now. Right where you are.

Your Feelings Are Changing The World

I turn 38 in a few days and I’m feeling entirely lackluster about the whole situation.

Newsflash: Woman in her late 30s not super thrilled about late 30s getting later.

I guess I feel like more should have happened by now - besides the death of a parent, a miscarriage, and a rather startling collection of breakups. But you really can’t measure your life in Facebook events. Because that is a soul-withering road.

We all want the highlight reel, the one we’ve decided will make us happy. The partner, the baby, the job, the shiny accomplishment that looks oh-so-slick in a snappy bio.

But does all this really make us happy? Oh yes, absolutely. In moments. I imagine some of the very best moments in life are holding your baby for the first time or feeling so deeply grateful for what helped land your goal or marrying your person in a haze of mutual adoration. But these highlights, these moments, don’t necessarily equal a lifetime of bliss.

Any moment can bring joy. Even the painful ones, the ones that crack you open. Because eventually you’ll learn how to mend the pieces. How to put yourself back together like Humpty-Dumpty did after the king’s men wandered off and the story ended. Or you’ll realize that the scars have healed themselves, as wounds often do. The lightness that follows pain is its own joy.

My highlight reel feels a little sparse - and, yes, I do care about that perceived paucity - but my soul hasn’t withered. I’ve tended to it, often relentlessly. Just as I’ve tended to my heart. Both have been filled with light, and the cracks filled with gold.

One thing I have learned: Those of us who are deeply sensitive, who feel a lot, who process a lot, who sometimes think we are doing nothing with our lives but feeling and processing - we aren’t just feeling and processing for ourselves. We’re feeling and processing for everyone.

It may feel like you’re just sitting in your bedroom crying - but you are feeling for the entire world. You are healing thousands of people, maybe even millions.

When you process that heartbreak, you are making the heartbreak of others easier to bear. When you feel that grief, you are easing the pain for others on the planet. For those who may not have the luxury of time or access to the tools that we have.

It won’t win us any awards or commendations, no one can even prove we’re doing it (yet) - but I would argue that this is some of the most important work a human person can do.

Lately, whenever I work with a client and they ask why it feels so hard, why the world feels so heavy right now, I always receive the same answer: Because you aren’t just feeling for yourself, you’re feeling for the world. Because you aren’t just healing for yourself, you’re healing for the world.

It’s so easy to forget that this applies to me too. To get down on myself for not having done more, having been more. But shame has no place in light, and it doesn't get to take any more of mine. 

You’ve probably heard the term lightworker, and if you’re reading this right now, chances are good that you are one. Because you’re infusing this planet with much-needed light and desperately-sought love. Even when you don’t know you’re doing it.

Next time you’re feeling sad or lost or unsure, pull light into the experience. Imagine light filling your dented heart. Pour light over a tricky situation. Ask for light to be applied to any moment, any event, any hurt. You don’t even have to do it yourself, you just have to request that it be done - and it will be.

Light. You have it. I have it. No matter what our Facebook feeds look like.

(That said, I really hope 38 is the year my highlight reel gets dusted off and starts rolling again.)

What Happens When a Spider Lands on Your Head

Doing my taxes yesterday, I felt the energy waver near my right ear. There was a disturbance in the force. 

BECAUSE A SPIDER WAS TRYING TO RAPPEL DOWN THE SIDE OF MY HEAD. 

After a panicked flail that ended with me sticking my head out the window and shaking my hair vigorously, I realized there are few things more nightmarish than becoming a jungle gym for an arachnid while doing your taxes. 

Spiders sound like an absolutely dreadful spirit animal, but it turns out they're actually a symbol of creativity and your ability to weave your own destiny.

Spiders are a symbol of creativity and your ability to weave your own destiny.

Spiders represent focus and planning and spinning your dreams into reality.

On the shadow side - and I do love playing in the shadows - spiders point to places in your soul and psyche where you feel unworthy. To repressed aspects of ourselves that need to come to light in order for us to live fully. 

Turns out, scary-bug-with-terrible-timing knows what's up. The past two weeks have been a whirling maelstrom showing me where my deepest shame is still hiding - in my fear of charging for what I do, in my worry that I won't earn enough to support myself, in my jealousy of other writers who seem to get what I want so easily, in my sticky need for the outward trappings of success even if they're simply a new client or likes on a Facebook post.

Shame is like an unholy marriage of black tar and quicksand that will suck you down if you stick your foot in it. 

But the beauty is that all of that murky shame is coming up to be processed. We're all on the verge of transcending where we have been. And the new won't let us drag in the old. So we've been purging. I've seen this in almost everyone I've spoken with lately. We're shedding our old patterns and preparing ourselves. We don't yet know what, precisely, we're preparing ourselves for, but it feels like it's going to be beyond anything we've yet seen. So the dark is floating to the light to be transformed. 

Surrender is key for me right now. Surrendering my desire to know how it will all work out, surrendering my plans and schemes to game the system and make it work for me, surrendering my control. So I can let my path unfold before me the way it's meant without letting my human brain and ego stifle the journey.

I have absolutely no idea what's coming next, as much as I'd like to plan for it, as much as I'd like to manipulate it so that my future happens the way I envision. But that's not what this time is about. This time is about cracking ourselves open to the light that's here and letting it flood through us. Surrendering to the flood and trusting what comes next. 

So ... thanks, spider. Stay out of my hair next time. 

xo - Amber

If you enjoyed this and want more, you can subscribe to my newsletter here.

On social media, I’m @amberadrian on Instagram, TikTok and Threads. Come say hi! We don’t have to talk about spiders. :)

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.

The Relentless Roar of the Ego

There is a fierce and relentless section of my ego that roars in fury whenever I see someone else doing what I want to do. Shame is triggered when my heart sinks because an essay I wish I had written, or did write to a far quieter reception, is splashed all over the internet. The piece of me that feels that this reaction is bad or immature or not spiritually enlightened (whatever that means) is reflected in the reactions of others when I share that I feel jealous over the words of others or the number of people who see what they do.

But maybe in some twisted way, this ego serves me. Because it only quiets down when I’m doing my work - writing or sending out that writing or even resting when I know that it isn’t the time to write because I need to rejuvenate before I can create. When I am consistently in the space of creating and sharing what I create (or consciously resting in preparation to create), my ego is quieter, calmer, more centered in a space that can appreciate what others do without feeling a deep and shameful lack in myself.

Writing this made me feel better, and isn't that what writing is supposed to do? Purge us, calm us, and help us realize that the monsters we feel lurking deep in our stomach aren't the terrors we imagine them to be.