Empty Hallway

I’m feeling doors shut all around me - doors to past relationships, doors to former options, doors to old worlds that used to feel so comfortable.

All the doors needed to shut, but no new doors have opened up. I can’t even see the doors yet.

So I’m in an empty hallway.

The question is always, Do I transform the hallway or just keep walking it?

I have a lot of tools for empty hallways - flood it with light, create new worlds, call in the dragons, call in Mother Mary, dive into the dark pits that suddenly yawn beneath my feet, re-code the entire structure.

But maybe I’m just supposed to be in the hallway.

Maybe I’m just supposed to be with myself.

Maybe I’m just supposed to breath in the uncertainty without trying to change it.

Maybe I’m just supposed to trust that the part of me that can see more than I consciously understand in this moment knows exactly what it’s doing and I should just allow everything to unfold.

But I was definitely supposed to get a breakfast sandwich with bacon, so I’m glad I did that. Empty hallways are easier to face on a full stomach.

Spirit Babies

One of the perks (or downfalls, depending) of being a channel is that we tend to see our children long before they’re born.

The first time I saw my eldest daughter was the summer of 2014. She was standing in front of me at Super Duper Burger - which makes sense, because Super Duper Burger is basically my church - and I started crying into my lunch.

But until a few days ago, I had never seen my younger daughter.

She showed up while I was in Shasta, gave me a quick hi, and then she bounded off into the woods, probably chasing a unicorn or something.

This afternoon, I was hiking on Mount Tam as a hot, dry wind blew, and I dropped into some future where my second daughter gave me a bit more. By yelling, “FRIENDS AREN’T FOOD, MOMMY” before storming off as I sat on the grass holding a chicken.

I started laughing, because she sounded like a Prius bumper sticker, and then had to wonder if I threatened her pet with the soup pot? Or if the burgeoning little psychic had seen me, circa now, digging into a chicken sandwich with relish.

I suspect the latter.

Both my children are going to be sensitive little psychic powerhouses - and I’m going to have my hands full. My eldest daughter is connected with the angelic realm - and whoever decided “angelic” meant “sweet and cherubic” has likely never met an angel. Angels can be a serious pain in the ass. So can fairies. So, naturally, my younger daughter is connected with the fairy realm.

I’m really in for a ride with these two.

Me as a baby witch. My brother looking basically normal, which is misleading.

I think that’s why they haven’t shown up yet. They’re going to be born consciously understanding what’s taken me decades to develop and learn. I wouldn’t have been ready to help them until now - and I’m probably still not ready, which is likely why they’re holding off.

(If “angelic and fairy realms” sound like a bit much, I’m totally with you. Whenever I receive these things, I have to go through a period of “REALLY? Come on” before I end up just going with it, because my life would be so much less interesting if I didn’t roll with what shows up.

Because if you're offered a life with dragons or without dragons, who the hell says "No, thanks, I'll pass on the dragons"?

NOT ME. OBVIOUSLY.)  

I have no idea when or if these spirit children will show up, but they keep dropping in to say hi, and other channels and healers keep picking up on them. I've had to go hardcore on releasing expectation and desire (hi, fortieth birthday while single) - which feels good and freeing. We'll see if they ever drop into the real world, the one where I'll be required to feed them and change them and keep them entertained. 

They may choose to stay with the unicorns, as unicorns are infinitely more fun than parents who make you clean your room and eat green stalks grown in the dirt.

Naturally, as I typed that, they both yelled, "NOPE!" 

Figures.

We'll see, kiddos. In the meantime, have fun with the unicorns.

How To Deal With Grief

I've learned a lot about grief in the past ten years. From watching my father die to a miscarriage to more breakups than I willingly admit, I feel like a bit of an expert. 

Therefore!

How To Deal with Grief

Here’s What I’ve Learned:

Grief is the heaviest emotion.

As the grief rises through your system, it lifts every other emotion up and out with it. Misery, fear, sadness, anger, loneliness, you name it. It's a feelings cocktail mixed by one of Satan's underlings and served with a maraschino cherry.

So you think, "Well, hey. This royally blows, but at least I get a maraschino cherry." Then you bite into it and have to hack it into your napkin because it's so damn foul. You didn't even think it was possible for maraschino cherries to go bad, but then your horned bartender turns to you and grins the grin of someone who ruined a maraschino cherry on purpose. 

I joke about hell's minions, and that's often how the process feels, but my father's death was one of the best things to ever happen to me. I say that feeling like a grade A twisted asshole in my human self and like it's 100% true and perfect in my higher self. 

Being forced to drink the grief cocktail is nothing you'd ever want to put on your calendar, but it swept me clean of so much emotion that I'd been carrying around my entire life.

I think of my dad's death as my Cracking Open Moment. Those are the moments that shatter you, but in the breaking, you let all the sticky emotion flow out, everything you were holding onto and protecting without even realizing. 

After you put yourself back together, you realize that there's so much extra room now. Room for joy, room for love, room for peace. 

Grief comes in waves. 

Sometimes when you're angry, you're really grieving. Sometimes when you're lonely, you're really grieving. Sometimes when you're pissed at the world and especially everyone currently driving a car, you're really grieving.

Sometimes you think you're done, and you aren't - and the grief wave knocks you into the sand. 

See: grief cocktail mixed by Satan's minion. This time with gritty sand in indelicate places. 

Don't beat yourself up for riding the emotion roller coaster. 

Be extra careful with big financial decisions while you're in a grief cycle. 

Everything is all over the place, so stay out of your bank account and away from your credit cards if you can.

But since life happens, you may need to sell a house or something. Call in someone you trust with a dispassionate perspective to help you do whatever needs to be done. 

But also trust yourself. If you need to take some fancy trip, maybe that's the exact perfect thing for you to do. 

(But don't do what I did, which is try to take a trip and then end up not taking the trip after paying for half of it. Whoops.) 

Love doesn't die, it only changes forms. 

Love isn’t gone because the object of our love is gone, we simply learn to love them in a different way.

Do whatever you need to do to get yourself through. 

Be extra gentle with yourself. Rest as much as you need to. Lean on your friends, watch your favorite shows, read your favorite books. Give yourself whatever feels like a soul sigh of relief.

If it means developing a weird relationship with a stuffed otter and taking her on road trips, so be it. 

How To Deal With Grief: Try a stuffed therapy otter!

Go on long drives with your therapy otter, take classes in things you're terrible at, read anything you want, eat fried chicken in bed, upgrade to first class.  

Ramp up your self-care exponentially. Shower every day. Treat yourself like a toddler, making sure you've napped, eaten, cried, and played in the grass.

Tap into your creativity. Journal, draw, paint, sing. Tap into your innate ability to move through emotion and come out the other side.

Let yourself feel without making it mean anything. 

One of the grand challenges of being a human is allowing your feelings to be felt.

Feel them as physical sensations, as something passing through, rather than something that needs to be stuffed into your spleen until one of you dies. 

As the feelings are rising, your brain will frantically try to give you reasons why the feeling is happening, and it doesn't care if those reasons make you feel better or not. So your brain might make those feelings mean something about you, something about your life. Do your best to disengage your brain from the process. Just feel. Let the energy move through your body. Up and out. Hush, brain. 

Keep crawling through the tunnel of sewage, Shawshank Redemption-style.

Keep going, keep crawling, keep putting one foot in front of the other.

You've got this. It will pass. You will feel better. You will feel joy again.

You just need to move through this season of your life until the next season arrives with cherry blossoms and red convertibles driven to Mexico by Tim Robbins. 

Lots of love,

Amber

If these musings on how to deal with grief were helpful, there’s more where that came from. Subscribe here.

If you want to dive more deeply into your feelings, Feel Better was designed to support you as you move through your emotion and tap into your power, intuitive guidance, and ability to heal.

Creating Worlds With Rubber Bands

I have quite a history with frustration.

As a wee one, I would lose my EVER-LOVING SHIT if things weren’t exactly as I wanted them to be. I appeared in the world fully expecting it to conform to my whim. When it didn’t, I became confused and upset and, more often than not, a holy terror.

While it must’ve been quite challenging to raise me (sorry, Mom), I’m not sure I want to eradicate that tendency completely.

Because I see the world as a place where we’re all loved, all valued, all supported - simply because we exist, simply because we’re here, and we’re all our own weird and awesome expression of love and divinity. If I hold strong to this vision, the world will rise up to meet me. Kicking and screaming, but it will happen.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, I can’t help feeling - all the way down, in the deepest pockets of my soul - that this is truth.

Maybe if we all keep seeing the world that way, it will shift in that direction. 

Because we create the world around us. My two-year-old self felt that (and she really wanted a world where her lacey socks never wrinkled - bless my dad for putting rubber bands around my ankles in an attempt to make it so). My 39-year-old self is finally catching up to what I knew as a child.

In the mean time, I’m working on my tendency toward frustration. Because it doesn’t improve anyone’s experience, least of all my own.

Luckily for my personal growth, baffling new laws around privacy policy and the laundromat are helping me out this week.

Thanks, world. You’re constantly doing your utmost to help us humans create your highest possibilities. We’ll keep trying til we get it right. 

In the mean time, here is my frustrated face. I’m working on it. At least I don’t throw tantrums in the street any more. Progress! 

Cash from the Great Beyond

My dad adored sci-fi novels. Loved them. He was the reason I saw Star Wars multiple times and how I got hooked on Firefly after an initial "Space-Western, Dad? Really?" resistance phase.

He had a whole series of novels in his head that he never actually got down on paper - I like to think that he'll write them in his next life. What he did have was an entire wall filled with hundreds and hundreds of sci-fi paperbacks that we had to deal with after his death.

After about half the books had been disposed of - the man had a LOT of them - the used bookstore my mom had just visited called her up and said, "We just found $400 in one of the books you just dropped off. Would you like to come pick it up?"

Let's unpack that.

First, an employee of a used bookstore finds a reasonably large amount of cash in a book and makes the effort to return it. 

Second, my father was stashing wads of cash in his books.

Third, we had already gotten rid of -hundreds- of said books. How much cash floated out into the world via yellowed fantasy novels?

While I didn't hate the extra money - mom split all the cash found from there on out between me and my brother - my favorite part was knowing that whatever cash was in those books will be found by my father's kindred spirits. People who love books, who love science fiction, who have wild imaginations.

I like to think that some of the people who find that money are very much in need of two hundred dollars, or flip to the cash right when they need a lift or a little gift from the universe.

If you live in the Bay Area and ever buy a used sci-fi novel and find a hundred dollar bill between the pages, it probably belonged to my dad and he's sending his love from the great beyond.