Oh So Subtle?
After decades of feeling the call, I am finally a student of the art that is Qi Gong. Throughout my life, I’ve had several opportunities to explore modalities of embodiment that weave together the mind, body, and spirit. Yoga has been my primary practice for the last 3 decades, starting early as a counter to my competitive athletic endeavors as a child. Wow, that feels like an eternity and (at the same time) is just a moment, a mere glimpse of life that occurs on this planet through the consistent cycles of birth, life, and death. We are all such unusual and unique individuals with various needs, backgrounds, and origin stories. Perhaps, for me, I had to build a foundation of exploring my inner realms physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually to practice Qi Gong in the way I wanted to. And it is here where I begin…
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How Dare Thee Underworld?
This is not just any full moon, nor just any full moon in Scorpio. Does anyone else feel that the intensity of the recent astrology is somehow on purpose? As a means of conveying a message of sorts? I make up that the cosmic thunderous rhetoric of this decade - starting with that Saturn/Pluto conjunction just after the Cancer Full Wolf Moon Lunar Eclipse in January of 2020 - is less of an invitation and more of a coercion to attune with self-responsibility…
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What Did 2023 Teach You?
Can you imagine a water cocoon? I recently had a dream that I was inside of one. Maybe if I were a whale I would just call it home? Anyhow, a dear friend of my heart reminded me when I shared this with him that this wasn’t the first time I had been in one of these. Rebirth is near, which means this year has been so much about death, release, and honestly, endurance…
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How Do You Surf the Vicissitudes of Life?
I was only an ocean surfer for about 5 years of my life in my early 20s. I thought that because I had been raised on a snowboard there would be a natural translation of my ability from snow to waves. I was wrong. I didn’t realize how accustomed I had become to being strapped onto my board and knowing that Earth would catch me regardless of where I was jumping from. Surfing waves was a completely new frontier, one of fluidity and unknown…
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What Now?
I love this question because what else is there but now? I mean, despite that most people either live in the past - lamenting, dwelling, yearning to change, or traumatized by what has come before, or live in the future - hopeful, daydreaming of, or worried about a time that has yet to come - now is all we ever have...
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How Can I Help?
As someone who is oriented toward service as a life path, I am often reflecting on to what extent I can actually help people and what kind of circumstance is required for that to be a reality. Over the years I have learned 4 big lessons on this topic 1. I cannot actually help anyone unless I help myself first and 2. I can only help people who are also willing to help themselves because 3. You can’t help anyone if you are sacrificing yourself in order to help them and 4. If they don’t want to help themselves, nobody can help them at all…
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Are You Free?
Life is beautiful. It is such a gift, perhaps it’s the biggest gift of all…to be alive. And yes, it comes with a full spectrum of human experience that is both shattering and exhilarating, expansive and terrifying, possible and trying - all at the same time. How is it that I get to wake up every morning to this glorious mystery and experience something completely new and different if I so choose (to become aware of the new and different)? Am I in fact free to change my mind and life at any moment? Am I not free if I forget this?..
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What Is Sacred?
Have you ever heard the definition of Shamanism as that of making the everyday sacred? Having explored rituals, ceremonies, underworlds, inner worlds, and outer worlds for at minimum the last 25 years I am yearning to pull this definition apart. I don’t actually believe that anything becomes sacred just because I believe it to be, that simply does not feel like my seat to sit in. I truly feel that every day is sacred regardless of me and it is my job, and my privilege to remember this…
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Who Is at War?
At one point I wrote a blog about the following statement - We cannot change the world until we accept we are the world. This is the new conversation. Today I am steeping in this phrase. What does it mean to me? Why did I once announce this to myself and what is the conversation I am longing to have and with whom?..
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If You Could Have More of Anything, What Would It Be?
God. What does this word mean to you? Every letter is a symbol that coalesces into form when put together to create a particular wor(l)d. There is a resonance, a vibration, and a powerful resounding tone that emanates from this word. Some may throw their life before it, surrendering to the intoxicating gaze of destiny and dance with wild abandon into the eternity that is God. Others may run, as far as they can from it, barely uttering these letters upon their tongue. While others may dissect it through time and space, tracing history with their intellect, “proving” the absence of such a thing as if a construct of the human mind itself…
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Be Still and Know?
How often do you find yourself simply being still? I’m reflecting on the stillness that is calling me from what feels like a faraway land, beyond the bustle of New York City, beyond the constant flow of thoughts that rush as a river through my unconscious, beyond the momentum of life that persists even if my body is not moving at all. Psalm 46:10 reads, Be still and know that I am God. What does this mean to you, if anything?
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How Do I Know?
Ok, so this moment feels complicated. No longer does summer equate to easy as it somehow did during my childhood. And even that feels like somewhat of a generalization as I don’t know if it was actually that easy back then either, having to get up at the crack of dawn to jump into a cold plunge of a swimming pool for swim team practice every day, even earlier than during the school year. All of this to say, we’ve officially entered summer and nothing feels easy about this moment…
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Who’s Going Retrograde and What’s With This Weather?
Upside down, Mercury squaring Neptune, boy you turn me. Inside out…and round and round. Anyone else feeling washing machine vibes? Is the current awareness of the acute complexity of challenging circumstances glaringly obvious to you too? And yet, is it also difficult to know which way is up? Same here. Although we’ve recently moved onto the shores of Cancer Season, this moment in time feels deeply mental, ripe with waves of confusion just murky enough to encourage pause from moving in any specific direction too fast…
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What Captivates You Now?
Hello out there! Is anyone else feeling insatiable about what you are learning? There just don’t seem to be enough hours in the day. One moment I am expanding my astrological knowledge into the vastness, the next I am toning my vocal cords with new exercises, after which I dance to unexplored rhythms, and then attempt to memorize the lyrics of old songs. All of this is juxtaposed with the balancing act of my brain seeking reprieve from the overflow of new terrain I discover on a daily basis through my J.O.B. in the Architecture & Design sector. Multi-task learning is the perfect crescendo to wrap up Gemini season on this new moon in Gemini…
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Are We on Common Ground?
There is nothing like waking up with vitality, feeling the inspired pull toward these keys to flush out some ruminating heart thoughts about a provocative inquiry. At least, for me, getting to share my enthusiasm, curiosities, and future memories or visions with you in this journal is quite a distinguished gem in the treasure chest of my life. And when an evening such as last night rolls through my life experience, I am all the more up and at ‘em, even after only a few hours of rest…
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When Does It End?
There is no end! Haha, in my humble opinion of course. This is not true from certain vantage points (we do die) and yet there is maha or “grand” truth so fervently embedded in that statement. Where am I going with this? Eternal life is defined perhaps by the incessant continuation of the cycles of death, rebirth, and transformation inherent within the rhythms of life itself. For example, we die to one way of being in the womb, once surviving through our umbilical cord and swimming in amniotic fluid, to then an abrupt ending as we die to being a fetus and are born into this world…
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What Is Changing?
Astrologically, 2023 is poised as a revolutionary year with a spotlight on Pluto, Saturn, and Jupiter providing the scene for the micro and macro tectonic shifts that will carry us through into the rest of this decade. This is not about being comfortable. Although I am tempted to say something about how challenging and radical this moment is as an indicator of the sea change…it is hard to compare “these times” with all times throughout history because, let’s be honest, when has being human ever been easy? Whether dealing with predators, plagues, sanitation, natural disasters, wars, tyrants, and the most challenging of all, ourselves (our ego and the indications of said ego), there has always been an antagonist nipping at our heels…
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Where Art Thou Temperance?
When you are walking through Hell…keep going! Why does this thought make me laugh so hard? Because it is so obvious? Or maybe because when you know the temperature of the inner hell realms so intimately that just thinking of them sears your flesh, the only options are to laugh or cry. I don’t know but maybe there is something about the dichotomy of opposing forces that does bring us to the middle path. Pain and suffering on one end versus joy and laughter on the other. Perhaps somewhere in between is where the homeostasis of being resides, and from there, it is only human to taste the flavors of said emotional spectrum…
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Are You Uncomfortable Enough?
Comfort is a curious thing. I’ve noticed just how eager I am to feel it, especially in times of distress or when I feel deeply uncomfortable due to whatever the circumstance, illness, challenge, etc happens to be. There is a register, almost an internal yearning for homeostasis, that seeks comfort as one would a soft blanket to melt into. However, when is it that true change of mind, thought, action, attitude, and beliefs, occur? Certainly not in a state of comfort…
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How Does Your Lava Flow?
As willing as one is to see, this new moon in Aries (a truly rare hybrid eclipse on all levels) will pierce the veils to the inner realms of knowing thy self. The question could be, how willing are you? In my bones, in the cells of the marrow of my bones, I am receiving a very deep invitation to change. And not just my mind about something in particular, or a habit, but to see myself as I have never before and in seeing what I cannot unsee, I am now tasked with a new responsibility to do something about it…
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