Over the last couple of months, I have been having many conversations about the idea of using what I call ‘a felt sense of aliveness’ to guide my choices, direction, and actions.

When I begin to feel myself becoming swallowed by the anxiety, rage, grief, and utter confusion, I know I’ve strayed from my sense of Aliveness.

In the wake of the election, I’m often hearing Audre Lorde’s famous words echoing in my mind. She said “For the master's tool will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”

Historically, I would keep any exciting life change carefully under wraps until there was an overwhelming certainty that all would be well with the new endeavor and then I could triumphantly reveal that I am doing this thing! Cue applause.

But, with my recent decision to pursue graduate school I broke with tradition and shared my plans with everyone everywhere...

Since May, my life has been unfolding in some surprising and often really challenging ways. It has been apocalyptic in the true sense of the word, which means “to pull back the veil”.

Much truth was revealed, illusion dropping to the wayside, and in that the opportunity to accurately respond to reality in all its colored faces arose. I’ve found that the more I am able to respond to the present moment just as it is, rather than react, the quicker everything begins to unfold.

Paradoxically, this unfolding has looked like things completely falling apart at times.

I woke on my birthday feeling really sad. Prompted by the reflection that often comes with a birthday, I was filled with stories about what I have created, what I have not created, and the uncertainty and confusion of where I’m really going and how in the world I’ll ever get there.

These are old old stories that create feelings of helplessness over what has or has not been done, and hopelessness over how I will move forward from where I am.

But then I remembered to stop traveling the narrative timelines of the past and future and I came to rest in what was true for me in this very moment. I turned to the present and I sat with these stories and the beliefs they hold…

Call it love, call it the Divine, call it oxytocin. Whatever it may be there is immense power in simply putting hand on heart and breathing that defies any logic or understanding.

I have learned that shedding our skin holds both grief and joy. It invites both a loss of the familiar and a creation of the new and never before. Placing my hand on my heart has become my go to when the hard moments (which feel frequent these days) come to the surface. With this small and simple gesture a warm soothing calm washes over me, interrupting the well worn path of spiraling down.

I believe pain has a purpose, it brings our attention directly to what needs tending. And with this gesture of kindness toward what hurts inside myself, I begin to perfect the act of shedding my skin, again and again.

In my unravelling at the rise of these old symptoms, a deeper pattern was revealed. I could see how my attempts to eliminate my symptoms through extreme and life altering means has also been a way of avoiding this disorder.

And now it has come knocking with a vengeance, and all I hear are whispers with an invitation: “can you be with, rather than run from, this unexpected guest?”

For many years I have been using the river as a metaphor to make sense of life. It twists, it turns, sometimes it’s calm and sunny, sometimes it has rapids and you get tossed. But all the while I’m moving forward floating on the river that is Life…

I wanted to explore the energetics of fluidity in my nervous system, just as water flows around a rock in the river, how could I navigate life obstacles with more grace and fluidity instead of feeling more like a snag that takes some finagling to set free again.

What I discovered completely transformed the way I see challenges, and myself.

In mid January, covid danced through our home, taking a unique shape in each of us. I got hit really hard and found myself wracked with incredible body aches and a serious headache for an entire day and night.

As unpleasant as it was, something significant, even necessary, seemed to be taking place.

I have had a long and difficult relationship with my desire to belong. For most of my life, I had a deep longing to simply feel at home with people and also to feel that I belong here on this earth.

I often felt like an outsider, feared being judged, and wanted to find my true community…

When I can hold a larger perspective, I acknowledge that wars in the world will never cease until I, and a critical mass of other individuals, stop the wars we wage inside ourselves.

Working with this idea becomes more feasible when I begin to attend to the parts of myself that I have persecuted, ostracized, detained, locked out, squelched, silenced, and driven away.

Can I tenderly begin to look at the embarrassment of that mistake, the shame of that accident, the humiliation of that misunderstanding, and the attacks I wage on my own thoughts, feelings, and actions?

For several years I’ve been contemplating the interplay in my life between the forces of desire, motivation and pleasure. What inspires them, how do I utilize them, where do they come from?

I spanned the spectrum from hedonism to feeling flatline, but I wanted to find access to the healthy interplay of desire, motivation and pleasure.

This past spring I had an insight about the key ingredient for me to continue creating a sustainable balance between home life and my professional calling.

I realized my inner work was no longer broad enough to hold and contain my external offering.

This imbalance was the source of my wobble and I could see I was about to topple. But, I also could see exactly what I needed to do to regain my footing.

The watershed moment was when I realized that the feeling I labeled as “fear” was actually the arrow pointing the way.

I began to intentionally look for and listen to the sensations of this fear when they arose. At first they were small instances that encouraged me to push an edge, really reflect on and receive critical feedback, or engage in ways that I felt vulnerable about.

As my relationship with the fear was strengthened, it began to speak louder and more often. And it began to ask me to speak, act, or show up in increasingly difficult ways. Ways that made me feel deeply uncomfortable or asked me to bring more truth and authenticity into my relationships and overall way of being. Ways that seemed to threaten significant loss of something that felt safe.

I still thought the feeling of love was supposed to be soft, easy, gentle. I thought feeling love was reliant on a circular flow of giving and receiving.

If the experience was not that, then it was not loving or being in love. The idea of attaining ‘unconditional love’ mystified me.

And so that concept of love is what I was seeking and emulating in various ways throughout my life.

This winter, however, we had an experience that transformed this previous notion of love and I came to know that my narrow conception was only a small facet of its magnitude.

Raising our children has been the most transformative, difficult, illuminating, growth inducing, and rewarding experience of my life. It is relentless by design and can be brutally revealing at times.

I’m convinced our kids came into this world with the exact attributes to illuminate the areas most longing for change and recognition within our own being. They also arrived with their own unique way of teaching.

Since I began studying Nordic Shamanism this past December, I’ve become rather captivated by the concept of initiation. By definition, an initiation is an experience beyond our control where an out-dated part of ourselves dies and is shed in order to create the space to take on a new identity, expanded sense of self, or greater clarity of purpose.