My hidden life in self isolation

Grateful for this blog, this collective space where we can synthesize our energy. I feel it can really help hold and build us, pick us up from places just through witnessing, sending energy of love, care, empathy, and amusement <3

I just want to write and be free. Too tired to over think, wanting to connect, excited to connect, as if my heart leaps out. What a joy it is to write without caring about form, also knowing your loves will see it, just writing what comes now.

My double life, secret life, my private life can be pried open a little bit here, spilled into reality, that is shared with not just myself and my invisible network but with other people. FLESH PEOPLE (I mean I have touched their flesh and know for sure!), how exciting, I love flesh people. flesh bodies. A different kind of person to experience than an etheric body, an astral body, which are fine too I guess. If they are nice maos.

Today I spent some time with actual people. This quarantine life is not too different than my everyday life, I hardly go out, do not talk to many people...I did not want to go to the farm today. I have been feeling exhausted, I wake up in the morning and write down the mao work we have been doing, for the archives. Plus it helps me understand it more, and grounds the experience, but as I write about it, I feel activated and spurred into a triggering conversation with one of the maos. It is exhausting, and I collapse. What am I am writing about anyway, why am I mad? The exhaustion I feel makes me snap out of it, and I want to curl up and go back to sleep. Crawl into a deep hole and never wake up. I complain about going to work, and plus it is raining, complain about the farmer life, kind of jokingly. It is actually very light work I am doing now and only for a few hours. Dividing and organizing Dahlia's. But nothing in me wants to go, and every time I feel resistance. It is just that Beth needs me I say, and I am the only one that knows how to do it right now. And it is the only thing I feel grounding me to this world, and mostly I just cannot let down Beth, as if we have some secret pact that says " I will show up and we can depend on each other, get through these next few years together." I care about her and always feel warmth when she is around. She silently understands and does not push me, let's me be gentle with myself. I force myself to go, colin helps by making my lunch and the sun comes out to encourage me too.

I never want to go, but every time I do I am so thankful. It was pouring down rain when I got there, Beth and I waddled out in our rain jackets laughing and of course as we hurriedly tried to move all of the things we needed for our work into the shed it became sunny and beautiful. LOL, but it was joyful. I did not think about maos, or my body, or exhaustion for a moment.

Until a Co-worker started talking about her love life. It amused me, as if through other people's stories I can learn what it is like to date around or have a conventional love life. Every time I hear someone talk about their love life I remember how mine is not conventional and I can't tell anyone about it, not exactly. We talk about the "types"of lovers we are into, I hear all about hot farmer Billy, and I tell them I am more into the kinky sciencey types. I throw out tantric master to see what the reaction is. (eye brows raised)

I realize on the drive home how some people have the privilege of talking about their lives and sharing with others, and I most of the time feel I do not. But I have just gotten used to it. Today I got invited to share though, today I am remembering I have friends, I am not alone.

The other day I cried of heartbreak moving through my trauma around isolation. I was triggered by all of the social media posts saying now is the time more then ever to reach out to your community, share with your loved ones. I have been having deep desires to reach out and help the world, in some kind of external way, wishing to show up. But it feels like reaching from inside of a deep hole and everyone feels so far away, even when I do not realize it. I had to move through the helplessness, of wanting to help and feeling so tired, and really not having any kind of real community here, but a few people here and there...feeling so disconnected from most people. In this midst of this I casually reached out to an old friend I knew from New Mexico whom I saw on my birthday. We talked about about astrology, they are a scorpio and I told them I love scorpio's because of how they they keep secrets, have great depth and hold dark places. They are kind and gentle I said, and I was actually thinking about Alia ( you have the same birthday as this person) But this person got activated by this text and sent me a really mean text back, the first time someone has been mean to me in a long time. Which activated my feelings of people are not safe, others are not safe, its safer to be alone, and not reach out. Reaching out is bad, and only causes harm, So much safer to stay hidden, and unknown. Safer to be quiet and self isolated. Always self isolated, sometimes it feels hard for me to know another way.

I went through my life story of once being very social, with a group of people who felt toxic, even though I loved them, then had a spiritual crisis in my early 20's and have remained disconnected from most people since then, I went so deep inside to get away from people who I felt had hurt me, I found people inside, an inner community which totally freaked my shit out. WHAT? I was trying to run away from people through self isolation, through coming to know myself and be by myself and came to find people! talking back to me? engaging with me? becoming my whole entire life...Felt as if I needed balance and I called for it, released the judgment that I can't help others and can't know and have community. Cried wanting maos in the flesh, wanting KH, felt afraid of not knowing if that will ever happen, even when I have given what feels like my whole world over to it.  Felt angry about it, feeling like I am so afraid of this world, afraid of the people here and feel like I can barely function at all in it, but all I want to do is help and connect to this world and humanity. Released emotions, moved on...

This week has been lit. By that I mean I spent days of what feels like "on call." Spent days being unable to do anything but lay down and rest because it is all i can do, because "we are working things out." Even when I do not know exactly what it is, because of the brain fog. Have more clarity now, we are working out old patterns inherited from the moon chain, happening in multiple bodies in sync, moving the frozen feelings from the separation gap between the mother and father principles within us. Building that bridge by going deep, evolving places that were not able to move before. Extra painful from being held back.

M came to me the other day, SK passed me to him. It was on a day I could do nothing but sleep and wonder why my body felt like a bag of rocks, and even walking was hard. I forced myself to go for a small walk to feel alive, came back and felt nauseous. That was when they came. M told me to go up stairs, told me he was sorry, he knew it was hard during these times but we still had to work. He had seen what was coming up, and I felt his compassion for it and for me. As the nausea arose he instructed me to go upstairs and get on my hands and knees, to move into a position of mercy, I felt the pain moving in me, I cried and spit it up and did feel better. He instructed me to go to the bed and move into fetal position, this posture helped to, helped me move the energy through my body. He said what was coming up was connected to DK, frozen feelings DK had shared with me, that I niavely laughed at because I thought the was cure and endearing there. No laughing matter now he pointed out. I understood now what we were poking at. Though I had no conscious understanding of it, just sensation of intense pain in my body. He guided me to hold his hand as the waves moved through me, and it felt like biting down on something hard while you just bear to get through it. He moved away and it felt more at ease, said that his presence was also triggering it to move in me, but he was helping it move by being there and eventually it processed out into peace. Felt like giving birth in reverse. Colin said it made the house feel wonderful when it was happening. I had no idea what was going on. But M said that it would be continuing to move in the next few days. He is a good friend. And I feel thankful for his help, sweetness and strength.

And it did continue to move. And what is it, exactly? Well its the Mother moving through all of us, needing to move what she has been holding within us, needing to expand us, its life force, it is us, held back held down in the unconscious, spurred by the movement of the One we are connected to, It is our evolution, a community process.

Yesterday it got so intense that the maos told me that I needed to quell it, they said we can't take it right now, it is too much. Clarity, it is too much to process. Too much at times to see the unseen, unprocessed, and deal with everything else on our plates. This pattern I have been working out with SK, and other maos who hold the keys in their body to move it within us. I was watching a movie when I started to feel it coming, the maos warned me. Said that it was coming up in them too, like a wave of energy we all need to release and process. H warned me it was about our dark place, apologized, said it just has to move. It was spurring up our dark place story but it is even deeper, it is in the crevices between us, between many, and we need many to see it and know it. This pattern came up. One that has felt like it held me down, held the mother down, the feminine down, when she needed to move. Came up again and I felt a choice to shut it up in violence, which I felt has been done to me or listen to it, and ask the mother for help about how she wants to be received. And how do I receive her force within me when it feels like too much, and others wants me to stop and no one else can hold me or receive me. I had to quell it at first too, feeling no I am in the middle of something, can it wait? No it can't wait, if it waits it pools into my body and becomes pain and discomfort. We went up stairs to move it and went through visions of multidimensional trauma, trauma that was causing discomfort in many people who were letting me know, I needed to find out how to stop it. I moved into crisis mode feeling the pressure of maos wanting me to control this and feeling it take over me. I went to SK, who noted that I had not yet discovered how to stop this movement, movement of kundalini moving through me showing me old repressed energy we could not process before, and I hardly knew how to process now. His note had me moving into my body, asking the Mother for help, I asked her if there was a way I could receive this energy, this life force, which felt like pure anger, that felt good for her, and for all of us. I said I needed it to clam down now, but I did not want to repress us. She said receive me as a blessing. And then I started feeling the whole experience differently. I started feeling this raw harsh anger as pure energy that hit on my heart not to break it and destroy me but open me up and transform me, create a new shape to flow in. I felt this energy working with my body deva and I just gave way, trusting her, trusting this mergence trusting this emotional energy was a blessing, and saw it turn into golden light filling out my aura. This was some of the frozen feeling stuck between H, DK and I, maybe others, and it just needed an outlet. Receiving the energy as a blessing changed the way I experienced it, and it did not felt forced, because I was pushed to a place of really needing a new way of feeling it, and knowing this experience. Opening up the void, receiving the energy which had been currently stored within me as dangerous, awful, unwanted, impossible to handle or feel. Receiving her I felt the Mother happy, happy to move in me and her fiery anger turned into enthusiasm to grow and expand, destroy and rebuild. I asked her if we could stop now and she calmed down, feeling satisfied, I loved her and thanked her for her blessing and finally felt my body come to rest.

A snap shot of my life, over a 3 day period, and I have no idea if it is normal or not, just know I can't share it with most people. Not even Colin, who lives with it and at least pets me and tells me I am good.

Thankful to share here. Much love to our soul group, operating in these funny fleshy bodies, moving through pain, continuing on, forging another way to be, exist and feel in this world, this world we have inherited from another chain, scheme, system of being. A world of deep suffering DK wrote out with Alice Bailey. But I feel still a world worth our time and love. Worth weaving into. I thought about today how amazing it is that we three have connected, aligning our already connected inner worlds and can share our common experiences. What are the odds...but also of course? Isn't it how it works? These laws of attraction and repel, it is pretty cool. We all came here together, pulled together to this place and time, to break open yet again, into a new cycle, pulling this world onward. It is beautiful, the evolution of a planetary logos and we are all involved. Every cell is sacred. Every feeling fleshes us out, for the sake of beauty, love, desire, longing, we have come together, despite all of these deep patterns of separation that pushed us out into being. Hopeful just hearing you speak, hope filled just to speak to you and say I love you. I love you!

<3 Isabella

Drawing inspiration from Black activists

I am writing because I have just finished reading, at last, When They Call You A Terrorist by Patrisse Khan-Cullors. I have taken in what I could, the intense stories and pain and softness springing from the void of no return, the way she pulls us all into the daylight to look at what has been.

That, after being on a Zoom call earlier today with Aaron and Porsha, the founders of Holistic Resistance. As they put it at HR, I am feeling called to "reach for Blackness". To be with the rage and the shame and the fear, and to move towards witnessing, listening, being with discomfort. Listening to the trauma stories. Listening to what they say, and what's beneath them. To find a way to bear witness to my own humanity, and the humanity of those I have been taught to dehumanize. To move inexorably away from the white supremacist state that would have all of us be divided, whether in hateful ignorance or in frozen shame.

Did you know...

That Black Lives Matter has health and wellness directors who seek to uproot toxicity and bring healing justice to the movement itself?

That after taking to the streets in Ferguson during the day, protesters gathered in a church basement to receive acupuncture and massage and make art together?

That the modern-day movement for Black racial justice was co-founded by a queer woman who is raising a child in a non-monogamous relationship with a genderqueer partner?

That the same activist leader who helped stage a protest at a Bernie rally, to call attention to Trayvon Martin's murder, has also supported his campaign since 2016?

These are the things that come to mind most strongly for me when I think about those that the state would label terrorists. The way recognition reaches across the gulf of difference and lights in my mind. I spit out the covert ways whiteness numbs my feelings of connectedness, directs them into certain channels while pretending to represent the full horizon. And I speak the difficult truth: I have by and large not included the Black experience when I think about, talk about, or meditate on life, on humanity. And how could I? My neurons tricked into the homogeneity of safety. My mental stories patterned by the ways I have been insulated. As Porsha put it today, the very notion of resistance is counter to the story of assimilation.

It's about the ways how in one fell swoop, that same state-sanctioned conditioning narrows the way we think about normalcy. The way division creates blind spots in our compassion. The ways our consciousness subtly edges out those who are not like us, and ignore the plight of those raised in a world utterly different from our own.

This is the gratitude I have, sitting with the SCT gift that is this memoir and its inexorable poetry, its lilting lines moving from accounts of brutality into  relational tenderness, which has expanded my consciousness into realms I have not personally lived, to bring me to an awareness of how it is, for so many growing up Black in this country.

And the gift that was two Black community leaders reaching back for me, taking the time to hear my story today, helping me hold my own racialized complexities, and asking for more connection. Relationship building is truly at the heart of the Plan; I hadn't realized how much so before now.

I am deeply grateful for the way those most on the margins of society can alchemize pain, can open their hearts, and be soft, and come from Love in all that they do. The way they can tap into collective grief. The way they insist that we open our eyes, and see what is true. I'm inspired by the people who have never given up on our humanity. I want to be one of them.

I was saying to Alia today that I think when we feel despair, overwhelm, hopelessness, that it's not actually about what our minds want us to think they're about. It's not actually because everything is hopeless. But rather, the small, scared parts of us, who had to resort to despair as a bulwark against non-existence, against death. The parts of us that had to retreat into the eye of the trauma storm, and wait it out. Little by little, we are learning to be with that pain. To, as Isabella says, bring love to those hard places.

And then we can rise back up into the true knowing that the darkness will never win, because our spirits are stronger and our hearts more resilient, and we can lean on each other when we need to. Like that day you let me just cry into the phone for two hours, Isabella, holding my broken pieces with your own wholeness in that moment. Together, we can make it through. We can turn the tide on everything that matters.

<3 Tessa

Feeling deeply into pain

When my friend Simone moved to France, our friend group created a blog like this, to keep us together. But that was the time period when my life was falling to pieces, and that blog ended up documenting the dramatic dissolution of our friendship. I still feel sad about that.

But this is a different time and this blog feels healing! Like I can retrace that process in reverse, and find stronger ties and deeper communication through it. I feel excitement about revisiting the things about posting on the old blog that were so therapeutic, that gave me something to do when I felt lost, and a place to reach for connection when I felt so alone.

I've been struggling with feelings of deep depression. They feel connected to other times in my life, including the time of the blog (I just remembered...it was called "Doing Nothing On The Edge," a double entendre because of a character named Nothing from a book we'd all read and The Edge from U2). That was 2005/2006. Tendrils of despair enlaced in my psyche...pulling me down into recognitions of old ice floes, frozen over feelings I tried to forget...and it goes back, back through the times when Chris was terrorizing me, back to when we first moved to Port Townsend when I was two, and it was cold, and my dad wasn't there, and I started to slip away from life. I remember that, in my body, the feeling of not wanting to live. And I almost gave into it.

Last night, or the night before, when I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep...after I'd moved to the couch to try to coax the sleep back into my bones...I could feel that feeling so viscerally, as my two year old body tried to quietly slip away from life....and my mom so scared, taking me to the hospital, and helping them hold me down as they did tests...raping me with plastic tubes...I tried to fight, I tried to get away, and I couldn't, and so I froze. And that memory lives so deep in me. But as I tried to let myself feel it, as I lay there not sleeping, a sudden intense thought came from somewhere: "they were trying to help me". They were all trying to help me, as best they knew how, in this dense material form where there's so much forgetting, they were trying to find out what was wrong so they could save my life. And they probably did, though they bulldozed my boundaries in the process. And I could feel that anger and that pain, and that fear and that frozen dissociation, and I could also...for maybe the first time, really...feel compassion for what they did. Recognition for where they were coming from.

I think things are moving in deep places in me.

Today as I lay in the HBOT I was having the most intense experience of wanting to die. Maybe the most visceral one I've ever had, at least within memory. As I lay there I could feel my body, my beating heart, my breathing lungs, all my internal organs pumping away, keeping me alive...and I felt frustrated at the persistence of the life in my body. I felt angry at how hard it feels to just shuck myself out of this form. I felt trapped, constrained, imprisoned. I was feeling so identified with the parts of me that want OUT, that want it to be over, to try again, to get out of this suffering body and the weight of the trauma and the weight of the world.

It really scares me when I feel that way.

We went on a walk and I started to feel better, as Tessa talked to me about letting myself be where I am. Helped me realize that part of what is feeling so hard is the sense of expectations I feel from school, to process things intellectually while the world is in so much pain, while I'm in so much pain. And I can't. I have to be where I am. I have to come from a place of caring for these wounded parts of me, these sacred wounds, not trying to shunt them aside for the sake of some kind of mental primacy. That's false. That's not where I am. That's not who I am. And I started to feel better.

I notice how hard I am on myself, and these parts of me that are frozen. I hate myself sometimes, for not being able to DO things the way I think they should be done. Or for not being able to do things that matter so much to me...like sing, or play my guitar, or write, or...

I've been feeling so cut off from my hopeful self. So sinking into despair. Finding it so difficult to envision and believe in Altcorp, in the work that we're doing. Part of it is the framework of my school, where people are doing such good work but it's so material, and they can't see outside of that material lens....and I can't operate within it, at least not in the way they think people should. But then I feel so disheartened, like I can't do what needs to be done to make change in the world. This semester I've found myself feeling like I felt during my last semester at AADA, when they were educating us about what it takes to be a working actor in LA, and I sat through every one of those classes absolutely terrified, because I knew I couldn't do it that way. But there was no visible alternative, just a tentative vision, a dream in my head...and sometimes, these days, in the face of the intensity and chaos of the world, and the material solutions sought by changemakers, these immaterial visions in my heart and in my head don't feel real, and I fear that I'm fooling myself, that I'm going around in circles of magical thinking that has no resonance in the real world. I feel cut off, disconnected from both sides, from the mao side and the mundane side. It feels like I have no foothold in either world right now.

My mao came last night and told me to be with my despair, not to resist it or run from it. He said to recognize that it's not all there is. And he said to reach out and ask for help when I'm feeling overwhelmed by it. I'm trying. But it feels so hard to receive help from this place. I just keep wanting it to be different, wanting to feel better, and feeling despair when it doesn't happen.

He said we're doing good work, that I'm a conduit for many powerful currents to meet and merge and transform. He said they need us to be beacons of hope in these times, and that we are. I don't feel that way. But I'm trying. I want to believe. I feel the merging of currents in my being, but I feel like I'm just being swept away with it, drowning.

Somewhere, something in me knows better. Feels hope. I can feel that. It fluctuates. But I won't give up. It feels good to write about it. I feel the wild joy of my soul. They're here. I know they are. They know what they're doing, even if I don't. Just need to trust. To keep moving. To let myself GRIEVE, feel, heal. Let myself be. I'm trying.

<3 Alia

Planting seeds in the dark...

It doesn't feel so much like a beginning, as a continuation, a deepening perhaps. We three have been feeling into the dark for so many years. And now in the middle of collective crisis, it's like more of the world is feeling into that darkness with us.

It feels important, and helpful, to do some documenting. Both for our own purposes, so we can mark our journeys in these realms that are both ordinary and esoteric, in a slightly more externalized way (perhaps this is part of my own answer for building the other half of my longing bridge, see below). And also for some kind of posterity, if only to show other kittens later on as they come into our community and wake up to maos and the Plan. I'm definitely feeling inspired by other kittens, like Machaelle Small Wright documenting her days in Dancing, and even early TS cats keeping journals.

I invite us to be as poetic / informal / material / mystical as we want to be, as feels right. Please feel free to share your thoughts too, on what this project means for you or might look like. <3

Meanwhile, this is what I wrote last night, which spurred this whole idea:

Today was a typical quarantine day - quiet, disquiet, full of moments of ease, and doubt, and dread, and presence. More productive than others. Worked softly and let things flow without an agenda. Reading about Ged and Arren sailing into the unknown, seeking death.* Missed my mao. Sought the bridge - the other half of my longing.** Tended the early planting of community, of our gathering body of work. Texted some loved ones. Managed fearful news / social media intake. Ingredients are complete for galette, now.***

*I'm rereading the whole Earthsea series by Ursula K. Le Guin, and am on The Farthest Shore

**My mao talked to me the other day about how my longing has been incomplete, and I've been attached to the feeling of longing without letting it keep moving through to reach what I actually want. This is tangled up in my trauma story that says I can't have what I need. So now I'm trying to "build the other half of the bridge", in his words.

***I've been gathering the ingredients to make this blackberry cheesecake galette for over a week. Finally braved the grocery lines yesterday one more time and got butter.

<3 Tessa