Bee-ing, simmering old coals, learning from lizards.

Things I want to say about being a busy bee, resting, letting things be. There's an infinite Google doodle game live today for Earth Day, and it's fun, but also kind of exhausting. You guide a bee to pollinate many, many flowers, and it's hard to keep up. After awhile, you're led to a mandala where you get an educational fact about bees, and {most importantly} you can rest.

I am so tired, even though I've been getting enough sleep. My body is weary from processing so many old stories. And though I know I am pollinating future flowers by gathering the data now, it feels disheartening because all week I have been struggling to feel able to do external things, to feel like I can make progress. It's also hard to make words come out, because I want to write about the process. I did write a whole post yesterday about working softer for the Rain Blooming blog. Currently feeling frustrated because it feels like I am externalizing pieces here and there, but they're not coming together yet into a whole.

Pulling wool feeling out of my ears with the gadget that sucks pressure out of headaches. Power tool buzzing outside. Am I in Seattle? /sarcasm

It is hard to feel like this because it's how I felt so many days living in the Northwest, struggling to be okay even though I couldn't think or do anything. Alia says to be with myself, to try to feel into inner tugs, and know that even working softly I may need to overcome a bit of inertia, but it's okay if I'm following the inner pulls towards what wants to happen.

There are things I want to say - about living through a pandemic and revisiting everything I have learned from chronic illness about making it through, day by day. My mao tells me that the world is getting ready to want the things we have to offer, that we're creating. And to trust that things are happening at the right pace, even when it doesn't feel like it.

But I want to cry with frustration, being inside this numb blank woolly feeling, while knowing with this sort of awareness external to my agency that there is so much that I want to do but it won't go. I'm pushing again. Let me try to talk to the numbness, feel into it. What are you? What do you need?

It tells me that it's trying to process the intensity of everything that has happened to me, that it needs me to be very patient and very slow, that it has things to teach me.

I cradle the hurting place in me that screams at me to go faster. I tell it that I know it hurts, I know this feeling state doesn't make a lot of sense, that the incongruence of thought and ability right now is super painful. I tell it that it's doing so well, and that I'm proud of how it breathes and tries to be okay with what is, to undo the conditioning that tests its limits.

Under the surface, I can feel grief. And I gently disarm the inner critic who has learned to resist grief, to apply labels of "too much" and "this again?". I invite the grief to arise as much as it needs to. It's tricky, trying to feel into this grief - it's like a shy animal that retreats. Like the lizard we found in our apartment this morning. It ran outside and hid in the shadows of the balcony. When we tried to grab it, to take it back down to ground level, it retreated into a rain-hole and I saw it from the other side of the balcony wall, poking its head out of the rain gutter, its little tongue darting out. That's how my grief feels. Maybe this lizard is coming to teach me, today. Maybe it's teaching me about lying fallow, about befriending the place in me that feels skittish, hermit-like. Actually, the tarot card I drew today was the Hermit. Well then.

Trying not to judge my writing, the stream of consciousness. Sometimes I feel so non-cosmic in what and how I process my day to day, compared with the two of you - especially you, Isabella. I have been struggling to feel like I can meet you in the esoteric web you're aware of weaving with maos, and I've been feeling guilty about not replying yet to your post.

But I think I need to find a way to honor the fact that I have unwittingly been in retreat this past week, inside the dome of symptom flares and intensive trauma healing. These threads go back so far, they pull at ways in which my being shut down when I was 7, 9, 12, I don't know. All I know is that I am trying to consciously be with, for the first time in many years, these subtle gradients of pain and depression and fog living.

(I guess this is my version of working through the dark place right now, the way it's manifested concretely in this life for me.)

Puttering around. Writing and planning bits here and there. Making little foods. Just finished eating some stir-fried kale and celery with Momspice and a few smoked oysters over rice. Already feeling hollow again inside. I've been so hungry all the time, and it's not really just for food. There's so much I'm craving, have been craving for so long. I'm missing my home, my roots, having a conversation with Jess about trying to trace back our indigeneity. Breathing with all this complexity. Sitting in the 80 degree heat that is San Diego heading towards summer. A deeply quiet, hot day, simmering things inside like a wood stove or maybe a dragon.

<3 Tessa

Refreshing my vision on boundaries, defenses and space

I am going to share some of my ritual as justice school inspirations here, weave it into my days, inner life to help integrate it. Sharing my healing journey.

Had so many ups and downs this week, surprisingly reaching some places deep inside through these peaks and valleys that have been really hard to get to. Really buried under the surface (down in the bogs of my being). Recovering still from a reaction I had the other day that brought up feelings of old rage, un-safety, threat with violent defenses, and resistance. Today I am letting the shame go of having these energies surface up, blowing out through my capacity to handle them, drawing me into patterns of attack without being able to stop. Breathing.

One thing that we were musing about in the RAJ class is reprogramming the way in which we view boundaries. Opening up the tendency of seeing boundaries as primarily spatial. We talked about how relations exist in space and time, we have cyclic openings and closing with the other and relations are really more like a dance. We talked about how the focus on boundaries as space, reifies a territoriality mindset which is fundamental in colonialist behavior.

Gently I am working with these ideas within as I crawl out of my shell of an inner world, to touch and shape the world. And let it touch and shape me! Of course this is always happening, I am always relating, connecting with the not self, even inside as I meet myself, I find "other parts," to integrate into my evolving persona. Lately I am finding these parts of me that really really really do not trust...well...men. And it has been equating to not trusting maos and having really violent reactions when they come near me, try ro touch me in certain ways, or reach certain parts of me.  And these parts of me, they are hard to reason with.

I realize that the maos represent the divine whole masculine. They really care about opening up the wounds of separation and division of the sexes with love. They have the capacity to do this, they want to, I know they understand the need for this healing, and cherish the juicy recovery that comes from collecting the ancient wounds within us, moving them forward in the sacred alters of our expanding hearts. But these parts feel so stuck right now ( even if they are moving). I see them going all the way back to when I was separated from SK, and left alone, tucked into the dark mother earth to be opened up again, pulled awake and collected by him. I love the masculine, but something deep in me, in my archetypal self is really holding them as the other, the polarity, that helps grow and shape reality, and along with that I am holding a stiff grudge..maybe just pounded into me, us through the long stretch of patriarchy we are working ourselves out of.

Anyway, these violent reactions I have towards the maos really freak me out, and I am slowly opening up these places believing them to be strictly this controlling, oppressive, pain inducing other who opens me to take what they want, then leaves me behind. Dark mao place stuff. Of course since trauma is complex its all woven into my childhood sexual trauma (where this actually played out), and the inherited gender binary programming power dynamic I want to break open softly too. That being said I want to let myself know its ok to have defenses, it is ok to that its hard, and confusing sometimes, and that I am not a perfect healer ( not even a thing)

Today I started building a fence with the Mother to protect my garden. I did not really want to have to build a fence, I wanted to be like Machaelle Small-Wright and just be in harmony with Nature so much the deer and bunnies just would not make such a big impact. But I just did not trust that this could happen yet, did not want to sacrifice my baby plants, and hard work to being munched out immediately. So I sat with the Land and talked to them about it. One of my ideas was to build a living fence on the perimeter of the whole lawn space, weaving in found branches and sticks into the edge of the forest. Nature seemed ok with it, If i opened up to listen and work with them. I felt invited in to the boundary line by Nature to feel what it was like on the other side. I had actually never entered that space before, moving beyond the threshold of the clearing. It was nice, peaceful and felt really special. Like a light, soft delicate sweetness, the perfect place to hide a baby deer in soft protection. As I was walking around in this space, weaving between the trees, Nature was telling me how making boundaries, and defenses was well..really natural lol. And they pointed out all of these thorns on the black berries, and nettles. They encouraged me to create a fence, and said they would work with me, to help me feel what its like to consciously create healthy boundaries, and defenses. Just talking with Nature started to help me let go of the shame I had around the not so healthy seeming defenses and boundaries I feel like I act from sometimes. I felt how these parts of me have just felt so used, so entered into so many times, they have been afraid boundaries are not even real or will never be taken seriously. For them it really has come down to life or death. Sometimes waking them up from "death," or freeze has them entering into the fight mode, experiencing it all over, the phantom attacks from the other the maos often play out for me. Now that they CAN move, they are ready to fight and REALLY assert their boundaries. A lot of these places have felt well I can't move, actually ever, because the experience I am holding is so hard to deal with that it will not be received well, by me, and especially by Him. And this is also often reflected back to me by maos, as they are having to meet these cut off places with me to forge new relations and it challenges them. They get angry at me.  I feel their discomfort and retreat. Which sometimes reinforces the other really does not like me, so it is safer to be alone and not wake up. But we are working through it.

I got really into building this living fence with the Mother and started weaving in the vines of the living black berry too. I let nature know that I wanted to use this space for human~nature gardening experimenting, and that the forest was for them, a place I wanted to keep protected in that special untouched feeling. I was working with the space and time of boundaries again, feeling the dance with Nature, how throughout time Nature will be growing this boundary with me. It felt like a sacred act that would create a beautiful living border. Defining the space and container for my new adventures in working with the land. Nature was teaching me about how this will also help build my immune system in general as I work with building this defense deer fence. Just by being outside working with the "not self  invaders" (deer, bunny, slugs, etc.) and trying to work with this topic in play space felt like I could draw in that play space to working with these parts of me that come up with maos.

Can't see very well in this picture the fence I started forming with the edge of the forest, but you get the idea! But that is the veggie garden plot, which is hard to tell but shaped like a leaf! And we got a new elderberry tree on the edge of the pond, a honey berry bush, and a goumi berry tree. New fruits to hang out with!

Ok back to my story. While I was weaving this fence together KH came to me, because I kind of started letting down my defenses and feeling maos was becoming ok again and he told me that he really liked what I was doing and that I had skills :) I was feeling good about being out and creating something, I started to feel those old parts of me again that I felt had taken a back burner after I had that spiritual crisis in 2012. My constructive external ambitiously artistic self who wanted to make statements and shape the world. I felt them merging with my self who wants to have a family, and children and create beautiful spaces for them, teaching them new skills.  And also merging with my tender, in healing space self. I felt so....I don't know...fem. We talked about it, how different my process of building is to what is dominant and considered masculine. Mathematically built structures, that have some rational seeming sense of order. Beauty and worth valued for technical difficulty. Power tools.  I was just weaving in intuitive flow, and I felt very loved by the masculine in that moment, to be creating my boundaries in intuitive flow and dance with the world. And then I just started tripping so hard...I had to go back and lay down.

He was very present, this masculine other in the form of KH, making his presence strongly felt and known. I had not been able to feel him close since I freaked out at him the other day. Telling him it's not safe to feel him, it brings up too much stuff, feeling so afraid he won't really come, feeling so much emphasis around the wound of Him not coming back. Giving him an ultimatum that if he does not plan on coming or want to come then I don't want to relate to him anymore, I do not like having my heart played with. And I pushed him away out of self-protection, directing all of my violent might at him and other maos. But then you know, today he came back and started responding to all that stuff, which I did not even expect him to do to be honest, still holding in all of that pain. I felt him and pushed on him with my foot, like a comfortable habit, of playfully pushing someone away, we played with the stuff that was coming up for me in a way that felt really safe...and also...fun.

As I pushed my foot at him, telling him to back off, I felt him, as if my foot hit his body, softy, pressing into his thigh. It was a very visceral experience, to feel myself astrally push on someone and feel so strong a response of push back. He helped me feel into it in detail, moving his body forward to feel his boundaries, the natural boundaries of his body, the other, not self. I could feel the squish of his flesh, his light furry fluffs, his muscle and then a sense of his solidness. He was telling me how feeling these boundaries, and this push back from him was helping me clearly define and see him better. Creating the experience of him feeling more with me, more present, clearer to see, and feel. I felt him hinting at and saying see I am real, I am coming back to you right now, and we are working on coming together and meeting one another. I have boundaries, refluxes and reactions to you too, its a dance. His body communicated to me, you know maybe I do not like you pressing into my thigh like this anymore, and he acted to make himself more comfortable by moving to take my foot up to his chin, reaching in to kiss my foot, and progress his lips down my leg. This gesture certainly opened up my boundaries and I noticed, melting me a bit, softening under his influence. Bodies pressing together, becoming clearly defined. I felt him pulling on me, and I felt my resistance. Gently pulling away, taught with tender apprehension.  Extracting honey from the wounds. That is what comes when we come together, and press into these tender places, the dark unknown places within us/between. "I am not going to push past your boundaries, unreachable places, he said," reminding me it's not wise, not time. But still he came close to the edge, and with the consensual authority I gave to him, dipped his fingers into me as if dipping them into a still deep sacred spring. We paused allowing my body to breath, receiving his gentle assertion. I felt myself squeezing around him, and his fingers gently curling around me too. He got into me, the only one I let in, who can get in to these very little places. I saw him refreshing himself in me, in my sacred hidden springs, patting his face with the water, with my wetness. To tell me I really respect, and love this place, that you draw me to, that also feels so hidden and kept away, thank you for letting me in. He started sensually pressing into pressure points in my energy body, evoking me to open in pleasure and give in more to subspace. As I write this now, some parts of me are like argh you got into me! But in the moment I felt thanks for your erotic wisdom, your receptive safe touch and your assertive influence.  He started pulling me to feeling that love I have for maos, the appreciation for the masculine that feels good and can help me heal.

I started tripping more about group work with all of us. We had a good conversation about his role, over seeing many bodies in motion and healing, our relationship within his role, how it weaves with other maos. It lead me to feel the spiraling void in my womb, and the pullings of everything and everyone on it. Started to draw me into all of these sore dark places, being pulled into healing. I started to move into his familiar edges and boundaries, the places where he feels angry, grumpy, spiky, absent. The places in him he protects from others, and also has a hard time opening to receive within him. I love those parts so much. I loved them in the other, and I loved them in me. And I loved how we met with them together with reverence for one another. We talked about long walks into the future, the process of becoming, through our pushes and pulls together, coming back to right timing again, feeling the dance of opening up together (through contracting away and coming closer), to create a shared reality. I started feeling trust again with him, with Him, with them. And that feeling lead into making these yummy mung bean cookies with friends! Grounding these trippy experiences into hand made pleasure, home and family  <3 Theme of the day, opening up more to the divine masculine, and sharing the sweets.