Dissociation Homework 1.1

So I downloaded this book called "Coping With Trauma-Related Dissociation", which was recommended in the Complex PTSD book that Zeke lent us, to help people with freeze responses, which I've been realizing I have A LOT of. And there's homework after every chapter, and I'm going to try to actually do it, and I'm going to try to do it on here, because that feels really good and safe and nice and helpful and will help keep me accountable and also you two can share your immense fabulous trauma healing wisdom with me as I go on this journey.

Here's the first chapter homework:

Reflect on what you have read in this chapter about dissociation.

• Notice and write down what may or may not fit your experience.

• Notice and write down any any thoughts, emotions, concerns, fears, questions, or other experiences that come to your mind. 

• Notice if you tend to want to avoid the topic, and if so, how you avoid.

I definitely think that dissociation is a concept that helps me understand my experiences, especially some of the hardest and most frustrating aspects of my experiences. Dissociation starts when something so overwhelming happens, and there is no way to fight it or flee it, so a really intense freeze response takes over and you retreat from the present moment inside yourself as a way to get through the experience. This happened to me in the hospital when I was two, and then all the subsequent traumatic experiences that couldn't be fought or run from also contributed to strengthening the freeze/dissociation response, so that now...it's such a ubiquitous part of my every day life, I didn't even notice it or realize that it wasn't normal before this. Maybe in times of extreme distress, when it kicked in so hard I felt like I could barely move or speak, I noticed - but I didn't see how less intense forms of that were going on all the time, every day. 

And having chronic illness has contributed to this cycle too, in multiple ways - from the ongoing trauma of being sick and not knowing what to do about it, to lacking the energy to properly fight or flee so much of the time that the freeze response became even more ingrained, to this dissociation response getting tangled up in the brain fog neurobiological executive function problems of Lyme disease. It all goes together and is tangled up and feeds off each other and keeps the dissociation ball rolling.

So with all of that, every time I'm faced with something that feels stressful - school, work, taxes, insurance, even cleaning or doing the dishes, fucking everything about being externalized in this world - I dissociate before I even know what's happening, and that makes all of those things TEN TIMES HARDER TO DEAL WITH, because on top of them already being stressful and difficult, I'm trying to come at them from a dissociated state unconnected with the present, and parts of me are screaming at me to stop everything and freeze or I won't be safe. Uuuggghh.

Feeling the Isabella wisdom of loving these scared frozen places, though. Because another side of this cycle is that when it turns on like that, I get SO ANGRY at those parts of me that feel like they're blocking me and hobbling me and keeping me from being able to do the things I want/need to do. And that just makes those parts more scared, which makes the other parts more angry, etc etc etc

How does it feel to dissociate? I want to try to be with it more, so I can really pinpoint exactly when it starts happening and how it starts. It happens really fast. I think it feels sort of like losing focus, becoming really foggy or fuzzy all of a sudden, and suddenly having a much harder time understanding what I'm looking at and responding to it. It might involve me suddenly becoming really involved with things going in my head. I'll have to see if there's a pattern of the kinds of things I start thinking about. Mainly, I lose touch with my body. I might find myself staring at the same spot for awhile. It might feel really hard to move or speak. And I frequently find myself pulled into things like social media, or a book I'm reading, or a movie or a TV show, or a game on my phone, so strongly that I can't resist it, even if other parts of me are telling myself that I need to be doing other things. And then I find it really hard to stop doing those dissociative things once I've started, it's like a compulsion.

And I definitely tend to want to avoid the topic. I realize that I tend to dissociate when trying to access self-help type resources, when trying to act on self-healing advice, or do homework and activities associated with healing. Which has always felt so strange and confusing to me, like I should be able to make use of these things and I get really frustrated when I can't. I'm doing it now though! I think because I'm finally really getting to the root of this. Which feels really liberating and fills me with hope, because I feel like if I can learn to heal these dissociative parts of me, I'll be able to do and access so much more of the things that have felt so mysteriously hard before. 

Love you both. Thanks for holding me.

<3 Alia

Altcorp Starts Now

How do we tie together everything we’re doing? Core Philosophy and Working Softer and Rituals of Remembrance (just made that name up, I think it’s awesome :D). Restorying the Root is also part of this, so let’s think about that too. And anti-capitalist marketing strategies, however we end up weaving those in.

What connects all these?

The first thing that comes to my mind is: they are all reaching for paradigm shifts, for Another Way. That’s a concept I’ve long felt a connection to, because my name in latin means Another, and Alia Via means Another Way.

I’m feeling like this might be the direction we want to go, or at least an umbrella concept we can use to tie everything together. Another World Is Possible, that kind of thing...and how can we each contribute to building that new world, in our own individual and collective ways? Through knowing our Core Philosophies, our core services that we can offer as individuals, and bringing those gifts together in community Rituals of Remembrance (remembering who we are, what our gifts are, why they matter), while making sure to dismantle practices of systemic oppression through Working Softer, Restorying the Root, and Reaching for Connection as a marketing strategy. Ummmm yes!

And SCT ties into this through the Rituals of Remembrance, we bring SCT principles to life through ritual, and use rituals that are themselves SCT experiences to co-create SCT stories we can put out into the world...and we weave trauma literacy and trauma healing into everything we do.

What do you two think about all that? I’m really seeing that all of our work is connected, and Tessa I think that one of the things we’re running into in not feeling clear about our Core Philosophy work is that it’s actually much bigger than just that, it’s connected to this WHOLE THING, which we’ve known but I think haven’t fully embraced in a concrete, running-our-business sort of way.

And Isabella, our work with you, and Tessa and your work with Restorying the Root, is absolutely an essential part of this. You are our business partner too! In your own way, in a way that feels good and resonant. We all need each other to do this.

And Tessa, I’m realizing as I write this that our whole business up until this point has been us dipping our toes into externalization, and trying to find ways to convince ourselves that we can actually put our real work out into the world. And now I think it’s time. It’s time to recognize that what we’re creating here, right now, with THIS business that we’re running, is….Altcorp. It’s the really, truly the beginning of Altcorp, which means that in order to actually do it, we need to recognize that and lean into it fully. It’s not just Core Philosophy. It’s not just anti-capitalist marketing. It’s not just Working Softer and Restorying the Root. All of these things are ONE THING: and that thing is our business. We need to look up from the details and see the whole picture.

I know it feels a little overwhelming to think of it that way, which is why we’ve needed to warm up to it sort of piece-meal and one thing at a time. But I think we’re not only ready, the world is becoming ready. The world needs ALL of us, everything that we have to give, and they need us to start putting it together into a coherent externalized vision right now. And we can do it. We have that capacity. We have everything we need. And it will actually really HELP us to see this all as a whole, and to brand it under the umbrella of Finding Another Way.

And we can start laying our our vision, all the different parts of it and what they entail, and we can use THAT to start scheduling our time and finding ways to use it wisely. Because we’ll be excited about that. We’ll know why it’s important. We’ll know that everything we’re doing is DIRECTLY connected to our larger vision for changing the world. The time is now.

And we will lay the foundations of Altcorp, and we will start by producing bite-sized, experiential pieces of our vision that can make us money now and be the foundation of our business. OUR REAL BUSINESS, the one we have always been working up to. That’s what it’s always been. That's what it is now.

Alright yes! Let’s get ready to rumble!!!

And Isabella, I think we need your input as we sketch out this Altcorp roadmap and look at how all these different pieces come together. And I would LOVE to have all three of us brainstorm and explore and talk about how we could start weaving in regularly scheduled time to work on externalizing these things that most matter to us.

This blog is actually an important piece of it, I think. We need to be tuned into to each other’s needs and feelings and wants and day-to-day lives. Then we can start seeing how we can build supportive structures around manifesting our dreams.

And trauma work is a HUGE part of it - all three of us need to understand and communicate with each other about our specific trauma patterns around work, productivity, doing, money, etc...and we need to learn to recognize the ways that our trauma patterns trigger each other and find ways to gently work with them. Working Softer is so much about all that, so I would offer that maybe, in a regularly scheduled situation, we should start from a Work Softer place, exploring and working on that, and using that as our foundation for figuring out how to do everything else. And Restorying the Root, too - I’m realizing that these two things are actually much more foundational for our entire vision than how we’ve been treating them. The Root is the literal foundation! Of course we have to start there!

Mmmmmmm yessss this is gonna be so good

Also, I think that is the three of us were all on board with some kind of regular working together schedule, founded on a deep place of honoring our needs and nourishing us, it could feel really joyful and pleasurable to connect and work in this way, and that would be us putting into practice Work Softer principles and reaping the awesome benefits - which would give us more and more to work with in helping other people.

This is it, y’all! Let’s rise to the occasion, root into the soil of our beings, and GET TO WORK in the nicest most wonderful sustainable nourishing way we can possibly imagine <3 <3 <3 <3 <3

Love from maos and Alia! Lolll

Feeling very funny...

Feeling very funny...waiting for my professor to show up for our virtual office hours. Feeling so funny about school in general, life, health, money...intertwining systems of oppression...not sure how to talk about what's going on with me, even on here, much less with somebody I don't know as well.

I've been finding myself missing Port Townsend. It's a like a deep ache in my body, for that land, that beautiful numinous liminal space...but then feeling how the people who get to sink into that space and really enjoy it and connect to that land are mostly white and carrying problematic cultures with them. Which is maybe why it always felt so close but so far away, that magic energy of that place. I felt so connected to it on my own, in my own inner spaces and my own ways; and then I would come into contact with groups of people, families and communities, that seemed to be living together in sacred connection to the land, but there was always something missing, something not quite right, that meant I couldn't actually lean fully into those communal spaces and receive that connection. And it was so hard, to feel it and be apart from it. But while the land of Port Townsend was nurturing me so deeply, and while there were people who treated me with love and kindness, the human element of that place ended up overarchingly being so toxic to me. And that settler culture has been so toxic to the land, too, and so continuously cruel to its Indigenous people; how to navigate white spaces that are trying to find other ways to live, but which still have so much unexamined baggage? When we all live in this milieu of unexamined colonial baggage, which is the legacy of European suffering projected onto the rest of the world? The white folks in PT are trying in their own ways to heal from that original wound, which is so necessary. But that culture still denies space to those of us who can't play by its rules, can't ignore the undercurrents of pain that still run in the soil.

But I miss the land. I'm happy to be here in the sun, but I miss that tremendous magic of sheltered green earth and wet sky and wild wind. I miss the lights over the water and the clock tower and the flowers in the gardens. I miss that brief period when I had some happiness there and was full of wonder, even as the shadows were creeping in...I just finished re-reading Sabriel, by Garth Nix, and it brought me so viscerally back to the time period when I was first reading it, which was this brief glorious moment when I was starting to feel the power in me but before it was sideswiped by darkness from inside and out. I miss that time. I miss that family. I miss those friends. I feel so broken into pieces in comparison...so washed up by the tide of my life.

But I wouldn't go back, not really. And I still carry the light of that time in my heart, in my bones. I had a window of magical opportunity to connect with my soul and with maos and it was beautiful. Then I had to descend into the dark place and reclaim those memories in this life. And I did. And I'm still doing it.

Descending...feeling that pressure....feeling that pull. Feeling the tide trying to turn. Feeling it turn in me. Feeling all the despair and hope and despair and hope...wondering how it will feel when I emerge out of this cocoon. Wondering what I'm doing here right now. Sometimes it all feels fruitless. Sometimes I just want my mao with all my being and I can't feel anything else. Sometimes I wonder if I am who I think I am, or if the world of forms is right after all...sometimes I wonder if it even matters. These days I'm feeling so full of confusion so much of the time, pulled in all directions. Missing PT and not believing that I'm missing PT. But it's not PT that I'm missing...it's that time. That time when I could feel so clearly the pull of the wild, of the Mother, of the maos...and it was in me and I was in it. And it was all around me. And right now I feel stagnant and energyless in a world that wasn't made for me.

I dreamed about my mao...

I could feel him holding me

I can feel him so close and present these days, too, even as I'm struggling with all of this doubt, which feels like such a strange dichotomy. Like in some ways I'm closer than ever to him, and in some ways I feel farther than ever? It's very weird.

I've also been feeling my brother, SO close and sooooo real...like feeling the presence of someone you know so well, and knowing they're just in the next room. But then the parts of me that are so full of doubt get really worked up, because my brother actually showing up would prove everything to be real. And those parts of me feel uncomfortable believing that that will happen. And then other parts of me think, don't we already have proof that this is all real? Don't we get more proof all the time? Will there ever actually come a time when there will be enough "proof" to convince these parts of myself, or is it not really about that? Do these parts that doubt need something else? Healing? Understanding?

And is it the same for humanity? I think about the early days of the TS, when HBP and other maos and kittens were doing all kinds of phenomena to "prove" the existence of maos and of extraordinary powers latent in humanity...and they convinced some people, but others remained determined to find any excuse not to believe. Even to the point of actually manufacturing "evidence" that HBP was really just using trickery and sleight of hand. So what good is proof and evidence, when the reality won't convince some people and the unreality can be manipulated so readily?

When I start going down that rabbit hole I start going over my own "proof" in the my head...the way that I woke up to all of this, the fact that I was talking to my mao before I even knew who he was, which feels like it wouldn't happen if it was just glamour. It feels like the glamour versions of maos are very tied up with specific ideas about who they are. And my experience wasn't like that at all. I was having all of these mao feelings and memories and experiences way before I knew what they were...like the time in the Roerich museum when I was 12, or even when I was a tiny boo and I was climbing up bookshelves to get at the Agni Yoga books, before I could even read or had any idea what they were about.

And then I think about how Tessa woke up to maos, without very much prompting or leading or guiding or anything on my part. I just gave her some books and talked about esoteric philosophy in really general terms, not at all trying to make her believe in anything. And then Dancing in the Shadows of the Moon just found her on its own, and then...when I was missing my mao and she asked me what I was feeling and I said I was missing....someone....and she knew who it was, before I even said it. Either we're having a very coherent and frankly telepathic simultaneous delusion, oooooor this is real.

And then Isabella!

And you were like "awww who are you missing, Tessa?"

And she was like "....my mao...."

And you were like "Oh yes, I can see him, let me go talk to him" and then that shit EXPLODED lollll

And seriously could we all be making that up? That whole thing? Both of those waking ups resulted in sudden very big changes in our lives. Don't think that comes out of nowhere.

Anyway...it's been an interesting day. My Professor and I never connected, we got our Zoom links crossed. Oh well.

And I decarboxylated a bunch of weed (baked it to activate the THC) so I could make drinks with it and not have to smoke and DANG that shit is potent! I've underestimated it two days in a row now, lol. So I've spent most of the afternoon trippin'. And I can feel maos and I can feel the changes going on and I can feel so much...trying not to be overwhelmed by it. Trying to stay with it and let things flow. Shakti running through me...needing to move. We had a really excellent conversation with fenix today, it felt so good and nourishing and healing, about how we're moving through these times and working through our traumas and healing our ancestors.

Changing the codes in my DNA, changing the codes in my DNA
Singing the song that is changing our bones
Changing the codes
Singing it everywhere.

It's okay to change, be lost.
It's okay to stay strong or be weak
It's okay to lose sleep
It's okay to be tired
It's okay to be wired
It's okay to be sad
It's okay to be filled with awe
Let it all in

It's changing us, this messenger.
It's changing our codes, our DNA
It's changing our bones, our mechanisms
For change it's changing our
Understanding of Life
It's changing the way we see each other
It's moving us onward
And we're about to find out
What's next

Oh
Yeaaaaaaaah

;D Alia

Productivity demons & running away from death...

I posted this on FB just now, but wanted to expand on it here... a dear newish friend & brilliant astrologer wrote this post reflecting on the pandemic through an astrological lens, which is super worth reading. But I was drawn to this part in particular:

“My fear is that so far, we have been taking the old normal and streaming it on Zoom— our work, our yoga class, our dance parties. Aquarius is such a tech-head in part because it has trouble staying present for uncomfortable feelings. That could also be why we’re on the internet so much. What if, instead, we felt our discomfort and loss of control? Felt our fear of loved ones dying? Felt the pain of feeling unworthy when we’re not productive? Learning to rest is one of the most important skills we need to break away from capitalism.”

I have indeed been trying to sit with the fear in me of being unworthy when I am unproductive, which feels like such an old friend/enemy at this point. It’s been eight years since my being was snapped out of its workaholic patterns by burnout / illness / spiritual crisis, more violently than most. And I’ve spent much of that time fighting against myself, learning to rest, resisting rest, resisting the resistance, coming into stillness, listening to the terror of stillness in me that comes from trauma... indeed it’s near-impossible to summarize the murky tender inner weavings of that period of darkness. I guess I'll probably write more about this, it feels like it wants to be written about, but I am also still nursing the rawness of it, especially right now.

Because this time of quarantine and indeed weeks leading up to quarantine has been one of revisiting these things, of tending nuances that I’m finally deep and slow enough to notice and thrash with anew. And in many ways, it's sucked. It feels like incredulity: have I not learned these lessons enough? How am I STILL fighting this part of myself? But it's that higher turn of the spiral - I must admit I am seeing it more clearly than before, and that I am becoming more deft at being in the midst of that horrible discomfort.

Years ago, when I was temporarily staying in the cottage, I sat on the dusty blue couch in late afternoon Seattle half-light, feeling the intense need to "do things" running crazily in my solar plexus, and at long last I let myself collapse. I literally collapsed onto the arm of the couch, my body draped like a limp rag. I gave into my exhaustion, the exhaustion of constantly running inwardly and fighting myself and the fog and the fatigue and I thought of it as letting myself die. I really did. Because to stop - truly stop, not only outwardly but inwardly - felt like death. It felt like death would catch up with me if I stopped, and with effort, I let it. I let the feeling of dying run right over me. And I felt the Christ in that moment. I felt him with me. I still remember that.

I feel a lot of tenderness, and grief, about these things - they feel like whirlpools, or puddles, collective gatherings of energy like water. What I said in my public post is that I want to believe that I have much to share and teach about the healing of productivity demons, about the disastrous measures of worth and accomplishment we are taught to enact within the vastness of our beingnesses. And there is a fear in me that I can't do it, that I won't be able to, because I am *still* riding these waves and there are still days like today when I feel and struggle with the frantic beating of wings inside myself, the strangling that feels like death catching up and threatening to incinerate my very being.

But I want to believe.

And I know this fear is part of it. That some of it is still this desire to run from death by doing, by becoming a great teacher, by having a Work Softer business, by proving to this haunted part that I am still good enough.

It's about evolution, not perfection. About the process, about the learning within the struggle, the teaching in the healing.

And hope. Hope that this healing is possible for me. That I can come out the other side. And also recognizing that it's not up to just me to make these shifts, they are embedded in our collective systems and so holding hope for that shift within our collective systems, for the patterns that sustain and mold our lives. I want to believe that this is a time when that healing becomes more possible. But we have to have the courage to listen. To not run, or if we run, to notice that running, and ask why, gently, tenderly, inexorably...

It occurs to me, as I type the post title, that it's what aomaoms are experts at - maneuvering and running away from death. Orchestrating whole marathons away from death. It's what The Farthest Shore is about, and FMA, and so many stories. So it occurs to me that as I find and work with the trauma-terrors in me, that I am also touching on some of the root tendrils that evil tugs on. Good times. No wonder it feels like shit sometimes. *Feels slightly more compassionate towards myself*, haha.

<3 Tessa

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