ReMothering with Clara Belize Wisner

I have been circling around, feeling into, digesting, metabolizing, holding in my prayers the events happening in Iran and Minnesota in my own way over the last few weeks. I do not consume news on a regular basis through any channels (other than reading my local newspaper weekly) because: 1. I have a very sensitive system and I know myself well. I’m not afraid of ‘dysregulation’ but I am solidly aware of how much I can actually hold within my body without going unconscious. I am in a season of life where I have young souls to shepard and my solid, stable presence is needed here, at home. As Mother Theresa said, “You want to change the world? Go home and love your family.” I take this very seriously. 2. My personal life, the way I live, how I spend my money, the work I do in the world, and the way I hold myself, is my activism. It is how I use my energy to create the world I would like to leave my children. I am very clear and very passionate about this. As I’ve heard credited to Marion Woodman (although I don’t think she originated the quote) “the personal is political.” I truly live by this concept in so many ways. My way of living and being is my rebellion. However, it can feel a little off in some way to be posting about my business and little memes about nourishment when it feels like the world is on fire. The Two CampsThere is one camp that says, “Be professional.” This voice says, “You don’t need to weigh in on every political disruption.” “No one cares what you have to say about politics, just stay in your lane.” This voice is the voice of business as usual. This doesn’t feel attuned to the thread of Truth and authenticity I aspire to uphold. And yet, it is exhausting and not necessarily in service for me to add my voice to the cacophony of enraged and disembodied voices. There is another camp that seems to be more prevalent these days in the social media sphere: “Share every single thing you think.” It’s become fashionable and popular for anyone with a social media account to share their political views perpetually, at all hours, and without discernment or consideration. In fact, for some (and I’m so glad this is not my readership) not sharing your political views or stance is akin to sin. The threat of ‘silence is compliance.’As always, the Truth is somewhere in the middle. It’s not ok to float right over all the atrocities and current events and act as if nothing is happening and just go on posting about my offerings. It’s also not ok for me to lose my s**t and report every single thing I think and feel when it isn’t related to what I’m in the public eye sharing about.Wide Open Heart, Big F*****g FenceMaybe surprisingly, I think of myself as a private person. I would not have social media at all if it weren’t in service to The Mother for me to do so. I don’t always want the attention on me. I can be comfortable in the confident leader role and I can also be comfortable as the quiet, back-of-the-room observer. I have a very big, robust, and strong fence around my heart because of how open, soft, and sensitive my heart is. As Danielle LaPorte says, “Wide open heart, big f*****g fence.” I keep my inner circle very small, on purpose. It’s taken me until my late 30s to get comfortable and clear with this.I share a good deal about my personal life, but anything I share is for the specific purpose of teaching on a larger theme. I am not just sharing my life to share my life. I am sharing my perspective/experience to illustrate a universal deeper meaning. That’s the way my writing and expression works. I show what I would like to teach with my beingness. I become the lesson. However, this doesn’t mean I share anywhere near the majority of my unique and personal process. I am also a messy, unsure, hurting-at-times human, after all. My messaging politically has been consistent throughout my whole tenure being in the somewhat public eye. I belong to neither side. I identify with neither side. On a personal level, I agree with one side on some things and I agree with the other on others. I am on the side of humanity, and that is a not a political party. Something I read today hit home: “Love your neighbors more than your government.” I am on the side of humanity, of love, of courage, of beauty, of the thread of organic Life. Always.Separation Has Always Been the True Enemy Separation has always been the true enemy in my eyes. Atrocities happen. They happen for no good reason. I would never try to explain away or gloss over pain, suffering, and real injustice. My spirituality doesn’t avoid the dirt. It is about brining the Soul into the dirt, the body, the matter. Not in a “lets make meaning out of this” way, but in a way that honors the organic and God. A long time teacher of mine, Coly Vulpiani wrote recently:“What if the quality of energy we are expressing in the name of justice is actually feeding the very atmosphere we are trying to change? Not because our concerns are wrong. But because of the quality of consciousness we bring to them matters…. In times like these what we are becoming matters as much as what we are resisting.” What we are becoming matters. This is the creator’s focus: in the face of atrocities, what and who am I becoming? What am I embodying with my actions, words, and thoughts? We are creators and artists. Each and every one of us in a co-creation with our reality and those around us. This isn’t woo woo mumbo jumbo. This is quantum entanglement. This is the field within which we all abide. How we show up matters. The “quality of consciousness” we bring to a situation matters. We cannot fight violence, disconnection and insanity with violence, disconnection and insanity. As Martin Luther King said: “The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."We don’t have to go out and hold signs on the streets to be activists. We can if that feels right for us. We don’t have to call our senators. We definitely can and should if that’s what feels right for us. We don’t have to ‘be political’ in any way shape or form to be advocates for the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. We do need to love each other. Truly love. We need to become the people that can do conflict differently. We need to bring integrity and coherence into our work, our homes, our relationships, the places we spend our time, where we put our attention. We need to clean up where we’re sitting. The personal is political, after all. For me, this looks like a very deep and personal practice of prayer. I spend precious time each morning with my attention on all the pain and hope emanating from Iran. I send the freedom fighters my energetic support. I allow myself to reach into the hearts of the people in pain and offer them my love. I pray for the souls of the people in the regime causing the hurt to wake up to their own despair and feel it. I pray for Trump and ICE agents and the families being torn apart. Sometimes, I breathe in the agony and suffering into the alchemical energetic chamber of my heart and breathe out love. I do this over and over again. I use my attention and intention to bring coherence to the field within myself and the one we all inhabit.I am reminded of the poem, Call Me By My True Names by Tich Nhat Hanh. I remember that one being’s ache is my ache. Make Art with Our PainWe need to make art with and from our grief, our misery, our fear, and our suffering. People always lament, “What can I do!? I just wish I could do something!” This is what we “do.” I am not saying every person needs to become a painter or a sculptor, but in the broader sense of artist, as in making something that is uniquely yours and did not exist before you came to be on this planet. Maybe it’s taking a walk every morning and dancing with the sunrise. Maybe it’s the way you chat with a stranger at the grocery store. Maybe it’s baking biscuits for your new neighbor. Maybe it’s writing poetry or love letters. Maybe it is making an epic protest sign and holding it in the freezing cold. Maybe it is writing a post on social media. Make whatever it is with your whole heart, the grief, the rage, the hopelessness included. I believe this to be the greatest act of resistance. I can never pretend to understand why the atrocities happening in the world happen. I would never desecrate a mother’s or a father’s or a child’s or a friend’s pain by trying to explain it away. I do encourage all of us to express ourselves through art. To make our pain known through an act of creation. To let ourselves and our pain be seen, heard and felt through our unique extension of ourselves and our love out into the world. Please, let us know in the comments, what are you creating? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

“There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” - Carl JungI’m writing this in the first few days of 2026. It has not been an easy transition. I haven’t had anything drastic externally happen to me or my family, although I have had two very tragic events happen to people adjacent to me. My personal life has been nothing but really quiet, sweet and simple. And yet, so much inside me is moving. Like the tectonic plates within my reality are lifting, shuddering and re-jiggering. When an unconscious aspect of ourselves and our patterns comes into our conscious awareness, it can feel like it threatens the very fabric of our reality. I have felt this the last couple weeks. I can feel my reality changing, at its very core. We have a few options when we’re feeling like this: 1. We can deny it. Try to push the uneasy feelings underground. We all will do this for awhile. It’s human nature to deny change. I personally don’t know anyone who feels a whisper of change on the horizon and just willingly surrenders to it right away without any denial. But, the longer we shove it away, the more uncomfortable it gets. It’s like trying to hold a lid on boiling water, eventually it’s going to spill and get all over everything. We can find all sorts of ways to release a little steam here and there. so we can play dumb about the awakening for a long time. We can deny anything is off or needs adjustment. We can stick our fingers in our ears and say, “LALALALALA,” for quite a long while. We can get really distracted and pulled into all sorts of side quests that take us away from the actual realization our Soul is pointing us towards. Nothing is wrong with this. It’s all part of the process. It takes so much courage to be truly honest with ourselves. 2. We can fight with it. Then, eventually we are no longer able to deny it any long. We become aware something needs to change. And then we fight it. We resist it. We don’t believe it’s possible. We don’t see a way to make the change or integrate the realization. A friend of mine said when speaking about realizing what we must change, “Anything but that. I can do anything but that.” This is how awakening can feel, “I could literally do anything but that.” So we fight. We claw at the walls. We resist the sensations, feelings, despair, honesty, vulnerability, and weakness that comes with change. Most of the time, we have be beginners again. There is a way awakening will always bring you back to square one. Being a beginner isn’t fun for most people. This is also totally normal. We can’t stop fighting until we’re ready to stop fighting. It’s all part of the process. It takes real courage to lean into the despair and not fight with it.3. We can surrender. We can have faith. We can move into the awakening willing to be carved, changed, and trusting that all it brings is for our and everyone else’s highest and best good. Any difficult experience we are having/have had is an opportunity for an awakening. The most truly faith-filled people I know are the people who have been through unthinkably difficult experiences and come out the other side with more grace, wisdom, and faith in some guiding force that is beyond our comprehension. This doesn’t have to be a religious faith. This isn’t always the same faith I have. However, I do not know a way to truly get through the arduous and stripping-away task of awakening without it. You need a tether into something bigger than you. Our small human minds cannot weather the immensity of our Soul’s tasks, desires and journeys without a tether to some meaning outside of our small selves.This is why throughout human history, you will always find faith, spirituality, and a relationship to something mysterious and unlimited at the center of the human condition. Faith doesn’t give you a reason for all the awful things that can happen in the world. Nothing can. Faith doesn’t tie our lives up in a pretty bow. Faith doesn’t mean there is a big daddy in the sky coming to save you. Faith means you can say yes to your Soul. It means you can take a leap into the unknown, knowing whatever happens, you’ll be caught. It takes a lot of courage to have faith. Faith doesn’t make awakening easier. Knowing that you’ll be caught doesn’t actually make the jumping into the abyss any more comfortable. There is still crippling fear. There are still nerves. There will be more despair just around the corner. There are still all the parts of you who don’t have faith or who need to “see it to believe it.” We are not all one way. “I am large. I contain multitudes,” as Walt Whitman said. The big misconception is that faith will somehow save us from pain. We think if we have faith, we’ll be able to just “give it all to God” or breeze through our challenges with a smile and a wink. This hasn’t been my experience of faith. I know for me, personally, I have a deep, deep practice of faith. Faith is the foundation upon which I live and know myself and I have never come to the precipice of a big change, transition or awakening in my life without feeling completely and totally terrified. Faith simply gives me something to practice while I’m in the midst of pain and unknown. Once I’ve stopped denying. Once I’ve stopped fighting, and trust me, I do plenty of those, I come back to this statement: “God/Source/Universe/Guiding Light, I don’t know what to do here. Help me. Show me.” And then I wait, open. A teacher of mine asked me recently, “Did God ask you to do this?”This could be one way to determine if we’re denying, fighting or surrendering. If God didn’t ask us to do what we’re doing, we’re probably not in a pose of surrender.I’ve been practicing. What is God asking me to do? Did God ask me to do this? We will each have our own unique ways of connecting with God/Source/Higher Self. For me, I have come to know when I drop down below the static layer of life and busyness and drama and my own patterns, I tap into a deeper knowing. This where God “speaks” to me. For me, this requires a quiet mind and somewhat settled body, which can be hard to come by, but is maybe the most important thing I can give myself, and ultimately it is a choice I make, to listen or not to listen. I know I need to have a sense of unattachment to the outcome or information I will receive. It’s like listening carefully to someone, but with your whole body instead of just your ears.Sometimes, in this space of listening, I get nothing. Sometimes I get something like “not yet” or “it’s unclear” or just “be still.” It’s not always a definitive, satisfying answer.For the past few weeks, the only thing God has been asking me to do is one thing: write. And it’s the last thing I want to do. When I sit down to write I am plagued with the idea I have nothing of value to say or that no one cares or that it’s too much to even try. My Soul doesn’t care about any of these excuses, but my human mind does. But, it’s the only thing that is clear: Write. Write. Write. Write and take care of myself. Write and take care of my children. Write and sleep. Write and eat. Write and read. Write and pray. And…I haven’t done it. That’s how this works. We can also know exactly what we need to do and not do it. It is no small thing to be honest with ourselves. We will avoid it in every way possible because “there is no coming to consciousness without pain.” There are many parts of ourselves (for good reason!) that want to avoid pain at all costs. Avoid the discomfort. Avoid the shake up. Avoid the unknown. Avoid the raging, the grief, the hurt, the things that we’ve been trying so hard to keep down under the surface. The amount of energy that it takes to keep things at bay is vast. It is big. And when we finally turn towards them (which is what writing does for me) it can feel like we are never going to be able to turn away. Here I am, finally, after months of denying and fighting, I am writing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

My Recent ExperienceOver the weekend, I spent 4 nights in Mexico participating in Moondance with over 300 other women. Moondance is an indigenous ceremony where women opt to not sleep, fast, and dance and sing under the full moon for 4 nights. There are a lot of other aspects and details to it, but ultimately it is a prayer circle for the healing of the Feminine principle. For me it was a way to connect with a time before women we were thought of as the ‘weaker sex’, a time when women were respected for their spiritual connection to the power of creation and manifestation. A place where women’s strength is trusted, exalted, and fully experienced. We sacrifice our comfort to deepen our attention on our prayers and make them sacred. Prayers for ourselves and our families. Prayers for our relationships and relations. Prayers for our lands and Earth. Prayers for our ancestors and legacies. Prayers for conscious change and remembrance. Prayers for all creatures, plants and the elements. As I am taking space and integrating what was a deeply alchemizing and profound experience for me, I am seeing the power of women remembering their strength. Damsels There is a strong collective story so many women play into of the “damsel in distress.” On a symbolic level this story says that women are weak, powerless, and need a man or something to save them. This story says physical strength trumps spiritual strength. This story says logic trumps intuition. This story says mental academia trumps embodied experience. This story says winter is bad and summer is good. This story says death is scary and to deny/erase it. This story says faith is only for those who are impractical, dumb and delusional. This story says money is worth more than integrity. This story says our difficulties in life are victimization not initiation. The Feminine does not need saving. She is the creator and the destroyer. We, the beings that are the altar through which spirit comes into form, do not need saving. We, the beings that raise up the next generation of humanity in spite of wars, famines, unthinkable abuse, and dangers beyond comprehension, do not need saving. We, the beings that give of our bodies so that Life may continue forward, do not need saving. We, the beings that die and bleed only to be reborn, every single month, do not need saving. Women are strong. And yet, it is not a dominating kind of strong. It is the strength of the Earth, who will always hold you, no matter how high up in your tower or how deep in the ground you are. It is the strength of spirit, in form. We may not have the brute physical strength that men have, but, weaved into our very bodies, we have a strength that comes from our connection to nature, cycles, creation and destruction. So many of us have forgotten this strength. It’s like this strength has been put to sleep, lulled into a drowsy, comfortable, slumber, and we have forgotten who we are. I can’t help but think this is partly due to how few contained and guided initiations we have in modern life. Instead of owning our power, we waste our energy comparing ourselves to others. Instead of owning our power, we use up our energy tearing down other women. Instead of owning our power, we park our energy by agonizing and ruminating over our unworthiness. What if we remembered we are all the daughters of Creation, Herself? Sisters to each other?How do we remember this? Initiation We remember through initiation. We remember through seeing and watching ourselves approach, cross, and be transformed by thresholds. Facing our fears and experiencing our own strength, not with force and gritting our teeth, but through surrender. Initiation demands that we put our small minds to the side and walk, willingly, into the flames. So many of our built-in initiations in life have been corrupted and stalled. Menarche is shamed and rushed through unceremoniously for most young girls. Childbirth and pregnancy has been medicalized and pathologized. Menopause also pathologized, stalled and stopped completely if possible. Death is only spoken about in whispers and swept away as soon as possible. Even our monthly cycles and bleeds, which can be mini initiations, are expected to be hidden, kept under wraps, and largely experienced alone and ignored. If you feel shame or confusion about any of these initiations there is a great likelihood it has been stunted, stalled, or is incomplete. We can also have plenty initiations that are unique to us, through life events, painful experiences, and coming up against the dark, unknown and mysterious. Initiations shape us. They change us. They allow us to become. They allow us to experience Feminine strength which is directly connected to our embodied experience of Creation.Cultures that still have a connection to the natural world as sentient and alive in and of itself, revere the Feminine principle. They revere matter as holy, because they know all things are imbued with spirit. They would create containers and rituals that would complete the initiation of a woman into her power and connect her to all those before her through all time (like the 40 days sitting in practice post childbirth, for example). Tyson Yunkapora (aboriginal philosopher and writer) says, “You know a culture is really domesticated when the women are considered weaker.” Women’s strength has almost been forgotten in the Western world. We infantilize women and call it femininity. A woman is not meant to be held as trophy or an object of sexual satisfaction, this is perhaps the biggest travesty of our modern times. A woman has access to creation and destruction. She has access, through her very physical form, to the forces of nature. Her value is not in how small her waist is or how big her lips. Her value is in her beingness, the radiance of God that shines through her eyes. Her very aliveness and her ability to allow that aliveness to flow through her, unimpeded, is what feeds the world. Women do not need to be saved; from men, from the world, from corporations, or from the Patriarchy, women simply need to be fully and completely initiated, because then they save themselves and their families and the world. When a woman truly experiences her strength she will no longer feel the need to subvert her power through looking for saving, comparison, or validation. A woman’s strength does not come from gritting her teeth and getting it over with. It doesn’t come from what or how much she produces or how much she can ‘do’, it comes from her ability to sit in the dark, with herself and for herself. If you feel called to explore this concept of initiation I am going to be speaking at a 3 day online gathering called INITIATION next weekend October 19th at 1pm Mountain Time alongside some other incredible women who hold deep wisdom about this concept of initiation as well. You can get more information and register here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

I am about to embark on a great adventure. Eight nights away from my girls and husband. Traveling internationally alone. A ceremony that involves days and nights of not eating, not sleeping, and lots of sweating. As I sit here staring at my mostly packed suitcase full of camping paraphernalia and gear that I hope will bring me some semblance of comfort in the potentially blistering hot sun or freezing cold rain, I feel a familiar vulnerability. There is a voice in the back of head saying, “You know you don’t have to do this, right? You know you could just stay home, sleep in your beautiful organic bed and bedding, holding your little girls hot, curling, little hands? You could stay in close proximity to the safe, solid, refuge of your husband’s body? You could eat wholesome food and wake up rested, regulated, to the cacophony of the Sandhill Crane migration happening right outside your bedroom window? Life is so good here You could just not go. You know that, right?!”This is a voice of reason, it’s true. I am choosing to do this hard thing. I am choosing to fly thousands of miles away from my home, my land, my people, my comfort, to experience something that will most likely be quite rough, difficult, involve big physical challenges, and be wildly outside of my preferences. And the truth is, I don’t have to do it. I could simply stay home. I could stay comfortable. Life would probably stay pretty good. Since the moment I heard my Soul call to attend this ceremony, my personality has had all sorts of judgements and fears about it. For almost a year I have been having dreams revolving around this ceremony. Dreams filled with fear, anxiety, confusion, mystery, as well as expansion, newness, and potential transformation. I don’t have any expectations of this experience. I don’t have high hopes or any lofty ideals I’m hoping to bring to fruition. I don’t feel better than anyone who hasn’t/won’t do something like this.I am not one to fantasize much. I’m generally quite optimistic and always operate from a mindset of abundance, but I also really value boots-on-the-ground realism. I’m hesitant to jump into things because when I decide to do something, I generally do it well and do it fully committed; both feet first. I wish I could be more “type B” sometimes, but I would hate to be unprepared. So, here I am staring at my suitcase. I have and am prepared. I have agnoized over the packing list. I have contemplated a lot of possible scenarios. I have gone through all the things I need to do ad naseum. I have prepared my family, our home, and our village of helpers and supports for my time away. I have asked my community for prayers and well-wishes. I think about how many times in my life have I stared a suitcase with similar thoughts of “you don’t have to do this” swimming through my head. I felt simliarly when I went to South East Asia by myself when I was 20 years old, before readily available GPS, smartphones, airbnb or uber. I remember feeling deeply afraid, heartbroken, and alone. I was meant to go with a boyfriend who had broke up with me seemingly out of the blue before the trip. I ended up getting a tape worm and almost dying by myself in a hotel room, but alas, I prevailed. This trip built my confidence to navigate the world by myself on practica, l as well as spiritual levels. I remember the agongy of will I or won’t I go, before I travelled to Africa to live in Zambia for 2.5 years as a Peace Corps volunteer. I could write a whole memoir about that experience, but let’s just say it deeply shaped and softened me. It humbled me, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. I remember a deep tension before leaving to Japan, again, by myself, the very start of over a year of living nomadically. Little did I know as I stared at my suitcase then, that I was mere months away from my entire world as I thought I knew it, crumbling. And yet, again, I survived, and I am so much richer in heart and Soul than before this experience. It’s sexy and flashy to say, “Do the things that scare you!” “Get out of your comfort zone!” But the things that scare you are scary for a reason. Simply doing the things that scare you does not guarantee you won’t find yourself hallucinating with fever in a hotel room, alone, in Thailand. It does not guarantee you won’t get your heart shattered.These voices that want you to stay home and stay safe, aren’t wrong. They are taking what has happened in the past and applying it to the future. What else can we be expected to do, really? How else would we learn? This morning the voices urging me toward comfort were loud. They had been arising before, but I had been shoving them down, sticking them in any nook and cranny so I could get on with my preparations. But this morning, I also remembered, these voices are here to protect me. These parts want to protect me from the shock, pain, sudden change, THE UNKNOWN, and that is ok. I am so grateful for these parts. Afterall, they have done a really good job. I am safe. Generally, I think people really need to get a lot more comforatble with the mundane. I think most people would benefit from just sitting their ass down, so to speak, and being still. I think the majority of women in a similar demographic as me, would actually benefit from a lot more simple, consistent, safe, and ‘boring’ living. Feeding themselves three nutrious meals a day, getting enough sleep, and focusing on what relaxes them and brings them pleasure. I believe this is what most of us need, most of the time. However, there is also Soul work and Soul nourishment to be done. There are times when we need to take a leap of faith. There are times when we need to throw ourselves into the black unknown. There are times when we need to shake our life up and put ourselves in the way of transformation. A little known piece here is we don’t need to go looking for it. Stay with the basics. Perpare yourself for the call. It will find you. It will be clear when it’s clear. It won’t be urgent or desperate. It won’t be an “I need that!!” of the small mind. It won’t be confusing. It will feel like bell is ringing your entire body. Resonance.When I feel that resonance, I have learned, you simply must say yes, you go no questions asked, you follow that thing. It doesn’t mean it isn’t going to take you to the brink of annihilation, it probably will, but what is available on the other side, is an entirely new way of being. What is on the other side, is something you cannot even fathom from this side and that’s precisely why it is so terrifying. And if you feel that resonance and you say no, the thing will keep knocking, it will get louder and louder and harder to ignore. You don’t need to worry or fret about missed opportunities. You will be presented with many. What do I do with these terrified, protector parts that keep applying the past to the future in the face of a resonant Soul call? When I remember to stop trying to make the voices go away or being completely identified with them, I go on a walk with them. I give them my full attention. I turn towards them instead of away. I allow them to tell me what they’re worried about. I ask them what they want me to know. I ask them where they came from. I take the time and space to really listen, just like I would listen to my daughter if she was scared about something. When they have told me everything, I tell them thank you. I tell them I appreciate you. I tell them, I see you and what you do for me. I tell them, I hear you and I really value your insights. I tell them, we are safe. I tell them, I know this is scary and we don’t know what is going to happen, and I have got this. This is what we’re doing. Soul leads my life. It’s ok for you to be scared. My Soul can take it from here. A Soul-led life most definitely requires we do the things that scare us, but it doesn’t mean we leave our scared and protector parts in the dust. We can still love them, appreciate them, and listen to them. We can still remember they are parts of us and deserve acknowledgement, hearing them out, and respect for their learned wisdom.In these moments I always think of the Rumi poem, The Guest House. This being human is a guest house.Every morning a new arrival.A joy, a depression, a meanness,some momentary awareness comesas an unexpected visitor.Welcome and entertain them all!Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,who violently sweep your houseempty of its furniture,still, treat each guest honorably.He may be clearing you outfor some new delight.The dark thought, the shame, the malice,meet them at the door laughing,and invite them in.Be grateful for whoever comes,because each has been sentas a guide from beyond.Doing the things that scare us does not mean we ignore the parts of us that are scared. It means we walk alongside our fear. We acknowledge and honor our fear, while courageously leading with the resonance of our Soul. What scares you? What are you resonant with, but the ‘voices of comfort’ are loudly discouraging you to do? Use this inquiry as a journal prompt, comment below, or hit reply. I would love to hear if you want to share. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

It is with great tenderness and genuine humility that I would like to introduce the new title and energy of this space: ReMothering. Up until now this publication has been called Matriarch, which is a powerful word and symbol. Matriarchal energy is compelling, intense, passionate, and refined. Matriarch has a true Queen current. I love it. Holding this formidable Mature Feminine energy in the world is definitely part of my unique medicine.However, this spring and summer have brought so much to the surface. This has been a time of reckoning and revelation for me, as for so many of you I am sure, because we are connected. I have softened in ways I didn’t expect. I have been humbled in ways that were ultimately quiet and gentle, yet profound. So much of my personal experience with awakening before these recent months has come through suffering. I have experienced awakening through big life experiences that were painful, shocking, and violent. I have experienced awakening through feeling so deeply uncomfortable in my body and life that if something didn’t change I would have had to end my life. I have experienced awakening through substance abuse and self harm. I have experienced awakening through fighting with myself so much that ultimately I had no other choice than to surrender. These were all experiences I am deeply grateful for as they led me to who and where I am today, but they were all severely excruciating processes. But the last few months have been the first time I have felt like I was simply blooming. No force. No excess pain (still plenty of pain, as “there is no coming to consciousness without pain,” Carl Jung), but no unnecessary suffering. It has been a gentle opening to something different and completely new.The Matriarch wasn’t the archetype that carried me through me this one, it was The Great Mother or the Collective Nurturer, as I have called her before. ReMothering isn’t a static word or concept. It’s a verb. It implies an ongoing process; maybe a process we can experience in our own individual ways as well as together. I know in my heart, womb, and Soul that the world needs more Mothered Mothers and Mothered Women. I call this the Mother-Continuum. Whether you’re a daughter, a daughter who wants to be a mother, a young mother, a seasoned mother, a grandmother, and beyond; you are on the Mother-Continuum. If you are not a mother yourself, you have come from a mother and that’s all that matters here. We are recognizing of the legacy of the Love of The Mother that sustains us all. We all deserve to feel the complete but unintimidating, huge but gentle, unshakable and unconditional love of The Mother. We can all remember how to access this simple and stable love within our own bodies, offer it to ourselves first and foremost, then offer it to our loved ones and eventually out into the world. This is my intention with ReMothering. Creating a space rich in the love of The Mother, so that it may nourish those that come into contact with it. This isn’t just all touchy-feely new-age gobbly gook, The Mother knows about practicality. She is a master of the systems and structures that hold us in the rhythms that nurture and feed us. So, this space will have some very clear deliverables. As a free subscriber you will receive these personal essays and recordings of me reading my personal essays. As a celebratory gift for the launch of the ReMothering, for the next month I am also offering all free subscribers my Deep Nutrition Framework, which is a prioritized list of what to focus on when it comes to building a diet and lifestyle that nourishes you and the people you love on all levels. As a paid subscriber for $7/month or $77/year you will receive my essays, Deep Nutrition Framework, as well as: * My newly updated Meal Planning Guide (with lots of easy, simple, deeply nourishing recipes for the whole family). * Monthly (at least) Nourishing Tips, Metabolically Supportive Recipes, Meal Plans, Rituals and Ways of Connecting to the Seasons, Nature, and Your Body. * ReMothering Village subscriber chat, where you can share pictures of the food you cook, recipes, parenting tips, gratitudes, personal shares and anything that you feel pertains to this ReMothering process. I am envisioning this being a place where we can crowd source ReMothering resources, practices, food info, parenting ideas, tools, and provide sacred witnessing, reflection and mirroring to each other. Thank you for being here. I am available for any questions or clarifications you might have.I appreciate your time and energy here, immensely. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

I have been contemplating the real meaning of humility. I see such a lack of genuine humility in the wellness/personal development spaces. As a provider in this space, especially on social media, there is an omnipresent drive to position yourself as the one who ‘knows.’ You need to have a hook— a way to grab peoples’ attention in the first few seconds as someone scrolls on by. A society of people who are searching for saving and sound-bite-solutions, produces a an assortment of vendors playing the role of savior and giving oversimplified answers. Where is the humility on either side of this equation?What is True Humility? I have come to believe that true humility has nothing to do with shirking praise. It is not feigning meekness or modesty at your achievements. It is not believing yourself too weak or incapable of impact. Humility is not saying “Oh jeez! Please, stop! You don’t have to do that!” (All the while loving every second of acclaim and compliments.) It is not pretending that you don’t need or like recognition or validation. Humility is as much not an inferiority complex as it is not a superiority complex. One of the spiritual texts I come back to again and again is the The Way of Mastery. Concerning humility it says: “Genuine humility flows from the deep-seated recognition that you cannot save yourself, that you are created and not Creator, that you are effect and not cause (in an absolute sense), that something called Life is not yours, that there is something beyond your capacity of containment and intellectual understanding. And if that something ever decided to give up loving you, you would cease to exist.” In other words, real, true humility is an in-the-body recognition that without Source Energy, God, Universal Intelligence, The Great Mystery you would do and be nothing. Really sit with this a moment. Let it wash over you and in you. No matter where you are or what you are doing, really allow this fact into your body: the thing responsible for your very existence is unfathomable to your mind. You cannot know it. How does that make you feel? When I feel into it, I feel a lot of things. I feel a deep relief and a great fear. I feel simultaneously like weeping with grief and cackling with ecstasy. I feel terrified and completely electrified, at the same time. I feel a deep, resonant, quaking Truth in my bones and through my center. This is true humility.The Power of Dreamwork I have been working intentionally with my dreams in the style of Marion Woodman and Carl Jung for about a year.Dreamwork has been an unending source of humility for me. I feel inexperienced with the language, while at the same time feeling highly attracted and resonant with it. I feel like a total rookie, but also clear that it is for me. As someone who has identified as an ‘experienced practitioner’, who has genuinely built my life and career around my own interests and spiritual seeking (hello 1/3 profile in Human Design), I may have gotten a bit stuck in a rut of feeling like I knew what I was doing and had done it all.I have done a lot. I have had more experiences in my 37 years than many people have had in lifetimes. And yet, as the saying goes, the more you know, the more you know you do not know. Stepping earnestly into the world of Jungian dream analysis has given me humbling experience after humbling experience with just how much I do not know. It has shown me how little attention I have give my Dream Maker, my Soul, the subconscious part of me. The part that is actually most connected to the Great Mystery. Every single night our dreams are filled with symbols, images, stories… subconscious material that we can choose to work with or not. I used to think dreams were just psychological castoffs; unimportant details being sifted and reorganized from our days. This is, on a small level, true. Our dreams can largely be our psyches trying to synthesize and rebalance all the information and experiences we’ve taken in throughout our waking life. Our dreams are not junk, however. They are not lifeless jibber jabber. They may be full of content we do not understand, but they are alive with metaphor; the language of the Soul. When we write our dreams off as nonsensical or just weird interpretations of what happened to us in our waking life, we lose out on the Wisdom staring back at us. One of my most spiritually fulfilling practices is to look out onto the natural world and feel how it is looking back at me. This is what I am doing with my dreamwork, acknowledging that there is some part of me, I like calling it my Dream Maker or my Soul, attempting to communicate with me. I am looking at my dreams and seeing and feeling them look back at me. Dreamwork is quiet work. It’s not work done out in the world. It’s done at home, in my journal, in silence, and within my very own psyche. There is zero flashiness to it. And it’s some of the most deeply rewarding work I’ve done with myself and ultimately it is for no one else, but me. Shamanism and Dreamwork When you choose to practice ‘dream weaving’ you start to see and feel patterns, insights, realizations, and assimilations within yourself. It’s like your own personal shamanic journey created by your own personal Shaman (your Soul) each and every night. As Marion Woodman said, “The more you work with your dreams and your unconscious, and honor it, the more you understand it and it understands you.”Shamanic journeys are simply connecting you to this dream world and dream state in a more conscious way. This is what we do by working with our dreams. We bring consciousness to the unconscious, within us. We see that there are different forms of consciousness all around us. We are expanding our consciousness. So much of shamanic journey work is simply allowing our imaginations to run and move without the narrowing influence of the programmed egoic mind. Imagination is how you access the shamanic realms (without drugs). Dreams are as well. Dreamwork has shown me a new level and depth of unconsciousness within myself. As I build a relationship with my own Dream Maker I cultivate a relationship with the magical, feeling, intuitive, mysterious aspects of myself through the guidance of the bigger, wider part of Myself that lives unconfined by our consensus reality. My mind doesn’t really get it. And that’s precisely how I know it’s the place I need to be in and explore. We ‘experienced practitioners’ think we are out here ‘working with our shadows,’ ‘figuring out our patterns,’ and making some headway on comprehending our deeper selves while filtering it all through our conscious understanding. We think we are moderately far up the mountain peak of enlightenment, that we have made some noticeable dent in the meal that is a Soul’s journey to consciousness, but what weaving with my dreams has shown me is that the sheer amount of unconscious material I have to work with is endless.It’s like an iceberg. What we are conciously aware of is the part of the iceberg on the surface of the water. The unconscious is not only the lower, massive, under water part of the iceberg, but the dark oceanic waters as well. Its vastness cannot be overstated. We could never fully understand our motives. We are never going to totally comprehend our unique path. We will never know all the pieces and parts that are driving our own becoming. We cannot see all the lenses we perceive reality through. We aren’t meant to. It’s not how human life works. It’s not the experience we came here to have. Maybe when our spirits leave our bodies we will be able to access a higher vantage point, but until then, here we are. While here in these human forms, the idea that we could somehow comprehensively figure ourselves out, with our small intellects, lacks genuine humility.Humility When Giving and Receiving MedicineThe amount of information available to us nowadays is shock-inducing. We can find the answers to literally any query we may have in a matter of seconds. We can ask Chat to summarize the entire internet for us on any subject we find ourselves wondering about. It can be so hard to imagine how little we know, especially when we can know so much, so quickly.We are also inundated by all sorts of advertising, algorithms, sales tactics, and general lack of authenticity every minute we choose to engage with any source of media. This can leave us feeling inferior, superior, angry, confused, and just plain overwhelmed. All of these things play in to our subconscious states. Everything we engage with takes up psychic space. We are so wildly impressionable.This is another humbling realization, just how little awareness and control we have around what is influencing us at any moment. It can feel so good to feel like we have got it figured out. It can feel like the safety we have always longed for. On one level, isn’t that what we are hungrily searching for? The answers? The secrets? The keys to life? The ways we’ll be safe and protected and stable forever? What is that thing you find yourself endlessly pining for? Money? A partner? A career? Fame? Power? A home? To be truly seen or loved? We all have some weak spot, or many weak spots. We all have some tender, raw, trembling desire (probably coming from a wound) that we might do things we are not proud of to acquire. Humility is recognizing this about ourselves. It is understanding that we do not know all we think we know, that we could never know. Again, recognizing that we only exist because of a The Great Mystery. Even though we think we know what reality is, we could easily be tricked or persuaded or enchanted at the prospect of getting something our unintegrated wounded parts secretly yearn for or believe they need.Humility is to know and honor that these desperate parts exist within us and understand that we may not see them until they’ve already been driving our behavior or choices.I remember when I was 8 years into running a business only to discover that my inner teenager was

I have been taking a social media break over the summer. It’s been about 2 months I’ve intentionally not engaged with social media. I go on to check my messages and respond to things once in awhile, but other than that I am not on it. For someone who spent the last 10 years (with one 6 month break around when my second daughter was born) building a social media account and showing up there pretty much every day, this has made me feel a lot of things. I knew I had to take a break when I really saw and, more importantly, felt fully in my body, how being on instagram at the capacity I was, was undeniably going against my values of nourishment and presence. Integrity: Why I Chose to Take an Instagram Break I recently read this definition of integrity from Amy May: “Integrity is the alignment of what you think, what you say and what you do.” About six months ago, I saw, with full, blinding clarity, that the way I related with instagram was not nourishing me or my family. I felt myself constantly being pulled into the digital sharing of my life versus actually living my life. I found myself preferring the ‘social engagement’ I received on instagram over my real life community connections. I noticed that if something cool or exciting or novel happened in my actual life, my first response was to think about how I would share it on instagram, instead of actually being in the experience itself. I noticed how when I was sitting down to eat dinner or relax on the couch I was much more likely to grab my phone and start scrolling than I was to be with or connect with my kids and husband right in front of me. This narrative around social media use and its insidious, dehumanizing qualities is a well discussed phenomena, most of us here on the internet are abundantly, conciousnly aware of it. Those of us that use social media regularly have heard it and felt it all before. We’ve all probably felt guilty or shameful about the way we use instagram as a pacifier at times. It wasn’t the first time I had noticed myself being hijacked like this, but it was the first time I really connected the dots between my social media use and my own aligned integrity with the frequency of nourishment. There was also this new dissatisfaction I was feeling with my ‘real’ life. Some way that my actual life just wasn’t filling me up in the ways I knew it could. I was starting to notice more and more low level, almost subconscious, uneasiness and disquiet, a lack of contentment that followed me around like a piece of toilet paper stuck to my shoe. I know the signs of addiction. One of the ways I know addiction is running the show in my life, is an isolated dissatisfied jitteriness, a pining for the one thing and not being able to enjoy anything else fully. There is an always-on-my-mind rumination that starts to surface. It brings me into myself in a harmful way, in way that makes me feel separate, hollow, and desperate. It disconnects me from those around me.There was all the sudden no longer a doubt instagram had become an addiction. The Personal is Political Poised at precipice of needing something to change, I heard my ‘business owner voice’ loud and clear saying: “You can’t stop. This is how you generate an income for yourself. This is how you ‘find clients.’ You’ve spent so much energy, time, and attention on building this platform and audience, you can’t just let it go!” And yet… I could not unsee how much lifeforce I was giving to this entity that is soul-less.If I am to be the change I wish to see in the world and be in alignment and integrity with my teachings and messages, I could not continue. If I was going to be the mother, wife, daughter, friend, and person that I would like to be, I could not continue. If I believe that I serve the highest and best good in the Universe when I am full, nourished, juicy, and grounded, I could not continue. If I believe that nourishment is possible in this modern world, I could not continue. If I believe that integrity, alignment, and authenticity are the most powerful frequencies, I could not continue. This is so much more important than my business. This is so much more important than money. This is so much more important than anything else. These are places we have to hold our values so strongly if we really want to see a New Way and new paradigm emerge. If we want to see a paradigm that truly values integrity, beauty, authenticity, nourishment, and the power of Life itself, we need to value those things more than our own fear. This is where, as Marion Woodman says, “The personal is political.” Through our choices and what we choose to follow within our own lives, we choose what we take part in creating. We are culture creators with each of our very personal choices. I am not on a crusade of better-than. I do not judge you if you use instagram. In all likelihood, after this summer I will probably find a way to use it with more consciousness. I am on my path and you are on yours. I trust both of those paths, completely and infinitely. How could I ever know what is best for you? How I Feel Off of Instagram In the last two months since I got off instagram, I can feel my nervous system settling in a way it hasn’t in many, many years (maybe since I got on social media). I feel genuinely happier. I keep searching for more a more precise way to say that, but that’s really it. I just feel happier. I feel more content.I feel more excited about my real, in person life. I have more energy for depth and connection for those friends that don’t live close to me, but that I value deeply. I feel more bonded with my children and like I have more capacity to hold space for them in their hard and frustrating moments. I feel like I am more engaged and am leading my family with more clarity and precision, instead of just reacting to what is thrown at me. I have more space for my husband and find myself way more interested in intimacy. I find myself feeling more gratitude and heart opening for him and our life together. More genuine connection. What I think, what I say and what I do are endlessly more aligned. Performance and Narcissism Being off Instagram, I have been struck, like a clanging bell, by the amount of performance social media creates. As someone who had the conscious intention to be completely and totally ‘real’ on instagram, to not use filters and to not only show the highlight reel of my life but share some of the hard stuff too, I’ve realized how it’s actually impossible not to perform at least a little. When you are creating content for other people, you are always going to be orienting externally. No one would be on instagram if they weren’t interested in having other people see them. That could be for business purposes or creative goals, but it’s going to create this view where a person is constantly putting themselves as the object of other people’s gaze. This creates an energy of performance and breeds narcissism. Narcissist is a big buzz word these days and I’m not going to get deep into the pop psychology that surrounds it, but it comes from the Greek Mythology story of Narcissus, who becomes so enamored with his own reflection that he eventually dies from unrequited love.Think about instagram, YouTube, and reality TV personalities, they are entertaining. They create a caricature of a person, which doesn’t allow that person to be multifaceted and nuanced (like a true human). Instagram promotes characters, not people. It puts people into black and white, pro and anti. It doesn’t have space for the nuance that true connection and understanding requires. This doesn’t have to be wrong or bad, it’s just true.If I create a character for myself and I play that character for years and years for my audience, I eventually come to believe I am that character. This can create a numbness. A despondency that can make people depressed. It’s what I imagine happens to celebrities, on a smaller scale, but more prolifically, considering the way anyone can be an ‘influencer,’ these days. If you create content on social media you know how blatantly narcissistic it can be. Photographing or videoing yourself constantly. Looking through and editing photos and videos of yourself. Listening to yourself over and over again. Writing about your life, your thoughts. Again, always orienting to yourself as the center, the ‘main character’ energy. I don’t believe there is anything inherently wrong with promoting myself or creating content that centers me, but I think it is very important to be aware of the way it can plant seeds of narcissism. It creates a tendency to preform, center myself, and speak in aggrandizements and half truths. Even with the best of intentions, I would argue that social media will make anyone who uses it regularly more narcissistic. It’s not a reason not to use it, but it is a trade off to be wary of. The story of Narcissus, is the story of so many “influencers,” big and small. It is possible to get so obsessed with ourselves, that we start to miss our lives. We miss our families. We miss the very humble lessons being offered to us. We get so caught up in the self importance that we forget we are but a speck on a blade of glass, spinning through infinate space. We forget how to live be in community with other flawed and unimportant humans. We forget how to really live our lives from a place really rooted in reality. My Take I don’t have anything figured out here. I’m very much in process with this all.I do not judge anyone or myself for where we are on our paths. I love performance. I love the bigness it can bring. I love when people allow something energetically big and archetypal to roar through them and let the watchers experience something almost super natural and spiritual. I love people going big with their expression and thoughts. I also think it’s important to understand that social media is not real. No matter how real you try to keep it or the person your watching is trying to keep it. Life happ

I have been stalled in my formal writing. I write furiously in my journal. Producing pages of nonsensical dialogues with my many selves and internal voices. I write out my dreams in painstaking detail. Pouring over them, trying to unravel and unwind the messages my unconscious Soul is communicating with me. I write out conversations I wish I’d had or feel like I need to have, but also know to say the things I wish to say would not be kind or compassionate or true, in the long run. I write letters I’ll never send. I write poems no one will ever see. I write from altar egos trying on what it would feel like to be completely different than I am. I write statements in the margins of books I’m reading, on random scraps of paper I find around the house, in the notes app of my phone, of potential topics I would like to think and write about more deeply. I have a notes folder called “inspiration” with close to a thousand half-started articles and essays and incomplete thoughts. It’s all felt dense; heavy, lately. There is never a time when my mind is quiet enough to focus, always thinking of who needs a dentist appointment, what to cook for dinner and playing mental Tetris with my schedule so I can squeeze in a walk or workout. When I do get a moment to write with a seemingly solid a thread to follow, I only find another knot. Like a pile of tangled gold chain necklaces. It feels impossible. So all my writing has stayed spread out, like a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle. I’ll come back to it later. There are times in my life when writing has felt easy. I have so many things to say and I just have to let my fingers fly around the keys and something relatively cohesive spills out. Sometimes it feels like God is just whooshing through me and I just have to get out of the way. Those are the days for which the slogging becomes worthwhile. When I’m writing a lot, I am in the habit of translating my thoughts and feelings to words. Everything worth doing in this life, takes practice. Writing is no different. Expression is no different. We have to actually express imperfectly; messily, before we can express in a way that fully lands for ourselves and for others. I am not a great writer by any accounts. But, I have indeed put many, many hours into the practice. I have been writing here on Substack since 2021. And I started with a 100 days of writing practice, which I completed. I think there are over 200 articles on this account. I don’t write weekly, but I’ve written one or two articles a month since beginning, sometimes more.Before Substack, I wrote on Facebook, instagram, blogs, newsletters, for years. I have journaled since I was 10. As I think about the sheer amount of writing I’ve done, I’m realizing I should probably be a better writer than I am. Writing is medicine for me. When I first started this Substack it was called “Medicine Writing.” I was a brand new mother of two really needing a creative outlet. Those first 100 days of writing were me committing to a practice of spending time with myself each day. I will not forget the moment I sat down to write my first Substack article. It was early morning, the sun was rising, breaking through the mist that had settled around the river below my home. My babies and husband were still sleeping and I had a hot cup of cacao steaming next to me and my computer open to a blank page. I felt like I could take a deep breath for the first time in a long time. There is something very healing about allowing other people to see you in your process. The perceived accountability of other people watching you show up for what you’ve committed to can be the thing that keeps you going when you’d rather not push through the humps of resistance. I don’t feel any external pressure to write publicly at the moment. I am having a very family-oriented summer and enjoying the slower pace immensely. However, I am very familiar with the feeling of what I will call: expression-constipation. It feels a lot like a head too full of ideas. It feels like you’ve eaten too much dinner and it hasn’t quite started leaving your stomach. It’s uncomfortable. It makes you tired and complacent, sleepy and forgetful. It makes you apathetic and unenthusiastic. Sometimes you can feel very “busy,” but you just can’t seem to focus on one thing. When you do have something you want to say or express, this overfull fogginess makes the resistance to saying it have a little more weight and feel more tempting. Whereas, when you’re in the practice of expressing, that resistance will burn off quickly. There is so much of this apathy in the world. So much non-committal, draggy, tired, stuck energy towards our own inevitable and necessary regeneration. We are alchemical creatures. We are here to transform, shift, learn, grow, and flow, not stagnate and idle. I read a quote the other day from Joanna Macy, “Apathy is the refusal to suffer.” Reading this was like finding a key piece of the jigsaw puzzle under the coffee table. So much could finally fit together. This swelling discomfort I’ve been experiencing is the exact thing I need to move towards. As I refuse to feel it, experience it, allow it, I am ‘refusing to suffer’. I am refusing to allow the alchemical, creative process to happen. I am postponing the inevitable ever-changing reality of my humanity. This is not a small concept. Nor is it easy to embody or take in. But it is relatively simple. I am reminded of another anchoring statement I have used throughout the years, “Whatever is arising….love that.” Writing is one of the ways I turn towards my own suffering and feel it. It is the way I acknowledge and make sense of my own jumbled thoughts. It is the way I work out what is me and what isn’t me. Writing is one of the ways I stay fully alive, awake to the burning transmutation happening within me and without me at all times. It keeps me as conscious as I can be of the pain and joy of this Life.Thank you for being a witness to my process and writing. My prayer is that you find something in these writings that sparks this aliveness within you. May we all be a little more willing to feel what we have been refusing to, so that we may awaken from our slumber and turn our open heart towards the world again. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

For over a decade I have been sharing my life and my work on instagram. I have slowly been coming to terms with the truth instagram it is no longer a place I want to spend a lot of attention and energy. There are so many reasons for this, and most of them you’ve probably heard a million times, so I won’t go into all the harrowing statistics about social media and how it negatively affects our health and our ability to think critically and independently. I tell myself that I need to be on instagram for ‘my business’ but I have done enough inner work in my lifetime, I know better than to really think this fear based belief is a fact. So, I have decided to take a break from instagram for the summer and put my attention and focus here on Substack. Some the questions I want to know the answers to:How do I feel without instagram as a daily activity? Can I run my business, generate clients, without it?Will I feel disconnected from friends if I’m not on it?I’m feeling the desire to do more focused work, research, and contemplative writing and reading. I’m craving more deep focus.I love instagram for all it’s given me and allowed me to create from just my phone.It truly is such a miracle in the potential it has to connect people.I’ve made and sustained a lot of very cherished connections on instagram. In my personal life and practice I am in a reckoning and reclamation of my attention back to what feeds, nourishes, and moves me towards how I want to feel in my life. I am deepening my devotion to service and my unique work in the world, and somewhat paradoxically, this is calling me to spend more time in connection with nature, quiet, stillness, and true, whole self listening. True focus is such a lost art.I made three posts over on instagram as I took my leave:1. Who Am I? 2. Ways to Work with Me. 3. What I am in Service To? I am sharing a longer form version of the What I am in Service To post here.What I am in Service ToYes, I run a practice that needs to generate money.Yes, I charge for my services.Yes, I value having comforts, safety, and the freedom having a steady income allows.And, the reason I do the work I do is not for the money or the validation.I could do a lot of other things that would make a lot more money.I could find a high paying position somewhere. I have a lot of amazing skills. I could run my practice in a way that was more “scale-able”I could charge a lot more for what I do.I could find “high paying” clients.I could make my work exclusive or create a system that would allow more people to access it and me to work less. Maybe I will do some of those things someday.But only if it would be in service to do so.Because, the reason I do what I do and offer what I offer and offer it how I offer it; is because it is what is most in service to the energy and frequency that I call: The Mother.The Mother is where all nourishment is derived and being in service to Her is my mission in life.The Mother frequency is related to the frequency of Life itself, The Father, Divine Union, The Family, and humanity in its most flawed and perfect forms. And so, I am also in service to these frequencies and you’ll see them woven throughout my work and offerings.This is not just some fluff I say out front and then in the backend disregard based on metrics or what’s popular or logical. This is my very real and solid barometer and ultimate decider of every step I take, in my personal life, in my business, in my soul.“What is in service here?” is always my first and most prioritized question. Serving the legacy of humanity is my mission.It is crystal clear to me.My personal practice and journey brings me further and further into alignment and integrity with this energy. It’s a tight rope to walk at times because there is very little room to be out of integrity with Life and Nourishment. (hence the social media break when I feel like I’ve recently had the most traction I’ve ever had with social media. It really make no “logical” sense.)This service to The Mother is the most foundational aspect of my life.I follow Her. I serve Her. I am not confused about who makes this Life I live possible. I do not get bewildered about who deserves the accolades. It is Her. It is always Her. Not me. Does this mean I’m no fun and all somber seriousness and never celebrate myself?No! That would be not be in service to The Mother or Life itself, would it?Does this mean I don’t have parts of me that wish I could just run away, lay on a beach all day? Of course I do. And in some ways, that is sometimes necessary for me to be in service. The Mother knows how to take care of our earth and bodies. She knows when to say, “That is enough. Time to rest.”Serving The Mother definitely is not an all work and no play gig.I am only human. And I own my creational power, fully, because She lives in and through me.I will mess up. Just because I know my mission doesn’t mean I will carry it out perfectly.I do not serve mothers or fathers or children. I do not serve people. Not myself. I serve a bigger, broader, deeper current. As I move into this summer of making myself a little less available (via social media break) I just wanted to be abundantly and crystal clear what it is I serve.I am not just some “business owner” making a living off of coaching people (there is nothing wrong with that, by the way), I am deeply devoted to something much bigger and this is weaved into every thing I write, offer, and hold.May my Life, words, transmission, being-ness be of service.May I honor all of Life.May we remember Her and Her place at the center of our Hearts and Wombs.May we delight in Her presence all around us.May we hold and see ourselves as She holds and sees us.May we all be nourished as we are and remember the abundance of love that is offered all around us.Amen.Who Am I?Professionally.. I teach nourishment for embodiment.It is my intention that through interacting with my work women are more attuned to themselves and their needs and are able to recieve the nourishment of their lives more fully.I am a Master Nutrition Therapy Practitioner (MNTP).I blend my knowledge, experience and extensive training around nutrition, cellular biology and female physiology with my deep practice of divine union in service to creation and Life.My expertise is in the areas of fertility, gut health, female hormonal health, physiology as well as somatic parts work and the spiritual undercurrent of all dis-ease.I approach all my work with clients from a bio-energetic framework. I draw on everything from my embodied experience, spiritual practice and study, my own personal health journey as well as over a decade of working with women; one on one and in groups.Personally.. I am a woman. A mother. A wife. A sister. A daughter. An Earth Friend. A humanity lover.I belong to the Jefferson River Valley in Montana.I love local and seasonal wholesome food prepared with reverence and love, deep laughs, authentic relating and raw honesty, attention to the details and beautiful surroundings.My love language is acts of service and gifts.I am a Manifesting Generator, Emotionally Defined, 1/3 profile in Human Design.I am a Taurus Sun, Sag Moon and Cancer Rising.I feel that working for myself and creating income on my own terms is far safer than being “employed.”I do not trust the medical industrial complex, big food, big pharma, but I believe individuals are mostly good.I find Motherhood to be the greatest and most worthwhile “job” in the world and my greatest spiritual endeavor. I would like more children.I have a very small inner circle, but feel rich in community and am generous with my resources and time.My highest value is freedom, followed by s p a c e.What am I doing here?When I share and write I am transmitting what it feels like to work with me in a professional capacity. This is how I invite people into my work and how I generate income for myself and my family.I am so grateful for the community we’ve cultivated here and the women who consistently engage and reflect back to me that what I am in service to is entirely needed in this world, that my life of service is indeed received and appreciated.I don’t do this work for validation, trust me, it wouldn’t work if I did, but to see the ripples from my unique kerplunk of devotion to Life is always satisfying as it is form of art, creation, and expression.I provide a ton of free content and have been for literally years.Take your time.Come into my field slowly.Look through my feed and links, listen to the Matriarch by Clara Wisner podcast on apple or spotify or read it here on Substack.You’ll get a great feel for if I am for you.You are always welcome.Ways to Work with Me This is a public episode. 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One thing I learned early on in motherhood is that I needed more structure in my life if I was going to hold the responsibility of motherhood in a way that didn’t fully drain me.I think of this similarly to if you wanted to lift (or “hold”) more weight than you have previously at the gym, you would need more physical muscle fibers, or else you would get trapped under the weight and not be able to lift it. Or, just like as a tomato plant grows it needs a tomato cage or wall to climb up or else it becomes a jumbled mess of vines and inaccessible fruit. Our lives can also get too overgrown or heavy for us to hold alone without some solid systems in place to support us.For some reason, however, many of us seem to have the idea that we should be able to pile more and more on ourselves; more tasks, more activities, more responsibilities; and hold it all without any help or assistance (and not show any signs of strain in the process). I believe part of this false line of thinking is a deficiency in our culture of The Mother, or what I’ve called The Collective Nurturer, whose job it is to say, “Stop. That is enough.” She can see from a higher (or maybe lower and more grounded) perspective. She can feel we are moving too fast, with too high of expectations. She is the one who tells us, it’s time to rest and enjoy the fruits of our labor. She is the one who tells us, after a pause of appreciation for how far we’ve already come, “It’s time to reevaluate, readjust. It’s time to put some more support in place.” Because she can see and is tapped into the long game.I have always been a highly functional person. I have always been capable of doing a lot.Since I was 23 years old I have basically only worked for myself, so I’ve always had a ton of flexibility with my schedule and how I spend my time.(Honestly, the main reason I became an entrepreneur was because one of my highest values is freedom.)I love being free to do and spend my time as I see fit. It’s never been hard for me to be self motivated and to move into action.Before I had kids; my days flowed. I would always wake up and do some sort of spiritual practice and eat, but the rest of the day was totally free form.I might have clients, work on the computer, meet up with friends, workout, have meetings, go to the grocery store, travel, go on a hike; whatever. My time was wide and open and that’s how I liked it.When I was pregnant with my oldest I was determined to keep living this way. I hated even making my own schedule too rigid because even that felt like I was being trapped. I rebelled against even my self-made rules. (That’s how much of a rebel I am..haha).I had the idea my baby would sleep when she was tired and I would just bring her everywhere as I kept doing my stuff and it would all be totally fine. HA.I wasn’t going to be one of those mothers that made her whole life revolve around being a mom!I wince, shake my head and chuckle lovingly at this past self of mine that was so (endearingly) clueless about what was about to smack her square in the face.The first 6 months postpartum were all the things postpartum is: sweet, nourishing, exhausting, tender, raw, and a lot like being thrown into the middle of a game you don’t know the rules to. Where the consequences of f*****g up involve the livelihood of a tiny human you now experience as your own heart outside your body.But, for the most part, my husband and I kept flowing.We didn’t meal plan or think about what our “working hours” were. We didn’t think about childcare, but just kind of passed baby Alma back and forth to do whatever work either of us needed to do in the moment (and of course, when she needed to nurse).When Alma was 6 months old it started to become glaringly clear that this “going with the flow” was no longer possible. My inner Mother said, “Stop. This isn’t working for anyone.” I was clear we were going to need some structure; set childcare hours and some clear delineations about family time vs work time. We were going to have to figure out how to have food for us all to eat at regular intervals. Basics to some, but to us, this felt like a radical adjustment.Then I got pregnant again.Just as I am starting to come to terms with the fact my life was going to become way more structured; I was hit with the responsibility of another precious baby on the way.We hired our first nanny around this time and started doing a semi-strict nap schedule with baby Alma. She had decided to stop sleeping at night and I realized that it may be because she is not getting enough sleep during the day with my lackadaisical idea of “she’ll just sleep when she’s tired” but then not actually creating any space for her to fall asleep.This was my first hard learned lesson about the importance of building in more structure as you expand in family and in life: the need for scheduled and regularly available down time with kids.I resisted the nap schedule idea so much until I was pregnant, breastfeeding, and deeply sleep deprived and very desperate, I would try anything; even ….duh duh duuuunn…a nap schedule!As my husband and I committed to creating time in our days to lull baby Alma to sleep by nursing or swaying her back and forth in a carrier, her sleep at night improved and our energy system as family recharged a bit.Another piece of structure we added: childcare.Adding childcare was the first time I had to choose working hours.I recognize this may not be a common experience but before this I just worked, pretty much whenever I needed to. I had very classic entrepreneurial-grind-“boss-babe” vibes. I loved my work, it didn’t always feel grinding. It’s just what I was into. I had lots of freedom and flexibility but I was also very ambitious and driven to “succeed.” I went on vacations, sure, but I would work if I needed to. I probably worked less on weekends. But no time was technically off limits. I was always available to work. I was always creating. Always dreaming and scheming about what was my next offering, idea, or post would be. Once Alma came, I pretty much operated the same. I just worked when I could, but as any mom knows, that “working when you can” with infants and children, is basically a recipe for resentment and/or total chaos and feeling like you’re constantly being pulled between quality time with your family and creative expression.We hired a nanny, now her working hours were my working and self-care hours. I had to be more structured with my work. For me, this is what it really took for me to feel like I could do a good job at being a mama and a good job at my work.I couldn’t just work all the time because all the sudden I wanted to have time that was family time.I started having set days of the week that were my work days.This was really the beginning of what is now so key to the structure in my life that really keeps me grounded and sane, while I hold businesses, my household and a young family.I struggled adding in this structure. I resisted it. I really pushed back against it; but now, I’ve finally really embraced and accepted it; I see so clearly how the more we add to what we need to hold energetically, the more structure we need.If we beat ourselves up because we feel overwhelmed with what our daily lives require of us or because we find ourselves energetically dropping things we care about or we feel disorganized and like we’re barely getting by the majority of the time, I bet it’s not that we need more internal pressure. If this is your experience, I bet you need more structure to hold you. That structure could be internal, eg keeping promises to yourself, creating a schedule that works for you and sticking to it, experiencing yourself as worthy enough to take time for yourself and receive help. But, it could also be that you simply need more help, externally. You might need to hire someone to clean once a month or hire childcare (like I did in my story).You might need to get really real and take things off your plate while you build the stamina to hold the life you’ve been wanting. You might have to make your life much smaller. It is not shameful or regretful to need to downsize. It could be really true in this season of life you’re in. The actions you personally need to take will come from The Nurturer within you and they will be individualized to you and your very beautiful and precious journey. However, so many times we find ourselves in a ditch with our wheels spinning. We’re not going anywhere, but we’re using all of our energy. We just loop around the same issues again and again. Which is also a place we can build deep wisdom from, but a place where we will eventually need to hear the quiet, loving voice of The Mother, saying “Stop. This is enough.” Personally, I am currently feeling really supported. My kids are older (which is such a huge part of me feeling more resourced) and so I have recently been feeling a season expansion coming. From when baby Alma was born up until just recently, our family has been in a season of major stabilization. We grew fast without much structure to hold us, we had to build it as we went and even retroactively, at times. It’s interesting that my health was also a reflection of this. But now, it feels like we have steadied. My health is really burgeoning, just as the Spring season we are in. We feel secure and solid. I have come to recognize this place as the restful, preparation-time plateau before the next big level up.Our family has a lot of potential growth coming.We are coming into a season of change and evolution.There is a lot coming and I can feel that it is time to start putting the scaffolding in place so we can open to this next iteration of us. This is my Nurturer at work. She is the one who senses and sees this. She can see the bigger picture and she has been directing me to soften, take things off my plate, give myself more space. To really open to receive, we have to feel safe. She has been hard at work ensuring my safety.This has looked like

I wrote a Substack post about what nourishment really takes and then I made a little video over on instagram showing what I do to nourish myself in a day.I received a lot of really good questions and comments about what came up for people seeing the practical ways I center nourishment in my life. I also got a lot of comments to the tune of “this seems so hard!” or “I could never do that!” or “That’s not realistic for my life.” In this piece, I am attempting to really parse apart some the intricate reasons for the resistance people have towards whole body nourishment.Nourishment Doesn’t Have to be Your Medicine I have no agenda other than to hold the frequency of nourishment and transmit it. I do not, in any way shape or form, believe that all humans need to value nourishment above all else. We all have our unique paths, journeys, lessons we are here to learn, and work we have to do in the world. Sometimes nourishment isn’t part of your journey. That is totally ok with me.It just so happens that nourishment is one of my highest held values for myself and my family. It is the thing I attune people to in my work in the world. It’s literally and figuratively, what I eat, sleep and breathe.It is important to point out that nourishment has been my teacher for my whole life. My early years, I was extraordinarily undernourished and completely unaware of my body and its needs. I have now made nourishment the center of my world. Initially because of necessity and now out of pure love and desire to love myself as deeply as I can. It really is, in my case, the adage of my biggest wounds being the place of my greatest medicine.Nourishment, as a frequency, continues to teach me more than any other energy I have come into contact with. So, I continue to be immersed in the refinement of this medicine and healing the places where I am still not really in full alignment with it.Other people have other subjects of deep pain and healing in their lives. We all have the seeds within our greatest pain for our greatest potential. And I don’t mean potential in some sort of grand materialistic, conventionally ‘successful’ way, but maybe a quiet beautiful way that is all your own and never “amounts to anything” outside of the way it changes you. Food based nourishment might not be your thing. That is totally ok. Many people live beautiful and fulfilling lives without addressing their physical nourishment on any level.Nourishment, Values, and DiscernmentI value food-based nourishment. So I spend my resources (time, money, energy) on food. It makes sense for me because I value it. There are plenty of things that I value less or don’t value and don’t mind cutting corners on, that other people might be really appalled at. I don’t wear make up and therefore, never spend time or money on it. I do value skincare and spend time and money doing that. There are probably all sorts of things I don’t value that you really do.It can be so key to know what you value. Know your values. Know your standards. Know where it’s worth it to you to spend your resources. That is part of nourishment, being discerning (see: Adult Discernment) with what you spend your resources on.In the 3D world, there are finite amounts of time, energy, and money. There just are. We can talk about the quantum level and I love to live there sometimes and dream there. But when you live a full life here in the 3D there are realities that you cannot deny and are important to come to terms with. When you have a baby to take care of, for example, there can be no doubt in your mind, that your resources are finite. We cannot do it all. We simply cannot. I am a very functional, capable, and efficient person. I can get a lot done. But one of the lessons I’ve learned in the hardest of ways is this: that my energy and my resources are, on one level, are very exhaustible. Being connected to what I value and making discerning decisions about how I spend my time, money, and energy is necessary for me to feel fulfilled, nourished and in alignment.We cannot be nourished if we are leaking our energy, time, and money in all directions. We need clear delineations of what we would like to spend our resources on to live in such a way that feels good, aligned, and like it’s moving us towards what we desire.Nourishment, Embodiment and ReceptionBecause I value nourishment, I attempt to only move at the pace of my embodiment. If I have to force and push myself beyond my capacity to stay with myself just to make dinner because I’m so exhausted, that might be a time when it’s more in service to my nourishment to order a pizza or grab a rotisserie chicken on my way home or hopefully, I stashed away some hot dish casseroles in the freezer, one of my fav ways my past self takes care of my current self).If you can’t cook a meal and clean up the kitchen in an embodied, present way, but you have to force and push, it probably won’t be a nourishing experience because you won’t be able to receive it. You’ll be leaving some part of yourself behind.Am I saying I never push myself to clean up the kitchen at the end of the night? No. I do quite often, but I am gauging myself and if it really was going to bring me far outside myself I might definitely leave it or I would power through and then do something really sweet and nourishing for myself after, like a hot bath with candles or reading while putting my legs up the wall and breathing deeply into my back body.I have to be attuned to myself (see: Self Attunement is the Key to Everything) to know what I need in these moments and not easily collapse into scrolling on my phone or watching TV I don’t even enjoy. A Matriarch is highly attuned to her own needs AND the needs of the others she cares about, at the same time. This doesn’t mean she always puts others’ needs before her own, it just means she is aware of them and takes them in consideration. This is where I think a poor model of mature feminine affects so many women in the realm of nourishment. If we didn’t have a model of what it means to be a woman committed to her nourishment then it doesn’t feel safe and we feel unsafe claiming it for ourselves. Safety is such a big part of being able to receive. You’re not going to truly receive something if you feel unsafe or there are a lot of unknowns involved, because you can’t open. Imagine a closed fist and an open hand. Which one is going to be able to receive something offered to it? There is a finite amount of time. You have a finite amount of energy. This is just a 3D fact. So we do have to be really attuned to ourselves (See: Self Attunement is the Key to Everything article) and the values we want to choose to uphold and be willing to make trades and swaps for the things we don’t value as much. This is where efficiency does matter and commitment to our values does take effort (See: Nourishment Takes Effort).Nourishment and The MotherIf you are here, I am willing to be there is something within you that yearns for a life that is more nourishing on some level.Maybe you wish you enjoyed cooking more.Maybe you wish you knew what to feed your kids so that they grew up robust and strong.Maybe you just have a feeling that you are in some way under nourished and you’re exploring what would remedy that.Maybe you are really well physically nourished but you still feel the ache of hunger for something more in your soul.All nourishment, no matter physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual comes from The Mother. The Mother is where all nourishment is originally derived.When you think of the word nourishment, what picture comes up for you? A table full of scrumptious food? A warm cozy couch full of blankets and a fire cracking in the background? A well used kitchen? Maybe a maternal figure of some sort? A soft and curvy woman? A warm embrace? Something else?I’m willing to bet that whatever it is, it has a feminine feel to it.We are profoundly lacking in the mature feminine principle in this day and age. It is rare to have a maternal model of a nourished and embodied older woman. It is rare to find a real world example of a wise old crone. And because of this, I believe we are severely undernourished as a society.I draw a very strong connection between the lack of modeling of mature feminine energy in the world and the collective experience of the lack of true nourishment.Why Don’t We Allow Nourishment? Generally, people know how to nourish themselves if they just slow down and listen. Everyone knows they should spend less time on screens, less time comparing themselves to others, eat more whole foods, and prioritize their sleep. Everyone knows that nature is healing and that they would be happier if they spent less time being concerned about material gain and more time truly receiving what they already have. We know this.But, why don’t we make these things part of our everyday reality? What is it that keeps us so stuck in the habits and patterns of excess stress and deficiency of that warm and subtle thing that I call nourishment?It is easy to say, “My job keeps me in the stress!” “If only I had more time, then I would nourish myself more!” “It’s everyday modern life that has me so stressed out!” “It’s the way I was raised, I was taught that my worth was dictated by how much I could preform!” “It’s my mother. She didn’t nourish me, so I don’t have a blueprint for nourishment!” “My mind is always spinning! It feels like I can’t catch a break and just be!”These could all be totally true. I don’t doubt your high stress job, feeling super overbooked, modern life, and the way and culture in which you were raised all contribute to your habit of choosing stimulation over rest, even when rest is what you need. I know. I am right there with you.Have your feelings. Be victimized. Acknowledge the ways you are programmed away from nourishment. This is part of it.And then, once you’ve felt that, my question is: ‘So what do we do from here?’So you’re tired, overwhelmed, overbooked, patterned

I am not ‘the best’ at anything.To say that isn’t a very smart ‘marketing strategy’ on my end. We are supposed to claim our expertise.To exude authority.To share things with the certainty of a herd of elephants.To lay out a program with the exact 5 step approach to save your life.There are so many voices out there, so many smart, convicted, and confident voices.And they all have valuable things to say. We love certainty. We love authority. It makes us feel safe. It makes us feel like if we mess up, then it will be someone else’s fault and we won’t have to hold the pain of it.But pain is a teacher.We love the idea of a big Daddy in the sky that’s going to save us from all our indecision, failures, and mistakes.Every time we give up our own responsibility to an authority figure and/or we rely on someone else’s certainty to guide us, we get a little dose of Daddy, and that can feel great, until that Daddy turns out to be another flawed human being, and we are left back where we started, unsure and wavering.The truth is narcissists exist. So do humans with ill-intent, people who are unstable, humans who have been hurt deeply and are playing that out by hurting others. There are people who have hidden their soft vulnerabilities so deep down, behind so many layers of armor, they don’t even know or have access to those parts of themselves anymore.There are people who will take advantage of you and people who you should not and cannot trust. There are plenty of people who put material gain far above their alignment with Life. There are plenty of people who most of us wouldn’t blame one bit for doing this. I would never want to send my daughters out into this world without a healthy dose of skepticism, critical thinking skills, and much encouragement to trust their hearts and guts when it comes to if a person is safe and trustworthy or not.Our world rewards people for being heartless robots. The tougher, the better. The less sleep you can get, the more you can get done. The less needs you have, the stronger you are. The less empathy you have, the higher you climb. The more you can play into and identify other people’s wounds and not be affected by it, the more money you can make. On one level, our modern world breeds insanity.Why do you think we are getting sicker and more mentally unwell every year?When our world is filled with so much darkness, unthinkable cruelty, and torture, how can we be soft and sensitive? How can we have faith? When we need to work 40+ hours a week just to keep our homes and put food on the table, how are we supposed to feel the backlog of grief building up or not be tempted by people selling different ways of being? I believe the only sane response to this, however, is to double down on our humanity. This is why softness is so courageous.Our humanity does not need more certainty, but more curiosity. Our humanity doesn’t need more authorities pontificating from podiums telling the peasants how it is, but more true listening.We need more humility and willingness to do things differently than we ever have.We need more discernment about where we place our attention and who we give our attention to. And recognize that this is where our power lies. The power doesn’t come from the people out there hellbent on doing harm, it lies within us. We need to recognize all the places we have misplaced our power, placed it in authorities, gurus, collective societal programming, and take it back into our own human hearts.We have to stop making material wealth the measure of our success, but instead, make success about how willing we are to meet life with an open heart.Even writing that feels a little cliche, but it’s actually one of the most important ways to bring sanity back into an insane world.Can I soften in the face of this?Can I allow Life to teach me here?Can I allow this thing to touch me?Can I feel it, all the way?Can I let myself be led by something much bigger than myself?Can I let myself open… even here?Can I stay in the tension of opposites, indecision, wavering and not knowing?Can I stay in and with the uncertainty I feel, even if a knight in shining armor offers me clear path forward, so that I may find my own way forward? Can I resist other peoples’ certainty and wait for the click of my own certainty to lead?Can I receive my Life as it is?I am not the best at anything, because ‘the best’ is subjective. ‘The best’ for you, depends on you.The best diet.The best supplement.The best practice.The best teacher.The best advice.It all depends on you and where you are at on your journey.Your journey is yours and no one else’s. It cannot be compared to mine or your friend’s or that-girl-on-instagram’s. Your circumstances are yours and yours alone. For better and for worse. We cannot know another person’s journey. It is theirs. And to pretend that we know is actually quite insulting and what I see as quite broken in the wellness industry. So many people espousing solutions and no one willing to sit in the tension of the symptoms and what they are teaching the individual, on their individual journey. I will not tell you the ways you are broken so as to tee you up for the ways I can fix you.I will not align with systems that suggest anything other than each human being as a child of god, because, to me at my point on my journey, this is what sustains humanity.I will not sacrifice my peace, wellbeing, physiology, my children and therefore my future children’s well being or physiology, for material gain. This is what is being asked of me at this moment. And, I am deeply flawed and 100% human. I am learning, growing, expanding, and changing always. I do not have anything fully figured out.One thing I choose to settle into is that Life is sacred.If nothing else, I make it sacred. I make the not knowing sacred.I build my life and my choices on faith in this Life and in humanity. Not in a bypass-y way that makes my eyes sprout hearts for every single person that comes across my path or blinds me to the atrocities of the world. (Although, on a good day, one of my practices is to see all humans through the eyes of God.) It doesn’t mean I don’t doubt. It doesn’t mean I know what you should do. It doesn’t mean I have answers. It simply means I choose to make what happens to me in my life, sacred. I choose to give my life meaning beyond my small self. Not because it has to mean something, but because devotion anchors my nervous system. It is functional. Faith quite literally gives us a capacity for wholeness when without we feel broken, fractured, and torn apart. I don’t know anyone who has gone through something truly heartbreaking and come out the other side ok who didn’t lean on faith and the idea that something mysterious and bigger than them is going on. Faith and devotion allow me to keep my attention on love, sacredness, joy, and belonging in the midst of the suffering around me.As a song I love to sing to my girls as they’re falling asleep goes:“I am grateful to be. Breathing, heart beating, joyous and free. Even though hard times are all around me, I am still grateful to be.”It doesn’t mean we bypass the hard times or we pretend they aren’t happening. For me, devotion literally gives me nourishment as I feel the darkest corners of my psyche and experience. Devotion fortifies me, so that I may face the world with an open heart and feel what is there for me. Faith connects me to something bigger than myself so that I can withstand and alchemize more than I could on my own. We all need a little extra space in this crazy world. Devotion gives me that space. And it is a choice I make every day and every moment. I do my best everyday to BE the thing that I am teaching and transmitting. This is what I am committed to.That means my “business” and money isn’t the most important thing and it never will be.Service to Life, even when that looks like making less money or having less “followers/engagement”, is.And it starts at home with me, always.It isn’t important for me to look extra special, I am special to my family and my children and that is enough.We are all standing on the shoulders of giants after all. There really aren’t any new “teachings” or “codes” at this point that you can’t access by getting quiet and listening to the whispers of your very bones and sitting underneath a tree and opening your senses and listening.I will point you back there, to your bones, to your ancestors, to the trees, to your pain and your wounds and the lessons they are teaching you.I will point you back to your symptoms, to curiosity, and to your own wisdom.I will share my experiences and stories of my life. I will reflect back what I see when it is appropriate.I will share the things I have studied, researched, the patterns in the collective I see and that I have contemplated.Maybe these will ping something for you to search out and experiment with.If we work together or have any sort of relationship, I am sure you will teach me and I will teach you.“We are all just walking each other home,” as Ram Dass said. Stop and really be with and listen to the people around you tomorrow, you’ll see that the world is filled with teachers and wisdom keepers and they come in all shapes, sizes and the most surprising packages. God is coming through each experience, person, tree, mountain, animal you interact with, you just have be open to receive it. You don’t have to trust them. You don’t have to agree with them. You don’t even have to like them. The Buddha said the next Buddha will be the sangha (community).This isn’t some special community or commune, but literally the people around you, right now.Listen, open, be receptive, and be discerning at the same time. It’s not about the personality in front of you, it’s about seeing the child god within them and within you. The Matriarch understands that different situations require different handling. She knows her worth and her power doesn’t come from someone else or fitting in, but in her devotion

I don’t know what to call the journey I am on. I’ve been writing about it for years at this point.Is it a spiritual awakening journey? Is it a personal development journey? Is it the journey into motherhood? Is it a body or healing journey? Is it my online journal?At this moment I’m inclined to say it is simply: my life journey.It is the journey of living a life with more and more conscious awareness.It is my singular and simple expression of an internal searching and finding process.After many years of big explosions, realizations, changes, transformations and alchemizations, I have reached a Still Point.The image that comes to mind is me, as a surfer, having paddled through and traversed the intensity of the breakers, sitting on my surfboard, water still and clear as glass around me. Being able to see far into the horizon in all directions. I can see from a more steady place what I have been through, where I have been, and ultimately what I have created for myself.No one else created this for me.I did.I did the work.I used my arms, my legs, my sheer force of will, my devotion to something bigger than me, to get myself here.And now, I need and get to really take it all in.From this location I am at now, I really have the blessing of being able to see everything from a new vantage point. There are times in our life we get to really appreciate what we’ve built and what we’ve created; the good, the bad and the ugly, and I have reached one of these points on my life journey.I’ve been inquiring into the deepest reaches of my heart and soul why it is that I share and what it is that I’m sharing.There is so much noise in our world.So many inputs coming from all sides.There is a cacophony of voices with strong opinions and activating ideas. And there are plenty of platforms for these voices to be projected and spewed out upon the world.There are a select few voices saying things I feel deeply need to be said and heard. These voices seed more love, more authenticity, and more realization that we are, in fact, all walking each other home.There are far more voices out there that just love to hear themselves talk and are using their words to prop up their small-s-self aggrandizement. Or feeling like, if they aren’t heard, they don’t exist.The amount of voices overwhelms me, as I’m sure it does you. We are all so desensitized to this constant inflow of other people’s expression that we can’t really be discerning, let alone really process what we consume.We are all walking around absolutely stuffed to brim of other peoples’ ideas, tips and tricks, little quotes, funny video clips, pings from messages bombarding us every few minutes, and sound bites.Without a still point, a serious pause to digest, a chance to look up from the waves of life that have been crashing over our heads, it’s hard to really understand where we are in time and space.I have been feeling that my spiritual body has been quite far ahead of my physical form for sometime now. I believe this to be a puzzle piece in the mosaic of the contributors to my health crash 3 years ago and part of my continued health issues. I said to a friend the other day that it’s like my spiritual body clock is at 10pm and my physical body clock is at 4pm.I don’t necessarily think it is true for our spiritual and physical bodies to be perfectly synced, but there is a point at which we have to take some space to really allow our vessels to catch up.It is clear to me this is where I have landed.Doubling down on the explosive spiritual awakenings at this point in my journey would be like trying to escape the season of winter.All things in nature go through cycles and part of these cycles are always a period of rest and release. The trees drop their leaves. The energy is drawn in toward center. The grass up top dies. The uterine lining sheds. There is a pause, a darkness. A re-gathering of strength for next rebirth cycle.When we override this truth in micro or macro ways there will always be consequences.On a macro level we see this with our collective societies’ obsession with always being up-and-to-the-right! More money! Bigger companies! Greater “influence”! More likes! More “engagement”!On a micro level it’s our obsession with coffee and stimulants and the idea that we can’t trust our bodies and their needs for rest, space, nature, food, breaks and screen free down time. “It must be something else making fatigued and exhausted! It must be an infection or complicated hormonal issue! It couldn’t possibly that my physical body’s basic needs aren’t met with the processed food, 10 hours of screen time a day, and 6 hours of sleep I give it each night!”Stimulants actually only feel good to people who have low energy, because it gives you a short term expensive boost to where you actually would always be if you had sufficient energy. If you have adequate, organic energy, stimulants make you feel jittery, shaky, uneasy, and paranoid and you would avoid them.[Read more about this idea of burnout here]I believe part of the reason “uppers” are so addictive is because of how collectively burnt out we are. People do cocaine and for the first time they have a plethora of energy. It’s not organic energy but it’s something more than burnt out.When we are burnt out we will consciously and unconsciously seek out things that will stimulate energy production in our bodies. We will reach for caffeine, sugar, simple carbohydrates, drama, chaos, and situations that activate a sympathetic nervous system response. Because these things gives us false energy.Burn out is different from simply being tired or fatigued. It is beyond fatigue. The body is really in a place where it has no charge, no juice. This is the potential place we end up in when we don’t listen to the whispers and knocks from the fatigue our body is showing us.And so I am in this place of listening. I have been listening. But there is a new intensity with which I am listening to the body. I am listening on even a subtler level.I can feel how I am actually on the precipice of a totally new imprint here with my body.I have been in and out of burnout since adolescence. I believe this was one of the reasons I started abusing substances at the age of 13.I have an imprint of going hard, pushing myself, partially because of how exhausted I always was. I had to create extra pressure so that my body could rev up enough to have any energy at all. And this carried on into my spiritual work as an adult. I used the activation of spiritual work as the spark to rev up my engine.I’m not mad about this. I don’t think I made any mistakes. I have grown and expanded so much.It’s all perfect here. It can be true to push. It is true to expand. It is true to dig up old ways of being and do the work to integrate them. It is true to really transform myself again and again and be reborn. There is a time in life when it’s appropriate to rev the engine and go!However, more activation would actually be the easier and more comfortable thing for me to choose at this moment.My mind wants the stimulation of it all.On the surface my body craves the action, so that I may avoid the stillness, which within it may have fatigue, exhaustion, but what will also have space, peace, and gathering of information.How much do we crave spaciousness only to fill every inch of it with scrolling and spending?How much do we ask for more time only to schedule every inch full when we get some?How uncomfortable is true peace for most of us because it is simply so unfamiliar?These are the inquiries I’m interested in right now as I sit in this Still Point on life’s journey.I will choose peace this time. I will choose spaciousness. I will choose to allow my body’s its exhaustion and its gathering of strength for what is to come. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

Modern life tends to make people soft in the places we should be tough and tough in the places we should be soft.We have endless OTC drugs to make simple illnesses like the flu more bearable. And trust me, after being fully incapacitated for 3 days with the flu, it is not pleasant in anyway shape or form. I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t love it. I’m still pretty physically miserable, to be honest.Taking ibuprofen or any other OTC drugs that are simply meant to keep us comfortable, slow down the natural healing process. And, I believe, they create a numb divide between the communication of our bodies and our consciousness.I did take one capsule the second night just so I could sleep, so I am not militant, but that is the first ibuprofen I have taken since tearing during childbirth, so I take it VERY rarely and only when very necessary.I was so hesitant to take that one ibuprofen because I knew it would lower my fever and a fever is what you want when you have the flu. We are programmed to be afraid of the ways our bodies heal themselves because sometimes they are quite uncomfortable. I am a woman who leans in to the communications of the body.There is value in the pain. There is wisdom in the experience of something hard. There is insight to be had when we are brought to the edges of our sanity with discomfort.Now, does this mean we should unnecessarily make things hard for ourselves? Does this mean we should be gluttons for punishment? I also know all about this, because I am someone who has had, in the past, a very strong internal punisher. The story you have got to earn it was very much part of my programming.So I’ve sat with my hesitancy to take OTC drugs or go to a doctor and I’ve asked myself, “Are you punishing yourself here?” And the answer is truly, for me, no. I believe ibuprofen disconnects me from myself and my own felt sense. Call it a sort of extreme sobriety, but I feel it when I take it. It’s super subtle but it allows me to override parts of myself that I wouldn’t be able to override if I didn’t take it. The answer is that I believe these physical health challenges are shamanic initiations of sorts. I believe they leave us better than they found us, maybe not physically initially, but mentally or spiritually. To disconnect from myself while in that experience doesn’t feel aligned for me and in integrity with who I am and what I teach and model.(As far as going to a doctor, my observation is the closer you get to conventional medicine the sicker you become and the more interventions you get.)As I was in the deepest dark of my recent flu journey, one of the stories that really got kicked up is how I’m going to lose what I’ve created in business, and in life. Like I have this idea that my family will fall apart, my house will fall apart, my business will fall apart, if I’m not capable of holding it all together. Because the fear is always that I will always feel this way (sick). These stories are not logical or based in reality, they are the illogical fear stories that just play on a loop when you’re in a vulnerable, painful, uncontrollable, uncomfortable place. It’s not actually about the stories. It’s kind of like the Bogart in Harry Potter, the stories just show you what you are most afraid of. This takes A LOT to be with and not want to run to something to take it away. There is the physical discomfort and that is painful, but it’s the stories that arise from that discomfort and the idea that it may never go away that really gets you desperate.I am not saying that everyone should see every headache as a mini shamanic initiation. This is my practice. My path is of listening to the body and trusting the communications of the body, and that needs to come with the fun and pleasurable, as well as the pain.This is a spot where I do feel like people have gotten a little too soft in a place where it would serve us to be a bit tougher. Not in a “tough it out” kind of way, but in the way that we see physical processes as an opportunity to learn deep truths about ourselves. If we stay deep in the cavernous blackness that opens up to us when we are in pain, sick, or grieving, there is a massive opportunity for growth and expansion.In this particular flu, for me, there was a big healing around my younger self who was sick a lot and always felt like she needed to get better quick. That being sick wasn’t ok and it needed to end as soon as possible. I got to revisit this wound during this illness and rewrite it for that internal little one. I got to love her and let her know, no, it is ok. You can be sick. You can rest. You can be warm and cozy and do nothing.One of the messages that came through was: This sickness doesn’t mean “you’re falling behind”, it’s actually propelling you forward in ways you can’t see right now.What if that was true? Our minds think we need to keep all our appointments and can’t handle the inconvenience that illness brings with it, but what if the illness was actually preparing us for something? What if this pause right now is exactly what we need? What if this is the “fastest” track to our own awakening?What if illness was always an upgrade?I see this in childbirth. Childbirth is an initiation. It is not meant to be easy or breezy. I do not think it is meant to be “orgasmic.” I think it’s possible for it to be orgasmic, but most of the time it is f*****g intense. As it should be. We deny our strength when we try to rescue women from this fact or offer epidurals or planned c sections to anyone and everyone. I am speaking on a collective level. I, obviously, believe each woman has complete bodily sovereignty over her choice of how to birth, but if this narrative was shared more, and we practiced being uncomfortable more via going through things like headaches without ibuprofen, maybe women would be more willing to surrender to the birth process as the intense initiation and rebirth of a mother that it is. Which is intense, painful, and, ultimately, always leaves you a better woman than you were before, when it’s integrated.Postpartum feels so long and “unproductive” and I understand how isolating it can be for women, but postpartum is also thought of as the “golden opportunity” in Chinese medicine. It is a time in a woman’s life when she can miraculously heal old illnesses and diseases, complete cycles, change relationships, and massively blossom into who she is becoming.It’s all about how we frame it. What if we met these naturally occurring initiations in our lives with courage and strength and a resolve to learn what there is to learn from the communications our bodies are giving us?What if we softened into the ways these initiations want to shape us?(Ok. I want to be really clear here. There are a lot of things in this that could ruffle feathers and poke at some tender spots. I want to say, I am speaking on a collective level. If you decided to have a planned c section, I do not judge you. If you take nyquil to go to sleep every night, I do not judge you. If you go to the doctor all the time, I do not judge you. We all have our own stories and our own histories that shaped us into who we are and got us to where we are today. Your journey is yours, mine is mine. We all have to live our lives in this day and age. There is no judgment on how you decide to go about healing your own body). This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

The end of 2024 for me has brought with it many endings and therefore new beginnings.A big overarching theme is a deep reckoning with how available I have been.I wrote more about this here.On a macro level I can see how I have associated my deservingness of love and my availability.The more available I am, the more I give of myself; the more love I can get, right?Or, maybe more accurately; no one would love me for just being me; I must prove my worth by being useful, capable, and available. I must earn the love I am given. I must make sacrifices and work hard.If I have something people want; I should give it away, right?The answer is probably yes, but there is a subtle line between being generous because you can be and giving more than you actually have to give in hopes that someone else will see you and replenish you.Where does that line live? Who determines where it lives? I have been operating as if my business gets to decides where that line lives. Or that the collective society gets to determine where that line lives. Or that other people’s expectations get to decide where that line lives. [I loved this piece on this subject].But what about me? What if I got to decide where the line lives?So much of my work, personally and professionally, revolves around nourishment.But being nourished can be quite relative and subjective.One one level; I am very nourished. I have impeccable boundaries. I have more than enough and more than I need in so many ways. I am very well resourced.On the relative scale of nourishment; I would say, my current life is probably quite a bit more nourishing than the average person’s life.This is not about comparison and it is not about better or worse.The frequency of nourishment and Mother are my teacher. This is my path. The levels of which I have been undernourished in my lifetime are also quite extreme relative to most.The pits of despair and pain we crawl out of happen to be the places our medicine gets the strongest.Wisdom is built in our experiences of alchemy. This is the way of the medicine woman. We know the medicine is in the poison.And so.. l am being invited forward.I am being called into even more integrity with nourishment.I am being called through the spiral 🌀, and into the more integrated, mature, and powerful woman I am becoming (as we all are by our current circumstances whatever they may be). I am seeing how starved I am of certain necessary nutrients of wellbeing: spaciousness and self preservation being major themes.I have given so much away before I have really digested and received the nourishment of it.I have rushed toward a perceived reward that as I slow down and give myself more space, I’m not actually sure I want.I notice that the more I integrate and heal and nourish myself, the less ambitious I become.I start to see what so much of my ambition around having a ‘thriving business’ and proving myself as a ‘respected authority’ on certain subjects, was just about wanting to be loved and feel safe in my place in the world.As I see and feel in my body more and more that I am perfectly safe and will always be loved, by g-d and myself, there is no need to hustle. There is no need to grind. There is no need to override my precious physiology. I don’t need to spend hours a day on platforms I know to be wildly depleting and in direct opposition to the juicy and cozy frequency I call nourishment. I don’t need to respond to every DM or give people endless hours of my time just so they will spend money on my offerings.I don’t need to deliver my message in a way that feels for good to anyone but me.I don’t need to sacrifice my physiology or the physiology of my children or the entire energy system of my family as a whole, to make sales.I don’t need to make people like me. I don’t need to make offers that are more accessible. I don’t have to have a clean kitchen or more new or trendier stuff.I don’t have anything to prove. I need no external validation when my internally sourced worthiness is stable and abundant.And my internally sourced worthiness and abundance comes from me protecting it, cultivating it, and listening to it, like it is The Most Important Thing In the World.Internally sourced worthiness comes from being unendingly devoted to my inner well spring of energy. And this is ultimately what I teach and guide other women to do.Obviously, there is nothing wrong with being kind, generous and loving. I am actually naturally such a generous soul. I love nothing more than to nurture, give to, and feed people. But the way these qualities get twisted up with self-sacrificing, ‘being nice’, and likable more often than not, has made me really question all the places in my life I am giving others the benefit of the doubt or explaining away bad behavior, at the detriment to myself.My inquiry this year is really around: what if I really honored my own energy system FIRST?What if nothing came before it? What if I really asked myself; what do you want? What are you hungry for? What do you think? Is this serving your well being and your nourishment?Because I’ll tell you what: being constantly on social media; feeling like I have to respond to every message I get across all platforms and apps; feeling beholden to make my offerings accessible to all, constantly having my attention pulled between different apps on my phone and my family; and using my life to create content instead of living my life, doesn’t actually serve my nourishment one bit.Consistent creative expression does serve my nourishment. Working with women committed to their own long term nourishment, nourishes me. Spending time being a main feature in and holder of my girls’ daily lives, nourishes me. Having the space to dive deeply into topics that interest me for no reason other than I’m interested in them, nourishes me. Having the space and time to create and cook my own food, nourishes me.What nourishes you?Because I am so deeply devoted to The Mother (where all nourishment is derived), I am heeding the invitation here because I can’t unsee how the level of unbridled availability expected in this day and age is actually in direct opposition to what I so vehemently believe the world needs. Which is more reverence; a deeper sense of sacredness and respect for the sanctity of human life and life force, eg more of a connection to what nourishes us.Quite honestly, I feel very alone in my sober realization here. I feel like most of the world can’t feel what is at stake at the tenor at which I feel it.I respect peoples’ choices and their sovereign paths. I actually really do trust humanity. I would never assume I know what is best for anyone but myself and my children, because only you can know what is best for you.However, I can no longer bare the dichotomousness of teaching about nourishment from the compulsion and addiction that is wrapped around social media and the constant consumption and creation of ‘content’ and ‘having a growing and successful business.’It’s not it and it feels like the elephant in the room.The wellness industry is indeed an industry and it’s one that 99% of the time isn’t actually promoting anything even close to true wellness or relaying accurately what it actually means to nourish ourselves. The wellness industry is promoting fear driven quick fixes and sparkly silver bullets to overstimulated, depleted people who simply need to put their phones down, eat enough whole foods to properly fuel their bodies, go outside and drop to their knees at their connection to something larger than themselves.We all need the long game work of real and true nourishment. Which requires a slowing down. A tapping in. A willingness to do the mundane and unexciting work of being where we are. As Sarah Blondin said; “Sometimes it’s not about blazing a new path, but rather kneeling down on the one you’re on and asking if there is anything you have been denying.”I spent the last 2 weeks off of social media and deep in quiet contemplation of where my work is headed. I slowed all the way down to the speed of my embodiment and what I’ve been feeling at this spot actually surprised me.When I slow all the way down and ask what I really want without the compulsion and addiction to results driven thinking; it is that I want to spend more time with my family and with my girls on a daily basis.Who is this Clara that pines for more time spent coloring with my girls? Who is this powerful woman who feels her path bringing her right back to what we, as a collective, are told is the lamest location of all, barefoot in the kitchen?What if the window into my desire was wiped clean of all shoulds and have tos and potential sparkly accolades and what I see so clearly is the truth that I want to be a mother who doesn’t outsource her mothering?I want to be a mother who understands what a privilege it is to be able to spend this short season of my children’s childhood being a mother before anything else.To quote Sarah Blondin’s most recent essay again, “Everyday is new, wild, and whispering in your ear, and courage sometimes involves letting go of who you thought was you, and embracing someone else underneath. It is okay for life to be lonely and raw, unfamiliar and newly discovered. Neither is it predictable nor is it even definable. You are free to explore an entirely new, unformed version of yourself and tell no one about it.”Who am I without work? Who am I without the incessant pull of the inbox? Who am I without this ambitious drive toward making something of myself? Who am I when I’m less available to you and more available to me?This is the new version of me I am being called to explore. Lonely and raw, I am sure it will be. But embracing the woman underneath, the woman I am becoming, is where my nourishment lies. It’s the long game step by step my soul is hungry for.My work and offerings are going to change drastically in 2025. I am going to be far less available, which is actually very in service to the potency of

As I’ve been watching and experiencing the fall out and division surrounding the results of the United States election I have had this resounding truth about myself settle in: I trust humanity.In a world where the places we are different are constantly being highlighted, we have to remember to come back to the places where we are actually the same. In a world where the fear mongering is so constant and the assault on our nervous systems is so pervasive (in the sense that we are living in environments that are so far from the natural environments we evolved in) we have to remember that we are not our highest selves when we are triggered. In a world where it is profitable for us to feel powerless and like we need fixing, we have to remember that we are whole and holy as we are. I see this really disappointing and inhumane response of, “Anyone who voted for Trump is a bigot and an idiot.” As if anyone who doesn’t think like a liberal is simply stupid and awful.How much of an ignorant oversimplification is it to assume because someone came to the conclusion that voting for Trump was in their best interest, they are a “bad” or “stupid” person? (and this goes for the judgment of people who voted for Kamala being brainwashed or somehow less intelligent.) Humanity is so much more complicated and nuanced than that. Humans are multifaceted, multi-layered, beautiful, terrible, awful, manifestations of Universal Intelligence.All of us have done and said things we regret. All of us have hurt others. All of us have aspects of ourselves that we are not proud of and are working with and on in our own ways. We are all hurt and, therefore, project that hurt out onto the world and those around us.This is what it means to be human. We are inherently flawed. Each and every single one of us.Anytime we start to get high and mighty, righteous (not to be confused with rightness) or so egoically convinced that our way is the only way, we are not in our right minds. We are all getting played in some way. We are all glaringly misinformed in some way. We are all convinced of at least a few things, that, in reality, aren’t at all true. If more people were able to remember compassion is not condoning, that our own personal healing is the greatest form of activism, and that it is completely possible to have connected conversations with people who don’t agree with us, we would not be in the situation we are in.However, because we are in this situation, let us not use it to seed more division, but instead seed more unity. This is a choice. A choice we have to make of our own volition, every moment of every day. We can choose unity or division by how we speak to our partners. We can choose unity or division by how we treat a stranger in the coffee line. We can choose unity or division by how we treat our own bodies. We can choose unity or division by how we choose to see people who don’t fit our definitions of “good.” We can choose unity or division by how we talk to our opponents. We can choose. And with our choices we create. We forget that we are not each other’s enemies. We are each other saviors. We are the friendly souls that came to play out roles and parts for eachother to learn our life lessons through.I understand that what I’m saying can get dangerously close to going over the edge into “spiritual bypassing” territory. You may say, “Ok, well if we’re all just friendly souls walking each other home, what are we going to do about our DEMOCRACY?!” right? I hear you. But if you actually attempt to listen to what each side is saying, both are actually afraid of losing our democracy. Both are positioning themselves as the prevailing party over the evils of some dystopian future.The left thinks Trump is such a lunatic and misogynist that he doesn’t and won’t respect the traditions and precedents set up in our country. They believe women will lose all their rights and we will fall into international chaos because of the policies he is going to back and put into place. The right thinks Kamala and her backers are threatening fundamental constitutional rights like free speech and the right to bear arms. They believe she is a pawn of the shadowy deep state agenda and a threat to the United States. They believed choosing her was a vote for the globalist World Economic Forum’s 2030 agenda and the statement “you will own nothing and you will like it.” If you zoom out, both sides are actually concerned about the same thing: the collapse of our freedoms and values. We can double down on our divisions and differences OR we could see that we actually both really value our country, our traditions, and what they represent to us.If we can stop making snap judgments and sweeping generalizations and letting our systems to be dragged into fear mongering, we can come back to ourselves and remember that we are all human and we all, for the most part, want the same things.We all want life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We can agree that we all feel the severe need for something to change. It is so clear our country is not ok and that our systems are broken. That’s why the tensions are so high, because, collectively there is a very clear feeling that something cannot go on as is. I feel this too. I want change. I want big change. And, I know the only change that is going to be worthwhile is going to achieved through further unity, not more division. Separation is actually the enemy here, my loves. When we band together, we move mountains and create worlds. This is the space of miracles. There is a potential here that people who are still focused on the “win” or the “loss” are not seeing and that is the potential for True change and True shifts. The amount of potential energy here in this moment is massive. Because of my own personal practice of body based energetic alchemy, I have an embodied understanding of how when we can be with a “negative” emotion or sensation, no matter how powerful or overwhleming it may feel or seem, if we can actually be with it and welcome it and invite it in deeper instead of push it away, it transforms.True energetic masters understand that everything is energy. There is no negative and there is no positive. It all just is. The greatest pain can be transformed into the most orgasmic pleasure when we are fully present with it. (orgasmic childbirth anyone!?)Humans are alchemical beings. We are the conscious connection between the physical and the energetic. We have a massive capacity to transmute energy on the very basic level of how we turn food, light and electrons from the Earth into energy in our bodies and on the more spiritual level of how we are spiritual beings having a manifested physical experience. In many spirtual traditions we see this theme of humans being the bridge between heaven and earth.Human beings are quantum, a particle and a wave, energy, light and matter all at once. When I hold my attention on humanity’s power, I see what is possible for us. When I hold my attention on individual human’s power, I see them as their highest version.I choose to see each human as a sacred amalgamation and expression of God, not because I am some love and light chump, but because it is the best use of my creative power and energy to do so. I choose to see Trump and Kamala as two souls who are deeply in service to our alchemical potetional for change on this Earth. Souls willing to play roles for us cultivate our own power within oursleves. (And souls who wanted to have a wild ride this time around.)When I make the choice of unity, in all the miniscule ways of my day to day life, I am choosing to see humaity in its power. That power can be used to create all sorts of things, terrible and beautiful, and has been. But I am ready for it be a conscious choice.I trust humanity. I trust peoples’ choices. Because the moment we start question our neighbor’s humanity, is the moment we lose sight of what it is we are here doing. It is the moment we start to let separation win. And this is what creates the future world that I wouldn’t want my children to grow up to inherit. I trust in humanity because I am a mother. I trust in humanity because I am a creator.Come be with yourself and listen. Next Live Practice: Saturday, 11/23/24, 9-10:30am. $33. Register and more info here. This is a public episode. 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This piece has been percolating for a long while.This is an invitation into a new or deeper experience of what I am calling; Divine Union, or the aligned relationship between the Feminine and Masculine energies within us and outside of us. As I repeat again and again, I am in service to The Mother, the mature feminine frequency that lives within our physiology. I have also called this energy ‘the collective nurturer’, because the mother is the source of all nourishment. Something that has become clear more recently is that because I am in service to The Mother, I am also in service to the Family, or, in other words, the legacy of humanity.When we think about the family we are not only talking about The Mother, but also The Father and the legacy that is begotten from the two coming together, the child/ren and the family as it’s own creational force.When you start to study things like masculine and feminine energy, you can go down all sorts of rabbit holes. There are infinite teachings about these two energies, because they are ultimately what our world (and maybe everything in existence?) is made up of. They are are the balanced (ideally) and opposing forces. The yin and yang. The two aspects I’m going to use as a way to demonstrate my translation of the integral relationship of Masculine and Feminine forces are modern relationship polarity teachings and feminism. I have written a lot about these two aspects before so you can check the archives of the Matriarch substack and find all sorts of articles on the Feminine, Masculine and co-creation. The two articles that feel the most applicable to this piece are The Mature Feminine the World Needs and Mature Feminine Responsibility Just Is. Polarity On the most basic level, the word polarity means the separation, alignment, or orientation of something in two opposing poles. That is a very mental way of saying; duality. Duality exists. In the reality that we live in on earth, duality exists. There are all sorts of spiritual teachings suggesting there is no duality and that we are all one. This is a big YES AND, we also live in a world of opposites. We see this in the charged particles of atoms and we see this in night and day; the micro and the macro. Relationship polarity teachings suggest that a “polarized” relationship is preferable to an unpolarized relationship because it creates an enlivening, sexual tension within the relationship. Polarity teachers and coaches suggest that the more the poles, Feminine and Masculine, are embodied and enacted (very important word choice here I’ll come back to later) the more aliveness and spark there will be in a relationship. This basic concept, I don’t really disagree with. It seems to be as factual as the basic definition of polarity. We select partners that generally create some sort of tension in us and have some unique magnetism that pulls us in. It could be their appearance but I would argue it’s really more their energy, something about what embody pulls us towards them. However, polarity teachings lose me when they suggest that we should role play the epitome of Feminine and Masculine characters so that we can somehow create polarization in our relationship.My very clear embodied knowing is that when I pretend to be something that I am not; it is never good for me or, ultimately, my relationships. If you have to pretend to be something you are not to be friends with someone, are they really your friend? If you have to pretend to be the perfection of feminine softness and receptivity to turn your husband on, are you really connected? I do believe that we can have fun and alchemize a lot of frustration and disagreement through role playing with our partners. Sexual role playing can obviously be very hot. There is something super sexy about inhabiting that demure feminine and being ravaged by your masculine man in his beast. I’m not in denial or delusion about any of this. However, if these types of interactions with your chosen partner aren’t done with a lot of intention and a set container, then it’s just fantasy and boundaries get foggy. It starts to get dangerous when we’re not sure where the role playing stops and the reality begins. And this is what I have heard from women who have gone deep into polarity teachings as a lifestyle; that they started to lose themselves and disown parts of themselves that weren’t part of the polarized Feminine menu. [This is a good post by Madelyn Moon on her experience.Teachers espousing that we should live our entire lives within the confines of some polarized definition of feminine and masculine as women and men are not in any way shape or form leaving room for the subtle and intricate dance of these two energies within ourselves and the way we express each aspect uniquely. I’ve noticed that zero of these polarity teachers have children, because you simply cannot maintain these rigid poles and fantasy in a relationship when you have to keep baby alive too. Polarity is true. It just is. There is a lot to learn about yourself as you play with these aspects in yourself. Your partner and you have it, or else you wouldn’t have been drawn together. It can be fun to embody in an intentional way, but when it comes to Divine Union, creation, family, and legacy, polarity just is not a huge part of it.Feminism In a world where feminism is basically just the masculinization of women (wrote more about this here) polarity teachings can feel like a relief to women who have been trying so hard to basically do everything men do. Paradoxically, feminism also has this kind of “girl power,” vibe that feels deeply off and immature. In the world of feminism women can do it all! They can have a career. They can have drink, smoke, and f**k just like the men do. And then when they turn 30, they feel their biological clock ticking, they can also have a baby, while they still do all those other things. And f**k their lazy, silly, stupid man-child husbands who are good for nothing but drinking beer and, at best, playing with the kids on the weekends. Of course I believe women should have the freedom to work and own businesses and property (and I’m very grateful to those women that fought for me to have those freedoms), but saying women can do everything men can do is not actually revering the Feminine.The man hating I see in the feminist spaces stems from this over masculinized woman. She’s bitter. When women aren’t allowed to be fully expressed versions of themselves, then men aren’t either, and both sides of the whole, suffer. Women’s bodies are made differently. We are on a 28 cycle vs the simple 24 hour cycle of men, so working the same way everyday doesn’t really work for our physiology, just as an example. Our bodies (until menopause) are always prioritizing the ability to build a baby on a biological level. We need more sleep than men. We need food on a more consistent basis than men. Why do you think things like thyroid issues and autoimmune disorders so disproportionally affect women? Revering the Feminine would be valuing the Feminine, not just more valuation of the masculine through women, which is making women sicker, victimized and more burned out than they ever have been. This is why so many women are attracted to this polarity idea of “just let me be in my feminine and the man can tell me where to go for dinner so I don’t have to!” It feels like a relief to a body that is tired of trying to be something it is not. And it’s a radical thing to attempt to be completely devoted to a man when you’ve seethed about his ineptitude. It’s a pendulum swing over to the other side. In both of these examples there is a compartmentalization happening. In the polarity examples there is an idea that women should only be a certain kind extreme feminine; soft, demure, gentle, open, devotional. In the feminism example, it’s women being over masculinized and denouncing their softness, openness, and devotional nature.The Mature Feminine Loves the Masculine As I have found with most truth, I find it in the gray, in the subtitles and in the twists and turns. I find it in the paradox. Feminism is not true and these polarity relationship teachings are not true. The Truth is the mature Feminine loves the Masculine. She loves Him because the desecration of Him would be the desecration of Her, because they are two parts of the same whole. Which I will call the Third Thing. The integral relationship between the exalted, mature Feminine and the exalted, mature Masculine is that they understand they are creating something together. The two parts come together and create something that is more than them individually: the Creation, the Child/ren, the Family. Polarity teachings say the masculine must always lead and feminism eg ‘the future is female’ concept says the feminine leads. The Truth is, the Third Thing must lead. God must lead. Creation must lead. Union must lead. The Feminine has more access to raw creational life force. She feeds life force to whatever she backs. Therefore, she must also have discernment. She must also be able to say, “No.” I am reminded here of the hormones estrogen and progesterone. The old idea was that estrogen was the feminine hormone. However, estrogen is the hormone of growth and proliferation. We need it. It is important. However, when we have too much of it or it is unchecked, it will tell cells to grow and grow and grow. Endometriosis is connected to too much estrogen in the system and results in the overgrowth of the uterine lining. Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) characterized by cysts on the ovaries is also due to too much estrogen in the system. Same with fibroids. Too much estrogen equals too much unchecked and undirected growth. Progesterone is actually the solution to this because it tells the cells where to grow, how to differentiate, and when to stop. This is discernment. Progesterone is actually far more important for feminine fertility in a lot of ways than estrogen in our m

There is a punishing harshness I want to unpack in the health and wellness world. I see so many female influencers in this space peddling punishment as virtue and unnecessary harshness as ‘facts.’ I see ‘get-your-s**t-together-you-lazy-f**k’ energy being sold as radical responsibility. Just to be abundantly clear: This is not what we need to heal. We do not need more punishment, more harshness, more authoritative, hierarchal, disciplinary energy to make ourselves healthy. If you are overweight, ill, unmotivated, exhausted, acting in ways you are not proud of; more punishment of yourself will never equal real transformation. It may create a lot of change. You may lose weight through punishment of your body. You may run a marathon by telling yourself harsh words to push through the pain. You may make millions or billions of dollars through a deep hatred of yourself and a desire to make yourself feel worthy. Punishment can be an entirely effective mechanism for certain action; until it’s not. Or until it’s just you and your mind on your deathbed and you hate yourself. Radical responsibility is not dominating your tender, wild, broken, hurting, tired parts into submission. Radical responsibility is being willing to look at those parts. It’s being willing to see them and take stock of where you truly are with neutrality and sobriety. In my personal life and in my work, I live by the statement: “You cannot transcend what you do not first accept.”Acceptance is massively misunderstood. For some reason people think acceptance equals saying the thing in question is good and right. That’s not it. Acceptance is saying what is, IS. That’s it. It’s not a value judgment. It’s neutral.We are terrible at this as a collective. Before we can make any attempt to truly “solve” a problem, we have to first look at the problem soberly. We have to see where we actually are and accept it. Only then, can we really move forward in a way that takes the reality into account. This is a big reason why we haven’t actually made any big changes in regards to climate disaster. We can’t actually get in alignment (another way of saying “accept”) with where we are and feel it. When we get in alignment with where we are and accept what is true about ourselves and our patterns, we can access the despair, the grief, the loss that comes with it. This is why everyone wants to avoid this step because if we opened and softened to what is truly here, we might actually have to feel pain. Even the people pedaling punishment, harshness, and judgment of self are using those tactics to avoid the grief and the despair that comes with actually acknowledging where we are. It’s like they believe if they force the pain; then they won’t have to actually feel the pain and fall apart. If they force the pain; they can get ahead of it and still be in control. We are all avoiding the coming undone; which is inherently feminine. All of this harshness and punishment is rooted in hatred of the feminine; eg misogyny. It’s rooted in not understanding the death and life cycles and how to ride them while staying awake and aware. It’s all rooted in actually wanting to avoid transformation and becoming.We all say we want transformation, but most people aren’t actually willing to die well. You may read all this and think I must be for coddling people. For allowing them all their emotional turmoil and victimization. That I somehow think we all just need to fall apart and lay on the ground and give up. That if I’m not for harshness and punishment; then I must be for permissiveness. This is where the nuance that doesn’t get translated enough comes in. This is where we get lost if we don’t have the maturity and flexibility in our systems to hold paradox.Radical responsibility is not harshness and it’s not punishment. It is a noticing. It is a being with facts and realities that may be hard to sit with. We are so quick to jump into punishment once we see these facts, and that is the place where we need to cultivate softness if we want to experience true transformation. Let’s say you decide you want to work out three times a week. And for a few weeks you do. Then one week gets busy and you miss your workouts and before you know it a month has passed and you haven’t worked out once. What do you do when you notice this? Do you berate yourself? Do you feel ashamed? Do you tell yourself how bad and broken you are? Do you try to avoid thinking about it? Do you kind of go blank? Do you tell yourself you’re a piece of s**t and go to the gym and work out harder than you really had the energy for? No matter the outcome of any of these options they are all based in harshness and punishment. What I’ve found is most people don’t know how to go about change without punishment. Isn’t this the way we were raised? We colored on the walls and then we got punished by having to be in time out so that we didn’t do it again, right? We screamed too loud and then our mothers turned away and ignored us (withdrawing love is most certainly punishment for a child) hoping it would make us be quiet. We parent ourselves the same way we were parented. Our parents’ voices becoming our internal dialogue. How is this working for us? There are wildly alarming, unprecedented negative statistics pertaining to the average person’s physical, mental and emotional well-being. As a collective, we are not ok. This is a fact we all need to look at, soberly. We can look at this and say most people are fat, stupid, ignorant, and lazy, and we all just need to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps and get it together. We could disguise this attitude by saying people don’t “respect” or “love” themselves enough to make good choices, but that’s still using shame and self flagellation (I’m such a loser! Why can’t I just love myself more!) to get to our goal. You can’t hate yourself into loving yourself and if you don’t love yourself now, as you are; you’re not going to love yourself as a rich woman or a skinny woman. That’s not how self love works.What we are seeing in the collective today is actually a result of punishing culture, generations deep and well worn. Eventually, punishing wears us down and ultimately disconnects us from Life. You can see it in the way we believe how separate we all are. “I’m not one of those stupid people because I wear linen clothing and eat organic food and workout!” Life, creator, God, Truth, whatever you want to call it, connects us. It reminds us that we are all part of something much bigger. It tells us: “you are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a single drop.” However, we don’t get to collapse in that either. We don’t get to just lay down and do nothing. Life will humble you. Life will show you where you think you are in control and blast it apart. Life will continually with a whisper at first, a brick next, and a Mack truck last, guide you, lead you, and point you in the direction you’re meant to move. So instead of operating as if everyone is an idiot that just needs to get their s**t together; you could decide to actually be with what is true here.The truth is; humans are good. They are flawed. They are hurting. They are traumatized. They are being poisoned by processed food and chemicals. And we are always more alike than we are different. Underneath all the noise; we want the same things: health and happiness for ourselves and our loved ones. This is where the massive power of softness comes in. When we treat ourselves with softness; we don’t give up responsibility. We simply choose to no longer punish ourselves or others.When we treat ourselves with softness; we will treat others with softness and the world becomes a softer place. A place where people can stop being so deeply afraid of their feelings. A place where people aren’t afraid to look at the facts; because they know; no matter what they will not turn on themselves. You don’t know your power until you know what it’s like to be a woman who refuses to turn on herself. This is the kind of power that creates worlds. This is the power of God’s Love. When we no longer turn on ourselves; we are not afraid to speak out. We are not afraid to stand firmly in the world we would like our children to grow up in and wave people toward us. When we no longer turn on ourselves; we can lead from a fully integrated place.Softness is not weakness. Softness is power.When you embody and hold this kind of softness, you aren’t afraid of the facts or the reality because you can accept anything because you aren’t going dread living in your own mind if you f**k up. When you embody and hold this kind of softness, you can let Life lead you because you trust yourself to not beat yourself up no matter what happens. When you embody and hold this kind of softness; paradoxically, you are precise in a way overarching harshness could never be; because you can feel all the little caveats and deep pockets. When you embody and hold this kind of softness; you can take full and total responsibility because there is no punishment on the other side of it. This is radical. This is not the paradigm any of us were raised in; but it is the paradigm we are shifting in to. Some people (my past self included) think of softness as disgusting. They find it repulsive. They find themselves avoiding it at all costs. Disgust is not neutral. It’s a very charged feeling. It’s visceral. When we have a deep, real need for something and we are again and again denied that need, one way we make the pain of that missing need feel a little less brutal is to be disgusted by the need itself. This has been shown again and again in attachment research. Babies and children require this kind of softness I am talking about; this unconditional love. If you were not given this softness enough as a baby and child; you may feel disgusted by it because disgust is a more powerful position than need. We reject what we need most to make that need less painful. I find the harshest people are most di

Last night, I saw a male spiritual teacher’s post that stated: “fat people are untrustworthy.”He went on to claim that because excess weight is a result of “unmetabolized trauma” and “emotional numbing” fat people are avoiding “a necessary transformational crucible” (that would result in weight loss; I am assuming). On one hand; I partially agree. Not that fat people are untrustworthy, but what he’s saying about unmetabolized trauma, emotional numbing, and the need for a transformational crucible leading to weight gain. These things are absolutely a part of weight gain and excess weight, as it’s part of, I believe, all health dis-ease and disease. Any symptoms we experience are our bodies trying to communicate something to us, on multiple dimensions. Weight gain isn’t some sort of special shadowy case of this. I actually taught a class called the Wisdom of Weight about this specific thing. You can purchase the recording here if you’d like. The most important thing to me regarding trustworthiness is; anyone who has claimed to have metabolized all their trauma, to never take part in emotional numbing, and to not need a transformational crucible or five in their lifetime; is definitely NOT trustworthy.We are all humans. Flawed, scarred, and hurting. It is what makes us human. Even humans considered enlightened; Tich Nhat Hanh or Ekhart Tolle. for example, talk about their painful human experience and struggle. The wound is where the light enters you, after all. Now, as an obviously overweight person who teaches and guides other people; in the field of nutrition, no less *gasp* (see my article, The Fat Nutritionist); being lumped into the category of untrustworthy doesn’t trigger me exactly, but it does make me want to set some truths about weight gain/loss and who we should or shouldn’t trust, straight. First off, I don’t take commentary on my body from anyone and I don’t advise anyone else to either. You get to be the arbiter of your own experience in your own body. The only advice about my health I take is from experts I’ve vetted and who I can feel trust my body’s process and it’s deep wisdom as much as I do, or have a very particular expertise that I am looking for in an acute, specific way. I don’t take advice about my body from men, ever, that’s one of my very clear boundaries. I would never go to a male doctor, a male OB (or let’s be honest for me, any OB), a male nutritionist, a male gynecologist (or any gynecologist). I will, in special instances, work with male body workers, therapists, or spiritual teachers, but for the most part anyone on my body care team is a woman. That’s just what makes my system feel smooth and feels true to me. Men and women have very different physiology, life experiences, and spiritual relationship to creation. Therefore, I generally don’t think men have a clear embodied understanding of what a woman’s body might need from a physiological perspective. My body and my own intuition are the ultimate litmus test that everything runs through, be it health decisions or how to handle symptoms. A huge piece of my work with clients is giving them information from my professional training and my embodied experience, and then pointing them to feel into their own Knowing about what to do with that information. I am always pointing my clients back to themselves as the leader of their own health journey. The other piece of this is that weight gain/loss is so much more than discipline and calories in/out. I’m honestly so tired of even refuting these ideas. The confusing thing about this post I’m talking about is that this guy is basically saying: “don’t trust fat people because they have so much shadow, they can’t even discipline themselves into looking better.” Wow. Just wow. There are so many things wrong with this I could write a book on it. (maybe I will). The obvious first issue is the value placement on physical appearances. The idea that if you aren’t some vague and subjective ideal body size then you must be hiding something sinister and therefore unworthy of trust is so blatantly misogynistic and comes from a worldview that is obsessed with optics being what matters most. This is not the world I want to live in. It is not the world I am creating with my energy and my intention. On the other hand, of course, looks do matter. They can tell us a lot about a person’s habits, lifestyle, values, and health. I love to do visual diagnosis in my practice, looking at things like the whites of the eyes, the tongue, health of the hair, skin and nails. However, if we stop there, if we choose something as subjective as “being overweight” as a decider for whether a person is trustworthy there is no wisdom there, there is just surface-level preferences. One person could look overweight but be quite vital, radiant, and embodied and the other could be really toned, thin, and conventionally the “right size” but could have really low energy, a dullness behind their eyes, and be disassociated. Is their weight really what you want to judge your deeming of trustworthiness on? The other piece is that weight gain is not about eating too much or exercising too little. It is an energy management issue. Most of the women who are overweight I see in my practice are eating far too little nutrient dense food. A big reason they aren’t eating enough is because of sentiments like this post shared. Because there is this collective program that says “fat people are lazy pieces of s**t who stuff their faces all day,” so, as a collective, we have stopped eating, to the detriment of our own vitality, lest we become one of those fat lazy people. We are not fat because we eat too much and lack discipline, we are fat because most of the food easily available to us is toxic and we are burnt out. Our energy management systems cannot regulate our energy levels because of toxins in our food and environment, shortage of connection to nature, lack of nutrient dense food, and our sedentary lifestyles (this doesn’t mean we need more intense exercise).I am not blaming the government or big food or big pharma, we are responsible for ourselves always, but we do have to actually understand where these issues originated if we have any hope of reversing them. As a woman, to lose weight in a sustainable way that works with your wise and beautiful body, you need to be eating enough nutrient dense food on a consistent basis, moving your body in a way that feels good on a consistent basis, and spending lots of time in nature. I truly believe given enough time (this may be years) ninety percent of weight issues would regulate.You do not need to go on a diet or deprive yourself or force yourself into some sort of box that doesn’t fit. This is just the same old same old. It may work in the short term but it will never works in the long term. The only way out is through. The only true way to work with the body is the long game. Which brings me to the next thing; weight gain can may be the needed crucible, in itself. For me, having lived in a body that was conventionally attractive and the “right” size for most of my adult life which required a lot of force, manipulation, and discipline in the forms of dieting (basically starving myself) and intense exercise, to let my body gain weight, take up space, and fill out was actually the transformational crucible I needed and am still undergoing.As I released my punishing tendencies, allowed myself to see the grip with which I was living my life, the way I wanted to temper the energy of Life itself from flowing through me through controlling my food intake and movement and let go; I have gained weight. A lot of weight. I know it’s my body telling me something. I know I will not be this weight forever. I know I take impeccable care of my body. I feed her with nutrient dense food, consistently. I move throughout the day and build muscle in a way that allows for my body to feel juicy and strong. I prioritize rest and working with my hormonal cycles. I focus on my felt sense of radiance and vitality.And, other than my weight, I can say, after years of working towards this, I am incredibly healthy. My skin is plump and radiant. My hair is long and strong. My cycles are painless and consistent. I sleep deeply and well. I have good energy levels throughout the day. And all this was achieved gently and without any force over the last three years.  I am still trusting this process. I am still committed to the long game. I am listening deeply to myself and willing to hold myself with such gentle care and trust of the ancient wisdom of healing that lives in every single one of my cells. Since the majority of my weight gain about 3 years ago, I have lost 20 lbs. This seems to be the rate at which my body can lose weight in a sustainable, non forceful way. Everyone wants to lose 20 lbs a month, but this is stressful on the body. It takes energy to burn fat and process what is stored in that fat (toxins, estrogen, etc). And if you don’t have that energy or you get it from an unsustainable source, it will almost a hundred percent of the time, come back. In the process I have learned what it’s like to live in a body that isn’t the ideal. I have softened and learned about my own judgments of myself and where I placed my value of self in my appearance. I have learned to love myself deeper than I ever could have if I had not gained this weight. Through the process of weight gain, I have learned to trust myself most of all. And it continues to be an invitation into more trust, more gentleness, and a radical choice of letting my body go through her process while just holding the position of: you deserve to eat, you deserve to rest, you deserve to open, you deserve to be trusted. I am not suggesting that gaining weight is something every woman should do. It is just my ongoing journey of trusting myself.If there is anyone we can trust across the board, it is people who trust themselves, not their minds, but their inner Knowi

It’s really interesting that as I prepare to hold a retreat experience called VILLAGE, I am being called deep into my wound of aloneness.From the outside, I’m not sure I look like someone who has a core wound of aloneness. I have community, family, friends and, for the most part, function quite well socially. However, for some of us who have the wound of aloneness being socially adept has been a developed coping mechanism.I believe some of the most charming, magnetic, and likeable people probably have a significant “I am alone” wound.Developing the skills of charm, magnetism, and having people feel comfortable in your presence is a beautiful survival skill. You could think of it as “fawning.” Personally, I am not a fawner exactly, but I do know that because of my core wound of “I am alone” developed social skills so that people couldn’t see just how alone I felt and experienced life to be. The “I am alone” wound is one of, “No one has got me, so I’ve got to get myself.” “No one has my back.” “No one can really be trusted.” When you have this programming, you compensate a need for connection by not needing people. You may become very self sufficient and very capable. It’s not a “bad” thing; although it is a disconnecting thing. Our core wounds tend to be pre-verbal. They were inflicted before we could speak or had language, so there really isn’t a story when we experience the wound arising in the current day. Typically, a pre verbal core wound would feel like unexplainable terror around something that doesn’t seem like it should be that terrifying. It could be that you were ripped away from your mother’s body at birth. It could be that you were left alone for what was deemed too long by your primal body as an infant. It could be a lot of things, subtle to completely unthinkable and awful, and it doesn’t really matter exactly what it was. It just matters that the wound probably started there, at the primal layer of your animal body.Just because we can’t cognitively remember the experience doesn’t mean it didn’t create a program that continues to run in us far into adulthood. As you grow, you have experiences that highlight this wound. Until you are willing to feel the pain that lives in that original wound in a way that integrates it into your being, it will continue to resurface in all different locations and situations.Maybe your caregivers were aloof and self obsessed and you were alone a lot. Maybe you were treated like an adult far before you were, or expected to do adult tasks. Maybe you experienced bullying or rejection in adolescence. Maybe you experienced heart break or professional rejection or isolation. Maybe you’ve had far more serious and terrible things happen to you. Again, it could be a lot things that highlight and reopen this wound of aloneness for you again and again. It isn’t really the details or the story that matters, because the only way you overcome a wound like this is to feel the pain of it from an integrated conscious place. Eg, you allow yourself to feel what you were incapable of feeling when the wound happened and process the pain. I feel this wound of aloneness right in the center of my sternum. It’s a tender, shaky, wobbly spot that is activated anytime I have a perception of: ‘I am alone. I can’t trust people. I’m on my own in this life. I have to figure life out all by myself.’If I scan back through my life; there are many experiences that brought up this sensation/wound, this feeling of deep isolation, being misunderstood or unseen, feeling rejected for the way I exist.And the skills I developed to cope with this pain (notice: I’m not saying feel this pain. I’m saying cope with this pain. Those are very different things) are:1) To put a wall up around my heart and internal world. A protective barrier. 2) Understand social games. It’s not in my make up to be a people pleaser in the traditional sense, but I did learn how to “play the social game,” in a way that made people comfortable at the expense of my true expression. The goal of this was to  make me “popular”, cool and superior (a safer position). The problem with both of these skills is that they completely cut me off from the nutrients of true human connection.We all need to be witnessed and seen. We all need to feel heard and cared for. We all need to feel like we can let all of ourselves out and we will still be loved. We all need to feel connected to other humans without feeling like we have to change who we are. As I said in another article, we need each other. When we put protective barriers that have zero permeability all around us we get into a place where we don’t actually have access to the nutrients of true connection. A barrier may be protective on one level, and was quite possibly a necessary survival strategy at one point in our lives, but it’s also extremely isolating and can end up feeling like we’ve put ourselves into a prison of aloneness. Having social skills isn’t a bad thing, but when we lose the ability to actually share openly about the truth of our lives or how we feel from an authentic place; it’s all just being fake and superficial and we feel that. It’s like junk food connection. It might feel good to gossip or collude with our friends, but it isn’t actually what we are starving for. Fake, superficial, gossipy, victmized, complain-y conversations with people we are close to, will always leave us hungry for the real thing in the long run.We may even be so convinced we could never be our true selves around others or share our most vulnerable stories; that we don’t even try to anymore and keep it all inside. Where it pressurizes and festers; making it seem even more inane and toxic in our minds. A snowballing of all the reasons you’re too different, too stupid, too bad or too crazy to be considered a good person worthy of sharing their feelings or desires. I have been working on revealing myself more to those I love and love me for many years now. I have long ago given up the compulsion toward overly superfulous social niceties or the urge to gossip and opted for honest relating. This is not always comfortable, easy or fun. But it is wildly more nourishing. I don’t lie. I don’t have secrets or things about myself I’m trying to keep hidden. I don’t spend energy trying to be someone I’m not. Can you see how much less energy social interaction takes when you relate like this? When there is real conflict I address it in a way that’s honest and willing and I have the energy for it because I’m not wasting my energy on lots of inauthentic pseudo-connections. When I hang out with people I am just me, not some version of me that I have keep up the facade of or remember. Getting the shadows out of the closet and into the light is something that is terrifying but ultimately always feels like the best kind of relief and release.As Gabor Maté says, “Safety is not the absence of threat, it is the presence of connection.” I have deconstructed the barriers and implemented boundaries, which are loving layers of protection that do not block all flow but simply set up gates and specific channels where connective nutrients can be offered and received between myself and other humans. I feel deeply devoted to being a fully expressed Clara in the world. Nothing to hide. Nothing to keep hidden. All parts of myself integrated and integral and in integrity is the ultimate intention. And yet, in the past 3 weeks I have been so hit by this I am alone wound. In the process of promoting and transmitting VILLAGE, a family embodiment retreat, I am feeling the everyday rejection that comes with “selling” things on the internet, as if it were a dagger to my personal heart. I am seeing all the places I still use things like “likes” and numbers to validate myself and the worth of my work. I am seeing all the ways I still operate with the idea that creations are only worthwhile if other people like them too.The dark side of community is indeed rejection and betrayal. This is one of the reasons why we don’t cultivate the community we say we want; we are afraid they will reject us and we will end up feeling alone and bad, once again.The obvious downside of opening our hearts is if we do open them they could very well be shattered. I am seeing all the places these fears still have a hold on me. Better to be alone. Better to self isolate and disengage. Better to just do what I can alone and not invite people to join me. I am seeing where my instinct is to wall up and disconnect. I see where I have a sneaky voice that runs in my head always keeping score of who is “worse” and who is “better” than me so as to not be blindsided by rejection or judgment. I am seeing all the places I still believe I am alone and that I can’t have the connection I want or need. I am seeing all the ways that when I believe I can’t have the connection I want or need; I don’t get it. I am seeing all the ways I am the creator of my own experience with this wound.When I expect people to be untrustworthy; they are. When I expect people to not be able to hold me, they can’t. When I expect people to not get me, they don’t. The wound of “I am alone” is self perpetuating. We unconsciously create from our wounds until we are willing to feel the pain in them from a conscious and integrated place. The only way I have found to start to dissolve this wound is to start to lean into the ways I am not actually alone and open my heart. And a big part of this is actually feeling the pain of rejection. It’s feeling the pain of the aloneness I’ve experienced in my life and also the greif of how I’ve subjected myself to a lot of it in the interest of safety. It’s feeling the pain of being laughed at, ridiculed, bullied, misunderstood, betrayed, and left behind and then choosing to open my heart again. If I’m going to receive the nourishment of true community; I have to open my heart and to open my heart I have to feel all the times my heart has been broken, from a conscious place. I