IT IS CRUCIAL THAT YOU ALLOW YOURSELF TO BE NOURISHED ::: TRANSMISSION✶TUESDAY

you have to be connected to your own experience of yourself in order to really connect to another person. 

you will not know how to help someone else if you are not connecting to how you help yourself. you touch your heart, and you feel the feel the pain that is there, you lean back and receive comfort. when you feel the hunger in your belly, the tired and aching muscles of your body, you can know how to hear about someone else having that experience — this is about compassion.

you think  - and you have been operating under the understanding - that the way you have compassion for someone’s pain is that you leave your own experience to be in the experience of that other person. but that is not compassion, that is disassociation. that is saying to yourself, my experience is not worthy, my experience is nothing. you are becoming hollow, actually, when you do your work in this way. you are not coming from your whole heart and whole body.

the way to have compassion for someone is to start by being grounded in and connected to yourself. because in that way you can hear someone’s words, you can hear someone’s experience. and even though your experience might be that you have never had some particular thing happen, you can, in your body and in your being, imagine how it might feel, imagine how it must feel. it has to start with your empathy.

you can let that perceived experience touch your heart in a way and then say - this is the action that i want to take. because with the touch of your heart comes a straight arrow forward. it is through your feeling and perception in your sensory body that you let the information light up inside of you. you let that story land in your body and it will guide you forward. and you can only do that if you are inhabiting your body and your own experience.

otherwise, you’re like a tennis ball, getting hit back and forth and back and forth. every racket that hits you is a trauma of the world. all of the traumas and all of those experiences, if they are all you are focusing on, then you see that you are going to be smacked in the face constantly, and you will not have room in yourself for anything other than the experience of being hit. and while it is so important to listen to and to know the experience of other people, the way to do it is not inundate yourself with only stories of pain.

because then you will have nothing to tend to others with.

when you do this you are like a tree many branches, extending your arms in each and every direction, wanting to offer your love and help, but you have forgotten what it feels like to be inside of yourself and where your center is, so your roots will not receive any nourishment and you will not be able to sustain your reaching. you have to balance the reaching with receiving. this is a law of nature. 

this is a hard world to be in. there are many stories, many people, having painful experiences. it is very easy to access those stories, so much so that you might think that there is nothing good or beautiful happening in the world.

you may be perceiving and receiving from a state of trauma, hyper vigilance. which says 'I can't relax now, because trauma is happening to others'. and if you are only thinking about all of those traumas that people are experiencing, and you're basing your own wellbeing on whether or not something bad is happening to someone else — that is never going to work out for you. because there is always going to be pain and hurt and wrongdoing in this world. that is truth. i know that it is hard for you to hear. but it is true today.

so what you can do when you get the sense that you are being in a state of hyper vigilance, that you are casting about looking for who is in trauma now and you are not connected to the needs of your own body and heart, you need to catch yourself in that moment. i am going to give you an affirmation. "the way that i help others to heal is not by mirroring and emulating their trauma. it is by using the strength that I have, the ability i have to sleep, rest and eat, to fortify myself and to take loving action."

and then, from there, you use your strength. a way you use the privilege you have is by allowing yourself to rest and to be strong enough to do work when it comes to you. not by being so ungrounded and uprooted by being inundated with the trauma of the world that you don’t have room or space for anything else. i know that this i hard for you to hear, but this is essential. it may even feel counter-intuitive, but you need to rest, you need to receive your nourishment from the earth, from the sky and from other people, and you need to walk forward in the way that you are going to be able to be whole and loving. not just a shred of an exhausted person.

feed yourself. create the structure that you need in your life to thrive. you will see that you will not forget about these others. we know that this is your fear. it is ok to let yourself be nourished.

this dynamic exists. of some people having, and some people having great burdens to bear. it is not just, but it also IS. you cannot change that in one day. in one lifetime. so as you take your meals. as you take your rest, do this in gratitude. and in gratitude for that nourishment, you can say a prayer. 'may the nourishment that i take become the soil that grows the food to feed those who do not have nourishment right now.'

i am not advocating for giving up. there will be times to rest and times to push. but look, you need to sleep! and in that moment before you go to sleep, there is no action to for you to take for another person. yet your action can be to receive the gratitude of this ability to rest that you have, and to send your love out to those who cannot. 

SURRENDER TO THE GRAVITY OF TRUTH::: TRANSMISSION TUESDAY

SURRENDER TO THE GRAVITY OF TRUTH::: TRANSMISSION TUESDAY

Our guides, ancestors, this earth, plant and animal and mineral allies are all working to remind us of who we are.

when we allow it, when we sit in silence and let everything fall way — truth reveals itself to us. it guides us back to ourselves. its current is all around us, inescapable. 

like the Tao says, it’s not about learning, but un-learning. when we un-learn, what remains is truth. the unnamable center of everything. 

truth is a gravity —  it has a will and it is always and will always be pulling you back to itself. a heartbeat so strong that your body unconsciously seeks to match it. it takes so much effort and energy to evade truth, especially when you have glimpsed or tasted it. you feel it grab. 

Truth — who is the parent of justice —  is not something that is attained. it is something that is recognized when you GIVE UP your need to explain, justify, scheme, and use your will to orchestrate.

getting to truth is simple. you allow yourself to fall there. SURRENDER the elaborately constructed belief systems that you have built that keep your justifications afloat and your mental energy tied up in rationalizations. 

truth is what happens when you allow those to dissolve and you become willing to see what is underneath. it can be scary when you are invested you are in your constructions.

know this: truth is universal and available to all. it cannot really be covered or avoided, because it exists without justification and its current will always be asking you on the molecular level to come back to it. it cannot be created because it already IS. the forces here — the natural forces, the earth spirits, many spirit beings, your ancestors -- are reifying its pull. whispering or sometimes yelling in your ear. magnetizing you to them and to truth. 

the pull is loud. surrender to it, and see what happens. 

our elders in nature have the answers that we seek:::: TRANSMISSION✶TUESDAY

the river exists

just in the same tangibility and reality that everything else in the world exists.

these trees, this cliff this earth around us has a vibration and a pulsation and a love and life. the river and the land say:

is that it's really important for you to realize that, as much as you pay attention to the pulsation of what is happening in our cities -- the pain, the concrete, all the people who are hurting and harming others — part of the confusion of that milieu is because of your living in separation from nature.

so you need to come back here, and be in the river, in the trees, and resonate with our heartbeats so you can be pulled back into the heartbeat of who you really are. 

when you are around only the things that were made by human hands — steel, buildings, cars, sidewalks, pavement — all the violence that was involved in the making of all of those things echoes and reverberates off of each other, adding to the noises and confusion. there’s not really a chance to shift your perspective when you’re in the middle of all of that. it’s challenging to connect to the solution.

coming out to nature may feel like a leisure activity but it's actually what you have to do to get healing and perspective.

when you’re in the crush of humanity and everything that human hands have created — yes you can cultivate love for each other and tune into what is good and tune into each others hearts and share food, bodies, hugs, comfort and community —

but when you come out to nature there are beings, trees, bodies of water, the sky, that already have the information you need, we are the elders and we know. the way you listen to us is not the same way you listen to a person. it is through a resonance in your body. just like your body learns from the body of other people, you body learns from bodies of water and trees and the heartbeat of the earth and the natural world.

when you come to the earth with your problems of heartbreak, despair, the intensity of living in the city and among each other, you don’t come to nature to escape, you come here for answers. you don’t come to ignore your problems, you come to receive perspective on them. 

you are rightly aware of the problems of escapism and the privilege of being able to leave. however, when you come and ask in prayer for guidance, it is very different than coming to suppress and ignore what is troubling you and your collective hearts.

just remember that this river medicine is for everyone and you can carry it back with you. that your body — as much as your body is a body of a city and a people who are struggling — you body is also a body of earth and water and pebbles and river. this is just as crucial as anything else. 

YOUR HEART HAS A WILL TO BREAK /// TRANSMISSION✶TUESDAY

"O friends, what can you tell me of love, whose pathways are filled with strangeness?" (Mirabai)

I can tell you that you should expect to walk through this world with a broken heart, a heart that is broken open. i can tell you that the experience of being here is too much to contain in one vessel, and when you allow your heart to be broken, you allow your heart to live in different parts of your body, your arms and limbs are chalices of feeling and light that can refract and receive.

when you put all of your effort into maintaining what you perceive to be the wholeness of your heart — protection — you miss what you are here to do, which is to be wide open.

you talk about duality but really, it’s triplicity, multiplicity. all of the experiences that can be had, of every single different direction, that are happening at the same time. your tears, your rage, your passion, your peace, your love, your acceptance and in the same breath your anger about all of it.

you can’t expect to be able to contain all of these varying and contradicting experiences within one heart that is intact. and when i say intact, i do not mean not broken open, not wounded, because you are still an intact person if you have allowed your hear to be expanded into all the different parts of your body.

when i say “intact", i mean protected, i mean a heart that is defended, maintaining an artificial shape that is meant to be expanded. 

the intelligence, the brilliance of your heart can perceive the brilliance and the brokenness of this world. and if that does not break your heart open, then you are doing yourself a great and painful disservice by manually suturing closed the parts of your heart that want to split, that want to bleed, that want to cry with pain and with the sadness of separation. 

you cannot be in this world — REALLY be in this world, and the truth of how it is — without your heart being broken.

when you prevent your broken heart, you are taking threads of your misunderstanding will and weaving them together in the lines where you feel your heart wanting to break. and you are putting so much effort into containing the will of your heart, which is to metamorphose. you are tying down the wings that want to grow.

all the effort you are putting into that, it is exhausting.

the muscles in your heart are the strongest muscles in your body and they are going to continue to pull in the directions that they want to go in, and the expansiveness that they want to be -- the muscles want to open up and make your heart the size of your entire body. your body will integrate these pieces of brokenness and what you will see when your heart covers all of you, is that yes you are sensitive to the touch but also, behind your heart, there is your spirit. it is the light that is inside of you, and it is bright and strong and it burns. 

and when you allow your heart to break open, to stretch, the muscles in your heart going into the farthest reaches of all of your physical being, allowing yourself to be as big as you actually are, to hold the complexities and the contradictions of the pain, joy, suffering, pleasure, exaltation, the separateness and the togetherness and the everything of this life — you have to let your heart stretch out into your entire body because there’s no other way you can have room for all of these experiences — 

when you do that, you will inhabit the brightness and strength of your spirit.

when you suture your heart, your spirit can't come forth because all your energy is being put into this self protection. and the result of that protection is about your perception of your preservation within yourself. a heart that is sutured together is ultimately a heart that is closed, and a heart that is not willing to accept the world as it is and be in in the world as it is.

but there is no work here that closed heart can do, because all of its effort is bent in preserving a manufactured and artificial way of being, so your spirit can’t come to the front. because all the spirit’s effort is hearing “stay back”. and sometimes, this is ok. this is ok. it is ok to maintain. it is not always time to break.

and when you are ready, take out your sutures. you can do this slowly. and know that the direction of the pieces of the heart that wants to break will move in their own accord. this is not something that you have to do manually. all you have to do is let those pieces go. behind you, in front of you, in your mouth, on your tongue and lips, in words that you speak to your lover. to the back of your heart, the back of your body, to the pain of not feeling protected. out to the right in your arms of service, out to the left in the pain of not being able to help all who are suffering. and feel all of those things. and every time you have a new experience that you don’t think you’ll be able to contain, you can say to it, yes, this too, this too.

this is not a logical process. and although your heart is intelligent like a brain it doesn’t follow the same rules. and every time you think you won’t be able to contain another contradictory piece, you will be surprised at the brilliance of what you can hold.

find those with whom you can share your most tender heart: TRANSMISSION✶TUESDAY

don’t forget what it feels like to feel good,

don’t forget what it feels like to sing in your body, in your heart --

to play the fiddle that is you.

take a breath.

feel how your heart your belly, your brain, your sex, your vocal chords, your arms, your limbs --

are an instrument, a symphony together, vibrating and humming.

feel how when you make love with someone, you are making music.

feel how when you dance with another person, you are creating a symphony.

feel what happens when you stand next to someone and you hold their hand. when you stand next to someone, chanting or singing, feel what is created.

when your hearts become a chorus , tuned together, two instruments, three instruments, making music in your connection.

do not forget that these connections, these heart connections, are the bedrock of strength.

these connections are the pliable, strong spider’s web that underlay everything.

and as you go and you climb and you struggle to change and to make this world better, and to be heard, as you sound out your voice, you will become depleted, misdirected if you do this work without the richness of community.

let the ground swell and quake with your love for each other.

let your heartbeats resonate.

let yourselves be held.

let yourself gather your strength here, in the arms of those you love. in moments of vulnerability, physical and emotional. 

let yourself gather strength when you lay next to one another. know that as you lay in confidence and as you whisper plans in the night, that this conspiring is in the fabric of healing that you bring into the world. do not devalue your pillow talk and the sweetness of your one-on-one relationships.

as you let yourself be seen, as you find safety, vulnerability, and openness — through sexual connection, and through intimacy in friendship that allows for that kind of nakedness and being held — 

find safe people, be a safe person. undress the baggage, undress what it is that is overlaying you with armor. find those people with whom you can share your most tender heart. find those people who you can say “i fear greatly.”  be as honest as you can. with yourself, and in the company of another person.

because as you are in company and as you share your vulnerability with one another, your tenderness reverberates. 

you think that this world needs a fight, but what you need is to learn how to be soft.

and it does not mean that you do not exclaim to the world with your loudest voice what you know to be true.  but it is that those tender moments are precious, they are small but big. and they echo. your tenderness creates tenderness creates tenderness creates tenderness. 

and so when you come together with your embrace with your groups, your friends, your organizing, let yourself cry. let yourself feel what is there. in addition to everything else, find the people that you can be the most tender, the most naked with, and cherish those relationships. nurture them so that they grow in strength and in number. 

because the more people who can be tender with more people, the less armor that you have to wear as a whole. the more you will be able to hold, to sustain, to generate, to love, to have your hearts beat together. 

find the people you can be tender with, find the people who can hold you, and hold them. hold them, and be held there. 

TRANSMISSION✶TUESDAY:: CLIMBING DOWN FROM THE TABLE BUILT BY EVIL

*Transmission Tuesday is a weekly offering that features a message I've channeled from the earth and / or spirit guides. This message was channeled on 6/19/18, during a time of intense public outcry about children being separated from their parents when crossing the US border.

This message is for folks who are from colonizer lineage and are doing work to heal the trauma of colonization in their communities and in themselves.*

It's important to feel you own feelings because you have to clear out, make space make room. You can’t want to support someone and their feelings of bereft-ness, grief, pain -- if you are not able to touch those feelings within yourself.

Your feelings don’t come at the expense of someone else’s feelings. they are how you connect.

And it is true that something people sometimes do is to use their feelings as a shield and a blanket to not connect with others.

because it is confusing,

overwhelming.

there is dissonance of information and it is comfortable or more easy to stay in your own cocoon of feeling and broken-heartedness 

and we are not advocating for that.

but you cannot connect and love and support each other from place of your own disconnection.

as you try to walk in this world to do your dance of service

which is your dance of beauty as well, your dance of loving and supporting one another, you cannot do this work if you do not know how to love yourself. you cannot go to the table of someone who is in pain or bereft and offer them flowers and food and nourishment if you do not know how to offer them to yourself also. 

AND

it is important that if you are full, as you are abundant, that you set the table for somebody else. to set the table for someone who is in pain when you can look at the suffering of another person and see how their body quivers and shakes with pain and grief, you must go to them with your gifts and comfort. when you are full, when you have support, when you have nourishment. share.

it will not cost you your life or even your good feeling-ness to go and share the bounty of your security with somebody else.

this is called balance. this is called giving.

this is called setting a table that every one is invited to. this is called using your heart’s stew — the recipes and the security that have been passed on from generations — the nourishment that you feel inside your body, the love that you have been given by the people around you, when you have that, is meant to be shared, and the table is meant to be set for everyone. 

now their is a famine, and it is a famine of the spirit. in the united states, as a large group — not every individual — but as a large group, your table is bountiful. and it is time for you to set the table and share it with others. this world is not meant to thrive on some having and some not having. and anytime you create a system that is out of balance in this way, it will not last.

and when it — this system —  comes down. it might be a surprise. it might be VERY painful to those who have been attached to it. But everybody else who has been living in a different reality, it will not be so different for them. It will not be so different for them to pull the cloths down from the table and to allow the food and the fruits and the bounties that have been there to reach those who have been at the bottom of the table picking up the scraps.

if you sit in a chair that is high, if you sit in this chair and you have a seat at this table that cannot be reached by many, what you can do now is you can move your table to the ground. you can bring your dishes and what you have made to share with very few onto the ground and share with more.

we know that you do not have a vision, an understanding, of how this will work. and what this will look like, we know that what you know is a system where some people have and most people do not. 

and if you have, you strive to keep.

and when you sit at the table that is so high, and you feel those below you gnawing at your ankle, you kick them away. and there is evil in that action.

but you do this because you are used to sitting at the table. and to you, sitting on the floor means death. you do not know that experience. you only know the opulence of fine linens and white sheets, you do not know that in the height of your table you are not sitting on the ground, you do not know the energy and the pain and the forcefulness that it takes to uphold, to withhold, such tight securities and boundaries. 

and although you are fearful — more than you can say — of this table crumbling, when that happens, first of all - if you are already sitting on the ground of your own volition, this will feel different. second of all, when that happens, your illusions will take some time to break and it will take you some time to reset.

but you will notice that

deep inside of you 

deep inside of you, deep inside of you

you have been looking down on the ground with envy.

not because you envy poverty, or pain, or trauma or suffering.

but because the deepest part of you, the most true part of you, has wanted to be with your fellows. has known that your comfortable life has come at the expense of others, keeps you cordoned off, keeps you separate.

and as you move into a global age you realize that you do not want to be separate.

so as you are sitting on the ground

and yes some of the fine foods have fallen away and the security has fallen away

but you will see that the food that has been laid out before you is rich and diverse. and although you may be offering 33 or 45% more than other people, you will see that the connection that you feel and the way that it feels to share food and break bread

this is the life you have been wanting.

this is the life you have been learning for and yearning for.  this is the life that fills the emptiness that has been inside of you that you didn’t even know. 

sitting so far away and up from everyone filled you with isolation

with distance 

it robbed your joy, it put parameters around your joy and said you can only feel joy in this way, you can only feel love in this way.

they said: HEY -- look forward, don’t look down at them. look at me. smile. everything is great. since your youth, they told you never to look. in many words and many ways.

we will tell you that the ones who set this table, the ones who built it, higher and higher. yes, they did so on the backs and bodies of others. they did so with death and violence. the death and violence upon which they built this table was a death and violence to themselves as well as others -

those that they enslaved, raped, captured, brutalized.

you see, this also necessitated a severing of the self. to cauterize, really, to burn a piece of flesh and of the heart. the people who built this table did so at great expense to their spirits,

such that they became less than human.

and you do not want to dine at this table of the monster. 

and you ask the question - were these people evil, who built this table? how is this human nature/ how did this come to happen? is the white man truly a scourge? is the white man worse? 

we do not have that answer. what we can tell you is that there were brutal people in your history AND there have been brutal people in every country, every culture, dating back before people were even white. people raped, enslaved and they saw what could happen with the notion of power, control, violence, threats. when people are deprived and desperate they can be controlled. look at Egypt, look at recorded history and you will see that this is not a new phenomenon. you will see that brutalization has happened throughout, continued to happen.

and so your task is NOT to say that this group of people, this demographic, is evil. Your task is to say that "these people that created the table at which we sit, were evil. and we will not dine at a table built on the charred bones and bodies of our brethren, of our siblings. we will not sit at that table, we reject that table and will burn it down.”

your task in that burning and in that naming of that evil is to invite ALL people to name that evil.

and in doing so, in doing the naming, they will see that there have been evil and brutal and terrible people the world over, history over, this is not a new phenomenon. but what you have the opportunity to do IS phenomenal. it IS about intentionally denying the benefits that have come from a system of brutalization, turning them down. invalidating them. climbing down onto the ground which as much riches as you have amassed and sharing them with others.

we know that it is scary, we do not want you to keep yourself cordoned off. you must.

YOU. MUST. REALIZE.

the emptiness, the hollowness, the sadness you feel,

the hole you cannot fill,

the things you avoid in your deepest depths,

will never be remedied until you are sitting among everyone else. 

that this is not the work that you do to be a “good person”. this is the work that you do to be a person, period. and it is as much for you - for your soul, for your life fulfillment, as it is for anybody else that you are here to help and support.

so know this. that even as it appears that bombs are falling and the world is freaking out because changes are being made, you must at times allow yourself to rest in the embrace of sunlight. in the gentleness of wind, and know that the atrocities of mankind, the free will of humans, some of whom are evil and have been thoroughly corrupted through the process that i have described, 

that this is separate from the will of the one who loves you. the divine, your maker. the one who holds you, and all beings, precious. and we have never wanted this for any of you. that this violence and pollution and smoke, the bombs that fall and fell, have been created by humans. please do not conflate our love — which is unconditional, vast, inexplicable, inexhaustible, which covers every molecule of you regardless of whether you are sitting at the table, on the ground — please do not conflate that love, with the atrocities that mankind has done to one another out of its confusion and free will.

this. is not our will.

and even as we love you, if you are sitting in your high table, know that we long for you to join those on the ground, whether that is by falling or climbing down on your own volition. maybe if you bruise your butt you will learn the lesson and understand a little bit faster. know that as we see you at the table, we weep. because we know what completeness could feel like, and we know your soul longs to and needs to experience that, and we know you are afraid. and we hold all of you equally. even in your state of disillusion. we love you and long for your wholeness, just as we long for the completeness of others, for the nourishment of these children who have been left behind, who are begging for scraps. this has never been the way to live. and it pains us. some of you have chosen it.

take heart. do your work. let the table fall. climb down. and share what you have. you will know how to do it when it comes. and every action and every breath, you make yourself on the same level. we will show you.