Sutra of Ayra-Tara

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Sutra of Ayra-Tara vs. 1, 2, 4, 5 & 8

Homage to the Three Jewels
Homage to Venerable Tara!

Having reached this gem-like paradise, 
Understand actions and their results:
Keep to good and leave evil aside!
For whoever practices wrong actions
Will, in the life that is to come, fall down.

Beasts are dumb and stupid; one eats another;
Up weary paths, down cliffs, they climb and fall,
In panic, terror-stricken, trembling with fear,
Full of caution--one cannot conceive their sufferings.

Sentient beings who are born in hells
Are led against their wills by vicious Yamas,
Burned and cooked and cut up with sharp weapons; 
Their suffering, hot or cold, cannot be borne.

Therefore, doing wrong deeds in this life
Manifests to oneself, magnified--
For many eons, fierce sorrow torments one
With no time to escape, nor chance to bear it.

But though happy themselves aid all migrators,
Greed, hate, delusion gone, root of compassion
Firm, and striving with three doors pure do virtue,
Strive in this essence of the most profound.

Yoga Basics Workshop this Saturday September 23, 8-11 a.m.

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  • Introduction to Yoga as a way of life
  • Instruction on basic yoga postures and how to modify for your body
  • Experience a gentle yoga practice
  • Great for beginners or those who want to solidify their yoga foundation
  • Instructor has over 16 years as a practitioner of yoga, and four years of teaching
    Space is limited!!
    Register for this and other upcoming workshops here.

Fall Yoga Retreat: Healing Trauma through Yoga & Fairytales in Pipestone, MN on Sacred Land

Visit the historic town of Pipestone, MN and experience the sacred peaceful grounds of Pipestone National Monument. On this land dedicated to peace and integration of all people we will explore healing trauma through yoga based on the books, Overcom…

Visit the historic town of Pipestone, MN and experience the sacred peaceful grounds of Pipestone National Monument. On this land dedicated to peace and integration of all people we will explore healing trauma through yoga based on the books, Overcoming Trauma through Yoga-Reclaiming Your Body by David Emerson and Elizabeth Hopper, Phd, the IRest Program for Healing PTSD by Richard C. Miller, and Donald Kalsched's book, The Inner World Of Trauma, Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit.  To get the most out of this experience, I would recommend purchasing the books! 

Our experience will begin at 4 p.m. Friday October 13 and run through dinner Saturday.  Our days will include learning about the nature of trauma through fairytales, mapping our own personal and ancestral wounds and prospectively our personal and collective dharma, practicing gentle Healing Yoga and Restorative Yoga, visiting the Sacred Native American land at Pipestone National Monument.  You are invited to stay overnight in a historic (rumored haunted) hotel on Friday the 13th! You will also experience healing music, a peace making ceremony, meditations, natural beauty, intriguing mystery, and a deeper level of understanding your inner world and self-care practices.  Please make a downpayment to reserve your place. More information to come soon!

May all beings everywhere be now happy and free!
The light in me salutes the light in you, namaste, namaste <3
Jessica

"I am a part of all that is" Monday Meditations

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When the world feels overwhelming, I pray. When I feel small compared to the size of the problems that surround me, I pray.  For me, singing is my deepest prayer. Last week I came across this old Norwegian folk song and I have been singing it ever since. May these words bring comfort, strengthen, and help us to remember that the true point of power is here and now. Together, in the unity of the divine force of life which flows through all of creation, we can do immeasurable good. May it be so <3

Lyrics:
I am a part
Of all that is
And all that is
Is a part of me
And I belong here
In this world
I belong here
As who I am

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Classes start this week at Blue Lotus Studio in Moorhead, MN! Sign up for Workshops and our Fall Retreat: www.taraloma.com.

Classes start this week at Blue Lotus Studio in Moorhead, MN! Sign up for Workshops and our Fall Retreat: www.taraloma.com.

Classes start this week at Blue Lotus Studio in Moorhead, MN! Sign up for Workshops and our Fall Retreat: www.taraloma.com.

The light in me salutes the light in you, namaste, namaste.
Have a beautiful week <3
Jess

"Holding the Tension of Opposites, Birthing the Third" Monday Meditations

Doreen Virtue's now an Episcopalian? Jesus is the King of Kings, Patriarchal issues in Christianity, the struggle of the emerging Divine Feminine and how the Tarot can teach us.

Doreen Virtue's now an Episcopalian? Jesus is the King of Kings, Patriarchal issues in Christianity, the struggle of the emerging Divine Feminine and how the Tarot can teach us.

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Visit www.taraloma.com to see our fall schedule, join our Yoga Basics Workshop Saturday, September 23, get private readings, dream interpretations, yoga lessons, intuition training, and more!  Have a beautiful week.

The light in me salutes the light in you,

Namaste, namaste,

<3 Jess

"Solar Release" Monday Meditations

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Viewing the eclipse from the Circle of Stones at Carleton College in Northfield, MN earlier today.

Viewing the eclipse from the Circle of Stones at Carleton College in Northfield, MN earlier today.

As the light dimmed on earth this afternoon, the energy got a little creepy. I had to get up and walk around to release the collective anxiety I began to feel vibrating. I shook my rattle and beat my drum to steady my body. My mind felt a little more scattered suddenly. Dark thoughts and old issues presented themselves to me as mosquitos came out of the woods and swarmed me as if it was twilight. In the intensity, I remembered that the Goddess is the Queen of the void and I called upon the Divine Mother to assist humanity in creating new life on earth. And then the thunder came, and the rain, and the release. I remembered that this is what it feels like to give birth.

As the day went on, hard conversations and tears were also released. Where in the past these intense conversations would blow up and create barriers in relationships, today I saw people come closer in disagreement and behave more gently. I am so hopeful for humanity.

On top of the solar eclipse, it is also a new moon today, and it is the perfect time to set new intentions.  As I am learning: we can't do everything. We must make choices. We can't continue to live in some future fantasy. We have to say no to some things, and yes to our dreams. I invite you during this potent energetic time to get clear on your hearts desires.

In the sweet story, The Alchemist, one character proposes that the deepest desires of our hearts were put there to be a guide for our soul's path. Our deep joys are soul gifts planted in us to grow and be manifested. Yet it has taken me some time to give myself permission to truly discern what I want. I didn't want to be selfish. For a time I thought surrendering my dreams for others was what God wanted for me. I felt guilty for being happy if others were suffering--not realizing that my joy might actually birth relief and steady others joy. I felt if I was happy, I must not be paying attention to others' suffering.  It took me some time to learn that to serve others I didn't need to diminish myself or be a doormat. My gift to the world will unfold in tending those seeds of joy planted within me. 

There's a lot of strange things going on in the world today. And a lot to get upset about. And while we honor all of our feelings as humans, when others are telling us how we should feel, we're not really tuning into the truth of our being which is rooted in wonder and love.  The media seems to be asking: Are we scared enough? Angry enough? While those feelings can be great catalysts for change, they will run us down and eat us up over time. They are meant to get us back to our joy. 

According to ancient yoga teachings, in the heart center there is a place where joy always resides-- a place that no matter how much heart break we have experienced, remains unbroken.  I invite you to go there this month and let it unfold with the expanding light of the moon.

This weekend I had the honor of sitting with women at the Women's Awakening festival and leading them through meditations to release energy blocks and connect with the light of their soul. I was reminded how profound a practice it is to simply clear our space, and to release.  I do a shorter version of this practice at the beginning of each of my yoga classes by guiding my students to ground into the earth and open up to divine cosmic help.  This week I'm sharing a sample of a powerful Sovereignty Statement that you can use at anytime to release unwanted energies and clear your space. (See below).

When we release, we make room for new life. May we choose to live in abundance with the love that is available to us everyday, that which is eternal and everlasting. <3

May you have a beautiful week,
Jessica

Sovereignty Statement

I am a sovereign being.
I wish to align myself with Mother Earth and the divine cosmos.
I invite the energies of my highest/whole self and my highest level spiritual guides and most helpful ancestors to be with me and guide me today.
I declare that nothing is allowed in my space that does not serve my highest good and the highest good of all beings.
I am a one soul occupancy. 
Any energies, attachments or entities that are feeding on my light must leave now and
either return to Source or return to kin, but are not allowed to stay in my space anymore.
I choose to shine the light of my being today.
And so it is. It is done. Blessed be.

Visit www.taraloma.com to see all the fall offerings at our new home studio.&nbsp;

Visit www.taraloma.com to see all the fall offerings at our new home studio. 

"Peace Begins Within" Monday Meditations With Jessica & Friends

The Kingdom of God is within you.
-Jesus, Luke 17:21

If it is as the ascended masters say ~all we need is found within~ if the outer world is merely a reflection of our collective (conscious and unconscious) inner worlds, the question I've been pondering is: how do I relate with my own inner alt-right-neo-nazis in order to help untangle the present day mess?

I am curious. And I wonder what brought them to this place, because I am human and it's too easy to decide that Jesus didn't really mean it when he asked us to love our enemies and pray for those who hurt us.

I look for a door into compassion because all I feel is their hatred in my body and I'm hating them right back and Martin Luther King told us that only love can drive out hate. I think about times when I've been filled with hatred towards myself and others. I remember myself at fourteen, with an armor of Aqua Net bangs hard enough to stand up to any weather the four seasons would throw at me. I wore enough black eyeliner to make my mother ban it from the house, and a scowl to keep people as far away from a very vulnerable and hurting part of myself that I was deeply ashamed of after experiencing sexual abuse as a child.

That hard defense served to protect my terrified inner child, for a time. But it was ultimately too mean, too tough, and not in tune with my deepest truest self, which was nothing to be ashamed about in the first place. That's what trauma does. It puts up the toughest defense it can think of to protect the involitable spirit that is cut off from the energies of our naturally numinous divine nature. 

Angry young men flaunting the symbol of cheap, flimsy tiki torches is a big clue to the delicacy of these beings who I suspect are hiding behind tough scary masks of hate. It points to their collective trauma--which has largely been externalized and unintegrated into their consciousness due to the long history created when society demonized men's sensitivity, their need of the Great Mother, and groomed men to be more soldier than human.  All of her children have been suffering ever since her temples were torn down, ever since women were stripped of power, ever since being called a 'girl' was the worst thing that could happen to a boy, ever since divine wisdom was co-opted for the some sort of disembodied logic that has led us to the brink of destroying ourselves and the earth.

These scared young alt-right-neo-nazi men are waking up to the shocking reality that their world view is crashing and no one has initiated them into their hearts or their bodies or divine wisdom. And they are pissed, but not quite sure who is to blame. When we mirror their hate back to them, it only confirms their hopelessness and feeds their fiery rage. 

All I know is Jesus asks me to love them too and pray for them and this is a hard calling.  

Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.
And comfort those mourning the loss of their loved ones who died for love and for our freedom.
For until we are all free, we are not free.
Comfort all who suffer this day. 

Trauma repeats the past. It overlays the past upon the present moment and turns the wheels of karma in the same old directions. And there is a lot of karma that has been put in our care to work through and repair from ages past.  

It is time to destroy illusions and demons--not humans. The Divine Mother is calling us all home for supper--and she doesn't want any fights at the dinner table.

It's eclipse season--so changes are coming more intensely. The illusions will not last. The veils are parting. Change is hard, but change is so good. We need it. We need spiritual midwives to lead us through this transformation. We've been preparing for it. We are becoming the change we wish to see in the world. Enough of us have done our inner work and the collective is shifting, big time.

Here's my August advice:

  • Hold onto your yoga mats. Intend to live anchored in the compassionate witness of the present moment. Open to the mystery of Source unfolding in present time. Resist reacting from a place trauma. Move with purpose. Move with peace. Trauma moves fast. Peace moves slow and deep like a river. Move slower.
  • Be aware of ancient traumas and wounds the human family has sustained and be tender with our collective vulnerabilities.  Look behind the hard masks for the wounded child the mask protects and try to relate to the human aspect. Watch for false flags, headlines and news written with the intention to trigger us, distract us, and pull us into intense emotions and old unfruitful patterns. 
  • Stay grounded. Bare feet on the earth for 10 min a day will balance and clear all your chakras. It will also tune you in to the resonance of the earth, which has been ramping up in a big way lately.
  • Call on the energies of your higher self and your most helpful ancestors to guide you.
  • Intend to serve the greater purpose somehow, a little every day. It's wrapped up in your own greater purpose, wherever your great joy meets the world's great need (F. Beuchner).
  • Sway the hips. Dance. All this breaks up the collective trauma and fear in the environment around us. We exist in a sort of hologram, so as we activate, clear and hold sacred space in our body, we can activate it in the cosmic body of which we are all one. We are all connected through the light that created us and flows through us, so as we each continue to do our inner work, we will make a big difference in the body of the collective.
  • Visualize the rainbow colors of the chakras fully activated and shinning through the sanctuary of your body. It makes a difference!  (Activate your chakras through my on-line course.)

When we are in trauma's fight/flight/fear/freeze mode we are operating from our lower reptilian brain, and not the higher crown chakras and heart chakras that align us with the divine cosmos and our divine self.  The higher self incarnates and stabilizes peace and love on the earth plane. It's time to zip up and clean up our auric fields and get clear on what kind of energy we are allowing into our space, and what kinds of contracts we are making with ourselves and others. (Schedule a private session with me to learn how.)

May this morning meditation bless your day, and your week, and aid us in anchoring a more integrated whole self filled with more compassion, more peace, and especially more love here on earth at this time.  When we push our embers together, the fire we make will transform the world. Let's take back the collective narrative. We are moving into a new beginning, a new birth. Let's co-create a world that serves the highest good of all.  This is what we came here to do, each in our own unique way.

The light in me salutes the light in you,
Namaste, Namaste,
Jessica

Join me this weekend at the Awakening Women Festival at magical Ottertail Lake Saturday August 19, 9:30-6 p.m.

Hear inspirational speakers, practice yoga, meet amazing women, explore local offerings, pick up swag, get mini healing sessions and more at this years Awakening Women's Festival put on by Wendie Billie. The theme this year is all about activating your intution. Look for me in my yellow tent! I'll be offering healing sessions and signed copies of my book, Detoxing God

Seven weeks of remembering, learning and practicing using your intuitive skills and oracular abilities to claim your sovereignty, clear your energy body and revision a better world for yourself and others. We will meet Tuesdays 11-12 am. For seven women only.  

YOGA RETREAT IN PIPESTONE, MN OCT 13-14

Join me on my first yoga retreat: Healing the symmetry of trauma through yoga and fairytales on sacred land dedicated to peace.  We will be staying at a historic (rumored haunted) hotel on a Friday the 13. Participants will experience the energy of Pipestone National Monument where the Great Mother told her people to dig into her body and make pipes for peace that all tribes may be one since they are all her children.  See local Native American artisans, explore the gift shop, walk these sacred grounds and learn how you can help heal the symmetry of trauma in the human family.

The light in me salutes the light in you, 
Namaste, Namaste,
Jessica

Monday Meditations: Introducing Blue Lotus Studio

Now offering yoga classes, meditation &amp; chanting, workshops &nbsp;and music events in our new in home studio!

Now offering yoga classes, meditation & chanting, workshops  and music events in our new in home studio!

Happy Monday!  
I've decided to share a little magic on Mondays in my new weekly blog. I'll be offering guided meditations, reflective writing pieces, intuitive readings, and more!

There's a lot of intense energy in the world today and with a full moon in Aquarius TONIGHT, and a lunar eclipse, and a solar eclipse later this month, we all feel big changes in the air.  I'm holding space for us all to breathe, meditate, stay grounded in our bodies while we reflect on the deeper mysteries and myths at play in our collective consciousness (and unconsciousness) and find the way through.

Life is all about choices. Many probable realities are emerging. Many people believe that once the collective reaches a critical mass in choosing what kind of a reality we want to consciously create, things will shift dramatically.  There is a push of multiple agendas.  Will enough of us choose the path of compassion and love and peace?  The pressure to fall asleep, to go unconscious or give up is strong. Staying awake and mindful is a daily practice. Staying connected to a supportive  community is also essential.

Things are many things coming up for review now. Karmic contracts and relationships are being cashed in. What once could be hidden away is now being revealed. The chasm between our ego ideals and our inner worlds is becoming more and more apparent. New bridges need to be made. Reconciliation and restitution are coming.  Playing victim, no matter how justified, just won't cut it anymore. Blaming outside sources isn't going to fix the issues, but being naive about the shadows of authority is not an option either. Feeling helpless is a trap.  Finding our authentic divine sovereignty is key. We are being called to do the deep reflective inner work and get responsible about the energy we are allowing to flow through us into the world while rooting out the weeds around the light of our soul and tuning into inner truth.  The Kingdom of God is within and you never know when the gates might suddenly burst open again. 

I invite you to join me this fall in deepening your practice of meditation. Calming the body and training the mind will help us all move through these intense times with more purpose, awareness, and collective wisdom.  When we practice relaxing the body we allow our parasympathetic nervous system to activate which helps the body release stress and heal.  Cellular regeneration occurs.  We can access our heart, gut and womb knowledge. We can open to new frequencies of divine wisdom streams. We can make better decisions and heal the affects of trauma on the human family.

This fall I'm so grateful to have the opportunity to unfold a big old dream of mine by opening Blue Lotus Studio in our home. I will hold regular small classes, meet with clients, offer workshops and music events here. I'm also offering a yoga retreat on healing trauma this fall. And if you want to kick off this Egyptian new year with some serious inspiration, join me at the Awakening Women's Festival in Ottertail County August 19. I'll be hosting a booth and offering healing of past/present/future timelines and book signings of my memoir, Detoxing God.

I look forward to serving you on your soul path this year,     

Jessica
High Priestess of Taraloma Earth Temple & Yogini in Residence at Blue Lotus Studio

SACRED ORACLE PRIESTESS TRAINING

Seven weeks of remembering, learning and practicing using your intuitive skills and oracular abilities to claim your sovereignty, clear your energy body and revision a better world for yourself and others. We will meet Tuesdays 11-12 am. For seven women only.  

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BLUE LOTUS MUSIC EXPERIENCE
SEP 15~7PM

Experience Jessica's music. Relax, receive, be serenaded. Free will donation (Junkyard beer an acceptable donation :P).  Please RSVP via e-mail to Jessica@taraloma.com.

I am a Terrible Mother

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Change is good but sometimes it's fucking hard.

Last night I walked to the corner of my back yard where I had just created a little fairy altar, complete with a butterfly bird bath and mini angel chimes that remind me to SHINE and BLOOM and that CHANGE IS GOOD.  I knelt down, pressing my skin into the earth, and checked my neighbors' back yard to make sure I was all alone.  Then I gave myself permission to break down and sob until I had snot running down my face and smeared on the back of my hands, arms and shirt.  It's the sort of monthly ritual crying that releases all the denial that everything is fine.  I need to take time to face all the worry wheels and trauma wheels that like to spin under my radar and keep me moving along too fast to stop and notice what precious dears I'm neglecting and what's really going on down below.  

I seem to have a special sort of break down at the beginning of July every year as if a deep portal is open to me during this time, since I was little, since the abuse happened, when my life was pulled into the underworld.  Years later, my divorce trial took place at this same time, tacking onto my earlier trauma deeper grooves like an exclamation point.  I simply must kneel and release at this time.  

Life spirals around that old stuff and sometimes you wonder, and then you worry, and then you freak out because you realize you may actually have a role in recreating the past traumas of your life (or your ancestors) over and over again and even if you want to stop, you may not yet know how.  

Sometimes I worry if I stop and face the piercing parts of my inner world, I might not ever stop crying. I smile so that people don't know how sad a part of my heart always is.  I'm trying to build a more flexible bridge between my heart and the world.  I might go mad in the process. I might be even more disorganized than I already am.  I might not get the dishes done.  My kids might catch me losing my shit. I might not be able to stay the same as I was today.  I might have to change.  

Life, she reminds me, is always changing.  If you're alive, then you're changing.  Sometimes change is fucking hard.  That's why we created orthodoxy--to give the illusion of change without all the existential angst.  In orthodoxy, isn't the original sin creative imagination? Is this not Wisdom's broken crown weeping at our feet? Once an Episcopal Bishop confessed to me: it doesn't matter if it's true, the order comforts people.  Yes, I replied, but without the animating spirit, the life force herself, the Shekinah, God's presence on earth, the church will die.  

Tradition says change is not good.  Family members and friends often prefer we change back lest we outgrow things they have given up on, and who are we to be better than someone else or suffer any less?  Change somehow singles you out as a magician for the true magic of life is growth and the spiral of energy that keeps consciousness expanding and learning from old mistakes that we might turn humanity's sin into gold.  The ways to work this are known, but they are not renown.  They have been hidden for an age.  But we are remembering.

I am a shapeshifter and that makes people, including myself, uncomfortable.  I bear 10,000 faces of the lost Goddess, this includes the weird ones that make your tummy hurt and your heart race.

I feel into the subtle realms and I can tune in with the codes in the air. Unconscious shadow material arises and I hold the mirror.  I can become your missing parts so that you may find yourself again.  I can become a garbage can so you feel better having loosed your shadows upon me.  I can become your wildest fantasy, I can embody the sexual energies of tantric priestesses of old who used to heal men after war. I can be your worst nightmare for I am not really any of these things and by our participation mystic, I am also all of them if we so choose.  For I am eternal divine essence and so are you.  This is why the angels always remind us: do not fear.  Because it is too easy to forget that we are playing and become trapped in our worst 3D nightmares. 

But my body does quake at times with fear.  I try to hide this from others very well.  I come across as aloof, stuck up, spacey, pushy, controlling.  Sometimes I tremble and shake as if the ancient wounds happened today, as if I can feel into the wounds that open like screaming mouths and so hungry for healing.  The PSTD care is ongoing.  This is why I do what I do.  Relaxing and feeling safe in the body that has known violation takes a lot of practice.  It takes a lot of gentleness and embodiment to sneak past the fiery gates of inviolable rage.  It takes a lot of strength to swim in the deep sorrow beyond the fire and let it rebirth you.  

I weep because the earth weeps.  Because Mary weeps.  Because Jesus wept.  I weep for all those who are now unable to weep because they've lost access to their tender hearts.  I weep because the prophets are still killed for the profits of a few and the demise of many.  I weep because there is so much broken that I cannot mend.  So much hurt that I cannot make go away.  For what we do to another we do to Christ, we do to the divine, we do to our very selves.  And our bodies are wounded and traumatized.  The human family is a little jittery, a little schizo, and when I feel into that, sometimes I am too.    

Saying goodbye to my children for four weeks every summer hasn't gotten easier over time. Never mind that on Thursday I was counting down the minutes until I would get a break from an intense period of transitioning as we moved in with other people that--let's face it--all of us have some fears and reservations about.  Nobody wants to repeat old traumas.  We all want to know we have learned our lessons and have moved on--but we can only learn together as we learn from our repeated mistakes.  And we need each other to make good mirrors for one another.  If our horns and tail are showing, someone will definitely point it out.

Have you ever lived with someone who refuses to see their shadow?  Have you ever experienced that feeling when you are the epitome of pure evil because the other person is so out of touch with their tender spaces?  

I reminded myself that people tend to regress in transitions, and then we make leaps in growth.  The past few weeks we were all regressing, short tempered, anxiety-filled, yet trying our very best to do life in a whole new way.  The challenge of leveling up and undoing the years of pain that threatened to cocoon us into a breathless space marked by the traumas of time, bound by ancestral sin and unconsciousness. Some days seems insurmountable.  But we press on.  

"We only fail when we give up," Grant reminds me. "I'm not giving up," he says.  Me either, I say, but sometimes I just want to give up for an hour and cry in the backyard.    

I cry because I am a terrible mother. I ground my children from video games and I insist that we treat everyone with dignity and respect. They argue that people deserve what's coming to them.  They try to solve violence with more violence. I can't keep up with all their toys; sometimes they get lost at my house.  I am a terrible mother, just ask my kids. Just ask my ex.

Some days, on my worst days, I wonder how I was able to manipulate the court system so well into believing that I am actually worthy of raising my own children. Why didn't they believe all the stuff my ex said about me? Some days, on my worst days, I listen with dread as the things that were said in court and written down into public record replay throughout my mind and draw me deeper into shame and lack of self-trust.  "Everyone lies," a clergy woman once told me. "It's how we play the game to survive."

It's a long history to shake off.  This week as a trauma anniversary rolled around those energies came at me full force again.  This has been my crucible for many years, my secret shame, that I have been treated with such disdain and disrespect on a regular basis in my own home.  Some new age philosophies tell me that it is ultimately my responsibility: that I invite it, that I agree to it--at some level--even unconsciously and so the energy continues to be attracted into my life.  One mentor pointed out: it's like I have "abuse me" written into my auric field.  I don't know if it's all my fault or if this is just what people are trained to do to love when faced with primal fears of survival: they kill it.  

Jesus showed me how love was sometimes an undignified sort of surrender, a turning of the other cheek and praying for those who hurt you.  It's also a scary bit too close to Stockholm syndrome.  

I am worried about our boys and the accumulation of so much trauma done to men in war and throughout time. So much shame that is shifted around and hidden behind silent heroic feats.  So much weeping left undone for the wounds of our most tender human aspects.  So much energy cut off from the heart center, where warriors of love were transformed into soldiers of war, wearing such heavy armor over their tender love, so they could be good obedient sons, committing atrocities for a manufactured ideal of honor.

Women's studies classes at college helped me wake up to my own participation in hating my feminine essence.  I'm still working on mending our Christian theological history and how it cut out the divine feminine and how these wounds flow through our human family still. 

A few weeks ago I walked down my apartment stairs with "the stern mom-look" because I heard my two children screaming and playing too loudly in our thin-walled halls.  My youngest took one look at me--knew he was busted--and proceeded to run straight into the corner of the wall giving him a fast swelling shiner.

Once he was feeling better both he and his sister decided that it was my fault he ran into the corner because of how I looked at him.  They decided that I "made" him do it.  I suddenly felt the echo of those witch trials where young girls accused witches and wizards of making them do things like roll their eyes or pass out in court.  People fear I have some magic power to do them harm--or heal them. It's up to them I guess, what they want to bring to the field.  It's like waking up to the Matrix that we're all living our own realities and creating so much on the screens in front of us, through the logs in our own eyes, through our projections of evil onto one another, that we're all walking around in a panic--or a kind of dissociated madness.

No matter what happens, we must not lose connection with our hearts, for the light that flows through us here, connects us all to divine love.  We are one family.  One body.  May we love one another.  May we be whole again.    

As a little girl I hungered for safe space to recover from sexual abuse and the anger that erupted in our home and in my private inner world. I too was a part of the problem.  In fact, maybe I was the whole problem; I wondered for years if people like me didn't exist, then the world would be a better place.  All that externalizing our worst fears really causes a big mess. Then we have to turn around and make peace with the wake of illusions we bought for truth. 

Just before my youngest left on this long vacation with his dad he said to me, "Mom, I wish you were dead." You don't ever want to hear your children say that to you, especially when you remember the way you felt when they were born, when you held these little miracles in your arms.  When you never knew how much love would flood your heart for another creature who depended upon you for everything.  And then you see past the hurtful words into the hurt emanating from their heart that is working so hard to shield itself from deep pain that is unable to be integrated. And so it is projected, and you hold it tenderly as a mother does, those fragile things.  

I think in a past life I was a sin-eater, for I feel into the role of someone in a community who is agrees to take on the sins of the dying in order to help their soul pass onto to a better realm in the afterlife.  Isn't this sort of work a minister, a priest, and a shaman does? Often times the sin eater was a person was of lowly stature and often homeless or living in poverty--an outcast--such as became the Shaman Medicine Women and the witches (who were midwives and healers) to Western medical culture.  

In family systems theory this role is played by the black sheep or the scapegoat.  In Christianity this is the role Jesus plays, which gets really confusing for a young girl who wants to do good.  I remember when it dawned on me: the soul never dies or sacrifices itself--it is only the illusions that shield the truth of the eternal soul which fall away.  In the Tarot deck the Emperor reigns over the crucified reality as an archetype of the Prince of Peace.  His crucifixion involves protecting the energies of the Empress (Being) and Priestess (Wisdom) and Magic (divine co-creative play).  True surrender is for love and protection of the vulnerable.  True surrender does no harm to the vulnerable, in divine cosmic law.  But sometimes we confuse the archetype of the crucified Emperor, the good son, as one who is simple dead inside with no animating feminine life giving spirit, because that has been sacrificed instead to a lesser god presently ruling this world with trauma.  

I feel into the experience of being burned at the stake in the public square.  I seem to remember gazing at faces who both love and hate you.  I remember into the way the body feels, how the womb constricts and the heart bursts into flames, when a woman was put on trial by theologians who feared her magically feminine ways of being. I feel into the safety given to "good Christian men" who didn't know what to do with their deepest fears and darkest fantasies, but to project them outward, to externalize them upon certain women who fit the bill--not to ultimately be condemned as evil themselves--as some feminists have confused--but ultimately to help men become more conscious of themselves, to grow in love towards all parts of self, so we can grow in consciousness. 

I am remembering that I came here to work on this issue in my lifetime. It's this soul contract that set me up in a way--to choose to be born into this Norwegian Lutheran lineage, to experience the shadow of the "good sons," that we might remember also remember the "good daughters" and the Goddess, and heal the wounded feminine, and Medusa's madness, and the wounded masculine, and restore Poseidon's passions.  

With all these strange energies in my field, in my cellular memories, in my agreements made before I was born, I am remembering that I agreed to carry the archetypal projections of the whore and the holy woman in this lifetime in order to resurrect the body of the Goddess and activate her divine feminine energy for humanity's ascension, for as she rises, so do we.  

I am remembering that I agreed to initiate people into the underworld because these are the resurrection mysteries known by Mary Magdalene, Isis and the Great Goddess of old; these are stored in all of our DNA awaiting activation and integration.  The Divine Feminine fell under the sea of unconsciousness, as the Gnostics understood Sophia to fall for an age, for our understanding of all these things.  Now this age is coming to an end. This lifetime is to be different.  What was held in secret will be shouted from the rooftops.  

What I am seeing now is how the human imagination has been hijacked to spin repeating traumas.  How much have we stoic Norwegian Lutheran's been told we can't think about certain things?  See how much fear we have stuffed down deep.  How the energy line between the third and fourth chakra has been severed so that we work with a good crucified son energy, while working ourselves unconscious and disconnected from our body wisdom and our sacred sexuality.  This was never the plan.  We are allowed to dream and to imagine.  So let's stop fearing the worst is about to happen and externalizing evil.  Let us instead see the fragile children behind the evil masks throwing tantrums with compassion.  

I have to remember the big history I was born into to understand why the present day circumstances feel so heavy at times. They are heavy in the human family.  

I often heard Lutheran's rail on Mary.  She was stripped down with lofty theological arguments to affirm her lack of divinity--only Jesus was divine; the rest of us--we were worms--except maybe Bach.

It's easier to perpetuate trauma in the human family when our dignity is lost. When we forget that we are truly royalty at our core, true sons and daughters of the One Most High, made with infinite light that no sin could truly cover our essence--only ignorance, and only for a time.

I dream of lifting up the floorboards to find the house is rotten.  No one wants to look. There are lady bugs everywhere. In the patriarchal mind: Ladies bug me!  The hatred of the feminine essence is strong in the rivers that flow through history to meet me here; loving our most vulnerable parts is the way to recovering human dignity. I must find the keys to unbind these wounds in the world: You can't be that weak in the world.  You need to toughen up.  Stop being so sensitive.  You think too much.  You feel too much. You'll make a mistake in public and your whole life will be ruined!  Hiding away is safer than standing in the light.  Science is more valid than your silly art.  You make me feel uncomfortable.  I want you.  I am repulsed by you. I hate you because you're tall, because you're skinny (or fat). I hate you because you're beautiful (or ugly).  I hate you because you make me feel insecure.  I hate your naivete because it reminds me of my innocence lost. You are a stupid girl because you can't do math.  Beauty is a deceiver since Satan was the most beautiful angel.  You just want attention.  Women are manipulative and not to be trusted.  Men are to be trusted more than women. You are crazy. You are mad.... the list that binds the feminine soul goes on and on and on.  

The primal fear of the weakest link is being abused by the collective, being the scapegoat of what people fear most: vulnerability.  Ultimately the abuse of the child and what is most tender in humanity.  But we know all to well growing up what happens to the kid who appears the weakest to his peers; he get's beat up or raped.  Loving our enemies is hard. But we are not truly one another's enemies.  We are traumatized creatures projecting our deepest fears onto the divine faces which we all have.

To unlock, I must descend.  I must go through.  I can't fight and deny.  I must accept:  I am a terrible mother. I embody the fears. I hold a place for all the things that have been unacceptable which belong to the wholeness and dignity of the human family.  

I lost my shit one day--granted we were sitting in a hot car without air conditioning for a long time and my son began to complain that I needed to give up being a yoga teacher and get a real job and be a more normal mom so I could make real money and we could get out of this apartment that was too small and I could buy him every video game he desired or something like that.  I snapped. I saw red and words flew out of my mouth from the depths of my own private hell.  Words that I reserved only for me on my worst days.  This rage asks for deep tender healing.  So much healing I have to do still.  I wounded my son with my reaction.  And he'll never forget it, and neither will I.  I am a terrible mother. I am a human mother.   

I was reminded how high school kids tend to be jerks to each other in order to lessen the pain of saying goodbye to all they ever know, to act tough as they prepare to adventure into a new unknown world.  I was reminded how anger is often an easier go-to emotion that resides above the deep grief that invites us into the center of black inertia--not to die--but to be reborn.  But we don't show each other our grief very well.  The anger keeps the boundaries around all that is so fragile and wounded.  And I know that I am only a terrible mother because someone else feels so terrible and doesn't feel strong enough to love and integrate their demons yet, so I must hold them for a while.  I must transmute them.  This is what a healer does.

I've been learning to make peace with the terrible mother that I am who is prone to see red.  I'm a Taurus after all.  Saint Paul asked, "How can we hate our very bodies?" And I want to know if the man felt what it was like to be a woman and hold the deep fears of men in her body?  For we are taught how to hate our bodies and buy products to fix what was never was broken for the striving of perfection and freedom from our Mother.  We are sold illusions and fear and war to keep the Prince of Peace at bay.  The Prince of Peace needs the terrible mother, and she needs him, for they are the partners of sacred union, the true kings of earth, submit to and marry the goddess who is earth herself.   

After a rough morning that involved taking her aggression out on the cat, her brother, and her newly cleaned room--my daughter Ela confessed to me in despair: I'm bad, I'll never be good like you...I'm the devil."  For those times I see red, I do have those other times when I open my mouth and I don't know where the words come from.  I've had to undue those taboos that say I can't channel for that is of the devil, and decide that no actually I can for I AM A CHANNEL OF DIVINE LIGHT a living sanctuary.  I say, "Ela--we are both good and evil.  We came here to learn wisdom and the knowledge of good and evil.  We are all devils and angels trying to find our way back home."  

She says she sees angels. She says she sees demons. We carry an ancestral line of sensitive women who've learned to deny what we see and feel and know in order to appease the great fear of the scientific world who overtook the intuitive feminine realms, that force that convinces us that all that is real is what we can see and touch and measure.  Yet I know spooky action at a distance.  I know my feelings are real even when my ex valued his logic over my feelings, even when all his brilliant mind reduced my interior experiences to insignificant madness.  I know there are realms of reality, and I remember the other dimensions from before birth. If that makes me mad, then may my hair turn to snakes.   

I was scared to have children.  I didn't want to be a terrible mother.  But it seems it was my divine destiny.  In the Renaissance feelings carried a higher value than logic.  Feelings and passion could move a crowd much better than logic.  

This long-time dance of opposites continues to spiral through our expanding consciousness as we turn again and try again for integration. 

Intuitive women have been ridiculed, tucked away, silenced, burned at the stake, locked up in looney bins, banned from serving as ministers in the church, banned from the right use of our imaginations, which when graced by divine feminine wisdom, have the power to change the world in the blink of an eye.  We are all magicians.  All weaving illusions.  All invited to co-create a reality together. All remembering how we each belong to something greater than ourselves.

I have been practicing a new relationship with myself as a terrible mother.  This is my shadow work--loving that what I fear with tender compassion.  It's been too easy, to knee jerk to rage on our vulnerabilities.  We were Vikings for godsake.  Don't be a wimp. But being tender and gentle actually takes great strength.  This is why the angels are frightening when they appear.  They know good and evil.  And they restrain themselves with great care so that they abide by the highest laws of love.

Kali Mandala drawing by my mother. &nbsp;See our coloring pages.

Kali Mandala drawing by my mother.  See our coloring pages.

The Indian Goddess Kali was also called a terrible mother--and a good mother.  She holds the opposites of these energies together in balance.  She is the Goddess of Terror wielding her knives dripping with blood as she is the demon slayer.  She destroys illusions. It is she who makes the demons tremble.  When she has consumed the demons, she nearly runs mad as she digests and transforms all this energy in her body, as our earthy and cosmic mothers do, it is her lover Shiva that comes and surrenders to her and heals her.  Together they create the sacred marriage and birth the universe anew with their divine sexual union.  And maybe that was the Magdalene's role as well.  Maybe it was she silently standing in the background, adding her divine feminine energy to support Jesus' ministry.  Maybe Jesus died not for the sins of the whole world--but for his own sin (gasp!) of accidentally killing a childhood playmate as he was learning his divinity, as the Gnostic texts reveal.  Maybe we are all here to balance out our personal and family karma, all called to activate our divine-human wisdom and integrate the shadows and the light, to know good and evil, to see it first and foremost in ourselves and all else as an illusion unraveling into deeper mysteries.

I weep because the Goddess weeps.  I love because She first loved me.  I see how much my children love me that they must sever themselves from me with harshness in order to shield themselves from the pain of the loss of my presence.  We have done this for a few years now.  Still our edges are rough.  Thank Goddess her energies are strong even if on some days my humanity is not, for divine love never fails, though it is pressed thin.

I am learning to accept that I am a terrible mother because I know that is the only way I can also be a good mother.  I am integrating the fragmented parts of the divine feminine in my body.  I am the whore and the holy woman.  I am all these things that you see in me, and I am no-thing, for we rise out of the great beginning and we are still divine emerging. 

We created the idea of the terrible mother.  She exists so we can shield ourselves from the great pain of the feeling the loss of our connection to the earth and our most vulnerable aspects of ourselves. If she is demonized, we can stuff away any regret or feelings of neediness for her love.  But She still is among us, sending us love no matter how much we have tried to deny that we need Her.  She who is Terror, She makes all of our demons flee. She helps us to see more clearly the way of love is the way of return to the Garden of Eden.  The love we truly need has been right here all along, no matter how far we as children have strayed.

Solstice Blessings: Play Your Trump Card

SUMMER OF LOVE, REPRISE 

I'm not an astrology expert, but those who have been watching the stars and planets have said that we are moving through a similar conjunction as we did in the 60s. We are in a time of great change and shifting sands.  This is all very uncomfortable.  It seems every day there is something reported that fuels the flames of indignant rage.  People have said this is the time of Kali rising, the dark mother who brings death, transformation, and new life.   

Anger is a challenging emotion.  In my psychology studies I learned that emotions are neither good or bad, even though by the time I had gotten to college I had already decided which ones were acceptable and which were not. It is what we choose to do with our feelings that matters, if we can still reach our feelings and relate to them consciously. Many of us move too fast to even have time to consider how we really feel.  Our electronics and modern day life keep us operating at a different frequencies that are out of alignment with the natural frequencies of the human body and earth.  Many of us are raised to think more than to feel. But when we take this too far, when we are more prone to obey to the rules of society in order to be 'successful' many of us will find ourselves swimming in a world of psychopaths so cut off from true feelings that they are able to do horrible acts to other people without flinching. This is not as some have confused, true strength or power, this is the fragmentation of humanity. These are the doors to transhumanism and genocide. 

As a child I remember having meltdowns and huge tantrums. I remember feeling that my frustration was valid--it happened for a reason-- and that the adults around me just didn't understand what was going on inside me and I didn't have the words to tell them. As I grew up and wanted so bad to be cool and accepted by my peers, I cut off a relationship with my anger. I didn't want to feel it, see it, or be it.  At one point I found it incredibly difficult to express any of my anger.  Often anger is the only emotion men are permitted; conversely I was afraid of becoming an angry woman that men feared. I became an expert liar. A pleaser. I was great at pretending everything was fine when it really wasn't. I had horrible boundaries because I didn't want to be mean or make anyone else feel uncomfortable. I believed standing up for myself was selfish, so I took the internal hit. I didn't know how to connect to that place deep within me that had been shamed as a child and hold her safe. Because being nice and smoothing out differences was a higher cultural value than expressing individual feelings and individuating unique differences.  At some point this game starts costing too much. It costs us an authentic connection with our soul and true self.

For many years I believed I was just a chill person (the weed helped with that) until I found myself in a relationship where my ancient rage got triggered. Then in an instant my illusions about myself and my persona unraveled and I stood as The Terrible Mother, like Kali herself, full of rage. I was scared of myself and what I was capable of feeling: it was big. We are taught to repress this socially unacceptable stuff, but we really can't keep up this work. As Carl Jung discovered, what we repress becomes even stronger in the unconscious until one day it is strong enough to unravel all the illusions--it breaks forth from the underworld like destiny.  And then you discover yoga and learn how to meditate. (I don't do what I do because I am an expert; I do it because I must learn.)  Maybe all we can learn is how much we do not know. And then we learn to be humble, more sensitive to others, and truly human.  

We are unraveling so many illusions in our world today.  Lifting up the floorboards we are finding the structures rotting. At first blush this is daunting. At second, we are finally seeing more clearly. Third, we begin to build a more compassionate relationship with the terrifying aspects of our human psyches and learn how to harness this raw primal energy for new life. For the anger is a clue that boundaries have been violated; it's not the goal or where we stay in our healing journey. We pass through the fires of transformation that all the illusions may burn away, that we may rise to new life again.

I can't help but think that during this Trump presidency that this is our calling: to consider and discover the true trump cards, or values, that rule the deck, or the sacred cosmos. So I've been thinking a lot about Tarot cards lately and learning about ancient Christian hermetic tradition that comes out of France, my hunch is from the Magdalene wisdom and from the more mystical Jewish roots of Christianity. The cards teach us about archetypes, or building blocks, or nodes in the human psyche of wholeness. Each card is a human lesson that helps us integrate and connect the wisdom found in the tree of light available to the whole human family.  In the 78 card Tarot deck there are 22 trump cards also known as Major Arcana. The trump cards reveal what is the higher spiritual law. There are hierarchies in the spirit realm, there are lessons we must learn before we can be initiated into the higher sacred dimensions. The subtle rules the dense, so if we know the cosmic law and how it operates in the universe, we can move through these challenging times and continue to do what we came here to do: to learn, and to teach, and to learn, etc.  

I recently had a dream that I was inside of The Tower trump card, and I knew it was about to fall. While the card appears frightening--the good news is that the illusions are being stripped away and the false gods are falling making way for the truth.  

For those of us who have been willing to give away our power (and thus alleviate our responsibility) we are really struggling as those external authority figures are obviously flaying--or as we saw in 9/11, quite literally falling out of The Tower. The process of waking up and discovering our own personal connection, personal authority, and journey of learning requires us to take the logs out of our own eyes, to stop projecting power outside, or evil outside, and to do the reconciling work of balancing the opposites within.

For me this is ongoing work with my rage. If I remain cut off from what's beneath that rage--which is deep sorrow-- anger can bubble up out of me unexpectedly.  Sorrow is also a challenge for our culture, for no one wants to be the Debbie Downer of the party. But once we acknowledge what is inside of us, it releases us--it does not sneak up and possess us or wreck our plans to get our attention. 

The truth of our human experience is at heart a crucified reality.  Love dies over and over again on the earth plane. Justice is not served--she's crying out on the streets. We saw this again in the senseless shooting of Philando Castile and the trial that followed. We live in a crucified reality because love still dies here on planet earth; it is raped, starved, homeless.  It doesn't climb the corporate ladder so well. It doesn't rule this world for power and Sophia (the love of wisdom) have been long estranged.  But love does rule the subtle spiritual reality which rules the entire cosmos and will rule eternally. So whenever we play that trump card, we will have the whole force of the heavenly realms at our side to witness and stand in solidarity with our brother and sisters in sorrow.  We will also have the assurance that no matter how things turn out down here, that we are doing what we came here to do: we are learning/teaching/learning love, and we are not giving up until we have played all our cards.  And in the end, love will reign again for it is everlasting and no forces of darkness shall overcome it.  So press on dear ones, and let love call us on to even deeper awareness and care for ourselves and the whole human family.        

SUMMER SOLSTICE SONGS

Enjoy these songs I sung by Buffalo River last night <3  Baba yaga is my nod to the dark feminine, Kali energy that can bring the light of consciousness back to our mad lives.

LYRICS
I need hairy woman
With a few extra pounds
I need a very old woman
Who hobbles around
In a house with chicken feet
In a yard covered in bone
I need a witchy bitchy woman
Cuz she knows what's going down

Baba Yaga can ya light my fire?
Cuz my light has gone out
And I've lost my mother
My light has gone out
And this world's been cruel
My light has gone out
And I need another

 

I offer private healing sessions to clients using yoga, meditation, energy medicine, oils, prayer and more.  

 

MAY ALL BEINGS EVERYWHERE
BE NOW HAPPY AND FREE <3

Introducing my new memoir: Detoxing God, a story about one girl's search for eternal love

"These words contain the grace and grit of true spiritual transformation.  This book is a testimony to the temerity of faith and the power of what’s most fragile in us all."

-Meggan Watterson, Author of REVEAL:  
A Sacred Manual For Getting Spiritually Naked
Hay House, April 2013

Greetings on this Holy Week of 2017 on the day of the Magdalene Full Moon!
I'm so excited (and so freaking out) that this book gets to launch on this auspicious day.  
May it serve the greater good and our collective healing.

You can order your copy here today! 

Pop in to my new yoga classes in Moorhead, MN this week!

LIVING IN THE UPSIDE DOWN WORLD

Recently I got hooked on the Netflix series, Stranger Things.  It feels like ET meets Goonies, as these kids straight out of the 80s get caught up in a mystery that involves aliens that exist in parallel universes after a friend gets stuck in a dimension called "the upside down."  We learn that top secret government programs have learned how to rip portals in the fabric of space-time and some scary beings are now able to cross over into our dimension (and we into theirs).

Reflecting on the series I got this eerie feeling that this actually sounds a little like real life now--well, it certainly would explain a lot.  (Maybe DT is "the upside down" and we've got to find our way into another portal of reality!) Lately it feels like we've flipped into another dimension as we find ourselves living in some kind of fake news meets reality TV show, where SNL and The Onion seem to be our sanctuaries of refuge. People who look at big cycles of time have been talking about how humanity has recently completed a Great Cycle of time that began at 3114 B.C. and ended at the Winter Solstice in 2012.  Since then we have learned that our government has been spying on us through our computers and cell phones, pedophilia rings are being busted in the highest levels of global power, UFO sightings are increasing with American's being 300x more likely to report them, new planets have been found habitable for life, and outrageous events are reported daily until almost nothing is shocking in our news feeds anymore.  

This is certainly a pivotal time in human history.  

A few weeks before the Winter Solstice of 2016 things started feeling super intense.  I took up an old practice I had as a child: I began to watch the sky for Jesus. I grew up in a culture that believed his return was immanent and as a little girl I was always hungry for the outdoors and the mysteries of the skies.  When I went to seminary I learned that people have been feeling this way since Jesus ascended to heaven over 2000 years ago and I gave up the practice.  But as I open up my clairvoyant skills and listen deeply within, I am confident that something big is stirring.  Some people think it's the end of the world and this doomsday panic is infused in our media. Others think we are on the brink of turning the tide on a dark chapter of history,  that we already have the technology to clean up our planet and create abundance apart from the ancient Babylonian money system that enslaves us all and that some incoming solar flash may help activate our chakras and help us ascend into our higher natures.  Which reality is it?  Well, we get to choose what reality we want to live in.  If life is holographic in nature, then we can begin to understand how what happens on a very small level, also exists on a very large level. The mustard seed becomes the Kingdom of God. Whatever we bind in earth we bind in heaven.  What reality would we like to bind here?  The race to create it is on.

This is crucial: we must all make a choice. And this is also crucial: we are co-creators of our reality. So what would you like to create? 

As the winter rolled around I found it hard to write.  It seemed I had no center of voice as my consciousness kept popping back and forth between different probable realities.  (Growing up as a military child and moving every three years of my life gave me a lot of experience in this practice). I could see many sides of the same situation and with that came a state of open wonder and a relatedness to suddenly many things of which I did not know. Cultivating relationship with the mystery is a high spiritual practice for it invites us into the unknown.  It invites us to see our shadows, and wow are they all coming out of the woodwork or what?  

I've heard that this is a time where the masks come off.  Whatever we've been hiding begins to bubble up. The inside becomes outside.  The upside-down becomes right-side up.  In seminary we had this theological term called The Upside-down Kingdom of God and in this Kingdom, which is surely coming Jesus says: the meek inherit the earth, the poor are rich, the last are first,  the wounded are healed, the earth is made new, wars cease and love reigns forever. Maybe that feels too far out, but if we have any say in what we'd like to see unfold next then direct your heart and energies in the ways that serve the highest good of all beings and let's just see how our mustard seed faith can move mountains.  May we see even stranger things. 

NEW YOGA CLASSES OFFERED IN MOORHEAD, MN

NEW LOCATION & CLASS OFFERINGS
Beginning March 11, 2017 at The Center for Mindful Healing
Classes are $15 or purchase a 10-punch pass for $135 and receive a 10% discount.
Please bring cash or check in person, or pay with your card on-line.

Saturdays, Simple Yoga 8:30-9:30 a.m.
Enjoy the benefits of a yoga practice can bring to your life. This class is open to all levels and I will help you modify each pose to suit your body.

Mondays, Restorative Yoga 8-9 p.m.
Come learn how to relax deeply and feel the benefits of allowing your body's natural healing systems to work for you. This class is especially helpful to anyone suffering from high stress, grief, or difficulty sleeping.

Wednesdays, Simple Yoga Noon

MEMOIR RELEASE: IT"S GUNNA COME WHEN THE BABY IS DONE
Thank you all for your patience as I heed some wisdom from my inner circle and run a few things by a lawyer and make sure all my ducks are in a row before releasing my memoir to the public.  I am hoping to have it up on Amazon by the end of the month!  Stay tuned! 

A Day Without Women, the Fearless Girl and the Bull

This fearless girl stature was added in front of the Wall Street bull as a statement on how more women need to be allowed into leadership positions.  But on first glance my gut recoiled because what appears on the surface as a symbol for the liberation for women, is anything but.

The bull was/is an ancient symbol of protection for the feminine--not Wall Street.  The Bull of Heaven was also known also as Gugalanna, the husband of the ancient goddess of the underworld Ereshkigal. It was possibly the death of her bull that sent Ereshkigal into a tailspin of inconsolable grief.  In the ancient myth (which is one of humanity's oldest) her sister, Inanna Queen of Heaven descends to face her mourning sister. It was also partly Inanna's fault that the Bull of Heaven died, for she sent it to kill her lover Gilgamesh/Orion after he betrayed her and refused to remain married to her, after he decided to usurp the natural order of the True King's relationship to the Goddess--which was a promise to rule in harmony with the Earth--and instead went on to create eons of patriarchal dominating warrior societies that placed masculine deity above feminine deity and drove the balance of the planet to the brink of destruction.

This myth reveals to us the consequences of ancient feminine rage which belongs to all women who have grown up in a world that has asked us to sever our connection to our depths and our true essence in order for us and our children to survive under Patriarchal rule.  This story also holds the keys to our healing: the Queens of Heaven and the grieving Goddesses of the underworld must reconnect. The Kundalini energy from our lower chakras must flow again freely up to our crowns.  Compassion upon all the suffering we have endured and the grievances we have done to our sisters in order to survive and the trauma that has passed down through our family lines must be acknowledged, worked through, forgiven and transmuted.

Surviving by the Orion warrior code is what we have on display here on Wall Street.  Rather than a symbol of empowerment, it is actually a symbol of subversion of true feminine power.  The bull, the healthy masculine energy, actually serves as a representation of the true strength and protection of the Goddess.  That it is used to represent Wall Street reveals that the Old Kings who once honored the Goddess have been captured and are being used by patriarchy to continue its defamation of life and the earth for greed. 

The death of the bull of heaven can be seen as the death of the healthy masculine in right relationship with the feminine and the earth.  The loss of Gugalanna tells of how the constellation of Taurus was put in the sky according to our most ancient myths. To this day the Bull of Heaven protects the baby stars and the feminine muses which are associated with the star system of the Pleadies and doves and spiritual inspiration.  Also, many indigenous and Native American people associate this constellation with their stories of origion. The bull's horns represent the uterus and the season of Taurus is the Spring herself which celebrates the return of life to earth.  The bull was also associated with ancient priestesses as the carcasses of dead bulls were places from which bees emerged. Bee hives and symbols of bees have been found at these ancient priestess temples, for the hive honors the Queen and the inter-connectivity of all of our vegetation that the bees make possible on earth--bees that are disappearing under capitalistic consumer economy that flourishes by out of balance means. 

This addition of a "fearless girl" invites women to gain worldly power by standing up against our own true strength; it invites us to continue fragmenting ourselves, to deny our depths of pain, our path to healing and reconciliation, and our true feminine essence.  Notice how the bull's tail wraps around the flag pole, representing that feminine line of energy or Shakti which flows upward to activate our crowns.  When women are set against the bull, they are set against their very nature, and their sisters, and eons of war that has worked to keep the feminine fragmenting and warring against itself.  

We are waking up to the machine that is working to split the two sides of the pyramid so that only the top (the fragmented elite) may flourish.  But when women become allies, when we draw courage to descend to our depths and behold our sisters' depths of pain we face the magic that has been hidden from us.  When we discover fearlessness of our depths, we receive the power of resurrection.  The fragmentation of the feminine--which runs through every living thing--heals.  The Goddess rules in Heaven and on earth once again.  

It has been noted by many who study cycles of time that we are moving through a major transition and this is why chaos is erupting around us.  The time of the patriarchal gods which have ruled with artificial means to create power and a life outside of the domain of the Goddess and all the creatures of earth are coming to and end. The Divine Feminine is returning.  Sisters are uniting.  We are agreeing: we will not demonize our Bull, our ovaries, or our feminine priestess power any more.  What is done is done.  It is now Her time to rise again.

Sacred men, I invite you to take up again the ancient vows as did the Good Kings and Knights of Old.  Vow to protect and defend women, the feminine, and the Goddess in all her expressions.  Renounce your vows known and unknown to repress and divide the Goddess within yourself and others.  Receive Her blessing and return to your sacred heart. 

As it was in the beginning, is now and shall be forever, world without end.

<3 Jessica
Dove Oracle Priestess 

 

Jan 29 - Feb 4 "From Where Does My Help Come From?" TARALOMA Earth Temple, Weekly Newsletter

Discover Your Inner Well of Wisdom

Discover Your Inner Well of Wisdom

Wow it has been an intense week energetically.  In response to the rapid news stories and ratcheting up of tensions on the global stage, I have found myself doing my own introverted style of protesting by moving slower, meditating longer, and going deeply inward.  I'm taking more time to sit at the feet of my Inner Teacher to understand and see more clearly what is actually going on and what is my mission during this time.  May we all find that dawning clarity as we move through these times together.  

These past few months have felt like a stripping away of many old ways of being that no longer serve my highest good or the highest good of all.  Things that I thought I saw clearly were becoming clouded, places where I once put my confidence felt like shifting sands.  I was reminded again of the practice of "groundlessness" when this beautiful article appeared in my Facebook feed.  I sighed deeply into the peace I remembered there.    

Being in right relationship with groundlessness is like creating a meaningful link between your certainty and what is truly best for you, which is always found at the edges of what you think you know.  In yoga this expanding edge is known as Yin energy.  Yin is feminine energy, it is expansive, like a pregnant momma.  Yin energy moves into mystery.  Yin breaks up old ways of thinking, prisons of thought, body and mind, reaching always for more life, for life itself is always in motion.  

Conversely, Yang energy is the contracting center, the eye of the storm, the firm pillar of truth which has cataloged all the past wisdom gleaned from Yin's wondrous adventures.  This expanding and contracting energy is much like a heart beat, a score of music, and labor.  There are intense moments as we head for the climax of a song, or the crowning of the baby.  When we can maintain the connection between our center and our growing edges, we can see how we are truly one body learning to come into harmony with the flow of life itself.  Rather than battling and destroying our opposite we learn the sacred dance that creates more life together.  Opposites require a third to emerge, the center is the bridge that holds the tension and allows the dance and expanse of life to continue.  

This is our call now: to see the game of opposites.  To resist the cries for division and the temptation to externalize our fears and our shame on others creating scapegoats so we can feel more righteous and thus grounded (yet in illusion).  Resist the cries for war and take those weapons and transform them into instruments for cultivating the earth again.  Resist publicly humiliating people and learn the art of becoming bridge builders, that all beings may be connected to the center and connected to the growth edges.  No one learns in shame.  We learn in dignity and love.  What we have lost is safe space to be flawed growing humans who have permission to learn from our mistakes.  We have created a sort of gotcha culture that enjoys outting someone else so that we can feel better.  What if all of our accumulated knowledge is really just a giant defense system designed to keep us safe at the expense of someone else?  What we have lost is the playful Yin space to expand into our human potential. 

Our call is to love in the expanse of known and unknown as we each hone in on our mission and role.  Some will be the pillars, some will go to places we do not yet understand.  But we are each doing our part to heal the web of life.  

What we need now is a cosmic faith, a faith that goes beyond good/bad, american/unamerican, right/wrong and win/lose.  A faith that serves the common greatest good of all creatures of earth.  May peace prevail.      

In his ministry, Jesus often took time to be alone.  He hung out in the desert and walked up mountains.  He needed time away from the crowds so he could tune into his Inner Teacher, the Holy Spirit, the Source of Life, the Fount of Wisdom again.  One mantra I have been using to reply to the anxieties being drummed up in the media has been Psalm 121:

"I lift up my eyes to the hills
From where does my help come from?
My help comes from God, the creator of heaven and earth."

Even as I see our leaders hastening to destroy the earth and inflict harm to her people, I trust in our Source.  There are real heavenly powers that exist that are much greater than those who presently rule this world.  We may take refuge under those wings and in the promises of old. Each of our hairs are numbered.  We are deeply known and loved, even if we don't feel that energy coming from systems of power upon the earth--that's not our true Source.  So take heart, go within, connect to your Source and do the work you have been given to do, to love and serve love for the sake of love in your own unique way.  

This week, let's make sure we are all taking some time to slow down and tune to our inner worlds so that our actions are mindful and in line with our great mission and the highest good of all beings.  Together, aligned with the power of our Source, we can do miracles. Nothing will be impossible. We can be a part of establishing a new earth.    

May all creatures be happy and free.

Love,
Jess

ENJOY THIS TEACHING
I'm sharing this message from the on-line course that I developed in my unique exploration of the chakras. The 7 Gates of Resurrection is a seven week healing journey.  This on-line course provides a weekly message, on-line yoga and meditation practices to activate and awaken the seven major energy systems in the human body as we explore each one every week.  This course is unique in that it offers a creative intuitive, imaginative exploration of ancient myths and spirituality of the Divine Feminine.  If you or someone you know is looking for more energy and deep inner healing, I invite you to join me on this journey of transformation.  

Here what people are saying about it:

"New insights through these videos and messages and a beautiful way to share energies! I honor your path dear sister!"

"I'm really loving the 1st of the 7 gates. You've done an amazing job. Thank you for your service warrior Goddess of the light!"

The light in me salutes the light in you.  

Have a blessed, healing week.
<3 Jess

Weekly Newsletter

MINDFUL HEALING YOGA IN MOORHEAD &amp; MEMOIR RELEASE

MINDFUL HEALING YOGA IN MOORHEAD & MEMOIR RELEASE

I'm so excited to announce that I will be offering yoga classes, workshops and available for one-on-one yoga lessons at The Center for Mindful Healing in Moorhead, MN beginning March 11, 2017.  Here's what will be available:

CLASS OFFERINGS
Monday Evening 8-9 p.m. Restorative Yoga.
Come learn how to relax deeply and feel the benefits of allowing your body’s natural healing systems to work for you. This class is especially helpful to anyone suffering from high stress, grief, or difficulty sleeping.

Wednesday Noon: Simply Yoga.
Enjoy the benefits a yoga practice can bring to your life. This class is open to all levels and the instructor will help you modify each pose to suit you.

Saturday 8:30-9:30 a.m. Simply Yoga.
Enjoy the benefits a yoga practice can bring to your life. This class is open to all levels and the instructor will help you modify each pose to suit you.

$15 a class and I will offer options to lower the cost for those who want to purchase a 10-punch pass for $135 offering clients a 10% discount if they buy their classes at one time.

WORKSHOPS
Meditation Workshop on Sunday April 23rd, 4-5:30 p.m.
Cultivate your connection to inner peace. Learn about and practice different styles of meditation to bring more mindfulness and deep healing to your life.  No experience necessary.  Come as you are in comfortable clothes.  Pillows and chairs provided.  $25 per participant

Balance the Body’s Energy Saturday May 13th, 2-4 p.m.
Learn about the body’s 7 major energy centers also known as Chakras.  This workshop will include some gentle yoga postures to help bring more energy to each of these important areas of the body.  Accessible and open to all levels.  $25 per participant

MEMOIR RELEASE MARCH 1, 2017
This book has been over twelve years in the making and I'm almost ready to release it to the public.  Detoxing God is a memoir that tells of healing from childhood sexual abuse, violence in religion and culture that devalues the feminine.  Please like the book's Facebook page to see a trailer and get sneak peeks before the release date.  The book will be available to order on Amazon on March 1, the first day of spring.  

As women took to the streets all over the world yesterday, I could feel the massive shift in energy taking place around the globe. Unity does not mean silencing our enemies.  Unity is a work in progress as each voice finds true harmony with the whole.  This means each person's healing journey is essential to humanity's healing. If our security is dependent upon another person's insecurity, then we are doing it wrong. If we can only feel better about ourselves by comparing our lives to someone's who is worse off than us than we are still living in the illusion of separation.  Our collective healing is connected to our individual healing.  Silence serves oppression. Unity calls for conversation and compassionate listening. Before we can hear clearly the pain in others, we first need to hear it in ourselves.  For as we love ourselves, we love the world. Now is the time for a revolution of love!  It's exciting.  It means we all win, because love wins. 

Blessings and joy,
Jess

Weekly Newsletter

FINDING OUR BACKBONE
Recently I had an intense dream. A tornado was coming. I was frantically looking for shelter. A woman found me and pulled me into her home. She guided me towards the center of the house and showed me a pole grounded in the earth that I could hold onto when the tornado hit. I crawled towards the pole and wrapped my hands around it and held on for dear life.  When the strong winds hit, it blew many things away, but I was safe, even though I had to work hard to hold on. The dream said to me: stay in the center of the storm. There is always a calm in the center. The dream image has continued to nudge me back to the center when I catch myself stressed out by the storm.

In my yoga classes my students and I have been practicing visualizing our spines filled with light. Our spinal chords create a tree of light that branches out to the seven major energy centers known as chakras. As we tune in to our center, to the life that flows through us, we listen to our breath. The sound of our breath regulates our body. It brings us into the present  present time. Trauma does not exist in present time. A new moment does. Trauma takes an imprint of the past and overlays it on the present moment so that we cannot see it clearly. This is the veil of Maia, or illusion.

Sound dissolves the illusions. Sound creates life.  Sound helps us tune into the center, which is why we chant and sing and why a favorite song can bring us home in an instant. Sound causes patterns to form in sand.  Breakthrough studies are showing how cancer cannot live at certain resonant frequencies. It is probably likely that if we humans organized a global event and all sounded together we could dissolve many traumas and pain of our planet. Groups of people meditating have shown to reduce crime rates.  That's how powerful we are when we work together, when we resonate together for the highest good of all.

It is true there is a lot of dissonance in our world, especially as we march towards an unknown unstable future. However, there is also a lot of hope. There is just as much potential for us to find our resolve, to tune in, to reach across the nation and to work together to create a better future. Things must change. Our way of life is unsustainable. We want change, even as much as we fear the unknown. But we can be a part of the change. Every day, every moment, we can move towards the center and breathe. We can visualize our hopes and dreams, speak words of love and comfort, use our energy and our words not to serve our fears, not to fight each other, but to create, to co-create, to co-exist with the One Source which runs through all living beings.

May we each find our backbone, our light filled trees of light. May we be brave to face where we are chained to systems that do not resonate for our highest good and work to keep us distracted from the real work. May we be courageous to try something new. As we each do our healing work and stay centered, we help all beings do the same.

Chaos may be immanent, but we can move to the center and pulse peace out into the world instead.

Love, 
Jessica

 

ENJOY AN INSPIRATIONAL YEAR OF FAIRY WISDOM
This playful calendar embodies the energy of Daphne the Wood Nymph as it celebrates the embodied feminine and the healing that is possible after rape.  Proceeds benefit RAINN. I have ONE left! And it's on sale for $29.99.

JANUARY'S FULL MOON IN CANCER

I am new to learning about the stars, but I see honoring the cycles of the moon as a part of one of my priestly duties as I honor the spirituality of my feminine essence, the Earth, and the cycles of nature.

The crab symbolizes the astrological sign of cancer which is marked by water and the emotions. This sign amplifies the emotions, our tears, and the flood of feelings we experience being human. This sign is also about going home and finding our center as the crab carries its home on its back. 

This month is a good time to reflect on being home in our bodies (maybe nestled in blankets with warm liquids to drink) and discover the deep satisfying healing that is possible when we tune in and honor our essence.   <3

Have a beautiful week.
May we inaugurate our best selves.  

 

Weekly Newsletter

ENTER THE MYSTERY

It seems our culture has lost an appreciation for mystery in its desire to know and control and attempt to avoid suffering (which unfortunately only creates more).  Much like birth and the expanding YIN/feminine energy that adventures to the edges of human experience to discover something new, mysteries are wonderfully messy.  One of my nick names growing up was "Messy Jessie" as it was apparently easy to spot where I had eaten. (My excuse: I'm part fairy and my mission is to leave bread crumbs in the forest!)

But messy can conjure up a lot of shame.  Having our messy lives hanging out of our ego ideal is painful. We do a lot of shadow hiding, a lot of "squirrel!" a lot of "look over there instead!" Our shared reality has been pretty painful lately.  It's been messy.  And we're just not going to be able to avoid it.  But there's an adventure to be had here too.

Lots of little pieces of paper left over from an epic art project stuck to my feet on my walk to the coffee maker this morning.  Before brewing I surveyed the majestic mess of my living room. I also caught a glimpse of the inner critic who informed me that this was not an acceptable situation; this place is way too messy and by the way you're failing at life and you'll never measure up. Oh that critic can be so gloomy sometimes.  Before I allowed the critic's words become THE TRUTH OF MY LIFE I quipped: that's just your opinion, man.  We build resilience when we practice detaching our ego identity from our thoughts. 

We are beginning to shift our collective consciousness in powerful ways as we awaken to face messy realities on planet earth, and at the same time: truly infinite possibilities.  We are all connected to the One Source of Life.  Yes, even the guy with orange hair.  So some of us have yet to incarnate our highest selves, but the potential is always there, and even more so when we keep affirming it is there.  A wise woman reminded me that Scrooge can change overnight, so let us continue to be open to miracles.  

There's a lot soap boxes, rants and slams in the airwaves as we slug towards Jerusalem to find our way back to the sacred masculine and healthy YANG energy.  I'm always looking for that line between tough and abusive.  When is another human being denied dignity and sovereignty because of our flash projections and reactions?  Just because someone else is being a jerk, if we respond with the same mean-spirit then we are being a jerk too.  Standing strong doesn't mean we play the victim either; it means we are empowered to choose how to respond to all that arises with love (and grace because it's an ongoing practice).  It also means we give people room to make mistakes, learn, and grow.  We need messy creative spaces to make art out of our lives.

Staying connected with our bodies is so vital for staying connected to our Source.  Our task in these times may simply be to become more mindfully aware of what's going on in our inner worlds and practice staying home in our bodies.  For bridging the worth of our souls into a world that more easily denies it is truly the task at hand.  As the snakes of consciousness and unconsciousness twine and prepare to face off, tensions and taboos of awakening are bubbling up from our depths.  And sometimes we find ourselves seared by an old wound that is coming up for healing.    

Usually behind the critical voice is a wound that needs to be greeted with so much tenderness (so if the military has given you any of their fancy toys, do not be fooled into thinking Rambo style will fix what only a compassionate mother can). There are so many critical voices in the world today.  So many are quick to find a scapegoat or make a story about who to blame and why.  I know that strategy doesn't work well in my personal relationships.  What if every trigger from here on out opened up the opportunity to practice compassion towards ourselves and others?  What if we practiced compassion as a collective? Can you imagine the collective shift of energy that would ripple over the planet in the twinkling of an eye?  

Life spirals.  We are remembering past traumas.  We are remembering what happened in Nazi Germany.  We are remembering the flash floods and the great falls of ancient civilizations.  Breathe.  And go deep within.  We are remembering our mission and what we came here to do. We have been preparing for this.  We have been called to this.  We have been created for such a time as this.

It was an epic battle between me and my inner critic before I had a cup of coffee.  But I found my way into compassion as I practiced some of my mantras for motherhood:

I bless this mess
I am grateful for the gifts of imagination and creativity
My mess becomes my message
I celebrate this real human life
Order arises out of chaos (WOW there is SO much potential order here!)

And I shook off the dread.  We can all shake off the dread.  Shake off our chains.  Dissolve the thoughts that come with scary Darth Vader music and tune back in to Love.  And when we forget, or we're just too tired, we just simply begin again.  We just practice.  Life is just a practice.  We came here to remember that we come from love and we shall return to love.  We are just waking up on our journey in between.
 
Have a compassion-filled week <3
Namaste,
Jess

Are you ready to reconnect and heal your relationship with your body?
Are you interested in learning some practices (including simple yoga) to move old energy out of your body?
Do you want to feel more alive?
Do you want to learn more about the 7 chakras of the body and how to optimize your energy?
Do you enjoy learning about ancient myths and mystery teachings?
Are you open to going on a creative imaginative healing journey?

My 7 Gates of Resurrection program is now available to download in its entirety!
You'll receive:
+ A message and a teaching on each chakra (7 lessons total)
+ A practice in the form of yoga or meditation to help activate each of your chakras and bring healing to your body in each major energy center
+ Creative, playful, imaginative portrayals of various aspects of the sacred feminine as we explore the myth of Innana and Ereshkigal
+ Channeling, songs, mantras, and more!
+ A discount on an intuitive Oracle Reading with purchase

These seven mystery teachings will help you activate and heal each of your seven chakras through wisdom teachings, yoga, meditation and creative imagination.  

Here what people are saying about it:
"New insights through these videos and messages and a beautiful way to share energies! I honor your path dear sister!"

"I'm really loving the 1st of the 7 gates. You've done an amazing job. Thank you for your service warrior Goddess of the light!"

Each lesson contains a practice for the entire week, so you are investing in 7 weeks of personal transformation for only $10 a week!  Are you ready to be initiated into deeper healing?  I'll meet you at the first gate. 

May the essence of your soul shine ever brighter in your earth temple
<3 J

 

LOCAL UPCOMING WORKSHOPS:

Prepare for birth with: Birthing Best Practices, January 28, 2 p.m. Mojo Fit Studios

Ignite your Valentines with Couple's Yoga, Friday February 10, 6:30 p.m. Mojo Fit Studios

Celebrating my biggest yoga class yet at Mojo Fit Studios this Saturday!&nbsp;

Celebrating my biggest yoga class yet at Mojo Fit Studios this Saturday! 

Weekly Newsletter January 1-7

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

TARALOMA Earth Temple has so many ways to support your physical and spiritual growth this year:  
+ Do you want to feel good in your body?
+ Learn and practice yoga at any age?
+ Experience the calming benefits of meditation?
+ Feel healing shifts in your energy?
+ Ready to adventure in spiritual growth?
+ Want to explore ancient myths and mysteries?
+ Recovering from patriarchal religion that devalues the feminine?
+ Interested in finding the gold of your inner world through dream work?
+ Curious about cultivating a relationship with the Divine Feminine?
+ Looking for a priestess/teacher/muse to catalyze your transformation?
+ Ready to weave together your unique gifts and heal your ancestral line?
+ Interested in meeting your spiritual guides?
+ Interested in using the Tarot, intuitive readings & oracular divine transmissions to get insight and guidance about your life?
+ Enjoy a little goofiness from the Goddess too?

Visit www.taraloma.com and check out the SERVICES page to discover all the ways my ministry can support you.

I'm so excited to introduce my first mystery school course, 7 Gates of Resurrection which explores the energy of the divine feminine and offers a mystery teaching, creative imagination, yoga, and meditation practices for each of the 7 chakras.  These inspirational teachings will help heal and activate these major energy centers in your body while providing you with practical exercises and practices to tone and feel great.  Starting TODAY all seven lessons are available for download at the time of purchase!   Learn more here.

YOGA VIDEOS ON SALE!

OPEN YOUR HIPS AND YOUR HEART: ALL LEVEL YOGA PRACTICE

MEDIATION ON THE NEW MOON, THE TRIPLE GODDESS, CARRIE FISHER & MOM

Many blessings and love to you this 2017.
The light in me salutes the light in you,

Namaste,

Jess

Dove Oracle Priestess at TARALOMA Earth Temple
www.taraloma.com

Weekly Dove Oracle Message Dec 25-31

LOOK UP! THE ANGELS ARE BUILDING A GOLDEN LADDER FROM HEAVEN TO EARTH

LOOK UP! THE ANGELS ARE BUILDING A GOLDEN LADDER FROM HEAVEN TO EARTH

The veils are thinning, do you feel it?  Do you feel the sudden spiral of energy you put out in the universe looping right back to you?  Once upon a time, this action/reaction cycle took many generations to come full circle so that "the sins of the father" in biblical vernacular, were visited upon generations to come.  Now, in some instances, the circle of exchange is almost instantaneous.  Notice: are you generating creation or creating a destructive negative feedback loop? The other day I made a rash decision that hurt someone's feelings and I immediately took the hit in the back of my heart center.  I could feel the effects of my actions right away. This is a painful, yet helpful teacher--just like the hot stove teaches you "don't touch!"  So our learning is now accelerating.  

Growing up the teachings of "we reap what we sow" was often eclipsed by so many ideas about God's grace and forgiveness and what one favorite priest called "warm Jesus" that many of us lost that inner/outer connection between our faith and our real lives as we continued to create (consciously or unconsciously) negative feedback loops that severed our souls from fully incarnating in these bodies designed to be temples of light on earth.  We have fancy high tech terms to justify our non-growth, non-learning, non-changing, our entrapment in sin and nothing can get us out but Jesus.  So we give up growing because the hopeless distance between the poles feels impossibly far off (or too socially risky).  

My "happy holiday pictures" I post on Facebook likely don't reveal the challenge it has been to avoid sudden heart pangs and a few ugly cry sessions that took place under my covers last week.  I was considering why this Christmas season in particular has been emotionally challenging for me, and I almost feel I can trace this sadness through the annals of time--to the time when humanity fell, when we were enslaved, when the teachings of sacred mothers were eclipsed and erased, when women and land were divided and conquered, when a war machine of money making destruction overtook our planet to bring us to this near breaking point.  

Breakdown?  Breakthrough.  -Jerry Maguire

This dark time of year usually brings to the surface  so much loss, so much old heart ache, so much unveiling of deep places of ancestral wounds that long for healing, not only within me, but in the human collective.  

Today as I was reading my Great Uncle Phil Froiland's account of our family line, I learned that my Great Grandfather had a brother who passed away on Christmas Eve of tuberculosis at thirteen years old.  His name was Thorvald--which also happened to be the name of my beloved dog during my teen years--which were also punctuated by trauma when I was thirteen.  

I gasped aloud as discovered/remembered this family trauma, and I FELT how the past echos through time, through my body.  How many years was I unconsciously grieving for him?  May he rest in peace.  May all who have died rest in peace.    

During these dark days of the year, and especially this year, I feel the echo of my personal and our collective history even more intensely.  The pain that echos through our personal lives (never mind also the ancient past) can be so daunting to face.  So daunting that we automatically sever our connection from the intensity and from the integrating principal.  Trauma severs.  It severs us from our gut, from our heart, from our feet, from our head, from our family, from our community.   

To feel deeply these days is challenging for we are a traumatized people and there is much unembodied pain looking for a host to help it heal--or keep recreating/feeding the negative feedback loop of a trauma wheel.  Beings are now coming to me in dream state asking for help to cross over.  One of my healer friends recently confessed: the veils are so thin!  It made me think of end times and the prophecies of the dead rising--maybe we will just all be able to more clearly see those whose trauma is living on in order to be healed and released.  

We are a fragmented people. We are afraid of something terrible, not knowing exactly what or who lives in the shadows of our minds, not recognizing the log in our own eyes, mistaking a speck in our neighbors for everything we loathe and fear in ourselves.  As I move into the role as a seer, I must also acknowledge how I am also guilty of much unclear seeing.  At times it feels impossible to escape our projections. Sociologist,  Peter Burger ignited the 60s with the idea that reality is socially constructed, that the deepest order of society – the sacred cosmos as sacred canopy.  Our imaginations and feelings are just as important in shaping our reality and the healing of our planet--maybe even more important than unembodied thinking.  

The healing path is not always up the mountain to some kind of abstract, ungrounded, non-messy, unmattery, disembodied purity, but down towards the cross at the center of our collective suffering--deep into our flesh and bones.  We move towards the eye of the storm which we must go through in order to find relief. 

In the center, the life force, the light of which we are made, activates in our spine, like the tree of life branches out into our seven chakras.   Light and shadow ascend and descend up the spinal chords like the snakes on the caduceus flowing from base to crown.  The paradox of the bird vs. snakes is brought to resolution: the earth and heaven unite and light in its smallest form fractals into infinity like the sacred star of David as the life force awakens us to see all things new.

[Science now confirms that the
merkabah is the shape of the photon--a double amplituhedron-- the smallest particles of light which make up the entire structure of our vast universe.]

As I worked to complete Level One of my Dove Oracle Priestess training, I began to practice honoring the gift of feeling and learning how to release it and transform energy.  I've often been accused of being "too" sensitive.  I've not always been good at blocking everything out in order to "focus" or "think rationally" or "penetrate my reality" in this sort of culturally idealized hyper yang fashion that Americans relish.  Instead of seeing my innate difference as a weakness (and feeling shame about it) I'm working to honor and open more to this yin essence. It feels, in SO many ancient ways, taboo.  Because to be "a girl" has been a pretty lowly place in the "success ladder" of our cultures--for eons.  Because witch hunts and Inquisitions, and families siding with power in order to survive, families having to choose between soul and bread.  But these days are coming to an end, as the inside is starting to look more like the outside.  As the feedback loop accelerates, we can integrate and build the cosmic sacred shape together on earth more effectively.  

If yang is penetrating masculine energy, then yin is receptive feminine.  What does the spiritual path look like with less penetration (less convert everyone) and more openness, more balance between the opposites, more equanimity?

More relatedness to mystery and play. 

I think in some ways it also means (for now) that we may feel more pain as we work to face the gaps in our inner and outer worlds.  As we make these connections within we are also constructing the golden ladder between earth and the highest dimensions of the universe, creating a meaningful link between self and Source, as repairing damage to the spiraling helix in our DNA simply by witnessing pain with compassion, we can change our spiritual DNA and we build the sacred canopy more effectively together.  

Pain transmutes and also reveals a light side once acknowledged.  Resurrection happens. My practice has been not to attach to the pain (more practice needed).  Not to create a shame or a blame story, (more practice needed) but to work to view it like a Sacred Mother would gaze upon all her traumatized crying children as she looks down from the divine heart at the root of pain and heals us with her love rather than severing us with further yang/judgement/trauma of which we have had enough.  

Whatever arises, love that.  --Matt Khan

The Sacred Mother has two faces, so beware, for she also comes like Kali wielding her knives severing the "thinking" severing the male head, maybe the patriarchy, and whatever attachments continue to poison the earth and her children.  Kali, like Medusa, reminds us that even crazy has a symmetry, has a root, has a door, a lock, a key to healing and transformation.  Death is a door to new life.  The Dark Mother brings a different death than the unceasing hamster wheel of the corporate machine: She initiates us into the natural mysteries of the life force as they work in a woman's body, they also work throughout the holographic structure of the entire cosmos, which is also a sort of womb.  She teaches us the way of resurrection.

Many of us judge ourselves so harshly and hate ourselves (or our nature or our perceived weaknesses) so intensely it's virtually unconscious.  When we can't see the log in our eye we use someone else in our life to hold that which doesn't seem to fit into our ego-ideal. With holiday visits fresh, this won't be too hard to feel our way into.  I know I have held the shadows and deep fears of many.  I know I have put my shadows and deep fears on others to bear too.  May all of our collective mess become like great fertilizer upon the land.  From the mud, the lotus.  

Energy is energy and it is always flowing and changing.  Pain is also energy that has the potential to be transmuted to serve our collective healing.  May it be so.  Rather than building up defenses against future pain by trying to control everything, we are learning another kind of courage and strength, that which knows how to open up more, expanding into unknown.  This is Yin/feminine energy.   While the masculine categorizes what is known, the feminine branches out.  It's a flow.  

We can act like bees in a hive and create the dance of life, or we can act like locust and destroy creation.  We have too many locusts and not enough bees these days.  Be a bee.  

Fires of transformation call us to descend our core to face the roots of our collective suffering, to help burn away illusions.  To live is to change, and yet we cling to the known and fear the unknown.  To be fashioned in the holy blacksmith's hands, we enter a great mystery of relationship as we are taught how to ignite the soul light to shine inside of our sacred matter.  Love anchors into the earth of our bodies and spans the dimensions of the heavens.  The golden ladder is growing.  

We are a precious and beloved people.  During these sacred days of rapid growth and awakening, may love come down evermore connecting this golden ladder to the earth to mend together our every wound, that we angels may ascend and descend again.  May we work to restore creation to the sacred balance, may we awaken and feel the true worth and beauty of our souls, may we see more clearly our path and our part in building the sacred canopy together.

May all beings be happy and free as it was in the beginning, and shall be forevermore, especially in 2017.


Love,
Jessica

Enjoy this song from my Peace Before Us Christmas album <3

And one more gift:  a 20 minute Peace Practice filmed at Sacred Passages Chapel in Wimberley, Texas by typing in the pasword: MayPeacePrevail <3 

Weekly Dove Oracle Message Dec 18-24

LOVE ENDURES ALL THINGS
Many of you are tired.  Many of you are feeling ground to the bone.  Take heart, for you are being made into pillars of stone, pillars of earth.  Old Kings are now awakening, your Sacred Women are rising.  The true rulers of the earth are returning to their places.  Do not fear little ones, for it is the Creator's pleasure to restore all of creation, to heal every wound, to wipe away every tear.

Remember to love.  Love is patient.  Love is kind.  It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrings.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.  It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.  (1 Corinthians 13: 407).  

(Painting by Emily Balivet)

Love always prevails.  So do not fret when you are faced with dark times.  

Do not fret because of the wicked; do not be envious of wrongdoers,

for they will soon fade like the grass, and wither like the green herb.

Trust in the Sources of Life, and do good; so you will live in the land, and enjoy security.

Take delight in creation, and the divine will give you the desires of your heart.

Commit your way to life; trust Source, and Source will act.

Your Creators will make your vindication shine like the light, and the justice of your cause like the noonday.

Be still before the Creators, and wait patiently; do not fret over those who prosper in their way, over those who carry out evil devices.

Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath. Do not fret—it leads only to evil.

For the wicked shall be cut off, but those who wait for the divine shall inherit the land.

Yet a little while, and the wicked will be no more; though you look diligently for their place, they will not be there.

But the meek shall inherit the land, and delight themselves in abundant prosperity.

The wicked plot against the righteous, and gnash their teeth at them;

but the Sources of Love laugh at the wicked, for they sees that their day is coming.

The wicked draw the sword and bend their bows to bring down the poor and needy, to kill those who walk uprightly;

their sword shall enter their own heart, and their bows shall be broken.

Better is a little that the righteous person has than the abundance of many wicked.

For the arms of the wicked shall be broken, but the divine upholds the righteous.

The Creators knows the days of the blameless, and their heritage will abide forever;

they are not put to shame in evil times, in the days of famine they have abundance.

But the wicked perish, and the enemies of creation are like the glory of the pastures; they vanish—like smoke they vanish away.

The wicked borrow, and do not pay back, but the righteous are generous and keep giving;

for those blessed by the Creator shall inherit the land, but those cursed by him shall be cut off.

Our steps are made firm by the Creator, when Love delights in our way;

though we stumble, we shall not fall headlong, for Love holds us by the hand.

I have been young, and now am old, yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread.

They are ever giving liberally and lending, and their children become a blessing.

Depart from evil, and do good; so you shall abide forever.

For the Creation loves justice; they will not forsake the faithful ones. The righteous shall be kept safe forever, but the children of the wicked shall be cut off.

The righteous shall inherit the land, and live in it forever.

The mouths of the righteous utter wisdom, and their tongues speak justice.

The law of their God is in their hearts; their steps do not slip.

The wicked watch for the righteous, and seek to kill them.

The Creator will not abandon them to their power, or let them be condemned when they are brought to trial.

Wait for the Creators, and keep to their way, and the divine will exalt you to inherit the land; you will look on the destruction of the wicked.

I have seen the wicked oppressing, and towering like a cedar of Lebanon.

Again I passed by, and they were no more; though I sought them, they could not be found.

Mark the blameless, and behold the upright, for there is posterity for the peaceable.

But transgressors shall be altogether destroyed; the posterity of the wicked shall be cut off.

The salvation of the righteous is from the Source of Life who is their refuge in the time of trouble.

The divine helps them and rescues them; the divine rescues them from the wicked, and saves them, because they take refuge in LOVE.  
(Psalm 37)

I wish you and your loved ones a blessed sacred week.  May you experience the power of even a little light as it shines in the darkness.  

Love, 
Jess

CELEBRATE THE SOLSTICE WITH ME!
Enjoy a cozy atmosphere, holiday cheer, energy cleansing & releasing, time to set intentions for the new year, sacred songs, and treats!  And live stream in if you can make it to Fargo!  

CHANNELING IS...EVIL?  
Enjoy this throat chakra activation: 

Weekly Dove Oracle Message Dec 11-17

 

SOUL SPEAK
Some poems for these shortening winter days.  Less words.  More dreaming.  Infinite creation.   

Mom's Old Jeans
The creation of the world begins with a thought
Spoken
Day after day
Year after year

Images conceived
And squeezed into small words
Like old jeans
That do not fit after the babies come

Last year's wineskins
Simply will not hold
This new life
Within

~

I Call Myself Back

I know this sweet pain
The new life that comes
As the skin tears

It's all worth it
We know
The ripping of the two that became one
And strangers again
The holes in the fabric of our lives
That we cannot mend

I know this darkness before me
This eternal hope
Expands the space between
The unknown
And the unlived dream

I call myself back again
From the places I have lost her
From the other lives in which I have sewn her

I call her back to me
Let me be whole again

Let me be holy

~

Terra

Terra you're dying
And my father is crying
The phone is ringing
The preacher man is passing
It's time to answer your call

Dark your earth like Mary's womb
Guards the seed before the boom
Calvary
How sharp is your sting?
It's time to face the tomb

My mermaid is keeping
Secrets lost from my speaking
She's smiling
While I'm scuba diving
I've got to find the key

Because these airplanes keep
Coming down
Headed for the church upon my ground
Her terrorists don't need his apologetics
She's got to sing her own song

Oh Terra
Can you spare a little room
For a girl's mustard seed
To bloom?

She says
Dreams can rise
From the ashes of our lives
Like a phoenix take to the sky
Oh girls come on and rise

After your old dreams die
There is new life
 

Read more poems.

Hear more music, including Christmas songs.

Have a beautiful week.  Be gentle with you.  That's the work now:  LOVE THYSELF, then you shall love the world well.  

<3  Namaste, Jess