My Soul Journey

Meditation is an opportunity to be still, to not go anywhere, except where you currently are, and just observe with curiosity whatever arises. In many ways, sheltering in place for the past month has been like a living meditation. There has been a lot to observe in myself and the world around me. While there is a whole host of things I have observed and could discuss, I’m choosing to focus here on just one facet.

One of the silver linings that I have observed over the past month is that I haven’t felt rushed. That is a miracle in and of itself. What a relief. Prior to the quarantine, rushing was a daily occurrence in our household – rushing out of the house in the morning, rushing to pick up the kids after school, rushing to soccer practice, rushing home to make dinner, etc, etc. I recall often looking at the clock and rushing my kids to hurry up, we gotta get in the car to get you to school/practice/game/meeting/birthday party/whatever on time. I never liked how it made my body and nervous system feel, all harried, disjointed and fragmented, and how I was imprinting this go-go-go, hurry-up we’re going to be late culture onto my kids, but I felt almost powerless to do anything about it. I have to admit that I’m the parent who secretly wished that our kids had no extracurricular activities and that we would enjoy long lazy empty days moving from one activity to the next when our bodies and inspiration called for it. I never expected that a pandemic would be what wiped our activities schedule clean, but here it is, an opportunity to observe what our family life would feel like if we didn’t follow a packed regimented schedule that offered no room to breathe, feel, and ponder what to do next.

It has been a huge exhale to not feel rushed this past month. I no longer set alarms. The kids now fix themselves breakfast when they get up in the morning. And yes, we still rely on the clock to structure our day and activities, but there is so much less rushing around and time-pressure. I have felt my body fall into its own rhythm, and I have observed with relief this same ease in my children as well. I mentioned to some friends that I have not been in continuous physical presence 24/7 with my children for this long a time since maternity leave. This constant physical togetherness that is not interrupted by going a million different places has made me feel more connected as a family. The rhythm and pace of our days feel more real, more grounded in the internal cycles of hunger, rest, movement, and guided by daylight rather than clock time. Not getting into a car, not moving at a pace any faster than my own body can power me, and not going anywhere much further than a few miles from the radius of my home has finally brought me into rhythm with myself. I feel more coherent, more centered, more resonant, and more in harmony with my own nature. In poet John O’Donohue’s words, there’s a felt “kindness of rhythm” in these days.

As I glance over the news headlines and conjectures and plans about when we might resume our normal lives, I am observing that my body has no desire to rush back to rushing around everywhere again. To live out of sync with my own natural rhythm feels like a betrayal to myself and my body. Like all of us, I don’t have a clear picture of what life will look like in the future, but I have been gifted with the sweet remembrance of what it feels like to move through “modern life” at a more humane pace, and this is not something I will easily forsake again.

As we all shelter in place at home, with our freedom of mobility limited, I’ve been reflecting on the places my heart most longs to go. It’s not work, or school, the stores or malls. It’s outside, in nature. More specifically for me, it’s the ocean. I miss the ocean so much. Having grown up in Hawaii surrounded by the ocean, and now living in Davis, CA, at least 90 minutes away from the coast, I ache to be closer to the ocean, like the moon herself is pulling on the ocean of my heart towards her, the same way the moon’s gravitational pull on the Earth causes the rising and lowering tides of the ocean each day. It’s a persistent pull inside me that I’ve tried to ignore, or make do with, because that’s just not where our family is currently settled. But it’s always there, this pull in my heart to live closer to the ocean that feels like home to me. That is why this morning in my Amba embodiment circle, I was so grateful for the reminder that the ocean exists not just outside of us, but also inside of us. This is something I have always intuitively felt, but I experienced it with such truth and clarity today.

Like many of us, I have been feeling unsettled by all the disruption and chaos that has been swirling around in the world around us. It’s hard to feel grounded when the ground itself appears to be in the midst of major movement and change. It’s like the tide has unexpectedly come in, swept us all off our feet, and now we find ourselves floating, disoriented, and topsy turvy in a new reality that hasn’t settled in yet. A part of me feels the need to surrender to the motion, like when you’re tumbled in the surf after a crashing wave. You have to stay soft and fluid and limber to allow the wave to wash through you. There is little you can do to resist the power of the ocean.

There is no doubt that as a human collective we are all now caught in the current of something much bigger than us. When it feels difficult to ground into something that is still shifting, I find it helpful to instead focus on centering inside of myself, to that place of stillness inside me that is impervious to whatever is happening in the outside world. Through embodiment practices and shifts in our own consciousness, we can ground into the Earth of our own bodies, the Earth that exists inside each of us. Our bones and structures are the land, and our breath and blood are the rivers and oceans that flow within us. I can feel and experience the ocean of my belly breathing and the sea caves that the arches of my hips hold. I can fall into rhythm with the waves and ocean tides inside me to guide me in navigating the shifting tides outside of me. I can feel the steadiness in my own body to hold me as I also allow the movement and waves of change to wash through me during this time of incredible transition. We are all caught in this rising tide together.

Even though many of us knew that a major shift needed to happen on this planet for us to survive, none of us could have expected this particular unfolding of events, a viral pandemic that has literally stopped the human world in its tracks. We were all caught off guard, and each one of us is having our own unique experience navigating this tide of change, while also sharing in a collective human experience of something much bigger than any of us. This is a global experience that is affecting every living being on our planet and into the universe. No wonder it feels too big or too much to hold and process just individually. The more connected we can feel to not only our own experience of this time, in our bodies and in our hearts, but also our shared experience with other humans and the planet itself, the more we can trust in the process itself. Because the tides will change. There is no doubt that this tide will eventually recede. That is just the nature of tides. They come in and then they go out. But how will we individually and collectively navigate this particular tide cycle? How will we allow ourselves to be moved by these rising waters, what lessons can we learn about ourselves and our place in the larger web of life? Because when the tide goes back out and we find ourselves standing again on the newly found shores underneath our feet, none of us will be left untouched by this experience.

Sorry the registration link on my previous email didn’t work! If you want to register for the Lei of Love online Zoom call this Sunday 3/22/20 at 10am PT/1pm ET, please register here:

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/uJQrde6qqTkpnoiOo0PNutHi4J-sBEIkTA

Today is the Vernal Equinox and the official beginning of Spring. Next week Tuesday is the New Moon. My Spring Nature Workshop had originally been scheduled for this coming Sunday 3/22/20 intentionally to harness this potent window of time for renewal and restoration. When I had to cancel my workshop earlier this week due to the current pandemic, of course I was disappointed. I had put a lot of myself into preparing for this workshop and was excited to step into my soul-aligned work. But mostly I was disappointed because I knew how much Mother Earth wants to connect with all of us right now to provide us with her loving support. The theme of my workshop was about learning from Nature how to transition between the old to the new.

There is no denying that we as individuals and a collective are currently in the midst of a transformational upheaval between the old and the new. Everything that was once so familiar to us has been shaken up – schools, jobs, schedules, travel, our health, how we connect with our family and friends. It is not an exaggeration to call this a period of death and rebirth. The death of Old Earth and the rebirth of New Earth. The old ways of doing things are dying, and we are being asked, or forced if we are not willing, to surrender everything we took for granted just one week ago. Old stories about our lives and what our future was going to look like. We are being faced with the reality of the present moment and invited to observe ourselves. We can’t stop the changing of the seasons. All we can do is adjust how we respond to these changing times.

As birth and death are the only two known entities in each of our lives here on this Earth, being forced to face the fragility of our existence is bringing up a whole spectrum of feelings and experiences for people, on top of logistically rearranging our lives just to survive.  We are also being asked to socially distance ourselves during a time when we need each other even more, when we need to feel that we are truly ALL in this together.   I have decided to convene an online gathering this Sunday 3/22 morning at 10am PT/1pm ET, during the original time of my scheduled workshop. This will be a FREE 90 minute Zoom call where we will enter into a Sacred Council to be with one another, speak and listen from our hearts, and provide community, support, and connection with one another and Mother Earth during these challenging times. I will also guide us in meditation to connect with ourselves and Mother Earth to receive her loving energies and support.

On the islands of Hawaii where I grew up, a flower lei is a way to express love, honor, respect, blessings and gratitude. It feels so good to make a lei, give a lei, receive a lei, or just to be in the presence of a lei. Each one of us is a beautiful flower. But we can’t make a lei with just one flower. We need a circle of flowers to make a lei. If you would like to join me in making a Lei of Love this coming Sunday to provide love, support and connection to Earth, our human community, and to all living beings on our Planet at this time, please REGISTER HERE for this event: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/uJQrde6qqTkpnoiOo0PNutHi4J-sBEIkTA

If you don’t already have the Zoom application downloaded onto your electronic device, you can download it HERE: https://zoom.us/signup

Hope to see many of you on Sunday!

Much love and aloha,
Liz

Last Friday, after picking my kids up from school on the heels of learning that our school district would be closed for the next 4 weeks, I stopped by Trader Joe’s to pick up a few items that I like to get there. There was an attendant at the entrance to the store offering hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes to everyone entering. As I always do, I paused at the floral display, admiring the tulips, and debated whether to get yellow or white tulips. In the end, I figured my spirits could use some brightening during this time, so I chose the yellow tulips. As I made my way through the store, hordes of people were piling up their carts with food in preparation for the pandemic and the few food items that I normally buy at TJ’s were already gone. So I strangely found myself making my way through the checkout line with milk, cheese crackers, and yellow tulips. I felt very out of sync with the rest of the population, which is not an uncommon experience for me, but only more starkly highlighted at a time like this. My purchase of a bouquet of yellow tulips during a time of a pandemic made me reflect on what feels important to me right now.

Some people might consider buying flowers an unnecessary luxury item at a time like this. But for me, having houseplants in my home and fresh flowers in the spaces I inhabit feels almost as essential as the milk I buy for my children. These flowers not only grace me with their physical beauty and energy, but provide me with a real live connection to the natural world that I so often feel is lacking in our modern world. As I have deepened my connection with these beautiful beings, I learn more from them each day about the interconnectedness of all life forms. When I marvel at the allure of a rose bud, or the simple elegance of a tulip, or the infinite folds of a ranunculus, I am awed by the majestic orchestration of events that allows a blooming flower to be in front of me. That somewhere right alongside, or maybe even right in the middle of, this pandemic sweeping across the globe, there are powerful invisible forces orchestrating the unfolding of life itself. Flowers are a symbol that the cycles of sun, soil, seed, rain, seasons, bird and pollinator migration and many, many other interconnected processes are all working successfully in rhythm and harmony with one another. If just one of those elements were disrupted, it would have ripple effects on everything else.

Modern humans have forgotten that we are a part of this tapestry of life. We have long been exerting control over the natural environment with the illusion that we can separate ourselves, master, control, and exploit the resources of nature without consequence. In many ways, the human deaths and the disruption to our daily lives that the coronavirus has caused mirrors the way we have been affecting our non-human community for far too long – the extinction of thousands of species of plants and animals, and the destruction to ecosystems and habitats that support these living beings due to human activity. Some people have proposed that this pandemic is nature’s way of rebalancing the effects of human activity on the planet, of waking humanity up to the interconnectedness of all of life, not just within our human communities, or as a global economy, but as a global ecosystem of all the living beings that call this planet home.

Our planet Earth is over 4 billion years old. We have gone through 5 major mass species extinctions in the last 450 million years, and many scientists agree that we are currently in the age of the sixth mass extinction, and this one has been primarily caused by one species – humans. Someone asked me if this is nature’s way of taking revenge on us. I don’t believe that nature is a vengeful force. Nature is just the sum total of all the processes that drive and support the evolution of our planet and all of its inhabitants. Humans are also a part of nature and our decisions and actions have consequences that are playing itself out as part of our evolution.

Life wants to express itself through us. Each of us can be seen as a unique flower that is meant to bloom to our fullest potential during our time here on Earth. The poignant beauty of flowers are enhanced because of their fleeting nature. Flowers know that they won’t last forever; they’re not meant to last forever, but for the time they are here, they are designed to bloom in full glory. It is my hope that humans will begin to see ourselves and live our lives as if we are a part of nature rather than separate from it. In that light, buying flowers during a time of pandemic doesn’t seem so outrageous to me. Because the day that we no longer have flowers on this Earth probably means that our days are numbered too.

Today is my beautiful daughter Penelope’s 7th Birthday. In honor of her and all women everywhere, I want to share this blessing written by my feminine embodiment teacher Meghan Makena. Her mission is to have every woman know that she is sacred, wild & loved. https://www.ambamovement.com/

Blessing for All Women
May you know how loved you are by life
May you stay true to your timing, and honor it
May you feel your breath deep in the tissues and skin of your back, supporting you always
May you trust your wild instincts, your gut knowing, regardless of what others think or say
May you find your voice, and know your truth
May the fire of your ambition be balanced by the softness of your heart
May you tenderly open to receive how huge your heart is, no matter what the details are
May you go through enough challenge that you are humbled, so that you can truly walk an earth walk, with your feet touching the ground in every step
May you access an unstoppable passion inside your core that keeps you naturally devoted to your true and real path
May you source your power from within you, and from the earth and the heavens, so that you can be replenished as you do the work that you are here to do
~ Meghan Makena founder of Amba School of Embodiment

When I launched my vision of The Nature of Soul one month ago, I thought I was done gestating. But I was wrong. My guidance tells me that I have another season to be patient, to once again allow myself to surrender to the womb of darkness, trusting and resting assured that the seeds I have planted are growing, and waiting for their time to bloom in the spring. In the Northern Hemisphere, where our Earth is preparing to enter a time of darkness and stillness, our culture instead responds with more bright lights and activity. In these next few weeks leading up to the end of the year and the decade, can you find some time to honor the darkness, both within and outside of you?

In honor of the darkness, I share a poem by Emily Dickinson “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark.” Nature provides the most magnificent background and lighting for the reading.

We grow accustomed to the Dark –
When Light is put away –
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye –
A Moment – We uncertain step
For newness of the night –
Then – fit our Vision to the Dark –
And meet the Road – erect –
And so of larger – Darknesses –
Those Evenings of the Brain –
When not a Moon disclose a sign –
Or Star – come out– within –
The Bravest – grope a little –
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead –
But as they learn to see –
Either the Darkness alters –
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight –
And Life steps almost straight.

Earlier this week I spent the morning down along the American River, soaking up the healing elements of the natural world. I have been cultivating a practice of slowing down, to match my rhythm to the rhythms of Mother Earth, which moves at a much slower pace than modern life. Between work and mothering young children, it takes a lot of conscious intention to pay attention to my breath and be mindful of how I am inhabiting my body as I move throughout the day. I find that spending time in nature always resets my nervous system and makes me just feel better overall.

I recorded a guided meditation video that will lead you through a simple process of grounding into the Earth, clearing your energy fields, and opening your energy channels up to listen to your own inner guidance and receive divine support. When I enter into meditation, I merge with the energies of Mother Earth/Gaia and Divine Source, and this video is an energy transmission through me to you. There is no need to do anything except open your heart up to receive. Love and blessings, Liz

This past July I received a divine download that the future direction of my work would be in ecological restoration and modern lifestyle design. In this video I share more about what those concepts mean for me and how I am opening myself up to allow this work to come through me. As humans we are a part of the web of life that is Nature. We each occupy our own unique ecological niche in our planetary ecosystem. When we seek to uncover our true nature, occupy our one true place, and express ourselves from that embodied place, we contribute to the health and diversity of our planetary ecosystem. We thrive and our environment thrives. What is the nature of your soul? What is seeking to be expressed through you?

Our souls speak to us in a different language than our everyday communications. We need to learn a new language if we want to learn how to listen to the language of our souls. Our souls speak to us through dreams, imagery, art, passions, stirrings, poetry, sensation. Here is a video I made sharing one of my favorite poems.

What to Remember When Waking
by David Whyte

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you being your plans.
What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.
To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.
You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.
Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?
Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?