Here's the Path. Now Walk It.

Who else has one hell of a holy-whoa full moon hangover?

If you are raising your hand right now, hi. You are my tribe.

Shifts have been rolling in, fast and determined, which is what happens when you let the feisty phoenix give your life and soul a fiery blast.

I’ve been feeling the shift coming on for the past few weeks, which is why I stepped back from anything that drained me, started drinking ridiculous amounts of water, and focusing on healing myself over everything else.

As much as I want kids, I’m really glad I didn’t have them this month, because they probably would’ve demanded things. Like love. And food. And it was all I could do to get myself food, much less love.

Fully surrendering the illusion that I have any brand of control over my life did not come easy. Wading through the muck that was floating to the surface was a Shawshank Redemption-style army crawl through the sewer of my soul.

I want control. I tried to wrest control. I did everything in my rather stubborn power to make the universe bend to my will.

And, sure, the universe will bend to me.

But not by doing what I was doing.

What I was doing just made the universe laugh at me.

(Rude.)

Because, as ever, I need to focus on what’s happening internally.

I had to fill up my own damn cup - by crying, moving through old emotions and energy that got stuck in my spleen sometime in mid-2007, roaming the seashore, and drinking green juice and eating potato chips. By meditating and reading Harry Potter. By connecting with my heart and higher self and watching Netflix.

The human and the divine in one big messy orgy of It’s Goddamn Time and This Shift Is Coming Like It Or Not.

Halfway through, I hated it and was mad at it.

Now that I’m on the downhill slide, I like it.

It feels good to move through something big and dark-feeling and come out the other side with your light back on.

Here Are Some Things I Learned (Again) And Hope To Remember This Time

(Note to self: Remembering simply requires daily practice.)

Connect daily with my light and heart and higher self. It’s all in there, I just have to tap in.

Sweat and yoga it out, every day. Move out anything that wants to malinger.

Notice and be present with any shadows or dark spots. Love myself through it all.

Love myself through it all. Yup.

Have fun. Best way to shift into a higher state of being and vibration.

Fill my own cup daily. Just ask what feels like a soul and body sigh of relief and do the thing.

Blaze my own light and vibration. It works even better than shielding and clearing, though do that too.

Be fully and happily in a “whatever happens happens” frame of mind - with money, relationships, work, and life in general. It’s always “this or something better” and as I feel it all here now, life will organize it for me, all the faster if I keep my grubby mitts off.

Feel what I want to feel now - instead of waiting for the love or abundance to give it to me, because it won’t. The universe is mirroring my internal world back to me. So I can just go ahead and feel loved and secure and abundant right now, and the outer world can do whatever it damn well pleases.

Now is the only moment that exists. So I’m gonna be in it and enjoy it.

Taken in Mill Valley after staring at the ocean waves for awhile.

There’s the path. So we just gotta walk it and enjoy the motion.

No More Trying. Just Being.

I was talking to a friend tonight, and he said I was "looking, rather than creating."

I've felt too drained to create. So I've been looking.

Looking outside myself to find ease and fulfillment. Looking to other people, to money, to success (whatever the hell that is) to fill me up.

I know better. Of course I do.

But when you're drained dry, it becomes very hard to recall that hard-earned wisdom when you need it most. 

It's hard to self-source when you feel like you have nothing left. Even when that's not even remotely true. We always have access to this bottomless well of love and peace. Sometimes we just forget where the trap door is. 

It's why people who talk about this stuff tend to harp on endlessly about self-love and filling your own cup. 

Yeah, sorry about that. I know how annoying it can be.

Especially when you've been draining your own cup for so long, that you have no idea what this mythical overflowing cup even looks like, much less how to get one.

Which is why I feel so good about taking some time to just stop. 

Stop huffing endlessly on the hamster wheel of trying to make things happen and just allow whatever is.

No more trying. Just being. 

No more doing. Just feeling. 

I can't wait to see what unfolds.

Trust Fall Off a Cliff

Yesterday, I got some scary-ass guidance.

It happened right here on this ridiculously pretty California beach, as I sat on the sand in my favorite place to get answers.

I've been getting - and ignoring - a few messages for months. Since I'm also getting close to falling off the burn-out cliff, which would force the issue, I'm doing my best to pay attention.

Guidance: Take a month off.

Brain: I would love to, but I can’t afford it.

Heart: Take a month off.

Brain: Yeah, but money. MONEY IS A THING, YOU KNOW.

Guidance: You are not to worry about money.

Brain: EASY FOR YOU TO SAY, LIVING IN THE ETHER WHERE YOU DON’T HAVE TO PAY RENT OR BUY ORANGES.

Guidance: You don’t have to buy oranges either.

Brain: But I like oranges.

Guidance [sounding put-upon]: We’re getting off track again.

Taking a month off feels like both a soul sigh of relief (the feeling I always tell my clients to follow) and a red-alert-panic-button-you-gonna-be-homeless-crazy-lady alarm.

Now, I wouldn’t take it completely off. I’ll still be working with my current clients and groups and anyone who knocks on my door.

But I won't be searching anyone out. I won't be launching, sharing, marketing, newsletter-ing, or posting things of the Amber-Is-Sorta-Inspirational-(?)-But-Mostly-She-Seems-To-Be-Talking-About-Monkeys-Again oeuvre on instagram.

Not trying to make money, when humans do actually need money, would be full-blown surrender.

I would be required to trust the universe to send me what I need to be able to keep my house and my car and my oranges. Trust in myself and what I’ve already done, trust in my shaky nervous system not to go crazy with fear.

I’m not 100% sure I have it in me.

I've been getting guided to write more and take a month off for ages - and just haven't done it. Because, fear. Also: possible homeless and orangeless...ness.

But I can't keep touting "follow your guidance! follow your guidance!" to the world at large if I don't follow my own goddamn advice.

What if I did just follow my intuition and stopped doing things that drain me and just did things I love? What would happen?

We’re about to find out.

Imaginary Saber Tooth Tigers

I was born during the last gasp of disco.

To this day, if Got To Be Real comes on, I will dance in public. Whether dancing is appropriate or not. If inappropriate, I may restrain myself to shuffling my magenta Converse under the table, but some form of movement will always mark the occasion.

I’m forty years old, sliding rapidly into forty-one, and I’m still figuring myself out. I have a lot more knowledge than in previous years and decades, but virtually every week something new unfolds.

The unfolding of the self is goddamn relentless. Especially when you’re dedicated to the process.

Dancing makes me happy, that I know.

(Though I have to relearn it every few years, when it slips out of habit and my happiness levels decrease by approximately 22 percent. )

I need to be in trees or on a mountain or by the beach at least once a week for my sanity, that I also know.

Writing helps me find my center and my answers.

Color, bright color, delights me and I try to wear some every day. T-shirts with electric banjo-playing squirrels and rainbow jetpack-riding unicorns are always at the top of the laundry rotation.

Making myself stew - or anything else that doesn’t involve crackers or popcorn - feels deeply nurturing.

I decorate my house in the colors of the lower chakras: red, orange, and yellow. Plus turquoise. Coincidentally, the chakras I struggle with most.

I want to feed a giraffe, see the Northern lights, and learn to sing.

Tapping in as regularly as I’m able supports my perspective unlike anything else. I need to bask in that love and peace and anything-and-everything-is-possible, which is where I go when I channel. And it works best when I take other people with me.

Sometimes I feel like Neo in The Matrix - discovering just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

(Not so much with the sweeping black pleather jackets and jiu jitsu, though. Sadly.)

The longer I follow this channeling path, the weirder it gets.

First, it was "You get messages from an unseeable, unknowable source."

Then it was, "You can talk to Joan of Arc."

Then it was, "Yes, unicorns do drive past you on Harleys if you're in a bad mood." *

* because there ain't no one, in this world or any other, who wants me in a bad mood.

Then it was, "There are beings on other planets who want to hang out with you and put on a sweet light show."

Days when I write and move and channel and visit nature and make something just for the fun of it - those are the very best days. Because at some point, it’s not even about knowing yourself, it’s just about getting through the day with as much presence and joy as possible.

But my brain tries to talk me out of each and every one of these activities. Partially because my brain is a bit of a jerk, but mostly because I’m so used to not feeling good that when I do feel good, my brain gets concerned and does its utmost to nudge me back where things are comfortable.

As an empath and a person who doesn’t much enjoy discipline, I’m often wallowing in the energy and feelings and perspectives and thoughts of others. Which means, extra anxiety with a whipped cream topping of fear.

I used to get mad at my brain for spitting out anxiety-inducing sludge from the moment it comes online in the morning to the moment it passes out in the evening. Then I realized it’s attached to my tweaked spinal cord and constantly-in-fear-of-being-devoured-by-a-saber-tooth-tiger nervous system.

It’s doing the best it can, given the systemic information it’s being fed.

Holding energetic boundaries is difficult when your physical system is compromised. (That’s last week’s bit of unfolding fun.)

When I try to convince my nervous system that saber tooth tigers aren’t a thing in Mill Valley, California, circa now, my brain does its best to collaborate the story.

Sadly, nobody believes it.

Then I get mad because energy is my thing and why can’t I fix my own and ARGGHHHHHHHHH.

While healing is sometimes a quantum leap, it's more often a slow slog of small adjustments.

It's a day-by-day and moment-by-moment process of remembering to honor your feelings, follow the nudges, and point your brain toward what you want (rather than fears and worries) while enjoying the present moment.

I often wonder how anyone can do all this while also doing anything else. Anything at all.

So we have to nudge our brain into resting - by breathing, by moving, by making something, by stepping out into nature, by connecting with the quiet voice behind the brain hamsters.

I'm still learning how to do this - it's an evolution that unwinds through the lifetime of your soul (so, basically, eternity) - but I know it's happening.

Bit by bit, my brain and nervous system re-align and life starts to mesh effortlessly with spirit instead of imaginary saber tooth tigers.

Trauma Tuesday

I look fairly normal, right?

Nope!

Turns out, I’ve been a walking bundle of traumatized nerves my whole life.

I, hand-to-god, had no earthly idea.

While the world is a traumatic place, I haven’t been through any noticeable trauma (dead dads and miscarriage and breakups aside), so I assumed the word didn’t apply to me.

But there’s a whole subtle trauma underground. Emotional trauma, systemic trauma, empath trauma. They’re like the ninja turtles of trauma: Big, green and will karate chop the heck out of your throat, but no one quite believes they’re real.

After a charged but ultimately no-big-deal conversation on Tuesday night, I catapulted into a 24-hour period of shaking, must-flee, all-my-feels-are-like-fingernails-down-the-chalkboard-of-my-system panic experience.

Needless to say, it was zero fun.

It didn’t really cool down until I ran to the network chiropractor’s office the next day for the first slot they could give me, threw myself down on the table, and yelled “FIX ME!” Which they did.

In the past, I thought I was just being an overly-sensitive drama queen.

That’s the thing about emotional neglect and self-abandonment. (Two terms I don’t particularly care for but have been reading about anyway because they seem to explain a lot.) They’re more or less invisible.

We humans are deeply adept at normalizing and sweeping things under the rug - mostly because we don’t realize it’s an issue or know what to do about it if we do happen to notice.

It’s only been recently that I’ve recognized that this sort of reaction to a fight or any kind of harsh energy or emotion isn’t normal. Or maybe it’s all too normal and few of us really know what to do or how to talk about it.

After my system kicks into high-octane fight-or-flight (but mostly flight), I cease functioning in any normal fashion. I flood, my brain goes hazy, and I become one giant throbbing nerve.

Which is just as much fun as it sounds.

I’ve done a lot of emotional and energy healing, but my poor physical nervous system is so tweaked it can take me down in a hot second at the first sign of trouble.

This is why I have never allowed myself to do any kind of drugs or keep any kind of sleep aids or alcohol in the house, because in these flooded, panicked, in-severe-wracking-systemic-and-emotional-pain moments I will toss back anything handy without giving the first damn.

Which means that on Tuesday night, when I was mid-trauma-trigger, I didn’t have so much as a spare melatonin tablet.

So I went for a drive instead, which may have not been the best plan, all things considered. Luckily, it was after midnight and no one is on the road in Marin. I drove around Tiburon until I calmed down enough to go home, then I worked until I calmed down enough to go to sleep. Then I woke up with a pounding heart, a deep sense of dread, and no idea how to feel better.

The hardest piece of this is the Having No Idea How To Feel Better.

Suddenly, my attraction to energy healing makes sense. For the longest time, it was the only thing that helped me feel better.

To be fair, I have a much better idea of how to feel better than I did in my twenties. Sometimes I can even remember that the trauma spin cycle will eventually end, leaving me much better off. But it’s hard to believe, mid-trigger.

What I learned to do was avoid trauma-triggers. Which means it’s very hard for me to have an argument with someone or, really, any kind of meaningful relationship. Because something jagged eventually and inevitably crops up that requires normal-person communication and possibly a bit of a disagreement and my poor overloaded system just can’t deal. So I run away, silently screaming.

Empaths end up wrangling insane amounts of trauma. Because every human on the planet has been traumatized in some way or another, and very few of them have the privilege of the time, money, help, and knowledge needed to heal. So we just go around sucking it up, all day long.

Energetic boundaries are great, but - as I am currently realizing - very difficult to hold up when your physical system is compromised.

Add in inherited ancestral trauma, whatever you got growing up (because your parents got it growing up), and any of the things that actually happen to you in your life, and it amazes me that anyone gets out of bed. Much less holds down a job and goes to the grocery store in any sort of regular fashion.

Long story short, I had no idea my system was holding so much trauma, and now I know so I guess I get to do something about it.

Big hug to all the other traumatized bundles of raw nerves walking around out there like normal people. You’ve got this.