Let's Discuss Vultures

One of my major life challenges is How To Not Be Drained Always.

This shows up in work, in relationships, in going to the grocery store without needing a post-produce section nap.

I get drained because I want to help everyone feel better. So I let them in. Way in, energetically speaking. While that’s awwww sweet on some level, I'm ready to officially declare the Amber Buffet closed.

So much about how our energy intermingles and interacts is unconscious. Even for those of us who make it our actual job to know (raises hand), half the time it’s “wait, what the hell just happened?” after coming home from something only able to climb into bed and stare at Queer Eye for three hours straight.

I believe that energy vultures are just trying to survive, the only way they know how. When someone’s been drained their entire life, they will naturally be drawn to energy they can drain, just so they can get through the day. It’s unconscious, until we get a clue and start working on good boundaries.

I’ve been both the drained and the drainee. I’ve been both the vulture and the tasty roadkill.

Vultures are just doing their best to get through life. If you have some tasty energy on offer, they’re going to partake. Like any one of us would if we missed breakfast and Starbucks had banana bread samples sitting out. Obviously you’re going to take it. They wouldn’t offer it if you weren’t supposed to eat it, right? Right.

There’s nothing wrong with being a vulture. Vultures are their own perfect part of the food chain.

But it’s my choice whether or not to let the vultures feast on my carcass.

So I’m declaring again, here and now:

THE AMBER BUFFET IS CLOSED.

Hey, cool, but how do we close the buffet?

Good question.

I’m still working on it.

What I’ve been doing lately is simply paying attention.

When do I need to crawl into bed? When do I just want to watch Netflix and hug a pillow? When do I land face first in a bag of kettle chips? When do my thoughts circle endlessly on something that doesn’t help or doesn’t even feel like me? Those are all signs that my energy has been drained.

What precipitated the poaching? A trigger? A conversation? An internet troll? A social gathering?

Energetic hygiene - clearing, cord-cutting, shielding - is great for empaths and sensitive peeps. But ultimately, the best protection is connecting with your own heart, your own energy, your own light, and blazing it through your own field.

When you’re all wrapped up in your own light, outside intrusions can’t get in nearly as easily.

So I’ve been chanting “I nourish and cherish myself”, putting my hands over my heart whenever possible, paying attention to my breath, being as conscious of my thought patterns as possible, and doing whatever I can to bask in my own goddamn light.

These past six months, I’ve felt so drained that I couldn’t even find my own light. My rib cage was as dark as a haunted house on November 1st. So I finally had to stop everything I was doing and make myself my number one priority - over my business, over helping others, over money, over relationships, over everyone and everything.

ME ME ME.

While this may be a controversial opinion, I highly encourage any and all empaths and sensitive people, especially those who feel drained and overwhelmed, to adopt a ME FIRST policy.

When you’ve been giving so much of yourself for so long, a wild swing in the other direction is often needed. In the ME ME ME direction. When we’ve been offering our love, energy, talent, care, money to anyone and everyone for our whole lives without receiving enough in return (from ourselves, others, or a particularly wretched combination of the two), we need to put our foot down and declare THIS IS THE ME MONTH. (The Me Day, the Me Year, the Me Decade, whatever.)

Then you do whatever you have to do to take care of you.

For me that means writing with big pots of tea, scrubbing my house, going to the beach, quitting the soul-sucking task of selling myself, doing my best to break a sweat everyday, re-reading Harry Potter, taking off my shoes so I can feel the grass between my toes.

Plug yourself in so you can recharge.

Prime re-charging spot. The beach is like the empath genius bar. Just walk up and your connection gets fixed.

On Overcoming Triggers and Downward Spirals (After Much Stubbornness)

Since I still don’t know what I’m doing with my life, business, home, relationships, writing - with anything at all really, thanks, quantum shifts! - I’m doing my best to just keep myself happy and in a relatively positive state. “Vibration” if you live in Northern California.

One thing that’s always made me happy is blogging. Just sharing my experience. Not in a “this is what you should do!” way - in fact, I would generally advise against doing what I do - but simply because talking about what’s true for me in this moment feels important.

Apparently that’s a real thing for empaths. We see and feel a lot and we get trained out of sharing it as kids and then we end up choking on unprocessed information as adults.

Blogging clears the throat chakra (apparently) and hot damn could my throat chakra use some of that.

So I’m going to talk about my week, because that's what you do on a blog.

First up:

The universe is trying to trigger the hell out of me. 

… and it succeeded with vigor on Monday. 

Mostly because my internet went out, which is the most first world of problems, besides maybe being denied your favorite flavor of green juice. But I still find it deeply aggravating. Mostly because it’s a solvable problem that somehow never gets solved.

Side note: One of the best descriptions of the United States I’ve ever heard is that we solve problems no one else can solve (internet and space travel) (the Russians might disagree with that, but I don’t think anyone from Russia reads my blog) and we can’t solve problems that are a major “duh” to everyone else (healthcare and guns).

Anyway, whenever my landlords call Comcast to fix something, my internet gets disconnected. This leaves me full of rage. Because 1. this keeps happening even though I’ve asked for a heads-up so I can make sure the Comcast guy doesn’t sail off on his merry way leaving me without a connection and 2. because I work from home and I need that shit. 

Rage was felt, triggers were acted upon, and if that was a universal test of my maturity and / or spiritual growth, I failed miserably. 

So I drove to Petaluma in high dudgeon to use internet that actually worked while simmering in my frustration and rage, because that’s always a great idea. Rage is good for the skin. 

HOWEVER.

Even though I massively failed the universe’s perverse little test and made life rockier for myself thanks to said rage and high dudgeon, some good things still arose:

Good Thing Number One:

While I was in Petaluma, I went into one of my dark Everything Is Bad, I’ve Done Everything Wrong So I Never Get To Be Happy, I Can’t Do This Any More, Let Me Off The Planet spirals. There was shaking, there was crying, it was not pretty.

I used to get stuck in these dark spirals for hours or days or weeks, 100% certain that I would never get out of it, that there was no light at the end of the tunnel and everything would be bad forever. Which is not a fun place to be, especially if you’re there for weeks. I rarely go that far down the spiral any more and I pop back out fairly quickly. This is big, and I’m doing my best to be conscious of how far I’ve come. Possibly even congratulatory, because while it’s not a sexy achievement, it is an important one.

During this particular dark hell spiral, I was able to recognize that there actually was dark energy spiraling above me and I was held in its thrall.

It freaked me out. I didn’t want anything to do with that dark energy, I was scared, get it away from me.

But then I noticed that I was feeling calm again. The relentless and wildly painful cycling of my brain had stopped. I felt peaceful.

Post-dark spiral peace is absolute bliss. It’s the best high on the planet and this, my friends, is why the world has drug addicts.

So I asked the person next to me if he was doing anything and he said he was. I replied that whatever he was doing was working and please continue.

When I asked what was actually going on, he said he was cycling the dark energy through his heart. He likened it to the obnoxious kid on the playground who just wants to be included. If you try to push the dark energy away, it gets worse. But if you love and accept it, it settles down.

Cue head explosion.

Because I knew this intellectually. But in practice I was too scared to welcome in the dark energy. Partly because I feel like I’ve been welcoming in dark energy my whole life and that’s part of why a reasonable portion of that whole life has been one giant festival of pain. *

*Slight exaggeration but not nearly as much of an exaggeration as I would prefer.

But maybe it’s because I welcome it in but then get scared of it and try to push it away. Maybe by fully loving and accepting it - and myself - everything gets easier. Peaceful.

I’m still chewing on this, but it was a profound experience.

And one that may not have happened if my internet hadn’t gone dark.

Good Thing Number Two:

Even as I was feeling righteously enraged by the egregious internet offense, I knew that there was going to come a point when I realized it wasn’t a big deal at all. Hot on the heels of that point would come the point where I feel rather sheepish.

Yes, that moment came. But no, I didn’t feel sheepish. I don’t have much shame any more.

At the appointed time - well, technically an hour and a half after the appointed time but still half an hour within the given window - a friendly bearded man with a thick southern accent showed up. He admired my hobbit house - he even called it a hobbit house, which is exactly what I call it, and this endeared him to me forever - and said he wanted one just like it. He had just moved to the area from Tennessee and this was only his third day here.

So I told him that there were hobbit cottages aplenty in Mill Valley and how to find one, along with where my favorite beaches and pizza places live. He labeled my internet line with a “Back cottage, do not disconnect” so that Egregious Internet Offense doesn’t happen again.

It felt like one of those encounters that needed to happen for some reason, obvious or otherwise.

So I was feeling good about the whole thing.

Then the universe tried to trigger me again, a mere day later.

Because the universe is nothing if not determined, and also I failed the first test so I guess it wanted to give me another chance? 

But this time I didn’t trigger. Hahaha, take that, universe!

Because I didn’t trigger, I just let the parking meter eat my debit card and calmly reported it lost. Then I calmly walked to the bank and a very friendly teller handed me some cash so I can eat and buy gas for the next week. When my card comes, I will calmly re-set up all my automatic bill withdrawals.

Like a goddamn grownup.

Then I went to my appointment and we worked on receiving (because I am apparently not very good at that) and forty-five minutes later, I got a whole bunch of free soup and bread. Because I was working at Arizmendi’s and it was closing in ten minutes and they had to get rid of all the unsold soup. So me, the college student sitting at the next table, and an elementary school teacher all got big containers of free tomato soup and fresh bread and it was great.

The moral of the story is: Everyone wants to help. Everyone did their best to support me through my (minor first world) challenges and since I’ve been deeply wanting to feel more supported, this was a much needed reminder that feeling taken care of can happen.

Even if the universe was being a bit of a dick.

Me, wearing a stolen hat and triggering only slightly.

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.

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.

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.