Glimmers are the opposite of triggers.

They’re those brief moments when we attune to the glimmers of beauty, joy, delight and wonder in our environment, and allow the time and space to feel them in the body.

The word ‘narcissist’ is flung around quite liberally these days.

Phrases like “they’re such a narcissist” pop up frequently in conversation, often about someone I don’t know and so have no first-hand reflection of.

And while it’s true that narcissistic traits are being seen and named more clearly in others, what’s not happening quite as much is the awareness that if we recognize narcissism in someone else, and are triggered by it, there’s a strong chance that we have our own disowned inner narcissist waiting to be met and tended to.

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Decolonizing our relationship to money involves bringing an animist, relational lens to our practice by learning to relate to the energy of money through sensation which is the body’s language, and by extension the Earth's.

Spring is here and this desert is shamelessly alive.

Last week, three Green Mojave rattlesnakes in two days (or potentially the same one) that Oli, my husband, wrangled and relocated. Each time, he came back a bit wiser and more attuned to dancing with primal fear: snake medicine.

​The gentle desert tortoise is out and about too, feasting on wildflowers.

Let’s talk about fawning, aka people pleasing.

You may already be familiar with the Sanskrit word dharma. Its meaning has nuances depending on the context. On a cosmic level, dharma speaks to the evolutionary process of Nature’s order and balance that emerges out of primordial chaos. The laws of Nature, if you will.

This spring in Root + Rise, we’re journeying with the Indian Goddess Lakshmi, and the story of churning the great cosmic ocean of primordial consciousness, known as Samudra Manthana.

The tale is multilayered and multidimensional - an invitation to explore, among many things, the nuances of balance, which is what Lakshmi’s auspicious energy is ultimately a symbol of.

Rooting into our values as the nutrient dense foundation of how we live our lives gives us access to authenticity - a word that has sadly become pretty trite and hackneyed these days.

I’m sitting outside on the most heavenly almost-spring desert day writing this. Earlier, my body cheerfully informed me: we will do our doings mostly outside today. We sure will.

In the space that’s been created, the spirit of money has been consistently sending me downloads that have me scribbling away in my journal. Reading back on them, I’ve shed some tears at the ways in which we have been forced to participate in and feed harm + control-based systems that degrade and exploit the life-affirming, loving + playful (yes!) essence and spirit of money.

Did someone turn up the overwhelm dial?!

Overwhelm seems to be the dominant experience for so many of us lately. I know I’ve had to become more intimate with it in my own life. And in conversations I’m having with others, as well as with clients I’m supporting, the general theme seems to be one where overwhelm has decided to take up way more space in our lives.

When we experience beauty undistorted, as in a perfect mirror, we recognize it as truth. For Tagore and for so very many of us, this undistorted beauty of truth is most clearly felt and experienced in the temple of Nature and the wilderness - which isn't capable of lying and deception.

We belong to earth + sky: when we sing songs of love and celebration to the land, to fallen leaves decomposing into the soil, to tiny seeds still under the ground with their unseen roots quietly growing down into the depths, to the unhurried cycles of sun and moon, we’re all nourished by the growth that emerges.

How do you feel when you observe the dominant structures of authority and governance in the world?

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​Need I ask how you’re feeling as you observe the megalomania of global terrorism being rained down on the people of Palestine in complicit support of settler colonialism (and big profits from the industry of war)?

A subtle and significant sensation has been present in my noticing lately - an old friend who hasn’t been to visit for sometime. I’ve come to understand it as a particular whisper from within, from the wild and deep waters of soul, letting me know that change is afoot.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I last wrote, and what a couple of weeks it’s been. There have been big + small playful nod-winks of affirmation from the universe, urging me to keep - clumsily, gracefully, shamelessly - dancing with the art of getting out of my own way so that Life can move me, move through me.

If you’re a free-thinking visionary, you may have already had the tickle of a notion that the invisible but valuable current of money has some deeper mystery stitched into it. (A $100 bill is a symbol of a quantity of money. Symbols are abstractions pointing towards something more difficult to apprehend. And in these increasingly cashless days, money's invisibility is all the more visible.)

I’m writing this missive just as the full moon lunar eclipse in Taurus is moving through on the afternoon of Saturday October 28th, on an appropriately atmospheric windy desert day.

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Two days ago, we marked our tenth year here in the desert. Ten years since Oli and I arrived at the gates of our rural desert home at dawn, straight from LAX, on a jet plane straight from London, with two suitcases of worldly belongings and two big, wide open hearts smiling into the dusty abyss of the unknown, which smiled right back and gathered us into its bosom.

Do you know that your energy, through the vehicle of your attention, is an extremely valuable currency and resource? For real, not just figuratively speaking.

Being human has been all the things recently. In my own life, I’ve noticed my mind furrowing my brows in judgment at people behaving in ways that my mind has all sorts of opinions and stories about. And when I occasionally peer out at the polarizing shenanigans in the collective from my particular vantage point, it’s enough to make my mind take a running jump over the nearest precipice with a final jubilant geronimo!