Releasing into Power

I.

My husband Oli and I moved to the rural wilds of the Mojave high desert here in southern California from England in 2013. We arrived at our new home with one suitcase each of our worldly belongings, both of us having eagerly shed the weight of our previous lives, which had long become stale and meaningless. Nothing else was being shipped over. This was it, here we were. The shedding hadn’t been difficult: we had arrived at a place where it was easy to feel everything that was dissonant with our souls. We were ready to make a completely fresh start in a completely new reality, one where the accumulated baggage of expired iterations of us did not belong.

In our eleven years here, we have become intimately familiar with the process of shedding that this desert unfailingly facilitates, both within ourselves and on this land, for instance through the remnants of snakeskin found here and there. I learned that this process of reptilian shedding has a name: ecdysis. A strange word. One that silently vibrated in my mind every time I realized this desert had guided me into a new cycle of letting go, often nowhere near as easy as our initial enthusiastic letting go that marked our arrival here. I learned that when snakes are in the process of shedding their skins, their eyes turn ‘milky’ or a cloudy hue and they require solitude or else they become irritable.

Through the silent, spontaneous intonation of the word ecdysis when I realized I was in a new cycle of shedding, I slowly learned to lean into my own cloudy outer vision, my mind’s lack of clarity for what lay ahead. The hackneyed term ‘trust the process’ finally landed in a visceral way, because Nature reflected this back to me, and because here on this land, there was no doubting that I was inseparable from Nature. Embracing solitude when necessary - without distraction - became as rejuvenating as deep, slow breathing. And when I didn’t, irritability navigated me back to center.

The cycles of ecdysis initiated by Life, and by this land weren’t always easy because they involved shedding (unconscious) layers of self that were false or obsolete, but that had served a purpose: they had helped me to survive. I would not be here, breathing and living if it hadn’t been for them. But they were no longer helping me to survive, let alone thrive. Yet, my nervous system had accidentally made vows of loyalty to them, to identity layers of victimhood, suffering and smallness that had kept me safe in this world where generational and cultural trauma were normal but so very far removed from being natural.

Even so, over the years of shedding these expired identity layers, the process became increasingly serpentine and instinctual. All dimensions of the experience were given the light of witnessing presence, including the mind’s propensity to grasp for certainty and control. Organically, as I breathed deeper into it, each cycle spiraled deeper inward and out. Previous incarnations began to make themselves known; karmic imprints from different lifetimes in different bodies, revealed as the mimetic patterns unconsciously playing out in this life, in this body.

And they were shed, continue to be shed. These past few weeks have been something of a crucible in this process, taking place in another wild and beloved landscape, in the mountains of northern New Mexico. I am back home now, integrating what has emerged. Feeling lighter, renewed yet with the heavy flavor of a complicated grief that is also here, from the sudden and premature loss of a loved one who was unable to release her identification with her accumulated pain-body, until she was ultimately consumed by it.

II.

"The appearance of disorder is merely a function of the limits of perception."

From The Map of Consciousness Explained by David R. Hawkins

Collectively, we are at a precipice of something for which there are no appropriate words yet, because it is completely new and unknown. For the sake of simplicity, and at the risk of sounding trite, let’s call it ‘a new paradigm’, something which I have written a bit about already in previous missives, and which I will be speaking to more often. I am not overtly referring to global politics and current affairs. Those things are the symptoms of the process of collective shedding + emergence that we’re currently in as we enter the mystery of a new unfolding.

By the Rio Grande gorge in northern New Mexico with husband + hound

Whether you’re experiencing this time as terrifying chaos or profound exhilaration, or a combination of the two (and I hope I have a diverse representation of consciousness here because homogeneity is something I’m finding increasingly dull these days), there is a unifying, evolutionary response that is being asked of all of us individually as we navigate this time. Namely, to come back to the sovereignty of our center, our core, our essence, over and over again, and to become intimately familiar with it as the truth of who + what we are - beyond our wounds, confusion and externally derived conditioning.

​There are many reasons for the necessity of this response. After these past few weeks of intense shedding, and after cloudy eyes have oriented to clear-seeing, an essential reason that I’m palpably perceiving is re-membering our own individual, soul-aligned power. And reclaiming, integrating + embodying it. I’m making the educated guess that this sort of empowerment is perhaps not a new theme for you. And if you’re in any way sensitive, empathetic, spiritual, creative, I’m making the educated guess that you have a complicated relationship with power, with your own power, with fully trusting yourself with it.

We’ve seen how the abuse of power has played out through the ages, over and over again, and the systems of harm created as a result of that. If that is what power is, the sensitive, empathetic parts of us have rightly decided that they want no part of it. But of course, that isn’t true power. It’s a distorted version of it, projecting out through distorted + damaged lenses of consciousness, coalescing into the dominant culture.

Or to summarize, in the words of a teacher, “power does not corrupt, power reveals.” (Much like money.)

Because power is, among other things, an instrument of revelation, it’s vital that we release over and over and over again, all that is no longer aligned and authentic for us, so that we can step into our true, soul-aligned power and steward it masterfully to create new, emergent systems of power with, as we evolve out of systems of power over. Not only is this possible, it’s a certainty. It also requires each one of us, especially those of us who have disowned our power often because of previous incarnations where we were the ones who abused it, to be rooted in our center, our essence, our True Self, the seat of true power and become stewards of this new paradigm.

It requires that we compassionately clear and transmute our identifications to our wounds, our traumas, our victimhood, our projections of shame + blame on self + other - because we cannot bring these things with us. And we certainly cannot work with our power with integrity, anchored in the True Self, if we’re still identified with and attached to these false layers of self.

This reclamation of the sovereignty of soul-aligned power is also how we can access the undiluted, world-building power of the imagination.