The Visionary Alchemy of Choosing
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.
If you’re answering with a yes! I send you a delighted namaste-fist bump. Your awareness and acknowledgment of the profound value of your attention and energy can empower you to choose where, to what and to whom you’re giving it to, and set your boundaries with joy.
If you’re answering with a doubtful no, then I invite you to become aware of all the many ways that your attention + energy are being tugged at 24/7, all the countless strategies that are used to ‘grab’ at your attention and hook it into something - perhaps beneficial, perhaps not. These days, it takes some sturdy intentionality to actively choose where, to what and to whom we’re ‘paying’ our attention, and consequently our energy, to.
What I’ve been noticing as a common condition among many of us humans is a wobbliness around this inherent power (and responsibility) to choose where to direct our energy via our attention. There’s a deep distrust of our own ability to choose and decide for ourselves how and where to ‘spend’ our energy, to choose and decide what’s the most generative for our own soul-body, to choose and decide to align with our own joyful potentials and possibilities.
A common symptom of this wobbliness is the feeling of being regularly drained and depleted - energetically, emotionally, physically. When we’re giving our energy away without choosing to, when it’s being siphoned away from us, we feel drained, stressed out, powerless.
Our native power to choose is a powerful treasure.
The energetic alchemy behind not trusting ourselves with it is analogous to a very, very rich person, blessed with unlimited wealth and resources, who has been hypnotized into believing that they can’t be trusted with all this abundance. As a result, their power to choose how to direct and work with their vast wealth has been handed over to some external authority that ‘knows better’. This rich person is better off, safer off letting their wealth be siphoned off in whatever direction this outside authority decrees. Oh, and that unshakeable feeling of exhaustion, anxiety and Self alienation that seems to follow our fabulously wealthy protagonist around everywhere - that’s just the way things are.
Perhaps this is a bit simplistic, but you get the gist. Without going into lots of esoteric energy alchemy speak, this is essentially what’s happening. In legends and fairy tales, it’s often depicted as the ruling sovereign who has been possessed into giving away all their decision-making power to a cunning henchperson, until all the land’s resources are used up.
King Théoden's possession by the Sauron-Saruman serving Grima in Lord of the Rings / what I feel like when I engage with mainstream media without robust energetic protection.
Meanwhile, when we’re in full possession of wielding our power to choose, and unconditionally trust ourselves with it, it’s a whole different story. When this power to choose is attuned to our soul’s values, we’re aligned with the evolutionary current of Nature moving through us.
And what this alignment feels like is (our) joy. This is also how new, visionary paradigms are birthed.
We become intimately familiar with feeling in and through our hearts + bodies when our energy + attention are being pulled towards things that are misaligned with our soul’s joy, which is also Nature’s evolutionary frequency.
One of our Foundational Practices in Root + Rise is (cyclical) attunement to our soul’s evolving values. Guided by that, and by Goddess Oshun, this season we’ll be yoking our power to choose with our authentic values, birthing the frequency of our embodied joy. This will be our GPS towards taking aligned action - the ways in which we choose to circulate, direct and spend the valuable, abundant currency of our attention + energy.
Along the way, we’ll meet, tend to and integrate any distortions around trusting ourselves with our own power, and create the safety and capacity to allow our joy to be the wayshower.
Oshun, as goddess of the sweet waters, governs wealth, abundance and fecundity in all forms, and she moves in the world through the felt- sense of joy, through orientation towards our authentic, life-affirming joy.
By reclaiming our inherent power to joyfully choose for ourselves how to channel the wealth of our energy + attention, we’re becoming the rivers through which Oshun's sweet waters can flow. And from here, we get to create, nourish and generate our lives and our communities.
Whether or not you choose to join Root + Rise this season, I hope you receive the intended gift of this transmission: the felt-sense knowing that your energy is the currency of abundance, and as you choose to orient towards the (re)generative waters of your joy, and choose for yourself how to save, circulate and invest your energy from there, you’re simultaneously participating in the dismantling joyless, disempowering and degrading systems, structures and mandates that would have you believe that the sovereignty of your heart-soul-body’s choice is not to be trusted.
Registration closes tomorrow, September 30th at midnight PST.