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!

This autumn in Root + Rise, we’re being guided by Oshun, one of the most powerful and beloved of the orishas - the pantheon of 401 deities from the Yoruba people of Nigeria.

A couple of months ago, during my Morning Pages, some delicious downloads began to flow through about the energy of desire, specifically about soul-aligned, or authentic, desire.

A deep truth that I’ve been increasingly turning towards is that the more available I am to life, the more life becomes available to me (because life + I are intimately entwined.) This sounds obvious enough but we tend not to really lean into it, become infused and embodied in it.

Summer is in full swing, and the desert is hot. In the 100s before 9am. Rushing around is not an option, although the newer energies moving out here these days seem to be hell bent on overriding the slow summer pace and maintaining a constant gogogo...but that’s another story for another day perhaps ; )

I had a memorable dreamtime experience recently. The dream itself was a dull and mildly stressful one where my bag was stolen. As I was about to angrily run after the thief, my limited sense of ‘I’ expanded quite significantly and the thought arose:

”This is a very boring dream. I’m going to wake up and have a different one.”

And I woke up, smiling to myself at the delightful simplicity of it all, and fell back to sleep, dreaming another dream.

The rhythms of these slow, seasonal shifts are the ways that the Earth observes time. They’re the ways that our bodies, that belong to the Earth, are designed to observe time.

Supported by this wilderness, I’ve been tending to wounds from the dominant culture, from generations and ancestry. After a couple of journeys into the underworld to retrieve + restore parts of my soul, the embodied knowing that I am not these wounds took seed in my nervous system one spring.

Back in 2010, when I was still living in London, my soul began to stage a revolution with the quiet repetition of there’s more to life than this. The existence that I had been sleepily fumbling through had become completely devoid of meaning: a husk-like existence that, for myriad reasons, demanded an awakening from.

As I dive into this missive, I want to presence all of my Self, invite all that’s happening within me to participate in the formation of the words taking shape on the page as I write.

If you’re reading this, I’d hazard that the answer is a yes.

​Before diving into an exploration of this, let’s begin with a quick working definition of trauma. For me, the one that’s been most clarifying is from the somatic (body-based) therapeutic lens.