One could say that there is no end to spiritual pursuit, that a deeper realization of who and what we are, of God, of Cosmos, of meaning, of the absolute is always in the ever unfolding infinite possibility. And, there is nothing quite like the limitations of our humanness to humble us into the reality of enough-ness. I’ve never been more grateful for the limits of my body, of material reality, and of the demands of my personal needs than I have in this last year of my life.
I turned 42 in May, completing another 7 year cycle, if you’re into that kind of thing and know what I’m talking about. This birthday was the first time that I actually tracked the pattern within my life, tracing it back to when I was 7. I’ve truly had some big life change every 7 years, and about 6 months to a year after that shift occurs, I find my flow and things start to get really good. They don’t always stay that way, but there’s a grace period that has extended itself the older I get.
I spent the last 7 years in a rigorous pursuit of awakening, liberation, wisdom, embodied aliveness, connection, and the direct experience of true surrender and grace. At 35 I had embarked on what I later realized in hindsight was a mystic path, one I had begun 7 years prior at 28, but didn’t have the full courage to risk what it would ask of me until years later. I hesitate to even write that because some part of me thinks the it all sounds spiritually pretentious. Take it with a grain of salt if you need to, but as I let go of all the teachings I’ve been immersed in, my own intuitive sensing and knowing has returned with a potency I’ve always longed for. The mystic, gnostic, healer, lover, silly goose, irreverent wild woman, creature, hag are all alive and well and demanding their full breadth within my life. And I’m also realizing how much of what I was drawn to inside of initiatory teachings was a resonance with something I was already living inside of, and even as I have “left” the field I was a part of, initiation informs so much of my life and my work.
In the last 7 years, I did all the things that you would typically imagine one does as a white Western American when they’re on a spiritual path, and maybe then some. Medicine ceremonies, tantra practice and trainings, meditation, breath work, energy healing, soul initiation, spending time in isolation and spiritual community, pilgrimages, ceremony, countless rituals, esoteric study, and some other flavors of pursuit that I don’t think I’ll mention on my Substack. I could try to say all kinds of profound things about all of this, and god knows I’ve tried, but I find that the profundity of my own experience is way less interesting to me these days than the hummingbird outside my window, or learning Italian. Globally, we’ve done a particularly good job at creating a thriving industry of spiritual consumerism, often making it our whole personality while missing some of the depth that is actually available to us. And I’ve been sure to judge this disdainfully from the purity of my own practice, which I say in both obvious jest and subjective truth. We would always need meaning as humans, and we do some weird shit to find it, sometimes (often) lost within our own delusions.
At 35 I met Marcus, the relationship that would be a catalyst for a shift in the trajectory of both of our lives. We realized we were born 35 hours apart, and met 35 years later. Cute. He was dear friend first, but would soon become lover, partner, companion in all things initiatory and esoteric, and now 7 years later, ex-fiancé, but also continued soul ally and family. Our relationship took us to some wild places within ourselves, each other, and around the world. We dove into the founding (and later dissolving) of Chesapeake Temple, to initiatory trainings and group experiments in New Zealand, Ireland, and across the U.S., to pilgrimages across the world to sacred sites, up a holy mountain in Tibet, and ultimately would complete our time together as partners with us trying to put down roots in Hawaii and realizing that we had entered a chapter of divergence from each other.
It took us a while to realize this, as the love we have for each other is massive and can sustain so much. But suddenly (and also not so suddenly) we were like two very different creatures trying to adapt to an environment that no longer felt like our natural habitat, wanting and needing very different things. You know it’s real when you can say the truth out loud, and something inside can finally take a deep breath. I’m grateful we were able to recognize it together. In the wake of this realization, I learned more about grace in a short span of time than I could previously imagine. I kept being met with that presence that is beyond any need for forgiveness, an all encompassing love of something holy, ineffable, deeply human, and from somewhere unknowable and beyond the fallibility of any human experience.
(Side note: as I write this sentence, the song “Grace” by Florence and the Machine starts playing in my headphones. And now I’m laughing, almost spitting out my latte at the cafe where I’m currently posted up. Life’s synchronicities can be so fucking literal sometimes. It makes a part of me almost roll my eyes, like someone in the beyond has a super cheesy sense of humor. Someone, somewhere in the unseen is going “now! cue the song, see if she notices!” And when I do, they cheer, and we all have a good laugh together. And the more I notice, the more it happens, like when a good friend learns what makes you laugh and also cringe in a good way and runs with it. Thanks team.)
Marcus and I closed our relationship in the south of France, with a group of friends, on the land where Mary Magdalene spent the last years of her life. This story, of visiting the caves where she is believed to have spent her final years, is one for another piece of writing, maybe. I will say that the group journey was a memorable one, and a deeper lesson for me personally in releasing attachment to expectation while staying with the profound grief happening from within my own womb. There is a space within the chapel that is for children and babies that have been lost. I hadn’t known that going in, and the grief and love laid down in that place blew me open and left me weeping on the floor of my own heart.
(saying goodbye)
In the space of a single month before that Magdalene pilgrimage, my engagement had ended, I had moved out of the home I had planned to build a new life in that included having a baby, and my family dog, one of the most significant relationships of my life, had died suddenly, inexplicably, under his favorite tree. Bodhi was eight years old and seemingly healthy and then he was gone, found in the quiet of the land he had guarded, given back to the earth.
In animistic traditions, animals who die at the threshold of a home or in a significant spot are understood as guardians. Beings who hold the energetic field of a particular place and chapter. When Bodhi died under his tree, I knew, in the part of me that knows things before my mind catches up, that he had been a huge part of holding the life I was leaving. And that his leaving was not separate from mine.
I am deeply proud of the way Marcus and I unraveled our relationship, with respect, honoring, and the recognition and profound gratitude of what had been and what we will continue to be to each other. In some ways, I feel even more proud of the love I have for him than I did when we were together because it is still just as big, and freed from the ways we weren’t able to meet each other. And I miss him inside of the day to day, as anyone who has gone through a breakup knows. The loss of a shared life and companionship is painful and so often the thing that causes us to backslide after a breakup. Even posting this piece of writing touches something tender because he’d always be the first to read my writing. And I know he’ll still read this, inside the strangeness that comes when you’re no longer in the intimacy of partnership and back in a place relationally that is also occupied by others. And he’ll probably be smiling or laughing at some of the weirdness of this (hey, Woo), maybe also some relief, but also happy to read me. Sweet, right? I think so, and at the very least, I hope so.
And now I find myself once more “on my own”, figuring out the life I want to live, one that is wholly my own, while simultaneously living inside of it, enjoying it, letting myself be fulfilled in love and service within it. My path at 35 was led by more: more teachings, more connections, more thresholds to cross. I did all of that and expanded the love in my life exponentially. And the deepest initiations ask you to live all the way inside your humanness. This may sound obvious to some, but it wasn’t to me 7 years ago in my willingness to risk everything for the ecstatic transcendence and insane underworld descents. I had a hunger for experience that, at the time, felt insatiable, and I didn’t know how to fully occupy my life. I’m grateful for the me who was bold and trusting and jumped head first into changing my reality from within through a wild and relentless following of that hunger. Grateful in large part because now I get to be paid for work that lights me up and is fulfilling to my soul. And grateful for all the help I’ve had along the way. I’ve had a lot of support, and I worked hard to be able to truly, from my core, enjoy my life. As in drink every last drop, make love to life with your whole damn body and being, kind of enjoyment.
When we’re not fully inside ourselves, we do all kinds of things to compensate for that. There’s been significant cleanup to do, mostly within my relationship with myself, but also with others. I don’t know if there could have been another way for me, not this life at least, and I know I wouldn’t have wanted any other path than the one I took. Perhaps there are gentler, less extreme routes that potentially don’t require as much cleaning up. But that’s a karmic conversation, and also, who knows? From the level of soul, we’ve all had a rough go of it at some point. I don’t say that to minimize the very real suffering so many people are in right now. I do believe we somehow get the path we choose, conscious or not. And there’s a whole bunch of shit we definitely wouldn’t choose along the way, and sometimes we start in the shit and stay there. And for those of us privileged enough to do the work of Self development, the cleanup comes from all the big and small movements around self-abandonment, whether it’s because of trauma (most often), a need for belonging (usually), or for the sake of a greater “purpose” (also, often: think hive mentality or military obedience). I say all of this from a Western viewpoint, amidst cultures that fuel this pattern, and from this particular moment in time.
And this cleanup often involves a sobering dose of honesty followed by waves of grief, dismay, anger, and ultimately accountability (with self, and often with others where and when it’s possible- a tricky one when there isn’t a willingness for repair) forgiveness (which lives right alongside remorse) and softening (a must) to truly sink and stabilize into wholeness. I don’t say any of this as if it’s a constant, stable state of being for me. I would say it’s easier to access than ever, but still a deep practice of continuous return. And I’m devoted to this. It’s so much of what I do in my client work in the mechanics, bio-energetics, and understanding of belonging to oneself, body and soul. And what it is to be in collective service in the world from there.
I also make use of the word sobering with intention, because walking away from a field of experience that some part of me was addicted to, has been a literal process of getting sober. Did I have significant realizations of divinity inside of this field? Definitely. Did I need a particular degree of intensity and wild permission to experience that? Also, big yes. My closest bonds have been born through some of these experiences, friendships forged through that same fierce hunger and now sustained by soft love and nurturance.
And there was also a cultural thread that perpetuated a level of special-ness and self abandonment that showed up as denial of the tenderest parts of being human, a dismissal of the need for right pacing of the body, and sacrificing personal needs over prolonged periods of time for the sake of the whole or a collective mission. One day I’ll maybe write about psychic injury and its relationship to self abandonment, but maybe you catch my drift by me even mentioning it.
Inside of the sobering, the teachers have been to let grief be exactly as large as it is, so that joy can be just as massive. And to let a body that grows tired, a bank account that has limits, and a heart that can only hold so much at once within my own deep sensitivity inform each day, each step. And while I can only speak for myself, there has been a shared experience with many of my peers, each with their own unique story of something that feels akin to all of this. Ironically, for a group of souls that had been oriented toward group initiation who have moved away from this to focus on our personal lives, we’re all having a collective experience through divergence and individuation. Go figure.
I know that one day, maybe even soon, I’ll meet another man I will want to share my life with, and adjustments and expansions will be made to merge our lives together. I know intrinsically that much of my dharma is woven into my romantic life. I’ve got tidal wave kind of love that rises up from the oceanic depths in my heart and body, and it’s been bigger than some of my past partners could be with. I dive in and devote myself fully. It’s my nature and I love this about myself and that it has been such a significant part of my story in this life. I don’t reserve this love for just romantic partners, and I’ve been met deeply by beloved friends here. But there are places inside that love that really are just for that one person who holds that place in my heart. I also know now that in order to truly live with grace, I must have a deeply solid yet still soft individuated sense of myself, fully inhabiting my own life.
I have always known this in some way, but now it’s not so scary to get to be a turtle who rests on the shores of my own isolated island when I need to. It’s a move from striving to prove or hiding in self preservation into deep nourishing reprieve and replenishment. I’ve always enjoyed my own company, solitude has long been familiar to me as an only child, but it hits differently now when all my bits and pieces feel at home under one roof.
In preparation for motherhood that never came through having a child, I became a truly safe place for myself. This feels like the greatest luxury and responsibility to be able to live this way, because it is. I’m so much of the woman (and creature) that both my 7 and 21 year old selves would have been so in love with, who they would have wanted to sit with and just absorb love and presence from, and ask all kinds of questions about the places I’ve been and things I’ve done, thirsty for the magic in my stories and wanting me to share what I see in them, for them.
Bodhi didn’t die so that I could understand his passing in some deep metaphorical way. He died, as all things eventually do, under his favorite tree, in a spot where he spent much of his life watching, guarding, in what seemed like contemplation much of the time, serving his purpose in life. The loss of this animal, who loved me so completely, who was so fully present and here for such a short time, released something in me. The loss cut so deep into my heart and cracked what all the pilgrimages, initiatory pursuit, and the loss of my relationship hadn’t managed to do: the presence of all that is holy and true for me wrapped inside the immense personal love I had for my dog, pure in spirit, and true to his name. And I was met with the willingness to stop reaching for the infinite and just be a fucking woman, so deeply myself, down to my marrow and through to the most transcendent. Right now that’s in Berkeley, sitting in a cafe, crying and laughing at the same time, feeling so warmly met by my own choices and this particular, finite life.
(Bodhi)
This, for me, is the intimacy I long for. It’s the synchronicities that no one else will ever know about (except when I sidebar my own writing to tell you about them). It’s the smile of the two elderly men next to me right now talking about the Knicks and New York. (Swoon from the New Yorker in me, we’re a proud bunch.) It’s a feeling that it’s all here right now: the loss of life in a body, the future romance and love making, the hardship and violence so many are experiencing now or at any given moment, the journeys across the world, you, whoever you are reading these words, and the bee that just landed on my cup. The ordinary and the mystical rolled into one landscape when you get just the right view.
That’s the only kind of enough-ness there really is. Just this, over and over: the daily, humbling, grace-soaked practice of being exactly where we are. And I smile at that sentence in its truthful cliche, spiritual trappings turned into spiritual sappings. Bless.
A super significant photo of me amongst the redwoods for your viewing pleasure. Joy after grief, because for real, these trees make me cry and sunlight makes my hair shiny. Thanks for reading. xx