On sacred loneliness
This is not a how-to. There are no steps for shifting loneliness into solitude. Loneliness is an intrusion that makes my bones cold. Loneliness feels like a void and Solitude is a sanctuary. Some days I just feel separate from the universe.
I think of the Rupi Kaur quote “Loneliness is a sign you are in desperate need of yourself,” but what I am missing is not myself, but my connection with the Divine. And Yes, I know the Divine is also me, but knowing this doesn’t make the loneliness go away.
The gaping hole in my heart grows wider and I ache for a sign, or a signal of love, or for someone to seek me out. When I was in my twenties this is when I would go out to bars, get drunk, sleep around — anything to escape myself. What I do now is different.
I seek out nothing. I acknowledge that I am in pain and I sit with it. I imagine other humans feeling this same profound sadness with no source point and I breathe into that feeling. This is how I create an equilibrium. I remind myself this is a condition of being human. I find connection in the separateness and that is what brings me comfort.
This mystifying grief called loneliness belongs to you and it belongs to me and everyone else, and that is what makes it sacred.
All roads lead back to yourself
In dreaming life I pulled a tarot card. I saw myself in a sacred circle surrounded by other versions of myself pointing what felt like staves/wands/arrows. At first I felt cornered — was this something to ward off?
No, my subconscious interpreter said.
This card means that you are never worried about a missed chance. These are all versions of you existing after each road taken. Opportunity after opportunity will continue to arise. All roads lead back to yourself. You are never lost.
10 of Arrows
All roads lead back to yourself
As human as possible
I scatter your moons like dice on a table. Pick one. You expel spirit animals from your body. The tiger that claws your heart out. The whale who always digs up your dreams. And that damn peacock you refuse to accept is you. We’re not here to be animals, I say. We’re here to be as human as possible. Find out what that means to you.
A mantra for clearing shame
Sometimes — seemingly out of nowhere — I’ll find myself stuck in a spiderweb of negativity. What I feel is resentment or fear or anxiety. I avoid giving it a story. I simply say:
This feeling does not belong to me. I return it back to the Universe.
And then I’ll often make a sweeping away gesture with my arms that looks really silly and weird, but is so damn helpful at releasing shame and shooing it away.
Update: The hologram as visual took for grief
Grief Deck is a free visual resource for grief support. All the cards were made by artists or caregivers or someone who has lost someone. Anyone can contribute if you have something to say about processing loss. You scroll seemingly endlessly for an image card that resonates with you, when you click on it, it flips to deliver a prompt or meditation to focus on and let your feelings arise. Grief has never been something I expect to go away, but it is something I learned to coexist with. The best advice I ever received regarding grief was to schedule it — daily if you need to. For a month, I would hold in my tears until I was alone and then I would cry until I was exhausted. After a month, it became less and less, but I never stop making space for it. Here is the card I contributed to Grief Deck, inspired by my father-in-law who we lost last year.
We’re taught at a young age in school that form is in flux. Water can change its physical state from solid to liquid to gas a million times and never lose any part of itself. We forget this fact in grief. The ones we love die and we forget to sense their new state. We only miss the form which we lost. We cry and grieve, but somewhere in this realm there is a hologram, and it is made of love, and it has no physical form — only feeling — but that feeling is one that heals and integrates and transcends all sadness. Try to spend some time feeling this new form.
Ideas for bringing more pleasure into your daily life
I took a Clearer Thinking program test that helps you bring more joy into your life by enlightening you to what your greatest sources of pleasure are. (I recommended it in Recomendo.)
I discovered my greatest pleasures are mostly Sensorial. With the highest being humor, nature, animals and sound/music. Which is not surprising because this is what I try to fill my days with. But my favorite part of the program is at the end when you’re given ideas as to how to consciously bring even more pleasure into your life. Here they are below.
Spaceship Earth & Synchronicities
A collection of Earth from Space media that has been floating through the internet and my subconscious. Use them as tools to shift your perspective and expand your consciousness.
The Overview Effect
“The overview effect is a cognitive shift in awareness reported by some astronauts during spaceflight, often while viewing the Earth from outer space. It is the experience of seeing firsthand the reality of the Earth in space, which is immediately understood to be a tiny, fragile ball of life, "hanging in the void", shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere. From space, national boundaries vanish, the conflicts that divide people become less important, and the need to create a planetary society with the united will to protect this "pale blue dot" becomes both obvious and imperative.”
Spaceship Earth
Spaceship Earth is a worldview encouraging everyone on Earth to act as a harmonious crew working toward the greater good.
"As we begin to comprehend that the earth itself is a kind of manned spaceship hurtling through the infinity of space—it will seem increasingly absurd that we have not better organized the life of the human family."
— Hubert H. Humphrey, Vice President of the United States
We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave—to the ancient enemies of man—half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.
— Adlai Stevenson to the UN, 1965
Astronaut Bruce McCandless free floating above earth
The Earth Rising Over the Moon
Earth Restored — Toby Ord
If somebody’d said before the flight, “Are you going to get carried away looking at the earth from the moon?” I would have say, “No, no way.” But yet when I first looked back at the earth, standing on the moon, I cried.
— Alan Shepard, Apollo 14
Channeled Message, Goddess Light
Look at the earth. This time, truly look at the higher frequency and vibration. As you do so if you have had any concerns about what is happening you see how much light and energy is present. So too look around the all that is look around at the many ships at the many, many benevolent ones that come both from other planets and the universe all are here working with you. And the planet of earth is becoming brighter and brighter illuminating all that is within and around.
When you look through expanded consciousness it helps you to clear the lower frequency.
You can see it or sense it or feel it. If there is something that comes across your awareness in your daily life and it begins to pull you down again remember this; there is so much light frequency available to the planet, available to all.
You may also have that perception of how easily the energy flows between the earth and these higher frequencies. The all that is has multiple dimensions within it and you have the ability to flow, moving through those many, many dimensions. It is your way of experiencing the ascension process.
Resources:
The resurrection of Phantom Kangaroo
More than 10 years ago, I created an online poetry magazine called Phantom Kangaroo. Its birth could be described like this:
Strange occurrences of kangaroos appearing in areas where they should not be are sometimes reported. Often they appear ghost-like, disappearing or hopping through walls.
Some speculate they are aliens, or spirits haunting us from another dimension. Someone suggested animal teleportation, maybe they bounce in and out of existence. Whatever they are, these phantom kangaroos are an omen. A cryptic warning that you will soon be falling into the unknown. They seem to say: I am real and I am a hoax, and so are you.
Sometimes poems seem to say the same thing. Sightings of these poems can be found here.
I was in my mid-twenties, poor and living in a studio in West Oakland. Phantom Kangaroo was a passion project that, at times, couldn’t sustain itself. Like the cryptid, it hopped in and out of existence. At one point the domain was held hostage by algorithms wanting thousands of dollars to give it back. So I waited it out.
This past year of sheltering and cocooning forced me to rummage through my inner cauldron for all the things that bring me life. Creating a space for poetry is one of them. For the past few months, I worked late nights and weekends to put together something that was long overdue — Phantom Kangaroo: The Anthology. It is a 296-page hardcover book of 300 magical and paranormal poems published during the past decade.
Now that it’s complete and no longer haunting me, I have resurrected the magazine. Issue 24 will be published on June 13, 2021, along with the first ever print magazine. Phantom Kangaroo remains an eerie place for poems. The door to the unknown is now wide open.
Sensory Bathing and Sensory Deprivation
I tried to meditate but it turned into worship. I say “but” when I should say “and.” I am shifting all of my buts and no’s into yes, and(s), because this is where the magic happens.
“I tried to meditate and it turned into worship.”
I realize now that meditation will become whatever it needs to be: breathing, listening, dancing, prayer, channeling — what ever it needs to be.
Right now, I am balancing practices of going inward for guidance and then immersing myself in the environment around me. Here is a practice of sensory immersion I pulled from Angel Tech: A Modern Shamans Guide to Reality Selection:
Close your eyes. Listen, moment-to-moment, to the sounds of your immediate environment. Listen to how your mind may make sense of the sounds: naming, categorizing and figuring them out. Now, give yourself permission to simply listen to the sounds as different energies. You can do this by not associating meaning to any of these sounds and just let the sounds come sweeping through you as currents of sonic energy. Let these sonic forces have their way and go where they may within, around, under and over you. If they like, let them merge forces with other sounds to produce new levels and overtones of sonic resonance. Your sensory task is this: How much can you give yourself over to this experience and let it envelop and encompass you…until you are at one with the sounds?
Grounding yourself with Sensory Bathing
I sit outside in a sunny spot and close my eyes. I listen to each sound and name it. I hear the wind rustling through trees. I hear various birds chirping — different tones. I hear wind chimes, some high, some low. A car’s motor. Loud, nondescript words. A plane flying overhead. Machinery turned on. My dog panting, then lapping water. A horn honking.
Life expanding and contracting.
My perceptive world is all at once multi-dimensional, and I am a part of it. Small and important at the same time.
I am that child crying out. I am the car speeding toward something. I am the rooster crowing. The urgent horn honking. The wind blowing — just passing through.
Going inward with Sensory Deprivation
I don’t deprive myself of all sounds. I use noise-cancelling earbuds to listen to Solfeggio frequencies and soundscapes that connect me with source energy. I put on my eye mask and I go inward. With every breath in I take in energy from the universe and then I breathe out longer than I take in. Every exhale feels like a gift from within. This is how I connect with the consciousness beyond my identity, my physical body and this reality.
Not here. Not the sounds on Earth. No light from this planet leaks through my eye mask.
I go inward — but outside of space and time. It’s dark, and sometimes there are visions, or hallucinations, or imagination — whatever you want to call it.
The things that I see are for me to interpret. And words are spoken — sometimes they make no sound, sometimes I repeat them aloud — messages about me or loved ones or whoever pops into my circle from time to time. In these short moments, I become privy to some arcane knowledge about how the universe works.
I understand how going inward can become addictive. The chasing of enlightenment.
Which is why sensory bathing is needed for grounding yourself. Use whatever methods you need for balance.
How to ascend (a growing list of ways to elevate your energy)
Unanchor yourself
Make conscious choices
Exist in the waiting period
Sunbathe
Space out the silences
Ask for guidance
Pray & listen (meditate)
Stretch past your shame
See people as energies
Forgive. Accept. Love.
Breathe as deeply as you can into your mind, heart and body
Sound bathe in nature / Soul bathe in nature
Visual: Mind Voyages I
Here’s a gif I made of what I see when I meditate, attempting to traverse space consciousness.
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
— Robert Jastrow, The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe
Wormhole wonderings and other things
An ad hoc list of what’s been happening:
YouTube: #MeditativeMind soundscapes
Reading: Angel Tech: A Modern Shaman's Guide to Reality Selection (while staying grounded in this reality)
Internet: CIA Electronic Reading Room, Analysis and Assessment of the Gateway Process + Vice, How to Escape the Confines of Time and Space According to the CIA
“Brain change willed is as close to magic as we’re going to get.”
Workspace:
We installed a new, larger window in my home office. My first thought: “View is about to get expansive AF.”
Message from meditation:
“One channel only.”
Advice about difficult friendships
It shouldn't be hard to be friends with someone. The sooner you realize this the sooner you'll start making real friends.
Cute and short explainer video about empathy
Making emotionally intelligent decisions
You should never make a permanent decision based on a temporary emotion.
— 33 Quotes That Will Inspire You to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
On fulfilling your potential and self-esteem
When I notice myself worrying about “what other people will think” I find I’m usually not worried about any single person’s opinion. If I pick a specific person, I‘m rarely concerned about what they will think. What I fear is the collective opinion in my head. It’s imaginary. — James Clear