Sunday Consciousness
I have been there — on those Sundays
standing on the cathedral steps
when the sun is bright and pious
and it blinds me
What kind of worship is this?
When even in my Sunday dress
and frilly socks
and Mary Janes —
I feel unworthy
What kind of worship is this?
Beams of light dancing on a little girl's skin
and still she feels shame
What kind of worship is this?
This God must die
I have been there — too many times
standing on those steps
sinking into that Sunday consciousness
Here is atonement
Here is absolution
But why must I answer to anyone or anything?
I go back there in my mind —
to those blinding Sundays
to those pious steps
to that sinking consciousness
I pray to a dead God
and I create a new one
What kind of worship is this?
The sun continues to shine — pirouettes on my skin
and even though the sun is outside of me
it warms from within
and this is how my new God
chooses to love me
Healing your inner child is time travel
When I was in Sedona, Arizona last year for my 37th birthday, I met with four different healers. A shaman, dream weaver, reiki therapist and someone whose business card said multidimensional intuitive. Each one talked about the importance of healing your inner child.
During one of the sessions, I was given a visualization exercise that had profound effects on my psyche and was definitely a form of time travel.
The exercise:
I was told to go back in my mind to my first moment of shame. I was told to see myself as a child and let myself feel every painful thing Little Claudia was feeling. To induce tears. To let that moment in time break through me and cry. I did. Then I was told to swoop in — as myself from this current point of existence — knowing everything I know now, with all the love I have now, and to pick up that little version of me and heal her with my compassion and wisdom and tell her all the things she needed to hear back then.
My first moment of shame:
I was 4 years old and I was in an upstairs bedroom listening to the radio. There was a Spanish love song playing and I was singing along with it. I had a pen and a piece of paper and I was writing a love letter. I don’t know to who, but I suspect it was to God. My mother came into the room and asked me what I was doing. I told her I was writing a love letter. She laughed at me and I felt embarrassed for the first time in my life. I didn’t want to finish my letter. I didn’t want to sing along to the love song. I thought I had done something wrong — and I was ashamed of being so in love.
How I healed Little Claudia:
In Sedona I was 37 years old when I went back in time and picked up my 4-year-old self and I hugged her, and I kissed her and I told her she had done nothing wrong. I told her she came into this world in love and that’s how she was supposed to remain. I told her to write more and more love letters, and to sing along to all the Spanish love songs and to never — for one moment — feel embarrassed about it. I told her that her heart was pure and that was her super power and to let herself be guided by that for the rest of her life.
We walked out of that bedroom together, Little Claudia and I, and she’s been with me ever since.
The Grounding Stakes or a Resolution for Trauma
You can feel free and blow in the wind and be grounded.
The psychic language of images is intimate. There is no universal visual dictionary to help you decipher your visions or dreams. Why would you want one anyway?
You are a Psyche Archeologist and this is a solo expedition. Your mission is to discover new aspects of your self, interpret your personal images, and then merge this new meaning into your soul. This is a long journey we are on.
On the inside of my left wrist is the word heal tattooed in white ink. It is fourteen years old and fading and it is a monument to my suffering.
After years of therapy and talking about the trauma and then not talking about the trauma, I wondered what the end game would be. What does a healed person look like?
What do I feel like? Someone who has sovereignty over her mind, body and spirit. Someone who can pause and reflect in the face of strong emotions. Someone who is grounded and open-minded, and most of all, open-hearted.
Still, the question persisted. What does a healed person look like? The answer came in the form of an image — an image infused with an overwhelming sense of gratitude and love and freedom.
I saw myself as an expansive tent — if not tied down — I would blow away. I saw the traumatic event in my life as a stake grounding me to the Earth. I felt grateful for my grounding stake.
I recognize and accept the event as a part of my history. It is not the suffering I appreciate, but the journey to heal and how it has widened my capacity to love.
Not all of my stakes are made of trauma. One of them is my loving husband. The others I am still getting to know, but each day I am grateful for them.
How beautiful that I can be a sprawling tent with the wind blowing in my face, and how it feels like I am flying, all because of my grounding stakes.
A New Temple
A New Temple is the completion of a three-month psyche project. It is a short, small book of poetry, dreams, visions and animal spirit messages. It is a quest for healing ancestral trauma and it is dedicated to my bloody, muddy ancestral mothers who made their entrance in the middle of my life and said, “You wanted aliens, but instead you got us.” It is available here.
A form of cord cutting is becoming a new creature. This book was a quest to heal and to honor my mothers by building a temple with my words. Their blood is my ink. Completing this was a form of soul recovery. Now that it’s out of my system, my psyche has more room to play and imagine and create something new.
The book itself is 5 x 7 inches and 54 pages long. A New Temple begins somewhere in the middle and the rest is a visual journey through dreams, visions, poetry and animal spirit messages. Below are some pages from the book.
Diary excerpts from 2021
A year in review. Here are fragments of my life in 2021. I pulled them from diary entries.
JANUARY
Have I been circling the same shallow depths for so long?
After a call with my journey guide:
She asked me to share about myself, specifically what has brought me to this moment — what has made me want to do a journey. What came out of my mouth was a word jumble of bad things that had happened to me. No, not happened to me — the bad circumstances of my life. I was born to two teenagers… we moved around a lot … my mother left us … she is bipolar … I never had stability … I had suicidal ideation since I was 11 … and 14 … and 22 … and 24 … and 26.
All this changed when I turned 30 and went on a vision quest, spent more time in nature and committed to therapy. I described how my entire childhood I bounced from one dogma to another, and how at 30, I finally cut the cord with my mother and created myself as an adult. How my career, my husband and choosing to be childfree are the best choices I ever made. But also, how I feel like I have no creative voice.
Later I realized, my voice is lost because I cut the cord with the narrator. The narrator who wrote all those poems in the past is gone. She’s no longer depressed or dark and as much as I miss that voice, it’s not coming back. I can’t summon her. I think it’s time I get to know my new narrator. This woman that I am.
FEBRUARY
I try to break free from the expected everyday.
An oracle card reading:
I pulled The Cauldron card, which says, “We become integrated and mature by watching, waiting, and trusting that all these insights and impressions will be added to the cauldron and will, one day, be fully cooked.”
This year is about creating the space. About following what ignites my heart and trusting it will guide me somewhere better. It is a waiting game, but I am the cauldron. I am the witch brewing my dreams.
A dream I had in February:
Last night I dreamed that they kept showing me an ultrasound of my womb and why I could never get pregnant. The energy that was supposed to latch on just kept “floating away,” like the smoke that comes out of my oil diffuser. The souls just kept diffusing. But I was OK with it. I don’t want to birth children. I can be a mother in other ways.
The back and forth of integrating trauma:
This day is displaced from other timelines. It feels new. Or maybe I am new. The years are piling on like dust on top of dust. I am being buried under patterns, synchronicities and routines. New goals. New Year. Resolutions. Old habits break through. I lose myself in other people and the ticking of the time hand. And like the trees lose their leaves and then return, I think that the same thing is happening to me, but no, it’s not. The opposite thing is happening to me. The leaves only fall and don’t regrow, and every new day is different and I am on a path I can see and sense, but ignore anyway. I see other people have one foot in reality and the other god knows where, and they uproot their minds and fly away so easily, yet I keep treading this darkness one step at a time. Only now I can see the form. I know I can.
….. I lean into the darkness again, this time more protected. There are no shadows. All the unknowns are outlined. Nothing scurries or brushes past in pitch blackness. Nothing groans or howls. Except for me. Darkness, I am enveloping you. It is a momentary eclipse. We’ll become the same, but I'll still keep my shape.
MARCH
I will no longer dull my edges.
On being the older sister:
My therapist told me something last week that stuck with me. My sister came into this life with a different purpose and journey, and her journey to evolve is different from mine. I am her friend and her sister, but I am not here to save her. Her journey does not have to look like mine.
On my dead brother’s birthday:
My brother Steven would have been 36 years old today. He only lived one month. Why do they come and go and where is his life force today? What happens to these short spirits?
SHORT SPIRITS
A light cuts through briefly
flowers limbs and bones
sprouts from nothing
gathers dust, disappears
again, leaving my mother
holding the bag,
a palmful of ash is enough
to spread grief for lightyears
APRIL
Anyone who goes digging into their subconscious is a witch, attempting to make sense of everything in her cauldron.
Life came to me in pieces. Slowly I could see that I had long been trying to make sense of it. Since birth. Since crawling. Since hiding. Since discovering dark rooms and hidden agendas and bad people and secret dreams and imagination and in the safety and sacredness of solitude.
A description of how I feel:
Myself — loosened
spread all over
in another time
unanchored from now
A lesson in a dream:
I found myself hanging from a high cliff because I had climbed up the wrong way. I was about to blame the dream people for leading me astray, but they didn’t know any better. In the end, it turned out that the easier climb was just inches away from where I started. If I would have just taken a few steps back before climbing, the other option would have come into view. This is a reminder to trust myself, stand back and consider my options.
Automatic writing on Easter: How to ascend (a growing list of ways to elevate your energy)
MAY
I dust off my aura, I protect my aura.
Spiritual Border Control or How to Share Space with a Stranger:
I build a wall around my aura. This is my space. This is allowed. This is not discriminatory. We are all part of the source, but your energy is yours, don’t siphon mine. I am allowed to say mine, because this is my journey. This is my consciousness.
When I was younger I would go out to bars and bump up against others, and kiss strangers, and bond drunkenly in bathrooms, and then wake up feeling empty. It was so exciting until it wasn’t. Then you learn to conserve, that there is a balance in connecting and sharing space. You are allowed to be selective.
On revisiting old diaries:
I forget there is treasure in there. My subconscious bleeds out of me on to those pages. There are 15 years of confessions, dreams, wishes, changes, mistakes. I find it’s easy to get lost in that space, that time. What was I so desperately wanting? Not men — Life. I was desperate for life, it seemed.
A note about my grandfather’s ghost:
Somewhere embedded in the fabric of my reality is my dead grandfather. He comes as white butterflies, and in dreams. The weight of his consciousness I could not tell you, it is heavy, maybe tons. Like a whale, but he is just one dead person.
A freewrite about the moon/life/process:
I try to stay connected to the moon, whatever that means. I cut myself in slits. I am waning, I am waxing, I am growing myself whole. I am becoming bigger than I am. I follow the folklore, nothing should be planted on the full moon, only cut your hair on the new moon, banishing spells when the moon is large, any love spells should grow with the crescent moon. I watch myself expand and shrink in the matter of weeks, like the ocean, my body bloated with salt. I hide away when the sky is dark. I am brewing something magical inside. When the moon is bloated like my body, I bleed, and the process begins again. This constant shrinking and expanding wears on me, but I realize every 28 days I become something new, something bigger than I was before. I head toward the sun and the end of my life with hair as white as the moon and sun spots from the universe. I am spinning with the earth toward death, growing closer to my body, to the mother earth, blossoming and withering at the same exact time. This is the process destined by the heavenly bodies that govern us. So yes, of course we are connected to the moon.
JUNE
There is no completion to life. It just continues.
How hard it is to be human sometimes, to not neglect any part of my being — physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. … I can only be on one side of the dodecahedron die at a time.
Birthday trip to Sedona:
On the road headed toward Arizona, trusting we will meet our life somewhere along the way.
Fragments from a psychedelic journey:
It began with doors opening to the sacred chapel of mirrors. Climbing the stairs of my grandmother’s apartment building in Morelia, it transformed into a temple. … They kept telling me the imagery does not matter. The universe expanded into a bismuth stone. So many dimensions, so much work that is unseen. They kept repeating “The imagery doesn’t matter.” They kept telling me I was focusing too much on form, and my form kept shapeshifting into something else. I became gooey and shapeless and I called out, “I don’t want to be gooey and shapeless, I want form!” I want this body, and yes I will honor it. They were showing me: this is what clairvoyance is. You see the lineage and archetypes and the chakras people get stuck in. Astrology, tarot cards, breath work, these are just tools, they say. They showed me the dimension where play takes place and said all art comes from this place. Play here. Pull from here.
JULY
I am trying to exist below the surface of everything.
A dream question:
In another part of the dream, I was in an old neighborhood from my childhood. Through the window blinds, I peeked out on a group of women walking. I recognized them as children I had met and played with briefly, before moving again to somewhere new. The possibility of life-long friendships was never in the cards for me. I woke up with a question on my mind: How do I root myself in a past I never had?
On Reality Tunnels:
I wake up with the message: they’re only going to show me what I can handle. In a dream, I see myself seated on an alien tapestry, like a magic carpet. On a wall of the universe, I see messages reflected in Space meant only for me. I see others seated on their own magic carpets, tuning into their own private screenings, I take a peek. They tell me those messages are not meant for me. Stick to your own reality tunnel, they say.
AUGUST
You’re never going to lose touch with the world because you are the world.
On boredom and loneliness:
For a moment, I’ve abandoned myself. I can feel the negative space that it leaves and I think this is what you call loneliness. Ten degrees to the right and it would be solitude and it would be sacred, and I think of all the ways I can veer off course to my true north. Since birth this has been a solo voyage, so why am I aching for something other than myself? Turn your compass inward. The needle vibrates and spins out of control. You’ll need to figure this out on foot with no equipment/tools/compass. You do not want someone else, you do not need another voice to speak for you, to guide you, to hug you, to love you, to accept you. You only need yourself. Turn the compass inward. What are you feeling? The words that come up are uninspired, bored, aimless. You feel like you need a spark. What could it be? Inside yourself there is no light on, if only you turned on the light you would see a treasure trove of ideas and inspiration and love and epiphanies and revelations — so many that you would never want to come out. Investigate. Be curious of yourself. Close your eyes. See an image that has been haunting you.
A moon poem:
I am the crescent light of the moon
cradling my own shadow
each day I look inward
brighten the darkness
inching my way toward wholeness
SEPTEMBER
I dress myself in dream imagery.
On my ancestral mothers, and the start of what would become A New Temple:
To build a new temple means to create a new language for my bloody, muddy mothers. I have been pieces of them throughout my life. In the beginning they felt like shards of glass piercing through my skin, manipulating my body like a grotesque Pinocchio. Breaking me into pieces with their suffering - but now I see what they made me — a mosaic of mirrors to see all of my soul.
Something my journey guide said:
There is no rush. Just be aware, honor what you are shown. Celebrate yourself.
A reminder:
Reminder: I get to participate in life today. Work. Create. Write. Make something out of nothing. Connect with the world.
OCTOBER
The great mystery of life is a gift.
Dreams symbolizing mental constructs:
The balcony fell down. We sat all of our friends in rocking chairs we made and then it crashed down. The children were playing in the room and pushed the bunkbeds off which created a tremor and the balcony crashed down and I thought all the older people were injured but they were not. This was the second dream about balconies falling off. I know these symbolize shedding mental constructs. In the last dream, I was sharing war stories with a stranger about living in Oakland. He said the terrace on his apartment was so poorly built that it had broken off, but it was OK because he still sees it from time to time. I asked “how?” He said a homeless man must have picked it up, because every once in a while he’ll see it in a shopping cart rolling on by.
A dream about past perspectives:
I am in an empty parking lot in Mexico. I intentionally sit facing a cliff and look out upon a vast and unknown territory that is my home. A rear view mirror appears to be growing out of the cracked concrete. I gaze into it and see the magical blue sky behind me, the clouds marching. I see a mariachi band walking past. A walking celebration of life. I can’t stop gazing into the rearview mirror.
A case against compartmentalizing:
All last week I pulled the death card. An aspect or construct of me died. The construct is the idea that I can compartmentalize these aspects of myself. If you lob off a side to a prism it becomes less luminous. We are all multi-sided, messy and beautiful humans. I sit here spiraling in my thoughts, a multitude of voices chiming in, wanting to say things, ask questions. This morning I meditated and I met an angel in my sacred space, and she held me and I asked her how can I be more myself and yet be pure. She said the answer is desire itself. I am allowed to be complicated and dark and scared and guarded and hesitant and still be pure in that sense. Yes, I am a spirit having a human experience, but I have been so, so, so, deeply human in my errors and ways and it is the intention of my desires that pull me closer to my pure self.
NOVEMBER
What is this individuation process? I thought I was supposed to be getting clearer and now it feels like I’m getting more complicated.
A dream about shadow work:
In a rented room that I share I try to put together my dilapidated furniture. I broke a mirror trying to move it. My furniture is old, chipped and from my childhood. I see other rented rooms designed so extravagantly. I wish my room was swanky and stylish. I keep rearranging furniture, trying to design something beautiful and minimize the space my shadow furniture takes up.
On controlling the expansion of consciousness:
My gray hair was growing in. At first I was happy, this was the mark of living. It said to the world, I am still here and I am sticking it out and I love every minute of it. On a closer look in the mirror I saw that my grays were growing in the opposite way, from end to root. I felt a desire to control it or cover it up. I didn’t want to be vain. I woke up with the message that we cannot control where awakenings and wisdom choose to appear.
How to get closer to heaven:
My hope is that by the time I leave this life I am closer to heaven, by the way that I love, by the way that I walk the earth, and by the grace that I gift myself.
DECEMBER
For the first half of December, I do not journal. There is no excavating of my psyche or logging of my dreams. I put all my energy into completing this small book of visions, poems, dreams and animal spirits that I call A New Temple. It is dedicated to my ancestral mothers who appeared to me last August during a psychedelic journey. It is an artifact of my subconsciousness and it is available here.
It’s been a long year of inner work. I set off in the beginning of the year to get to know my new narrator — the woman that I am now — and I did exactly that. I am ending this year closer to myself than I’ve ever been.
Draw your inner child’s dream bedroom
One of the healing frogs, and
a page from my book “A New Temple”
I dreamed that child me was standing in an empty room. My husband was there. He offered to build me the childhood bedroom that I never had but always wanted. Just then the door flew open and the frogs — who I call the “healing frogs” — hopped in to help.
Unfortunately, I woke up. So I meditated to re-enter the dream. I envisioned everything that child me dreamed of having: a wall full of books, a window seat for reading, a view of a river, an art easel, and a microscope.
I then envisioned what adult me would appreciate: a chaise lounge and bar cart with endless, flowing champagne, a sitting area for friends and tea, and another window with a view of mountains.
This room is now a visual safe space that I can return to in meditation for solace. If there is an answer I need, I can pull a book from my shelf. If there is something that is confusing me, I can inspect it under the microscope.
After completing the drawing, it became obvious to me that all the spaces and things inside my room are the most important aspects of my life — quietude, learning, art, connection, nature, and celebration.
Dream fragments
I find lost parts of my self in dreams that I can bring back to waking life as gifts. This is a version of me that is confident and whole and walks the world with her front-facing soul.
The Legacy House
n. a property that has maintained its historical and/or cultural significance over multiple generations.
My “legacy house” was run-down and boarded up. I walked a long way in the dream realm just to stand guard in front of the house and protect it.
Squatters had broken in and ruined all the plumbing and stolen all the copper. Nothing worked inside and it was unlivable. But still, I stood guard.
I knew my family had forgotten this house. They no longer stopped by for their shifts.
I wanted to gut the place, pay for someone to come and haul all the trash away. But then I was told, “It’s not your responsibility to clean up your family’s mess. They can help too.”
This was never just my house. It has gone to shit, but I am not responsible for protecting or preserving it.
Then I woke up.
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.
The Labyrinth Theory
What I love about walking labyrinths is that the closer you get to the center the farther you are in distance. Life has often felt that way too.
A brief summary of the past 37 years: I am born to two teenage immigrants who speak no English. As they grow, I grow too. Their mistakes are my mistakes. I am uprooted and left behind. In my earliest memories, I am always alone. I write love letters to God and search for portals in trees. I will be the new girl in school 15 times. Being called “weird” or “poor” will never faze me. By age 10, I am irrevocably damaged and weighed down with worry. Poetry saves me. I write it all down — the dark parts and the dreams. I never stop searching for meaning. At age 17, I move across the country to survive on my own. Besides books and my own intuition — and the occasional Divine interference — there is no guidance. A decade is spent destroying when all I want is to create. After one near-death experience and three suicide attempts — at age 30 — I decide to get off Zoloft and heal through nature and talk therapy. I give up poetry for a brief time. I ground myself in the Earth. I meet my husband — my anchor. I grow beautiful friendships. I find my center. It feels a lot like the wonder and magic of my short childhood. All those years spent in the outer circles, I never knew how close I was to myself.
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.
What has carried me (an ever-expanding list)
What has carried me from birth until now has been this: love, the openness of the world, wild overgrown yards, imagining I am a princess warrior, digging for dinosaur bones, calling out for god in the dark, what prayer is, wishes, the sky at night, that one star brighter than the rest, my grandfather communicating from the dead, love, the dimensions of dreams, coincidences — no — synchronicities, magic spells that work, love, being alone but not feeling alone, love that grows claws, my mother in my throat chakra, art as a choice, stretching past my shame, a wide open sky, walking in nature, aliens, the believers, love, a murmuration of birds, love, falling down on my knees, getting back up, a warm bed, nostalgia, oh my god, so much nostalgia, animals as familiars, freedom, every beautiful thing, this incessant flowering of time and life — each day, I open my heart up for the looting.
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