Deep Continuity: the spiral web your soul weaves
A goddess of spiderwebs of alternate timelines and dimensions (Midjourney)
I dream of spiders and spiders can dream.
For several nights, I dreamed of stumbling upon spider webs. One night, I found a rainbow-colored web in the back of my closet. It was woven tightly like a sweater. The strongest material on earth made by the most fragile bodies. If you drop a tarantula from a small distance it will break and die.
In another dream, I was between the walls of Space and Time when I saw a book about the future trapped in a spider web. An old-timey radio broadcast came on and alerted the public that this book was being changed from the past. The words in printed copies were being altered as they were read.
The dream messengers said I could do this too. Write my own life across timelines — backwards and forwards. Change the past to create new futures.
Still the message is just a metaphor. Symbols are flat. And animal totems are shapeshifters. Dreams weave themselves outside of time — the meaning of them is revealed only after patience and reverence. So I carried the dreams with me for days, trying to fit them into my reality like puzzle pieces. Then one morning, I woke up to find a spider had spun part of its web on the lawn. It gleamed in the sun. I meditated on it quietly, until a meaning arose in the form of a question — what is the deepest desire that drives you?
I think of my parents, because I am a continuation of them. Their desires are encoded into my DNA and my whole life I've tried to disentangle my identity from theirs. My father, who never wanted to be poor, would spend hours shining his shoes only to hide his holey bottoms. My mother, even as a child, could never escape the male gaze, and it splintered her into a hundred pieces.
Fears often disguise themselves as desires and sit behind the wheel of all our decisions — these are things that need to be rewritten.
Your true desires are separate from any external influence. You sense them in the trajectory of your life. Every decision I have ever made has been driven by the desire to feel freedom and connect with God on my own terms.
So this is what I do. This is how I time travel. I connect with my deepest desires — not my parents, not anyone else's. I go back and sit with younger versions of myself. I consult and console. And each time I return to the now, I come back with another piece of my puzzle. This is how you establish Deep Continuity.
Sometimes I meditate and sit with my 60-year-old self. A woman I am getting to know little by little. She is graceful and wise and boundlessly loving, and I always ask her — how do I get from me to you? The path is not clear. One time I asked her in a dream "What is the difference between me and you?" and she responded, "Pull the universe toward you."
Deep Continuity is the spiral web that your soul weaves. You can travel it, back and forth across your life. You can quantum leap into paths not taken. You can extrapolate into futures not yet created. You can pull the universe toward you.
You can do this, because you now know what drives you in every direction.
Ferris Wheel of Activators
Sometimes in dreams you are given assignments or astral homework. The purpose of which is to clear out energy blocks or to act as guide posts along your path, pointing you to a new trailhead.
Advice and assignments from the astral realm line up in a queue in your mind, and wait for you to act upon it. If you don’t, the queue gets backed up and new messages from the Divine won’t be able to cut in line to get to you.
On Sunday, June 19, 2022, I saw in a dream what they called my activators rotating on a ferris wheel — similar to the Wheel of Fortune tarot card. An activator is an energy that you draw power from. It propels you through life with passion. I was assigned to categorize the activities and people in my life that act as activators.
I began with a blank astrological chart. In each of the 12 houses I wrote down values or concepts that are vital to my existence. Each one is a dimension that I can travel to or a room in my mind that I can dance inside of.
Underneath each dimension, I wrote down the activities that activate these values. I took note of the ones that repeat.
Hiking activates Freedom and Solitude and Play and Beauty. Working with my dreams in waking life activates Mystery, Exploration, Divination, Creation and more. Reading teleports me to the dimension of Mystery and Wisdom. Worship is Love.
The last part of my astral homework was to categorize the people in my life. I chose colors for the persons closest to me and drew lines connecting them to the realms they activate. Some people are more influential than others.
If I know what activities and people activate my passion for life then I have no reason to ever be bored or uninspired. I just spin the wheel and try something else.
You can download your own blank ferris wheel here.
There are only fragments
“There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands.” ― James Salter, Light Years
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.
“For all the supernatural lust in your eyes: BELIEVE”
Dream Journal, August 2, 2011
Disclaimer: I was 27 when I had this dream. I feel like anything written or experienced in your twenties should have a disclaimer.
I was walking the streets of San Francisco, sometimes it was Oakland. Irrelevant though, because it was acting more like an old lover. Acting as if it had forgotten me, never loved me, moved on to better things. Still, I stepped onto every curb and turned every corner trying to remember what drew me to fall in love in the first place. There was a boy, like there always is, and at every crosswalk we met. I tried walking in front of him, tried leaving him behind like so many had done to me before, but somehow we kept crossing paths. My destination/destiny became a broken-down bookstore where Spacewaves was performing. Suddenly, I knew his name was Camus and that he was their new drummer. I said, “Fine. You can have me.” Then, I dragged him into the bathroom and made out with him, like I was drunk, but I wasn’t. Not even on love, I don’t think. I left him there and as I walking out, a stranger with an Indian accent, stopped me and said, “Don't be afraid of Camus. Rule him the perversion in your life. For all the supernatural lust in your eyes: BELIEVE.”
Note: When the Indian stranger said “perversion” he also said “purpose,” like at the same time.
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.
A chart for finding your reason for being
Ikigai is a Japanese concept that translates roughly to “reason for being.” Your Ikigai is found at the intersection where your passions and talents converge with the things that the world needs and is willing to pay for. Make a list of all the things you're curious about and figure out where they intersect. Then, find a medium through which you can express that passion.
Create dangerously
“To create today means to create dangerously. Every publication is a deliberate act, and that act makes us vulnerable to the passions of a century that forgives nothing.” —Albert Camus
Favorite quotes: Warrior Goddess Training by HeatherAsh Amara
The first step to claiming your strength and igniting your will is to get clear about what you want. Not what your victim wants, or what your judge wants, or what you would like, but what your highest vision and purpose is for yourself. What I have found is that when you get clear about your heart's desire, the Universe steps up in magnificent ways to support you!
So I say, if you are burning, burn. If you can stand it, the shame will burn away and leave you shining, radiant, and righteously shameless. —Elizabeth Cunningham
What is your main taproot? Make it deep and solid. Redirect it if it has grown attached to a person or ideal. Anchor yourself in infinity, in earth, to the life-force. Where is your true source of energy and stability? Reach deep.
How to clear old emotions: Take five minutes each day, whether you feel like it or not, to move through some emotions. You can also do this by dancing vigorously and yelling. Use your voice; scream, cry, om, growl . . . let your emotions move!
Life does not personally punish people or seek to cause suffering; it simply moves.
When you let go of who you wish you were, you reclaim your power to be radiantly, magnetically, and creatively who you are.
Six right livelihood guidelines
Consume mindfully.
Eat with awareness and gratitude.
Pause before buying and see if breathing is enough.
Pay attention to the effects of media you consume.
Pause. Breathe. Listen.
When you feel compelled to speak in a meeting or conversation, pause.
Breathe before entering your home, place of work, or school.
Listen to the people you encounter. They are buddhas.
Practice gratitude.
Notice what you have
Be equally grateful for opportunities and challenges.
Share joy, not negativity.
Cultivate compassion and loving kindness.
Notice where help is needed and be quick to help
Consider others' perspectives deeply.
Work for peace at many levels.
Discover wisdom
Cultivate "don't know" mind (= curiosity).
Find connections between Buddhist teachings and your life.
Be open to what arises in every moment.
Accept constant change.
Happiness is a skill and a choice
Our happiness is built by attitude and intention. Attitude is not everything, but it’s almost everything. I visited the jazz great Jane Jarvis when she was old, crippled and living in a tiny apartment with a window facing a brick wall. I asked if she was happy and she replied, “I have everything I need to be happy right between my ears.”
Follow your inner moonlight
“Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness. ”
Be a wholehearted creative
The wholehearted creative woman knows that art is not simply the work of her hands. Her truest artistic work is being fully herself in the presence of others. The book, the painting, the meal, the presentation are all simply evidence of a deeper art happening within the soul of the artist.
“Art is what happens when we dare to be who we really are. ”
— Emily P. Freeman