light from the shadows

lord shiva, unknown artist 

Last night the entire Hindu world reveled in Maha Shivaratri, known as the destroyer, the aspect of creation which lords over dance, dismantling to make way for new creation. A god of extreme compassion, his gifts are given to sweep you into freedom, to unchain all that doesn't serve you at your highest, to pull from your throat the no, the stop, the end so that you can reset your path again, his strength infusing each step towards consciousness, his invitation always there to birth your world from the deepest yes in your heart. Shiva is total Silence. 

Once years ago, a man who could speak to the Devas did a reading for me. He spoke words from Lakshmi, Ganesh, and all the rest of my dear, lifelong aspects. What struck me the most was what he said regarding Lord Shiva, whom he quoted as saying, 'I try to bless her but she won't accept my gifts'. Somewhere buried in me, this communication stayed and gave birth to my pilgrimage to Mt. Kailash, and an ever more magical relationship ever since, to this gloriously fierce aspect of creation, a shared partnership with my beloved Durgha, Kali Ma, the one who resides in my pelvis as a pure force of energy, the one who knows yes and no and who acts accordingly, without doubt or hesitation. My first series of journaling over the last two weeks, following the first Circling immersion weekend of the course, gave birth to the following, the clarity of insights blooming to fullness during the night of Shivaratri. My assignment was to write about my ex-husband or other relationships where there seemed to be a spark of emotion or a relationship to a current state, and as conscious light moved onto shadow, to see what came through.

Here's what came. This is truly a journal entry.

When I've attempted to see into my shadows regarding past relationships, everything I touch there dissolves in the tiniest puff of smoke and it's gone. Shadows are not of substance. The ideas I have about who and when and where are just ideas and I go in and look for their bearing on my body and it's not there, and so, since I don't have to play with them, I've gone deeper.

What is here is that I have such extraordinary sensitivity. I have extraordinary...not empathy, that's not the right word, not empathic, that's too small. I have a sensitivity of heart and soul and body that guts me. When I was a child I came in with no known borders. The sensitivity to being hurt, to such big sensations, to fear, to the magnitude of what it was that I felt, to what I experienced others feeling, to what it was that I picked up and tuned into in the energy around me everywhere-it was so overwhelming that as a survival mechanism I began to construct a defense. I began to stifle the natural energies that ran through me, I ran so much Shakti, so much sexual energy, so much life force, I was so vivacious, too much.

And so I started to shut everything down and I lost myself and I lost myself young. I remember by the time I was seven I was angry. It was too much for me to be here and I was angry and very scared. Any illusions that I've had over the course of my life that I was angry at my parents because they did this or that and they abandoned me this way or that way were falsely gathered. And so those shadows just puff up in smoke. I abandoned me, rejected me. I didn't have a choice. There's no blame there, there's no problem, there's no fault, there's nothing. I had to check out in order to be here, to survive. I had to at the time in order to remain acceptable within my family and societal structures. Because if I had not, well I'm not sure what I would have been, but I felt on some level, from this life or some other life, who knows, that persecution can come when one is noticeably different. Especially when that difference creates difficulties for fitting in because of unacceptable, uncontrollable hyper sensitivity. And so as I've gone through all the false layers of everything I've ever done with anyone, of all relationship with everyone I've ever known, shadows are there, I carry those memories in my cells.

But they don't have substance when faced with the power of no. The only place where there's any grip is around my heart, and what that is is that I have been hurt. I've been deeply, deeply hurt by people, by others, by others actions, sure, and that's there. But that's also a little dandelion puff in the wind, because underneath that the hurt that I bear, that gives fruit to the flower of story, is that I have denied myself. I created such a sophisticated structure as a child of self-denial that I was no longer able to discern who I wanted to spend time with and who I didn't. My radar was completely off. I no longer listened to my body. I stopped listening to my body and started shutting it down probably around five years old. So lets say by the time I'm fourteen years old, I've had a lot of practice rejecting myself and I'm not really going to have a proper skill set to read another human being and their energy. So from this, I'm going to be destined for a good part of my life to say yes when everything in me screams no, because I am no longer listening. And when you add enough of those yeses that are really nos together, there's a powerful energy signature to that comes to be carried.

Because I convaluted my abilites, my delicate readings, my own deep energetic connection to my body and what it was wanting and not wanting, I found over the years that I was no longer able to distinguish anything. I was barely able to relate to anyone in any way because I was so full of all of damage from all of those yeses. So I was not able to open up even a tiny corner of myself to people, and this became a survival mechanism in itself. I certainly was not able to show myself as a being, a woman, I was not able to show myself in my own life force energy, my own sexual energy, because I was misusing it. It was either a game where I played the part of prey or something was going to be exposed that was way too vulnerable and I was going to get preyed on because of it. I did not have a clue as to how to have a relationship with anyone that wasn't somehow mixed in with predator and prey, with possession and crushing control. Regarding ones self as prey, on an energetic level, will draw the hunters. There was no opportunity for sweet flirting, I was always poised to be captured because I knew my own pattern to say yes when it was no. Anything that came my way was threatening, all the more so because I knew what I attracted, and I didn't know how to do otherwise.

And I'm purging those yeses from me right now. Regardless of their context in my life, these yeses that should have been nos, still they move into light and as they go the entire construct of my being becomes new. That funny, sophisticated little methodology that I developed allowed me to dance a dance with so many things that I never would have allowed into my life if I'd been able to embody and retain my sensitivity. I was never taught this, there was no one in my life who could possibly teach me, so young. I've been my own teacher and every relationship I've had in my life has been my teacher. I am now in a position where I'm viewing all of this and I'm suddenly so aware of what a no is and what a yes is. The light that's flooding into new parts of my body, into new connections with my soul, is the light of this recognition. I am releasing maximum sensitivity, I am putting away barriers, I am shining light on so many things that dissolve as soon as the light touches them. There's a tremendous amount of compassion for myself and forgiveness because I had to do what I had to do and I'm here now.

So as things fall away I find that I'm left with greater and greater sensitivity, not peeled back and exposed like an onion, but revealed as whole and fully formed, with less and less reaction to the sudden change in light. I find that I experience not only this dimension but others, that I communicate not only with people embodied, but that there are many other communications that happen. This is fine, but it's the communication with myself that has me floored. The newness of this creature that was always here, but always lost. I find that an extraordinary gift that's come in the last couple of weeks is that I can see and know the yes and the no clearly. I've turned off the manual override. I'm here in my body.

I've had the gift over the last couple of weeks of being drawn into that pattern again and to see it and act on it and to say no where there was a very strong no and to be so aware of the ways I was trying to override that into a yes. And just yesterday I had a very clear example of what a yes is, my voice deep and connected to my deepest root. The two experiences, both regarding men, were so remarkably different, so clear and I mourn a little bit for how much of my life I've lived in absolute misery, when this is so easy. How much of my life I've lived spending so much time with men who energetically repulsed me, but overriding that because I wanted something to anchor myself to in this world so I wouldn't just careen off into myself and all of the fear that sat just below the surface of my life waiting for me. That fear has long been faced, and the body, such a dense little thing still, took its own time to come to realization. But at one time I didn't care if it was a no, I went ahead, and that damaged me deeply. I lived in a constant state of fight or flight, a constant state of self-revulsion. I had sex just because I thought I was supposed to, to keep someone around who I did not know I deeply did not want, for so many years. And only last year when I was thirty-six years old was I given the gift of a man crossing my path who completely changed my concept of sexuality entirely, who showed me what it was like to be truly sexually awakened, connected, who showed me a potential from within me that I had no idea was there. As it needed to be, we didn't have sex, and that was part of the gift. He wouldn't sleep with me without months of knowing me, observing me because he was too emotionally sensitive to the effects on himself, and he knew himself well enough to know that if he slept with me too soon and then we broke up, it would be too hard on him. And I honor that in him. He was a dick, but he was only a dick on one vibratory band of his personality. The rest of it was magical. I realize that if I go back through all the men in my life, there was one yes in high school and after that all the way up until January of 2014, there were no yeses. If I'd said no much more often, the quality of people in my life would have dramatically increased. Every man that I've been with between then and last January was a no that I made into a yes, some more than others. And last fall I had my wake up call. I fell hard in love with a no, that I made into a yes, but this time my body and psyche couldn't bear it. All of the lights that were still turned off popped on at once and blinded me so that I had to go in and look at what was going on, and I sure as hell did. I had never made the energetic distinction within myself between adversary and lover, and I had confused the two through all my years. I thought I had to fight to pull love, to draw it out. I didn't know that it was just available, glowing and alive, but only when I turned my attention to yes, to soft, to true.

I notice now that I'm getting more chances to practice. Some nos show up that I wish were yeses, but they're not, they are nos and that's that, no need to think about why or how I might change that, what a weird load of crap that would be to put on myself. The extension of my voice that I'm just coming to know is the one that says no with such love that I'm drawn to saying no, rather than anxious about it. This is hard to explain but there is a burst of self-love that comes when saying no that envelops both me and the one I deny. It's worth each step of practice and each test.

This knowingness extends so far beyond my relationships with men, or my friendships with humans in general. I'm already pretty good with 'Do I want to do this or not?' and most of the time it's a no. I am an introvert. I'm very choosy about what I do and with whom I spend my time. And I'm feeling throughout my life the reverberation and the resonance of saying yes when it's a no, especially to men and to polarity as solace. I feel like this is the core of where I'm at right now. This is the core of the coming power. There's much more to my power, but if I don't employ that no when it's true, I'm denying myself and am diminished. Any form of saying yes and feeling no reinforces so much anger and self-loathing, smallness, and it feels repulsive and crushing, as though my insides are turning inward, a sea urchin closing right up. I feel that it's my job right now to stay very, very, very close to the no and to the yes. To get to know them much more intimately than I do now, although they've become very clear, visceral, physical and require me to become increasingly sensitive. It requires me to allow the sensitivity to grow again, to allow the overwhelming physical and emotional experience of being in this world to simply overwhelm me.

I know within the core of my body that this sensitivity revealed in its entirety without protection, without concern for damage, is my strength. That strength isn't even on the other side of the sensitivity. There is no side, there's no place to get to. The strength and the sensitivity are the same thing. Total openness is required. That doesn't mean, and this is important as a distctinction for myself, being open to everything. Total openness means 'Hey, this is a no', 'This interaction with you is a no', 'This relationship with you is a no', 'Putting any attention on you at all is a no'. That's total openness. That's me being totally open to me and what's here. 'No I don't want to do this', 'No I'm not interested in that', 'No I don't want to hear any more of your story right now'. Wow. That's it, that's life, that's a long buried shadow of strangulation rising to the surface and being free. And the yeses stand out in bold relief. And there are very few.

I don't know what's next. But this feels like such a damn fine relief to see, to experience, that none of the stories of my life bear substance or weight against the power of a true no and a true yes. To find that there's no story I can go to that doesn't immediately dissolve in its own construction, and to honor the childhood need for the construction just the same. Except one. And that story has to do with myself and my ability to provide for myself. It has to do with my relationship to nature in terms of money, abundance, and prosperity. That is the only area where I remain in story. Everything regarding the men in my life, the things I have done, healed by exponential degree when I realized what no was, and my relationship to it was, and what yes was, and where that relationship could take me. I realized my role in choice.


The fact that I can now choose to have this sweetness in my life. That I can say no to anything and everything that does not fully resonate with the vibration that I choose is a revelation that sinks down through all the layers of my being with the joy of celestial celebration, something from the highest part of my soul has made its way into my body and my psyche and it grows. The most important job I have is to establish it once and for all through authentic practice, through raging life, through listening so simply, sweetly, and by fully disempowering the thought form that I once identified with. Life is always just a little more about coming into voice than letting go of pain. The pain is not for dwelling, analyzing, no. It is a signpost to where voice is lacking, to where truth is repressed. The wisdom of the body will stop any story in its tracks.